#28 - Building Big Ass Fans For Big Ass Money

people on the other end of the phone would say are you those guys that make those big ass fans i expected that the first year that we were gonna sell a thousand fans that we sold a hundred and forty two fans people calling us up and saying you're crazy there's no way that fan is worth five thousand dollars check out this next story where a simple name change completely revamped the company's culture sales and that attitude but they're going global of the sky is eleven when we started the business we were the only people in the world that we're doing those and there is no doubt that it is paying off we made a lot of multimillion millionaires we made a lot million and now it's an iconic brand for by seventy percent to fortune five hundred companies growing of thirty percent year yeah what made you wanna sell and then how did you get the number five hundred i felt that five hundred million was a big enough number five million is not a alone ten million million twenty million dollars hundred billion dollars half a billion hundred and fifteen million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually for re to these like giant multi dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy add two more zero for honey first every week we sit down with so made millionaires and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today i wanted to know the real stories what all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like that shit the fuck i ask them how do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million okay so we are here with carrie smith somebody who when i read your story immediately hunted did you done i did the thing that i never like to do which is i went to like the contact me page on your website where there's just a form and you you don't you never know if anyone's ever gonna respond to that thing but i said i gotta try because i i've no way of getting in touch with this man and i have to get in touch i have to get him on the show because your company is a wild one has the best name of any company on the podcast so far so you are the founder and ceo of big ass fans bill actually actually i was the cb which is the chief big ass the chief ass man okay you were the ten yeah and everybody always told me that they love to introduce me simply because they got to say asked twice right and that's a real turn on so yes i wanna know so much about this business because it's fascinating to me but you know what does the premise right let's let's start at the top for somebody who can't figure out from big ass fans through business did give us the very simple one sentence explained like i'm five years old what you did well biggest fans was in the business of manufacturing selling distributing very large ceiling fans and the fans ranged from six feet diameter to twenty four feet in diameter and they normally are used or were used and still are in large manufacturing plants distribution centers auditor and the like mh and so the way i like to put it ever wrote this down because i'm pretty proud of it fans make you cool but carrie smith you made fans cool you made you made a fan business very intriguing built it about twenty years old now right this business yes year correct from nineteen ninety nine and we sold the business in two thousand seventeen so and you sold the business for five hundred million dollars on the dots and correct that is a fantastic outcome and did you have investors a along way or was this bootstrap business we bootstrap the business we started because i didn't know any better but we found in the long run that that was the best way to do it because i think that when you're starting a business to imagine that you know what you need the money for is little ridiculous and i always tell people that come to us that come to unorthodox ventures which is the company that we have now that there's a time in a place for everything and that includes money and if you take money too much money too early there's certainly the opportunity that you're going to misuse it and then you've traded typically a significant amount of your equity for something that you've turned around and wasted right and so you you bootstrap this business you grew it over nineteen years you sell the company for me i wanna rewind to the start of it and so and as i understand this amazing name that you have for the business that wasn't the name when you started it so tell me about the name first and then we'll go into the rest of the business when we started the business we referred to the fans and the business as h v fans and that stands for high volume low speed which from an engineering perspective describes the fans because they're very large in diameter but they required very very little power to operate and we're talking about between a one horse and a one and a half horsepower power motor it is less than a kilowatt and what was interesting about the fans is we could with the air foil that we used instead of typical fan uses blades just flat pieces of metal or wood we actually developed an air foil that moved a significant amount of air at a very low speed and i always i think it's akin to when you were a kid and you saw your mother mixing batter and a bowl with with her a mixer and you just had to do it you just had to ask her to do it naturally she's doing at a low speed so that she's actually mixing all of the batter in the bowl but as a kid i didn't cut it i mean you wanted to turn it up high speed and if you remember when you did that well if you took it out you got a mess but when you were mixing it if you mixed it at a high speed you saw that it wasn't really mixing everything it wasn't in training all of the batter within the bowl it was simply mixing what the space where the mixer was and the same thing applies to air because air a it's a fluid and you move it at a low speed and you can ent a significant amount of air so with one of these fans with a even a smaller one with a one horsepower motor you could actually move all of the air within a space that was twenty feet floor ceiling and an area of ten thousand square feet so it's a very inexpensive efficient means of providing cooling for people in those spaces and so just so people have a picture in their mind these are being used in where