Paul Akers of FastCap (USA)

Paul is the founder of FastCap that started when he invented a very easy to use and incredibly effective “peel and cap” system which has since grown into a multimillion dollar business that’s now about to move into a new 50 000 square foot building! With over 2700 distributors around the world and booming sales in the industrial market, Paul has achieved incredible business success and is now a published author to boot! You can visit his company at http://fastcap.com.

Your first product came late at night developing a “peel and cap” system that quickly became a multimillion dollar company. Can you explain in more specific terms exactly how much time is saved by craftsmen by using your invention?

It saves 900%! It’s really outrageous! It would normally take 35-45 minutes to cap a typical job because the screw caps traditionally, the mechanical head, fell out and the screw head had to be perfectly flush. Ours could simply be peeled and stuck right on the top and what happens when the screw cabinets come together, or you screw them to the wall, the bugle head screw generally goes in a little too deep because you want to cinch things up. So now the screw is below the surface and then the mechanical head doesn’t work very well.

Ours happens to work perfectly in that application so the amount of time is the difference between 45 minutes and 5 minutes. It’s dramatic! I think that’s one of the reasons why it was so appealing a solution. Additionally, it came in so many different colors and variations like real wood, unfinished wood, textured, smooth, speckled and we were able to match the interior of all these different projects where traditionally they had only a few colors to choose from and they all looked terrible.

How did you handle the incredible financial growth curve you initially experienced? When you start making crazy amounts of “easy” money, how did you keep yourself in check?

Those are two excellent questions! Number one, my wife and I were fortunate enough, even though I’m a C and D student – I wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, I did follow the mentorship of my father and invested in real estate.

We started in the ghetto and near and around Los Angeles where we bought our first home and we made a goal to buy a rental property, to accrue a portfolio of one for every year we were married. So while my wife and I had friends going to Hawaii and buying nice cloths and cars, we buckled down and saved our money and invested in real estate.

We bought very bad homes in bad Neighborhoods and even had our life threatened many time while we were just trying to make ends meet, but we were able to do that so we started to small and as the properties matured, we grew into higher quality properties and then into commercial property. We started at the very bottom with nothing and because we had the real estate background, we had the ability, to some extent, to self-finance FastCap but then when it grew beyond those financial capabilities, we had to borrow money from the bank. Even with our portfolio, the banks didn’t want to lend us money so finally when they saw us as a credible company, they were able to loan us money.

So we had a period of time there for 2-3 years where we used bank financing but the answer was that I always knew the prudency of not spending or living beyond my means and before long, FastCap was able to self-finance itself. We had very little bank interaction in terms of them helping us grow because we just didn’t spend money we didn’t have. We grew at the rate that we had capital to grow. We could be a 100 million dollar company right now if we borrowed money but we choose not to because we wanted to be very financially stable.

How do I keep myself in check? It’s the simplest equation possible, I’m grateful. I’ve never been able to figure out why it is, that I was not born in Bangladesh or some other third world country begging on the side of the street. I feel like gosh, how was I fortunate enough to be born to amazing parents and in the United States full of boundless opportunity. I was born in a free market system in a democratic country! It’s just a staggering through to me. So I’d be in my driveway everyday and think “I’m the luckiest guy alive!” So I remained grateful!

The other thing I do is that I’m always on the shop floor, I don’t have an office. We are building a brand new 50 000 square foot building and the first thing people ask when they come in is “where’s your office?” and I tell them that I don’t have one. The most important work in our company is done on the shop floor and that’s where I am. My office is on the shop floor in a small rolling cart.

I’m always in touch with my people, I’m accessible to everybody and that keeps me grounded. I’m just a regular guy and there’s nothing special about me other than applying enormous discipline and focus to my life and I follow-through with everything and the result of that is enormous success! Really, that’s the key for anyone – if I evaluate people around me and in life in general, the people who aren’t successful but want to be just lack discipline, a vision and are unwilling to council with smarter and older people.

You have a lot of other awesome innovations on your site, from BestFence to Kaizen Foam… which ones are your favorites?

Well, I have a lot of favorite products but the bottom line, the product I’m the most proud of, is BestFence. I took and enormous amount of time and almost a quarter of a million dollars developing that. We worked with our internal design team and about 70 contractors externally to make everything just perfect. Even to this day, we are constantly improving on the initial design even though it’s already an incredible product. It was a huge undertaking and a much grander project than anything else developed by FastCap and I”m most proud of it due to the investment it took to develop it from start to be able to pull-off something that significant.

In terms of the product I like the most, because it has the greatest appeal to everyone and the most useful, Kaizen Foam. It’s incredible, we developed that for our own internal lean processes, to make our shadow boards more effective and easy to do. People saw them on the tour and said we should sell that stuff, we said “OK!” but actually, we sell it but don’t make much money off of it. We sell it roughly the same amount it costs to manufacture and it’s a very popular product that everybody uses, from Bentley and Rolls Royce to Virgin Air to Delta Airlines, everybody buys Kaizen Foam because it works! The US military, we have customers all around the world that love the product. It has the widest appeal and helps the most people. People get the most joy out of getting organized and becoming efficient.

I really like the videos you make on your website promoting the innovative products you offer, are they as much fun to make as they are to watch? It really personalizes it tremendously and adds a lot of trust… was this on purpose or did FastCap just happen to evolve in that direction?

You know what, I’m extremely proud of our videos, the reason why is that we don’t have a production crew. I do most of the videos all myself, and the cool thing about it is that I’m not trying to be perfect on any of the videos I make and none of them are perfect. They are just ME!

We try to present ourselves as being regular people who are down to earth because that’s really who we are. So most people would be all caught-up with the graphics, the audio isn’t perfect, the stage isn’t perfect, all the props weren’t perfect – we couldn’t care less about any of that. What we care about is delivering value to our customers. What the customers want to know is how does the product work, in a real-world, non-canned environment. So we give them exactly that. We can produce 3-4 videos a day which is really unprecedented – we have over 700 videos online and produce way more than that. That is really a cool thing and really the message behind lean, just get good about communication by simply shooting a before / after video on all your lean improvements. It’s basically what we do with all our product videos and everything else in our company. We just make everything very simple.

The vast majority of our videos we shot that are online were done with my iPhone. We want it simple and we want it to flow. A customer wants to know something, like how do you use FastEdge, we pull-out our iPhone and in 5 minutes we shoot the video and upload it to YouTube. The customer then look at us and say they never heard of a company that can do this. We move that quickly because we understand the power of flow.

I know for my site, CNCKing.com, there has been a definite synergy between product quantity / diversity and overall order value. Have you discovered the same?

The great synergy between product quality and diversity with overall order value is very simple. Products that are innovative and enhance a process or improve how something is done to add more value and eliminate the wastage of time and motion… that’s the greatest synergy between all our products. We also celebrate the creativity of other people’s products because 80-90% of our products come from cabinet makers and general contractors. So our theme is “other people’s innovations.”

What was it like launching your own radio show “The American Innovators” and how has it helped your company profile?

What was it like launching my own radio show? Fear and intrepidation, I don’t know… it was a big step. I have no background in broadcast or anything like that but I had a message that you can run a more successful business if you learn how to innovate and learn how to continuously learn while creating that culture within your organization. I thought that sure, I’ll screw up, it won’t be perfect, but I knew I could do it. So, I called a radio station and pitched my idea. They said no. I called them again and they said no… and after enough calls they finally considered my idea. They then called me back and told me they liked the idea.

It didn’t just happen, it was a lot of work and persistence over the course of 9 months to a year on my part. I will never forget sitting in-front of that microphone the very first time when they said “on the air” and I had to literally fill the airways for an hour and it was a daunting task to be able to do that. But I did it, I rehearsed and practiced with lots of discipline and went over my subject matter, which I knew very well, then I realized that it wasn’t really that hard although it does take a fair amount of work.

It was a big deal! It really was a big deal but you know what, anybody can do it if they have one ingredient, PASSION! What the world is lacking is passionate leaders and people with passion. Most people are so subdued in expressing themselves and there is nothing fascinating about being subdued.

Now that you have a variety of distributors (1700 of them!), how much of your business is online vs offline?

The vast majority of our business is with our distributors, which now number 2700 around the world, and represents 95% of all our business but the online business is undoubtedly growing and it’s there to provide access to people who normally couldn’t access our product lines. Our products are generally sold through commercial and industrial distributors, not retailers. As a result, the retail market generally has trouble accessing our product lines so the website fills that void.

What advice would you give Paul to both your fellow inventors with great ideas but no money and “jobs” that prevent them to following-through to a finished product?

Be humble, don’t think you are a genius or deserve a million dollars. These are the two biggest problems I run into with inventors – they think they are God’s gift to the world – which you are not as anybody can innovate – and you just need to be humble about that. You also need to be very persistant, you can’t give-up and be a continuous learner. In the process of doing that, you’ll discover the innovation you want to bring to the market but if you get stuck on just one thing, and THIS IS THE ONE, you are crazy.

I came-up with so many great ideas prior to coming-up with the FastCap and they were not marketable. All great ideas, improved time savings, all helped me but the issue you need to know whether you have a great product or not is so simple. It’s something called a “strong felt need.” What that means is simply this, when you show the product to someone, and they say “where can I get that? How much is that, I’d like to buy it!” You know you have a great product. If they respond, “that’s a cool idea”, that’s not necessarily a good product. Everybody will say that as it’s just part of being polite.

What you want people to say is “I WANT THAT! How much is that? Where can I get it? ” Those kind of questions are a clear indicator that you have developed something that is very cool.

What is your advice specifically regarding patenting a device or product idea?

Patents are the biggest joke in the word and a massive amount of wasted money. I have tons of patents and by and large, they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. Unless you have millions of dollars to defend them. I have had lawsuits with major corporations and they try to run right on top of me but because I have enough money to fight them in court, only after I’ve spent a hundred thousand to a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees, they finally say “ok, I guess this guy is serious and isn’t going to go away, we’ll settle.”

Unless you have the ability to do that, the patent is worthless and you have to calculate that. I say, unless you want to waste your time with developing patents which costs 20-30 thousand dollars, develop your product and get it onto the market instead. Product positioning is far more important than a patent and at some point when you can afford to throw away 20-30 thousand at an item, because you think it will be really big, and have the money to defend it, yeah, go ahead and get a patent.

With all the tremendous success you’ve had, do you still spend some time in the shop making things?

Not necessarily woodworking product. I built my home, all the furniture in my home, my guitars, everything but I don’t have much time to do that, I do dream about being able to do that again. I’m constantly building new things, like our new 50 000 square feet facilities, innovating from one end to the other, so I’m in a very creative mode. A lot of other people do a lot of work but I still even today, literally, I’m working on our new facilities putting up speaker wires so we have a phenomenal sound system so I’m a very hands on person but I don’t get to make a lot of woodworking projects.

What is in your book and what made you want to become a published author?

Here are the reasons why I wrote the book, first of all, I have a lot of people touring our facility all the time and they saw all the work we have done. They were curious along with a few comments like “you should write a book.” I thought about it and I said “yeah, I should write a book!” So that was one reason, another was that I read a book a week and I realized that people that were capable of having the maximum influence in life were people who could articulate their ideas well, additionally, these people were generally authors as well. So I realized if my goal in life was to be as big an influence on society and people as possible, being the biggest thing in the universe, that it was necessary for me to have a book to make me both credible and for me to take the time and discipline to formulate my ideas. So I realized that writing a book would be very advantageous for my personal development as well as helping other people to develop a lean culture. That was the impetus behind writing my own book.

You can visit his company at http://fastcap.com.