Melissa Bernstein's Journey to a $950M Brand

We're all creative deep inside. It's just a matter of not letting our own constraints limit it and having the courage to allow it to flow and not worried about sort of what people would think.

Our guest today is an entrepreneur, a creative and a working mother of six. Imagine that, six children. And in 1988, Melissa and her husband Doug co founded Melissa and Doug out of their parents garage. And over the years they built it into a global brand having over 1200 employees. Now Melissa spent the last 30 years helping children discover themselves, their passions and their purpose through open ended play, including my own children. We've been a user of her amazing products and in 2020 she co founded Lifelines. In this new venture, she is using her unparalleled creativity and imagination to reinvent well being products and help adults relieve stress through their senses. Absolutely incredible. Welcome to the show. Melissa Bernstein. So happy to have you with us today.

I am looking forward to this conversation so much.

Now we, we talked before we hit the record button a little bit about this, this incredible experience of launching a company in your parents garage and you know, growing it into this amazing thing over a 30 year time frame. Not too many people can share a story like yours. When you reflect back and you go back to those beginning days and having an idea to start a product and you know, needing a workshop and what have you. So, so how did, what was the initial challenges that you and your husband had in even just getting started?

Well, honestly there weren't any challenges we didn't face. And I would say, you know, when you were saying like reliving the years, you know, I wanted to think of some glorious like uplifting adjectives, but all I could think of was grueling the word that came to mind because you know, being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is the hardest job you will ever have. And not that there aren't like exhilarating moments, but I coined a word that kind of explains entrepreneurship in its essence and it's exhilifying, which is the combination of exhilarating and terrifying. And I would have to say that every moment of this journey has been utterly exhilifying.

I love it. That's a great term. I'm going to start using it now. I mean, and I'll make sure to give credit where credit is due.

You don't have to, I say live life exhilified because you want to live at that sort of point where your exhilaration is just a slight bit more than your terror because that will give you still the Impetus to do the things. Whereas if your terror exceeds your exhilaration, that's going to be a problem.

Makes sense. Makes sense. And so, you know, you, you, where did the idea even come from to, you know, how did, through discussions, you guys decided, you, let's, let's, let's start doing this thing and get, you know, we need a place to do it. We're going to start the parents grid. Like where did the discussions even begin?

Yeah, I think that the great thing to know is that most of these things don't start too loftily. Right. Basically, you know, Doug and I out of college really followed very conventional paths because back in the day, the 1980s, the late 1980s, people didn't start companies like it was not like the word unicorn didn't exist and you didn't form companies. You actually got a job at a big company and basically were supposed to stay there your entire career, which is like unheard of today. But that's what we did. And we never thought about doing something on our own until we were both incredibly miserable. I mean, I was literally like a flower without sunlight and water. I was shriveled up and wasting away and almost couldn't get out of bed each day. So basically we had no idea what we were going to do. We went away for this fateful weekend to a bed and breakfast in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. And we basically said, we're not leaving, we're not coming home until we figure out what we want to do because we can't stay where we are any longer. And we started brainstorming and we very quickly honed in on children because we knew we wanted something that was meaningful enough that we could potentially impact. Right. Something measurable in life. And we thought if we could somehow touch a child in a deep way, then that could make us want to get out of bed each day. So we quickly honed in on children, but then it was about what are we going to do with children? We didn't have any drugged ideas. And we really, like most people do, we brainstorm, we wrote down like a lot of ideas and we finally just picked one. Wasn't like it was any better than the others, but we just picked this idea of children's products, sort of these open ended products that had the capacity to spark imagination.

That's amazing. And I mean really, it sounds like the driver of all this simply had to be the discontent that you have with your existing life experience and, and that desire for change. You know, there's a saying that change will only happen when the desire for, for staying this or the, the, the, the, the fear, the, the pain of staying the same is more than the pain of change. And then you just start to make that transition. It sounds like you were both at that point, and the fact that you committed to the process together, say, we got to figure this out is, I think, really telling. And that's a good lesson for our listeners to take away from. And so you, you, you decided that you were going to come up with a product, and you had to then figure out, how do we figure out this product is even marketable? So, so what was the next iteration of that? How did you go from creating the first thing to seeing who even wants it?

Yeah, and I will just add to what you said by saying we're no different than anyone else. Our only difference is that we acted upon our thoughts, right? We said, we're miserable. We don't want to lead a life that in the end we say wasn't a life of our own, wasn't meaningful, was following someone else's path. We didn't want to have that regret on, you know, our deathbed. So we just said, we're going to do it, and we don't really know what we're doing. We have no idea, but we're going to do do it anyway. And basically, you know, we started creating a product and putting everything we had, including our meager life savings, into this product. And that's the way we worked. Right. It's trial and error. And the only way you move is by engaging in trial with the information you have at the moment, putting it out there, gaining information from your target market, and then applying that to your product and either changing it or getting rid of it or trying a new product. And by doing that maybe a thousand times, we gradually started, you know, moving forward.

Amazing, amazing. And I imagine you needed some, some initial guinea pigs to test out the early products. And so did you kind of wrestle, you know, just head to a nearby playground? Did you wrestle together friends and family who had kids of a certain age? You know, how did you start initially kind of getting their feedback to be able to iterate and start to change the product design to get it to a point where it was now starting to be, you know, more. More acceptable for people to utilize?

It's a great question. And if you ask people what allowed us to continue to grow for 30 years at Melissa and Doug, they will say it's because we asked for feedback. We really wanted to hear the critical feedback, and we took that feedback and changed our products because of it. And the truth was we never had an ego about our products because all we wanted was for them to resonate with our audience. And we knew that if we had an ego and we held to our firmly, you know, our firm beliefs and they didn't resonate, then we weren't going to sell any of them. So yes, we always had numerous groups weighing in on that. We had our retailers right because they were the ones we always sold through retail stores. There wasn't the Internet back then when we started, so we had to sell through stores and we loved that. So they always weighed in our products. In fact, we started something really creative at the beginning of Melissa and Doug. At our large trade shows. We would do surveys on all our new products and we would ask our salespeople when they went around showing our retailers the new products, they would ask them, what exactly do you think? Like what do you really think? Is this good as is? Does it need enhancements? What are those enhancements? What do you think of the price point? And once the retailers saw that we actually cared about their honest feedback, this wasn't just a like lip service. Oh boy, were they honest. They were too honest. And we would collect that feedback every single night. That the salespeople would literally fill out a four or five page survey based on their retailers feedback, not their own. They had another opportunity to do that. And then I would at the end of the show because these shows were usually like four days I'd pour through, you know, a hundred of these surveys and that really gave me my marching orders. But through that I knew which products were good to go as well as was, which were going to go forward but needed, wow, some pretty big changes and which were like sort of going out to pasture, sad to say. And there were always A, B and C. Based on that feedback and my own gut intuition alone, it was really a combination.

That's amazing. And I mean really, that's one of the early innovations that you created on just helping your business scale and get more focused in, in your niche and getting very clear. The brutal, the brutality of the honesty that you receive from your suppliers. Although that could be crushing for some individuals, the reality is it's the fuel that you needed to be able to implement the change.

And what you realize over time is they actually are just being honest, they want to help you. Like very rarely do people give feedback just to crush your dreams. Usually they are thinking about the product as a user, as a consumer. And our retailers really weren't thinking about it. As consumers. And they were saying like, this doesn't look good, like it doesn't look appealing, you know, and they say it like that. They'd say like, why did you do these colors? It looks awful. And it was like when it's your baby and you pick the colors, you're like, gulp. Because I thought they would be good colors. But it's really refreshing when you can detach yourself from your ego and really take it as just helpful. But then, you know, then there's a whole other skill which is understanding your concepts so deeply and having it resonate so much with who you are that you're able to distill through the feedback and pick those pieces that are important and get rid of so much of it that actually isn't true for you for what you believe and is irrelevant. And that's one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs. A lot of times what happens is their own feeling about the product, like sways and changes based too much on what other people think and they lose their compass and they lose the integrity that was originally in the product. And that can be really scary. Then they, they make their product into something that they think people want and they lose their own ethos and it, it ends up failing because of that.

Amazing. Well, and after these important messages we'll learn more about the continued growth of the this incredible company.

In the year 2009, my life completely and totally changed. Something momentous and incredible happened to me. That thing was this incredible book, becoming your own banker.

It was written by my mentor, an.

Amazing friend of mine, R. Nelson Nash. It completely revolutionized and changed my entire life. You can learn all about it by registering for a free on Demand webinar@learnibc.com Take the initiative.

You won't regret it. We are back with Melissa talking about this incredible growing company that they've created, they've launched, they're having success at trade shows and of course, you know, technology is moving forward and your business was, was starting to grow and really develop as the Internet was becoming even popular. And so going through the 90s and as we move later into this dot com bubble scenario, what were some of the things that you guys started to see as the technology began to shift While you were in a physical product based business, what were some of the ways that you began to see how you could leverage or implement technology in your own business?

Well, I have to say one thing. That's actually the name of one of our two dogs. Her name is Amazon prime and we call her Maisie because Amazon changed our business more than probably anything ever did in our 30 plus years. You know, we knew them as this small little bookstore that was selling some products in this weird, like on the web. And we sort of got on them early on. In fact, this is a crazy fact. We were the very first toy on Amazon in 1999.

Amazing.

So we were the very first toy and we literally basically were on the tail of that rocket ship. And what happened on Amazon, which was really fascinating, is if you had a great product, right, that people would review positively, it was the greatest thing ever. It was like we say, we can't believe they paid us to give us hundreds of thousands of incredible reviews. That became really the integrity and the trust for our brand. And by the way, we didn't pay a cent for it. You know, they paid us for it today to get that same thing. You would be paying a lot to cut through the clutter. And that really helped to build our brand probably more than anything, because suddenly. So before the Internet, I created many what I call mysteries in a box, right? They were products that were in a box and you couldn't tell what they were. You had to have a retailer literally explain them to the, the customer or they wouldn't sell. And the retailers unfortunately never quite explain them to the extent that I wanted them to. And many of my, what I believed to be my very best products did terribly and failed because they were mysteries in a box. But suddenly with the Internet, you can do like this incredible thing that was never before able to be done. You can not only take a photo of what it looks like inside the box, but you can do on video and you can show, like, how kids use it and how they play with it. And it's a game. It was a game changer because suddenly products that were really hard to understand and describe could come to life over the Internet. So I'd say it changed our business dramatically through that.

That's amazing. And so, you know, 1999 and even just reflecting back, trying to remember what Amazon was even like at that stage, and they were. It was such a new thing still. Again, it was all about books. It wasn't a lot of other products. So being one of those first products, whereas now everybody's got Amazon, you know, I'm pretty sure, I'm sure there's a delivery that showed up today at my house. I have no doubt.

And it's part of daily life.

Yeah, it's become.

Can't imagine life without it today. And yeah, we were in it when we were like what, they want to carry our toys. What does that mean?

Yeah, what's interesting a couple things is you talked a lot about just how tremendously powerful those user reviews were. And what comes up for me is the ability that the technology allowed for the customer to have a little bit of ownership on the direct response and the feedback to a product that you never could really properly get from a retailer. It was always like the game of telephone. You might find out something about what the, you know, what customers were saying, but usually it was only if they returned a product or, you know, or if the product wasn't selling through. And you're really trying to imagine what's the customer's experience, but the only way you can tell is if they're placing an order for more product. Really that, oh, customers must be okay because it's selling through.

Exactly. It also allowed a lot of mediocre products to make it, to be honest with you, because you really want weren't able to complain if you had an issue with a product. So on the good and the bad, it helped a lot of kind of weak products stay afloat. And we loved it because we felt like that was the great equalizer. Suddenly, like, if you have issues with your product, if you have issues with your customer service, if you have issues with anything related to your product, it's gonna come out. And for us, you know, a company that works so hard to make, like, our quality, as good as it can be, our relationships as good as they could be, our customer care, as good as it could be, you know, it was truly a game changer for us. It really allowed us to get kind of the credit that we had never really gotten without it. So, yeah, I think changed our business. Now it also changed business to the negative because it took business away. So our primary mode of distribution for the first, about, gosh, 15 years of our business were these small, independent specialty toy stores, you know, that existed across the whole world. And the Internet really hurt them because suddenly, right. You didn't have to go to your local toy store to get that gift. You could get prime on Amazon and get it like the next day. So we saw there was a, a negative to it as well, of course, in really hurting a lot of those specialty stores. And we saw major attrition in the number of stores over the years when Amazon was really growing at Amazon and other websites too, of course.

Right. So you, so you, you saw it was a balancing act between sales going out the door, you know, as a direct reseller and sale order volume Declining from your major consumers.

Definitely.

There were some months where you were, you were way up and some months where you were the. The gap where you would expect a reorder to come through and it just wasn't coming.

Yeah, the independents were devastated. It really started to have a major impact on their sales. And, you know, at the beginning they said, oh, we're going to carry stuff that Amazon doesn't have. But then it be Amazon became, you know, the everything store. So it was very hard to have anything they didn't have. So they had to really, again, it was about digging deep and thinking, how can we create an experiential retailing, you know, sort of neck up where people want to come and spend time in our store. And it became those who really wanted to work harder wasn't as easy anymore. Those were the ones that survived and the ones that kind of were just sort of slacking. They didn't make it.

Amazing. Well, and you talked a little bit, you know, before we were recording about launching one product or a product line or a category and then trying to expand that. And so there's some hurdles involved in that process as well, because you're testing out new products. You talked about always testing. So what, what's something that you would want? You know, someone who's an entrepreneur and they're looking at maybe they've got an invention or they've got a line of products, they're looking to expand it in some way. What are some of the hurdles and challenges you had to overcome that you think would be a good thing for them to understand and to really look at it from the vantage point of someone who's gone through it all. Sure.

So I think the thing I see the most often, because I mentor tons of entrepreneurs, we have an entrepreneurs program at Duke University, and I mentor so many young entrepreneurs, I see them trying to expand before they actually have something that's really hot. If you have something that needs to be expanded, you are going to know to the extent where you're going to be like, oh my gosh, we have an incredible hit on our hands. You know, many think of expanding before. I'm like, how's your product doing? Well, I don't know. It just came out. Then don't expand. And also before you expand, squeeze all the goodness you can out of that one product. I mean, expansion takes resources and, you know, focus and things that you don't want to give until you squeezed all the juice you can out of that one item. And I'll give you an example from our new company, Lifelines. So we introduced about, I don't know, 30 products, right, about a year ago. And I am a huge fan of data. Like, I'm a data driven designer because the data is so rich and it gives you so many clues. And basically a product designer is going to plant a whole bunch of seeds, right? They're going to make the conditions perfect for them to grow. They're going to give them fertilizer, they're going to water them, they're going to give them sunlight. And then you wait, right? You put it out there in the market and you wait. And then the consumers speak. And that's the most powerful moment, right? They're in their hands. They're telling you what they think. And it's always honest. When it comes to spending hard earned money on a product, they are going to spend it on things they want and not spend it on things they don't. So it's brutal. And that data is your marching orders. So with our new products, we had a lot of things that were okay, but we had one category and it wasn't really even category. It was like two, two items that were head and shoulders above the rest. I mean, like, whoa, what is going on? And that's what you're looking for. You're looking for the bumper crop, right? The crop. You, you know, the tomatoes are just okay. The carrots aren't growing at all. You're kicking the dirt. But the cucumbers, oh my gosh. Like, what happened here? And that's what happened. We started to see that this writing category was like taking off in a way that we were kind of surprised about, to be honest. We thought other things would do a lot better than they didn't. So we said, let's divert. Let's put these other items in these other categories on hold. Let's focus on writing and build that into an entire category from just a couple products. And that's what we're doing now. Like, we're, we're growing the writing category at the detriment of some others that were just kind of keeping as is. So I would say don't fall into the pattern of expanding before you have distributed your one item everywhere it can go, before you've done the simple things like create a multi pack. Create, you know, taking that one item and just like simply adding to it and expanding it before you go and create an entirely new item, right?

So, so go from a product to a product with a product bonus type situation. Look, look at how you can repackage that product in a few different ways to add additional value to a new customer or a repeat customer.

Essentially, they always say, make it bigger, make it smaller. Add some, you know, like, think about all the simple things you can do to aggrandize it before you are, like, let's create an entirely new item with new tooling and new R and D, because that's gonna, you know, that's gonna take a lot more resources and a lot more energy to sell and market and do all those other things, too.

Yeah. Amazing. That's absolutely phenomenal advice. 100%. Well, with that in mind, we're gonna come back and hear more from Melissa's incredible journey. Okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this.

Thing called the Colby A Index.

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How do I get information about this.

Thing, and why is it so important?

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So how exactly does getting focused on a mission, a mission of how you want to go out and serve and help other people, really inspire innovation in your. In your career and your business? And so, Melissa, I think you've got some great topics around that. You, you've done a lot of self work, you've done a lot of discovery, and you are really focused on making a real impact. You've already done that in the past with the Melissa and Doug toys. You were really caught by this idea of helping impacting children in a positive way, and you've redirected that energy now to a bit of a new focus. So talk to me a little bit about what that process has been like for you.

Sure. Yeah. I'm a big proponent of not sort of thinking, I need to have an idea. I need to be an entrepreneur and searching for that idea. I think the idea is the byproduct of a mission and a vision that sort of latches onto you and won't let go. And I really think of it as latching and sinking its teeth into you and not letting go, because that's what has happened to me. Now twice. Only twice, but each time, you know, the mission for Melissa and Doug was really sort of this idea that kids need open ended play. And that open ended play is a catalyst to unleashing the power of the imagination and, and allowing a child to discover their passion and purpose. And it was deep and it lasted, you know, until now. I believe in that mission ever so strongly. And when you have a strong mission, then the innovation to me is easy. It's an outcome of that mission. And that mission is your litmus test. Right. And your North Star every single day. And then with Lifelines, I wasn't planning on starting another consumer products company. In fact, it was the last thing on my mind and the last thing I wanted to, to do. But in my own well being journey to really my, my. I had a problem to solve my whole life, which was how do I untether from my thoughts? Because my thoughts occupy me to such an extent and get me in this rumination loop that I can't be free. I can't just enjoy my life. And that was my problem to solve for my whole life. And I realized one day in going through my whole journey that my senses were actually this incredible portal to well being. And if I could sort of immerse my senses in delightful stimuli, it was an immediate interruption of my stress response and in a, in an activation of calm and joy. And when I started doing it as part of my practice and realizing like, wait a second, I've tried everything. I've tried meditation, I've tried yoga, I've tried breath work. And this is the first thing that like is innate in me and really has worked. I was like, oh my gosh, I have to spread this far and wide. And it started again, not even with the products, by just spreading the mission of sensory immersion and writing a practice for myself. And then as I went further and created my own practice, I realized, you know, I need tools. Like I need something concrete to help me ground myself when I'm in, let's say, you know, having a conversation with someone. And by the way, I'm using one of my tools right now. It's a grounding stone that I hold when I'm doing anything that sort of could get me a little bit unsettled. And it's just my, my, it smells, has one of my favorite scents in it. And before I just grab myself and it's this incredible daily tool to help me through the ups and downs of life. So my products are always an outgrowth of a mission that I don't search for. I'm not out there, like, let me find the next mission. It finds me through my curiosity, engaging in life experience and just collecting sort of tons of life ingredients.

Yeah, I think that's very interesting and that you're got one of the products with you. Of course, I. It may not be one of those, but I do have a stone with me as well. I've got a couple here having some things of that nature. And you know, it's interesting because you mentioned using a tool and really that the impetus of this was creating a tool that would support you in what you'd already discovered was working. And he's like, well, how can I just double down on that activity fundamentally? And then you naturally, because of it, you basically find a market. Well, if that's good for me, there's probably other people kind of like me, so we should test that out. And then that's sort of how the steamroll begins to transpire.

Actually, what happens in both my cases is you have a. Like, huh. I wonder if there are tools that allow me to sort of immerse my senses and you go out there to search for them for yourself. Like, I wasn't trying to create products. I wanted to just byproducts, just like with open end to play. Are there toys out there that do what I'm imagining I want them to do? And when you go out there and find that, nope, they don't exist, or if they do exist, they're dull, boring, lackluster, too expensive, not well designed, you know, innumerable issues with them. That's when of course, my mind goes to, oh, no, I think there's an opportunity. And that's where you see the white space, the gap in the market. Right. The. The solution that you can provide. And it's only then, in my humble opinion, that you should embark on an entrepreneurial journey. Too many people start on that path before they really have something of significance and needy. And I sometimes have to say to them, like, sorry, sweetie, I don't think that's it. Like work a regular job or join someone else's beautiful mission that you support until you really have something that has enough meat to sink your teeth into it. Because otherwise it's not. You're not gonna. You're not gonna get the sales that you need to support yourself. And it's hard for them to hear that. But I think contrived products and contrived missions never, never get too far.

That makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, you, you know, with the New endeavor. Obviously, you've launched a number of different products, and you've. You've indicated you've put kind of some on the back burner somewhat. You know, the writing category seems to be extremely popular. How do you find that that is supporting people? What is it about those products that you're getting feedback on that's saying, now this is really, you know, kind of doing it for. For the consumer that's really helping them create the vision that you have in your mind of what you were hoping it would do?

Yeah, I think, you know, it's fascinating. In all my years of product development, I have something that I call the tree of familiarity. I live in metaphor because I see things in my head with products, too. So, you know, consumers, unfortunately, initially want things that are very familiar to them because that's how they trust a brand. Things that are too wacky or weird or mysteries in a box, they have a hard time trusting initially. So the best products, actually are the most familiar with some really cool twists that just give that element of like, whoa, I know what this is, but that is super cool. And I realized that's what writing was like. I have a lot of products, even these grounding stones, like, to me, these are a lot cooler than writing. But people don't understand what they are because they're a little harder to, like, visualize and understand in a box. So the writing just filled that perfect sort of that. That perfect box of. They get what it is. They use it on a daily basis, and we've elevated it and added these enhancements to the extent that it's very different than anything they've used before. So I think that's why it resonates, because it's a pen that writes beautifully or a colored pencil that writes beautifully, but it has these intoxicating, elevated scents that are very different than other scents on the market. Right. So it's. It's, you know, it's giving them a. A enhanced experience, but something they're already familiar with using. And that's where you have to start. And do. I like that as much as some of my wackier ideas that are completely away from the tree of familiarity. And I call it into the Meadow. Like, where it's just free white space. No, I like. I want to create wacky, weird stuff, but you got to start. You gotta. You gotta start and then gently, like, lead them away. You can stop hugging the tree. You can come out of the meadow now. You know, it's safe.

That is a very good metaphor. I love that. I think it's fantastic. Well, and it's. It's so interesting how, you know, you. I think it sounds to me like you're experience of design and having so much practice at that. You know, there's. There's things that we are naturally good, instinctually good at. You know, the. The Colby index is a good way to determine what that looks like. But then there's, of course, the skill sets that we get from learned experience. It's all the things that we develop as a skill, design being something that maybe you are naturally gifted at, but we're really able to hone your craft to a degree, to understand not only how you might be able to get a product made and move it from concept into reality, but to also just get. Explore the experience of designing in the first place. And. And what would you chalk that up to for you? Is it how much of that was something that you've always done versus something that you found yourself in a position that you just became really good at?

Wow. I would say it's probably a combination. You know, I've always been creative since, like, the. My first breath, but I think I didn't know that that creativity could channel into so many different areas. You know, I think I thought early on that it was just able to sort of channel into really dark things that nobody would ever appreciate or I'd be able to share. And I think knowing that it could channel kind of like, into any area that I chose to let it channel into was like an amazingly incredible epiphany. So I think, you know, I think we can all hone it, and I think, you know, we're all creative deep inside. It's just a matter of not letting our own sort of our own constraints limit it and having the courage to allow it to flow and not worried about sort of what people will think. I think a lot of it is the fear of what people will think. And I think one of the things I've learned over the years is to really trust my intuition. You know, as I've aged, I've really learned that intuition is critical because it's our only. It's our instinct. Right. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's the best guide that I have personally. And it's going to be better than some person, you know, who doesn't understand what I'm doing. So I had to learn that, despite sometimes what other people say, even on my team, every day, you know, my team is weighing in on things and saying, I think we should do that, and I think we should do this. And sometimes I'm like, yes, I agree. But other times, my intuition's like, I don't think that's the right move. And I can't really say why. Right.

I can't.

I mean, I could say I think it's not the right move because of this, but I can't know the result of my decision. But I just go with that. And I don't look back. And I think that's one of the things that I try to teach my entrepreneurs, is to learn how to trust their intuition. And there's a whole way to do that. You know, it's. It's. It's a skill like any other skill that can be honed over time.

Amazing. Well, we'll talk more about some of your incredible skills when we come back after this special commercial. Have you ever wanted to be a.

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We are back here with Melissa, and what an incredible journey, growing a company, being married to someone who's running the company with you, having six kids, trying to figure out how all that works. It's momentous. There's a lot of activity. I have two kids, and I still wonder how the heck we're figuring it all out. And so I'm really curious, and I think I would love to just hear from your vantage point, what were some of the things that you believe helped you and Doug become successful as partners, as business partners? And what were some of the separations that you were able to put in place or maybe you felt you figured out over time between the business life, the business world, and your own relationship, while also parenting at the same degree? So how would you suggest someone figures their way through that crazy environment?

So I'll start by by saying how we could even work together. Because the truth is, we're both incredibly strong, dogmatic people. Like, we're not. We're both type A plus plus, plus plus plus. And very opinionated in our, you know, areas.

It's easy to get dug in once you've got your mindset on something.

Yeah, we're.

We're.

We both. We both feel very strongly. So I think we just were fortunate. Right. I don't know if you call it karma or just good vibes. You know, if you think about your venture as a pie, again, I use a lot of metaphors and all the slices of the pie being the necessary components to build a successful venture. It so happens that Doug and I are each one different half of the pie. And what I've learned in my own experience in mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs is when businesses do not work, it's because the partners are in the same slices of the pie. And when that happens, there's no autonomy, there's no trust. They're fighting over the same decisions, and nothing gets done. It's actually awful. In fact, my own son had a business with someone, and they were in the same slices of the pie, and it didn't work. Like, it's almost an immediate. Like, this won't work. So we were very fortunate that his. I call them passions. His passions and talents were very different than mine. And, you know, he could do probably some of mine and I could probably do some of his, but they're not our passions. So I was very happy to have him be one side of the pie, and he was very happy to allow me to be the other. And we trusted each other. We'd come together whenever we had, like, Doug, I need to ask you this. Melissa, I need to ask you this. But we really didn't mess in each other's half of the pie. And I'm really seeing it clearly with Lifelines. You know, we did it 35 years ago, but now I'm seeing it so much more clearly because I understand it and I have the visual metaphor for it. Like, it's working so well now because his skills, like, I'm really appreciating them. They're things that, first of all, I could. I couldn't do and I would despise doing. And, you know, the things I'm doing, he say, same thing. So I would say that it's very critical if you're going to partner with someone you live with, that you're doing different things. In fact, we ultimately were on different floors of our building. You know, we ate Lunch together every single day. And we enjoyed it, coming together, but we weren't. Like, when we started, we shared a desk. We literally sat. I sat on one side of a desk because we could only afford one desk, and he sat on the other side so our feet didn't touch. But by the time, you know, we. We ended, we were, you know, on different floors, and that was really healthy. It was almost like we were at different companies doing different things, and we could share with each other our days.

It gave you a lot of things to communicate about because you weren't all talking about the exact same thing all the time. And that. That makes a ton of sense. And so when you, you know, raising kids while both. Both of you working, what do you think would the experience be, you know, your vantage point from your kids on them seeing mom and dad going to the same office building, working the same company, growing up in that environment, what are some of the things that you think they understood and took away from the experience of you guys being together in partnership?

It's a blurs, a blessing and a curse, right? There are good things about it, there are not good things about it. And I think part of being an entrepreneur and having kids and wanting to do both well is there's going to be sacrifice and there's going to be moments when you're giving more to your business, because that's a child, too. You know, I sometimes I would say to them, like, like, unfortunately, I had Melissa and Doug before I had you. Like, it was my first child, and it was every bit a child, and I was touching so many other children that I felt a profound obligation and responsibility to it that, like, was every bit as strong as my mother. You know, I was a mother to that as well. So I think that did take time away from them, no doubt, sometimes more than others. So that's the curse of it. And my kids would sometimes say, why can't you be the art smart mom? You know, the mom that's volunteering in the classroom? And I couldn't do a lot of things that, you know, regular moms did because I was really busy. However, you know, the positive is I certainly gave my four daughters and two sons, I certainly gave them the role model that they can have it all and do it all and that they should have aspirations and work to follow their dream, and you can have a dream and work hard to make it a reality. So I think they saw that, you know, we still worked really hard even after we were quote, unquote, successful. Like, we went to the office, you know, before sort of offices didn't exist, but we went to the office every single day and worked long hours and had trade shows on weekends even after, you know, 25 years when we could have been sitting back. So we were always until the very end, because we. We sold our company in the beginning of this year, but until the very end, we were working, you know, just as hard and cared just as much. So I'm hoping that work ethic and that tenacity to bear through a lot of hard times, you know, we're off on them a bit.

Yeah, I imagine that is definitely the case. And so, you know, you mentioned selling the company, of course, basically 30. 30 years and building and all the energy, all the effort.

35 years.

35 years. I mean, it's incredible the. The. The time vested. What. What was that experience like for you? And, you know, there's. We've had a number of other people we've entered on the show who've discussed exits that they've had as well. You know, what are some things that you think that people should be aware of and know if they're thinking or considering an exit? And from your vantage point, what. What worked out really well in the exit process and what are some things you might consider doing differently?

Yeah, it's an amazing question. I think, you know, everybody has their own answer, right. So I think, you know, the positive of an exit is you get to be free again to try something entirely new, like the thought that I am doing it again. And with Doug, you know, a new company and creating products in an entirely new category in an entirely different time, where digital is the way versus digital not even existing is unfathomable. And it's really like I was kind of released from, in a way, a prison created by myself of what I thought was entrepreneurial, but had long lost its entrepreneurial excitement. So that's a gift, and I now see it truly as a gift, you know, but the negative is that we sort of lost the legacy. Right. You know, and I think when we started, we thought, oh, my gosh, our kids will work there, and this will be generations of the same employees, kids. And we'll, you know, we'll leave this as a treasure to the next generation. And although it is exist, it does exist in. In its, you know, in its brand and everything. It's not the same, obviously, without the founders there, you know, at the helm, like, championing the mission every single day. So I think there was quite a bit of grief in that and, you know, decisions we made leading to that. Like, should we have made those decisions? Should we have not? But the truth is, the good news also about Doug and I, is we're not ones for regret. You know, we had a little bit where we're like, oh, I don't know if we should have made those decisions, but we did, and they were ours, and we could have chose to make different decisions and they ended where they did. So we were kind of like, let's make the most of this and, and prove that we can do it again. And. And that's what we're doing. And I think that's also a very good example for our kids, to be honest with you. Like, we're not riding on the coattails of Melissa and Doug after 35 years and sort of we're like, doing this again when, you know, we could be just like, blazing on a beach somewhere, which we would never do, because that's not who we are.

Well, I think that's an important distinction, is recognizing that you know who you both are and that you have drive, that a type personality, that determination and the desire to do something new and fresh and to help more people so that being latched onto by a mission, it's a powerful inspiration and driver. It's a. It's a major force in people's lives if they are able to have that latching feeling occur.

So the fact, my humble opinion is if you don't have it occur, do not go the path. Because, you know, I will say, people said to us, like, oh, you've done it already. It's going to be really easy the second time. This has been harder, I repeat, harder than Melissa and Doug. The market is so difficult today to find your way through it, and it's really like, we definitely second guess our decision quite often. So you have to believe so firmly in what you're doing, and it has to be such a beacon for you in a shining light that you want to continue the fight, even though every sign is telling you, like, give up and cut, cut it quits.

Well, it sounds to me like you. You've been inspired and you are forging ahead regardless of what's going on. And so the fact that you've been able to share your journey with us, so, so blessed to be able to have you on the program. And the takeaways, I think for anyone watching is going to be profound. And I just want to also say, Melissa, I appreciate the role model that you play for female entrepreneurs and going through your journey to. I think it's fantastic. I have a daughter. She's seven years old. And so you'll be one of the people I think she'll have as a role model going forward. If she decides to be inspired by something, she'll know that she, too, can do it. And so for that, I appreciate and I thank you and for being able to have used your amazing products while we were raising our children, I will also say thank you for that as well. And that in mind, thanks so much for being on the program today.

I love it. And I have a sweet spot for for female entrepreneurs. So I hope to be talking to her one day about her own venture.

Amazing. Till next time. Everyone else, join us next week where we continue to unpack and explore the amazing journeys of entrepreneurs and how they are overcoming challenges and finding new and exciting ways to innovate into the future.