Ronnen Harary on Creating PAW Patrol, Bakugan, Spin Master & Building a Billion-Dollar Toy Empire

[00:00:00] Ronan Harari: Later on we had the success with a product called Bakugan and I think I'm the only person in the world to turn down a hundred million dollar film from Universal. Okay I worked on this film for four years to try to get it made. Finally got it greenlit from Universal and we turned it down because Bakugan had crested and it went from like you know from zero to like 250 million dollars in sales and then did like a billion dollars in sales in four years and then the sales start to drop off and so we thought we can extend the life of the franchise by retiring it and and bringing out seven years later which was like this conventional rule that toy people used to have you can bring it out to a new generation of kids. So we ended up taking this conventional wisdom and instead of saying you know what somehow we can break the conventional wisdom and let's do this film we applied it and I believe that if I was younger if I was in my 20s I probably would I probably wouldn't apply to any of that conventional wisdom. [00:01:07] Speaker 2: Ronan Harari welcome to From Vision to Creation thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me today. Thanks Alexander nice to be here. You have an incredible story. Thank you. Your new book No Experience Necessary is one of the best books on business I've ever read because it really isn't a how-to you phrased it perfectly it's it's a manifesto but what I love about the book is how you captured your perspective your drive and the synchronicities and more importantly the hard work and persistence that went behind building one of the largest toy companies in the world and I think that no matter where anybody is in their entrepreneurial journey they can benefit from reading this book so I'm really excited to just dive in. Well thank you very much for the the accolades and thanks for taking the time to read it. Ronan let's start at the very beginning I want to go back to your childhood I know you were born in South Africa you moved to Canada when you were five both of your parents were small business owners how do you feel that watching them own and operate their own businesses shaped your perspective not just on [00:02:16] Ronan Harari: business but on life in general. Yeah I was born in South Africa and we moved to Canada when I was five and my dad had a gallery that sold Persian carpets and classic you know small entrepreneurs my mother worked there she ran PR and she did the business side of things and for me I grew up having the conversation of business around the dinner table. so we ate as a family every night 6:30 my dad was very like you know regimented he was very orderly and I learned so much about business because that's all that we discussed at the table so my parents they brought the business home with them and that continued into the discussion around the table unfortunately it wasn't there wasn't a lot of discussion around us as kids but it was around business so I was constantly steeped in that conversation and that kind of gave me the the insight of anything's possible and also the insight of certain things I didn't want to do right and I didn't want to be in retail because I used to go to my dad's gallery when I was a kid and I just I didn't love that feeling of just like waiting for someone to walk in the door mm-hmm and I wanted to flip it on its head and and have more of control in my life I also my dad he didn't have equity in his business and he was what I call the junior partner so he had like a profit sharing arrangement but he didn't own the business and when the person that did want to own the business wanted to close it down he had to go find another job and I'll never forget my dad ended up becoming vice president of sunripe juice and as a kid I was so like so proud of my dad was like a VP and then six months later he got let go and then he started another business um and it was importing antique uh kind of like reproduction antique furniture and he started a galleries called hararian guns and again he didn't own it but he had some sort of profit sharing arrangement and two years later it closed um and so I learned a lot about business but I also learned about the element of having equity and owning your own business versus not owning your own business and it taught me it gave me the drive to actually want to control my own destiny and also to own something myself that I could shape I love that [00:04:47] Speaker 2: and I think it's so cool that your parents brought the business aspect of their lives home and talked about it because kind of yeah I'm sure there were pros and cons there but you know from a very practical standpoint I think that it's nice to have to be able to speak the language whenever you're starting anything because you know I I started my own business very young but I didn't have anybody in my family that showed me what to do I didn't speak the language so I felt that I had to work double as hard in certain instances one thing you also touch on in your book that I think is really great is you talk a lot about how sometimes when you were a kid your parents weren't there for you in ways that you wished they had been but that how that taught you to be a self-starter and take care of things on your own can you talk to us about how those instances in your childhood helped shape the businessman that you [00:05:46] Ronan Harari: are today yeah I mean my parents were my parents are I'm very lucky my parents are still living um and you know classic you know from that generation it was all about food on the table shelter it was all about the physical things less about the emotional stuff so I grew up with a what I would call a lot of emotional neglect um and it really manifested itself in uh when I got identified at 10 years old with a learning disability so I was very lucky I got identified in the public school system I have a learning disability called dysgraphia which is the inability to get your thoughts out through your hands and my handwriting is super poor and as a result of my handwriting being super poor you know teachers can read my my exams I think basically everybody just graded me with a c my whole life like I'm like the king of c's I think they couldn't read anything so they just put like a c there you know occasionally get like a b minus a b b I don't think I ever got an a in my life um but uh I was very lucky to get identified because I got a lot of accommodations around my learning disability so I got extra time on my exams um I got uh 30 minutes at the end of the day with like a tutor type of thing but my parents never talked about it it was kind of like something that they didn't really want to acknowledge it was kind of like we'll just kind of put it under the rug type of thing and so I grew up with no conversations around having a learning disability um and my grades not being good and my parents were like they always expected more but they never made the connection back to the fact that it was hard for me to give more because the way I the way I actually learned I was learning in a public school system which was not catered for a person like myself so kids with learning disabilities in public schools are I call them we're outliers but thank god I got identified because I got the accommodations to make up for the gaps and if I wasn't identified I probably wouldn't have made it through school I would have dropped out and would have been my life would have taken a totally different turn um and so I grew up with with a lot of uh shame because no one no one told me and when you have a learning disability it's not a sign of lack of intelligence it's just