What a trip

The past 24 months have been a hell of a ride. Let’s walk through a timeline, 3 months at a time. This will be your next four newsletters, and I’m sticking to honest, comical, hard-hitting facts. 

Jan 2020 -  I sat down with my wife, Melissa, and decided to leave the corporate world and become, (ugh), a consultant.

Feb 2020 – My wife and I fly to Las Vegas for CES, where she would be off marching the floors for 3-days to see the latest and greatest healthcare tech, while I would be preparing for my first big meeting with a potential client. Not just any client. This client was a big deal from another country, and flew in for CES as they were preparing to launch a hardware product for zoom rooms.  The morning of the interview, he had contacted me to let me know that he was in the hospital with emergency health problems, and we would need to reschedule. Naturally I felt terrible for him, but I also felt terrible for myself. “I just left a steady paycheck for this?” I was filled with regret, remorse, and disappointment.  My first gig was slipping through my hands. Not to fear, he contacted me later that evening and stated we could meet the next morning. My spirit was revived! Now, this man was / is very kind, however; he speaks very little English and I didn’t / don’t speak Chinese. The interview was good, and I’m certain we understood at least 50% of what the other person was saying, (you know, just like any other sales call.) He went on to disclose to me that he had ordered cookies in their hotel room after being on the floor at CES all day. After eating one of the cookies, he started to feel very off. Light-headed, hungry, relaxed. Turns out, the competition delivered him pot cookies. And, this man was as sober as a goat. Terrible thing to do, but he did find some humor in it as he tested, “positive”, for marijuana in the ER. When he came back to the room, he saw that the leftover cookies indeed did have a marijuana plant imprint on the back of them. Marijuana is, after all, legal in the city of Las Vegas, NV, (among other things). Oh yeah, I got the job.

March 2020 – Covid – (the month we all took a collective gasp) I was now to fly to Amsterdam for this client, as they had a large international show where they were releasing their technology with a 600-square foot booth. My wife was telling about this new Coronavirus and how I shouldn’t travel. Mind you, it hadn’t really hit the news yet, so I had my doubts. I wanted to go. I needed to go. I didn’t go. She won the argument after 7-days. I am eternally grateful that she did.  3-days after the show, I received a call that the company would be halting their efforts in favor of selling medical equipment, since they had 3 large factories that they could convert. I had no idea what a nitrile glove was, an N95, and wanted nothing to do with it. They said they wanted do a press release in the US for all hospitals who would soon be in need. I said please don’t put my name and number on it, I want nothing to do with it. It was the last day of March, and it felt as if everything was falling apart. 

April 2020 – The next morning, I woke up, poured my coffee, and stared out the window in my best Tony Soprano way. What would I do? Go back to selling tech / IT? Nobody will hire a guy from South Dakota. I had bills to pay, and time wasn’t on my side. A number from NYC, NY hit my phone, and I prayed to God that it was a recruiter. Nope, it was the Chief Procurement Officer for one of the largest hospitals in the US. They wanted to buy 50,000 N 95’s.  I took the order, knowing nothing about a KN95, and then received 47 more calls that day to go on to sell $1.8 million dollars of KN 95 masks. Over the next 11 months, I went on to hire 46 sales reps as we paved our way to selling more than $168 million dollars.  We pivoted, we had attrition, and we had some true gems. That company went on to be acquired for $70 mm dollars, which I turned down a large sum of cash to start what you know today as TIDAL.

Stay tuned, we have 7 more of these newsletters to go over the next 21 months. Trust me, it gets much crazier.