3D Thinking – Interview With Tracy Hazzard From The Unshackled Owner Podcast With Aaron Scott Young

Welcome to the Unshackled Owner Podcast. The show where you'll learn the tips, tricks, revelations and realities that it takes to build a real business. A business that works harder for you than you have to work for it. Not just a job, but an asset. No matter where you are in your business, you're in the right place right now. Here is Aaron Young.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Unshackled Owner Podcast. I'm Aaron Young. I'm your host. I'm delighted to be with you again today, and thanks so much for being here and, you know, it means a lot to me. We've been getting some good mail and getting some good outreach through the social media world from people that are listening to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much for embracing this. And I just ask if you like the content that you're hearing here, if you like what we're talking about, if you find value in it, please share it with your friends. If you're coming to my website, or if you're finding it on itunes or Stitcher or some other place, if you're out there, please share, write in review, or give a thumbs up. You know, if you're on Stitcher, give it that positive endorsement and it will really help us grow and get this information out to more and more business owners. Because I'll tell you what, this is stuff that business owners who are growing a business they need, need, need to learn about. Because we don't want to just have a bunch of people running around kind of wasting time spinning that hamster wheel. We want to get people moving from where they are to their desired outcome. And if you have the right training, the right ment, the right ideas, you're going to get there a lot faster. And anyway, that brings me to today, and I'm really excited for my guest today. Her name is Tracy Lee Hazard. She's one of the founders of has Design. And I'm going to have her tell you more about what that means in a minute. But I'll just tell you this. Tracy and her husband Tom and their team have successfully taken over $2 billion worth of products to market. These folks specialize in identifying good opportun, putting together the prototypes, finding homes out there in major stores, and really taking a great idea and taking it all the way to the finish line. It's really cool what they do, but that isn't what they're famous for. So we're gonna have a lot of fun stuff. Tracy, are you there with me? Are you on?

I am so excited to be Here, Erin, thanks for inviting me.

You know, Tracy, I always love getting to visit with you. And just full disclosure again, everybody. Tracy is another one of my friends, and you guys are going to hear from a lot of people that I know and admire and respect. And Tracy, it doesn't matter what she's talking about. Whenever she's in an event, if she's giving a talk, the room is full. She's awesome. So, Tracy, let's just kind of go and fill in the bio just a little bit. Like, what do you want the people to know about, like, where you came from and maybe not even all the way how you started business, but what brought you to the place of becoming entrepreneurial? And when did you make the decision and how did you start out your entrepreneurial journey?

Oh, wow. Tom, my husband and partner at Rhode Island School of Design. We met, I think, the first day of school. He insulted me.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. He called me a Valley girl because I was from California. And from there on we became really good friends and eventually got married before we graduated. And I was all ready to go into the corporate world. Super excited. I was one of the first graduates to get a job. I got a job before I even. I missed my graduation ceremony or rehearsal to go and do an on site interview for a company in South Carolina called Milliken, one of the top textile companies in the world.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And so I was excited. That's what I wanted to be, a corporate designer. Like, the whole thing was my goal. And went down there, had a great time. Tom hated it. He couldn't find a job. He was always an entrepreneur at heart, and I was not, at least I thought. And we did a couple of moves after that, and I worked for another great company, Herman Miller, and I helped design the Aeron chair, which is, you know, a famous icon. Yeah. And so I. I got to help with that. And so I saw a whole different world there because a lot of their designers were independent, so they were kicked out of the house. And there was this great blend at Herman Miller of in house engineers and designers and project managers and out of house designers and boundary pushers, for a lack of a better way to describe it. I mean, that's what they were. They were these thought provoking boundary pushers like Bill Stumpf, who designed the chair. And that inspired me. Like, I wanted to be that, and that was what I wanted to grow into. And so at some point, there was a lot of changes and things happened, and Tom invented something based on kind of my Complaint about product. And he wanted to start this business. And I looked at him and I said, you're not starting this business unless I'm running it with you because you're a terrible business manager.

So a great creative mind, but not really a great. He's not a systems person so much as an inventor.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, love him. He is the best innovative mind and I love working with him. But I was like, oh, no, this is gonna be bad for our family. And we had a baby and, you know, all of that at that time. So we started this business together called Tea Tools. And it was surrounding the Palm Pilot economy. And we had an e commerce site and we had all these inventions that went with it as a stylus pen for handheld computers and a screen and a keyboard and a whole bunch of other things. And there were all these patented inventions and they were great and people loved them.

And we had this growing Palm Pilot.

Yeah. And we had this growing following.

Great. For the Palm Pilot. Yeah.

And. But I was in this crazy entrepreneurial world of running a company, and I mean, gosh, what was I? Probably 27 years old running this company, and it was just every day felt like a firefight. And I was, like, overwhelmed and scared and I had all these employees and I didn't know what to do. And, you know, I felt like I had no one to talk to. Like, that was so scary for me. And so I kept, like, coming home in tears and going, I just want to go back in the corporate world. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. It's too hard. And then one day, Ideo, which is the largest industrial design firm in the world, and palm computing, who invented the Palm Pilot, infringed on our patent. And I thought life was over. I mean, talk about just killing your company. I mean, it just instantly, how are we going to fight Goliath and the whole thing? And I went to bed in tears and woke up the next morning and said, this is not the person that you are. You're going to go out there, you're going to look at your team, and you're going to brainstorm and figure out and innovate a way out of this. And sure enough, that's what we did. And that's when I kind of found my stride as an entrepreneur, and it made me want to keep doing it. And we found Tom and I found that I loved working together and we loved the mindshare and the innovation process and the visionary side of things together.

Okay, so you started out together and you came up with all these patented products for the PalmPilot, which, you know, the PalmPilot kind of had its little lifespan.

Yeah, we were out of it way before that.

Yeah. So even if they hadn't infringed, it had a limited lifespan anyway. So you did that and you're running the business and then this big wall happened where they got in your way and you had to start innovating out of it. So like, what did you do to go from being focused on a specific channel, you know, Palm Pilot accessories, to expanding out and being involved with looking at lots of things? Like how did you morph from being very, very specifically focused on selling things you'd invented to becoming a resource for other inventors?

Well, I wish it was like a much more direct path, but I think we floundered for like about, I don't know, seven years in the middle there and trying to figure that out. So I mean, the company was. Had like a 5 million dollar valuation at the end of it and we sold off the patents in pieces and that's how we got out of it. But we looked back and we were like, we don't know how to expand this business into what we wanted it to be, which is what we have today as has design. And so we didn't know how to do that from the existing place we were in. We had like 13 LLC members and they were like all demanding and you know, it was really difficult.

So the best were they were investors or were they.

They were angel investors. Yeah, friends and family mostly, but you know, they were all really demanding and I had to produce like financials and it was good. It was so disciplined for me and taught me so much about how I needed to run my business differently the next time. But we realized that what we needed to was just to scrap T tools and start again. And that starting again was not an easy road because in the scrapping process, you know, we had to. We gave investors back, they got a return on their money and we sold off the patents and then got long term royalty on it, which was always really good for us. And that's kind of one of the models we keep using as our way of keeping income going even when times are slow.

I want to go back. I'm sorry to cut you off in mid sentence, but let's go back for a minute. You said you sort of floundered around for seven years. I want to ask two questions about what you just said and just kind of unpack this a little bit more. A few episodes. We Talked about bootstrapping versus bringing in outside equity capital. What's your short answer to going forward? Would you rather bootstrap or would you rather bring in equity capital?

Gosh. Based on your experience, you're hitting on like the point that I'm at right now where I'm like, do we bootstrap it or do we do this right now? So I've done both. And I prefer the bootstrap method because I like a lot of control. And in our industry, when you're required to be visionary and designer, having more control can be extremely helpful. And so that's kind of my first preference. However, there's a speed issue sometimes, and we are personally hitting on a speed to market in a particular technology category. And I'm at that point where I'm like, I don't know if I can do this in a bootstrap method as much as I prefer. So I'm looking at my options right now.

Okay, so the upside is when you raise money. And this is what our guest said the other day. When you're raising money, the idea is that you want to do something big and you want to do it fast.

Yes.

And that's kind of what you're saying for us to get to market with emerging technology as rapidly as we want, we may need some extra capital, which the only way for us to find that is to bring in outside investment money. I mean, you're not independently wealthy, right? You're not a Rockefeller where you can just tap into the family foundation.

No. I come from a long line of immigrant family who worked really hard to make ends meet. My grandfather a brick mason and used to build chimneys and fireplaces and all sorts of things. So big, hard working, blue collar families.

Okay, total sidebar. This is. We're gonna go way off the track here for a second. But you know, one of the things that I've learned is that we are the product of our ancestry and especially people like your parents and grandparents that you would have known or would have had influence, like on your folks or directly on you. And it's interesting that you said that you're much more of a procedural person and Tom is more of this creative energy. Right, right. And it's really interesting. You talk about your grandpa being a brick mason and you think about not only the very specific way and the variety of ways that brick masons can build a wall, build a chimney, put up a building, but not only are they very specific and fun, but they have huge responsibility. People could be hurt by them failing and doing A good job. And so there's a responsibility and there's a practicality and there's a system. That's the first person you thought of when you made a comparison was your grandfather, the bricklayer. Right.

