The Bootstrapper's Bible (2 of 30)

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The Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin. Copyright 2004 by Seth Godin.
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SECTION 1: The Joy of Small (CONT'D)

TRUE STORY 1:
I AM A LASER BEAM

The big call came just a few months after Michael Joaquin Grey and Matthew Brown had started up their toy company. Would the two San Francisco bootstrappers like their product included in the movie marketing blitz for The Lost World? Nope, said Grey and Brown, who preferred to stick with their vision of gradually building a market for Zoob, their plastic DNA-like building toy.

What the bootstrappers feared was a loss of identity. If they hooked up with the celluloid dinosaurs, they’d be seen as just another Jurassic spinoff. On their own, they could create a separate brand and not only avoid extinction but create their own world. Eventually, the two even hope to have their own Zoob movies.

TRUE STORY 2:
THE BOOTSTRAPPER IS HERE FOR THE LONG HAUL

Jheri Redding started not one, but four companies. And when the renowned bootstrapper died at 91 in 1998, all four—including the first, Jheri Redding Products, begun in 1956—were still in operation. How’d he do it?

Redding created lasting businesses through the combination of a gift for spotting long-term opportunity and his relentless drive to create significant competitive advantages in product features and distribution clout. The Illinois farm boy became a cosmetologist during the Great Depression because he saw hairdressers prospering and farmers failing. He soon began experimenting with shampoo formulas and showed remarkable flair for innovation.

Redding was the first to add vitamins and minerals to shampoos, the first to balance the acidity of the formulas, and the first to urge hairdressers to supplement their haircutting income by selling his products on the slow days of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The first? Yes, and also the last. There aren’t many like Jheri Redding, who also founded Redken (1960), Jhirmack (1976), and Nexxus Products (1979).

TRUE STORY 3:
I WILL KNOW MORE ABOUT MY FIELD THAN ANYONE ELSE

When Yves Chouinard starting scaling mountains, rock climbers used soft cast-iron pitons that had to be discarded after a single use. Chouinard, who was as passionate about climbing peaks as he was about his work as a blacksmith, designed a new piton of aircraft-quality chrome-molybdenum steel. The tougher, reusable piton met climbers’ needs much better and became an instant success.

As piton sales climbed, Chouinard himself kept climbing too, as much or more than ever. He recalls, “Every time I returned from the mountains, my head was spinning with ideas for improving the carabiners, crampons, ice axes, and other tools of climbing.”

It’s been 40 years since the blacksmith-climber hammered out his first steel piton. Since then, it and his many other designs have become the foundation for Patagonia Inc., a $100 million outdoor apparel company based in Ventura, California. Although he’s now a highly successful businessman, Chouinard still climbs regularly, testing his company’s new products while honing its most important tool: his own matchless knowledge of climbers’ needs.

TRUE STORY 4:
I AM A SALESPERSON

Shereé Thomas had a personal question in mind when she called the customer service line of the company that makes Breathe Right nasal strips. But when she found herself talking to the company’s medical director, she went beyond her question and revved up a sales pitch for a liquid she had invented that neutralizes the smell of cigarette smoke on clothes and hair.

A couple of switchboard clicks later, Thomas was on the line with the company’s president. And three weeks after that, the company had signed a licensing agreement to invest $4 million to manufacture, market, and distribute Banish, the product Thomas mixed up in her chemist-grandfather’s garage. Through the licensing deal, this Cedar Park, Texas, bootstrapper will rack up around six figures in annual royalty payments. Her investment in the sale: a phone call to the company’s toll-free line—and a personal commitment never to stop selling.

TRUE STORY 5:
THE JOURNEY IS THE REWARD

Charles Foley was 18 when he told his mother he expected to invent things that would be used everywhere. At 67, the inventor has 130 patents to his credit, including one for the venerable party game Twister, which he invented in the 1960s and still sells today.

But Foley, of Charlotte, North Carolina, is still at the inventing game. He recently revived a discovery of his from the 1960s, an adhesive-removing liquid, and sold the rights to make and market it to a company headed by his son. He’s also working on new designs for fishing floats and a home security system.