YouSaid · the spoken record

Bobby Trussell

lines on the record: 81
first: 2018-10-22
most recent: 2018-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think a lot of it's luck. I think it's a combination of perseverance. You know, if I'm going to pat myself on the back, it's for I kept trying different things. You know, I had the ionizer business and the horses. I'm definitely not smarter than other people. I think I'm a risk taker and I got very fortuitously matched up with a product that was Significantly better than what was out there, and it was something that no one else had.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to have the ability though and the mindset to take risks. But when you don't have anything, it's so risky if you think about it. And the other thing is I think it's important to have the propensity to think big. And so I always kind of had that feeling is you just got to keep trying. Gotta keep saying yes, and you got to keep praying and things will break.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was in a situation where all that I knew had kind of dried up and gone away, horses. And when you're 40 years old and your resume says horse, it's not like you can go get a job at a bank. Or an insurance company, you really have to consider doing something entrepreneurial, which you were probably well equipped for, because I think you're more equipped for that when you're 40 than when you're 20.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was part of it. And the other thing was, I never really saw myself as the CEO of a public company, talking to investors. And there's guys who can do this better than me is what I knew from the start. And yeah, I felt like I had been in it long enough. I kind of wanted to cash in my chips and do something different.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was one of the main concerns of the investors. Is this real or is it a fad? We were able to convince them that it's real and convince the public markets that it is real because it is.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we would have said, okay, but I never got the call because I believe that they thought that we would go the way of the waterbed and that this was a fad.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, all those years back in the early, I mean, late 90s and early 2000s, I was expecting to get a call from an industry player like Cly.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. We are definitely in the high end, you know, luxury, whatever you want to call it. We are able to operate exclusively there because the product is just so good. It really is a breakthrough in sleep science. It adapts to your weight and your shape and your temperature. And so your mattress is adapting to you instead of forcing you to adapt to it. What we always would say is, you know, an inner spring pushes up against you, whereas this breaks away from you. So you can see that we have a better product, and that's why we're able to charge more.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were probably then about 5-6% of the US mattress market, but we were a much larger percentage of the $2,000 and up price point.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we sold a little. I did get a little bit of a payday, but I got more options. And so now... You know, this horse guy, I'm CEO of a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. We're on ringing the bell there when we went public. And so this is just to me the total answer to a prayer times 100.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was a lot different? Because their thing was they wanted to buy into companies that they were already growing, already profitable, and they were comfortable with management. They didn't want to run it. So they pretty much let me do my thing. There was an equity kicker involved that we hit certain numbers, we would get another 50 million, which they didn't really think we'd hit, but we blew the doors off and we hit it quite easily the next year. It turned out to be... One of the all time great private equity deals for them. And then they took us public three months later. So it was like they didn't even have their money up for a year and they made like 10x”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they stayed on as a consultant for, as Michael did for a couple years, but not as much, no, certainly not. And my bosses now was the board, which was two private equity companies.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there was a, in the early 2000s, after we had emerged, my Swedish friends decided that they wanted to sell a partial interest because they needed it for their other companies. This is only one of their 10 or 15 foam companies. But the investors were slightly worried about having a minority interest with a private Swedish company. That they don't really know that much about. And so the Swedes came back and they said, well, we don't want to be minority, so we'll sell the whole thing. So anyway, that's what the 350 million was. The purpose of the transaction was to take the Swedes out. Not a ton of it went into the company, actually.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had the manufacturing plant and they had the IP and during the 90s I couldn't draw much of a salary but what I did do is sell little bits and pieces of equity to friends and family and stuff. So I was able to keep going based upon selling it down. So very many people I talked to who have startups will say, oh, I'm never going to sell controlling interests. I got to control them.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we did have a contract, but while that first year they sure could have, probably the second or third years too, but then we probably were hitting it, but it's still a contract with a Swedish company. What have they challenged it? I mean, it was very flimsy. But what I didn't realize is from their standpoint, they had the same problem. We were 60 to 65% of their world sales. So their company was only valuable pretty much because of that contract. So we both were very highly motivated to merge. The problem was, how do you value?”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As far as my making money personally, I never was able to pay much of a salary because we weren't making any money until we merged in 2000.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It was dominated by the four S's, Ceeley, Simmons, Sirta, and Springer. At the time, and they all were interprings. And they didn't even try to differentiate as a product. It was a commodity and they sold on price and terms. You know, it's 50% off and you never have to pay. That's how they sold it. So we came along with our message in our magazine ad saying, hey, We have something that's a better wheel. We have something that can help you in the one-third of your life that you're sleeping. And so it's a product that can have a big impact.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started advertising in the New Yorker magazine at first. And my main goal was to get our name out there. And so we started selling in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. And then one day I got a phone call from the New Yorker, our first magazine, and he said, you know, you guys have an 800 number. That means you're eligible for direct response rates. I said, oh, okay. 6000. I said, I've been paying $25,000 and I could be paying $6,000. And he said, yep, that changed my world. Because now I could advertise almost indiscriminately. I could be everywhere. And it was at this time that Brookstone was selling, trying to sell mattresses and people became gradually more and more aware and they would walk into the store and say, that's the one I read about in the USA today. And so that's what got us going with mattresses.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll pull out a sharper image if you sell the mattress too. And he said, Oh man. Okay. Wow. So he put a twin size mattress by this time they've got 200 stores and they were selling one mattress per store every six weeks And I was waiting for the call from him to say, Bobby, we tried. Yeah. But I never got that call because then it was one every five weeks. And then six months later it was won every four or three weeks. And it ended up being like two a week as the product got more and more. Momentum And the reason it got more momentum is because parallel to this we had opened up another channel called the direct response channel. And that's the other huge moment when we were able to figure out how to sell direct to the public.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had this medical endorsement. We had 10,000 chiropractors selling it. Of course, they had another 15,000 chiropractors selling it all over Europe. And so that was our core. And we use that as a springboard. And so, okay, we're in Brookstone. We're going great guns. And I told Mike Anthony, the CEO of Brookstone, that I wanted to sell, wanted them to sell the mattresses also, not that we had the American style mattress thickness. And he said, Bob. Our stores are tiny. We can't fit mattresses in there. We're a men's gift shop. And I said, okay. So I started selling to sharper image, their arch rival. Brookstone had an absolute cow about that. And they called me. Mike, Anthony called me, and he said, Bob, we want you to not to sell to Sharp Rimage. It's going to hurt our business. And I said, okay.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the chiropractors never did really get going with the mattresses. They were kind of pillow people, but we started selling in a store chain called Relax the Back, who had like 30 or 40 stores started in Texas. And when we first started marketing it, we marketed the mattress as, hey, if you have back pain, you got to have this mattress. Similarly to the analogy I use is Volvo when they started if your number one concern is safety you got to have this car right exactly”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, but the mattresses came in about 1994 because what we were able to do is customize the products for the U.S. market. In other words, we took that three-inch overlay and we laminated it to a five-inch base of normal high density foam. So now we had an eight-inch foam mattress, which almost doubled the price So now we're selling a queen for like $12.99 or $13.99. But now we had something that could appeal to the U.S. market.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My goal was always to get to 100 million. It seemed like it took us forever, but we did $300,092, then 2.6 million, then $6.5 to $13, then 28, then 45.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that 10% interest that they swapped for that container of pillows, we had to do that four more times. So they ended up owning 45% of my company. So me and my US investors, we owned 55.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a lot of tension and stress, and we got along great. I mean, he was very exacting, and he had his own ideas of how to market, and sometimes I didn't agree. And we would kind of have it out. So there were some stormy days, but we trusted each other. And one thing I learned about him is if you do what you say you're going to do, no matter how it turns out, you're going to be all right. And the same with me and him. He would always do what he said he was going to do. So we had a very close working relationship. And yeah, it was difficult. We had a lot of... Ups and downs”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The answer is yes I think if you sold it for 30, you'd sell less. And that is what Michael Magnuson wanted. That's why he chose me is because his vision was this was not a product that would be discounted. And he was afraid any other company would discount it and it would become just like everybody else. We have something no one else has. So why should you discount? It's high end and it actually performs. I would get letters from strangers saying, Bobby, I've had a sore neck for 30 years and now it's gone. That's when I knew. We were really on to something when I got these letters, and that's what Michael was his vision, is how to position the product as high-end.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. He said we're going to have to sell this, Bobby. We're going to have to sell this at $90. And I said, really? Because the chiropractor is selling it for more like $70. And he said, yeah, because just to make the numbers work, I said, okay, whatever you want to do. So they sold it for $90. And it absolutely started selling like cake.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got 100 stores. We're going to buy four for each store, and you've got to give me 100 demos. And I said, okay, and I hung up the phone and talk about high-fiving. I mean, that was the seminal moment. We had never sold anywhere near 500 pillows”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, it's very nice, but we sell seven pillows and we don't need any more. And yours would have to sell for a lot more than our other seven pillows. I said, okay. So we hang up. Ten minutes later, the Secretary comes in. Is that Steve Rich in Brookstone again? And he said, you know, maybe we'll take this down to research after all. And he had not taken it out of the box. And when he did at my, I made him promise he had the same reaction, the emotional reaction with the slow comeback foam. So taking it down to research meant showing his wife. His wife slept on it. And she said, this is the best thing I've seen. So then he calls me back the next week and he says, okay, you got me on your side. Now I have to pitch it to the purchasing board. And then he calls me back, okay, we're going to buy 500.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And finally, I don't know, two months later, my secretary comes in and says, Bobby, there's a Steve Rich from Brookstone on line two. And I said, I think I'll take that. And he was calling me to tell him to stop calling him because he had a note on his desk every day, Bob Trussell. Bob Trussell, Bob Trussell, tempered it. And I said, okay, but all I ask is one thing. Make sure you took that pillow out of the box because you can't tell by looking at it.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so we're walking through the mall, and she said, Oh, there's Brookstone. They sell pillows, go show them your pillow. I said, okay. So I went there and showed some 18-year-old kid the pillow, and he didn't know anything. And he said, well, I can give you the number of headquarters in New Hampshire. I said, oh, great. So he gave me the number of headquarters and I called them the next week and I got to the purchasing department and he said, oh, you need to talk to Steve Rich. I left a message for Steve Rich, and I sent him a pillow too. And so I would call Steve every day for weeks and weeks and weeks and leave him a message.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and we always wanted, of course, to get it into stores. And in November of'92, of course, now we're still broke. I got no salary. And we went up to Cincinnati to the mall up there. And we do some Christmas shopping, which is really more like Christmas browsing. I'm bored to tears. And my wife, Martha, said, bring your pillow and you can find a store that'll sell it.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I always will have a fine place in my heart for chiropractors because they really got us going. And we eventually sold or have 10,000 chiropractors, which I believe we still do now selling the products in their practice.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, you had a letter on top of the pillow, and there's a big box, and it said, This is a tempored Swedish neck pillow. It's the best thing since sliced bread, yada, yada, yada. It's yours free. If you order four. And if you don't like it, all we ask is you let us pick it up at our expense. So we got 25% of them to buy four pills, and that was the major breakthrough that turned us out of the nosedive. And so all of a sudden from that 500 chiropractors, we had 125 of them who were buying four pills a month. And we were selling it to the chiropractors for $49. So we did about $300,000 in sales that first year, all in the last four months of the year, pretty much. Wow.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if I just mailed him one? And the guy says, well, I guess it could work. So we mailed 500 pillows to 500 unsuspecting chiropractors.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't still weren't cheap, but the chiropractors kept saying You ought to make a pillow out of this stuff because that was more in their comfort zone selling pillows. They stole those anyway. And so they helped me design a pillow along with Danfoam. And they came out with a pillow probably right around then, right around July of 1992. So then I said, okay, now we got another product. And I asked the chiropractors we were working with, how would you go about selling it if it were you? And they said, well, it's really a unique product. You need to get it in people's hands. And I said, well, gee, there's 40,000 chiropractors in the US. We don't have any rep force or distribution. How am I going to get it in the hands of all these chiropractors? And I asked one of them and I said,”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the chiropractors who we were trying to market these overlays through couldn't sell the overlays, they would say, Bob, it's a pad. I said, no, it's a mattress. And they would say, what do you do with it? I said, you put it on top of your old mattress. They said, it's a pad.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had a container coming over, and it was $75,000. And I called Michael and I said, we have a problem. And he said, what's that? I said, the container coming next Tuesday, I can't pay for. And he said, oh, okay. Let me call you back tomorrow and talk to Dog, his partner and brother. So next day he calls back and says, okay, here's what we'll do. We will swap that container for 10% interest in your company, tempered. And I said, okay, because I was in no position, we weren't going to make the $10,000 minimum. And I was out of money, and he could easily have just pulled a plug on us and said, okay, sorry, it didn't work. We're going a different way. But he said, I'll swap that for 10% interest in your company. And I said, great.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were spending the money on well product, you know. The containers were 75 grand apiece. We bought two or three and we had salary. I wasn't taking any salary, but I had two or three people working for me. And we just had a burn rate.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, There's no possible way, so I'm going through my pants pockets and my coat. And I said, oh my gosh. And I thought Uncle Bill was going to say, you know, maybe my money's not so safe with you after all. And then he said, Can I overnight you another check?”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He goes into the back room, he comes out ten minutes later, he hands me a check for $50,000. So I am just absolutely overjoyed. I said, thank you so much. Michael and I left. I dropped Michael off at O'Hare. He went back to Stockholm. I got in my car and drove back to Lexington. And on the way home, I stopped at a fast food restaurant. So the next morning was Saturday morning, and I get a call. I'm dead asleep. It's 9.30. And it's Uncle Bill. And he said, he calls me Rob and he says, Rob, I got a phone call from Connie at a Burger King in Lebanon, Indiana, who said she found a check for $50,000 on the floor.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll just set this over here for a while and we can chat. And he said, okay, and so we talked about it, and I'm kind of eyeing the mattress to see if it looks like it's uncurling. So anyway, it did thaw out, and he really liked it. And he wrote me out a check. So I think that's the answer to the question. The product kept bailing us out. Michael Magnuson came over. I told him, I'm going to raise the money, but can you help me? He said, sure. So he came over. We met him in Chicago. And we went over to my Uncle Bill's house and we showed him the mattress, told him the story. He could see that, you know, Michael was real. He wasn't some fictitious guy because Uncle Bill had lost a lot of money in my yearly partnerships. So Uncle Bill...”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but the rest of them, I think they did it because A, they were comfortable with me, but B, when they encountered the product, they had the same emotional reaction that I did when I first encountered it. And this would include the first guy who invested Dave Fogg, who I had met only a few months earlier, told him the whole story. He said, well, bring me over the product. So I brought an overlay over to his house. It was January, and it was freezing. And one of the unique properties of the material is that it freezes as solid as a board at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the temperature sensitivity. So the mattress froze on the way over to Dave's house. And so I come in carrying this overlay, and I notice luckily that he had a fire going in the fireplace. So I said, let's just...”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's another really good question because now I had to go back to all my basic same people who had invested with me in these yearlin partnerships we raced in Europe and my other horse ventures that failed right, that had failed and gone broke. So I had to convince them that even though we lost money in something that I knew a lot about, that we were going to make money in something that I knew nothing about.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He took a chance, but his ace in the hole was that I had to sell 10,000 mattresses the first year to maintain ice exclusivity.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. And so he got comfortable with me as a person, I guess. And number two, he wanted to control it. He didn't want to have some company in the US that is going to have their own ideas. He had a certain idea in his head of how he wanted this to play out. And he knew, he figured anyway, that he could control me, which he could. And so we had a collaboration. We worked together, talked to him every day for 12 years, basically.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really a good question. But I had spent three days with him in the horse chiropractor, and we had hit it off on a horse level. Cause he was in the horse business in Sweden”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other condition was we had to sell 10,000 mattresses the first year in order to maintain exclusivity. And so I said, sure, you know, I can do both those two things.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In exchange for two things number one, I had to finance it because he said we don't have money to finance you. You have to raise your own money.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we thought it would go perfect in there. And we were also going to put an ad in the chiropractor directory. So, anyway, that was it. And he came over, Michael came over in late 91, and we met him in Milwaukee, and he and I negotiated that he would give me exclusive North American distribution rights for his products.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT