Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (30 page)

Some people think that the best way to get what they want is to pull power trips or get aggressive. But not only is that kind of behavior unnecessary, it’s also counterproductive. Even if you have some power, you don’t want people to do what you want them to do out of fear or because you’re making their life miserable. You want them to work with you to solve a problem because they believe in what you’re trying to accomplish, and because they feel like they’re part of a team.

When you run into trouble and need to rally the troops, don’t pressure people by focusing on the consequences of failure but, rather, on what you could all gain with success.

The factory and the toolmaker understand how purchase orders and retailers work, and they know how critical deadlines are for the holiday season, so I tried to persuade the toolmaker to fix the mold with lightning speed. I pointed out that if the product did well, the factory would do well—I could make more products, and he would make the tools for them. I shared what it would mean if, instead of manufacturing enough product to fill the shelves of twelve JCPenneys, they were manufacturing enough product to fill the shelves of hundreds of JCPenneys, in addition to the other
smaller retailers that were already about to carry my organizer. How much more profit would that translate into? How many more hours could they offer their employees? How many more jobs could they provide to the community?

I didn’t ask him to bend over backward for me out of the goodness of his heart; I asked him to help me because, if we could get this done, we would all win. And on top of that, I begged. He knew I was a brand-new entrepreneur, and he realized how much this new business meant to all of us. This was my first product order, and if anything went wrong I might never get another chance like this again. I laid my heart out and appealed to his sense of compassion. He got it, and the tool was fixed in a week.

The power of persuasion lies in making people understand the big picture.

Always explain to people why you are asking them to do things for you, especially when you are asking them to rush an order or go out of their way. No one likes to be ordered around, but when people understand why you’re saying, “I need this tomorrow,” or “Get it done in two weeks,” they’re often willing to help you drive the bus. This kind of communication and trust building is an important element in business.

Be Proactive to Solve Problems

That wasn’t the end of my problems, unfortunately. As the mold was being tweaked, the first shipment of boxes arrived so that the factory workers could start packaging the organizers and loading them into master cartons to be shipped out to warehouses. One look, and I knew we were in trouble. The black ink had bled and smeared all over the photo of my earring organizer on the
front, top, and side panels. Twenty-five thousand boxes, and you couldn’t tell what was supposed to be inside any of them. It was a disaster.

We had only two days before we had to ship out to the stores. I called the printer and they said they’d rerun the boxes and I’d have them in another week. This wasn’t going to work. I needed to get them corrected immediately. Production was running. The goods needed to be packaged. The product could not just sit there stacking up in the factory unboxed. The order needed to get out. I jumped in my car and drove three and a half hours to Wisconsin, where the printer was located. Inside, I was frantic; I needed my boxes now.

But I tried to stay calm as I marched into the factory and showed the foreman the ruined boxes. Surely he could see that this was not salable, especially when this was the first time JCPenney had ever done business with me. I then used the same line of reasoning that I did with the manufacturer to explain to him why it was in his best interest to rerun the printrun and reprint my 25,000 boxes. Now. And once again, I begged. This was my first order ever!

The printer wasn’t a crook. When I had picked up the phone and explained that he had sent me an unacceptable product, he had agreed to rerun the order. But first he had wanted me to send him a sample overnight, and then he would have put it on press the following week. In other words, he would have gotten to it when it conveniently fit into his production run. But because I drove there right away and was standing in front of him, he had to make me a priority. He could probably see that it would take nothing less than a forklift to move me out of his way, and maybe he even felt sorry for me. He finally agreed to start the print run over immediately. Within twenty-four hours, 25,000 beautiful
black boxes were ready to be shipped overnight to the factory so I could meet my deadline.

That’s how I operate. At the first hint of a problem, I try to be proactive. I’ll jump into my car at a moment’s notice for a face-to-face meeting. I’ll even get on a plane, if I have to. That’s the nature of an entrepreneur. From the very beginning, you have to be willing to do anything within your power to make things happen when needed. This is how you get business done and how you get ahead.

There Are no NOs

Years later, I was faced with another manufacturing conundrum. I had invented a new product called a Fill-A-Bowl. It was a big clear bowl in which you could fill the side walls with different decorative pieces, like candy, beads, or dried flowers. The parts were clear, like my polystyrene organizer, but because of its design, it had an inner smaller bowl and an outer larger bowl that needed to be glued together invisibly. We had to figure out how to successfully adhere the parts without ruining the aesthetics of the product. The only solution would be to use a completely new manufacturing process that would involve a special kind of glue, and press the pieces together so fast and hard they could adhere before the glue dried.

My factory had never done anything like this. Yet as far back as my first earring organizer, every product had always presented a problem, and each time we had put our heads together and figured out how to work around it. I knew we could figure this out—there had to be a way. In this case, however, everyone from the manufacturer’s tooling experts, to their engineers, to their
factory workers said that what I wanted to do couldn’t be done. Finally, I thought, what about a glue expert? So we found one, and sure enough, he figured out what to do.

One of my mottoes is: There are no NOs, just HOW CAN I?

In the end, the solution was to build an ultraviolet light gluing assembly line, with a conveyor belt that carried the parts at the exact speed for the parts to go under the light and adhere perfectly without ruining the crystal-clear transparence of the bowl.

That Fill-A-Bowl became an overnight sensation, making its way into hundreds of thousands of homes and earning a spot as one of QVC’s top five-selling items that year. We also got into Michael’s craft stores. For my on-air demo on QVC, I decorated thirty-five different bowls so people could see all the different things you could do with them. I filled them with everything I could think of. It took me weeks. My entire home was strewn with different candies, pastas, beads, and dried flowers. I made a Halloween bowl, a Mardi Gras bowl, and a pasta bowl with macaroni, spirals, and rotini. I made a bowl filled with lavender, rosebuds, and other dried flowers. I made bowl after bowl after bowl. They looked gorgeous, the packaging was gorgeous, and we sold 100,000 Fill-A-Bowls in Michael’s in the first six months alone. It was one of the top sellers in all the stores that year, and we were all so glad we’d hung in there and resolved the gluing problem.

LAY THE GROUNDWORK

There is a common theme in these stories: it’s not just what you do in the heat of the moment that can save you from disaster, but what you’ve done in the days before the disaster hits. The groundwork for your business lies just as much in the attention you pay to the people you work with as it does in perfecting the
details of your product. The strength of your relationships will directly affect how well you’re able to get your bus back on track if things go awry. It’s possible you can catch problems and fix things all by yourself, but it’s a lot easier with the goodwill and cooperation of others.

You must remember that in addition to paying attention to your direct reports or the people in power, you need to pay attention to all the individuals behind the scenes who make your business possible. A huge part of my philosophy is to always try to treat people respectfully and nicely. I see it as homage to my parents and grandfather, all of whom lived by the same principle. One of the things I loved and admired most about my grandfather is how he treated everyone the same. He would talk and joke with a janitor in exactly the same way as he would with a CEO. He had time for everyone. He instilled in me the philosophy that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have; what matters is what kind of person you are.

Kindness and Consideration

The manufacturing plant was located in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Many of the employees who worked there didn’t speak English well. Fortunately, I spoke passable Spanish. The plant ran twenty-four hours a day. I would come in almost every day, and often in the evenings, too.

Sometimes we would get an order that would overwhelm the factory and we would not be able to make the product as quickly as the store wanted. Sometimes there might be an outbreak of colds or flu, during which the factory would lose a handful of employees per shift. We were lucky that the product was doing so well on QVC, but deadlines could be so
tight it meant that sometimes there wouldn’t be time for the factory workers to shrink-wrap everything to get the product out as urgently as needed. When these situations occurred, I found it was helpful if I came in to help out, lend a hand. So Dan and I would come in at midnight and walk around and around the pallets with what amounted to a tremendous roll of Saran Wrap. God bless Dan; he was always there by my side to help when I needed it. Once we shrink-wrapped three hundred pallets in a weekend just by ourselves.