Kevin: [00:00:00] I tell everybody, I actually have it on in our race haulers of these big, tractor and trailers that are super tricked out inside and everything on the one wall is two things. It says comfort is a slow death and winning makes the best content. And it's the same thing, whether you're winning in business and sales, whatever it may be, but people.People like winners. Be a winner.Adam: Welcome to the growth Mavericks podcast, where we know that entrepreneurship isn't just about strategy. It's about stamina. It's about disrupting your default and getting comfortable being uncomfortable. So you don't burn out before you break through. I'm your host, Adam Callinan and let's get to work.My conversation today is with Kevin Conway. Kevin is the CEO of Phoozy. That's P H O O Z Y. And he's also a professional race car driver. There are an incredible amount of parallels between being an entrepreneur and [00:01:00] operating at the level that he has racing for Lamborghini and all sorts of incredible companies for a very long time.We dive into those. Much of that revolves around doing all the things that you need to do to get comfortable being uncomfortable, which goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship. We cover the startup of Phoozy tactics in and around getting on shark tank. We've both done that. So we have some great parallels there.We don't talk about how awesome Phoozy has become with respect to starting out as basically a koozie for your phone, Phoozy built on NASA technology, very cool starting story, getting straight into Best Buy at a very early stage. We don't get into how Phoozy is now being built inside of F 35 fighter jets.And space missions and all sorts of really cool stuff. We cover a lot of ground and you will note that we start mid conversation. I just hit record and let the recording record, but it'll all make sense. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kevin Conway. Let's go [00:02:00] back. How did we, do you remember how we met?Kevin: I think we initially met, was it Ed Yeager, Adam: maybe? No, I think it was Adam Craun. Kevin: Adam Craun that's what it was, Adam Craunt. Yeah. He's doing Memento Mori, Adam: which he still doesn't see now, has a tequila thing. Yeah. Negocio, which is awesome. And yeah, from my recollection you will get into your, your Phoozy stuff, plus your driving stuff.But this was a driving thing. You were doing I don't remember who you were racing for at the time. It was Lamborghini. Yep. And you were at a Rob report event in Newport beach and Adam was there doing some for Memento or Memento Mori, which is a super fancy winery that he owns with some buddies and you met there and you were on the early stage of Phoozy, like you were like fresh startup.It was, Kevin: yeah, it was very early days. And from the motorsports side, there is a gentleman that was one of Adam's clients, one of his early clients and Memento Mori was still a Cultish kind of boutique ish, luxury brand in the wine space that not a lot of people knew about and he had the logo [00:03:00] on his hat and I was like, Oh, I know Adam was wearing that hat.And I was like, I know what that logo is. And he's do you? And I was like, Memento Mori. I have a bottle of your wine in my fridge. And he's like, how, like, how do you have my product? He's I know every customer. And then, that led to conversation and we became good friends or we're still good friends to this day.He was in the. Early phases of getting Momentum or a launched, I was in the early stages of getting through the launch and along the way, he's Oh, you got to meet my buddy that's, I think you had, you were just getting ready to do Shark Tank or you had just done Shark Tank. Yeah. Adam: What year would that have been?Would that have been like 16 or 17? Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. 2016. Yep. Yeah. Adam: Yeah. So for context with Bottle Keeper, we launched technically it was 2013, but really it was 2014 we shipped our first products then. And yeah, 2016, that was like the height for us of the operating with no employees, where we got to about 8 million in revenue that year.We had no employees and which sounds incredible, but it was so fricking hard. And because we did half our [00:04:00] revenue in the last month of the year. So the wheels started falling off the wagon rapidly. So that timing was interesting. We went on Shark Tank in 2018. Kevin: Okay. How did Adam: you go on?You were on? Kevin: 21. Yeah. So that was, and that was a whole other crazy story having to go through Shark Tank during COVID and how all that even, that Shark Tank journey was crazy because they had come to us in 2018, we were about six months old and went through the whole process, getting assigned a producer and doing all the paperwork and jumping through all the hoops, submitting the videos and doing all the things you have to do.And they loved us. We're, on the fast track through, and then they just ghosted us. Dipped out and goes to this and we're like, wow, that was that, that first time I was getting dumped by the hot girl you really want to date and you're stoked and all of a sudden she just goes to you and you're like, what happened?Was it me with it? You you're wow. And then you realize that it happens to a lot of companies. You're like, oh no big deal. Whatever. And then we didn't [00:05:00] really mess with it and it was a blessing in disguise because we weren't anywhere near ready for Shark Tank then.And we probably would have failed epically on so many levels if that would have gone through at that time. Of course, when you're in those early stages and you're getting some success and you're like, of course, we're gonna, we're gonna go kill it on Shark Tank. We're invincible at this point.You don't know what you don't know and Adam: do you know if your company is profitable today? Do you know how to set an ad budget to get the company to break even or beyond? Do you know what contribution margin is or why it is the magical metric for a brand? If you answered no to any or all of these, you need Pentane, the financial and advertising command center for brands.Pentane will tell you exactly how to get to breakeven or beyond based on the data inside of your company. Learn more at pentane. com. That's P E N T A N E. com and use code growth to save a hundred dollars off your first month. Kevin: 2020. Early [00:06:00] February, the world stopped and everything ended and we were like, okay, how can we pivot real quick?What can we do? And there's just so much uncertainty and not knowing where our business was going, I literally just sit in my office one day and said, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to go to abc. com, pull up Shark Tank and apply, even though we didn't apply the first time they had reached out to us and said, I'm just going to apply what do I have to lose?It's the middle of COVID, the whole world shut down. I don't know what's going to happen with our company. And applied and I didn't, it's a month later they replied back and shocked me to death. I was like, Oh, that's one of those things. You go online, you fill out the application. You think they're like, Adam: not a chance.It's not a Kevin: chance, but Hey, it takes 90 seconds. Do it like, I'm always one to take a flyer. Like I'm definitely down to shoot for the impossible and go for it and see what happens, and they responded in a month and then, then we were going through the whole thing of was Shark Tank going to happen or not happen that year because they didn't know where they could film.And we ended up having to film in a bubble in Las Vegas. And yeah, you're quarantined in your hotel room [00:07:00] for two weeks. You weren't allowed to leave your room. Yeah, it was nuts. COVID test every 72 hours. It was a unique experience. And then you went and filmed. You haven't seen other than looking out the window, you haven't had fresh air or sunlight in two weeks.And then after you get done filming your segment, you're out of the bubble. You're done. And you're just like, this feels so weird. You're just done and kicked out, and it was like I guess we'll go home now. You walk outside for that first time. It's crazy. And then you don't know if you're going to air, you went through that where it's yeah, you have no idea if you're going to make the cut.And then when you get that call and they're like, Hey, you're going to make it to air. You have three weeks and then it's a while, three weeks, four weeks to get your house in order. And fortunately for us, we, we said, Hey, all the things that we need to do to prepare for sharp think are things that we should be doing anyway of operators, optimizing things, make sure your inventory's in line, making sure that you have the ability to for rapid scaling.And so we had our house in order, so to speak already, because. It wasn't something that we [00:08:00] had to step up and fix, because when you look at what you need to do to be ready for a major event, like a Shark Tank or something, as a startup, you should pretty much already be doing anyway. And we see so many companies that come to us and talk to us about our being on Shark Tank or companies are preparing to go on Shark Tank.And they're like, what'd you guys do to prepare? And it's man, if you're trying to figure that out now, you've already lost. So, we're fortunate from that standpoint. And then it allowed us to really capitalize on that. And to an extent, it's still the gift that keeps on giving with those three errors, we'll take it.Adam: Yeah, that's amazing. Let's back up for a second and explain to the listener. I know what Phoozy is, but they may not. What, from its genesis, it's done some really cool things. So going back to the beginning, what did you create Phoozy for? Kevin: So Phoozy is essentially a ultra high tech koozie for your phone, if you will.So it prevents your phone from overheating in the sun and shutting down. Not only does that cause a major inconvenience, but it permanently damages your phone, your tablet, your laptop when our devices overheat. It also reduces your battery's ability to [00:09:00] maintain a charge. If you've had that dreaded shutdown from your phone being too hot, if you're just sometimes leaving it in your car or if you're playing golf or you're at the beach, or, I like to wakeboard and wake surf a lot and there was never a good place to put your phone on the boat and it would always overheat.I didn't realize it was a pain to overheat. I didn't realize it was killing my phone when it would overheat. I just wanted something to keep it from overheating in the sun much like a Koozie in a way, but a better higher tech version. And then I like to snowboard in the winter and your phone battery dies very quickly in the cold.So when it's below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, your battery will lose about 60 to 70 percent of its performance. And when your phone battery is flow, you can cause a lot of damage to it by thinking your phone's dead. You go to charge it. It's not actually dead. It's just too cold for the battery technology, the way that lithium ion batteries work for it to generate power.So we said, Hey, there's got to be a way that we can help prevent overheating while also extending battery life in the cold. And then, when you're in those environments, you also want drop and float protection. [00:10:00] I've lost a lot of phones in the lake where you put it in your towel to keep it from overheating.Somebody forgets it's in the towel, pick the towel up, fling your phone in the lake. So no matter how waterproof or robust your case is, none of them float very well. So we came up with this wishlist of things that wish we could do. And it's, from a physics standpoint, really hard to protect something from hot and cold.And drop, and float, and my background is a professional race car driver. There's a big technology transfer between the aerospace industry and the motorsports industry. And thermal management is a huge component of what we deal with, not only from the engine performance, but from an aerodynamic efficiency standpoint, the managing temperatures in the cockpit, just all throughout, every element of the race cars, a vital component of what we do for performance.So we had access to a lot of cool materials, aerospace engineers. And I went to one of our engineers and just said, Hey, here's what I'm trying to do. There's got to be some materials out there. And ironically, there was not like a simple solution. I also got on Amazon cause I'm like, somebody made a koozie for their phone, [00:11:00] and it wasn't on Amazon.And I was like if it's on Amazon, it probably doesn't exist. And I just looked at it and we were able to combine multiple materials. Most of which were developed by NASA for use in spacesuits as part of the original Apollo program, and then evolving more into what is now the Artemis program, the next gen of space suits, if you will.And we were able to take most of the spacesuits have 15 to 18 layers. We were able to take the core element of those layers and condense them down into five and patent a thermal composite. And create the first Susie, we launched in June of 2017 with one product, one SKU kind of as a side thing, to be honest.Everybody comes back to us now and they're like, what was your business plan? What was your pitch deck? No, dude, we didn't have one, man. Yeah, that's exactly how Adam: we started. It's Oh, I'll throw that against the wall. See if it works. Kevin: Yeah. I had no idea, and. I said, worst case scenario, we'll get these produced.And if it doesn't work out, blow them out online or flea market or something, and [00:12:00] hopefully. Get some of my money back, worst case scenario. And I convinced Josh Inglis, one of my good buddies that we've known, since childhood. And he took a very different career path than me. He took the corporate path, went and got his executive MBA and from a great school and worked at Home Depot as an executive on the com side of things for 15, 16 years.And. I was always, professional athletes, so two very different worlds from, his love language is a spreadsheet and my love language is winning. Very different backgrounds and things. And we were able to come together and pull him out of the corporate side and bring them into the fun, crazy world of entrepreneurship.And that was the whole other struggling of itself. You think him, I've got this big rock star and he's done all these amazing things in corporate managed over a billion dollars of digital marketing spend annually. All these things. And then he comes to the startup world where it's just him and I have to do everything and Adam: he's Kevin: yeah, he's like, where are my tools?Where are my resources? And it was a massive adjustment for him. I think for the first six months he was questioning everything. Plus, we had a unique [00:13:00] experience. We launched in June and by August Best Buy had come to us asking us for a product in store. REI followed suit, Apple followed suit, so typically you'd go in and backfill with smaller retailers or direct, just focusing on building direct to consumer.And here we are two guys with, laptops and cell phones working out of their house. And we have some of the biggest retailers for our category in the country saying, Hey, we want your product. And we're like, we're not quite ready for, to go in store yet. So that was challenging.Adam: That's really interesting. How, was it. Was it as straightforward as one day Best Buy just hauled? There, there were, there had to have been some steps. Did you meet somebody at a trade show? Did you have a, a friend that was a friend of someone that was a buyer at Best Buy?Like how did they find you and how did that happen? Kevin: Yeah. So we launched around, we did our launch. We decided to officially launch Boozy in an event called the GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, Colorado, which is. A gathering for all outdoor [00:14:00] adventure seekers and for outdoor professional athletes.So for mountain biking, kayaking, mountain climbing, anything to do with outdoor adventures in the summer we launched at GoPro Mountain Games and we also utilized a very robust PR strategy. We had a great PR lady that helped us immensely. He had done all of the PR previously for a company called Lifeproof, which was acquired by Otterbox and they were the first ones to really come out with the adventure proof phone cases, if you will, the first waterproof phone case for an iPhone and stuff like that.And so she had been a part of that whole journey and understood communicating that. And then through that acquisition by Otterbox, they let the LifeProof brand die off. We were quick to be able to work with her and get her on board. And she helped us immensely. And I think the biggest thing was the PR coverage that we had, because this was something new and different.Made from space suit technology to keep the phone from overheating. It's one of those things that people have always just dealt with it, but they never thought about a solution for it. They're just like it's just what happens. Whatever. I'll let it cool down. It'll be fine. I'll [00:15:00] let my phone warm up in the cold and the battery will come back.And then knowing that there was a solution. All of the tech media immediately gave us a lot of great feedback and coverage that people like CNET, Digital Trends, Mac Rumors, some of them, the more kind of meek techie sites and blogs and plus, major media outlets. Everything from CNN, Fox, all the major outlets covered us and it was new and groundbreaking a lot of it, certainly my background helped open some doors as an athlete that certainly, but it was really more due to those PR efforts and then all of a sudden people see it and hear about it and literally I, yeah.One of the buyers at Best Buy had a really good relationship with their distributor because the majority of their kind of smaller companies or smaller businesses they work with all go through a distributor and that buyer had their distributor reach out to us. And ironically I was at a trade show and they called me and I thought they were calling to set up a meeting at the trade show and they didn't even know we were at that trade show, the trade show [00:16:00] called Outdoor Retailer.And Best Buy doesn't even Adam: really Kevin: go to that show. And so it was real, it was bizarre. I was like, Oh, it's just a failed call. This guy's calling me cause he, distributor read a press release and wants to sell our product. And then I think it was by Q1 of 2018, we had launched online in Best Buy and in about 122 stores.And by the end of 2018, we had rolled out to all of their A stores, all their large format stores in Best Buy with two different SKUs and then several SKUs online. But the REI story was really interesting. I did get an email randomly from our info at Phoozy from the buyer at REI, which never happens.It was a crazy thing. Ironically, the CEO did this executive leadership trip every year to Alaska and they go in the back country for a week and they have an internal social network and that CEO did a brief of his trip and he said, the number one product that gotten through those 10 days we don't sell and that's a [00:17:00] problem.And it was a Phoozy, his wife had bought him a Phoozy for that trip. I don't know where or how or whatever. And of course, as soon as that kind of went through their internal communications, that buyer was quick to reach out to find out like, how do we get this in store? That's not normal. By any stretch, we're sitting here four or five months into the company and we're just like, whoa, this is like breaking out of a fire hose.Trying to keep up and trying to figure out how can we make this work. And REI has been an awesome partner. They're great with small brands, small businesses. We were very transparent with them from the beginning of, Hey guys, we're new and they were fantastic to work with through the whole process.And that's been a, an evolution. I think retail for us as a whole has been a complete evolution. And, we're a bootstrap company. We've never raised money. We've never had any investors. We could all lay. Survive on the profits of the company. And that, that was challenging and that's especially challenging when you're going into retail.So again, not knowing what we didn't know, if we look back, we, there's a lot of things we would do [00:18:00] differently. We for us, our first foray into retail was an epic failure. It did not succeed. It was terrible. It worked in REI, it worked great in REI, but Apple and Best Buy. It was terrible.We're in a When you say Adam: it didn't work, what do you mean? Kevin: We didn't Did they just Adam: not sell through? Kevin: Yeah, we didn't sell through and I think it's an incredibly expensive channel because of the in store programming you have to do. Margin hole promotions, through all of those things where they're already taking, 60%, then you add margin hole promotions on it, and then you're paying for promotions on top of The margin support.It just gets to be really expensive. And for us, the challenging thing is we're a new product. We're a new category. We're not a phone case. We had to go create this category and require some customer education. So no matter how unique or dynamic we could make our packaging, if you just see it sitting there, you don't know what it is, and we learned that the hard way that customer education piece that you can't always communicate everything through your packaging.And [00:19:00] no matter what's on the box, people aren't really going to read it anyway. So at the time they still had a very large mobile accessories section. And somebody who's looking for a phone case is not necessarily looking for our product. We always say we were complimentary to a phone case.It's not this or that. So it was just that consumer education piece before we were able to really establish our brand and create demand for it and channels, the direct to consumer channels that are much easier to educate the consumer on. So I think that was our biggest thing, biggest lesson learned there is, putting the product on the shelf.It doesn't