Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Terry, welcome aboard to the show. So happy to have you today.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Fun day. Yeah, looking forward to it.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is kind of crazy. We can't ignore this. Terry, you decided to operate, manage by a zoo. Tell us that story. What? What the hell?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Well, I grew up on a farm and I had gone through a couple of careers and I was turning 50. And what happens midlife crisis.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: So 10 years too late, might I say.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: So I got a call from the ex governor and they said, hey, the zoo is going to close. It's losing $600,000. Would you be interested in going in with us? We're going to take it over as a nonprofit and run a zoo. So you saw a lot of the techniques I learned in the entrepreneurial companies that I worked with to help turn it around and raise another 15 million for an endowment that will keep it effective for years. And it's because become the second largest cultural attraction. So it was really a fun give back. After many years of just capitalizing, you know, money making in my life, that.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: First of all, wow, what, what you're coming into this job, right?
What, what are you thinking to yourself on that first day? Like, how do you even think through what you're going to do?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Well, I figured, you know, raising cattle and pigs can't be much different than giraffes and lions and tigers. But I learned a lot about what the importance of zoo.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Well, you know, cattle won't eat you, I guess.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: And then I started thinking, how are you going to make more money? Well, you realize that people coming into a zoo are usually 2 to 12 and they really have all of those. So you got to get more people through. So they were charging only, I think $3.50 because it was run by the government organization. Now that gosh next door they're charging $25 in Omaha. Let's raise the price to 995 and then let's give away free tickets to anybody in the inner cities that can't afford it. Somebody comes in, we told the front desk, and you hear mom saying, oh, I don't know if we can afford it. Let them in free. What the heck. We immediately cash load it. But the other thing that we did was try to look for things to raise money that hadn't been done before. So a new exhibit would be great, but that cost 2 or 3 million bucks. So I thought, well, what do we have that's free at the zoo? Hmm. Well, all animals poop. So we decided to do an exhibit called Scoop on poop so kids could Come in and they looked around and they saw all of the different kinds of poops of elephants and tigers and lions and all that. And doing that, they'd go home and tell their friends, and everybody started showing up. So we even got more in that age group. Then we thought, we need young adults in those days. We called them millennials. And we brainstormed and thought, what do millennials like? Booze. So why not keep the zoo open at night and do zoo brew? So we had bands and all the animals were out and people could bring their date, but they don't have all these little kids running around to be able to do that. And all of a sudden, I think last year, they sold $250,000 just in booze at night to have a really outdoor park entertainment that you could go to. And it became very successful. So we tried a lot of little crazy things that just like that that didn't cost much, but built it up to get people. So it was kind of hip. In fact, I think the gay and lesbian organization called said we lost our place for a Halloween night. Could we do the zoo at night? Well, you can imagine the board thinking, daytime. Wait a minute. We can't do that during. No, they want to do it at night and have a party. So we had full drag shows and everything else at night and just went over great. And all of a sudden, we became kind of the hip new place. It wasn't just a little kiddie zoo.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: That's crazy. What were the things that you. The crazy ideas that you tried that didn't work out?
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Well, another idea which is pretty easy, we thought, well, how could we get more free publicity? So I contacted the local radio station and said, hey, I want to have a zoo parade. Would you host it? And they said, yeah, let's do it April 1st. Okay. So what we did was you turned it on that morning, and here was the governor leading the Giraffe down Southwest 9th, and behind him was the mayor leading a tiger. And I'd say, you know, we'd break in between music, say, hey, tell us about the tiger. Well, the Amir tiger was, you know, is in Africa, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody's calling, saying, we can't find that. We can't find it. Well, you can imagine that it was all fake because we pre recorded it. You can't lead things down the street. But everybody was tuned in and talking about this zoo parade.
