Brian Smith — Building a Brand

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. There we are. Hey everybody. We're talking today about how to build a billion dollar brand. How do you build a billion dollar company, do a billion dollars a year, year after year? It doesn't start with a billion, that's for sure. We're talking with the founder of Uggs U. Ryan Smith is our guest today. We'll get to that in just a minute. Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with business leaders, thought leaders, authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and more, all about how to grow and scale your business, the challenges that you face to get the strategy right, to get the team dialed in, to execute well, to optimize and manage your cash and to navigate all of that as a leader. All those areas and more we talk about every week now for years and years. We bring our show to you. You'll find all those shows and more wherever you're getting this right now. YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, I don't know, wherever. Spotify, Apple, Podcast, Stitcher, etc. All that more or scalingcoach.com our website is@scalingcoach.com and that's where we've got all the back catalog. Actually redoing that right now. I'm very excited. Can't wait. The reveal, the new show, the new site with our new branding, a bunch of new things on it soon. That's KellyCoach.com all right, we're about to get into it now. Welcome to the show, Brian Smith.

Hi Bill, how you doing?

Brian is down in San Diego. I'm up in San Francisco. I met Brian recently in San Francisco where he gave a talk to a group of entrepreneurs there and I was really glad to meet him. I loved when you opened the conversation and he shows this Pink Floyd dark side of the moon shirt. And I'm like, He's like, I bought this album. I was listening to this album. I'm like, that was the first album I bought myself. I was a little bit younger, a little bit younger. And. And I bought it on the north shore of Oahu where I had just been surfing the town of Haleva. And I bought it this little head shop, I think you call them in those days, Head shop, record shop, all kind of combined together. Dark side of the Moon, my first personal purchase album.

That's fabulous. Yeah.

And I love, here's the thing I love. So I like unusual sports and outdoor things and things like that. I started surfing at a very young age. I still do a little bit. Mostly today I do this wing foil surfing. Anyway.

That's fabulous.

So when you were talking about your journey and how you didn't really like traditional business, which I'm gonna let you tell your story, but. But here's a guy for our listeners, our viewers who started a company, went through many ups and downs over 20 years to get it to that place where it went through a billion and many near death experiences for the business. Anyway, so I'm glad to welcome the show.

Thanks. Thanks, Bill. Yeah, the reason I opened with the Pink Floyd shirt is that I heard the words and then one day you find 10 years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun. Right? And I just graduated as a chartered accountant and I quit the same day after 10 years of studying. And I realized there was more to my, you know, that I wanted out of my life than being an accountant. So those words, like, galvanized me. And I ended up, you know, meditating, thinking, oh, my God, all the big trends are coming out of California. So I just decided to go to California on a whim. And, you know, I always wanted to surf Malibu. So I arrived at LA and rented a little house in Santa Monica and bought a van and went straight up to Malibu. And I was really on a mission to find the next big thing like waterbeds or Levi jeans or, you know, surf brands that all come from California. And I spent probably four or five months just pretty much surfing all the time, but keeping my eyes out in newspapers and business magazines and things. But it was one day in late October, the water had got real cold and the wind was chilly and I was sitting on the beach and I was pulling on my sheepskin boots that I'd brought from Australia and I just had this massive dose of goosebumps like, oh, my God. One in two Australians has some sort of sheepskin footwear, and there is none in America. And that was like a massive goosebumps, you know, event again. And I looked at my buddy Doug and just said, oh, man, we got to go into business, man. We're going to be instant millionaires. But like, every entrepreneur starts out with that.

Aha.

And they all have that same reaction, you know.

Yeah. So, you know, if you've been an entrepreneur or business leader for a while, you know that the idea is like 1/2 of 1% of the value. It's what you do with it. Now there is value in an idea, right? An idea, but an idea at the right moment in the right way, and a whole lot of effort to get it to something big. And I think that that's a really useful thing. We've all had great ideas that we knew were kind of interesting, but we're never going to come to much of anything without a profound amount of work.

That's right, yeah. Yeah. So the. We ended up calling a couple of manufacturers down there and we got to be distributors for one. We ordered six pairs of boots. And Doug, my buddy, was going to be the salesman. He went around to every shoe store in Southern California and came back with about 150 business cards. But he just said, brian, everyone tells me that we're crazy selling trying to sell sheepskin in California. And on the surface, that sort of is logical, but California's climate's identical to most of Australia. So it wasn't the real answer. And it turned out that we had to think laterally. When you're an entrepreneur and you hit that wall, you got to figure out a way around. And I thought, well, all my buddies up at Malibu think this is the best idea in the world. And it struck me that, oh my God, all those guys had been down to Australia surfing, and they brought four or five pairs back for their buddies. So within the surfing community, it was really well known. So, you know, looking for the easy, the low hanging fruit, you know, Doug and I just said, okay, let's go after the surf shops. And the initial reaction when we went in and showed the samples was, oh, my God, fantastic. You're going to make a fortune. And so that spurred us into realizing that we had to get some inventory. So we raised 20 grand just like so easily from a group of friends. And we bought 500 pairs in from Australia and they arrived in mid December and we got them all together and went on the road again to all these surf shops that said it was Going to be so fantastic. And every one of them just went, oh, my God, that's great, Brian. But we couldn't sell them in our store. We just sell surfboards and trunks and flip flops, you know, and so the bottom line is, the first year sales of Ugg was 28 pairs, if you can believe it.

Yeah.

Retire on that $1,000, you know, but, you know, in retrospect, if you look at the. Every business listed on those stock exchange pages of the Wall Street Journal, every one of those companies, at some time back in their beginning, probably all started out with $1,000 in sales, right? So it led me to write my book, which was. It's called the Birth of a Brand. And. And the theme of the book is that you can't give birth to adults. You know, everyone that starts a new business, they conceive it, they have the idea, and then they take the first action. And for me, the birth of Ugg was buying six pairs of samples right hand.

Hang on, pause. Your story's good. I want you to tell, but I just, like, I want to not rush through both the saying and that idea. Sometimes I'll hear people like, oh, God, I tired of hearing all these big companies. Why do we talk about Southwest? Why do we talk about Costco? Why do we talk about. I'm like, because they all started as, like, teeny, tiny companies. Now just a small thing, a small idea, and then they got going with it. Almost nothing is launched with major investment now. Companies spin off divisions and they create things like that. But most companies that end up as something later start up as a very teeny thing. A couple of customers, a handful of products, and then later, there's millions and billions sold. Right? And that second thing that you said there was, you don't give birth to adults, right? We give birth to an infant that needs a great deal of nurturing and training and rearing to get to that place that is fully mature.

Absolutely. Yeah. That first infancy is horrible for every entrepreneur because they think they're failing. And that's when most entrepreneurs give up on those ideas. But if you can nurture it through that infancy, it'll start toddling. And, you know, you get magazines writing articles about you, and all your true believer friends is telling all their friends about it. And that quickly goes into the youth phase, which is really the best. It's got your consistent inventory coming in, the sales and marketing's working, the accounting administrator, the warehouse is working. You can run a 20, $30 million company in that youth phase. But if It's a really great product or a really great service. You hit the teenage years and that's when all bets are off. You remember wanting to be at every party on a Saturday night when you're a teenager. Well, it's so dangerous in business because you want to be in every major trade show and every mass retailer and you can outstrip your capital so, so quickly and go bankrupt in. I was on the edge several times.

You. And I'll, I'll let you go on in that. But consider this breakthrough breakdown. Breakthrough breakdown. That's the cycle. You have a breakthrough, you get a bunch of orders. Now you're like, oh shit, how are we going to produce it? How are we going to fund it? How are we going to ship it? How are we going to. And then every time you have one or the other, then you've got something. Now you deal with the breakdown. Suddenly you have another breakthrough. But then what comes after that is another breakdown. Yay.

I've never heard it put in those terms, but you're absolutely right. That's exactly how it works. And, and if I look back on the whole 20 years of UG that I, you know, when I owned the company, I never was able to get enough inventory, you know, that we'd have sales was a big problem at first, but after it really caught on, just financing the inventory was like a nightmare. And that had a whole sort of.

So before you go to the inventory and the financing thing, because I think there's great lessons there. Talk about trying to get the sales going and the advertising and the whole tadpole business about the first campaigns that you ran, because I did those where I had models and great things like that that didn't exactly work.

Yeah. And it was a real, a four year episode in me learning about branding. And I started advertising with these models on the beach at Wind and Sea in La Jolla, you know, and had perfect, perfect, you know, hair and clothing and the big white tall boots, you know, the major part of the ad. And I ran those ads and the sales went from like 6 to 10,000. It should have been way, way more. And so the next year I got better looking models and another expensive photographer and did the same thing and the sales went to like 20,000. It was just horrible. And it should have been way, way more, you know. And that third season I decided, okay, I'm gonna give up. You know, it's too hard. Americans don't understand sheepskin boots. And I don't seem to be able to hit the mark on advertising. And I was having a beer with one of my retailers and I was explaining that I was going to go out of business. He'd go, shut up, Brian. And he calls out back to all these little 12, 13 year old grommets who keep their surfboards in the shop. And he said, what do you guys think of Uggs? And every one of them just went, oh, man, those Uggs are so fake. Have you seen those ads? Those models, they can't surf. And like, instantly I realized I spent three years advertising the absolute worst image to my target market. In other words, I was killing my brand in trying to get it going. You know, I thought I was doing all the right things. So I ended up lateral thinking again. And I called up a buddy who is running this Scholastic Surf association in Orange county, and I said, pete, you got any young kids who are going to go pro soon? And he gave me two guys, Mike Parsons and Ted Robinson. And I, I just went surfing with them to Black's beach in La Jolla and Trestles up in San Onofre. And these are, these walks, you know, I just took a photograph of walking to the beach and back from the beach. And I knew every little kid who reads Surfer magazine would just die to be walking along the path with Mike Parsons or Ted Robinson, you know. And I ran the ads in November, December, and the sales went to $220,000.

Just.

Why? Because I'd finally created an image that I knew every reader wanted to be in. And the Ugg boots in the ads were, like, so tiny, you could hardly see the boots in the ads. Right. So that led me to the realization that you never advertise your product. You advertise the features and the benefits and the more emotion you can get into the ad, whether it's a TV ad or a Facebook ad or even, you know, the paper we were doing in magazines. The more you can get people that want to be in that photograph, that's how successful you'll be.

And that, that's a, that's a really, really useful thing to point out. So you. In one case, they want it to be the thing. They're both, they're both intended to be aspirational. When we hire models and put them in a beautiful place, that's because in. Sometimes people imagine and want to be those models in those places. But in your case, trying to appeal to young surfers, they didn't want to be those people. They were viewed as plastic fashion people. And they wanted to be. Their aspiration was to be the Gritty surfers walking down a dirty road to a lesser known or a surf break that's harder to find.

That image created a whole movement in the youth of Southern California beach areas because every cool kid, you know, saying, hey, mom, everyone, all the cool kids have got ugg boots at school. I want a pair of Ugg boots, you know, and it became such a social pressure that it just took off. And that was the beginning of me then switching from advertising to how the hell do I get product?

Right. Yeah. So the first breakthrough is actually creating the demand, Right. At first you're trying to figure out who to sell it to and how to get them to buy it. And. And you're trying things and spending things. Now you've got something up, now you've got to produce it and pay for that production.

Yeah, yeah. So the branding phase, I just figured out, like, a brand is not your trademark registration and a brand is not your logo, and a brand is not your product. Right. Your brand is what the consumers think of you. And I'd finally overcome that, that obstacle. Now I had everybody just wanting to be in on it. And so the whole next phase was trying to position the company to raise money at banks and things, trying to get enough money for the inventory. And that turned out to be. Even though I was a chartered accountant, I quit that to become an entrepreneur. I didn't understand finance. And back then, there were no peer groups.

This is really funny, right? You study to be an accountant, hated the idea of it, went to find your own path on a beach in Southern California, came up with these ugg boots, started to figure it out, and then you encounter cash problems because you don't understand the finance. Really hilarious.

It is. And you would think accountants understand it, but finance is a totally different thing. And this is before. Now you can go to the software aisle in a store and buy a program on how to start up a business. And it's got all of the spreadsheets and the forecasting you need. Well, I had none of that. I had to totally wing this on my own and that, you know, for years I'd be trying to raise money at banks. And I go, oh, it's a fad. You know, it won't be around next year. And I, you know, after six or seven years of this, I'm going, it ain't a fad. And they go, oh, you know, fashion, it'll, you know. So I was always really having difficulty raising money for inventory.

It's funny because really, like, the shoes were pretty basic in the beginning, the boots and then. But if you look at them today, all the different colors and variations of it really is fashion, but it's a fashion where you're continuing to drive within the platform of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was an evolving process. It started with California, and then it sort of. I got into the snowboarding and skiing, and by using the same method this time, I got young snowboarders, you know, with the crazy colored hair and everything. And that really made it take off in the ski areas. And I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to get to the kids back east, you know, But I was ended up traveling with one of my sales reps at a sporting goods store. And I said, I said to the guy, what do the kids do here in winter? And he just said, what do you mean, they all play hockey? And when I did some research, I realized hockey's way, way bigger than surfing, you know. And so I started finding the youth hockey programs. I advertised in a little magazine in Minneapolis called Let's Play Hockey for All the Kids and did a great marketing campaign through there. And then all the moms back east who have to take the kids and sit in a freezing cold rink for two hours, they started buying them from themselves and for their daughters. And that was really the beginning of it. Branching out from a. A really cool male ownership into more of a female and family type business.

Yeah, yeah, I remember really clearly when all of a sudden I saw all the women and girls on the ski slopes, right in the after ski, walking around in their Ugg boots and. And I thought, wow, those look fantastic. After you've been skiing all day and your feet have been cramped in a Buddha, the idea of putting those on looks fantastic.

But even that market had its problems, you know, because so much of the ski areas would go, no, that's sheepskin. It's way too delicate. It can get. We have mud and we have slush and we need rubber, you know, we need sorrel. Right. And just breaking through that barrier of all the surf the ski shop owners was really. It took a couple of years, and finally I was able to convince this one woman, and she owned about eight ski stores, and I finally convinced her at a trade show to put an Ugg boot on. And she, she just told us that it would never work, you know, back east. And she put a foot in it and went, oh, my God, I could sell thousands of these in my after ski department, you know. And she put in one order that was bigger than our previous year's sales. Right. So I had no idea that anyone could order this many boots. And that turned out, you know, years and years later, I would have. The owner of one of the biggest sporting good chains in California just walked into the trade show booth and said, okay, I need 8,000 pairs. Tell me what sizes and colors. So going from like 160 pairs, which was like a humongous order, to 8,000, it just showed you how the Ugg did eventually scale.

Talk to us about your knockoff competition, the thug life, the thugs that were sold and how you discovered those and kind of share that story.

Yeah, that's a pretty long story. I'll just give you the highlights at the end of it. But the bottom line is my partner had died and my supplier didn't think I was going to be able to pull it together and be able to finance it because my partner was the money man. And so over the progressive, you know, this was in February, and you know, we ship every September, October. And for months and months I was sending orders down to him and he would keep saying, well, I just can't find the skins or how are you going to pay me? And I was busy trying to, with a business plan, trying to raise a couple of million bucks just to pay the inventory. And it got all the way down to the wire in September. And the, the trade show was coming up and we didn't have any way to get new product for the. Even though the sales were in the millions. Yeah. And this, you know, I got to this trade show and I found out that, that all of my product, I had new black ones and charcoal ones and all the natural and sand colors. And I, I. This other booth was called Thunderware, and they had done a deal with my supplier. They'd never told me, and they were sort of side, you know, back ending the product into Thunderwear. They called the, the brand was thugs. Right. Which I thought was appropriate. And, you know, I thought I was out of business, but I'd been in negotiations with a tannery in Australia, and when he heard what had happened, you know, this, my supply didn't end right. He just said, screw him. I'll get you all the boots you need. And so he cranked up the tannery and he got five distributed manufacturers on board and started sending me product. And by the end of December, we shipped about 60% of all of our orders. We threw away millions of dollars of orders that year, but at least we were still in business. It was one of the very, very lucky breaks that I, there were many Lucky breaks. And if you read my book, it's full of disasters. Lucky breaks. Disasters. Lucky breaks. And that's really what being an entrepreneur is all about, not giving up.

Yeah, I think that's really key. Don't give up. Because if you give up, there isn't an opportunity for that thing to happen. That little opening, that little breakthrough that lets you navigate through the other side. If you give up, all chance of that are gone. So you might fail, you might get shut down. But if you give up before anybody forces you, then you miss all chance for the lucky break, the breakthrough, or even the time it takes to.

Yeah, that's a really good nuance because failing is what being an entrepreneur is all about. That if you don't fail, you don't grow. But if you give up, then that you're never defeated. Defeat isn't a real thing until the second you give up and then you're defeated. But if you still got a glimmer of hope and you want to keep working out like I did, I just got so lucky with that, the tannery coming through and supplying me.

Yeah, well, you know what I think is really great? Because I can remember having breakthroughs in multi, multi million dollar years and selling just large amounts of product and then having suppliers, some tell me, yeah, no, we're not going to work with you and tighten the screws financially, and others really find ways to work with you and cooperate and to solve the problem together. And I can remember one guy in the middle the recession back in late 2008, 2009, saying, oh, Mr. Bill, you're a good man. Here's the deal. I'll give you a $5 million line of credit and I'll give you these great terms and I just want a couple things in return. We shifted as much production to that guy as possible. We had some factories and some places tell us no, and then we had other places say, yeah, we'll work with you. And guess where? We moved every bit of production we could. We moved it all to the places that were cooperative and the people that treated us an enemy, an adversary, or in one case, they talk to us like all you Americans are criminals. They got less and less of our business over time.

That's great. And that's how it should work. Yeah, I was just blessed that year that my customers were so low. Like, I'd spent three years on the road traveling with my sales reps all across the country. And each rep had to give me the 10 best customers for the visit. And so I got to know like 300 retail buyers a year and be in their store and meeting them face to face and sometimes playing golf, sometimes fishing, sometimes surfing, but we got to be friends. And this went on for three years. So that's like 900 visits. And when this company did the end run around me with Thugs, I found out just pure fluke, you know, the customers, brokers shipped boots to me, the Thugs boots to me, and my Ugg boots to them. And they're 30 minutes up the coast. So I drove up there and I swapped them around. And as I was coming back, I'm thinking how come we couldn't keep boots in our warehouse for 24 hours? You know, as the shipping was coming in and the Thugs warehouse was floor to ceiling full of boots. And I'd finally realize that my, my God, the power of the loyalty of my customer base, you know, because they had all found out on the grapevine that, that this company had sort of ditched me and they refused to buy the Thugs. So the Thugs warehouse was full when I was there after Christmas, which is, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And it just really pointed out how critical customer service is. And you know, now we're in an age. But I think.

Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Before you talk about the immediacy of today, this is a really critical thing because it wasn't just the, it was the partners, it was the end user customers. There's like a core integrity. And you can see just in talking to you, here's a nice guy, here's a guy who did right by people, and then, you know, other people who are like always scheming and trying to get over on people and I think what you're pointing to is that kind of thing comes around and you know, when I want somebody to do business with me or whatever, and they know that I am coming from a place of fairness and generosity and honesty, that they are going to stick with me versus the other person who, if they ever did business with them, it was an opportunity in a moment and not a place from a place of loyalty.

I have this saying that cream rises, you know, as long as they're not shaking the bottle, you know, cream will eventually rise and you'll find out you're dealing with the best people. As long as you have integrity, you'll attract integrous people to you.

Yeah, so. And you were starting to talk about the Internet, the immediacy and the things.

Because today, today it's all driven by websites and clicks and influencers and, you know, Facebook ads. And all that sort of stuff. And yeah, someone clicks, they buy a product. Well, if that's the end of it, that's sort of useless. I mentor a girl who, when she first started, was sending out little cards, you know, a week later, and then another week after that, they get a phone call. And so she's built a hundred percent online business with this lamb leather bag. It's a cross shoulder bag. And the striking thing is that we did a survey and over 50% of her customers own more than one bag. And there's like 10% own more than five bags and there's some that own 20 bags. You know, it's just insane. But she's been able to develop this sisterhood, you know, it's. The brand is Sash. So she calls them Sash Sisters. Anyone, you know, who sees another person wearing a. Take a photo and send it in, and they become part of the Sash Sisterhood. So it is possible to create a really good customer service and a really good following, especially online with all these chat rooms. Now, that's. If you're not doing that with your business, you're missing out on a lot of business.

So you had some breakthrough with some people like that, influencers and stuff as well. You had Pamela Anderson and Neil Young and. And then one big name that finally broke it up for you. Talk about the influencers in your world.

Sure. Luckily, there's two parts to answer this. There's the first, influencers, like way, way back when I was beginning in the 80s, I'd see Sting or Tom Petty or all these musicians wearing Uggs on stage. So I got photographs of them or in Rolling Stone magazine. And then my. My buddy who. You remember, I was sitting on the beach with Doug when we said, we're going to be millionaires. Well, he went and got another job, obviously, because we had no money there.

But.

I was coming back on a plane from somewhere and I noticed the girl next to me is reading People magazine or Us magazine, and there's all these photos of celebrities walking around Hollywood, you know, and they're wearing the latest denim this, or the latest, you know, whatever. And so I was talking to Doug. I said, you know, how the hell do you get to these people? You know, you. You got to get a. You know, find out who the stylists are. I said, what the hell are stylists? You know? He says, well, it's the makeup artists and the wardrobe stylists and the hair people. And. And so I found a mailing list of all these stylists in Hollywood. And I sent a letter out to about 400 people and said, hey, if you want a free pair of Ugg boots, give me a call. And about 40, 40 of them responded. And I sent 40 pairs of free Ugg boots out. And before long, you know, I'd be watching TV on a sitcom and someone's wearing Ugg boots, you know, and then two weeks later, there'd be a movie, and it's. They're wearing Ugg boots, you know, all the way up through to Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, you know, and that stylus thing became, you know, a fashion item. And as we started to get into the Hollywood scene. But that led to the most amazing encounter. We'd been shipping boots to this woman in London, Trudy Styler, who is the wife of Sting for years. And one day she called up and, Brian. Oh, Brian, I need a biggest favor. I've just been to a seminar. It's changed my world. I need the most perfect pair of size, you know, whatever, tall sand Ugg boots. And here's where to ship them. And I go, yep, I'm ready. She goes, oprah. Care of Oprah Winfrey Chicago. Right? And that was when she announced that, you know, Uggs were her most favorite things. And. And she put us on the Best Picks for Christmas show when. When she was at the absolute peak of her popularity. We had 22 minutes of nothing but Uggs on Oprah. And that was what really broke the whole thing open. Like, you know, and this is. Remember how we opened the show? You're going to. I'm going to teach people how to be a billionaire. Right. Well, the interesting thing is you can't start a business that's going to make a billion dollars because you need some number one. The product or the service has to be fantastic and radical breakthrough, right? You can control that part. What you can't control is that you need a worldwide societal shift to happen, which picks up whatever it is you've got and runs with it, because you've been there working at it for so long. Some great examples is Nike. You know, they were failing five or six years trying to get into the running industry, you know, advertising in running magazines and colleges and things like that. And then the sport of jogging took off, and everyone's going, oh, I need the best running shoes, you know. And so they buy all these old magazines. And who's been there? Nike. Nike, Nike, right. Not doing very well, but they're always there, right? So that's when Nike got picked up and went into the millions and the hundreds of millions and billions, right? And Reeboks, another one they were trying to sell for nearly 10 years in Santa Monica, this dance shoe. And they'd been advertising in the dance magazines and, you know, high school cheerleading events and shit like that. And eventually the sport of aerobics took off completely outside of Reebok's control. And everyone's going, well, what's the best dance shoe? And look at the magazine. Oh, there's Reebok, Reebok, Reebok, let's get them. And they got into the millions and 100 millions and billions. And that's what happened with Ugg. As soon as Oprah started to talk about it as one of her favorite things. You know, we were already doing millions at that time and it was really close to when I sold the company and we, you know, UG then after I sold it, got into, you know, we're already in the millions, but they went into the hundreds of millions and eventually the billions. So, so that's one key. You know, I want to applaud everyone who's trying to start a billion dollar business today, but just have that reality check. If you get to 20 million, you're a winner. You get to 100 million, you're an absolute star. If you can get it to 300 million, which is where most big companies sort of, they have a ceiling because they haven't had the societal shift happen. In fact, that brings up a great story. I, I, right before COVID I had to go up and speak to 300 employees at Zoom. And afterwards, the CEO and the couple of the founders took me out for dinner and they were up to 240, 250 million, right. And they're just crying the blues about everything they try. They think they've got every corporate customer involved, you know, and you know, there's no way consumers are going to buy it. It has to be corporate. And then three months later, Covid, all the restrictions hit. And I think Zoom was one of the fastest billion dollar growth things I've ever seen. So it just highlights that without the societal shift. And back on Nike, I read the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder, and it turns out that Ugg's first five year sales was greater than Nike's first five years sales. So they were in infancy, just like I was.

You know, there's so much to being clear about who you are, doing something different and finding your moment in history. But one of the other things that we see again and again is people who lean into these societal Shifts find opportunity. Our company was nearly decimated in 2008 and we came swinging back out, selling and growing like crazy because we looked at what was happening and we adapted our product to the moment. And we helped countless companies in 2020 start to find ways to adapt in both immediate and longer term ways. As Covid hit and accelerated lots of changes. We use a thing called our sweat tool. It's a way to look at what you're good at and what you're not good at against the trends. And I just wonder how, like, what experience or what stories you have to share about how you, I mean, you've talked a little bit about it, like, oh, I see the, I see hockey and snow sports. And so we took Uggs out to that. But how did you, and, and where did you look at trends? Did you do it formally or informally? How did you do.

It was, it was pretty informal because keep in mind that, you know, I sold the business in 1995. That was the year the Internet started, right. So I didn't have to benefit of all the information that you can get online now, but I did have an awareness in the, in the overall US market. I needed to get my brand out of the ninja. We were huge in surfing and snowboarding and hockey, but we needed an overall brand makeover. And so I came up with the idea of casual comfort. And for me, and we were doing about, you know, 12, 15 million around this time. And, and I had the money to hire a PR agency because I, I thought if, if I can launch this properly. And I wanted to be on the front section of the lifestyle page in USA Today, right. And so I made an appointment with that, that fashion editor at USA Today. And so in the weeks preceding that, I went to this PR agency in Boston and built this beautiful press kit and a whole pitch on how to get this into USA Today. And by the time we arrived at USA Today, our appointment was at 3. We arrived five minutes early and the editor came out going, oh, Brian, I'm so sorry, I've double booked. I, you know, and I just did this lateral thinking really quickly and I, because I knew I did. My process was 40 minutes, right? So I thought, I pulled out this old tattered file with all of these celebrities in it. And she was going through it and she saw this photo of Pamela Anderson on the set of Baywatch in a red swimsuit wearing these big, tall white Ugg boots. And I was, I was sort of embarrassed by that because that's not how you wear Uggs. But she Grabbed it and she, she wrote down the name of the publisher and the, you know, the photographer and, and said, I gotta go, you know, do you have a press kit? Yep. And she was gone. And, you know, I knew that we'd just blown, you know, I think cost about 60 grand, that, that, that whole exercise. And so the next morning I'm at Chicago Airport on the way back to San Diego and I got my coffee And I got USA Today, you know, expecting nothing because this was like 15 hours later, right? And I open up USA Today and then go the money section and then the lifestyle section. Here's a photo of Pamela Anderson. And in the next page, the entire page was about the whole history of shearling and wool in fashion and, you know, all the new boot companies and everything like that. And by the time I got back to San Diego that afternoon, I found that the phones had not stopped ringing from retailers all across the country wanting to know how to stock them and from consumers saying, where the hell is a company? Where's a retailer near me? Right. And so that was one of the, one of those other lucky breakthroughs that sort of came out of an accident, you know, it was, it was so cool.

Luck favors the well prepared. I think has been said in a variety of ways. It's amazing how lucky you are when you have all, everything lined up and you're able to capitalize on it.

Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Friend of mine said to me in the 2008 downturn, he said, well, look, it's a really great time to buy a Ferrari, Lamborghini, G Wagon, whatever you want, this is your time. I'm like, yeah, I can't buy any of those things. I'm laying people off right now. I'm buying a Prius, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, I did my share of downsizing in 2009 as well. I'd started a concrete precast, concrete delivery business. It was doing fantastic. But, you know, in 2009, like August, construction stopped worldwide. So I had to sort of pivot and figure out what I was going to do as well. It sounds like you. I'm going to look into that sweat tool thing.

That's really interesting. We'll talk about that and I'll give our listeners, viewers something to talk to you about afterwards. But I think you've hit on so many good things, but like one of the core ones here, John Paul Gettyon, our friend from Hawaii. Aloha. John Paul says you're never defeated until you give up quotes. You calls that out there. I think that's really the key, like all these ups and downs, you just have to keep at it and keep finding a way. One of our clients, past clients, not working with them anymore, but we did for many years had a very tourism centric business. And I said, listen, do whatever it takes. Just hang on, Just don't give up. And he sold his house and they paired off people and they trimmed off locations, but they ended up on the other side of it with a very profitable, great, fun, growing company again and totally different. Sometimes the most traumatic things actually are the breakthrough that you were looking for. I think you said that in one of the stories as well.

