John Corcoran: 11:25
Grow.
Brad Pedersen: 11:25
Out of it. Out of the system. Exactly.
John Corcoran: 11:27
Yeah. Yeah. He’s going to throw this toy in the park with this other kid that he’s paying for. I mean, they must have thought. That’s weird.
Brad Pedersen: 11:33
Yeah, I think they definitely were expecting at some point, I would come back to the mean and get back on the train towards being a chiropractor. But, you know, it just started to work. Okay.
John Corcoran: 11:48
So it’s taking off.
Brad Pedersen: 11:49
Yeah. One product turned into more products because word got out. Hey, this. This kid works hard. Moved a bunch of volume.
Word of mouth spread. I had other manufacturers that contacted me and said, hey, could you do this for our product? So suddenly I had additional products. And then I started to get ideas about, well, maybe I should select certain product lines and go after certain product lines. And in a short period of time, we went from this small little startup in my basement to the largest distribution company of our kind in Canada focused on toys.
And, you know, during that ride, we were recognized in magazines and rewards. And I got nominated for the entrepreneur of the year award. And like, I mean, life was good. It felt like everything was just, you know, up to the right. And it was 20, 25 that I went away for 2005.
John Corcoran: 12:38
This is 2025. So 2005.
Brad Pedersen: 12:39
2005.
John Corcoran: 12:40
Thank you. All right.
Brad Pedersen: 12:42
- We just finished our A record year. I went on vacation with my family. Came back and my CFO afterwards, he called me up and he said, hey, we got a problem. I said, what’s going on?
And he said, it looks like the ERP that we’d introduced or implemented earlier in the year was done incorrectly. We botched it. The data in our system was wrong. All the numbers that we thought we were reporting against aren’t correct. And actually, instead of having a profitable year, we had losses.
John Corcoran: 13:13
And jeez, that’s shocking.
Brad Pedersen: 13:15
Yeah, it was one of those really sobering moments in time where, you know, the business had just continued to grow and it just seemed to work until it didn’t. And within a short period of time, we were put into special loans. Which is, you know, I tell people it’s a nasty place where they just put you on enough. They drip enough cash, just basic life support.
John Corcoran: 13:34
Who’s they? Who’s they?
Brad Pedersen: 13:36
The bank.
John Corcoran: 13:36
Bank. Okay, so you had to go to the bank and get a loan. Okay. And why was the business after doing so well, suddenly unprofitable?
Brad Pedersen: 13:44
We grew too quickly, and we didn’t overheid.
John Corcoran: 13:47
Then maybe.
Brad Pedersen: 13:48
Or increased our overheads. Yeah. Like, you know, it’s funny how. A little bit of ego can lead to a lot of overhead. And when you start to scale something and you see it growing and you just continue to like, just add more complexity, add more overhead, more staff, team members, it all seems great as long as you are executing to a perfect plan, particularly if you don’t have a balance sheet that’s really strong, right?
That doesn’t give you options for making mistakes, but it had to be like we literally had to thread the needle perfectly because when you’re a distributor, you’re buying products with cash up front, right? You’re putting them in a warehouse, sitting on them for 90 days, shipping it to a retailer who takes 90 days.
John Corcoran: 14:33
So your cash issue is the problem? Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 14:36
Cash conversion is a real issue and growing that well. So we literally had put ourselves in a place where we had to execute perfectly and we didn’t. And so suddenly we went from, you know, the hero down to the zero. And in special loans, we refinanced the company through another party who came in and required a restructuring, which is a fancy word for bankruptcy. And, you know, it changed my life.
It was really the inflection point of kind of putting me on a different path, because while we restructured the company and tried to save it, it never really worked and eventually required us to pivot into a manufacturing business, which happened to evolve into basic fun.
John Corcoran: 15:15
Okay, so what did you decide to manufacture first?
Brad Pedersen: 15:22
Well, all I can tell you is that we are. Well, let me start with the premise of how we got to a manufacturing place after spending ten years building this company and then two years wrestling to try and save it before we ultimately bankrupted it for good. So that’s the second bankruptcy. Yeah, I’m a big believer that we don’t really learn from what happens. We learn from reflecting on what happens.