matter, you've got to create that pull and that drive. And it's really expensive to do that successfully in retail and very expensive to create your own category at retail. Not that much different from what you guys went through with Bottle Keeper. Adam: Yeah. It's amazing the parallels between that experience.We took a slightly different path to get there, but we ended up at a pretty similar place in that we went completely direct to consumer. And I thought of this [00:20:00] from the context actually of GoPro, thinking about GoPro. They did that. They did that really well. Granted, they did it at a scale that we didn't, but they did that really well.And by the time they went. Into retail at Best Buy, there was so much demand that they got to control. They got to control it. They got to control how it was distributed, how it was sold, where it was placed, how it was priced, something that I always looked at, as a guiding light when, with respect to Bottle Keeper, which is one of the reasons we said no for a long time we wanted to have the customer be the one that was going in the store asking for it, which is what ultimately happened, our first big breakout for retail.Which is in 2018 we had a ton of demand, but we just didn't want to do it. We were crushing, this is like the days where online advertising, this basically free, like you couldn't spend it fast enough. No, the returns were insane. It started to taper in 17, 18, but it was like, I don't remember exactly the situation.It [00:21:00] was like the daughter of the head of purchasing of ACE hardware came home with a bottle keeper and he thought it was cool and. Yes, my computer freaked out, turned off, and created this awesome gap in the recording. Finished the thought, I was talking about a sales rep that went out and found interesting companies that heads of purchasing for companies like Ace Hardware wanted to find.And I got a random phone call from a stranger one day that basically said, Hi, I'm Rick. Ace 000 stores. Are you interested in talking? And that represented a huge shift in, in our revenue model within Bottle Keeper. That was at that point. 100 percent direct consumer, take that as a super awkward transition.And we'll get back to Gavin. We're not going to pretend that didn't just happen. So there's just going to be a gap in the middle of it, which is totally fine. When you real quick, when you go back to your shark tank stories, because I get asked a lot about the shark tank experience as well, [00:22:00] and you made a comment that there are two things.One is why early on would you have failed? If you went on Shark Tank, in 2000, what would have been like 18 when they reached out? Kevin: I think for us, we were still so early in the game. We did have some success and we had a lot of media coverage and sales were doing great. They were really strong, but compared to the lessons that we were able to learn, the information that we were able to understand the additional products that we were able to create and test and really understand our market.And what we had as a company I think the biggest thing is, we know so much more now in some ways it's a double edged sword because it flows down your ability to roll out new products sometimes because of what you know. But it saves a lot of money in the long run. And, for us, it was just basically, we wouldn't, we didn't have the story, we didn't have the sales.We didn't [00:23:00] have the understanding of our customer. Of our market and IP side of things, we were just getting, we had a lot of provisionals filed, but nothing had converted yet to know that we had meaningful IP when you're in that provisional state, that's great that you have some layer of protection, but then, that's a long road to convert between working around prior art, working through all of the things to get those, to get the patents and the things that you really need.So we focused on trying to create one really good product. And then understanding where we knew we could expand into other things. And we started with just the phone product, we expanded into tablets and laptops, and then developing out the phone line of kind of a, having a good, better, best product and then having our IP in place and, having millions of dollars in revenue before we went on Shark Tank.And it was, the crazy thing is it was only two, like two years, two and a half years later, which sounds like a long time. And I think in the after career world, it's like dog years. But at the end of the day, looking back, [00:24:00] it wasn't that long. And, it was like, like I said, it was a huge blessing in disguise.And you get all excited, like Shark Tank, this is awesome. And everything's so new in that early phase that I think it's very easy to get lost in the distractions of success. Or the mirage of success before you actually create success. There's a big difference there. And even early success can sometimes be actually worse than not having that success because it it's.It can sometimes be a false indicator and build that false confidence that can ultimately be to your peril. And, for us, I think not having any other backing other than, what I was able to invest into the company and Josh put some money into and not taking any money out of the company for a while, the normal startup story here, a lot of times maxing out 0 percent credit cards.I've absolutely the first two and a half years of the company wrecked my credit because. I had so many 0 percent interest credit cards and then you'd find another one, you could roll a balance over. But