And there's also an art to it, though. That's what I found over the years when I used to watch him and my dad, of course, because my dad worked for him for a while when I was very young. And so my dad, whenever we needed something built, he built it. But I found that there's an art to it as well. Like the bricks that you choose and how you do that. It's intuition and it's creative statement as well. Like, because sometimes bricks are darker or lighter. And so I always found, like, I was fascinated by the fact that it was a great meld of both things of this science, technology, you know, in a way, because that they always, you know, the mix of science of cement is really has to be perfect or you do have flaws. And so all of that just always fascinated me. And I think actually you're right, that that's exactly who I identify myself as, is that mix of that.

And isn't it interesting also just to go another step down the rabbit hole that a brick mason is thinking, especially unless they're just building a wall. But almost anything they're going to build, they're having not just up and down and side to side, but depth. They're thinking three dimensionally.

Yes.

Right. They're building something that's a three dimensional thing. They're putting together blocks with mortar and they're building something. And then if they're going to create art out of it, they're having to think about how is this going to work in all directions. And it's interesting to me that now one of the big things that you guys are doing where you're making a giant splash, you and Tom is with everything to do with 3D printing.

Yes.

And I can't help but connect these points, Tracy, I didn't mean to go this way, but I'm thinking, isn't it interesting you went immediately to your grandpa, also your dad. And I'm looking at going, I know you guys are leaders, thought leaders in 3D printing and bringing that into small manufacturing, bringing it into homes. And tell me how you got there and tell me what you think if there is. I mean, do you see a linkage or have you always seen a linkage or are you just seeing it right now in this interview?

No, you know, actually it's really been in the last few weeks that it has come to me as that we. We had to go down. When I said we had to sort of like floundering for seven years, it wasn't that. I mean, it's not like we just didn't have enough cash flow to really bootstrap. I didn't want to bootstrap it as much as we had done it the first time.

Right.

I didn't want to bootstrap it as much as we had done it the first time. And so what happens to me was that we were, like, holding back from restarting the business the way that we wanted to. But it was really good because it gave Tom a chance to take some jobs and become. He was a VP of design and did some. Some other things like that. It helped him manage people and learn some of the business, things that I felt like he didn't have when we started the business the first time, when we started teachools. And so he got that in that timeframe. And so it was a chance for him to grow and do that. And it was a chance for me to do some other things that I wanted to do. I did a lot of writing, and that's where I sort of expanded into the place that I am from that standpoint. And so, you know, it was a lot of those things. I looked back at that and go, wow, we really needed all that. And I just looked back at this past year as we were reflecting on our financials from the past year and what worked and what didn't, and I started to really put the pieces together, and it seemed like, wow, doing this in column that I've been doing for the last year. And I interviewed all these very diverse people.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, folks. She just said that she writes for Inc.com. she does a column, a regular column for Ink. I didn't want that just to fly by people. Maybe think you're talking about some black smudges on your P and L. No. You're saying that by adding the Ink column and meeting the people there. Keep going with your story.

By adding that, I actually was able to fill in a bunch of pieces to this vision plan that I have going forward for where we're going to take our 3D print business. And that I couldn't have done. I would have never had those people in my circle. I would have never stepped out to meet them. I don't think I would have even met them through our networking and our entrepreneurial circles because I write an innovation column. So they have a Little bit of an innovation and tech edge that I needed to be exposed to and access to perhaps in the future to be able to help me understand, like, how to get the capital that I want, because it's not an angel investor round that I'm going to need eventually. And getting that exposure, all of a sudden I went. That's why that happened to me this past year.

And the big takeaway that I get from that, two big takeaways that I just got from what you said. One is that there isn't always this immediate direct path from where you are to where you have imagined that you want to be. Right. So you know where you are and you have a sense of. This is what I think success would look like. Exactly. And you guys know how I'm exacting on precisely where's the destination you want to reach. But so you're here, you want to get there. And a lot of times we try to draw this beautiful, clear, unobstructed, we understand every step along the way path. And the fact is, it almost never goes that way. There are all these things that you have to make choices about, like, should I start writing for Ink? Should I do this column? Or is that taking away from other things that I'm doing? And what you're saying is that by saying yes to that opportunity, making a calculated risk with your time, it actually opened up opportunities and relationships that not only would you not have had, I mean, you would have had no way to even explore them, but you actually learned things that you didn't know you needed to learn to accomplish the goal. Did I get that right?

Exactly. Because if you looked at it completely from like hourly return on investment of time, it would been a complete failure last year. But then you sit back and look at, wow, I just added this person to my network and their network to my network, and I'm going to need them next year and I can pull in a favor. And you know, I was thinking the other day about actually your men's group.

Yep. Oh, yeah.

And you know, Greg and everyone there, Greg Reed. And I was thinking about them and I was like, if I'm gonna go and pitch to a group of VCs, I'm gonna pull a favor with Greg and Aaron and I'm gonna go and pitch in front of you guys because that would be like the most intimidating.

There's an interesting.

That would be extremely intimidating to me. And that's what I would want to do to get over any fear that I might have about pitching to a vc. Right.

Wow.

If I pitch to your group, and, you know, and I know it's friendly at the end of the day, but it still would be intimidating to me, and that would help me overcome it. And I have the ability to ask for that favor. And that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't, you know, met you guys over the last couple of years and done all of that.

So, yeah, it's really important. And so here's a couple more interesting takeaways, folks. One is Traci saying, I need to stretch myself so that I'm prepared to receive all that I want to receive. I have to go do something that I know will be challenging, but, hey, isn't it awesome that I know people who are in a different business, a different circumstance? And I can go get access to the founder of Uggs Boots, to the founder of the Make a Wish foundation, to the guy that invented Pictionary, to the guy that, you know, is one of the top sports agents in the country. I mean, how interesting is that? That, yeah, those people are all right there for you to have, you know, really pretty easy access to Tracy. And so I think it really is partly who you know and partly the relationships that you've established, but it's also the guts to ask, to step out in front of those people and to humble yourself enough to say, how is this? Is this okay? Or what should I change? I mean, that's. Most people just stay in a small little world, a small little business, a small little group of friends. They stay hunkered down inside of a place where they have tremendous influence, where they can feel safe, important, maybe the smartest person in the room. Successful people surround themselves with those that make them stretch. Because if you're always the smartest person in the room, you're not growing.

Oh, I totally agree.

Good for you. And by the way, we have a meeting in the next week, and I'll bring that up if you want me to. So anyway, go ahead.

No, but, you know, this is really interesting, what you just said there, because this is the thing I think we get to too often, and I don't want to generalize like women, men, or anything like that, but I find that the women entrepreneurs I talk to are more this way than the men are.

Which way? Is that bold or hunkered down?

No, it's a little too perfectionist about things. So I realized that I thought that over the last year and a half that I've been formulating a plan, and I haven't jumped, we haven't dove in it's never been the right time. We haven't gone to do this yet. And I had to sit back and reflect on that and say, why is it not the right time for me? And I realized that I was sitting up there saying, well, I'm trying to hold myself as this great mentor and consultant and all this stuff. And in trying to do something so hard and so new, I would have to step out of that perfectionist mode and say, wow, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm out of my element. And that's hard.

When you finish something, you put it out in front of people, then you have now opened yourself up for judgment. And most people don't want to be judged. So if you're working on a painting and people say, hey, how's that painting going? You go, it's almost done. You know, I'm almost done. I'm really excited about it. It's going to be exciting, going to be great. It's going to be my best thing ever. But it's not quite done. It's not quite done. My digital program is not quite done. My book's not quite done, you know, because as soon as it's done, then everybody can shine the light on you. And all of your concerns about your failings, your warts, your blemishes, you're afraid are going to be on display. In fact, most people have never done a lot of the things that we're afraid that we're going to be judged harshly on. They haven't ever gone out and asked for money. They've never written a book, they've never made a painting. And so some haters are going to hate, but for the most part, people are going to go, that's really cool, and good for you for doing it. And then they're going to forget all about what you did and go on to the things that they're doing that they're so worried about. I mean, this fear of judgment is so overblown and overvalued.

Well, and I don't know that it was just completely a fear of judgment for me as much as it was a fear of, I'm not qualified enough for this.

According to who?

And that's ridiculous. Yeah, according to who. And it was sitting in your unshackled owner presentation in San Diego. Gosh, what was that like in November? I don't know. Four or five months ago in November. Yeah. And so sitting there and I sat down and I think. I don't know if you use the word but big, hairy, audacious goal, you know?

Right?