these are in i saw you know airplane hangar and farming situations in industrial manufacturing facilities schools you know what where are these fans being used well they're used all over i used to tell people that when they had breakfast in the morning they were consuming a product whether it was coffee orange juice eggs milk that in all probability had been packaged underneath one of our fans and as i said when we started the business we referred to the fans as h v which it sort of rolls right up the tongue and i can imagine yeah a little less catchy but technically accurate yeah and so what was funny about it was in the beginning there weren't many people working for the company and we would have a call and answer the telephone h b fan company and there would always be a pause and the people on the other end of the phone would say are you those guys that make those big ass fans and i don't know it took us a little bit of time to figure that one out because we're not the sharpest knives in the drawer but we renamed the company big ass fans and though we got some pushback it was i think marketing is you need a little ying and yang make it work and the pushback was good because most of the people recognized what it was and they thought it was a little r and i think it worked plus it was very very descriptive right and so when you came over the name did you have some other variations of it like big old fans or something else or was it just that one and you guys knew that was the one oh no it was just that one what was funny was the i'm not a country boy and we went out when we thought of the name to find an ass i mean to find a a donkey yep to take pictures of and one of the people in the office new a vet that had an ass and we drove out and and took pictures and i knew exactly the picture i wanted which was we would shoot it from the back obviously so we could see the asses ass and to have the animal looking towards us and it was interesting at the length of time it took us to get that shot and we had to clean this boy off because he was asses don't keep themselves very clean when they're out in the field it was a little bit of an adventure but i think it worked out in the long run were you asking anybody about this name like a consultant or an ad agency or anything like that or you just you got it you're ran with it how are you kidding me i mean seriously we had what was funny about that is we did with the business we used our own resources and we a lot of the things about the business that made it interesting i think were that we didn't use distributors we developed and built our own sales team and though we tried various marketing and advertising agencies we really didn't employ any for any length of time but and one of the reasons was when they would come in to talk to us of course you can imagine how this went over the first thing they would say as well you know that name we're gonna have to do something about it and it's like you're totally insane we also had ad agencies come in and say well let's you know you need to refer to we can show women with big asses or men with big asses on this and it's like no man that's just not that's just tacky i think that what made it work was we were very very honest about it i mean we'd had people writing us as you can imagine we had some pushback for every one of the letters the emails that we got that said you know you're going to burn in hell you're contributing to the deli deli of an entire country by using a name like this we would receive a number of letters that said things like you know i go to church every sunday and i think your name is great and the word it asks is used forty six times in the new testament and mary rode bethlehem on an ass and so what are these people talking about so it was one of those things i guess it brought out a little bit of tribalism for us it worked and as a matter fact over a period of time unfortunately for us it was less and less controversial because it it's sort of funny when people are reacting to you like that and it's good for marketing because it just is i mean people are talking about you but i think over gosh after maybe ten years or so it was less of a thing so okay and i i think it probably helps also that the buyer or the customer in this case was you know maybe a a facilities manager or a maintenance person right so you know it resonated with the right person it wasn't you know highly buttoned up corporate environment or anything like that no no you're right and it appealed we understood our customers and they appreciated it now i will say that as the company developed we designed different fans for different purposes some of them in residences some of them in auditor and so forth that we did wonder a little bit about that because you can imagine having a fan with the big ass on it in your daughter's bedroom i mean that doesn't resonate and but what was interesting about it was that it almost every turn we got confirmation as a matter of fact we advertised a lot for our commercial and residential fans in the new york times and we assumed that we would have to start moving away from making the big ass logo and the big ass the name of the company that we would put less emphasis on that and more emphasis on the name of the actual product but what was fascinating was when we did that we had people call us up and say are you guys running away from your name we don't understand this and we actually went from putting the name for example of the residential fan which is hi q we actually started using a smaller font for that and a larger font for the big ass fan so interesting the business obviously grows over time you sell it for five hundred million dollars but the beginnings of any big business are are sort of small and very humble you where you get the idea to even do this most people i think a lot of people listening to this podcast either you know just starting their own business wanna start their own business and they're looking for ideas and they wanna go into a a market that has a lot of potential what did you see early on that made you think this is a business worth doing i had been in started another business prior to this and we were involved in then sort of the same thing we didn't use air we used water and air conditioning to cool large spaces large manufacturing distribution spaces simply did not resonate to the degree that i obviously that i thought it should but i was introduced to the fact that there a a large amount of very large buildings in this country that are not conditioned and the people within those spaces suffer and these poor people would be working eight hour shifts and the only thing they had to comfort themselves was a small fan which those are great if they're within a couple of feet of you and if you're not moving around and it became obvious to me that i saw large fan that was being developed for cows i mean for the dairy market and i thought my gosh this is it and so that really was the beginning and i think though that what it points out is you really do have to know your market i don't think that i'm always telling people that you don't have a solution and then go out to find a problem you really should recognize the problems and look for problems or niche niches in the market that aren't being filled and then determine what the product is and that's sort of the way we did it with the fans and it took longer even in the beginning because i thought oh my god what a great product i know the market i know everybody can use it i expected the first year that we were gonna sell a thousand fans but we sold a hundred and forty two fans not quite what i anticipated and the next year it was wonderful we sold four hundred fans anyway it was very very slow it was something that nobody had ever seen before okay quick break to talk about our sponsor for today that's right a few weeks ago i did a fake ad read where i said this episode is brought to you by nobody and ever since sent people just email reach out to advertise on the podcast which is great and this is a really cool company the sponsor for this week's podcast is super cast so you know if you wanna cash in on your podcast super cast can help you unlock predictable recurring revenue from your audience how was that by cutting out the middleman man and turning listeners into paying subscribers in fact podcast using a subscription model can make twice as much versus advertising alone i like that is super cast dot com slash hustle to learn and earn more alright i will have to check that out after this i do love me some subscriptions and what gave you the sort of motivation or faith to just keep going right because you know sometimes there's that hard thing for an entrepreneur where growth is a little bit slow and the market's not picking up as much traction as you want do you just put your head down in persevere and oftentimes that's the right answer and other times you know you think to yourself wait is this a signal that i should be doing something different and you didn't need to know if i should pivot or or change what i'm doing so how did you think about it during that first year when you know it's coming in a little below expectations and what gave you the faith that you should continue versus change course i knew it was a good idea and i also knew that the way we were marketing was resonating and this was more of a we always had good response from our customers and i agree with you that there are sometimes times when you have to pivot or when you have to lay it down but i think one of the problems that young entrepreneurs have today is they imagine that these things happen very very quickly and and in reality they don't and you you really do have to persevere and give it a little bit of time and it took us oh gosh until i wanna say until maybe two thousand and four or so that we realized that in by that time we were selling thousands of fans that we were really really on the way now i i will say this i i thought we were on the way when we sold a hundred and forty two because well because it it was the response of the market and i think it's important we sold these direct i mean i personally sold these things and and occasionally helped install them and it there's a feedback you get from your customer directly from your customer when you do that yourself that you cannot get if you're selling it through a distributor or a retailer or amazon or something like that i mean you are right there and and i think that was a big deal for me because i it was very very positive and and this was something nobody had ever seen before and it was something that when we priced it originally priced it so that it would fit within the budget of the typical that the typical maintenance supervisor in a plant that had to work with which is about five thousand dollars and we had as many people interestingly enough call us and say why are you selling this for so little i mean it's such a great deal as we did people calling us up and saying you're crazy you know there's no way that fan is worth five thousand dollars and i will say that over the period of time but for various reasons i mean we built a brand and we obviously continually iterate it and develop the product but over a period of time we simply raise the price and so right now i think that the same standard fan now obviously it's a totally different model with different features and motors and so forth the price is about ten thousand dollars and i think the reason we were able to do that is that when we paid a lot of attention in the beginning we focused on getting everything right and again when you're talking directly to your customer you're able to do that they're gonna tell you exactly what they like or don't like about it you simply have to talk to them and i was always a big proponent of i don't need somebody to tell me what i'm doing right i need complaints because that's the only way you're gonna be able to fix something and we were able over that period of time to build a brand and when you build a brand you're able to command more margin more dollars in the market and the availability of the larger margin afford you the opportunity to spend a lot on r and d which we did we spent an awful lot of money on r and d and to spend money on marketing and in our case direct sales so it cost a little bit more but we were very very focused just on the customer and on improving the product and making sure that yeah and i think it's sort of odd we were fixated on selling you the last fan that you were ever gonna buy it didn't bother us that it was so good that oh gosh you know it's gonna