Living The Red Life - How To Build Your Dream Team with Kevin Harrington

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

"If you don't make the pitch, you don't get the shark!" These are the inspirational words of entrepreneur Kevin Harrington as he dares you to play outside of your comfort zone as a hustler yourself. Kevin was one of the original panel members and investors ("Sharks") on the hit TV show Shark Tank and so he knows a thing or two about spotting a good opportunity and then grabbing it with both hands!Kevin has teamed up with Rudy today and an audience of Red Life's inner circle to share his insights on how he was able to build a business empire with only $25K to begin with. This is the American Dream writ large as he becomes the "As Seen on TV" guy when he spots an opportunity to own 8 hours of dead airtime on the Discovery Channel and start producing infomercials.Rudy is drawing parallels with the early days of TV marketing and now, where the LifeTime Value of a customer is more important than ever! Having an online following on your social media account is something that you too can leverage as you test new products and services and grow your own empire!Discover what Kevin looks for in a partner, what mistakes he's made as a young entrepreneur, and share in the approach that he takes to bringing together his 'dream team' that will leave you inspired and ready for money-making action. Entrepreneurial enlightenment awaits! Please join us. "This is what I love to do. Get in on the ground floor, exercise my opportunities and relationships, and bring what I call a 'dream team' to the table." ~ Kevin HarringtonIn This Episode:How Kevin got started in ‘deal flow’ with small businesses as a young entrepreneurHow to test your products in the market without overextending yourself What mistakes did Kevin learn as a young entrepreneur?“If you don't make the pitch, you don't get the shark!”: how to get in the roomHow does Kevin prioritize his focus as an investor and partner?Advice on if you're just starting out as an entrepreneurConnect with Kevin Harrington:Website - https://kevinharrington.tv/Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

If you don't make the pitch, you're not going to get the shark, right? So, you know, and I'm not here to say I'm here to join everyone's board, but it's just, this is what I do. I'm involved in about 35 investments of mine, companies, and I sit on public boards as well as private boards, et cetera. And this is what every entrepreneur needs to do is building that team around yourself of experts. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Guys, what is up? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today,

I have a special preview for you with the man himself, Mr. Kevin Harrington from the TV show Shark Tank. He's a partner of mine. He's on the board. And this is a replay episode from one of our live mastermind events. Members paid 25 up to $100,000 to learn from Kevin. Kevin has incredible experience, worked with hundreds of businesses. I think he sold over 20 companies, built 20 plus companies, passed 100 million. Obviously, mass, mass experience. He literally invented the video ad on TV 25, 30 years ago. And now what you're going to hear is me interviewing him live, where he breaks down how to create amazing ads, all his experience generating hundreds of millions of dollars, all of his experience from Shark Tank, working with hundreds and hundreds of brands. In today's episode,

I couldn't be more excited to share this with you because this is behind the scenes stuff that most people never, ever get to experience. And obviously our members paid 25 to 100K to be in the room to learn this. And now I'm sharing it with you guys here today on today's episode. So let's dive in to my interview with Mr. Kevin Harrington. So we'll dive in, Kevin. So I think, you know, like I explained, there's a mix of experience and a mix of raisenesses here. And, you know, one thing that I've always said the key to success for me is experience. And you can't, you know, I always say, and you know, one thing that I've always said, the key to success for me is experience and you can't, you know, I always say, unless you invent a time machine, you can't really

buy that. And the closest way to buying that is mentorship. Right. And yeah, that's obviously part of the reason we connected is, you know, my, my future and where I wanted to go was a lot like what you've already done, where you've, you know, built businesses and worked with a lot of businesses to help them grow strategically. And I mean, everyone that sat here today, even though it might not be as an equity partnership, they're here for mentorship. They're here to shorten the learning curve. And they're here to, you know, progress through

strategy versus guessing. Because I think, you know, as you guys all know, we, when we start out, we guess a lot, right? And we fail a lot. And then when we get some strategy, stuff starts to work quicker. So my first question to you, and it's an open question, but with online businesses, with selling products online, right? What is, what are some of the key things you found are the difference between the successful businesses you've worked with and the businesses that don't normally grow? Whether it's traits from the entrepreneur themselves or the business. Right. So I want to answer that question specifically.

