How Failure Led to a Million-Dollar Idea – Steve Adams of Tick Mitt
Steve Adams
United States
Sushant@treptalks.com
Full-time
Open to opportunities: Yes
TiCK MiTT
Physical Location - Country: United States
Location - Countries Operating: United States
1-10 (Small Business)
https://tickmitt.com/
Business Type: Product
Category: Retail and Consumer Goods
Subcategory: Pet Supplies
Niche: Pet Accessories
Segments: B2C and B2B
Structure: Private
Number of founders: 1
Business Socials
Business Book
Inspirational Peers or Entrepreneurs
- His Daughter
Innovative Product or Idea
- Home diagnostics breakthrough
Startup or Business
Best business advice
Stay in the game. You never know which call, meeting, or moment is going to change everything—but you have to be ready for it. At the same time, understand that not everything is fixable. Great entrepreneurs know when to push forward and when to pivot. That balance is everything.
INTERVIEW VIDEO (Length – 1:23:06)
PODCAST AUDIO
Intro
Steve Adams, founder of TiCK MiTT, a patented reusable microfiber mitt designed to quickly and safely remove ticks from people and pets, inspired by his family’s experiences with Lyme disease. Steve shares his entrepreneurial journey from early hustle and real estate to building a celebrity-home construction firm and then acquiring Magnolia Bakery, scaling it from one shop to 35–40 locations across 14 countries before selling amid the pandemic and partnership disputes. He explains how TiCK MiTT was developed with a tick scientist and product engineer, how trade shows and retail distribution accelerated growth, and how his daughter Olivia now runs the company as CEO. Steve recounts their Shark Tank experience, key lessons on failure, integrity, partnerships, and the impact of tariffs on CPG economics.
Fearless Entrepreneurial Journey
I’ve always believed that entrepreneurship is part of who you are. While you can study it in school, the mindset usually starts early.
As adults, we tend to expect ourselves to be good at something right away. If we’re not, we often quit partly because we’re afraid of looking embarrassed in front of others. Kids don’t worry about that. They try things, fail, and try again. That mindset is incredibly important in entrepreneurship.
The truth is, every entrepreneur experiences failure. Those setbacks are where the real lessons come from. When things are going well, you don’t learn much. But when things start to fall apart, that’s when you discover what really works and how to move forward.
My entrepreneurial journey started young raking leaves, delivering newspapers, shoveling snow, and selling greeting cards door-to-door. Those early experiences taught me how to handle rejection and understand that success is a numbers game. You don’t need every opportunity to work you just need some of them to.
Entrepreneurship is ultimately about independence, persistence, and the willingness to keep going even when things get difficult
Journey Through Real Estate
My entrepreneurial journey began very early. I’ve always had the drive to do my own thing. Along the way, I worked with different people and had a variety of experiences including working at a summer camp but I was always drawn to creating my own path.
I left college early and entered the real estate business, which was possible at the time. In the 1970s, there were opportunities to step into industries like real estate without following the traditional path. Today, things are different, and completing a college degree is often essential.
Through both good times and difficult ones, those early experiences shaped the way I think about business, independence, and entrepreneurship. They reinforced my belief that the journey is about learning, adapting, and continuing to move forward.
Overcoming Early Challenges
I don’t believe a college degree is the only path to success, intelligence, or real-world experience. There was a long period where having a degree felt almost mandatory, but today technology and social media are opening new doors again. I was fortunate to enter business at a time when it was still possible to jump in without one.
That said, I still believe college can be a valuable experience. It provides a strong foundation and an opportunity to learn about yourself. My daughter followed that path, and I think she’s better for it.
For me, things unfolded differently. I left college early partly because I lacked the discipline for traditional academics and partly because, at 19, I was eager to get out into the world and build something of my own. What’s interesting is that while I didn’t have the discipline to sit down and write papers, I had the discipline to make sales calls, meet people, and pursue opportunities as an entrepreneur. Sometimes discipline shows up in the areas that truly motivate you.
I started my career in real estate, working with large brokerage firms and learning the fundamentals of the industry. Eventually, I realized working for others wasn’t the right fit, so I left and started my own real estate company. That was really the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey.
At the same time, I was always exploring other ideas. Back in the late 1970s, I was trying to open a bar and even a roller disco two of the hottest trends at the time. I was constantly looking for the next opportunity and figuring out how to turn ideas into reality.
Building Businesses and Partnerships
My entrepreneurial journey has been filled with both great successes and difficult setbacks. One of the earliest lessons I learned was how important the right partners are. A great partner brings complementary skills and strengthens the business. When partners overlap too much or don’t align, it can create challenges. I experienced that early in my career, and it pushed me to move on and start new ventures.
Over the years, I realized something about myself: I love building businesses. I enjoy developing concepts, assembling high-performance teams, and growing companies from the ground up. But once a business reaches a certain stage, the day-to-day operations don’t excite me the same way. That’s why I often bring in strong operational leaders and eventually transition to new opportunities. My career has naturally followed a cycle of about 10–12 years in each venture.
After starting in real estate, I eventually moved into construction, where I built luxury homes for high-profile clients including Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Eli Callaway, Laurence Graff, Uma Thurman, and Shalom Harlow. What started as a business built from a simple business card grew into one of the top construction companies in the city, with projects in places like Turks and Caicos.
While running that company, another opportunity appeared. Through a conversation with the owner of Magnolia Bakery a small, beloved bakery in New York’s West Village that had become famous after a scene in the TV show Sex and the City I ended up buying the entire business. What began as a single 620-square-foot shop eventually grew into an international brand with dozens of stores across 14 countries.
But during that time, life took an unexpected turn. I contracted a severe bacterial infection and spent nearly five years battling serious illness. While I was sick, my construction business collapsed, largely because the people running it lacked the experience needed to sustain it. The bakery, however, survived thanks to a strong team and an exceptional operational leader who managed the day-to-day business.
Eventually, I recovered and returned to help scale the bakery globally. After about 13 years of growth, the company was in the process of being sold in March 2020 just days before the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The timing changed everything. The deal collapsed and later closed under far more difficult conditions. It was a powerful reminder that timing and circumstances often play a major role in business outcomes.
Around that time, another idea that had been in the back of my mind for years resurfaced. Living on a farm with large dogs, I noticed certain fabrics naturally picked up ticks when wiping drool or dirt. That observation eventually led me to develop a product designed to remove ticks safely. After years of research with scientists and engineers, the concept finally became a real product.
When I eventually stepped away from the bakery business in 2021, I had no plans to start another company. But entrepreneurs rarely stay retired for long. I began exploring new ideas and ultimately turned to my daughter, who had recently graduated from college and worked briefly in finance and venture capital.
I offered her the opportunity to run the new business while I supported it with my experience and resources. She brought fresh energy, a strong educational foundation, and a new perspective. While her college education cost time and money, it also gave her a head start that took me decades and many costly mistakes to learn on my own.
Together, we began building the next chapter. Neither of us had deep experience in consumer packaged goods, but sometimes not knowing everything can be an advantage. It forces you to learn quickly, adapt, and build something new from the ground up just like every entrepreneurial journey begins.
Learning from Start-up Mistakes
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in entrepreneurship is the willingness to fail. When something works for you, it’s natural to keep following the same path because it’s familiar and proven. But sometimes the best opportunities come from exploring new directions even if they’re uncertain.
Working with my daughter on this business has been a powerful combination of perspectives. She brings fresh ideas, energy, and the willingness to try paths I might not have considered. I bring decades of experience and a broader view of how businesses succeed or fail. My role is often to help avoid the kinds of costly mistakes I had to learn the hard way.
Over the years, those lessons were expensive—sometimes hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in mistakes. In this new venture, our biggest mistake so far has been about $7,500 and we even recovered most of that. That’s the value of experience guiding the journey.
In the early days, we focused on getting exposure and testing the market. Through connections with Jennifer Ashton, we were able to participate in flash sales on The View and Good Morning America through their “Deals and Steals” segments. These promotions aren’t designed to generate big profits products are deeply discounted and networks take a percentage but they’re powerful marketing opportunities.
During two of those flash sales, we sold nearly 8,000 units in about ten hours. It was intense, but it proved there was real interest in the product.
From there, we started exploring the consumer product world more seriously. Our first major industry event was the Global Pet Expo, a massive trade show for the pet industry. Walking into an 800,000-square-foot convention hall with a small 10-by-10 booth was humbling especially when some companies had huge multi-story displays with coffee bars and elaborate lighting.
But that’s the reality of building a new product. You start small, learn quickly, and let the product speak for itself.
What makes our product unique is its universal relevance. Anyone who spends time outdoors can encounter ticks whether you’re hiking, gardening, golfing, or watching your kids play sports. That’s a huge portion of the population. We started in the pet market because pet owners are often the most aware of the problem. Dogs and other animals frequently bring ticks into the home, which then exposes the entire family.
That early focus helped us find our first audience and begin building awareness. From there, the journey continues learning, adapting, and growing step by step.
Pioneering Product Innovation
One of the most important lessons in entrepreneurship is being willing to fail. When something has worked for you in the past, it’s easy to stay on that same path because it feels safe. But sometimes the best opportunities come from trying a new direction even if you’re not certain where it will lead.
Working with my daughter has created a powerful balance. She brings fresh energy, creativity, and the willingness to explore ideas I might not immediately consider. I bring decades of experience and a broader perspective that helps us avoid the kinds of costly mistakes I had to learn the hard way. Over the years, those mistakes sometimes cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. In this business, our biggest mistake so far has been about $7,500, and we even recovered most of it.
In our first year, we focused on learning the market and building awareness. Through the help of Jennifer Ashton, we were able to run two flash sales on The View and Good Morning America through their “Deals and Steals” segments. These promotions aren’t designed to generate large profits products are heavily discounted and networks take a percentage but they’re incredibly powerful marketing opportunities.
In just ten hours during those promotions, we sold roughly 8,000 units. That exposure helped us validate that people understood the problem our product solves.
From there, we began attending industry events to learn more about the consumer product world. Our first major trade show was the Global Pet Expo. Walking into an 800,000-square-foot convention hall with a small 10-by-10 booth was humbling. Some companies had massive displays with multiple levels, lighting, and even cappuccino bars. We didn’t even pay the extra few hundred dollars for booth carpeting.
But that’s how many businesses begin small, focused, and learning as they go.
The experience helped us understand that trade shows were critical for building relationships and gaining traction. We started in the pet market because pet owners are often the most aware of the tick problem. Dogs frequently pick up ticks outdoors and bring them into the home, which puts the entire family at risk.
As we learned more, we accelerated our growth strategy. Because we had the resources to do it, we invested heavily in attending multiple trade shows across different industries pet, outdoor recreation, lawn and garden, and more. Each show cost between $8,000 and $12,000 once you included travel, hotels, and booth fees, but the goal was to compress the learning curve and quickly discover what worked.
One of the biggest breakthroughs came at the Outdoor Retailer Show, where our product was named Innovative Product of the Year among more than 140 entries. That recognition gave us strong validation that we were on the right path.
From there, momentum began to build. We attended more industry events from scouting organizations to outdoor recreation shows and started connecting with distributors and retail partners. Step by step, we began figuring out how to bring the product to a wider audience.
Like every entrepreneurial journey, it’s been a process of testing ideas, learning quickly, and continuously moving forward.
Diverse Market Strategies
One of the things that makes this business unique is that it operates across four different markets, or “silos.” Each one has its own marketing strategy, pricing structure, and profit model, but they all reinforce each other. Together, they create a much stronger overall business.
In our first year, we generated about $180,000 in revenue. In the second year, we doubled that to roughly $350,000. That kind of growth showed us we were heading in the right direction. As we continued attending trade shows and building visibility, we also started developing additional products.
A single product can create a great idea, but a real company is built around multiple products. So we began designing new solutions that could expand the brand and reach more customers. One of those products is launching this spring, and trade shows have been an invaluable place to test ideas, gather feedback, and refine pricing.
Having direct conversations with retailers and buyers gives you insight you simply can’t get anywhere else. You learn how they think about selling your product, where it might fit in their stores, and what customers are looking for.
In fact, one of our interesting challenges is that our product fits into several different categories. When we speak with large retailers like Target or Walmart, they often ask the same question: Where does this product belong? Is it in sporting goods? Pet care? Lawn and garden? Health?
The answer is that it can fit in all of them. Ideally, we position it as an impulse product something customers see and immediately recognize as useful, no matter which section of the store they’re in.
Shark Tank Journey Insights
One of the biggest things we’ve learned about retail is the power of impulse buying. When our product is placed near the checkout counter or in a high-visibility display, sales can triple. Time and time again, we’ve seen that customers immediately recognize the value when the product is right in front of them.
Last year, another opportunity came our way we had the chance to speak with the team behind the TV show Shark Tank. Instead of going through the massive open casting calls where thousands of entrepreneurs line up with their products, my daughter happened to know someone who helped us get an initial meeting with a producer.
From the very beginning, they make it clear that nothing is guaranteed. Even if you move through several rounds of the process, you can be cut at any time without explanation. The producers are looking for innovative products, compelling founders, and stories that will resonate on television.
We passed the first video interview and continued moving through the next stages of the process. Each step brought us closer, but we knew there were still no promises. The show films twice a year once in June and again in September and as we advanced through the rounds, we realized we were getting closer to potentially appearing on the show.
For us, it was another example of what entrepreneurship often looks like: taking opportunities when they appear, staying flexible, and seeing where the journey leads.
Pitching to The Sharks
I went through an incredibly detailed process to get ready for our appearance on Shark Tank. Once the producers believed we were a serious candidate, they assigned us a small team two people who guided us through every step. Each of them worked with only a handful of companies, and it was clear they knew exactly what they were doing. The process was intense and sometimes a little scary, but they were great at keeping us calm and helping us prepare to show the best version of our business.
Originally, we were scheduled to film in June and would have been part of the final two days of shooting. But when the Dallas Mavericks made it to the NBA Finals, Mark Cuban had to leave to support the team, and our filming days were postponed until September. In hindsight, the delay actually helped us. It gave us more time to close a few deals, increase sales, and strengthen our credibility before stepping in front of the Sharks.
Even during the delay, the preparation never stopped. One of the biggest tasks was perfecting the opening pitch the first minute or so that begins with, “Hi Sharks…” That part is completely rehearsed, but everything after it isn’t. On the show, you see about 10 minutes of the pitch, but the filming actually lasts around 15 minutes and the questions come rapidly from all directions.
Our new filming date was set for mid-September. Right before that, something unexpected happened: my future son-in-law texted me to say he planned to propose to my daughter on September 14. Our shoot had been scheduled for the 13th, and there was no way I could make both events without revealing the surprise. I explained the situation to the Shark Tank team, and thankfully they understood. They moved our filming date to September 18 so I could be there for the engagement.
After the proposal, my daughter and I flew out, and the next day we arrived on set to film the final day of the season coincidentally also the last day of filming ever for Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. We were actually among the last few companies to pitch him during his farewell season.
Before stepping onto the set, we spent weeks practicing our opening pitch. Every time our team asked to hear it, they pushed us to deliver more energy and confidence. Eventually, we had to perform it one final time in front of about 30 people producers, crew members, and executives before getting the official green light to film.
Once we passed that final rehearsal, we packed our bags, flew out the next day, and prepared to step into the tank.
Behind Shark Tank Pitch
When it came time to pitch, my daughter really shined. She’s naturally good at speaking on camera very polished, confident, and quick on her feet. She doesn’t get rattled easily, and that showed. I’ve done a number of TV appearances myself, but my mindset going in was a little different. I was there to support and defend her, so I felt the pressure more intensely. She was definitely nervous too you just wouldn’t know it from watching her.
Once we stepped into the tank, there was a lot that happened that viewers never fully see on TV.
Right away, Mark Cuban spoke up. Our product deals with ticks, and he immediately said he has a phobia and doesn’t even want to think about them. Since he doesn’t spend much time outdoors, he decided right away that it wasn’t a fit for him and went out.
Next, Lori Greiner said she actually loved the product and believed she could do great things with it. Unfortunately, she had already invested in a competing company that she was actively scaling, so she had to step back. We understood it wasn’t ideal for us, but it made sense.
Daymond John had a harder time connecting with the product’s value. Our solution really resonates with people who spend a lot of time outdoors, and it didn’t seem like an environment he related to very much. After some discussion, he decided to go out as well.
That left us with Kevin O’Leary better known as “Mr. Wonderful.” If you’ve watched enough Shark Tank, you know he often structures deals differently from the other Sharks. He frequently asks for a royalty on every sale along with equity, and sometimes the royalty alone can be two or three times what a typical deal might look like. Before going on the show, I had watched hundreds of episodes to prepare, so I had a pretty good sense of how he liked to negotiate and what we might be walking into.
Entrepreneurial Valuation Strategies
When we walked into the tank, we were asking for $250,000 for 10% of the company a $2.5 million valuation. Like a lot of entrepreneurs who go on Shark Tank, we were probably a little ahead of ourselves. Realistically, the company might have been worth closer to $1.5 million at that point. But I also knew something important: the moment a Shark invests, the perceived value of your business can double overnight. That’s the power of having one of them on your cap table, and I was trying to capture some of that value upfront.
When it came time to negotiate, Kevin O’Leary Mr. Wonderful made the first serious offer. Instead of a straightforward equity deal, he proposed a structure that included a royalty. In fact, he wanted a royalty multiple that was about eight times what we were asking for, along with significantly more equity. I remember telling him, “Look, I’m an investor too. If you can give me an eight-times multiple like that, I’ll invest with you.” We went back and forth, even increasing the equity we were willing to offer from 10% up to around 20% but the structure just didn’t make sense for us, so we ultimately declined.
Then Barbara Corcoran spoke up. She shared a deeply personal story about her child being rushed to the hospital after a tick-related illness while they were on Fire Island, a place known for deer and Lyme disease. Her story really resonated with us because this issue is personal for our family too. My wife, my daughter, and even our dogs have all dealt with Lyme disease, and my daughter had a particularly serious case. For us, this isn’t just a business it’s a mission.
For a moment, it felt like Barbara might be the perfect partner. But her offer came in at 30% equity. That was simply too much for us to give up at that stage. You can see on the show where my daughter and I lean over to whisper. In the moment, with the lights, cameras, and excitement, it’s easy to get caught up and make a deal you might later regret. I even considered going as high as 25%, which I had never planned to do but in the end, we decided to walk away from that offer as well.
There was another important moment during the pitch that didn’t make it into the final episode. The Sharks asked how much money I had personally invested in the company. At the time, I told them it was around $700,000 to $750,000. They were surprised and asked a very fair question: “If you’re self-funding, what do you need us for?”
My answer was simple. I’ve built and scaled several businesses over the years, and the fundamentals are always the same revenue, costs, profit and loss, marketing, operations. Those core business principles don’t change. But what does change is the nuance of each industry. Every industry has its own language, customs, relationships, and unwritten rules. Those are the things that can take years and a lot of money to figure out.
Our company was entering the consumer packaged goods space at a serious level, and that’s where the Sharks have deep expertise. I didn’t need them to teach me basic business principles. What I wanted was their knowledge of the industry. Bringing in the right partner might cost some equity upfront, but it could save years of trial and error and a lot of money down the road.
Unexpected Shark Encounters
We ultimately left Shark Tank without a deal. When you walk off the set, the producers immediately film a quick reaction interview while everything is still fresh. For many entrepreneurs, that moment can be make-or-break because they truly need the investment and the expertise the Sharks bring whether it’s manufacturing, marketing, or retail connections.
For us, it felt different. I’ve built and scaled several businesses before, so while the Sharks’ experience would have been valuable, I felt confident we could keep moving forward on our own. The first thing I did when we walked out was check on my daughter. She was completely fine we both believed strongly in the product and what we were building.
After the initial interview, we were taken to another building on the Sony lot for a longer follow-up conversation. Later, while walking across the lot, we unexpectedly ran into Kevin O’Leary. He told us we had done a great job and thought the business would do well. Then I reminded him that I was actually an investor in a fund where he was a partner, which caught him totally by surprise and led to a pretty funny moment.
Since then, we’ve kept building. We’re launching several new products, including one that’s currently in third-party testing. If it performs the way we expect, it could be a real breakthrough in this category.
Boomer Business Evolution
One of the most interesting parts of building this business has been the generational difference between my daughter and me. I’m a Boomer I built companies long before social media existed, back when bookkeeping was done by hand in ledgers. My daughter, who’s on the edge of the Millennial and Gen Z generations, naturally understands the digital world much better.
Today, many products launch online first. Social media alone can create awareness and drive early sales, even before paid advertising. Some companies never enter retail at all.
When we started, though, we didn’t have a fixed strategy. After a couple of flash sales drove traffic to our website, we looked like a direct-to-consumer brand. But a simple test changed that. I asked a local farm and garden store near my country house to try the product on their shelves and only pay after it sold. Within a week, they called asking for more.
That small experiment showed us retail could be a real opportunity and it also helped us realize the market was much bigger than we originally thought.
Building a Sales Hobby
When I first started this, I honestly thought it might just become a small side business. My goal was modest maybe generate $100,000 to $200,000 a year in revenue and create some extra income during retirement.
But every step we took revealed more opportunity. As we explored the market, things kept opening up in ways we hadn’t expected. That’s when we decided to start attending industry trade shows—events designed specifically for retailers to see how the product might perform in the broader retail market.
Expanding Retail Reach
We started attending retail trade shows, beginning with a pet industry show, and slowly picked up small “mom and pop” retailers. We made it easy for stores to try the product low minimum orders and even free first shipments. Soon we had a handful of stores in one area, then more in others.
Momentum built as we gained recognition, including winning Product of the Year at a major outdoor retailer show. Each step opened new doors. We also brought in a PR firm to help increase awareness something I was fortunate to be able to invest in early. At the same time, my daughter focused on speaking opportunities to raise awareness about the issue and our solution.
We also joined the board of a leading nonprofit in the space. That connected us more deeply with the scientific community, expanded our network, and aligned with our mission to give back.
As all of this unfolded, we realized the opportunity was much bigger than we first thought. What I originally assumed was a five-month, Northeast-focused business turned out to be a much broader problem affecting regions across the U.S., Canada, and even internationally. Suddenly we were hearing from places like South Korea, Germany, and the Nordic countries, all dealing with the same issue.
From Startup to Global
As interest kept growing, we realized this was far bigger than the small side business I originally imagined. What started as a local idea quickly revealed itself as a global problem. We began hearing from places like Canada, Europe, South Korea even South Africa. That’s when it hit us: this wasn’t just a niche product. We had created something unique with real traction.
That shift in perspective pushed us to think bigger. Instead of a single product, we started building toward a multi-product, multinational company.
Early on, most of our sales came through our own website and through Amazon, which is still where we make the strongest margins. As demand grew, we began working with distributors and getting interest from major retailers.
While landing big-box stores like Target or Walmart is exciting, we also learned that too many large contracts at once can be risky for a small company. Those agreements can be demanding and reduce your control.
So alongside those opportunities, we’ve continued building relationships with independent retailers and regional chains many of which have dozens or even hundreds of stores across the country. It’s been a balanced approach that’s helped us grow steadily while keeping control of the business.