Yeah, in fact, my piece of my book's full of philosophy and religious thought and stuff like that that I've developed over the years. But the one that fits what you just said is that nearly always your most disappointing disappointments will become your greatest blessings. And you know that example you just gave about selling the house and everything? I had to do that during that recession as well. Even though I'd previously made millions of dollars when I sold ugg, I still ran into financial trouble because I'd invested so much in my new business. And, you know, that eventually we pulled through it. And, you know, I love asking everybody in the audience, you know, put your hand up. If in the last 12 months something disastrous happened in your personal life or your business, and now you thank God that happened, right? Every audience over 60, 70% of people put their hands up. It's just one of those immutable laws.

You know, I think we, we go along in life fat, dumb and happy until something happens. And in any given moment, something can occur as a breakthrough or breakdown, Right? Like a miracle or a tragedy. But ultimately surprises. And, you know, you get a call, you weren't expecting it, somebody shares some news with you, an email shows up and you're like, crap. And then you hang on, and then another one shows up, you're like, oh, that's interesting. And the key is, like, playing through all of it. One of our key clients sold their business. I'm like, yay. Of course that means I don't have a client, but that also means I have an opening for another client. And then I get two emails of people who are looking for some help with their growth plans. I don't know if I'll work with either of them, but, you know, it's like one thing goes out, you got to kind of let it come and go. And like, all of that happen. And when you think about, like, for years we struggled with the thing with one major customer, too much concentration. A business model wrapped around a unique client and then nearly wiped out the business and personally by a downturn in the economy that allows us to innovate and then go through. But in that moment, we had to cut corners. We had to tighten our belt. We had to think frugally, but we also had to think freshly and not give up. I think that's what comes through again and again in your book. Hang on one second. Let me give a shout out to our sponsors and to a couple of folks. I want to talk about a very cool thing that you've got going on for people. So a great offer. Also, before we get to the one that we've got to share about you, the news, and that is from our sponsor, recruiter.com so it's really tough to hire people right now. It's really a challenge. And a new innovation has come from one of our sponsors. Recruiter.com has this new program called Shortlist. And Shortlist lets you put in the job requirements, that kind of thing, and then they'll pre screen and find you 10 solid interested candidates. 10 solid interested candidates, and charge you just 3,000 bucks for that. So hire one, hire them all as you like. 10 qualified candidates on your short list for only 3,000 bucks. There's a special offer there for our audience. Scale up is the promo code. Scale up is the promo code and you'll find it right there. Start.recruiter.com shortlist. And we should probably delete that trailing period on Shortlist, but it's on the screen there and we'll put it in the show notes, that kind of thing as well. So if you want to give that a try, this is maybe a novel way. It could be really great for you. I don't know, but it's at least worth a try to see if it actually doesn't provide a pathway. You got to figure out the thing that works for you in recruiting and it's been more challenging than ever the last couple of years. I want to give also a special shout out and thanks to Vern Harnish, author, creator of the Scaling up framework, the original Rockefeller Habits. He's my friend, he's my mentor in all things Scaling Up. And to a couple of the other folks, Wanda Mitchell in the background producing our show, getting our guests ready, show scheduled, that kind of thing, getting out the door, the folks at Podfly Productions who produce our show every week, get the audio, get the show notes, all that kind of thing. Get it out. So it takes a lot of partners to do this every week, week in, week out for years now. So big thanks to those and to recruiter. Now here's the deal. Brian has got a special thing. You can go and spend a day with Brian to rethink your business, your brand down in San Diego. So uggfounder.com is his website, briangfounder.com is the way to reach him, but he's got a very special offer. I'll tell you more about it, but it's super, super affordable and you can go down there and do a deep dive in the way you run your business, your strategy and how you're navigating as a leader. This is a chance, one on one to spend a full day, one on one with a guy who's built a brand that did over a billion a year for years on row and went through all of the lessons of decades of that kind of work. And I'll be sending people down Brian's way and giving him a little hand with that thing. So great offer from Brian. Go check it out. Brian, I want to thank you so much for coming on our show and dropping some wisdom and stories on it. If you liked Brian's style, like the conversation, I think he might be a person to help mentor you and get you going along the way. He's a great one to look out for. If we can help you with anything else, you want to drop us a line, feedback, comments, find a coach in the scaling up world or anything like that, send me a note infocalingcoach.com I've gotten already today. I think seven or eight guest suggestions for the show plus a couple of requests for coaching today alone. So info scalingcoach.com is an email that we watch if you'd like to give us some feedback. Thanks again everyone for watching. Thanks Brian for joining with us. We'll talk to you all again soon. Thanks. Bye bye now. Keep scaling up. Keep scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with scoreboard by aligned. To try it now go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.