How to Build a Purpose-Driven Business (and why you should)

I understand many people feel like, gosh, I'm luckier than I should have and I want to pay it forward. All of those things, that makes total sense to me. But doing the right thing and, and a good thing and valuing your impact on all stakeholders is not incongruent with profit because profit is a signal of the value that you have created in the world.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you All right, guys.

Welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builder Podcast. I'm excited about this guest today. We've been having a great chat in the green room, so we better hit record and get moving on this topic today. Uh, I think we're gonna talk about e-com business building and purpose above profit. I think that's a good conversation today. What do you think, Kevin?

Fired up. I'm very appreciative of the opportunity, Neil.

Well, I'm glad to have you here, my man. You got your hot tea.

We were just talking about teas of product and a drink.

Yes, he's got the Fire Belly. tea that he was talking to me about. We were talking about how we love tea in our house and all my girls get together and have these big tea parties and stuff. It's just, there's all kinds of tea types and turmeric this and apple spice chai that. And actually I have a big thing of tea. I know it's kind of bad in the evening. We always relax together. My wife and I will play games or something. And then we have a tea routine of different kinds. It's a great routine. I enjoy it a lot. We keep, we're on a fast, a screen fast in our house right now.

Do you have a screen fast in your house at all where you guys just shut the screens down? We don't do a lot of screens with our kids. Some days we let that slip a little bit, but largely very little screen time for the kids. And then my wife and I don't really watch shows and I just try and leave, try and leave my phone either in my office or in my closet as often as possible. So not official, just, yeah, just as much as possible.

Well, during the summer months, it's so light out till like 8 or 9 o'clock and there's so many things to do and there's things to our property to take care of. There's gardening and whatever. And by the time right now we're at a big theater project because the kids have that Anne of Green Gables theater going on for Friday and Saturday. They're starring, all 4 of them have different roles in the theater project. So this tech week is referred to, and all, all of the full rehearsal on stage and everything is happening at the local co-op theater for our homeschool. And right now it's all screen, are all off. So it's just a fast from the screen. It's good to do those things more, just intentionally or unintentionally get kids off those devices a lot. I think it's been, uh, very helpful for my girls to not get entrenched in the kinds of things and then have good conversations and play games and do other things as a family, which I think is purposeful.

I don't know if you've jumped into Jonathan Haidt's new book, Anxious Generation, talking about the impact of phones and kids forever have been using— well, I say forever. For a long time, kids played video games, there were computer games, all of those things. And adults always didn't like that their kids played those things, but largely it showed no material impact on children's wellbeing until smartphones. You could do a couple hours of a video game, but that was very different than even an hour of a smartphone with social media, with the world pounding on your door and— So I think the way he framed it, the way he framed it was, it is as perfect as could be over the last really 15 years and a little longer. We have dramatically overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online and with electronic devices.

Yeah.

And so my kids are 7 and 5, and I'm so lucky that I feel like we just, this awareness has really hit us before we lose them to those Wonderfully terrible devices. I'm not anti-technology, but it needs to play its proper role.

It needs to be a tool versus an entertainment. That's kind of how we talk about it in our house. It's a tool to do something versus an entertainment. If you want entertainment, we can do entertainment in other ways. Yeah, we do watch movies at times and we love that. And we have a movie theater and we'll be— we don't watch a lot of movies out there, but we have it to enjoy when the time comes and we choose movies and we don't watch regular news and networks and televisions and all that crap. We don't even have any of it. We just— anything that's on demand, we choose what we watch. In fact, none of my kids have social media. My oldest is 15 going on 16 this month, and she doesn't have social media or a cell phone, and we'll keep it that way for—

And good for her.

Well, I think at the end of the day, it's gonna sound to some people's ears like we're very controlling, but in actuality, as you said, I think there's a level of unaware people who, like us, having been in technology and developing companies and been around it our entire lives, see really truly some of the pros and cons of its usage and, and definitely in ways where children can be taken easily advantage of. It's one of those, I'm happy to be hyperprotective about that. I'll be a hover parent that way. In other ways, I'm not. My kids jump off of trees, they climb rocks. We live in the country, they shoot guns. We're very much on the other side of like, well, you're a hover parent. Well, no, actually, when it comes to online crap, I absolutely am. When it comes to the rest of the world out here where we live, like, go for it. All right? Jump, play, be kids, have fun, knock each other down, do something. Yeah, it sounds like you resonate with that.

100%. Yeah. I think there's a very meaningful difference between a controlling parental approach and an intentional parental approach.

Yeah.

Um, and kids need to learn, they need to make mistakes, they need to be able to grow. Those things don't apply to the world of social media.

No, no.

Especially in today's target-rich environment of, um, you know, hyper-partisan insanity, everything online. A child could ruin literally their entire lives with one mistake online.

I agree.

And that's just not the reality of in real life interactions, or even 15 years ago, prior to social media, there were ways to be online but still not suffer the totally out-of-line consequences that social media brings today.

Taboos have been broken in the last 3 to 5 years. And in that way, now what is becoming, quote unquote, taboo in terms of talking to children and engaging, it seems to be a normal everyday thing now. We see this happening all the time across all kinds of political, geopolitical, socioeconomic. It doesn't really matter. It's just happening across the board. So for me, yeah, carte blanche. You don't get on without a parental. All devices stay in the living room. No one has got anything in their room. Whenever you use it, by the way, Dad's pretty good at tech. So if you think you can skirt around the internet through my router, good luck with that. They don't even try because they know they're being watched constantly. So yeah, it's just one of those things. But that ties to the way we do business though, because we are online. I mean, your business is completely virtual, right? Yeah.

Yeah, we are. I started working with my co-founder building Harbor almost 2 years ago, and we've never lived in the same city and we've built a team team of folks literally all around the country and around the world. And that has enabled us to tap a level of talent and operate with a level of speed that I just, I never would've been able to do before. I completely and fully value in real life interactions, and there are things that you can't replicate when you sit shoulder to shoulder with somebody every single day.

Yeah.

But I also know that I wouldn't have been able to build this business over the last 2 years, which we'll touch on, without being able to tap a talent base of folks around the world.

Yeah, no, and it's so true. And I'm in the same boat and I appreciate that about where you're at because in the e-com world and the physical product world is what we're talking about and development of things. The world is really flat, as Friedman said. And so much of that communication interaction, the tools we use now that allow that are very powerful because it allows a different direction and purpose. And the company you mentioned, the one you've developed for the last couple of years, that's not your first rodeo, is it?

No. So I started a clothing company called Mism and Main in 2012, and I had the crazy idea for a performance fabric dress shirt. I grew up playing golf and watched performance polos. I'm wearing one of ours right now for those watching. I watched, I watched performance polos take over on the golf course as a kid and wondered why no one had ever made a dress shirt out of that type of fabric. All the industry experts told me it would never work. No one would ever wear that. It couldn't be done. But ultimately I realized the innovator's dilemma is a very real thing. And that's why a lot of people don't move forward with things that are very positive in terms of impact.

Yeah.

And then, so built that over many years and now on startup number 2, a company called Harbor. And we are transforming sleep and sanity for parents by building a better baby monitor and bringing sleep expertise, democratizing sleep expertise for the masses with the creation of a robo night nanny, which brings the cost of all-night overnight care and expertise down by about 95% for parents looking to help get better nights of rest for their kids and for themselves.

Parents sleep insanity. That's a mouthful. And having so many kids under the age of 5 at one point and even under the age of 10, It was a decade of sleep insanity. That's the best way to probably, um, yes. Yeah. You just can't predict when they're gonna be awake or not awake or trying to sleep with babies especially. I could definitely see that. And in, in this system you built, right? It's a complete system of software technology monitoring and oversight. Yeah.

So I'll, I'll hold up to the video. We have a camera and a tablet, 10-inch tablet that connect directly to each other without the internet. And both devices also connect to the internet when you want them to. There is nothing like this that exists today. So you get the best of both worlds, the old school local dedicated offline and also the internet when you want it. So it's a dedicated failsafe local device that alerts you when you're no longer monitoring your child. And also when you are outside of the house, if you want to look in on a nanny, a babysitter, your own kids babysitting or grandparents, whatever, you can have remote access and record and rewind functionality. And then also in the camera itself, we have some really awesome AI and storage capabilities. So all the other Wi-Fi baby monitors, importantly, they're not baby monitors. It's a Wi-Fi camera with an app on your phone.

Right.

Apps on phone crash. And we had a Nanit camera that crashed on us, which is why I set out to build this because iPhones, Android devices, they're not baby monitors. But the other kind of key security failure point of these devices is it's just a camera that uses an app on your phone. So they're routing everything through their cloud or whatever cloud they happen to be renting. And with our device, you do not route anything through our cloud unless you connect to our remote magnetic. So if we are supporting you remotely, then obviously we have to connect to you, but otherwise we never connect to any of your systems. And that is a, that is a key distinction. If you are in your house and you are just using our monitor, we do not have access and you cannot, it's not anything that anyone from the outside world can see. And then we've built this telehealth kind of world around it where You can hire us and our system to remotely monitor your child's sleep, and real live night nurses with medical backgrounds will guide you all night long whether or not you should go in and care for your child. So the easy way to describe this is if your child fusses or cries for 1 or 2 minutes and nothing is wrong, well, you don't need to hear that, and there's no reason for you to go in. And the reason most kids struggle to learn how to sleep is because the second they cry, their parent runs into their room and immediately picks them up. That's not how a child learns the skill of sleeping. They need to kind of work through it, just like when a child learns how to walk, they have to fall down a little bit. They have to struggle. They have to figure it out. The same thing is true with sleeping, just as it is with walking and riding a bike and everything else. And so we are there for a fraction of the cost of an in-home night nanny. We can remotely support parents in a way that's never been possible before because of that holistic system that we've built.

Very cool. So the whole idea spawned off of basically an app and system failure. To be able to monitor your children remotely from the systems that you were using before. Was there any threat of like, I think I've heard this before because the Wi-Fi remote connectivity to baby monitors and stuff is relatively new, say the last 10 years or so when we didn't need it ourselves anymore. So we didn't end up buying any of those, but I know it's relatively new to the market as a kind of a mass market appeal. Before it was just like regular baby monitors that we installed that just did two-way constant listening. Is there a security issue with those? I've heard some things about the Wi-Fi being able to be tapped into and other things where people can literally So, so there are all sorts of security vulnerabilities with each type of system that exists.

Some people think, well, if I'm just using that local at-home baby monitor, it's not possible for anyone like a Motorola or Vava, Summer, Infant Optics, any of those. Those typically use unsecured radio frequencies. And so you can— there are stories that are true where people will have somebody outside their house that's tapping into that frequency and just using that to, to listen in. Be able to listen or watch your child. And then there's also the vulnerabilities of Wi-Fi systems where the encryption is not what it should be, or the cloud services that are hosting that are not necessarily secured properly. I think it's important to acknowledge the horror stories that most people are going to hear of someone tapping in and watching a child. Usually those are just security hackers that are hacking things for fun. It's not actually like a real personal threat to the child. There are some times where that has happened, but the reality is for your infant, no one in the world wants to watch an infant cry and scream at night. It's more just security hackers that are testing systems. But I think there is a lot to be said for, do you understand the nature of the security of the system that you have? And so Charlie, my co-founder, and I from the very beginning have said, we want this to be the system that we would trust for our own families. And so If you are at home using your home system, not outside of your house, your video feed doesn't leave your house. And our system does have end-to-end encryption. And importantly, unless you grant us access for support or anything along those lines, we can't tap into it. And so there have been some issues over the last few years where law enforcement have gone in and taken people's Ring security camera footage and done it in ways that Raises real privacy and security questions.

Yeah, I've heard about this.

And the reality with our system is we want parents to know that no one can take their footage from them, that because it's literally just on their device, it is theirs alone. And so from a maximum security perspective, we designed this in the way that we feel comfortable with our own families. And I think that is an important distinction from literally any other system out there. There's no other system that has been designed this way. And so We're confident that it will give parents the security and peace of mind that they deserve.

That's awesome. Now, I understand the R&D process has been— is a long process in some ways. I've gone through an R&D process on a product for market and stuff. We talked a little bit about that and the patent and everything that took, you know, part of the process and a long time to get it kind of moving to market, which is why I ended up kind of reinventing my strategies about physical products and moving more to test product market as fast as possible, improving sales and viability of the product before innovating, customizing, and then moving towards a general patent. Allowance, utility, or design as kind of going the other direction, proving sales at first. Which direction do you go on this one? Did you go through the full R&D process? Did you go through the full development cycle?

You mean to start with?

Yeah. Before going out to market to sell, did you prototype, test market, or did you go straight? Like, how long did it take you to do all that?

So my co-founder and I have been working on this for almost 2 years, and given the nature of the product, there were some fundamental technical aspects that we had to work out. How will this work? We knew it, there were technical elements of this that we assumed and believed were possible, but we had to actually go do it. So that was a big part. System design. The fact that the camera and the tablet connect directly to each other without internet and both devices connect to the internet, that's a breakthrough in terms of also how that failover works. So importantly, if you are traveling and you go to a hotel and you have adjoining hotel rooms, If you have a Nanit or an Owlet or any of these Wi-Fi cameras, you typically can't use those when you travel because you can't tap into your camera into a hotel network. It won't allow it to happen. And for us, the camera and the tablet work without internet. So if you go and travel, you can just plug and play. The ability to do both of those things requires some pretty significant development work, and, and we have filed a patent on aspects of our systems. The patent isn't why we will succeed as a business, but it is nice to have as we grow in terms of defensibility of our product. But we followed the aspects of the Lean Startup mentality, which was let's test small aspects of what we're building as quickly as possible. And so there were some off-the-shelf components and devices that we used. Some of the early cameras that we had, they had exposed wires and they were kind of components that we built together with some outside vendors.

Yeah.

Not that were for any customer to use, but for us to test and build the system. And then as we got further along, we were able to offer more and more robust prototypes that then outside families, not just us, could use.

Yeah.

And then now at this point in time, we have our full-blown product that we worked with some great companies to design. The camera's a 10-inch tablet. You can watch up to 4 different kids at the same time. Beautiful, high resolution. And then I think the other piece of this from an R&D perspective is We've been using these products as families ourselves for the last 18+ months.

That's amazing.

And so many of the features that we wish that we had that no other products had as parents, that no other products have in the baby monitor space, we've built into it because there's just those moments where we go, I would love to be able to do that. Why can't the system do this? Well, we'd been doing it for 18 months, but then we just layered it into our roadmap. Uh, and so we think there's going to be a lot of wow factors that will be complete game changers for parents.

Ours was white noise.

Do you have a white noise feature on your— So we don't have white noise in the camera itself.

Mm-hmm.

Um, because what we found in interviewing parents is so many parents have so many different preferences of the way that the noise is and the, all the different things that they want to be able to do with it. And there are hundreds of white noise machine options out there. So we said, we'll leave that to parents. Parents can make their own decision as to the noise. Some people want it with a light. Some people want it without a light. Some people want the light to be able to change their heart rate. You go through all of those things and we said, you know what, we can solve certain problems at certain times. And that's what we decided to set up.

That's how a roadmap works. What can you actually choose to do and what should you leave to others? Yeah. I was curious because that's one of the things we definitely found was our children had sensory issues, I think, at night. And we kind of discovered that in the process of what would make them more calm. And the white noise was ocean waves. So we, when they were young, we took them to the beach and they kind of love that. And so, when we got the wave machines that were white noise, they slept like a rock when we put them in there.

Some of the best things that you could do, and one of our bigger goals overall is to help kids and parents get more sleep. The best things that you can do as a parent from the very early days are create a sleeping environment that is as dark as possible, that has some level of calming static noise. The ocean waves The white noise, the car, the airplane, that is much better than nursery sounds like the, the twinkle, twinkle little star, those types of things. They're not bad, but the more static the noise, the better.

Yeah.

And if you do those things well, the ability for your child to learn how to sleep from a very early age is just significantly greater. And so look, there are different aspects to schedule and there's lots of different opinions about lots of different things, but like It is indisputable. The darker the environment and the more static, the white noise at the appropriate level, the better off you're going to be.

It closely replicates the womb. And I've read the studies about that when they were trying to figure out what noises or machines were. It was basically the darker the environment, the static noise replicates the womb. It's how it sounds to them listening through a fluid environment when they're in mom's belly. And of course it's dark in there. So it just, that basically makes them feel comfortable and confident. We always wrapped them up really tight too, because that tight wrapping also made them sleep really well. And hey, what parent doesn't want to make sure their kid's sleeping well, right? What parent doesn't want to not sleep well? And so these are amazing devices and a good thing. When I say the phrase purpose over profit, what does that mean to you, Kevin?

So I understand that it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I think what I like is the idea that those 2 things are, when done appropriately, a virtuous cycle. And when you choose profit over all else, it means that you will ultimately make sacrifices, including potentially in Integrity, safety, all the things that matter for long-term doing right, right? When you incorporate doing the right thing into everything that you do, long-term, the value creation will exceed that of seeking profit over all else. And I start off by saying, I think that some people assume that many people think that it means a lot of different things. There's this idea that those things are independent of each other and that a company can do one Or the other. So I love what you're saying, that it's purpose over profit, because if you create value in a way that honors integrity and doing right by your customer and your stakeholders and the world around you, you have the opportunity to create longer relationships, have a greater brand, have a greater customer affinity, lower churn. And so when you choose that over profit alone, and it doesn't mean in spite of profit, then Over the long term, the rewards that come back to you as a team member, as a business owner, as an investor, as a leader will magnify many times over any expectations that you could have possibly had otherwise.

Yeah.

That's a convoluted answer. I have a lot of feelings about this.

It's your answer.

Yeah. One of the things that I've heard, because I spent a couple years working inside of philanthropy doing some very amazing things, I hear a lot of people say the phrase, I have to make sure that I give back. That implies that you have taken something and given something back.

Right.

Now, what I like to say and what I heard from some of the greatest philanthropists and most successful intentional leaders and folks that work in philanthropy and business is, I want to invest in my community. I want to create structures that enable support and opportunity rather than this sense of I owe it Yeah, no, I understand many. Yeah, I understand many people feel like, gosh, I'm luckier than I should have and I want to pay it forward. All of those things, that makes total sense to me. But doing the right thing and a good thing and valuing your impact on all stakeholders is not incongruent with profit because profit is a signal of the value that you have created in the world. And so I love this topic. I love talking about it. And I think it's one of those that the more that we talk about it, the more that we can sort of, as business leaders, share that it is purpose over profit and that those 2 things can go very hand in hand together, the better off everybody's gonna be.

Well, 100% resonate with that because I know that when I went for profit, uh, above other things, they all, everything else suffered, including my family as well as the business. And eventually the business collapsed on itself. But when I learned to figure out what the purpose was, and the purpose for me ended up being not just building my companies, but helping others succeed, And giving more than I took, the reciprocal is more people wanted to give, right? They want to work with people who help, and it's a better way of receiving. And something came to me a second ago, and I realized this wasn't specifically what you were saying, but the phrase cashback is basically the same in the world of e-commerce. When they say like, we're gonna give you cashback, it's like, well, you took it, but now you're giving it back.

What if you just didn't take it in the first place? Thank you so much for giving it right back to me. Cashback.

It's kind of this— yeah, it's a similar type of phrase and concept. I think that if people look, just change that intention, right? I think the words change the meaning very intently. If it's, we're going to take that money and invest it in something that we both agree is mutually wonderful. Every dollar of this outdoor product goes to planting a tree. Every baby monitor goes to stopping SIDS or something, right? It's about purpose. I think it's a fantastic answer. And it's your answer, and that's all that matters. That's all I was asking for. Everybody else can get their 9,000 opinions in some other way. But I understand that's a very good purpose. You are selling the product now, if I heard you correctly.

Yes. So in June of '24, depending on when this episode ends, so here I won't say how many weeks ago, but in June of '24, we officially launched our preorder. And the response has been fantastic. In a very short period of time of launching our preorder, we already surpassed my first year of business in tourism in Maine. So An exciting launch in preorders, especially because preorders can be very tricky depending on the nature of the product. And it just says that parents want something better. We've got first-time parents that are buying it in preorder for when their child's born shortly. And we've got second, third, fourth-time parents that are saying, I don't like the product that I have, and I'm so excited for something better here. And we are shipping our first units to customers here in the middle of June. So huge milestones in the month of June to kick off preorders, shipping the first units, and we'll be shipping more units over the course of the summer as they come off the production line.

Did you do a regular product launch? Did you do like a GoFundMe kind of thing and build up a product base, or did you launch an email list?

How did you launch your product?

I guess is the simplest question.

In late February, we, late February of '24, we launched a waitlist campaign and it was, you pay to reserve your spot in line. And that was a great way for us to begin to get our name out there, begin to interact with folks because if you build it, they will come is, is really not true, especially in the world of e-commerce. You, you have to be at it every day. You gotta tell 'em who you are, tell 'em again, show 'em, come back again. And so we have been building an awareness campaign over the course of the last few months, which has enabled us to step into a successful commencement of the, the preorder. We didn't do any of the, I know Kickstarter has sort of become a verb, but Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, we had, we didn't do any of those because ultimately Ultimately, the caliber and the nature of the products that we are making, I didn't want anyone to feel like my money is going to go to develop that product. Like they're gonna go figure this out as long as I give them some money.

Yeah, that's a smart way to do it. Kevin, I appreciate you coming on and sharing some good work with me today, man.

Ask you this, if you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable and how to successfully launch a brand, plus how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us? If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. And I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click get started. And book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders podcast.