What 20+ Years and 5 Ventures Teach About Resilience

0:00You find ways to get creative. And I think that's what really separates good entrepreneurs and good business owners is they can think on their feet really quickly and make decisions fast and adapt quickly. And fortunately, sometimes you got to make some cuts and you got to get lean in some areas. With the tariff specifically stuff, you know, we're negotiating with our factories. We're reorganizing how we invoice on the commercial invoices that come through U.S. Customs. We're changing up how we do that based upon the tariff code versus the services that we pay for. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses.

0:39Now, here's your host, Brian Roizenthal.

0:49Hey, welcome to another episode of the DTC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Royson, your host. And today I'm super excited to be speaking with Clay Banks, the founder of Glory Light. Hey, Clay. Nice to meet you. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. Nice to meet you and glad to be here. Yeah, my pleasure. For those who know about Glory Light, why don't you start there? What is Glory Light about? Yeah, I sold a company, another company back in 2022. And I said to myself, I'm not starting another company. Not anytime soon. I've been there. I'd gotten through kind of a long exit and sold my equity, fortunately, to a venture capital firm and was kind of kind of dabbling in some real estate, bought some Airbnb properties and was trying to kind of more shift toward that.

1:36And this this guy from my small group who I'd known for about 10 years, he texted me and was like, hey, I heard you left Haven Lock, the company that you started. I've got an idea for a business. And I'm like, I'm not hearing it. I don't I don't want to start anything. He was like, no, let's just go grab coffee. So he pitched me this idea of this kid's nightlight that projects Bible verses on the ceiling or a single Bible verse on the ceiling. And I immediately thought, I think I have all the resources needed to pull this together very quickly from manufacturing, inventory, supply chain, website development, putting up the marketing, running the ads.

2:15I think we could probably do this in about 60 to 80 days and let's test it out. So we went in and we it's ultimately I'll show you it's a kid's nightlight. Here it is. I've got it kind of up here. It's a it's a nightlight that for these trays go inside the light and it projects a high definition image on the ceiling of a kid's bedroom. And we have additional diss sets that parents can buy or grandparents can buy that have all kind of different Bible verses and Bible characters. We have a set that we call it the boy hero set, and it's specifically for boys. And then we have a girl hero set specifically for girls.

2:54And yeah, so we sell that Shopify store basically running your typical kind of tech stack, Klaviyo, Tentive, Meta Ads. We have an affiliate network of about 2 ,000 affiliates that help us create kind of top of funnel traffic. And yeah, it's your standard direct to consumer business. And we primarily sell Shopify and we have an Amazon store as well that we fully manage ourselves. So congrats first off. And second, you know, when this friend of yours pitched you the idea, it looks like you were very confident in your skills to pull this off. So it looks like it wasn't your first venture. You mentioned Haven Logs back before this.

3:38So was that your first before going there, you know, because I know there are many exciting things to talk about it. Was it your first venture or did you launch more before? No, Glory Light was technically my fifth venture. I had started a few. My first one was this company back when I was in college. I published a book and I want to go back in time. This was in 2002. Back then, Amazon was just a bookstore and people still bought physical books. There wasn't really audible books, kind of really didn't quite, they weren't popular back then. And so we published this book, had a collegiate license, sold it at every Borders Books, Barnes & Noble Books a Million, all the physical brick and mortar bookstores.

4:21Of course, the bookstore on campus at the university I went to. And I was 20 years old when I started that company. And that was kind of my first real endeavor. I went on to do some other things. Most of these were hard lessons learned, failures along the way that took me to Haven Lock. But I had a company. we built mobile websites back when people were on BlackBerrys. So if you remember the Black, if you're old enough to remember the BlackBerry and the trackable ball, websites were built for screens, you know, for computer screens. So you have to use that trackball to kind of track back and forth.

4:57I had a couple of projects for clients that we worked with that kind of dumbed down their site, squeezed it down, so to speak, basically make a squeeze page for that. Just did a tech transfer project out of the University of Memphis that didn't really take off. And so, yeah, I had in with Haven Lock, that was about a decade. So 10 years of building that company. That was a direct to consumer business, Shopify store. We sold on Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe's, these hardware stores in America. We also sold to schools and churches. So that was a company that I had kind of really cut my teeth and built the experience relationship with how to run a DTC brand and how to manage the supply chain.

