Daniel Flynn: What If It Works

Goalcast

Daniel Flynn reveals what it takes to make his dream of building a non-profit company selling water bottles that donates all profits possible.  Thankyou. Managing Director Daniel Flynn for WORLDZ  Want More Inspiring Stories? ► The Most Inspiring Speech: The Wisdom of a Third Grade Dropout Will Change Your Life | Rick Rigsby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg_Q7...  ► Denzel Washington's Life Changing Speech On Failure and Success | Goalcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZhzY...

Transcript

00:00I'm sitting at my computer and I'm crying, and I never forget two numbers I saw.

00:05One, 900 million people in our world still don't have access to clean water.

00:10The second number, in 2008 we were spending 50 billion dollars on bottled water,

00:16today it's 100 billion dollars. And I'm crying because I'm reading stories of kids as young as

00:22four and five years old, they're walking every single day to collect dirty water,

00:28water that ends up killing their brothers and their sisters and sitting there thinking,

00:32what if that was me? Imagine collecting water for them, they die from waterborne disease and

00:37I find out it was the water that I got them that killed them. The fact that it's some other young

00:41person's story in our world made me want to do something. What if you could combine the two

00:47extremes and sell a bottle of water that gives 100% of the profit to funding water projects,

00:51and in 2008 my best mate, my girlfriend and I, we founded Thank You. A bottle of water that gives

00:59100% of the profit, and to be honest we didn't know if you could call a brand or a product Thank

01:03You. For the next three years every single retailer in our country says no. For three

01:08years we felt like failures, and for three years we felt like this dream was impossible.

01:15But we couldn't walk away from the thought, but what if, what if it worked? Who says we have to

01:20do things the way they've always been done before, and it's at this point at year five

01:24people say to us you're crazy, but not good crazy. You see it's been five years and you can't get one

01:32bottle of water into any major grocery or supermarket store in Australia, and people

01:36were right. For five years we couldn't get our one product into the two biggest supermarkets

01:41in our country, Coles and Woolworths. They have 70% market share, and it was put to us if you can't

01:48get one product in how are you going to get your 14 new products in, and all those who heard the

01:53idea said that's not going to work. Our thinking was but what if it did, and one day we launched a

02:00little video on YouTube. We called it the Coles and Woolworths campaign. Now media were like you

02:08can't do that, you can't put the two biggest supermarkets who hate each other in the same

02:12sentence, and I was like well Wesley our graphic designer he didn't find it too hard, he he just

02:17sort of. Now this clip goes viral and people are singing, they're dancing, they're rapping, and then

02:25we may have flown this from a helicopter, said hey Coles thank you for changing the world in brackets

02:31if you say yes because we haven't met yet, and we flew over the city and around the head office for

02:37half an hour. To be fair Woolworths got one too, but my favorite part of the day was Peter and Jeff

02:45the pilots because they flew for free. I reckon every one of us in this room outside this room we

02:51want to do something, we want to use what's in our hand, our time, our money, our business, our resource,

02:56a helicopter to help change the world, and we can because in industry record time both supermarkets

03:03said yes, but my favorite number is this one, the 755,000 lives impacted currently in our projects

03:11in 17 countries. We feel like this is just the beginning, but I suppose I'm challenged by this

03:27thought that to get a result the world has never seen before you have to be prepared to do something

03:32the world has never seen before, and to make your ideas and dreams a reality you've got to be willing

03:38to get out and stay out of your comfort zone. We are in chapter two, and thank you world is in

03:44chapter two, and I have no doubt that there will be people outside of this room who would look on

03:50ideas like this and this and maybe even this conference and say yeah a lot of excitement

03:55don't know if it'll ever really work, but it takes courage to push past that. My all-time favorite

04:00quote is courage is not the absence of fear but the understanding that there is something more

04:05important than fear that exists. I suppose the critics will always look on and say what if it

04:13doesn't work and that's led us to ask and I hope everyone in this room asks the same question

04:18it's the most important question we can ever ask and it's but what if it does work because the

04:23answer to that is as a community we will go on to change hundreds of millions of lives and our ideas

04:28will literally go on to shape the course of history if we have that courage to get out and stay out.

04:35you

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