Episode 180: Innovation Leads to Business Breakthroughs with Terry Rich

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromsol.

Foreign.

Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. I've got a very special podcast today because in my travels around the planet, helping agents, collaborating with agents and everything else, I run into people that have incredible stories, to say the least. And the man that we've got on the podcast today has an incredible story. I got to know him a little bit when I was recently speaking in the Midwest. An amazing man that is sharing amazing things with audiences and wowing them. An author, a speaker in his own right, Terry Rich. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much. You got to have a rich guy on once in a while, you know, with all the success you're talking about.

Exactly. You know, we're talking about money.

That's right.

That's right. And people, when you, when, when you start talking about money, all of a sudden you have their attention. Right.

And if this isn't very good, then you can call me a son of a rich. Okay, I'm ready.

Ah, got it. I will keep that in mind. A son of a rich.

Very good. So does your mother know you talk like that?

Just a little bit. You know, I grew up on a farm, small farm in Iowa. And it was a great way to be brought up because it was always encouraging. My family being on a farm, we didn't have much money, but it was really a fun and very innovative type way to grow up. When you're on the farm, you always have to find new ways to do things. The tractor breaks down, you don't have parts, what the heck do you do? You figure out what's going on. So I graduated from college and all of my. I actually, I started as a math major and then my buddy said, hey, you can come over here and make a living. So I went over to the TV and radio business and all my buddies at that point went into broadcast television as news anchors and that sort of thing.

I raised my hand and helped and got involved in cable television. Before, cable was cool. Now this was the time that Ted Turner was involved. And it was so innovative and so fun and all the time, even working on the farm, it always seems like you're doing two or three jobs. I also was a dj, rock and roll on the weekends, which was a lot of fun. But I ultimately built my way up within that cable company, and everything we touched seemed to turn to gold. It turned into a New York Stock Exchange company. They couldn't pay me a lot, but they were paying me these things called stock options. And, okay, well, it went pretty well. But about halfway through that career, I had the opportunity to do a little dinky promotion in PR for my hometown and made it on the Johnny Carson show at age 29. That's what really kind of shot my career up within that company.

Yeah.

And when I was 40, lo and behold, the Bass brothers came in and took a run at our stock. And, you know, the end of that is we got cashed out. So all of a sudden, at 40, I've got everything I want, all the money in the world I want. My dad told me, you know, go to work at age 62, you'll get Social Security, and you're going to be happy. But I realized at age 40, that happiness really happens on the way to success. Every day in that company called Heritage Communications was so fun and so innovative, and it just was a way that, you know, encouraging, I guess. So I decided to start my own company at that point, and I learned the next lesson, which is, if you start your own company, you want to make sure you have some money and then don't bet the entire bank. You know, you try new things. And so every time I make a little bit of money, as I did with this new company that I started, doing HBO free previews was the whole business. I'd show HBO on your TV at home. Hey, Marge, are you showing hbo? And then we'd come on after the movie and say, hey, would you like to buy it? Here's the one. And we were selling 15, 20 million dollars of HBO every weekend that we were doing this with this satellite uplink type thing. But then I turned 50, and you know what happens when you're 50. No midlife crisis. Yeah. I decided I got to get off the road, got to be with the family. So I decided, what do I do next? And I got a call from a former governor who said, they're going to close the zoo down. Would you be interested in helping us turn the zoo around? It was losing $600,000 a year, man. I grew up on a farm. Why the heck giraffes can't be that much different from cows. So I took the CEO job of a zoo. Not People get. Many people get to run the zoo. It's a pretty easy business proposition. We turned it around. Cash floated immediately with a couple of very simple ideas, innovation as part of all of that, and made it the second largest cultural attraction in the state. And then I got a call from the current governor after that and said, hey there, the lottery directors starting to retire. Would you be interested in running a lottery? Well, that's, you know, I gave away over a billion dollars during those 10 years. And you can kind of tell I like marketing, promotion, sales and success and entrepreneurship. But we had a little bit of a little dinky problem with a vendor, created the largest lottery fraud in US History. So I got to work for almost six years as not only selling, but also cracking the largest lottery fraud in U.S. history. So 10 years there was really fun, good times. And then I retired and I started to get on the road and just tell the story about lottery fraud or talking today innovation and what makes life fun so that it's rewarding each and every day. You don't have to wait till you're 62, under drawing, Social Security. So that's my history, that's my background. Four completely different careers. New York Stock exchange entrepreneur, nonprofit, and a state official. Yuck. I hate the word state official.

An amazing story. I didn't know all of those details. I knew some of them, so I can't wait to dig in. So, Terry, I heard you say, and this is probably one of my greatest encouragements for agents that I'm so privileged to collaborate with. Happiness happens on the way to success. I mean, many entrepreneurs, they get so caught up in the race and the chase and everything else, they forget about the fact that that's where all the growth happens. That's where all the cool things happen. What would you say to any entrepreneur out there who might have forgotten about that or needs a reminder?

Well, once in a while, you just got to sit back. I think I was asked one time, what are the two things you would do differently if you were starting out at 21 or not differently, but what do you think where success is? And I said, first thing is raise your hand and volunteer. Because the person in a meeting that says someone, the boss says, toilets are backed up, janitor's gone, who wants to clean it, you get noticed. So always volunteer, whether it's nonprofit, anything you do. The second that I never really learned. Well, that I would give to a new entrepreneur is figure out how to find time to relax. And I did a gig with Damon John with Shark Tank, not Long ago. And he said something that was really interesting. He said, yeah, every night before I go to bed, I've got This list of 5 things I write down. I said, really? You got that many million dollar ideas every day? He said, no, now that I'm successful, now that things are going well, I want to do something for myself. So I write down the five things that are going to make me happy tomorrow. And so it may be I'm going to take my kid to school or I'm going to have pancakes for breakfast or whatever it is. But wow, I wish I'd learned that at a much earlier age of how to relax and how to. Because once you get into the entrepreneurial spirit, once you get into a big sale, man, that's better than cocaine, booze, or any kind of drug, man, it's so exciting. It's so easy to get caught up in all this and want to recreate and recreate. And so the second piece I'd mentioned to that is when you are successful, only use a portion of your success to do it. Most, most entrepreneurs love success and so it's easy to take a lot of risk, but you have to at some point take the risk, but take calculated risks and then take that small amount. And then just like gambling where you say, okay, I'll throw it down once that's if something's gone, it doesn't work. You get out, take that early loss and keep on moving. So those are the, those are the comments I would do. Happiness happens on the way to success. You got to learn how to enjoy yourself. If you're not happy today, you're not.

Going to be happy.

When you reach your goal.

Absolutely. It's an inside job.

Absolutely. And.

It all happens right here. Finding things that you love. I've never been fired. I always look for what the next opportunity was. If I figured I met the peak. And it's kind of like if you're selling ice cream, you know, you want to be an entrepreneur and you're selling banana ice cream. So you put your business plan together. You know that you can get 100 people to buy banana ice cream. You open the shop, get your social media going, you climb, climb, climb, climb. All of a sudden you're at 100 and you've sold all the people who have banana ice cream. What happens? Well, you reach maturity. You see that in entrepreneurial or business classes where it's the slope up and all of a sudden it levels off when you've reached your potential. And then people start dying, they start moving away. You've got to innovate again. You've got to add pistachio or butter brickle or something else to sell more and more because you want to keep going. Change is inevitable and you want to keep changing with new ideas and creating new ideas, always looking ahead.