Retail Expansion Journey
As we expanded, we started getting into regional chains we hadn’t even known existed places like Dunham’s or Academy with 250–300 stores. Suddenly, our product was in hundreds of locations at once, which was a real eye-opener.
We also began placing products in recognizable branded stores like Duluth Trading Company and Orvis. Those early placements acted as calling cards, showing other retailers that someone had already taken a chance on us and it worked.
Once that momentum built, bigger players started calling. Costco, Tractor Supply, and other major retailers began reaching out, and suddenly things were heating up in a very exciting way.
Defending Unique Innovations
A lot of people ask if others can just copy our product, and the short answer is: yes, someone will try but there’s a reason ours works.
When I first invented this, I actually started with car wash mitts. That fabric picked up ticks, and over time, after a few cases of Lyme disease from bringing ticks into the house, we realized a simple cloth wasn’t enough. We spent three years working with a tick scientist and a product engineer, going through 13 iterations of loop length, microfiber type, and design. That effort led to two patents here in the U.S., plus patents in Europe, Asia, and Canada all specific to this microfiber and its unique use.
Sure, some people have tried copycats like someone from China selling a glove that wasn’t even microfiber, and another company in Germany developing something similar. But we have the IP, the patents, and the brand recognition to defend our market.
Being first to market matters, and we’re moving quickly to make sure our product is the one people know and trust. You can’t stop others from entering your space, but you can make sure you’re the standard everyone looks to first.
Entrepreneurship and Retail Challenges
In our company, my daughter runs the day-to-day as CEO she’s doing the full entrepreneur grind, 10 hours a day, six days a week. I handle the bigger-picture pieces: legal, product design, manufacturing oversight, and large sales conversations. I also help with the hands-on work attending shows, setting up, and hauling boxes.
Last year, we brought in a creative to help with ads and packaging, and after a learning curve, we found an amazing teammate who works closely with my daughter in the office every day, brainstorming and managing operations. Meanwhile, I split my time between the country house and supporting major decisions.
As we scaled into bigger retail chains like Duluth Trading, Orvis, and Costco, the logistics became more complex contracts, invoicing, and warehouse management all ramped up. We recently hired a warehouse manager and took over a facility to handle shipments efficiently, including hundreds of mitts going out daily through Amazon and our website.
Even with over $1 million invested and another $1 million in capital needs ahead, we’re still scrappy. After Shark Tank, we packed 20,000 mitts ourselves in my daughter’s old bedroom and apartment, rather than paying high fees to a third-party logistics provider. That same week, tariffs jumped to 145%, but we air-shipped anyway, knowing Shark Tank exposure and early sales were more valuable than short-term profits.
Despite the challenges, our strategy worked. The credibility from Shark Tank and the retail shows boosted our sales, and we’re on track for about $2 million in revenue this year. Even with extra costs, it’s positioned us for continued growth and a profitable future.
Navigating Business Tariffs
I play a focused but hands-on role in our business while my daughter, our CEO, leads the day-to-day operations. She manages the intense daily workload that entrepreneurship, while I handle legal matters, major sales conversations, product design, and manufacturing oversight. I also support wherever needed from trade shows to setup doing whatever it takes to keep things moving.
As we’ve grown, we’ve built a small but evolving team. After an initial hire didn’t work out, we found a strong creative partner who now works closely with my daughter on marketing, ads, and packaging. We’ve also expanded operationally, bringing in a warehouse manager and preparing to move into a dedicated warehouse to handle increasing retail and online demand.
Despite our growth, we’ve stayed scrappy operating out of my daughter’s old bedroom and fulfilling large order volumes ourselves to stay cost-efficient. Strategic decisions, like investing heavily to capitalize on a major national TV appearance, helped drive visibility and sales, even when it meant sacrificing short-term profit.
Today, we’re scaling quickly, with strong revenue growth, but we’re also navigating real challenges especially rising tariffs and costs that directly impact our margins and hiring plans. These pressures force constant recalibration, from pricing strategy to supply chain decisions.
At every stage, we’ve remained hands-on, resourceful, and focused on long-term growth balancing opportunity with discipline to build something sustainable.
Manufacturing Jobs Crisis
We’re seeing a real disconnect in manufacturing today. On one hand, there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled manufacturing jobs. On the other, we’re limiting the very workforce that could help fill those roles. At the same time, there’s a push to bring large volumes of manufacturing back domestically but that approach isn’t always practical or sustainable.
I believe certain industries absolutely should be built and maintained locally especially high-skill, high-tech, and defense-related sectors. Those are critical. But not every product makes sense to manufacture here.
In my case, the product is highly price-sensitive, and customers don’t base their buying decision on where it’s made. What matters is quality, consistency, and cost. Overseas manufacturers particularly in China have developed deep expertise and fully integrated systems that go far beyond just low pricing.
For example, my product includes multiple components packaging, inserts, materials, and assembly. When I source it overseas, everything arrives fully finished and ready to sell. It’s a seamless, end-to-end solution.
I’ve explored alternatives, like manufacturing in other countries, but quickly ran into a major challenge: fragmentation. Instead of one partner delivering a complete product, I’d have to coordinate multiple vendors fabric suppliers, packaging producers, printers and manage the logistics between them. That adds complexity, time, and cost.
What I value most is a “landed product” a single, reliable price for a fully completed item, delivered ready for market. That level of integration is difficult to replicate elsewhere right now, and it’s a key reason why certain types of manufacturing remain more efficient overseas.
Rapid Fire Segment
Business Book Recommendation
One book that had a lasting impact on me is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It’s ultimately about integrity—staying true to your values, your work, and your vision no matter the pressure. That’s how I try to approach business: be consistent, know your lane, and stand behind what you build.
Innovative Product or Idea
I’m really excited about the potential for at-home diagnostic tools. In our space, a true game changer would be a fast, reliable home test for tick-borne diseases similar to what COVID test kits did for everyday health awareness. That kind of accessibility is where things are heading.
Productivity Tool
I’ll be honest tools aren’t my strength. My approach is to bring in people who are better than me in those areas. There are so many platforms and systems out there now that the real advantage comes from having the right team using the right tools, not trying to master everything yourself.
Startup Business
I think we’re in a time where technology especially AI is creating massive opportunity, but also real risk. Tools like ChatGPT are incredibly powerful, but like any major innovation, they come with trade-offs. The businesses that win will be the ones that understand both sides.
Inspirational Peers or Entrepreneurs
The person who inspires me most is my daughter. She’s a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and I get to see her operate every day. She’s building, learning, adapting, and leading in real time and honestly, that’s more valuable than anything I could read or study.
Best Business Advice
Stay in the game. You never know which call, meeting, or moment is going to change everything but you have to be ready for it. At the same time, understand that not everything is fixable. Great entrepreneurs know when to push forward and when to pivot. That balance is everything.
Episode Summary
Steve Adams, founder of TiCK MiTT, a patented reusable microfiber mitt designed to safely remove ticks from people and pets, inspired by his family’s Lyme disease experiences and developed with a tick scientist and product engineer. Adams recounts his entrepreneurial path from early hustles to real estate, construction (including building homes for celebrities), and buying Magnolia Bakery, scaling it to 35–40 stores in 14 countries before selling amid health challenges, partnership issues, and the pandemic. He discusses lessons on failure, integrity, and choosing complementary partners, and explains launching TiCK MiTT with his daughter as CEO, growing through trade shows, PR, online/Amazon and expanding retail distribution, winning Outdoor Retailer product of the year, and appearing on Shark Tank without taking a deal. He also addresses tariffs’ impact on CPG margins and staffing, and hints at new products and interest in home test kits for tick-borne diseases.
Interview Transcript
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hey there, entrepreneurs. My name is Sushant and welcome to Treptalks This is a show where I interview successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, business executives, and thought leaders, and ask them questions about their business stories, and also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start and grow their business sales.
And today I’m really excited to welcome Steve Adams to the show. Steve is the founder of TiCK MiTT. TiCK MiTT is an innovative, reusable microfiber mitt designed to quickly and safely remove ticks from people and pets inspired by their own experiences with Lyme disease. They partner with scientists and engineers to bring this unique product to market and are now helping families everywhere protect themselves from tick-born illnesses.
And today I’m going to ask Steve a few questions about his entrepr, but we’re
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: gonna start right there because we have a, a, a slew of new products breaking out next year. You know, just as a quick aside, if you have a great product. You’re a product, you need a multiple products to become a company the way, that’s the way the retailers look at it.
Very true. So we have some very interesting and innovative, uh, things coming on board, just like ticked was out of love field. No one had ever seen it before. There’s no competition right now in the market ’cause we came added from a different place. And, uh, we’re trying to be innovative in everything we do in this particular, uh, genre.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. So, yeah, I’m, I’m going to ask you more about your other products as well. Uh, and also we’ll ask you a question about your, uh, questions about your entrepreneur journey and so the strategies and tactics that you, you have used to start and grow your businesses. Now, before we dive into this interview, if you enjoy this kind of content, please make sure to hit the like and subscribe button.
And for more interviews like this, please visit us at treptalks.com And with that, Steve, welcome and thank you so much for joining me today.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Thank you for having me. Nice
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: to meet you. So yeah, I mean, you were sharing a little bit before we started, you know, you, you’re doing, uh, multiple things, you know, so you’re entrepreneur, uh, I, I, I saw some musical instruments behind you, and then you mentioned you are into car racing, you know, teaching people car racing and things like this.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Well, I’m actually a very good driver, but a very bad drummer.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So it’s a matter looks like anything else. It’s how much time you put into it is the results you get out of it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. But I think, you know, it’s, it’s also like some of these things can be hobbies also, right? So you, I mean, you don’t have to be perfect in everything.
Like you start and you become better over time. So,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: no. Yeah, I agree. And I think that’s one of the problems with adulthood. We lose that childlike innocence and ability to fail. We don’t wanna fail as adults, so we don’t get into everything that we should. Or give it the time it needs to really become proficient.
Kids don’t care if they fail or not, they’re just playing. Yeah. It’s a very different mindset and hopefully you don’t lose that when you get older.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I guess, you know, as a kid you probably, you don’t have that sense of, um, I guess, you know, as adults we become more aware of what will happen if we fail and we become more, more aware of, you know, that we have less amount of time and a less amount of runway.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I don’t think that’s the issue.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: No.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Nope. I think as adults we get to a certain level of competency and things we do, and if we can’t get to that level of competency quick enough, we, we, we bail. Part of it is social. We don’t wanna look embarrassed in front of our friends. Kids don’t really care about that.
Yeah. So to me it’s really about. Keeping that ability to fail and learn from failure, and that is directly correlated to entrepreneurship. Because entrepreneurship, if you’re going down that road and taking that journey, there’s going to be failure. There’s no story you’ve ever probably had on here and none you’ve ever read about an entrepreneur that didn’t have a number of failures behind him.
The failures is where all the lessons are learned. You don’t learn a lot of lessons When things are going good, you’re riding high. You’re thinking, oh, I’m the best and this is easy. But when things start to get tough and they start to go downhill, and when they ultimately fail, it’s tough. But that’s where your lessons are.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. And, and. I guess people are afraid of what other people, their friends and family and others exactly. Are going to think about them. So,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: exactly.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Once you give up that feeling of stop caring about other people’s opinions, I think you, you become, you free yourself to take more risks, I guess.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Very
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: true.
So, so, I mean, we were talking about entrepreneurship a little bit. Maybe you can share a little bit about your story, you know, some of the things that you’ve done, maybe other ventures, and how kind of you came to starting this
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: program. Well, I think entrepreneurship is something you’re born with. It’s a part of your personality and who you are.