wear out in five years ten years twenty years i mean these things are running after twenty years that's not what moved us it was providing the absolute best that we possibly could and i think that the customers recognize that and customers when they see that they are more than willing to pay a little bit extra for it so it seems like you did a few things that i don't know you can tell me but that most fan companies weren't doing at the time so you said r and d i would get that most companies in your space don't even have an r and d budget or definitely not the allocation you have and what i saw when i was looking through your website and looking at some of the competitors it struck me that it looked like big ass fans is a engineering company and it looked like everybody else is just like a retailer or marketing company and you know that has a few engineers i mean is that accurate or am i reading too much into it no no you're exactly right as a matter of fact i don't think that they have a few engineers at all and when we started the business we were the only people in the world that we're doing those and when we exited nineteen years later we must have had a hundred competitors obviously when we started we had hundred percent market share but when we sold the business because of the way we did business and because of the engineering because of what we focused on we had somewhere around an eighty percent market share if you do it right if you focus on it one of the other things i never really paid that much attention i know this sounds terrible but i never really paid that much attention to the money i always told people that if we wound up with making a dollars profit after a year that simply meant that i wasn't being very imaginative i couldn't find some place to put that dollar back into the business we were very very focused on doing this better than anybody had ever done anything not just fans i this was a hate to say a work of art but i mean it was something that we concentrated on and i think that we never thought about an exit strategy i people would ask me about that and i said well it has nothing to do with us we're not interested in that i think that when people start businesses and the first thing they think of is money how am i gonna make money am i gonna make a lot of money are they think well how am i gonna exit this business i think that's the chances of them being successful or significantly diminished and that's because you're not focusing on what you should focus on and and i think business is exciting it's very intellectually challenging but and you have to recognize that you can do a lot of different things a lot of very interesting things i always tell people that i'm a capitalist and and i'm proud of it because capitalism is very very effective tool to get things done and it's an effective tool to to help other people whether they be your employees are their families are are companies that provide you services as a company it's just a very very efficient way to approach life and i think that sometimes when you read business magazines or you look at the the media all of that is overlooked fact that it is very challenging lifestyle and a very rewarding lifestyle not just to the individual that runs it or owns it but to people that's around him or her and it also gives you the opportunity i mean when we were doing this i always paid people more than they could get any place else and we we're in kentucky and our wages were typically forty percent above average and kentucky and thirty percent above average in the us every year everybody got a bonus everybody got a bonus typically as long as we made a profit and we always made a profit even during the recession we made a little bit of a profit and everybody got a bonus but typically the bonus was a month more or less a month's salary it wasn't based on that but i mean that was sort of what it worked out when i sold the company i had provided well when amounted to stock options for for a number of people about a hundred and fifty of the people that worked for me and i wrote checks that totaled fifty million dollars to those people and so we made a lot of multimillion millionaires we made a lot of millionaires and a lot of hundred errors i guess but that went all through the company i mean there were people that were sometimes people imagine oh well that's only c suite or the managers that was not it at all there were people on the shop floor that had done an exceptional job over the years that really helped the business and they were in on that and it not all the managers were of that quality so i think that what it gave me the opportunity to do was and this sounds terrible but it was it give people that i really really appreciated a lot of money and and that was a good thing for me and i think that we sold the business for five hundred million dollars and i think the way that we ran the business was the reason that that we were able to do that and the way we ran the business was we were looking out for and including everybody that worked for us i mean everybody profit by being around us and that was from my perspective it was wonderful i mean the best day of my life was not getting a check for five hundred million dollars the best day of my life was the day after when i wrote the fifty million dollars worth of checks that was the best that's what i look forward to that's what kept me up at night was thinking about that and how wonderful that would be that was a big deal to me yeah that's very inspiring i mean obviously the reaction was good but i mean i'm just curious you know when you when you write this checks and i think people don't at that time it wasn't like people knew it sounds like you didn't have some share structure where people knew exactly what they were gonna get it sounds like you were sort of discretionary writing numbers down per person to to sort of pay out know what was the reaction like for employees were they surprised did they how did that go over well it it they weren't necessarily surprised because these people we had during this time about twelve hundred employees all over the world and they're own about a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty that were in involved in this because they had been instrumental in helping us build a company