The $65M Barefoot Invention: How A Crazy Shoe Idea Hit $65M | NBA Players Are Hooked

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. Hello, everybody. We're talking with Stephen Sashin. Hello, Stephen from Denver.

Hello, Larry. Technically, in between Boulder and Denver, people around here get very uptight about that.

Now, is that. I know you were going to correct me, but is that Brooke? I didn't know exactly the name. Is that one that starts with a B? One of those B towns.

Broomfield.

Yeah, Broomfield. That's what it is. I've got. I actually have an office there, but I forget it.

Oh, well, no wonder I haven't seen you around town.

Yeah. So anyway, congratulations on your continuing success and thanks for getting back on because we had so much fun. It was, I think the summer of 2022 when you were on and you were blowing and going then, but you are blowing and exploding now, it seems like. And so I just wanted to kind of check back in with you and hear about the fun, hear about the excitement.

E. Gadd who to begin, I'll do my favorite one. So. And I'm going to do the. Let's see, I'll give you the longer version of the story. So about seven years ago, I got an email from a WNBA player and she said, I've been wearing your shoes and your sandals off the court, and my feet and ankles have become indestructible. You should make a basketball shoe. Well, it just so happened that our chief product officer used to work for Converse, and we had recently taken one of our hiking boots, which someone said, hey, that's practically a basketball shoe, and stripped down and made it more like a basketball shoe. So we sent this shoe to her. It's a woman named Temi Feg Benley. And she said, it doesn't quite fit me, so I can't play in it. But I can tell you this, I couldn't sprain my ankle in these if you paid me to.

Really.

So I kept pushing people to actually make a basketball shoe, and no one seemed to pay attention to me. And then we started getting approached by all these trainers for from NBA teams saying, we have all these guys who are wearing your shoes off the court. If you had a basketball shoe, this could be really good. And it just so happens our VP of product development has been a ballplayer for his whole life. So we fast tracked that program. And at the end of last season, Justin Holiday, when he was with the Nuggets played in a basketball shoe. We developed Tammy Feg Bentley, who's in the with the Indiana Fever. She's the center, she plays in that shoe. Isaiah Stewart with the Detroit Pistons just started in that shoe. We have more and more basketball players coming to start play in an actual basketball shoe. But even more we have all these players who are wearing our stuff off the court. So Jimmy Butler from the Miami Heat wears this one shoe we have called the Dylan off the court. Just walking around when he's in the gym, training, when he's doing a shoot around and warming up everything other than playing because he's sponsored by a bajillion dollar company. So that's been super exciting and we haven't even really started to promote that as much as we can and partly because we're getting all these additional athletes who are coming to start figuring out a way to work with us. So it's everyone's running around their hair on fire. It's been a blast.

Well, it's really great to be a part of something where you come up with an idea and it actually works.

Well more than it's even more than having something work. I've said to people when I'm like talking at Internet marketing conferences, I go, if you have something that does the following two things your golden and most people in companies have at best half of one of them. And the two things are change people's lives and tell the truth. And happily everything that we're doing that's changing people's lives is from telling the truth about how your feet are supposed to work and how regular footwear seems to get in the way of that. And what we've designed supports that.

Yeah. And the thing is that for people who don't know, didn't, don't remember from the earlier story, the thing is this is organic. I mean this is came from you solving and a problem for yourself which is put you, you know, you don't need anyone to tell you about, be authentic or things like this when it comes from your own real world experience in solving a problem you had yourself. And you might just go through that real quick just to bring people up to scale.

Well and to your point, being authentic is really important and if you can't do that, faking it is the next best thing. So the authentic story is simply this. 17 years ago I got back into sprinting after a 30 year break and I was injured pretty much constantly for the next two years. And a friend who's a world champion runner Suggested I try running barefoot to see if I learned anything. Now, I'm not suggesting people run barefoot even though it changed my life. But the gist is when you're running barefoot, good form feels good, bad form hurts. And I could feel that something was hurting that I couldn't feel through like a traditional shoe because of all that cushioning and padding. I couldn't feel that I had a form problem barefoot. I could feel it. And even more, I naturally corrected it because I just tried to find a way that didn't hurt when I was running in bare feet. And when I discovered that my injuries went away, I became faster. So I'm a masters all American sprinter from 62 years old. I still compete as a sprinter. For the last 15 years, I've been like one of the, you know, 20 of the fastest guys in the country in my age group. Anyway, I wanted that barefoot like experience. But I got tired of arguing with people in restaurants about whether it was legal to be in there in bare feet. And my wife got tired of me walking into our white carpeted house with my dirty ass bare feet. And so we started making. Well, I started with a version of a 10,000 year old sandal design. Just something to protect your foot, something to hold that on your foot. That's really all you need for footwear. And just making those for people around town. I made about 50 pairs or so. And a guy who was a barefoot running coach said, I've got that. He had a contractor write a book called Barefoot Running. And if I treated this little sandal making hobby of mine like a business, he put me in the book. So he said, you know, have you have a website I could put you in the book? Well, I've been an Internet marketer since 1992. I built like a thousand websites. So I rush home and I pitch this incredible opportunity to my wife who assures me that I'm completely insane, totally stupid, this is a waste of time, won't make any money, and insisted that I not build the website. And I told her that I wouldn't. And then she went to bed and I did. And here we are 15 years later.

Yeah. And so the story from you weren't on Shark. Had you been on Shark Tank last? By the time we talked the first, yeah. When did you go on Shark Tank?

We. That aired in the end of January 2013 and then again the beginning of June 2013. And then since in reruns every on CNBC.

That's why I'm confused. And so the thing is that you. It's one thing to get something up and get it running, but I mean, then it takes a whole new. It's a whole new game. It's hard to stay on the exciting end of new products and talking to people and hearing their stories and all that. The big guy usually gets pulled off into complex things about filling orders and financing and getting inventory in and shipments and supplies and. And so you've had a crash course in dealing with growth, growth, growth, growth, growth over the last two years. And so how about kind of give us some insights on that because hopefully, Stephen, we're going to get some people listening that are going to have success. They're going to have good ideas and plenty of people out there to prepare you for failure and disappointment, but not a whole lot of people to prepare you for success. And so what can we tell people that. That you've gone through that will help them navigate the same transition and conceptually, anyway?

