Episode 233: You're Never Going to Get a Perfect Idea the First Time with Creators of Squatty Pot...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm happy to introduce to you Bill and Judy Edwards from Utah. Welcome.

Hi, Larry. Good to be here.

Yeah, we happy to be here.

You know, folks, we have special people talking to us now. We've got, I wish, you know, we're going to cram as much as we can. But these people know about, they know about winning in life, they know about winning in marriage. They know about winning and raising children, and they know about running a successful business because they started it in their later years and they've got seven kids. How many grandkids now?

We have 26 grandchildren and eight. I didn't know that as I counted them up this morning.

Soon to be nine great grandchildren.

I think you guys might have reached the limit.

I don't think so. It's just starting to grow, actually. I got a bunch of grandkids going to be getting married this next year.

Oh, you can't stop it, can you? I've got a friend of mine had two. He had two, you know, a boy and a girl, and they all of a sudden they turn into like eight grandkids. And he said, okay, that's it. You guys have got to stop.

I know.

He said there's only so many baseball games I can go to, but I guess you guys have sat in the stands at a lot of sporting events, huh?

We have.

Well. Well, that's fantastic. And so why do we have you on? Because you guys are stars in business. You started something called Squatty Potty in your garage in 2010, and it has exploded into a world of wide phenomena. You've been, you know, you've checked all the boxes. You've been on Shark Tank. You've been here. And by the way, some of my staff in Athens, Georgia, said they saw that episode. And then others of my staff say they use your product so.

Well, hopefully they all do.

Yeah. So anyway, you know, you made a major impact. So talk about starting. Let's just talk about this. Talk about starting something. There's a lot of people out there that, that feel like, well, it's too late for me and. But starting something new. If you've got a passion of an idea that you can get excited about, chances are there's something in there that could impact other people as well. And there's. You don't want to rule yourself out of the game just because arbitrarily you're past a certain age threshold. Well, how old were you guys and where were you in your life? I mean, when you got going on the squatty potty project, I was 60.

And my husband was 61. He's a year older than me. We were just thinking about retiring and we really wouldn't. We really had no retirement because we had been self employed our entire life. We married at 17 and 18 years old. And so it's just been a continual growing and learning experience trying to earn a living for a large family.

Yes.

And you talk about that. Some of the things that you did with online auctions, websites to get extra income when you have seven kids, that's a lot of food, clothing, everything. And so talk about what you learned just by scrambling and having your eyes open and how that really prepared you. It probably wore you out while you're going through it, but you didn't know you were being prepared and learning skills that could pay off in huge ways down the road.

Yeah. You know, when you have your own businesses and they fail and then they fail again, you learn to just kind of pick yourself up and look at failure in the face and just keep going. You don't allow failure to paralyze your actions. Once that happens, you will really fail. So I think through those years of success and then losing it all and then success and losing it all financially, we, you know, I am hoping that we learned that lesson so we weren't paralyzed at 60 years old to just lie down and roll over that when this idea came to us and we were looking for some help with retirement because we didn't even have a home paid for at the time. I think that's when that came along and we found out this product would be very beneficial to a lot of people. We weren't afraid to jump off that last cliff that we jumped off of.

Bill, when you, what kind of thing, what kind of experience did you have with failures along the way? Did you try businesses of your own or things like that?

Yeah, Larry, we've been self employed almost our entire life. You know, we, we've done everything from, we built model ships, we sold water softeners, we. We owned a tire store. We, we had a feed business which was quite successful. We bought and sold bulk feed commodities and sold in dairy farms and feedlots. We had some truck, we had some trucks and trailers, semi trucks and trailers. And. And so we've done a lot of things and you know, some of them were. Some of them done quite well. And we had some things happen to us that kind of set us back financially there towards the end. And so we were, you know, kind of scratching our head, wondering what we were going to do and grateful for this opportunity that came along.

Well, the thing is that you can. People need to know. It's a fact. I mean, you can have the high quality values in life and work ethic and then still find yourself out on the street because of the economy, because of things happening. And is that kind of what you went through?