and we had the company every year valued and so they all had an idea i don't know that they ever thought it would ever come to fruition those individuals but they had a rough idea what was going to happen but it was still very interesting because they would tell you oh my god you know this changed my life this and it did change people's lives i think the some people would several of them started their own businesses which i think is super great so they had an idea it was discretionary in the sense that that i made a determination typically years before as relates those individuals in terms of the job they were doing i mean these are exceptional people right it wasn't it it wasn't that all of the employees were special and they all got bonuses and but these were the real workers these were the people that you couldn't build a business you couldn't build a business without these people and and i felt it had to be you had to recognize that and it made a big difference to them and their families when you sold you know you said early on that you know you weren't planning to sell you weren't looking for an exit strategy at some point you decided to sell so i'm curious what what made you wanna sell and then how did you get the number five hundred you know what what is what was that a you know i i don't think that's all related yeah it was a deep it was a deep calculation based off of some you know formula tell me about that i you're exact right it's sort of funny because we had to the option the sars program for seven years at that point i wanted to make sure that there was a number that these people even i you know because everybody's like oh yeah wow sure it's great that we've got these things we really appreciate it carry but but you know what does that mean and i felt that that five hundred million was a big enough number so that it would make a difference of these people and and how that came up is sort of silly i hired a coo who was a very interesting individual and we were after a meeting one morning we were just and i said you know i just sometimes this just gets on my nerves and obviously wasn't i was a little about something then he was relatively new he'd been there about a year and he said well jeez you know have ever thought about selling this and i said you know i tell you what if somebody offered me five hundred million bucks i would sell it and he said oh okay and i'm serious this is the way happened so this guy who was a who had worked corporate with ge for some time he said well let's see and he calls some people and we got it going and it happened if he hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened and but it was just right off the top of i it really was it was just it was a number that i thought made would make a difference to everybody that was with me and so i think it also points out something that i think is interesting as well which is that from a pe perspective from a private equity perspective obviously those people those companies want to have control of the number that they're offering to buy a company for and we simply said this is what it is and so when they came back and said well we're you know it's more like we think maybe four hundred or four fifty and i said well i don't care what you think actually i'm just gonna that's what it is and if you don't want it you don't have to have it i'm fine doing what i'm doing and i think the the point there in terms of it was in terms of negotiation is you have to be at that point where you're am ambivalent you just don't care and i really didn't i'm not kidding about it i just didn't at that point it was like it's either this or i mean it wasn't like it was a terrible life or anything and i think that worked and so it wasn't something that i had planned here exactly right a year before that i would have never even imagined i would have never imagined that because i just that's not the way we were thinking about things but right it's a this is is a yes or no negotiation this is the price yeah i can say yes or no that is your part in this negotiation no exactly right i think that's the way you handle things like that you know as they say sort of the the party that's more willing to walk away has all the leverage in any negotiation and it sounds like you were very willing to walk away when we did our sale just now it was very similar where i told the companies that we were selling to so were either gonna sell this thing in sixty days or i'm just gonna shut the company down and go do something else and they were like what do what do you mean like and i was like well those are the two things that i most excited about i'm excited about either selling this we excited about doing something else and don't wanna waste a lot of time so here's the time box can you make us an offer in that time and on the price once one party named their price i just went to the other one and i said hey this is the offer we have and they gave me this complicated reason why they couldn't do that price and then we said well that's the price so at this point it's a yes or no from you i'm not trying to play a game like these are the numbers if you say yes then we have a deal and it was amazing how quickly things moved because i wasn't bluff i was really willing to do exactly that and i think that had i tried to do it as a bluff i don't think it actually would have worked no no no you're exactly right for yourself along the way in those nineteen years you know were you paying out a dividend to yourself or had you just been on a normal salary like did you go from zero million dollars to many many millions of dollars overnight not overnight but sort of in that once the sale happened or had you been paying yourself as a dividend along the way no i just paid my actually i got right before we sold it i said you know i want to make sure i make a million dollars a year at least once right and so i raised my salary but it was to that point but that was that was at at the very end and we invested a lot of money back into the business and i always tell people it's not like we had you know yachts or planes or anything like that we just didn't do that and it all went back into the business sands the salaries but you know i mean gosh i mean when you get right down to it you just don't need that much there's a lot more to life than having a bunch of money and but no i didn't know what would i do with it i mean i would be i couldn't possibly invest it and make it as useful as keeping it in the business the business was the best investment there was you still live in kentucky hell no when we were selling the business the firm that purchased it allowed me to basically take a department out of the company because which was the r and d the business development not the mechanical or the electrical r and d but the or of the business development r and d and because they don't make any money i mean you know if you're a pe firm your a financial guy you understand business like you know like like crazy or so good at it that r and d is like why would you need something like that i mean you know they just cost money they don't make any money and so they allowed us to do that which i thought was hilarious really but it was a bunch of young people the youngest at the time was nineteen maybe twenty they went all the way up to about thirty so most of between twenty and thirty and eight of them and i asked him well okay nobody wanted to stay in lexington i asked them more where they wanted to go and we looked at chicago and we looked at atlanta we looked at at charlotte to dallas and and austin and they all wanted to go to austin so that's where we went and i think that's been a good move because austin's a very very it's a hop in town i would have liked to move to that my boat was palo alto but we didn't make enough money to pay these kids that much money to try to i mean i don't think they'd had been happy in the long run because they couldn't have that had to live in gosh knows where and right gosh knows what far rent that wasn't an option but yeah you know what i what i love about you is you know when i started reaching out it was because i thought i have this like fascination with what we call boring businesses meaning businesses that don't sound on the surface like they required this tremendous insight in this new genius that was around it it's taking real world problems and solving them and with things that don't sound super glamorous or sexy from the outset like a fan but you approached it in a great way and obviously like you said something during this podcast where you said you know we wanted to do it better than than it's been done and he said better than anything's been done and i i love that you basically rallied a group of people around something that was you know on the surface not in itself that inspiring and you inspire people to do it so that's was cool so that's what i was was excited about as i've talked to you the part i think is sort of most unique and fascinating it to me is you pretty clearly do things on your own terms so it sounds like you picked a business that you believed in you ran it the way you wanted to run it you paid people more than the market rates you you know you paid out fifty million bucks your employees that you know you felt were instrumental ability the business you name the company what you wanted to name it that sort of defied convention you sort of have defied convention many many times over and so i'm curious is that by design or am i just when i zoom out am i just seeing that or are you intentional about that do you do you take pride in that i think that it's always the path and least traveled that offers the most opportunity and i will always go to the the more contra and i mean if there's a decision to be made that you have to look at the decision that most people wouldn't make for example we did all of our manufacturing in the us and the only exception i should say the only exception we had a plant we owned a plant with our own employees in kuala lumpur which is in malaysia and that's where we made fans for the east for australia and singapore and and japan russo but that was something that people i think they thought well that's a little dumb because you know i mean everybody manufacturers in china because it's cheaper and it's like why would i do that i mean i don't even get that we control quality much much tighter in the states we were a positive impact on the economy and we weren't so interested in making up buck that that we were willing to let people in countries that aren't i mean the chinese are wonderful people but i mean in terms of the government and so forth i mean why would you you ever do that i don't get that i think that there's a lot to be set for doing things in the just looking at them and and if you're gonna go right i'm certainly more interested in going left than following you and i think that that's just a style but i think that it's it's paid off and that's why the name of our firm now is unorthodox ventures we're more interested in the entrepreneurs than we are in making money and i know that sounds silly but i don't need to make any money and there's a lot of very interesting people that start businesses and a lot of them need much much more than money and they recognize is that and i think that our group were operators i mean all of the people here we've got one finance guy and we make fun of him all the time because he's a finance guy and we look at it in a different way and one of the things that i let people know is as that i would much much rather tell you not to take money i would much rather see you do everything on your own that you bootstrap it than to take our money and because there's a time in a place for everything and this this whole thing about getting money and taking money is to start a business i think is a little people stretch it a little bit the downside of that is we run into a lot of people that have given away forty fifty sixty percent of their equity and they really have a lot of runway to cover before they can take off and that's very sad for my perspective and i don't like to see that so that when we deal with people we try to make sure and we tell them that i wanna make sure that you've got a big chunk of this i mean that's what this is about part of it is about making money but part of it is education and hopefully providing people with a way of life that's really cool and is very very beneficial to a lot of people i mean not just them but the people that work with them and the people outside it's very powerful if you're not just interested in money money is nothing