In Overlanding Through the Boardroom, Johan de Villiers turns bush lessons into business ones. In this edited and expanded excerpt from the book’s 10th chapter, he takes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s warning about Day 2 companies to Nosy Be, where an Italian hotel shows him what Day 1 looks like. A rainforest reverses his own number one rule for game reserves. Back home, a salesman books a helicopter without anyone’s approval.
Hell-Ville
Kim and I landed just outside Hell-Ville in 2017, off a short SA Airlink hop from Joburg, with our flights home already booked. I had been to Nosy Be before. Kim had not, and I wanted her to see the island that had claimed my heart the first time round.
I have travelled to more than 60 countries, and only three keep pulling me back. One is Bali, the quiet corners well away from the bustle of Kuta. Another is the Okavango, which to me means Chobe, Moremi and Linyanti. The third is Nosy Be, the largest island in Madagascar’s northwest archipelago, a relatively unknown place of white beaches and turquoise water.
Its main town is named after a French admiral called De Hell. I could not make that up if I tried. The island’s own name means “big island” in Malagasy, and she wears two European accents at once. The churches are Roman Catholic, the schools follow the French curriculum and the locals speak fluent French, while the island is especially popular with Italian tourists.
Islands like this have a habit, and I should have warned Kim about it. Nosy Be is in no hurry and has no interest in anybody’s itinerary. If she could talk, she would have glanced at our return tickets on the way in and said: “We’ll see.”
Five storeys of Italy
I should declare a prejudice. Given a choice, I avoid commercial hotels. In Phnom Penh, after the Cambodian rainforest in 2014, Kim and I chose a six-room boutique hotel full of dark teak and burning incense.
So it is mildly embarrassing that the sharpest business lesson on Nosy Be came from a commercial hotel. This one exists mainly for Italians. Five storeys of it. The staff speak Italian, the kitchen serves Italian food and the whole place runs on Italian time, so that guests can spend the day outdoors and come back to a building where they feel at home.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a name for what that hotel had. In his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, he split companies into Day 1 and Day 2. Day 1 is the company that still behaves like a start-up. Day 2 is what success turns into when nobody is paying attention, and he describes it as “stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”
He also points out that the decline is slow, and that an established company can coast on Day 2 for decades before the end arrives. That is the part that should keep a profitable business awake at night. I have run First Technology Western Cape since 2010, which is long enough for Day 2 to come looking for anyone.
The hotel was Day 1 all the way through. Bezos puts customer obsession first among his defences. His reasoning is that customers are never entirely satisfied, even when they tell you they are happy, and a company that wants to delight them will keep building things for them before they think to ask. Somebody at that hotel had decided exactly who was going to walk through the door and then built everything around that guest: the staff, the language, the food and the clock. They had picked one customer and gone the whole way.
Never carry fruit
On the eastern side of the island lies Lokobe National Park, a tropical rainforest that is home to lemurs, and Kim and I paddled in by dugout canoe. The reserve offered guided walks through the forest. We were told that if we carried small pieces of fruit in our hands, the lemurs would jump down from the dense foliage onto our shoulders to feed.
Every instinct I own sat up straight. I wrote the number one rule of African game reserves into the first chapter of my own book: never, ever carry fruit in your vehicle. At Mana Pools in 1999, the ranger at the gate told us that our first sighting would probably be a brand-new Land Cruiser lying on its roof. An elephant bull had smelt an apple core in the ashtray and rolled the vehicle to get at it. That rule has lived in my head ever since.
Madagascar is an African country. My rule covered every reserve in Africa. Nobody had told the lemurs.
The rule was right for the reserves it was written for, where the animal that wants your fruit is an elephant bull. In Lokobe, the animal that wants your fruit fits on your shoulder. Same fruit, opposite outcome. The only thing that had changed was the place.
That is how most corporate rules go bad. Somebody makes a sensible decision in a particular place, for a particular reason, and writes it down. Then the place changes and the reason quietly leaves. The rule stays, and it keeps all of its authority long after it has lost its point.
Bezos warns about exactly this in the same letter, where he calls it managing to proxies. A process quietly replaces the outcome it was built to deliver, everyone becomes very good at following it, and nobody checks whether the outcome still arrives.
Call it the Lokobe rule. Before you enforce a rule, find out which forest it was written for.
How Day 2 moves in
Day 2 shows up in the diary first.
It usually starts with clients. You stop visiting them, then you stop entertaining them, because they have been with you for years and the orders keep arriving. You assume they are committed and that they will never leave. Meanwhile somebody else is knocking on their door, making them feel special and doing everything you used to do before success made you comfortable. Ignore your clients for long enough and they return the favour. One morning your account manager phones a buyer he has known for a decade and gets routed to procurement.
“Supplier onboarding,” says the procurement system, in the voice of every procurement system in the country. “Please upload your documents.”
Somewhere along the way you slipped from partner to another supplier with a vendor number.
Day 2 works like rust on a Defender chassis. The Landy starts every morning, drives beautifully and looks fine from the kerb. Meanwhile the rust gets on with its work inside the box sections where nobody looks, and you find out about it on the corrugations of Kaokoland on the day something structural lets go.
