From No Experience to a $2.2B Toy Empire — Ronnen Harary - Spin Master Co-Founder

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: advice for people that are young and feel like taking risk it's something completely against what their parents wanted them to do so how do you how do you get over that well-meaning but [00:00:08] Ronan Harari: limiting sort of belief system it's easier to game out the downside than it is to imagine the upside we all know the negative what could happen when you're taking a risk question is do you want to miss miss out on the on the screenplay of your life by not taking that step as long as you're enjoying what you're failing at it's okay and you're still building up a whole body of knowledge [00:00:26] Speaker 1: at the same time today's guest is ronan harari co-founder of spin master he started the company with two friends and ten thousand dollars with no prior experience in business or toys spin master grew into a publicly traded company generating billions of dollars in sales harari's new book no experience necessary outlines his approach to building a business without relying on market research or industry background the entrepreneurs that i look up to i could find stories like that in almost every single entrepreneur's journey really really not great stuff in the moment happened on the rebound from that the learning like the learning the lesson it turned into something [00:01:00] Ronan Harari: exceptionally positive learning luck actually you need to look at it as a lucky thing that's happened to you you're lucky that you had the experience and you're going to do something with the experience afterwards and so you're lucky to get something imprinted in you you're going to grow from the imprint [00:01:12] Speaker 1: my fitness pal is a success story partner now here's something i've noticed after interviewing hundreds of founders the ones that are performing at the highest level the ones that are truly winning they aren't just optimizing their business or their calendar or their team they're paying attention to what they eat and the ones who 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fitness pal premium that's podcast.myfitnesspal.com code scott renan why is inexperience an asset [00:02:33] Ronan Harari: no experience is that what you're saying no experience no experience i think that there's a wonderful thing in sometimes the power of not knowing and sometimes we over intellectualize things and when you don't know so much but you're when you don't know you actually defer more to your body and to your intuition and your own internal knowing that it feels right um and when something feels right it's like it's an amazing uh thing to source of energy to draw on and you can actually do amazing things and bring amazing things [00:03:05] Speaker 1: into the world um i find it interesting like the title of the book is is no experience necessary but you know every every investor is looking for the second time founder or what are they teaching in business school like you got to like go and do the thing and learn how to do it and break a few things before you can actually become successful at it um what made this such an important idea for you in your journey the no experience is the x factor or the advantage [00:03:32] Ronan Harari: well you know when i hit middle age and i thought and i started to reflect back on my 20s and so we started our business when we were 23 years old and i was really thinking about what that decade was like for me and all the magical things that that occurred and with hindsight and be able to look back i was like there were so many amazing things that happened you know everybody was rooting for us people gave us better payment terms you know when we when we started our first year of business our payment terms were receivables were net 20 and our payables were net 90 right so we had like 70 days of free cash flow and the only reason why we had it was because we were super young and everybody wanted us to succeed we were like sponges back in the day we'd ask people for tons of meetings and we'd go to every trade show and anytime we got an audience um we would take it i remember the late alan hassenfeld who's one of the founders of hasbro um we'd call him up and we'd ask him questions and he was so gracious with his time and we were 25 years old and and i think if i called him when i was 35 or 40 he probably wouldn't have given us as much time but he was like these guys are 25 years old and i love the toy industry and these guys are going into the toy industry and i want to help him and he didn't see us as competition and so you know when you're so looking back i was like what are the things that that helped us get the plane off the ground and a lot of it was being in our 20s and being super passionate and wanting to birth something and bring something out into the world and people just recognized our passion [00:05:03] Speaker 1: so do you think people you know you work with a ton of founders and i'm sure they all ask for advice and they are they are the uh inexperienced 20 to 25 year old um do you feel like people wait too long to get started are they sort of hesitant because they haven't done it yet they they feel like they need to do something and validate their own skill set before they build a business for [00:05:25] Ronan Harari: example i think it's personal for to everybody and everybody's got their own path everybody's got their own journey and everybody's got their own time i think that i'm just passionate about if you if you have an idea not if you have an idea if you want to do something like for us we didn't have the idea for our first product but we decided that we wanted to be in business for ourselves so we made that decision and then the idea came to us afterwards so i encourage people if you have a certain career path or a certain pursuit that you want to do especially around opening a business then and and you have that that internal knowing then try to listen to yourself and the challenge that we in society that we live in is your parents tell you to do certain things society tells you to do certain things and then you end up doubting yourself and doubt is the anti-luck and then you start to freeze and then once you freeze then that energy dissipates and then you then you take a different track and so i think that that internal knowing could come in different points in your life and come in your 20s and come in your 30s um but if you do have it in your 20s it's such an incredible decade to seize on it because you have so much energy that you have to apply to it you have like three times the amount of energy that you have than a person in middle age and and then you're gonna you're gonna allocate this incredible decade do you want it to accrue to you or do you want to accrue to someone else do you want the equity do you want you have a moment in time where you where you have a you want to do something and then do you want that equity to be do you want to rent your time or do you want to own your time and so it's all around taking advantages of those um insights and opportunities that come to you in that moment and not letting them pass you by there's so much wisdom there um one idea that you touched [00:07:10] Speaker 1: on that i want to ask how you sort of wrestled with this idea when you're young you have the most energy and this is the time for you to build and try and fail etc etc but a lot of your belief system is tied to what your parents believed or what your teachers believed and and this is the biggest issue is that this is like implanted in your subconscious from like a very young age and as you get older hopefully you can figure out like what life you want to live so the opportunity when you're young usually that's clouded by the fact that all these different opinions about how you should live your life are so recent and so new and so strongly embedded so maybe speak a little bit about how you so you gravitated towards building your own thing but also just advice for people that are young and feel like building the business taking risk it's something completely against what their parents wanted them to do because i'm speaking from like even personal experience right like my parents always wanted the best for me but they didn't know entrepreneurship worked for the government in ottawa so how do you how do you get over that well-meaning but limiting sort of belief system that your parents deploy into you it is i keep on coming back to your own internal knowing and you [00:08:24] Ronan Harari: know i wrote this i wrote this book to be a supportive parent to people that are asking themselves that question and to create discussion with your parents or create discussion with people around you um around these types of topics so you can actually toss it out and it's funny because like in so many families there's so many unsaids so it's better to like not have the unsaids and i encourage people to like just use the book to create conversation and dialogue around these different things and and then you'll you'll be able to um uh figure things out but i think for for myself you know i was you know fortunate and unfortunate i i knew from a very early age that i wanted to be in business for myself and when i was 10 years old i got identified with a learning disability called dysgraphia and dysgraphia is the inability to get your thoughts out through your hands and so my handwriting is like atrocious and people are like oh you know you write like a doctor and i'm like no it's not it's not like a doctor at all okay this is this is something completely different and it took me two hours to do an exam that took people one hour to do took me eight hours when i was in you know doing some undergrad business classes um when i took my classmates four hours and and as a result of that i i felt that my options were limited and i knew that i wouldn't grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer because i just didn't have the academics so i kind of set my sights on on business from a very young age um plus i was a very curious child and i loved reading the business section and my parents were entrepreneurs and that was that my discussion in the house was was business and my parents took lots of risks as being new immigrants to canada and having to find their way and not being able to take the conventional route so it's funny that you bring it up it's like it is a lot about your your environment um and my environment definitely it's conducive to it was conducive to entrepreneurship because i didn't have a lot of options and sometimes having less options gives you a clearer path because you don't have the other ones but i think that there's a lot of people that do have the options and having too many options sometimes makes it makes it difficult to make a decision so i don't necessarily have the the direct answer to your to your question um other than at the end of the day it's your decision to make and it's your life to live and it's easier you know i write in the book about a chapter called the inverse risk it's easier to game out the downside than it is to imagine the upside we all know the negative what could happen when you're taking a risk right you started your podcasting and no one's going to watch it no one's going to listen to you you know like and and and and it's and and you're gonna get bad reviews etc etc but i bet you didn't imagine you probably couldn't imagine what has happened to you since you've actually started in the last five years and so i don't think we're built to actually let our imagination run wide wide like that with the upside with the upside yeah so the question is do you want to miss miss out on the on the screenplay of your life by not taking that that step and even if you fail you know you'll learn along the way and then you'll learn you know i i think a lot about like you know as long as you're enjoying what you're failing at it's okay and you're still building up a whole body of knowledge at the same time [00:11:47] Speaker 1: were there any moments when you were first starting out and i'm sure there it's a silly question because there's always moments but think about moments when you really doubted what you were doing because that's that's the the hurdle that people have to go sort of get over right it's easy to say it's very easy to say um you know imagine the potential imagine the upside hindsight's always 20 20 looking back it's it's so obvious you can see all the different things you've done to get to where you are but when you're first starting out and at anything with with no experience with no role models who are entrepreneurs for the majority of people um it's very easy to see the downside it's very easy to get hung up on things that don't work out it's very easy to you know call it quits when you're year two or year three into this thing and you're not making the money that you want to be making so just for that person who's