that was a big part of our funding. We went [00:25:00] through probably 200, 000 worth of credit card debt at 0%, to utilize that.And that sustained the company and helped us fuel that growth. And even same things with our manufacturer partner, which is funny. We shared the same manufacturer unknowingly until, till, we found that out later. The guy that owned the, all of the, did all of our sourcing and manufacturing for us hooked us up and he, did a smoking deal with this to help us on inventory and carrying that inventory costs for us and those things that enabled us to have a far more compelling story to, to build a track record of success before we went into Shark Tank.It's you take it when you can get it and you make the most of it. But we were very fortunate that we were able to come back and have that first experience when we were far more ready than, the early stage. When you go in early stage without a proven track record or any of that, you're really, you're going to get hammered on your equity and what you have to give up.But it's also sometimes easier to sell the chisel of the stake than it is to let them take a bite and not like it. [00:26:00] Adam: Absolutely. And that's from a manufacturing standpoint, I assume, and I'll give credit where it's due. That's Bruce at DirectSource was, they were game changing for us, particularly with respect to Shutter Tank.Because they allowed us to go and create, it was 10 or 12 containers of inventory, which was hundreds of thousands of units of product that they just made and held until we needed it, which made all the difference in the world. And that chirping thing came live. I assume, did you have a similar, my next question was literally about inventory.So I, I assume you had some similar experience done. Kevin: We did, Bruce has been instrumental in our success. He saw our early traction early on and said, Hey, what can I do to support you guys and help you guys? And, for us, the, from the cost standpoint, the inventory was a killer. And especially on demand planning, when you're rolling out new products and you're growing and it's very difficult to have any type of meaningful forecast you either, you're over by a mile or under by a mile, both of which I feel like are equally [00:27:00] problematic.So it's hard in the early stages, it's hard, especially again, in the category that we're creating, it wasn't like we, we went into an existing category and just did a different brand or a different take on an existing widget. So it was hard. And Bruce is like, what if I help you guys tell us what you need, I'll make it and then you pay for it as you sell it.And that was a game changer for us. It, it changed everything, quite candidly, we would have had to have looked at either some type of inventory financing or investors or something to get us where we were, if it was not for. Bruce and the DirectX team, they've been instrumental in our success and they still are, our primary partner across the board when it comes to sourcing manufacturing and as a 3PL partner.They've been great. It's been bumps in the road for all of us along the way with it. But you get hammered with regulatory issues that come up. People have been hearing about all of the PFAS challenges there and, certain states requiring that and all of a sudden you're like.Oh, great. That's a whole big can of worms. And then you [00:28:00] realize that some of your product may have create the mouth pee fast, some don't, and as a small business, there's never ending challenges that are going to continue to pop up and that you just have to roll with, but man, some of them are definitely a big punch in the face for sure.Adam: Absolutely. So changing gears. You're a race car driver, like you're a race car driver, a professional racer. Probably first, how do you see yourself in that role? If you give just a quick background on what you do, I know you're a GT four and I've been doing it for quite a while and then how do you I'll couple onto that and I can regurgitate these later if needed.How do you take that experience and what you do there and how you prepare there? And how does that impact how you operate in business? Kevin: Yeah. So I started racing when I was six years old, growing up, I wanted to either be a fighter pilot or a race car driver. It's the only two things I ever wanted to do.I think much to my mom's demise, my first words were motorcycle, not mom or [00:29:00] dad. I think they're pretty bummed about that. But I started racing go karts when I was six and moved up through the different ranks and through the different series over the years. My entire life doing that, my education was based around racing.I was homeschooled, finished, school high school when I was 15, started college, finished undergrad when I was 17, did a executive management an executive NBA light type thing, had that done by the time I was 19. So didn't really do the whole college experience because everything for me, it was just around racing.And made it to the highest levels in North America, racing the NASCAR cup series or the cup series rookie of the year 2010. And then transitioned to sports cars in 2012, becoming a factory driver with Lamborghini. Like Talladega Knights in rebirth. It was like the redneck going to Italy.It was it was a little different, but it was cool. So I was with Lamborghini all the way through still am actually currently with Lamborghini, but also. We got, had the opportunity to start a team for Toyota. There's no real conflicts there between Toyota and Lamborghini. And I driven for Toyota on the NASCAR side and they have a [00:30:00] driver development program where we develop up and coming and emerging talent.And they're very robust on that in the stock car side. And they're getting more involved in a factory level sports car racing. So we were able to put together a team for myself is on the ownership side. To manage that driver development pipeline for them, that talent development for the next generation of, the stars that basically Quake Canada doesn't want to have to race against.So if they don't want to race against you, they keep you. If they don't mind competing against you. They'll let you go. So it's super rough. Some of these kids it's you see the stress and the pressure they go through. It's the 0. 001 percent of the 1 percent that make it it's, so it's a part of that too, but started that program in 2021 with Toyota and just merged actually with a have a new partner that we just brought on this year on that team.And we run 10 full time race teams. It's a very robust, we have over a hundred, about a hundred different employees supporting that program. It started into a big company. That's, it started to a massive company. We have, Fortune 5, [00:31:00] Fortune 10 partners supporting it. We have huge brands.Obviously, Toyota's our factory partner. We have brands like mobile one and others that are utilizing it as part of a major part of their marketing initiatives and developing emerging talent and still letting the old guys like me get in and go racing. Whoop up on the the youngsters a little bit, but as it relates to business and it is having two different lives, it's funny people in the racing world that have known me from the racing side, my whole life, I've literally been making a living driving race cars since I was 16 years old.Yeah, I'm 46, so I've been doing it for a minute. And people in the racing world are like, didn't you invest in some company called Phoozy or something? Like you invested in that or something. And I'm like, yeah, you could say that. A little bit more than Adam: investment. Yeah. Kevin: Yeah. And then, the, everybody that knows me from the Phoozy world, they're like, Hey, don't you race like cars or something for fun?Yeah, my neighbor races Porsches. And I'm like yeah it's not quite like that, but yeah. So it's like having two totally different lives and but. It's important. I tell everybody the racing world is so compressed and [00:32:00] condensed in terms of performance and it doesn't reward effort.It just, it's the net result, right? You're measured in what you do, what you try. And it's a very, it's a world where every person, every guy and girl that's on the team from the lowest level to the highest level they are executive team. They are ultra high performers. They are in our world, we make mistakes, people die.So it's the pressure is high. Stress is high. They know their expectations. And I think transition to business world, it was a, it was definitely a tremendous asset for me to have that mindset, to have that mentality of just execute, execute, execute, execute, execute. And I always tell people, it's I don't care how hard you have to try, I don't care how hard you try.We are, you do or you do not. Very simple. Some people it's going to be much easier for. And you can say, it's not fair, life's not fair. Some people aren't going to have to work as hard. Some people are going to have to work their ass off. And at the end of the day, we go off of those results. And [00:33:00] and push hard.It was, fortunately for me, Josh had, my business partner, he has much more of a corporate background. So he's much more HR friendly in terms of his approach to managing people. I'm very direct and very much is what it is. And. I think it's been helpful. And then now, as we've transitioned into doing a lot of the government work and a lot of defense work that mentality is triangulated and works really well with those guys, because at the end of the day, if you're designing a solution for the military nobody cares about the process.It's just the end result, the end product. And at the end of the day is much. I call it kind of hyperbole and marketing jargon and BS and warm fuzzy stuff about culture. Culture is important. Don't get me wrong. And what goes into your products and all these things, the consumers at the end of the day, they really don't care.They want a solution that works for them. There's a small subset that buy into the why of a product that most people are buying into the product because it's fulfilling a need they have in their life. And in some way or shape or another, that product is providing value that they're willing to [00:34:00] exchange their money for and.So for us, it was always making sure the wins, in the racing world, it's very easy. You win or you lose every day. And of course, very simple for us on the business side, it's, are we providing value and what does that value look like? And at the end of the day, no matter how we feel about a product, how we position it, or how great the product actually is, if the consumer doesn't understand that and the consumer doesn't recognize that value is not very easy for them to understand why they need this and the value that it provides, then we fail.And so I think that mindset has it's been a blessing and a curse. I'm highly driven. And it's it's good because, but it's hard to get the right team that can share that drive and that passion and it's taken us a long time and we've had to, go through a lot of people to get the right core group that we have now that, they know they know what the expectations are.They know. What we want and from my standpoint, I tell all of our employees when I meet with them each quarter, we sit down and I'm like, Hey, what do you want to do? And I'm like, if [00:35:00] boozy isn't what you want to do over the next five years, that's cool. You can tell me that what is it that you want to do?So let me equip you for, or if, and if I can't, I'll be more than happy to make a phone call to introduce you to somebody that might be better because. If we're not helping people pursue what they really want to do or where they can grow and thrive, then, we're not providing value to the people that are, that we're trying to say, Hey, you get your job is free value for others.You always say you can't pour from an empty cup. It's, for me, it's always been saying, trying to stay in touch beyond like the. Employee, boss employee relationship beyond that of personally and professionally what's working, what's not, where do you want to be?We change, we all grow, what we thought we want to do. Sometimes we find out that's not it. And, that's why I tell somebody, even if you have creative teams or whatever, if they're like, Oh, you want to do your own thing? Cool. Then let's talk about what that looks like and how we can get you there.And what I found is when we do that, our attention's through the roof. Because they're like, Oh wait, you actually care? I'd rather be [00:36:00] here than try to go do something else. And, and it's the same thing, even in the racing side is, we've, those are lessons that I've taken from how we manage on that side of very strong personalities, very high performers to bringing that to, to, ultimately help somebody that they don't even know they can perform at that level, they can execute on that level equipping them and giving them the reins to do it.Adam: That's amazing. Last question. And you can pull this from this is really more of a general life question. I think it probably has significant application to your racing and racing career, but I also deeply believe it has significant application to business. And that is how do you, what do you do from a physical and mental standpoint to prepare, whether, again, whether it's for the race car or whether it's for Phoozy, what are the, some of the things that you do?Kevin: I think, for me our simulation is still really big [00:37:00] and in the motorsport world, the simulation will become incredible. I think that helps on the processing and the sensory, which is really important now more than ever be able to quickly process data and information. We think of things like Neuralink and we think of all of the different AI things and the way that it's not just changing the way that we consume information, it's changing the rate in which we process information.And As we age, that slows down. So that, it's one of the things that I still am very fortunate. I still get to get in the car and race. You have just massive sensory inputs. I think from that standpoint, it's really important. I think the physical standpoint of physical preparation in business is just as important in racing.Racing, I tell everybody it's 80 percent mental and the business world is no different. And without getting into a whole different rabbit hole, I feel like. We are our minds and our spirits are so much more capable than what we ever even allow ourselves to tap into and for me, I think it's a matter of [00:38:00] not believing preposterous things or saying I'm going to go do X, Y, or Z.But when you're passionate about something, you're moving forward in something knowing that, I don't have the answer today, but I'm going to find a way I'm going to figure it out. And I feel like that positive motion is rewarded with positive motion. And that mental side is so important of having that mental clarity.For me, I love saunas. Like I'm obsessed with doing cardio in a sauna. And I think the most important thing for me is to continually exhaust myself. I do that through working, but it's different when you have physical exertion. I think there's a reason why our bodies are designed to reward that, that exertion.And I tell everybody, I actually have it in my race hauler to these big, tractor and trailers that are super tricked out inside and everything on the one wall is two things. It says comfort is a slow death and winning makes the best content. And it's the same thing, whether you're winning in business and sales, whatever it may be, but people.[00:39:00] People like winners be a winner, you're going to be something in life and it's just as easy to be a winner as it is to be a loser. So be a winner. Adam: That's epic. It's a choice. A slow death is a phenomenal phrase. That's fantastic. Very cool. Thanks man. I really appreciate you taking time.I've known you for, we've known each other for almost a decade. I feel like I just learned 5, 000 times more about you and your history than I've than I previously known. Thanks for sharing your time with me. Really appreciate Kevin: it. Glad to be here. Adam: A huge thanks to our guests today. Don't forget, this is powered by Pentane, Financial and Advertising Command Center for Consumer Brands.Stop what you're doing, put your phone down, walk away from the computer screen, go outside, get some air, do something hard. Push your limits, get uncomfortable, become more durable and more resilient, create the stamina required to get through those entrepreneurial barriers, stay in the game for as long as you [00:40:00] can.And we will see you next time.