Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute invites Nicholas Esayian, CEO & Founder of Light Helmets, to discuss innovations in football helmet design aimed at enhancing player safety and preventing brain injuries.
Um, so welcome to Irma and Calman Bass Innovation lecture, hosted by the Center for Innovation at Baptist Health Care and Miami Neuroscience Institute. Um, our speaker today is not a physician. Uh, he was a professional race car driver and he's also an inventor, hence the innovation connection. Uh, Nicholas is saying, uh, I met when the Center for Innovation was looking for a place to try and land a patent application that we had. And when uh we met via Zoom with Nick, and he was giving his pitch, I was texting Neila Bakuni saying that Nick is reading our the background for our patent application, which meant that nothing is new, but we both had the same idea about how to protect the football players primarily from concussive head injuries based on, I think it's Newton's second law. That in order to bring a moving body to rest, you need to apply an equal and opposite opposing force, um, and that's where the energy comes from when the patient or when the player hits the turf, even though the world is still and not moving, and the player is moving, the force is transmitted back to the patient's head by the ground. Um, and so Nick has been through, um, the whole thing through 6 years of innovation, and it's, it's an incredibly complicated journey, but I, if you want to start from the beginning and know what it's like to try and bring a product to market, which is what innovation is about, then Nick is a great example. So Nick, thank you for coming from San Diego. Well, thank you, Doctor McDermott, uh, everyone else that was so welcoming today. Um, Quick little background on, on me, so, uh, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. I'm not a doctor, so we'll start with that. Uh. Interesting, um, quick background. I grew up in the Midwest. I played a little Division 3 football, some other sports, ended up moving to San Diego after some work in the corporate world, started an entrepreneurial venture of my own, which, uh, had some moderate success and concurrent to that, I was racing automobiles professionally. I've been a bit of a serial entrepreneur in the investment space and founder space, um, have made more mistakes than I've had success. Hopefully today a little bit. With what I'm gonna share, um, will assist in your mindset about innovation. So, half of today, we're going to touch base and talk about innovation. Uh, what are the challenges? What does your mindset have to be? What is the culture of the organization you're in, um, need to bathe you with? What do you need to. You know, project to the people around you, what do you need to visualize? How do you prepare yourself? How do you prepare your family? Because all of these things are, are part of the process and whether this is, uh, bringing a new product to market, a service, a procedure, uh, a different way of thinking, a different way of communicating, what we're gonna go through today will cover the majority of that, and then we're gonna dig a little bit into the football space because I know everyone loves football. Raise your hand if you like football. Come on, I got one that didn't even raise him. I'm kidding. He's smiling though. So, um, I'll jump right into this, um. When we look at innovation, um, from a, from a See if I can get my pages to turn here. There we go. Now I know how to work the device. I did have Legos as a kid, so, um, innovation, a new idea, method or device. The introduction of something new, pretty common. Obviously, we've got innovators that we're all aware of along the bottom, and in this case, I'm using the F-22 Raptor as a, uh, an example of the best and brightest minds came together to produce what now is being called the greatest airplane or the greatest fighter jet in history. Uh, we don't know how much it's been in combat. It's replacing an F-15 that is 108 to 0, uh, air to air, um, record against adversaries. And whether that's flown by the Saudis, the Americans, the Israelis, whomever, uh, this plane is the next chapter, and, and the next chapters is soon to be released. This is the tip of the spear. This is something that has to work. When it's 70 degrees below zero, that an 18 year old kid can change the engine on in desert heat, that can deal with particulate matter, humidity, uh, that software can be updated and, you know, we've all changed software on a computer and then your printer doesn't work. We've all changed cell phones and oh, this is a faultless way to be able to update to the next cell phone, and then none of the passwords work. And of course, it happens at the exact time that you need it. The person flying that plane by themselves, uh, the cost of failure is a fatality. And it's not only fatality of him, but no one on the ground. In the US military has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951. So when you think about that, there is a component to what that airplane can do that you do here at Baptist Health, that we do on the football field, and unless we continue to innovate, the challenges that we face eventually will take that past F-15 that was 108 to 0 and it'll be 108 to 2, 108 to 10. What happens to the people that that jet is protecting? What happens if the next follow on of this is not as reliable so the 18 year old can change the engine. It's not what the, the device can do or what the process can do or what the procedure can do, but it's how consistent can it do it? What's the cost of failure, uh, what's a dividend of success? How long does it take to get there? We're gonna talk about all of that today. Um, clinical versus practical. I'll give you an example. The NFL has done a fantastic job since about 2017 of trying to develop a test that reflects impacts on the field. There's a great company called Biocor, Doctor Crandall, uh, Jeff Miller at the NFL. They worked together with a wide range of physicians to put together a test that's a living test that continues to grow and mature as more data is gleaned. Um, sometimes what we see on TV is anecdotal. Uh, sometimes what we see that's anecdotal actually leads to a conclusion at a later time that, oh, maybe that wasn't a one in a million chance that it happened with some frequency. So a lab test has to be repeatable. And what we see is a great lab test that continues to make the game of football at all levels, uh, safer. But at the same point in 2022, concussions were up 18% in the NFL. Why was that? Is that we're diagnosing concussions, uh, in a more concise manner, that we have more people watching. There's 22 of the world's best athletes traveling on a football field. The fastest guys in the NFL to rekill here from the Dolphins, broke 23 miles an hour. Um, you know, he just challenged somebody that won a medal at the Olympics to a sprint. We'll see how that goes. But, uh, 50 yard dash, not a 100 yard dash. The point is, is that what happens on the field is a lot different, a lot more variables. In a lab, you see an impact from one direction. On field, there's not a single impact or a single event on field where you're only getting hit once in that exact place in a linear manner, or where a player is just standing completely stoic and still and a linear impact, linear impact or hits them. So, one thing to keep in mind as we're making our plans, as we're thinking about the hypothetical of what our innovation is going to affect, You have to start to think about all the different variables because if you don't, you tend to be a bit optimistic or a bit pessimistic. Um, nothing works 100% of the time. Uh, I'm gonna rewind some quick numbers for you, which are a bit shocking. So since, uh, in the United States, the last major air incident was October of 2001, an Airbus crashed in Queens. It was only a month after 9/11. Since then, if you figure there's about 300 to 32,000 flights a day, 365 days a year times 23, 24 years, you're looking at over 250 million flights. Think about that. Somebody's opening a door, closing it. There's 2 or 4 General Electric engines on the plane, Rolls-Royce engines on the plane that you're in. There's pilot air, there's weather, there's ground traffic. There's all of these different things. Think about that the grand scale of what those numbers look like and how perfect that has to be, and we all just roll through life saying, gosh, Man, I had a tough travel day yesterday, but when you think about that, you think about those numbers, it's, it's miraculous. And that again goes back to innovation. That wasn't the case 30 years ago. It wasn't the case 50 years ago. We learned from our mistakes, um, and, and we come up with different ways of doing things moving forward. All right. So, when we're thinking about innovation, of course, does it solve a problem? And, you know, how big is the problem? So, in my in my football situation, we're looking at roughly 5.6 million people that I love that. That's OK. He's watching a different video. No, I'm kidding. 5.6 million kids and adults that are playing football at all different levels. And you think about flag football, 7 more million should be 10 in the next 3 years. So it's a lot of people. 3 million people play hockey in the US and Canada, how many in Eastern Europe? Lacrosse, then mixed motorsports and. Talk about all these different things. For us, helmet technology, it's huge. Think about the military. Military alone. Um, you know, you had over 2.3 million people serve over the 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed to impact, concussion, vibration, other things that can cause, cause head trauma. But in your department, in your area, in your company, or something completely outside of your company where you see an opportunity for innovation, what's the problem that I'm trying to solve? Who does it impact? What's the value of solving that problem? Um, Is the problem quantifiable? If I'm not measuring how many kids are getting concussions because I don't know what a concussion is. And frankly, that's what's happening right now in youth sports, because you have someone that's a generous person with their time. It could be Joe the plumber, or it could be Michael McDermott, who's an expert in the area, that's examining a player when he comes off the field, and it's no disrespect to the plumber, but their backgrounds are different. If I've got 100s, 10s of thousands of coaches examining for a concussion. Everybody's looking at this different. We can put sensors in a helmet. I've seen a kid get a 100g impact on a sensor. No concussion. Seeing a player get a 5G impact and show symptoms of concussion. So we have to be able to quantify whatever that is. Whether it's an OR efficiency rate, whether it's a time on station for a fighter jet, whether it's who is getting a concussion. When are they getting it? Are they getting in the 4th quarter when there's fatigue? Are they getting it early on when they're not warmed up? Is this related to a neck strength issue? What's the size of the player? What's the size of the player in conjunction, indexed against the people they're playing against? All of these things come in, come into play. And I'd urge you, everybody has an ID here, and I'm gonna ask a silly question, but I promise it's not R I won't make you raise your hand too many times. But how many people have an idea? Relate to something in their department or an invention outside of their department or something at your home that you can do to improve things. Almost 100%. Well, maybe about 89%. My math is a little off today. But, so, and the data has to be significant enough where we can, unless it's obvious, ascertain, especially when we're getting involved with spending a lot of money, making systemic change in an organization, or spending a lot of time and resources to reculture how people operate. And again, that goes back to an emergency room, it goes back to the military, it goes back to how a family operates. I don't want all the Legos left on the stairs when Grandma's here. She's gonna step on a Lego, it's gonna hurt her foot, down the stairs she goes. Grandma's not there. Le was not on the floor anymore. His dad gets older at the ripe age of 56, less chance of me stepping on the Lego and going down the stairs. That innovation, that's overly simplistic, but it is. But we need to know that what is the data set that we're looking at? Going back to the NFL testing and we're going to talk more about football in a bit. They do a pretty good job, but you only have a data set of roughly 1800 players. Playing 17 games plus playoffs. You've got a lot of eyes on that. What about practice? What about the preseason? What about when they're training with their trainer off site? What about when they're playing basketball or they're on the 4th of July and they're jumping off a boat into the water. You have all of those things, no control over any of that data. So the data we're looking at, even in a supremely controlled environment like the NFL where everything's videoed in super high definition and you can recreate those impacts. There's a pellet in the player's shoulder pad, so you know how fast that they're moving. Um, now there's mouth guards to be able to descent. That data is not always available and sometimes you have to create the data set before you can test your innovation because it doesn't exist. Um, we'll talk a little bit more about that. What's the cost of failure? If I decide today that I want to make the innovation of flight. Meaning me jumping off the 3rd story of the building because I have a size 48 suit jacket, and according to the math, I should be able to glide gingerly to the ground. Cost of failure is huge. The cost of failure is huge if you make some uh endemic change in how we process patients coming into the ER. You have a mass casualty event. And we've not done a training. How are we going to deal with that? If we have a mass casualty event and my innovation has never been tested, What's the cost of that? And we can do this from how we drive. How we discipline our kids, whole variety of areas, but cost of failure is huge. So when you are looking at How much resistance you're going to get, how many foes you're gonna have around the way along the way, how many people are gonna say, nope, you can't do it, how expensive it's gonna be. Sometimes, it's related to the cost of failure. Does that mean you shouldn't do it? Absolutely not. That goes back to how big is the problem. But you do have to weigh cost of failure there and be conscious of it as you go through the process. Now, when we look at what are the things that, you know, you need to actually go out and be successful, because Everybody has an idea. I bet we probably get at light helmets 3 submissions to 4 submissions a week. And it can come from Stanford University in the form of a valve that lets air pass through a pad, super effective. Proven to be 20% of an of a of a uh reduction in impact forces in the testing that we did. Great, was well vetted. I've also had, and I'm not joking, someone come in with a concrete crown and bang their head against a train and send us a video of it saying that this is the solution to potential head injury. Clearly was not well versed in the cervical structure and the forces of impact and probably never watched a football game, but When you go through this process, it comes down to a simple list. How much is it gonna cost to implement this? And there's two sides of that. And we had a little discussion about this today is number one is just vetting whether it's worth doing has a cost to it. And then the actual implementation is a completely different cost. So when I do R&D on a helmet update, where they do an R&D on a missile for the F-22, that might take years. And how does this interface with all the other software on the aircraft? How does it come off the aircraft? Does it reduce the stealth, uh, characteristics of the aircraft? All of those things have to be calculated in advance. Now, when you actually go and you build that, missile of that projectile. I've got a cost associated with that. It's got to integrate with other airplanes because we can't make a missile for one plane. It's got to work when it's 20 degrees out. It's got to work when it's 130 degrees out. How do I clean the seeker head? What happens if particulate matter gets behind there? All of that has a cost. So you need to go through that analysis. Can most of us do that on our own? Nope. You're gonna need help in that process. So usually, and we're gonna talk about your posse. Later. Uh, the posse can be the people that you bounce ideas off of that are smarter than you. There's not a single person at my company, at this company, at one of my other companies when I raced, that wasn't smarter than me in at least one if not multiple areas. I want to surround myself with the smartest people. I wanna inquire, what do you think about this? How would you attack this problem? Doesn't mean you're always going to agree with them and you can push back. But unless you have that dialogue, your ego takes over, and your hypothesis is just you're gonna ram it through. And that's not necessarily what's gonna work. What does that do? It costs you a lot of money. And the money doesn't just mean, hey, we're coming up with an invention, we're gonna go through the discovery process and whether it's doable or not, and then the actual implementation, but the money can be, hey, I'm changing a process in my department, doesn't cost me anything. But it certainly can cost you political capital if you haven't thought it out properly, or if you don't get buy-in of everyone there, or you create an empire where 3 of the people in that department love the idea and 3 of the people of the department don't like it. Now, you took a harmonious environment and you just divided it. Is that um is there a dollar and cents? Value associated with it, you bet. When you have the attrition of people that could potentially leave. When a patient could be affected, when a physician could be affected, all of those things are things you need to take into consideration. Time, how long is it gonna take? Our F-22 example, 20 years in the making. The next generation air dominance fighter took them 4 or 5 years. They cut it down, a lot