Profit to purpose: Simon Griffiths shares his marketing, tech, and leadership tips

Simon Griffiths spent 50 hours sitting on a toilet in a cold warehouse to crowdfund his, Jehan Ratnatunga and Danny Alexander’s business idea — a toilet paper e-commerce business which puts its profits into building toilets in impoverished communities.

Since 2012, it has made more than $20 million in profits, donating half to non-profit partners working on clean water and sanitation projects.

Griffiths sat down for an interview, sharing his marketing tips, how he made tech solutions as the company scaled, and how he’s adapted his leadership as the company grows.

Take shots to hit homeruns

In 2018, Who Gives A Crap started a marketing campaign offering a free trial pack to customers who signed up for a toilet paper subscription, launching it on Earth Day.

They converted 10,000 new customers in the first couple of days. Before that campaign, the team was converting 20,000 customers a month.

But ‘homeruns’ like that only happen because they take so many shots, according to Griffiths.

“We have marketing campaigns that fall flat every week, and campaigns that kick goals every month,” he says.

“Companies that do well are just having enough shots to hit enough home runs to get them to where they need to go.”

But you can’t just keep swinging forever, Griffiths notes. The company has the ability to send SMS messages and emails 24 hours a day, “but that would be a horrible customer experience,” he says.

The litmus test for him is whether it is content that he would want to read himself, and whether he would be excited to receive an email and open it.

“We try to get to a place where if someone sees us in the inbox, they know that it’s going to make them smile,” Griffiths says.

Gaffa tape tech solutions

As one of the early e-commerce companies in Australia on Shopify, Griffiths says they had to make do with a lot of their tech choices as they grew.

“We felt like we were always about six to 12 months in front of the development plans of the platforms that were on,” Griffiths says.

To manage, Griffiths and the team had to settle for options that gave them 70% of the capability they needed, and find a way to ‘gaffa tape’ the final third.

One example is WGAC’s decision to offer free shipping to Australian customers in their early years, despite only really being able to offer it to seven out of 10 customers.

Because there was no plugin available to calculate shipping cost from postcode, the team had to manually check each order that came through, and if free shipping wasn’t possible for them, send the customer an email requesting $8 to ship their order.

The only alternative option was to build a full tech stack of his own. 

Even though Griffiths had a background in computer science, it just wasn’t going to be a good use of his time, he decided.

“We had bigger fish to fry,” he says.

How his leadership style has changed

When Griffiths started out, he says he felt he had to solve every problem in the business himself. The bootstrapped business was short on capital and new hires had to be trained — it wasn’t possible to hire highly experienced people.

But as the company got bigger, the problems became too big for him to even think about solving himself, he says.

“You have to transition from this very kind of problem focused mindset, to now figuring out how you inspire the team to go and solve those problems,” Griffiths says.

For him, it was a matter of evolving to be no longer near the problems, and giving his team the agency to solve them.

Instead of being in the weeds, he sees his role as inspiring and leading them, so that they’re attacking problems in the best way possible.

Griffiths says he achieves that by explicitly linking everyone’s day to day work with the overall goal of the company — to make sure everyone in the world has access to a toilet and clean water by 2050.

That’s the 30 year goal, which is then broken down into five year goals, then one year strategies, all the way down to an individual or team’s quarterly goal.

While not every small business will be explicitly purpose-driven the way WGAC is, every organisation has a purpose, Griffiths says.

“Figuring out how to find that purpose, and articulate it in a way that is easy for people to remember and connect into, is the biggest challenge.”

You can watch the full webinar, Nailing Growth: Ambitious leaders reflect on their journey from purpose to impact, for even more insights.

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