In this practical episode, Hugo van den Biggelaar, CEO and Co-Founder of The Bitsing Company USA, shares why growth hacks fail and how a balanced, insight-driven method makes growth predictable again. If you’re approving budgets that don’t return and feel stuck playing permanent whack-a-mole, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What a balanced growth strategy looks like so you don’t starve today’s business
– Why chasing silver-bullet growth hacks keeps you stuck fixing one fire after another
– How to use actual revenue data instead of gut feel to decide where to invest
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host Scott Ritzheimer, and today we’re talking to all those founders out there who are approving budgets that their managers just can’t tie to any real return, especially those of you who are in the disillusion leader stage, because we all do it. We all want it to be true. The usual fix is to go out, and we want to find that silver bullet, that one growth hack that we heard about from this incredible leader on this incredible podcast. That that one approach that’s going to save the day, but you know and I know it doesn’t.
Growth hacks make for great content, but they inevitably make for a lousy strategy. That’s why my guest today brings a growth method that’s built to replace the guessing. Hugo van den Biggelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur and former director at Nike, now based in Brooklyn, New York. When his time at Nike ended, he made his biggest bet yet, moving to New York to bring BitSing to the U.S. BitSing is a proven growth methodology with a 30-year track record across more than 1000 organizations, from global giants like BMW, HP Enterprise, and DHL to fast-growing startups and scale-ups. Hugo works with founders and leadership teams to diagnose where growth is breaking down and rebuild it in a proven way. He’s currently building Bitsing USA from Brooklyn, one client at a time, and he’s here with us today. Hugo, I you know I don’t know if you do.
We’ll find this out here, but I love a quick fix. Like I love that one thing that like it just everything else magically falls into line, and all the dominoes do what they’re supposed to. But I’ve chased enough of them at this point in my career to know like they they just don’t pan out. But but for a lot of founders, I know this was for me in my first organization. You you kind of don’t know another way. Like the whole reason you’re looking for the growth hack is because whatever you were doing before isn’t working like it used to, and you’ve got to find another way. So how do you help founders that have had success? Right, this isn’t brand new startups that have never figured anything out, but folks that have had some success-they’ve brought it to market and it worked until it didn’t. How do you help them grow from that frustration to the next level?
Hugo van den Biggelaar
Thank you so much, and thank you for the the fantastic intro. It’s a pleasure to be here. And yes, to answer your question, how do I help founders to understand where their growth is stalling. Well, what we do is we use this methodology that’s called bidsing, like you were explaining. And what is the really cool part about bidsing is that it’s all encompassing. So when I sit down with a founder and with their teams, and we start to analyze, you know, what the company has been doing, we look at the insights. What we actually do is we build a a plan through that methodology that’s all encompassing. Now, what does that mean? It means that it’s not just a plan that’s focused on, let’s say, optimizing top funnel. It’s not a plan that’s focusing on and saying, hey, you should double down on this new product category.
Now, what we do with Bitsing is we make an analysis of the entire organization. Then we deliver a plan that spans across seven principles, from strategy to finance to branding to marketing to sales. And then, not only do we deliver the plan, we also help you to execute on the plan, and we train your team to be able to do it themselves. So, what I feel like often, what happens when we are looking for that silver bullet or for that magic growth hack, is we tend to be hyper specific on fixing a part of our organization, or you know setting up a new team, or like I said, you know creating a new product category or doubling down on a particular market, and that might not be the wrong thing to do, but what we do say is that performance happens only when everything works together. So instead of you know trying to double down on that one thing that might give you a short sprint or a short boost in growth, we help you to truly change your organization and be ready to be focused on on the future by looking at everything and making sure everything works together.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the things as I was getting ready for this episode that I saw you all really stress is leaning on things that that you can know work. And and one of the challenges for a lot of founders at this stage is the things that they knew worked feel like they’re not working like they used to anymore. The and there’s this kind of like game of whack-a-mole where it’s like, oh, this thing’s on fire over here. Let’s run over here, and while you do three more fires start over there, and while you’re fixing one of those, there’s three more somewhere else, which I think is a big part of why this idea of a comprehensive model is so very effective is because it it. Short circuits the whole whack-a-mole approach, but one of the challenges is how do you know which one works? Because there’s lots of people out there selling lots of different things. How how do you help folks have the confidence in your method to know that it really is going to help them?