of computer aided design. Uh, our last NFL helmet, there's one sitting here, you guys can take a look at when we're done, um. It took us about 1 year to go soup to nuts on that. One of our competitors, uh, the last one to bring a new company to market with new technology, it took them about 3 years to go through that. LSD, a variety of impact simulation softwares that have come out really helped us in that, in that process. But there's time associated with all of this and what happens during that time, the environment changes. You are burning money. When you have rent, when you have insurance, when you have employees, when you have an IP attorney that you're talking to and the engineering changes, so the drawings have to change, all of those things come into play. The same thing when you're making an innovation in your department. Well, I went through this process, but I didn't get the second tranche of people trained. Now I've got half trained, half not trained. By the time I get to the 2nd group of people, the first people, because they've not been exercising what they've been taught. Become less proficient in what you just got trained on. So now you gotta go back and do it again. Time, money, go through the same thing. It is just something that we all have to deal with. Once again, this is not something that can defeat you, but it's something you need to be aware of. Knowledge, the last person in the room that anyone wants to, you know, be involved with, um, you know. Brain surgery. It's not gonna be me. Scared. I don't like black. Kidding, I really don't, but If I'm in this helmet space, the first thing that I did was go out and get 14 physicians that knew this space better than I did. And this included physical therapist, neurologist, forensic neurologist, orthopedic specialists, trauma doctors, and then I went to engineering firms that were in the head, health and helmet space. We looked at components from the Department of Defense. What are they doing? They spent more money on. The modern combat helmet than you could imagine. The most expensive helmet in the world is the uh helmet with all the electronics in it that's used in the F-35. It's a $2 million plus helmet when you take into consideration all the electronics. The most scrutinized football helmet in the world is a football helmet. Because more people watch the Super Bowl than any other television show. More people watch the playoffs, more people watch these key games, and you have people making $60 million a year. Running around at 20 some miles an hour, and their head is hitting different parts of other people's bodies. Your job is to advance. A leather-filled balloon, while there are 11 other people that are Olympic athletes trying to stop you from doing that. Now, the rules have changed. To corral some of the kinetic events that happened, but it doesn't completely get rid of it. So, when I'm getting into the space, I want to make sure that I'm surrounded by the best doctors, the best engineers. Do I want my engineers to be all in-house? I have one engineer, played football at MIT. Smartest guy at the company by far. My hats off to my chief operating officer, but it's even smarter than he is. If you guys are watching, you can pass some money back and forth, uh, and who I was gonna say was, was smarter. Uh, the reality is though, whether it's your vendors, whether it's your partners, whether it's the people that are physically working on this, knowledge is key, and the knowledge goes well beyond just In terms of what you're trying to invent, the problem you're trying to solve the procedure you're putting in place, but how to implement it, which is a management component. Um, barriers to entry in football. If you want to start a football helmet company today, get your checkbook out 40 million bucks. Did we spend that? No, less than half that to get to this point. But for that example, what's the barrier of entry to get into the fighter jet market in the United States? They're South Korea is trying to build their own fighter jet. Japan's trying to build your own fighter jet. Good luck. Be able to fly that thing around with the test flight. And the first time, saltwater gets all over, component A, B or C and corrodes, you'll be coming back to the United States and buying from Lockheed Martin or Boeing or whomever else. It's not a dig that they shouldn't try, but good luck. Um, When we look at bears entry in the football helmet space, it could be the NFL saying we don't want your helmet. It could be that the helmet's weight is too heavy for the new standard, which for youth players is 3.5 pounds, that we're by the way below, the only ones that are below it. It could be that you run out of money, it could be that you can't get insurance. It could be that no one likes your idea. Can be any of those things. What are those barriers? Identify them. Can you get through them? Can you not get through them? Um, competition. We all know what that is. One thing that's The one of the best things about the United States is competition. When you look at an NFL field, the absolute best players at the position, doesn't matter race, color, creed, age. The best of the best. That's who's out playing that game. In different parts of our economy, things weigh a little bit differently than that, but If you are in an office environment, you want to change the procedure, does somebody else have another idea? If the problem's big, and we go back to the cost of the problem, and you have the only solution, even if it's not a 10 out of 10, and you implement that solution, the cost's not too great, you have the knowledge, and it's a 7, there's an improvement. No competition, you're in, you're done. Everyone agrees. We were talking about something here being changed on the campus. Everyone agreed on the plan. Great. Onward, congratulations. The plan was good. At least you think it was, otherwise you're all gonna be wrong later. In this case, it'll be good. But you need to realize that sometimes competitions from within, sometimes it's external, sometimes it can be the environment. In our case, I know there's no new helmet competitor coming anytime soon, but are the existing companies gonna come out with new technologies? Sure. Can somebody change the board? The monopoly board, so that all of a sudden a bunch of new competitors can come into the space. It's possible. If I'm in the hockey helmet business. The military business, very different businesses. Um, media, media can be a friend of your foe. They can turn black to white, they can turn white to black, if they don't buy into your idea. And they pound away, pound, pound away at you, your audience for money. Your audience for cooperative thinking becomes less and less and less. You can use the media, uh, and there's an art to that, and people that are in the media are people too. You have to build that relationship, because if you don't, You are just another story and you're just another object. They need to understand not just what you're doing, but they need to understand what the problem is. They need to understand what the cost of failure is if the problem's not solved. They need to know what you're trying to do and what you've thought of to try to get there. They're still not gonna always Give you the positive spin, and sometimes it's unfair, but you have to keep that component in your mind because today, social media clips on TikTok, on Instagram can sway huge swaths of people and we're seeing it in the election, and we'll see it related to products, we see it related to young people and their self-confidence. And all of that's media, whether it's social media, whether it's national media. Politics, it's another thing. When you're in an organization and you're in a big organization like Baptist Health, or you're in General Motors, or you're at McDonald Douglas, or you're any place else, there's always politics. We should be more of a cardio facility. No, we should be more of a neurology facility. Fighting for budgetary dollars. Budget might be 3 years out. That's not something that, oh, I'm just gonna move on to the next thing because, lo and behold, 3 year budget. That's frustrating. You're gonna stay at work, you're gonna leave. Is that organization gonna thrive when you have mass exodus in one of those departments because the politics came into play. And politics comes down to leadership in an organization like this, and it comes down to leadership when it comes to companies, you know, battling to try to get new products and new technologies on the field. Variation of the environment, we talked about that, the monopoly board changing, and that can be a lot of different things. In my case, it could be uh Knoxy making a change to helmet weight. Tomorrow, all the helmets have to be under 3.5 pounds. Touchdown. I went. Is that the NFL, they're gonna say, you have to be able to take the face mask off in 2 seconds. I might have to make some modifications cause I can't get mine off for 3. That can be the same anywhere else. Insurance companies, laws. Environmental loss HR laws. You have all of these different things that you need to compete against, rules of certain games. Some may conflict, different environments may require different things. American football, 5.6 million people. Football and the rest of the planet, tackle football, less than 100,000. Hockey helmets, completely different. Military helmets completely different. Lacrosse. Probably about the same as football in terms of that environment. Rugby's growing quickly. The environment's changing. Do I, maybe I do I move rugby up further on my, on my list as I go. These are all things you need to take into consideration. So when you're in a department and you're at a company, or you have an idea that you want to market elsewhere, not only do you need to look at where you're at today, but where do you think things are gonna be in the future? What's the most likely outcome, and then we your Solution for that based on what those likely outcomes are. And sometimes you may guess wrong. Sometimes you may pick the thing that the environment kills you and you're done and you move on. And that's just the way that it is. Uh, dealing with failure is part of innovation. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. Um, now what do you do? The dog that catches the car, I use this example all the time. When we bought this company, uh, we didn't even have an office. So we went to Palomar Airport, which is a little FBO, uh, north of San Diego, and we rented two executive suites, and I remember us sitting across from each other, looking through the glass like. Holy man, what are we gonna do now? Like, we have to come up with a football helmet and neither of us, you know, we're engineers. What are we gonna do? We had a plan. I mean, we weren't like completely crazed or we chased us around, got the deal done and decided what to do. But now you have to start taking action. And guess what? Every that environment thing, everything starts changing. And when I look at things from here, if I take 2 steps to the right, everything looks completely different to me. And that happens with time, and it happens with perspective. If we all see a car accident, we've all heard this before. You all see a different version of it. You all notice different things, different things stick out in your mind, and you start to be able to have that dialogue is how do you knit all those data points together so that you can agree on a course of action so the politics don't get in the way. So you have a protracted argument about politics that cost you this much time or this much money. So, what resources do we need? To compete. Money, time, expertise, management. We already talked about this. Money. It can be your money, and you're more likely to get money from other people if you're putting money in. And I don't mean you digging in your pocket. If you want to get into the football helmet business and compete compete against us. Write a check. You might be able to go to Rawlings or Wilson or Zenith or someone else, where you'll get collaboration, more people put money in, and when you have more people putting money in, you have more people's opinions to deal with, which can be good and bad. You can go to an institution that may help you on the money side. If you're internal here, and you want to change something in the emergency room, You have a budget The budget isn't next next idea. It's not on the line item. Where's that money gonna come from? When you take that money from someplace else, if the people aren't bought in on on it, guess what? You're the bad guy. So Always remember, I don't care where it comes from, innovation costs money. It can be your money, it can be your family's money, it can be your friend's money. Every small restaurant that opened at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, on somebody's dream, on their credit card, on their family's line of credit at their home, that went broke. Was open with money. There was innovation. It's gone. And regardless of anyone's opinion on how that was managed, the environment changed. And that money went away. If we decide we're gonna go build fighter jets, you know, get out the hundreds of billions of dollars. If and and how many collectives are gonna be able to put that kind of money together. If I'm getting in the football helmet business, Say it cost me 40 million to get started, if I wanted to start today. Even if I have $5 million I'm gonna put it in. If I go to NFL players, how many players have 5 million liquid? Am I gonna go to an institutional fund? You don't have revenue, you don't have patents. You have 4 competitors, the barriers to entry are huge. It's gonna take too much time. What's your burn rate? Challenge, right? The time component of it? How much time do you have? If you're in a department, you're working, you're trying to get something done. How much physical time do you have to shave away in addition to your regular job, in addition to your kids, in addition to your family, in addition to stopping to get dog food, grocery store, going to junior's football game, to be able to spend to this new component? And what value is it? Because if I make an $1 amount. And this is gonna take 20 hours a week for me to push this across the goal line, and I don't own any of the company, and I'm not gonna make any more money. Am I gonna do that? Nope. As an organization, do you want to create a culture of innovation? You better put in place opportunities for people to be able to win, whether it's promotion, whether it's title, whether it's money, whether it's something else. Otherwise, you will not breed innovation. And all those people will do is look at the innovator as you're a pain in my ass because I have to do extra work because of your idea. That's just the way that it is. Expertise goes back to what we're talking about before. You need to have A knowledge in that particular area and about everything around that area, uh, but then the management of it. Execution. If you put a good manager in, But yeah, I, I mean to take an old president, take Ronald Reagan. He didn't know a lot about defense. He didn't know a lot about economics. He didn't know a lot about this. He was a pariah, he got hammered away. But over time, you saw he was a good manager because he Ended up with reasonable results. There's still people that think he was terrible, but he was a manager. He wasn't an expert in one given area. You can look at a Jack Welch, you can look at an Elon Musk. You can look at, you know, Elon Musk worked at the Tesla Model 3 plant for months, slept there. Now, should he have been committed for sleeping there while he's running a spaceship company? So when people say, oh, you know, what does he know? He's a rocket scientist. So, the point being is that that management goes beyond the knowledge of Well, how fast does that rocket need to be going, you know, to get out into low Earth orbit? Where do the boosters go? How do we rely on this thing? What do the gyroscopes look like? Does he know all those things? Nope. But he certainly knows how to manage that process. And sometimes it takes a team and initially in your department doing something, or in a division or in a military unit, uh, you have to have the management to be able to get things changed and get it done once you've come up with that innovative process. Tactical resources, and I'll whip through these engineering, we know what that is, production. What does it cost to produce this? Where are you gonna produce it? How are you gonna produce it? Uh, we'll talk a little bit about our helmets in a minute, but if I take a competitive helmet, rip it apart, it's got between 70 and 100 SKUs, a lot of different pieces and parts. You look at their catalog, there's 2500 SKUs. They've been around longer, so there are more helmets. But in ours, everything can be changed. You can take a face mask from helmet A, put it on helmet B. You can resize a helmet. The job pads are the same from helmet A to helmet B. Production, where do you do it? How do you do it? What is it gonna cost per unit? Whatever you think that cost is, it's always gonna be more. What are the equipment cost? Can you take that and spread it out? Production may be if it's a procedure. What do I need? Do I need more gurneys? Do I need to put RFID tags on equipment so I know where it is, so I don't need as much equipment? All of those things are part of production. So think of production outside of just a physical product, but actually implementing a process or changing something. Inventory goes back to Hey, I've got a byproduct to run this through. I'm gonna have to have inventory for not only manufacturing and selling, but if I have multiple sizes. I can't take that cart that was so generously picked up a box for me and brought it over here. If that cart's in here, there's not a cart someplace else that somebody wants to use. All of that needs to be thought of. And a lot of times, if you're changing a process or a procedure, and you're going to implement a new one, the old one, the old procedure is still being used while the new one is being implemented. So in that case, you need more inventory, and the inventory can also be time, people. Devices, services, power, water, anything like that. People that have certain certifications to execute