Maybe it might be helpful if I took one minute, just a little background, how some of this happened. Because that kind of dovetails into the answer to that question. But I'm going to go back almost, it was the early 80s, almost 40 years ago, because this is 2002, it was 1982. As a young entrepreneur, I was sitting there and wanted to get exposure to great opportunities and business deals. And 40 years ago, the world of entrepreneurship was nothing like it is today. I mean, today, everyone here could be an entrepreneur like that. I mean, you can be a digital entrepreneur. You can find a product.

You can go global. But 40 years ago, none of this existed. The internet didn't exist. I mean, I was sealing driveways. I was installing air conditioning and furnaces. It was my business in college. And I mean, these were ways to make money as an entrepreneur. But I said, I need to be exposed to more opportunities because I don't want to be a labor-oriented entrepreneur.

Because it defined me in terms of how far I could grow, et cetera. So I started a business brokerage company and this was 42 years ago, 1980. I started, I was selling businesses, pizza parlors, delicatessens, flower shops, manufacturing companies. And why did I do this? Because I wanted to see the trends in business i wanted to see who's going up what you know franchises were coming into town opening 25 locations wow this is a hot one what's what's this all about right so i started getting in on the

ground floor partnering with entrepreneurs and this was when i was i would sell a business but i would also say hey the many times that the person buying it didn't have all the capital yeah i put a couple bucks in and own some equity in restaurants and manufacturing and that's how i started getting involved in deal flow and so um but it was getting the exposure to small business by being a broker because when you're selling businesses, you get the books and the records and all the leases, all the percentages, the food costs, the leases.

And really what you see are the troubles, the good stuff and the bad stuff. Because someone would buy a business a year later, run it into the ground, and I find out, what did you do? Oh, well, you know, I'm looking at your numbers. Last year, you spent $20,000 in advertising, the guy that owned the business before you. And this year, that's all gone. You didn't know, oh, that was an expense I didn't want to have anymore. Okay. Well, you just destroyed the business. Okay. It's like, oh, I'm going to take 20 grand out of advertising and that took a hundred

thousand out of sales and so it's like i this was 40 years ago i'm watching all of this and so one day um i was watching um i just ordered cable tv and in the early days of cable you had 30 channels and so i've gone through all the channels. Does anyone remember that, by the way? 30 early days. Okay. So I see some gray hairs over here. All right. But so I'm going through my 30 channel package. It was ESPN, 24 hours of sports and MTV music, HBO movies, CNN news.

I get to the last channel, channel 30 is Discovery and it was blank, nothing on. So I called the cable company and I said, what's going on? And they said, oh, it's a brand new channel. It's only an 18 hour a day channel. They don't have a budget to produce 24 hours a day. So it's just going to be dark for six hours. I said, every day? They said, yeah, every day. So I said well can i you know buy that time from you all right so discovery channel launched their channel back in 1980 and they spent billions of dollars launching it it was an 18 hour a day channel i gave them 365 000 a year thousand bucks a day for six hours of i own 25 of their channel time for for a very

teeny little piece and now it's generating 28 million dollars a year in sales for 365 000 so i then went from discovery to lifetime to bravo to and then we also went to rupert murdoch in england and shakes all that camel in the middle east and the TV Tokyo in Japan and all the Latin American channels. And all of a sudden we were selling Tony Little, Jack LaLanne, George Foreman, all these infomercials in 100 countries around the world. And so that was the birth of all of this. And it was just picking up that unsold time on discovery but if there's unsold time on discovery there was unsold time on pretty much every many other channels so and and so the key for me then was then getting good products and so that was phase two so once i got

the channels and the distribution now i started getting the Tony Littles of the world. And I had to say, where do you find good products? Well, at the houseware show in Chicago, at the hardware show in Las Vegas, at the auto show, at the beauty show. I went to the golf show in Orlando, PGA golf show, 1991. And there's a guy hitting a golf club called the Medicus. It had a little hinge in it. Has anyone ever seen that hinged golf club,

the Medicus, right? That, you know, this was how I started getting products and getting to the point of where I could test the ads, right? So I would find guys like, there was a knife guy, Arnold Morris. He was doing the Ginsu knife. I watched him. I taped him.