And the other side of that is it’s often not easy to get clear on what you want, but it’s really easy to get clear on what you don’t want. And so I went through like, here’s the things I don’t want anymore list. And it was things like, I don’t want to have a warehouse with millions of dollars of inventory anymore. I don’t want to have Canada as my only country that I can sell to anymore. I don’t want to have multiple offices with employees scattered all over the world. So I just went through this list of all these things I didn’t want anymore. And it became the basis of building a new business plan, which was.
John Corcoran: 16:16
And by the way, I just want to second what you just said, because I have seen this so many times before, especially with serial entrepreneurs, you can almost chart it. You can look at what their previous business was and then what their next business is. And so often it is just like they figure out a model that just is a reaction to all the things they hated about the previous model. Whether it’s like perishable goods or whether it’s like managing too many teams or managing teams in person, so they go distributed or remote. That happens so frequently. So I just want to second what you said there.
Brad Pedersen: 16:47
Yeah, I agree. And it all comes down to like you have to understand that everything happens for a reason, or at least you have to give it the reason. But it takes your time to reflect and assess and then choose again for how you can use what’s happened to you as, as a, as a force for good, for the future.
John Corcoran: 17:04
So you decide to then build a basic fund in a model that was a reaction to the limitations of the distributorship.
Brad Pedersen: 17:12
Yeah. So it wasn’t called Basic from the beginning. It was called tech for kids. And it was the initial launch of what would become a basic fund. And yes, out of, you know, sort of the ashes, the Phoenix rose.
We learn from our mistakes. We went into manufacturing versus being a distributor. We scaled our team down. I remember we cut our team down from like 50 some people down to like eight, and a lean, mean machine was set up. That allowed us to move very quickly and to respond to trends in the marketplace that allowed us to launch toys at a rapid pace, faster than our competition.
And ultimately, we landed on a couple of things that were big hits. One of them was Angry Birds, others, we were in Disney Frozen, so we got things that were just kind of ahead of the curve. That ended up becoming massive boosts for our revenue and allowed that company to grow to become infinitely bigger, more successful and more satisfying in terms of the type of business it was. So the crazy thing is, as I look back and say, if I’d been successful as a distributor, I never would have discovered that. I literally got disrupted. And through that disruption, it forced me to find a better future with this better business model that provided so much more than I would have had otherwise.
John Corcoran: 18:30
How did you do it? So I think one of the early hits was an Angry Birds product. And this was early in the development when the app was not as well known. But even before that, had you stumbled on the idea of licensing other IP and creating products around that? And how did you come to that epiphany? Because, you know, lots of toy companies just create something that they come up with.
Brad Pedersen: 18:54
Yeah, that’s a great observation. In fact, that was one of the key sort of principles behind what we were going to do in terms of building. Building new products. You know, building brands and toys is really hard. Like, I can number on two hands the number of what I’ll call iconic toys.
Yeah. You got Lego, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, and then the list gets real thin right after that because it’s a very fad driven business. So we said rather than creating our own brand equity, we’re going to borrow the equity from other people’s brands and come up with cool form factors that we can apply it to. And so we started off on the principle of licensing, and we started off with a couple, you know, at the time, incredible licenses that got us going. And then we just continued to snowball and take bets on things that we thought had legs.
So when we saw the Angry Birds app come out, we saw how quickly it was adopted. We saw the opportunity to make merchandise because you had these cute little birds that were kind of, you know, adorable, and they’re shot from a slingshot. There’s a story there, and there’s these pigs that they’re enemies. It just screamed for merchandise. And so we saw that. And that turned out to be one of the biggest deals we’ve ever done.
John Corcoran: 20:00
So you approached them?
Brad Pedersen: 20:02
We did. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 20:03
So just like you tracking down Doug Flutie’s agent, you tracked down the creators of Angry Birds. And what was that like?
Brad Pedersen: 20:10
Well, they’re Finnish.
John Corcoran: 20:13
Okay.
Brad Pedersen: 20:13
You know? No, to be honest with you.
John Corcoran: 20:16
What are Finnish people like? Are they hard to read or are or are they difficult to connect with? They don’t speak English. Well. Tell me.
Brad Pedersen: 20:23
No. The Finnish people are great. Actually, I’ve enjoyed my time in Finland. And you know, Helsinki is a really cool city, but they’re very, I would say, stoic in the way that they do business and the way they talk and the way that you interact with them. But behind that, they’re actually amazing.