Hugo van den Biggelaar
Yeah. So what we see often when we think about okay, where you know what what what thing do I have to hit right through the Whackmo analogy, what you will tend to see is that people start to look at you know sometimes their intuition, their their their underbelly, their gut feeling, and and then start to double down on that. But what we do at Bitsing is we say let’s look at the insights. What is the information we have available, and where has your money been coming from? Right, we call this your money sources, or what are your revenue drivers? And what you tend to see often is that when you actually look at where your revenue is coming from and where you’re spending your marketing or sales budget, there could be and often is a misalignment, and I will give you an example that I love to use. So we were approached by the Storystar chain in the Netherlands, and they told us, “Hey, our market is declining. It’s not working anymore. You know, how do we turn the ship around?
And we did a financial analysis of where their money was coming from, their money sources, as well as that, we interviewed a lot of people. We asked them, “Hey, where do you think you should be spending your time, your budget, and your effort on? And what they said was, not surprisingly, and you know, intuitively making sense because they said we need to focus on kids because we’re selling toys here, right? So we need to double down our marketing efforts on kids, and what do kids love? They love games. So we need to double down marketing kids to games. We need to be aggressively marketing that because that’s how we’re going to turn this thing around. Because that’s what you know we think will work. But when we actually looked into the insights, what we found was that first of all, their biggest target audience or consumer group was fathers, was 82% of their revenue, and the biggest product category they were selling was Legos, was 64% of their revenue.
So we told them, amongst other things, instead of doubling down on what your gut is telling you, and you’re going after games, which was around 10 to 15% of their revenue, and kids, which was in the end 0% of their revenue, you should be going after fathers and making sure you sell more Legos to them because clearly this has already been working without you investing a lot of time, energy, or effort into it. So sometimes it’s about you know looking at the insights and what’s available and understanding where you focus your efforts on. Now that doesn’t mean that we always say where your revenue is coming from today is gonna be able to set you up for success tomorrow. But what it does mean is that you want to spend a significant amount of your time and investment and budget into where your money is coming from today, so that we can go after some of the high potential opportunities that we see for tomorrow’s future. But people tend to be biased and think, okay, well, we see potential in certain areas, whether that is based on a gut feeling like kids, or whether they feel the potential is there for games, and double down on it. But you know, some potential might not be as much or as important as some of the revenue drivers that you have today in your business. So we help you to build a balanced growth strategy, where you don’t start today’s business by chasing tomorrow’s.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the the kind of common growth hacks. I don’t know that we’d really call it this, but it is what what’s happening is for a visionary founder be like, “Hey, we just need blank like this new thing, a new product line, a new revenue channel, a new something, and and so I love what you’re saying because more often than not, making sure that we’re at least executing what’s already working or or you know close to working well is a really big part of that, and so you kind of brought this nuance that hey, just because your revenue is coming from there doesn’t mean that it should keep coming there, or that that’s going to be the revenue of the future. How do you help folks figure decipher that? Because sometimes it can feel like hey, we’ve maxed a market. How do you know if that’s actually true?
Hugo van den Biggelaar
So what we do when I work together with my my clients is we sit down together, and like I said, we stop thinking and we look at the insights that’s available to us, and then together we look at you know we have a special methodology called the pencil method. So we call this the way we call this the pencil method because we say you have your sharpest pencils in your toolkit, and that’s what’s drawing or that’s what you use to draw your revenue today, and then we have your blunt pencils, and we want to sharpen some of those because they might be your most important pencils in the future. And having that analogy makes it very easy for people to understand around. Okay, you know what does my toolkit look like today, and how do I want my toolkit to look like tomorrow? And then we basically sit down and we just have.
