A tire company is the reason why some chefs take their own lives today.
Not even kidding.
If you want to scale your business, read this.
Just finished researching about the Michelin brothers, the founders of the Michelin tire company;
Your car or bike might just have their tires right now as well.
The founders of the Michelin tire company were two brothers, of which the older brother (André) was probably one of the best marketers to ever exist, and the younger (Édouard) probably the best industrialist.
Their grandfather's rubber items manufacturing company was on the brink of bankruptcy.
So Édouard stopped all the things which weren't bringing profits.
Due to desperate survival, back when tires were a solid block of rubber, the Michelin brothers, André and Édouard,
invented the first air-filled tire for bikes.
Solid block tires used to take almost one day to replace, whereas this took a max of half an hour.
Also, the solid tires were very uncomfortable, whereas the new air tires were smooth as butter.
To showcase that their new type of tire was superior, André hosted their own bike races with nails on the track.
(The bike racer they signed completed the race 7 hours before everyone else.)
Cars weren't popular back then. In 1900, there were fewer than 3,000 cars in France, and André knew they should focus on cars more than anything else.
But they had one more issue: people didn’t drive much. Therefore, fewer tire sales.
So André had a fantastic idea.
He literally created guidebooks, which were given out for FREE. These contained practical information for motorists, such as maps, instructions on how to repair and change tires, and listings of petrol stations, garages, hotels, and restaurants.
They also built various road signs throughout the entirety of France, a job that should have been done by the government was done by a private company.
The idea was, they organized the entire company around a core loop: encourage more driving → which leads to more movement → more movement leads to more wear → more wear leads to more tire sales.
Encourage people to drive more, travel further, and, in doing so, wear out their tires and buy new ones.
Bro was the first to make “lead magnets” before lead magnets were even a thing.
The restaurant section became increasingly popular, leading the brothers to recruit anonymous inspectors to review and grade restaurants.
This led to the creation of the Michelin Star system, introduced in 1926.
It’s, to this date, such an important grading system that there have been documented cases of chefs who have ended their lives because their Michelin star might drop.
Their story is too fascinating to squeeze into just one post.
But here’s 3 things we can learn:
Niche down - their competitors tried manufacturing everything, whereas they had one motto “Everything for tires, tires for everything”
Figure out what will always matter to your customers, what will always be true or important even years from now; and build your business around continually delivering on those things; Everything about the car changed in their lifetime, except tires.
Give, Give Give - Their Michelin guide, was given out for free for the first 20 years. In return they saw their sales increase.
- Tharv