Well, I think the thing that's helped me the most is I have really bad aims. When I tried to shoot myself, I kept missing because on any given day, you want to do that once or twice. You know, like once a month, sometimes twice a month, I'll call one of my best friends on a Friday afternoon and go, would you like to own a $65 million footwear brand for $9.38? Because I'm selling. So let's be clear, this shit's hard. And it frankly, people don't realize how rapid growth is probably the hardest thing to deal with for a number of reasons, most of which you just laid out. So part of what's allowed us to do this is I have somehow been married to this brilliant, wonderful woman named Lena Phoenix, who is my co founder, and she's a brilliant finance operations person, I'm a product marketing person. So we kind of. We respect each other and stay in our own lanes to the extent that we can. Although for a long time, my job was to think of cool ideas and Lena's job was to tell me that I didn't have the money to do that right? And my next job was to stop whining and being, you know, such a little whiny bitch. So I got pretty good at just going all right, and figured out a different way to do it. The, you know, part of what she's been doing all along was trying to find the capital that we need to sustain the growth that we have. And for people who don't understand what that looks like, because we were growing like 40, 50% year over year, the amount of inventory that we needed kept growing and we got to pay for that way in advance of selling it. So we used to have what we call the February problem, where we paid for product in December or actually paid for it like the beginning of January, and it didn't show up until March. And we had to cover that gap in cash flow during February. Happily, now we're doing well enough that we don't have that problem, but we still don't have the cash that we need to do all of the things, all the taking advantage of all the opportunities that are coming our way. So we're trying to see what we can do about that. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is many people refer to founder syndrome as someone who just wants to be in control of everything. And I, I have the opposite problem, really. I don't want to be in control of things. I want other people doing things. And I probably give away control too quickly and then discover too late that person can't actually do what we need them to do. And Lena and I are also bad at firing people quickly. I mean, I know that sounds horrible and.

Right.

But you got to cut your losses as quickly as you can and we've not been great about that. So there have been times where, let.

Me just say, let me just insert something on that. I hear that regularly fire people quick and it always grates on me a little bit. And I respect the people that have, they have experience, they have reasons, but with me, it's just too easy to quit on people.

Well, then let me clarify that a little bit. I do have a dear friend who is well known for firing people at the drop of a hat, which is tough because he worked at a haberdashery, so hats were falling all the time. But he's a serial CEO and he's like the first moment that he sees something awry year after out the door. Our issue is that we tend to lean in the same direction you do of trying to get people up to speed, trying to teach them what they need to do. The balance is how quickly can you determine whether or not they can learn that and adapt.

Right.

And there's a problem that goes along with that. When you're hiring, especially the more people you hire, especially the more people you hire at higher level positions, they want to come in and go ta da and bring their history with them and show how great they are from what they've done in the past before they learn what you do here, what you're doing in your ecosystem. And so the right combo in someone who will just kind of go with the flow and understand what you're doing before starting to inject their thing and what you're doing as a manager or whatever. I don't think of myself as a manager, but what we do on our end is try to craft benchmarks and KPIs, key performance indicators and other things to measure whether or not they're able to then come along for the ride. And so too quick does not mean six weeks after we hire them. Too quick can mean because, like, I'll use salespeople as an example because of the way the selling seasons work. So this is now end of October. We've already sold everything that we're going to be or sold into retail. Everything they're going to get in January and February to launch in March. We sold that stuff a while ago. We're actually already starting to show people fall of 25 and spring of 26.

Really.

So the point of that is, is that you don't know if a salesperson is good for about a year and a half because that's how long it takes to see if they can actually grow the accounts. So we have been naive. That's been a huge chunk of everything because we knew nothing about the footwear industry. We'd never run a company this big, Lena or myself. And so we. The naivete was things like bringing in a salesperson thinking that we were ready for retail when we were a good five years away from being ready for retail, and we just didn't know. And so there was that mistake. On the flip side, the person who we brought in should have been smart enough to go, I don't think you're ready for retail. So it's a balancing act. No one does it perfectly. And I will say one thing, is that in the early days, when typically when we let somebody go, they would point the finger at me and scream and yell about what an ass I am. And good thing that they're getting fired because. And they went on and on about me. And my wife was suggesting that I needed therapy, and I was saying, no, these are people who recognize that they couldn't actually do the job. And it's much easier to go, it's your fault, than to go, yeah, I failed.

Oh, yeah.

And she didn't really believe me until it happened to her. The first, actually, third. All right. The third time, she's like, oh, okay, okay.

You know, Trump says that I fired people gently. I fired them with big severance. I fired them with big transitions. I fired them abruptly. He went through the whole thing. I fired every way you can fire me. He said the end result is always the same. They hate my guts.

Well, you know, we've had a few that actually I had someone that we let go and he came up to me at an event just not long ago and he said, I just need to thank you because I've had this new job and everything that I'm doing there that's made this successful, I learned from you. So that was sweet.

Yeah. I usually find that's the exception rather.

Than the rule, though. It's true. It's actually interesting when I think about the people, certain people that we let go almost without exception. When I bumped into them socially, we've gotten along fine and they've sort of understood why I did what I did and they've grown from it as well. But then again, there are some that I haven't bumped into socially who I'm sure would cross the street.

We won't divert any more into this, but there is a timing issue that you, when you see it starting to head sour, you can say, and I've done this many, many times to say like, I like you, we get along great. But things, I can see the direction here and we need to cut this off in the past because I want to be a friend of yours long term. And I can see it's not going to, if we stay on this track we're going to, it's going to be an ugly end.

Well, there's another piece to that. What we've learned to do is to get their buy in for what we need to see in order for them to stick around.

Now that's why, that's, that's the wisdom right there.

So we both agree, here's the project for the next whatever. And this is really important because this determines whether or not you're going to fit for where the company is going. And this is the advantage we've had because the company has been growing so much. The idea that they may not be the right person moving forward is not news to them. So. But we agree. It's like here's the task has to get done the following way and if that doesn't work, then this isn't going to happen for us. And one of two things happen or one of three things happen, they snap to and they get it done. They do the best they can and it doesn't work or they just bail.

Yeah. And so I interrupted your, your flow on the Financing and the ordering. Where do you get your. Were these shoes made? I should know that.

But everything's made in Asia right now. Because there's literally not another way to do it at the moment when people say, well, you could if you wanted to, it's like, when did you become a footwear expert? What I can tell you is the people who are experts in this say that to bring footwear manufacturing, especially performance footwear back to the US is a $10 billion, 20 year project. And people say, well, if you really wanted to here, let's do the easy one. I would love to make things domestically, but it's literally not possible in the same way that it's literally not possible to have this conversation on domestically made devices. And I don't know why you're not complaining about your computer. So we are doing everything we can to do the right thing. The factories we work with treat their employees brilliantly. These are well paying middle and upper middle class jobs that if that. I've watched the towns that we have factories in, I started going there 12 years ago. Go from being like farming towns, I mean, not much going on other than a couple of factories to now the kind of place where I would love to live. I mean really, it's great food, great entertainment, great transportation, access to nature. I mean like amazing places. If you can handle the fact that the government knows everything that you're doing, which ironically, once you get over that, it makes life a whole lot simpler in many ways. So it's nothing's perfect anywhere. And people are a little naive, I'm going to be using that word, apparently about what it's actually like somewhere else where they're doing manufacturing, I would. I know I could tell you that if I took anybody who was complaining about what we were doing or where we were doing it to those towns, to those factories, they'd go, oh, I had no idea. This is not what I imagined.

Yeah. And the thing is that who knows, if you continue on your trajectory, there may be a point in the future where you'll be Nike size and you'll have those billions and be able to.

Import, you know, but they're not manufacturing in the US either. I know, I know it. Yeah, but. And they're moving to other countries where this is the part that people, I mean humans love simple stories. And rarely when it comes to running something, especially if something's growing, especially something big, there are very few simple stories. So people say, well, you go to Vietnam, it's like, well, you could, if you had enough Money. The big companies bought out all the factory space ages ago. But also the talent isn't there. The supply chain is still coming from China, typically, and the people aren't being treated as well as they were in China. One of the reasons people moved out of China is not just because of political things, but to go to somewhere less expensive. So I heard a thing on NPR this morning about clothing manufacturing in Bangladesh. Companies move there because it's cheaper and they're exploiting workers there in a way they couldn't exploit in China.

Yeah.

So it's just not a simple story is the best way I can say it.

And the thing is with these are all things you had to learn. Yeah.

Yeah. I've joked with my wife. The number of things that we have learned that given the chance, we would happily remove from our brain is very, very high. Some of it I feel really cool about. I mean, not like, hey, I'm cool. Just like it's interesting and I'm glad I've learned these things and it makes me effective. But it's a lot of things. It's like, I cannot believe I know these things and I can barely remember my mother's maiden name.

Yeah. Now when you you. For those of you who are sick and tired of fooling around and are dead serious about wanting to move up fast, I've got something especially for you. I've combined the best insights from over 40 years in business and making $70 million in income and compressed them into a free webinar. That's right. It's a free resource. If you want to find out exactly what the concepts are that I use in coaching million dollar earners, Register now@widelonwinning.com you'll discover the five part framework used by so many to reach their financial, personal and professional goals. You can find that link in this episode's show Notes. What have you learned about your product line and how big and because I'm sure everybody's got like the basketball people you've got, it's a shame Caitlin Clark got her Nike deal, but she'd probably be wearing these off the court anyway. Okay. All right. I noticed that one of those players you mentioned was on the Fever. So anyway.

Or center.

Yeah. So how do you reign in those? Come up with your product line and keep it fine tuned.

It's a combination of a number of things. We've been very lucky. Or actually it's not true. We very deliberately wanted to be very actively engaged with our customers. So we're very active on social media. We're very active via email. I give out my personal phone number to everyone who buys a pair of our shoes. Interestingly, a fraction of a percent. Take me up on the offer to call me, but three times a week I have conversations that go like this. Hi, this is Stephen. Oh my God. So that's fun. But so part of it is that our customers have been telling us since day one. I mean, we started out with a do it yourself sandal making kit and people would say, that's cool, but I'm not going to make my own. So I racked my brain to figure out a way to do a ready to wear version of that basic sandal, which I have a patent on the lacing system. And let's just say there's a very large Italian company that has infringed on that patent. And all I can say is, daddy needs a new Mercedes.

Yeah.

So anyway, be that as it may, then people said, cool, I love your sandals, but what about when it's winter or when I have to go to work? So we made our first closed toe shoe that was in the end of 2016. And then they said, that's great. It's a casual shoe. I need a performance shoe. So that came out in 2017. They said, that's great, but I need a performance shoe for trails. That came out the end of 2017. So a lot of it has been people saying, I love what you're doing and here's what I need. It's like an improv game. It's a yes. And the other part is that between myself and our former product chief product officer and our current product team, we can kind of see holes in the line or things that we know we should do that people haven't asked for. And we're not 100% on that. I think we're probably, we're like 80% right on those. We've launched a few that have not done as well as we thought, but we've launched many that have done way better than we thought. So that's the second part, is just figuring out what people haven't asked for that we know we need or how to expand the line. So as an example, there's a shoe that we have, I mentioned before, the one that Jimmy Butler plays in the Dillon. So we started out it was a knit shoe. Then we came up with a leather version and there's going to be a canvas version. And I know that sounds silly, like that's just the same shoe, variations on a theme. But there are people for whom a leather is more appropriate in certain situations. People who like the canvas better. I mean, it's. So there is a balancing act. I mean, right now we have almost 60 different styles of casual and performance shoes, boots and sandals. And some people go, oh, it's too many. It's like they're selling. The only thing that would make it too many is if we didn't have the warehouse space for it. But as long as we have the space, we know these things are going to sell. We just have to buy better instead of buying too much and having it sitting around. And it takes a season to learn how to do that.

It helps when you know, big picture type things. And now you're in how many countries? I mean. Oh, gosh.

Well, we have sold into 102 countries. We have our. 0shoes.com handles. Well, do it the other way around. 0shoes EU handles all of the European Union. 0shoes Co.uk handles the United Kingdom. 0shoes.com handles everything else. But then we have distributors in I think nine countries right now. And we have retail outlets in, oh, gosh, I don't even know. Probably about 40 or 50. And that's all growing every season. That grows significantly. The wholesale side of our business is what's growing the fastest.

The wholesale?

Yeah, because it's just. It's obviously individuals buy individual pairs or they'll buy multiple pairs. Half of our orders come from existing customers. Many of our existing customers own more than five or ten pairs of our shoes. But when you pick up a wholesale account, they will buy. There's one wholesale account. They have a thousand different. A thousand stores, or if you want to know the cool lingo, it's one store with a thousand doors anyway, so keep that in the back of your brain when you're at a dinner party and want people to think you're obnoxious. So if they're ordering just three styles in every size and every color for a thousand doors, that's a lot of money. I mean that really just the percentage between direct to consumer and wholesale goes up. So wholesale is where things can scale very quickly, in part because they're also dealing with their customers who are already coming in, who wouldn't necessarily find us online.

Right.

So it's a balancing act of sorts.

Well, the thing is that there are problems created from that too. And how did you figure out, like, okay, we've got to fill this order. I guess it's buying in advance. I mean, your timetables and schedules and we. How much of that. How do you do work the financing and all of the. The deliverable on just one monster order like that. Because an order like that kills those kind of orders that kill companies.

Well, again, two things. One, remember, I have bad aim.

Yeah.

So that's one thing that's kept me going through that. The other thing is that we're not dealing with orders that are so big that they're a giant percentage of our business. So again, last year we did just drive $65 million. And by the way, that's public information, which is why I'm able to say it. And the wholesale side, there was not one order that was big enough that would have really hurt the business just because of the overall size. So the problem, what's happened over the last number of years is. And Covid accelerated and worsened. This is in the. When we started this, we would get an order from a store and they would say, this is about 80% of what we expect to sell. And we expect you to have the other 20% just in case. Now it's gone the other way around. They're ordering 20%, but they don't even tell us it's 20%. They literally don't tell us what percent it is. But we can kind of do the math. So here's what we sold with you last year. You're ordering a fraction of that, even though you're telling us you're putting us in more doors with more styles and more colors.

Yeah.

So we know you're ordering this much and, and requiring us to have the inventory burden. So we said to a number of these accounts, just tell us what you're actually projecting to make sure we can help you. We want to be a good partner.

Right.

We're more than happy to buy it, we're more than happy to store it. Just throw us a bone. And they won't do it.

Really?

Nope.

Yeah. Because whoever's in that position is an employee. Does not want to have things reverse course on decision made above them and have them eat it. Because they said, you know, well, buyer name on a thing like, no.