something. Uh, finance, different than money. Finance is if Michael's gonna give me a check for $20 million tomorrow to start a new race car factory, is he gonna give me all $20 million on day one. And I'm gonna put the money in a high risk investment and all of a sudden it's $16 million on a bad stock market day, or is he giving me small chunks as we go? How do I manage my timeline with what my expenses are gonna be with what's happening? What do I have to show the market to get the next round of funding in? What do I need to prove to my insurance company that I can get insurance or my boss? All of those things. The finances, again, it's not just time, but it's how you manage resources to accomplish the goal. Legal. My first attorney that I ever had when I started my first company said, Nick, you need two things. I still have the crumpled up piece of paper. You need a good tax accountant, because no matter what, tax that doesn't go away, that may have changed, but according to him. And the second thing is you need a good general counsel. You don't need to have them on a retainer, but you need to have access, right? Now, in a big organization, of course, you're gonna have general counsel. Now, Remember, just because they're an attorney doesn't mean they don't have a preconceived notion. They may not like your idea. So they're gonna throw up all the barriers and why you shouldn't do it. I have to ask somebody else. Does attorney A get mad or your general counsel if they found out you ask somebody else, you bet. So you better manage that, right, otherwise, you could be walking the plank pretty quickly. So, you know, anytime anyone has got a level of expertise that nobody else understands, whether it's the IT guy that tells you it's 4000 hours to write that code, and it took your kid 4 hours. Or whether it's the attorney that says, you can't do that, and a different attorney said, sure, you can do that. We just have to pay for it differently. That's something you have to take into consideration. Marketing, everybody's a marketing person. I would say until 10 years ago, I, I was a marketing person. The worst decision I ever made was showing up to the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and saying, I'm gonna be a marketing guy, cause you know what the marketing degree. Has done for me, 0. Everything's done with analytics now. It's all numbers. You can be creative. I can come up with some great ideas on how I want to pitch something and you have to have that, but most people can do that without a, without a marketing degree. But what you have to realize is whatever my idea is. Other than the two other people that agreed with me when I was drinking too much wine and that decided it was a good idea to make this department change or to go and start a company, or, hey, we're going to buy a whole bunch of electric cars and lease them to Uber people that have bad credit, whatever that crazy idea is. That somebody laughed in the back. Whatever that idea is, I, I've got to be able to go out and market that and whether it's social media, whether it's paid search, whether it's talking to people internally, talking to people externally, how do I package this? What does the pitch deck look like? What is your deck look like when you come in and do a presentation to people that dabble in, in, in your space? All of that's key. Sales part of marketing, different component. Sales very mechanical in the football space. Youth programs, bunch of parents on a board of directors making decisions. A lot of parents don't have time, so one person's making the decision. If he gets 1000 bucks from the helmet wrap to buy XYZ helmets, he's buying those helmets. The high school coach Hey, you know what? I can have a big party with the athletic director at the NFI save 20 grand, not that high school coaches would do this, but Um, I'm gonna buy this less expensive helmet for my 2nd and 3 string guys. They're not gonna play that much anyway. The XYZ rep takes me to the steakhouse. They're getting him as a, uh, my, my daughter on the rowing team at XYZ school. All this stuff happens. You got to balance all this out. But as you go out, whether you're this policy, procedure in your department, whether you're gonna start a new entity or whether you've got an invention, you're gonna have to sell someone. That means you're gonna have to talk to someone that you don't know. You're gonna have to identify who that person is. You're gonna go talk to them. You're gonna have to do a little research on them. You're gonna have to figure out what's the compelling win in it for them organizationally and individually to push them over the edge, blah blah blah means we're only here for an hour and I'm probably already going long based on where we're at. There are a lot of other components of this which we can talk about offline at a small fee. I'm kidding. So When you have a product, If you are here, and you come up with an idea for a great new set of running shoes, and you don't have enough money in your bank account to float you and your family for 2 years, 3 years, and you're not willing to burn through that and then start over. You're better off to take that concept for those running shoes and go to someone else, shop to 2 or 3 people. Got to have your intellectual property in place, otherwise all you're doing is giving somebody an idea, because guess what? You could be the guy with the concrete on your head, showing up at Nike trying to sell them a running shoe idea that, yeah, we heard of that 6 years ago, right? And that happens all the time because everybody's got ideas. Your idea is good to you because of your perspective. 2 steps over here, not a good idea. 2 steps over here, great idea. So, um, If you have the opportunity to give it to someone else, I'm gonna give this policy change to my boss. I'm gonna talk them through it, the steps of it, cost of failure, cost of winning if this works for us, the win to them, the win to you. All of the other, how much time it can take, how much money it's gonna take. Let them fight that battle. Fight it with them. If you have a product, and you can take that shoe idea, maybe not to Nike, but to New Balance, hey, all I want is 1% of everything that's sold. Pay me quarterly. I don't need any advance. Just give me $10,000 so I can cover my costs today. I'm gonna go and do that. Do that and move on to the next thing. Guess what? I don't have any experience in the shoe area other than wearing them. So, I might be able to do the management piece, but my expertise or knowledge is small. That doesn't mean I don't have a good idea. It just means my chance of executing it on my own is gonna cost more money, take more time. I Opportunity for success is gonna be reduced. Do what you're good at. If you are a founder, if, if you start a business tomorrow, by the time you take other people's money, you spend your own money, the opportunity cost of that money, the opportunity cost of your time. You gotta calculate all of this because what do you earn in the end? You may earn your freedom, but you also may become an employee of the business that you created. And your cost of failure is a lot higher. Again, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone. I'm just going through this. It's in realistic vein. Other people's money, you reduce risk, it's not your money. You have less control. If I'm in business with Steve Smith, and Steve puts in 70% of the money, and I'm grinding it every day and not taking a salary, Steve's gonna come in and say, why did you spend the money on that? Southwest flight when you could have flown JetBlue. Do I wanna hear that if I'm working a twenty-hour workday? But Do I want to put all my own money into it? Am I gonna go to an institution that's gonna tell me, hey, the business is mine, if you're not profitable in 3 months. Same thing institutionally when you're dealing with these things. You know, the higher cost of failure, people say, well, I'm taking other people's money, the cost is lower. Well you just potentially burn that relationship. If you went to your family members, December 2019 to open the kebab stand in Carlsbad, California, who opened it, and then there were no customers for two years and the place went broke. Your uncle that loaned you the $100,000 you might not be on his Christmas list anymore. So there's a cost of failure. Network expansion. When you bring partners in and they're bought in, time, money. Yeah, guess what? Now I've got their network that I can tap. Maybe it'll help me sell, maybe it'll help me raise third party money. Time dilution You bring people in and, you know, they're helping you in some areas, but in other ways, guess what? You have to give them an update. The person that puts 70% of the money into your, uh, operation, if they give you $700 out of their savings and they only have 100 in, they want to know every week, what are you doing with that 7000? Why'd you buy 3 pencils and not 2? Your time gets diluted. So these are all things you got to balance. All right, so, I say this. With a grain of salt, happiness is a function of expectation. Sometimes people will say that this is the key to dating. We don't know anything