EverydaySpy Podcast - Razor Blades, Secret Clubs, and Billionaires

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Some spy ops are just plain sexy. They have all the glitz, glamour, and glory you see on TV and in movies. And even better, you get to bring home your own stories. This story is one of those... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. So I recently got back from a trip where I had to go to Los Angeles. Now, I go to L.A. maybe two or three times a year, and it's almost always at the invitation of somebody in the entertainment industry. Now, if there's anything I've learned about film and TV, it's that it's a super unpredictable, super challenging industry, and one that I'm happy to contribute to, but most certainly one that I can't fathom the kind of resilience and hard work it takes to succeed in film as an actor or a director, a producer, whatever it might be. So if anybody out there has ambitions of going

into film, you have my absolute respect because that is such a challenging industry. But while I was there, I'm usually there as a guest to actors or to producers or to agents of some sort. So I get to do some cool stuff. And this trip, I was invited to go to a private club. And now they have these private clubs throughout LA, all sorts of different names and brands. And it's kind of like Fight Club. You're not allowed to talk about it. So I can't tell you which club I went to because they had very clear rules. You can't talk about the club. You can't take pictures in the club. You can't use your cell phone in the club. You can't even walk up to people in the club who are other club members unless they invite you to talk to them. Right. This is someplace where celebrities go to be

left alone. So, you know, whoever they happen to be, even though they're recognizable on site, the club rules make it so that you don't bother them. And then similarly, nobody bothers you. So it's kind of a genius idea when you think of it that way. No paparazzi, no nosy neighbors, nobody who's going to come in and waste your afternoon by talking too much about, you know, whatever it is that people talk about when they waste your time. So I'm sitting in this club and I'm sitting there with the gentleman who's who is my agent, my talent manager, if you're, if you you will, the guy that helps me manage all of my contracts for anything in the TV space, anything in the book space or the film space. And while we're sitting there, this nice gentleman sits down at a table

next to ours, and he just starts working, starts tapping away at his computer and starts doing his thing. And, you know, it's a beautiful Los Angeles afternoon in April, which is just glorious. And then it turns out that the gentleman sitting next to me and I order the same lunch. So the lunch is delivered and we both have the same plate and we just strike up a conversation within the rules of the club, right? I didn't interrupt his lunch. He didn't interrupt my lunch. We just kind of mutually made a joke about having the same lunch. And that conversation went on to grow. Now, it turns out that this guy's, his name is Michael, really nice guy, really cool, interesting gentleman. And we start talking about business. He asks me what I'm in LA for. I tell him about

everyday spy. He tells me that he was a founder of a startup that he was able to sell back in 2019, I believe it was. And we just start having a conversation about business. And one of the big themes that popped up was so powerful to me that I want to share it with you. The thing that we both agreed on, me being an entrepreneur with a business that's netting somewhere around a quarter million dollars a year, and him being an entrepreneur who was already built and sold his entire business, the thing that we both agreed on as critical to anybody who's trying to make it and trying to succeed in life is this willingness to accept failure. Now, I'll tell you, my first. I'll tell you, story in a second, but let me just tell you why failure is so important to me.

Failure is something I have not often tasted. And I say that not to be egotistical, but to admit that I have always been wanting to feel the flavor of failure more and more, because failure is how you know you've reached a boundary. It's how you know you've hit a limit so that you can grow, develop the expertise, the energy, the resilience to get past that failure and get to the next level. If you've never felt failure, then you're living inside of a box. You don't even know what the boundaries are. You have to find those boundaries. And the only way to find those boundaries is to fail. Another way that I've heard it said by some folks in the business space is that you're not really in business until you have failed in business. Once you have failed in business, that's when you know,

okay, this is my boundary. My boundary is in marketing or my boundary isn't advertising or my boundary is in closing sales or whatever it might be. So with this in mind, I actively seek out opportunities to fail. And I've had so many awesome failure moments since I've started Everyday Spy. Let me just give you a few. So first, Everyday Spy used to be called Everyday Espionage. That was a big failure, right? Everyday espionage, the name of this podcast is a very catchy name, but only to a select

few people who know what espionage actually is. Many of you listening to this podcast, and the reason this podcast is still called everyday espionage, it's very deliberate now because I want people who understand the word espionage to be drawn to this podcast. I don't want people who are either too uneducated or too paranoid or too like crazy. If they don't know what the word espionage means, they're not even going to be looking for this podcast. No algorithm is going to offer this to them in their search on Google. or on Apple Podcast or anything else. So I like that, and I like that a lot. But for my business, I needed to change my business name to everyday spy, because spy is a word that pretty much anybody understands. And spy is a word that everybody understands. And for the most part, everybody sees the word spy in a cool, positive light.

There are plenty of people who see espionage as a negative, dark thing. But when it comes to the word spy, you know, spies are interesting, spies are fun, spies are smart, spies travel, spies do all sorts of cool stuff. Most people like the idea of the word spy, even if they don't like the word espionage. Had I not started by calling my business everyday espionage, however, then I would have never run into the boundaries that happened when I called my business something that was so specific that I basically cut off most of the audience. There were a lot of people who didn't know what everyday espionage was. It was really hard for me to explain. It was hard for me to make an elevator pitch. It was hard for me to be able to find the right audience because

there are so many people out there who just think espionage isn't what it really is. So that was one failure. That was a small failure compared to some of my other failures. I don't know if for those of you who have been listening for a while, I think I told you the story once that I actually tried to start a bounce house business and that failed. I actually tried to start a consultancy where I was giving people advice on how to get into the military academy. That failed. So I've had all these business failures. I went to get my MBA at a business school in Florida. And even though I got good grades at that business school in Florida, there were multiple

exercises where I had to do something in the marketing world or something in the strategic planning world, some kind of project where I got a massive fat F or a D on it. So I have been able to experience just wonderful boundary discovering failure throughout my business education. So now, let me take you back to that private club in L.A. So I'm sitting here with Michael, and I'm explaining to Michael how much I've enjoyed building my business because I've been building it on the back of failure. Failure after failure teaches me something new. I make some kind of change.

I adapt in my business grows. Then Michael decides to tell me that failure has been critical to his success also. So Michael started out as a marketing professional, and he was doing marketing in New York. and he was doing marketing in other parts, big cities around the world. And he was always trying to climb the corporate ladder in marketing for big firms. Sometimes it was ads. Sometimes it was sports, whatever it might have been at the time. Sometimes it was digital.

Sometimes it was print. Until he was laid off from a marketing agency when he was in New York. And he was at a point in his life, it was at an age where he was like, where he was frustrated. He was tired of the struggle of constantly. failing. So he hit the reset button, right? I think he said it was 2007. And he just left. He left everything behind, moved from New York to L.A., not because he had big ambitions to be an actor or to go into theater or anything like that. He moved to L.A. because he had a cousin in L.A. that was willing to give him a free couch to sleep on. So Michael moves to L.A. And while he's in

L.A., he's trying, again, to find where he belongs. So he's applying to different marketing agencies, he's trying to get new jobs, he's, he's seeing if he can network himself into a new lifestyle in L.A. And he's failing over and over again. He's not getting called back. He's getting interviews. The interviews don't call him back. He's got applications that get ignored. And he struggles. And in that struggle, he finds himself one day at a party where he makes friends with another guy. And this guy at the other end of the table that he meets is also having tons of struggles. And that guy's in like the shipping and logistics world. And they end up striking up a friendship over their mutual struggles,

their mutual failures trying to build a life for themselves in L.A. Well, through that friendship, an idea is born. And their idea is that the friend has the ability to source inexpensive razor blades from overseas. And Michael knows that razor blades are a marketing area. that is really only controlled by two or three big companies. So the idea is, what if they can make a razor, you know, like your men's razor, your women's razor, what if they can make a razor that is cheaper and more accessible

than what all the mainstream razors are? Now, it's funny as I'm sitting here talking to Michael because I have a face full of hair and I always have. And when I was in the military, I used to have to shave twice a day. And it's really miserable to shave twice a day because razor and razor blades are so expensive. And when I was 18, 19 years old at the Air Force Academy and I was bringing home a massive $600 paycheck every month

because that's just what the Academy would pay me, it was painful to spend $30 on two sets of five razor blades. So as soon as Michael told me about this pain in the marketplace, this idea that razor blades were overpriced, I completely agreed immediately. Because I remember being, I was in school, in 2008. I remember exactly how expensive razor blades were. So they birth this idea to start a company making cheap razor blades. And it turns out that the company they built is called the Dollar Shave