Buyers are incredibly risk averse. And at the same time, if there are any buyers listening and I say something that you think is obnoxious, I'm definitely not talking about you, I'm talking about everybody else. So the number of times someone has said, well, we love that shoe. We want this color. And we say, well, that's our third best selling color way after number one and two. And they go, well, this is what our clients want. And I go, I don't think so. And then we end up being correct in that situation. And they don't want to fess up that we knew what we were talking about because we have so much data from what we've done online. But they want to be right. Everyone loves to go be right when. And take the credit when they're right and be able to dodge it when they're wrong. And so we try to help, but it's challenging. I mean, there's an old lawyer joke that is true about buyers as well. I'll do it for lawyers. You can interpret or you can do the translation. The joke is, how do you know when a lawyer is lying? The answer when his lips are moving. Right. And so how do you know when a buyer is lying? When their lips are moving and they say, oh, yeah, we want all of these. And I'm not trying to be mean to buyers. I mean, they have a very stressful, tricky job because they are subject to the whims of macroeconomic things and taste and changing stuff as much as everybody else. I would never want that job because I can see how the urge is just go, I'll just take that in black. And just one of those, because that's safe. And so it's. Yeah, it's a very. It's a tricky relationship where, in short, as a brand, we have to do more to help them than what it used to be, where they were doing more to help us.

Yeah. And so how does it work now? In a typical situation, you get a. And there are no typical situation, you know, but how do you navigate that? You just make your best call and throw the dice.

Yeah. Early on, Lena, when she was handling inventory management, was just very frustrated about how we were never right. And I said, no one's ever right. That's why TJ Marshall Ross. What are the other ones? Marshalls, TJ Maxx Ross. All those stores exist because no one ever gets it right. And so sometimes you're getting it wrong where you don't have enough, which is horrible. Sometimes you're getting it wrong where you have too much, which is frankly, not quite. Well, they're both horrible. I mean, people. When you run out of inventory because it sells too fast, people say, this is a good problem to have. I go not being able to take people's money and give them something that would help them. That's more painful than having too much inventory that you close out and just break even on the end of it.

It just seems like in business you can't get away from risk. I Remember asking, oh, God, no, Lee. At a performance ski in Aspen about. Because they're buying trips, they go to Italy and this, that, the other, she said, I remember the first time we were over there and we looked at. I looked at my husband before we got. He said, we're getting ready to commit to a million dollars. They go, like, here we go. And I said, when do you get comfortable with the risk? She said, never.

No, I'll tell you. Well, there's two things. First of all, you're absolutely right. It's all about risk management. I used to. Every business book is basically asking someone after they've been seemingly successful how they got there, and they will tell you how they did it. It's all about them. If you ask somebody how they went from making a bunch of money to being bankrupt, they will usually blame everything else. But if you ask someone a question that I started asking people where I knew that their personal or business finances went way up, then way down, then way up and way down, said, if you were teaching a college course on how to go from $100,000 a day to zero, what would you teach? And they all said the same kind of things, like, I was over leveraged. I didn't pay attention to my competition. I had money that was too expensive. I didn't know where to find money. I mean, they're all very usable lessons, but you would never hear those. So mitigating risk is the number one thing. When people call me with some new marketing initiative that they say is going to make me a bajillion dollars, I go, I just want to know how quickly and cheaply I can find out. If you have your head up your butt. Yeah, because maybe you're batting a thousand now, but I might be the first one where I hit it over the fence in a bad way. So I just need to know how much risk I. Because that's all I can control. And when it comes to spending my money, the other part about risk and when you can get comfortable with it, is Laina and I, we got a small business loan and we had to personally guarantee that one was, I think, $2.3 million. At a certain point, we had personally guaranteed $5 million in debt. Once we got past a million, my wife and I, we own nothing. So we're going. We're personally guaranteeing it, but we could never pay it off. So once, you know, she was pretty anxious until we got over a million that we had personally guaranteed. Yes, we're going to be back up no matter what. So Here we go. Who cares? So that's how you get over it.

Well, more than anybody that I've talked to, you have been aware and you made very clear that there's no such thing as systems that work every time or. I know how to do this because every day, every situation, you do, by the way, more than anybody else. You stated that case, which is the reality. Life is complex, business is complex. I mean, you can't even raise. You don't even know what your kids are going to do.

I'm very well aware that at any given moment an innumerable collection of things could happen that could put us out of business by tomorrow. The odds are not high, but rare events have ultra large impact.

Right. And so, yeah, they just had a thousand year floods and all through Spain, right? Yeah, yeah.

So rare things happen and they have disproportionate impact. So I'm very well aware of that. And we have, you know, Bernard Burke was asked how he made so much money and his answer was, I sold too soon. And the point is, if you can de risk your position, and de risk is a phrase I never used until I started doing this stuff. But de risking your position is just like putting some money away so that if all things go bad, you're okay, you're going to do it, you'll be fine, you might be okay, you might be great. However much you want to de risk. The more you de risk, the lower your potential upside is. But you have lived a much. Yeah. Less stressful life by doing it. Right. So.

Yeah. And so there comes a time where, you know, early on you just have to put up with the stress to start it.

Wait, hold on. Are you going to suggest that that ever stops? Are you crazy?

But you. I know what I was going to say is the longer you put up with that, the more the desire grows to lessen that threshold.

No, I'll tell you something really personal. So I'm 62, a little just shy of two years ago, I got diagnosed with cancer in my retina. Who knew what suffice it to say, to make a very long story very short, went from diagnosis to being cured or being rid of cancer very quickly. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me because I realized that I've had a lifelong habit of postponing enjoyment. So I'm 62 years old, I had cancer. I realized that I've been putting off enjoyment for a long time. And this is a very stressful thing that we're getting into and more so because it's going way past my skill set and Lena's skill set. We're smart people, we can learn things, but not fast enough for what we're doing. Put all that together and yeah, our desire to find a way to reduce the stress and DE risk is much, much higher than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, or if I was 40, I'd want to ride this. To be a $5 billion company at 62 with all those other things, I'm looking to find the right people who can do this. And as long as we end up okay, that's great. Can we get a little bit at the second bite of the apple they refer to? Maybe so. But we are mostly rearranging our business and our personal lives so the business doesn't need us so that we can enjoy the remainder of our life. My mom actually just died from complications from Alzheimer's. I don't know if I'm going to get that. So I've got a limited window and I'm not looking to be working 70 hour weeks until I die.

Yeah, well, let me just tell you and your wife take this with a grain of salt, but this is smart. This is incredibly smart. And you need to take that instinct and run with it because what it allows you to do as the founder, you now have more and will continue every day you get more and more insight, knowledge, experience about running that particular business at this particular time in history. And nobody is ever going to know what you know because by the time they would catch up, it's too late. And so the longer you can keep yourself fresh and engaged and stay in control of your time and your schedule and stay inspired, the more you'll stay and have your impact and not let the minute to minute, what you look for is offloading the minute to minute type things where you have time to breathe. That's what happens. You gotta breathe.

No, you're right. And I have twice made the joke of shooting myself in the head. But the reality is that what gets me out of bed in the morning is two things. The thing that would want to keep me in bed is how difficult this can be on a daily basis. What gets me out of the bed is hearing every day from people who say, what you've done has changed my life. And I mean, I've literally had people walk up to me in airports crying to say thank you, which is amazing. And also there are really exciting things that happen. The basketball project is one of them. But we have other things just as interesting as that are coming down the pike. And so those are very exciting. And my role, I'm the most. I hate saying this, it sounds really self aggrandizing, but it is factual in the whole sort of barefoot shoe, minimalist shoe, natural moving thing. I'm the most recognizable face in the world because I've just put out more content for more time. And so there's an advantage to that because when people approach the company and they talk to me, they have a certain kind of. I don't even like using this word, respect or something where it's like it's a big deal, right, that they're talking with me. I find that very silly. I treat everyone like they're friends of mine. So when they're clearly doing a little bit of this, it strikes me as kind of comical. But there's a value in it. People and what I can, then I'm good at engaging people and getting them on board with what we're doing. So that's the value that I bring. Somebody said to me a while ago, a company, they were thinking about buying us out and they said, what would you do if we wrote you a big check? I said, well, it depends if you want me to stick around and do what I like and what I'm really good at. And I can do it kind of part time. Happy to help. But if you don't think you need me, it's going to be your company. No harm, no foul. Just come visit me on the island. I bought with your money.

Yeah.

And they said, God, that's a smart answer. I said, what's a stupid answer, right? They said, oh, it's my baby, I've got a vision. And I go, oh, oh, let's be clear, it's my baby and I have a vision. But I've got a side hustle selling vision impaired babies. So this will be your company. I know how it works. You're not going to want me around anyway because founders don't play well with others.

So the thing is that they'll buy it, they'll run the thing into the ground. Probably like most of the time they do, but maybe not. But it will not, I'll tell you this, it will not have the success I predict that would have if you're around for another five or six, five or 10 years.

Well, again, it depends on what I'm doing. I know what I'm good at, I know what my role is and what I should be doing and I know where I'm not. So look, I was at an event, there was a trade show in Munich. And our lawyers put on a dinner, which was very upsetting because it was one of the greatest meals I've ever had. And I would have much rather had five grand taken off my legal bill. But either way, everyone else in the room was the CEO of a multi billion dollar outdoor brand. And at one point, the lawyers were having people say a few words. And I'm thinking, well, they're not going to talk to me because, I mean, I'm this tiny little. I think at that point we were like a $12 million company. And so I was the last one. They said, and here's the only founder in the room. And I don't know what, I said something, but afterwards, every one of those guys came up to me and said, we're so proud of you because we can't do what you have done.

Yeah.

And I said, well, here's the flip side. I don't even know what you do, but I know I need one of you in about five years.

Yeah, right. And so the future out there is unlimited, but you have to take it one step at a time. And so what does that mean for you?

Well, that means something that my brain doesn't understand. I don't do prioritization. My skill set is that I can think of a lot of ideas and my natural inclination is to try to go after all of them simultaneously because they didn't have Ritalin when I was a kid. And so the next step is really bringing on, bringing on the people who can do the prioritization, but simultaneously bringing on additional capital so that we can do more than they would do with the limited resources that we currently have. So, for example, our CFO said to me the other day about a project we don't have, if we're going to do that, we have to reapportion how we're slicing the pie. And I said, no, we need to get a bigger pie.

Right.

And so that's the way I think. I mean, I've always had that. It's like for whatever reason, I know that if there's something I'm trying to make happen and I don't have the money to do it, if I keep working, the money's going to show up somehow. And that's just happened. I don't know why or how. And it's not like magic, it's like busting my butt. I'm talking to everyone I can think of, etc. But suffice it to say, it's that combination of someone who knows how to prioritize given what we're trying to do, and see where the biggest bang for the buck is, which may be an immediate hit or, or it might be something that's not going to pan out for a year and a half, two years, but that's going to be, make a bigger difference at the end of that two year mark and again, bring in enough human and financial capital to be able to, to, like I mentioned, take advantage of some of the opportunities that are showing up. I got a call from about, from a very, very big deal pop band and they're doing a music video and they wanted us to be part of it, but they also wanted us to put up a bunch of money. And I said we don't have the cash. I mean, yes, your videos get 50 million views, one of them got 500 million views, but I have no way of knowing if that's going to turn into sales for us. And we literally just don't have the money that you need as fast as you need it to even give it a whirl. If we had more cash, the amount of money they're asking for wouldn't have been a big deal. I mean, I could do the math and even if things were just okay, we would have broken even. But we don't have the cash, so we have to pass on that opportunity.

Yeah, but they'll come again.

Something else. Yeah.

Fans will be making videos for a long time.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't worry about that. Everybody has a story about the thing that they missed out on, the opportunity that. Look, one of my biggest ones, to your point about what Lena and I have learned is we know this industry really well now, which gives us insider knowledge that we could use if we wanted to invest both in or against other companies. Second biggest business mistake of my life was when one of our kind of competitors had an IPO and I said to all my friends, short the out of this stock and every time they have two updates in a row, short it again. And had I followed my own advice, I could have turned 10 grand into 10 million.

Wow.

Yeah, because I just. Because I knew the company, I knew the problems they were having that no.

One else knew Right now would that be like with you and your wife from a business thing? Let's, let's just focus on the last couple of years.

Okay.

If possible. On a business standpoint, what do you think are the biggest things that you've learned? That you're grateful that you know now that anything stick out from a business standpoint, and how you run your business, how you think about things. I.

Well, this is going to sound stupid because it's just business 101, but cash flow is king. So my natural inclination is, is to just worry about money coming in, not the ratio of money coming into, money going out and what that allows you to do. So now I pay more attention to that than I have in the past. That's one big thing. The other biggest thing, it's not that I've learned it, but I've. And I won't even say that I've mastered it, but I deploy it more often than I ever imagined. And that is people ask me for my opinion about things all the time. I say, I don't give a shit what my opinion is. Let's test it and find out. Let's do a real test and see what the world says, what we're saying here. We could be in an echo chamber. We have no idea. And so it's something that I've actually tried to instill in every team that we have, and it's a hard one because people, frankly, are afraid of testing something in advance and finding out that they're wrong, which is ironic because it's less expensive to do that than put it out in the world and find out you were wrong. But what happens for many people when they put it out in the world and they find out they're wrong is they'll rewrite history and go, ah, see, I knew that. It's like, no, you didn't. So we're also having people write down their predictions about certain things to see. Not to. Because we want to punish them if they're wrong, but just so we can help them learn what to do to minimize the risk of that moving forward.

Well, it's very helpful to get. Make them specific. Just like commit, what do you think it's going to be? And then let's test it.

And the testing, I mean, we were actually in a meeting earlier today with an advertising person who said, well, we can do a focus group on. I don't want a focus group. And I'm going to test it in the real world. I'm going to run. So this is an ad that had like five different colors. We had arguments about the colors. I don't give a shit what the colors are. Let's just do a thousand variations, put them all in Facebook and see which one people click on. Then we know. Why are we trying to guess what people are going to do? Let's put someone in an EEG helmet And watch their brain waves. Look at their galvanic skin response, which measures stress. Check their heart rate and do eye tracking to see if they're actually paying attention to this shit. Yeah, it's like, why are we trying to guess when there are tools that let us figure it out? Look, Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Workweek, the way he came up with that title is he ran a bunch of AdWords ads with different titles as the headlines and he looked to see which one got the most clicks. That's how he decided on the title.

