Scott Duffy interviewinf Dan Fleyshman: How To Build A Global Business Empire

Hi, everybody. I'm Alan Taylor and this is Microsoft Launch, the program we're celebrating, National Entrepreneurship Week, presented by Microsoft, of course, Scott Duffy here. He is the author of the book Launch. And this is all about helping you folks that want to get into business or already are in business. You can follow us at msftlaunch. So our guest today is Dan Fleischman. He is the founder and CEO of FirstSeason Slice Media. They're the makers of Hoverboard. Amongst a lot of products that they make, he's the youngest owner of a publicly traded company ever. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So, Scott, I know that you have a relationship here with Dan, and I'm looking at some of the things that he's done in his lifetime. And you're a young dude for doing as much as what's on your plate. And I love First Slice Media. Like you said, like a slice of pizza. How did you get into all this?

So I'm young because I got started early. So I actually trademarked the catchphrase, who's your daddy? Back when I was 2.

I love this. Back when I was 17 years old, we trademarked it for 300 products. The main one was clothing and energy drinks. By the time we were 18, we had done a nine and a half million dollar licensing deal with starter apparel. Thank gosh. Because we went through a lot of roller coasters being young entrepreneurs. We kept getting that check every quarter to help fight through the punches. When we were 22, we started working on the energy drink under the same name, who's your Daddy? And by 23, we were selling into 55,000 retail stores. So I was just traveling the planet, meeting with chain stores and distributors and everybody in between to get us in convenience stores and Costco, et cetera. So I did that company for 10 years until I was 27. On the 10 year anniversary date, I resigned so I could have another feather in my cap because I'd done the whole company my whole life. It felt like my whole life because I was 17 to 27. Wow. So I went on to start a poker site, an online poker site. And I picked up, put on my backpack and I moved to Malta in the middle of nowhere. What? Never even heard of Malta before. I just knew that's where I had to be for my gaming license. So I picked up and moved out there. Within eight months, we're the third biggest poker site in the world and we're off to the races. Wow.

When you say we, you keep Saying we.

Who's the we?

It was mostly me because it was me living and breathing it all. But it always takes a team to make things happen. I have a core, half a dozen people that are always helping me. The same guy, Mo has been building my website since I was a kid. My mom's helped me with all the accounting and processes. I have a certain core group that's my family essentially to help me with everything. My brother Leon does all the accounting. So it's just a core.

You're leading the charge, but it is a we. I get it.

Yeah, I'm the quarterback. But there's still a full team, right? Sure, sure. And then all of a sudden online poker gets shut down in America. Boom. I didn't get shut down, but I willingly shut down because I was all of a sudden number one in the world. I didn't want to be number one because the other guys got shut down for bad things. So I went and made it very, very public and I showed all my records and proved everything was great and did 82 interviews and ESPN everything. And all of a sudden I did so good that all these land based casinos started hiring me to consult for them. So then that's kind of one of these topics I talk about. Don't sit on the floor and cry about. It is when you have a major failure like that where even though it wasn't my own fault, it just got the company got shut down because everybody else got shut down. I went and turned that into a positive and started getting hired and getting paid way too much by these casinos to then teach them how to do things.

What I get out of this already is if you do a great job at whatever you do, the world will be the path to your door.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Wow, I love this. And such a young guy for all this.

Yeah, you're an angel Investor. I think 25 is in 25 companies. When you sit down with those entrepreneurs, what are the top pieces of advice that you can give them about launching and growing their companies?

Sure. I guess the main one is don't be afraid to ask. What happens is a lot of times they get in their own way and they get too proud and they don't realize that. If your father's friend is an accountant and you need help with accounting, ask him. Don't go searching yellow pages finding some other stranger as an accountant. If your dad's uncle's friend is blah, blah, blah, and he's a big angel investor, talk to him. If somebody else has already opened up four Restaurants. And you want to open a restaurant, ask him. There's no. You're not hurting anybody by asking for advice.

