Episode 482: Entrepreneurship is Like Walking Through a Dark Room with Mike Watts

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind where we get real world insights on winning from people who have accomplished amazing things. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. And let's get going. I'm here talking with Mike Watts and he's explaining how he got into the idea of finding his own product. And eventually he's going to tell me how he wound up inventing his own product probably. But, you know, it gets inside, obviously it gets inside your system because you start, your mind goes off in a different tangent and then a lot of times your mind will do what you challenge it to do. And we have all these reserves of creativity inside of us. They're never tapped, you know, never turned on. It's almost like our brain knows that it'd be a waste to suggest anything to us because we're not going to do anything with it. But then once you start telling your mind, you know, you're serious, let's start thinking about this stuff, Then all of a sudden they start shoving these ideas up to the surface and then you learn how to evaluate them. And like you say, find a good product versus, you know, the right price point, the where you have universal need and what makes a good and a bad product and easy to manufacture, how to manufacture it and that you start, you know, there's a whole list of things that are involved in this, but you can get them in place pretty quick and your, your mind will respond back to you. If your mind knows your serious, you know, that's, it's, it's interesting how the body works, you know, like if you have a blockage in an organ or something like that and the signal for that comes out of your brain. But if there's a blockage in there, the brain sends that pulse down there and it's like nobody's doing anything with this. So that then it stops. And that's when that, you know, organ can kind of start to die or whatever. It's just like, you know, nothing's going to happen, so we're not going to waste any energy sending signal down there anymore, you know, and that's how therapists come in and reactivate areas of your body. And your brain is not going to waste energy if it finds you're not going to do anything with it, it's going to stop sending those signals.

Right.

And so you, most of us, you know, when most of us start to learn, I think most of us could come up with some kind of idea, but we have it in our mind that we're no good at it. And I was just talking to my son but 15, 20 minutes ago and we were talking about a mutual friend of ours. And she's one of the most, she runs factories. I mean, she's, you know, short young lady, but you know, unassuming, but I mean she's like a mastermind, you know, she's into a factory, she's running factories and got all these people, you know, hundreds of employees. And she told him, she said, you know, I went through, all through high school and no one ever told me you can get better at anything. Like, you know, I was, she said I was a mediocre athlete. And it was just like, well, you're a mediocre athlete, you know, you know, you want to play tennis, you're not very good at it, you know, play something else, you know. And as it turns out, you're not very good at anything. Well, how can you be good? It's like musical instruments. You pick them all up and you're not going to be good at any when you start, you know. She said she's basically resentful for the fact of like, I wish someone had told me early on and in the educational process there's a lady called Carolyn Dweck that's done a lot of studies on this, but they'll go into like these inner city schools and you'll have some math teacher that will go in and refuse to let the kids be dumb on math. And he will tell them, you can get better at this. And let's start. And all of a sudden they've got straight A's, they're going into the big schools and you know, everything has changed just because someone told them you can get better at this, you know. And so, you know, you're kind of a role model as kind of. I see you as a role model on tapping into our brains because you've said a lot of interesting things like you get married, you start to have kids. It's like we need to be a one income family and the one income is not going to work if I'm working for somebody else. And we need to make a change. We need our own business and then we need a business with an idea or product that we can control so we don't get put be putting other people coming up with the same thing next week as we move around. And so lots of interesting things here. But to do that you've got to allow yourself to realize that there you can come up with this stuff, you can create. And Mike, I'm just really fascinated with how you've evolved because you said you were a marketer, you were selling stuff, you were finding stuff, selling it, moving it on, and you progressed from that point on. So I just think it's very inspirational and something we all need to challenge ourselves to say, don't give up on yourself just because you haven't come up with your idea or you haven't found it yet. Keep looking, you know, and so let's get into how you moved in. Like with the, the guy from Nicaragua that had that pivot head, pivot trim thing you had. Where did you get to wind up finding the place to get them manufactured? And your first steps, because that had to be a learning process for you because now you're going into a different product line and a different scale. So talk about how that, the steps you went through on that.

Yeah, it was, it was quite the, the journey because for me, I knew nothing about this is manufactured out of plastic. And we ended up changing the design through the process, but I didn't even know how plastic products were made. But I think that's a good example of what it takes to find success as an entrepreneur and what it really takes to find big success in life is to embrace the unknown, be willing to lean into it and figure it out and be okay with failure. Which ties back to some of what you were saying about the school system and trying to teach our kids to not never fail. Right. How bad did you fail? Is all they, all they measure you on, but really life judges you on how many times you try, how much effort do you put in, not how many times do you fail. Because failure is how you find success. So for, for us, we first we figured out how injection parts were made. We found a local injection molder in our town that we could meet with and understand how we could improve the product. You know, he had already started making a few with a low quality tool. So we figured out how we wanted our design to be. Found somebody that could do the 3D drawings, found somebody that could cut the tool for us, found somebody that could make the components and figured out materials and we figured out we needed 33% glass filled nylon. It's because it was tough. And so we met with a materials expert and we researched on the Internet and we researched by just finding experts and we made some and some weren't great and some were better and we just constantly improved. We found right out of the gates, we found a way to make it lighter so it worked better on small trimmers. And we were Just. And we didn't know anything about packaging either, so. But we had to figure out how to package products. And a lot of that was just going to the store and looking at, well, how are other people doing this? And benchmarking our competitors. What, what do we like about. We bought one of every one of our competitors products and we said, what do we like about each one? And then let's take all those things we like and let's put that into our package. We want the package to be interactive, where the customer can try it and understand what makes it unique. And we wanted to have a brand that we could own, that we could get trademarks on, so we, we fit in something memorable, ideally just a couple of syllables. You know, we just, we just figured it out along the way and we didn't. We made plenty of mistakes, but we were blessed. Right. Very first show we went, big show that we went to, we were literally putting together our very first production run in the booth before the show opened. And the second day of that show, the Walmart buyer comes up and sees the product, sees our demonstration and falls in love with it, invites us to Bentonville. We go out, and by that fall, we're in all Walmart stores with our new product doing over a million dollars a year.

So repeat that, repeat that one more time. The night before you're in there assembling. Go through that again.

So then the day, the night before the first day of the trade show, we're literally assembling. We were in the hotel room with screwdrivers and putting together because of the trimmer head was the top and bottom piece. We're building them, assembling the packaging, putting the displays together, and leading up to that show. And then the first day, we got great feedback. One of our competitors come by and tell us that it was his idea that, that we were infringing on his patents. And so we kind of struggled with a little bit of competition bravado, as it turned out. But then the second day, the Walmart buyer came by and he was impressed and said he had a spot, that he needed a product just like this. And, you know, that's how it worked out for us.

And so as you basically, when you're talking and you see that product and the first thing is like, I know this thing is people are going to respond to it, because just this morning I was using this thing and frustrated with it. And so you were happy for yourself. So you have personal knowledge and experience in, but you didn't know all that. You didn't know about the plastic and getting somebody to do the computer design and the, all of these kinds of things, legal documents, how you did the licensing, how did you. And basically you just gotta find the people who know and ask the questions. Is that right?

That's exactly. It's totally that simple. I tell people entrepreneurship is like walking through a dark room, pitch black room. You know, on the other side of this room there's something great. You don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but you're going to go through and you're going to hit your shins on the couch and you're going to run into walls. But if you never quit, if you keep moving your way through, you'll come out a little bumped and bruise, but on the other side you will emerge and it will be better than where you started. So. And you're gonna, you're gonna know more, you're gonna have more experience. You know, none of my products have come out exactly. I thought they were gonna, they've. None of them are and typically they're better. And I ended up in that, that company allowed me to, ended up being. Because I had to figure out all the hardware to attach weed eaters to the head to all manufacturers of weed eaters out there. And so we had to go get measurements on all the different left hand thread, right hand metric, standard nuts, bolts, the different lengths. We've, when we figured that out on our own and we created the perfect universal kit, well, our competitors needed that kit too. So we ended up selling those kits to all of our competitors and we were doing over a million dollars in sales just on hardware kits alone. And I would have never thought I would be in selling hardware kits as aftermarket components for trimmers, but we were, because the opportunity presented itself and we were willing to work with a competitor to do it. So you just never know.