Yeah.

I have another friend, a guy named Marlon Sanders. He's a very an OG copywriter and he used to send emails to his list saying, I'm working on, I'm looking to do one of 10 different ebooks. Which one do you think I should write? He had already written the ebook. It was just one ebook. He was just testing 10 different titles.

Yeah.

So find out what real people. When people ask me for advice because they're starting a business, I go find the cheapest and fastest way to see if people that you've never met will give you their money. In the old days, in direct response days, when the way people would pay you have a full page ad in a magazine and the way people paid is they send in a coupon with a check.

Right.

And so people would run a full page ad for a product that didn't exist yet, trying to see how much money the ad would pull. And if it didn't work as well, they'd either try the ad differently or and then make the product if the ad eventually pulled enough cash or they just scrap the whole thing and it only cost them a couple grand instead of like committing to a whole development project. So you can do the same thing now on the Internet, even cheaper.

When you get with your teams, I'm sure you have to train them on how to do the testing. It's not something since they're reluctant to do it, they're not thinking in terms of testing. So how do you get them going on the concept of testing and give them ideas to where like, okay, we've got it now, we're off to the races.

It's a really good question right now. The answer is that I'm still the one who has to make sure that the test is designed correctly. It's a very hard one. And this is something that actually I've done in other contexts. I've done this with studies that people are doing about our shoes or about biomechanics or kinesiology. Or human performance. I've done this with studies that people were developing. I was a cognitive psych major when I was at Duke University, and I was doing a bunch of primary research, so I learned how to. Yeah, yeah, I was in green.

I was in green. I raised my family and did my first stage, my business in Greensboro.

Right down the road. Down the street.

Yeah.

A fine place. Well, so for whatever reason, I'm good at thinking of edge cases. So most people, what they do, they come up with an idea and they look for ways to prove that their idea is true. And when I'm like, looking to test something, the question is, what can I check to prove if I'm wrong? I just want to see if I'm wrong. And so what do you decide to do? That so weird. There's a upside down way of answering that question. Like, if I'm looking to hire a copywriter, I'll say to them, Okay, I want five headlines for an AdWords ad. I'm going to give you the first one. I need you to give me the other four. And the first one I'll give them is the greatest shoe I've ever worn. Now, if they don't come back with out of the next four, with at least one of them being something like, my wife says, don't wear these shoes or she'll divorce me. Something that is, like, completely counterintuitive. The exact opposite of what people are thinking. I'm just good at thinking of those weird things that people could do that you wouldn't expect, in part because I'm really good at figuring out loopholes and taking advantage of them. A computer that I'm using for this, I won as part of a massive multiplayer online trivia game when not only was I pretty good at winning in general, but then I figured out there were a couple rules that I could use to exploit them.

And.

And when I did that, I made 10 grand in a weekend. And so then people figured out ways to exploit my exploits and fell apart. But I made 10 grand in a weekend, bought this computer, bought my wife an iPad, bought a bunch of stuff. So I'm good at thinking of these sort of alternate histories. And that's a very unusual skill set, even among professional researchers. Just as a quick aside, I met a guy who, he used to run what he called the consciousness lab, or he did a bunch of research on meditation at the National Institutes of Mental Health. And when I first met him, that was a world I had been involved in. I said, just as a test, I said, most of the meditation studies are horrible. And without missing a beat, he goes, oh, yeah, the controls are bad. And a lot of the methodology is just trying to prove that they were right instead of looking to see if they're right. And I went, oh, my God, I can be your friend.

So.

And he used to bring me into a class that he taught, a graduate class, where all of his students had designed a testing methodology for something they were curious about and actually did the test. And I would come in and pick apart their methodology and what was really fun, because they were students and they were young, they were excited to learn. Oh, I didn't even think of that.

Right.

If it was their job, they'd be defensive and annoyed and. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you think of a test. What's the best place? Where do you get your feedback? Where do you stick it out there in the public to where you get feedback. Does it take.

Depends on what we're testing.

Social media.

It depends on what we're testing. If we're testing an ad, you do it on the platform that you're running the ad. And. But the question becomes, what are you looking for? What are your goals? Some people, all they care about is, does it generate more revenue, even if they lose money in the process? Some people, all they want to see is clicks because they have a boss who said, I need to see more clicks. And they go, okay, well, here's more clicks. Some people, you're looking at revenue per visitor, or you're looking at the average order value, or you're like. I mean, there's a lot of things that you want to look at. So you need to start at the end about, what do I need to see, right? And then what platform am I doing this on? And what's the. What kind of content am I putting on that platform? Is it an ad? Is it a social post? Is it a. Whatever it could be? And then you just gotta think about all the variables that might make a difference and within the platform, how to deploy those. So a company that I know, they. They had a tree stop and they put it on a Roomba and just to have it spin around in a circle. And they put their product. They had like, 20 different products. They put a different product on the top of the tree trunk or tree stump, and they had a green screen so they could put in whatever background they wanted. And they tested like 5,000 variations of which product and what background. And out of all those, they found one that just crushed it in terms of sales. And they spent like $5 million on that ad over the course of a year. So. But they knew they started with, all right, we need to be selling more of this product. So all we care about is selling more, and we're not doing it at a discount. So it's like, so the ad has to perform and be enticing enough to get people to the website. And we're going to leave the website alone so that there's no variables there. Or if you can drive it to a landing page, you can change the landing page. So you need to just know what all the variables are and test them. Basically, I'm going to say one at a time, but I just mean one variable. So this is a stupid example. Like if you're testing the color of a button, you can test 50 different colors. That's one test. So you're testing 50 variables, but one thing, which is the button color. So you don't want to test the. I mean, now you can do massive multivariate split testing where you're testing like 50 different things at one time and there's a thousand variations of each of those 50 things. There's whatever that is, something factorial. There's millions and millions of combinations, but because there's so many combinations, you know that it's going to be stupid at first and then hopefully eventually start weeding out the stupid ones and then getting smart, and then getting smart enough to fill the hole that you just dug, being stupid, and then pile up enough on top of that to pay for that hole and then make the profit you need. I'll give you this one. Everyone is really gung ho about AI for advertising performance Max on Google, Advantage plus and Facebook, and they say, well, that's going to be better than what you're doing because it's their AI. Well, no. So first things first. Again, in any sort of AI or machine learning AI, ML AI, there's a learning phase and the question is, what's it learning on? So if it's learning on sales, actual transactions, how many transactions does it need in what period of time to learn something? And then you've dug a hole of finance and time, and the question is it going to again, fill the hole and then pile on top of that hole and then give me what I need? It may optimize your ad, but its optimization might not be good enough. It might not give you the return on the ad spend that you need. So it's going to do the best it can do, but that might not be good enough. And people forget that part. They Think, oh, AI is going to be smarter than me and it'll give me everything I need? No, it's going to do exactly what it's designed to do, which may not fit your goals. And FYI, when we're running ads on any of the meta platforms, we've been doing this so long that we know if we spend $50 on an ad and it doesn't make a sale, it's out. Yeah, our learning phase is $50 worth of spend because we know it'll never catch up. Now, I'll give away this one. If we do have an ad that's crushing it, where it's making 50 sales a day, for example, then we can give that to the AI because the learning phase is one day, and then we'll see. Can it outperform what we're doing or not?