We did with the feed business. You know, we sold mostly to dairy farms and feedlots. It was all semi truckload commodities. And we dealt a lot with the railroad, bringing in train loads of commodities and. And the milk prices went up and down and free prices went up and down. And we got caught in a bind where milk prices were extremely low and feed prices were extremely high and we had a lot of dairies that went bankrupt on us. And so we just kind of got, you know, left holding the bag and kind of was scratching our heads, wondering what we were going to do the rest of our lives at a time in our lives when we were hoping to, like Judy said, kind of slow down a little bit and look at retirement. But we seen this and we all kind of. It was a. There was Judy and myself and our son and we, this idea came up and, you know, we looked at it hard and thought, you know, we think this will work. Judy was smart enough to. We got some prototypes built and we had about 50 prototypes built and give them away, give them away to family and friends. And boy, within, within weeks of that giveaway, we started getting phone calls and emails and texts about how great they, how much they like the squatty potty. So with that, we kind of give us the encouragement and the confidence to go ahead with it.

Yeah, at some point you've got to have some kind of success to let yourself know I'm on the right track. Even if it's doing the giveaways just to get the response, you know, get the.

We give away a lot of. We give away a lot of stools. And I, I think that's one thing that, you know, that we might interject here is that, you know, you do need to, you do need to do your homework and your due diligence and make sure that you got a product that you feel pretty, pretty good about. But then you can overthink it. You know, you can think it and think it and think it and think, wow, is this going to work or is it going to work? And at some point, like Judy says, you just kind of have to step off the cliff and go for it. And we realized that and took that big step, and we're really glad we did.

What was that moment? What was that moment? Would you say, I'm sorry cut you off there, Judy?

Oh, sorry. I was just going to say. Would you? You know, actually, I can't remember what.

I was going to say.

I'm sorry. That's the old brain.

We have those senior moments.

But what Bill was talking about, at some point, you've got to not overthink it. You just got to make a move. You know, you just got to jump in. And what caused you to reach that point where you realize, enough thinking about it, we've got to find something else, and we've got to push this thing.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Boy, there's a point in time when we were. We'd give all these stools out to our friends and family, and they loved them and they were working well, and we knew that we couldn't sell little wooden stool. It was too expensive. And so we had to put some money into the business to have molds made and find a manufacturer for plastic. But that's very expensive. And that was the moment that you have to make the investment. And we didn't really have it to make. We had a equity line of credit, and we debated whether we should do that or not. But I remember one moment in my kitchen, I'm a religious person. I have a very strong faith, and I was really praying about this. And I just had this very strong feeling come over me one day that this was going to be bigger than I can even imagine, and it wasn't my voice. And I just felt like that gave me the courage to pursue and go forward with this. Yeah, it was really scary. At 60 years old and to have failures and not sure of the knowledge that I. That we had together in order to. We'd never marketed a product before. We really knew nothing about it. And our son was very helpful. He had some great ideas. And he's the one that said, hey, let's contact bloggers, health bloggers, and let's give away stools to them. And we want them to write about it and write about if they love it or not. And of course, some of these bloggers had thousands of followers. And that's really the, that's really where it kind of all started.

Yeah. And it's funny how you can be stalled out in life, just, you know, have no idea what to do next, but then one idea comes along and then you're off to the races again. And it sound like your son was, Was the one with the ideas. Thank goodness for him.

That's right. You know, and because of those, like giving those to bloggers and they started writing about them and we started getting some sales because of that. There was some, you know, some. We say luck was involved. A staff member of the Dr. Oz show happened to buy one of our stools and loved it. And they were having a staff meeting with Dr. Oz about things they could do on future shows. And she mentioned the squatty pod and they happened to call us. And it was a funny call. The lady's name was Fiona Wozniak. And I thought that was a. That was a different name. Our kids are kind of pranksters and they, especially Bobby, the son that's involved with us, he would make prank phone calls often. And we were the victims of those prank calls sometimes. And so when we, when I got a call from, from Fiona Wozniak from the Dr. Oz Show, I says, yeah, sure, this is. And this is Barack Obama. How can I help you? She paused for a while and she says, no, really, this is really the Dr. Oz Show. So we took her serious. And I remember at the time, you know, this is how. What kind of mindset we were in. And she says, this is kind of. We're in kind of a hurry and we're going to need you to overnight three, three or four stools to New York. And we were in Utah, of course, and it was. This was in the afternoon. And she says, we need them here by ten o' clock in the morning. And I took them up to the UPS store and it was going to cost like $500 to overnight those.

Sure, sure.

I don't know if we can do this.

We just barely Moved out of our garage and bought a little warehouse for these new plastic stools we were getting. And so barely starting. And the Dr. Oz show calls you as like, you know, it's a lot of great luck, but what a great opportunity for us.

So that was, you know, that was a great boost. And then we. We got a little more. What would you say, a little. A little better at doing things. We were able to. We had a website, and we were able to track traffic and where sales were coming from and different things. And one day, another day down, this was a few months later, our cells just blew up and nobody quite knew what was going on. Our phones lit up and we were taking orders, and we started asking people what was going on, and. And they said, well, Howard Stern's talking about it. I guess one of his staff.

Wow.

I guess one of his staff members had purchased a stool and she was having. She had had issue elimination issues, like lots of people.

I think she had had colon cancer.

Or something, I think. And anyway, she started talking to Howard about this great thing, and they actually talked about it for almost 30 minutes. And really it was just thousands and thousands of dollars in sales. And so that was a, you know, another. And I'm sure that comes from. From. From these bloggers and influencers that Judy had been talking about.

Well, you talked about. I read on your website or somewhere that your first big order, all of a sudden, now you're ordering 2,000 of these things from China.

Yeah.

That must have been an interesting day when the box came with 2000.

Yeah, that's when we had to find a little warehouse. Our garage wasn't any longer able to handle that, so we. We bought a little warehouse for that order to come into, and it was very scary. We was not sure we were going to be able to sell all those stools, but we went through those pretty quick.

And the thing is, the point for people listening to take away from this is in the beginning, you're just doing what comes naturally. I mean, you're looking for ideas, you're talking to who, you know, you're running with the ideas you come up with, and you're. You're listening for ideas from other people. But when you get the idea, you know, you follow through on it, and it's. The beginning is not going to be glamorous, and it's probably going to be a lot of hard work by you. But also you're going to. It's a high anxiety thing because usually you're stretching your finances to the limit to take Advantage of the option to kind of crawl up to the top of the mountain and get a, get yourself up there. And there's a story about Jeff Bezos. Well, he was in an interview and he was talking about a thing where when they started Amazon, they would literally, they were like in a garage, warehouse type thing, concrete floor. And they would literally sit on the floor or on their knees wrapping up packages. Okay, to ship out. And then he said one day, he said we had done it so long, he said my knees were killing me. He said I had this. He said, let me show you how stupid, you know, I was. He said, I had this light bulb experience and there was only two other guys, me and two other guys. And I said to him, I've got an idea, why don't we get knee pads, you know, because that way we'll, that way we'll protect our knees. And he said, one of the other guys said, hey, I've got an idea, why don't we just get a table? And he goes, oh yeah, we could get a table. But in the beginning, you know, you're worried. That's Jeff Bezos.

You know.

There'S a lot of times when you can't hardly see the forest for the trees because you're so busy, you know, doing the task at hand that you can't, you can't see that. Hey, yeah, pair of knee pads or a table would be a great idea.

I wanted to share that because I'm sure you could relate to it. Well, that I appreciate you guys sharing. That's a great kickoff and I can't wait to get back and talk to you further about how this thing kind of mushroomed in your next steps. But in terms of start up ideas, do you guys have any last word you like to add before we wrap up this portion?

I would just, you know, I just repeat again, you know, kind of said this before is, is that, you know, you're never going to get an idea perfect. I think, you know, if you've got an idea, check it out, you know, do your due diligence and then do something, you know, go do it. You're never going to get it perfect the first time. No matter how much you think it out. Get going and things will come to you, you know, as you go along. Hopefully you don't make a mistake that'll kill you. You'll make mistakes for sure, but go forward.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons to do the due diligence and the checking out and the planning in the beginning is not to get the perfect plan, but to at least think of the things that could kill you and throw you totally off track, you know? And you want to at least give yourself a chance to win by avoiding the obvious blunders. And so. But at some point, you got to dig in. Thanks so much. This has been great, and I can't wait to get back and hear how this story progressed.

Well, thank you, Laurie.

My pleasure.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, Go, Go.