Live with Lisa & Michael Miller

Thank you, Lisa. I appreciate it. It looks beautiful. Where are you right now? You know, we're actually at our house here and just enjoying summer while it's still here.

Oh my gosh, I don't even know that I know that. Really, it's one of those things where you're an inventor yourself, also working for corporations throughout the years coming up with new products, and gradually over time learning about licensing and license agreements and trademarks and patents, of course. I was doing a lot of that before the internet, and so the ability to get that information, you literally had to travel to Washington DC, file your patents snail mail. I mean, oh my gosh, before faxes even, right? Oh, it's crazy. And so now, of course, all of the information that's available is just absolutely spectacular, and it really helps with, I think certainly the quality of the types of inventions that people have now, because they are able to do that due diligence and really figure out what is new and unique about their products. It's just amazing, and I certainly enjoy doing it every day.

Absolutely. It actually started, I think, when I really got the bug was when I was in the Navy. I came up with a product idea and they actually paid me some really good money because of this product idea that I had. It was actually a modification to Canon bubble jet printers that allowed them to work on submarines, and so saved the Navy just millions and millions of dollars. They pay you a percentage of that, and I was like, wow, this is cool, maybe I should try to come up with some more stuff. So I just kept on doing that. Then I was in the semiconductor industry as a technical training manager and technical support manager for a number of years. Then I invented some medical products, went into the medical device area of medical bandages, and then came over to the Danco and started working with plumbing products, home products, new construction, home construction type products. We actually had a pet company that I worked for up until a couple years ago, for eight years within the same corporation, for Pet Props and all those areas, licensing products for all of your major big box retailers, your Amazon, your Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Menards, Ace, QVC products, Petco, Petsmart. I had a lot of products that I've worked with inventors on and brought them to market in all of those different areas.

The thing that I really keep in mind every single day when I'm working with people that are submitting their products is that I know the amount of time, work, effort, sacrifices, and the fear as well that everyone goes through whenever you're doing this. Unless you're one of the many serial inventors that I work with that just come up with product after product and have licensed multiple products to multiple companies, those are pretty rare. The majority of the people that I talk to every day, this is their very first time out and about, and so there's a lot of fear. What I try to do is just be very fair and try to explain to them where I see their product. Is it an A product, B product, C product, good for the companies that I work for or not? In many cases, I'll let people know if I even think it would work in the marketplace to begin with. The reality of my job every day is that I definitely say a whole lot more no than I ever say yeses, and you just have to be kind about that and at least try to help people out.

I get them in all stages. As a person working for the companies that I do, are we open to accepting products in all stages? Absolutely. But once I put on my inventor hat, the thing that you have to keep in mind is that the further along the product is developed, the more money that you have spent towards developing that product. Those are all things you're taking into account when you do hopefully get to a license agreement stage with the company. If you've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars or if you invested two thousand dollars, that makes a huge difference in what that license agreement has to look like from the perspective of the company. Earlier stages in some cases are great, sometimes later stages are great. It really does vary by the type of product. In some cases, if you're not a trained product developer, in many cases the patents that you file are not that strong and they're not well written, and you haven't thought through all the different options. If that product would have originally been brought to us, our engineering team could take a look at it, they would make modifications, and then the patent that can be filed can then be much stronger, cover a lot more different things. Whereas if that's already done and over with, remember what we're licensing from you is that intellectual property. If it's not strong, that means we can't really offer you very much. If it's strong, well then now we know it's something that we can actually protect out in the marketplace and there's value to that. So it can vary along that whole spectrum. The big thing is just to make sure that you have good agreements in place to start out with, non-disclosure agreements that protect you whenever you're discussing it with the company. I would just say try to make sure that it's a company that's actually licensed products before, that really understand the inventor and what are some of those concerns, and try to protect you.

