We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Randy Nolan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Randy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
What a great question. When I went through the choices of questions, I was struck with this one as it is so personal to me. I have a daughter who went to Hollywood at the tender age of 18. Dropped her off and told her good luck. So, the goal back 18 years ago was to one day see her on the Red Carpet.
When I came up with the idea to do teeth whitening I wanted to tie in the idea of how hard it is to get on the Red Carpet and how good you must strive to look. So, what better than a red carpet-worthy smile?
It hit me and I never had any thought about another name for my teeth whitening business.
My son is a graphic artist and he produced the idea I had for a logo. He had just graduated from architectural school. Since then he has gone on to be a very successful graphic artist in California, but this simple logo he produced for me has become one of the largest companies in this field worldwide.
Fortunately, I have another daughter who has come to help me and she was able to get through the maze of getting a Trade Mark for Red Carpet Smiles logo. Our business continues to grow from a simple idea to a worldwide customer base that is extraordinary large. My family is now involved in this enterprise, among their own pursuits. I love this business, my customers thrill me with their enthusiasm for our product, and I am so grateful to have the name of Red Carpet Smiles. It is what differentiated me from my competitors and that should be the goal of any company name.
Randy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
In 2006 at the age of 63, I sold my last real estate development just prior to the real estate market collapse. During the previous 45 years, I had developed office buildings, apartments, and subdivisions.
I was investing in the stock market and noticed a company going public whose business was teeth whitening and I was struck with the idea. I had never thought of teeth whitening as a business model. I was set to retire but had lost so much money with the collapse of real estate I knew I would need something to sustain me. Plus, I couldn’t stand the thought of retirement, whatever that is! So, I read all I could find about how teeth whitening works and decided to apply it to a retail store in a major mall.
In early 2007, I opened Red Carpet Smiles in Willow Bend Shopping Mall. The store was an immediate success, I did more than $15,000 in sales the first month. I thought how lucky I was to start something so unique. I loved how happy it made people to see their yellow teeth turn white and it was extremely rewarding personally because I felt like I was providing something that made people smile.
I was open for about two months, when a competitor came into a Sam’s store nearby and undercut my price considerably. I was forced to reduce my price, from $199.00 down to $99.00 which meant I could not afford the dental customer packages I was purchasing, pay the mall rental, and have employees so I let the employees go and was working 70 hours per week alone in the store. Some retirement! After 3 months of this I closed the store and came home to lick my wounds, dog tired, down trodden, disillusioned and disgusted.
However, I was hearing about all the others who were now opening mall kiosks at a fast pace. I quickly decided my personal future in teeth whitening lay in the wholesale and not the retail part of the business. I began to study the labels of different dental suppliers for teeth whitening like Zoom, and Beyond Dental, and formulated my first gels for testing in mid-2007.
Now I needed to learn how to build a website so I could sell my gels to all the others who were setting up kiosks or mobile operations. After months of research, formulating, testing, and learning DreamWeaver, I launched my website in November of 2007 and absolutely nothing happened.
I was forced to go back to work for a friend in the oil business just to pay the bills. At night I kept tinkering with my website and testing teeth whitening gel formulas.
On Monday March 30th, 2009 more than two years later after launching my website, I got a my very first order for $23.00 for two of my teeth whitening kits. I was thrilled. It wasn’t the money necessarily but the fact that I had sold something without being face to face with the buyer! It was a water shed moment for me. Two days later on April 1st, I received an order for $182. A week later I received a small order from Canada, and then one from Great Britain. Within the month I was getting repeat orders from some of these people. I began to get a glimpse of how powerful the internet is and what it could do for me.
I was filling the gels I sold by hand and had no idea how I was going to be able to fill orders of any size so I found a company that sells dispensing equipment and I invested in air compressors, valve controllers, dispensing guns, cartridges, mixing equipment and set up a small lab. All the while I was working full time again filling my orders by hand because filling the syringes by automation was difficult.
More and more orders were coming into my website and I realized the same thing I experienced was true for all the other small business operators for teeth whitening. The kiosk owners could not pay the extremely high costs for their customer kits when most of it was pretty packaging and of all things my gels were giving better results.
It is still true today. RedCarpetSmiles.com enjoys a customer base of thousands of repeat customers, many of whom have been with me since my earliest days. My gels are sold worldwide by numerous distributors and re-sellers in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. We are one of the largest purchasers of syringes for teeth whitening in the world. The gels are marketed under numerous private labels now also.
Since 2007, I have whitened or been responsible for whitening millions of teeth. I have mentored hundreds of others in the business and that is how I have grown my business because I realize my success depends on their success.
Where ever you are, if you have had your teeth whitened, the odds are good it was with my gels.
Several of my protege’s are the top teeth whitening operators on daily deals, one is number one in the world according to Groupon.
Have you ever had to pivot?
If success were easy, it would have no value.
I have done many diverse things in my life. Things that have no relationship to each other except the one true constant. They all had plenty of competition. When I mention an idea to others who are searching, I am always hit with the response- “There is a lot of competition already”. It seems like most people are stopped before they start because they hear of competition. There is practically nothing available today that does not have competition, so if you are looking for something no one else has discovered you are fooling yourself and using it as an excuse to never venture out. It’s because of your study of that idea that you are beginning to see the competition associated with it. As an example, let’s say you are interested in a certain car, so you begin noticing it and pretty soon you think everybody has one, and you never noticed it before. The reason is you are now looking for it and notice it more often. Same with business.
I never worry about competition. If others did it, then I figure I can too. There is only one thing you have to have to be successful. A willingness to persist against all odds and most people don’t have that, but all entrepreneurs know it is the key to success.
I have had to come back from losing everything more than once in life and I know it isn’t easy, but what in life is?
My advice to anyone starting out-do what you are passionate about and the money will follow.
More than once I have had to stop mid stream and change to a new direction, but I never gave up, because I had no choice. Odds are you don’t either, so just do what you are interested in and don’t give up after a few setbacks.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
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