Chad Mann: 300% – 500% Annual Business Growth

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Say that again? Are you going to be able to cut it anywhere in the middle and change stuff? Or do you want this to be one string, but, um, yeah, I mean, we can cut it up. It’s not that big of a deal. We have a video producer that all he does is edit the, so he has the intro outro. So I mean, if there’s, if there’s a too big of a train wreck yeah.

Like cut it out. So like we’re recording right now. So this probably won’t be so. Okay. Any other questions before we start? I am curious to know this other gentleman. I didn’t, he didn’t introduce himself. I don’t know him. Oh, Kyle, sorry. Here. Let me kill this recording. Hey, it’s Damon Burton from SEO national and learningfromothers.com.

Today we have a guest that, uh, come to find out I’ve known for a long time. Uh, Chad mann from manmade, um, is joining us today. He’s got a great career in engineering, uh, built up this company, solve it, and, uh, is working on some, some new projects now. So Chad, hello? Good to see you again after almost 20 years.

Yeah. Good to see you. So why don’t we kind of start backwards a little bit? Um, well, why don’t you give us a quick, short or condensed summary of what man made is, and then let’s work our way from the past to the future. And why don’t we start kinda where you said we were in high school together. So tell us about manmade and then jump back to high school and, and close the gap and tell us what happened to get to manmade.

Sure. So manmade is a practice own company. So specifically we do engineering. We help people develop their products. So, you know, they go from, uh, you know, the engineering part of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. Uh, we get into app development and industrial design and we help a lot of customers.

And we’ve been doing that for an awful lot of years. So I started the company five, five and half years ago, back in the beginning of 2013. And, uh, we’ve just been growing pretty rapidly since then. And then, uh, just so loft the division, uh, our engineering division, believe it or not at the end of the year, last year.

And, uh, so going back to high school where I originally met Damon. Um, after that, I, uh, after, after high school, I, uh, was in contact with a company that it actually hired me to develop a motherboard for a pinball machine. And so I spent a summer figuring it out and learning how to do it right out of high school.

And I found out that it was really fun that I had a knack and I had a passion for it. But the problem was, is after I built this, they gave me $300 and said, good luck. And I thought, well, wow, That’s an awful lot of work to not get paid very much. And that’s when I realized the value and the importance of having that piece of paper, that actual degree.

So I went on to get a, a, an engineering degree at the university of Utah. And I also served in LDS mission, went to the Dominican Republic for a few years, learned how to, you know, have a good work ethic and work really hard and study and learn. And then, uh, I did an awful lot of, uh, engineering work and got into the world a little bit with, uh, With an MBA and business development.

And so I’ve got both of those degrees and that kind of all meld together to form the structure and the abilities for manmade. And that’s where we kind of bridge the gap a little bit to, you know, what manmade was and our growth. And then today, how, you know, I said that a partial exit from it and, uh, are already starting to launch a new venture so that shouldn’t be.

Sorry. I’ve got a quick question. So, you know, you said after high school, you developed that pinball board, so obviously an entrepreneurial spirit, um, that always been in you. Um, that’s an interesting question. I would say, um, entrepreneurial spirit, maybe hasn’t, uh, always been in me, but I did definitely learn that from my father who was an entrepreneur.

He’s been successful, lost a number of businesses and sold them. So I kind of, I mean, I wasn’t born with it, but definitely I grew up around it and I saw it. And I think that probably involved a little bit of the passion when I did get into business, that kind of everything came together and culminated to, to kind of form, you know, a nice force to carry through all the rough times of manmade.

So going back to the pinball machine gig, how did you get in contact? I mean, that sounds like a pretty, pretty random task. So, how did you get tasked with that? How did you know the company and how did you get placed with, with that opportunity? Yeah. Great question. So it’s just only enough. My dad developed arcade games and kinetic card gumball machines.

And so he regularly received, you know, information and contacts from people in the industry that may or may not need this help. And this was one that, uh, he decided that he’d like for, for me to do. And so he actually passed the lead on to me to try to work on it. And at the time I had never done, I’d never done PCB design.