But the best part was we found some extremely rare red bats. And we think they came from Ohio, and we put them in a 50 gallon drum over the top. Cost all the $25 to do this. Danger red bats. And we talked about these exotic red bats and you had to come see them. And we think they were from there. They might have come from Louisville, I guess. And it was all said and done. And then we put two baseball, basically what it was, where they were actual baseball bats, we painted red. And then we put two baseballs on one of them and said to the parents, hey, can you tell which is the male and which is the female? And so just crazy things like that that people would just start talking about the zoo. And it became kind of the hip place to go and things to see.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: What did you, you know, what did you learn from that kind of unique experience? Right. It's not your regular CEO gig. You would say what was different about that? Which you took away, I took away.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: I think that you have life experiences, some things that are just lucky, you know. I was going to be a math major. I thought I'd be a professor at a college somewhere. And the second year I was there, I passed out of a year of calc, year of physics and everything was going great and I just got bored. And somebody said, we can go over here and make a living. So I got into TV and then started into cable television. And I had my first failure and realized something that was lifelong. It's better to have tried and failed than to succeed at doing nothing. And what it was, was I was doing TV when I was working with this cable TV firm and I noticed I didn't have a 5 o'clock shadow at 5 o'clock on TV. So I wrote to Gillette and told him, hey, I love your track two razor and if you need somebody for commercial, call me. Well, I knew in two weeks they'd call me and I'd be headed for New York. Two weeks of the day I got the letter back and it said, Dear Mr. Rich, we appreciate your satisfaction. Unfortunately, you wrote the wrong company, but I wrote the wrong company. So I failed, you know, so I really screwed up. But I kept thinking it was fun thinking about being on national television. So I took a whole different path. All of a sudden the life changes that you do. And a couple years later I had a call from a local, my little hometown, that said, hey, we're going to have a centennial and we've never had one and we don't know whether 100 years, but we need some help with publicity. And I've kind of done a little publicity in cable television. So I said, okay, I'll help. And I wrote my very first press release, and we decided to try to adopt a celebrity. We've never had anybody famous in 100 years. Let's adopt a celebrity. So I sent out 44 letters to the New York Times, Louisiana. Just anybody I could think of. You know What? I failed again. 43 of the 44 letters, no one called back. But the one person that called was a guy from something called upi. I'd never heard of upi found out later was United Press International, who put it on the national wires. And within a half hour, I had a call from the Johnny Carson show who said, we like the idea. We'd love to. Johnny's from Iowa. We are thinking about doing something. You got to guarantee we're first. Hell, yes, you can be first. You know, long story short, they came out, looked around, and talked about doing a satellite uplink and going live from Cooper. They'd never done it with the Carson show, with the Tonight show, but then they figured out they couldn't get it all done, so they decided to go ahead and let us come out and be on the Tonight Show. 20 million people watched us. That.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: Holy cow.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: All because I failed on 43 of the 44 times. So that's where the real experience in this whole entrepreneurial company, the cable company, that I got to meet a Ted Turner and others who tried and failed so many times, but no one ever remembers that they remembered the successes.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: And so it's just fun to be creative and try something new, to try to make it work.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Yeah. This isn't. This is. What's important to say is that this is not a unique experience. My favorite example, right, WD40, you know, the oil, the lubricant, the reason it's called WD40, I don't know if you know this, they had 39 failed formulas. Right. So, you know, coincidentally, yours is also 40 something, but, you know, that's it. You fail and fail and fail and fail. And maybe you succeed one, two times. You know, percentage wise, 1 or 2%, but it can make the whole difference. And that's such an important point. I appreciate it. Yeah.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: And I realized in business, there are project managers. Project managers. Okay, we're going to do this on this date. This is what we're going to do. And here's our ending. You have all these meetings. Well, they did that when they sent three people to the moon. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And they sent them up. Now, if that had been a project manager they probably would have said, okay, we're done, we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks after you touch base on the moon and be back. But you know what, if you look at that Apollo mission, they failed over 90% of the time. They had to keep course correcting and keep course correcting. So if you just try once and quit, you're never going to succeed in anything. So too many people have the greatest million dollar idea. And I got a couple for you at the end here. If you want to invest, you just ask me, I'll tell it to you. But they fail once and they don't try it again. So it's important to keep tweaking and get. I like to get 100 ideas at any one time because when I learned in cable television knocking doors, I'd have to knock a hundred doors to make two sales. And the same with ideas.
Many people have an idea for a new company and they try it and it fails and they say, well, I can't do this. But you really have to have a hundred ideas so that when that first one doesn't work, you're ready with a second and the third and ultimately it will.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: There's a conflict or a debate between what's more important, what's valuable, is it the idea or is it the execution? Where do you fall on this?
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Well, it's like you set me up. I wrote a book called Dare to Dream, Dare to Act. I think it's a two step process. What you want to try to do is when you are coming up with ideas is to sit down and write down as many ideas you can. Keep a pencil by your bed because I always wake up in the middle of night, think oh God, there's a great idea, but I forget it the next day. So you want to do that and then the second step is getting the right people around you. If you want the success, you want to make sure. I wasn't much, I didn't know that much about legal or accounting at all. You know, I knew a little marketing, but execution operations, eh? So I got the right people around me when I started the company and so you get the experts around you and then that's, that's where the success comes. And you'll have more success than if you just try to do it all yourself when you don't have the expertise around you.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, you know the. I'm a techstars alumni and when I of came into one of these first meetings, they said, here's the five things that we care about Number one is team.
So this is their investment criteria, how they decide to invest. And ultimately did invest in me. Number two is team.
Number three is team. And then there was a four and a five. But I don't remember what it was because I got the picture. The team is important.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. And some of the best ideas come. You know, when I became a CEO, I realized we use something called the COP method that the.
That getting people like the receptionist in the front who have good ideas. How do you get. Well, most people have suggestion box but what we found is that what we tried to do is we came up with cot consider or throw away as something we would put on emails which basically said if you got a crazy idea, just put that on it. And if you don't have time to read it, you're, you know, doing a new reorganization or whatever you're doing, just hit delete. You don't have to read it, but people need to just get creative. So that that front desk person used to put a, hey, the chairs broke, somebody's gonna fall, we're gonna be sued.
Put that in the suggestion box and didn't hear anything for three weeks. This is in the. In down below saying, ah, they never listen to me. Well, she now could she or he could put down that idea, send it to the world, send it to the CEO. And no, they wouldn't get back to her because there's no judgment and good ideas. But they. Everybody keeps those ideas. But she knows that she vehicle to present all of our ideas, good or bad. Any idea is a good idea. And then you take all of those and put that team together to say, well, lawyer says this will work and that won't. Accountant says this will work, that won't. It'll all rise the top. Now you have a group discussion and a decision. And now everybody's on the same rail going down the success road.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: There's something interesting there about the almost a change of culture in the organization.
