https://www.listennotes.com/e/0af7b791954e44ecb6b69512f4e78760

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launch hazards. Welcome to an episode that we're gonna talk about something that's a little bit different 'cause we're not really talking about the product development process, we're talking about what you're gonna do with your business. And so I brought my good friend, Aaron Young on, and he is the CEO of Laughlin. And Laughlin is the place, if you've already been communicating with me, you know that that's where I send you to form your corporation or your LLC. It's already the place that we do our business with for all of our corporations, and we have multiple. And so we definitely want you to hook that up because what I really want to get across today is that you should be thinking of yourself like a business. It's not just an invention. It's not just a product brand. It is a business and you need to be getting the full benefit of those businesses and the full protection of that. So that's what we're going to talk to Aaron about today. Plus, there's so much more. So Aaron Young is the consummate entrepreneur. I don't know what else to call you except that you've been an entrepreneur pretty much your whole life, Aaron.

Hi, Tracy. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Yeah, I started my first entrepreneurial efforts when I was in high school and I actually had my first company with a payroll just before my 19th birthday.

Oh my goodness.

So I've been an employer for a long time and have started lots of companies, over a dozen multimillion dollar businesses that I've built and some of them, I don't wanna overstate it, but unusually successful.

Yes, unusually successful. He's being very modest there, guys.

We've had some phenomenally great failures too. That's why I never wanna make a big deal of it because I never know, maybe I'm on the precipice of crashing this company into the ground.

Oh, I don't think so. I think you've got a good thing going here.

No, no. We bought Laughlin, Mr. Laughlin had passed away and Lee Morgan and I bought that company back in 2001. and utterly transformed what it was or significantly transformed what it was. And so, yeah, we've got 18 years now there. And, you know, people have said, well, if you buy and sell companies, why do you still own this company? And it's because Laughlin's such a cool business and so fundamentally important to many tens of thousands of customers that are active with us right now. And it's really, I don't know, it's one of those businesses I get offers every year to sell that or people want to buy it. and I don't want to sell it. It's like the gift that keeps on giving.

It's a great company. So I don't do a lot of promoing on this show. That's not what this is about. It's about presenting great experts in there. But there are some basics you need in your company and there are some people and services that are better than others. And I've been there. So I formed a lot of companies through, I formed a corporation through an accountant once. It was a disaster. It cost me a whole extra $1,200 the first year because he formed it two weeks too early. 'cause he was late, he didn't want to do it right on the beginning of the next year. He wanted to get it done before the holidays, formed it, and then I had to pay the taxes for that extra year. And he's the tax guy. I was furious about that one. I've had lawyers form them, and then when lawyers form them, they're like, oh, that's it. And they never think about it again. So you have no one to ask questions of, and you have no one to help you with everything. So that's what I love about you guys, because not only do you form them, you have great lawyers and accountants and tax advisors that you work with and that are part of your community. But at the end of the day, when I have a question, I have somebody to go to and somebody who's got my back.

Laughlin was the original Nevada incorporation service. So anybody that's ever heard that Nevada or Wyoming or Delaware is a good place to incorporate. Laughlin Associates, Mr. Laughlin was the one who kind of started all that for Nevada back in 1972, working with the Secretary of State's office in that state. But when I got there in '01 and looked at what was going on, I thought, well, everything in our marketing is true, but it's only sort of half true because there are all these misrepresentations of why you should use Nevada or Wyoming or Delaware that all sound great, especially if you're in a state like California, Oregon, New York, high state income tax states. And so they're like, oh, we would like to not have to pay 11% income tax to the state of California, state of Oregon, 10.8 to Oregon. So we'll go run all of our money through Nevada. And even the Nevada Secretary of State's website looks like you can do it, but it's disingenuous because the law in, let's say, California or Oregon, where I grew up. And then the law in Nevada even says, if I'm a Nevada corporation, but I'm doing business in California, I have to register with California as a foreign corporation. And then I have to pay California's taxes and Nevada's fees. You're paying double or more on this fantasy that you can evade state taxes. So there was all this misrepresentation that I wanted to fix. and everybody said, Aaron, you're going to lose all your customers, you're going to lose all your business. And I said, lying to the customer is not a good idea.

First of all, it's not a sustainable strategy, right?

Yeah, it's a horrible strategy. Second of all, I said, we may have less sales, but the people who buy will stay our customer. And guess what? We have almost 90% renewal rate where before they had less than 25% renewal rate. Because once people found out about the lie, they not only quit using our services, you know, because it didn't make any sense, but we had black eyes. People were saying, oh, those guys lied to me. So forget that. That's a horrible strategy. So what we've done is we've built, we had to rebuild, but we've built a very loyal client base because we don't sell them too little. You're like $99 incorporation at legal, well, I won't say, but some radio advertising company. There's a misrepresentation of what's being done. And so what we want to do and all of you that are listening, you don't want too much and you don't want too little. You want exactly what you need. Right.

So let's talk a little bit about what they need.

Yeah, you don't want to buy into the car. You may not need all the bells and whistles, but you do need wheels and a transmission and an engine and safety belts, everything that's required by the law.

