Brad Pedersen is an award-winning entrepreneur, angel investor, and business coach with over 30 years of experience. He co-founded Pela, the creator of the world’s first compostable phone case, and Lomi, a smart kitchen composter, both aimed at promoting environmental sustainability. Previously, Brad co-founded Tech 4 Kids, which later merged to form Basic Fun!, a company behind iconic toy brands like Tonka and Care Bears, achieving nine-figure revenues. He is also the author of Startup Santa, sharing business lessons from his entrepreneurial journey.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [3:29] Brad Pedersen shares his entrepreneurial family background and lessons learned
- [6:23] How one toy sparked Brad’s journey into the toy industry
- [9:16] Brad’s strategy for securing Doug Flutie’s endorsement
- [13:15] The impact of the financial crisis, including special loans from the bank
- [24:43] Brad explains the decision to exit Basic Fun! in 2017
- [27:07] The inspiration behind founding Pela and its environmental mission
- [32:22] Insight into the creation and benefits of the Lomi composter
- [37:42] How entrepreneurs can balance profitability and sustainability
In this episode…
Many aspiring entrepreneurs struggle to turn their ideas into successful businesses, often facing uncertainty, financial risks, and the challenge of standing out in a crowded market. How do you take a passion, navigate setbacks, and build a brand with lasting impact?
Brad Pedersen, an experienced entrepreneur and business leader, shares his journey of overcoming obstacles and scaling multiple ventures. Brad emphasizes the importance of staying curious, keeping costs low in the early stages, and aligning business efforts with a greater purpose. He also highlights the role of innovation, strategic partnerships, and perseverance in building a brand that resonates with customers.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Brad Pedersen, Co-founder and Chairman of Pela and Lomi, about transforming businesses into forces for good. Brad shares how one toy sparked his passion for the industry, his strategy for securing high-profile endorsements, and his lessons about sustainable business growth. This episode is rich with anecdotes and strategies that underscore the potential for businesses to drive change.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Brad Pedersen: LinkedIn | Website
- Full Spectrum
- Startup Santa: A Toymaker’s Tale of 10 Business Lessons Learned from Timeless Toys by Brad Pedersen
- Cradle to Cradle: The Trial of Dennis Oland by William McDonough, Michael Braungart
Quotable Moments:
- “I always had this idea that there were ways for me to make money, whether it was selling golf balls or cutting wood.”
- “I came from a line of chiropractors, but they were entrepreneurial, always looking to create value and solve problems.”
- “A little bit of ego can lead to a lot of overhead, especially when scaling and adding complexity.”
- “We don’t really learn from what happens; we learn from reflecting on what happens.”
- “When we talk about Pela, it’s a mission-driven company creating a waste-free future with products that go back to the planet responsibly.”
Action Steps:
- Stay curious and open to new opportunities: Brad Pedersen emphasizes that his entrepreneurial journey began with a single spark of curiosity. By maintaining a mindset of exploration, you can uncover unexpected opportunities that may lead to groundbreaking business ideas.
- Keep costs low in the early stages: Minimizing expenses when starting a business allows for more flexibility and reduces financial risk. Brad shares how resourcefulness and cost control were essential in scaling his ventures without unnecessary strain.
- Align your business with a greater purpose: A strong mission not only attracts loyal customers but also motivates teams and drives long-term success. Brad highlights how purpose-driven brands create deeper connections and stand out in competitive markets.
- Leverage strategic partnerships and endorsements: Securing the right partnerships can significantly boost credibility and visibility. Brad’s success with endorsements, including Doug Flutie, showcases the power of aligning with recognizable figures who share your values.
- Balance profitability with sustainability: Businesses that integrate sustainability into their models are more likely to achieve lasting impact and customer trust. Brad underscores the importance of making ethical decisions that align with both financial success and environmental responsibility.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to make business be a force for good, from transactional to transformational. My guest today is Brad Pedersen. And I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:14
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:31
Alright. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of the show and you. Every week we have interesting, smart, intelligent founders and entrepreneurs. We’ve had companies like Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard.
Check out our archives. Lots of great episodes for you there. And this episode brought to you by Rise25, where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. And Brad, I know from looking at your background that you really value the importance of relationships. And for me, that is what it is all about.
And that’s what I love about doing things like this, interviewing you, sharing your story with my listeners. People get to hear some of the inspiration of what you have done throughout your career. So for those who want to learn about what we do, go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. All right. My guest here today is Brad Pedersen.
He’s a Co-founder and Chairman of Pela and Lomi. And he’s a serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in founding and leading multiple successful ventures, including direct to consumer e-commerce company focused on creating sustainable products, which started around well, started earlier, I believe in 2018. But he got involved in 2018. And then we’ll also talk about Lomi, which is a company that produces an electric kitchen composter, which is a super cool product, and we’ll talk about that as well. And then before that, he served as the Co-founder and President of Basic Fund from 20, 2008 to 2017 before exiting that.
And we’ll talk about that as well. But Brad, I’d love to. You know, those are all the accolades and you’ve accomplished a lot in your career. But I also love to get to know what people are like as a kid. And so we always start with that.
And as a kid, you were just a kid sneaking onto golf courses, getting golf balls out of the ponds, cleaning them up and selling them five bucks a pop. So hard to imagine that in this same life. But tell me a little about that.
Brad Pedersen: 02:26
Yeah, I guess I was just a mischievous kid. Always curious and always looking for ways that I could create value. You know, I got into trouble quite a bit. I got the strap 3 or 4 times when I was a youngster in school. I don’t think they do that anymore, but that just gives you a sense of my propensity. It never was.
John Corcoran: 02:41
Got what? What was this?
Brad Pedersen: 02:42
The strap. You know, the strap.
!no name provided!: 02:44
Oh, give me the strap at school. Oh, is.
John Corcoran: 02:47
This a Catholic school? Is this a?
!no name provided!: 02:48
Public school in Canada?
Brad Pedersen: 02:50
No, it wasn’t a Catholic school. It’s just what they did. It gives you a sense of my age.
John Corcoran: 02:54
Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. That must. Maybe that’s a Canadian thing, because I don’t hear many stories about that at public schools in the United States.
Brad Pedersen: 03:01
Well, I think if you were out of line and you weren’t living, you know, within the integrity of what the school wanted, that’s just the results that that happened. And, you know, it was really not being bad. Like, I wasn’t smoking in the boys room or anything like that, but just always pushing the rules, testing the boundaries. And, you know, so the idea of like, how could I? I was always thinking, how could I create an opportunity to make some money?
John Corcoran: 03:22
And where you were you did you come from like not a lot of wealth. Is that that was that part of driving? What was driving it or what was driving it?
Brad Pedersen: 03:29
Actually, no. I came from a family that was pretty entrepreneurial. I mean, my dad was a chiropractor, his father and mother were chiropractors, and my great grandfather actually was the first chiropractor in Denmark. So I came from a line of chiropractors. Wow.
But all of them, except for my great grandfather, who I don’t know what his history is, but both my father and my grandfather, both were entrepreneurial. They had businesses on the side. They always had other things that they were doing. So I was kind of immersed in this idea that, you know, we’re meant to be entrepreneurs, we’re meant to create value and we’re to solve problems. And so I think at an early age, I saw that hands on, you know, lived in a middle class household, I think, never had want for anything, in fact, quite frankly, had a really great childhood living in an incredible place in the prairies of Canada and having, you know, infinite access to outdoor pursuits and really just enjoying my time.
But yeah, I always had this idea that there was ways for me to make money, whether it was, you know, sneaking to golf courses after hours, diving in the ponds, collecting golf balls, clean them up, put them in egg cartons, sell them for five bucks to a wood cutting business that, you know, I got kind of I had to do all the. So I lived in a place where we had to heat our home with wood. So I got really good at cutting and bucking wood using a chainsaw, like at an early age. My dad taught me how to do that, which was, I guess, helpful. So knowing that skill set and that my dad had all these tools, I decided to start a business where I would just basically use his truck, his chainsaw, his gas, his oil.
Go out to a local forest that we had access to, cut down trees, buck up the logs, split them and sell them with pretty much no cost to goods except for my time and sweat equity. And, you know, I hired my friends from school because they got kind of busy doing this and used those funds to basically fund our outdoor pursuits that we love. So, yeah.
John Corcoran: 05:13
It’s impressive that you hired your friends from school because there’s when I ask about, you know, guests on the show and I ask about their upbringing, a lot of times it takes people until much later to figure out that, oh, I could actually handle more of this if I hire my friends, rather than the mindset of if I hire my friends, I have more costs and I could just do it myself.
Brad Pedersen: 05:35
Well, I wish I was that smart. I think I was just problem solving that I ended up getting more sales than I could handle. So it was like I had an order book and I had to fill it, and I was like, man, I’m not going to get through all this. So, hey, you know, Joe, do you want to come out and I’ll pay you five bucks an hour. And they were happy to do it, so. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 05:52
So yeah. Yeah for sure. So it’s funny because there’s this repeating theme of, of keeping your cost of goods down through, through, whether it’s cutting trees in the woods or getting golf balls or things like that. And you eventually go into toys. But how did you get interested? Because you were on the path to become a chiropractor. And I think it was one toy that you just got curious about that led you into going into the world of toys?
Brad Pedersen: 06:23
Yeah. Look, I’ve always been a curious kid and always been playful. I think we’re actually meant to be playful. I think that’s part of how we’re designed. It’s how we are.
We learn. It’s how we grow. And I read a story in a success magazine about a kid who had invented this toy, and it was a throwing toy. Do you like Frisbee? Except for different things, but it could go really, really far. And I was curious. Well, that is a really cool toy. It’s not.
John Corcoran: 06:50
A toy. Okay. They go super far.
Brad Pedersen: 06:52
They do go super far. This one was called the Xylo and it was from California. The R.O.B. came from California as well. That was in San Francisco. These guys were down in LA.
It was a cylinder. And it basically was this airfoil that had this gyroscopic effect. And when he threw it, it would just go forever and ever. And so I bought some and was, you know, amazed at it and then started to think about going, wait a second. Like, you know, how does a person get more of these things?
So I contacted the maker and talked to them about their distribution plans for Canada. At that time, they didn’t have any. And fortunately for me, they were as naive about Canada as I was about the toy business. And so it seemed like a perfect marriage. I put together a business plan, which was, I think, just a bunch of paragraphs of all the things I was going to do.
And next thing you know, I was a distributor for this product across Canada and basically was a carnie because I just go from, you know, event to event, throwing these things back and back and forth, demonstrating them with a kid I hired and selling.
John Corcoran: 07:49
A toy at just a toy conference and things like that, throwing it back and forth.
Brad Pedersen: 07:53
This was just at parks and events and fairs and things that were going on. That was, you know, before I knew how to.
John Corcoran: 07:58
So you were selling them. You were like trying to you weren’t you weren’t going to toy companies or you weren’t going to toy stores to try and sell the toy store.
Brad Pedersen: 08:06
Yeah, it’s full circle to my life now. I was direct to the consumer back then, before it was the internet and before.
John Corcoran: 08:12
Yeah. You were. Yeah. Direct to consumer. In a park, in a playground.
Brad Pedersen: 08:16
In a park? In a playground.
John Corcoran: 08:17
At a festival or something? Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 08:20
But I also figured out that that wasn’t scalable. So eventually I, you know, I was going to have one big arm at the end of my career. So I decided that I would.
John Corcoran: 08:28
Gotta really strong arm throwing this thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 08:32
So figured out I had to get this into retail. And it was a great problem to solve at the time because, you know, the problem is if you don’t see the product work, it’s hard to to understand it. So it wouldn’t sell off the shelf on its own. So we had this idea: what if we create these really long loop videotapes that would show somebody throwing this thing really far? Yeah. And so we created this videotape, and then we had even a better idea. So what have we got a celebrity to endorse ? And at the time, Doug Flutie, who was an infamous NFL player, but he started.
John Corcoran: 09:02
In the CFL, the CFL. That’s right. Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 09:04
That’s right. He was a quarterback for the Argonauts. And so it’s a whole story about how I got Ahold of him. But you say.
John Corcoran: 09:10
I want to hear it. I want to hear it. How do you mean you got this toy? How do you convince Doug Flutie to endorse it for you?
Brad Pedersen: 09:16
Yeah, I had to meet with his agency, which was in Boston, and I lived in Alberta, which is a long way away. I was too young to rent a car. I had to fly to Boston, sleep in, you know. Yeah. It was just a whole situation of how I got there and how.
John Corcoran: 09:31
How did you get the meeting to begin with, though?
Brad Pedersen: 09:33
I made a call.
John Corcoran: 09:34
Okay. And they said, all right, we’ll take a meeting if you show up in Boston and we’ll meet with you.
Brad Pedersen: 09:38
That’s right. Okay. And I had a meeting with his agent. We came to an agreement where he would get paid a royalty for every unit sold. In exchange, he would agree to film footage of him throwing this thing.
And we got footage of Flutie throwing it from one end zone to the other end zone of the football field, put it into a loop video that was six hours long and ended up. Long story short, having that on end caps on major retailers across the country and sold hundreds of thousands of pieces. So it was a big, big success in terms of being able to figure out how to educate the market about what this product would do to solve their problem of finding things to do for fun.
John Corcoran: 10:12
Was it entirely you paid them on the back end or did you? Was there any money up front?
Brad Pedersen: 10:16
Yeah, it was entirely on the back end.
John Corcoran: 10:17
Amazing. Wow. Wow. See, a lot of people would not assume that they could even get a deal like that. They would assume, like, oh, he’s going to be too expensive. But you have the cojones to ask for it.
Brad Pedersen: 10:29
Yeah, I think it was. Mark Twain said to be successful, he needed a lot of confidence and a lot of ignorance. And I definitely had a lot of both of those. And I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I was willing to ask. And I guess they just saw a young kid who had a lot of vim and was ready to go, so they wanted to be a part of it.
John Corcoran: 10:46
Wow. Amazing. Amazing. And so. So that’s the first toy. Then you did a toy distributorship or was that the distributorship?
Brad Pedersen: 10:55
Yeah, that was the beginning of what was going to become a toy distribution company and scaled that ten years, and it eventually became the largest toy distribution company of its kind in Canada.
John Corcoran: 11:05
Yeah. And by the way, before we get to that, at what point did your family come from a line of chiropractors? At what point did your family say, what the hell are you doing with the toys? What? You’re on the path to become a respected doctor. What are you doing with the toys?
Brad Pedersen: 11:20
Yeah, I think that’s a great question, because I think they all thought it was a phase. You know, he’s just. He’s got to just.