I think really anytime that's the same answer as the previous one. On the patent side, no, we don't require a provisional or even prefer it in some cases. Once again, it just really depends. There have been people that have submitted products to me that I look at and go, well, I think you might have something here, but what you're really looking at filing and all of that, I don't think it's quite there yet. You really need to do some more research and work harder on this and then maybe come back to us later. Or we might look at that same type of product and go, oh my gosh, there's a nugget here that we would like to use. So we would license that idea from you, but then we would file the patent with your twist, because maybe it matches with something that we're already working on. Once again, it's a collaborative effort. That's why my name and my job description, partnerships, is right, because that's what it's really about. Just remember, a company, or at least the companies that I work for, we're not going to invest our time, effort, dollars unless it's something that we really think can go to market and be profitable both for us and for the inventor as well.

Yeah, always on the merit of the product. It also depends upon the flexibility of the inventor that we're working with. In many cases, some people are so tied to what they have and their vision of it, it becomes very difficult for them to let go and look at what might be a vision from somebody else being added to that. That's understandable. It's just that for us, especially where I get so many new products every day, it's like, okay, you know what, you're not open to that, that's great. Have fun, go out, reach out to other companies, do whatever on your own. I've got 10 more products to review today that I have to work on. Namaste. Good luck, and if you do decide to come back, the door is always open and we'll look at it again.

There's so many times that I've actually turned down a product, and I shouldn't say just me, it's also our team who also looks at these and we make decisions on what we're going to move forward with or not. But you might get in a customer meeting a month later, which has happened, and they just happened to mention, well, we would really like to get a product that solves this particular problem out there in the marketplace. That might have just been something I just saw two months ago. It might be something that's out of our normal, but we looked at it, we thought it was great, but it was just a little bit too much on the edge of what we normally do. But now that a customer has asked for it, that's great. I'll call up the inventor, hey, is it still open? We want to show this to Home Depot. That's a happy event through that day. It's amazing. That's why it's so important for inventors to get out there, get their products out in front of the people that review them. It's almost the lottery, right? You can't win it if you don't play.

Oh, of course. Everything about the product and about the IP affects the royalty. Those are all things that both you as the inventor and us as a corporation have to take into account. The reality is that the more work that we do on our end, the more that we add to the intellectual property, so the more that we add to the idea, then of course the more we need to be able to get out of the product. Same as you as the inventor. If you bring a product to us right off the bat and we're able to go and sell it without a single modification, well then you need to be paid for that. If we look at it and go, wow, there's no way to go to market like that, it's too high of cost, it really needs to be changed or it can do maybe other things that we think of, well then we need to be compensated for those ideas because it all comes down to the overall dollar value of that idea and what from an intellectual property perspective we are really paid for.

Yeah, so that's a really interesting question, especially with so many of the different chemicals. You have chemical products, you have things that actually go into cars, and then you have things that are built into cars. Of course, things built into cars, of course not. But the possibility of a chemical product that cleans a car in some way or maybe some kind of carpet shampoo or something like that, well then yeah, and possibly. So it would be very problem-solving specific. They can go to the website and see the list of your brands to know more about what you're looking for.

Actually, you can go to danco.com, you can go to lsproducts.com, another one. Our chemical line is under True Fusion. I just remember seeing NCH, nch.com, that's our parent company. If someone were to go to the nch.com website and click on Brands and Divisions, you could see all of them. In fact, I think I can share. Let's try this. I've never done it before. Share screen. Boom, I'm figuring this out. How cool is that? You don't need that. So you can see that now, right? So you can see all the brands. Sorry, just went to nch.com, brands division. So if you have something that might fit well in any of these types of applications, then Michael's your guy to talk to.

You know what, Kickstarter, just like any other marketplace, there's products that do extremely well on Kickstarter, there's products that don't do very well on Kickstarter. I would just say if you are looking at doing something like that, make sure that you go with a company who actually has, once again, just like a company like mine, make sure you're working with somebody who's done Kickstarter before. I would not want to, even if I came up with something that I thought was Kickstarter ready, even doing what I do, I would not put it on Kickstarter myself. The world of doing that is long gone, and I think you really have to hire professionals who understand how to properly put that product onto Kickstarter, how to manage the social media. All of that is really important, so you need to do it correctly.