Boom. And that really was how the whole Tony Little thing started too. Tony was a fitness guy and we just turned the camera on, captured his pitch and put him up on television and up on home shopping network

etc so so that that's what i've been doing for the last 40 years and um i will say that nine years ago um i had we had built 20 of these businesses had done over 100 million um five of them adult over 500 million a couple over a billion um the Tony Little Gazelle, the Food Saver, many great projects. And then I owned As Seen on TV.com, As Seen on TV Inc. And nine years ago, I saw handwriting on the wall. And I said, what's happening? Well, sales were starting to drop because digital was taking over. What was happening?

What was happening is television, which was, I was the as seen on TV guy. My sales were dropping because television viewership was plummeting. It's down by 60% in the last 10 years. And you think, wait a minute, why? Well, it's pretty simple. They're on Facebook. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok.

They're on the internet. They're watching Netflix. Many They're on Facebook. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok. They're on the internet. They're watching Netflix. Many fewer viewers on TV. So nine years ago, I said, boom, I'm selling it. I'm out. You know, because I sold our sales going like this. I like to see sales like this.

And so sold all the assets of AsSeenOn on tv.com as seen on tv inc you can hand me that uh at celsius over there it's one last last story and then i'm going to answer the questions okay and i've got a few points already so i said you you got to know when to hold them know when to fold them and so i sold it all and i said what i want to do is advise and be part of helping companies because, you know, we've launched, I've invested in over a thousand projects, lost money on over 700 of those. So you don't have to win on everything, but you got to have some winners that take care of the losers, right? Of course, we had, you know, plenty of winners that more than took care of those losers. But the bottom line is my next move was to invest in companies.

I got on Shark Tank, started doing some of that. And all of a sudden, now, I said, this was the very first company. I joined this board nine, actually, it's now 10 years ago, a company called Celsius. I've seen various people drinking it. So I know, how many have ever heard of this company called Celsius. I've seen various people drinking it. So I know how many have ever heard of this company, Celsius Energy, right? I'm one of the founders of this company 10 years ago, founding board member. The company was doing a couple of million dollars in business and it had a stock. It was 10 cents. Then it went to 20 cents. I got involved, got a big block. And then we started pushing this company into big

directions. We went with fitness, Instagram influencers, and a whole different approach than many like the Red Bulls and the Monsters were doing. And make a long story short, the stock went from 20 cents to five bucks to 20 bucks to 50 bucks it went over a hundred dollars a share we built a mega multi-billion dollar company it's a four billion dollar company to this day now from zero and this is what i love to do is get in on the ground floor exercise my opportunities and options and and relationships and bring what i call a dream team to the table. And that's why when, by the way, I've got a condo a couple of minutes from here and I got a house over in St. Pete. So, you know, when Rudy and I got together, I said, let's do some things and

hang out with some of the right folks. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. Now, I forgot your first question. I got some follow-up questions. So, you know, I want to piece some of what you said and help these guys relate it. So the first thing that was really interesting that, I mean, you guys can take away is you found almost free advertising blocks and then use that traffic to sell products, right? Yes. So the modern day version of that for you guys to apply is all the big influencers that don't do much for monetize, that you can pay a small amount

about the equivalent of a thousand a day versus the billions it's spent, right? Right. That you could use to sell your products. All the big- Underutilized. Yes. All and or medium.