5:37I was the chief operations officer, co-founder of that business. So I kind of managed all the supply chain, the building materials, and most of the marketing efforts as well. What was it about? So Haven Lock was a floor-based locking device that could detect and prevent home break-ins. Instead of a lock that would go on your door, it went at the bottom of the door and it raised up. It would detect through an accelerometer any kind of vibration and report that back to the user's cell phone through Bluetooth. We also reported and had a dashboard on Google Nest and Alexa. So if you had an Alexa, it could also report.

6:13You could control it through your Alexa or through your Google Nest as well. So that was the company that, like I said, we had, let's see, that one had about 17 SKUs, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. The product was very hard to manufacture. It was custom built. We had about three or four patents. We have three patents in a dozen countries. But that one, custom-built technology, it included injection molding, powder coating, firmware, software, embedded development. We had an app that you could control it with. We even had a sewing machine that had to kind of sew it together. So pretty complex. Pretty complex manufacturing.

6:52Produced it all in America at first. Right here in Tennessee, I live in Tennessee, and it was made here in Tennessee for probably the first four years. And then we set up a redundant line in China. And that's kind of where I learned how to import from there. So, you know, we have this podcast released over 220 episodes, if I'm not mistaken, five seasons. We started in 2021. We interviewed brands of all sizes, 7, 8, 9 and above. So the things that I see in common from what people tell me here is that this is what the company they feature here on the podcast. It's not the first company they have built at all.

7:34And it has a reason to be, right? Because there are so many lessons learned that maybe, for example, the way you said in the beginning of this episode, Like someone pitched you an idea and he's like, I can see like the matrix and I can see how to pull it off and have something decent in a few days. So what were the biggest lessons for you that you got from these businesses that you built before? Yeah, for one, when I was first starting out, I would hire subject matter experts in topics that I didn't know enough about. I just kind of knew I needed to get them done. So let's, for example, take engineering.

8:11I mean, this is kind of before AI. we had hired an engineer to start designing out the product. And we would spend time and money ultimately to find out that that engineer didn't have a certain capability or didn't have manufacturing experience. So you would spend a lot of time kind of thinking you were going in one direction, ultimately to find out that you weren't ready or the point in where you thought you were. So like, for example, we had spent a good nine months to a year with an engineering group designing our product, testing our product. I thought we were like ready to go to manufacturing.

8:50And I built a relationship with a manufacturer separate from that. And I took the design files to the manufacturer and they politely said, you're about two years away from being ready for manufacturing. There's no design for test. There's no design for manufacturing. There's no jigs. There's no fixtures. There's no tooling. There's no radius call outs in the molds, all the complexities. There's no building materials. And I'm like, I didn't know what I didn't know. So then you have to kind of establish, is this problem still worth solving? So as you learn those things that you don't know, you need to know over time.

9:24And then your next venture, I think, kind of leading to where your question's going. The second or the Glory Light venture, I'd already kind of spent the last decade running a Shopify store, running an Amazon store, running Klaviyo campaigns, all of the funnels and systems that we use in e-commerce today. And then I'd had tons of relationships on the manufacturing side who I had already kind of built trust with and relationships with who I knew could steer me in the right direction. And I had a broker because we were literally brokering freight from China to America with Haven Lock. I went through all kinds of lessons learned about how to transport lithium ion batteries and other things.

10:06So I had the relationships and I knew who to go to. when I was first starting out, I'm kind of like, I kind of use this example of kind of feeling my way in the dark. Like imagine yourself like in a dark room trying to get out, you know, there's a door in the room somewhere, but you really don't know until you find the wall, right? And then you have to kind of start inching down the wall with when you're first starting out, you have to find those indicators that like lead you down like the path out, right? But with, as you build up these relationships and this experience, you can kind of already see the light at the end of the tunnel to get out to get out of the room much faster right so with with glory light it was immediate i mean we within like 60 days we had a brand a website some affiliates we had an inventory on its way to america we were taking pre-orders and we were running engagement campaigns to start building awareness within like the first 60 days or less haven lock Now, on the other hand, took like four and a half years to get to that point.

11:05Much longer. Right. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. In fact, I remember these, I mean, there are a few, you know, some guests that I have recently have on this episode, on this podcast, sorry. They had something in common. And I recall specifically one of the latest episodes that I recorded. It was this experienced entrepreneur that worked at, you know, all these big companies, you know, Meta, Amazon, and some others. And when she launched, she learned a lot of processes and mindset and many other things. And when she launched her skincare brand, she pitched Sephora because she wanted to go there because of her reasons, whatever.

