Nate Lawrie: Entrepreneurship, Post-NFL

Welcome to the new retirement podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Nate Lowry, who is a former NFL tight end and current founder and CEO of Brazen Life, about his journey to the NFL, what he learned playing football and then reinventing himself as an entrepreneur. Nate went to Yale and played for several NFL teams, including the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Philadelphia Eagles, New Orleans Saints, Cincinnati Bengals, Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers, and the California Redwoods, which I'll have to ask you about later.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm super excited to have a former pro athlete on our show for a few reasons. You know, one, their life experiences are so different from most people that you meet. Two, they face retirement from their first career, you know, really early. The average NFL career is only 3.3 years. So they've got kind of a, a quick initial career and then they have to kind of reinvent themselves like a lot of our audience. And three, many earn a lot of money. Most earn a lot of money, but also many struggle with managing it and then have to think about how to manage their finances as they go forward in probably a lower earning career. Anyway, with that intro, Nate, welcome to our show. It's great to have you join us.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Steven. I'm pumped to be here. I noticed you listened to every, every team I played for. I really consider that I played for essentially Tampa, the Saints, Cincinnati, and then California Redwoods, which, which then became the Sacramento Mountain Lions, the United Football League. Some of those others were just kind of a cup of coffee, as you would say to, you know, whether it was a training camp or, you know, early in the season, practice squad, that type of thing. But yeah, had had a 8 year old NFL career and pro football career.

I've been watching Hard Knocks, which I love that show and it's interesting. Yeah, kind of getting the inside scoop. And I'm gonna ask you about that later. But yeah, I'd just love to kind of get a quick summary from you, kind of how your career went to this point in terms of high school, college, NFL.

Yeah, So I grew up in Indianapolis. I played for my high school, obviously. I went to Ron Collier High School on the south side of Indianapolis. We had an awesome team in high school. My senior year we were 15 and 0 undefeated Saint Champs, ranked nationally, which is pretty unusual for a smaller school from Indiana. But we had a really good squad. My whole life I dreamed of actually playing for Notre Dame. I was Catholic kid from the south side of Indianapolis and Notre Dame was the school that Indiana, Indiana school Catholic school, great football tradition. So that's kind of always where I pictured myself going. And when they didn't really come knocking during the recruiting process but Yale did a lot of the Ivies did as well as some other D1 schools. I started taking a hard look at Ivy League and took a visit out to Yale. Loved it. They were just coming off of an Ivy League championship season and there was just a really good feeling in the building, a good feeling with a lot of the recruits and decided to commit there. And that meant, you know, turning down some scholarship offers to go pay to go to Yale, but knowing that, you know, at the end of my time there, if I had the ability to play at the next level, then I would be able to. And you know, that was kind of the thinking. And if it wasn't going to work out, you know, in four years, you know, if I wasn't quite at that level, then I would have a Yale education and that was a pretty hard.

Thing to turn down.

Pretty hard thing, yeah, exactly. That was a pretty hard thing to beat there. So yeah, so I went to Yale and had a great college career. As I got into my junior and senior year, I was playing a lot and pretty much dominating the Ivy League. And so after my senior year, got into training for the NFL because I wanted to make it happen. Like I said, it was a childhood dream. So yeah, started training for the combine and off season programs and pro day type stuff where you're doing all the drills that everyone kind of knows about at this point are the 40 yard dash, the agility shuttles, vertical long jump, standing long jump, all of these kind of metrics that the NFL teams will put on players to kind of see what kind of athlete they are. Started training for that and got to a place where I was able to put up some really good numbers. Had a very productive college career and that was it. Then you just kind of wait for draft day and see what happens. And a lot of people will overlook a guy from the Ivy League or you know, from not, you know, not the top tier schools when it comes to draft day and that kind of thing. So it was kind of a crapshoot, but I knew I'd have a chance, you know, even if I didn't get drafted, of signing onto a team and making a name for myself. So yeah, but I got drafted in the sixth round by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and you know, that was the start of my pro career.

That's pretty cool. So it sounds like you kind of had to make this happen. Yourself to some degree. Right. I mean, were you getting heavily recruited out of Yale or you were kind of like, I'm going to go for this. I'm going to get myself in shape and do all the training? Yeah.

I mean, I was an All American tight end at Yale. And, you know, it was in the. It's not called the FCS Football Championship series. It was back then. It was basically one AA, which means it's a. It's a Division 1 program. You can play Division 1 schools, but, you know, you're not in the BCS or Bowl Championship, you know, caliber. We would never, you know, if we had a stellar season, we would never be considered for that. So it was A1 program. I was an All American in the 1 AA level and all Ivy, tons of awards, went to a couple different All Star games as a senior and showed up well against some of the best college players in the country. At the All Star Games, it's people from all the top D1 schools, and I more than held my own. And so from that, I knew that I had a good shot of getting a chance to play in the NFL. And. And, yeah, so it was one of those things where you never know how you're going to compete at that level. Coming out of an Ivy League school because there's such a big transition from. In terms of athleticism, in terms of the speed of the game. What I didn't expect was the mental part of the game to be such a jump from what I was doing in the Ivy League, and that was a big, A big transition for me. But, yeah, so that's what happened.

Do you, I mean, do you think things would have gone differently if you went to kind of a more traditional, you know, D1, like a Notre Dame or, you know, Ohio State or something like that? I mean, you know, if. Would that have totally changed your trajectory, do you think, or would have ended up the same place?

Yeah, I mean, I think potentially, had I gone to a school like that, I, you know, I could have gotten drafted earlier. But once you get your foot in the door, that's the big step, right? Maybe teams will give less leeway to a rookie coming in if they're drafted in the later round or they're an undrafted free agent. But once you're in the door, it's up to you to make the most of the opportunity to show up on film and to be a productive football player. And so, yeah, I don't know how much it would have changed the trajectory if I would have gotten signed earlier. Maybe I would have had a nicer signing bonus or something like that, but I don't know how much it would have changed the NFL career other than kind of always trying to overcome the stigma of an Ivy League football player, which I think is probably changed a little bit. There's a ton of great talent coming out of the Ivy League right now. A lot of guys in the NFL that are, you know, on rosters and performing well. And so it was, it was. There was a lot fewer of us back in the early 2000s. And I think that's, you know, it just goes to show the quality of the Ivy League football and really across the board of training and of, I guess, teams abilities to go out and seek out good talent and find people that maybe develop late or, you know, you know, had ulterior motives when they were. When they were going into college and developed into great football players. So, yeah, I mean, there's. There's a ton of that, you know, you could dig into there. But definitely, you know, I kind of felt like the underdog going into the NFL and, you know, that was something that mentally I had to kind of overcome early on to, you know, you know, realize to myself that I did belong and that I should be on teams and I should be a contributor. And. Yeah, yeah, I got to that point and was able to have a pretty good, albeit on the move a lot, career.

Sure. Well, you know, as part of this, I was looking at the stats and, you know, it's for high school players that make it up to the, you know, NCAA, it's 1 in 17. Right. 5.8%. And then for NCAA players that are seniors that get drafted, it's about 1 in 50 or 2%. So the chances of a high school senior, so they have to make it, you know, play as a senior to getting drafted into an NFL team is 1 in 10,000 or, you know, 0.09%. It's pretty. Yeah, pretty, pretty. Pretty tough odds.

Yeah, it is a fraction of a percent. It's, it's about the same as getting into an Ivy League school, I think. It's. It's a tough thing to do and. Yeah, and it's super competitive once you're there. And there's no guarantee that once you, you sign a contract that you're going to be able to stick around. And that's part of the competitiveness of it because there's so many good football players out there and there's so few roster spots. And it's one of the things that makes it really interesting. And kind of now being in the business world, a lot of people kind of ask about my time in the NFL and what it was like, and it's. Sorry, I have a little something in my throat there. It's different. It's similar in a lot of ways, and it's different in a lot of ways. Being on an NFL team and being a player is really kind of a zero sum game. So when a company does really well, typically that means you're bringing on new people, the company is growing, new staff is added. When an NFL team does well, it doesn't mean that you can add more roster spots. You know, it doesn't. Doesn't mean you can, you know, more people can be around and you can add players. So from that standpoint, you know, there is. It is a zero sum game. Whereas in business, you know, when teams do well, it's kind of a rising tide, lifts all boats situation. And so from that, it makes really competitive. But you'll see, guys, you know, you said you watch Hard Knocks. Love that show. I mean, it does a good job of showing what a training camp is like, what the stress of going through a training camp is like, and how hard it is to actually make a roster. But you see guys even in that situation where it's ultimately competitive and, you know, they're fighting over a few spots on a team, they're helping each other out. You know, they want each other to be better. And I think it's a cool thing about sports, it's a cool thing about football and just the teamwork that it takes to put together a good football team or any good athletic team. Yeah, I love watching it for that reason.

Yeah. I saw a really good analogy from Reed Hastings at Netflix. He describes his culture at his business as not as a family, but as a professional sport, as a sports team, and not like a rec team, but like a pro sports team. He's like, we're here to support each other, but everyone has to do their job. You got to earn your spot and you got to keep performing to keep it. And I thought it was an awesome analogy for business and like a great way to kind of look at. Look at your company and, you know, you can do. But you can do better together, but you really. Everyone has to perform.

Yeah, totally. I mean, it's crazy being, you know, in. In season on a team and you're working hard, your body's hurt, you're, you know, you're spending time in the training room, you're working out, you're Spending extra time watching film, you know, you're putting a good product in the field. And despite all that, you know, you might see the team bring in three or four guys in your. In your position to work out on a. On a Monday, you know, afternoon, because they're. They're looking for somebody to either replace or to be on call if somebody gets hurt. And so that part is stressful. You know, that competitiveness of it and the fact that you're always on a job interview essentially while you're playing, that's the hard part of playing in the NFL. But the upside is so big, right? You're playing a sport for a living. You're making good money, and it's a fun thing when you go out there on Sunday and you win and you get that camaraderie. It's a cool kind of dynamic situation that's both stressful and. Yeah, I mean, I can totally see that in top corporations, you have to show up. Everyone wants eight players. Right. And as long as you can put eight players on the field, then your ability to win in sports and business go way up. So I think that makes sense.

Yeah. A little bit more on kind of like what it takes. Since we're on this topic, I was curious. You mentioned when we talked earlier about you kind of had this burn the boats approach for making it in the NFL. You, like, didn't give yourself an exit. Right. You kind of gave yourself one choice coming out of Yale. Right?

Yeah.

So I thought. Could you share more about that?

Yeah, I was going to go for it. I mean, I obviously would have a Yale degree to fall back on, but in the summers, you know, leading up after my sophomore year, junior year, I didn't go. I didn't go down to New York and, you know, get an internship in finance or Wall street or anything like that, like a lot of my teammates did. I stuck around campus and I trained. I had a summer job, but my focus was getting stronger and getting faster and preparing for the season because, one, I knew I was good enough to do it, and I didn't want to have that regret of giving myself a way out. I was fully committed. So people would ask a lot of times, what's your backup plan? And I didn't have one. Definitely. If it didn't work out, I would figure out something then. But I didn't put a lot of trouble, lot of time into preparing for an alternative situation because I didn't want myself to go there mentally. I wanted to play in the NFL and I was going to make that happen no matter what.

Nice. Well, I think that's a good. You know, it's good. Like, if you want to get something big done. They do talk about kind of burn the boats here. It's just like, hey, you know, I don't know if you know that story, but, you know, there was some invasion, and they were like, okay, we're here now we're burning all the boats. So there's no going back, right?

Exactly. Yeah. If you take out that backup plan, you have to be fully invested. You're all in.

That's right. So looking back now, it sounds like obviously it was worth it to you. I mean, did that experience kind of live up to all your hopes and expectations, or were the things that were totally different than what you thought?

Yeah, I mean, as I kind of alluded to, the NFL is a business. And as a player, I've always kind of considered it as you're kind of a sole proprietor, essentially. Like, what you put on the field is your own product. How you train in the off season, yeah, you could be trained at the facility. You're working out with the strength coaches, but the level of effort you put into that and the commitment that you show the team, Team, it's kind of your own product. And in the end, if your services are good enough, then you have teams that are bidding over you, and if you're good enough to stay on a roster, then it's you that's kind of taking care of your body and leading the show. So you kind of become entrepreneurial in that regard because you know that it is such a limited thing and it's so competitive. And like I said, zero sum game. So you're really competing against something. Players out there that are trying to do the same thing, and you have to work hard enough to be able to outperform them. But, you know, at the same time, there's. There's so many different elements to being in the NFL with injuries. You know, the fact that you can. You can get hurt on any play which can end your career.

And.

Yeah, I mean, so from that, the business side of it, it's, you know, it's a little bit challenging, you know, from the game that you grew up playing as a boy, just because you love to play. You know what I mean? So there's a different aspect in the business side of it than it is as you. As you grow up imagining playing in the NFL, but at the same time, like, it's. You're playing in the NFL. I mean, there's no Better job in the world for somebody that loves to play football, you know, loves to compete and play at a high level. Anything, I loved it. So, yeah, there's conflicting emotions there, I think from a personal standpoint on what it means to be an NFL player, but overall, yeah, definitely a positive experience.

That's awesome. It sounds like you took a lot away from it and you've got lessons that are applying to your life now. A couple quick questions just about the money side of it. You know, watching this show Hard Knocks and just thinking about it a little more, you know, you always see these headlines about, you know, so and so's, you know, making, you know, 24 million bucks this year or whatever. But it seems like a really narrow triangle. Like there's a few guys that make a ton of money and then, you know, watch Hard Knocks and you see these guys grinding kind of like practice squad or kind of lower on the roster. And I know they make a lot of money relative to, to regular people, but like they're making a lot less money, it seems like, than the top tier players that are really hauling it in. Did you see that?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's, there's only a small percentage of guys that play in the NFL that can retire from their NFL earnings afterwards. So, you know, like you said earlier, the average career is 3.3 years. There's a lot of guys out there that don't get the headlines, that aren't Talked about on SportsCenter all the time that are grinding away. I consider myself an NFL grinder. I mean, they're showing up. Yeah, they could get paid a good salary during the season, but that could be lost at any point. If you get hurt, if you don't perform for a couple weeks in a row, you can lose that position. So yeah, I mean, there's a ton of guys that are in that position that have to have, you know, a second career in mind. And it's the vast majority of guys that play in the NFL.

Right. What's the minimum? So I think there's like money if you're on the practice squad. And there's also like minimum salaries. Right. Do you know what those are?

I don't know what they are today. I think when I was a rookie, practice squad was 80,000 and league minimum if you're on a roster. So I can go a little bit into what the difference is. So each team has a 53 man roster on game day. It's actually 46 players, I think that will dress and so not even Everybody that's on the roster will dress. So the roster spots are, you know, are very limited. And then you have an eight man practice squad and that might have changed since I retired, but you have an eight man practice squad that is essentially on the team. They do everything that the team does. They show up to practice, they do all the workouts, they sit in all the meetings. They're effectively on the team, but they just don't get paid like they're on the team and they don't play in the games. There's no shot until they get activated onto the active roster for them to play in a game. So usually what will happen is a guy in a position ahead of them will get hurt and, or they perform really well in practice and the coaches want to give them a shot. They'll activate them onto the active roster and then they can go in and they try to make the 46 man roster for game day. But the practice squad essentially is everything that anybody else on the team is doing. More so because you're spending extra time in the weight room and studying really hard and. But yeah, they get, I think it's, it's probably quite a bit more than what I, when I was playing, but it's, it was about 80 grand back then.

Okay. For the practice. And I, I heard, I think I sat next to a player that was going to go into the NFL once on a flight and he was saying something about 350,000. This was five, 10 years ago for like the.

Yep. It goes up every year. So as a rookie, the league minimum kind of goes up every year. And then as a player, your league minimum goes up. So your second year, the league minimum will jump 80 grand or something. And then as a third year player, your minimum now jumps up another 80 grand. So the longer that you play, the more money that the league, the teams are obligated to pay you. Which is itself kind of an interesting dynamic because you'll see guys that are five or six year vets and they perform well and they'll beat a guy out in training camp who's younger, but maybe they're a backup, their second or third string and a team will keep a rookie because their, their minimum is so much less. Yep. And so it's not, it's. There's, you know, that's the business side of it. Right. Like guys that maybe aren't performing as well as a veteran guy, they can develop them, they don't have a critical role on Sunday. And then that team has all that extra money to Go and spend on high dollar players and that kind of thing. And so the way the league minimum jumps each year phases out a lot of guys.