Yeah, I think, once again, just like with so many other things, it truly varies by product. There have been products that we have licensed that started out at Kickstarter and did that, but at the same time they actually had a pretty darn good video that they were able to shop around to our company, and what they did didn't hurt them. You know what sometimes will happen is somebody will go and start out with a product, they'll get their first 5,000 units made, 20,000 units made, they go immediately to one of the big box stores, Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Home Depot, they get a store test with the store, and they blow it. They can't meet the order requirements, they delayed in shipping, there's a quality issue, whatever the case may be. The problem is now that product, no matter how good it is, is very, very tainted. I really can't touch it at that point because I guarantee you I will never get it from that buyer again with that product, and other buyers won't touch it because all the buyers from all of these different retailers, they're watching all the other stores in their categories. They know what's been there, they know if it's not been there, they know if they're seeing something new in the industry or not. They're doing this day in and day out on their individual categories and are very knowledgeable, so they're never going to pull the wool over their eyes. So yeah, it really can't be a tainted product.

Sure. In that particular case, the problem that you have with those types of things is that's not intellectual property. There's really nothing to protect there. I'll give you a perfect example. Here's a fantastic idea: I want to power a spaceship that can go to Mars powered completely off of water. Super inexpensive, you can go and do it. Oh my gosh, what a fantastic idea, right? I have no clue how to do it. I don't know even if it could be done, but boy does that sound wonderful. So there's a lot of product ideas that you can come up with, and honestly we don't have time or people to be able to go and really try to work through how to make that happen. That's what we rely on you as the inventor to really come up with. So there's a lot of fantastic ideas and concepts out there, but unless those concepts can be put into at least somewhat of a workable model, I don't care if it's made out of paper, I don't care if it's made out of cardboard, plastic moldable, whatever, it somehow has to be put into some kind of practice, or it's obvious to you that it could be.

Yeah, in many cases people call me with a pie in the sky type of thing. It's like, I don't even have anything, how would I even present that to my team to even get the allocation of time, money, and resources? You have to remember that our engineering teams, our marketing teams, our sales teams, everybody within the organization is all working 100% today, I guarantee you probably more than 100%. So that means whenever I go and from an outside inventor bring a product into the mix, I'm going to be displacing something that we're already working on because we believe that this item that's coming in is better. So I need to really prove that point and essentially be the inventor's advocate to come in and show the PowerPoint, the video, the prototype, the engineering time so that engineering can evaluate the prototype. All of that requires time, money, and resources that they normally don't have available unless I'm saying, hey, this is the next big thing, we've got to look at this. So I want you to put off to the side 5% of your time over the next two weeks and really take a good hard look at this and maybe run it on the prototype machine and let's do up some prototypes on it. But that's what it takes.

Yeah, actually, from, and once again I'm not an attorney, but I do have to be very careful about what we do and what we look at. Part of the problem with that is it might be something that we're already working on internally of solving that same problem, and it's very difficult if you don't have that solution already defined when you come to talk to us. Then how can I sign an NDA for that? I can't just do a blanket NDA that says, oh, anything that you come up with for a coupe drain is protected under our non-disclosure agreement. Well, no, we do coupe drains every single day. We do hair catchers every single day. I'm not going to protect you on a hair catcher idea. We already have products in the marketplace for that, we already are selling those products, and we of course would be innovating in that area as well. So no, I can't do an NDA. You need to have a much more defined solution to a particular problem for I would sign an NDA on that.

Yeah, it needs to be something that is, I will call it not broad. It needs to be a very defined, you know what you would put in your claims for a patent type of solution.

Yeah, and honestly, I get a lot of people that reach out to me and say, what are you looking for? That's another thing that I get. I mean, honestly, we have to go very broad and say, well, anything in these spaces, or truly innovative products, because if I get any more narrower than that, we're probably already working on it.