Blogs, right? Big blogs that get millions of traffic that don't know how to monetize. Big YouTube influencers that are craft makers that they don't know business, but they get millions of views. You can partner with them. So everything you did, you know, all those years ago still is the psychology of it and the strategy behind it still applies today.

It's just on a different type of platform, right? And then I think the next interesting part was a lot of you guys probably don't understand the correlation, but you basically created the video sales letter, right? So we all watch video ads now. Who's ever made a video ad? Good. And a lot of the foundation of the script, if you guys want to see the best video ads in the world, go and watch HSN and stuff, right? Cause they're scripted, they're crafted, they're split tested a

bunch. I think it'd be great. Can you talk about how they create winning videos on an ad? Yeah. I mean, so this is, this is great. I had built this, I talked about how i started this little company back in the 80s and i started with 25 000 i built that into a 500 million dollar company we were public on the new york stock exchange and and um having great success with stock went from a dollar a share to 20 a share i had a boatload of stock so had had a chance to exit, sell my steak. And so here, this was 1994 when I did this. And the first phone call I got when I sold out and I was free and clear, I had no non-compete, which was very important. Okay.

So first phone call was Home Shopping Network. And Home Shopping Network said, come on down here. You built this amazing infomercial business around the world. And so I came down and an infomercial is one product for 30 minutes. And like a Tony Little infomercial, it would run thousands and thousands of times. Whereas home shopping, they would put Tony on and they would give him, you know, like a 10 or a 20 minute segment. And so this was the beauty of

what i got at hsn we formed a venture it was a 50 50 partnership between me and hsn i moved here in 1994 sold my equity in the public company and and now hsn puts 50 000 products on a year and guess what i we would sit there in the and in the room when at the green room and up in the peep with tony little's going to go on the air so all morning long there's been product after product after product first one let's say we're let's say we get in there at eight o'clock in the morning in the studio and watch him the first guy goes on for 10 minutes he sells twenty thousand dollars worth of product in in 10 minutes that's two thousand dollars a minute right 20 grand in sales next guy goes on he gets 10 minutes he does a thousand dollars a minute he only did 10 grand

so two grand a minute a thousand a minute then tony little would go on and he would do 10 grand a minute 120 000 in sales or whatever it was huge 10x what the other guys were it's like wait a minute what was tony saying that was so much more powerful than the others well he had a pitch he had he had fine-tuned his pitch, right? So now, me as a partner with HSN, I didn't focus on those first two that did $10,000 and $20,000. I focused on Tony Little that did $120,000 in that same segment. And now, what was that product? Oh, it was called the Ab Isolator. Yes. Okay.

So, Tony, let's do an infomercial on the Ab Isolator. And we did, and it did 350 million dollars in sales so so the point of of hsn hsn gave us a testing graph yeah and we would put dozens and dozens of products on a week and only follow up on the ones that really worked and it's kind of like we all are in this business of testing products so i was going to say what do i tell you guys to do every time you ask me, what should I do with this funnel or this? What's the word I say?

Test. I mean, it's the most important thing because if it isn't testing good, it's not going to roll out good, right? So you have no sense spending good money after bad if it didn't test well. Well, the interesting thing, too, is we talked a lot about the success of products right but the thing you've got to also think is the facilitator of that platform i.e where it's hosted talk about the revenue they generated by bringing eyeballs hsn oh yeah so like that's something people i think miss that if you can now eventually as you build a big influence and a big spear and then you become

the central platform for media or for influencers or for product you know that's kind of the next ascension after yeah we actually meet as with my partnership at hsn we had great access to their millions of viewers that was a great place to be able to do a focus group i mean we put tony little on with what we thought was going to be an amazing new product it was this little gym that did 60 different exercises and um we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in it and tony went on and just his first time out just absolutely bombedbed. Second time, not much better. And, you know, it did work. You know, so we're not going to focus on that one.

We took our lumps and went on to the next one. And so, but we learned from what we did wrong there. And so now what we ended up also doing though, yes, we had HSNs customers, but now as we were running all these infomercials, we had millions of our own customers. So we could send an email to our customer database with a new product and say, hey, we've got something new. We haven't even put it out to sell it yet. You're one of our customers. Can we get some feedback from you? Do you like this?

