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Kenneth Cole Started a Film Company… Just Kidding. Sort Of

Kenneth Cole speaking at the GMSC event at Goizueta Business School on Thursday, May 7th. 
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of hearing THE Kenneth Cole give a keynote to MBA students at Emory’s Goizueta Business School (GBS) as part of their Goizueta Marketing Strategy Consultancy (GMSC). I was there as a judge of the group presentations, not as a student.
A little intro to both:
  • Kenneth Cole is the founder and designer of Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. one America’s premier fashion brands today with products spanning shoes, clothing, bags, etc.
  • GMSC is a program that allows Emory MBA students work in teams to solve very complex, real problems for some of the world’s top companies.

So I’m going to share the short story about the founding of Cole’s company that highlights some of the creativity and persistence I enjoy so much about entrepreneurship and then some good sound bites from his talk… Sadly, I won’t be able to do his comedic side justice, but maybe you’ll have the pleasure of hearing from him live one day, too. Till then…

The Birth of a Shoe Company…

As any good presentation starts, Kenneth Cole open with a story on how his company was started. A newly minted graduate of EmoryUniversity, Cole wanted to start his own shoe company following in the footsteps (pun not necessarily intended) of his parents who owned El Greco, a shoe manufacturing company.
Cole applied for the “Kenneth Cole Inc.” as he started out – there was no Google to just search company names in the 70’s after all.
He started the company based on shoe designs he had incepted during his stay in Italy, and he knew the massive market and financial opportunity of America. He knew for success, Cole had to make an entrance at Market Week held at the New York City Hilton. However, he didn’t quite have the funds to pull it off.
Much like conferences today, it takes significant investment to grab a vendor booth – hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. However, many of the large brands would set up a secondary space located within blocks of the Hilton to showcase more products. For Cole, that was too much.
Cole was speaking to one of his friends about his predicament, and his friend offered up his 40’ trailer (who doesn’t have a friend with a 40’ tractor trailer?). However, it’d be insane to park a 40’ trailer on a busy NYC street. Cole would have to get a permit for that type of thing…
So Cole called the mayor asking for a permit to park the 40’ trailer on the street next to the Hilton – the show happening in 10 days. The skinny on that conversation: “No.” The mayor told Cole permits were only issued to utility companies and movie filming. So the only logical thing to do now was to ask friends and family for money to buy a booth. Just kidding.
Instead, the next day, Cole changed the name of his company from “Kenneth Cole Inc.” to “Kenneth Cole Productions Inc.” and applied for a permit to film a movie “Birth of a Shoe Company”. The permit was granted, and to top it off, the mayor provided a couple cops on set of the filming.
So what happened at the shoe show? Kenneth Cole sold 40,000 pairs of shoes in 2.5 days (!!!). And to this day, the company’s name is Kenneth Cole Productions Inc.
My Kenneth Cole wallet has served me for more than a decade – received as a present. I’ve received another high quality Italian wallet a couple years ago, but I’m not interested in replacing mine. Actually, I can’t remember where that new wallet is – don’t tell my sister.

Tassels, buckles, and more accessories

Kenneth Cole wouldn’t be the creative he is today without some witty, inspiring sound bites, so here are several of my favorite:
  • As it relates to resources and problem-solving, usually the most costly solution isn’t the best or the one that “wins”. Instead, the most creative solution pays off the greatest. Case in point: Cole’s request for a filming permit above.
  • The difficulty and honor of selling his brand is that he has to earn the right to be chosen. Nobody really needs another pair of shoes.
  • Kenneth Cole wants his company to be a vehicle for good citing his company goals intersecting with the needs of the community – its responsibility.
  • “Empower others to be change agents and change makers.”
  • “Build a platform that responds to change, not be stifled”. This is relevant to creating sustainable company despite rapid changes to fashion and technology today.
  • The brand is the greatest point of distinction, but today, everyone is creating their own brand and audiences. Kenneth Cole’s goal is to earn the right and convince everyone to include him in their brands.
  • The 4 top life tips:

1.      If you can’t change the world, be an accessory.
2.      What you stand for almost as important as what you stand in.
3.      When in doubt, wear my shoes.
4.      Good to be known for your shoes, but better to be known for your soul.
I enjoyed Cole’s speech a lot given how many of his talking points resonated with me as an entrepreneur – namely, points about being creative and the responsibility of a brand to the community. Real glad I got a chance to hear his keynote, and shake the Legend’s hand afterwards. (Now, if only I got a selfie with him… just kidding.)
Mr. Cole, I’ll be picking up a pair of your shoes soon… even if I don’t need them.
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The MBA in a Startup World – It’s About Positioning

Blend in just enough for better positioning… (Image source: http://tinyurl.com/ohhqkoa)
There are ton of MBA vs. Startup articles out there, and no doubt there are those who have very passionate (if not myopic) views on the subject. Like every other research paper, it’s catered to our views. I was even told recently in an interview at a startup that an MBA is largely looked down on in startups. So my view? MBAs suck! No, wait, MBAs are great! No wait…
Does it really matter? Maybe. My view is really that at the end of the day, we make do with what we’ve got. I’ve got that little piece of paper with “Master of Business Administration” and my name on it. I’ve also founded a startup and worked with several others. So maybe I have one of those amazing perspectives cuz I’ve been on both sides.
At the end of the day, the MBA was a great experience. Learning all these different subjects like Finance, Accounting, Marketing, etc. isn’t going to be the real value of the MBA. Instead, it’s really about the connections. So if you’re like me trying to really solve the aches and pains vis-a-vis B2B technology, it’s great to know I have friends and business school connections at companies of all sizes across the world. Essentially, I have some great prospects to ask questions or test out ideas.
At the end of an MBA program, you’ve got a great foundation of all the major business functions. What’s that mean? Well, for one, you know how to talk the talk, walk the walk, you can blend in with the rest of the corporate suits. That then enables you, as an entrepreneur, chameleon-like powers to be able to blend in with potential customers! When we think about customers and how to really sell or even build a product for them, it’s all about empathy and credibility.
You can get some empathy points with a corporate client when you know how companies really work. How does pushing that button or pulling that lever in marketing affect operations at the warehouse? How does inventory play in accounting? Big corporations drive the world even though small companies really employee the lion’s share of the workforce. (Think how big companies lobby and influence government policies. If small companies worked together…) With that, education is still highly valued in big corporations meaning that little sheet of paper gets you in the door as an employee or as a vendor.
Building a startup is like getting the theory behind the practice. Except, you’re also getting the practical lessons. In business school, I learned all these marketing terms, all these little financial models, but when we were building Body Boss, we organically built out the marketing mechanisms. We learned and adapted our sales strategies that was otherwise just talked about in case studies. With Body Boss, we built our own pipeline tracker and indeed, our own crude CRM. We weren’t just handed SalesForce at a major company to run with it. We now understand why we tracked various marketing and sales activities and why and how we employed drip marketing. You give us a powerful technology like SalesForce or PipeDrive, and that just becomes an accelerator for us. We’ve lived and learned from the bottom of theory, and we’ve lived the practice. 

With an MBA as an entrepreneur, I feel that much more Ninja-like

I went into Emory’s Goizueta Business Schoolto help augment my otherwise entrepreneurial/ freestyle consulting style with some structured approach. I have no interest in really sticking to one of those extremes of being wholly freestyle and entrepreneurial or highly structured. Instead, I’m trying to adapt a style between the two that fits me. Startups, as they get more successful, are startups for only so long before they feel the pressure of implementing some structure. Facebookis NOT a startup anymore, but credit to them for enabling a culture that still feels entrepreneurial. Other large corporations like IBM, GE, etc. were once startups, too. However, those corporate policies, operations, etc. are adaptations over time to sustain growth and support existing customers. With an MBA and some corporate experience behind you, you get to leverage some structure to the entrepreneurial spirit to get the best of both worlds.