So now most of our listeners are inventors or Amazon sellers or e-commerce sellers of some kind. So really they have brands where they, most of them do not. Now there are some that are much bigger and they have their own warehouses and they're distributing and they're doing things like that. But for our startups, the earlier ones, the ones who just have new products, most of them don't have facilities because Amazon is their warehouse. And so they really are just a I'm going to call them a design development company, right? Who's a brand and their marketing. So everything that they do is virtual. So they have a lot more flexibility and choices. And that's why having someone like you guys who can advise and say, is this the right thing for you? It's really important. But too many of them think, oh, well, we're too small and we don't really need a corporation or an LLC. And that's the part that I'd love to touch on really quick because I think that's the biggest mistake is to not look at yourself as a business in today's world.

Well, let me make a couple of differentiators there. Okay, let me just, let's just talk about how we would think about that. So if you're an inventor of a pen, so I've invented this new special design thing that is unique and I believe there's gonna be an opportunity to sell millions of these things. And so I'm not trying to argue about this. This is just my perception. You're not really a business Yet, you're.

An idea about to be a business, right?

You might become a business, but you know, one of the guys that I'm in a mastermind group with is the inventor of Pictionary. So, the inventor of Pictionary, Rob Angel. So, Rob never did start a business. He invented something. He licensed it out to somebody who already had distribution for games and he's become a ridiculously wealthy man and he never did have a business. He had something that was able to be turned into revenue. So there's a difference between a business and a product. However, if this thing really is special and there really is going to be a market for it, it looks huge when I hold it up in front of people.

Yeah, it's a giant pen.

It's the hugest pen of your life. But anyway, this pen If it's special, then you do want to protect it. And one of the big misunderstandings that people have is they think that I'm not really a business, so I don't need to be incorporated or I don't need to form an LLC. And that is a misunderstanding of the use of corporations and LLCs. There are probably most corporations or LLCs are not designed to hold, remember, they're like a bucket. They hold something. So they're not really designed to hold a going concern like an active brick and mortar or even digital business that has employees and has lots of customers and stuff. Most of the corporations and LLCs that are formed are meant to hold some asset. They own a piece of real estate. They own a piece of intellectual property. They own a bunch of heavy equipment. And this is something we might want to talk about further as it relates to intellectual property assets.

Yeah, we'll get there in a minute. But yeah, so I just wanted that concept to being is that a corporation, a business doesn't mean that you have a bunch of employees. They're coming in and out of your store. It doesn't have to look that way. It can simply be a holding company for holding your assets for a very particular reason because there are lots of tax benefits and protection benefits. So, yeah.

And a lot of going can not a lot, but some businesses that you think of as a, you know, there are people coming in out of the door or they are selling at the farmers market or they are selling on Amazon. There's a business and they're not incorporated. And those people are what's called sole proprietor. You could have 100 employees and be a sole proprietor. Okay? The problem with being a sole proprietor or not doing something with your intellectual property is that if there's any challenge, like let's say there's a lawsuit, somebody sues the business, well, instead of only having the business at risk when you're a sole proprietor, everything you own, your equity in your home, the art that your grandma gave you, you know, when she passed, the coin collection from your dad or whatever, all of those things, your kids' college savings, your anything, anything you have is all up for grabs if you lose the lawsuit, you can lose everything. The reason corporations and LLCs exist is to separate these assets from these assets so that if some problem happens over here, it doesn't bleed over into this. In this case, your business challenge doesn't bleed over into your personal estate or I've raised five teenage drivers and every one of them with the car. So if you have a problem at home, you don't want that to bleed over and have somebody that your kid rear-ended going over and taking your company or your intellectual property, your invention.

Your patent, right? Be thinking about that. You worked really hard for these. So You guys have something you call the Rockefeller Strategy, which is really a real estate kind of model of having a holding or a trust in a state and for real estate retirements and all of those things. So you've got this kind of program. And so I was thinking about it. You have this wonderful event and we're recording this before that event is coming up. So if you're in the San Diego area, you definitely want to check it out. It's called Magnify youy Wealth and there'll be links to it in the blog post on our website, productlaunchhazards.com and there's a discount code because I'm a speaker there and you guys gave me a discount. So we've got a discount code that we'll be giving everyone there. It's one of my favorite events. I love to come to it because I learned something new because my business is always at a different stage every year when I come. So I hear something new. So the last time I was at one of your events, I heard something that I had been ruminating in the back of my mind about using an insurance policy model of actually funding future development work. And I was like, now I have somebody I know I can ask my questions of because it'd been just kind of going on in my mind. But a year earlier, I would have like gone, oh, I don't need that. And so this is, there's always something interesting that I get out of it. But what I loved most about it when they talk about the Rockefeller Strategy is that I was starting to think about this as being a really ideal way, especially for licensing intellectual property. And whether you're licensing it back to your core business or licensing it out to others, it gives you that sort of protection separation that I found over the years. So what many people may not realize is that Tom and I have been in, I don't know, Six lawsuits, I think, over intellectual property. Like, it's just crazy that you cannot do as many patents. So we've had, I think we're on 40 now, 40 patents and not have entanglements, whether you have to sue someone because they've infringed or they're claiming intellectual property that your patent's not valid. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes on or confidentiality, like, oh, it's crazy the stuff that has happened. And and to think that if we hadn't had businesses in all those times, which I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. So the sole proprietor thing or like just winging it never occurred to me. I always saw us as a business. So we were always incorporated. But if I hadn't done that, wow, that would have been really, really dangerous. But this is an advanced strategy. Talk a little bit about like how that works. I know that you're not, you know, your team's an expert in this, but talk about why that's important.