Let's talk about that change and it's going to keep happening and we need to keep changing. You know, the late, great Jim Rohn said, and I'm sure you've heard it, if we want things to change, we've got to change. Because if we're willing to change, everything will change for us. So change and innovation. And innovation is something that you share a lot with audiences across your speaking spheres, if you will. International, if I'm not mistaken. Correct?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I think the key here, for me, and it took a few years for me, actually it was over a glass of wine in Napa Valley, because I always thought that the winemakers just went out back and used their own vines to create the award winning wine. And I learned that, no, they go out and they take a bushel basket and they get a few grapes from here, here, here, here. And depends on the climate, on the, on the ground, what happens in that given year. The wind, all of these temperature, everything like that. To find the one grape out of a hundred that's going to create the award winning. And that's what they do. And I tell audiences, man, daring to dream. Every day you should try to think of a hundred new ideas and put it in that bushel basketball. And then you get your group around and you prioritize which ones you think will work. But you always keep that group over here so that you can always go back to that. You find the two or three things that are going on. And in daring to dream, you know, people like to brainstorm, but you never brainstorm and let anybody be the no man, which is people who say, no man, that's, that's never going to work. So you say, no, we're doing 100 ideas. Every idea is a good idea. And you want to make sure that in this meeting you have the lawyers and the accountants too. And they can't say no, don't have enough money, or hey, you're going to get sued on that because sometimes they or the receptionist up front have the best, best ideas. Second piece of that is the making sure that the people around the table are very diverse. Everybody looks like you and they're around the table and everybody has the same background. As you see, if you just have the salespeople in getting the ideas, you aren't going to. You aren't going to make the bazillion dollars. You're going to make the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so to speak. So you want to make it very diverse. And you get all. You try to get a hundred ideas in 15 minutes and then put it aside, then come back. And that's where the lawyers and the account say, hey, this one will work better than this one. The salespeople say, I think I can sell this one. And everybody. Then you've got the entire group talking about an idea and prioritize, and that's the one you want to take on to bring your success. Every day when I go to the grocery store or I go somewhere, if it takes me five minutes and 33 seconds, I'm thinking, how the heck can I beat that? So every day I try to think of ideas that improve something. Can we make a better this, better that? And you got to write them down, because my own mind, I forget them. So writing down those ideas are so important to be able to go back and then put them all together and prioritize them with your team.

Yeah. Something that we talk about in our circles, don't think it, ink it. Because if you ink it, you will say that again, right?

Say that one again. I have not heard that. And I learned. I like to learn new things on these.

Okay, that means I second. I agree. Don't think it, ink it.

I like that.

Because when you ink it, you will sink it. And the place that you need to sink it is up between the 8 inches, which is between your ears.

I wrote it down. I feel it. I hope that's all right.

Of course, share with anybody that will listen. I mean, I'm sure it didn't happen with you being the son of a rich, but.

Yeah, then that's right. Now, I. When I came up through college, I had a professor that really got me going on entrepreneurial new ideas.

I came up with this idea that they just started, these pop tops that you pull like that, where it doesn't come off. It's just what we have today. But when I was traveling, I always saw flight attendants breaking fingernails. Why can't we get a tool, make a tool and try to market that? That was my first real entrepreneurial deal. So we got together, we created one. The professor said, let's do this. That he gave me some business ideas. And then I got back on a plane and someone had already invited. Invented. I was sad.

Yeah.

You know, you guys, you know what? Failure is the first step to success. Because what we did, he said, if you have one good idea, don't worry about if somebody steals it. You'll always have that next one. You've got your mind working and you think about a kid. Well, year and a half, year old, baby. My year and a half came over and they pulled themselves up on the couch or the davenport. And what happens? They took their first step, boom, fell right on their face. But did they quit at that point? No, they crawled back over and took two steps, boom, fell again, three, four, five. And they can run around everywhere. And the point to that is the first time you fail, you got to figure out, what do I do differently to make it work? You know, think about when we sent three men to the moon. A lot of people are project managers. They're focused. And it's got to happen on this date and this date and this date. Really detailed, oriented. But did you know when they. When they said, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1, they didn't say, hey, blast off, we've got this thing planned out, we're done. They were off course going to the moon. Over 90% of the time, they failed over 90% of the time. And so you got to realize that failure is just the first step. And you take a look, readjust put it back together. I failed the first time when I got out of college. I got on TV and I was shaving, not, wow, it's 5 o' clock. And I don't have the 5 o' clock shadow. So I'm going to email Gillette and tell them how much I love their track 2 Razor. So I sit down at these things. In the old days, we called them typewriters. And I sent off a letter knowing that in two weeks I would get a letter back and I'd be able to be on broadcast television. Right? Well, I sat for those two weeks, probably feeling like you do when you play Powerball or Mega Millions, thinking, if this happens, I get to be on national television. I got really excited. Two weeks to the day, I got the letter back. And it said, Dear Mr. Rich, we're glad you're happy with your razor. Unfortunately, you wrote the wrong company. Schick makes that. Sorry. Here's their address. But it excited me so much that that's what gave me the encouragement and the ideas to be on national television. That's how I got on Johnny Carson, that's how I did all these others, because it gave me a new desire in that creative process of coming up with the ideas, writing them down, and thinking ways to be able to do it. So failure is the first step to success. I tell a lot of people that because when I do speeches like you, people say, well, don't you ever screw up? Heck, yes, we screw up. We mess up all the time. But you never hear about my failures. You heard about my successes because I kept trying. I didn't just give up too many times. You just have an idea and it didn't work. Okay, that didn't work. I. I wasn't very good at it. No, no, keep plugging away.

That's right. So here's a quick idea for you, speaking of ideas, and just to recap what you just said, I want to make sure I get this straight and everybody hears it. Because sometimes we need to hear things up to seven times or more. Right.

You realize that my deal about the bushel basket, I'm all over the wall because I'm trying to get 100 ideas in during this program. Somebody might just get one when we're done, which is the winner.

Go ahead, take it away. That's all they need, the bushel basket. So 100 ideas, which is in the bushel basket. The goal of a think tank group as an example, and I'm privileged to participate in a lot of these. The goal of the think tank is to get in the bushel basket in 15 minutes. 100 ideas.

That's correct.

And there's no right or wrong answer, Right?

No. And that's. You want to have somebody watching for the no man's. The no man's will usually go right. You know, we've tried that before is another one. Let me give you an example. Here's a quick test just to show you how this works. So just quickly, just to see how quick you are on things. What color is the stop sign?

Red.

What color is the yield sign? Yellow. Nope. Since 1971, they've been red and white.

See, we have perceptions when we're going into these things, and we think people are wrong. If somebody says yellow, most people would say, yeah, that's right. But no, no, drive down the road. Next time you see a yield sign, it's red and white.

I will be looking for that. So that's actually with my hands at 10 and 2, my eyes straight ahead. I don't pay attention to any of that stuff.

That's right. Well, the point is, we have preconceptions. That's why you've got to get the no man's off. And you have somebody kind of Watching because everybody, when you give an idea, kind of look at the boss to see if you don't want bosses actually uncreative ideas, you know, but you need a really diverse group too. Because we have such a large audience today. It isn't like you're just serving your own demographic and your own ideas. You need to have as many people there because the million dollar idea may be outside of the sphere that you're normally used to selling.

Yeah, that's why, you know, innovative companies and growing companies. It's so important to have that diversity. I mean, you need the group of foundational people who, you know, keep things humming. But you got to have this other group who are trying to fill the Bushel basket in 15 minutes with 100 next great ideas that they can mix into the foundational stuff. And that's where you get that synchronicity.

Well, that's why change is, is. Is so important that you're always looking for something else to add. If you have a successful. You need to find out how to replace that banana ice cream with something else, because it will stagnate. Every business stagnates at some point. I mean, think about whoever thought that cable television would work. When I went door to door, people would say, I'm not paying six bucks for more channels of cable TV. Well, gosh, what are we paying today? 120, 150 bucks for more channels of cable television or more. Whoever thought that taxis would ever go away when Uber came in? So I don't care what your business is. Things are going to change in a rapidly changing society. And you always want to be ahead of that and looking for ways to expand your audience, expand your business to be able to grow. And growth is how we make money. And money is the cocaine to success that we all like. So you don't have to do cocaine.

The endorphino rush. Can't get enough of it. Right. I mean, there's a company that we heard about in past entrepreneurial history, Blockbuster, I think they were blockbuster.

Great example. VCRs. Yeah. The whole. The whole deal. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I believe his name is Reed Hastings from Netflix. Yep. You know.

Well, I believe in you because you believe in it. So I'm going to believe in it if you believe.

Thank you so much. But I mean, there was an offer on the table to buy Blockbuster and they balked.

Yep.

And now they're gone.

You know, it's absolutely amazing. The other thing that I learned in life is you may have an idea today that develops into something 20 years from now. My example, Johnny Carson. So I did this little promotion. Carson picked it up. We got to go out and be on Johnny Carson. But the real bonus wasn't there. He talked actually about doing the entire show from our little town in Iowa via satellite. And nobody in Iowa had ever done anything via satellite. So, you know, we got through it. We had 15,000 people show up at our centennial. Everything went well. But I took the idea of the satellite back to the work when I was working at cable and started doing these HBO free previews so I could broadcast to Everybody around the U.S. well, that idea then brought to me these free previews. But I didn't have an asset. When I was done, I would go into a company like a Comcast or Time Warner, do a free preview and I'd come home, they'd send me this big check. But I didn't have an asset that I could continue have. So I realized I need to do something with programming. So I looked around. What's the number one cable program at this time? World Wrestling Federation. They huge rating. Well, what other sport is like wwf, WWE or WWF that has professional players, you know? Well, in wrestling you're done after college usually. So they kind of built on that. Well, at the time, soccer was nothing. So I thought, I'm going to do a full contact indoor soccer show called Soccer Slam S O C K E R. So we bought an ice arena, we put the Astroturf on the bottom. We, we got a whole bunch of professional players. Then I hired some stuntmen to do all the fights. Hired just basic people off the street to. So that the manager over here was messing around with the girlfriend of the player over here. All these kinds of weird things that happen in wwe. And we did four shows on Fox Sports World, but we got so busy with hbo, kind of forgot about it. Well, remember how I told you sometimes weird things happen down the road with a great idea. A year and a half ago, I got a call from the Athletic, this big, huge national website that does all the sports. And the guy who covered soccer said, did you do soccer, Sam? He said, I just found. This is the greatest thing I've ever. This is completely nuts because it's, it's. People don't want to see 10 soccer. They want to see 50 to 49. And we, we had two bonus boards that got five points. I mean just anything we could do to just make it nuts. And he said, I want to do an article. So he did this big, huge article. Translate that into that Big, huge article. Got a call from a producer who said, we really like this. We want to do a documentary on the making of Soccer Slam, which then I can't announce today, but maybe near your TV set real soon on a documentary which may resurrect Soccer Slam. Because think about it, I think it was the Rock just paid $15 million for the XFL and bankruptcy. This is a lot more fun and a bigger sport of soccer when it's all said and done.

All because Worldwide.

Worldwide. All because we tried and failed at the very beginning, but took an idea and say we want to continue that to be on national television or to do all the things that we did. So when something fails, you want to take a look at it and know that it may be big down the road.

Well, you know. You know the story of Bezos walking in Central park in New York City with his hedge fund manager and the hedge fund manager, huh?

I have not heard this one. Go ahead.

Yeah, so Bezos was working in the hedge fund industry in New York. I mean, I just got done doing more study on this little company that he built. But anyway, success leave schools, right?

Yep.

And he's in the hedge fund industry in New York, a very well educated man, double major at Princeton, smart dude. And he's working in the hedge fund industry, walking through Central park with his boss and his boss just making conversation. Jeff, how are you doing? What's new? He goes, I'm doing good. He goes, I'm excited about your future, Jeff. You're doing really well. About 10 years from now, you're going to be a very wealthy man. So what else is going on with you, Jeff? He goes, I have an idea. And he goes, really, what is it? He goes, I want to start an online bookstore. And he goes, really? Is that going to be like a hobby? He goes, no, I'm actually thinking about doing it full time. He goes, wait a minute, Jeff, you're going to stop doing what you're doing now to start an online bookstore? Are you freaking crazy? Do you have any idea the wealth that you're going to start to accumulate to the next 10 years? And he goes, yeah, I understand. He goes, why the heck would you do an online bookstore, Jeff? Go think about it for a couple days and come back and we'll talk online bookstore.

Yeah.

So obviously Bezos went in a couple days later and said, yeah, I'm going to tender my resignation, I'm going to pursue the online bookstore. He said it wasn't the failure. They would have had regrets with it. Was the regrets that he would have had if he didn't at least try.

He hadn't done it. Absolutely, absolutely.

So as we know, it became so much more than an online bookstore.

Yeah. And of course, you got to surround yourself with good people. You know, entrepreneurs, they know theirs, but they need a good organization. Very few entrepreneurs are great managers. They probably aren't really good in legal and they're not really good in accounting. So you kind of need, even if they're just an advisory board, don't pay them anything just to help you out until it gets going. And then, then bring them on to, to give you the background because you'll be crank, crank, cranking all those. Hey, I have 2 million dollar ideas before we get done, so save me 90 seconds at the end. I'll give you a 2 million dol ideas that your viewers can take and develop.