A Day 2 company looks just as healthy from the kerb. The hierarchy is tidy, everything is measured and reviewed, every decision climbs through several layers of management before anyone acts, and the customer has quietly become a number on a balance sheet. From the inside, all of that feels like maturity.
Hierarchy has its uses. It makes a large group of people predictable, which is why armies run on it. A Day 1 company looks messier by comparison: a flatter structure, teams drawn from different departments, and people trusted to act on a new idea without waiting for a queue of signatures. Messier is the price. Staying relevant is what it buys.
The helicopter nobody signed off
At First Technology we are interested in only two things, our customers and our employees, and we try hard to stay a Day 1 company. We run a flat structure. Nobody reports to anybody in the traditional way, and people may make decisions as long as those decisions are ethical, legal and commercially profitable, in that order.
New staff hear the same thing at induction. If you cannot get hold of a manager or a director for approval, ask yourself whether what you are about to do is ethical, whether it is legal and whether it is commercially profitable. If the answer is yes every time, go. You can explain why you skipped the process once you have delivered.
Bezos makes a related argument about speed. Most decisions, he says, should probably be made with about 70% of the information you would like to have. In his view, waiting for 90% usually means you are being slow, and many decisions are two-way doors that can be reversed if you turn out to be wrong.
In 2022, during a morning meeting, one of our salespeople found out that a potential client had never been in a helicopter. That same afternoon, he had a JetRanger fly them to lunch at a wine farm in Franschhoek. He had not secured anyone’s approval. Our approval process was written for a different forest. When his expense claim arrived the next day, attached to it was a sizeable purchase order from a prestigious corporate, at an impressive margin.
I trained as a helicopter pilot and I am rated on the JetRanger. The salesman is the one who thought of it. Our training policy, for the record, will not pay for anyone’s helicopter licence.
The flight was completely above board, and it did what no brochure could. The client wanted something memorable, the salesman delivered it, and they felt confident enough to make a substantial commitment. Our commitment to customers and staff took First Technology Western Cape from R60m in turnover and no profit in 2010 to R1.1bn a little over a decade later, with only 20 more people on the team. I will come back to that number, because it deserves more suspicion than I gave it in the book.
What the helicopter does not prove
Now let me argue with my own story, because it flatters me more than it should.
I tell the helicopter story because it worked. Had the lunch produced nothing, the same expense claim would have landed on my desk as a very expensive sandwich, and nobody would be putting it in a book. The salesman carried the risk. I get to call it culture. A story told by the person it makes look good is the weakest evidence there is, and I am that person.
The three questions carry a catch that the book does not dwell on. Ethical and legal can be checked before you act. Commercially profitable usually cannot, because the answer depends on a customer who has not decided yet. My salesman could not have known the flight would pay until the purchase order existed, so the third question is really a judgment call, and that judgment is the part that makes the story exciting.
Then there is the helicopter itself. Somebody flew that JetRanger to Franschhoek, and whoever it was did not fly it on 70% of the information. I learnt this at flight school: before a pilot starts the engine, a checklist confirms that every switch is where it should be. In a cockpit the checklist is not a proxy. It is the job.
Bezos himself warns against using one decision-making process for everything, because only some decisions are two-way doors. My salesman could move fast precisely because somebody else’s process was rigid, and a Day 1 company that forgets which of its doors only open one way will eventually walk through the wrong one.
And the number. R1.1bn is a turnover figure, which is the kind of measure Bezos warns about, because turnover records activity rather than health. Growing that much with only 20 more people tells me the model scales. On its own, it cannot tell me how much of that growth came from the culture and how much from the market we were in.
Who should hand out the three questions, and who should not
Hand your people the three questions if they deal with customers every day and your approvals take longer than your opportunities last. Hand them over only if you will sign the expense claim that comes back without a purchase order attached, because that claim, and not the one with the order, is the real test of whether you meant it.
Do not bother if your business is mostly one-way doors. If you run a charter company or an operating theatre, write the checklist, follow it and let the fast thinking happen somewhere it cannot kill anyone. And do not bother if what you want is the story. A Day 1 culture that only exists in the induction pack is a Day 2 company with better slides.
We spent the last days of that trip on Nosy Sakatia, an island a six-minute boat ride from Nosy Be, with no cars and no roads, diving among giant green turtles just off the beach. After two days there, as we boarded the boat for the mainland, Kim started crying. Kim was a hardened corporate litigation defence lawyer. She did not cry at boats.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I’m not ready to go.”
There was another flight the following week. I phoned our travel agent and moved Kim’s booking, a decision that took as long as the call and could have been reversed just as quickly. Then I flew home on the original ticket, because the dogs were waiting and somebody in our house had to be Day 2.
The island had been half right about our return tickets. Kim waved me off at the airport and went straight back to the lodge to ask for our cabana.
Johan de Villiers is the CEO of First Technology Western Cape, an award-winning turnkey IT solutions provider, and hosts the JDV On Air vodcast, which has more than 100,000 subscribers. He has driven a Land Rover Defender through 14 African countries, climbed three of the Seven Summits, survived the Cambodian rainforest with the Kuy people and flies helicopters. His book Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business is published by Rockhopper Books.
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