Deep conversation around you know growth ease is the potential that we see in a certain blunt pencil making up for you know potentially under indexing our effort and and time and budget into your sharpest pencil. We talk about margin, right? Because margin is also very important if we think about product categories, for example. Is it what what is coming top top line and what’s coming bottom on on the bottom of our P&L, so we sit down together, we look at the insights available, and then together we create a balance growth strategy. And I think balance is the the key word here, because what you see often is like you explained, people see potential, they see something new, and they double down on it, and if you do that, you know you might be able actually to live up to the potential. But if you’re losing on the markets or the product categories or the consumer groups that are working right now, that that you know that 100% growth you you manage to create in in this new product category might not be able to make up for the 5% market share you lost in your biggest product category.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true, so true. Hugo, there’s a question that I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you’d have to say. But the question is this: What is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish every founder or leader watching or listening today knew?
Hugo van den Biggelaar
Okay, so I would say that that secret that we want everyone to you know know, so it’s not a secret anymore, is that growth actually is predictable. So we we’ve been talking about hacks, we’ve been talking about you know for example luck, and we feel like oh we’re doing such a great thing by just doing this one thing, or it suddenly just happen to us, but I think growth is predictable as long as you you know think about the sequencing of setting yourself up for success. Like I was explaining, if you focus just on one part, let’s say optimizing your top funnel, you might be doing it very successfully and you might grow, but it might also be the right thing to do still.
But still, it might not be successful because other areas in your business are lacking and are dragging it down. So, if you want to make growth predictable, think about your entire organization and sequence and plan for growth. Use the methodology. You know, think about okay, what are my financial goals? What is my strategy that I have to get there? What are what is my brand positioning? What is my funnel looking like? And make sure that all those those questions are answered in the right order and at the right time, so that your entire organizations is is you know is is set up for success and is making sure that that growth is going to happen, versus you you know making sure that one part is working, but then the others are not. It is predictable. We can work on it together. It’s not something that you should be guessing for or hoping for.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so good. It’s so good, and and that’s such good news for folks because it it feels like the opposite of that when you’re playing that whack-a-mole game, and you fix this, but this breaks, and this, and then this breaks. It feels like that, like that’s just it. Like that’s the game we have to play forever. But I couldn’t agree more that when you get the right things in the right place and at the right time, those it does it creates a predictable pathway to growth that is-it’s not just great because you’re growing, but it’s great because you’re not playing whack-a-mole anymore. Like, let’s be real, like that-that only is fun for so long. So I-I love that point, Hugo. There are some folks that are are you know are hopefully really encouraged by this, and and they they want to believe that there’s a predictable path to growth for their organization. Where can they reach out to you to find more out about the work that you all do there?
Hugo van den Biggelaar
Yeah, so we have our website, which is bitsing.com. The methodology is called Bitsing, so that is b-i-t-s-i-n-g.com, which they can visit. There’s obviously some contact details on the website, they can hit me on LinkedIn. So Hugo van den Biggelaar, I will leave the spelling for this beautiful long Dutch name, but you can see it probably in your post. And then also they can hit me up via email, which is [email protected]. And I gladly, you know, discuss any questions they have, any thoughts they have. I’m here as a resource.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic! We’ll get all that, including Hugo’s brilliant Dutch name, in the in the show notes. It it the name itself is worth it, so check that out. But also reach out to Hugo and his team. It’ll be fantastic. You will not regret it. Well, Hugo, thanks so much for being on the show. It really was a pleasure having you. Welcome to the U.S. of A. or here at least on the East Coast, and so thankful for the work that you do. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time at Attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you. Next time, take care.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Retzimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10 question Founders Evolution quiz for free at foundersquiz.com. That’s foundersquiz.com. It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Hugo van den Biggelaar
Hugo van den Biggelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur and former Director at Nike, now based in Brooklyn, New York. When his time at Nike ended, he made his biggest bet yet: moving to New York to bring BITSing to the US. BITSing is a proven growth methodology with a 30-year track record across more than 1,000 organizations, from global giants like BMW, HP Enterprise, and DHL to fast-growing startups and scaleups. BMW tripled its market share. HP grew revenue 168% across 72 countries. DHL added 22%. Hugo works with founders and leadership teams to diagnose where growth is breaking down and rebuild it in a proven way. He is currently building BITSing USA from Brooklyn, one client at a time.
Want to learn more about Hugo van den Biggelaar’s work at The Bitsing Company USA? Check out his website at https://bitsing.com/
Connect with Hugo van den Biggelaar through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugovandenbiggelaar/