Episode 244: Screw Business Plans — Use “Incredible Urgency” Instead - Barbara Corcoran with Busi...

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 am here with Brian and Michael Special, owners and founders of the Comfy. And we're talking about how they launched this incredible product that now we find out my information was wrong. They're in 100, over 100 countries, and the number three selling Shark Tank product of all time. You guys are kind of the definition of the, the thing of beginning with the end in mind. Right from the beginning, you not only got the idea, you got the idea of what to do with the idea, where to go with the idea. Right away. The Christmas edition of Shark Tank. And I didn't even know there was a Christmas edition of Shark Tank. And I thought I watched that show quite a bit, but I, I had no clue. But that also gave you a deadline. So that created a. What you did was inadvertently, you gave, you had a great idea, great goal, but you had the deadline in there right off the bat. You know, that was. You had a, you had the essentials of a plan, the details you figured out as you went, but is kind of magical about how all of that came together at once.

Incredible urgency is what it was from the beginning. And honestly, that's still how we operate the business right now. We've hired an incredible executive team, starting with our CEO, Susan Hudson, who brings us back to earth a little bit sometimes for sure. But Ryan and I just really never stop pushing. And so there's a lot of, lot of strategy that goes into a lot of our decision making now, where at the beginning it was just go, go, go.

And I'll tell you, Larry, a big.

Part of that the urgency was because we knew this was an idea of a lifetime. We knew this was an incredible product. We knew this product is going to outlive us and it will outlive us and there will always be a version of it out there. And we knew that the knockoffs were coming and they did come, and they came early. And that's why the urgency thing has never stopped. It's always, always driving us, the competitiveness to keep pushing forward and becoming the brand of wearable blankets, which we are. We created this category and we are going to fight to keep it for the rest of our lives. Honestly, it's what Drives us every day.

Yeah. That's one of the first things people got to understand if they want to actually want to get a business of their own, is forget about working and think about racing. You got to move fast, right? And John Wooden at UCLA said it's one thing to have the fundamentals down, but if you can't do the fundamentals at speed, you might be. You might be dribbling the ball perfectly down the court, but they're going to steal it from you every time.

So that's a good one.

You got to be. You got to be able to move at speed, and that's what you did. Now, one thing you did is when you do things at speed, a lot of times you don't even remember how you did it. You know, there's a lot of phases in my life. It's just like a blackout period. I don't know. And you look back and you say this. There's just no way that happened. But it did. And so, you know, it's just like, how does a bumblebee fly? I don't know what it does. And so the thing is that.

You.

Guys, like, even the step of finding the pro, the company down at Mesa that does the proto. I mean, how do you do that? Because that step alone would, without a big head of steam, would stop a lot of people. Like, I just don't know.

I guess, you know, it's. It's as complicated as putting a search term into Google. Honestly, that's, that's, you know, prototype. There's no rocket science to this.

Wow.

You know, it's just figuring it out. It's using. You've got, like I said, you've got the world at your fingertips. You've got the sum of human knowledge in your pocket at all times. We all do. So use it. It's all hard to figure out.

Now. How do you get on Shark Tank? The audacity. I'm going to tell you right now, the audacity of you guys is beyond naivety. It's, It's. If you ever watch the show, you know the questions that are coming. How did you get that? How did you get that valuation? You, you know, you ding. Bad. You know, you know, it's fantasy, you know, and you know, what are your sales? And then they, if the sales are, you know, you know, in your website, and then they all frown in unison, you know what I'm saying? It's almost like it's orchestrated by somebody off camera. You know, the reactions from the shark. But, you know, you Knew you were going in and not having sales, not having website, not having a track record or things that you could put. How did you get your valuation for Shark Tank?

I think we just kind of said, sat with our producer and said, what do you think? 50,000 for 30%? That sounded right. That's really about as far as it went, wasn't it, Michael? Because we're just like, we needed something that was going to be a dangling kind of carrot that if they like the idea, okay, they're just taking a flyer on us. It's not that big of a risk.

You know, you didn't want to go too low where it's kind of silly. 10,000 or something like that. So producer who'd been working on the show for nine years at that point knew that that number sounded good from the beginning. But one thing we're really proud of with getting on is that we were the first true startup to launch on that on Shark Tank night in about four years, where Shark Tank used to be about basically launching new companies, new products and things like that. But they got into the really large deals, the hundreds thousand dollar deals and million dollar deals. And so that was a hurdle that Brian and I had to overcome and convince not just our producer, but the other six producers as well, to just take us on because we knew we were gonna go on there and not have great answers on what our sales are, what's our customer acquisition? You know, we just look at each other and honestly, we knew the question was coming and you can watch the episode, we just laugh because we knew it was coming. But how do you answer it? It's like we don't have any sales. Right? And so you sell the idea of the Comfy, which we thought somebody would get and understand what this product is and that it is for everyone and it's just one size and can take it out to the entire world. None of them really got that. But what Barbara did get, and she said it, if you listen closely, at the very end, she came up and shook our hands after we made the deal and she said, you guys are absolutely phenomenal salesmen. And that's what she bought into. She bought into Brian and I. She knew she could feel our energy from the beginning and that's really what she brought into. She gets it now completely. The Comfy and the product. But you just never know what's going to get you over that next hurdle. So go 100%.

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, you know, and that goes. Speaks to the deal. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. It's not what you say, it's how you. It's what you emphasize. But you guys got really. I mean, it's almost like you had a magic spell put over you where you saw this thing and instantly believed this could be a sensation. You're even taught, you know, thinking Shark Tank, you never. You didn't have one made and show it to some of your friends and get their feedback and go to a local fair and try and sell some dinky local farmers market or something and see how people like it. You didn't give any away to bloggers, which a lot of people have used, you know, to start their affiliate network and everything. You just steamrolled your ass in there and got the deal. I got to go watch this episode now. Okay.

Yep. Season nine, episode 13. Just so you know.

Nine. Season nine, episode 13.

And literally, even with Shark Tank, Even with Shark Tank, the entire process, we were told no every single step of the way. After the. I should say after we went in and we did our song and literal song and dance in front of the. The casting producers in Denver, and then, you know, made it through that first round and started working our way through the process. But when it came to the end of the process, like, God, we haven't heard from our producer. We haven't heard from Kate in a long time. Bro, what the heck's going on here? You know, they kind of went dark on us. Finally got a hold of her, and she's like. She's like, guys, this is like a week before we're supposed to film. She's like, guys, you know, they just think you're too new. They think you're too new. They love you guys. Come back next year. You know, it's going to be. Unfortunately, we're going to pass on you guys for this year, so just, you know, come back next year. Better luck next time. Blah, blah, blah. This is like a week before filming. So Michael and I went you know, I immediately grabbed my video camera.

We had our third pity party, remember?

Yeah, we had our 32nd pity party. I grabbed my video camera, I went over to Michael's. Michael's house. He was, he had, he had excavated himself away from my couch by that time and was living on his own again, thank goodness. So he's starting to. Things are starting to get better. But I said, we just said, screw that. You know, who knows if Shark Tank is going to be around next year, right? Who knows? TV can't show canceled all the time. You know, if we're going to go down, bro, we are going to go down with every bullet out of the damn. Out of the damn chamber. Every single one of them. That's. So we, we sat down and we came up with a little script and we called it the top five reasons why you cannot cut the cozy. At the time, it was the Cozy. It wasn't even a company yet from Shark Tank. And we did a fun little video, came up with five different reasons, dance, sang, had all kinds of fun with it. I went back to my house, edited that up, send it off to the producers, kind of our last gasp, saying, hey, you guys can't get rid of us, no way. She watched that, she took it into the showrunner, the executive producer, Clay Newbel's office. They called us that afternoon and said, okay, be in LA on Monday. So even after they told us, even after they told us no to Shark Tank, we're like, no, no, no's not gonna work for us, guys. And we just continued to push through. Then when we got to Shark Tank, when we got there and we did our practice pitch in front of all the producers, nerve wracking experience, but we nailed it. And they came up to us afterwards, the, the lawyers came up to us afterwards and said, guys, that was great. However, there's already a bunch of companies that use Cozy in their title. And so you cannot be the Cozy. You need to change your name or you're gonna have to come back next year. So we had, we were not marketing this as the Comfy. It was the Cozy. And it had been that way for that six months since we had the idea. Now they're telling us, change your name or you're off the show yet again. So we said, heck with that. We love the name Cozy, but we're gonna, we'll come up with something else. And everybody just kind of landed on Comfy, I think the day before we were supposed to film it. Sounds so simple now, right? Duh. But at the Time. It was very difficult because when you have something ingrained in you, it's been the cozy this entire time. It's the perfect name. Blah, blah, blah. Changing it was difficult. Then we had to change our. You know, we brought over our T shirts. We had to go. We had to get new T shirts with a new logo on it. We had to have our logo change. Worst of all is that we had on the actual product, we have the company embroidered on the. On the pocket of all of our products. Well, we had the cozy embroidered on all of our pockets. So the Shark Tank producers had to, like, take all of our five prototypes and sew over the top of them. So if you look real closely on the show, you can see where the logo is supposed to be. It's just kind of a patch over the top of it. So they made it difficult for us every step in the step of the way. But we persevered, came through. Here we are.

The worst part, bro, is that we had to change the song.

Yeah. The song that we sang. Yeah. Lyric.

Well.

Well, it sounds like a simple thing until you go out there and try and find the name of a product that somebody doesn't already have. Good luck on that. You know, it's kind of like if you want, you buy a pro team from any sport and you move it into a new town. One of the hardest things is, now, what are you going to call these guys? You know, and it's like all the good, great names are taken, but you came up with a brilliant, simple solution which is perfect and better, I think, in terms of saying what it. What it actually you expect to get from it, the feeling that you get from it, you know, and so I. It seems to have a more warmer, welcoming type deal than cozy.

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.