11:51But she pitched Sephora with a 3D printed version of the product that didn't work at all. They did some photo shoot, all those stuff. So, and she got into Sephora without even having a product. But it's not only about Sephora. She had a business plan and everything that she wanted to do. Like she draw the full, let's say, she saw the forest and not the tree. And then she said, okay, if this is a thing and this is a go and this, we have green lights here, here, and here, we'll build it and we'll go. If there's demand, she validated that, which is of course not easy. and she pulled it off. And there are some entrepreneurs that have done that too, you know, with the product, without the product, but it's not only about having a great product, it's about knowing how to sell it, right?

12:36Correctly. And sharing that and being able to articulate that vision to the customer or to whatever audience you're projecting that vision onto and that you're the right person to lead them through that vision. And it sounds like this woman that you're talking about had a really good vision And she was able to articulate and validate her authenticity toward that vision. And people were aligned with that and saw her as the guide to getting them to that. It was pretty cool. Those people are rare. Yeah. And there's a, and I quote, framework she learned at Meta, which is super simple, super simple.

13:17But sometimes the best things are simple. We don't need to complicate stuff. Totally. Sometimes we think we need to do, but it's just to justify ourselves. And in her case is what she was working. She said at a project at Meta and she was assigned, let's say, a task. And she didn't know anything about that particular project or task. So she asked her superior, what should I do? And she said, list all the questions you have, all of them from the most basic to the most complex, list all of them. And then ask yourself or ask around who has the answers because you won't have all the answers. And she did that.

14:01And that's the way she operates now at her business as well. And when I thought about it, it was like, that's super obvious. That's straightforward. And it's genius too, because it's how many times do we find roadblocks and we get stuck of things is like we don't have all the answers sometimes we want to play that game to find all the answers ourselves but at least all the questions that we have has the answers let's find them let's getting you know into conversations with them a lot of times we is we we want to kind of uh figure it out on our own through brute force uh instead of kind of opening it opening up that vulnerability to allow other people to kind of see that we don't have all the answers Right.

14:43And when you have when you go to that level of writing down all of those questions, you have to be in a vulnerable state to go outside of not only your media network, but extended network and show that you don't have it all figured out. And she's you're right on about how we go through figuring out how we uncover the roadblocks and the solutions to our biggest problems. So what about Shark Tank? Because I know in there, it really was in 2019, right? It aired in 2019. Yeah. Yeah. And I have interviewed many founders and have been there and they tell me, you know, amazing stories because I think that they, one of the requirements is to have a specific like pitch in a specific time.

15:26And so it's like having your pitch, you know, dialed in and how to sell yourself and your company in like in national TV. And so it puts a lot of pressure, but that pressure allows you to go to a level that otherwise you couldn't have gone. So in your case, what did you learn from it? Yeah, you're right on. It was a lot of pressure, but I also kind of say it made our team focus on a singular topic for a good nine months. Now, yes, we were still running the business and we were still building the product and trying to acquire customers. But like it was like this side project that the entire company, I think back then we had about 13 full time employees and or some contractors that were that were in there, very engaged day to day.

16:14And I can remember like we were all it was like what the first time where I felt like we were all rowing in the right direction because the things that the producers, Finmax, have us do week to week. We we didn't have like a full like here's what to expect the whole nine months of here's everything that's going to be delivered. It was more kind of like week to week. They would say, OK, submit this next week. We want a handwritten script and then we want you to video yourself doing the script and we want you to do a dress rehearsal. So it's kind of each week was different topics and things that we had to do.

16:47But like each week we would kind of get our assignment and then we'd go back to our team and say, OK, we got to instead of just doing this on our phone and doing the script and and halfway doing it on a phone. Like, how can we really blow this out of the water and show them that we're camera ready? So, you know, our team kind of came together and we hired a videographer and we hired a set crew and we hired lighting and sound. and kind of went through more than just mediocre work. And while it technically was a side project because we still had to run the business, it was like at that moment or those nine months or so, the entire team was behind us and we were all rowing in the same direction, which was pretty cool.

17:27So you're saying that the Shark Tank production, once you are selected, makes you work for nine months or before? No, no. No, you're not really selected until you're in pitching the shark. So nine months before, nine months behind that, they're kind of doing, they're doing an elimination and they're trying to eliminate people. They're down selecting. And through that process, they're having you do different tasks and they're trying to weed out people that they don't want to put on camera or put in front of the sharks. there was never a guarantee that we were going to see the sharks and there was never a guarantee that they were going to air our episode um and until it's actually done so i can remember going out we got on the plane flew to culver city it's still at that point we are we are in sony studios and we had not yet met the sharks we had started to meet with the producers and we were going through our pitches and going through the dress rehearsals and this was like we were there from a monday through a Friday.

18:30Oh, wow. So we had flown in. Yeah, yeah. We were there five full days. And on Monday, we kind of landed. They welcomed us. We, you know, kind of informal meetings, kind of what to expect that day. And then Tuesday, we spent most of that day doing dress rehearsal, pitch practice with some of the producers. And that's when they told us, they're like, still at this point, none of you that are here. There was probably, I'm going to guess, 40 companies, maybe 50, give or take. And they were like, there's still no guarantee that you're going to go see the sharks. And we were like, we flew all the way here and we still aren't going to see the sharks.

19:05They're like, you're going to get a call from us tomorrow. And like, you don't have to do, this was Wednesday. So on Tuesday they were saying, Hey, tomorrow we're going to give you a call and let you know if you get to go see the sharks. And we had nothing on the agenda for Wednesday. So my business partner and I, we went on a hike. We went, hung out with some investors that we had in marina del rey and we you know spent most of the day just kind of hanging out practicing our pitch kind of going through it and they never called they never called like the date the day kept going by and it was like two o 'clock and then four o 'clock and then we're just like oh my god like we're we're almost kind of getting mad we're like oh my gosh we're not gonna get called up and then about seven o 'clock that night i can remember we were like eating dinner and they're like they call us and they're like be in the lobby of the hotel at seven in the morning and we're So that's where we got the call to go on.

19:57And then they picked us up. And then the next day, that Thursday, that's the day that we pitched the Sharks and Fleaback Friday. But that whole process took about nine months. Yeah. What did you feel when they called and said yes? It was almost overly expected. But as the day went on, it was like, what did we do wrong? Like, we nailed the rehearsals. We nailed everything they asked us to do. And we were just basically sitting by the phone for that day. And then they called us up and were like, okay. And they were like, yeah, it was expected. But that whole waiting period was pretty stressful nonetheless.

20:37But yeah. Do you know how many companies made the cut out of those? Out of, I mean, if I had to guess, they probably cut maybe seven or eight. I can't. Out of the 40 or 50 that were there, not all of them. came or at least I didn't see them um that Thursday uh so yeah yeah well what a experience right it was cool you know and it and and then when you when you film it um that was in September of 2018 then we kind of come back home and um we're like waiting around basically to find out if they're ever going to air it and then we got a call so we got a you record and even if you record you don't know if they're going to air.

21:24Right. And then about a week before it aired, 10 days before it aired, they let us know. They're like, hey, your air date is going to be this day. I can remember it was in April 2019. So from September to April, we were waiting around to find out if it was going to go on air. So then we knew the air date. And even in the communication, it was like, it could be pulled at the last minute. Something could change and we might put something else in its place. But we had a big watch party with all of our investors and friends and family and pretty cool experience to have everybody together to watch it.

22:00It became the most watched, most download episode of all time. Wow. Really? Yeah. Most shared, most viral, most watched. They did a goat episode. They picked five of the top episodes of all times called their goat episodes. It made the goat episode. So he would lose the force of the energy going in and he couldn't kick through the deadbolt. So the sharks are like just in the floor, laughing at but ultimately he does he kicks through the door it burst wide open he does a flying kick he didn't give up he keeps pushing and then when he breaks through the door you know the sharks just erupt in laughter and clapping and they're standing on their feet it it was a it kind of it was a pitch that completely nosedived and we're like about to hit earth and then all of a sudden like he breaks through the door we come out of it i actually watched it and i saw that they were laughing and it was like poor guy like he was throwing hard yeah and i couldn't tell when i watched it that it was moving a lot because of course it's what you see in him totally i in my case on youtube but it's like he's really trying and he's not moving and he's in national tv and he's like and and and the shorts were that ended up being going viral so that's let's say positive but they were laughing so at the moment what did you feel like these guys are laughing your partner was trying to break through the door.