Yeah, your bhag. What's your big, hairy, audacious goal? And I sat down and I was doodling in my notebook, which is what I do when I'm at conferences, because it's kind of a free flow way of thinking for me. And as I was doodling, I wrote, I want to build a $1 billion company. And I went, oh, my God, I've never said that out loud. I never wrote that down before. I may be thinking that, but I never wrote that down before. And then Jason. Jason's necessitation. I actually don't know how to say his last name.

Jason Cisneros.

Cisneros, yes. God, awesome guy. And I'd never heard him speak in person. I've like, seen him on Facebook and stuff before, but I'd never seen him. And he was just in your face the whole time that he was giving that talk. And I needed that. And he basically pushed back and says, well, what are you afraid of losing if you don't go after that big goal? Right. That's basically the message he was giving. And I looked at that and I went, wow, what am I afraid of losing? I'm really proud of my relationship with my husband. We've been doing this for 25 years together, on and off. And I'm not afraid of losing that. I'm not afraid of losing my clients. What am I afraid of losing in this? Why am I not doing this?

And if you say billion dollar business and all you ever do is get to $750 million in revenue, that's pretty darn good, huh? It's pretty darn good. Remember what Les Brown always says. It isn't that you aim too high and miss, it's that you aim too low and hit. And that's what most of us are doing. We're saying, I'm willing to play small because nobody's going to tell me I was a fool or silly or it was folly for me to go after my billion dollar goal.

Well, and that's, for me, is like that side. Part of it, though, was the fear that I wasn't qualified to run a billion dollar company. And I looked first off, I said, well, I don't end up having to run it when it is terrible. Right, Right. And that's your message. And I got that loud and clear. But I sat back and I said, no. My big aha of that moment was, over the last eight years, Tom and I have built $254 million product lines wow, that's wholesale. That's wholesale cost, Right. So double that for retail. That's how you get to $2 billion of business, right?

Yep.

I've built that. I didn't just do it once, I did it again and again and again. I built a four million dollar product line. It's a business for the people that I build it for. It's significant part of their businesses. And out of that 250 products, many of them went to a couple of the same companies. And two of those companies went from 100 million to 300 million in the time that we worked with them. So I helped their companies grow and I helped them get bought out at the end of the day because we added so much value to their bottom line. So they got bought and sold in that time period and then we were out of a job, which was how we came back to like, wow, this model's not working for us as well as it's working for everybody else. We better fix that.

But the point is, when we add up our life's experience and we think about what have we actually done in our life. You'll be surprised if you start to really boil it down to how many face to face sales presentations have you done? How many people have you closed? How many dollars does that add up to? How many people does that affect? When you start to really boil down the impact what you've done out there in your business, wherever you are right now, you will be surprised at the impact that you've already made. Tracy, I need to ask you a question. So as it relates to this whole idea of the unshackled owner. So you guys started out, you had Goliath that battled with you, you guys went on, you've designed a new system where you're able to take lots of products to market, do multiple millions of dollars. Now I know you and Tom work together. Do you work mostly with employees, with contractors, with vendors? Because you can't do it all by yourself. So how is your team designed?

You know, that's really interesting. And I think that was like the biggest takeaway for me from the first business, from T Tools, when we had all these employees and because we were doing light manufacturing on assembly of the products. And so I had a lot of employees, I had a big team and I felt very burdened. And you and I talked about this when you first started because unshackled meant something to me. And you know, it resonates that when someone's had that experience and it kept me up at night Worrying, did I get enough orders this month? And, you know, all of those things stressed me out. So when we built the business the second time around, and we built it to be able to do very diverse product lines, we built it with a virtual team. And I don't mean like a va, like people do here. I mean, I have an entire team that's in Asia that works exclusively with me. But we don't support them directly as employees. They are autonomous, they can take other projects. We just take up a lot of their time. But we've been working with them for a very long time, for almost eight years now. So we're all very comfortable with how we work. We have systems in place to communicate, so everything flows and works and is as efficient as possible. And that's what we built to be able to handle that. In addition to that, we have designers we bring in to expand our products. So Tom and I, we basically design products for mass market retail. So consumer products, you buy every day things at Costco and Walmart and Target. And a lot of the products lately are on Amazon. And so we get a lot of smaller companies coming to us, startups and entrepreneurs doing what they call private label selling on Amazon. And we can handle their business too. But sometimes you fall into a realm of like, I'm not totally the expert in, you know, beauty tools. I might bring in somebody who's had a little more experience in that as a designer to work with us on a project. And so I can flex and do that based on products that I don't know enough about.