about that, but When it comes to anything that you're gonna do, happiness is a function of expectation. If you go in and like, I've got this great idea to come up with a football helmet that weighs 50% less than everyone else's, it's gonna perform as good, if not better than everyone else's. It's gonna cost less. I'm gonna get NFL football players to wear it. I'm gonna get Tony Romo to invest in it. I'm gonna be able to just take the market by storm. I've got all these brilliant doctors, they're gonna make testimonials for me. I'm gonna open it in Carlsbad, California, so people think, man, you're cutting edge. Well, It sounds glamorous. There's a little glamour, not much. But it's not exactly what you think. If I go in thinking, hey, I'm gonna get this done in 6 months, and it takes me 6 years to do it. Even if I spike the football and I sell the company for half a billion dollars, would I cover sports, commercial and everything else. And I'm 63 years old, and I'm ground to dust because my expectation was that I was gonna get it done in 6 months. I'm not gonna be a happy camper. But if I'm like, man, this is gonna be a six-year project. I'm gonna grind. I'm gonna put people around me through it. People are gonna question my sanity because I went and did it. Um, yeah, that's it. So you better have the right expectation, otherwise you will always feel like you're failing even when you're not. There's gonna be more challenges than wins. You're, you're not gonna see the places that you can step or the landmines you can step on. Everything is gonna take longer, including me speaking today. Uh, it costs more than than what's expected. You'll have more people that tell you, nope, you can't do it. You can't figure it out. It's impossible. And I'm telling you right now. Take everything with a grain of salt. Listen. And if you ask them why, and they give you a good reason, great. If they don't, move on, right? The people that sat on the couch, watched Tiger Woods, wow, here's this great young golfer, uh, creeping up, and he's doing a great job, was the same person on the couch that mocked him when he had personal problems, was the same person on the couch. That cheered him on when he won the Masters. I got a lump in my throat watching him win the Masters. I don't even like Tiger Woods that much, but I know what it's like to be out there and get beaten down and have people throw rocks at you when you're trying something that nobody else will do. And that's one of the reasons that I identified Michael as such a great human and professional. He's willing to take chances and go out and do things that other people are not willing to do. Timing's everything. The idea of today may not be the idea of tomorrow. You gotta look with what foresight you can, but you can't control everything. Innovation is not easy. Tom Brady said in an Instagram post, sorry, I have Instagram, that why do I love football? Because it's hard, because it teaches young people that you need grit, you need determination, that things aren't always gonna go your way, things aren't always fair. Um, there is a pain tolerance needed to innovate. Have a posse. Your family, your friends, the people you're gonna attack with. I don't know if anyone ever saw the show Tombstone, but Movie Tombstone. It's a fantastic movie. Doc Holliday is the best ever. So, Um, embrace the friction. If you wake up every day today and you're like, oh, so humid here. I can't believe there's another patient. Why is that noise, that beep going off again? You're just gonna be unhappy, especially as an entrepreneur, compared to Just do your thing and just float along. There's people like that. We all know people like that. You're not in this room because you're that person. Embrace the friction. When something bad happens, I listen to Jacko Wilnick podcast. It was the best thing I had heard. He's like, oh, the building collapsed. Jacko's response is good. Because now he can go and fix it. And it didn't collapse when there were 1000 people in it. It just wrecked some inventory. Let's go. And that's true, and you have to do that. When this started, I would sit, and I actually had a hand mark, I think a tanning line for my hand being on my face like this, how to discuss when things went wrong. Innovation by nature's isolation. If we put everybody on a line and said, who's gonna swim across the English Channel and one person steps across, you just isolated yourself from the group. You're trying to do something that nobody else can do. Mentally be prepared for that. If you go and you propose an idea, we've all been in a meeting where you're like, God, there's an obvious thing I want to point out. You raise your hand. What happens? You're you just isolated yourself, right? You're the one that had the gumption, the courage to raise your hand and go and do it. Uh, and then this is it. Super Bowl one happened. I think I was, I don't even think I was born yet, 1967, 1966, something like that. I could be sitting on the field today, and even if Big Bird from Sesame Street said, never quit, you're never out of the fight. The game's over. You can't win. But if the game's still going on, you have a chance, and there's always something that you can do to improve your prospects. You can't have a quitting mindset. You have to burn the ships. There's no retreat, I'm moving forward, and, and that's, and that's it. Um. I, if I start to read that, I won't get through it, but it's a man in the arena speech. I'm gonna let you take a second to read it, and then I'm gonna jump on the football space and compress it into less than 5 minutes, I promise. Um. We had gotten back from an investor in Philadelphia, Richard Greene owns First Trust Bank. And The day we got back, the stock market crashed at the start of the pandemic, and I'm telling you to go from, hey, I'm writing a check for 3 million bucks. I am part of the Philadelphia Eagles. Congratulations. Welcome to the show. Take a picture next to the Lombardi Trophy to sitting in our office, having to send everybody home because California was getting shut down and the stock market was collapsing. Uh, one of my partners, John Sarkeesian, who was the founder of Skills, read this. To me, and, you know, I'm not a big emotional gushy, gushy guy, but if I try to read that, I won't get through it, so I'm not gonna do it. So I would encourage you to read this. And it goes back to that Tiger Woods analogy. Anybody can sit idly by where there's opportunity for you to make things better. This country was built on people trying to make things better. If you've not ever been to a military cemetery, 1.1 million people that you didn't know most likely died. In some dump someplace else in a horrible way to give you an opportunity to make things better. They had courage, you should have courage to go and attack opportunity as well. So, this to me means a lot. I hope it means a lot to you. I'm gonna show you a short video and then I know I'm gonna run out of time before I even get to the football section of this. Helmet weight. Now we're talking football. Cameraizing, look at the score. It's 38 to 38. They're playing Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Cam gets sacked, he's wearing. Somebody else's helmet, you'll see what happens. Use her air On grass Not a huge hit. Obviously you can see he's got the fencing thing going, he's having an event. At the time, that was the number one rated. NFL helmet, and this is not a big hit. Anybody that watches football. They go on to lose the game. He's out of the game, diagnosed with a concussion. Now he's wearing our helmet on turf. Now watch his head hit the ground here, 3 pounds lighter. Her television gives the helmet knock. Moves on from there. This is a kid that put his NIL money as an investor into the company and you can see by that clip, that's the real deal. Um, the energy equations, 2 times the mass, velocity squared, can't get rid of velocity in football. Fastest players, 23 miles an hour. Think about 2 220 pound players going 23 miles an hour at the closing speed of that. It'd be the equivalent to me getting on a Honda dirt bike and riding at 46 miles an hour and running into you. That's the same weight, same velocity. That's a violent impact. Um, levels of play for football, youth, high school, college, and professional. We talked about numbers. Here's our competitors. Shut and Visus are one company. Riddell is a behemoth in the room, 80% market share. Uh, Visus started as an independent company, got burned up, spent too much money, became part of Shut. Shutt got sued by Riddell, lost two lawsuits, they're crawling along, and then entered the new, the new player in the spectrum. Um, authorities in football space, Knoxy, every helmet used to the NFL has to be Knoxi approved. They have a new standard 3.5 pounds. We didn't know this getting into it. We're the only ones that are already there because we knew that helmet weight and reducing helmet weight would reduce the kinetic event in head to ground injuries and in secondary injuries when you lose control of the mass of your head slapping around in some of these events. Virginia Tech, they're basically the consumer reports of uh