23:21So what was going through your head back then? My mind was like, we had a column mile markers or checkpoints in our pitch. There were certain checkpoints that we wanted to make sure we addressed. And I still, if I'm pitching anything or teaching anybody to pitch things now, we kind of mentally make these mile markers. And I was just trying to get to the next mile marker. I was just like wanting to like move on past where he couldn't get through and like, let's go to the next mile marker. Right. in the pitch and fortunately Alex didn't give up because I now think about if we would have done that you know we would have kind of left that door not broken through I don't think it would have had the impact that it the show had fortunately for us we had before we never went out to Culver City we had raised a million and a half seed round for that company before we ever got on the show so technically like the the money that we were raising wasn't truly like needed and that that kind of came out behind the scenes it didn't make the air don't don't tell me wrong we wanted to do a deal with one of the sharks but it was also about the publicity and about the experience and getting some exposure for our brand which which catapulted us into whole new levels after the show for a lot of different reasons the company completely spun off and started working we We started selling into schools to prevent active shooters getting into classrooms.

24:41I don't think that would have happened without Shark Tank because when Shark Tank happened and it aired, schools and churches started buying our home product. And we started to see a demand for the school product. And that gave us an avenue and a path to market faster than kind of create one on our own. So, yeah. Wow, my experience. Going back to Glory Light, as we already mentioned, you have a lot of experience in DEC and things have changed a lot, a lot in the last decade, in the last few years. Everything is changing super fast with the rise of AI and what's happening with SMS in Texas, right?

25:27Yeah. And, you know, the tariffs and, well, everything, right? So how do you approach, let's say, customer acquisition and retention these days in 2025 for your company? Yeah, as an entrepreneur, especially, you know, I've been doing this for 20, 25 years. There's always things that you can't predict happen. Like back when, you know, we couldn't predict that iOS 14 was going to completely change the way that we acquire customers on Meta, right? I can remember running evergreen content on Meta long before iOS 14 changed the landscape and retargeting people for 30 days and putting them into these funnels.

26:01And in the early days of running ads, it felt like it was like this untapped goldmine that no one knew about. And now it's so competitive. CPMs are through the roof and there's more people that know how to run Meta ads. So it's gotten a lot more competitive on the acquisition side. But even back then, there's challenges. Like you look at like the supply chain side of things. I can remember when the Suez Canal got blocked and all of the ships kind of got diverted from one end of the world to the other end of the world. And we didn't have containers. We had containers on one side. We had ships on the other.

26:35Part of that was coming out of COVID and we couldn't get containers to put our product in. Right. So now we have demand, but no supply. And how we dealt through that as an entrepreneur. Now we're faced with increased tariffs. With Glory Light, last August, I had a 3.9%. 9 % tariff. Today I have 179 % tariff, right? I got hit with the IEPA tariff, the 501 tariff. All my exclusions got ripped away. And, you know, most people are like, oh, I got, you know, how are you going to keep your business going? Well, like the same way I did when other things happened, right? I couldn't predict those other things.

27:09I couldn't have predicted this. You've got to get creative and you've got to get scrappy. You've got to, unfortunately, sometimes you got to make some cuts and you got to get lean in some areas. With the tariff specifically stuff, you know we're negotiating with our factories we're we're reorganizing how we invoice the commercial invoices that come through U.S. Customs we're changing up how we do that based upon the the tariff code versus the services that we pay for you know so you know you find ways to get creative and I think that's what really separates good entrepreneurs and good business owners is they can think on their feet really quickly and make decisions fast and adapt quickly so we're We're not sitting around hoping or wishing for something to change.

27:52We're like, as soon as we started seeing these tariffs come in, we immediately started negotiations with our factories. We immediately started calling. You talk about this woman who the questions that you don't know answers to. We started calling our network of who are the best supply chain brokers in the world and asking them, what can we do? What are some options that we have to bring this tariff down or bring our costs down? what are some ways that we can do we set up a distribution center in China doing direct fulfillment then we lost the de minimis the de minimis clause you know that was something that we'd kind of implemented and built to kind of preempt this so yeah there's you know there's always going to be a I think a problem that you're going to be faced with whether it's on the supply side or the demand side and you just kind of have to start to break it apart and go like you said go out to your network and who do I know that Mike can answer or help solve or come up with a creative solution and and then you have to act on that pretty really quickly yeah 100 we have discussed at length here in the podcast many times when you just said you know that the fact that before ios 14 and even before the pandemic meta was a money-making machine you know where he put you have to go 10 out and then the pandemic created uh this hype in this high demand and then of course everything we know right now right the the bar is higher and everyone started talking about you know profitability because money wasn't cheap anymore and many companies weren't paying attention to that it was all about top-line revenue and of course it was all about growth back then growth at all costs and you know scaling fast and you know all that and with that, you know, the neglect of retention as well.