I’d never done electrical engineering to that degree. And, um, so I spent a summer learning how to do it. So if that lead came directly from my father and, uh, he was kind of helping me out, giving me something that I could be passionate about and spend some time on to really dig down and dig deep. Oh, so you had no background at all up until that point in this scope of work.

Nope. I’d taken you a few engineering classes in high school, as you remember, but they, they weren’t, you know, super in depth. They were very cursory. Yeah. That’s interesting. How one little moment, uh, CA can, can be, be the catalyst for a whole career. So, um, So after high school, he got an engineering degree after pinball gig and we got about 300 bucks.

How much time did you put into that pinball project for 300 bucks. Wow. Um, it was probably a week thrown into month. Um, it’s been long enough. I mean, you know, as all side of it, that’s been quite a long time. That was back in 99. So last century, um, it probably took, it probably was hundreds of hours. Um, so figuring out how to do that.

And even then I had to, you know, go through revisions of it and make sure that it worked correctly and everything. So. It was complicated. The good news is in the end. Yeah. I still have, in fact, I should probably go grab it, but I’ve got a number, number of prototypes here that I show people. Sometimes this was the beginning of my career and you know, the beginning of the start a manmade.

Yeah. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Um, so did you go into any more continuing education after that to expand your engineering capabilities? You, you went and got a degree, right? Uh, yes. I went and got a degree at the university of Utah. Um, And that was a lot of fun. A lot of sleepless nights in the, I was calling the engineering Dungeons at the U and then they did an MBA, which is outside of engineering.

Um, we went and did business and yeah. And that was kind of hard to shift your brain from, you know, seven pages of a whole bunch of math and formulas to get plus, or minus 27.2, six degrees over to business where it’s like, well, as long as you’re over here, the answer. So that was a little bit of a mind shift for me.

And, uh, it was, it was pretty fun. And then more recently I was selected to do the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses thing and that’s through bouncing college. So that was, that was a lot of fun. Um, those are probably the three, you know, bounced with academia that I had outside teaching. I actually did teach a semester, but we per state university in engineering for a little bit last year.

Not them. Okay. So you had mentioned, uh, going to the Dominican Republic on a mission. So for listeners outside of, uh, uh, you know, particularly Utah are not familiar with mission, so it’s, uh, uh, let’s see, how could I explain this? So you go on a mission and it’s a service project for, uh, your religious institution to kind of share the message.

Um, of your religion. So you went to the Dominican Republic on a mission. Can you, you had talked about how it helped you, uh, with work ethic. Can you elaborate on the work ethic that you learned on your mission? Yeah. So that’s a great question. So, um, it’s just really enough when I, let me take a step back, back to high school.

So. I kid you not. When I graduated from high school, I had a pretty low GPA and then I did one semester of college and that semester of college, and they did me a GPA at 1.18. That’s pretty low. And I just was not that interested in school. I was not that interested in college. I was not that interested in that.

Mmm. So needless to say, I kind of dropped out and then I went and did the mission and that taught me how to, you know, wake up early study with a companion. Um, how to really dig into the scriptures and footwork, um, and think about the, you know, things that, the content in there and how they fit into the world.

And. Uh, that work ethic, uh, actually it was pretty valuable to me. So, uh, when I came home from the mission, I obviously started right up and a couple of weeks back to college and got pretty close to , uh, throughout the rest of my career at the, uh, in college, just based on that, uh, you know, back around that having learning the work ethic, um, from the mission, the mission is pretty rigorous.

It’s not something where you just kind of, you know, Go play and vacation or whatever. Our mission is actually pretty dedicated and you’re working hard. You’re putting in a lot of long hours waking up early and, uh, you know, very, very dedicated, a lot of loyal type work. So that definitely helped me, um, gain the work ethic to where now I would almost say maybe it’s a burden because now I put in way too many hours for per week to launch businesses and whatnot.

But at least I have the ability to do that. Yeah. So it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like before the mission and after. The mission is a pretty black and white two to two different versions of yourself. Did the change happen pretty black and white? Like, was there a specific moment or with a solid solution?