The legend is that John D. Rockefeller, and by the way, John D. Rockefeller, third wealthiest person to ever live on the planet in history, third wealthiest person, John D. Rockefeller. So his son said on his deathbed, Mr. Rockefeller told his children that the secret was to own nothing and control everything. It just feels like an Yeah, control nothing, own everything. Or own nothing, control everything. Ooh, I screwed up my quote. But the point is, the idea is that in order to shield yourself from the challenges of being in business, and he was a real player, right? He was a big time player. He makes Jeff Bezos look like a beginner as far as wealth, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. His wealth was so enormous. There's nothing to rival it with anybody alive right now. But this idea of own nothing, control everything was the same idea that Sam Walton mimicked another guy who became the richest man in the world. And everybody who's really seriously wealthy is doing this. And what it is, is you separate. So we call that strategy. And you said it was a real estate strategy. And Certainly many people use it for real estate.

Well, you talk a lot about that at the event because you have more real estate investors.

But yeah, but we also I tell you who uses it a lot. Movie studios with intellectual property. Ah. We regularly have movie studios come and set up a Rockefeller strategy and they'll set up multiple corporations underneath the strategy to own different parts of the movie. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

So the idea is very simple. In its most simplistic form, you have a holding company and an operating company. The holding company is where you put the intellectual property, right? That's where you put your money, your intellectual property, your heavy equipment, anything that is critical to the progress and success of your business. And nobody knows about that company. That is a time to use Nevada. or Wyoming, not really Delaware, but Delaware is for publicly traded companies or companies that are going to be purchased by public companies. Nevada is the most privately held business friendly state. So you have this privacy company in Nevada, and then you have your operating business that's going to trade shows, got a website, got a podcast, got a business cards and pop-up banners and everything. The operating business, the one that's doing business with the public, and they're selling pins, but they've licensed the technology, the patents, from the holding company to the operating company. And what happens is the holding company says, I don't really know how successful these guys are gonna be. And because they owe me a lot of value back in this agreement, we're gonna put liens against the operating company so that if they have a problem, we're the first ones to get paid. But the point is, is the idea is that, so now the operating company gets a lawsuit, right? Somebody comes after them and they win. They win the lawsuit against the operating business. And there's a judgment of, you know, X dollars here. Well, before the new creditor can get paid, There's something in the law called first in time, first in line. And so the holding business now that has the liens, remember, you're controlling both of these companies, but the world doesn't know that. And they are separate legal paper people. They are utterly separate from each other. One doesn't own the other. They have common ownership, but this one doesn't own this one. So when the judgment comes here, Before they have to pay a judgment creditor, they have to pay their bill back to this company. So this company basically sucks all the value back and leaves the judgment creditor high and dry. That's powerful stuff.

I keep thinking about that as being so valuable in terms of also making it easier to spin off and sell off the license later as well. Because now you have a whole entity, you could just sell the entity along with that if you're not holding multiples at the same time. But that's a really smart strategy as well from a patent standpoint because it makes it a smoother transition because I can tell you it's messy when you try to sell a patent out of your company.

If you look at iconic things like the Coca-Cola formula or the Coca-Cola logo, it was famously known and although this is no longer a great example, but the giraffe Jeffrey the Giraffe for Toys R Us. They're all held in separate corporations.

Because the brands have value, guys. That is what I want you to hear because when your brand grows into an icon like that, it has tremendous amount of value in and of itself.

My business partner was going on a car ride with his neighbor who happened to be the CFO of Intel Corporation and explained how he had They were talking about corporations and LLCs. And this guy was saying as CFO, he has responsibility to keep track of several thousand corporations and LLCs that hold all the patents and all the different pieces of intellectual property and this one contract with this one affiliate or whatever, all in separate corporations or LLCs that are not businesses They're just holding assets that are critically important to things that big Intel corporation is doing. So hopefully we've given a number of examples now of why you would want to take your intellectual property and put it into an entity just to keep it separate from anything that might negatively come into your life. Right. Which could include like a divorce or medical bills because Right. Somebody gets sick or you don't want your valuable asset just out there flapping in the wind for somebody to come say, oh, we'll take that. Right.

I just really also think, just want to touch it a little bit because we're heading into tax time. That there also is great tax benefits to utilizing these strategies as to first off, forming a company. So please form a company from a standpoint of if you're earning income, if you are making money on your products, if you are doing any of that, It's really extremely important that you have a corporate formation of some kind, whether LLC or S Corp or C Corp, whatever it is, you need to get some advice and get that going. Because I can tell you, because I get this all the time, wine, wine, wine from a lot of the e-commerce sellers who are like getting hit with huge tax bills at the end of the year because they didn't realize how they were categorizing their inventory. And there's a whole bunch of issues that they don't understand when you go into it. But having a company and having that can at the end of the day save you because I had less than It said I had a negative tax rate this year because I got so much back. But normally our average is under 10% for a tax rate.

Well, first of all, you have to have revenue, right? To have tax. If you don't have any revenue, then your taxes are not a big concern. But if you start having revenue, here's the biggest problem wealthy people have, no joke. When you have more money than you are consuming, then you go, well, I've got this extra $1,000 or $1,000,000. what am I going to do with it? Well, then you say, well, I guess I'll invest it in something. I'll buy a building, I'll invest it in a project, I'll put it in gold. I mean, I'll do something. But then when that works, now you've put this money and now you've got another gain and there's more taxes. When you become wealthy, it actually becomes a full-time job figuring out what do I do with this money? Because if you don't plan with an intention, if you wait until it hits you, you'll end up paying the highest tax rates possible. But if you get proactive and are looking out and do tax planning, you can reduce your taxes down usually to very, very low numbers. Or you even hear about certain big corporations who pay nothing in taxes, even though they make huge profits. Well, guys, this is any rules that are established for the big companies, probably apply to you, right? So when you hear about huge campaign donations, but all these wealthy people are giving to a certain candidate, right? Or these companies are supporting a certain candidate, you need to understand the reason is because they want the candidate, if they get elected, to do things to help their business be more successful and pay less taxes. Every single time.

Right. So I wrote an article on this, Aaron, you're going to love this. I worked for Milliken, Roger Milliken, Milliken and Company in South Carolina, and they are famous for being libertarians. So I actually went to Freedom School. Like, it was a part of, like, the leadership orientation training they'd sent me to. Sent me to Freedom School for a week where you learned about, like, why the government shouldn't interfere in businesses, why the union, they can teach it there. why the union isn't helping the business grow, even though you can't union bust, right? They would teach you not to union bust, but they would teach you about how we didn't want to engender an environment because it makes everybody else lose jobs. Like that's what they were talking about, a non-interference kind of thing. And Roger Milliken was one of the first corporations to start to make significant donations into candidates. And so it's really interesting what I learned there. So I wrote this all in an article a long time ago. It was probably like three years ago. So I'll share that here. But you know, what I learned was exactly that, that in order to get what you need for your business and make sure that it's growing, make sure that you can keep the employees employed and keep the business growing in the region in which you want to stay in. Because when you start a business in your hometown, you do want to keep it there. You don't intend to move it. That becomes necessary if you don't lobby. And so this starts. So it's really important to understand it's, that's what's happening. It's self-serving. but it's self-serving for the corporation, which serves employees too.

Well, it's also our democratic process. We want to put people in office who we believe will represent our best interest. And the people, as I look out my window, most of those people, they don't see a direct connection between their day-to-day life and what's going on with the Capitol building in your state or in DC. They hear all the salacious stuff.

The sound bites.

They get promoted.

Right.

But most people don't even know who their representatives are. But for those people that have skin in the game, like business owners, like people who own real assets, who own real estate, and so on, they want someone, and I don't care what your philosophies are, they want someone who's going to represent their desire for their personal life. and the reason businesses make contributions is to get favorable treatment by the political bodies. And so you don't have to be a gigantic company with hundreds or thousands of employees to get the same deductions that the big guys are getting. Somebody working from your spare bedroom or from your front seat of your car or from whatever can take these deductions if you're properly organized. But if you're not, if you think of yourself, oh, it's just little old me sitting at my dining room table, I guess I'm nothing. I'm not really making much money. You will miss out on huge opportunities to live a highly pre-tax life.

Right. I just want to interject something here is that you said before. So it doesn't necessarily mean that your product like Aaron was showing off the pen, right? The product itself doesn't have to be making money. If you are making money, whether you're making W2 income and you're in this e-commerce business is your side job, right? right. It's your night gig, whatever you're doing, your side hustle. You know, if that's how you're doing it, remember that many of these tax breaks can roll back in and get you taxed back from that income. So this is what happened this year for my dad. My dad is a retired, was pretty upset because of the property taxes are no longer deductible. And so he took a big hit this year. And so the interesting part about that was, is like he was Coming back to me was saying, like, my children ended up no longer deductible, right? 'Cause she aged out. And so, yeah, so she's no longer deductible.

But they've doubled that deduction for the.

Younger- For the younger ones, right? So I got double the deduction. So I netted out even, like, it was per, actually, I netted out better 'cause I had two younger ones and one older one. So I netted out better there. And the property taxes were completely offset by business taxes that, you know, business credits, really. And so for me, I got a big check back and my dad was looking at me like, I'm lucky I barely managed to get it so I didn't have to pay in more than $500. You know, like that's how he was like. And that was like, I felt like I won, but that's what's happening. So keep in mind that there are still some strategies. And even when you're in the development process, the product development process, there are many discounts and things there that credit backs that you get to take and you can take them in the early years that can really offset the cost that you're spending To make your product come to life, to get your invention to market.

And if you're a C corporation, you can do what's called a tax loss carry forward. The tax loss carry forward means all the money we're spending now to build this thing and get it going and pay the lawyers and do the patent and do all this, these expenses. So you don't have enough revenue, you're spending way more than you're making. So you don't have any tax. But if you're a sole proprietor, or an S corporation, you can lose the tax loss carry forward. But if you're a C Corp, the difference between what you spent and what you made, instead of it just evaporating at the end of the year, can be carried forward for up to 20 years.

Right, right. And that's a huge benefit if you're building something that's going to have licensing fees and/or royalties for future. That's a really great way to look at that.

Huge thing. Yeah, it's a huge thing.

So actually we do that. I should mention to everyone out there, and this is, you've got to consult your tax attorney and find out if it's okay for you and, you know, and make sure that your advisor is telling you that this is okay. But one of the things that we do is we don't actually expense all the expenses related to a particular patent invention. If we think we're going to license it, it's different if we're going to like pretty much within six months, bring it to market. But if it takes us a year or more to develop it, and so if it takes us a year or more to develop it, we save those costs and we actually don't expense them against the business. We hold them separately to help raise the basis because when you start to license something like that or you make royalties on that, it's all straight income. And so you're just all straight earnings and you need something to set against it. And if you sell it, you also want a cost basis to set against it so that you don't get hit on 100% of that because you didn't have any expenses.

Yeah, your baseline was zero.

Your baseline was zero. So we'd actually do that because we have enough money in our business and maybe not enough revenue in certain years. We hold those expenses separately and you track them separately. They're on our balance sheet, but not on our P&L and not on our cash flow.

So I think this is a good time to do a little, I'm just going to take a risk here and do a little commercial.

Please, yes. I was going to do it for you if you didn't, so.

Well, but these things that we're talking about, they're very accessible, but they're not simple. There's no one size fits all plan. And so you want to be able to sit down with people and the reason, Tracy, the reason I wanted you to come and speak at our event is because you bring unique knowledge that people in my following, my tribe, my customers, I believe that there's a group of them who are really going to benefit from having access to you. Likewise, somebody in your industry having access to somebody like Kevin Day to talk about estate planning or Jim Conaway to talk about financial strategy, or whomever you choose to use, but we bring people to speak at the event. And the reason we call magnify your wealth is because no matter where you are, early stage or quite wealthy, we can show you how to get more bang for your buck from whatever you've got.

Right. And this is something really I also want to mention out there because I know a lot of you are doing social good products because I hear a lot of that. There's also some really great social good strategies. You mentioned Jim Conaway. love some of his strategies for social give back programs. And there's just some amazing things there that you may never have heard of before that are not only tax saving, but they do something that you've been wanting to do, whether you're trying to do in your business anyway.

Yeah, there's so many things that the average small business owner has never heard of. They're not weird or super exotic or You know, I wonder if that's legal. It's not like that. It's just that you're busy doing what you do. You're really good at doing what you do. And there are other people who are specialists related to money, taxes, asset protection that are highly focused on that. And so when you can sit down with them privately and start to work out a strategy for your unique situation, super valuable. It's why this event has continued to be successful for so many years because we limit the number of people, we keep it small, and we bring them in and you can sit down privately with the experts and get your specific questions answered so that you can leave there with a game plan and not just a whole bunch of disparate information. You're going, I don't know what to do with this. Like you get at most events, you're going, well, this sounds cool, but I don't really know what to do next. When you leave my event, if you want to, you will have a plan.

Right, absolutely. And yeah, you can execute that over the next year, over your time. You know the right people at that point. That's what I love about it too. You have a great group of people and these aren't people who just come in and been assembled. You've been working with them for years. And it shows because everybody has a great dynamic.

Look, you just got invited to speak.

Yes, but I've been going for a couple of years. So yeah.

And I've known you for several years and I've been using you guys to help with my podcast and you know I have all these warm feelings about the hazards.

Aaron's like my big brother.

I do, I feel actually I was listening to your interview style and I was thinking, I mean if it's not rude to say, but I thought we're kind of the same in how we do this.

It's like laid back, yeah exactly.

But my point is that I want to really make sure, not that I care about somebody or enjoy somebody, but I'm seeing what they're promising actually is happening before I bring them in front of my audience.

So this is why, guys, I brought Erin on here for you because you know that I have been there, done that again and again rule with all the experts that are on my platform and they don't get invited in. So you may not know this, Erin. They don't get invited in to do more than guest once. if they don't get invited into the expert platform side of it without having been someone that I would refer every single day for my own clients that have done business with me for a while. That's how we work on the expert side of it. So that my referral partners, and we don't pay referral fees or do any of that here. That is not what we're about on Product Launch Hazzards. It's just a direct relationship. We all collaborate together. And I already been referring you. You may not realize it, but Laughlin's always been getting the referrals from us. So we all send our clients to you. But why have I not had Erin on and had a face put to this expert that we share with people because you don't have a real profile and I don't want to put a corporate logo there. I want to put a real face to it. So that's why Erin's been invited here. But there's one more thing that I really want to touch on that you do, Erin, that is very, very unique. You have a podcast called the Unshackled Owner and you have a program. And I love this program because there are some people who've already started it. They're feeling that pressure of it. I know you have one in your mastermind group. But where they've built this e-commerce business that has gotten to be multi-millions of dollars, it's starting to weigh on them. It's starting to be such a day-to-day business. And your tagline or your motto, I don't know exactly how to call it, is that you want to build a business that works harder for you than you work for it. And I love that because I really think becoming unshackled from a business sounds like a future retirement plan. That sounds really awesome.

Thanks for bringing that up because we've been talking about Laughlin Associates, which I own and which I love. And we've got phenomenal people. We do great events. We do the Inner Circle, which is kind of sort of like a mastermind, but it's really a way to get a little deeper.

It's a nitty-gritty mastermind. I would say we get to practical movement in it. And that's what I like about your mastermind.

Thank you. But the Unshackled Owner is me. and the Unshackled Owner is what I've learned over 35 years of growing successful companies. See, the thing that Tracy said, and I don't know if anybody listening caught this, but Tracy said at the beginning, I know you have these experts on your team that do this every day. I knew what she was referring to. Do I know how these things work? Yes, of course. Do I do them? No. I own things, but I'm not operating any businesses. I haven't even walked in the door of Laughlin Associates for over two years. I haven't gone and visited my team there other than on video conference. And we've got a whole bunch of people there and we've got tens of thousands of clients. When I first bought it, I was there four and a half days a week for the first couple of years. I had to be away from my family and down in Nevada to rethink this business using the tactics that I've used successfully for all these years. Tracy, I thought all at least successful entrepreneurs were doing basically the same thing I was doing.

They are so not.

I've learned that they're not because I have all these companies that are anywhere from, let's say, on the smaller end in the class, the Unshakable class. So we might have like a dentist who's doing 750, 800,000 a year. all the way up to a government contractor doing 80 million a year in the class. We have people with two or three virtual assistants and all the way up to my largest client with my employees, over 2,000 employees. I have clients right now in the class today who are from all over the world, Romania, from England, from right now Canada. I've had people from South American countries, from Brazil, from Colombia, from Venezuela. all these people that have, well, actually the Venezuelan had moved from Venezuela. But my point is, because these principles that I teach, they just always work. Over 200 companies have gone through the class and that we've never been asked for a refund because it just works. And when you learn any recipe, if you learn how to bake chocolate chip cookies, if there's a recipe and you follow the recipe, odds are you're going to get chocolate chip cookies. You're not going to get waffles. You're not going to get a bike. You're going to get chocolate chip cookies. But most people go out there and they're trying to make it up. They're going, well, maybe we should put some vanilla in and maybe we should put in some squash or maybe we should put in, they don't know what to do. So they're just throwing stuff in going, what I really want is chocolate chip cookies. Well, folks, as you get to a place where your you either want to know from the beginning how to do it and not have to go through the pain, or what normally happens is people have become very successful, they've become wealthy and they have no life. They're like a slave to their company. And those are the people primarily that come to me and say, this sucks. I don't want to be doing this anymore. I have all this money. I have all this opportunity. I live in a beautiful home. My family's going on vacation, but even if I go, I'm still sitting there on my laptop in the hotel room or having my cell phone with me at the pool because I have to be ready for this call or I have to be checking for this email. You don't have to live like that. Yeah, so I want to tell a.

Little story about one of the first times I met you. So I met, Aaron and I met at a networking event and I had been listening to his previous podcast called the Lookout and I said, wow, that voice sounds really familiar. And it took until someone said he had a podcast that I looked on my phone and I go, that's the same person. Like, I was like, oh, because the voice had been in my head, right? From the podcast. That's how it happens. And so we got to know each other over that course. And I had been working on a business plan for our design business for how we were going to grow it. And I'd been really hesitant about adding employees because I had felt that burden of it. And that's when someone hears that word shackled, right? Or unshackled, like, That's the one I hear is the having so many employees that it keeps me worried and up at night stressed about whether or not I have enough business on a constant basis because retail and design business is up and down and seasonal. So you got up and down and seasonal and they're all weird season times because you get Chinese New Year is like March is the worst month of the whole year, right? Because of the cascade of getting paid. So thinking about that was like, I didn't want to grow the business because I was worried that I didn't, but I was at capacity. for the amount of work we could do ourselves. And so I was trying to figure out alternative ways to grow the business. And I came to Aaron and one of these plans had employees in it. And he looked at me and he said, I'm going to be really straight with you. I don't think you want this business. I don't think you want these employees. And I burst into tears, right? And he's like, oh, no, I made her cry. I'm like, but it was the right thing to say to me because it started to get me thinking about how what type of business do I want and what does it look like and how does it look? And now over time, we are just shy of 50 employees worldwide, Aaron. And it doesn't stress me like that. It doesn't. I mean, growth pains stress me right now, but that does not. And that's partly because of what I've learned from you. And I didn't even take the class yet, so which I'm doing this year. We are doing that.

We'll welcome you in with open arms. Just as we, I don't know how long we're gonna go here, but I mean, I do wanna say this. about that. Sometimes people talk to me regularly and are frustrated because they're so in love with the thing they're doing and they're working so hard and they're spending all their savings and they're taking, you know, they're borrowing money from friends or family and they've maxed out their credit cards to try to get their thing out there somehow. And there are really three primary reasons that I can think of why things don't work. And so as people are listening, and if you're out there struggling, let me just give you a few things to think about so you know you're not alone. One is the idea is either ahead of its time. There's not an infrastructure. There's not a market that understands it. You've got this cool idea, but nobody knows what to do with it. So they can't work with it. They go, oh, it's cool. But we can't engage with you because we don't know what to actually do with it. Or the other side, the flip side of that coin is your idea is crummy. Like your idea sucks and no offense. But so many people, they're trying so hard to push something at a market that just doesn't want it. And so the first reason people struggle is because of the idea. It's ahead of its time. It's great. but it's ahead of its time or it's something nobody wants.

We call that product market fit here.

There you go. So, yeah, put in your own vernacular here with your language. But second thing is there's no money. You don't have enough money to live long enough to bring your idea to the market that exists, but you can't afford, you just mentioned, Tracy, growth pains, because when you're growing, you never have enough capital. So, you're always behind the eight ball trying to find this balance. But when you're growing, at least you can anticipate, like, where do we want to level off for a little while and get some discretionary cash collected, and then we can grow again. But growth is expensive. But the second thing is, do you have the money to not only get your idea patented, get your idea promoted, to buy a pop-up banner, to go to a trade show, to go to somebody who can help you? Do you have any money or can you afford the growth? That's the other thing that kills companies, not that the product is no good, but they don't have sufficient funding. The third thing is they just don't know what to do. They don't know how to run a business. And you can do okay for a while on your own wits, but you will get to a point if you're successful where the business concepts have outgrown your knowledge.

Yeah, this is so true, Aaron. I see it all the time that you're the visionary. I see it in the product world. You're the visionary, you're the designer, you're the brand, you're that great side of it. Or we have a lot of our e-commerce sellers who are really great on the marketing. And so they're all in this marketing world. And when it's early on, you can be there. But the minute you start to have to build infrastructure, warehousing, operations, and it's not your forte, this becomes an issue. And you're absolutely right. But what I find is that our visionaries, our inventors in the world think that their ability to do it themselves, their ability to have great know-how, means that they should just tackle this themselves, figure it all out. And that is a recipe for disaster because that's where we run into the hazards, the rookie errors, right? The hazards of launching. And we also run into the problem of reinventing things that don't need to be reinvented and having to work too hard to build this when we could just be scaling it quickly with an accelerator of someone who knows what they're talking about and they're doing. So that's why you're here, Erin, because you are someone who knows what they're talking about, knows what you're doing.

Yeah, plug into people who, I had a doctor call me one time on my cell phone. You know this doctor. And she said, Aaron, can you explain bylaws to me? She goes, like, I'm struggling with some language. I said, what do you mean? She goes, well, I've been working for like three weeks on writing the bylaws for my new business. I said, what? You're doing what? I said, what do you bill out at per hour? And she told me, I said, how many hours have you put in? And it was like a ridiculous amount of time. at a hundreds of dollars an hour. And I said, you know, we could just provide that to you for like $150. She's like, are you kidding me?

Yeah, you can look them over and go, yeah, that one sounds silly. I don't need this one. And that's like all you have to do is like edit it out.

But entrepreneurs have a tendency to say, I can figure it out. They also have a tendency, I know we've got to watch our time. I'm watching it on the clock here. But The other thing that people do that's penny wise and pound foolish, what happens is you have no money when you start. You've been spending money and now you start to make money. So now you can like breathe again. You can go to the grocery store. You can go out to dinner. Maybe you buy a nicer car or move into a nicer home or apartment or something. And then finally, the company starts to be a burden on you and you know you need to hire somebody to help you, but hiring them means you go back down in income. And what is that going to mean? There's a reason that Mark Cuban, who's on Shark Tank right now, he owns the Mavericks, he's a billionaire. He talks about, I was eating ketchup packages. I was stealing from McDonald's and just squirting ketchup in my mouth for sustenance when I was flat broke. But What we've got to do is bring on the right team around us to build our business. And then we get to make the big money once the system works. But at first, you have to be willing to live low and bring on the right team until then all of a sudden the business is truly successful and you become wealthy and people are blown away. But I just talked about Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos has similar stories. Gary Vaynerchuk, who's real popular right now, tells similar stories.

I interviewed John Paul DeJoria. He gave me a whole bar hopping strategy for eating and when you live out of your car as he started.

His Paul Mitchell brand. So Paul Mitchell, huge success, another wildly wealthy guy who's not just hair care, but he's, what is it, Patron?

Isn't that his? Patron, yeah.