Fantastic. We're going to ratchet up, but let me just add one thing on the same thought process. And I love the conversation. So I hope everybody will go out and get their bushel basket and get their most innovative thinkers around. Give yourself permission to just listen and let the basket fill up with these incredible possibility ideas. But you know Google, I don't know if you've heard of them. Yeah, I mean, like Amazon, they're doing okay.

They're doing all right.

But I've also studied Google in depth, and they also have a portion of their budget, I'll suppose that goes to innovation and new ideas. And they actually encourage their teams to have that time to just think outside the box with new innovations and ideas. So I love this.

You think about it, in the old days, they called it R and D in the manufacturing day. But in today's technological world, it is innovation.

Yes, absolutely.

It's better to have tried and failed than to succeed at doing nothing.

That's the other one that I use in my speeches because when I was a state employee, some of the employees didn't want to do new things. And I said, it's better to have tried and failed than succeed at doing nothing. The rewards of success are phenomenal.

This is the pregnant pause right here.

So everybody says, no, I'm writing it down.

I'm inking it so I can sync.

Oh, yeah, you're inking it.

Yeah, I'm making it so I can sink it. It's better to have tried and failed than to succeed and nothing and do nothing.

Yep. To succeed at doing nothing. Yep. All right, while you're writing that, you want me give you the $2 million ideas.

No, I want to be listening 100%.

Which is important in its own right. Right.

Seven to one. Actually, we talk about in our circle. So not just 2 to 1. It's 7 to 1.

I like that, too.

Would you like to know what they are, the seven. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, cool. And that'll tee you up for your. Your 90 seconds of million dollar ideas. So.

And I probably did this because of my own shortcomings, my failures. Right. So we got one mouth, right? That's the one.

That's one.

We got two ears. Two ears, two eyes.

Two eyes, that's four.

One mind.

One mind.

That's five.

Wait a minute. One mouth, two ears, two eyes.

Oh, hold on, hold on. Okay, it's seven. Two, One.

Okay, Seven, two, one. Okay. Okay, go for it.

One. Two ears, two eyes, that's four. Okay. One mind, that's five.

Okay.

One heart, that's six.

And one soul or gut. That's seven.

And that's an important one, too. Holy smoke.

So you should use those seven.

As many times as the one here or seven to one. So if we use those faculties seven times more than we use this in any situation.

Yeah.

Then we will contribute. We will learn more and become more and be able to contribute more instead of just no man. No man. No man.

Yeah, absolutely.

So just those are the kind of things that we talk about within Unstoppable Nation, among many other things. So you're Terry. You're contributing to the forward thinking and flourishing innovation of Unstoppable Nation. How does that make you feel, Terry?

Have employees come up with an idea rather than me coming up with it. Or you got. You get people. Being innovative is pretty exciting.

Yeah. So I've got something to introduce your $2 million ideas. Ready?

Okay, go for it.

Since you have history here, but I'm going to put a little twist on your television appearance. All right, here's Terry.

I like it. Okay, here we go. So Mega Millions is just getting started, and they were trying to come up with ideas. So they asked me, do you have a marketing idea for that? And, well, of course, you start thinking about it, you try to do it. But as I'm driving home, I looked up at the moon and I thought.

Why couldn't we find a big enough laser or spotlight to put the jackpot amount on the dark side of the moon? You know, when it's a crescent, just a little bit of a sliver. So I contact a lot of people for laser and all that, and I haven't been able to figure out how to break through the atmosphere unless we get a satellite in the air. But Bezos and everybody else doing all this stuff, we could own the moon. For a billboard, there's number one, number two, I had a little town call me and say, hey, would you give us some ideas? We're a quarter of a mile off the interstate. 60,000 cars go by. What could we do for a business to get we started thinking, well, everybody has a gas station. Everybody has a restaurant, you know, McDonald's usually at all the interstate stops. What's the one thing that you really need when you're driving down that no one has? Restroom. I mean, clean restrooms. Let's build a building that's the cleanest restrooms in the world. And we do a big. What I call a Morton building. And you put about 20 stalls on each side. You get. You get Gerber to give you different uniques. They start doing research on which stool is best, what kind of flush is best. You do research. What Charman would give you the toilet paper for free. For research, you sell Tootsie Rolls, Baby Ruths up front, T shirts. I got pooped out in Menlo, Iowa. Dog place outside, you have outhouses for pictures.