I would say it’s probably more of a smaller solution. Um, it was, it was more that, uh, you know, it was something that I was passionate in well in the church, something that I can really get behind as opposed to, um, you know, doing. Hi gen EDS and in college, as well as, uh, you know, some of the coursework in high school, which was less than interesting for me.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then you come back from, um, come back from your mission and then, uh, you did some consulting, uh, is that right? Had a few part time jobs, trying to figure out what you’re passionate about for you, where you got to manmade, um, launch that’s right. What kind of, what kind of consulting did you do in the same scope engineering stuff?

Yes, that’s exactly right. So after I designed that board, I, uh, worked a little bit doing a, uh, you know, some more design work for a few companies. I also took on a job working at, uh, one called Hollywood connections. And I was what they called the game tech. I would go in and I would troubleshoot their arcade games and figure out what’s wrong with them.

And, you know, bring, bring in a soldering iron and, you know, order parts and whatnot and fix, fix a lot of the stuff in the wiring that was going wrong with those. That was pretty fun. I did that as a part time job. Um, And, and, uh, it was interesting because I was already a little bit in the, uh, I’m using the park and amusement games and arcade space, just kind of some, some, some of the stuff that ended up the pinball machine, it was a little bit of a natural progression for me.

Um, but I didn’t have the degree or anything like that, that I could actually, uh, you know, go do something. And then after that, that was when I actually went on the mission. Oh, gotcha. Okay. So, um, Let’s jump into manmade. So 2013 started manmade. Yeah. So interestingly enough, I, uh, after getting an MBA, I’m learning a lot of, you know, stuff about business.

I jumped on LinkedIn and, uh, decided, well, I’m gonna start a business. What am I going to do? And I jumped on LinkedIn and found that there were a number of people that, uh, recommended me. There’s, you know, sections in there where they recommend you for stuff. And the one that was sitting right at the top, there was what’s called embedded systems.

And so a number of people had recommended me and endorsed me for embedded systems, which is a kind of a sub slots if you will, of electrical, electrical engineering. And so I started into that and, uh, decided, well, I’ll start a company doing embedded systems then. And that’s exactly what I started out for.

Is that, uh, you know, I was designing those boards and writing the low level code, a little framework for them. And it, uh, I did it for quite a while and it was pretty fun. It was just me. Um, and then I started realizing that there was way more demand and phone calls and channel partners getting work. And while not that I could keep up with, so I, uh, ended up hiring a few people as independent contractors and I grew a team of about, I don’t know, 15 or so independent contractors.

Uh, pretty rapidly. And that was actually really interesting. A lot of flow, a lot of projects come through. I remember one time I was managing 14 projects, uh, at a given time. And I had, you know, a number of different people doing different aspects of in embedded systems and firmware development and designing printed circuit boards.

And then I started getting into a, you know, a little bit into the mechanical engineering aspect of it. And that was obviously kind of different for me, but because of the background, it also, it helps to solidify all of the moving pieces into one product. And, uh, that was, we actually were pretty successful on that.

Um, we. That helps us to grow. Like I had mentioned before three to 500% every year, which was quite a bit. And then at one point we decided to actually, uh, hire everybody on it, actual employees. So we, uh, started going, going out to some of these independent contractors and other people started hiring. And in one year we hired 18 people and I can tell you that that’s pretty nerve wracking when you hire 18 people in the 12 month period.

And then, uh, You know, you have no venture capital. You have, you don’t have this huge safety net, like other big companies do to do that. And that was pretty stressful, pretty scary. Um, I’m obviously pretty, pretty risky, but we had a lot of success with it and we manage things correctly. Uh, we had a lot of successful product launches, a lot of customers that were really happy with our work and then they spread the news.

And so it was interesting as I’ve been going through our, uh, ERP and CRM data is that we actually have about 60 to 70% of our work, or we have this last year, 60% up to 70% of our work has come from either existing customers or referrals from existing customers. So it’s weird when you get to the position where you’re looking at well, where should I spend my money and my focus to get more projects and we’re leads and more customers.

And the truth is you just go back to the same network that’s been providing them to you for years. And, um, which, which is kind of good and bad, it means that, you know, there’s not this specific thing. You can put a whole bunch of marketing dollars in push work through the funnel, but it does mean that you’re going to probably get a constant churn and, or not constant term, but a constant flow of work, uh, just from being in the community and having a lot of happy customers I’ve been through your system.