helmets. Hockey helmets, baseball helmets, football helmets, flag football helmets. And then the NFL. We talked a little about the NFL and their testing. Sales channels for football, big box, let's, and only youth, right? It's a white helmet, gray mask, you go to Dick's sporting goods or shields, you buy a helmet. It's got whatever mask on it. Junior's probably not gonna play again. They buy the helmet, they put it on them the next year it's at play it again sports, selling for $20. Retail is not a big place for us. You sell volume there, it's great cause it's credibility when people walk in to buy their gloves and sweatbands that they see your product, but it doesn't do much. Dealers, BSN just got sold for $4.7 billion. Huge dealers, they sell the high schools, D2 colleges, D3 colleges. You give up a big chunk of change going in there and having them sell for you. Direct to consumer, I love it. Not Ron Pope, direct to consumer, but paid search. Look at, we have these doctors that helped design this helmet. It's light. Tony Romo invested. Look at the athletes we have versus a competitor that's just saying our helmet's red, put a white face mask on it. It's $500. I can control the messaging. I can control who sees it, I can control where I press, I can control where I test. And then a direct sales team, that's who's dealing with the NFL. You have people that are knowledgeable in that space. I need a person that's knowledgeable to talk to them. Revenue streams, you sell helmets, you sell visors, accessories, and other things. And we're just talking about football. Our goal is to go to a variety of places, including military, including construction and other areas. Refurbishment, every football helmet has to get refurbished every 2 years. You send 100 competitive helmets in, they send you 90 back. 10 have catastrophic failure. You have to buy new ones, it's a racket. 70% of our competitors' revenue comes from refurbishment and new helmets during refurbishment. Did that catastrophic failure happen on the last play, the last game, or was a kid playing with a bad helmet? And you just didn't know until it was sent in. Our helmet's very visible if there's a failure. Uh, and then related, we've got an adjustable line that we're working on, apparel and other things. What else can I sell that customer? They trust me with their son or daughter or with their athlete that makes $60 million. What can I sell them that I have knowledge about? Don't have knowledge about shoes, not going there. But what pre-workout, pre-practice, pre-game drink gives mental acuity, and what's best to recover. Is that something that you can send a packet every month? Possible, Pfizer. Neck strengthening devices, other things in that space. Who's the customer? The only people in the United States that buy their own football helmet, female professional players. That's it. The 6 year old, mom and dad, the youth league, high school player. The league, or I'm sorry, the high school or the parent, college, the college is paying for it. The pros, if you're in the NFL, the team's buying it. The that player is 6 years old to 46 years old. Tom Brady. What do they care about? Mike Haynes. He's almost 70 years old. Super Bowl, Hall of Fame, comes in my office, puts the helmet on, says, where's the bathroom, goes and looks at himself in the mirror. Heisman poses. Mike. What the hell are you doing? He's like, it's gotta look good. Player mentality. Do I play better with it? Who else is wearing it? That's all they care about. The buyer. Equipment manager, Athletic director, high school coach, they care about safety, costs, sustainability. Excuse me. And then the influencer, who's the influencer? Parent Another player, doctor. Orthopedist, could be. There's a bunch of depends on the kid. Industry status in football, dominated by one company, we talked about that, very resistant to change. Why is that? Goes back to our innovation discussion. Easier to stand on the line and not take the step forward. I don't want to be the first person to put these helmets on the head. Well, hang on a second. We have the highest recommended helmet rating at the NFL. We're up at the front or tip of the spear at Virginia Tech. Knoxy rated. I got a bunch of retired players. I had the best physicians on the planet. That know this space, that are supporting it, yeah, I just don't want to try it. Whole different group of reasons for that. Some of it's risks, some of it's cost of failure. In equipment manager, Some of these guys, they're great guys. They care about their players. The players bond with the equipment guys. They don't want to put their guys at risk, and they feel, man, if I just do the same thing, I want to wait for somebody else to see if it's gonna fail or succeed. That's pervasive, but they're not everybody's like that. And I have to make them feel comfortable. Uh, at the same point, you know, there's some, the NFL, they don't want to get sued again. They had a huge lawsuit 1012 years ago. Um, colleges are like that, youth programs like that. Um. Technology We showed that individual that had the concussion on the field. That helmet tests great. On field, not so good. That helmet Last year in the NFL 16 players wore it. Quarterbacks specific helmet. 12 players played 1 player more. Out of those 12, there were 5 concussions. It's a 41% concussion rate. And that was the helmet that was touted at the beginning of the season of being position specific. Was there any nefarious activity there? Nope. But the test can't always duplicate of what happens on the field. Now, the test will change with time, but we like to think that we're 2 steps ahead of the test. Because our quote unquote knowledge base is based on what's worked in the military, what our doctors say, and that we know that weight matters. And no education tools. There's no video, there's no program, there's no class for parents to say, this is how you should make a helmet decision. To anyone, even athletic director. So, I'm going to whip through some of these because we're a little bit out of time because I pontificated in the early stages. But this goes back to It concussion in all sports is an issue. It's gonna continue to be an issue. Sports bond, kids of all different backgrounds. It teaches them grit, it teaches them goal setting, it teaches them, you gotta show up on time. You have to be respectful. I've been in NFL locker rooms all month for now for 12 months. For 6 years in high school and colleges. These are the most polite young people when you index them against everyone else. Football is part of the solution. Hockey is part of the solution. Baseball's part of the solution, soccer's part of the solution. Getting kids to play together, get them out, get them out of social media, get their head out of their phone, get them away from the video games. All those things have their place. But we want to be part of that solution. Right now, football and other sports still have a problem. These are some of the people that are involved. Jordan Palmer, Carson Palmer's brother, Tony Romo, you know, from broadcasting. Cam Rising was a young man that you saw dinged in the video. Uh, Darius Robinson's playing on the Cardinals. Tyrod Taylor's throwing the ball there. Drew Stanton, we have a whole host of others from the business, uh, space, insurance space, um, doctors, etc. The big thing here is, I need to provide an athletic benefit. For these players, because they don't care about safety. I'm taking 2 pounds off the worst part of the body. Center of gravity, the last place I want to put his weight high. And so if I can take that out. Players potentially gonna buy in. It may take some time, but there's an advantage there as long as it looks cool. Most of, and we talked about the use standards changing for weight are tethered to the military. I think we have 6 retired special operations personnel that wore these materials in this tech in battle, so they were invested in this. I thought it was remarkable that they all stepped up to the plate because they care about the kids, they care about sports. These are our products, we can talk about those, there's one up here for you to take a peek at. NFL test, you'll see this poster, green light green, yellow. Dark green means You recommended helmet. Um, all of those helmets are within the margin of error, and that's what you want somebody in. The lighter green is basically the uh and the yellow is the You know, you, you can't wear it next year, um. And that's really it. These are a couple of our folks, got a little bit of media. We all know it's a big market. And that's it. Good. Sorry, I carried on a little too much on the innovation piece. You traveled a long way. Thanks, appreciate that. Uh, your excitement. Um, so in this industry, there's lots of barriers you brought up some of them, and um, when your market share, when Ryde is up there and you're in the lower market share and you have potentially the best product based on all your research, um, and, and your weight, etc. How do you, it seems like it's not a team decision, right? It's an individual football player decision. And why is that when you have statistics to back it up? Why doesn't the team or the NFL say, hey, this is the recommended uh helmet for the year. So it goes back to test versus on field, right? Some people want to see it to believe it. Uh, they don't want to put their $60 million quarterback in it. Yet on the other hand, I've got dozens of NFL players. Uh, that I could go through from Jeff Garcia, Lonnie Paxton, uh, announcers that you see on ESPN that are with NFL players all day long and their kids are wearing our, our helmets. The youth helmet is far different than the NFL helmet. If you look and watch an NFL game, you see the hexagon on the head. You go out to the youth field, the hexagons on the forehead, that's a model of helmet from one of our competitors. The NFL helmet, where the guys are running 23 miles an hour and weigh 250 pounds, up to 360, 370 pounds, is far different than what You know, is built in a youth helmet, but the marketing makes it appear as if those are the same. There's a $60,000 Corvette and there's a $250,000 Corvette, same with Porsche 911s, and everything in between. So some of it is awareness that people aren't aware of us yet, and that's a function of cash. Uh, some of it is. Confidence and credibility that comes with time if we're doing our job properly and our doctor physician partners, our PR company, um, you know, we, we have a, an interview with Axios and one with the Washington Post because the football season is upon us. All of those components, it kind of goes back in the innovation piece of sales. Gotta have sales people. Riddell has 200 salespeople. We have 23 with 1 internal person. How do I compete? Do I use dealers and give away my margin, the dealer sell on price? Do I use direct to consumer where I can control the messaging, but I got to shower someone with $200 worth of marketing to get a sale? Or do I use direct sale and hire a bunch of people and I have turnover and I got to manage that. So it, it's a process, it's not an event. And I'd like to think based on where we are in the process, we're a little ahead of what I would expect to take the pandemic out, but you'll start to see a watershed event and I liken this to the Tesla model. When the first Tesla came out, it was a Lotus 6 siege with the battery and electric motor in it. It was a piece of junk, and people were like, oh man, this thing is fast. And the thing rattled and scrambled, and I mean, I couldn't even fit in there with Michael. It's that small of a car. But now, they're everywhere. So you have these early adopters, then you have people that are kind of innovators, and then, you know, you, you go on from there. So it's a process and I think that that's part of it, but In the end, it's really up to me of where do you allocate the limited resources you have to knock that barrier down. What space are you most successful in right now, would you say? I would say this year is a percentage in the college, top tier college and NFL because people like to wait. And you think about somebody, how many people play football into their mid to late 20s or 30s, very few. Those are the people with the most knowledge because they've been playing football for a long time. If you go to an 18 year old kid, he just wants to see what, hey, this looks visor looks cool and that's what the guy's wearing on Sunday. When you're talking to a 26 year old or a 28-year-old quarterback that's had a couple of concussions and he's seen You know, hey, my head, Rick Meyer called me when we started this. He played quarterback at Notre Dame. He said the worst impact I ever had was hitting the back of my head on the turf. And that's, I think, why we have a success there. The other place that we have great success are the little kids. And it's strictly because of helmet weight, because you see the bobblehead out there. We have a competitor that their youth helmet weighs 6 pounds. On a 60 pound kid, 10% body weight. That's like me wearing a 21.5 pound on my birthday downhill with the wind. Helmet Nobody laughed. That's it's 10% of my body weight. So, but, but that's the point, right? And when a parent sees that, and what else does a parent do? They go to the website. They go look up Michael, they go look up the other doctors that are, that are involved, and that's what kind of pushes him over the edge. And with the college, you, you, uh, the whole team adopts the helmet, right? No, they give the players the option. So a team will bring in, you know, 5 helmets off the, the dark green list, and then the players will come in and, and look and make a decision from there. Um. Anybody else for the question? Yeah. I have two questions. Um, what are some features that, um, distinguish your helmet from the more popular helmets? It's a great question. Make it lighter. Yep. So the, so what makes it lighter, the, the reduction in weight is a big piece of it. Um, so the shells nylon or other helmets, the shell's Kevlar, it's very similar to a, a combat helmet. So Kevlar spreads the impact out and on the younger player, we find that's the best. Way to manage things because they're not moving as fast, with the, with the NFL helmet or the tip of the spear D1 players, the nylon shell absorbs impact. It's got flexibility to it, but it's a system, so that and the TPU internal components of that, they're geometric shapes that it's almost like a uh a dampener on an automobile. When you are going over little bumps, you don't really feel the little bumps. The suspension takes that compression, but when you really press down on a big impact, it stiffens up. So, because of where we're able to use this 3D printed lattice on the internals, it's extremely light, and then we use either titanium or chromali tubing on the face mask. Um, and some of these things are patented, others are not. But the system of those things together is what gives you the lighter weight and the ability to attenuate impact. And take a Chobani yogurt. The harder you shake it, the more disruption there is on the inside. It's the same thing and the forces on your, on your spine. If you hit me on and I'm running a sea route, and that's 80Gs, the 2 pounds now, 160 Gs of extra force that my cervical structure's gotta, that's the biggest word I ever said, manage. Or one more question, yeah, Baza. No, no, shared around. We got one more. We're way over, so it's my fault. Uh, I was just curious, do you guys track any, like, you mentioned sensors. Did, uh, are you guys looking at that or these helmets have sensors? Like I, I wear an X-ray badge that says how much x-rays I'm getting every day and that's kind of tracked uh throughout the year. I'm not sure if there's any data saying, you know, um, is there a big hit where they get whatever 100 G's, um, or commutative stuff over the season, um, and having that data to kind of help guide, uh, you know, player safety. Sure. So there, and it's a great question. Um, and data is king, right, as long as the data is good. So the challenge that we're running into right now is that depending on where the sensors are placed in the helmet. And what we see is you'll see a kid that gets a 100g impact and he's fine. You'll see another that gets a 10G impact. The alarm doesn't go off and it's not there. So the data and whether it's the sensor or, or how the sensor interacts with the helmet, it's just not accurate yet. So the NFL is going to this mouthpiece now, and that seems to provide much more accurate data because you don't have as much of the The head whip involved in it. And, you know, some of this is if you watch UFC, if I'm, if you're beaten up on me, I can take a lot of damage if you just kinetically in the front. But when you start whipping my head from side to side, That becomes a different type of injury and the sensors aren't able to get that data compressed yet. So I think with accuracy in that area that that will help. But right now, there's not a uniform way to diagnose concussions and as you know, it's not binary. There's subconcussive injuries that add up, you know, there's wear and tear on cervical structure and then you start, you know, like a lineman. The offensive lineman test for the NFL doesn't have, uh, uh, criteria for the highest speed that they test for because the chance of an offensive lineman getting hit like that's almost zero. So it's got to pass the base test, but in the offensive lineman criteria, they don't even look at that. So they're getting better at it, but we're still not there in terms of diagnosis, and I think there's a lot of people chasing that tool, and whether it's something that measures gait, whether it looks at your eyes, other things. How are we gonna get there, then we'll really be able to use it and you'll have a massive, uh, sampling, more scientific sampling than just the NFL cause that's all really that exists now. So we're gonna end on that note, um, but I have one anecdote which I thought was always important when I was starting racing. I asked the head mechanic who raced amateur for many years, but one SECA runoffs, and I said, John, what kind of helmet should I get? And he said, Doc, the only thing I can tell you is if you have a 10 cent head, get a 10 cent helmet. So we'll, we'll end with that and uh thanks for everybody's attention.