I don’t think you can, you can certainly take a class. I know they have schools that give, uh, courses in entrepreneurship, but if you don’t have it in here already, it’s not gonna work for you. It’s a very tough journey and it usually starts pretty early. You know, for me it started with, uh, raking leaves in the neighborhood and, you know, having a paper route and, you know, shoveling snow and things like that.
I used to sell greetings cards, you know, I used to go in the back of what a magazine called Popular Science and they would sell, buy these greeting cards and sell them, and I would go door to door and that’s a lot of rejection. So you learn early that that’s okay. You know, ev you learn that life’s a percentage game.
You know, you’re not gonna make a hundred percent of sales and it’s okay. All you need is 10%. I think Bezos probably owns 9% of Amazon now. You don’t need, you don’t need the whole pie. So, and by doing these things, you’re. You know, you’re, you’re setting yourself up for your own money, your own independence.
This is part of that journey. And then of course, you inevitably hit a wall in something you’re doing, and then you gotta figure out how to push through it. Or are you just going to work for somebody else and change, you know, move on. You know, a lot of people try entrepreneurship, hit that hard time, cer a lot of it’s circumstances.
You might have a family and kids in school, whatever it is, and you have no choice but to get to a job. You know, if you’re gonna take that journey. Uh, unfortunately, the people that are in your closest circle are taking that journey with you.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, for sure.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Good times and bad times. So, you know, so for me, the journey started very early.
It started with just doing my own thing. Yes, I worked with some people along the way. I worked in a camp, I worked, uh, came out of school. I dropped out of college very early and started to work in the real estate business, which was something you could have done in the seventies. You can’t do that anymore.
You have to finish that college degree.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I think, um, we’re getting away from that a little too, luckily with social media and with tech. ’cause I don’t think you needed a college degree to be successful or to be smart or to be worldly. Uh, but you know, somewhere between when I jumped in at 21, 22 without a college degree to just about the last five, seven years, you needed one.
Yeah. And I was lucky enough not to need one at the, in the moment. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great base. Of knowledge and a place to, to learn about yourself. And my daughter took that journey and she’s probably more the wiser for it. Um, but I, you know, for me it was doing those things then dropping outta school, partly because I didn’t have discipline.
Uh, that was definitely part of it. Part of it was I wanted to take over the world at 19. I just wanted to get out there. And it’s interesting ’cause when I say I didn’t have discipline, I didn’t have discipline to read a book and write a report, but I had the discipline to go out and do the sales calls and do those things as an entrepreneur.
So, you know, discipline, you find it when you need it or when it suits you or when it fits better. Um, so, you know, I started out, like I said, in the real estate business, which is a very easy business to get involved in. I worked with some big brokers, wasn’t my thing to do that. But I learned some things along the way about it.
And I ended up leaving and starting my own real estate company. So this would be, I guess, the start of my entrepreneurial journey. What I was really trying to do when I was younger, and this was maybe 77, 78, 39, I was trying to open a bar. I was trying to open a roller disco. Those were the hot things in the moment.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I mean, I looked 14 years old at 23, 24. So I mean, no one was talking to me. It was, it was a pretty tough, I didn’t have any family money, uh, no one to back me. You, you’re trying to raise the money. You’re trying to find a deal. You’re trying to find a deal that can raise money. Uh, you gotta go to a lot of iterations before that catches.
Um, so I started in real estate, made a little money, created a pretty successful company, uh, had I was at odds with my partner and I was at odds with who I was as a person. I was trying to figure out how to go forward in certain ways of my life, and I walked away from that company. Took a year or two off just to regroup.
This was at about 30 years old.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Uh, that company had, uh, some interesting things happening to it. Um, but sometimes you find out partners are tough.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: You know, that’s a very important part of your journey, uh, or the how you’re gonna move forward. A great partner who fits with you hand in glove, uh, different skill sets that merge together as the best partner in the world.
The partner does exactly what you do or wants to do what you do, or vice versa. Doesn’t really work much. It’s redundant. So, you know, I got outta that business. I, uh, partner I wasn’t getting along with, didn’t like that business anymore, and moved on. Um, I’ve been, and out of many businesses since then, uh, some are solid.
I seem to have this 10, 11 year cycle.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I’m really excited about concept, uh, building teams, doing the initial sales, getting it to a, a certain place. And for me, the day-to-day operations are boring.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So, you know, I seem to always try and bring in the right COO could do the daily operations and take that over.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Uh, that’s important for me to build that team. That’s what I’m good at, is building high performance teams. And, uh, usually at about 10, 12 years, I’m transitioning to another business. I don’t know why. Exactly. Part of who I am. You gotta accept who you are. Uh, it’s part of who my personality is, I guess.
And, uh. That’s my journey. Everyone’s got their own, you know, sometimes staying in something very long, 30, 40 years, that arc creates enormous value and creates enormous wealth. Uh, maybe it, it creates, uh, really good feeling of, you know, accomplishment. For me, I’ve had those things happen in smaller bites.
So I moved on from real estate. I’ve always been in and out of restaurants and bar businesses, so, you know, I’ve been backing those. I’ve owned a few and, you know, ran a few. But those are sideshows for me in some, on some level. Um, I moved from real estate. I actually transitioned to construction. Hmm. And it was a very interesting move.
Real estate construction. And during, along the way, I had operated some restaurants. They didn’t really had some basis to each other. I had done some construction, light construction in the real estate business. This was a whole nother level. I moved into the, what we call lifestyles, the rich and famous, and I was building homes for, uh, some very famous people.
And I built homes for Bruce Willis, uh, here in in Turks and Caicos, Samuel Jackson. I worked, uh, built for Eli Callaway, Lawrence Graft, the Diamond dealer, Shalom Harlow and Uma Thurman. I mean, on, on and on my client list was, was heading and throw in there a bunch of real estate people. Some uh, you know, tech titans, some, uh, wall Street guys, try and stay away from the lawyers.
I built that business from a business card and in 10 years I had one of the top five companies in the city and I’d had an outpost in Turks and Caicos at that point too. So, you know, I’m very good at getting there in that way. But again, an opportunity presented itself while I was building that company.
Uh, I was, uh, friendly with a woman who owned a bakery called Magnolia Bakery.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: That was a very well known bakery due to a, a scene in sex in the city that had gotten a lot of traction. A two minute scene on TV carries a lot of weight.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Wow.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: It became a cultural phenomenon where cupcakes exploded worldwide and everything was that.
Back to this ground zero, this little bakery, 620 square feet in West Village. I, uh, got into a conversation with her while I was in construction about maybe, uh, getting some franchises from her, or license, uh, store or two. I wanted some cash flow. I had bought a building and flipped it and made a quick mill and wanted to put it to work.
She was intrigued by the idea. Had never done that before, and we got into a conversation around the third or fourth. Time we sat down for coffee. She asked me if I would buy the whole thing, the whole thing being 1 620 square foot store. And I paid her two and a half million dollars for it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And took that bakery, opened the second one a year later on the Upper West Side.
I don’t know if you know New York. This was in the West Village. I was another part of town. Put a third deposit on a third store. I had both businesses at that time. I still had the construction business. I had two junior partners running that for me. While I was scaling this, I had a junior partner in the bakery that I brought in to do the day-to-day operations who was amazing at that.
And, uh, still the CEO of that business now. And, uh, a year into both businesses, I caught a deadly bacterial infection and spent the next five years slowly dying. So while I was, that was happening, my construction business imploded the two junior partners that were running that didn’t have the capacity to run it properly.
Uh, a lot of things look easy if you’re doing it well as a, an operator. Uh, people don’t understand how difficult it is, what all the moving parts are, how important the credibility have established over a long arc of business and time, both in general and then specific to those businesses. These people did not have any of those skill sets.
Business just showed up, things, problems got resolved. Uh, now they had to do it themselves. And they tanked that business within five months.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: That was a $40 million business with $35 million backlog of work. Wow. On the other hand, Magnolia who had this wonderful woman partner, uh, who was running the day to day, was able to survive while I was sick, uh, with some minimal contact and direction.
And some fi, you know, my finances completely evaporated. Uh, the construction company, company devolved into, uh, a lot of lengthy and, uh, expensive lawsuits that I didn’t cause, but I had to deal with. ’cause my name was on the, the shingle and on the legal papers. ’cause we, they, these guys were gonna buy it from me and never got around to finalizing that deal.
So everything was on me that they did.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And I was trying to navigate this all while I was going downhill in a very, very, uh, dramatic way. Losing mental capacity, uh, at home pretty much all the time. Bedridden. Sort of got that together five years into it, found a cure, wasn’t uh, uh, you know, like instantly I’m cured and I’m jumping around.
But you know, I’m still dealing with some of the residual tales of those business, that issue. But I got back into the bakery and we started to scale that worldwide.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So in the time I had that baker, which was about 13 years, I bought one store, turned it into about 35, 40 stores in 14 countries. Then the pandemic hit At that time, I also now had partners that I had to bring in when I got sick.
That partnership was going well until some issues in that partnership happened. Some transfer of, uh, responsibilities and ownership on their side created some rifts, uh, in our partnership. And ultimately with the pandemic as a small business, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. Properly. And we had a sale and this is the way it went down.
I was in a partnership dispute. We agreed to sell the business. We had a sale ready to go March 13th, 2020. The world shut down. We were supposed to close March 16th that Monday.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Whoa.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And of course the world shut down and the whole deal blew up.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: They, uh, decided they would stay in, uh, the deal but with new terms and when things, uh, got very bad is when they closed.
’cause that’s when they can get the most out of the business from me and took a lot of money off the table. But that’s life. You know, A lot of things in life are timing and we don’t always have control over our, our life, our business life and how things are gonna happen and when they’re gonna happen.
’cause that was very good lesson, by the way. ’cause I had been offered a lot of money to that business a few times along the way and was happy running it and thought that it would always be there.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: yeah,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: you know, uh, sometimes you get,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: nobody could have predicted the pandemic, right?
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: No. And then even then I was on the, you know, that that business had to go.
The reality is I was having a, a second round of being sick. I wasn’t really able to put the energy and the time into it. It was a, it was the right time to sell in a sense, uh, for everybody. I needed to take a break and, and regroup with my health and, uh, whatever else was gonna happen. And now we’re gonna get to a little bit into the tit.
So in 2018, while I still was running Magnolia, I was the owner, majority owner, CEOI had, I have a farm upstate, big property, two big dogs, Mastiffs, they drooled a lot. We started using fabrics to clean up the drool. I realized that some fabrics picked up ticks just by accident. I realized that. So, and you know, being who I am in the back of my head, it’s like that’s a business.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So I always had it in the back of my mind, and that happened maybe 20 years ago. In 2018, I incorporated, I started working with a tick scientist out of a college in Connecticut, a university in Connecticut, and a product engineer. And over three years with a factory in China, we got to a product that I was very happy with.
The efficacy was there and um, that was it. I put it away, you know, I was in the middle of an another business, wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t even on my mind to scale. This business pandemic happened in 2021, January, 2021. I sold Magnolia Bakery. Uh, they’ve scaled that into places I couldn’t have done given my cash situation.
CPG and things like that costs a lot of money.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Um, and I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I was all intended purposes retired.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: You know, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re never gonna retire. So then I started looking for businesses to do, started working with a friend of mine, Jen Ashton, who was the, uh, senior medical correspondent at a b, C.
She had a, a business she wanted to scale regarding menopause. It was a perfect time in the, in the culture for that. We spent a year putting a business together, science-based, et cetera. Started looking at retail stores and she decided not to move forward. Uh, I started looking at some, oddly enough, another bakery to scale.
’cause that would’ve been easy for me. Uh, both the credibility in the market, the, the marketability of that to the, and the PR side would’ve been easy. It was a, a wonderful bakery that I had been eating at many for many years and liked, but that didn’t work out. And during all those times, my daughter was, who’s graduated college, went to work at Morgan Stanley.
Nine months in. She didn’t like it was too big. She grew up in an entrepreneurial household, smaller businesses, more your own, you know, your own boss. Moved on from there to a small VC fund. Didn’t like that. And I turned to her one day, uh, two and a half years ago and said, Hey, you know, I have this business that I’ve put together.
If you want to take it over, I’ll back it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I’ll bring whatever, you know, money’s necessary, and I’ll bring whatever skillset I have. Mm. But you, you run it, you know, I don’t wanna run any business day to day anymore at that level that I had a 45 year run like that. And, uh, after a small break, I don’t think I can get back into that headset, nor do I want to.
Um, but, um, you know, she’s 26 wants to take over the world has that energy, has that skillset, has that college degree that I didn’t have, which was a, a base that cost me millions. You know, it’s interesting. She spent four years and I, it cost me $300,000 to give her the space of knowledge that took me about 15 years and about $3 million of mistakes to learn.
So there is a very large value in finishing that college degree and learning some of those skill sets. Anyway, she came in. First year, we didn’t have, uh, any real clue about how to move forward on CPG. It was a new business for me. Consumer packaged goods and all of this was new to her. But, you know, sometimes not knowing is a great way to go forward.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And especially towards the, the beginning of this conversation, uh, failure, being willing to fail. Um, you know, if you think you know a path, you try and stay on that path because that path got you here. Even though there’s other things that might take you further, uh, in a better direction, maybe even a different direction, it’s better.
You’re not really willing to take those shots. As you get further and further in, you have tried and true ways to move things forward. You know, coming into a business with no. Real skillset yet, but a lot of brains, a lot of energy, uh, a good head on your shoulders. Uh, you can go down a lot of roads that I might not have gone down, which is great.
So you marry that to my skillset and my overview, because my job partly is mitigating the bigger mistakes, the ones that I had no one to help me mitigate.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So the ones that cost me half a million here and a million there, and 300,000 there, the biggest mistake we made was $7,500 in this business. And even that we got back, uh, 4,500 of it.
So, you know, I wish I had somebody over my shoulder all these years helping me with that. Mm-hmm. But you know, part of that is my learning curve and part of that is the education, right? So I was able to imbue that for my daughter and to bring that to this business. So anyway, the first year, and I just mentioned I had, uh, this is prior to my starting, uh, business with my friend Jen.
At a, B, C or trying to do one, she helped us get two flash sales, one on the view, one on Good Morning America. These are, you know, deals and steals. It’s called you, basically, it’s a marketing exercise. You’re not making real money on it. You’re cutting your product down to half price and then giving a, b, c, 25% of that.
So you’re just hovering above costs, but you’re getting a lot of action. You’re turning product and you’re starting to see, uh, some marketing that’s is paying off. So we did two of those. It’s selling maybe 8,000 units in 10 hours.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Wow.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: It’s, it’s intense. Um, so we did that, you know, went to a few small consumer shows, uh, tried to get some sales.
We did $180,000, not too bad. And, and probably 160,000 of that was the two flash sales. Hmm. But we, we started to realize that. We needed to start going to consumer product shows. And the beauty of our business, and you had talked about it up front of this business, is it’s for anyone who’s outdoors in an environment where there is ticks, and that’s basically 80% of the United States or 90% of the United States, and a huge population that spends time outdoors doing all kinds of activities.
You can get a ticked bite. Even you’re golfing or you, or is playing, or your kids playing soccer or you’re out gardening. A lot of times it’s pets. That’s, you know, the, that’s where we started in the pet market because that’s the most aware market of it, because they’re bringing their magnets. They’re in the environments and going into the places where these things exist, they’re bringing them into your house, they’re transmitting it to you.
The pet market is certainly the most aware market of the this issue. And that’s where we started. So our first consumer show, it wasn’t a consumer show. Uh, B2B show was called the Global Pet. It was a year ago in March or May. And boy was that eye-opening. You know, we had this little booth in the new products section.
It’s an 800,000 square foot space. We walk in the first day or in the back, we got a 10 by 10 booth. We didn’t even buy the carpeting, which was like 400 bucks. And we walk in and the first booth we see is like 5,000 feet. Double story Cappuccino bar, you know, fully carpeted and lit. Like, oh my God, I’m not sure we’re in the right place.
But sure enough, you know, people went their way back there and see the product. These, uh, a lot of these new product, uh, sections also have a little display area. You could put your product and people will find you.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And we started to see a little traction in the pet market and we realized, you know, we knew that pets had a high visibility of this issue and we had to get some traction there, but it really showed us that shows are important and then we went crazy.
And part of this is my, what I was trying to do, not knowing CPG that well or at all really. And because I have some money. We threw a lot of money at these things quickly to see what worked, what didn’t. Mm-hmm.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: had, had I had less money and I was starting this journey and I still could have invented this product that didn’t cost a lot of money, and I got there and brought in of 10,000 units.
I could have gone door to door and I could have taken this journey over three to five years. And I knew that from my learning curve could be steep, but it could be quick if I throw the money at it, the money going into things like let’s go to these 15 shows, see what works for us.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Shows aren’t cheap.
By the time you take a hotel, get into, you know, a, uh, two airfares, get a booth, you know, you’re looking at eight to 12,000 a show.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: But we were willing to, I was willing to do that, to figure out what worked and what didn’t and move this needle up quicker.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We press that learning curve up. So we went to Outdoor Retailer show, uh, we ended up winning product of the year.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So we’re at a show with some of the biggest re uh, manufacturers in the, in the country on outdoor products, 140 submissions for a product. And we win Innovative Products of the Year. That certainly told us we were on the right track of what we were doing. Then we’re going to the Boy Scout Show. We’re going to, uh, a more pet shows.
Were going to, uh, lawn and garden shows, you know, anything to do with it. And we started to pick up distributors. We were starting to, we’re figuring it out.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: There are four silos to this business. Each one has its own marketing. Each one has its own price point. Each one has its own profit, and they blend together very nicely.
They reinforce each other. Um, so this business went from 180,000 the first year. Second year we did 350,000. It’s double. Not bad, right?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: But more shows starting to get more visibility, starting to develop more products. As we discussed earlier, you know, one product company is a product. Uh, to be a company you need multiple products.
So we invented another product, which is gonna break out this spring. We started to socialize that into these marketing, uh, opportunities at the, at these conventions or these trade shows. We could get some feedback on pricing. Is, is this work for you? What do you think of this? You’re talking to retailers, you got, you know, having that level of direct consumer and buying interaction is very helpful to move the needle and to show you what’s necessary, what they’re looking at, what they think they can sell, where they think they can sell it in their departments.
’cause if you look at us, when we talk to a target. We talk to a Walmart, they don’t even know where to put us.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: To we go into the sporting section. Are we in pets? Are we in Lord and Garden? Are we in health?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We always want to be an impulse. So we could get all of those.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: That’s where we’re gonna make the most sales.
We’ve seen that time and time again. Display on the counter, add impulse, full triple sales of our product. Anyway, so last year we had an opportunity in March to talk to the people at Shark Tank and we didn’t have to go to a cattle call. You know they do a thing in New York City, they do at the J Center.
10,000 entrepreneurs show up with your product and your little pitch and you do it. And my daughter knew somebody who could get us at least in front of one of these people to vet us. There’s no guarantee anything’s gonna happen. Let me tell you, shark Tank makes it very clear to you right up front the first conversation.
There’s no guarantee you’re gonna be on, no matter how far you go in this process, at any time, we can bounce you for no reason, there’s no recourse. And thank you. Have a nice day.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So, you know, they’re, I guess they’re trying to find innovative products, people who could show well on tv.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: People who understand their product.
I don’t know all the criteria ’cause they don’t tell you a lot of things. But we passed that first video conference where they move us onto the next level.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And they’re moving us, moving us up the food chain March, they shoot twice a year. They shoot in June for three weeks and September for three weeks.
We keep moving up that food chain and what happens is you get to a certain place, I don’t know if you wanna hear all this, is this of interest to your
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I was going to ask each of those questions, but, uh, I mean,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I’m, I’m take
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: process. I think, I think you’re sharing the whole story.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Good.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, for sure. Go
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: ahead. So what they do once you get to a certain place and they think you might make it, they give you a team of people, in this case, two people that take you through the whole process.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And this team has, they told me five people like us that they work with for the process. And I would say that this is one of the most well thought out processes that really takes you down a very long road of some very complicated and certain way, a scary, in another way, exciting, uh, path and really your hand.
And they really know what they’re doing and everything they do is to help you calm the hell down and get through it to the other side where you’re gonna show the best you can.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So we were all slate, we were slated to go in on in June. Of last year, uh, we were gonna be on the last two days, two days of filming.
And sure enough, the Mavericks go to the Mavericks, go to the finals.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Cuban has to peel off.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And they shut down those two days of filming. Okay. And push us off to September. And on some level, for us, we were kind of like, oh, okay. We weren’t really fully ready for it on one level. On another level. We wanted to close a few more deals, have a few more sales, see if we can get the, the ask up a little bit, have a little more credibility, a little stronger foundation before we went in.
And sure enough, we, you know, September during this whole time, by the way, you’re still going through the process. You get to a point where you have to. You know, start doing that first one minute, minute and a half pitch. Hi sharks. I’m Steve and I’m from tick min. And you know, and you have that, that’s rehearsed.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Everything else that happens on the show, and it’s about a 15 minutes of shooting to get that 10 minutes you see is unrehearsed and it’s coming at you rapid fire from everybody at the same time, half the time you, you have to actually tell them Calm down. Let me hear you, let me hear you. So was slated for September 13th I believe, or 14th.
It’s a, a Saturday or Sunday shoot. But sure enough, my daughter is going to get engaged and she doesn’t know whether I get a text from my future son-in-law, her boyfriend. Hi. I am gonna propose to Olivia on the 14th, right? The shoot was on the 13th on a Saturday. He was gonna propose on the 14th. There was no way I could get her back.
On the 14th after the shoot, without telling her she was getting engaged and we couldn’t do that. I called the Shark Tank people. My team said, look, Olivia’s getting engaged at this point. They know her six month, they have a, their vested interest in her.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: They
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: said, okay, we’ll shoot, the last day, the September 18th, you’ll shoot.
Sure enough, he proposes, she has no clue she was supposed to shoot on the 13th. Then we tell her after she and I fly out on the 17th. You’re shooting, uh, the next day we get there. Uh, we’re shooting the last day of this season and we’re shooting on Mark Cuban’s last day of shooting ever.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: he was his farewell day, farewell season with the third to last people shooting with him.
Of course, everyone wants Cuban, you know, we want, we wanted him as, uh, our investor. Yeah. We’d earmarked. We knew Lori. Had bought a competitive hours about two years before and couldn’t do it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We weren’t sure about Damon. You know, we knew that Barbara Mead might be someone and Mr. Wonderful, you know, to crapshoot.
So, um, we get on, uh, so, so before you get on, you have to really hone that first minute and a half pitch.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And we’re, we’re practicing it and every time my team, you know, says we’re going to, we wanna hear the pitch this week. Okay. So we get up there, we get on our bedroom, hi sharks. It’s never high enough energy.
You know, more, more bring it. So we’re, we’re practicing it. You’re trying to remember it. ’cause you know you’re gonna get in front of these people on TV and you’re gonna forget it. You be sitting there going, and now you have to give it one last time to 30 people.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Every producer, every team member, people from A, B, C, you know, and you got the screen, there’s 30 people watching you, and you’re in your bedroom again, and you’re doing that pitch.
And apparently we did it. Okay. We got the, the go ahead. We fly out, uh, the next day.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: But by the way, I, I should, I should say I, I did watch that pitch before, before this, and I, I, I, and it stuck out to me that, uh, I thought that your daughter was really, really good. I, I felt like when, when she was speaking almost like natural salesperson, you, you felt a little bit nervous, but your daughter felt like a natural sales person.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: She’s pretty naturally good at this.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: she is very polished, very facile on the way she speaks on tv. She doesn’t get rattled. Um, I, on the other hand, you know, I’ve done a bunch of these things. I’ve done some TV appearances. Uh, I was there to defend her. My, my focus was a little more intense. Um, I, uh, I probably a little, I look, she was nervous too.
It showed on me more than her, but she was nervous. She’s just very good at keeping it, the pro, you know, on it. So, as you know, we get out there, you don’t see everything. First thing that happens is Mark says, I’m phobic. I don’t wanna even have the word tick in my head. I don’t go outdoors. I’m out. Okay, Lori.
Uh, I love the product. I think I could do a great job with this. I think it’s wonderful. But I have a competitor of yours that I’m scaling. We said we know that we, we, we wish it wasn’t so, but we get it. Damon didn’t fully understand, I don’t think the value of it. He was not in that environment that much.
You know, he could relate it to a, a pool party in the Hamptons. That’s about the most he’s outdoors, it seemed. And he was out then Mr. Wonderful, Mr Wonderful, who normally asked for his, you know, tail. And he wants his peace and he wants royalty. And if you go back, and I really didn’t watch lot of Shark Tank prior to being, uh, on it, but I watched hundreds of episodes before going on it.
He was usually in about three times multiple of royalty before he was got out and had a just a piece of your action.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: In our case, for some reason, he wanted eight times the multiple. Of the, the ask. So we were asking 10% for 250,000, two and a half million dollar valuation. Like everybody else who goes on, we were ahead of ourselves.
Of course we were probably worth a million and a half at that time. But I baked into that knowing that minute a shark came on and doubled in value and they get that value. That’s the beauty of being a shark. The minute you say yes, whatever investment you made, doubles.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And I was trying to get some of that upfront.
They weren’t having it. Of course. Um, as you know, as you watched Mr. Wonderful, uh, wanted me, we were asking 10, I think he wanted 20%, but eight times his royalty.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And if whoever was watching this goes and watches it, I said to him, look, I’m an investor too, and if you can gimme eight times multiple, I’ll invest with you.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And there’s a second part to this later, I’ll tell you in a minute. So we, we turned that down. Uh, but I think we went from 10 to 20% on that, maybe even 25, I think 20 on that one. And then Barbara came out and she had a very, very heartfelt story. Her two and a half year old got rushed to the hospital from Fire Island, which is a, an island renowned for a deer population and Lyme disease.
Her daughter or her son was sick and got rushed to the hospital on the mainland. And, uh, by the grace of God, they saved them because of, you know, interjecting the, the meds. So she really understood this issue, really heartfelt. It was personal to her, just like it’s personal to us. ’cause for us, having all had Lyme disease, my wife, my dogs, my daughter, multiple times, my daughter had a fairly serious case.
This is mission driven to a large degree. So you think, hey, Barbara’s telling this great story about, uh, terrible story, but really heartfelt. She’s gonna be our shark, our angel. Except she asked for 30%. I mean, uh, the reality is, you know, I’m not giving 30% away for that. Mm.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Um,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: so my daughter turns to me, you see has do the, the whisper thing, everyone does.
I said I’d go up to 25, which I never wanted to do, but you’re in the moment. I think a lot of people make deals in the moment. ’cause you’re caught up in the excitement and you feel special and you’re making a deal with one of these accomplished people. Um, and we turned that deal down. Um, the reality is, you know, part of, if they, they didn’t put this in the, in the show, but this was something that I think would’ve been very important for entrepreneurs and people to see.
You know, they asked me how much I had in the business at that time. This was almost a year ago. And I said, I think I had 750,000 at that time, 700 in that. And they were like, wow. That’s a lot of money to put into your business.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I said, yeah, I’m self financing. They, and they were like, what do you need us for?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: great question. The reality is I can’t self finance this. I have the, I’m lucky, but my answer was this. I’ve been in a number of businesses, probably five solid real businesses that I’ve scaled, and probably another 10 or 15 smaller things I’ve helped along the way. All the business precepts, the fundamental pre precepts are the same.
Income cost, p and l, very fairly simple. I know I’m gonna need insurance, I’m gonna need this, I’m gonna have marketing, I’m gonna have paper goods. You know, all these things are all level set no matter what you’re doing. But what I found out over the course of a number of businesses is where you really lose time and money is in the nuance of the business.
Every business has its own nomenclature, its own customs, its own written and unwritten rules of how it works and how things get done. And you don’t know those, those things take years to figure out. And I had never really been in consumer packaged goods at the level that we were getting into it. And my answer was very simple.
Look, I understand business. I don’t need you for business precepts, but I don’t know, you know, consumer packaged goods, and you guys do. And by bringing you in, it’s gonna cost me some money upfront. It’s gonna save me a lot of money and time going forward.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And um, so sure enough, we didn’t do any deals.
We came out of there. You have, this is a, this is the funny story. You come out of there and, uh. To do that initial interview. You are walking out, you’re a little, you high fiving, or you know, oh, I’m so sorry. No deal. Or What am I gonna do? Mm-hmm. And I think to, for a lot of people, that is a defining moment in their business.
Most people getting on here need this investment. They are missing part of the knowledge that the Sharks bring. Maybe it’s manufacturing, maybe it’s marketing, uh, maybe it’s just, uh, the ability to, uh, the connectivity that you have getting into a store. All those things are so important. And, you know, they bring those things to the table.
I know a lot of those things myself. I didn’t really feel I needed them for some of those. Uh, if I had to go down the road of learning Curve, I would prepared to do it. So we come out, you know, I, I’m turning to my daughter, to Olivia. Are you okay? She’s like, I’m good. She knows what she has. We, we kind of figured we had something.
We do the quick interview, then they take you to another building. You are on the Sony lot. You have one of the team members that I was talking about. We go to another building, they do a much longer interview and I don’t even know what it’s for. ’cause I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen one on Shark Tank.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: But they give a more in depth and you’re still raw. You know, a lot of this is your raw, when you come right out, you’re like, you know, they TV and the sharks and as I was saying earlier, they’re coming at you like rapid fire from all directions. We do that interview, we’re coming back out. Now what had happened prior, I, I never told this story publicly while we were going through the Shark Tank paperwork, which is the most onerous paperwork I’ve ever seen in my life.
You know, they, have you ever done business or have a cousin that works for NABC or this or anything affiliated? And I actually had a few hundred thousand dollars investment in a business that Mr. Wonderful was one of the general partners of.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So when I. When I was doing this, I flagged it for them. I didn’t wanna get down the road and find out, Hey, I have a legal issue here.
And I they’ll find that out. You know, find out I’m fine. They came back, passed it to legal. I was a, you know, I’m a limited partner with 90 other people, you know, I don’t know him. You’re good. So coming out of the second interview, we’re walking through the, uh, the lot I had on a nice watch. ’cause I knew he liked watches, you know?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And he says, he sees us, he walks over, Hey guys, that was great. You did a great job. I’m thinking we did such a great job. You didn’t wanna invest. That’s what I’m thinking. Mm. But, um, you know, you’re gonna do great with this business. And I turned to him. I said, what are you wearing? ’cause I know he is wearing a watch.
And he looks at mine and he goes, oh look, classic. I said, oh, thank you. And he is got a watch on both wrists. That’s the way he rolls every time. He’s got a watch on both wrists.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And he shows, we chatting a little more. And then I finally turned to him and I many, I’m not gonna mention the business now, but I said to him, so what’s happening with so and so?
And he looks at me like, what? I said, yeah, I’m one of your investors. How’s my deal doing? And he was stammering, had no answer for me. The deal was kind of in a limbo right now. It was supposed to move forward quicker. It hadn’t, he had no real answer in the moment. Took him totally by surprise. I’m sure it’s the first time in Shark Tank’s history.
Someone was investing with him and put him on the spot. But it was so much fun to do. He took it, he took it in stride. Um, but you know, you never know who you’re gonna run into, right?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he is a, uh, he is a smart guy. He is a shrewd guy. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I’m, I’m sure he didn’t want to say anything, uh, that he would get him in trouble.
So. So, so
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: anyway that, that deal’s doing well, I believe so. Right now we, as I said, we’re breaking out some new products and one of the ones we’re gonna be breaking out is something that no one’s seen in this market. I’m not, I’m not gonna talk about it yet ’cause we’re doing third party testing right now.
It’s chemical has to do with testing and um, if we break this out, which we believe we’ll have in the spring, it’s gonna be revolutionary in addition to some more mundane products that I would call mundane. ’cause they’re not revolutionary, but they are twists on what’s out there and much cooler than things that are out there.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So let me ask you this, I mean, I saw on your website you are quite well distributed in retail stores and I think your product makes a lot of sense for retail stores also. Was that kind of your strategy going in?
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: The interesting part, and you know this for me, I’m a boomer, okay? My daughter’s, I don’t know, millennial, whatever she is, I don’t, she’s right on the cusp of Gen Z.
I can’t keep it all straight. So I, and I’ve been doing all my businesses without social media, without any of the tech. You know, when we first started, we’re writing everything in the ledger by hand, you know, on your bookkeeping. Um, it’s a new world out there and you have to figure out what your plan’s gonna be, but a lot of times the market tells you what your plan’s gonna be, plus your finances and how you start, tell you what your plan’s gonna be.
Obviously, going on social media with a product, I’m not even talking about paying for ads yet, just. Breaking it out and doing some fun things just to get, you know, some notoriety and some eyeballs. You know, you can start a business and never be in retail. There are businesses that are solely online, do very well.
The costs are great because you not, like I said earlier, there were four styles of business for us, and uh, only one of them is directly, uh, you know, direct sales and that’s where you’re making the most money. So if you can build that brand and build that business that way, that’s wonderful, but it’s still gonna be limited to some degree.
And we did not go out there with any preconceived notion of whether this was gonna be a retail business, an online business, or otherwise. We did those two flash sales, that’s tv, all those sales came off on our website. Now we’re an online business and oddly enough, I had one retail store near my country house that’s a farm and feed store and pets and gardening center, and I used them as a test run on the retail.
I went over there, said, Hey, I’m just invented this product. I know them for many years. I said, would you put some out and see how it sells? I said, great. I said, I’m not charging you. You’ll pay me once you sell. Put it on a peg. And they’re calling me the next week. We need more.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm. I’m
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: like, oh, okay. This is interesting.
Maybe this is a road we should start looking at.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So that one experiment. Now that might have been, I might have went to retail and found out only that store sold them, or only that type of store sells it. Um, I, as I said earlier, we did not fully understand one, the market in general. In terms of, uh, what the tick season is, where it is, nor did we understand how big the market is.
So when I first did this in 2018 and started this, to me, it was a northeast five months, a year season.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And if I could get some online sales, and, you know, when I was thinking in my mind it would be a hobby almost. I would do some sales and have some cashflow coming in, build it up to a hundred, 200 grand in income, have some, you know, money coming in my retirement.
You know, that was the way I was first thinking of it. But, you know, a lot of the, every time we went down a particular road, it was eyeopening and we saw more opportunity. So we started to go to these shows. Uh, these shows are retail. They’re, they’re for retailers. Hmm.
Track 1: Um,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: so we go to a pet show and we start to pick up, uh, mom and pop retailers.
Uh, and we, we made it very easy. You only have to buy 10 units or 12 units to get started, you know? Uh. We’ll, we’ll send it to you free for the first order. And we used picked up, you know, 10 mom and pops in this area. And then, uh, 20 here. And then we started, as I said, we had one product of the year, an outdoor retailer, which is was the big outdoor show.
That certainly gets you some attention. All these things build on each other. Um, you know, we brought in a PR company again, that’s something I had the luxury of being able to pay for upfront. And you know, if you’re small and you’re just starting out, you have to figure it out yourself.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: You’re trying to go viral if you can, but you can’t make that up.
That just happens. You can’t make things go viral. Uh, we, we were able to hire some, uh. People like that, that helped us plot and get us into some, uh, better positions of PR and things like that. And yet my daughter just said, well spoken into some spots, get awareness of the issue and of the product. They both joined a very prominent board of directors of, uh, one of the top line charities.
Uh, gives us access to the science makes us part of the community in a bigger way, uh, helps us understand the issues better and is a great networking opportunity and it’s, uh, along our personal mission to give back, you know, so that, that worked great for us. Um, we started to see retail as the real path.
Um, we started to see a number of things happening. One is we realized it’s not just a five month northeast business. It’s just as rife and as bad in Minnesota. And the northwest. And by the way, uh, it’s terrible in Canada. Oh, we’re getting calls from South Korea and Germany and, uh, Nordic countries, and Columbia’s calling, Hey, what’s going on here?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We, we, like, we don’t South Africa. They want, we think, oh my God, this is a real, from a mom and pop side business in a sense, on one level to, wait a second, this is a global issue. We’ve invented a product that’s unique in getting traction. We’re starting to put together a, a real company here, which then led us to put together other products.
And we see this as a multinational multi-product company. And we are, uh, doing that. So this year, again, most of our sales were online, or Amazon, which by the way, uh, is where we make the most money. Amazon and, uh, ourselves. But we started to really look at distributors. And, uh, other people like that and the big box stores started coming calling.
So, you know, you’re always hoping a big box store will come in. You learn very early on, hopefully that you don’t want too many of them At the same time, those contracts are onerous. You don’t have a lot of control. And if you had three or four of them and they came at you in certain ways, at the same time as a small business, you can get hurt.
So while we were hoping to be in a Target, a Walmart, et cetera, at the same time we were happy with the independent store. The guy who has five stores, and then you find out their chains all over the country that have a hundred fifty, two hundred, three hundred stores you never even heard of.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Because they, you’ve never been in the MITT. This, you know, and there’s this, a company called Dunhams or Academy. These are 2 50, 300 store chains and they bring you in. All of a sudden you’re like, I never knew this existed, and now you’re in 200 stores. Mm-hmm. So that started to happen. Uh, we started to get into some branded stores that you would know, Duluth Trading Orvis.
You know, you always have to get a few of those under your belt as your calling card to talk to other people and moving up that food chain. And no one wants to be the first one in.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Everyone wants to know somebody else took a, a chance on you and it worked. Uh, next thing you know, Costco’s calling and tractor supply’s calling, and, uh, things are getting a little heated over here in a nice way.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Well, one question, let me ask you, uh, about product. Um, uh, by the way, we are at one hour mark, so I’m going to try to finish this soon. Okay. Um, so obviously you said that your product is unique and, um. A myth like this. I mean, I’ve seen, so I’m assuming this is some sort of microfiber pro, uh, or variation of it.
Uh, I mean you usually see these kind of myths. Uh, I use it for like my cleaning my car and things like this. Can you talk a little bit about your innovation and
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Okay.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Then you talked a little bit about competition also. Like, are, are there people now copying it or,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: okay, so it’s a great question ’cause it comes up all the time.
Not all the time, but you can imagine. I’m at a show, I’m at the booth. Somebody picks up the MITT and goes, oh, I have, I have, uh, I use my car wash mi at home. I don’t need this.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: great. I, that’s how I invented it. I had some car shammies, that was one of the fabrics we realized, picked up ticks. And over time, after one or two of us getting Lyme disease by bringing ticks into the house via that particular cloth, not understanding the nuance of it, we realized that you can’t just pick up cloth and say it’s a.
A product. We spend three years with a tick scientist and a product engineer. 13 iterations on terms of loop length type of microfiber and have two patents on it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Oh, oh.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We have patents in Europe. We have patents in Asia. We have patents in Canada on this. This is patented microfiber specific to this use.
Now, could somebody come in and say, well, your patent is this narrow? Yes, but we know that that’s where the magic is in that spot. Uh, there have been a few people that have come up behind us and tried to sell copycats. One of them was someone outta China selling literally an oven, glove. It wasn’t even microfiber and all did a mi and I had to fight Amazon to get them off.
I’ve got someone in Germany now doing, uh, one. You know, with the, it’s a really mentation, I don’t even know what the fabric is, and I’ve got the patents there and the IP there, so I, I’m going after them. You know, part of it is I have the means to be able to defend this stuff. Is there gonna be someone coming up with something similar, uh, close enough that’s so efficient enough?
Of course, you know, this is gonna happen in the next coming year, possibly. I don’t know what’s out there and who’s developing what. Uh, I know that I have a brand name. I’m the bandaid of that product right now. Checkmate is, uh, flows off your name, flows as a name. We know we have patents that we can defend.
Uh, we have IP we can defend, and we are first to market and are going to go fa far and wide as quickly as we can to make sure that we are the product in that market. That’s all we can do. You cannot stop people from stepping into your market.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: That’s so true. I mean, you can, it’s like how much money are you going to spend to, to stop though.
Um, let me ask you this. So in, in terms of your team right now, you’re, is it just you and your daughter or
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: do you have No. So, okay. First of all, I, I have very specific duties. My daughter is the CEO. She’s doing that day-to-day scrum that you have to do 10 hours a day, five and a half to six days a week. As an entrepreneur, that’s the baseline.
If you’re not doing that, you’re not really gonna go anywhere.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
She does all that stuff. I handle legal, I handle, um, the, the bigger sales in terms of conversation. I do. I’m a pack mule. I go to all the shows with her and carry the boxes and set up and things like that. I, I devi, I design all the new products, oversee the manufacturing, et cetera.
She does all the sales and all those things. She brought in early on, not early on, but last year we brought in a, um, creative in order to help work our ads in order to, uh, do things like that to help us with packaging, et cetera. That person didn’t work out. We brought a second person in who’s just been amazing, uh, teammate for my daughter.
They’re in the office day to day, sitting across from each other, brainstorming everything. And I’m in my country house, uh, working half a day, thank God. Um, we just brought in, as you get bigger into the retail side of it, every retailer. Not the mom and pops, you just put 12 minutes into a bag and send it.
But if you’re dealing with a chain like Duluth, Orvis, Costco, there’s six pages in their contract of how they’re gonna receive goods, how you have to prepare the goods, how you have to bill them, uh, when you can do all this stuff. And as we’ve gotten bigger and as we’re now doing a lot of more sales, we board in a a we one, we got a warehouse that we took over, we’re taking over on September 2nd coming up and a month and a half ago, we hired a warehouse manager that can not only manage the warehouse, we’ll do, uh, client facing sales, re resales, we’ll do all of the paperwork and coordination of all the, um.
Loaded in the load outs for the retailers we’re dealing with was still online, uh, both on Amazon and ourselves. So there’s, you know, a hundred, 200, 300 Midt have to go out daily in season. Um, you know, when Shark Tank hit, we were doing 10,000, we’d send out ourselves, three of us in two days. You know, look at the end of the, you know, the end of the day, one of the things I’m gonna say, which is actually very interesting.
I could fund a lot of things here. I’ve now got 1,000,003 into it and I’ve got 1,000,003 in capital needs coming up for the next year for all these things we’re doing. But we’re still scrappy.
Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: We’re operating outta my daughter’s old bedroom, uh, in my apartment. And we packed 20,000 mitts. My wife, my daughter, one helper to after Shark Tank.
I could have given that to, uh, uh, somebody a three PL that could have done it would’ve cost me three to $4 each. And I wouldn’t have made a dollar on any of these things because of that. I was, uh, the tariffs were very high. The week that I got the notification gonna be on Shark Tank was the week that Trump said we’re having 145% tariffs.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Mm-hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And I knew that no matter what it was, whether it was 145%, 200%, or 10%, I had no choice but to bring the goods in by air. Which cost me a lot of money and pay the tariffs because the marketing opportunity to be on Shark Tank and to make those sales was more important than any money I could make in that moment.
It extend, it gives you a certain amount of credibility. Uh, it gives you some notoriety and no, at these shows, people will say, oh, shark Tank, everyone knows in the retail business, if it has that nomin, you know the name on it, you’re gonna get a little better sales.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So I knew that in that moment I had to just do what I had to do.
And we know we’re doing our p and l and what would be profitable this year, and we’ll probably end up with 2 million in sales and our, uh, it’ll be our second two and a half year mark at the end of this year. Um, we would’ve made almost two and a half times the amount of profit had I had inventory already here, and I wasn’t paying that load of tariffs.
So, you know, it’s, it’s been a little bit hard to navigate it all.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Uh, yeah. Tariffs. I mean, uh, it must be difficult still, right? No.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Yes. It’s very difficult still. I have one product that I would’ve brought in already and I just trying to find, uh, you know, I need to be at a certain retail price. You have to work backwards.
You, you look at the product, you, you scan the market. You say it’s gonna fit into this. Maybe 1699 to 1999 is about as high as I can go. For me to make money on it, I have to be able to pay $4 because of these different steps. And then you look at the tariffs and the tariffs running a hundred, a dollar 27 on this product.
So the tariff used to be 12.70 cents. Now it’s a dollar 27. That takes me out of the market.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And, you know, so, uh, we could talk about all this forever, but I just wanna make one thing very clear to everybody. The country’s selling it that it’s coming from does not pay the tariff. Your factory may help you a little, maybe 10% on the tariffs, the guy importing it.
In this case, we pay all the tariffs out of our pocket. This, this is priced at a price point where I can not go higher. Oh, I’m gonna lose sales and price myself out of the market, and all of those are absorbed by us. Now, what’s the, what does that mean? That means I paid $180,000 extra in tariffs this year, and I could have made three, two to three hires that I absolutely need.
That’s how it’s affecting people like me in a very, very big way. So, you know, you wanna bring manufacturing back here, that’s great. I’ve tried to manufacture this here, there are three times the amount, even with the tariffs and whatever manufacturing job I could have created here, I could have created three other jobs instead of one manufacturing job by just having not paid those tariffs.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s difficult And let’s see how, how it plays out, uh, because I don’t think us can bring all the manufacturing that’s in China, I think, yeah, you can focus on some select, uh, industries like semiconductors and so forth, but. I don’t think we are bringing back all the manufacturing that’s in China to,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: we have 500,000 manufacturing jobs here that are empty that they can’t fill.
So you wanna bring, and then at the same time you’re kicking out the workforce that might be able to do those jobs. You wanna bring in millions more. It’s just unsustainable. It doesn’t make sense. I agree with you. There are some high paying, high technical jobs that should be brought back here. There’s certainly industries we need here for our own defense in, in actuality, you know, heavy industry.
But there are things that we should not even be thinking about manufacturing. And one of them is, no one cares where this is manufactured and no one can price point. Now the reality of China is not only do they have a price point, and they’re not even the lowest cost producer anymore, they have an expertise that they’ve developed.
So, for example, I have. I get everything shipped here. Everything’s done. I’ve got a a bag in there that’s a dryer bag. I’ve got packaging, I’ve got a instruction card. I’ve got the mid itself. There’s four or five components to go in there. This comes to me fully made here. I went to talk to someone in Mexico, said, I can do this for you cheaper.
I said, great. He goes, yeah, but can I get your fabric guy from China? I’m like, well, then you’re not doing it. And he goes, yeah, and I need to know if you have a manufacturer for packaging. No, I don’t wanna be in that business of having to coordinate that deal with the shipping from this guy to that guy, get the card delivered.
I like getting a price landed. Everything’s in the box. They do that very.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: China has created that. Uh, the whole, uh, I mean, I think they’ve grown with this whole Amazon ecosystem and they’ve really mustered it now.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: It’s a very good, uh, way to look at it.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. Uh, I’m going to move on to our rapid fire segment.
Uh, yeah,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I, I read through that, by the way. I never, I don’t read books anymore about any of that. Okay. I don’t, let’s do it anyway. I, I think I got four answers for you.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay. So I’ll, I’ll skip the book one.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Uh, no, no. I’m gonna tell you I actually thought about it because I
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay. Okay. So,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: and I was gonna, and I was gonna tell you the book that hit me the most, and it, it’s long, it’s out there and you have to understand the lessons you’re learning.
But I would tell you to read The Fountainhead.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: The
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Rine,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: yeah. Iron Red.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Yeah. And the rea and the reason I say it, because the story’s crazy. She’s, she speaks too much. There’s just like, her other book Outta the Shrugs is like a hundred pages. You could just turn and not miss anything. Ultimately what it comes down to, and this is the way I try and live my life, which is harder and my business life, which is hard, but can doable, is with a, a huge degree of integrity, not situational integrity, and bring it to every part of your business and the quality of what you’re selling it, how you’re selling it, who your partnerships are with that book is about a man’s journey through a society that no longer values, personal contribution and integrity, and the guy’s willing to die for it.
And you don’t have to do that in business. I’m not telling anyone take it to that degree, but there’s a little lesson there, which is really a great branding lesson. You know, uh, the lesson is stay, stay where you are in your lane. Understand what it is and just keep messaging it and stick with it. Now of course, you have to learn some lessons.
Say maybe this isn’t working at a certain point, but there’s an enormous lesson there of personal sacrifice for that. Go ahead. Next one.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: An innovative product or idea in the current e-commerce retail or tech landscape that you feel excited about.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Is this the product or the actual, uh, vehicle to sell it through?
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: It could be any, anything, any product or
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: idea. I mean, I, I would tell you that we are working on one right now. That’s a game changer and I’ll, I’ll mention it, uh, but I’m not gonna say it’s coming to fruition yet ’cause we, we have a lot of steps, but, and there’s a number of people working on it. The holy Grail in our business, I think is home test kit for tickborne diseases.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: It’s no such thing. Everything is send a tick in or send you blood in. The efficacy of those tests is not great. Sometimes it takes weeks before that test has any, uh, value and by that time, if you actually have the disease, you’re in much worse shape. So being able to do a home test kit that tells you that either you have disease, thetic has disease, or disease has been transmitted, any of those things, that’s a holy grail.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Wow. It’s almost like the COVID test kit, right? Like you can
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And by the way, that’s the, the COVID test kit. Whether you liked it or not, or you used it or not, it certainly socialized and normalized home testing for disease and as and as by the way, and as tech moves forward, medical Med Tech moves forward over the next 10, 15, 20 years.
A lot of this stuff’s gonna be self-diagnosed diagnostics, whether it’s, you know, putting your finger on something and someone’s reading it or somewhere else, or whatever it is. So all that’s coming. And the COVID was a good example of being able to test
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. A business or productivity tool or software that you would recommend or a productivity tip.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I am really bad at that stuff. I always hire people who know that stuff better than me. So what I would say is, if you’re me, go find someone who knows their shit, not knows their stuff. I,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I think,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I think that part of I’m, I’m not good at, I’m not good at the, the spreadsheets and I, I mean, I certainly, I could read a spreadsheet and I could certainly read an Excel sheet, but I can’t make one.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: So no, I, all that stuff is moving so fast. There’s so much of it out there.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: It touches every single part of your business. Now we’re talking about shipping and warehousing. There’s innovation there. You know, you’re talking about retail sales, how to manage that. There’s innovation there. There’s all is all is tools for everything.
Finding the right one for yourself is hard, and you’re gonna make a mistake here and there, and you’re gonna have to acknowledge it and respend the money to get it right.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: By the way, uh, Chad, GPT can help you out quite a bit in the, in that, uh, in that area. Like if you are trying to find the right solution, the best solution, give that problem to Chad, DPT.
And it usually comes up with like the, the best, uh, tool.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I, I would agree with you. And in my case, I give it to Olivia and she goes to Chad, chief tp, and then she comes back to me. I have an agent. My agent is her not the
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: awesome, um, another startup or business that you think is currently doing great things
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: that I think is currently doing great,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: great things like they’re, they’re creating value in the world.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I really, you know, I looked at that and I think what we’re looking at, you know, there’s a double-edged sword to everything. You just mentioned chat, GTP. Yeah, I follow a lot of the AI issues. Everyone’s very excited about what AI can do, but you have to follow the AI issues and while this is, uh, game changing and remarkable and, uh, it’s probably a bigger thing than the wheel even.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Uh, the downside of this, uh, is very dangerous. So I think that could be said of almost every technology. There’s a pro and con misuse or use. Um, if it’s a diagnostic, it could be that’s misdiagnosing.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: If it’s, uh, chat GTP, it could be that he’s gonna be your overlord one day. I mean, I’m not really following tech innovation daily.
So, you know, if I would tell you things like drones and warfare, that’s a terrible thing, but that’s our future. You know, it’s scary and exciting at the same time, both for its personal use. And then the flip side of it is a bad use,
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: uh, a peer entrepreneur or business person whom you look up to or someone who inspires you,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: you know? But I, I, I, my daughter, as you may not know this, maybe she got Forbes 30 under 30 in December.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Oh, really? Wow. Yeah.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And boy, when I was 16, 17, 18, I read Forbes religiously, probably from the age of 13 or 14 to 30, 32. I read every single issue, 52 a year, my Bible, and then my freaking daughter. And of course I wanted to be 30, under 30, but you know, where was I go and then she gets it.
So when I have to look at entrepreneurs that inspire me, she is it, she is in, like you said, incredibly well spoken, uh, understands her business constantly seeking out, and, and the thing I’m really good at, it’s two things I’m really good at. I’m really well, a few more, but I’m really good at sales because not only do I do the sale, I understand that a sale without the follow up, the proper follow up means nothing.
I’m good at building high performance teams. Part of that has to do with my lack of knowledge in every other area that I don’t have. And my lack of ego when it comes to that. Obviously I have a healthy ego. I wouldn’t be building businesses and, and running my life the way I do, but at the same time, my ego’s not caught up in this accountant and knows more about accounting than me.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Um, so you know, when I look at my daughter, she is me. 10, 15 years ahead of where I was in both employees.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: In mentality, in the use of tools. Has my gift for gab and sales understands the follow up ’cause she was brought up with that mentality. Understands the new things that are out there and understands what she doesn’t know about them.
Knows that she needs to bring in a social media person because as much as you know about social media as a 26-year-old, you still don’t know as much about it as someone who’s doing it day to day. Right? Mm-hmm. So I look at her and you know, my father who’s 93 and when I sold my last business and I the pandemic happened, I told him I’m retired.
He now calls me the busiest retired person in the world. ’cause I worked full-time almost, but I couldn’t think of anything better. In retirement. There’s nothing better I can think of doing than working with my daughter and helping her scale her business and helping her move forward in her life. This way, it’s teaching me things.
Um, every day I am awed by her. So, look, I could read an article about Mark Cuban or about this one and say, that’s great, but I get to watch it day to day in action. The thought process, the result, uh, you know, that’s, it’s, it’s just amazing. So she’s gonna
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: be my
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: entrepreneur.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I, I think, I think that’s, that’s, uh, that’s so great that you’re able to like, mentor, uh, and, uh,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: oh my God.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Be able to share your knowledge. Like, you know, you’re basically transmitting your knowledge to your daughter. Um,
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: and, and I would tell you something about that. Um, when I first. Had her in the room with me and we were starting this business. I was basically throwing up everything I knew in the world. Ah, you should do this.
You gotta think of that. And it’s just going ’cause it’s too much. I have 40 years of experience. A lot of it is nuanced. And I realized very early on that the only way that someone like her and the only way that someone like me should be teaching, the only way she should be learning is lessons in the moment.
Yeah, okay, this just happened. Let’s look at that. And I can tell you the lesson. And if I’d given you the lesson a year ago, you would never have remembered it. You still would’ve made this issue, this mistake, and I would’ve wasted my time and yours by even trying. But now it’s in your face. It’s in our issue.
It is an issue for us in this manner. And this is the way we can deal with it. And by the way, I don’t know what to do here. What do you think? You know, let’s figure it out together. You know, that happens too.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Final question. What is the, what is your best business advice? Uh, what is the best business advice that you have ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs?
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Um, I haven’t gotten a lot of business advice from people. Usually it’s something in the moment where I need a very specific thing. I gotta talk to a lawyer or a friend of mine about an issue. But I really think that, uh, we talk about entrepreneurship or we’re talking about business in general. ’cause in entrepreneurship, I would say it’s just, you gotta just go move forward.
You know, being an entrepreneur is a double-edged sword. And, and it cuts both ways. It cuts the good way, which is you think you can do anything and if you just keep your mind in that mentality and don’t keep your eye nose to the grindstone, ’cause you gotta be able to see the horizon and you gotta be able to make pivots.
But if you can do that, that’s a great way to go forward. But the, the flip side of that is you think you could do everything. So this is the exact same thing, but the bad side of that is you end up spending too much time trying to fix things that are unfixable or that the time, value, time, uh, you know, formula is not working for you in that manner.
So if you’re gonna be an entrepreneur, stay the course. Every phone, the next phone call could be the one that changes your life. When I was in the real estate business, I was managing, I don’t know, 1500, 1800 apartments, and one day get a call from one guy says, Hey, I’ve got a portfolio of 3,600 units, can you take it on?
Changed my whole business outta the blue. One call wasn’t expecting it, but I laid a foundation of competency, et cetera, and I was ready for that phone call. I couldn’t make it happen.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: But
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: I was ready when that did happen. So if you’re an entrepreneur, just stay in your lane, keep it going, but don’t kid yourself.
Sometimes you hit a wall and you gotta move on to something else or make a pivot, but just stay in the game and not everyone’s built for that. You’ll find out whether you’re a real entrepreneur or not very quickly.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Very true, very true. Not, not everybody’s, uh, meant for entrepreneurship.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: No. And by the way, and
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: that’s okay.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: And that’s okay. And I think people should try it. There’s nothing wrong with trying it and finding out it doesn’t work for you for whatever reason. Some people just wanna go home after work, get that cocktail, put on the TV and chill. You’re not doing it as an entrepreneur, not getting home till seven, and then you’re making two hours of calls and email follow up.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Steve, thank you so much, uh, for, for your time today, uh, for sharing your story, for sharing your successes and lessons learned. And for inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs. Um, if anybody wants to check out, uh, your projects or website, there’s ate, uh, what is the best way to do that?
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Oh, tick me.com is the best way to look at that business. They’re also, you can probably find me and my daughter both on Shark Tank and some other interviews. You’ll find some of her stuff. She’s now doing things with government officials and doing press conferences with senators and things like that.
And it’s really showing the full immersion in the business, both in taking and giving back. It’s a 360 thing. If all you do is take, it’s never gonna fully work. So she’s a great example of someone who understands. It’s a complete circle that you have to live.
Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Steve, for your time.
And thank you re really appreciate, uh, uh, your story and uh, yeah. Wish you all the very best.
Steve Adams of Tick Mitt: Thank you very much. Take care everybody.
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