So, um, that’s, I think that’s what you were getting at with your question there, that, that kind of bring this up to a. You know how we have, we done a number of those projects and grown pretty wild successfully. Yeah. It’s funny. The last day you’re talking about, about, um, Growing by referrals. We are in the exact same spot at SEO national, you know, we can connect the dots.

So, you know, we have, we still have our first, I’d say three to six clients from 11 years ago, which is, you know, unheard of in almost any industry, but specifically SEO. And so we start our first time for clients. One of them is, um, I’ll talk to him about buying EMS solutions. They’re they’re in your world of printed circuit, board assembly and things like that.

Um, there’s a connection there. I know you must really well. We worked with them a lot would be. Yeah. So EMS is, um, they are, EMS is officially our first customer and then they referred our second customer, which was speed hut. We still have speed hut and then it just goes on and on and on down the line.

And then at some point, you know, we have, um, I could probably connect out, uh, you know, the hundreds of clients we’d have over the year. We averaged, you know, 30 to 40 active at any given time. And I can probably connect the dots from one client to another on 95% of them. So it’s interesting to hear somebody else say the same thing.

Um, so you had mentioned that you didn’t take on any and most businesses don’t thrive off of organic, organic growth like that. So we’re kind of in the weird unique outliers when we can say that. Yeah. And the other thing that you mentioned, that’s interesting that a lot of listeners might not appreciate is that.

It’s great to have a consistent source of clients and business and income. Uh, but at the same, you know, you had made an exit assault part of your business as an asset. And so for any listeners who build up a business and then later go to sell, uh, as you had mentioned, that’s actually a problem by having referrals as your main source of income, because what a buyer wants is they want to come in and say, all right, uh, primarily we want two things.

The first thing is. A turn key business. We just want you to give it to us. We want to run with it. And then the second thing that they want is they say, all right, where’s the fire. So we can just pour more fuel on it. And so, as a, as your main source of clients coming from referrals, you can’t say, Hey, everybody loves us, but as soon as you buy, I’m going to leave.

So it’s a problem for investors that come in and say, you know, Hey, that’s great. It’s great that you have a consistent source of business, but like you said, it’s not scalable. Now, uh, you had talked about, you didn’t take on any funding when you were, um, there’s two things I want to touch on. You didn’t take on any funding.

Um, so no investors, it sounds like, um, you had mentioned that when you talked about hiring your independent contractors, so, so two questions. Um, so is everything was everything, um, you know, bootstrapped, was there any funding, any investors at all, and then to, uh, what was the reasoning and converting independent contractors to actual employee hires?

Yeah. Um, so that’s, that’s an interesting question. Um, or actually a couple of series of questions. So, uh, when I originally started it, I remember. I bought a computer for like 600 bucks. And that’s what I started doing. All of the printed circuit boards design on an engineering work. And then I kept taking, you know, the revenue that I got from that and putting in investing more and more into the other aspects of the business, buying a website and all the other pieces.

And so, no, we never, we never took on any money. I never took on any venture capital and. Um, as we were starting to grow pretty fast, I actually started looking at it to see if by chance we could, uh, you know, absorb some of that without having to, uh, um, you know, be faced with a hundred percent of the risk on growing a company like that.

Uh, but what I found is that in, in a service based company where most of your leads are coming from referrals and channel partnerships and things like that, and, and previous customers. Uh, investors actually try to stay away from, they actually don’t want to get in something, unless there is kind of like a, a black box where you put in a certain dollar amount and you know, that whatever happens in there at the end of the black box, you’ll get three times whatever you put in.

That’s what investors like to see. And in the service space business, it’s. With, with a lot of people and resources like that, it’s a lot harder to come up with a, uh, evaluation because, you know, is it a one X, multiple? Is it a four X, multiple? And what sort of space businesses and CPA firms and other stuff like that, it’s really hard to get a high, multiple.