So if you think about folks, I'm getting so much gold here, and I hope the listeners are hearing the same thing I'm hearing. So you guys see an idea, right? Somebody comes, says, we have this concept, we have this drawing, or maybe they've got a napkin idea. You're able to build out prototypes. These are physical products, right? And so you're able to put together pro tips. Now, folks, listen to this. Remember the bricklayer, Remember this three dimensional thinking. These guys, Tracy and Tom, do a great podcast and have a whole business on 3D printing. That's significant. And it's not exactly the same as everything that we've been talking to up till now. So here's the deal. But think about this 3D idea. So Tracy's taking ideas, they're taking concept, they're building it into prototypes, they're finding manufacturing, they're selling it in Office Depot, but they're also selling on Amazon. Business is business is business. You can deliver products Through a variety of channels and depending on certain elements. I mean, you're not going to sell tremendously heavy things necessarily.

Well, no, we do. We sell furniture. So they are heavy.

Well, okay, let me go back. My point is certain things may be better, more useful coming from online versus a store. Other things you know you're not going to buy, you could buy, oh, I don't know, like a piece of heavy equipment. You could buy a big backloader, you know, backhoe. You could buy that online. But odds are you're going to go to a place, a physical facility, look at it, learn how to drive it, get some instruction, have a place to get it service. That's not an ideal Amazon product. No, but then there are other things that why wouldn't you be buying online versus in a physical location? But my point is Tracy and her company have figured out how to take your concept and using all the different channels, not being limited to one way that they're familiar with, they're able to go to lots of channels to get people to this multi million dollar result over and over and over and over again. It takes looking at all of your options. There is not one path to the top of the mountain. There's a thousand paths. Just because you're familiar with one doesn't mean it's the only one or even the right one.

Yeah, you've hit on it, Erin. That is what we do. And that's really our kind of our secret sauce here. And I'll share it because it's come from having done it 250 times and made a whole lot of mistakes along the way to understand what that path is. And so for us, it's not a direct route, but it has an order to things. So this is what we tell people. That is the understanding part. It's not like we do anything different than another industrial design firm might, which is technically what we are, or another sourcing agent who finds manufacturers for you. The part that we do there is the same because there's lots of great practices to model after. It's the order we do it in is what increases our success rate. So 7 out of 10 consumer retail products fail in the market. Tom and I have an 86% success rate from our products that we've done with our clients. And when I say we have 250, those are just the 86% successful ones. There were a couple of dogs in there, so. But you know, it happens. But we flip that around because what happens is we have an order, we do things in and so we essentially kill off products that kill off ideas really quickly that won't work, that are unlikely to be successful either in the sourcing process, the pricing process, the manufacturing process, whatever it might be. We know that because we've done it with so many different products, and we know what works and what doesn't, and we kind of synthesize that down to a specific order. And our key really is, is at that very, very beginning, not getting attached to these ideas. These ideas are not babies. We don't work with inventors very often because inventors get too caught up into their idea. We want business builders.

They have to stand on their own. Right. It can't just be your baby, your dream. It's got to stand on its own. Another topic we covered a few weeks ago.

Yes.

So, folks, listen, there's a consistency that we hear from every one of these interviews, and that is you have to have team. You have to have communication. You have to have systems, Team communication systems. And I will add exacting ways of measuring. That's what you just said, Tracy. You organize yourself so you know when to kill an idea quickly so you don't waste a lot of time on it. You've figured out how to make assessments and say, this one we keep pursuing, this one is a dog. We're done with it. So that you can have 86% success rate and just outperform the market. Guys, these are the fundamentals. These are the fundamentals of becoming an unshackled owner. And with that, we're going to break for just a minute. We're going to hear from our sponsor. We're going to come back right away with kind of a new twist on a old way of doing things. So hold on. We'll be right back. One of the most important things that you can do as you're starting and growing a business is to surround yourself with a tribe of great people and have lessons from a mentor that you can count on. Well, if you don't mind me saying so, I'd love to be your mentor. And twice a month, on the first and third Wednesday evening of every month, I do a private video conference call where I not only teach you what I believe is the most important things for you to be hearing to help your business right now, but also take your questions, answer the things that you need to know so that you can be getting that help as you're getting that business up and growing and off the ground. It's called the freedom call. And if you go to www.theunshackledowner.com freedomcall theunshackledowner.com Freedom Call. You can learn all about it. See what kind of guests we have in the call and see how a tiny investment in your business can pay gigantic dividends. Join us on the freedom call. Okay, guys, this is Aaron and Tracy Hazard, and we're back with the last part of our presentation. Now, the last few episodes, I've been kind of playing with this and I've been calling it bullet points. A few rapid fire questions that we get some quick answers. And I've been thinking about it. I thought, what does bullet points have to do with the unshackled owner? Let's come up with a better name. And so today, and for the foreseeable future, we're going to call these not our bullet points. We're going to call this our golden keys. These are the specific golden keys that we're going to get from our guest for today for Traci Hattuser today, what are the golden keys that she can share with us to help all of us become unshackled. So with that, you ready to go, Traci?