a line that you you process information differently anyways so I uh became very independent as a result of it and I became a grinder you know I just grinded my way through through school um and made it made it through school I made it into university uh barely I remember I had a 69 I needed a 70 to get into university and and uh I was on the wait list and my mother's like you need to go to the university and and and make make your case and she didn't drive me she's just like here's the keys to my car I drove two hours to western and I made the case and they let me in um but in terms of my business it it I think that when you grow up with a learning disability you're constantly um uh behind the eight ball and you're constantly the underdog right and so I think when you when you're constantly in an underdog position and you're and and you're making it through and making it through and making it through then when you get out into the business world um it's actually two things happen one is you have this you've had this muscle that anything's possible right nothing was impossible because you've done it so many times because everything was hard and then two is that for me I felt very untethered as a result because now I wasn't in this confined system that wasn't made for me and then I was just able to express myself and I love business and I consider business like an art so I was able to you know take my curiosity and the way I like to express myself and and bring it out into the world so I felt very untethered as a result [00:09:44] Speaker 2: when we're young and in school specifically I think that we do at least I know I did measure a lot of my self-worth came from the grades that I was making in school we all know now that just because you're not great in school it doesn't mean you can't be great in other areas of your life so hearing this come from someone like you is a huge inspiration and lesson to everybody listening just because school is not your thing does it mean that you can't go be successful in life right 100 but [00:10:18] Ronan Harari: you're 100 right I mean that that constant grading you know it's a it's a re it's a constant reminder of where you're at right um and it's hard to get it's hard to get away from that but I would say that it's it is um I think school is for everybody it's just are you being taught in the way that your brain is developed intake information right yeah that's a great point right like it's not it's not even if you have a learning disability or or if you have adhd or anything anything like that um it's just it's just finding your way into a school that can actually um uh teach you in a way that's suitable for you and give you the opportunity to output the information that's suitable for you right because I think that it's it's actually it's actually a shame and and it's a it's it's a I can't believe I mean I got identified in 1981 okay and so it's over 40 plus years ago and there's still people today that don't get identified and they don't make it through the system and they're so creative and then they end up doing things in the gray the gray market um and there's a stat out there that for people with learning disabilities that don't get don't get identified it's one of the fastest tracks [00:11:33] Speaker 2: to go into jail and how do you think school systems can better identify students with learning disabilities why is it still a problem you know I think it's very complex I mean it goes from state [00:11:44] Ronan Harari: to state and country to country and all that type of stuff um but I think it's awareness awareness and probably allocation of monies and um resources and stuff like that and attention like are you paying attention to it right is it a priority yeah is our youth a priority like you know is it it's it's is everybody have the the right to an amazing education right is that what we're focused on [00:12:10] Speaker 2: and I want to talk about your mom sure because she sounds like an incredible force she would love you [00:12:17] Ronan Harari: Alexander you guys would get along like two peas in a pod I'd love to meet her when I was reading your [00:12:23] Speaker 2: book I thought oh my gosh she encourages you to go drive to the university and say go make your case and no I'm not going with you love it of course and then I also love how her initial conversation with you when she was translating the newspaper article to you about what would later become earth buddy right I love that not only did she inspire your first idea but when you said hey I'm going to go make this thing she was totally supportive of that I feel like most parents when kids say they want to you know step out of the box and do something that's not maybe traditional or practical at that moment in their lives they're met with a lot of hesitation and maybe even discouraged yeah 100% you know that is [00:13:10] Ronan Harari: one of the reasons why I wrote the book I wrote the book because I wanted the book to be a supportive parent to people that don't have necessarily supportive parents or parents that have a bit more of a conservative you know risk adverse outlook on on life and then for the book to actually create the discussion but yeah for me my mom was like yeah she was like super supportive there was never any negativity it was always like you know my parents actually got divorced when I got straight out of university and my house was very strict going growing up and then when my dad left the house everything changed and my mother was like whatever you need to do like like she I lived with my mom for like two years and she when I left she was she cried she was like why are you leaving but yeah no it was unbelievable and when we started the earth buddy we we uh um we did all the prototyping we basically took over the house um she gave me her car she gave me all our contacts all her relationships and and and there was never a a um a moment of doubt there was only one conversation we I remember in the kitchen we were talking about should I import the earth buddies from Israel because that's where it was it was really popular there that's where we got the idea from and so it was the conversation was should we import it or make it ourselves and we had a nice conversation and then I said I think we need to make it ourselves because I want to have control again back to my control issue um and my mom was like yeah great do it um so she was always there to have the conversation but never to tell me what to do I love how in the book [00:14:46] Speaker 2: you mentioned that a lot of the decisions that you made are based on intuition and I think that that's important because when you're young or just starting a new career or business I think that that fear of the unknown which you talk about beautifully in the book is what stops people from moving forward and another thing that you highlight which I think is huge and I've never really read or heard anybody else phrase it this way is that being young and not knowing is actually a benefit because you're you're not bogged down by all the real risks and challenges I mean when I was 17 years old I came up with an invention it was a fruit slicer and juicer have you ever heard of a lemon squeezer sure you know you slice it in half and then you juice half by half um one day I was making drinks for friends and I was having to cut a bunch of limes and I realized that the most tedious and frustrating process of doing that was having to slice all the limes and then juice them half by half and then all the lime juice would got to get on my hands I'd go in the sun and I had sunspots for two months wow long story short I came up with an idea to invent a handheld device that both slices and juices citrus