So I don’t think any, any evaluations that we did on our company, it just didn’t seem like it was right. So for that reason, we never really took on any investment. And then, uh, And then it was also good not to take on investment because it allowed us to kind of choose our own destiny. Right. I found that, uh, once, once you take an investor on, um, the culture almost always takes a hit.

And because this is, you know, my, my baby, I didn’t want a culture hit here. And so. We, uh, we actually promoted an awful lot of things here in our company to foster this amazing culture of helping people develop their products to the tune that we had. You know, we come into this, this office, um, once, uh, once a month I’d bring in pizza, you know, I’d bring in a lot of cool stuff and we would just innovate and come up with cool new ideas, cool products that we could launch.

And, um, just that kind of most people get outside of the engineering mentality. And think outside of the box, how do you innovate on something? How do you want to launch your own product? And by doing that, it allowed our engineers to really focus on, well, Hey, if I was in the customer’s shoes, this is what I would be struggling with.

So I’m going to help them solve this piece of it and that piece of it. And, and all of that is bred this awesome culture where people wanted to work together. They wanted to stay here in the, you know, be part of a really cool thing. So if I were to have taken on some venture capital, I would be afraid.

That, that, you know, culture was slowly digressed and tigress and digress. And I just couldn’t have that in our company. So no, we never, we never ended up taking on any venture capital. And you had a second question there and I’m trying to remember what it was. I probably got long winded. What was the reasoning in converting independent contractors to employees?

Yeah. So that’s interest. Um, there is, it’s, it’s kind of a shift of risk if you will. Um, when you take on independent contractors, you’re obviously shifting the risk to them. And then you’re making a, you know, a margin of what they can provide for you. Um, when you bring on employees, all of a sudden, you kind of bring that you bring that risk in, in house.

And it depends on how well you can manage that workload to do it. But the good news is, is that you can get a much higher and much. Um, I returned, this has less of a ceiling, if you weren’t thinking of it that way. And so it allowed us to do a few things. And one of those is we could leverage some, uh, some platforms.

So in hardware and in software, there are what’s called hardware and software you use. But that means is that, uh, you know, if we design something on a printed circuit board or a motherboard, you can take maybe a quarter of that or half of that. And you use that as a design for other customers. Obviously there are legal games to make sure you can do that, but.

Um, and so we, what we decided to do with it, bring on the employees, is it, now you can create these, these platforms with hardware and software in CAD, and then in firmware development. And that allowed us to, um, basically we take a design and then we can sell it and get it to a customer in half the time.

Let’s say so. Right. And taking, you know, four or five, six, seven, eight months. We were able to get a product out the door in two or three or four months. Which helps them a ton, especially in a, in an industry like we’re in where there’s, it’s fast paced and technology changes every three, six months. So that timing of when you come onto product makes a really big difference.

So having employees, having everything here in house and managing everything allowed us to really, um, get that scalar multiple of having a standardized platforms. And so there were a number of reasons to do that. Both pros and cons. We did face and cons to doing that as well. Um, and one of those obviously is that we took on a lot more risk, um, writing, reading in, in house.

Um, but it allowed us to have a little bit more of a scaler, multiple, uh, of the returns coming in and the profitability, hopefully that answers your question, but that is pretty long winded answer. No, that answers it. Um, so you talked about that some of your clients, um, The products you helped develop vary from, you know, circuit bars, you know, app development, which is, it sounds like a variety of products.

Is there one industry that you enjoy building out products in the most? Mmm, that is an interesting question. So, uh, probably I would say me and the team, um, we enjoyed what’s called internet of things. IOT is kind of the, uh, radiation acronym for it. And it’s essentially connecting a device to anything else out in the world, like a server or connecting your app to, um, your microwave.

You know, that’s just an example, but stuff like that. And what we found is that, you know, there’s with the increasing technology, there’s a lot more people jumping into that space. And so they call it the connected world or internet of things. And so we have received an awful lot of requests to connect their devices, to an app, to a smart phone, to.

A server somewhere server-side software, stuff like that. And we’ve really enjoyed that because it’s, it’s a, it’s a little bit all encompassing and it’s kind of fun to see, you know, you create an app on something and then you also create the hardware physical device somewhere else. And then to see it go full circle, sending signals to the internet and getting a feedback loop.