Absolutely.

Okay, so what book inspires you? What's the one book that you tell people, hey, this is the thing you need to read as it relates to your world that you live in.

So I read a lot of books. Tom will tell you. I read like 300 books a year sometimes not this last year, though, I've been too busy. But the best book that I read in the last year and the one that I've been carrying forward with me is about lateral thinking. It's Shane Snow's smart cuts. And I absolutely love this book. First off, he's an incredibly good writer. He's a tech writer. He's written for Wired and other places like that. And this is not a new book. And I hear that he has a new one coming out and I'm looking forward to that. But this one, the idea of lateral thinking is really what we operate on and what you need to do to be extremely efficient to cut to the core and not follow, you know, the hard work.

I love it. Okay, so smart cuts. And we'll have a link for that in the show notes. Now, if you could go back, you talked about the circuitous route that you followed at ups and downs. If you could go back and change something, what would you change?

You know, that's a really interesting question, and I love that question. I don't think I would change anything. And it's really, we've had a few hard times in there. And, you know, people would say, well, wouldn't you want to erase that? And I might have, on a bad day, might still want to erase that. But I think it's those flaws. I think it's those mistakes. I think it's those things that we learn from that really make your future possible. And right now, I'm sitting on the cusp of going. All of those things have made it possible for me to be on the verge of building a billion dollar company.

So it's that old idea. And Tracy, you know my wife Michelle, and she's a great life coach. And one of the things that she.

Awesome.

One of the things that she talks about is this is what it looks like on the way to this thing. You want. So a lot of times we want to go back and change things. And there are things that I look back and think, maybe if I hadn't done this or if I'd done that better or if I'd taken that opportunity, but then we wouldn't be where we are now. And if we're happy where we are now, going back and changing it could mess up the. What do they call the time space continuum or something?

Exactly.

Nerdy and Star Trekkie.

That's right. Well, that wouldn't be out of realm. A possibility in our office here, so. No, exactly. You know the way that I always like the kind of simple way that Michelle words. It is messy in the middle. It's messy in the middle. And when you're in that middle, you just want to cry and you want to get out of it. You want anything to be on that other side of it. But it is in that messy middle that all that hard work that's done that is the foundation builder for really making it successful.

Yeah. If you guys. If anybody wants to learn about Michelle Young, you go to Michelle at Play on Facebook, Michelle at Play. And you can learn about my fabulous wife, which was not my intention.

Just on a side note. On a side note about Michelle is like, this is the thing about it is I've never done something like that. Never hired a life coach before. And I met her, and in five minutes, I knew that was gonna be the first thing that I'd ever done for myself. Like, that was just something just for me, an incredibly long time. And it was the best thing that I'd done in the last three years.

That's. She's gonna love hearing that when this plays. So without getting too much more per. Because you and I have a funny way that we came together. Actually, you walked up to me at an event and said you thought you knew me, but it was actually you'd been listening to my podcast.

Yeah, so I was listening to your podcast as I was flying to the event, which, I mean, I was flying to Vegas, but we didn't have an extra car to drive. So I flew in, and I'm flying in, and I was listening to it on the airplane, and I don't know how I stumbled across your podcast back then. That was the Lookout.

The Lookout, yeah.

Yeah. And I get to the event, and I was like, wow, this guy's voice is really familiar. I feel like I know him. And, like, somebody said something about podcasts that you were a podcast host, and I'm like, oh, that's where I know him.

And now you guys are my producers of my podcast, so.

That's right.

We've completely closed that loop. See, guys? Complete transparency. Tom and Tracy have a great podcasting service if you're interested in podcasting that. We'll also make sure we put that in the show notes so you can find out. Okay, thanks, Tracy. Back to Golden Keys, which is supposed to be fast, but I'm enjoying this conversation. Tell me, what's your favorite quote?

