Gerhard Apfelthaler is the dean of the School of Management at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. In that role he oversees graduate and undergraduate programs as well as the Dorfman Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Cal Lutheran’s community startup space Hub101 and the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting. He previously held several positions in Austria. Here, he discusses a mistake he made early in his career.
“One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my early career? Not trusting my gut feeling and instead listening to biased advice.
In the mid 1990s, I was in my late 20s and in a very different career track from the one that I am in now. I was an Austrian diplomat and had been afforded the great opportunity to serve as Deputy Austrian Trade Commissioner in the United States. The biggest part of my role was to assist Austrian companies in doing business in this vast market that seemed to offer nothing but opportunities. And this is where I made my biggest mistake.
After some time in this position, I thought I had a good grip on the market and that I knew my trade. One day, a representative from a then relatively unknown company visited our office in Los Angeles. He introduced his company that today is synonymous with one of the most iconic drinks globally – Red Bull – and asked for our advice regarding entry of the U.S. market.
I genuinely felt excited about the new product, but I also wanted to be the professional I thought I was and first do my research.”
Disappointing research results
“After reading industry reports, investigating the market, and – most importantly – placing several calls to industry insiders, the feedback was disappointing but clear: Americans don’t drink energy, they eat energy.
Besides, so I was told, energy drinks may contain ingredients that the FDA would not approve of. In short, no one was excited about this new category of product the way I was, and so our recommendation was clear: Stay away from the U.S. market! What a mistake that was, I should soon learn when Red Bull kept popping up everywhere – on college campuses, in fitness centers and at their legendary Flugtag events! I realized that I had restricted myself to asking contacts in the beverage industry who were possibly more interested in keeping out a competitor than being bold and doing the hard work of bringing a new product to market.
The rest, of course, is history. Red Bull defined an entire new beverage category in the market. It is synonymous with energy drinks. They had outmaneuvered all the dominant giants of the beverage industry.
Today, Red Bull sells about 12 billion cans of its energy drink globally, with the U.S. being the single most important market for the company. I guess you could say that my advice was just a load of … bull!”