It’s really cool. We really enjoyed the internet of things. We’ve also done a number of things in the museum space. So we’ve done some more of the other vending machines. Um, we’ve done some other pinball machines. Gumbo vending machines. And we’ve done some, uh, actually a lot of medical devices, which I never would have guessed that we would delve so much into medical devices because that’s obviously not my personal expertise, but you know, it’s obviously expertise of people that we brought on and hired.

Um, but what we found is that hearing you talk, I’m really close to salt Lake city, there’s this kind of hub. Of medical device companies that come from the university of Utah and BYU and other places. And we seem to always get them as referrals coming in, which has been great because there’s a lot of us to use our expertise and help them.

So we’ve had a number of different industries. I would say probably one of the other outliers it’s been really fun to work on has been, uh, drones. So we’ve actually worked on three different drone projects. Um, and some of them are from really faster than me, an awful lot of money, uh, based on the hope that we were able to give them.

So I don’t know if you’re familiar with drones, but, uh, you know, flying them with a little, a remote control and radio control and, uh, you know, flying them around, racing them, um, fun, stuff like that. And so it’s been fun to know that we’ve helped, you know, do some of the pieces for those. So I have a very, a very serious question.

Okay. What’s the dumbest IOT thing that you’ve said, it’s exactly what I was. Some of us wanted to connect to the internet. Uh he’s like, what can I say without?

Well, so we did have somebody that wanted to connect their credit card to the internet. Once that one was pretty, pretty far out there. Um, If it was possible, if it wouldn’t be possible, it’s actually a really cool idea, but I don’t think technology has caught up to where they can quite do that yet. Um, huh.

I don’t know. There’s there have been some random things that people have said over the years that they’d like to connect to the internet. It would probably get, I would probably need some time to comb through all that, but, uh, at the radio I don’t have anything. Okay. So you saw part of your company last year, uh, was that like if you had to break it down to a percentage, was it like.

90% you saw there. How much did you sell you mean of, of, uh, revenue or of Deepa? Uh, however you want to take it, I mean like how much of your time got freed up? Oh, um, well, that’s, that’s an interesting question. So of my time, um, well it didn’t really ever get freed up. That’s kind of the interesting thing is because then I was able to leverage a lot of the, uh, you know, the connections there.

To put it into this new thing. Yeah. And, uh, so I don’t know if I’ve ever really slowed down from the 50, 60 hour work week from India, but, uh, yeah, no, it says something that was, was, uh, you know, it was, it was, it allowed me to, uh, focus on things that had maybe a little bit less risk to it. And that was pretty useful.

Um, it was also something where. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like as an entrepreneur and growing fast paced businesses, I kind of need something new every few years to do. I don’t think I can run one business for 10 years. You can, I’ve got to have something kind of new something going on. So this was nice transitioned into something different, a little different.

That seems to be the reoccurring theme with a lot of the entrepreneurs we talked to is that they, they need that change of pace every couple. Yeah. Yeah. So no downtime. And so now you launched, um, Epic product launch. Is that, is that a new new company that is it’s called Epic product launch? So, so tell us about Epic.

Um, it sounds like it’s a good compliment to what you were doing with manmade, um, but help the listeners understand the differences and explain what you’re into now with Epic. Yeah. So, uh, manmade and manmade still exists. Um, but, but the idea of the manmade focuses primarily on engineering and developing products, mostly physical products, um, but also app development.

And. Um, what we’re doing here is we’re actually trying to harness a big market that, uh, we never were able to tap into, uh, with manmade. And that is that I don’t know, I would guess maybe 30, 40% of our customers that came to us every week, um, had for whatever reason, they were not able to start and launch a product.

They maybe didn’t have funding. Maybe they didn’t have. Um, access to the right people, the right engineering talent, the, uh, you know, marketing people. They didn’t have access to market research. And so what we’re trying to do is actually build up a system and an ecosystem to our, we could coach these people and train them so that they could go through, um, the other aspects of launching a product successfully.