So our favorite quote in this office is, hope is not a plan. And we say that all the time because it's partially because you get really caught up in these ideas and you hope everybody's going to love it, and you hope it's going to be great. But hope is not a plan is what we found is that you still have to work the system, you still have to work the plan, you still have to go through it. That doesn't mean you lose your optimism about it. And we fight for it. I mean, that's how we decided that we were going to do 3D printing. It's not very logical. Like, if I sat down and said, oh, yeah, let's 3D print prototypes. Why do we need to be spending time 3D print prototypes? Some technician should be doing that. I can build prototypes faster in China or in a local foundry here, if that's what I need. I can do those things. So why do I need it? And Tom looked at me and said, we need to skill build. We need to understand the technology, and we need to figure out if there's something we can do with it. I went, you're absolutely right. I can't look that up. I can't read about it. I've got to experience it firsthand. And once we did, we realized this is a plan. But this would be one of those things where you would give up too easily if you kept too strictly to your measurements, your guidelines, your plan. You have to sometimes really look for those opportunities, but that doesn't mean along the way you don't keep your gates, your screeners.

Okay, so that's interesting. So hope is not a plan. I totally agree with that one, guys. Now, as we wrap up here, I'd like to ask you a couple of things. Just any parting counsel. You've given us so much good value today. Some parting counsel. How do people reach out to you? Because, guys, remember Tracy and Tom, it has. It's not all under has design, but just for purposes of this show. They have their product business taking products to market, and they have this whole 3D printing business and a really, really successful, very, very niche podcast. It's WTFF is the podcast. And really the whole idea is if you're into 3D printing, this is one of the must listen to programs. So you've got bringing products to market, you know, deciding 86% success, getting them out there, 2 billion plus in retail sales. Then you have the 3D PR world. And then they also have this business that works with podcasters, lots of them to do all the production work for their thing. So there's a lot of reasons you'd want to reach out to Traci Hazard, and there's a lot of background that she has. So as you go out, Traci, what are some kind of parting words of counsel and how can people get in touch with you? And then we'll wrap up.

So, yeah, I mean, parting words in the sense is that it sounds like we're doing too much. But Tom and I are big believers in market testing. So our 3D print podcast, it was a market test. It was a test to see if people wanted to hear what we had to sell. And we aren't selling them anything at this point. It was just a test to see if people would listen. And so that's one of the gates that we go through, and it's the very first one we go through, is to make sure people want to buy what you have to sell. And just because it's not in itself final embodiment. Remember that perfectionist thing we talked about earlier? Just because it's not the final version of it, it's not the perfect invented version. Maybe it's just a test of the category or a test of the product type, or a test of can I reach the audience? I want to reach through my marketing method. Right. Any one of those things are critical factors to success at the end. So sometimes we do these things that are little market tests out of the way, and then. And sometimes we find, like, with the podcast production side, it becomes a life on its own. So that, in a sense, is that it's a little past startup stage. It's in the growth stage right now, but it's going to run itself in about two more months. Like, that's how close it is to being an unshackled business. And that's awesome that we took that from a little seed concept last summer, and now it's almost an unshackled business.

So what's the takeaway?

So the takeaway for me and to you guys is that you really have to sometimes give your ideas a chance, but you also have to coach that with some advisor or some measurement tool or some plan that says, if I reach this point and it's still not doing it, I have to sit back and reflect about why. Because is it important? Is it reaching my big hairy goal? Is it any of those things and I still need to keep going, or do I have to stop? Because just because I like it doesn't mean I should keep doing it.

So give them room to breathe, but have some sort of coach, counselor, some trusted voice that can tell you this is working or this is not working. Another favorite quote. You can't read the label from inside the bottle. You need somebody sometimes to look at you objectively. How do people reach you, Tracy?

So you can reach me@hazdesign.com so H, A, Z, Z, D, E, S, I, G, N. There's a link to my Ink column there, and I would love to have more readers. You never have enough readers as a columnist, so that's always a good way to help me out. And then 3D start point is actually where the home of the podcast is and the podcast what the fff. If you know what that means, then you know you're in the right place.

All right, well, guys, it's been so nice having you here today. Traci, thanks for taking so much time with us and to share your journey and your experience. Because, folks, as I said earlier, there isn't one way, but it will always come back. It will always come back to a great idea, a great vision, a team, metrics to measure what's going on and having the courage and the tenacity and the audacity to keep pursuing your dream. And that's what will make you an unshackled Owner. So until next time guys, you go out and make it a great day and I look forward to seeing you next time. Make sure you tell your friends you share you like and you write reviews and let's spread this information all over the business world. Okay, Take care. See you soon. Bye Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Unshackled Owner podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you get new episodes right when they come out and help spread the word by liking and sharing the podcast across social media. You can get more information and ideas from aaron@www.aaronscottyoung.com. and while you're there, download Aaron's e book, the Critical 20, and grab your copy of the the Freedom Formula. The seven Step Process to Build an Asset, Not Just a Glorified Job.