Episode 239: Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks with Founder of Squatty Potty Bill & Judy Edwards

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 back with Bill and Judy Edwards of Spotty Potty and, excuse me, of Squatty Potty. And I'm on a different time zone out here. I think it's, I passed my limit.

Getting a little late.

Yeah. Let's start it over again. I am back with Bill and Judy Edwards of Squatty Potty from Utah. Thanks for joining me, folks.

Hey, it's our pleasure.

It's good to be here.

Yeah. And, you know, you guys have become role models. I'd like to point out one thing about people that are looking to do something, and maybe they feel like time has passed them by. The thing to think about is maybe the experience you got along the way of reaching your 50s, early 60s or late 40s or whatever, where you feel like, well, the bloom is off the rose for me. You need to remember that Colonel Sanders never started the fried chicken business until he was 65 and he got his first Social Security check from the government. And he said, you know, because country people back then were very proud and they didn't want anything from the government. And so when he got that from the government, he said, oh, no, oh no, I'm not going to be, be like this. And, you know, a lot of businesses have been started, but in fact, you know, you talk about you guys have almost, you know, you had several successes, but also some, some failures along the way. Fortunately for me, I heard early in my career that most super successful people go bankrupt once or twice along the way up the ladder. So if it happens to you, don't worry about it. You know, you're gonna, you're gonna learn lessons you need, you need to learn. And I found that to be true. And it doesn't have to happen, but if it does happen, don't worry about it. Keep on going because you're learning. And you guys learned a lot of lessons. But the point is that when you had this new idea, you were able to, he still had to do the work and grind it out. But those skill sets, time management, problem solving skills, contacts that you developed just instinctively living your life and doing the things you had done along the way may have had a role in you being able to kind of compress timeframes, because we're talking about in less than 10 years, you built a business that sold a record, what, 28 million units in a year? Over 200 from scratch. What do these things cost? What does that cost on one of these?

Well, I'd say average about 25. We do have a new stool on Amazon that sells for 15, 50, 1560 something.

And so not a big ticket item. But in spite of that, sold over 2. What'd you say, over 200 million in sales.

So far our sales are up over 200 million.

Yeah. And so. And you did that within inside 10 years, you know, from starting point and something you had no idea about. No, I hadn't done before. Didn't know how to get it manufactured, sold, whatever, but. And you were able to retire.

I'll give you the title to a new book you can write.

Okay.

Old dogs can learn new tricks, you know, and we, and we had these old dogs had to learn some tricks, you know, and, and it was kind of the school of hard knocks. But it's amazing what you can find out. And you know, we're not in a, it's not a small town anymore, but it's not a big town. But we were just surprised at all the local help we could find. We have a local tech college that was able to help us, you know, print parts, you know, so we could develop new products and develop things that way. We found local designers, local web designers. We just found almost everything we needed right here in our little town. And so it was fun. It was fun to be a part of that. It was fun to involve our community and just discover all the people that could help us right here locally.

And you knew how to go look for them, you knew how to find them, you knew how to tell them what to do to get them engaged quickly. And you mushroom this thing up very, very quickly and you were able still to move on down the road and retire. And now you've got a lot of people that you said you're in your third year of retirement. Why still, I'm sure you still have your hand in the business more than you would admit. But the thing is, I'm sure people come to you all the time. Again, we talked about the children, the grandchildren, and I'm sure they're getting up and getting independent and going out on their way, but I'm sure people are coming to you for advice quite frequently. So what are the things that you feel like can give people that are starting out in life or starting a new business or Coming back from maybe a failure. What are some things, you know, 1, 2, 3, that you feel like would be really difference makers and give them a winning edge?

You know, I don't know, I guess, you know, we kind of talked about these a little bit before, but I think, you know, the first thing is just, just don't give up. You know, keep, keep your ear to the ground. You never know quite where a good idea is going to come from. Once you decide you want to try something, do a little homework, you know, check your, check the pluses and minuses and make sure you're willing to do what you think it's going to take to be successful. And then, and then don't overthink it. Just, just do it, you know. What is that? Nike that says just do it? I think that's great, great advice.

Well, I think too that's another senior moment. I think if you just follow your gut, a lot of times in your gut you have a feeling that this may not work. The three of us work together and we found out through working together that if all three of us agreed, it was usually great, it worked out terrific for us. But if one person wanted to do it and the other two didn't agree and that person went ahead and did it, it didn't usually work out. So, you know, you put three of us together and we all felt really good about it, it usually was successful. That was the thing that we learned.