No.

So cool. Anyway, play with that one.

Talk about. I want to circle back to this. It seems like I'm plowing the same ground, but I really wanted to hear you elaborate a little bit more on what you tossed off as an obvious thing. The cash flow.

Cash flow.

And talk about how that clicked for you and how that you're using that now, how that affects the way you think.

Well, it clicked for me because I was beaten over the head with it by people saying, yeah, we don't have the money to do that right now because we just had to pay all these bills that we had to pay a year in advance for something. And so I just got told. And then simultaneously, if we had a product launch sale or a holiday sale, that crushed it. I knew that's when I was going to ask for money afterwards. So basically, I know there are certain times in my personal life, certain times where I can ask my wife a certain question, certain times where it's not a good time. So it's just the same thing. I've just learned to watch what's going on in the balance sheet to know when it's a good time to ask for more money and when it's the time to shut up about my 50th idea that day.

Yeah. All right. Now, personally, let me circle back to something you said about when your mother passed and you had a light bulb experience there about, let's think a little bit different about life. What kind of changes as that? Or have you implemented those yet? Well, down the road or.

I'm practicing, I'm getting better. Okay, so there are a couple of. I'll give you.

Let me interrupt you for a minute. When I went through those Stages in my life I found when I was full bore and then it came in there like, you stay like this, you're going to blow up or you're going to have a heart attack or something like that. You've got to make changes. I would find that it would take me 18 months to shift gears, but I would shift gears.

No, that's probably not too far off for probably anyone unless they're just going off the deep end and crazy shit. But. So we took a private equity investment back in December of 2020 and in De Risking Lane and I took a little bit of money off the table and I called her a couple weeks after we had done that. I said, I think the money is going to my head. She says, why do you say that? I said, well, I'm in the grocery store and I just bought apples that are $3 a pound. So it's the most I'd ever spend per pound on an apple. Food is actually the biggest place where I've noticed the change. So we take our dog to doggy daycare twice a week because he has to burn off some steam and hang out with other dogs. There's a grocery store across the street that makes very good sushi. There's a sushi place across the street that makes better sushi. It's 50% more expensive. It's better. I just go get it. I don't look at what it costs. I know that's not true when there's stuff that's 25% off. I'll check and see if I think it went bad. I'm still looking for a deal. I mean, when I, my wife needed a new car, I negotiated the crap out of that because I love doing that. But for things like food, I just don't, I don't pay attention to the right side of the menu. But I also don't have, have exorbitant taste. So I'm not. I don't buy super expensive stuff. We don't drink wine, I don't eat steak. So it's all within reason. The biggest thing that I've done is when my wife and I are taking any sort of vacation, even if it's like a three day weekend, I let her book the hotel or the Airbnb and I don't ask what it cost. Yeah, that's the biggest one and the only other one I did. I've been, I've always, I've been an athlete my whole life, but I've gotten much more serious about lifting for sprinting and for Vanity, frankly, in the last year. And I said, I think I need to upgrade my gym. And Lena said, well, here's how much money I spent on clothing this year, so you need to catch up. So I've said for years, anyone who says money can't buy happiness has never driven my cars. I don't buy expensive cars, but I buy cars that every time I look at them, I go, God, that's beautiful. And every time I drive it, I go, I love driving this car. And that's the way I'm kind of doing it. It's like I'm trying to see how much I think I'm really going to enjoy this based on some kind of experience. And if it's. And if it's really going to contribute to my happiness on a daily basis, yeah, I'll do it. And I'm not going to think about the money up to a point. Yeah, there's a certain point where I'll go, I'll say to Laina, actually, we bought some art for our house. I've never done that before, but we did that together. I found a piece that I loved and she's not crazy about it. I go, it'll go in my office. And she said, oh, well, then you didn't need my permission. I go, sure I did. It was $700. I wouldn't have spent $700 without telling you and getting you to be okay with it. But, you know, this is a piece of art that I love. And so that's the. I'm basically starting to use. I'm doing two things, starting to use that as my kind of guide post of, is this something that I'm really going to love? Love. And it's not Maria Kondo. I'm not throwing. I don't throw away stuff that doesn't spark joy because I don't really keep a lot of stuff. I don't collect things. But the other thing I'm doing is I'm thinking about the things that I won't be able to do in five or 10 years, and I'm trying to prioritize them. I'm trying to look at anything where, for whatever reason, I might not be able to do it when I'm 72, 75, 80, whatever, and see if I can move that forward and find a way to do it.

Let's talk about that for a minute with you're a lifelong gymnast and track athlete, off and on, and talk about the advantages of that from your health as opposed to being in golf. Or you could do you know you haven't started your pickleball phase yet, but.

Oh, no, no. So I've had two claims to fame in my life. The first is I'd never worn crocs. The second is I never played pickleball and I had to play pickleball a couple weeks ago.

Oh, you did it.

And so a jumbo ping pong mini tennis. It's interesting, it's easy to. I can see the appeal. It's easy to get pretty competent. And the intermittent reinforcement quotient is high. It's like, oh, if I'd only done that little thing. But the people who are serious, they are way too serious about it. I have no interest in that. So it was entertaining. But I can't give you an answer because I've never done those other things. This is all I've ever been interested in. I will say that.

So why should someone stand? You know, you see this on Instagram or YouTube, the 70 year old racers. Now some of them are out there, you know, they're all stiff and everything. But then you'll see some that are like striding out like they're 20 years old. And so what is the effect? What do you find?

No, no, no, you got it upside down.

Okay.

So when I was at the World Masters Track and Field championships, this was the one 15 years ago, I hung out with all the 80 plus people and I asked them all the same question. I said, nature or nurture? And every one of them had the same answer. They said, it's genetics that I'm here at all, it's training that I'm beating that guy today. And so a lot of it I think is just luck of the draw. And I. One of my things that I enjoy, I have a video on my 61st birthday. I didn't get to do it on my 62nd, I did a standing backflip on the ground. And I've shown that to my multi time Olympic friends who are in their 30s and 40s. And they all just went, screw you man. I said, no, now you got a goal, baby, come on, catch up. So I enjoy it. I like that I'm doing well, I was gonna say, I like that I'm doing these things because I enjoy doing them first and foremost, right? But at the same time, I'm at an age now that I just transitioned into recently, where the 30 year olds refer to me as an inspiration, to which I flip them the bird, I go, I can be an inspiration when I'm over 70, not when I'm in my 60s, I'm still trying to beat you, so I know I won't. I'll Never beat a 35 year old.

Yeah, but the, the advantage of. We'll talk about. You were gone away from fitness, from running for 30 years and you came back.

Well, no. What. So yeah, what happened was so sprinter and gymnast and then only gymnast. And then I blew out my knee tumbling when I was 32 and I spent the next 13 years looking for something that I enjoyed doing. Yeah, I tried a lot of things. I was doing circus arts like Chinese pole and trapeze things, which was fun. But I'm never going to be in the circus and that stuff's hard and very painful. I was a competitive jump roper. That was pretty fun. I don't know why I stopped doing that one, but there's a handful of things. In fact, I was still jumping rope when someone told me that there was a whole masters track and field circuit. And I just went, what? And that just seemed like the thing to do. So it's just kind of. I kept trying to find something and then here's where I landed so far.

Yeah, because you already that with something that you had an affinity for earlier in your life.

And so sprinters are born, not made.

Is that right?

So, absolutely. There's a guy. Names fall out of my head now. Ralph Mann. He was a silver medalist in the 400 meter hurdles in Munich, if I'm remembering correctly. Biomechanical engineer. And he has a great book on sprinting. He says there's eight things that make a sprinter. Seven of them are genetic and the eighth is how well you maximize your genetics. And it's totally true. I mean, if you want to find a good sprinter, you just find the kid who's the fastest in his fifth grade class.

Yeah, pretty interesting. I just had another thought roll through my head from the pickleball thing. Pickleball is real big in these Lifetime gyms, like around the country. And so in Palm Beach, I was in there and I noticed up on the TV, there are your shoes.

We are a sponsor of Lifetime. So yeah, here's the thing with pickleball. I just realized this. I'm an individual sport athlete. I don't like it when my winning or losing is dependent on other people. I mean, I'm okay if I have a direct competitor, but if there's other people on my team. And here's the fun thing about track and field. As a master's athlete, it's really stupid. I mean, we're working really Hard for something that's very difficult with no real reward. Why are we this competitive? But we're all old enough to know that we're all this competitive doing all these stupid things for no really good reason. So everyone I've ever met on the track, I completely adore. It's kind of like we have a secret hand. She like, you're a moron, too. Join the club. Let's have fun. And at the beginning of races, I mean, I'm 5, 5, 143 pounds, okay? Other people show up and they are way bigger, weigh everything more than I am, and it's not uncommon. There'll be some big guy who looks at me, he's like, hey, have a good race, man. And I said, whoa, whoa, slow down, get to the end, stay healthy, have fun. There's no prize money, there's no rewards. No one's, you're not going to get laid because of this. And by the way, I totally want to kick your ass. So we're old enough that we can enjoy just the. The fun and the silliness of this whole thing.

Yeah, they say that it's always great to have an exit plan, and it's hard for entrepreneurs to think about in terms of exit plans, especially if you're enjoying what you're doing and you're consumed by it.

Yeah, but I call those people idiots. Seriously, if you don't have an exit plan from the day you start. Yeah, it's going to be problematic. Now, that doesn't mean you can execute. Look, to be candid, we tried selling this company in February of 2020, and if you remember correctly, someone got the flu or something around then and everything got a little wacky. And so, you know, I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm not good at. I. We knew what our financial goals were as well, and so we were very clear about what our plan was. But as I say about any sort of business acquisition, beauty is or valuation is in the eye of the beholder of the checkbook. I can wanna sell as much as I want, but if there's not somebody on the other end with a checkbook, it doesn't matter what I want. And people have been moving the goalposts on us every year for like a dozen years when we were at a million. Call us when you're at 5. When we're at 5. Call us when you're at 10. When we're at 10. Call us when you're at 20. When we're at 20. When we're mean every year it kept moving and still has. So we're not constantly for sale. People say, hey, I'm looking to buy business like yours. Are you for sale? I go, no, unless the price is right. And they go, oh, well, then what's the right price? I go, well, first of all, do you really want to do business with someone stupid enough to answer that question? I would never give you the first number. Secondly, I'm going to give you the same answer the Supreme Court gave in the 1980s when they were asked to define porn. I'll know it when I see it. So if you want to make me an offer, I'll give you all the info you need. You can make me an offer. Otherwise, we're running this company on parallel paths that at some point somebody might make us an offer, and at some point nobody will make us an offer because we don't have control over that. So we're going to keep going. But we want to be ready in case someone does show up. We want to be able to show them this is a valuable and viable and rare opportunity that you're going to want to take advantage of.

Absolutely. And what did you learn? There was a. Try to remember nine years. I mean, you've had big success before, and you had a period of time before you started this that you were. You were out.

It seemed like, yeah, we were retired. Yeah.

What was that like?

Awesome. How awesome?

How old were you when you retired?

Well, from 2000 to 2009, so 38 to 48. And we had done some very clever real estate investing with a partner by 2006. When my last friend said, hey, I'm getting into real estate, we called our partner and went, start selling everything. Now, by the way, I don't know why this is still the motion we use for a phone to be. Anyway, I didn't do this one at least. So, yeah, it was great. I mean, for both Lena and me, we just pursued things that we found interesting. And the bar was raised very high for people would call. It's like, well, if you spend an extra two hours a day doing this, you can make an extra ten grand a month. I went, I don't need ten grand a month. And no, we weren't living on a lot of money. It was just enough that we didn't have to work.

Yeah.

And we lived again pretty modestly. So. But the decision to do that took five seconds. It was like, oh, we could either do this and still be having to get a job, or we could live comfortably and not have to work. And it's like that's how long that took. So I, you know, many people say if you're going to exit, you have to know what you're going to do next. Not my experience. I mean things showed up and things that we didn't expect showed up and that's what I imagine would happen at some point in the future if someone ever buys us out.

Yeah, well, fantastic. I appreciate the time. I was really excited. But you had the time to get back on again because I knew it would be a wild ride.

I do what I can.

Also, I'm looking forward to seeing the new crop of shoes and congratulations on all the progress and all the good you're doing.

Well, thanks. It's very kind.

I always like to give my guests the last word. And so what would you say is maybe we haven't covered yet. That you want to give us a parting thought for entrepreneurs, leaders that people are.

Oh, I probably said this the last time because this is what I always say if someone asks me about advice for entrepreneurs other than test your idea as quickly and cheaply as possible is get a government job with a pension. Because I'm at an age where I have friends who are retiring with from their government jobs with pensions and they don't even know how to spend all the money. My brother in law is about to do the same thing and it's like, holy crap, man, that's going to be a hell of a lifestyle. Because if my suggesting that you could do something where you might find a job that you find satisfying, where you get benefits and vacations and insurance, that'd be really cool because look, if you are a real entrepreneur, there's nothing I could say that would talk you out of your statistically stupid idea anyway. So just the only thing I would say is know that the only thing you control is risk. And if you use that as your kind of mantra and be constantly looking for what could go wrong, I'm a total optimist. But at the same time I'm always looking for what could go wrong because that's the part that sneaks up behind you. If you're not paying attention and you can pay attention to that more, you can learn to be on the lookout for what your competition's doing. What's happening in the macroeconomic world. If tariffs get raised on us, that could put us out of business. We're very well aware of that. So what are we going to do? You got to anyway, so get a government job with a pension. Unless you know you have no choice.

All right, thanks so much, Stephen, and say hello to Lena for us. And look forward to. I've got to come by sometime when I'm in Broomfield.

Absolutely. Look forward to it.

Have a great Halloween the rest of the evening.

Thanks. Be well. Take care.

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