And all of that together. Free publicity. You get a king to come in and sit on the throne to kick it off. I mean, you've got everything. Doesn't cost you a dime for marketing except for the Burma Shave signs that you put all over up and down the interstate because they were at exit 88. You go urinate at exit 88. If you had the cleanest bathrooms in the world, you would have so much publicity and everybody stopping in. And then you sell all. Well, you have recliners because it's a rest stop restroom. So all the other. So there's two ideas I've never really, really got to put together. And I had one other kind of fun poop idea. We had the zoo. And, you know, you got to spend $2 million to get a new tiger or whatever it costs to do new Exhi. So we looked around and we said, what do we have? A lot of that we could sell, or we could do something unique to get people through the door. Poop. Because all the animals poop, right? So we did an exhibit called Scoop on Poops. So kids could come in and giggle and say, there's what tiger poop looks like, and there's what lion poop looks like and giraffe poop looks like. Or, you know, everything. They got a kick out of that. But we realized in doing this that tiger poop. Tigers are predators. White tailed deer in our state, our prey. And there are a lot of them. And so they come in and eat your flowers. So we started selling tiger poop for 20 bucks in a gallon bucket that you could spread around your flowers, and lo and behold, the deer would never come up and eat your flowers. He sold $25,000 worth of tiger poop that summer until the USDA came in, said, you can't sell white, wild, exotic poop. So we had to end that. But anyway, those are the kind of things you always look for because there's always a way around you don't have enough money. Okay, let's figure out something we can do. And I love the ideas that we do, and I know how successful you've been with that, so thank you so much for inviting me today.

Well, innovation at its best. You want to, you know, keep the deers out of your front yard. Tiger poop, everybody. You heard it here first.

That's right. That's right.

Terry Rich, this has been absolutely awesome. Talking about innovation and everything about business, hearing all the depth of your business journeys out there in the world. Congratulations, and most importantly, thank you. Thank you for continuing to share with audiences across the globe everything you've learned to not only teach, but to inspire them to continue to be innovated. Innovative. Better said, innovative. That is just flipping fantastic as we begin to wrap up today. Anything else you'd like to add?

Well, creativity gives you no money. Innovation does. You can have the best ideas in the world, but until you act on them, you won't make any money. So good luck with everything, and I'm going to see you on the road. We both have a really fun career and being able to see a lot of people. And the reward of having employees or people in the audience succeed after we speak and listen to ideas and take something out of that bushel basket to make their own is pretty darn rewarding in itself.

I know. In just a few minutes we got to spend together at a speaking event in the Midwest, I knew we were connected somehow. And you were spot on in what you just said. Two things, a decision and action.

Absolutely.

It's all it takes. Terry Rich, thank you very much.

It was fun. Thank you.

Yeah. Hang on just a minute. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for joining this episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. If this is your first time, welcome. My name is Mike Stromso and you can find out more about me@unstoppableprofitproducer.com I'm privileged to be a leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. If you're interested in attending one of our virtual or live events, you can find out more about our virtual events@uppfaststart.com or our live events are at beunstoppablebootcamp.com maybe Terry will be there someday.

Yeah.

Anyway, both of our events, all of our events are designed with some of our best money making strategies developed over 35 years of research and in the trenches in our own independent insurance agency industry. All designed to grow your business, help you grow your business, create generational wealth so you can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. We're super excited to bring you this podcast and one every week. You can find us on all the channels out there, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, stitcher, our own YouTube channel, Amazon and more. So look us up, you'll find us out there. We're super excited. We can't wait to see you next time. Terry.

Rich.

Thank you.

One more thing. Yeah, Please void we're prohibited member fdic.

And by the way, I have never. This is the first time ever I've had a son of a Rich on the podcast.

That's right. Absolutely.

What an honor and a privilege.

Heck, who knew?

Thanks everybody for joining us on the podcast. Until next time, get out there, make a difference, be unstoppable, leave no regrets, and remember, you got this. We believe in you. See you next time.

You love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started. Come join our next virtual training while seats are still available. Register now@uppfaststart.com that's uppfaststart.com.