you gotta get beyond that and i think that a lot of people that start businesses today or thinking all about the money they really really shouldn't it it's not that there's something bad about it there's nothing bad there's nothing wrong with that it's just that i don't think it is productive as thinking about the common wealth of the community so that's just my take on life i like that and i was telling my friend the other day i said i think i'm chasing money too much and i said i'm pretty confident that over time you know i have more money than i'll ever need i'm already doing pretty well i feel like i'll get there so why don't i just fast forward to that point in time and just say cool what do i wanna do with my time and my talent yes what would i do then let me just do that now and money will just come as a byproduct anyway so that's why i do things like this podcast that's why i've shifted the way i sort of look at the world in order to just go there because when i look at the people who are at that level in the game they're all saying the same thing you're saying which is that there's you know money has its place has some utility but ultimately it's not what matters is not what should motivates you and it's not what should be the decision making process behind what you do with your time and so yeah i'm trying to make that shift myself when you think about the businesses and entrepreneurs you're trying to support you know what's got you excited what are some either problems that they're solving or business ideas that what gets you to jump out of bed right now what are what are you most excited about in terms of new stuff what i find interesting and what gets me up in the morning is that there are a lot of individuals and i didn't think this honest gosh when i was running my business because when you're doing that you're doing that and if you would ask me how many people would you imagine meeting that were wired the way that i'm wired and i would have said very few but now that we've been out doing this i think the coolest thing about it is that i meet these people and most of them are much younger yeah well they are younger what the hell i'm i'm on the old fuck but they've got these ideas and these approaches and these desires in this drive and i guess it's the drive more than anything and it's just interesting i just find it fascinating it's it's a lot of smart people out there and it doesn't us necessarily mean that if you're smart you're gonna be able you're gonna naturally succeed at this because there's a little bit more involved than that but i like the people it's not particular sector or opportunity to make money it it's the people it's just barely it's interesting it's fascinating i'm the sort guy that always gets a window seat i mean i love to watch what's going on and this is just the best window seat that you can imagine you can have a positive impact on people and i think that's cool do you ever think you'll go back into the driver's seat do you think you'll start operate another business unfortunately yes probably i mean you see opportunities and you see things and i mean part of this is it's not rocket science i mean businesses i've seen opportunities where it's very difficult to actually pull together a team that initially that can run that can start up bigger business and so i think that there certainly are situations where we are looking at things where we would have to operate and i would have to be involved in that i would love to see your team like go revolutionize the porta potty industry or something you know basically if you take the the same approach you took to fans where you say how do we engineer the best product how do we make it so that our customers are really happy how do we take this kind of a widespread need and solve it in a more efficient way and how how do you know with your team and that approach i would love to see it go and you know what you did for fans i'd love to see you for you know i say porta pot as a joke but like you know something like that where it seems it seems like the biggest ass fans approach could be applied to many many different product lines no no i think you're right i think you're right and i think that i think what's key to that or the way we look at it is it's marketing based on educating a large portion of a market when you said marketing based on educating the market you know i thought of these new kind of like plant based meat companies or you know the alternative to meet it seems like that's what they do in a big way which is they sort of educate the market that hey this is you know this tastes good it's better for the environment it's better for you that's you know that's sort of the pitch and it sounds sort of a unorthodox and funky but the people who do go that lifestyle rave about it well what's a good example of another company or another industry that's doing this sort of marketing by education to you know preaching the gospel of this is the way to do things well i think that's a good example and we have looked at that to some degree i think that for example bed days that's an interesting piece simply because that's a better way to clean yourself with water rather than paper i think that that's something that the us market does not pay enough attention to i think that interesting big ass an educational piece yeah there you go man so alright everybody's got one terry this has been awesome if one thing that happens a lot with these episodes is that people wanna reach out afterwards they you know they love what they heard sure something resonated they either wanna help you with your mission or they want your help with their mission or something like that what's the best way for people to follow you get in touch who should get in touch with you sort of this is your chance to sort of talk directly to the audience i'd love to talk to people and we love to try to help people and it's just they can email me at carrie c a r e y at unorthodox ventures dot com that's the easiest way to do it right or give us a buzz i mean look it up and give us a buzz awesome carrie thank you so much for making the time this has been been a lot of fun i really admire what you built and i'm glad i got to talk you today well thank you very much i appreciate the opportunity to talk to you as well need