And how about just real quick like you guys are on a pension, right, for being in the NFL. Any, anything unique about how that works?

Yeah, you have to qualify for it. So each year that you play a certain number of games, you get an accredited season and then you need a certain number of accredited seasons to earn like the full pension benefits. Each year you can contribute to a 401k. The NFL matches 2 to 1 for what you can contribute up to a certain point. And so if you are smart about taking advantage of those opportunities for the retirement plans, you can come out of the NFL with a decent little retirement nest egg. You can't touch any of that money usually for 20 or 30 years. So it's just kind of sitting there. But the nice thing about that, and specifically in my situation, is that gives me something to fall back on where I can maybe take a little bit more of a risk in entrepreneurial ventures knowing that I'm not going to, if things go south, I'm not going to be an indigent retiree and be living off the system. I don't know. That's a nice fallback.

But yeah, yeah, I thought it was cool. They had this guy, Carl Nassib, you know, in this, this season's on the Browns, right. In this season's Hard Knocks and he's like this personal finance guy and he's going through and kind of whiteboarding out for these guys. Okay, if you, you know, put your money away and save, save, save much more of your income now and, and get, you know, I mean, he was putting up really high, like 10% compounded. But you know, if you get a, you know, compound rate of return for, you know, 30 years, it's going to be huge for you because you're earning all this money up front. I thought it was good that they featured that and it was funny kind of listening to him go off about it.

Yeah, it's funny. I was talking about this earlier, earlier today actually. It's funny how, you know, I think HBO does an awesome job of finding those, those guys on the team that have a lot of personality and they can develop good stories around it. It's not always the guys that are the top dudes on the roster. But yeah, I did see that it was funny. And I also thought it was funny that he was like, yeah, just 10% every year and you'll double your money every seven years. If I could just guarantee 10% every year, I would never work again.

Yeah, we're all going to invest with Karl. It's going to be great.

But yeah, I mean, to have those principles and to have that guy in the locker room that's talking about that to young guys, that kind of going back to what you were asking about earlier. Guys, they come in, their whole life has been, been dedicated to playing football and making it into the NFL and there's, you know, this big chunk of money that is on the table for them if they can do that. And a lot of them have never thought about personal finance or what they would do when they get there. They're young guys. You know, imagine yourself as a 22 year old with, you know, a couple million dollars in the bank and how you would be, you know, you're just not mature enough to really be able to handle that, even if, you know that it's, it's a limited time. So a lot of guys will get into a situation where, you know, they want to live the NFL lifestyle. They, you know, this, there's that kind of, that ballers, if you've watched ballers. Yeah, it kind of glamorizes this part of the NFL that's not, not totally accurate. You know, like a lot of guys, most guys aren't partying on $100 million yachts every weekend. It's just, you know, it's not, it's not a totally accurate situation. I mean, stuff like that for sure happens. But yeah, it's, it's. But they, they've kind of glamorized that in their mind and that's what they want to live up to. And that money can go pretty quick, as, you know.

Totally. Well, yeah, and I mean, just one data point on this, and this data's a little old, but, you know, in 2009, Sports Illustrated did a story and they said 78% of NFL players are either bankrupt or under financial stress within two years of retirement. And 60% of NBA players go bankrupt within five years after leaving their sport. That's probably gotten better, but there's obviously a lot of opportunity to improve financial management for these guys and have much better outcomes.

Totally. I think the NFL certainly tries to address that. You'll go into meetings throughout the summer or rookie orientation and they tell you about personal finance and they make it clear that you shouldn't buy a house for every member of your family and that you have to be. The common joke is the NFL stands for not for long. And so they try to instill that, but it's still hard. And when you make a certain amount of money, you want to live a certain lifestyle, and then once that money stops, it stops pretty fast. And then all of a sudden, you have all these bills, you have, you know, all these liabilities and obligations that are getting funded from your savings. And unless, and most guys can't replicate that type of money right away coming out of the NFL, they haven't developed those skills. And so it's. Unless you do a lot of planning, and a lot of guys will have financial planners and will, you know, money managers that do a fine job. But again, the money that you make in the NFL can only last so long, especially if you've accrued a certain lifestyle.

Totally. All right, well, look, I appreciate all the color on football. It's actually, it's fascinating to kind of get the inside look, and it sounds like you took advantage of a lot of things that are available to you there and then, you know, did a good job of transitioning out. I do want to talk about your business and kind of, you know, how you got there. You know, last quick question on football. Do you think you're going to let, I know you've got little kids or at least one like a son, right? Are you going to let them play football, do you think, or not?

Yeah. Yeah. I get asked this question a lot. Definitely. You know, from my perspective, the game of football is. Is like no other. I mean, you have, you know, you have so many different elements that come into putting together a good football team. And it's really kind of like this division of labor. I liken it to, really a corporation, right, where each guy on the team is skilled at a specific task and he has a very specific role to play on each play. And if he does his job and everyone else does their job, then the team is successful and it's like a business. And so you can learn these lessons as a young player of what it means to play on a team, what it means to contribute to a specific task when, you know, you're not the quarterback or you're not the star. And I think that, you know, the advantages of football as a sport and what it can teach young men is pretty incredible. And now, definitely, considering all the stuff with CTE and head trauma and concussions, you have to take a second look at it. I think, you know, I, I followed the news and some of the research. I'm not super dug into all the little intricacies of what happens in the brain, but I have A basic understanding. My feeling is that some of that susceptibility to the proteins forming in your brain is a little bit genetic, right? Yeah. So all my uncles played, my dad played. They're all basically fine. I'm not overly concerned. I'm sure that I probably have a little bit of cte, but I'm not overly concerned about what that means for the future of my brain. We'll see. But, yeah, I mean, because of the positives of football, I'd be cool if my son wanted to play football. I wouldn't start him as early as I did. I started playing tackle football in third grade. I don't. I don't think that's necessary. Probably, you know, high school level is where you really need to start playing tackle football. Or maybe. Maybe junior high.

How old's your son right now?

He's six.

He's six. Well, so you've got, you know, nine years, whatever. Eight. Nine years to think about it. I mean, there are definitely. I mean, I thought about this because I have a freshman in high school, and he's playing football now. And for up until very recently, I was like, he's never going to play football, but he plays lacrosse. He played soccer. You know, you start looking at the data and it's like, you know, the concussions are occurring in all these different sports, and football's actually. I mean, they're. They are changing it. They're trying to change the game, how you tackle, the equipment and stuff like that. And also in your way. I do think it is unique. I didn't play football, but I'm learning more about it, you know, and I totally get what you're saying. It's definitely this total team effort that's very different, and there's a lot of positives about it, so. And I think he's actually taken a ton away from it already. You know, you're seeing all the things he's doing and what's happening with the team and the culture inside the group.

So, yeah, it's so cool. I mean, it's the most chess, like, of any major sport, I think, too, because of the way that you set up for each play and you have two people that are essentially calling the shots. It's. I don't know. It's a beautiful game, in my opinion.

Well, maybe it'll be coming back, because I know last year, our high school team, Tam High, they scored, like, four touchdowns in the whole season. And so. And they. I think they. They got crushed and they had, like, no players. And. And this year. They've got, like, over 30 kids on the JV team. They scored four touchdowns in the first game. And, you know, it seems like it's coming a little bit of a comeback. So there was a lot of people there watching. And, you know, actually one of the guys we had earlier in the podcast, Bruce Goldberg, the former DEA agent, is, you know, coaching. So, you know, it's kind of. It's kind of interesting. So it's coming back. All right, well, look, I do want to get into kind of what you're doing now. And so, you know, you started this company Brazen, but before you did that, it sounds like you kind of took over your family business and did a turnaround. There any quick color on that?

Yeah. So, you know, while I was playing, I did. The NFL has several different career transition programs. One of the cool things I think they do is they have these programs through some of the top business programs in the world, really. So they have one at Wharton, they have one at Stanford, at Northwestern, at Harvard Business School, and I took advantage of those. So I had gone. And it's basically a very boiled down version of their executive MBA programs. You get kind of their best. Their best professors, and they teach the material in a very, like, condensed format over the series, over the course of one or two weekends. And so I took a lot of advantage of those types of programs to the NFL and had put a little bit of thought into what I wanted to do afterwards, but didn't really know. I mean, you know, I was passionate about football and kind of that same thing where it was like, I don't know, right or wrong. I felt like if I started working on what I wanted to do after that, I would give myself a way out. And I needed every ounce of my mental and physical ability to go into making teams and playing. Tried to set myself up there, but wasn't really sure exactly what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to go into commercial real estate. And when I kind of. After my last season, my wife and I took this long trip. We were supposed to spend six months in Hong Kong where I was going to play rugby. Right before we left, I found out. We found out she was pregnant with my son. And we get over there. I started getting into the program, and we get there at night and drive into the city and it's super dense fog, like, okay. And then wake up the next day, still foggy. A couple days later, still foggy. And without having done much research on our new home, we realized that it was smog and I confirmed that with the coach, and he's like, oh, yeah, this time of year, it blows down from mainland China. It'll be like this until February or March. And of course, my wife, being newly pregnant, does what most wives would do in that situation. She gets on the Internet and. And sees all these potential birth defects that can happen from that level of toxicity in the air. And so she's like, no, we don't want to do this. Ended up kind of traveling a little bit more and then ended up in New Zealand for a couple months, where I did end up doing an internship at CBRE and was kind of thinking maybe commercial real estate was where I would transition to. And then kind of at the same time, my wife's father, who had built. He had created a storm door closer. So it's called the touch and Hold Door Closer. He is an aeronautical engineer that spent years developing jet engines. Extremely gifted engineer. And just saw this need for a better screen and storm door closer. Invented it. And the thing basically skyrocketed right off the. And, yeah, and had really good market acceptance and traction. And then as I was retiring, the biggest customer who was ordering containers of product at a time, essentially it was the biggest door manufacturer in the country, essentially came after us. And they made some decisions with the product that we didn't necessarily agree with, but it was. It was for their doors. So we went with it. And their customers didn't like it, and in the end, they wanted to charge us for it. And so it was like, basically went into this. This battle where we're fighting just to keep the business afloat and to keep, you know, our intellectual property and the patents in our own hands, you know, in trying to figure out what the future of the business would be like without, you know, the customer that was paying 90% of our revenue. And so basically, I jumped into that out of necessity, and I thought it'd be a good learning experience and I could skip a few paychecks at that point. And, yeah, really fought to keep the business alive. And then once we were able to do that and kind of get out of that burden, like reorient the business. And we had worked through it during the whole process, but my dream was never to run a door hardware business. That's not necessarily what I'm passionate about, but I see the utility in the product. It's a great product. It's the best product on the market for this type of door closer. I wanted to see what we could do. We basically salvaged the business and we made it More of a direct to customer business. We still have wholesale customers and distribution customers, but I wanted to focus on the things that could give us the highest dollar per unit that was the lowest. That was setting up our online and Amazon listings and making that as optimized as possible. Automating a lot of the fulfillment and automating a lot of our processes so that it didn't take a lot of input to run a nice cash flow business. Was able to do that. It took me a couple years and skipped a lot more paychecks than I initially anticipated. But now that business continues to run, we still run it on a pretty lean with the pre lean operations. And once I was able to do that, I was really able to start focusing on what I really wanted to do, which was create my own products using a similar business structure and business model to help athletes and to help people take care of their bodies in more convenient ways. I had this idea from when I was playing, so kind of the backstory on Brazen and the Morph collapsible foam roller. So I don't know that we've talked about it yet, but basically our main product is a foam roller that collapses flat so that you can put it in a backpack or carry on if you're traveling a lot, if you're on the road a bunch, or if you're an athlete going to a race. If you're a high school athlete and you want to take your mobility practice out to the field and you don't want to rely on whatever the team is offering or your school has on hand because a lot of times schools don't have the budget to provide good equipment. It's easy for you to now take that with you, take care of your body, get more out of yourself because you're staying healthy, you're maintaining yourself. And so I had this idea that if I could make a foam roller, which is a product I was using all the time as a player and even more so critically after a bad back injury when I was with the Saints, if I could have that sit in my bag so I never had to think twice about where it was, then I could, you know, I would have something that was pretty cool and that could be a nice something that people could rely on, right, to get more out of themselves and to be healthier. And so started developing that kind of once I was able to redirect the other business.