Yeah, you know, that's the whole, whole idea of the ambiguous nature of being an entrepreneur. You have to realize things will come up as you dive in and you just don't have, you have to be willing to roll with the punches. Because I think if you talk to most composers, music composers, people who write songs, the songs come out completely different or usually different than what they had in mind when they got started. But the thing is, you got to start with the idea or play or a book or a novel or books. You know, you write a book and it takes, it becomes what it wants to become. You know, it's like I paint and a lot of this thing is like, you get started and it's like pretty soon it's like a child, you know, it's like a child. You could raise them when they're young and they don't know how to fight you and this and that, but pretty soon they start to exert their personality and their will on you and then they start to become who they want to become.

You know, you can, you can work.

With them or you can have a fight on your hand every step of the day. How many kids do you have?

I have three.

You got three. Okay, so I'm speaking to the choir probably. You probably learned that lesson early on as a dad.

Yeah, definitely. So. And it's neat because, I mean, one of the things about entrepreneurship that is so amazing to us hasn't been getting a million dollars, which, you know, had done that plenty of times. It's not about the money, guys. It's, it opens up lifestyle design. And for us, right in the, in the room right behind me here, I've got my, my oldest son, Ethan, who was the one that was, you know, the reason we, we decided to go to a one income family. He's 22. He's the lead graphic designer in sales here really. I've got my 18 year old daughter who runs our TikTok and Instagram and influencer accounts. My wife is marketing manager here. My dad takes care of the machines that we use to manufacture the love handle products. And so, you know, every day I go to work, I get to be around my family. I get to give them opportunities to try new things and try out roles that they never would. And we travel to trade shows all over the world and get to experience that. And so it's, it's just amazing to be able to build that by using entrepreneurship as the, as the mechanism to create an amazing lifestyle.

Absolutely exciting in terms of the unlimited and unpredictable opportunities that come to you when you're willing to make that plunge. And you still have to follow, you know, you still have to make it work, but you're working towards something that when it does work, basically the lid can come off of your life in terms of potential. So we'll wrap up this segment of this. What's the main thing you learned from, and you had learned at this point about finding and inventing your own product that you would pass on to other people that are at that first stage?

I would, my advice would be that most products cannot support an entire business on their own. So you need to be very selective. You only have, there's only so Many minutes on the clock. So do be very selective about the products that you go all in on. But the training ground is also important. Don't be scared to try a new product or a new business idea, but don't assume that the very first one is going to be the one, because it probably won't. So don't spend all your resources on that. So just continue to keep trying new things. But when you find something fantastic, then you do need to go all in on it.

Yeah, unbelievable insight. And at stages of your life, you'll go all in on different things, you know, and there's a time to go all in, but you can go all in knowing this is a first step. But this is not going to be. Ultimately, it's interesting to hear Jeff Bezos say, you know, Amazon's not going to be here forever. You know, he said, you know, I'm not so naive as to think Amazon's going to be here forever. It's like, well, you are thinking ahead, aren't you, Jeff? And so it's good to have that in your mind, you know, that, you know, we are on a spinning planet and you can go all in on something, you have to go all in at some point to make something work. But you don't have to go all in for the rest of your life. You know, you can keep your eyes open for the next opportunities. Like you said, you get, you made in the the process of getting that product put together. You had a kit that you could sell to other people and you wouldn't have done that if you hadn't had your antenna up for alternate income streams. So that's really powerful and valid advice and exactly why I enjoy talking to people like yourself who've got the mileage of accomplishing things behind them, because you not only know the major points, you know the application of them. So thanks so much, Mike, and that was really, really good stuff.

Awesome. Thanks, Larry.

That wraps up this episode. Consider leaving a rating and review if you like what you heard. In addition, I have a free video for you and it contains my best insights from 20 years of running my business and also coaching million dollar earners. You'll find it@whitelownwinning.com webinar. Thanks for listening and do it big.