Tactical Agility in the Age of Covid

James Wilkes is the very definition of an entrepreneur. The West Australian has worked in marketing, strategy, engineering and consulting. His zigzagging career path led him, eventually, to Christchurch and a new venture called Triple Nine Farms.

The business is an attempt to not only produce some of the world’s best beef, but to disrupt the traditional commodity meat marketing model along with it.

The company is run by Wilkes, but owned by the Kiwi farmers that supply him. Each family farms the highest-grade pedigree Aberdeen Angus stock and most intertwine their arrival in New Zealand with their cattle.

Their ancestors literally came on the same boat as their cows. That’s important because most Aberdeen Angus herds have been interbred with inferior American cattle. Even Maccas now offers a “Classic Angus” burger. Triple Nine sells only the highest-grade cattle — F3 and F4 animals.

The brand name itself refers to the tiny number of cattle the company plans to process each year. The business plan is simple: supply premier retailers and restaurants around New Zealand, and eventually the world, with grass-fed super-premium Aberdeen Angus. Millions were invested. Years were devoted. And Wilkes spent pretty much every waking minute preparing for the launch of Triple Nine Farms. The planned launch date was April 1, 2020.

In February he started to worry. Chinese tourism was drying up and meat producers all around him were letting employees go. In March, just a week before Triple Nine was meant to open, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a level four lockdown that shut everything, with the exception of large supermarkets. Every restaurant and premium retailer that Triple Nine had lined up to sell to disappeared. The lucrative export deals Wilkes had signed were cancelled as air travel ground to a halt. Years of planning and preparation were rendered pointless in a matter of days.

Wilkes describes the experience as “like waking up in a Jeffrey Archer novel”. Many businesses were rendered inoperable by the crisis. Others are booming. But in the middle are thousands of businesses like Triple Nine that, despite possible extinction, will probably survive with appropriate and immediate changes.

And survival is the only objective right now for Wilkes. His plans of a first-year profit of $1m are long gone. But if he changes his business model in time, keeps revenue coming in and liquidity flowing, Triple Nine might just make it.

Words like “pivot” and “agility” are overused in modern business circles. But not over the past six weeks. They are exactly what is -required if businesses are to survive the coronavirus crisis.

This is not the story of multinational brands changing their ad campaigns to generic representations of communities “pulling together in these unprecedented times”. That is not agility, that is cliche. Instead, this is about making massive changes to every -aspect of a business’s operations.

What would once have taken years must be done in days. The fundamental operating strategy and the famous “four Ps” of marketing — product, price, place and promotion — all have to be transformed if companies such as Triple Nine are to survive.

Overnight, Wilkes had to find new customers for his meat. So, he went direct. Or “F2C’, as he calls it — farm to customer. Suddenly, Triple Nine was an online business that needed a commercial website. It also required a completely new distribution model using couriers to deliver meat to consumers in their homes. When you deliver to restaurants, the delivery channels are automatically chilled. When you target home users using couriers, there is no refrigeration. Triple Nine had to change its packaging to ensure its meat would reach a consumer within a three-day delivery period and under the 5C threshold.

Wilkes and his team “learned a decade’s worth of packaging knowledge in three days”. The product had to change, too. You can’t sell 400kg of meat to an end user. So Triple Nine created four “lockdown boxes” of mixed cuts.

That’s been expanded to eight different options. The boxes have sold well, but that creates another problem. Only about 18 per cent of each animal is a premium cut, so what about the remaining meat? That question propelled Triple Nine into developing ready meals that could be even more profitable for the company but again require a totally different approach.

With no data and no precedent, Wilkes has had to apply a simple “poor man’s” approach to pricing. He has matched premium supermarket prices even though he knows his meat is vastly superior. There is no doubt that his consumers are getting a bargain, but the new direct F2C model enables those bargain prices to also turn a profit for the company.

Finally, there is Wilkes’s biggest challenge: communications. He has neither the time nor the budget to build his brand and -create the demand he now needs to support the business. He has turned to social media to drive sales and regards Facebook and LinkedIn as his two best channels. But he needs four-figure engagement, not the few hundred he currently gets. Triple Nine needs its very happy consumers to start telling their friends how amazing their beef box is.

The irony of a business hit by a virus that needs viral marketing to survive is not lost on Wilkes. He chortles at the realisation with typical West Australian grit. When I ask him what his odds of survival are, he takes a deep breath and says, “100 per cent mate”.

We both know he is lying. But I would not bet against Wilkes or any of the other entrepreneurs out there who are doing it tough, changing their business models to survive the crisis and maybe thriving in the period that follows.

You can learn more about Triple Nine Farms and, if you live in NZ, order some amazing steaks at https://www.999farms.nz/lockdown-box/

MARK RITSON, COLUMNIST