Do you know a little more formal than I'm talking about? But it was like a focus group. And so we could do a, we called it a test before we had passed. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return.

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so let's get back into the episode i appreciate you guys and let's dive back in yeah and i mean how many times have you guys see me do an instagram story about a product or one email and then you never see it again think about it several times this year right because it's the same concept whereas you see other things you see a couple of several times this year right because it's the same concept whereas you see other things you see a couple of emails and then a month later it's everywhere on your ad manager from me right so it's the same concept and you know i encourage a lot of you even though you may have smaller followings you don't need thousands of people you can literally test it with 20 30 40 people and get generally when you have a winner like i teach a lot of you

the winner is clear right do you see that like it's not kind of like oh this one's 10 better this one's 15 it's like well it was just like i said with tony yeah 10 000 in sales in a 10 minute 20 120 it would be 10x yeah and that's like hey in fact when he did the gazelle it was the same thing we we did the target training videos we did the ab isolator etc etc and each one of these had had tested but i will say another thing too um the the very first time tony went on with the gazelle on hsn it didn't work and the reason was it was very expensive like four to five hundred bucks and it looked like tony was it was just tony selling it it looked like it was for real fitness gurus yeah and so what we had a chance to do with hsn was to go back and try something different so So, so they gave us four appearances.

The first one did fair and not very good. The next time Tony came on, we said, Tony, you need to have more fun with this. This is expensive. You know, let's get some music going. And so he came out the second time, brought some music, started having more fun. Sales went up. Then we said, wait a minute, we're not connecting with enough of the people that are out there listening. Let's get five or six people live on the set, young and old and showing how they're having fun and dancing with the music and everything.

By the third time, we had almost quadruple sales. By the fourth time, it was huge. And now we had a grand slam that went on to do hundreds of millions of dollars. So we also utilized HSN to create the pitch. And this is the same thing you do in digital. It's changing your creative. Well, two things there, right?

First time, it didn't succeed, but it wasn't necessarily the product. It's the way it was presented. And then the second thing was user-generated content. A big part of what I teach, right, is I'm always on about user-generated content, and that seemed to help there. It was the same Tony Little, the same product, the same everything. We just changed how he addressed the people in terms of what the benefits of the product were, and then brought user-generated content on etc and it was so so the never so yeah that i think links to it is you speak a lot about say tony little who was successful over time yeah right but how many products and people went on there it flopped and you never heard about them ever again right and

that's the difference here the people that keep split tests in figure it out pivot the offer pivot the funnel try new ads versus the ones that have one product one funnel it doesn't work they live and die by it and then never succeed i mean that's on that's an unfortunate part of the business i mean hsn they they they run 50 000 products a year they tell 50 000 and about 5 000 of those are um are. 500 are grand slams. Yeah. So it's a 1%. 10%.

1%, 10%. Yeah. And then they make money on some of those other ones, but they're constantly churning because if they put you on for 10 minutes and you only do 5,000 in sales, you're not coming back. Okay?

Well, same thing happens at Shark Tank too, right? Same thing. Like same thing. You know, the percent of success that get a deal, then the deals that go through, and then even when the deal's gone through, they're actually scaled. Exactly.

Right? Yeah, it's a tough situation, yeah. So let's dig into the entrepreneur. What are the traits of the entrepreneur that you've partnered with or seen that defines the successful ones and the non-successful? Yeah. So, you know, I think that myself, when I started as an entrepreneur, I actually was afraid to hire and pay good people the right money.

So, okay. So I can tell you, I made huge mistakes in the early days i'll never forget i had a i had a 15 million dollar business and i said my accountants these guys were blown away they're like we did this in like 18 months from zero and they and i my accountants were just like you know because we started with $25,000. And we kept turning cash, right? I took all of our profits and dumped it back in inventory. And we had such a low media cost. We were making big profit.

But we plugged it back in to more media and inventory. And so my CFO, or rather my accountant said, you got to get a really good CFO. And I said, what do I have to pay, you got to get a really good CFO. And I said, what do I have to pay that person? Oh, probably $150,000. Now, this is going way back, by the way. So that seemed to be like, I wasn't taking a big salary out of the company. I was building a company, making millions of dollars, but I wasn't grabbing it and taking it.

I'm like, $150,000, I'm not going to pay a CFO that. They said, well, what do you want to pay? I said i said well i don't think we got a budget for that well i ended up talking my accountants into getting somebody at 80 000 to run a business doing 50 million it wasn't what i was doing maybe that guy at 80 grand could have handled what we were doing but we were going to 500 million so i short-sighted myself. This guy screwed up so bad, literally cost me millions of dollars. And the accountants came in and said, you gotta pay for the right people, build yourself the dream team of people. And maybe you can't afford them, but you need them. And so I started finding ways to build a dream team without paying the big money.

I'll explain how I do that. So for example, if I'm starting a new company, like I just got involved with a cannabis company out of Vancouver, it's called Hollister. And that's $100 million a year cannabis company. And they brought me in to join the board. And they said, Kevin, we need advisory board members. This is the cannabis industry.

So I started bringing on some great advisors. And one of the guys that we've signed and just put out the press release, his name is Bert Ullman. Bert was, ran Donna Karan. He ran Fat Baby. What uh the fat business Russell Simmons and Kimora Simmons what was what what baby fat okay he he was the CEO of baby fat the CEO of Donna Karen the CEO of food roofer hit Damon John he's Tommy Hilfiger's partner in a company called Star Brands and they've got deals with Jennifer Lopez and this and that. So now you might think this guy was making a million bucks a year on a salary.

I brought him in for zero dollars up front and a couple shares of stock. OK, so this is how we build dream teams, right? I mean, we're bringing on another gentleman. I can't say his name because he asked that we haven't finalized it yet but he used to be the president of nbc the broadcast company nbc and so heavy duty people and by the way they're going to be part of our new venture for no money down yeah all right and now we're public. So we add a couple of shares of stock, but you can do this as a private company. And even revs.

Yeah. Revs. Even serious ones. Absolutely. So, I mean, the key thing for me when I was building these businesses after I've realized, don't shortchange yourself and not get the right people. Get way better than the right. Get the best that you can get. And on that note, like some people,

I got an email from somebody that was moved here from Washington, D.C. five years ago, started his company in Washington, moved here, had 100-some employees. He said, Kevin, I've been following you. I'm a young entrepreneur. I'm 26 years old. That was five years ago. And would you mentor me? Look, I'm sorry. I'm busy. I don't have time. I'm traveling 200 plus

days a year. He said, yeah, but let me show you what I'm doing. He's sending me and he finally, he said, he's going to donate some money to my charity. He's going to, he hit up on the right pitch. I joined his advisory board and this guy now has 200 franchises that he's expanded with around the country. And I don't want to take any credit. It's his credit to take. But my point is that he got me, the shark, to be on his board of advisors. And if you don't make the pitch, you're not going to get the shark, right? So, you know, and I'm not here to say I'm here to join everyone's board, but it's just,

this is what I do. I'm involved in about 35 investments of mine, companies, and I sit on public boards as well as private boards, et cetera. And this is what every entrepreneur needs to do is building that team around yourself of experts. And I mean, partly these guys are starting to do that just being in this mastermind, right? And then, you know, you hire staff, you bring in maybe agencies on rev share or percent and it kind of, as the business grows, it then leads to a position where you can maybe give shares and equity and bring in partners that you've partnered with for a shark tank and all the years what what what have you seen in your partners the traits that have made the successful one successful well so one of the things that i love about where i am now i used to be the ceo of a lot of the ventures that i was running so i was ceo of as seen in tv inc ceo of as seen in tv.com we had thousands of products in 100 countries, all these languages. It was like we had hundreds of employees driving me freaking crazy. We had an office in London, an office in Tokyo, an office in Sao Paulo, an office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

And it's like this global business. And so sold it all and got out and and now as an advisor um i i don't have to run anything so so that's that's a good thing so it allows me to be able to focus on what i want to focus on but also um to be able to give good advice to the entrepreneurs that that i that i get involved with so um brandon Brandon Adams is part of my team over there. Brandon, just say hello. And so Brandon, as he follows me around as we do our different things,

he is part of the dream team because Brandon helps put on events and Brandon helps connect into digital. So for example, we just signed. We just took a big equity stake in a very substantial company that's in the business of erectile dysfunction, as well as other products. And it's a it's a it's a pharmaceutical company. And so we're there's there's weight loss. There's erectile dysfunction.

There's this. There's about four different categories. Who are we bringing in to do digital marketing? Rudy. Because Rudy's part of our dream team on the digital side. And so that's what I like to do is to be able to have these alliances, allegiances with people that bring really powerful things in the table. But because I'm not the CEO, I don't have the time. I don't have the focus. The key thing I need in it, and you said, what do I look for in a good CEO? It's the ability to really focus on executing a marketing plan. And there's two parts of a marketing plan that I focus on. All my life, two numbers, every infomercial we ever ran, whether it was Tony Little, Jack LaLanne, George Foreman,

we did Kim Kardashian's first infomercial. It was, what is the customer acquisition cost? The CAC, C-A-C. And what is the lifetime value of that customer? And if your CAC is a lot less than the lifetime value and you can make those numbers work i mean the tony little ab isolator was a was a 40 item that had a 15 cac and and a 40 sale the product cost me three bucks we made a lot of money, right? So we just said, how do we focus on, you know, and our focus was every single day customer acquisition and building the value of that business and the backend

and also the brand to be able to take, then build the brand so we take it to retail. Yep. So I love partners. Like, you know, I have an equity stake in a roofing business out of columbus ohio it's called roof max and it's they don't replace roofs they rejuvenate a roof and extend the life of it because most shingles get brittle and crack after about five to seven years whereas roof max

is a spray that impregnates the shingle and turns a brittle shingle back into a brand new pliable shingle as if it was brand new. And so this company went from zero to 600 dealers in the last four years. I now have taken a big equity stake, but I do a two-hour session once a week with these guys, and now we're franchising and we're crushing it but this is a family business it's it's two brothers and a sister out of columbus ohio why do i love them because they focus every day all day on selling more franchises building that business that's the only thing they do and that's what i love as a partner yeah because i i'm not the ceo but i'm i'm bringing in all of the people yep that I can.

And there will be a place there for you at some point also. Okay. All right. And I would say, guys, put your hand up if you think you're getting pretty good on the data side, measuring the cost per acquisition and focusing on improving it as a group. Right? So one of the biggest things I think we focus on here is exactly that. Yes. And that wasn't set up, by the way.

These guys probably think he said, because that's what we spent a lot of our time on. Right. You're not in business if you don't have those two numbers under control. Yeah. But it's amazing how many don't. Right. Can you talk a little about how many $50, $100 million companies you come in and they don't really know it. They definitely have no LTV or backend.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's mind-blowing uh and this is why you know i i get involved i'm on nine public boards and they and these the reason i got involved with all of them was because they didn't have any of these skills yeah i mean these are companies that are they're. They've got capital in many cases. I mean, even Celsius in the beginning, they had no customer acquisition strategy. It was just, they're going to just put the product into stores. And I'm like, guys, I'm a direct to the consumer person, right?

If you can engage direct to the consumer, how did, why will people want to go into the store? You haven't advertised it there's no budget to promote this product until we got on instagram with our influencers and all of a sudden boom how many have seen these fitness instagrammers on instagram for celsius how many have seen that before there's a there's tens of thousands of them now. And that's what took the company to billions of dollars. So you've got to put a marketing plan together and focus on, I mean, I'm a direct-to-the-consumer guy,

but that means customer acquisition. So who here spends time every day or week focused on new customers and the front end? Pretty much the whole room. Would you say that's rare for a room? Yeah, because it's and then this this this is where the rubber meets the road yeah and then the next part that's even rarer is who here is focused on understanding ltv and building an ascension model put your hand up

even rarer right that's great so not an educated group here yeah we try and good it's great good so i mean maybe anything else he's got what we do yeah no no i i mean um the i mean i think i i guess just to summarize what i was talking about there i'm a big believer i call it in building that dream team right yeah so um you know i i've got i, I was mentored by Zig Ziglar. And when Zig passed away, I did, I went to Tom Ziglar and said, you know, Zig was a great force in my life. What are you going to do with all the assets that Zig created? And so, hand me that and I'll show you one of the assets.

Thank you. Yeah, my bag and i i said why don't we take all the uh you know all the assets that zing created and and and re-release them so like here is his one his famous book secrets of closing the sale revised and updated zing ziggler with kevin harrington now this book went back out into all the stores a relaunch And this is one of the most powerful parts of this. This is a dream team play, right? How do you align yourself with somebody, right? So Zig, when he passed 10 years ago, had never done any social media, never had a Facebook page.

But now that he had passed, the daughters and Tom said, let's put up a Facebook page so people can give a tribute to Zig. Well, they did. 5 million people are now following the deceased Zig Ziglar. So here's the play as an entrepreneur. I went to the family and said, let's take Zig's assets, rebrand them with some added content,

18 new chapters from the shark. And how are we going to sell it to the five million people that are following you on facebook okay that's the first place we're going to start and then into bookstores etc so i like aligning myself building my brand utilizing other brands i mean much like we're doing right here today it's a Rudy and Kevin, right? We're powering the brand building experience here. And so what am I doing with my companies? I mentioned Bernd Ullman, now on the board of advisors. And we brought Tommy Hilfiger on the board of advisors.

And we're bringing the president of NBC onto a board of advisors. So create your dream team, build your dream team. And that is one really cool way to have some great mentors and advisors in your business. So last question before we do public Q&A. A lot of the guys say I probably understand that, but they think they're too small or too startup to do that. Right. I think that was my perception when I started out. Do you guys feel that a little bit like it's harder to do when you're not successful? Right. Or you like feel that a little, that like it's harder to do when you're not successful, right?

Or you're like starting to get successful. So any tips or advice on how they can start? You know, I'll say this. I was trying to get a gentleman that I couldn't get through to his secretary. No, no, you know, it was like, it just, you know, was like really getting frustrated.

And then I found out, the guy lived in New York and hung out after work at certain places. So I knew where he went for cocktails after work. So happened to be sitting at the bar one night when he happened to be there also. And man, did I get a great pitch and close the deal. So it might be something like that.

It might be at a charity event. By the way, I do a lot of deals on the golf course and i i'm not a good golfer but i love to play okay so for the key that's the creative is get creative people i mean people i was at i i don't know if you were with me when we were playing but the pro i'm on the eighth hole a couple weeks ago the pro comes out kevin sorry to bother you it's a guy that's staying at the hotel we he heard you were played he just had to say hello and shake your hand and he came over shook my hand and i'm getting ready to shoot and and i gave him my email and now we're talking okay so it's just you got to go for the gusto. Yeah, I mean for the scared right doing that right, you know

Charity events I'd go off advance it restaurants it you know where but it's not always easy Getting in through the through the show assistant or yeah, you know What you know and it's the most easier now because a lot of these big, you know speakers and celebrities They speak at the events we go to yeah So you have to still be creative when you get there because everyone wants to speak. But you can make it happen. Like you see at big events, if there's a big famous speaker,

they step to the side after. And most of the time, if you're quick and creative, you can get 10 seconds or 30 seconds. So I think it's easier now than ever to meet those people if you're proactive and creative about it. Exactly. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.