YouSaid · the spoken record

Curt Richardson

lines on the record: 88
first: 2019-12-02
most recent: 2019-12-02
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

“And that allows them to be more creative and more fulfilled. And I wasn't doing that. I mean, everybody that worked me had to recreate their job every day, and I was just, it was Newton's law everywhere. And it wasn't always a good reaction.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was it? Well, if any of you have read that book, it's a story about a lady that makes pies, you know? And so it was her hobby. She loved making pies. She went into business making pies. Like I went into business making molds and kind of turned into a nightmare. Well, my wife had kind of turned into a nightmare. And so it resonated with me that I had to do something different. And what struck me in the book was one of the things that he said is that systems run the business and people run the systems. Now, what does that mean? It doesn't mean you turn people into robots. But it does mean... that people don't recreate their job every day.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, we were making otter boxes, and I was flying back and forth to China, building tools, bringing the molds back, manufacturing the parts here in the US. And it was just a struggle. It just felt like I was running in mud. And somebody gave me the book EMIF. I didn't read it on the way to China, but I read it all on the way back. You know, that's about a 15-hour flight. I got off the plane. I went to the pay phone. And I called Emith and said, I need help. It was whatever you got a 12-step program for entrepreneurs, I need to sign up. And I did. I got a business coach, and her name was Donna Uzelik with EMIF. And I'll start crying here because she made such a difference in that business. I mean, she changed the whole way, I think. The whole way I went about doing business.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I had to keep doing it, I got pretty old, I got pretty tired of doing it. It wasn't paying the bills anymore, and I was getting tired of doing it, and I was getting to the point where where's this going? I mean, I'm just doing the same thing over and over. It's insanity.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was still a what I call a firefighter. I mean, I got all of my kudos out of putting out the fire of the day. And a lot of people do. I mean, there's a bunch of small business people in here, you realize that there is a fire a day. Some days it's bigger than others. And so that's what I did. I put out fires. But I soon realized I was the problem.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it really wasn't. I never discounted it, but I didn't throw it out there like that was what was going to happen until later on. Now I did do that later on.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which time? No, we talked about the business a lot. I mean, it was part of our lives, whether it was in the garage or it was growing somewhere. It was a big part of our lives. I mean, the kids, when it was in the garage, the kids would pick plastic parts in front of TV. The machines would screw up the TV because they'd make static all over the TV. And there was always metal chips in the carpet. So yeah, it didn't go over good”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the internet was just starting. I can always remember the first. We were in Florida and we just had put our first PDA cases online and we started selling one, two, three. And we went, man, we're doing $5,000 a month online. We thought we're killing it.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just took our standard box, basically cut a hole in the front, and put a membrane on it. So it was nothing pretty about it.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come up with something. So we came up with a way to do that. We worked on that and we did it for all these different PDAs. And then it grew into some different tablets for medical things like that where they wanted waterproof as well or waterproof or clean proof.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't think I ever really thought the box itself would take off, but we started to get people, I call it progressive revelation, okay? So people would come to the trade show booth and go, I've got a PDA, but I really want to use this PDA through the box.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started with the dive world and we went to trade shows We went to trade shows with our boxes and peddled them, tried to get dealers. We also had a phone bank of guys who we called the dialing for dollars. They'd get on there and they'd call all the different scuba shops. And yeah, we had about six or seven different sizes with way too many bad colors.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an outdoor product, and I always loved the outdoors. So for me, I always had a passion for that still do today. And so we started with just a very small 1,000 series box, and it grew from there.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm an outdoors guy. I like gadgets. So, you know, there was Pelican products out there that made the big boxes. But nobody had small boxes. It's like, I don't need a box this big.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but again, we spent a lot of time and energy developing the tooling, you know, we had the machines to produce these. We did one run. It's a one-run wonder. We had a lot of those.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember one, you know, remember the oil cans before you twisted off the top? Sure. You had to open them with a can opener? Well, that's how old I am So it was basically a spout you stuck into the top of the il can and was plastic on the top, had a metal. Stamped piece And it punctured the oil can you pull your oil out. It worked great, but he didn't sell any.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made the whole thing. So the guy came to me with the idea. We drew it up. We tooled it. You know, it hangs on your tree while you're at the camping site. Keeps your toilet paper dry. Oh, this is a.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be a small component, could be a small case for a duck call. I mean, one of our products, this was a good one, was the loosey-goosey toilet paper holder. You see that a lot today, don't you?”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just part of their cycle, really. I was part of the beginning of it and then the production of it and the hope was that they would sell millions of these things. Well, they didn't.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Waterproof boxes. Well, what drove that way of thinking early on was the fact that I was making things for other people and I was counting on their ability to run a business and be successful with their product. So my success very much depended on their success.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money was always tight. Yeah, payroll was always an issue and cash flow is what kept me awake if anything kept me awake. And so you had to get scrappy. We were very scrappy in those days.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't scale, so it's go okay, I'm going to back up, I'm going to go back to just me or me and one other guy and build it up again. Try something a little different, a little different slant on the business.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something would happen within the economy, and the business was so frail that it wouldn't survive it. And I had to back up and start over.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't have a plan. That was part of the problem. The plan was just do the next thing. I mean, that's how many of us entrepreneurs are in the early days, I believe. And then we grow up. So a big part of it was really... As the business grew and matured to a certain point, it would fail. And it would go back and go back.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It continued off and on for years. I was always building injection molds. Business was always up and down. You know, it went up, it went down, but I was always in the plastics part of business, whether I was importing molds or building molds. It was all around injection molds.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I bought a job, okay? I mean, really, that's what I did. I was making a decent living, but I wasn't making, I probably in the end of the day wasn't making any more than if I was working for somebody else.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business. I mean, wow. It wasn't that big a deal. The guy who bought it from had been kicked in the head by a horse. So he financed it for me, you know.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, just to give you an idea, a cup like this, that mold might make four of those every 45 seconds, but that mold probably weighs close to a ton.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Injection, I built the injection mold, so the large and even the first business I bought was that, just building injection molds, steel injection molds.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plastic products just for about anything, whether it was garden tools. They were making a lot of parts for courses at the time. So plastic parts”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I wasn't there yet. So I heard about a small company in Fort Collins, technical molded products, and they had a opening for an apprentice and a guy luckily hired me on.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I had heard about a program in Fort Collins, Woodward Governor, had an academy there where they taught you machining and eventually you could get your engineering degree. That didn't happen because it only lasted three months there”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Metal shop in high school? Yeah, our school had a vocational program and you got exposed to four different classes. And the one that struck me right away was Machine Shop. So I walked into Machine Shop. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to own my shop, my own shop.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wanted me to. I know my mom did, you know, I know she wanted me to be an engineer. But I really had no desire to go to college. It was all about work, working with my hands, and that really was formed from high school experiences”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we lived in the mountains. We lived at the base of the Spanish peaks on the south side of the Spanish peaks. So we were in Upper Borough Canyon. My dad's a minister, and we moved up there to the middle of nowhere, and he started a church there”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I grew up in a small town called Bon Carbo, Colorado, down by Trinidad, Colorado. So, anybody here from Bonbarco? Yeah, right.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he said, but we'll do a test. So they did a test and they were going to do a three-month test. Well, I think they did a three-day test because they all sold out. Wow. They sold like crazy. I mean, it was like that UPS commercial, you know, or it's like tick, tick, and we're going, oh crap.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Vegas, and Michael Cowan, who was the head guy for stuff at AT&T, came by and showed him the case. And he said, well, how much is it? I said, well, retail's for $49.95. He's like, you're crazy. $49.95. Crazy to buy it.”
2019-12-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT