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Fortune Favors the Fearless: A Bold Bet Becomes a Breakthrough
It’s been said that you can’t reach a new horizon unless you’re brave enough to lose sight of the shore, but the time spent paddling in between can be hair-raising. In recognition of April 5 as Go for Broke Day, I’m remembering a time when our business faced what seemed like insurmountable odds, and how we went for broke to turn things around.
This all happened about a decade ago. When we bought the company, we depended heavily on a single brand, a pain-relieving clinical ointment that accounted for roughly 35% of our revenue. Chiropractors across the country used it to help relieve patients’ pain from arthritis, muscle strains, and other conditions.
That brand was soon acquired by a bigger company, and we were concerned that the new management might abandon their strategy of marketing exclusively to clinicians. On calls, their sales reps repeatedly reassured us: “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
I had my doubts.
And when I walked into a Target store in Seattle and saw big point-of-purchase displays promoting a consumer-grade version of the brand, my worst fear was confirmed. Our biggest source of revenue had shifted to a full-blown retail strategy. In the next six months, we took a massive revenue hit.
Our Risky Next Steps
About a month later, a customer brought us a suggestion: At a trade show, he had tried a new product, a pain relief ointment containing CBD. He experienced great results and urged us to check it out. CBD wasn’t yet widely known or understood. But I took a chance on it.
The manufacturer’s initial rollout of the CBD ointment was a little bumpy. Sometimes we couldn’t get the product we ordered. But I decided to run a high-stakes market test. We sent out thousands of free sample packets of the CBD ointment with a brochure. We didn’t have to wait long for a response. Within the first four hours after customers began receiving the sample packets, we were flooded with more than 100 phone calls requesting more!
That decision changed everything. Within 18 months, our CBD sales reached levels that had taken 15 years to build with the pain-relief product we had lost! Over the years, we have probably sent out a quarter of a million of those little packets of CBD Clinical.
I didn’t know it then, but we had caught the bleeding edge of a 20-fold explosion in global CBD sales between 2014 and 2022, to nearly $2 billion in 2022. The sampler strategy has worked many times since then. And we still sell CBD Clinical today.
Life presents plenty of opportunities. But in both business and life, we all experience a few moments when we look back and say, “I’m glad I took that risk.” Something Jeff Bezos once said springs to mind: When he was asked why he left a cushy, six-figure Wall Street job in the 1990s to launch an internet bookstore, he asked himself: “When I am 80, am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the internet? Yes.” He didn’t want to be lying in bed at 80, filled with regret, wondering, “What if?”
If I had bypassed the chance to catch the CBD wave a decade ago, I would have regretted it forever. Sometimes, you just have to take the leap, figure it out along the way, and hold on for the ride.
Best of all, we heard countless great stories over the years about people who had been in all kinds of pain and felt better after using the CBD ointment. Any product we can offer that helps people avoid taking pain medication while still improving their quality of life. That’s the biggest reward for me.