starting out with no experience they took a bet on themselves how do they get over the mental hurdles of like shitty stuff that is inevitably going to happen to them on the road to building an incredible company well building an incredible company is not easy [00:12:52] Ronan Harari: it's not it's not an easy path it's a long path and i encourage people to look over a 10-year period of time a 20-year period of time a long arc and especially when you look like your earning potential you'll you'll earn much more in year 15 20 than you do at the beginning and so you kind of have to divide your earnings backwards um but uh i think that's i think again like as long as you're passionate about what you're doing and even if you're not getting there as fast as you want you're you're accruing a body of knowledge and it's going to happen for you you're actually you're in the doing and you're making your own luck right i i would say that uh you know um for us we've missed on opportunities and and and then good things happen afterwards right so you know i'll never forget i started going to japan and um japan's the second biggest toy market in the world and so we started to go to japan looking for ideas and i got presented beyblade i don't know if you remember being when you're a kid yes i got presented the dayblade when i was a kid i mean when when uh uh you had it when you had you were a kid and takara told me showing it to me and it was i took it back to the guys and they were like spinning top yeah spinning tops they're old they're not going to do really well um so i called up uh takara told me i told them you know we're going to pass on it i came back to japan six months later i said what's happening i'm just curious how's it going they said it's going great we're creating a whole tv show around it and i was like wow that's unbelievable like can we do it and they're like no we just signed a deal with hasbro and i'm like well why don't you call me and tell me you're doing a tv show because like selling a car without tires like there's a whole other aspect to it and they're like we did the deal with hasbro it's done and that went on to become this multi-billion dollar franchise and that was really hard for us to like miss that opportunities like wow we missed hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of toy sales um and then six years later we had our own opportunity to do our version of a blade which we call bakugan which was brought to us by this 23 year old toy inventor it was his first invention ever in his life and he had this idea to put this action figure into marble and we developed it to certain points and our development was like so so so i went back to japan and i pitched all these toy companies um and mr coco bun who didn't speak a stitch of english and he was running sega toys at the time he said i see it we'll partner with you come back in three months came back in three months and he added this whole magical pop open transformation element to the ball and so it would transform different characters different monsters um and you'd roll it onto a card and you would battle together you'd land on the card i'd land it on the card then you flip the card over and i had the point scoring system and it was the most magical toy had the incredible feedback and then i said to him how about doing a tv show and he said it's going to cost 12 million dollars do you have six and i was like that's a lot of money i'll get back to you i took three months and then i came back to him and and i came back to him like okay we're in and we created the show together we sold to cartoon network and it went on to sell uh in 100 it went on to air in 150 countries around the world we had four seasons and bakugan became a billion dollar franchise and so you know if we would have stopped and and really gotten down on ourselves um then we would have never gotten to bakugan so we learned a lot about you know we became students in terms of like how tv shows get made we started going to uh uh nipcom in in france and we started to really go up the learning curve of children's tv shows but it was that real that big missed opportunity that gave us the energy to like make it ourselves [00:16:58] Speaker 1: the next time so so it was the opportunity that you missed that was actually the silver lining that allowed you to learn about it and then do it successfully correct and i and it worked out [00:17:07] Ronan Harari: better because you know bakugan's owned by spin master and and dayblade we would have been the toy license even though i would have liked to have both but i don't think bakugan would have never been born without the without the miss without the passing i think that that's you know all the negative things [00:17:24] Speaker 1: that have sort of happened in my career and my building this this podcast they've all been positives in the long run like every every time you know an interview hasn't gone as well as i'd wanted it to like teaches me how to be a better interviewer every time you know um an episode doesn't go as well you know doesn't get the the reach or the viewership you're like now it's something to study and to figure out right everything is uh everything is a lesson and i think that that's something that if i look at the entrepreneurs that i look up to the people that are the most successful like yourself included like that story i could find stories like that in almost every single entrepreneur's journey of like really really not great stuff in the moment happened but then like on the rebound from that the learning like the learning the lesson it turned into something exceptionally positive yeah [00:18:12] Ronan Harari: that's it's learning luck actually you need to look at it as a lucky thing that's happened to you explain it doesn't seem lucky because you're because you're lucky that you had the experience and you're going to do something with the experience afterwards right and so you it's it's not an intellectual pursuit you didn't read in a book you'd read in a magazine you didn't even hear it on a podcast like it happened to you and and that that visceral feeling like of passing on something that became so big like that was that was imprinted in me and so you're lucky to get something imprinted in you right because you're going to like you're you're going to grow from the imprint it's it's in the body it's it's deep inside you yeah you don't make the mistake again you it's yeah and and you're constantly like i you'll make different mistakes but that particular one you're going to get redemption if you stay in the game long enough my business partner ben we have three there's three of us and ben has a saying he's like don't bet the farm stay in the game and if you stay in the game long enough good things happen and that's been our whole mantra like our company probably it could have been 10x the size if we would have taken more risk but we were very measured and calculative in terms of what we did along the way we never bet the farm and that was very intentional for us it's interesting now that [00:19:28] Speaker 1: we're sort of unpacking this idea of of needing to experience you know wins and losses to build anything great experience the way that most people describe it like experience like you know reading from a book or or or working in a company and experience almost means nothing that type of experience when it comes to building a business or taking or like because if you think about uh like a stanford mba well they can learn every single case study and business scenario ever but they didn't live it they didn't go through it themselves so they just spent years and years and years preparing but then they're still going to make the same mistakes and they're still gonna have to experience it themselves to actually learn the lesson so no experience necessary it's it's almost like well that's the only way you'll ever start whether or not you think you have experience you actually don't until you actually [00:20:23] Ronan Harari: do the thing correct the no experience is actually permission it's permission to start it's giving [00:20:28] Speaker 1: yourself the permission yeah so just the point is like just don't delay don't wait you'll never be you'll never have the the level of skill or aptitude or whatever that you think you need to have [00:20:39] Ronan Harari: so why not just start when you're 20. for sure um when you started spin master [00:20:47] Speaker 1: you did no research you didn't run any focus groups um so your core thesis was toys are a feel industry not a data industry you can't consult yourself in a creative business does this idea i want you to unpack that idea a little bit but this side does this idea only work in creative industries or does this idea work in in other industries this idea of getting into it doing things taking action and [00:21:14] Ronan Harari: that that's sort of like your feedback loop yeah i think instinct is is applicable to all industries right and having an instinct and a sense for what's happening in your industry and what's happening around you um and being able to triangulate a lot of data points uh is is relevant and common to a lot of industries um when a creative industry like like toys or tv shows i think goes even a little bit deeper because you everything we make we don't finish the product and then show it to the kids right we have a rough prototype the prototype doesn't necessarily work um and so you can't get really good feedback from kids from that so you have to use your intuition and and you have to use another form of knowing so i consider our business like an art and science together and the science part is you know you need to know the history of the toys that have come in the past how well they done what do they do how they sell why didn't they do well you have to know currently what's in the marketplace from a competition perspective um and then you have to have an understanding of like the zeitgeist and what's what's out there and what's the white space you know in terms of like what's what's going unattended to and then marry that with is the is there some piece of magic or pixie dust in the product is there something there that just gives you this excited feeling i'll share with you you know our third product was the air hogs which is an air pressure plane and we brought it out in the 90s you pump it up and you get a flight for 45 seconds and back in the day you'd only have balsa you know wind up planes in the 90s it's not like today when you have these incredible drones okay it's more fun growing up today um and you or you'd have a an air a gas power plane like a cox plane and it would fly once and usually break or take your finger off those were the the options and so we got presented the the the the the sky shark which came to us by these two british inventors john dixon peter manning and we went to the park we flew it and all they wanted to do was run like a seven-year-old kid pick up the plane and fly it again it was like it was wonder just watching the circle going around and around around around and then like where is it going to land and i was and then i go chase it and i just wanted to do it again then ben wanted to do it again then the inventors got up they were like listen this prototype take it easy guys so i'm thinking to myself okay if if if a 25 year old guy is getting excited could you imagine a 10 year old kid or seven year old kid and so that's that's what it was you're looking for that that feeling and there was just that magical feeling of wonder and wow in that particular product and that that's that's what you're looking [00:23:54] Speaker 1: for all the time to the difference maker i was gonna know because for somebody who's in like a creative field um where a lot of a lot of creatives start like television podcasting right whatever it is they they copy what exists already and i think that that's i don't know maybe it's a it's a safe place to start but i don't know if it builds a a business that really stands out yeah so for [00:24:21] Ronan Harari: you conjured up two thoughts in my mind one is the toy business is actually a very iterative process so it's building on what's come before it but they're always look you're always looking to add something new and different and the craziest things is kids they're always look they always know if there's something new or different that was added okay even if they're new to the world and a product from five years ago is new to them they still know it's old it's the strangest thing ever i don't know how that works um but uh the kids just have incredible antennas and and uh uh so there's that aspect there's that aspect to it and um uh i lost my train of thought no you're good so i was i was just saying [00:25:04] Speaker 1: um as a creative uh like a lot of us we just copy what exists already but then how but then what i was [00:25:10] Ronan Harari: going to say to you yeah one of the mantras that we thank you was that we made a decision our company is that we want to design develop our own products from scratch we want to own the ip we want to own the intellectual property for them and we want to make history so that was our driving motto with everything that we decided to allocate capital to and bring into the world and that was that was the thesis that was our thesis yeah it was just a very broad thesis we also said we want to stay in kids and we want to grow the company as big as possible and that was it we didn't box ourselves in we didn't you know make any claims and whatever we could fill it in with we did bringing it back to [00:25:48] Speaker 1: when you first like when you first started uh spin master you said you wanted to be an entrepreneur always that was sort of like what was ingrained in you um what was the what was the inflection point that got you so excited about toys and it was like this is what i got to commit my life to [00:26:09] Ronan Harari: the irony is that if you would have asked me in university if i ever thought about going into the toy business it never crossed my mind once and maybe it was the fact that he didn't grow up with a lot of toys maybe i'm trying to fulfill uh you know a lost childhood in a way but um no we our second product was devil sticks and um we had distribution into 2 000 retailers and then ben who was living with uh jen erwin which was daughter of the most famous canadian toy company at the time they gave us this list of toy inventors and said here here's 200 inventors go at it and see what ideas you can get from them and so we just kind of put it together it was like devil six sold a million and a half pieces we had distribution of toys russ and kb toys and then we had this inventor list and we were like well let's just go down this road for a little bit longer and see what we can do and then we got the air hogs and that did really well for us and both my business partners are students of ivy business school and at business school they teach you stick to your knitting when it's working stick to your core competency and that was becoming our core competency and it was working for us and the irony of the whole thing is like i grew up when the internet was starting and you know it was like dial up and and i could feel the tech was the the direction to go in like that's where the zeitgeist was really moving um but toys were working for us and and we stayed with what was working and it was also very um uh uh it was very commensurate to our skill set and where we were in our journey as entrepreneurs and it was very age appropriate for us at that moment in time and i think that's an important thing it's like you know we were doing we were able to build the product the company one product at a time and we weren't thinking like we need to be this big company straight away no you're like next win and next one one one one at one at a time so it enabled us to like not overthink things and almost do it as like as projects while we were actually building out a foundation for a business [00:28:23] Speaker 1: air hogs that was 35 million in 1998 um was that like the first sort of mass market success you know [00:28:29] Ronan Harari: we were super lucky our first product was called earth buddies and we did three and a half million dollars and sales that year first like out of the gate first product out of the gate first product yeah [00:28:39] Speaker 1: it's amazing i mean it's like for context it's very rare to have like the first thing that you ever launched be incredibly successful um but i mean like sometimes i'll say this too early wins can sometimes make you think that you're you are better than you are and that can actually hurt you long term if you don't understand sort of your own like uh uh not deficiencies but like if there's like a little bit of luck involved in that and you can make your own luck with a little bit of luck involved and you had this like sort of home run right out of the gate maybe the next time it doesn't work as [00:29:10] Ronan Harari: well you're 100 right when we when we did bakugan we went from 450 million dollars in sales to 900 million dollars in sales okay in two years and then two years later we went back to 450 million dollars in sales and we had to let go 350 people in the business for restructuring restructures put capital back into the business we lost money for 24 months i saw brackets for the first time okay and for 16 years we had growth and we had pro and we were profitable as a company and then for years 17 and 18 i call it the teenage years it was like basically when our kids were like out getting high smoking pot and not managing the business and and uh but to your point it's like we in all seriousness we believed that everything we did was going to turn to gold and we had so much hubris at that moment in time like all the product we put out we we were like putting out so many products we thought they'd all be successful and it didn't happen and so when bakugan went down in sales all the new products that were coming to the market they didn't hit and so there was nothing to reinforce the the sales what was [00:30:17] Speaker 1: that what was the thing that now looking back you should have paid attention to that you didn't well [00:30:23] Ronan Harari: one is don't grow so fast don't hi don't hire into your sales when the sales are like spiking like this two is be as judicious as you were before about the products that you were actually putting into the marketplace um and make sure that you have like a super wide funnel of options because the more narrow your options are in terms of products um you know then you let you you you need the revenue so then you're not being as discerning and you can be much more discerning when you're looking at 3 000 items a year versus like 1 000 items a year so it's a combination of all those things happening at the same time it was like you know we have a saying it was when really bad things happen it's not usually one thing it's a perfect storm it's everything happening at the same time and that's tough too because when [00:31:09] Speaker 1: things don't go right at that level like it's a bigger issue like putting it lightly than if things don't work out with the first product launch and okay fine that you know we don't draw a salary for the next six months but we're not having to lay people off and when you're when you're letting go 350 [00:31:27] Ronan Harari: people and their lives uh i can tell you for myself it was the hardest time period in my business career by far with with the most amount of learnings at the same time what was the what was the way that you [00:31:40] Speaker 1: got out of that that relatively dark period year 17 18. um well after we stopped fighting [00:31:49] Ronan Harari: because growth hides a multitude of sins all the sins came out so after we stopped fighting and after we basically decided to recommit because you know in those dark times you have thoughts like should i sell the business should we call it quits all that type of stuff um we got back to the basics which was being much more judicious about the products we're bringing to market um giving the products a real way more time and attention and care like everything's about the details if i look back in my history it's like the products that have done the the best are the ones that we've paid the most amount of attention to detail to and we weren't really thinking about how big they would become we were just focused on the product and the consumer at that moment in time and then we did things like we opened up the funnel so we started looking at a lot more stuff um and and then crazy thing happened like our biggest success it was paw patrol and paw patrol was born in our lowest moment you're going back to basics at this point [00:32:51] Speaker 1: obviously incredibly stressful environment um you're being more to just judicious excuse me about the products that you're bringing to market uh what was the what was the idea behind paw patrol because at this point what you don't want to have happen when things are not going in the right direction is to sort of have like this knee jerk reaction and try and bring a product that is it's almost like you can you can compound the issue if you weren't careful at this point yeah i i don't know if you would compound the issue but it was i mean if you rush a decision or if you rush a a new product launch to sort of compensate for for like lost revenue declining revenue correct for sure i think for us the learning was really [00:33:32] Ronan Harari: slow down let's slow down because we were like we were riding really high we're riding really high at that moment in time um and uh it was really time to just take a beat and really focus on the product at the end of the day and probably you know in our industry we have a saying called product is king brands are king franchises king but let's focus on the product so this was four years of restructuring you [00:33:57] Speaker 1: you called this two years of restructure or two years of restructure excuse four years would be a disaster what i'm thinking about is you had like these two like sort of like mbas and whatnot and you had and you had all these great successes um i guess if there was something that you at that point in the company you pivoted how you thought about product or you pivoted or you went back to your roots or if there's something that was like because you mentioned like there was too much hubris and too much repeated success was there a was there something like sort of a a mental model or a way that you looked at the company at that point that you felt like you know what we've like sort of lost ourselves at this point we have to go back to basics was there any like moment like that or was i mean if there [00:34:41] Ronan Harari: isn't then it's not a fair question you don't have i mean no no no no that that is that was what happened it was we need to go back to what got us to where we were before and that was basics and that was again just focusing on the product um not believing in our own stuff uh and having humility it was actually rooted in humility just have humility and just focus and don't think that you know you're going to have this big company you know it suddenly became about having a big company and it's not about you can't just have a big company it doesn't work like that right you need to have all the products and the franchises that support having a big company but just because you have a big hr department and a big finance department and all this type stuff the the focus went into the wrong wrong areas and we [00:35:27] Speaker 1: expand our international too fast i'm trying to figure out for for entrepreneurs that are scaling it's exciting like it's a super exciting thing to to be hitting those revenue levels and whatnot um what's your advice to somebody who's scaling at that level like how do they how do they keep up with momentum but not lose track of like who they are as an entrepreneur like what got them to be [00:35:49] Ronan Harari: successful in the first place i think for every industry it's it's very different right like our industry like inventory you got to watch your inventory like that can that can really take down a company um but i think a lot of it is is overheads and bloat and just watch your overheads watch your bloat um you know when i'll tell you this much when when you're having people that are like you know when you stop doing things internally and then you have people that are managing people from the outside and they're just becoming managers and they're not doing anymore and the pace of operation goes down um you feel like you're growing but in a sense like you have to have managed growth especially around people and if you have too many people coming in too fast then your culture starts to break down and that's not a really good thing the most important thing is to protect culture culture culture is king all right that's your moat that's what that's what makes your business different and so if you have an influx of people to support your growth and your culture is getting diluted and and then that's going to cause certain problems um and so i i would say it's all around watching [00:36:58] Speaker 1: the people i think so at that level um because obviously now because even man sorry interrupt but [00:37:05] Ronan Harari: like even managing larger teams it takes time to learn that skill a thousand percent it's nothing you learn out of the gate when you start yeah so if you're like doubling your people in in a year [00:37:16] Speaker 1: like that's a lot that's just a lot right i think that we just like don't like when we think about um building a company we always think about okay we just want to get it off the ground find product market fit we want to um you know great revenues moving up and to the right we're not an abject failure yet but then you think about the the things like okay how do we hire at scale how do we maintain culture i don't think these are things that people think about more often than not until it's too late [00:37:46] Ronan Harari: i would say like this is i would not let it doesn't matter how fast you're growing i would not let anybody in the door without making sure that they match your culture and i would not i would not delegate out the hiring process to other people that don't really understand the culture and have lived the culture in your business do not do not go to hr professionals or anything like that no no despairing hr professionals they're great but if you're definitely starting your business and you're in the early years like you need to do it yourself and you may not feel like you have the time but you will lose the time in the future as a result of not doing it hubspot is a success story [00:38:25] Speaker 1: partner now customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from now when a buyer or a customer asks ai for a solution like yours does your business come up they're looking for a product they're looking for a service and they're going into some ai chat tool and they're saying hey help me find the best one if your company isn't showing up you're missing out and most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up and by the time they figure it out they've already lost a deal to somebody that figured out ai this is what aeo is answer engine optimization hubspot aeo helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your buyers and your customers are looking for it could be before the first click before the first form fill that's the moment hubspot aeo is built for so check out hubspot.com to learn more about aeo hubspot is the agent to customer platform for growing businesses my fitness pal is a success story partner on this show i speak to tons of high performers and the people that sustain that high performance not just sprint and crash and burn but they actually sustain they all treat nutrition like a system not an afterthought the same way they treat revenue or hiring or product it is key to their business they pay attention they look at the data and that really stuck with me and it's how i started thinking about my own health and wellness and what i put into my own body not in like a restrictive diet way but in a data way see most people take a look at daily calorie total and they think they have the full picture that's just one number the my fitness pal app premium it shows me macros that means proteins carbs fats broken down by meal so i can see am i getting enough protein at breakfast versus dinner and it also shows me how my food is distributed across the day because of course i can take a look at my total calorie number but to see everything broken down by meal those are two completely different things even if your daily total looks fine and you're gonna feel the difference if you eat proper nutrition across your entire day and you track it your energy is going to allow you to sustain that high performance also the food analysis picks up trends over the week that i'd miss just going by feel see this information makes good food choices automatic see food is a foundation right energy focus performance recovery it all starts with food so do yourself a favor go visit podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code scott all uppercase letters for 15 off my fitness pal premium that's podcast.myfitnesspal.com code scott one of the most important jobs that i've seen the most successful founders take on is just the the recruiter like the person who's always like even at a high level you have eight-figure company nine-figure company publicly traded company like it seems like the founder if they're still part of the company they're still involved in recruiting [00:41:13] Ronan Harari: at some level totally you want to attract and retain the best talent and a lot of times they're coming there because of the founder that's true they want to be close to the founder [00:41:22] Speaker 1: um when you are at that level you said it's a really common issue that culture starts to break down if you're not careful how do you maintain a culture across a couple hundred person or a couple [00:41:35] Ronan Harari: thousand person org i think that it's it's all with being very judicious on the people you bring into the company and then giving people the opportunities to grow within your company and getting and giving them opportunities to stay we have it's funny it's like in spin master if you started in shipping okay you had a direct track to a vp job you know i say i say it slightly in jest but there's there's there's countless countless stories it's been master where people started shipping and they ended up at vps or svps and you know our company's it's a metocracy we don't care about what what's your background where you come from it's all about what you can actually do and what you can contribute and it's diversity of thought it's those two things happening at the same time and that's that's our culture and we're looking for those types of people but it's really if you want to preserve a culture and a business it's all about promoting within and the people that are staying there for long periods of time and giving them different opportunities to grow within the organization and then they just get this wealth of diversity of of knowledge um i mean when just going back to paw patrol i mean one of our gentlemen's that helped create pop patrol his name is matt wexler he started working in our factory when we were making earth buddies when he was 18 years old okay and he came into the entertainment division we started to go to mip together um learned the business together adam beater was there we learned the business it was like the three of us and they'd never done it before they'd never been in licensing they'd never been in entertainment never produced any shows but i worked so well with them and they just got me and i got them and they were spin master and we were able to do things together and we had that shorthand um and so that's something you didn't you never want to lose that shorthand with people in your business right because you can go so much quicker this is a [00:43:19] Speaker 1: theme that i've picked up on as i've interviewed like a ton of founders it seems like what you're describing how you're just hiring from internal and like with people that have worked with you for years that from what i understand is like the best way to preserve culture and and to build a successful business like it seems like that is the requirement yeah i will take i will take loyalty [00:43:40] Ronan Harari: and determination and passion and smarts over experience really you're looking at me with a [00:43:47] Speaker 1: surprise babe i i am i i like it makes sense though it makes a lot of sense because that's like you said if you just bring an experience then it like it it's not like they know what's going on in the company they maybe bring experience or a way things have already been if they bring in the quote unquote way things have always been done from a different industry that could hurt how they [00:44:09] Ronan Harari: perform that too that's it listen you need a balance of everything but you do need a core of individuals that are holding the culture together and what that number is i've never really thought about what the what the right mix is but i would say probably 60 of the business 70 needs people that are die hard [00:44:27] Speaker 1: into the culture if you don't want the culture to erode so your book no experience necessary that is built around 11 core principles when you went through this gray hair moment in your career what was the principle that you learned during this time or the one that stands out the most that was like this is something that is like very applicable to what i'm going through right now well always always keep on [00:44:54] Ronan Harari: pushing the envelope right don't leave don't stop you know as i said before paw patrol was born in the lowest point and uh you know we've never done a preschool show before we'd never done one and we were like let's let's try and uh you know um i can share with you the story that uh around it but uh that that was the the real lesson was just keep on pushing forward even even even though your lowest point keep on pushing and and do things differently and take on things that were different um if you look at you know going [00:45:29] Speaker 1: back to these principles as well for somebody who is i mean they're all they're all obviously quite important but out of the 11 just looking at yourself like what was the principle that had the most impact [00:45:41] Ronan Harari: in your life i think a lot of it was uh the power of not knowing the power of not knowing just like that that ignorance what you don't know serves you well so just back to the air hogs uh you know when ben and i when we took that product we spent two years of our life engineering and developing it we never engineered and developed the product like that we figured it out but what we found out after a year and a half was that hasbro and mattel both passed on the product okay and we we thought we were super lucky like we were the first people to see this product but hasbro and mattel passed on it and they passed on it for good reason really good reasons you know it's an airplane it crashes it's going to break there's a propeller there's safety issues uh there's going to be high returns and the returns will probably take out your profits and then they were like we're out and for us we were like yeah we know there's a propeller but we'll figure it out and we we did we you know we put on these you know soft uh plastic tips and we had this beautiful like soft nose cone and we figured out this way for the wings to like pop off on impact and you could be able to put them back on um and we made a super durable product that can drop out of the air from 100 feet and we thought about it for like we knew inherently there was these issues but we gave it literally like five minutes of thought and and we knew we'd be able to figure it out and we did and the other competitors they used their intellect and and they were right but they didn't let their their passion drive them you know i think for us back in the day like the biggest lessons is is passion delivers risk and so we were this was a risky product to do air hogs was 100 a risky product but we were super passionate about it and naive at the same time and you put those two things together and it was a great great recipe great cocktail and we got through and we delivered the product and and it went on to become this big success and we were making flying toys for 10 years 15 years actually built up a brand we probably did over 100 over a billion dollars in revenue over the 15 years in terms of flying toys and that was rooted in the power of just not knowing and being curious at the same time so i think for me a lot of it is is that and then also everybody's rooting for you i mean i had a situation when when we started with the earth buddies which was a small little potato head you put in water grows grass for hair um and i found out about it from my mother okay and she was reading this this israelian newspaper called the irat akronat and inside there were six different people manufacturing their products and when i added up the total that they had sold because they all basically gave their numbers away so it totaled 300 000 people 300 000 pieces so i'm like 300 000 pieces in a country of 10 million and no one's selling it in north america it's a big market so i convinced anton to to make the product and we decided we're gonna make 5 000 pieces for mother's day and three months later okay we had an opportunity to go having a meeting at kmart corporation and kmart back in the 90s was like walmart today they were the biggest retailer in the world and it it came from anton was was traveling the summer before and he met this guy and he was based in michigan and he called him he said to him do you have any connections at kmart and he said sure i can get you a meeting he charged us 10 percent which was outrageous but it should have been five percent back in the day but we paid it anyways and the most lucky thing happened okay and this is rooted in in everybody's rooting for you everybody wants you to to win when you're younger so scott i wake up in the morning okay i drive from toronto to detroit four hour drive i don't even think about staying in a hotel okay because we're trying to save money so i woke up early and i go and i go to the meeting i get there at nine o'clock and i'm sitting in front of the buyer and i do a 30 minute presentation and the buyer looks at me completely deadpan and he says i'm not the buyer for this product so i'm thinking to myself he's not telling me the truth so i pitch him for another 15 minutes and then he looks at me he says i'm not the buyer for this product of which i said to him you know we'll give you the product on consigned sales we'll give it to you if it sells you pay us and he said i'm not the buyer for the product so at that point i said you know i'm giving him basically the product for free he's not taking it so he's not the buyer so i said who's the buyer so he he he went to his office and he came back with a piece of paper and it said adrian zacks on it so i said thank you very much and i start walking around kmart corporation looking for this lady and i'm super lucky okay i find her she's sitting at her desk and i pitch her for 30 minutes or 30 seconds 30 minutes would have been you know a little a little aggressive just sit and just get in the chair and sit in her office i was standing in the hallway i actually didn't even i she didn't even walk into her office i was standing at the door so standing at the door and i told her about the earth buddy for 30 seconds and she said i'll give you an appointment at 3 30 today i go downstairs the guy that got me the appointment was downstairs he's like let's go for lunch i'm like i'm not going anywhere you go for lunch i'm staying right here i was so nervous i was like maybe you should call me earlier or maybe i won't get let back into the building i'm like i'm staying right here i didn't eat any lunch okay i stayed in in situ 3 30 came i went upstairs i walk in again now i get into inside her office and on the left side of her shelf okay is seven other competitor products okay seven other versions of this grass head so i'm like okay good i'm in the right office she is the buyer she is the buyer down the buyer and but then i was like i got a lot of competition i got to lower the price so i was originally i had in my mind my whole time driving to to kmart i was going to charge 265. the other thing i i i'll share is that i never prepared for this meeting at all i had no powerpoint i've never done powerport presentation my whole life i still haven't done one today okay and i i was like okay 265 i gotta drop in a buck so i went to 165 and i sat down and literally this far away from her on the other side of her desk tiny office and i pitch her and she stays silent for like 15 minutes so she does the most magical thing she basically she turns around and she puts this big book in front of me and it was the vendor book and she said you're going to become a vendor of kmart i'm ordering 48 000 pieces from you and if the 48 000 pieces goes well i'm ordering half a million for christmas and this was june christmas was in like in like you know we had to deliver in september and that's what happened and we ended up shipping her half million pieces for that christmas we got it out we ramped up our factory we were producing 17 500 pieces a day we had 200 workers working in downtown toronto over the course of like two years we sold her a million and a half earth buddies um and four years later she called me she said renan could you come to detroit i want you to speak to some inner city youth that i'm working with and that was for me like confirmed that she was she had seven other people that she could have given the business to she gave the business to us and to me when i was 23 years old because she wanted to help a younger person a hundred percent wow that that had been in business for three months did she know that yeah yeah i told her everything it was transparent you could see it on my face my shirt was like crinkled i was telling the story i told her the story i told her how we got got the idea i told her the story about you know selling on the streets of toronto okay i told her about her factory i told her about everything the other way it was like i never make up a story you always got to tell the truth but she thought that you could do it she she believed in the fact we can [00:53:27] Speaker 1: get it done for sure because before this like your your factory was what like your your kitchen counter and and table and no we still that was in the prototyping stage no at this point we were we [00:53:37] Ronan Harari: were ready out into another fact we had to but when we got this order for the 48 and a half mil we moved factories we ramped up again but we were ready out of my mom's house because when you first first [00:53:48] Speaker 1: started it was what ten thousand dollars in credit cards the factory was every flat surface in your mom's place and all the prototyping she was very generous she opened up the house to me [00:53:57] Ronan Harari: she gave me her car she had a celica there's still sawdust in the celica today oh my goodness that's funny and this is this is taking the advantage of of being young correct being young and understanding that things accrue to you if i was 35 if we have to like fat if i was 35 with the earth buddy walking around came our corporation they probably would have kicked me out okay but you see this young kid they probably thought they now i'm thinking back they probably thought that it was someone's kid who worked there they worked there yeah do you know what i mean like i've never even thought i've never thought about it until we actually had this discussion right that's probably what they were thinking they were like that's probably why they didn't kick me out like i didn't ask for any permission i didn't go to the lobby and call the buyer i didn't drive home and say i'm going to call the buyer afterwards and come see her i literally took my box of earth buddies and i'm walking around camera corporation it was an octagon building asking no permission all right so amazing things happen to you when you're every everybody wants to root for you when you're young everybody wants to be around you when you're young you you don't even realize it when you're in your 20s you have this incredible energy you have this this like it's just this wonderful energy and then you get the middle age you're like where's that energy like you know like i want to be around it and then you're doing a favor for people that are older because they have all this accrued wisdom and they want to share it it's a way of that it's their way to give back in real time it's like a real-time charity even though it's not charity but it's like like that's the way society because everybody wants to help like an ambitious [00:55:25] Speaker 1: like kid that's full of life and like just trying to figure out the world like who doesn't want to help that kid correct you'd be kind of mean if you don't yeah you're an ass you are an if you don't [00:55:37] Ronan Harari: and you know what the world does reward audacity but i will tell but i will tell you we've had flip sides i mean we had we had someone who uh uh would only distribute our devil sticks if we gave him equity in our business that wasn't nice we said no okay um we had another person you know scam us for some money with some sweatshirts in the early days that wasn't nice um you know we had uh we had uh a factory in mexico when we're producing the devil sticks we would supply in the raw materials they would put in the labor content and the factory owner didn't pay his workers and the factory workers took over the factory they hung a black flag okay and we couldn't get the product and we couldn't get our inventory so listen not everybody's rooting for you but there are enough good people out there that will make the difference in your journey and adrian zacks without that like there was so much energy got unleashed as a result of that order for half a million pieces it's it's it was everything it set the company [00:56:43] Speaker 1: completely in motion when that order came in what were you feeling were you scared nervous excited [00:56:49] Ronan Harari: well i was well before the order came in i'll tell you a very strange thing and i i'm like i i feel strange sharing the story you know now that i'm doing these podcasts and stuff but you know what i got to be vulnerable i did the strangest thing when she when she said i'm going to give you the order when i was in her office because she was the buyer of horticulture so she had these garden gnomes in her office so she had one sitting on the top shelf and i'm looking and i'm like i said adrian can i have your can i have that garden gnome like this random thing is just like i don't know i don't know what's going through my head at the time well no like a million things are going through your head at this point it was such a surreal thing i didn't believe that it was real yeah so i actually i think i wanted just like a tangible representation that this this really happened like it's not a dream it's not a dream so i drove back to toronto [00:57:37] Speaker 1: with the garden gnome did you have like a moment where you thought this is a good idea we've made it like at this point were you like that's my question were you excited were you scared were you like holy shit this is going to turn into a real business we just took it one product at a time all we were [00:57:56] Ronan Harari: focused about all we were focused on was getting the earth buddy orders out the door for that year that was the most thing important thing plus we were we were cognitive fact that earth buddies was a novelty product and novelty products have a lifespan to them so we were looking for our second product and at the end of that year we found the devil sticks so we were doing both the same time but we weren't thinking like too far out we really weren't but i will tell you one interesting story about being scared like we were never scared and i i don't think i have the scared gene in me um for a lot of reasons but there was one moment probably in our third year and we had about four hundred thousand dollars in the bank and this was before air hogs hit and i turned to anton i said to him you know we each got two hundred thousand dollars here why don't we just call it a day it was a lot of money it's a lot of money and he looked at me and he looked at me scott and he and he's he gave me he didn't say anything he gave me the weirdest look like he gave me the look like are you crazy and that was the only and i didn't say anything in return because like i knew where he was at and after that it was like okay let's keep on moving forward and it was the only moment of doubt that i've ever had in 32 years it's because it's more money than you'd ever seen up to that point total is a lot of money and [00:59:10] Speaker 1: you don't and you don't know if you're going to lose it or if it's going to continue like so when you're starting to build a company kind of like what you were doing there it's interesting because you were just focused on the next product and that's actually how you were successful like let's just do the next product and the next product and the next product do you think that more founders should think of the end in mind thinking like what do i want this business to turn into like do i want this to be a million dollar per year business a 10 million dollar per year business pass it over to my kids ipo it or should they not worry about that i would [00:59:46] Ronan Harari: encourage people to make broad statements and not box themselves in and things like ipos like we ipo at our company after 21 years right it took us 21 years to get to an ipo so we made the statement we want to be open to ideas from wherever they come from we want to build the company as big as we can we've never put a number on it so i think it's personal but i keep the statements quite broad and things will happen along the way and and you can you can start to pivot and do what you need to do as as as your business grows but sometimes if you think too big then you're like too hard on yourself and then you're frustrating yourself and you're not going fast enough and and i think all that stuff is [01:00:29] Speaker 1: counterproductive at the end of the day because it sounds like you had like a great co-founder relationship and you were always always aligned and there was no disagreements and no arguments but listen there [01:00:39] Ronan Harari: was arguments all the time we micromanaged each other okay there was crazy arguments um you know but what there was was what i can tell you about our partnership was that there was um we were always aligned in terms of our values okay which is the most important thing um we were aligned in terms of our work ethic we were aligned in terms of honesty we were aligned with recognizing the best idea when it showed up we were aligned with not blaming we've never done a a summary of a failed product in our whole history in spin master we never look backwards because everybody kind of knows the score um but i'll tell you funny story about partners so in our in our second or third year business i got to really learn my partners okay like you you don't know at the beginning until you get into it so you don't know until you get into it um but uh a buyer from one of large accounts one of the reps called anton and said you know if you give this buyer something nice for his backyard aka like a whirlpool it could really grow your business well this is this is what happened it was back in the 90s it could still happen today i'm sure it still happens some places so so he he he called anton and anton came to my office he's like we're in like we could really grow this account like just it's just a whirlpool and i think i i looked at him the way he looked at me with the 200 000 and i was like we talked about it for 30 minutes or something like this and i'm like that's just not we can't do that and we're completely aligned and then we you know we've never ever done anything like that but i knew in that moment that i had the the right partner right i have another funny story about anton it was an anton's like he's he he's like it's like watered off a duck's back and and uh nothing bothers him really nothing bothered them so there was a there was a there was a there was a um when we're selling the devil six we had an opportunity to work with these reps that were going to represent us in southern united states and especially with walmart and we're at their apartment this is the middle of toy fair and we're consummating the deal and everything's going great and then their late father walks in the room and anton says something and he gets super upset and next thing i know my girlfriend anton and myself are out on the streets in new york in the middle of the winter we just got kicked out of the apartment next morning oh that night i said to anton i'm like we are never doing business with these people ever again okay not our people next morning i go to the show i see anton he's he's with with the guys they're laughing they're having a good time like what are you doing with them like why are you meeting with them he's like i got the deal done this is great we're working together i'm like what do you mean i thought we talked about this i thought we said we're not working with them and he was able to look through the the the ego in the moment right and there was something more there than like maybe there was something more that more to the reason why we got kicked out of the apartment and he was 100 right because their late father was drinking and it was really the alcohol talking and the sons were actually you know that wasn't the way they wanted to actually do the business and um so i got i got to learn a lot about my business partner at that moment time that uh uh keep focused on the goal and don't don't get don't let don't let the ego get get involved because the ego holds [01:04:25] Speaker 1: your back always um i think that when people get into these business partnerships i've always sort of had a tough time telling people to go into them because i think it's really hard for people to find the right business partners i think that more often than not what happens is you have two or more people just super excited about an idea and they're like oh let's just do it together and you don't know if you have shared values shared whatever don't know if your skill sets complement and then like fast forward a year two years you have a huge falling out because nothing was ever aligned we were very [01:05:02] Ronan Harari: lucky so i mean that's another benefit of starting young anton and i met when we were 12 years old at summer camp so we knew each other since we were super young and we started a business together at university called campus faces so we had really worked together for three years um and then anton went to business school with ben and they were best friends at business school anton basically loved ben because he had great notes and so they were in the same class but then if you if you don't have that [01:05:28] Speaker 1: i'm gonna i'm gonna ask you for now advice for people that haven't gone through like their 20s are a little bit older don't have these childhood friendships like like because a lot of this book is about okay take risk when you're young do business with people that you that you that you know well but people that are listening to this not all of them fit that category so what's what's the advice for them what's let's start with the advice for like a business partner when you don't have a childhood friend like how would you get into a new relationship with somebody and build something new if you don't know them for the past you know 10 years i think it's very difficult i think it's [01:06:04] Ronan Harari: it's seat time you got to spend time with them get to know them get to know them in different environments know their history the the one advantage you do have is people have a track record at that point in time and i think you use the track record for um making that decision and uh and don't be on what's called uh uh don't be lazy about it and don't be um not ashamed but like i go back and actually see what how is this person affected everybody in the last 15 years that they've touched what's their reputation what have they done etc etc and if there's stuff flags that come up don't negate them because they're probably real at the end of the day so i would use the track record [01:06:47] Speaker 1: to your advantage at that moment in time and then i don't want this to be a depressing podcast for somebody who's in their 30s so you know betting on yourself in your 20s that's the best decision you'll ever make you're in your 30s now or your 40s you don't have that young kid advantage anymore [01:07:04] Ronan Harari: what's what's the advice to that person well first of all the average age of an entrepreneur in the united states is 38 years old really yeah by the coffin foundation so you're not too young okay it's still still times on your side um i just an advocate of starting younger because i bet you the i bet you have more people started i bet you there's more people in their 30s that have decided not to to pursue it that has kept that average at 38 and if people would have started younger that probably the average would be lower but i i'd say i'd say the same same things apply and and in some industries it's actually better to wait right certain industries it is better to accrue a body of of knowledge um some industries take more capital and to acquire that capital maybe you need more connections more relationships so i think that uh you could do it at any at any age at the end at the end of the [01:07:58] Speaker 1: day listen you may not have the the luck of running around kmart listen you're still without security [01:08:03] Ronan Harari: let me tell you okay i'm 55 35 is still super young and you still have a super amount of energy 45 is still super young right so there's lots of things um it's still a great time i mean like i think the risk quotient goes up in that time that's that's the biggest i think you have all the capabilities um to go and do what you want to do you maybe have to be a little more professional than a 23 year old running around kmart but but when you're doing your pros and cons list your risk quotient the the cons [01:08:41] Speaker 1: list will will go down even it's gonna be it's gonna be a longer list netsuite next is a success story partner so they say that every day your business is late to using ai you fall two days behind and the competition is only moving faster so how do you keep up well fortunately there is netsuite next now you probably already know netsuite netsuite is the ai-powered business management suite is trusted by over 43 000 customers it securely connects all of your data financials inventory commerce hr crm into one single source of truth but netsuite next is the next huge leap in how 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after interviewing hundreds of founders on the show the ones performing at the highest level the ones that are consistently winning they aren't just optimizing their business and their calendar and their team they're paying attention to what they eat and the ones who aren't they're usually the first ones to burn out and this pattern is consistent enough that it actually got me thinking about my own nutrition not whether i was eating well but whether i actually knew what the big picture looked like what's going into my body and how is it fueling me that's why i started using the my fitness pal app i wanted to see what i was actually eating not what i assumed i was eating throughout the day but the real numbers uh what my protein looked like how my macros macronutrients were broken down where my calories were actually going throughout the day and the app gives you all of that now what kept me using it is that there's zero friction i can scan a barcode on something i eat and it pulls everything up i can also voice log what i ate it also remembers my regular meal so most days i'm logging everything i ate in under a minute it's very very easy food is a foundation for your energy your sleep your recovery it's not one of many inputs it is the one input that matters so go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code scott all uppercase for 15 off my fitness pal premium that's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com code scott so there's this there's this concept that i love of um two mountains it's not my concept but basically the first mountain is like building and achievement and you're sort of you're you're this is what led you to build uh spin master into a very successful business but then the second mountain is when you've achieved and then you're trying to figure out like what's next in life and i mean the book is one part of that but you also work on so when i was researching uh you do mead um you have a documentary called dancing through about three girls in war zones you do a lot of really interesting things so i guess my question to you is now you're speaking to somebody who's in the second half of their career they're climbing that second mountain they've already achieved and they have you know they've succeeded by whatever metric was important to them um how do you find what to work on next and i ask that because when somebody has spent so much time building something a lot of it becomes their identity so you step down as ceo you're working on all these different projects how do you manage that transition and how do you do it so that you actually enjoy have energy for the next few things you take [01:12:40] Ronan Harari: on you know i follow my curiosity i follow my curiosity things that i'm curious about and i want to learn and that i'm passionate about um you know when it comes to the film uh it's a film about uh three displaced girls i'm very passionate about displacement um and the knock-on effects that that accrue as a result of displacement um it's been a lot of displacement in my family's history as a result of in my both my parents from bulgaria and they had to leave as a result of the communists coming in and taking all their possessions and you know moving to israel and then going to south africa and luckily ending in canada but i've seen all the the um effects of microtrauma that gets passed down right as a result of having to like be uprooted from a place that you've been living for hundreds of years and so that well that led me to my passion to produce this documentary which is about these three amazing girls one's from venezuela that moves to colombia another one's from syria that moves to germany another one's from south sudan that moves to uganda and it's a coming of age story of these four girls from 10 years old to 15 or to 14 and mika or who's the the director she basically lived with them for years and she's being able to amass this beautiful you know um documentary uh of their lives and when you watch it it's like you actually feel like you're in their living room it's actually like you feel like a bit like too much of a voyeur because they just they lost the camera it's kind of like doing these podcasts you know eventually you lose the camera um and it's just this wonderful story and so like to be able to share what it's like for girls growing up after in for girls growing up that are displaced um and how they battle through it and how resilient they are in the relationship with their mother um uh was it was something i was passionate about doing i didn't know exactly what it was going to turn out to be i just i called amika i'm like let's do something around displacement and you know this was this was born so i just follow a lot of times i do a lot of things based on my curiosity and my passion but i think that's super [01:14:53] Speaker 1: important i i genuinely believe that's very important because i think there's a lot of people that preach about how to build and how to start from scratch but less people talk to you about after you've done the thing you want to accomplish in life okay how do you like how do you live a good life after what i [01:15:09] Ronan Harari: what i wanted to say is is like if that film can could change one person being displaced i'll be happy because i i know that the the knock-on effects myself i live them i experience them they're in me they're in my body [01:15:26] Speaker 1: and they're and they're not pleasant say a 22 year old walked into say you walked into this room today when you're 22 years old um you're fresh at a western what's the most important lesson that you [01:15:38] Ronan Harari: tell that 22 year old you know i'd have to ask a lot of questions to ask a lot of questions i really i think everybody's so different i think everybody's so different i would say lean into your difference lean into your difference and your difference is is your superpower at the end of the day right don't don't conform do what you want to do right um and uh ask why like why are you leaning in this direction like what what is it right and so really parse out that that question ask yourself that and at the end of the day it's your life to live it's your life it's your decisions um and that's the most important thing is don't i would say this don't whatever your decision is don't outsource it don't outsource your decisions like like meet with certain people be be selective on who you're getting advice from who you're surrounding yourself with because people influence you in in many different ways right um talk about it don't just sit in your head i think that's a big thing like a lot of us you know we have ideas stuff like this we just ruminate in our head about it and we just never get anywhere right so it's it's hard to it's hard to suss out things in your own head so you need to engage with certain people but don't engage with so many people and then make the decision it's your decision to make it's your life you you you're responsible for your [01:17:01] Speaker 1: own life no one else is for that super ambitious 22 year old as well um what's the biggest misconception about success and achievement like what's the thing that they think is going to happen [01:17:14] Ronan Harari: when they make it big that doesn't happen well first of all i think it's the pace right how fast it's it's like look at it if success doesn't happen just overnight it's it takes a long time to get there think about all like great musicians like they played in shitty you know venues for years and they were just honing in their craft so give yourself time um to hone in your craft whatever you want your craft to be uh and then and then have your own definition of success like what do you deem as successful like what you deem as successful may not be for someone else so don't don't sign up for someone else mental model what success is because it could be something completely different to you your success could be i i want to have one air i want to have a b&b bed and breakfast place in italy okay for the next 20 years and i want to have a permaculture farm and i want to have the best food and the best wine and i want to have a 12-room place and i want it to be busy all the time um and that for me is success and i want to be able to live in nature and host people and your parents might be thinking like what do you mean like you can't make a lot of money doing that like like you're not even italian you're not even italian like why are you even thinking about italy but like that's that's personal to you like maybe you grew up dreaming about italy your whole life and you're reading about it so i mean like maybe that's success for you we all have different versions of success you you know the the jeff bezos regret [01:18:42] Speaker 1: minimization framework where you do not it's a very powerful please tell me um idea that sort of prompts you to take more risk and do what you want in life but basically how he made the decision to leave wall street and to go build amazon was he would imagine he was a nine-year-old on his deathbed looking back at his life and he asked himself would i regret or not regret making this decision and if he regretted not choosing a path that's what he leaned into so he regret he would have regretted looking back over his life not starting amazon and that's because he was getting paid a lot on wall street he was very successful before amazon so like whatever the whatever the framework is that pushes you in the direction like i think that that you intuit it we know what we want to do we know what what we want our life to look like um i think the issue is that we question our our own intuition too much because of what parents say or what friends say we're like oh being an entrepreneur or living in a small little villa in italy which sounds absolutely beautiful yeah like sign me up yeah i'll do that sign up or like yeah but if you if i said that to my parents growing up they'd look at me like i have three heads like what are you talking about scott like we live in ottawa like hey how are you gonna [01:19:59] Ronan Harari: get to italy how are you gonna yeah listen i've never heard jeff bezos framework and i think it's it's a smart one um and and uh obviously works for him and probably can work for a lot of people [01:20:10] Speaker 1: it's just a way to like move it's like follow i mean like it's cliche but like follow your passion follow your heart follow what you feel like you should do and i think the most important i i i come [01:20:20] Ronan Harari: at it from like rather than looking back looking forward right mantra so i think you can take jeff's and you can take a looking forward one too um and i just think that i think the one thing we all have to acknowledge is that your kids grew up in a different time with a different outlook and they get to see the world differently and i think that's one of the most powerful things for entrepreneurs is to realize that you are seeing the world differently and when you see the world differently you see the opportunities you see the white space right and that's because you've been you've been sheltered in in the nest of your parents home for 20 years then you go to potentially college or start working and then you have agency you for the first time in your life you have agency so you're seeing the world differently you have agency and then it's like okay go go do but then you're like no hold on hold on a second here but the way you're seeing the world is like it's the right way if you think about all the most famous artists in history okay musicians painters writers okay i write about in my book i can't remember the whole list here the majority were in their 20s their best work happened in their 20s and i write in the book in the last chapter called painting your masterpiece i think business is an art and the only reason why the only difference in business versus being a painter or musician is that people are the materials of which you're creating your masterpiece with and so people think about businesses profit and loss numbers and you know greed and this and that and it's like no it's how you organize yourself together and how you create a culture and whatever culture you want to create how much equity you want to give away you know how you want people to be in the workplace um so it's this really creative i think business is one of the most creative endeavors ever um and creativity if you look at the arc of creativity the most creative stuff is happening in the 20s you know i encourage everybody to do the research at chat chat gbt go ahead and whatever your whatever your place is to go get information but you will see in the 20s okay it is the place for the greatest burst of creativity because you are new into the world and you're seeing it with such fresh eyes [01:22:38] Speaker 1: so don't miss out on that fresh eye moment so you don't know my origin story or why you know i mentioned that my my dad worked for the government very like risk adverse nine to five so i lived in ottawa um but my origin story is exactly what you described but i've never heard anyone else describe it so i see the playbook that my parents lived by and i saw my dad buy his first house cash in toronto at like 25 years old which you know you cannot do anymore and i was like that playbook doesn't work for me if i if i do the same work go to the same you know get the same job get the same income like my quality of life is going to be significantly less than my parents had so then i'm like okay how do i how do i figure out a new way to live life and that's what prompted me to go a complete 180 and if i just take one second to be a podcast host for a second how did you how did you make that happen for yourself i moved towards things that excited me i took more risk knowing that i could always find my way back um how i actually did it is i i started working in tech which for me was a big leap i mean like for most people working for a tech company it was bell canada so that was tech to me that was that was risky private industry was like well yeah yeah bell for the listeners is like you know it's like the most monopolistic company out there but for me it wasn't government so that was like a huge move away from like what i knew no but how did you know intuitively that that your father's path wasn't your path it also seemed like well because my my dad worked for uh csis his whole career so it's like canadian security intelligence like he does you know now he's retired but he used to do investigations and whatnot and um and i couldn't imagine myself walking into an office because i knew where the office was it was right down i couldn't imagine myself walking into that office at 25 and doing that till i was 60. but also living a less good life than him so being able to afford a home probably 10 years after he could at his age right being able to afford a family like all these things that for me that was like because i think most of your worldview comes from your parents like what a good life is whatever that means good life it's like i want to just live at least the life of what my parents lived if you had a good comfortable upbringing and i realized that i couldn't do that and i also i i also thought not only can i not do that going on the same journey as what he did but also it just doesn't seem fun and exciting to me so let me let me sort of two birds one stone this let me take more risk live a more exciting life and hopefully land in a better you know financial situation earlier than if i just followed him and that's what made me work for bell which i thought was like uh oh that's so cool i'm working for like a canadian tech company it's like it's like not but like whatever and then after that i worked for a smaller uh telecom startup that was acquired by private equity and now i started learning okay well this is interesting the guy who built this company was a founder built it from 1990 to today sold it for tens of millions of dollars and that's okay now i understand the entrepreneurship game so then i i sort of progressively moved more towards ownership away from corporate and that's that was my path yeah that was it so it was but it was it was really it was really and i was in my 20s and it was just me understanding that the way my parents built their life it wasn't for me but what gave you the courage i've tried to figure that out a lot i think that i think the courage was um it was i've taken a lot of bets on on myself and even when they didn't work out eventually they did if that makes sense and then you develop pattern recognition learning luck that's it that's really like everything you're talking about is like what i've lived i've never really put words to it but that's what i've lived right beautiful you speak about the difference between luck versus chance what is the difference [01:26:43] Ronan Harari: i think that's chance when something just happens to you and luck is when you're out there doing like you just described and then in the doing right the universe will meet you halfway and the opportunities will start to show up for you like you just said in your example when you went to the private equity firm and you wouldn't have gotten there if you didn't go to bell you kept yourself moving and i think it's the luck is all in the momentum it's always in in the staying in the doing and if we if we seize up and we get doubt duck doubt is the anti-luck right so i would say don't stay in the doubt mode it may not be perfect like bell wasn't perfect for you but you kept on moving and as a result of it the universe start to open up and align for you even when i moved [01:27:28] Speaker 1: into bell tell you one more thing i've always looked at the people that i worked around and i've been like i don't want that i want more than this and i saw people even that bell but look how look how lucky you were to actually get that experience and that knowing a hundred percent and they were working there for like again 30 years and i'm like no i can't do that that wasn't right for you nothing [01:27:45] Ronan Harari: nothing wrong was it was right for them it wasn't right for you so the same thing it's it's it's in the doing and uh you know we got super lucky with this this product called flick tricks um back to the the sky shark like taking that chance with that product and we got this product called flick tricks which is this bmx bike a small replica bmx bike i know all