and I told all my friends I told my family I was going to do this thing everybody's gave me every single reason why it could not be done it's too expensive it's not practical prototyping can take years whatever all the reasons I partnered with one of my best friends we ended up inventing it patenting it mass producing it and introducing it to the market in the united states and then suddenly everybody knew we could do it right so I love that you talk about this though because the voice was very strong in my head like I'm young I don't know what I'm doing so it's like I love that you capture that so beautifully and say that hey your youth and you being naive can actually be an advantage that is it's a great example of of I think what people face [00:16:55] Ronan Harari: um that uh you can game out the downside but it's hard to game out the upside right like our imagination can't actually understand what is possible and I think that um you know the moment that you don't bet on yourself you potentially could be missing out on the screenplay of your life right and I also think that the internal knowing it's it's hard to actually give voice and language to something that you feel inside like we can describe it as best as we possibly can but it's hard with the words yeah right and and so I think it's it's a very delicate band dance in terms of something that you that you've seen in the zeitgeist or you you sense there's a there's a white space opportunity and you want to fill it um and then you go to people and I think that it's good to get advice but from a very select amount of people not not to go too broad the moment you go too broad and then you get doubt doubt is like the anti-luck and the moment you get doubt you lose momentum and then you just kind of freeze and then nothing happens right so I think it's very it's it's a healthy thing to do and I applaud you for being able to like get through it because it seems like you had a lot of like you know naysayers around you um but uh you know I think about it like it's the inverse risk it's like riskier not to bet on yourself it's riskier not to go with your own internal knowing um and also you know even if you fail like if you enjoyed what you were doing while you were failing then it's a good thing right and if you didn't enjoy why what while you failed then you learned something too because you don't you're not going to do it again because you didn't enjoy the process but I think success or whatever definition of success you have doesn't necessarily come on the first try and it does and and what you what you do and potentially fail at or what you have success at will lead you to many many things that you'll have never thought about like when we you know we started with an earth buddy a small little potato head you put them in water grows grass for head for hair and you know 19 16 years later we're producing tv shows I would have never made that connection but that's the screenplay of my particular life but I will say the power of not knowing it's the craziest thing we had we had um this opportunity our our real big toy product was a product called the sky shark and it was an airplane I don't know if you had it when you're a kid but it was an airplane you pumped it up you flicked the propeller and it flew around 45 seconds and then you can just pump it up again and fly no gas no rubber bands nothing um and it was really big in the 90s and these two British inventors came to show us this product and Ben and I my business partner we we flew it and we were like wow and I just ran and I wanted to fly it again and then he ran he wanted to fly it again and then the inventors were like okay you guys this is a prototype take it easy but I felt like a seven-year-old kid and then we ended up spending okay all the money we made on the first few products to get this product to market went to China found a factory was working with a company in Chicago doing all the development we put all our money into it and about a year and a half in we found out that the two biggest toy companies at the time Hasbro and Mattel had passed on it and they passed for good reason you know it's a flying toy it's it's it flies it's going to come down it could break you have returns it's got a fast spinning prop so you know it could there could be some safety issues there they applied some really rational reasons to it but for us we kind of thought about it in the moment and then we were kind of like oh there's got to be a way around it and then we just went forward with it and you know we we've developed this like cool uh you know plastic material that went on the ends of the propeller tips and this foam nose cone and the wings would always pop off on impact um so we solved all the issues but if we would have probably been 10 years later in our toy journey and our knowledge we may have passed on it too but so there's such power in being young and not knowing so much that it can really propel you forward later on we had the success with a product called bakugan and i think i'm the only person in the world to turn down a hundred million dollar film from universal okay i worked on this film for four years to try to get it made finally got it made so i finally got it greenlit from universal and we turned it down because bakugan had crested and um anybody doesn't know bakugan it's a small little ball that it's kind of like crossed between a pokemon meets transformers meets babyoid and it went from like you know from zero to like 250 million dollars in sales and then did like a billion dollars of sales in four years and then the sales start to drop off and so we thought we can extend the life of the franchise by retiring it and and bringing out seven years later which was like this conventional rule that toy people used to have you can bring it out to a new generation of kids so we ended up taking this conventional wisdom and i was 38 40 at the time and instead of saying you know what somehow we can break the conventional wisdom and let's do this film we applied it and i believe that if i was younger if i was in my 20s i probably would have i probably wouldn't applied any of that conventional wisdom so i've seen it on both sides i've seen it on both sides the that power of not knowing and not knowing so much and just not not cluttering the mind so much [00:22:45] Speaker 2: and that's one of the benefits of being young and starting a business when you're young and i want to go back to earth buddy for a second because there are so many great lessons there you get this idea to replicate a product that was already being successful in israel you went out you found the right supplies you figured out how to produce these things you end up getting a meeting with kmart who then place a huge order just a few months after having that initial discussion with your mom um what i love about this story is that you're talking about how sometimes people will think oh i'm young i won't be taken seriously but in your case you believe that because of your youth you believed that people wanted to help you correct can you tell us the story about going into i love it going into the boardroom pitching and the buyer saying i'm not the right buyer for you and then what happened after that yeah i i truly believe that everybody's rooting for you when you're young [00:23:48] Ronan Harari: you know everybody's rooting for you uh older people want to be around younger people they love the energy the younger person has um it's an opportunity for an older person to give back uh and uh all you got to do is ask all you got to do is ask and all you got to do is show up right and i think that the scales are tilted in your favor as a result if you're competing with someone else and so with with the earth buddy um anton was actually as my business partner he was backpacking the year before and he met this guy his name is aaron hermelin and aaron was based in in detroit and that's where kmart was in troy michigan so anton called up aaron and said to him do you have any contacts at kmart and he said sure no problem we can get get you guys a meeting so he does and i don't know why till this day i was the one that went down to do the to do the sale because anton was doing sales and i was doing like operations but for whatever maybe he couldn't go or something like that so i wake up 3 30 in the morning and alexander i don't even think about staying in a hotel okay because we're saving money okay at the time welcome at 3 30 in the morning i drive down to detroit i do no preparation other than thinking about it in my mind no powerpoint no nothing like this i just show up with my box of earth buddies i get there i meet aaron i meet the rep meet the buyer and we're sitting in a boardroom okay i do a 30-minute presentation to him and he looks at me says thank you very much for coming but i'm not the buyer for this product and i was slightly paranoid when i was younger so i was like he's lying to me so i pitch him again for 15 minutes super great gentleman doesn't interrupt me okay that's the other thing about being young like it was just like if i was 40 you'd be like do you not get it i'm not the buyer yes you know this is like this poor young guy okay i'm gonna let him go um so then i said to him i said well you know i'll give you the product on consigned sales which means like i'll give you the product and if it sells you pay us afterwards and he said i'm i'm not the buyer for the product so i'm like okay i'm giving him the product for he doesn't want it so okay he's not he's not the buyer for this product so i said to him you know can you let me know who the buyer is so he leaves the boardroom comes back and gives us a piece of paper and on it is written this name adrian zacks i shake his hand i take my box earth buddies and i beeline okay out of this boardroom and i start walking around okay kmart's headquarters and it was a crazy octagon building and i'm walking and i'm walking and walking i'm looking for adrian zacks now looking back now if i was 35 40 there is no way okay they would have let me walk around that office they would have kicked me out i think back now and it's not even like it's crazy i i only think about it now that i'm doing these podcasts and stuff is that they probably thought it was some person's kid mm-hmm i was 23 i probably looked 19 or 18. okay you can always subtract five years off my luck so so uh and to my luck i find her and she's sitting at her and she's sitting behind her desk and she was in like a tiny tiny tiny office so many things scattered around there and she said to me okay i'll give you a meeting at 3 30. that's unbelievable so i go downstairs and the guys are like what happened i said i found her i got the meeting i got a meeting at 3 30. they're like let's go for lunch and i said to him i'm not going anywhere and i stayed in the lobby till 3 30. and then i came back up and i walked in and the most magical thing was that it wasn't in a boardroom like it was before it was in her office it was so intimate and she had a tiny office and she had like this big brown desk and she was sitting behind it and i was there and and then i saw some competing products on the side so i knew i was in the right office um and we started chatting and she was super warm and super nice and just like a nice person we're talking and i'm just like telling her the story about how we got started and newspaper article on this and my mom and my grandmother and you know like she's listening and listening and listening then suddenly she does the most magical thing she turns around and she gives me this book and it's the vendor book and she said i'm going to order 48 000 pieces from you it wasn't like it wasn't like thank you very much like come back later i'll call you i'll think about it she made the decision right there on the spot wow and i'm ordering 48 000 pieces from you and if you deliver and it does well we're ordering half a million pieces from you wow and i was like it's incredible boom like that and it changed everything went home we moved factories we like it was crazy we actually had to to produce the to get the half million made we actually shipped the 48 000 pieces and then we got into production of the half a million without even getting the purchase order because we did the calculation we couldn't actually wait to see the sell through so we just bet on ourselves again because we knew the sell through would be good and then we started producing it and it's just like you know took off like a rocket ship it was just a magical time um but i look back on that that she had seven other options of places to go to buy this product because it wasn't a patent product it was an open market product and she decided to go with a 23 year old kid okay and with zero track record because i didn't tell her any stories you know i was like we're just at a university we're just starting and she was rooting for us so much so that i know that she loved helping young people that she called me four years later and she said renan will you come down to detroit and speak to some inner inner city youth that are having a difficult time and i was like of course i'm [00:29:31] Speaker 2: coming and i went i spoke that is such an incredible story because i feel that when especially when you're first you know you first graduate from university and you have big dreams and aspirations a lot of people i'm i'm i mean i was one of them too i felt that things kind of had a magic factor so to speak that things just kind of happened to you but what i love about this story is that there is magic it's magic you created in showing up and being prepared and so i think that it's empowering to know that even though yes it does take some luck and some magic so to speak you really are in control of what can happen in in your life 100 100 like if you think back to it [00:30:20] Ronan Harari: it was like the anton meeting aaron calling him up going down there being in person right staying with it in terms of like finding the next buyer like i could have left and like called her tried to make an appointment right uh you know gone down to lobby like it was just step by step um the ability to actually manifest it and make it happen and and uh i think showing up is a big part of it because people want to feel and they want to see you they want to connect with a person i think it's like if you if you think if you ask people in the venture capital world at the end of the day um when they make their decision to go with something it's the idea but it's the idea with the person and if they're not if they're not connecting with the person and they feel the energy and the passion and that that that intangible like this means a lot to you like you're going to make this this happen yes right they're betting on you and the only way they're going to bet on you is when you show up and they see you and they feel your passion that's why i've never done a powerpoint in my whole life okay partially because i got a learning disability it's hard for me to do it but but but i i i'm at my best when i'm just speaking verbally right because writing is hard for me but there's a gift in that because when you're expressing yourself verbally like there is no intermediary it's direct right you go through a powerpoint suddenly someone's looking at the screen there's no emotion coming off that screen right right and so people want to feel that and i think that's the one thing you have when you're super young like you have like so much energy and also there's a bit of the naivety okay in there and it's endearing it's just kind of endearing because it's authentic and everybody want to they want to feel your authenticity right they want they don't want just a direct feedback direct connection they want to feel you right and they want to sense your authentic authenticity and the moment you break 30 35 you know you start getting the layers and everything's just getting layered and layered and layered and you know they just want to see the real you yeah at the end of the day and you have that when you're in your 20s in spades that's a really [00:32:38] Speaker 2: good point to bring up because i feel that people do tend to lose that as you go through life and you especially if you have a very structured job but i feel like being able to come back to your authenticity it requires a lot of courage because fear of failure for whatever reason is so pervasive but another thing that you write about in the book that i think is genius and worth its weight in gold is that the risk of not doing something that you feel passionate about is actually outweighs the risk of trying and failing for sure because you first of all you'll never know right you never know and you [00:33:19] Ronan Harari: never want to live without regrets and two is is that you're you're not being authentic to yourself right and so you know what's your definition of success right there's nothing more i would say like this that your chances of success are much higher if you're being authentic to yourself right and also if you're not being authentic to yourself like you you will pay the price for it at the end of the day right because there's lots of things that come up as a result of your body not being in line with what you truly want to do right the body keeps the score and so things come up right and when you're in your 20s you know you're like you're like you're pretty good right you're like bulletproof but you get into your 30s you get into 40s and if you if you're consistently being unaligned and you're not you know doing really what your your intuition wants you to do and what your soul wants you to how it wants to express itself in the world it starts to like it starts to add up and it shows itself [00:34:20] Speaker 2: yeah the small gap between who it is that you are and what your passion is if you're not aligned with that suddenly that small gap becomes a chasm that's unavoidable and that's why you've i think people end up becoming overwhelmed or depressed or anxious it is so important to pursue what excites you [00:34:39] Ronan Harari: correct correct and then and then it's like and then at the end of the day you get so much energy from it right and then it's not even work right i think even that work that con that that word work you know should be we should take it out of our vocabulary because it's so archaic right it's like yes we need to do things to to provide um but i think you can have both you can have both provide and be aligned with what you want to put out and do in the world same time and another thing that you talk [00:35:21] Speaker 2: about in the book is the zeitgeist and i took huge lessons from this personally um first of all when it comes to earth buddy or devil sticks these were things that already existed but you sensed that the trend was coming back and that you could capitalize on that when giving advice to young entrepreneurs or just entrepreneurs in general who want to build something and tap into that zeitgeist what advice would you give them well first of all just to realize that you are the zeitgeist [00:35:56] Ronan Harari: first and foremost um and that you have a gift that is given to you as a result of your station and your place in life being in your 20s right and the same the same stuff is given to anybody at any moment in time when they're in their 20s and what i'm what i'm referring to here is that is that your ability to see the world differently than your parents or older people is profound because you have to understand that for 20 years you've been living for most people not everybody for most people you've been living in your parents home and you've been observing the world and you've been taking everything in and you've been taking everything in with fresh eyes no plaque no no filters everything's super fresh and then suddenly you get in your 20s and now you have agency and you have the ability to express yourself in the world and do things and you have some means um and then the question is how are you viewing the world and how do you want to express yourself and so the greatest thing in business is that when you see when you see the world differently you see the opportunities and so it could be i want to open up a restaurant and i want to serve differently food differently or i want to give people a different experience when they're when they're sitting in a restaurant because i've sat in restaurants many times as a kid and now i think that uh i would like to do it differently now that i'm now that i'm an adult um or i've been listening to music for the last 10 years and music's been changing and the way people want to experience music has changed and the way i want experiences is is different and so i want to do concerts differently it could be many many different things but you're you're connected to what's actually happening in and around you in in society whether it's culture it's arts um sports experiences whatever it is uh and you take that and you start to apply it um to whatever area that you're passionate about in life um but the tough thing is like you're going against traditional norms going back to my let's say you want to do a restaurant differently and but you're seeing opportunities and so that's it's that it's that combination between not doubting yourself and trusting that you're sensing there's a change in society and the way people want to eat or do things um versus going with the uh contemporary you know norms and stuff like that uh all the most amazing things that are being created in in music and film in the arts world usually is brought by people in their 20s i encourage people to go and do their own uh you know kitchen research on it and you will you will see that's people in their 20s that are really pushing the envelope that are sensing opt changes in the zeitgeist and then shaping the zeitgeist as they're going right and so not only can you see things in the zeitgeist you can also push the zeitgeist and create the zeitgeist in your 20s and so that's all available to you but you will go if you go and look you will see like you know so many incredible uh artists that did their most profound work in their 20s and i [00:39:43] Speaker 2: think that business in a sense is like an art too and you talk about it perfectly when you're describing social media and maybe even starting too early like myspace or six degrees and then you know zuckerberg perfected it with facebook and then twitter came around too so you don't always necessarily need to be the first person at the party which is also encouraging in its own way correct yeah i'm i'm [00:40:08] Ronan Harari: a huge believer in like um if you don't go you don't get and there's so many things you could be doing to see what's happening in society and tapping into what's happening in the zeitgeist or you think about like apple you know like when they put it came up with the the um uh the ipod you know it's like they weren't the first people to do mp3 music right they did it like three four years later they just did it really well but they realized that all music was going digital and there was a big opportunity there um so yeah there's lots of there's lots of opportunities the one thing about the zeitgeist is always moving right it's always moving and movement creates opportunity for you right it's the funniest thing is you maybe think about it's like when we started in the toy business i always thought we'd run out of ideas i was like at some point we're just going to run out of ideas like maybe this is not a good business to go into and we've never run out of ideas and i think that's just the human imagination we're constantly regenerating but when you're younger you you you're re you can regenerate even faster right um then i think the older generation can and so everything's moving and there's constant opportunities all around you the one great thing is like i always encourage people to like go travel i think it's one of the greatest things is to travel and see what's happening in different countries around the world because you can pick up so many ideas and then bring [00:41:28] Speaker 2: them back to your home country oh that's great i like that yeah and i remember when the internet was becoming really big when i was a kid and i started thinking this is the next big thing what's going to come after the internet alexander you look like a kid what are you talking about i i i remember thinking like what what's going to come next and now it's ai right what do you [00:41:54] Ronan Harari: think is going to come after ai i have no idea i think we're just like it's just the ai is just beginning yeah right so we're just like on this beginning course of uh of uh you know technological change um so i i don't know all i know is that things are changing and change is actually good for business and it's good for young people um because you know that's when companies the big companies even like ours like we're a bigger company today even though i gave a speech yesterday our staff and i'm like we're small company again actually compared to like all the big tech companies like they're like the companies have become so big you know magnificent seven are like so large they're not they're not similar to like ge and and ibm were back in the day so we've now become a small company but putting that aside like companies that become big and they come bureaucratic they become slow and when you're younger and you're just starting out right you can run circles around everybody and especially now with ai you have all the opportunities to like start a business at way less cost because you got all these great tools you have basically an in-house mckinsey or bain consultant sitting beside you in your pocket even i use it okay to ask questions i mean i would have loved it 20 years ago when we were starting out basically it's like it's like going to school and it's like school in your pocket yeah right all the time like what an incredible thing you go up the learning curve super fast um and so you can make good decisions and then suddenly you know there's there's things you've had to pay for before that you don't have to pay for and when you start a business cash flow was king right you don't have a lot of money but here you have all these amazing tools and your ability to like express yourself is incredible with with the ai um so i think it's a technology gives a lot of opportunity for newness and we're just at [00:43:46] Speaker 2: the beginning at the beginning of this curve you talk about how when you're young you're scared to ask for help which is interesting because i felt that many times in my life i wanted advice or guidance in pursuing my education or growing a business but i almost felt it it was revealing vulnerabilities in me or making me feel like maybe i didn't know what i was talking about it was there were the wrong reasons that i didn't ask the question but you talk about how when a young person asks an older person a question it really is a gift for the older person as well correct can you talk about your philosophy behind that [00:44:27] Ronan Harari: well i just i saw it play out so many times i mean when we started our business we asked everybody right like we went to every trade show every event we took every meeting uh you know our whole philosophy was we're open to ideas from wherever they come from and we wanted to grow the business as big as we possibly could and so whenever we had an opportunity to learn we would take it and we would i we would call people on the phone ask some questions we were basically like sponges right and my business partner anton is like we we had it was done in a very nice way um and so i saw the the reception of older people to want to help us and i'll never forget the late alan alan hasenfeld which came from uh was one of the is the grandson of the founder of hasbro okay and he was he passed away about a year ago um and he was really the matriarch of the toy industry right uh he passed away in his early 80s and he just loved toys and we were 25 and we would call him and ask him for advice and here's the well the founder of the largest toy company okay and he's taking our calls he's not thinking that we're competition he was so excited okay that there were young guys coming into the toy industry because he loved the toy industry and he's like he's like yeah they're they're young guys like how much market share can they take for me not going to take so much but it's good for the industry because if there's innovation you drive innovation the more people come to the stores if there's more people in stores coming for their products right they're gonna buy some of my products so he had that he had that open mentality um and we were super young and so i i saw it play with so many times and it's just the ability to tap into that and to ask for the help but then only later on did i understand why they were wanting to give the help because you're so young and it's like it's just it's it's almost like a it's like a primal thing it's like you remember when you were young yourself you remember what it's like to be in that situation you know it's like being in your 20s is like there's uncertainty you're trying to figure out like what's going to happen with my life etc etc yeah and so you know that yourself and you know what it was like to be there and most people especially people that have had success in their life they've had someone that's helped them giving them that break everybody needs the breaks right it doesn't just happen it happens because you get certain breaks along the way we got it with adrian zacks it was a break so it's a moment right it was just like a moment a huge step change for us and so so many people remember their step changes their breaks that they got along the way and so when you come to them and you got that baby face and you're like you know piss and vinegar and you're super excited right they're like it takes them back to that their moments and then not only that it's like suddenly they're like wow i got this whole uh uh you know body of knowledge and i got some wisdom and i want to share it and i want to talk and then they just go off especially when people talk about things they're they're passionate about they're and they're excited about they go that's the most important that's the they can go for hours yeah it's not work for them all right and you're you're interested and i think that's so people are rooting for you and always ask for help and you're and you're doing them a favor by giving them an opportunity to like help you out because they remember it's a giving back it's a way of like uh it's it's it's a form of giving back it's like instead of writing a check people give back by writing checks a lot which is wonderful too but they don't get to feel it right and this is this is the way society should work it's like we should be spending time with the younger generation imparting our knowledge wisdom contacts relationships because that's a healthy society why not so i encourage people just like total reframe yeah total reframe ask a lot um but that's how we are as a society for me too it's like i just i don't like to you know like somehow you just you don't want to ask for help but i was i was very fortunate my business partner anton he loved asking for help love still today he's a great greatest networker not even network he just he genuinely likes people and he likes learning and he likes staying in contact with people and he likes relationships and all that type of big relationship guy and i got to tell you like when you get 35 40 right you know i think if i would have called alan hasenfeld at 40 he would have been he would have been helpful because he's that type of guy but uh people will start looking at you as competition and they start looking at and they start saying he's 35 40 like or she's 35 40 like they've got experience and knowledge and they can handle it right they're inclined to help but just not as much as it it's just a natural thing it's like the most people look at you as like you're you're 25 and [00:49:29] Speaker 2: you're starting out it's like you're you're their child they become invested in your success versus intimidated by it there's no intimidation at all they don't see you as a threat and how do you feel that failure is a gift in general and can you give us an example of how failure in any project has been [00:49:49] Ronan Harari: a gift in your life the biggest gift of failure is the learning right because even though you're you may not get the outcome that you're looking for but you got an incredible body of knowledge in exchange for the time and effort that you put in right so you know in our fourth year of business um we launched three products in consecutive order that all failed they all failed don't free freddie tickle tickle secrets baby and key charm cuties and um i'll never forget okay we did don't free freddie it was basically this monster and his hands were handcuffed and he basically uh he had this smile on his face and he oh press the button with the handcuffs and he could be like he roars and he like gets scary and i'll never forget when we did the commercial um and i saw this kid's look on his face and he had this look of just like this like dejection of like you know like complete disinterest like there was like even no emotion and i was like wow this product's not going to do well at all that's all i needed to see wow all i needed to see was the look on the kid's face and i knew it so here we were we spent two years design developing this product okay um and it didn't do well and the other ones we spent two years design develop and they didn't do well but we learned new categories to go into we met new factories we met new buyers we did commercials right i can tell you our commercials got a lot better than don't free freddie commercials okay right we knew who to work with who not to work with so we just like there was so much learnings and as long as you're not betting the farm right you can absorb the learnings right because not everything's on the line and so that's that's a key thing it's like do failure in moderation right do measured failure right and do failure with things that you enjoyed failing at like i was saying at the beginning when we started chatting um but yeah like it's it's and i i think that if you don't fail you don't get to the the great stuff so in 2001 i went to japan and i got shown beyblade okay which is this incredible spinning top battled together with you and your friends in a plastic arena um and it's got this great tv show around it you're smiling maybe maybe you grew up watching it okay so i got shown beyblade okay i was 2001 in japan with takara tomi okay looking for ideas all over japan and i'm so lucky i'm sitting at this meeting and they showed me beyblade before it shipped to retail and they said do you want to partner on it do you want to do it in north america i said to him i paused okay because i didn't believe in myself i really loved it actually okay and i was like i'm gonna go talk to my business partners back at home but i took it home spoke to my ben and anton and a few other people and everybody's kind of like yeah spinning tops like this is not so cool so i told them we're gonna pass and i went back six months later i said just curious out of curiosity what's happening with beyblade i said oh it's going great it's awesome it's fantastic you see the development excellent and i'm like got the sinking feeling inside and then and then they're like they're like oh and we're doing a tv show i'm like you're doing a tv show i'm like maybe we need to reconsider and they're like no sorry it's too late we gave it to hasbro we signed a deal with hasbro and i'm like i was so bitter i was so i'm like but you didn't tell me about the tv show i'm like that's like selling a car and telling them it doesn't have like surround sound inside like it's a big deal but i missed the opportunity and it went on and it's till today it's been running for 25 years and it's done in toy sales it's done billions and billions of dollars all right it's an incredible franchise and hasbro still has it today 25 years later wow okay so that was a huge failure for me it was like that passing on that was a big big big failure but the lesson in that was when you see the magic go for it and that set us up for bakuga and i always wanted from the moment he told me that they were doing a tv show i'm like i want our own tv show for something it's just like it was like a direct imprint in my body okay the failure imprinted me and that's the other gift the other gift you get from failure it imprints you it's not an intellectual pursuit right you can read all the books you can read my book you read any book in the world but till you actually do it yourself okay and you experience the failure you you don't have the imprint you have an intellectual understanding of potentially what it could be but you don't have the imprint in your body and it's totally when you have that imprint in your body it's like it's a different type of knowing and it stays with you right forever and when you get the chance to correct and build on that failure you are going to take it in the future and not only are you going to take it in the future you're going to kill it you're going to do amazing right and so the failure is a gift you don't know it at the time i didn't know it at the time but five years later okay a 23 year old came with an idea of putting an action figure in a marble and that set in motion the creation of bakugan and created our own billion dollar franchise with tv show attached to it that we sold to cartoon network that played around the [00:55:26] Speaker 2: world in 150 countries wow and you think that had you not had that experience with beyblade [00:55:33] Ronan Harari: no chance oh wow no chance zero we would have been busy selling beyblades and all about beyblades and all about beyblades that when that inventor came along maybe we would have taken or not but it was the whole story of bakugan is a very circuitous path and story and and how how it manifested itself but [00:55:52] Speaker 2: i don't think it would have happened let's talk about paw patrol sure how did that opportunity come about and did you have any idea it was going to be as big as it is no no i did not have any it did not [00:56:09] Ronan Harari: we were cautiously optimistic that it was going to do well but no one dreamed that it would be as big and pervasive and adored and loved by kids globally around the world like you have those goals but but it was almost beyond your wildest imagination it was it was a screenplay i couldn't write i couldn't write uh but i would say that there's a lot of learnings from from bakugan and some of the failures in keeping bakugan going in terms of the longevity because bakugan was around for four years and then we kind of abandoned our own baby and the company was actually at its lowest point because the company went from 450 million dollars in sales to close to a billion and then back to like 500 million dollars in sales and then paw patrol was born in the lowest point in our company's career wow yeah the lowest point but yeah pop patrol was our our our desire to want to do something in preschool and try our luck and being able to tell stories to young kids um and we were very fortunate we met a gentleman by the name keith chapman who's the creator of bob the builder and i'd love keith i was like i have this whole thing i'm like if i identify you as lucky i just want to be with you i want to work with you in some capacity at some point along the journey i want to do something with you and i keith chapman is one of those guys he's the most incredible human incredible storyteller and just had this this feel for telling stories for kids and so we had this idea about creating a show around transformation for preschoolers and we created this brief and we took it out to five different creators around the world and one was keith and he came back with this idea for these five pups that go on these rescue missions and it was originally called robbie and the rescue pups that was the original name uh and we just loved the idea even though it had nothing to do with transformation um so we said let's go let's start developing this together um and again like wanting to work with keith that was a big thing for me so there was the idea and what wanted to work with him and then we found these incredible writers who are canadian we found this incredible director jamie whitney who's produced most amazing sorry direct the most amazing children's shows also was like the special special person there's just something about him right and you looked at his body of work and you're like wow this is just like this person he just loves directing children's shows like that is his that is his mission in life he just loves he lights up and then we worked with this incredible studio studio called guru studios owned by a lovely gentleman in toronto and he was just starting out um and then we started to mash up our knowledge of toys and toy development and you know toys is a very creative pursuit so we took the creativity of toys and we took the creativity storytelling and we mashed it up together um and and all the people put in a lot of love and out of that love came game pop troll right it's just uh it was love love thing and it's like it's it's probably one of the greatest um uh things that were in my opinion created in canada uh so all the majority of people other than keith is english but we're basically like you know part of the commonwealth so it's almost the same yeah uh but it's such a canadian show like even like adventure bay is like modeled after some place in in in british columbia and all the characters you know everybody's very canadian very nice very polite um and then we got the pups and it was magical you know each one has their own world onto themselves and their own personalities and they're really uh irreverent in the in in what they do and you know how they always save the day so it's uh it's hard to describe and then we partnered with nickelodeon um you know we did we went down and we did this incredible presentation to uh seaman's army and you know to her credit you know we'd never done a preschool show before and she she believed in the collective effort i'll never forget being in her office myself uh keith chapman jen dodge adam beater uh maddie was there i can't remember and and we did this presentation and she she was like okay let's partner on it together and i think it's [01:00:46] Speaker 2: so cool that paw patrol was born at what you said was the lowest point in the company's history because i recall you mentioning in another interview that for 16 years all you experienced was growth that is correct you didn't even know what brackets meant that is correct we never saw them and then at this moment that feels things aren't on that upward trajectory anymore this amazing story is born this is it's [01:01:13] Ronan Harari: incredible yeah i i think that's that is correct you've done your homework uh it was 16 years of growth and then two years of losses i'd never seen a bracket before um and you know we didn't hit our numbers or you know talk about like failure like this was this was the worst type of failure okay because this was like running a business inappropriately and when i say inappropriately i mean just like getting ahead of your skis like growing into the business hiring too fast bringing on too many people right not having the products to support um potentially if if the sales go down uh so it was just a lot of hubris and that's that's that's an unacceptable failure my in my book but um yeah but it taught us the greatest lesson which is if you're going to bring things to market really give them the time attention care and detail that they deserve because that's the only way for you to actually give yourself the highest percentage chance of connecting with the consumer and the kids at the end of the day and if you're just dialing it in and some of the products that we were actually doing before that we were dialing them in um and they didn't connect it was a result of just dialing it in and and believing that you can do a lot more and not giving that attention to detail and kids know it kids are just like they're just incredible they know okay what's got the magic what's got the pixie dust um and what people did for [01:02:48] Speaker 2: for them versus necessarily commercial reasons and what is the biggest life lesson you've learned so far enjoy the journey enjoy the journey with whatever you're doing and where's the best place that people can keep up with you your work and buy your book you know i just to buy the book you can [01:03:07] Ronan Harari: buy it on you know barnes noble amazon uh you know all major reach walmart target so very lucky uh got a great publisher shout out to them crown great publisher incredible editor i got turned down by 19 out of 20 publishers i'm very i'm very grateful to uh them for publishing the book and uh uh you can find me on soon on linkedin and uh no experience necessary instagram and tiktok perfect [01:03:38] Speaker 2: well i'm going to include the links to all the social media handles in the notes below also the amazon links and barnes and noble link to the book awesome so anybody who wants to buy it just click below it is such a great book thank you so much and if you could go back in time and offer your younger self one bit of advice specifically tailored for you and your life's trajectory maybe back to the young kid who was sitting down at the table with your mom learning about what would later become earth buddy [01:04:09] Ronan Harari: what would it be don't doubt yourself just don't doubt yourself right and if you i would say like this if you're if you're feeling any forms of resistance sometimes resistance is a good sign it's a good sign it's telling you something telling sometimes telling you to go sometimes it's telling you to move forward i would also tell myself you know um if you ever take a trip to france for business don't rush home especially when you meet a nice girl that's what i would say [01:04:42] Speaker 2: well thank you so much for taking the time to do this this is so much fun i really appreciate you coming on [01:04:47] Ronan Harari: thanks alexander pleasure