Stephen Key - One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs: Live Your Dreams and Create Your Own Profitable Company

If you enjoyed this book, discover your next great read with the following excerpt.

H I, MY name is Stephen Key, and I am a successful entrepreneur and licensing expert. I dont have a degree in engineering, marketing, or business. I dont own a big company, nor am I employed by a big company. Instead, companies work for mebringing my product ideas to life while I sit back collecting royalty checks, creating new product ideas, and enjoying the life of my dreams with my beautiful wife and our three children. I wrote this book to show you how you can do the same thing and reap the same kinds of benefits.

But before I tell you how to bring your ideas to life, let me tell you a little more about me because I have a feeling were a lot alike. From an early age, I dreamed of being an entrepreneur. But I didnt want to go to college for four or six or more years to study how to create and manage a business. I didnt want to run a business with a lot of employees, overhead, debt, hassles, and headaches. I didnt want to live to work, as so many business owners and professionals do. Instead, I wanted to work to liveand to live well. More than anything, I wanted to create stuff. Have fun! See the world! Have a family! Enjoy life!

Thats exactly what Ive been doing for more than 30 years. I just wish someone would have told me the secrets of the gamethe secrets Im going to tell you in this bookwhen I started out on this journey.

My first foray into entrepreneurism began when I handmade soft sculpture designs and sold them at art shows and state fairs across California. Thats when I learned my first big lesson in product design: when the rent is due and youre hungry, if the product youve spent several hours making doesnt sell, you quickly move on to something else.

Before long, I taught myself how to make patterns and began freelancing for the biggest plush animal toy companies in the world, like Dakin, Inc. Then I got my first real jobyou know, the kind with a regular paycheckat a start-up company called Worlds of Wonder (WOW). I figured I could work at WOW during the day and do my freelance projects at night, doubling my earnings. As it turned out, I spent far more time overseeing the manufacture of products than I did designing them. Still, as head of the design group at WOW, I was involved in the design (not the creation, but the manufacturing and design) of several hit toys, such as Teddy Ruxpin, the worlds first talking teddy bear, and Lazer Tag, the top-selling toy of 1986. But I would often look at the new product ideas that came in and think, I can do better than that!

So after two years I left WOW to start my own toy creation, design, and licensing company. For a while, to pay the rent, I continued to do freelance design work for toy manufacturers, including Disney, Applause, Dakin, and WOW, among others. Then I began focusing solely on creating and licensing my own ideas.

Ive licensed more than 20 ideas for products in such diverse fields as the toy, beverage, music, novelty, and pharmaceutical industries. Celebrities Michael Jordan and Alex Trebek have served as pitchmen for two of my products. Collectively, my creations have sold more than a half billion units and generated billions of dollars of retail revenue. I have served as a consultant on the reality show American Inventor and been featured on the CNBC show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. I am invited to speak at U.S. Patent and Trademark Office events, Stanford University, IDEO (one of the worlds top design firms), and elsewhere, and I teach my invent right strategies to thousands of people.

My product ideas range from the simple to the silly to the lifesaving. In my view, good ideas are those that sellplain and simple. I dreamed up a Valentines Day dart with a suction cup and a flag reading, Im stuck on you. That idea brought me $10,000 in advance income with zero up-front investment. I reenvisioned the plain gray guitar pick as a blank slate for new colors and designs like skull shapes and paisley patterns, to name a few. I even made lenticular picks specifically for Taylor Swift. This simple insight upped a 25-cent purchase to a $1 purchase and has sold 20 million picks.

One of my favorite early ideas was a small basketball backboard designed to look like a basketball player with his arms outstretched. Ohio Art licensed that idea from me and sold more than one million Michael Jordan Wall Balls the first year! One of my most successful ideas is the Spinformation rotating label, which adds 75 percent more information to bottle labels. The label has sold more than 400 million units worldwide and has won more than 15 accolades, including a Gold and a Bronze at the Edison Awards. In its newest incarnation, the Spinformation label as sold by Accudial Pharmaceutical, Inc., is helping prevent the estimated 30,000 cases of medicinal over- and underdosing of children nationally.

On any given day, Ive got six new ideas out to different companies. Like my students, Im still creating.

Ive had a fantastic time creating new product ideas and renting them to manufacturers. Its fun. Its exciting. Im never bored. I never run out of ideas. I never have to worry about going to work for someone else. And I never worry about money, even though I dont claim to be good with money in the conventional sense.

I have many friends who spend all their time trying to figure out how to increase their wealth. Theyre obsessed with investing in the market and paying less in taxes. I could not care less. Money for moneys sake doesnt interest me. When the stock market crashed, I was unaffected; I wasnt in it. When the recession hit, it didnt impact me. Two of my children attended the University of California, Berkeley, and my youngest graduated from the University of Oregon. I paid for all of their college educations, comfortably.

Our home in Modesto, California, though lovely, was a tract house in a nice but nondescript neighborhood. We owned it outright. Although our home was not lavish, it was by our choice, and we did not live a practical lifestyle. The cars we drove, all purchased with cash, were probably too expensive. And it probably wasnt practical for us to take the kids out of school and for me not to go into the office for a month so we could go to Africa, or for six months so we could travel the United States together.

Two years ago, my beautiful wife and I moved to Glenbrook, Nevadathe oldest settlement on Lake Tahoe. We are delighted to have made such great friends here already. Janice and I walk several miles around the neighborhood often, stopping to gaze out across the lake and take in the colorful sunsets. I, of course, can do my work anywhere. And Im happy to report that the view from my home office has never been better!

Sometimes, I still cant believe that Ive been doing this for more than 30 years and making a living at ita good living. It wasnt easy at first. It has taken a lot of hard work, and Ive learned a lot along the way. I have made a lot of money and lost some as well. But Ive had a ball.

Anybody can do what Ive done, including you. Like I said, I dont have a background in sales or marketing or engineering. All I have are ideas. Some of my ideas are great; some are OK; some are lousy. It doesnt matter whether your idea is big or small. It doesnt have to change the world. It doesnt have to be the next best thing since sliced bread. And you dont have to quit your day job to start creating and licensing ideas. All it takes is one simple ideaand the ability to translate that idea into a product that consumers want and that a company will want to make and market for you.