John Corcoran: 20:39
So you, you get on a plane and go to Finland to, to try and pitch them on this idea several times.
Brad Pedersen: 20:44
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 20:47
And then meanwhile this app is like taking off. And so they’ve got kind of like a crazy rocket ship ride and you’re coming along and saying, we want to sell plush toys.
Brad Pedersen: 20:57
Yeah. Look, they I mean, to be honest with you, they were making so much money off the game. Merchandise wasn’t a priority for them. I mean, the digital game was on its own massive. So this was kind of almost a distraction.
So they ended up hiring an agency to take over looking after merchandise. And so we ended up working through that agency to get the merchandise in place. And yeah, we made, you know, dozens of different types of products. And as I told you earlier, I think today, you know, if I look back at units, we’ve shipped billions of pieces of that product around the planet.
John Corcoran: 21:30
And you end up stumbling on this idea of the plush toy, which becomes Mashems. Tell me about that.
Brad Pedersen: 21:38
Yeah, actually, it’s not a plush. It’s actually made out of TPR, so it’s squishy. So we came up with this idea of, you know, stress balls.
John Corcoran: 21:46
I think I don’t have the right terminology, the right language. I’m just like me describing snow. There’s just one kind of snow. But I know that some people are like, oh, there’s all different kinds of snow.
Brad Pedersen: 21:55
Yeah, yeah. Well, plush is like, you know what, a Care Bear or something like that is. It’s something that, you know, a teddy bear. That’s what.
John Corcoran: 22:01
We.
Brad Pedersen: 22:01
Call. Okay, okay, okay.
John Corcoran: 22:02
So I’m just like grouping everything that’s squishy together in my mind.
Brad Pedersen: 22:06
All all good, all good. So yeah, we ended up creating this squishy collectible made out of this rubbery material that’s called TPR. And they were liquid filled and they were shaped like these characters. And so we had these little birds and pigs and that and, you know, they were the actual form factor. But what’s so cool is that when you grab them, you could squeeze them and squish them, and of course, it distorts them. And, kids just love that tactile play. Yeah. And we came up with some gameplay around it as well. And we sold it as a surprise capsule. So it came in a capsule.
Didn’t know which one you were getting. So there’s a collectible element to it. Some are common, some are rare. And, you know, it started with Angry Birds, but once we got it going, we ended up licensing every imaginable property. So whether it was from Disney or it was Minions from Universal, you know, we literally had every character you can imagine in that as a form factor within that collection.
And it just allowed us to continue to sell these. And to this day, even though I haven’t been involved in the company, they’re still selling mashems, you know, hundreds of thousands of pieces every year around the world.
John Corcoran: 23:09
And where did you have copycats?
Brad Pedersen: 23:12
Of course. Yeah. I mean, that’s just part of the nature of the business. The toy business is a fad driven business. You know, things don’t typically last very long.
In fact, Mashems kind of defies it. It’s one of those things that’s endured past it, because the play pattern of squishing things is just something kids want to do. But of course, you’re going to have fast followers as soon as you show any kind of success.
John Corcoran: 23:33
How do you deal with that? As a toy maker who’s invented this new kind of category of toy? Like, how do you fight that off?
Brad Pedersen: 23:40
Yeah, well, here’s the thing. IP is, you know, people think that it’s actually a shield, but it’s actually a sword. Like, the only way it’s really effective to use IP is to actually go after people who are infringing on it. But I will also tell you it’s a massive distraction. It’s massive and very expensive.
John Corcoran: 23:56
Yeah, yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 23:57
Expensive and takes a lot of your time. So, you know, I can tell you I’ve tried my history. Every time I’ve tried to enforce IP, I end up wasting a ton of my time and money. And the only people who make out in the end are the lawyers. So the way we stay ahead is we just continue to innovate. Just stay ahead of the curve and particularly around when you have licenses, because you own property from a third party that they can’t they can’t access or they can’t legally access. It gives you just a point of difference.
John Corcoran: 24:23
That’s kind of like a moat as well, or shield as well because they can’t create a Star Wars version, they can’t create a frozen version of the product that you’ve created. Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. At what point did you decide you ended up exiting in 2017? At what point did you decide it was time to exit this business?
Brad Pedersen: 24:43
Well, it actually was decided for me. So I’ll give you some of the context. And this is kind of back to saying my life is a series of happy accidents. So tech for kids grew significantly. I had some investors be a part of that company because that’s how the initial capital got it going.
And they were looking for an exit. And so as I was thinking about the opportunities to do that, along came an opportunity. Instead of selling the company to merge our company with another toy co in the States, and that we would actually acquire other medium sized companies and eventually go public. And so the result of that process, we finally got to agreement was that we created a product or a brand called Basic Fund. And the Basic Fund is in existence today.
Prominent brands like Tonka and Carebears and Lite-brite and and Connect. So things that most of your audience would know. Yeah. 90 days after we merged that company, I got fired and it was one of those things like going from a majority owner of my business to a minority of a larger business. And, you know, everything looked good on paper, putting these two companies together because, you know, the economics, the rationalization of costs, the optimization, all that kind of good stuff.
But what they didn’t account for was the culture clash that the CEO of that company and myself as the CEO, just had very different sort of values in terms of how we would lead and build companies. And we just weren’t playing nice together. And the board ultimately had to select who they were they were going to keep. And so I got released back to the marketplace. I, you know, I guess I feel like I’m in good company because I know what happened to Steve Jobs as well.
So yeah, but it also became the forcing function of, of again, myself having an opportunity to choose a new future. And so, you know, as I’ve looked back, it didn’t happen to me. It happened for me because it literally freed me up to reimagine my future and apply it into a whole new area. And so it was a sudden exit, but had a soft landing and gave me optionality.
John Corcoran: 26:40
Yeah, you’re a very positive person, aren’t you? You’re kind of a glass. Very much a glass half full type of person.
Brad Pedersen: 26:47
It’s the only you mean the alternative isn’t. It’s so great. So.
John Corcoran: 26:50
Yeah. So then how’d you get involved in Pela then? And where did the idea come from? I think it was your business partner who had witnessed this from a family vacation in Hawaii. Had witnessed the damage that plastic was causing to the oceans. Is that right?
Brad Pedersen: 27:07
Yeah. I mean, look, I would say I’ve always felt somewhat conflicted about how the consumer economy works. I mean, I was in it for 30 years, and it’s just the way it is, but it also is a very much make use waste economy. So while I was in the toy business and I understood the process, I understood that most toys, the vast majority, end up in a landfill within a year or less. Right?
So it’s a high waste stream business based on fashion. And so when I left the toy business, one of the things I’ve always done is being a lifelong learner. I’ve been a part of entrepreneurial groups, members and a number of different things, and I went to an entrepreneurial meet up in Napa, of all places, and I met two fellow Canadians in Napa at this event.
John Corcoran: 27:53
As one does. Right. You go to Napa to meet Canadians? Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 27:56
Yeah, exactly. It makes a lot of sense, right? Yeah, sure. And, you know, one ended up and both of them ended up becoming a business partner. one knew how to make it.
So he had discovered this idea that became a pillowcase, which was a material science where he could make phone cases out of a compostable composite. And he knew how to make it, but he didn’t know how to market it. And my second founder, he was an incredible marketer. In fact, he owned one of the largest marketing agencies in Canada, and he knew how to market it, but he didn’t necessarily know how to scale it into mass production, particularly because he was a marketer and not a guy who made products. And then that brought.
John Corcoran: 28:33
That’s where you came in?
Brad Pedersen: 28:34
Yeah, I know how to make products and I know how to scale and scale companies. So. So the three of us got together and agreed.
John Corcoran: 28:39
Tell me you were meeting at a consumer product goods conference or something like that. This wasn’t just like wandering around the pool randomly.
Brad Pedersen: 28:47
This it’s it’s crazier than that. Yeah. Literally it’s just like one of those things that just, you know, the universe aligned. And we were able to connect because there was not a product conference. It was a mastermind event with entrepreneurs from all different disciplines connecting. And it’s just.
John Corcoran: 29:06
It wasn’t a mastermind talk, was it?
Brad Pedersen: 29:07
It was a mastermind talk. Yes.
John Corcoran: 29:09
What year?