So you use the same platform that you built for the, for the door hardware business and all the lessons there and said, okay, we're going to go for something that you. And you created a new company to do that. Cool. And I think you were mentioning something about like, you've actually, I think a lot of people who think about making things are like, oh yeah, I can just go kind of do the design. I'll go to China and they'll crank out a bajillion copies of this thing and it'll all be good. And you discovered that. No, it's actually not super simple to like make physical things and have it go well.

Yeah. It's so hard. It's really challenging, really a big challenge to produce something new with our product. It seems very simple when you get in your hands, but there's been a lot of engineering, a lot of trial and error that has gone into creating something that operates well, is lightweight, is strong, is going to be durable, and gives as good or better foam rolling experience than anything else out the market. And, and also doing that on a lean kind of startup budget. We launched a Kickstarter once we got to the point where we felt like we had the product pretty dialed in, did really well on Kickstarter and then thought we had production pretty much lined up, went into production and realized that a lot of our assumptions were completely wrong and a lot of our suppliers who we thought were ready to go were not totally ready to go. And that led to a lot of delays, which is pretty customary for Kickstarter projects, but not where we wanted to be for sure. And there was a lot of hard times through that process, getting it corrected and also delivering on our promise to deliver one of the best products on the market. That was always my goal. I lived to a high standard. Some, some, some have deemed me a perfectionist. So, you know, which is, is both good and challenging when you're, when you're coming out with anything because you put so much into.

Right. Yeah. No, hey, I was, I'm kind of interested like so for our, you know, for our audience. Right. A lot of them. One thing that, that a lot of people don't know is that I think most companies are started by people that are over age 50 now in this country. So partly by need and partly by choice. Right. There's many people that are looking around saying, oh, you know what, I have this dream or I have this vision and here's something I want to do. So I'm pretty interested in how you went about this doing Kickstarter. Can you just give it a high level how much time and money it took from idea to, hey, there's Products conceived, products delivered, making money at a high level.

So I have to think back. So running a Kickstarter, we did as leanly as possible. And I've had discussions, I've actually talked on podcasts about what I think of the current crowdfunding landscape. And I think the days of essentially having an idea, shooting a short video, putting it on Kickstarter and having success with it are pretty much gone. It's become professionalized in the way that you really need to work with people that have done a lot and have had success with launching Kickstarter campaigns, because there's so many little nuances of how to market, how to find customers that are going to buy on a Kickstarter and all that stuff. So you really want to work with a marketing agency that's done it before. But getting the product at that point, it could be across the board. Some are fully dialed in. They have manufacturing set up and they're ready to go. Some have just sourced the product from China and they're trying to sell it as their own, and they can pull the trigger without any concern of delivery. Some are pretty conceptual and they have a long way to go. You can typically tell that within the campaign and the video and then how well put together their marketing is. But yeah, doing a Kickstarter, getting a product up on there and using that as a way to fund, you know, some sort of physical product business could be across the board. I think we put maybe a couple hundred grand into getting our products ready to ship from. And a lot of that, you know, we got through our Kickstarter campaign. A lot of it was self funded, and then a lot of it was also from taking pre sales after the Kickstarter campaign going up to when we actually started shipping. So it took us about a year to get the product out the door and to get all caught up. A little bit longer, actually to get completely caught up with all of our pre orders. So all the orders we took after our Kickstarter campaign. And then from then, that was Basically March of 2017 is when we got completely caught up. So just over a year ago. And from then it was like, let's now go market this thing. Let's really turn up our marketing efforts and see where we can take this business.

You're going direct to consumer, right?

Mostly direct to consumer, yeah. We have some wholesale customers that sell our product at retail. We work with some bulk customers as well, a lot of teams, that kind of thing. But mostly it's direct to the end user. And, you know, I Have experience obviously through the door, closer business with setting that up. But a lot of it is, you know, marketing this product is a lot different than marketing that product because it's something you want rather as opposed to something, you know, you absolutely need to get in out of the door. So. Yeah, so. Which is a lot more fun and it's a lot more challenging. And I love the upside of Brazen and I love the upside of our platform of delivering, you know, useful recovery and fitness products that can be used on the road as well as at home without denigrating the quality or without, you know, taking having to sacrifice usability for portability or functionality for portability. That's, that's really where we stand. We want to make products that are as good as anything you would use at the gym or at home and make them easy to put in your backpack or your carry on luggage so that no matter where in the world you are, your lifestyle doesn't suffer.

Totally. I could totally see teams using this, you know, lacrosse teams, football teams when they're on the road and stuff like that. I mean, I've used foam roller foam rollers myself. It's, it's pretty awesome if you learn how to use it. I think a lot of people don't, don't really appreciate, you know, that you can kind of massage a lot of like stuff, stuff, you know, kinks and bad stuff out of your body using these products and release tension and stuff like that. So for people that haven't tried it, you know, you should watch a couple videos about, or check out Brazen's website and you can see the exercises. I know tons of. I mean I've gone through a couple, like a couple ACLs and like the PT guy is like all about the foam roller and the exercises you're doing with it. So.

Right. Yeah, it's such a, it's such a cool little product. I mean it's so simple, right? It's a cylinder, typically 6 inches in diameter and they vary in length. But by having something like that, that little platform that you can get on top of and use your body weight to massage, you can roll down your spine and get kind of like a vertebrae adjustment, you can stretch on it. It's such a dynamic little tool that they've become really ubiquitous in the sports and athletic and recovery physical therapy world. And yeah, when I started developing this product, I was like, hey, I want to make a foam roller that you can put in your backpack. And people are like, what's a foam roller? And now I Tell people that, hey, I have a foam roller that you can put in your backpack. And, like, that is awesome because those things are so annoying to travel in. So just the mindset over the last couple of years has changed drastically, and we like the trajectory of that going forward because they're important tools. More people are aware of the usefulness of them, and there's a lot of innovation around there. But we're the first ones to make it so simple to travel with and to deliver a product that meets the high expectations you would have as a professional athlete or somebody who's a physical therapist.

So, yeah, it's pretty cool that you've kind of innovated, built it, now you've got customers, and it sounds like your company is profitable and, like, growing. Right? So, yeah, that's a big accomplishment. Hey, one quick thing also. I saw that you got on Shark Tank, like, any. Any. Like, was that just. Did that just kind of happen, or did you seek that out?

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is kind of more the story of the company, right? So we got back in stock. We were. Had our first stock that wasn't already sold in March 2017. And I had done a program actually through the NFL at Babson College. So I didn't mention Babson, but they have kind of an entrepreneurial program where it's kind of a startup. And became really well acquainted with the guy that was running the program. His name is Angelo Santinelli, and essentially asked him to be an advisor for Brazen. And we've had a good working relationship since then. When? I don't know, maybe a few months later, we were kind of talking about Shark Tank, because Shark Tank, they had actually, one of their scouting producers had sought us out early on in the process, pretty early after Kickstarter. We weren't even close to ready with the product or production or any of that thing and any of that stuff. So I basically let it go. I didn't want to go on there and be one of those companies that it's just way too early and they get laughed off the stage at that point. We're kind of a year later now we're in a place where, hey, it might be interesting to see what Shark Tank has to offer. He knew he had a friend that had a friend that was a producer on the show. So through a couple emails, we were introduced to one of the producers, had a conversation, and. And within a week of that conversation, we were basically within the Shark Tank ecosystem, which means the production team signs off on whether you'd be good for the show. And then you start preparing and you start thinking about what you're going to say to the Sharks. And yeah, really, like a month later, we were actually standing in front of the Sharks. I think it was six weeks from the time we started, the time we were standing in front of the Sharks, where were we pitching? And it's kind of a crazy thing. The thing that I think is the coolest about Shark Tank is the pitches and the Shark reactions is totally legit. They don't know anything about the business before you come on. They haven't heard of you, and they don't know who's up next. The interactions are completely real. You do a deal, if you're lucky, and then you go into a due diligence phase afterwards and see if it actually makes sense to go forward with the deal. And it's such a crazy process. I mean, overnight your company is front of 6 to 8 million people, and that visibility can tell you a lot about the product or the future of your company. Right. And we had a lot of success from that. That actually put us through another long backorder phase where after Shark Tank the first time. So it was October 29th of last year, they aired us then they aired us again December 29th. So basically, through those two airings, it put us out of stock from October 29th until, I think it was actually maybe June of this year. We finally got caught up. We got our production in a much better place. And. Yeah. And now again, we're putting on this back hat of. This hat back on. Let's go market this thing. Let's start to put it in front of new people's eyes, and let's talk to people and tell them about our mission. And that part has been. It's been fun challenges all along the way, as you would imagine, but it's, you know, a lot of rewarding days in there.

Yeah, well, I think it's. It's a great story. I mean, I, I actually, I love kind of your whole arc, right. Working hard, getting very focused, getting in the NFL, what you learned there, kind of grinding away there, making some money, but, you know, not enough to, like, be financially independent or anything like that. And, and then having to reinvent yourself as an entrepreneur, like restarting a family company and then starting its own company from scratch. And I think for myself, I've met some Internet billionaires and whatnot, people that have made tons of money at Facebook and Google and stuff like that, but I've met many more people that are Small business owners have built it themselves, have cash flowing. Businesses that do even better have a lot more control over their life. It's almost like the guys inside of, you know, some of these startups, they're like pro athletes. If it works out, they're going to hit a home run. But for many of them, it doesn't work out. And the guys that grind it out and they build their own platform and they kind of control their future, they end up having pretty great lives and doing all kinds of innovative things. Especially if, you know, if your platform starts getting bigger, you know, it's amazing what, how it can scale. So it's a cool story.

Yeah, totally. I mean, and that's the fun part, right? Kind of at the end of the day. And what we create is based off of our ingenuity and our ability to hustle. And that part is super fun. It's also very stressful in ways where I have a family with kids and you're kind of putting yourself on the line to create something which is certainly challenging and it does become a stressful thing. But when you start to see the success and as we continue to grow the business and we see the fruits of our labors, it's so rewarding. But yeah, I mean, I don't imagine Brazen to be a small business. In five years, I think we'll be a very big business with a lot of innovative products and we want to be a household name and disregard. So it's fun to kind of envision the future and picture where we're going to be and then find the steps to get there and just grind and hustle.

Well, you've seen other companies do it. I think I remember early on with Under Armour, there was. The guy was out there with like, he's just got his shirts and whatnot and now it's a huge organization and same thing with Nike. It's like he was. The story about him selling shoes out of the, you know, the back of his trunk at track meets and, you know, now look, now look where he's at. So, yeah, focus, you know, dedication, willing to. Being willing to kind of take that risk and push through the inevitable super painful and risky parts that are in front of you as what it takes to kind of, you know, have a chance of being successful. Right. And hopefully that goes well.

Yeah, it sounds like. Have you, have you read Shoe Dog?

I have not read. I've heard of it. I've read parts of it, but I've heard some stories about it. I read up on Entrepreneurs and listen, I don't know, if you listen to Masters of Scale, there's some really good podcasts out there about what it takes to build these companies and the trials that people go through. So that's always interesting to hear those stories.

Yeah, it's so cool. Well, I would recommend to any of your listeners and to you to, to read or get on Audible and listen to Shoe Dog. It's so well done. It's actually written by Phil Knight and it reads like a novel, but it tells how he built Nike. And I don't know, it's pretty inspirational. It's very well done.

Yeah. It's always amazing when you hear these stories about these big companies. They tend to come back to, you know, one person. I mean, it's not, it's never obviously one person, but there has to be someone that's kind of holding the vision and you realize that it's this decade, you know, multi decade thing. I was, I was listening to a podcast with Howard Schultz from Starbucks and Starbucks on it. And you know, he wasn't the original founder. He was kind of brought in. He was a low level guy and then he rose up and then he kind of took over. But what Starbucks went through and how they got big and scaled in the US and then internationally and what they're doing now and how they try to still maintain the culture, it's amazing to hear it firsthand from these guys that live through it. Like all the challenges they've gone through and all the kind of stuff that happens in the background that's not glamorous, that you, it's great after the fact, but during it, there's so much kind of effort that goes into building these things. And it's never simple. It is never an easy process to build these businesses.

Yeah, yeah. It's like anything in life. I mean, there's a lot of skill, there's a lot of vision involved, but there's also a lot of luck. And it's always interesting to hear where those inflection points come into a company to create something that's as iconic as Nike or Starbucks or any of these companies. And obviously for every Nike, there's there's 10 that you've never heard of and will never hear of. But you know, I think it's kind of that American, American spirit. Right. Like, let's go create something and let's see what we, what we can make of it.

Totally. I think there was a quote. I don't know if it was Hard Knocks. I saw it somewhere. It Was like, at some point in every battle, there's a point where both armies are willing to quit and surrender and it's the one that's willing to continue to attack that is going to prevail. And I thought that was a great quote.

Yeah, I was thinking about something like that the other day. I didn't see the match, but I just caught the headline of like the Nadal match, right where they played till 2am in the morning. And you know, you think of a guy like Rafael Nadal who's you know, one of the all time great tennis players and like, you know, you just expect that he's going to come out of that battle because he's, he's put so much effort into getting there that he's not going to stop. He's not going to be the one to acquiesce. You know what I mean?

Right. Well, and same thing like, you know, Tiger Woods, I, everyone had, you know, he was such champion, then he was struggling and trying to fix his body and then finally I think did the right, you know, got to the kind of level of surgery he needed to kind of fuse his back and, and everyone had written him off and like, you know, we're like, he's done, he's got the yips, he will never come back. And I'm not even, I'm not really a golf fan, but I will watch that guy like everybody else. And now, you know, he's making a run and people are like, okay, he's back, he's going to win. He's going to win some more, you know, championships. And it's incredible. It is these individuals that have this will within them where they will not quit that are different. You know, they're unique out there. So.

All right, yeah, totally. And it's, it's totally, you know, it's learned, I think, for Tiger Woods. I mean, everyone, you know, talks about how brilliant of an athlete and golf player he is and was and you know, how it's his naturally gifted, once in a lifetime golf player. But you know, when you like really learn about Tiger woods, like he started when he was what, three years old, four years old, something like that. He was hitting golf balls and he put in his 10,000 hours well before most people even pick up a golf club. And that puts him in a place where he can go and he can make history and he has that mentality. I also hope that he, he makes a full comeback and is competitive at the top because it's a fun game to watch when he's involved.

Totally. He totally changed it. All right, well, look, I know we've gone for a while. Nate, I appreciate you being on our show. It's great to hear your story. And good luck with Brazen. I think the product's cool. It looks awesome. Hopefully it goes really well. And thanks, Dado Robeson, for being our sound engineer. Anyone listening? Thanks for listening. Hopefully. Hopefully you found this useful. Our goal at New Retirement is to help anyone plan and manage their retirement so that they can make the most of their money and time. We offer a powerful retirement planning tool and educational content that you can access@newretirement.com and we've been recognized as Best of the Web by groups like the American association of Individual Investors.