Tequila, yep, he's into a lot, yeah. Another friend of ours, Brian Smith, you know, UGGs. was selling sheepskin boots out of his trunk to surfers. He had no money. You guys, that's how it starts. Be willing to make the investment into the business and you eat the ketchup packets. You go eat the bar food, not the food on the menu, the food on the counter, until the business is solid. When the recession hit, we knew getting our team back together if we had to fire them would be very difficult. So my business partner and I both took gigantic pay cuts. We both ended up short selling our homes and moving into rentals during the recession, but we didn't fire our people. We didn't fire the team. And a couple of years later, when the market started coming back, we had a team ready to run the business. And the business, a successful companies like Goose that lays golden eggs. And if you keep the goose healthy, safe, well cared for, you will most of the time be the beneficiary of the success of the company, but you have to be willing to sometimes go back to eating ketchup.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, guys. Tom and I, like I said, we're on 40 patents. We've done two billion dollars worth of products for our clients worldwide. And we went back in a rental. We downsized a lot of things and bootstrapped it back so we could build up the second business for us because we realized that we needed to have alternative income because our product business was just not going well in the way that the economy and the way everything was shifting. And we built that up in time and underneath us so that we would be ready to take advantage of all of that. But it involves strategy, it involves great mentors like Aaron, it involves team, it involves getting to the right events and getting to know the right people, which is why Aaron's here to talk to you today. But at the end of the day, what I really want to get across to all of you product launchers out there is that you're not just building a product, You are building a brand, you're building an asset that has value. And when you're building those things, you need to support them with people who know what they're talking about. You need to support them with tools and systems and things like corporations and tax strategies and all of those things. Because at the end of the day, you wanna maximize the benefit of this blood, sweat and tears you've put into your ideas and your inventions. You wanna make sure that they're happening. But you also wanna make sure, and this is one of the things that I love about Laughlin and I love about Erin, They're going to tell you, you're not ready yet to form a corporation or when this is ready and this is ready to launch, we'll form the corporation and put the patent in it. Like they're going to advise you timing too. They're not going to sell you something too soon. It's not in their best interest to do that. And I think that that's really critically important. So thank you, Erin, for coming on and talking with my group here. And thank you for having our business back. I really appreciate your team and everything that you all do. And I appreciate you and We haven't gotten to talk about your lovely wife, Michelle, but I do mention her on the show occasionally, people, so they do know about her because she is my personal coach and my good friend.

She's the bomb. Michelle's great. As you know, we just celebrated 32 years of marriage and I couldn't be more thrilled with the person that I married. And I don't know how we knew as I was 22, she was 19. We went on our first date in September and got married in February. How did those kids get it right? I don't know. But I'm glad that she gets a little coverage here because she really is.

She's awesome. Yeah. Well, every so often I'll throw out a Michelle-ism and give her credit for it because when I'm sharing that with the community, because it's so important to have, and this is just kind of the last thing I want to end on, is that it's important to have support in whatever way you need it. And that's from personal, professional, your friendships, advisors, like all of that support is critical to it. Like I could not do these businesses if I didn't have Tom having my back and being part of my collaborative vision together. Like that wouldn't work for us either. So really everyone out there, product launchers, this is why I brought Erin to you. This is why I bring Laughlin to you whenever you call me and I share that with you. This is why. And I wanted you to have a person, a face to put to it, not just a corporate logo because they're not that at all. Every person behind their company has the same commitment and heart that Aaron does. I love your entire team. I have to tell you that you have the best. We've modeled a lot of the customer service that we have on our podcast production business off of the customer service and the way that you guys touch base with us because it is very personal.

Thank you. I'll tell you, there is something good about 48 years in business. You know, I mean, the company's 48 years old and and we have learned things. And I always ask when I speak, is there anybody here's a Laughlin client and hands? I don't care. Pretty much anywhere I go in the world, somebody's hand goes up and I never have to be worried about what that person's going to say.

No, you shouldn't be. That's right.

I know they're going to have had a good experience. So anyway, I hope that somebody on here is hearing this and says, I would like to get a little closer to that group and not feel like you're going to get sold like crazy, it's just a matter of getting the right pieces in place and then having a map to grow and understanding where the milestones are that you will then say, oh, now it's time to look at doing something more.

Right. And so our second step in our process here is about planning. This is part of your planning. It's not just about the product. It's about what my brand might look like. how I might sell it someday, how I might license it, and what does the plan and understructure of that whole thing look like? It's bigger than just the product development. And that's where a lot of our people get a little narrow focus. They get a little tunnel vision on all about their product. You and I both know that because, you know, we talk to them all the time, but this is bigger vision and we really need to open up and think about this because at the end of the day, this is actually how you're going to reap the benefits and stay secure and do all those things. So Thank you so much, Erin. Product Launchers, you can find all the information about Erin Laughlin, about the Unshackled Owner, about the podcast. It'll be in here too. You'll find that@productlaunchhazards.com We'll have links and, as I mentioned before, a discount code for the event. And remember that if you're coming to this and you've missed the April event, there's one in the fall too, so there twice a year. So we'll also have links for that. We'll keep them updated in the future. Because I know a lot of you listen to this and it'll be years in advance and you'll be oh, how does that still exist? I'm sure it will because it's such a good program. So thank you again all, and thank you, Erin, and we'll be back next time with another Product Launch Hazards. Thank you for joining us on this.

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