In 1990, the UK government imposed a tax on company cars.
It was £4,600 and would be added to cars costing over £29,000.
At that time the average cost of a Porsche 968 was £34,000.
The extra tax would make it nearly £40,000, which meant people would simply buy cheaper Audis and BMWs instead.
Kevin Gaskell was managing director of Porsche UK, he knew the only way to avoid the tax was to find a way to get the car’s price below £29,000.
He called the engineers in Germany and asked them to make the car cheaper.
They told him there was no way they could make it cheaper. They wouldn’t compromise on quality.
That’s when desperation forced Gaskell to have a brilliant idea.
Don’t reduce the quality but strip out absolutely everything that makes it expensive.
Just leave four wheels and an engine.
To Porsche this made no sense, why would anyone buy a poor man’s version of a Porsche? It was crazy, no one would want it.
But they did what Gaskell asked. They took out the electric windows, took off the sunroof, took out the rear seat, the radio, the CD player, the air conditioning, the sound-deadening, the chrome wheels, the expensive paint-job, every luxury feature went.
What they were left with was an extremely basic car.
Gaskel, then had them replace the expensive powered front chairs with cheaper plastic Ricaro bucket seats and lower the car’s suspension.
All of this got the price down to £28,995 – just £5 below the tax threshold.
Then the truly brilliant part: he called it ‘Club Sport 968’ and painted that along the side.
Now it wasn’t seen as the ‘cheap version’ of the 968, now it was the ‘racing version’.
It was launched at the 1992 Paris Motor Show.
Performance Magazine immediately voted it ‘Performance Car of the Year’, beating the Ferrari 348 Spider, the Lancia Delta Integrale, and the Lotus Esprit.
The Club Sport 968 became so sought after that buyers insisted on having Porsche paint ‘Club Sport’ on the side in letters four feet long.
(No one wanted to be seen in a cheap car, but everyone wanted to be seen in a racing car.)
It became Porsche’s best-seller, because they changed a problem into an opportunity.
And if it hadn’t been for the tax problem, they would never have done it.
A problem often forces us to be creative, Winston Churchill’s wife understood this.
After he retired, Churchill decided he would take up painting, he bought all the brushes and paints and went into the garden. He set up the easel and the canvas and began to study the scene.
When his wife came out several hours later he hadn’t moved, he was still studying the scene, the canvas was still blank.
She asked him what the problem was, he said he couldn’t decide where to start.
So she grabbed a brush and daubed a squiggle of paint across the plain white canvas.
Churchill yelled “What have you done, you’ve ruined it?”
She said “Well now you’ll just have to fix it, won’t you” and she left.
And it worked, Churchill began painting.
Instead of a white canvas, with an infinite expanse of possibilities, he now had a simple problem to fix.
And fixing a problem is much easier than staring at a blank canvas and wondering where to start.
That’s why it’s always good to reduce the possibilities to a simple problem.
Then we just have to get creative about how to solve the problem.