Brad Pedersen: 29:10
2015.
John Corcoran: 29:11
Oh, that’s where my business partner and I got together. We started our business out of that same event. That is crazy.
Brad Pedersen: 29:17
There you go. Right.
John Corcoran: 29:18
That’s crazy. Wow. That’s funny. Funny.
Brad Pedersen: 29:21
Funny is incredible.
John Corcoran: 29:23
He’s the connector. Jayson Gaignard is the goat. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you Jason.
Brad Pedersen: 29:30
He is. Send this to him afterwards.
John Corcoran: 29:30
Well I owe him so much a debt of gratitude because literally, you know, not knowing in 2015 that I was going to be fired in 2017, that became, you know, the incubus of a relationship with Matt Bertoli, who owned Dmac Media, the marketing agency who would invest into Jeremy Lang’s company and on the basis that he was going to help them market. And, you know, just shortly after I was fired, we were in a forum together and we were having a sit down and he was talking. But I keep breaking this thing. They can’t keep up production and all the problems he was trying to solve. I’m like, I know how to do that. I mean, that’s not that hard.
And the short story is that I ended up saying maybe there’s an opportunity. And so we got together, we sat down, we hammered out what a partnership would look like. And I was inspired by the idea that I could apply my skill sets to this, but also that it was a business as a force for good. Because really, when we talk about pillowcases, a mission with a company like we’re, how do we create a waste free future? And we’re showing that it’s possible to make products out of a material science composite that actually has this graceful end of life. And it’s such a cool, inspiring thing to know that every product that we put out there actually goes back to the planet responsibly.
John Corcoran: 30:43
Yeah. That is. And have you been. So you make phone cases primarily, but I see also you have sunglasses on on the website here. How did you think about what products you would create?
Brad Pedersen: 30:56
Yeah, I think it starts with the customer and solving the customer’s problem. Like who is our avatar and what is she? Because she is primarily interested in it. And you know, so we’re constantly looking at like what are the the adjacencies to, you know, we have smart device protection covered in a pretty, I’d say, cohesive way. But then there’s like adjacencies to that.
So eyewear was one of them. And we considered looking at these other categories as well. I mean, the limitation quite frankly, is just that these materials cost more than traditional plastics at the moment. But like everything, as they become more ubiquitous, the costs come down and it just gives us more freedom to apply it into different categories.
John Corcoran: 31:36
Yeah, there’s a great book, by the way, which I read years ago. Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, which talks about this, talks about this idea of products and of the supply chain connecting them right now, they aren’t connected. You know, make these products on the front end. And it just all of it, as you said, within a year, ends up in a landfill. Really interesting book.
Brad Pedersen: 31:59
Yeah. No, I think I have heard of it. There’s a bunch of stuff out there right now that just really points to that. The world needs more of this type of thinking.
John Corcoran: 32:07
Yeah. For sure. Let’s get to talking about Lomi. Where did that come from? Where did that idea come from?
Brad Pedersen: 32:13
You know.
John Corcoran: 32:14
Explain to people what it is because it’s a new device that you have not traditionally been on the counter in your kitchen?
Brad Pedersen: 32:22
Yeah. No. So Lomi is an electronic kitchen composter that turns organic waste into a nutrient dense soil supplement that you can use around your yard. It’s incredible. It’s like a magic trick. When people see it work, they just can’t believe you put food waste in and you hit a button. You come back in a few hours.
John Corcoran: 32:41
It’s mind boggling. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Pedersen: 32:44
So what’s even more mind boggling is you take one of our peel off phone cases and you put it in, it turns to dirt as well. Wow. So pretty much any innovation in companies that I know start off with founders trying to solve their own problem, right? They were looking for ways to solve a problem they had. And through that, they created value that other people absorbed in the market.
So for us, the problem was that we were selling, you know, millions of pieces of pillowcase to customers around the world. And several customers would come back and say, where do I take it at the end of life? Where does it go? And we’d say, well, put it in a home composting bin. Well, we don’t have one. Well, take it to an industrial composter. Well, we don’t either.
John Corcoran: 33:24
Have those.
Brad Pedersen: 33:25
Or they don’t take, you know, compostable materials. Yeah. So we said we need to solve this problem and come up with a machine. And because we started with the hardest substrate, like when you think about compostable plastic, it’s the hardest thing to break down. By default, food waste was easy.
So the machine looks after our products as well as all the food waste. And then as we started to kind of peel back the layers of that food waste is like one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. You know, 50, 60% of what’s going to landfill right now is food waste and people’s bins.
John Corcoran: 34:00
Yeah, I believe that because I live in California and California, a couple of years ago passed a law where you have to put all of your food scraps into the green bin, which we have. And it was a little shocking at the time. Even I, who had composted before, thought, oh, that’s a little crazy that we have to do that. But once we did, I realized our trash bin has never been so empty and I didn’t even realize it.
Brad Pedersen: 34:23
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. I mean, your example is I couldn’t come up with a better one, except for there’s some people in certain jurisdictions that also pay bag tag fees or bin fees. Right. So one of the things we hear from people all the time is how much they’re saving in a year by using a Lomi, because their amount of waste has been reduced.
They don’t need as many bag tags, or they’ve got a smaller bin or get less frequent pickups. So and then on top of that, this waste stream is now being used for something good. If you have a yard, if you have flower beds or anything like that, you just use it in your yard and it’s incredible. Like my grass is the greenest in the neighborhood. It’s incredible.
John Corcoran: 34:59
Yeah. Now you have a track record of creating products in a category that didn’t exist before, but this is something entirely new. It’s a consumer product. It involves electronics and stuff like that. How different was this for you, or was it to explain and educate the market, or was it just this just the same as tossing the toy with the kid in the park and just on a bigger scale?
Brad Pedersen: 35:24
Yeah. Actually, I would say it’s about education and storytelling, right? I mean, this you’re right. This is a new category. We’re creating something called smart ways. Smart way devices never existed before, but it comes down to consumer education.
And the thing is, people, they want their problems to be solved. And that has to be the number one message that you have to focus on. You know, if you’re focused on the environment as a number one piece, people will be interested, but that’s not the reason compelling enough for them to actually make a purchase. The problem we’re solving for people is food waste is gross. They usually involve pests like ants and flies. If you live in the right states, bears and raccoons, it smells. And we eliminate all that. We take what’s disgusting, and we turn to something delightful and oh, by the way, it’s also amazing for the planet.
John Corcoran: 36:14
That’s a great way of putting it. Yeah. And how hard was it to develop this? Because it involves electronics. There’s an app involved. It’s not small. It’s large. How difficult was it compared to, you know, some of the products you developed before?
Brad Pedersen: 36:31
Yeah. Look, this is definitely the most complicated thing we’ve ever built. Shockingly, we built this in toy factories. That was my relationship. And what I tell people about that. Yeah, these same factories, you know, they do everything from digital cameras to remote control vehicles, to collectibles.
John Corcoran: 36:50
So complex products, in other words. Yeah, like complex electronics.
Brad Pedersen: 36:53
Yeah, yeah. They have a skill set of dealing with complexity. So when we brought this to them and said, okay, we need to have a machine that does this. The key difference though is the rigor of this machine has to be infinitely more substantial. Right.
It can’t be toy grade. This has got to be consumer grade. And it’s going to be grinding everything from, you know, you know, soft lettuce to avocado pits. It’s got to get it all. And so you know Gen one was a great product.
Gen two was even better. And now we’re getting ready to launch Gen three. And it’ll be the best of all of them. And as you said, it has an app on top of that, which is super cool because number one, it tells you your waste impact and you can see how much diversion you’ve created, but also it generates carbon credits. It’s actually a carbon asset. So this machine generates small micro carbon credits just by using it, which is really cool.
John Corcoran: 37:42
That’s cool. All right. Tell us about Full Spectrum. So you’ve taken some of your knowledge over the last 30 years, and you’re putting it into a course.
Brad Pedersen: 37:52
Yeah. Look, you know, in this kind of speaks to king of my heart in general about what I’ve learned along the way, because having been an entrepreneur for over 30 years and seeing some high highs and some low lows, the whole gamut of it, I’ve really come back to ask, what does it really all about? Like, is this journey just supposed to be about acquiring and consuming, or is there actually more to it? And so the other piece of that is that when you accomplish something in business, if you actually have an exit or you have some sort of meaningful outcome, I’ve found that most founders I talk to, they kind of have like this postpartum syndrome. It’s like, yeah, we really wanted to get there.