So what this is essentially morphed into is. Uh, a very, uh, very, uh, almost a social cause where we’re actually training people and coaching them. And we have a curriculum where we show them how to launch a product, you know, from back of the napkin, all the way to getting it on the shelf. And there’s a lot of pitfalls.

Um, and we’ve noticed a lot of years, we’ve seen a lot of places where people just don’t quite understand something or they make the wrong decision and something breaks, or they. No for whatever reason their product fails or they can’t get it to market. So we’ve been able to take that knowledge, kind of harness it into a curriculum where we teach people STEM on that and teach them to fit.

Although it, and so what we found is that there’s actually a, a, a report done by the product development management association. Uh, that stated that only 54% of all products launched were successful. So what we’re trying to do is take that number and, uh, you know, drive it up to a number of much higher than that.

So, you know, you’re 70 or 80%, or maybe even more than that, um, of a success rate of launching a product. And what that does is it creates a, uh, you know, bolsters the economy in any, uh, community that attends. So we’re starting here in Utah doing it very close to salt Lake city. And the idea is the idea of that is that a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies can, uh, I can appreciate, and also realize I’m a lot more successful, a returns on their, their time and their money, but they can also hire a lot of people.

So. Based on the information that we’re helping people with. They can, they can grow faster, they can hire people, they can create jobs. And so we’re really trying to create this, you know, almost an artificial economic engine. Uh, let’s try to bolster the economy here at Nissan. Now, here in Utah, we are blessed to have a pretty strong economy already, uh, in product development space.

There’s been a lack of leadership and, uh, there’s not really a nice methodology. That’s kind of universal. In launching products. And so what we’re trying to do is harness that and tap into it and get as many people through the ecosystem as we can, and to join the ecosystem so that we can kind of all grow together.

That’s, that’s kind of the focus and the goal. And it’s a, I’m going to tell you, it’s a pretty strong vision and it’s pretty hard. And there’s a lot of things that are complicated about it, but we’ve already seen a lot of success. We just launched the company we filed for the LLC, if you weeks ago, and we’ve already had a number of customers come through and happy customers.

So the, that is there, the market validation there, and we’re just about ready to pour the gas on it to make it go huge. Do you, um, tailor to specific product category more like, say like a tronics maybe to your background or any, any product in general, anything that wants to get brought to fruition? Uh, so in, in general, uh, the principles that we teach in our curriculum can be used universally.

What we find is that. The, the, uh, the products that work best going through the system are the ones that have, um, a really good handle and early and focus on the scalar nature of launching a product. So, and, and selling it out to the masses. So if you think about it, Mmm. And I’m going to give you a little bit of a, kind of a different analogy.

If you talk to an attorney, they’re very, um, it’s a very strong one-to-one relationship. They charge per hour. Now, when you talk about certain products that you can sell to the masses, um, there’s this really interesting thing where you can kind of get as far disambiguated from the product, which as you can, and that’s, what’s great about a product company, right?

As opposed to a service based company, like an attorney or an attorney firm. So we focus a lot on, and our ideal customers are ones that can really get that strong disambiguation between themselves as the entrepreneur and getting it up to the masses with. Almost no connection at the end of that to them personally.

And that’s what allowed them to realize, you know, some pretty high returns on their time and their investing in their resources. Is there a factor you had talked about, um, you know, the percentage of product conscious that fail? Is there a factor that contributes most that just clearly stands out to why products don’t successfully launch?

And obviously there’s a variety of reasons, but is there just one that just. The runaway majority, um, that’s, uh, that’s solo and dimensional. Um, I don’t know if I could pin it on one, but how about I give you a couple of them, a number of them? Um, I would say, I would say, uh, the entrepreneur has to be willing and ready to be passionate about what they have because.

You know, entrepreneurship is hard and launching a product is really hard, especially in a world where not many people have really figured out how to do it. And so, and there’s a lot of, um, in Russia, HSA against somebody that wants to launch a product. So I would say their passion, uh, their ability to, uh, you know, overcome obstacles cause they will happen their ability to, uh, kind of pivot and change the concept or an idea into something new.

