An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Create a single dominant approach & method. Mine is to be the low cost producer through lower overhead by simpler creation, design, supplier & customer network, IT delivery such as with AWS, online everything. Everyone associated with me looks for today’s opportunity to cut costs since consumers say price determines 80% of their purchasing decisions, which all starts with costs.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Deaver Brown.

Brown started as an entrepreneur early by buying and selling many things from school records, lawn services, and tutoring. He attended Harvard College to learn how to think better and received a Magna in History which has served him well. He got an MBA at Harvard Business School to learn and adapt the toolkit of business. He is a serial entrepreneur from the Umbroller stroller sold to Rubbermaid, APC to an IPO & sale for $6 billion to Schneider Electric, to simplymedia.com now with 806 downloadable $2.99 eBooks through the FAANG group, Walmart.cm & others. He is a published author with The Entrepreneurs Guide from Macmillan & 50 other books.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

My Father died when I was 7 and I woke up to the reality that life wasn’t fair so I had to make my own way. My father was brilliant, top of his class at University of Toronto, State Doctorate at The Sorbonne in French & English, Chairman of the English Department at 29 at Manitoba, working his curveball out in the minors, on to Toronto, Cornell, and Chicago. He wrote the definitive biography of Willa Cather. My mother had beauty, panache, great health and presence, and was called “The Movie Star” by students at Manitoba and Toronto. My DNA included some of my father’s brains, my mother’s robust constitution, and her personal presence.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Doing the right things is more important than doing things right.”

“The difference between making a buck and losing a buck is more than two bucks.”

“Never worry about getting opportunities. Worry about recognizing them.”

These three lessons guided me to better decisions in my life.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Milton Friedman’s succinct 1 hour and 10 minute lecture on Inflation using his seminal work, Free to Choose. His brilliant ebullient son, David, a Harvard College Economic Summa Cum Laude, succinctly explained economics to my roommate and me at a random lunch in Lowell House during the LBJ/Goldwater 1964 election, which shifted my career plans from law to business and entrepreneurship.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

It is a matter of personality and the ability to live with ambiguity to start with-I don’t know, I don’t know when I will know, and I can live with that. Most people can’t. Professor Amar Bhide, a colleague, co-case writer for Harvard Business School, and friend, identified this key personality trait in his landmark book, The Origins of Entrepreneurship published by Oxford.

I identified and listed the 8 key traits in The Entrepreneurs Guide. Enthusiasm and Endurance-boundless positiveness & the ability to get knocked down many times and still get up again to fight another day. Conclusive-the ability to pull the trigger and move on. Leadership-a few have it; most don’t. Product Pride-”You have to love the business,” to quote Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. Marketing skill-What sells & How to make it so. Nerve and shrewdness-The guts of a cat burglar & shrewdness to make it all work.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Not the point. Don’t worry about the other guy. Worry about the person in the mirror. Can you make it work? Walmart wasn’t the first discounter, nor McDonalds the first hamburger place, or Apple the first smartphone company.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Patents are overrated for most people. The great ones lead to big royalty money by and large or are ignored and not commercialized by the creator. Haloid was the 25th company to look at Xerography after 24 companies had turned it down. I have never been offered a patent that I turned down that anyone ever made.

Filing a patent requires finding a patent and trademark legal specialist. The challenge is to make the claims broad enough to matter but not too broad to be overruled. Legal venue matters. Blue states tend to overturn them as monopolies & red states to enforce them as creations.

India is my go to country now. LinkedIn has led me to all the vendors I have used in the last 15 years.

Physical Retailers are a challenge; less so if you can sell online to their endless shelf. Physical retail is dominated by large established companies. A tougher sell. A bad place to start. As with Vegas, you can win with an inside straight; just down not bet on it. You need as many odds as possible in your favor to survive, not to speak of succeeding.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Create more with less has worked since Adam Smith’s pin factory described in March 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. My approach with the Umbroller stroller was to set up an assembly line, not a job shop, to make 200 strollers per day in just 500 square feet, in an unused corner of an American contractor. I did the same in Canada. It worked.
2. Build a network of people to learn from and for you to reciprocate with. This takes time and is why young entrepreneurs such as I struggle-we had so few. At simplymedia.com I am older, have a broader network, so can daily fine tune my business with help, such as this opportunity here.
3. Create a single dominant approach & method. Mine is to be the low cost producer through lower overhead by simpler creation, design, supplier & customer network, IT delivery such as with AWS, online everything. Everyone associated with me looks for today’s opportunity to cut costs since consumers say price determines 80% of their purchasing decisions, which all starts with costs.
4. Secrecy. As Marlon Brando told Sonny in The Godfather, “Do not tell them what you think.” Deliver by avoiding all trade shows, advertising in trade journals, and such things.
5. Ability to live with ambiguity, critical to performance and survival. Harry Truman said it best, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” My crispest experience was in the tough supply and inflationary period of 1974 when OPEC used its pricing muscle, was to tell my partner who did the finances when he asked me how we were going to meet our $40,000 payroll on Thursday, $250,000 today, “It’s only Tuesday.” We made it.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

As Willa Cather wrote, “Pioneers die broke.” Much better, safer, more profitable, and predictable to refine a known concept as did McDonalds, Walmart, and Apple.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

No. Too risky.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

VCs are looking for front people who they can control as Wolfsheim did Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. That can be a road to wealth but not as an entrepreneur. Bootstrapping is for entrepreneurs with less than $250,000, often much less. Bootstrapping leads to the angel market which is much easier to break into. Remember: consider this a career and this just your first step. Most of us need to go venture to venture to build up the capital and references to go for the big one. I missed that lesson. Don’t you!

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

My biggest contribution has been deflationary, from Umbrollers, to APC UPS’s, to $2.99 downloadable eBooks & audiobooks. All of them used fewer resources, energy, and footprint. I helped make money for VCs, Investors, and angels so they could pay it forward to help launch & find other ventures, hire people for work, and pay tons of taxes to fund various governments.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

My new Merit Fund to invest in the few companies just trying to make money and let the owners handle their own charities and givebacks to the world.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Would like to discuss investing in my new Merit Fund. My own company is cash-flowing and have no acquisition candidates with any hope of creating affordable eBooks and audiobooks due to their high overheads, unprofitable author and narrator contracts, and placing a low priority on doing the work or making money. The ideal competitors but hopeless acquisition candidates, at least by me. As Warren Buffett says colorfully, and his comments stick to my ribs, “Sometimes it is better to switch boats than repair the one you are in.” In my case, my boat is fine but I only see leaky boats as possible acquisitions, I can’t see how or desire to fix. So I will keep developing internal affordable titles for expansion..

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Deaver Brown On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.