Today we’d like to introduce you to Alan Beckley.
Alan, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I graduated from Texas A&M as an aerospace engineer and went to work for Boeing in Everett, Washington on the 747 project. Three years later, I felt the large company environment was smothering me, I needed to make a change.
So, I resigned from Boeing, moved to Dallas-Ft. Worth to find a job. I knew was that I wanted to work for a small company, with an entrepreneurial environment, doing marketing where I felt I could have more impact. I landed a position in the burgeoning telecom industry working at a small company as a project manager on something most people had never hear of: cellular phones. I loved it! Every day was different, I worked directly with clients on many short term projects and I got to ‘wear many hats’ and learn many new skills.
I was in telecom for over 25 years and, during that time, I broadened my interests by creating a variety of part-time side businesses including vending machines, a marketing business, then speaking and training, and finally inventing. I began working for the Small Business Development Center part-time assisting business owners with many topics. I was honing a variety of skill sets both inside my day job and outside of it.
Telecom continued to grow, evolve, and mature during that time – with the larger players continually gobbling up the small companies. I found myself back where I had started: working for large, bureaucratic companies – spending 1 day each week creating mandatory reports no one would read, taking time away from my clients. I knew I had to finally escape the corporate world.
My escape came in the form of a thin leather wallet I had invented. I had worked for years selling my unique wallets that held many cards but were thin and flexible, so they didn’t hurt when you sat on them. My customers loved them, but I needed to get my wallets to a larger commercial market. In 2009 I was able to sell them on QVC – the home shopping network with over 90 million viewers. I decided to say sayonara to the corporate world and go full time with my invention business – a very risky proposition. I never looked back.
I was on QVC for two years – much longer than most new vendors – and sold over 5,000 wallets. But, when my tenure ended on QVC, I sure didn’t want to go back to telecom.
So I had to get busy and make a living selling my wallets as a vendor whenever and wherever I could. I sold at various fairs, at military bases, VA hospitals, at gun shows every weekend, on Amazon, and on my website. I was working 7 days per week, spending most of my time out of town. My debt was ballooning, and I felt continually frustrated: my dream felt more like a nightmare. These were brutal tough times that tested my resolve and belief in what I was doing.
But, I knew my product resonated on TV from my QVC experience and I refused to give up.
I decided that DRTV (infomercials) was the platform that would finally get my invention to large scale commercial success. I absolutely knew that my wallets would succeed on DRTV. I pursued all of the key players in DRTV for 5 years consistently and persistently. They all had an almost scripted consistent answer for me, “It’s not for us, we don’t see this as a DRTV product.” I knew they were wrong – I just needed to find one advocate, one person who would believe in me and my product.
I finally found that person in a veteran DRTV professional, Bob Greenstone. Bob liked my product and was willing to put some ‘skin in the game’ and test it for DRTV. The slim, flexible wallets tested very well (most product fail in testing) and we knew we had something. We signed a licensing agreement with All-star Products who rolled it out as the Wonder Wallet into over 10,000 retail stores, HSN, Amazon, and a variety of international outlets as well. Within the first year, Wonder Wallet sold over 1,000,000 units and I was paid a small royalty on each sale.
The huge success of Wonder Wallet allowed me to pay off my debt and take nice vacations to Australia and Peru. Now I am able to use my time as I see fit. Today, I am developing other products for DRTV and helping other inventors to license their products successfully. I provide training, information, blogs, and details of my new webinar for inventors called LAUNCH, due to debut this fall – details on my website. www.alanbeckley.com/webinars.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There have been many struggles. The chief struggle is shared by every inventor: almost everyone you present your product to is going to say no. In most cases, they don’t tell you why it’s a ‘no’ for them, so you have to learn how to be creative and get that information from them. The only solution to this is to be extremely persistent and to learn from every presentation, make adjustments and keep moving forward. This is very hard to do when there seems to be no signs of real forward progress.
Another struggle was in logistics. I manufactured in China for 8 years and had to continually monitor the quality of the product and to deal with many headaches I had no control over, such as longshoreman workers strikes at Port of Long Beach which could bring all shipping to a standstill for weeks or over a month. At one point, I had to borrow almost $5,000 because I had product sitting on a ship in Long Beach while a strike was in progress. With no product, I had nothing to sell.
The third key struggle I faced was getting my invention into large commercial retail sales, which I finally accomplished via DRTV after 5 years of continual persistent effort with many ‘no’s. I learned that tens of thousands of new products are introduced into the market every year and the vast majority fail. Ever heard of New Coke? Yes, the marketplace is brutally competitive for everyone and inventors feel like little league players trying to get into the New York Yankees. Inventing is not for the faint of heart.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Novability – what should we know?
My specialty is taking my 15 years of experience with inventing and converting my lessons learned into training and advice to assist other inventors. Over the years, I have learned how to accelerate the process so that I can help inventors to get to success in 1 – 3 years instead of the 13 years it took me.
I travel and speak to various inventor groups and attend trade shows. My goal is to locate inventors who have retail-ready products that I can nurture forward to license successfully. When this occurs, I share a portion of their licensing royalties. The process is like searching for a needle in a haystack. But, the payoff for finding the right product and moving it forward can be lucrative for both the inventor and me.
I also provide training, information, and blogs for inventors on my website www.alanbeckley.com. Much of the information I provide is free and my advice and recommendations are always free as well. This fall, I am debuting a new webinar to take inventors step-by-step through the first 6 phases of moving a new invention forward. The webinar is called LAUNCH and details are on my website at www.alanbeckley.com/webinars.
Lastly, I continue to develop my own inventions with a focus on DRTV, but other options available.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Three qualities that work in conjunction with each other:
1) Persistence
2) Self-belief in the face of much discouragement
3) Flexibility – willing to adjust and make changes
There is no persistence without self-belief. Without flexibility, you may continually pursue a course that cannot and will not work. Sometimes the course must be adjusted so you can move forward in a different direction.
Pricing:
- For any invention you need a 5X cost ratio
- If product manufacture cost is $5.00
- Suggested retail should be about $25.00
Contact Info:
- Address: 937 Lombardy Drive, Plano, TX 75023
- Website: www.AlanBeckley.com
- Phone: (972) 989-1002
- Email: alan-beckley@msn.com
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/InventorTips and www.facebook.com/alan.beckley.106
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/SavvyCaddy
- Other: #IdeastoWealth and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC56F-NqTHr_2j2KSP7MST1w
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