Club. Now many, many of you might have never heard of Dollar Shave Club. Many of you might belong to Dollar Shave Club. But the idea was kind of brilliant, if you ask me, they would make a generic razor blade and just like a Gillette or a sheet. or any other main brand razor. They would make a generic. They would put it in a box with some other kit, and then they would send it directly to your door. And you would sign up for a monthly membership,

and for a dollar a month, you would get new razor blades shipped directly to your door. $1 a month compared to going to the grocery store and paying $15 for five blades. It was awesome. I thought the idea was brilliant. So then Michael and his friend launched this business, and they're doing it all basically out of their garage,

you know, they're creating little shipping boxes and they're putting these generic razor blades in there and they set up 100 or 150 or whatever pre-boxed razor blades for their big launch day. Now here's where the magic kind of happens. They had no budget for a commercial. They had no budget for a big marketing launch or a promotional launch. So instead, Michael, the guy that I meet at this club, decides that they're just going to make a simple, funny video on YouTube. So they do. They make a funny video advertisement on YouTube,

basically called Why Our Razors are Fing Awesome. And that's it. And then they let the video go loose and they go to sleep, hoping that the video will create a handful of their first sales the next day. When Michael wakes up the next day, the server that hosts the website has crashed. So while he was hoping to open up and find 15 sales, Instead, he couldn't even log into his website.

So frustrated and kind of angry, he decides to go into the office. And when he goes into the office, he finds out that the server received 1,500 orders and that the order activity was so significant that it shut down the server. And then when they look at their YouTube video, they find out that their YouTube video went viral overnight, which drove those 1,500 orders because people loved the commercial and loved the entire concept. of a $1 shaving club. Now fast forward from 2011 when they shut down their server from too many orders to 2021 or 2022, excuse me, while Michael and I are sitting sharing the same lunch essentially at this

awesome club in L.A. In 2019, Michael sold his dollar shave club for $1 billion to Unilever Corporation, the same corporation that, you know, is one of two major owners in the bath and beauty care industry. And now he spends all of his time just finding philanthropic ways to spread and share his money. And it was amazing to sit with this guy and hear his story and realize how how at the end of failure after failure, failures in the marketing space, failures in the business space, failures in looking for a job, how all of that failure is. what gave him the skill sets, gave him the experience, gave him the resilience, gave him a common ground to bond with the partner that helped him build a billion dollar enterprise. That's what failure brings. And that's why successful people bond over conversations about failure. So if you're out there avoiding failure, minimizing failure, if you're afraid of failure,

If you're afraid of leaning in to take a risk that might result in failure, understand that you're falling victim to a mindset that is completely contrary to success. In the typical world, we don't want to fail a test in school. You don't want to fail to impress your family or your friends. You don't want to fail in front of a girl. You don't want to fail in front of somebody you might be interested in dating. The idea of failure is a very intimidating and detrimental feeling. But in reality, failure is the last. lessons that turn into success. Failure is the building blocks of your future ambition. So you have to

lean into that failure. You have to experience failure to get the building block, to get the lesson. Essentially, every time you fail, you get an A in trying to find your boundary. And that's perfect. Because when you find that boundary, you can develop it, improve it, work on it, and make something better happen. When you embrace failure, you get a chance. to learn something that nobody else gets to learn. And then you get to take that lesson that you've learned and you get to meet other people who have the same education. Anytime you put people who have equal education, equal courage, equal risk tolerance, equal ambition together, the net benefit is exponentially more than when you try to do anything by yourself.

When you try to do something by yourself, you're never going to have enough resources, you're never going to have enough time, you're never going to have enough reach, enough knowledge, enough expertise. So you have to balance your ideas. You have to have a group, a network of people that you can work with that are going to help you rapidly increase your education and help you rapidly embrace the types of risks that can lead to failure. That group of people is waiting for you sitting around a table of failure. When you find people who have, you find people who have failed. You have found the community of people that have a future of success. But you have to be willing to take a seat at that table. You have to be willing to bring your own failure. You have to be

willing to lean into risk. And then you have to be willing to say, hey, I failed. I failed and I'm glad I did. And when you can say that phrase, when you can honestly tell people that you have failed and you're glad that you did it, that is everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations.

And join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.