Did you ever have doubt, though? I mean, it seems like you just are like this fearless guy that never really learned how to doubt himself.

I think that's a big key to when you're running and you just keep running and you fall over. We just get up and keep running. And you don't sit on the floor and cry about why I fell. Just keep going. Because life is really short. I've lost a lot of people that have passed away, and I just realized how I feel. I'm young, but, man, I feel like I got a lot more to do and a lot of things to happen. Wow.

Well, listen, I want to get in your slipstream and follow you because it seems like you have this Midas touch, but I think also there's a certain innocence that I see. And, Scott, you and I deal with a lot of people from a lot of walks of life and business, but Dan here just seems like he has this innocence about him that, you know, it's just simple. Let's just do it.

Eight months ago, we were like, okay, let's start a media site. And then three weeks later, we had a media site. And then all of a sudden I just said, okay, well, what did that guy do? What does that website do? What does that website do? Let's just mimic them, put all these things together, make it better. And we won't write bad news. We're only going to write good news because we don't want to be talking about drama and gossip.

There's enough of people doing that in the world anyway.

Yes. And they're great at it. Yes, they are. And so we replicated what these guys were doing, made it the good version, got a lot of celebrities and influencers behind us. Now we've had 300 million page views in eight months.

Oh, my God.

Now we're one of the fastest growing sites in history because we just did it. You know, we saw what everybody else was doing right and wrong and made it.

Look at this guy. Look at him go. He's like the ever ready bunny.

One of the things I want to go back to is you mentioned being in business with your family. And we've spoken to people that have had good experiences being in business with their family, and some that kind of went sideways.

Sure.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs starting companies with their families?

So you have to lay things out in advance. The biggest problem in most relationships, whether it's with your girlfriend, with your business partner, with your family, is not knowing.

The expectations, lack of communication.

That communication is so critical. If you and I know we're gonna start a business together and we just start. And then one day I'm like, wait, I should have 80%. You should have 20. But we never said that. You just assume it's 50. 50. Right. We just started together. Even though I'm doing all the work and you're kind of doing it. If I would have told you ahead of time, you could have made that decision and it was all laid out. Even if it's a one pager, just lay it out. Even with your own family, you have to do that.

Yeah.

If you're going to say, hey, mom, I'm going to hire you for accounting, and hey, brother, I'm going to hire you to be my cfo, there starts to be very basic things in place. Otherwise, you're going to have a really, really tough time telling them, oh, I can't afford to pay you 80 bucks an hour when I thought I was paying you 20 bucks an hour. Right. Even if your rate's normally 80 bucks an hour. Hey, I'm your. I'm your son. Right. Do it for free. No, no. If you have to lay it out. If you think they're gonna do it for free, tell them that. If you think you're gonna pay them 20 bucks an hour, tell them that.

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

That's so critical.

I remember the first time I heard sow scope of work. I remember thinking to myself, scope of work.

Yeah.

Now I know what I'm gonna do. It's so simple. And it's like. It's such a beautiful little simple thing. It's just a communication tool.

Right.

One of the things that all of us as entrepreneurs face every day is kind of ups and downs, highs and lows, and sometimes. Sometimes things happen outside of our control as business owners that we have to adapt to, we have to respond to. And I know you've had an interesting experience with the hoverboards, and I was hoping that you could share with us a little bit about what you learned and how you attacked that problem head on.

Sure. So our company was called U Wheels with the letter U. And there was already a few hoverboards out there, and people were having a little bit of success. And I just noticed that nobody was really a business. Nobody had a real team behind them. So I went and got a key team together. I got guys that sold to retail chains. I got guys that know how to do production, manufacturing. We took in a huge round of funding, $10.2 million and we're gonna go make the biggest one when these other guys are just selling 500 here, 500 there. We were gonna be the big boys. So we did that. And I got 165 celebrities and influencers to post about us. Wow. All of a sudden we're doing 40 grand a day online sales just from Instagram. We were doing millions of dollars in retail. We're in chain stores, we're in Zumies, we're all these places, we're like, oh my God, this is fantastic. And all of a sudden our competitors, we find out, are using cheap batteries that are $13. Ours are $92 Samsung batteries. Those are 13 bucks. These cheap. Imagine trying to stand 180 pounds on a piece of equipment using a cell phone battery. What's going to happen? Of course it's going to, it's going to overreact. So we use these high end batteries. But the problem is our competitors, because they're using cheap batteries, started catching fire.

Now the public perception is everybody catches fire, right? You could put an elephant on mine and nothing's going to happen.

And most entrepreneurs at that point, with all the publicity and the negative press would just hide in the corner.

So instead of that, we went on the offensive. We actually made a video of the competitors board on fire, which got thousands and thousands of comments on ours. Because why would you post that on your own account when you've got a quarter million followers on a brand page? Why would you do that? We posted it. We put this long caption explaining what our battery is, our certification, what the battery number is, and explaining what they're doing wrong and why they're doing it. The press started coming to us. Amazon approved us, we started getting approved through customs. We're one of the only ones approved through customs. Out of the 40 or 50 whatever brands there are, there's only three or four of us now that are approved through customs, and especially us because we're shipping 9,000 units at a time. These other guys are shipping 500 and getting frozen and stuck at the customs because they won't get approved for their batteries. Ours do. So by going on the offensive, getting the right licenses, getting through and making friends with customers instead of trying to sneak it in like these guys were, they're trying to ship it in fake packaged boxes. And we're just doing everything proper and we're doing it very, very openly so that the brands and the chains are okay with it. That's why chain stores buy from us and not these other brands.

It's interesting. Crisis. Handling a crisis and going toward it. Of course, you had the confidence to go toward it because you knew that your product was superior and it was good. But that is such an important thing, is to deal with a crisis in a very strong way and to deal with your problems. You look at the airbag situation in the auto industry right now. The biggest recall in the history of the world, you might say, of the auto industry. But you guys are the company that make the good hoverboard. And that's a big message to get out. So you should go out with that message.

There was other companies that had good batteries and they're out of business because they got so defensive and nobody believed them.

They didn't deal with their crisis.

You are all about action. You're the kind of person that you don't talk about it, you just get about it. You just take action. And I think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are afraid to get started. They think it's going to cost too much or there's just too many. What would you say to those entrepreneurs?

Yeah, so what I say is don't talk about it, be about it. The reason for that line is everybody just talk, talk, talks. And your aunt has this idea for three years about this new little pet product she's going to do well, if she really wants to do it. Set up a website, trademark the name, open a bank account, do all the little basics that'll cost them under a thousand dollars and at least they'll have a business. They'll have a setup. They don't have to go spend 50 grand on this new company, but just start. If you never just start, which cost them zero to, let's say 8 or 900 bucks, that then that's never gonna happen. Right. They're just gonna keep talking for the next four years.

Do you have any regrets? Things that you would have done differently now, looking back, saying, gosh, I was only 17. Are you just full steam ahead?

Yeah, I never even thought about it. It's just full steam ahead because I know I can't.

So there aren't any then, which is great for you.

I know I've had failures. You're gonna have failures. Of course I don't expect them. I'm gonna have more failures. No matter how rich I get or how many businesses I have or what I invest, I'm going to have failures. Just part of it. I'm gonna learn a ton from them. And it's gonna help everybody else, because that's what I'm doing now. When I invest in all these companies, I'm just helping them fast forward their life. Because I know who not to use, I know what not to do, I know what not to waste time on. Know what not to spend all your money on, because I've lived and breathed it. I've gone through the roller coasters. I mean, I don't regret at all. If I didn't have online poker shutdowns or hoverboards on fire, I wouldn't have learned of what to do, how to adjust, how to build to the next thing. I wouldn't have gotten hired by those casinos to consult for them, which would have led me to my celebrity app. I would never have done that, which led me to my media site.

One door closes, another door opens.

Absolutely.

So you have this amazing mindset, and if you were going to pass anything on to an entrepreneur that is really struggling right now, they feel like they're stuck. Maybe they feel like they're in a bind they can't get out of. What's the one piece of advice that you give to them?

Sure. So there's a couple things. One, you have to be working, having a secondary income so you don't get into those binds. A lot of times they overextend themselves or they're like, I'm going to drop out of college and just start this, or I'm going to quit my job and just start this. Well, there's so many hours in the day that people could be working on their project before they make that leap. I don't recommend anybody quitting your job as a lawyer or real estate agent, and then your income goes to zero because you're not going to make money from your company the first year. I promise, no matter how good you do, no matter how good you do, if you make millions, you will not make millions personally. Because if you're smart, you're gonna reinvest it. So you have to have that secondary income. You have to stay focused on that. If you're in a rut or in a bind, get advice, get a mentor. Get somebody that's already been there to help guide you through. You're not supposed to go raise a bunch of money for your failing company. Don't go asking for loans to help put a band aid on it. You have to get advice, get yourself together, become an expert at what you're doing. Get hired to do that so you can become better at your own core.

Business I love it. And it comes back to ask. Ask.

That's right. That's right. A lot of entrepreneurs I speak to think that they need a whole bunch of money to start a business. I can't tell you how many people say, need a million dollars to get started.

Seriously.

Right. What's your opinion on that? When should you start?

I say start today. I don't say start today and then quit your job or quit school. I say start today. Because if you just work even two hours a day, you can come up with one hour in the morning, one hour at night, or just work from 10pm to midnight before you go to bed. That adds up really quick to 60 hours a month and then 720 hours in a year just from working two hours a day that you can actually put into your project. Right. So I say start today. I actually wrote a book about it called how to set up your business for under $1,000. Wow. What that means is there's so many things that are free to set up. Shop your website, social media. If you use WordPress and all your social media accounts, all that's free. Get a bank account, get a corporation. Those are the things that it costs a little bit of money is the corporation, the trademark. Almost everything else is 0 to 20 bucks and 40 bucks and free. So for you not to start, if you have this passion or have this idea, at least you get the framework done. Because what happens, a lot of times people say, I'm going to start a new coffee mug company. Will you invest $100,000? Even if I wanted to say yes, I can't. They don't have a corporation, they don't have a trademark. They haven't built a website. I couldn't even write them a check. They don't have a bank account.

Yeah.

So setting up shop is the simplest thing that should take you a day or two. And most people just don't do it.

That's absolutely right. It's very simple. All right, last question. Who in your life has had the most influence on you to become the man you are today?

My mom. Yeah. Yeah. Because we moved here.

Good job, mom.

Yeah. We moved here from Russia when I was six months old and I was just a baby. And she started with nothing. Like, literally. Like, my dad sold his watch to get us food on the way here, traveling to immigrate here. And we started from nothing. And they built it up and opened up three Levi's jean stores, and I was on the swap meet selling Levi's jeans and baseball cards and building up my business acumen. In high school, I worked three jobs from 14 to 17 just to save up money to help her and help pay for college. And then at 17, I took the money and started my company. Everything was a factor of her, and she's the only human I talk to every day of my life. I've never missed a day talking to her.

It's awesome. Good stuff. I love these kind of stories. Congratulations. I will love it. You're a good example for all of us, no matter what age. And that's what this whole show is about, really helping you guys to do exactly what Dan has done. All right, how about a website for you?

Victoryceo. Com. You can message me there. And then the book is how to set up your business for under $1,000.

Celebrating national entrepreneurship Week, presented by Microsoft. Thank you, Dan.

Thank.

You.