I think a good example of that, Larry, is perhaps you've seen our little unicorn video.

Uh huh, yeah.

This was again, these are local people that we found here in Utah. They're called the Harmon Brothers. And we had seen their products, some of their videos and some of their advertisements early on. And one way or another we tried contacting them. Either they were under contract to work exclusively for somebody else or we couldn't afford them. They quoted a surprise and we thought, oh my gosh, we can't afford that. But then fortunately, right after, just shortly after Shark Tank, you know, we reached out to them again and the timing was right. We had a little bit of money and they had a little bit of time and we were able to get together and we went and met with them and they presented this idea of a pooping unicorn.

They presented three different options for this video.

Three different options. And he says, now I'm not going to tell you what to do. But he says, my feeling would be to go with the unicorn. And you know, us being a little bit older and we thought, oh my word, I don't know. But we, Judy and I and Bobby talked it all over and, you know, as Judy mentioned, you know, we all thought, you know, let's go for it. And the minute they'd written some scripts and a few things, and soon as they read that script, we were laughing so hard we could hardly film it. We were trying to film it so we could take it home and make some decisions and. But all of us just thought, yeah, you know, these will trust our instincts and go with it. And that little video has had literally hundreds of millions of views.

Now, it increased our business, but even after Shark Tank increased our business by 600%.

Wow, 600%.

Yeah.

And go ahead.

Saw that as well. That increase.

What was that?

The stores saw that increase with the video. They had more demand retail.

It really helped our retail as well.

Now, talk to me about, you know, you say you had a little bit of money and a little bit of time, and how did you. In the beginning, you know, it's a matter of you got. It cost $500 to get these three stools overnight to New York. You just got to find the money, you know, but at some point, you've got to put some financial controls in place and try and get things organized. How did you go about doing that?

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 Whiteellumwinning.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.

Well, another thing I was going to say, one thing I feel like that we were pretty good at from the beginning is we were good at realizing what we didn't know, what we didn't know. We were good at realizing that we. We know some things, but we don't know all things. And we were smart enough to reach out to those people who knew a lot more than us. One of our first hires was an accountant.

Cpa.

Yeah, cpa. We weren't even drawing any money yet. And we paid him $70,000. He was our first hire.

That's what I was going. We weren't even paying ourselves a wage, and we realized we needed. We needed a good bookkeeper.

But when Your company's growing and you may possibly need a bank loan or you get a big inventory. You know, you just financially, you have to have everything correct or you can die in the water.

How did you know he was the right fit for you and he was going to be? You know, it's not, you know, the way you got to look at these things is not what it's going to cost you, it's what it's going to cost you if you don't get them. And it's not what they're going to cost you, it's how much money they're going to make you. And so how long did it take you to realize this was a smart move? This was a smart move. And also this is the right person?

Well, right from the beginning, after we hired him, he started organizing our books and making them so that if we needed a bank loan, we could approach a bank and have personal proper numbers. He knew how to do all that. I didn't know. I didn't know how to do that. My husband didn't know how to do that.

He came highly recommended. And we interviewed a couple of people, but we just, you know, again, all of us thought, wow, we sure like Devin. And it was a great hire.

Yeah, because people are wondering about hiring people. But you know, when you're hiring people, they should be able to make some kind of immediate impact. They should, because they're there. They should make things better. I mean, to me, hire, I look at the job of an employee is make my life better, make things better for us some way. Otherwise we don't need you in here. And as you went through, what was your next hire that you went through?

Well, then I hired somebody to work the phones and email, answer emails because that's something we could not keep up with and run the business as well.

Customer service and just all around office help. That just lightened our.

Well then we were still in our. We were still in our warehouse and we hired a shipping person to come in and box and ship all the products. You know, as we needed things, we would hire them.

Again, that's hiring specialists, you know, and you know, a warehouse person. Yeah, I'm sure you could teach pretty quick anybody to do it, but that doesn't mean they're going to be really great at it. You know, like somebody who's got the experience and go ahead.

We hired Jose to come and help us start. He was to come and help us assemble the wooden stools and package the plastic stools. And one of the big one of the things that troubled us the most when we decided to go to a fulfillment company is we might have to lay Jose off.

He had been very, very.

He is just so good. And Devin, our accountant, come up with the idea that maybe he could be a bookkeeper. And sure enough, we found out, we didn't know this, that Jose had had a couple of years of bookkeeping experience. And so he. We put Jose with Devin. And he's still there with us.

Yeah, he's still there to this day.

Yeah. Good people can do a lot of things.

You know, if you have a good person, you want to take care of them.

Yeah, they're priceless. Because it had to be fun for you to get this thing up to where you had lots of people involved, lots of moving parts. It's kind of like you're in a game or you've got this machine running and lots of productive things are getting going. It's just a good feeling when you get product moving through and your business really running at a high level. And what did you notice about that experience?

Have to think about that.

I'm not sure how to answer that. You know, just.

You know, I just. I feel. I feel so grateful because I really think that we have been, you know, what you give out comes back, and if you're honest and kind and generous and thoughtful of others, you are going to receive that back. And we have received that back tenfold with those people we work with. And so, you know, I just think that. That just having integrity, being kind, you know, a lot of those things mean a lot when you're running a business.

And the impact the success of your business has had on your family. Describe that. What have you noticed about that? Seeing you be successful, seeing you as role models, seeing you break records. What kind of. Has that changed the mentality or had an effect in a positive way on the generations, the kids, the grandkids and so on. The others are probably too young to notice, but.

Well, we hope so.

Yeah, we hope so.

We've tried to be good examples and tried to love our family. Whether we have money or not. It's, you know, we should try to be a good example for our family, and we hope that we can leave something to them. More than. More than money. More valuable than money.

Absolutely. And one thing you can be sure of, you always have more eyes on you than you're aware of. And that's where that consistency and the values you talked about in the beginning, Judy, you know, this started you in your kitchen and having a feeling that you were supposed to do something special and that has come true and ways you could not have imagined. I'm going to give you both a chance to have a final word here because your kids, your grandkids, great grandkids, are going to be listening. People around the country who know you, who have your products are going to be listening to this and learning from it. Do you have what, the last word, top of your head. What comes to you that you would like to pass on to those people who want to make a positive impact out there in the world? And as a way of encouragement, what can you say to them?

Well, I would say as a 60 year old woman, it's never too late. I was married, like I say, at 17. I do not have any formal education other than high school. But we went through a long, long school of hard knocks and we learned along the way. And hopefully you learn from your mistakes and if you don't pull yourself back up and learn from that mistake, then you failed. But failure only comes when you feel paralyzed through anything that happens to you that you can't get back up again. I would just encourage everyone to realize that it's never too late in your life as long as you have the courage and ambition to get back up and still keep working and not allow things to get the best of you. I know a lot of times people turn to drugs, they turn to things that are so destructive in their life and I'm so grateful that, that these things were instilled with me in me when I was growing up. That a lot of the things that who I am today is because of what I was taught in my home, you know, has really benefited me. That.

Yeah, that, that's really, that, that, that's really more valuable than it might have sounded to you as you were saying it. That that's really right on the money there. Thanks so much. Don't allow things to get the best of you and don't. Don't allow yourself to get paralyzed because you're going through the school of hard dogs. We all have to go through the school of hard dogs. And it's not pleasant, you know, but you know, it's, it's teaching you things you need to learn. And so don't allow yourself to get paralyzed or immobilized and doubt yourself. Don't allow things to get the best of you. And Bill, do you want to join in with a final word?

Oh, heck, Larry, what I say, you know, I guess I would. You know, I think two things that are important to learn I guess is. I think one of them is humility. You know, you, you. Seems like life has a tendency to teach us humility, you know, by the things that we. The dumb things that we do and. But I think it's good to be a little bit humble and realize that we don't know everything we need. You know, there is a higher power. We need help, and we need other people. We're more than just ourselves, and we're so much better if we can. If we can, you know, use the abilities of others. And then I think to go along with that is gratitude, to be grateful for the things that come, both the good and the bad. You know, usually it's the bad things that are our best teachers, and those are the things that we want to dismiss and avoid. But it's those mistakes and those hardships that really teach us the most. So to be grateful for, you know, for all things, you know, for. And. And just. And then. And then do have. You need some self confidence and some belief in yourself and stumble forward?

Absolutely, absolutely. Keep moving. Don't let you know when you stop. Nothing good can happen. If you keep those feet, those forward motion, great things can happen to you. So thanks so much. Great, great, priceless insight from people who know what they're talking about because they have lived it and they've used it to do something that's made a huge impact around the country and will for generations to come. So thanks, y'.

All.

Thank you so much and look forward to having a chance to talk again somewhere down the road.

Okay, thank you. Been a pleasure. Just remember, Larry, that friends don't let friends sit on the toilet with their feet on the floor.

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.