Well, this is one of the, and of course because I work for a company that licenses products, I'm very pro licensing your product to a company that already knows how to deal with these big box retailers. The reason I'm so passionate about that is because I have watched so many people fail over the years that have gotten to the stage that it sounds like you're describing, where they've shown their products sometimes at the National Hardware Show, sometimes they've sent it in, buyer is very interested, and of course you're very excited about that. You really want to go talk to that buyer and get them excited about it. But the thing that you have to remember is that that buyer is going to expect a product that they can actually put on the shelves and sell, and that you as the person that's presented it can make sure that it's on the shelves. I guarantee you those contracts that you sign with them require you to have a certain level of fulfillment for that product, and if you don't meet those levels of fulfillment, you're going to get fined. I've literally seen people go upside down on a product that they have brought into one of these big box stores because they could not fulfill the orders, and now they start getting fined for every day that that product is not on the shelf. It was because of not having that supply chain that can meet all of those requirements. In many cases, it's not just supply chain, it's quality assurance, engineering, manufacturing. That entire chain of people that you have, technical experts that we do certainly in our company and in many other companies, you really need that. I've known very few people, less than people I can count on one hand, that have actually started up and been able to actually service those big box customers from their garage. It was super simple products, very easy to manufacture, and they struggled at the beginning, but over time they were actually able to make it, and in some cases they were able to add additional products at later dates and have done reasonably well over the years. But it's a really small group of people that have really been able to accomplish that. You really need that whole supply chain to do it, and that's why I'm very pro licensing. Personally, if I have an invention that I've come up with, I'm going to license it to somebody. I'm not even going to bring it to market on my own. I'll license it to another company if it's outside of what I work on every day in my own company. I'll license it to somebody else. I don't have the skill sets that meet all of that.

I've seen it work both ways. Obviously, there's people out there like Lisa, there's a number of other people that are out there that are advocates for inventors that work with them, don't just take every single product that's presented to them, they're very well vetted. So when somebody like Lisa reaches out to me and says, hey, I got something really great to show you, then yeah, I'm going to look at it, no doubt about it. I know that it's going to have a lot of the things that I need to be able to not only for me to judge the product but also for my team to be able to judge it. A lot of that time is spent on doing the PowerPoint presentations of what we have to show our team and getting the prototypes in and costing and just every little detail that you could possibly think of. That's where they can assist. I've always believed in let people who are very good at what they do do that. There's so many new skill sets that you have to learn as an inventor regarding patenting and trademarks and prototypes and material specs and other solutions. There's just an incredible amount of information that you have to process and that you have to become an expert on. Then you reach that next stage of actually looking at licensing or looking at manufacturing yourself or whatever the case may be. Now you're moving into a whole other group of literally hundreds of new skill sets that you're going to have to acquire over a very short period of time.

Yeah, there's not very many of us out there, including myself, that can just throw millions of dollars at something.

Yeah, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm on there, I have thousands of connections. I always try to make myself available for five, ten minute phone calls with people if they want to run something by me just real quick, have some basic questions. I will also say that the other real place that I would definitely suggest you going is the United Inventors Association, which I'm a part of. It's a non-profit organization for inventor education. A great group of people. We've got a lot of information on our website. We have an event that's coming up here soon, I think it's over four or five days of just inventor education. Those types of things would be really great places for you to get information. Also, the US Trademark Office website has got a lot of information for new inventors. The other thing that they have is a pro bono program for inventors where they will actually assist you in getting your patent. You have to meet certain requirements and things like that, but that website has a tremendous amount of information there.

No, I really don't. I wouldn't say, oh, this is a specific agent that I work with all the time type of thing. But if you use someone, there's a number of them out there, and I know that they're always working on trying to get clients and they're competitors against each other.

Yes, just like with any company you're licensing to, anybody that you're working with, ask them what were their successes, what are products that are currently in the marketplace today that they very specifically got there. There's a number of people that are out there that'll go and throw out, oh, I put this product out there, put that product out there, and the reality is they didn't. So it can be discouraging. I hate to say there's folks like that, but just really try to research them. A lot of times when you just meet people face to face or even on Microsoft Teams or whatever, I think a lot of times you'll get the feeling if it's somebody that's truly out to help you or not.

And the thing that I would add to that is, whenever you're licensing to a company like Danco, we of course never ask anybody for anything as far as money is concerned. Our job is to find really good new unique products that we can bring to market, make a profit on, and then we share those profits with the inventor who brought it to us. Our success is your success. I would look at the same thing from licensing agents as well. If you're successful, they're successful. If you're not successful, I think that's what they're not hired for. That would be the way that I would look at it.

I would say that the preferred method would be to reach out to me directly on email: [email protected]. You can go to the danco.com website and we have Inventor Central. There's a little click link that you go to and that will link you right over to our online submission page. That's actually called MarketBlast, and it'll go right into there and you fill out all the information. Either way is perfectly acceptable. What I will do, if you email me, generally what I'll do if it looks like something that I'm going to take a closer look at, I would ask you to go ahead and enter it into the online submission page just so that it makes it into the queue properly for the products that we're looking at. The thing you have to remember about my particular job is I get about 10 submissions a day on average, and that's including Saturday and Sunday. So the big thing is to really try to keep all of that organized to make sure that I have properly looked at each thing that has been submitted. It's really key to have those things properly into our system so that I can make sure I've picked them all off the list before we wrap up here.

Yeah, our particular process is what they call stage gate, which is a very common practice within both internal and external companies. Basically it goes through gates. The very first gate is me, we call it Gate Zero, and I'm the first reviewer. Ground zero, yes. Then from that point, if it's something that I think is worthy of showing to the rest of the team, then I'll start working with the inventor and in some cases working with our engineering team, our marketing team, sales team, and develop a pull-up presentation that would include a pro forma, which would be the financial performance expected for the product, how much it would cost to manufacture, a whole litany of things. Then I would present that to our larger and broader team that would include product managers, sales team, marketing team, sourcing team, engineering. Basically what my job is at that point is to present that product in the best possible light that I can if I truly believe that it would be something that would be profitable for the company. How does that normally work out? If I'm getting 10 products a day, typically per month I would maybe pick two to three products that I would show to the team, and I usually show those about once every two to three months. So in general, I'll show maybe six to a maximum of 10 products every three months to the overall team. Out of those 10 per day, that's about 300 a month, so that's about 900 after three months. Especially if I attended a trade show, a trade show would add another 300 to 400. Or you do things like this, you're welcome, now you're going to get this surge. So in other words, folks, be patient in this process. Understand especially with good guys like Michael, they're doing their best to bust their butt to get it through the internal channels and processes that they have to. Give them the space and time that they need. If you have a question, ask it, but don't be drilling them with all of your demands or anything like that.

And feel free to email me if you've submitted your product and now it's two or three weeks have passed and you haven't heard anything from me. It's okay to email me and just check in. Remember, I take vacation, there's travel, there's internal meetings. We just got finished up a few days internal meeting, strategy meeting, and the week prior was all doing up all the slides. So there's a lot of times that I just quite frankly can't get back to you, but it's okay to go ahead and email and just drop a line. It's okay to be persistent, but not obnoxious, would be appreciated.

Well, you know, everything's up for negotiation. It's hard not to have a conversation. There's so many things that have to be taken into consideration both from the company's side of things as well as from the inventor side of things. My goal always is to try to reach some kind of middle ground to make that agreement happen. I will say, especially with COVID going on, anybody can go right now online and see there's actually all these maps that show shipping containers that are waiting to be offloaded, that are delayed at every single shipping port throughout the world right now. So every company is experiencing some really challenging supply chain issues right now, and that certainly affects the way that we bring products to market. It's also affecting our customers, and of course you as the consumers know that you're seeing empty shelves now where we never saw empty shelves before. Every time I go to the store now, I'm always looking at these really strange empty shelves in certain product categories, then you come back the next week and that shelf is fully stocked up and then another shelf in the store is empty. So everybody's facing that, but it also has changed the way that agreements are being structured now as well. The lead times to get products into these customers has turned out to be much longer than what it used to be, so there's had to be some fundamental changes right now on that. But I would say everything's up for negotiation. It's really about coming to the middle ground that works both for the inventor as well as for the company, and both sides need to be flexible on that. I would say probably the thing that most inventors don't really realize is how much upfront money the company that is licensing your product is going to have to put up front before that product ever even reaches the shelf. For your average one SKU, it's well over $100,000 to $150,000 that has been spent by that company, and that's not even counting the buying of the inventory before it ever goes on the shelves. That's just internal resources and engineering, manufacturing, molds. There's a tremendous amount of money, and for some products it's well more than a quarter to a half million dollars that that company would have spent before they've ever made a dime from selling that product on the shelf. So I know it's difficult, but just be considerate about that sort of huge expense for the company.

Yes.

Thanks everybody. Bye.