Tell us the background about why the considerer throwaway even works. So what's the problem that you're trying to solve?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Problem I was trying to solve was I came into the lottery coming out of a very entrepreneurial cable company. You know, went from zero to everything we touched turned to gold, cashed out. Same company took ideas from the first company, made it work. So I'm ready to, you know, the zoo. Just crazy ideas because what you have to lose, it was gonna. They were gonna go under if we didn't do something. So it was neat at that point. But I Went into the lottery, who makes a lot of money, and walked in and I started giving ideas. Let's paint the wall green. Let's make purple polka dots on it, do this, that. And I just saw a meltdown. And the meltdown was people didn't realize when you're trying to give an idea to consider and as the team consider and build upon and build that brick together rather than an ultimatum. And that's why I put action required after we came up with this. So that. And the whole attitude changed because they realized I knew, they then knew what I was requiring versus what I was just saying, let's brainstorm on this and put it together. And it just, the attitude just completely changed. It took me to, you know, everybody thinks they know everything when I came out of college, but took me to probably 55 to have that experience to understand. The other thing that I didn't realize till about a year ago, which I always want to pass along when I. When I do podcasts like this was the guy who is on Shark Tank, Damon John. I did an event with him a few weeks ago and he was writing something down. What the heck's he doing? And so I asked him, I said, well, you said, well, every night I look at my list and the next morning I look at it and revise it. And I said, you've got that many million dollar ideas? He said, no, because I've already been successful with all that stuff. These are things I'm going to do for myself. I'm going to prioritize. Because when I wake up in the morning, if I say I'm going to have a cinnamon roll, because I haven't had one for a month and I have that cinnamon roll, I'm in a much better attitude when I go to work to help other people succeed. And I thought, what a fun idea. It isn't selfishness that you want to do something for yourself. It's putting yourself in the right mood. I used to wear the right. I used to have clothes that I would wear when I went into big meetings or something that were lucky. And it wasn't so much they were lucky, it's that it put my mind in the right mood. But I was in the, let's go get a mood to go in there and make that idea successful.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I had this argument, I can't remember when it was with my wife, and she was taking care of everybody else and not herself. And I had to kind of sit her down and say, look, in order for you to do the Things that you really care about. And in order to do them well, you need to take care of yourself.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: You need to be happy, you need to feel well, you need to have a smile on your face. And you're not going to have those things if you don't make yourself, you know, number one first and then take care of everything else. You can't serve others when you're, you know, sad, suffering, broken, or anything like that. So it's such an important fundamental, I think, issue that showing up well is your first step of service.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. And most of us, I. If we're A types, you're an A type, I'm an A type that have been commercially successful.
It's tough to relax. I wish I would have learned more on how to take a break and relax, and I'm working hard on that. You know, maybe it's a massage, maybe it's whatever. But I. I think what you're saying is in waking up in the morning, if you're in a good mood, if you do something for yourself, you're actually doing something for others because you're going to be in a good mood and be able to portray that that's help others as you're doing it. You had one other in your question a little bit ago that hit me is the other key to success that I would recommend to anybody just starting out or in anything is to volunteer. And when I say volunteer is you go into a company if you want to be successful. If you go into a company and the boss says, hey, Chandra's gone today and the toilet's plugged up, I need somebody to go clean that. Be the first to raise your hand. Why is that? Because you get noticed and you learn new things by think. You do things I got to do in the cable business, no one, nothing had ever been done like that before. They thought four channels were enough. That $6 was too much to pay for cable television. What do we pay today? 120 bucks. So I just, you know, in something like that, you are. You are moving all the time, and the creativity and being able to raise your hand and try something new is so rewarding educationally to expand your mind.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, my own experience is like, my philosophy is, like, always say yes now. There's a terrible dark side to that of like, getting yourself burned out and that. You know, we can talk through that.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Especially if you have your own company, because you think every call is your last.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah, this is fair. But the thing is that what I found myself getting into these situations and always after the fact, I learned it to be. So I never knew exactly what I was getting myself into at the time, but it turned out that multiple times, when you're. The person always says yes, sometimes what happens is that everybody else said no, everybody else said no. And then you're going into this somewhat stupid or naive and like, okay, I took this task on, I said yes, but then you get it done. And then some of you have this reputation of, like, that's the only person that said yes, and they got it done. Like, what a reputation.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: You know, success is like cocaine. Once you've tasted that, where you've accomplished something no one else could have done or would do, you want to do it again and again. And that's how I think sometimes it's tougher to relax because you're always looking for it. Every time I see, you know, every time I go to the grocery store, I did it in 18 minutes. I wonder if I can do it in 17 tomorrow.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: You know, my son, he timed like, this is not good. Like, we should not do this because it's not even safe. But. But it's. It's, you know, I don't speed because of this, but. But it's kind of almost like a cultural thing. He, He. I pick him up from school every day. He tells me what time I arrived, and, like, if it's over, like, a certain time, he's like, ah, dad, you missed your target. He's, like, giving me these. These, like, performance reviews.
You know, it's kind of funny, right? It's almost this. This competitive culture. But, you know, talking about. About children, I feel like there's. There's something that is almost, I don't know, fundamentally dangerous in, you know, one's ability to think that they're not able to do something right. So. So for me, and I don't know how to do this, maybe you have some wisdom to give me. And this is an incredibly personal and, you know, egoistic question, because I truly am looking for help. How do you help people figure out that some of the barriers or many of the barriers that they put in place are just not real and they can do much more than they even know.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: That's part of. That's part of our society, I think, in that when I grew up, I grew up in a smaller town, so I got to play all the different. Try all the different sports, and I get to try all this today.
Our kids go into. If you want to be a baseball player, you must pretty much commit to that by the Time you're five and be on all the sports teams and all the way up. And in almost everything we do, you turn on TV or you find if you like dancing, you turn on dancing and you see that J. Lo's making all this money by dancing.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: And her dad, you know, running with her and singing at the same time. All those stories. Absolutely.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: I think drug dealers. The same way everybody needs money, and I can't make it quick. So you go find somebody who will help you to sell drugs. I mean, it's. It's relax. Back to the question of relaxing or how do you. How do we relax? How do we feel comfortable that when we have a success that we've made it and do we need to push it faster and harder the next time? I think that's kind of built into us some way. But in today's society, they see all the people that are making the bazillion of dollars in tech and real estate and being a TV personality or whatever and believe that that's what I've got to do. Where many athletes, 1%, half a percent, would make it to the level that they'll be making any money. So if they've had that disappointment, how do they turn around and say, try to put that somewhere else? I think you've got to have two or three irons in the skillet. I don't know if that's. That's the right word, but you've got it. You've got to have two or three things going at any one time. I was working radio when I was working cable. Cable didn't work. I knew I would. I would. Could be a rock and roll DJ or when I had my own company. I didn't just do more. I was doing HBO Free previews, producing those. I went out and did. Bought two other companies and bought a radio station. And the things that I enjoyed at the same time, knowing that if one failed, I would have something to back up. So I think having a. Having two or three hobbies or backups are important in that and maybe is one thought.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: I love that. There's also, I think, something about these baby steps that kind of create this compounding interest effect. Right. So my own personal experience when I was, what was it, I want to say, like 8 or 9 years old, I came back from school and I was so upset with my report card that I tore it up. So my mother had to piece the report card. Oh, my God. I don't believe I've ever told this story. She had to piece the report card together. And I was crying and I was upset, and it was just this breaking point of these other kids are doing, you know, a question, getting a question in class, and they just do it and they move along, and then they get three, four more, and I can't do it. And then I'm like, why? Why am I so different than these other kids? Why can't I be successful? Something's wrong with me. You blame yourself? I don't know. I got to truth. I don't remember who it was, but somebody said, instead of jumping and do question number 12, start with question number one. The teacher didn't say, do it. That was out of the homework. It wasn't even expected of us. I said, do question number one and then do question number two. Then do question number three. So what happened is that I just worked basically 10 times harder than anybody else.
You do that day in, day out, year in, year out, what happens? Not only do you catch up with everybody else, you exceed them big time. And this. This concept of that not only you can catch up, but you can exceed people, but just doing a little bit every day. And, you know, fast forward 20 years later, this. This manager of set comes to me and says, oh, Ari, you're a genius. And that made me angry. It's like, no, saying that you're a genius, that says to you that you were born with the skill. No, I worked my ass off, Mr. Sir.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: The skill, though, was hard work. I think maybe that's even a better answer than how people do it, because I'm one to try to skip two levels without hitting the first one. How can I do it quicker and how can I do it faster? And I think the key to all of it is your daring to act. You saw that and you needed to find the skill that would have you succeed at it. And I did the same thing, only I would try to shortcut it to make it faster, bigger, better, any way I could. But I worked hard at it. Where some people just wanted to say, you need to give that to me. I think we see too much of that. I deserve it, so I give it to me.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, victimism is a whole topic that I think you're just deciding to fail by deciding that you're a victim and you can't do anything. But I think your point is so important because one of my economics professors, he basically said, there's two ways to be successful in life. And what I've depicted is the work hard option, but there's another option, and that's be smart. Instead of doing 10 things, you can do one and you can jump there. I think that if our children or parents can teach their children to do both those things, one, know how to work smart, but also know how to work hard, then you can kind of choose what you want to do. When, you know, sometimes you work hard, sometimes you work smart, sometimes you'll do both. But I think just having that fundamental skill can make such a difference in people's life.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: I'd agree. I think that part of it is.
When you talked about your son, that really kind of hit me that I'm amazed at my kids and how they.
My daughter, you know, it's just go, go, go all the time, how they followed us as parents. So when we hear a lot during this political season about privilege or whatever, if a child is born without a father or without a mother or, you know, and they're already disadvantaged because they haven't had a positive role model to follow up through that. But by your son saying that they're already doing some of the organizational skills that you say now is what made you successful. He's looking and doing the same thing. He's following your path, and in a way that is going to make him successful as he looks forward. That's. And I find the same with my kids. So we don't realize how much impact we have as parents sometimes in making it work.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: It's kind of crazy because you really don't. Right. I think my biggest fear is that what happens when we let go, right? What happens when they're on their own and you can teach your children to work hard. You can. You can try and forcefully make them smart by, you know, studying and do all those things. But I think this thing that scares the out of me is how do you teach people to make good decisions?
[00:27:04] Speaker B: I made a really bad decision that could have turned my course completely around. I was in high school. I was a senior class, you know, doing all this leadership stuff. And remember, I'm a poor farm kid, but something about my way. My parents were on the school board and they did different things. They didn't have any money, but they did. They taught me to, you know, raise your hand and volunteer and do things well. We were taking the senior picture for the band picture. I'm in a black uniform as everybody else, and I see people whispering down. It comes to me, says, flip the bird. So in our senior picture for the band, we're all looking at the camera, flipping the bird. Two weeks later, they came back and took pictures Again, I didn't realize that everyone knew that they'd figured out, figured our joke out so they weren't going to do it. And I'm the only one that did it. So I did it. And so all of a sudden I'm faced with a dilemma of being kicked out of everything in high school and all my leadership and being completely ruined in my life. And I talked to my band teacher and he said, look, I said, my kids get in trouble too. Take your punishment and move on. So I think your point is your kids are going to screw up. So somehow you got to teach them understand it was better to have tried and failed than to succeed. Succeed at doing nothing. You tried, it failed, but you've learned something. And now don't do that again, but move on. I mean, my kids have made different mistakes in their lives and it's pretty amazing how once they've figured it out themselves and they've turned their life back around in something, how much more successful they are and how appreciative they are that you were there to be there to support in either case.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: I appreciate that.
Incredibly, time flies when you're having fun. We're at the end of the time and we have only one scripted question in this show, and that is. And it's a hard one and it's a personal one at that. If you had to go back to, you know, 20 something year old Terry, what would be your advice to him?
[00:28:53] Speaker B: What would be my advice? I think the biggest one is learn how to relax a little more. I wish maybe I'd have taken off for Europe broke and just learned a little more about the world and life would probably be the biggest one and how to relax.
But I don't have any regrets on the success I had by pushing hard, working hard.
But maybe it's back to don't be afraid to raise your hand and try things that others have not that probably is as big a one as any to look at things and to evaluate the world and then finally in today's society, to become more global and friendships, leadership groups around you so you learn everybody's different cultures and things. Because when you do have a product that you could sell, you don't want to just sell to anybody that looks like you. You want to be able to sell the world. You're going to make a lot more money.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Terry, thank you so much. What an absolute pleasure.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: This is fun. Yep.
