How To Build Your Dream Team with Kevin Harrington
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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'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. 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 Sharks, and he's a

part 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. 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, unless you invent a time machine, you can't really buy that. And the closest way to buying that is

is mentorship, right? And yeah, that's obviously part of the reason we connected is, you know, 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, 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, um,

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, okay? Because that kind of dovetails into the answer to that question. But on...

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 now.

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, flammer shops, manufacturing companies. And why did I do this? Because I wanted to see the trends in business. I wanted to see what,

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 and partnering with entrepreneurs. And this was when I was, I would sell a business, but I would also say, Hey,

Hey, the many times that the person buying it didn't have all the capital. I put a couple of 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 got the books and the records and all the, the leases, the, all the percentages, the food costs, the, the, uh, the,

the leases and really what you see are the troubles, the good stuff and the bad stuff. 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. Right.

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 I was watching, I just ordered cable TV. And in the early days of cable, you only 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, I'm going through my 30 channel package. It was ESPN, 24 hours of sports and, and, 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 buy that time from you, 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, $1,000 a day for six hours of, I own 25% of their channel time for a very teeny little piece. And now it's generating $28 million 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 Shake Solid 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 unsolved time on discovery, but...

If there's unsold time on Discovery, there was unsold time on pretty much many other channels. 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. Anyone ever seen that hinged golf club, the Medicus, right? That, you know, this was how I started getting products.

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

and putting up, put them up on television and up on home shopping network, et cetera. So, so that, that's what I've been doing for the last 40 years. And I will say that nine years ago, I had, we had built a,

20 of these businesses had done over a hundred million. Five of them had done over 500 million, a couple over a billion. The Tony Little Gazelle, the Food Saver, many great projects. And then I owned As Seen in TV.com, As Seen in TV Inc. And nine years ago, I saw handwriting a

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 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 were going like this. I like to see sales like this. And so sold all the assets of AsSeenOnTV.com, AsSeenOnTV Inc. You can hand me that at Celsius over there. Last story and then I'm going to answer the questions. And I've got a few points already. So I said, 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, 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 they 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...

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 $4 billion 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 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, 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, you know, the equivalent of a thousand a day versus the billions it's spent.

right? That you could use to sell your products. Are the big blogs. Underutilized. Yes. As all and or me. 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 um a lot of you guys probably don't understand the correlation but you basically increa created the video sales letter right so we all watch video ads now is 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? Because 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 great. I had built...

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 company. We were public on the New York Stock Exchange and having great success. Stock went from $1 a share to $20 a share. I had a boatload of stock, so I had a chance to exit, sell my stake. 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 now HSN puts 50,000 products on a year.

And guess what? We would sit there in the, and in the room when at the green room and up in the people, Tony little is 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 watching the first guy goes on for 10 minutes. He sells $20,000 worth of product in, in 10 minutes. That's $2,000 a minute, right?

20 grand in sales. Next guy goes on, he gets 10 minutes, he does $1,000 a minute. He only did 10 grand. So two grand a minute, 1,000 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 fine-tuned his pitch, right? So now, me as a partner with HSN, I didn't focus on those first two that did 10%.

10 grand and 20 grand I focused on Tony little that did 120 grand in that same segment yeah and now what was that product oh it was called the AB isolator yes okay so Tony let's do it 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 breath yeah and we would put dozens and dozens of products on a week and

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? 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 i mean we actually we

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. Wow.

And we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in it. And Tony went on and just his first time out, just absolutely bombed. 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 HSN's customers, but

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, 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 gonna 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.

what I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business, and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge,

and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far, or any previous episode, or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five-star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes,

and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram @rudymorelife, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth $499. Yes, $500 worth of courses.

for a simple 30-second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review, and I would appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. 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 seen 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 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 a

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, duh, duh, duh, duh. Well, it was just like I said with Tony Dittl. 10,000 in sales in a 10 minute, 20,000, 120. It would be 10x. And that's like, hey.

In fact, when he did the gazelle, it was the same thing. We did the target training videos. We did the ab isolator, et cetera, et cetera. And each one of these had tested. But I will say another thing, too. 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 500 bucks. And it had looked like Tony was, it was just Tony selling it. It looked like it was for real fitness gurus. And so what we had a chance to do with HSN was to go back and try something different. So, so they gave us four appearances. The first one did, uh,

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.

big part of what i teach right as i'm always on about user generated content and that seemed to help there um it was the same tony little yeah 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 then 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 run 50,000 products a year. 50,000. 50,000. And about 5,000 of those are mainstream. 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 ones?

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 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 that person? Oh, probably $150,000. Now, this is going way back, by the way. So that must seem 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 grand. I'm not going to pay a CFO that. They said, well, what do you want to pay? 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 it.

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 got to 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 a hundred million dollar 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 in just a

put out the press release. His name is Bert Ullman. Bert ran Donna Karan. He ran Fat Baby. What's the fat business? Russell Simmons and Kimora Simmons. What was it?

Baby fat. Baby fat? Okay. He was the CEO of Baby Fat, the CEO of Donna Karan, the CEO of Foo Boo for 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. Okay, 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 it, 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 gonna be part of our new venture for no money down, all right? And now we're public, so we add a couple shares of stock,

But you can do this as a private company. And even RevShare. 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, 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.

Yeah. 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 as you need it. Right. So, so what about, let me ask this though. So the 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 on TV Inc, CEO of As Seen on TV.com. We had thousands of products in a hundred countries, the whole, these languages. It was like, you know, we had,

hundreds of employees driving me freaking crazy. I mean, an office in London, an office in Tokyo, an office in San Paolo, 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, 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 to be able to give good advice to the entrepreneurs that, that I, that I get involved with. So Brandon Adams is part of my team over there, Brandon, just say hello. And so Brandon, you know, is, is, is, is he focused,

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. It's a pharmaceutical company. And so 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. Yeah. And there's, 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? Yeah. C-A-C? Yeah.

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 $40 item that had a $15 CAC.

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 RoofMaxx.

And 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 RoofMax 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 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. Because I'm not the CEO, but I'm bringing in all of the people 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 spend a lot of our time on.

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 mind-blowing. And this is why, you know, I get involved. I'm on nine public boards. And these...

the reason I got involved with all of them was because they didn't have any of these skills. I mean, these are companies that are, they're public. They've got capital in many cases. I mean, even Celsius in the, in the beginning, it,

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 that 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 at fitness Instagrammers on Instagram?

Instagram for Celsius. How many have seen that before? 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?

Primus the whole room that's when you say that's rare for a room. Yeah. Uh-huh 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 get it's great good So, I mean maybe anything else he's gonna we do. Yeah. No, I made on the

I mean, I think, I guess just to summarize what I was talking about there, I'm a big believer, I call it, in building that dream team. I see him, yeah. So, you know, I've got, I mean, I was mentored by Zig Ziglar. And when Zig passed away, I did, I went to Tom Ziglar and said,

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. I said, why don't we take...

all the, you know, all the assets that Zing created and re-released them. So like here is his famous book, Secrets of Closing the Sale, revised and updated Zing Ziegler 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 Zing, 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,

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 re-brand

How are we going to sell it? To the 5 million people that are following you on Facebook. Okay. And that's the first place we're going to start. And then into bookstores, et cetera. So I like aligning myself, building my brand, utilizing other brands. I mean, much like we're doing right here today, it's 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 a public Q&A.

Lot of the guys say I probably understand that but they think they're too small or to have startup tonight do that right? Yeah, I think that was my perception when I started out you guys feel that a little bit like it's harder to do when you're not successful Right or you like starting to get successful so any tips or advice on how they can you know, I'll say this I

I was trying to get a gentleman that I couldn't get through to his secretary. No, no. You know, it was like, I 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, 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, I get the key. That's the creative is get creative, get creative.

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, and the pro comes out. Kevin, sorry to bother you. There's a guy that's staying at the hotel.

He heard you were playing. 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 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 a sked to end up, right?

- Charity events, golf events, restaurants, but it's not always easy getting in through the assistant or-- - And it's the most easier now 'cause a lot of these big speakers and celebrities, they speak at the events we go to. So you have to still be creative when you get there 'cause everyone wants to speak. But you can make it happen. 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 of them. 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.