Kevin Harrington was an original “Shark” on the hit TV show Shark Tank, creator of the infomercial, and pioneer of As Seen on TV brand. His business ventures have produced more than $5 billion in global sales and his secrets to success have empowered many to turn their own dreams into multi-million dollar reality.
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Kevin Harrington was an original “Shark” on the hit TV show Shark Tank, creator of the infomercial, and pioneer of As Seen on TV brand. His business ventures have produced more than $5 billion in global sales and his secrets to success have empowered many to turn their own dreams into multi-million dollar reality.
Chapter Summaries
Resource Links
Click here to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are available
My last 30 years, I'm spending helping entrepreneurs. And that really is why I wrote the book Mentor to Millions because when I went on Shark Tank, you know what, there's two things people wanted when they went on that show. Number one, they wanted money. Number two and more so they wanted...
Greg Muzzillo:Hello and welcome to Million Dollar Monday. I'm your host, Greg Muzzillo bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams. I understand big dreams. I turned an investment of$200 and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream, Proforma, that today is a half billion dollar company. I am excited to introduce our guest today, Kevin Harrington. For more than 30 years, Kevin has empowered entrepreneurs and innovative business leaders to turn their dreams into multi-million dollar reality. Kevin was an original"shark" on the hit TV show Shark Tank. He's the creator of the infomercial. He's the pioneer of As Seen On TV brand and co-founding board member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. His business ventures have produced over 5 billion. That's with a"B" 5 billion global sales, the launch of more than 500 products and the making of dozens of millionaires. He's launched extraordinarily successful products like the Food Saver, Ginsu knives, and many more. He's worked with amazing celebrities like Billy Mays, Tony Little, Jack LaLanne and George Foreman to name a few. 20 of Kevin's companies have each top$100 million in revenue. His newly published book, Mentor to Millions contains lots of great secrets to success in business relationships and much more. Kevin Harrington. Thank you very much for joining me for Million Dollar Monday.
Kevin Harrington:Greg, great to be here, but it's a lot of, a lot of interesting stuff's going on in the world. Let's let's hang out and talk about it.
Greg Muzzillo:Let's do that, but let's start at the beginning because this show is for big dreamers. So let's start at the beginning. Like where did you grow up and what were some of your early education experiences work experience? Most importantly, what were some big dreams maybe you can recall when you were younger.
Kevin Harrington:So I love that. Tell the story, cause I've lived it and been a, been lot of, uh, interesting developments from this, but I'm one of six kids. I'm the fourth. Uh, so by the time things got to me, it was getting a little tougher. My dad was a bartender and and one day he said, Hey, I've saved up enough money to open up my own bar. Harrington's Irish pub. And so when I was 11, he said, come on in. I want you to, I want you to help out, but I wasn't just washing dishes and serving food at the end of the day, I'd be in there counting the money with him and he'd be like, okay, we got this from the bar and this from the food. And, and you know, and we'd look at all the costs. And, and so he was teaching me so a couple of years later, he said, it's time for you to start your own business. You're only making a dollar an hour working for me. And, you know, I can hire a lot of people at a buck an hour, you know, cause that's what the minimum wage was way back when I was at, when I was 11 years old, I guess. Right. So now I started a driveway, sealing business, you know, sealing asphalt and knocking on doors and I was just door to door and I chose, Hey, come on out. Let me show you the cracks in your driveway. Not in this in the winter water gets in there, it's going to freeze and triple the size of that crack. I could put some filler in there, beautify your driveway for$60. You know, boom. I was doing 10, 12, 15 of these a week. And while I was in high school. And so when I got to college, my dad said, well, guess what? That part-time business in the summer is not going to be good enough for you because you got to pay for your education, your books, your school, your utilities, your apartment, your car, your insurance. There's a lot of money for a kid. And I said, what do you think that is? You need a full-time business. So I thought what's, full-time heating and air conditioning. It's the summer and the winter, right? So I started a heating and air conditioning installing furnaces. Now the reason I did it is I tested. I was able to get names from the courthouse, all the new homeowner transactions in the entire counties of Cincinnati, Indiana, Kentucky. And we called the people and said, Hey, first of all, you just bought a house. You've got great credit. You want to have the best of the best in that new house. I said, we had telemarketers. Call them, set up appointments for me to go out. And the basic pitch was, Hey, we're gonna, we're going to send a furnace cleaner out and we're going to do a safety check and we'll have a guy there to tell you about your furnace. And that was me. And so everybody had a pilot light back in those days, right? So a pilot light burned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even though you only using your furnace, maybe, you know, four or five months out of a year. And so at that time carrier had just created the sparking mission. And this was 1977. And so everybody wanted this new spark ignition because there was no pilot, like we're installing 10, 12 of those a week also, plus air conditioning systems. By the end of my freshman year of college, I had 25 employees, six trucks, and we were doing the equivalent of six million in sales it was about 1.5 million back then. And my mom wasn't too happy, but I quit school. So anyway, make a long story short. I ended up very labor-intensive and it was great money. I made cash and sold the business. One of my employees and now I'm buying real estate. It was a younger entrepreneur with cash in my pocket from a selling my business. And I bought homes. I bought office buildings. I was becoming a real estate mogul, I thought, right. All of a sudden, one day I'm sitting at home, I just ordered cable television. And back in the early, this is n ow 1980 and 1980. They only had 30 channels. So I never forget going through my first, my first time going through all 30 channels, b ecause until then we only had like four or five channels. Remember the d ays Greg, right? I get ESPN 24 hours of sports, CNN, 24 hours of news, HBO, 25 hours a movie. I get to channel 30, the last channel. And it was blank. It was just these bars on the screen. And I've called the cable company. I said, Hey, the 29 channels are great, but I'm paying you for 30. And still that last channel was brand new. They don't have a budget for 24 hours a day. It's an 18 hour day channel. It's called discovery channel. Okay. So I said, well, you mean, there's nothing that's going to be on there for six hours. They said, exactly. So I said, what if I have something to put on there? They said, come on down and talk to us. I did. And I started getting ideas for products. And so I used to go to a lot of trade shows and I was very active entrepreneurially, but the Philadelphia home show, I'm watching this guy with a knife in his hand, cut through a muffler through, uh, a big thick rope. And he says, it's called the Ginsu knife. And so I watched him sell$2,000 worth Ginsu knives in one pitch. And when he got done, I tried to get up to him, he started it again, did the exact same words and another two grand in sales. Finally, after the third time he did it, he took a break and I went up and introduced myself. I said, I'm Kevin Harrington. I'm an entrepreneur. I said, I've never seen an amazing pitch like that. You're collecting thousands of dollars. And, and, and then it hit me. I said are you familiar with what's going on with this whole cable thing? He says, what do you mean? He said, channel 30 has six hours of nothing. I said, why don't we film your pitch? I'll take it down to discovery, cut a deal. So be partners. And then I'll go do a deal with discovery and let's see what happens. And he said, boom, we shook hands. He filmed it. It cost me$3,000 to film it because it was one tape. This guy had been doing this for 12 years. And that show ended up selling hundreds of millions of dollars in product from that point forward. And then I went to Discovery. This was all in Cincinnati, Ohio. Then I went to Discovery Nationwide. And I said, you know, I know you don't get downtime. You got, it's kind of worthless. Why don't I give you a thousand bucks a day for it? And let's sign a contract. I had a multi-year contract 365 grand a year. I own six hours a day on discovery. It was generating tens of millions of dollars in sales. And that was my birth in the business. We went public on the New York stock exchange, not too long after that. And we went from a dollar and I was the founder. Um, you know, we ended up having another large shareholder, but the two of us controlled the company. And we grew, the stock went from a dollar, a share to$20 a share. We had a$550 million market cap, and I had a big chunk of that. So, um, make a long story short. That was really my first I'll call it the chips off the table. Right. Um, and then of course, you know, here we were New York stock exchange, the whole thing. Then I get the phone call from Mark Burnett. And he's like, Hey, I'm doing this new show called Shark Tank. And I'm like, Mark, I know you do crazy things to those people on that, uh, on that survivor show, what do you do to people on Shark Tank? But he's like, Hey, no, it's not that kind of show. It's a business show. And so I went out and met with him and the crazy thing I said, Mark, if you, if, if taking pitches from people and making your mind up, if you're going to invest in their business is a Shark. Then I've been a shark for 30 years because this is what I do every day. He said, what do you mean? I said, I go to the house where show the hardware, show the fitness show, the beauty show, toy, fair golf show, et cetera. I'm a product entrepreneur. I've, you know, I own as seen in TV, Inc as CNN tv.com. And we know from the Jack Lalane Juicer to the Tony Little gazelle to the George Foreman to Billy Mays. You name it, we've been there and had an amazing run. Last part of my story though, Greg is now here we are in a different world today than we were 10 years ago. And of course with COVID much different world in the last year, but, um, television viewership has dropped by 60%. There's there's about 70 million cord cutters out there that don't have cable anymore. So, um, I saw the handwriting on the wall. I mean, I own, like I said, As Seen on TV.com sold it eight years ago. Why? Because I knew that it was you going this way. And so I got out at the peak, made some great money, took some more chips off the table. And I focused and shifted everything to social media, digital, Facebook, Instagram, all the things that we do now. So we, we still, I I'm, I'm in a lot of different businesses now because after a few years on Shark Tank and a lot of fun there, I've been helping and sitting on boards, I'm on, eight public boards and I have about 35 investments that have been you know, fueling my day to day life of staying in touch with my deals and stuff. So, um, but we shifted, we got out of I mean, we still do products and we still sell a lot of stuff on HSN and QVC, but I'm no longer the big As Seen on TV guy, because it's a very risky business. Now it's really shifted to a consignment business. So if you've got a product and you want to get it into Walmart and target and Walgreens and all these places, you ship as many of them in as they'll take, but if it doesn't sell, you're going to get it back. And it becomes a very risky undertaking.
Greg Muzzillo:Yeah. So Kevin, I think most of the listeners surely want to hear, because anybody with big dreams, especially in business has watched Shark Tank tell us, because I think a lot of people ask, are you really investing your money in those deals? Like you see on TV?
Kevin Harrington:Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, you know, I'll be very certain to say that Mark Burnett never invested a dime in any of the deals. Okay. And I don't mean that in a mean way, M ark would come down, w e'd film all morning. I l ike to do five, six deals and w ell presentation, nobody invested anything. And h e c ome down, he's like, Hey, what's going on? He says, if you want t o, if you want t his show to be successful, we got to see some investing. We're like, okay, Mark, which of the five deals that we've seen so far, would you have put your money into? Okay. And the reality is yes. I mean, I get a deal. I wrote a lady, a check for$500,000 and six months later, she closed the door and sent me a pile of unpaid bills. And so yes, that was my loss. And, you know, i t is what it is, but over, you know, I would say that, you know, all the deals that I did, I made my money back and it was, it was, it was ended up to be a good, a very powerful thing because Shark Tank now has b ecome, it's the most successful business reality show in the history of television and believe it or not.
Greg Muzzillo:All right. So you got to tell us, tell us about one or two, if you're allowed to, what are two of the craziest or worst investments you ever made from shark tank and tell us if you wouldn't mind about the best.
Kevin Harrington:Yeah. So, you know, one of the strategies I had upfront, because I, you know, um, I come from the TV business and I'm sitting there on Shark Tank bidding on a deal and, um, negotiating against, um, Barbara Corcoran for one called city kitty, it was a cat toilet training product. And so the cat jumps on the toilet, goes to the bathroom and jumps off the toilet, pretty cool concept. And it's guaranteed to work or you get your money back. There's 30 bucks. Give it a try. So now people say, why did you invest in a cat toilet training? Well, because when she came out and showed that video of the cats going up on the toilet, the entire crew and staff and sharks were all howling laughing. And I said, this, I want to own this because I'm going to get this on the late night talk shows, I'm going to get this on the daytime talk shows and that I did. So that went from zero to$10 million, over a short period of time with millions of dollars in profit. And, and it was just an unbelievable deal because this was CitiKitty. And it was a perfect product. You know, we were on Good Morning America, the Today Show Wendy Williams, the view, et cetera, et cetera. And I didn't have to spend money to get on those shows. It was all free publicity. So that was a good one. Um, and you know I, don't like to talk about bad ones and I'll tell you why Barbara Corcoran was very forthcoming and some of her bad ones. And she said, the worst deal I ever did was with so-and-so and, and well, that was a terrible deal. And she ended up getting sued and having an out of court settlement with that so-and-so. So I just take the high road. I did mention that I did lose a half a million on one. I won't say who it was though.
Greg Muzzillo:That's okay. We want to keep you out of litigation and Million Dollar Monday out of litigation. You've met, you built hundreds of millions of dollars worth of businesses. Tell us about some of your lowest lows, your biggest struggles. Tell us some of the things that you did, uh, like the kitty litter thing that we're really very successful strategically.
Kevin Harrington:I'm gonna go back. Um, it was in the nineties and I wasn't highly sophisticated financially. Um, I was, it was a private company and this was before we ended up going public and all that. And one day I had given, you know, I had a merchant account and I was doing 50 million a year in business, a million bucks a week. And so, um, one day I had given the bank$500,000 as a reserve as for them to hold against my merchant account for returns and chargebacks. You're familiar with that process of getting banking, getting bank credit cards, right? So one day my accountant comes in as a Monday morning and he says, Hey, all our sales from the weekend, we had a big weekend, a couple of million bucks came through the bank grabbed all that money, and they're not going to give it to us. They they're exercising the clause in the contract that they, if they feel they need more reserve, they at their option can choose how much it is at their own choosing. And just draw it down out of our account. Now, meanwhile, I didn't realize I had signed something like that. Okay. I mean, you know, when you're signing for a merchant account, yeah. Let me I'll sign the papers. Right. But what it says is they're going to grab any amount of money they want at any time from your account. So here I was without 2 million bucks and we were out of business. And so, um, I ended up sitting with some good lawyers and then with them, because that was my working capital. It was my cash flow. It was my media money. It was my salaries. It was, you know, nobody got paid that week. And so we were out of business technically because we had no media, we had no shows running. We couldn't pay our employees. And finally, we worked out a deal to let them keep some of that 2 million, 400 grand. And then we got 1.6 back, we ended up surviving a merging, et cetera. But this is the learning curve from this we had one of our products. We had a dozen products on the air. One of them, we were getting a lot of defective merchandise from China. And so the boxes come from China. We ship them. We don't open everyone up to see if they work. You know, we do a QA check over in China. So we were getting 20% of these, this one item back, people were getting it, plugging it in, and it didn't work. They were upset, but it was very small number of products, but they were calling the bank and the bank shut us down 2 million bucks from us. Right. So what do we do today? We set up separate merchant accounts for each product and each business, because we can't, you don't, if you have a problem with that one product, great. Shut that product down. Don't close me down the whole company, right. We learned a ton there. We brought on some really top finance guys. I brought on a mentor and I know we're going to talk about why mentors are so important. I brought on a finance mentor that just changed my life. And it was an amazing, magical transformation for me.
Greg Muzzillo:So let's go back to when you first learned, maybe it was a phone call, I'm not sure what it was, that, that they had taken your money. You had no clue. They could even do it. And technically you were bankrupt or out of business, whatever the right words are, what got you through Kevin? Because sometimes that knock is enough to knock people out. So what kept you going and who kept you going? How did you keep going?
Kevin Harrington:Couple of things. Number one, I, say I pursued getting out of this mess with the same aggressiveness that I u sed to build the company. Okay. It was a f ull t ime job for me to get, get this out of the way. And so basically I said, I said to these guys that w ere literally g oing t o put us out of business, that if they put us out of business, they were going to be, I was going to come after them for closing us down for, some small little situation with one of our products and that they were going to be sitting on the hook for major liability. And my lawyers were obviously voicing all of this in a very aggressive way. And, um, and make a long story short. T hey realized, I think they were a little bit, way over aggressive in what they did. And once they realized how devastating it was to us, that's when we were able to negotiate a fair deal where they could keep some of it, not all of it. Right. So it, you know, it, was a major learning curve in dealing with these guys. And I mean, even to this day, you still hear about all the troubles people have with their merchant accounts. It is not an easy situation to get a merchant account today. And so anyway, make a long story short. Yeah. U m, I used that, just, I pulled in all the top a dvisors. I had lawyers, I had accountants, I had everybody that was part of the solution to this problem. And ultimately it worked and we got, we got 1.6 million back.
Greg Muzzillo:All right. So that was a low, low, and congratulations. And thanks for sharing it because there's a lot of inspiration in hearing that there is a way maybe a mountain shows up in front of us and maybe the path isn't over it, but it might be around it, or it might be under it, but there's a path it isn't laying down and quitting. So tell us about one or more of the highest highs, one of the most successful strategies you've implemented.
Kevin Harrington:Well, okay. So, I'm going to tell you about something in this. I had amazing highs with, with Tony Little, you know, we did the AB isolator. It did, it did 350 million. We did the, um, the target training videos that did over 300 million. The gazelle ended up over a billion dollars. Tony Little was my favorite guy, but I got to tell you, here's a great story. I'll tell you about it. Have you seen this product called Celsius? No. Never heard of it. Okay. That's interesting because I got involved with this six years ago and the CEO worked for me at one time and he called and said, Kevin, I really could use some of your advice and some of your help and your mentoring. And, you know, I'd love if you could come down and meet myself and the team, and maybe we can get you involved with the company. And so it's an energy drink and I'm like, so, okay. I took a look and their company was a couple million dollar company. They had just raised some money with a little public company thing, like a blind pool. And their stock was 10 cents a share. They had a market value of a few million dollars. Okay. And they're going head to head against red bull and monster. So you got a big challenge here, right? And so they needed money. They needed this, they needed all kinds of stuff. Well, I said to them, I said, look, yes, retail distribution, red bull it's in all the stores. That's obviously that was their path for distribution. I said, that's great, but let's also consider direct to the consumer, Amazon. And, also let let's talk about it influencers. So we started, I brought in Flo Rida, the rapper, and he had 25 million followers. He started putting out videos every day. We bring him to the trade shows. He was doing private concerts for the buyers at 711 and Publix. And now we're in 711 and now we're in Publix. And we also then said, well, wait, this, this world has changed. As Celsius, didn't have 20 million to go spend on TV. We had to use influencers, Instagram fitness influencers, a thousand of them, what are they doing? They're talking about Celsius on a daily basis. So you get the update. Greg, let me tell you where we are now.$1.4 billion value from a couple million. And this is just over a few years time. In fact, in May of this year, the company was only about a$200 million a year company. It's gone from 200 million, to 1.4 billion in just this short period of time since COVID and market value. It's a public company. The stock went from 10 cents to$20 a share. So, I'm one of the guys who got in on the ground floor. So, you know what that means. It's another taking some chips off the table. This is what I love. I mean, I love public companies. I love, I mean, that's two stories of public companies. I had another public company. We took from a dollar, a share to$18 a share, and I had millions of shares. So I'm just, I love getting in on the ground floor. I, you know, I invest in the right deals at the right time and just wait for the right things to happen and put my strategies into it. But the big thing that I'm really a huge proponent of today when COVID hit, Oh, pier one imports, what did they do? They closed up. Why? Because they are a retail business, they had no direct to the consumer business. Really a buddy of mine bought the entire business for$30 million. And it's all going to be online now. And so this is where the action is. It's where are things moving? Obviously, Amazon, they proved it. I mean, there's a company that has crushed it across the board. If you don't have an online e-commerce strategy, you better get one quick. And so this is my focus with helping entrepreneurs build their business is focusing on customer acquisition, online marketing and Facebook, Instagram, digital influencers, et cetera. Um, Instagram is big. So a lot of great opportunities out there for new entrepreneurs today.
Greg Muzzillo:So I have to admit to you and kudos to you. If somebody would have come to me with the Celsius idea, another energy drink, I would've said, I think I probably would not have seen the opportunity to, I think I probably would have said, listen, there's red bull and all these other things out there, I'm not sure there's room for anybody else in that category. So kudos to you for Kevin, seeing the opportunity and thinking differently about where maybe there could be an opportunity where red bull or other competitors weren't playing.
Kevin Harrington:The basic difference. Celsius was a healthy energy drink. And so we got into all the gyms and the GNCs and vitamin shops and all those places real easy. And they also had seven clinical studies that when you drink one can of Celsius, it burns 140 calories in your body without you don't even have to move just sit. So the fitness people really loved it because they could drink one of these in the morning before their workout and feel pumped and juiced and ready to go. So that was the niche they had and the seven clinical studies. And that's what I, that's why I got involved. So it, you know, again, you need all the information when you're looking at an investment, why did I do it? Because there was some unique positioning that they have.
Greg Muzzillo:Yeah. Well, next time you come over to visit Kevin, you got to bring some of that with you.
Kevin Harrington:Okay. Absolutely all over the house.
Greg Muzzillo:Okay. Here we are today. You're very successful yourself. You've helped dozens and maybe way more than dozens of people become successful. You've created millionaires, multi-millionaires now the day that you've achieved so much in business, what big dream or dreams do you have now?
Kevin Harrington:So great question. Uh I tell it this way, the first 30 years of my life, I spent really trying to figure out what the heck I wanted to do, right? When you're, when you're 22 years old, you don't know what you want to do with the rest of your life. So, but at time I got 28, I was doing infomercials. And so that's, that's what I said right? So then I spent the next 30 years building dozens of businesses in the world of SUV, TV, and products, and the, again, the Jack LaLannes and the George Foreman's and the Tony Littles and building 5 billion in sales and public companies. And that was my next 30 years. So that takes me till I was 60. I'm going to be 64 next week. And so I say my last 30 years, and I plan to live till I'm 90, my dad, 93, God bless. Right. My last 30 years, I'm spending helping entrepreneurs. And that really, this is why I wrote the book Mentor to Millions because when I went on Shark Tank, do you know what? There's two things people wanted when they went on that show, number one, they wanted money. Number two and more so they wanted mentoring, advise, Rolodex. They wanted a partner that they could rely on, like Kevin Harrington, or Mark Cuban, or Mr. Wonderful or Daymond John. Right? I mean, they would, people would call me after on the show. I turned them down. I'm not going to invest. A week later. I get home. Hey, Kevin, you know, I pitched you on shark tank. And I know I wanted 500 grand for 20% of my company. What if I was to give you 20% of my company for no money? You just advise me. And I'm like, Oh really? Okay. So that's took on a whole new level for me, but I'm not talking about just equities, just helping people across the board. Because by the way, I turned down equity every single week, you know, people that offer me equity in their company. Why? Because they want to offer it to me. But what do they want in return? They want to talk to me every day or every week or every month or every whatever. And I don't have time for everybody. Right. And I, I don't want 20% of something that isn't going to grow to some great big company. So, you know, just because someone offers it to you doesn't mean you take it. Right. So, I mean, it's very interesting the other day, I offered Robert, Herjavec a piece of a company for no, you know, a piece of equity in a company. And he just said, Kevin, he says, thank you so much. He said, I just don't have the time. So thank you. But I can't take it. And so, you know, that it is what it is, but my goal is to help mentor entrepreneurs and people that want to be in business for themselves, because I made so many mistakes, Greg, and we talked about a few of them here today. Yeah, it's been a good run, but I can share a lot of great stuff. And it's also one of the things I say that we should look for in a mentor is do they have exit strategies for the business? I mean, I bought and sold dozens and dozens of companies and, and have sold my stake in many of them too. And that's the key
Greg Muzzillo:Taking those chips off the table. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Kevin, you are an inspiration and I love your dream of mentoring. Others really. That's kind of the whole vision here of Million Dollar Monday is really helping people with big dreams and aspiring entrepreneurs have great advice from really successful people. I love your book. Thank you. It tells me where your heart is, right? You're not asking for any money or shares in stock, and there's hundreds of millions of dollars of success advice in here. So Kevin want, thank you very much for joining me and to all of you out there. Thank you for joining me for Million Dollar Monday. Monday is the start of the business week for all of you. My hope is that for some of you today is the day you decide to take massive action in the pursuit of your big dream. Thank you.