And then when it happened, it was like, great for like a minute. And then all of a sudden it was like, now what? Yeah. So this is really focused on accomplished business leaders. And the topics we talk about are how do you develop wealth beyond money?
Money is an important part of the equation. But truly, to be wealthy in your life, it has to be around other areas. And we sort of see there’s three pillars. One is meaningful work with purpose, something you can apply your gifts, your talents to that actually knows that you’re using them well. Second is stewardship.
And how can you use what you have as a force for good, both in your time, your talent, and your resources? And finally, the most important one is deeper and meaningful connections. And at the end of our life, I think we will evaluate how we lived by how we loved and how we were loved. And a lot of us, you know, we use our, our, our wealth to acquire wealth at the expense of our health and relationships. And so we’re really thinking about how we can help put people on a path where they can truly have a life that’s holistically wealthy and doing so beyond money.
And it’s kind of the idea behind the full spectrum because within white light, there’s multiple wavelengths. Some of us are really good at 2 or 3 of those wavelengths. But how do you get all the wavelengths in your life to make sure that you’re projecting the white light that we think is possible?
John Corcoran: 39:53
Well, I couldn’t agree with that more. I am a huge fan of that. That is the mission behind our company is helping people to build those connections, build those strong relationships. And that’s why I’m grateful for talking to someone like you and hearing your story and getting to know you. And so I love that, Brad.
You know, I’ll wrap with my last question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, practicing gratitude, and also giving my guests a little bit of space and opportunity to thank people that have helped them in their journey. Who would you want to acknowledge or shout out.
Brad Pedersen: 40:28
Man, my number one thanks is to my wife. She has. She’s been my business partner. She has been through the mud, the blood and the flood of everything I’ve put her through and probably should have hit the eject button along the way. I married way up and she’s put up with most of my BS and still along for the ride, and I’m forever grateful for that because she is. You know, when you have things together on the home front, it’s amazing. It just empowers you to be able to do anything else. Well. So I’m highly grateful for that.
John Corcoran: 40:58
Sure. Anyone in the business world also.
Brad Pedersen: 41:01
Yeah. Look. In the business world, there’s so many. But I would just, you know, shout out to Richard Branson. I had a chance to hang out with him this last summer, and, gosh, I mean.
John Corcoran: 41:16
He is going to Necker.
Brad Pedersen: 41:18
Did go to Necker.
John Corcoran: 41:19
Yeah. What was that like?
Brad Pedersen: 41:21
It was surreal because he’s always been, you know, if you ask me, have a dinner party with five people in the world, either alive or dead, who would be there? He was always on my list. Yeah. And so to hang out with him for a week and I actually had three, one on one sessions with him, and he’s the real deal. I mean, he is a guy who I think is living life to the fullest.
He’s got an incredible business life, incredible family life. His fitness is incredibly intact and just the way he sees the world, I show it to him as just an inspiration. I look at him and go, that’s the kind of person I want to become. Even a fraction of his influence would be incredible.
John Corcoran: 41:59
Truly an exceptional individual for sure. Brad, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you? Learn more about full spectrum startup Santa also is the name of your book and where can they get that? Where should they go?
Brad Pedersen: 42:13
Well, I encourage people that, you know, number one, I want to be a giver in terms of gratitude. I’ve got a shirt on saying grateful dude. So if you want to learn more about Full Spectrum, you can find me on LinkedIn and you can just DM me and I will send you a copy of my playbook on my session with my wife that I have weekly and we call it cultivating our garden. And the garden stands for acronyms. That’s actually going to be applicable here.
G stands for gratitude. A stands for accountability. R stands for responsiveness. D is for any difficulties you have to discuss. E is for the events going on in your life.
And N is nurturing. And each one of those I have like an idea for how you can make the most of that intentional one on one connection with the most important relationship in your life. So if you just DM me, I mean connect with me there. DM me and say garden in your message. I will gladly send you our playbook, and I think you’ll find it extremely helpful for helping just make that primary relationship even more meaningful.
John Corcoran: 43:16
That’s great. Brad, thank you so much for your time.
Outro: 43:20
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.