I’ve seen plenty of people who have MBAs, and they’re wallowing in the pits of large corporations. I’ve seen MBAs be highly successful in startups. Does it all really matter? Nah. Instead, all about the mindset of the individuals and their drive. If you can leverage your background in a way to better understand the world and your market, your employees, your community… you can position yourself to succeed. If anything, I think that’s what any opportunity presents you with – positioning. Be it startups, an MBA, a techno-blog write-up, an introduction into a company, or an interview. How will you use your background to succeed? That’s how I view it.

How do you think education (and level of) plays a role in your job? What do you think you have in terms of [“requisite”] experience to be entrepreneurial?
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What consulting has taught me about weight lifting, and vice versa

Since I left business school at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School for my MBA, I’ve taken on the scary move of working full-time on the startup I co-founded with friends, Body Boss Fitness.  In a couple months of full-time startup-ship without the funds to really pay me (or anyone) a salary yet, I got all scared, and dipped my feet back into consulting part-time.  It’s been a few months doing this to put some money in my pocket, and I’ve taken on now two different consulting projects.  All the while, I also push Body Boss including traveling for sales and marketing and writing up blog posts like I just did here at Starbucks in Brookhaven on a Sunday.

I do enjoy supply chain consulting for sure… but I’m going to dip back out of consulting and give Body Boss my undivided attention for a long while.  If I say it out loud and put it on a blog post, I’ll have to stick to my word, right?  Well, all this experience has also brought out this strange affinity for writing my thoughts, and it’s about time that I write another article for my SC Ninja Skills blog. 

Reflecting on my previous life as a consultant (okay, some of my current, too) and my passion in weight lifting, I’ve seen a couple important take-aways that have been highly leverageable in both worlds.
  • Change is hard.  When you go to a gym for a few years consistently weekly, you see those who come and go, and those who stay true.  It’s clear those who are “newbs”.  They come in, sometimes work half-heartedly, and then either stick around and wonder they’re not seeing the gains they want or they just disappear as quickly as they arrived.  In consulting, similarly, companies who are looking to change make a difficult decision to embark on change.  However, it’s so easy for companies to lose sight of the goal and milestones to bring about sustainable change.
  • Even if you’re seasoned in the gym, you need to change to keep improving.  Companies who don’t embrace the necessity to change as the world evolves are likely to see growth become stagnant, and is most often the case, fade away.  It’s so easy for companies to keep going about their business managing the day-to-day without thinking larger and more strategically.  However, without change, it’s even easier to then let competition come in and take everything away (think Blackberry, Kodak, etc.).  In the gym, if you’re doing the same routine over and over again, your body adjusts and you no longer see gains in your strength.  It only takes six weeks before your body adapts.
  • Bringing an outside perspective can help.  As a consultant, this is almost the very reason we exist.  Similar to the point above, it’s so easy for companies to be complacent and continue to operate just as they have over the last 40 years.  However, bringing in fresh eyes from consultants, an outside hire, or otherwise, can easily give perspective from potentially competition, other industries, etc. In the gym, bringing a friend who is knowledgeable about working out can easily bring new routines, or even help spot when you’ve actually got poor form.
  • Establishing goals helps you achieve greater.  One of the first things you do as a trainer with a client is to run an assessment.  This includes understanding a baseline or where a client is, and where the client wants to go (i.e. lose weight, add 25 lbs to her squat, drop your 40 time by a half-second). Without knowing where you want to go, it’s hard to really push yourself and make it timely.  In the consulting world, if you don’t establish a baseline of “current state” and plan for a “future state” (Shangri-la), how do you know what to do, who to employ, how your customers will react (if any)?
  • Post-workout is just as important as in-workout.  In working out, it’s important to take care of your body after a workout.  That may include a post-workout protein shake to ensure you have the nutrients for recovery, or just daily nutrition in meals.  If you aren’t eating right and stretching and the like, it’s hard to sustain any gains you may have from a workout.  In consulting, implementing post-transformation catches is key to sustaining the change.  Tracking efforts via metrics is one way of ensuring change has sustainability; while establishing a culture embracing change is another sure-fire way of keeping the momentum going.
So what do you think about the parallels in working out and in consulting or even business in general?  How would you use the lessons learned in the weight room in consulting, or vice versa?
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Body Boss: Who we are and how we started — from Daryl’s point-of-view

It occurs to me that Body Boss has a great story.  A great story of why we’re here today with Body Boss trying to disrupt the “industry” of Team Strength and Conditioning.  
Darren Pottinger really started us on this path back in 2010/ 2011 of bringing more intelligence to working out – bringing regression and statistical modeling/ forecasting to training with a simple Excel model… yet can be built better and stronger.  Being the zealous and extraordinarily gifted problem-solver and programmer, Don Pottinger joined in on the fun looking to build the spreadsheet into something greater – an app for the masses.  
For several months, the brothers Pottinger iterated, and it was in the fall of 2011 when Andrew Reifman joined the team to bring his black magic of Design Creativity to the fold.  Andrew and Don were long-lost friends from Dunwoody High School.  After learning Andrew had built award-winning sites while working at various design agencies, Don asked Andrew to join.  Definitely loved his personal website.  I mean, how do I get little power bars like the X-Men cards I used to collect???  This Andrew guy is LEGIT.
I’m not sure when I really joined because I was consulting and always traveling.  Tell you what – if you can travel while trying to do your own startup, props to you because I don’t recall when I was adding value on a consistent basis.  SO enter me, Daryl sometime in that glorious assembly of the Dream Team.  Having played soccer at Tech with Don, we had become best buds for a while.  I bring to the field the execution and drive as well as some patience for the business administration – makes sense since I was entering Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in the accelerated One-Year Full-Time program May 2012.
Gifted with an extraordinarily talented team who also lived and breathed personal fitness, we entered Startup Riot as one out of 30 startups competing in a pitch-off of sorts in Atlanta in February 2012.  Many to this day will never forget our presentation where Darren stripped off his shirt to the hoots and hollers and affection of women… and men.  We were voted into the Top 5, and at the time, we were aiming to be a B2C company.  We were going to build an app based on the principles of intelligent personal fitness leveraging the growth of mobile and technology.  Though, we didn’t even have a product to show.  All we had was a dream.
After meeting with Georgia Tech and re-evaluating our strategy, we decided to shift to the B2B market – focusing our efforts on helping improve the feedback loop between Coaches and Players in sports teams and organizations.  As we reflect on our own past experiences, workouts were disseminated from Coaches to Players via sheets of paper and rarely, if ever, were those workout results ever returned to the Coaches. Even rarer was when the Coaches would take those sheets of workout results and plug them into something like Excel spreadsheets.  Tracking pieces of paper, writing it all down, transcribing the number into Excel… that’s about a 2-3 minute process for a single player.  If you’re a Coach of a team with 50 players, you can do the math and that’s a lot of wasted time.  Add to that other competitors’ focus on just the Coach… that’s not how TEAM sports are played.  We wanted to create a tool that engaged everyone on the team from the Coaches, Trainers, and the Players.  Afterall, Players are the ones who have the execute come game time.  That’s when Body Boss was really born.  
We built towards a vision without actually talking to too many other players or Coaches, but in August, we met with the Athletic Director of Centennial High School in Roswell, GA where we presented the initial design and vision of Body Boss.  Excited for what we were working on and seeing an immediate value, he invited us back after a few enhancements.  In December, we really locked in with the Head Football Coach and Head Baseball Coach at Centennial High School to trial Body Boss with their players starting January.  Everything since then has been… shall we say, history.  
So here we are, a bunch of Georgia Tech nerds + a talented Graphics Designer from University of Georgia.  Our home is Atlanta, GA, and our dreams lay in the stars.  Our backgrounds in soccer, weight training, certified personal fitness training, expertise in data and analytics, technical programming and design know-how, some great business sense, and a whole lotta drive… we’re aiming to change the world.  We’re not just a team… we’re a family looking out for one another.  We’re proud of the family and friends we’ve earned over the years, and we will make you all proud.  We’re here to disrupt the team strength and conditioning space with Body Boss.  Be excited.  Visit us at BodyBossFitness.com. Follow us.  @BodyBossFitness
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Second to market is the way to go (but don’t tell me that)

Going hand-in-hand with my most recent post about how everyone copies one another (How to Survive: Read the Market or Just Simply Read What’s On Your R&D Presentation), I received this in my email as part of my newsletter subscription to Strategy+Business — the article is titled “The Value of Being Second” by Oded Shenkar (see article here).

In the article, I nod my head in agreement with every word.  Shenkar cites a chapter from Eli Broad’s The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking.  I like to think I’m a thinker (else, why would I have a blog?), and I’m also a perceiver of the world.  That is, I like to sit back — no wait, I lay in bed unable to sleep at night — and reflect on the world around me.  And so I sit there and I think about how so many of the former companies of great stature, great products have just disappeared out of existence while new companies just take the world by storm.  Again, going back to my previous article where I talk about the Xerox’s and Best Buy’s of the world, it’s no longer needed or even desired to be the first kid on the block with a new product, service, or whatever else.  

As an aspiring entrepreneur, too, being a Co-Founder of Body Boss Fitness, I get to network with other entrepreneurs and hear lectures and presentations from successful entrepreneurs like Charlie Goetz (a Professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School), David Cummings (Founder and CEO of Pardot who just got acquired by ExactTarget for $95.5M after only a few years in existence!), etc.  They all say the same message that Shenkar speaks of in his article and what Broad wrote in his book — the market is changing and no longer is innovation and first-movers necessary to be successful.  Instead, it’s the guys who follow the first-movers who capitalize on the first-movers’ failures and mistakes, and they get to leverage the companies coming in second don’t have to educate the market.  Of course, second-movers come in with a new twist as the many entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to would say, including myself.  I especially like the analogy Shenkar cites from Broad: it’s like hiking.  The guy in the front has to clear the brush and is getting cut up and does all the hardwork.  However, he paves the way for the guy following who just simply walks the same path with less investment.

Of course, there are many benefits, too, of being the innovator and first to the market including brand name and access to the technology and more.  And then there’s me, whom I very much hope to be a builder of the future, and wouldn’t mind being the guy at the front of the line hiking.  I want my name out there because if done right, too, the first-mover can keep its place as number 1 in the market place.  The key here is the need to also continually innovate.  (I’m finally getting around to tying this post to my previous post.)  If you can continually innovate, you’ll keep ahead of the curve and you’ll reap the rewards and leave second, third-, n-movers behind you.  Don’t be stagnant.  Or be stagnant and be content to play second fiddle in the future (or no play at all).

And so in closing, I want you all to appreciate coming in second because when done right, coming in second just positions you for first place next year.  But if you’re willing to invest and keep innovation high and strong, keeping the pole position is certainly achievable.  When I hike, yes, I like to lead.  I may be the cut up by the brush and I have to be the one to clear it, but I like that. I like the challenge.  I’m okay with paving the way for others to follow because in the end, it’s for the good of the group.  Do know, though, that while I’m in front, I’m running.  So I’m keeping my place at the front.  You’ll just have to work that much harder to keep up.

[1] Shenkar, Oded. The Value of Being Second.  In Strategy-Business. [Website]. Retrieved November 1, 2012, from  http://www.strategy-business.com/article/ac00041?gko=ba14e&cid=BL20121025&utm_campaign=BL20121025
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