these products by the way i grew up with all and the only reason why we got the product was because we were developing the sky shark with the ray campers in chicago and i was traveling back and forth and back and forth developing it and one day i came to check up on the development and jeff was like hey renan i got this cool product to show you and i'm like oh cool what is it and he showed me the bmx bike and i'm like that's awesome i started fiddling with it i had that magical feeling okay like there's something that's this fiddle factor here and i said to him well can we option it from you it's like sure it's five thousand dollars no problem i took it home and we developed it we brought it to market we got licenses from hop and mongoose red line etc etc went on to be like a hundred million dollar business and the universe opened up to us because we were in the motion doing the development on the air hogs and luckily for us toy inventors are like kids and whenever they invent something they just want to show it straight away it's kind of like when you get engaged and you get the diamond ring and you think you're going to propose in two months but it's like burning a hole and like it happens the next week same thing with toy inventors um and i was just lucky to be in the room at that moment in time but it was all a result of doing all the schlepping and i didn't dial it in i didn't call jeff and like say jeff like how's it going like i i showed up i purposely went to chicago all the time to make sure that they were that they were getting the work done that we needed to get done and so i'm a big believer in like you don't go you don't get you need to be out there and if you're out there and you're going and you're getting the luck will will accrue to you i think the the key thing and i call it uber luck is like when you've generated the opportunity you're able to identify it and then seize on it at the moment so like in this example with jeff ray camper like maybe i would have said that's maybe it could have been like the baby story you know i don't think it's that cool so i was able to recognize it and that's like the uber luck that you get but you don't get the chance for the uber luck unless you're in motion well that's where the pattern recognition comes in [01:30:03] Speaker 1: over a period of time right and then that's why that's why you could start five more companies tomorrow and they'd all be pretty successful not just because like you can put them forget the money that you could put into a company start like you rec you take the action you recognize the opportunity you know what's going to work and what's not based on you know tens of 20 years of plus years of experience and then all of a sudden like it's it's not that hard it's not that complicated to figure it out the next thing that you want to work on like so the go ahead no i was going to say like if you're listening to this and you're like well i'm not 20 anymore i'm like 45 and you said well that's fine because the average age of entrepreneurs are 38 anyways but what you do have at 45 is the most well connected well resourced most pattern recognized aware version of yourself so yeah you don't have the ability to run around kmart but you have all these other things that are sort of in your corner and a huge huge asset for sure i totally agree the last thing i want to bring out and i think it's it's an important thought because a lot of people sort of shy away from their weaknesses and everybody's going to have weaknesses and i don't want those weaknesses to get into their head about why they shouldn't build the thing or shouldn't take the risk um so you've said that your particular weakness dysgraphia it forced you to rely on your empathy and your intuition um so just speak to an entrepreneur out there that has a weakness obviously there's a million different things that they could be scared of or stressed about or they could come with a reason why they don't want to you know take a risk and build a company um how do you leverage a weakness into a strength you know i would not [01:31:44] Ronan Harari: call my learning disability a weakness i call it actually a gift um because it actually taught me so many things as a result of you know living a life in academics that was quite difficult for me i think my weaknesses were more in the in the area of of self-control um emotional control i was very i i grew up as a result of having a learning disability i grew up with a lot of shame because we never talked about it in the house um i was always the kid writing in a in a separate room all my friends were like hey where were you i was like you know like just make up a story you know i was the king of storytelling um because you were ashamed and so as a result of being ashamed like you i grew up not being a very talkative person and i wouldn't ask for help um i felt like i got to do everything myself um and and uh and those things give you low self-esteem right and so i had to work with lower lower self-esteem for many years um and i think my biggest weakness was i was very defensive and so i would take things very personally and and and when you take when you're defensive and you take things very personally then you become you you you get into an argument and you debate and you expend a lot of energy that didn't need to be expended as a result of taking something personally when it's really not and so i had to work through uh not being defensive at the end of the day and really being open to conversations and discussions and and and different ways at things um even though like i do pride myself on our company like diversity of thought but i was very fortunate because my two business partners are the complete opposite so they are verbally gifted or ben's verbally gifted anton is very verbal he he has no filter so he'll express himself all the time ben will express himself all the time so they landed up with a business partner that was defensive and not so talkative but they drew me out and it created really robust discussions and and they were able to reflect back to me some of my weaknesses over my journey and it's one of the greatest things about having business partners is they can reflect back those weaknesses to you and they're kind of like a mirror and they stayed [01:34:13] Speaker 1: with me and what allowed you to reframe dysgraphia as not a weakness but as a gift well because i get to [01:34:20] Ronan Harari: see the world differently and so you know you talk you like you discuss mental models and repetition so since i was a small kid like because the school system is not built for people with learning disabilities and i was super fortunate to get the accommodations like extra time to make it through but the way they were teaching me was was not the way that my brain needed to input the information and the way it was outputting was was very difficult so i had to get so many work rounds and i use my intuition way more from i read body language like i can read body language at any moment in time i can come into a room so i would have to do things like read rooms read body languages you know just go on intuition in school um a whole bunch of different things uh that led me to [01:35:11] Speaker 1: to probably use the more creative side of my brain it made you able to read people better and and and probably build relationships better because you can understand like the non-verbal communication [01:35:21] Ronan Harari: my eq was i worked my eq got developed as a i think my eq is higher as a result of having the learning disability which turned into a learning gift and eq can serve you in different ways it didn't serve me in the confines of school but once i got out of school it was able to serve me better i love that [01:35:36] Speaker 1: though i think that and that's that's the lesson that i wanted to pull out like whatever the thing is that you think is the disability usually is the gift if you lean into it correct it will you don't [01:35:47] Ronan Harari: know it at necessarily the time the one thing i i would say is like it would have been greater to understand the gift earlier and the only thing i would say if there's anybody out there that has any learning disabilities that's listening to this i would say that it's the one thing that's important to know and i wish someone would have told me is that having a learning disability is not a lack of a sign of intelligence and it's a really important thing to know and i would also say this is that um do whatever you can to get identified and it's a shitty system because it cost six thousand dollars which is a fortune of money but if you if you have a child or if you if you have a feeling and you're a teenager listening to this do whatever you can so you can get the accommodations because i can tell you the fastest way to being a criminal is kids that don't get identified with learning disability um and they drop out of school and i would have been the exact same i would have dropped it if i didn't get identified and get the accommodations i would have dropped out of school and i would have been doing something gray in my life and could have ended up in jail that's incredible that's sad yeah and there's a lot and society is a lot worse for it because people aren't getting identified and getting the supports and they're like super creative and super amazing and and they're they're having to work outside the system the system's not supporting them [01:37:02] Speaker 1: a couple rapid fire just to close this out when a founder is starting out should they rely more on intuition or data i would go more on instinct and intuition it's better to start a company on your own [01:37:15] Ronan Harari: than with co-founders i think it's better with co-founders than by yourself i think it's a lonely journey and i think the people that can i think you have to be an exceptionally exceptionally exceptionally exceptionally talented human to do it by yourself and i think part of it is just like you having to and i also say it depends on how big you want to build it i think you can build a bigger company with co-founders with co-founders i was also going to say when things like [01:37:39] Speaker 1: aren't going well having somebody who understands what you're going through is like huge huge um because i think half of entrepreneurship is just like finding a way to not let yourself sort of self-sabotage [01:37:53] Ronan Harari: half the time for sure and i think the the other thing that i call it mind melding between me and my two business partners we mind melded and all the best my ideas came out of the result of the mind meld [01:38:03] Speaker 1: true or false the second act in life is harder than the first true true or false nobody actually retires they just change what they're obsessed with false i think some people do retire and they [01:38:16] Ronan Harari: just retire and they and they they give up on their passions where can people connect with you um well right now i don't have any socials but they're coming but i would say on linkedin um you can connect with me on linkedin and on no experience necessary instagram and tick tock and then obviously no experience [01:38:37] Speaker 1: that's necessary that's out july 14th wherever you can buy books amazon etc yep widely distributed now out of all the sort of wisdom that you've accrued over your life say you could only pass on one lesson the most important lesson it could be about business it could be about life whatever it is [01:38:52] Ronan Harari: what would that lesson be and why enjoy the journey it's the most important thing um take the time i'll never forget when the early days i was going to i went to the south of france to mipcom and i met this girl there and we developed this relationship over a week and then i was like i i rushed back to get back to toronto and i had this opportunity to like like rent a car and drive in the south of france with her and i was like obsessed with coming back to toronto for a bunch of meetings and i should have stayed and never gave that relationship opportunity to blossom she was an incredible incredible woman um and so it's like enjoy the journey life is life is longer than you think it's really longer than you think and so take those beats when those beats come up for you and just lean into them and and just treat yourself along the way make sure you take care of yourself first that's what i would say you need to take care of yourself first before the business before anything else you have to put yourself first and i would say it took me maybe 30 years no maybe 28 years to start putting myself first right and i think that's was way too long and if someone would have i wish someone would have sat me down and said renan make sure you take care of yourself first and foremost because you have more to give to the business your family your relationships everything like that don't don't give everything to the business it's not it's not it's not it's not everything