Um, and then I would say probably a second thing. Is there the business model? I think a lot of people have an idea for a product where there’s not enough of a, there’s not a big market or maybe there’s not enough margin in it, launch it. And so sometimes those ideas need to pivot a little bit. Actually a lot of times they need to pivot a little bit to kind of the direction of it and hit a target market.

That’s actually appropriate in that house. You know, some money in it. Um, And so sometimes, you know, we we’ve had to help tweak some of those business models and revenue models. Mmm. And then third, I would just say, uh, probably just probably the voice of customer. I think a lot of, a lot of failures in launching a product are that these entrepreneurs and these inventors, they don’t listen to their customers.

They gotta get out of the building and I gotta go talk to them. I mean, focus groups, right? Like we, we highly promote the concept of buying pizza for. You know, people and getting them over to your house or to your building and asking them a series of questions and surveys that are carefully thought out.

They give you the right answers and responses that you need to then verify and validate that your product is actually going to be successful. And when the customer asks for, you know, a simple knife, you don’t want to hand them a Swiss army knife because obviously that’s a it’s. It’s something that they don’t want to pay money, the extra money for.

And so we want to make sure that we’re launching these things as the minimum viable product. So there’s a number of pieces that go into it, but that’s just kind of a few of them that make a really big difference that those are good answers. Um, so you had mentioned you’re you’re three weeks into Epic.

Uh, what’s the longterm goal of the company that, uh, Uh, you know, obviously everybody wants to build and sell, but it is still kind of a passion play or is this just strictly a business business strategy now? Um, this, this is definitely a passionate place for me. Um, it’s, it’s an industry that, uh, I don’t see myself really leaving, um, just because I know so much about it and I’m passionate about it.

I’ve seen a lot of success and how a lot of success, I don’t think I’ll ever leave this industry. Um, so it’s definitely a passion play for me, however, The numbers make sense. And a there’s a pretty large market for what the service that we are offering and we can help solve them off a lot of problems for our customers.

Mmm. You asked about the end results. So obviously any, any good entrepreneur has an exit strategy or a long term play. And this, what we’re hoping to mold this into eventually is it’s going to be, um, work an incubator and an accelerator for launching products. And we’re actually pretty close to a lot of moving pieces of that court.

Um, but it’s good to know that, you know, that’s the direction, that’s the vision so that we can structure everything correctly. Now be appropriate later down the road when it is an actual accelerator and incubator. So I have somebody, um, we’ll, we’ll talk offline about this too, that, uh, I have a friend that all he does is Kickstarter campaigns is a consultant and he just, he, he knows what, you know, he’s had the best selling, uh, child’s product on Kickstarter, best selling outdoor clothing on Kickstarter.

Like this is what he does is goes in, finds the product, funds it, that, you know, somebody else’s baby funds it. And that’s the Kickstarter strategy and just kills it. So it might be some good opportunities if you guys, um, all right, Kyle. So I got an, I got a new thing before we go. Kyle, do you have any more questions for that?

Okay. So before we go, um, I now have a random question generator. So sometimes they’re weird questions and sometimes they’re serious such as, okay. So you have to tell me when to stop. Okay. Can you tell me when to stop? Okay. How about right now, if you knew that you only had a year left to live, what would you do?

We got happy on that first one. Mmm. I knew I only had a year left to live. What would I do? I would probably go a. I’d probably go, I would take my Jeep and I would go down to mow out and I would, I would spend a lot of time down there doing, off-roading getting up all the Jeep trails. I would probably spend an awful lot of time with the family.

Um, and I probably wouldn’t do very much business at all. How’s that for an answer? I like it. Okay. Um, Chad, thank you. Uh, as we pulled out, go ahead and plug yourself, uh, talk about anything you want, share your website, phone number, social media, whatever you’d like. So do you want me to say what our website is and my, and your phone number?

Yeah. Whatever, whatever contact information you want to give out. Okay. So, uh, my email address is chad@epic-pl.com. And so our website is obviously. Uh, www.ethic-pl.com. And our phone numbers are equity zero one two zero three zero four five four. And odds are, if you call, I may answer it, but it’s probably a business partner.

Alright, there you go. All right, Chad. Well, thanks for joining us. All right. Thanks Dan. And thanks Kyle.