Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Preston Jumps In With A Shark - Robert Herjavec

Transcript

Preston Jumps In With A Shark - Robert Herjavec · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:00
  Joining me on the program is one of the stars of the Shark Tank.
• 0:03
  He will be joining Barbara Corcoran and the two of them will be part of
• 0:06
  the Power Forward Speaker series. On Tuesday, January thirtieth at the Ruby Diamond
• 0:12
  Auditorium on the campus of Florida State University, Robert Herjeveek joins us. Robert,
• 0:16
  good morning, how are you, sir? Good morning? Very excited
• 0:20
  to be going somewhere warm in Tallahassee. Well, we'll have to wait and
• 0:24
  see how warm it is next week, but we can hope for the best.
• 0:27
  Hey tell me so, I was reading through your bio, your resume,
• 0:31
  and it is so vast, it is so large. I was trying
• 0:34
  to figure out, how do you capsule it all? If you were introducing
• 0:38
  yourself, how would you do it? Well? I would Gosh, I
• 0:45
  thank you for saying that. I think I'm just a super happy guy and
• 0:49
  I like to think I'm a great dad. But you know, I think
• 0:53
  the great thing about Shark Tank and about me and most people and businesses,
• 1:00
  you're deeply passionate about something. Anybody can do it. I mean, look
• 1:03
  at the five of us, for God's sakes, look at Barbara. If
• 1:07
  she can do it, anybody can do it. But that's the great thing
• 1:10
  about business man, right like it's you don't need a god given talent.
• 1:15
  You can just get there by the power of will. You know. I
• 1:18
  hear you use the word happiness, and I think it's an important distinction to
• 1:23
  make, because happiness is something that transcends success the way that most people define
• 1:29
  it. How do you define success? You know? I think in general
• 1:34
  what I would tell people about business and happiness and success is freedom. You
• 1:42
  know. There's the old saying you quit a forty an hour a week job
• 1:47
  in order to work eighty hours a week for yourself. And while that's true,
• 1:52
  you always find the time for the things that are really important. That's
• 1:55
  a great thing about having your businesses. You get to set your own schedule,
• 1:59
  you get to be there for your kids, you get to do all
• 2:02
  these things. The downside is you got to wake up early, you got
• 2:06
  to work later than most people. I'm curious, so you mentioned Shark Tank,
• 2:10
  and obviously I want to include that in a little bit of our discussion
• 2:14
  here. When you're considering somebody else's business on shark Tank, what are the
• 2:19
  tangibles that you're looking for, and conversely, how do you measure or seek
• 2:23
  out the intangibles. What's interesting is most people don't realize that on Shark Tank,
• 2:30
  the average pitches by an hour and we know nothing about the people before
• 2:36
  they come out, like literally nothing, We have no we don't even know
• 2:39
  their name. The first question is, hey, what's your name? And
• 2:43
  it's funny because we sit there twelve hours a day, we're grumpy, we're
• 2:46
  thinking about our other businesses, and then you come out and our first reaction
• 2:53
  is not, oh my gosh, you're there. So the first thing,
• 2:57
  the intangible is you've got to get our attention. It's like, you got
• 3:00
  to you got to be exciting, you got to be interesting, you got
• 3:04
  to be different. That doesn't mean you need a pony and a hula who,
• 3:08
  but you got to get our interest. And that's the very very first
• 3:13
  thing. Before you sell me on your once in a lifetime idea, sell
• 3:17
  me on yourself. You know. I heard someone once say that people intrinsically
• 3:23
  want to buy, but they hate to be sold. Is that kind of
• 3:27
  what you're saying? Create an environment where where you create an environment if we're
• 3:32
  pitching the sharks, I want to create an environment where one of you wants
• 3:37
  to buy. I don't want to make you feel like you're being sold something.
• 3:42
  I haven't heard that expression for many years, but it is so true.
• 3:46
  It is so true. Everybody hates salespeople, everybody. Everybody thinks salespeople
• 3:52
  are the used car salesman. But the art of selling is creating value.
• 3:59
  And there's this magic moment in Shark Tank to your point, where we start
• 4:04
  bidding against each other because we want the deal. The best sale is the
• 4:11
  one where you make the buyer think they made that decision. And that's what
• 4:15
  Shark Tank's about. Get us excited, get us bidding, and all the
• 4:19
  power transfers to the person pitching. When you are bidding, if you will
• 4:25
  borrowing that term against one of the other sharks, do you try to undersell
• 4:30
  yourself as being interested or do you go over the top to express interest?
• 4:35
  Such a great question if you know we've been doing it for the mean bald
• 4:41
  guy. Kevin and I have been doing the show for twenty years, five
• 4:45
  years in Canada right and now fifteen in the States. So it's all situational
• 4:50
  and depends on the moment. Sometimes you need a lot of bravado. Hey,
• 4:56
  go with me, I'm the best sharks. Sometimes you want to be
• 4:59
  the opposite of somebody else. It all depends on the situation. I think
• 5:03
  the challenge is we all know each other really well, and we're always trying
• 5:08
  to be unpredictable. What's the challenge of taking all of your years, all
• 5:14
  of your experiences and trying to find a way to distill it. At an
• 5:18
  event like Power Forward, we're going to be talking to business owners and managers
• 5:24
  and mostly entrepreneurs. How do you do that? The great thing about events
• 5:30
  like that, and the reason the Barbara and I and I think all the
• 5:31
  sharks love doing them, is, you know, the platform of Shark Tank
• 5:39
  is really about the ability to change your life. And I know it sounds
• 5:42
  high faluting and maybe corny to some people, but we are that classic American
• 5:48
  dream you can get out there and you can change your life. And as
• 5:53
  we go out and we talk to people at events like this, we see
• 5:57
  that dream and we see that excitement, we see that passion, and I
• 6:00
  think as old and jaded as we are, we are all driven by opportunity
• 6:08
  and we see ourselves and people. People don't realize this, but we are
• 6:12
  the number one show on television for families. It's one of the few shows
• 6:16
  that you can watch with a mom and a dad and kids. And kids
• 6:23
  just love our show and we love doing it, you know. I think
• 6:26
  what stands out to me, Robert, is that when I think about it,
• 6:29
  and I've been fortunate to interview a lot of the Sharks as they've come
• 6:31
  to this event in town and have them on the program, I think what
• 6:35
  stands out to me is the number of jobs that you all, along with
• 6:41
  the entrepreneurs, have created. It's incredible. I think that the last stat
• 6:46
  I read was something like ten thousand or twelve thousand jobs. But you know,
• 6:50
  employment, a bigger salary, a better living, these are all byproducts
• 6:58
  of building a successful, value driven business. I've met a lot of you
• 7:02
  know, one of the great things about being a Shark is you get to
• 7:04
  meet a lot of really successful business owners and people in general. And I've
• 7:10
  never met somebody really successful who doesn't love what they do and doesn't want to
• 7:17
  do it all the time and doesn't want to talk my ear off about it.
• 7:21
  And I think that's the great thing. Right Like, I'm in the
• 7:25
  computer security business. I love that business. I'm doing it for thirty years,
• 7:30
  and I think you'll find the same with Sharks. I mean, gosh,
• 7:33
  get Mark talking about basketball, and that's going to be a very long
• 7:36
  dinner. One last question, if we could find a way to kind of
• 7:46
  go back to when you were starting in your various entrepreneurial or business adventures,
• 7:54
  and somehow we just sort of erase that, but we took your same mindset
• 7:58
  as it is. What are the differences you think in being an entrepreneur now?
• 8:03
  What are the different challenges versus when you started? I think the biggest
• 8:09
  that's a great question, by the way, and Cuban and I just talked
• 8:13
  about this, and I think if if you were to race all that and
• 8:18
  took my current mindset to thirty years ago, the biggest difference would be my
• 8:28
  ability to believe in a dream bigger than me. And you know, I
• 8:33
  think part of the challenge with being an immigrant like I am, or coming
• 8:39
  from a poor background, is you're limited by what you think you can achieve,
• 8:46
  and there's always this element of you want to do great, but you
• 8:50
  want to protect your downside. And you know, Cuban always talks about this
• 8:54
  and says that everything he does you believe he's going to win one hundred percent
• 9:01
  of the time. And I think like that now, But when I was
• 9:07
  younger, I would be thinking like, yeah, I want to win,
• 9:09
  but I really don't want to lose. And I think it's just that belief
• 9:16
  that the world is a wondrous place. And you know, if you want
• 9:18
  to own a basketball team you can one day. If you want to buy
• 9:22
  a jet one day you can. If you want to get a better education
• 9:26
  for your kids, you can. You just got to add value. That
• 9:31
  is the core of every great business. Robert, thank you for taking a
• 9:35
  few minutes out of what I know is just a slam schedule and spending it
• 9:37
  with us this morning. I wish you nothing but the best and look forward
• 9:41
  to hearing what you have to share with Barbara coming up at the at the
• 9:45
  event Power Forward. Thanks very much, Preston, I appreciate it. Thank
• 9:48
  you, sir, Robert Herjibek with us this morning on the Morning Show with Preston Scott