Founder & President Of Mako Design, Kevin Mako

Chris Ronzio (00:45):

Welcome back everyone. I'm Chris Ronzio. Today I'm here with Kevin Mako and he is the founder and CEO of Mako Design and Invent. What's up, Kevin?

Kevin Mako (00:55):

Hey Chris, happy to be on the show.

Chris Ronzio (00:56):

Thanks for being here. So real quick, just tell us, what is your business? What do you guys do? What's like the elevator pitch.

Kevin Mako (01:02):

Sure. Super quick snapshot. We do global caliber physical product design for inventions, gadgets, that sort of stuff, but tailored to small businesses, startups and inventors.

Chris Ronzio (01:13):

Awesome. So if anyone's listening and they're an inventor or they want, they've been dreaming of some physical product, they just call you and you help them with it. Is that the process?

Kevin Mako (01:21):

Yeah, you've got it. We do everything from sketch on a napkin, through to full-scale production. That's kind of our core value add is industrial design engineering, prototyping, all the tough stuff. But then, because we deal primarily with startups and early stage companies, we also do a lot of let's call it handholding along the way. So connecting people with a bunch of resources, whether it's financing or patent attorneys or web development, branding, etc. Right? Crowdfunding agencies, all that sort of stuff. So we kind of help them with those pieces along the way, that stuff's not for any cost or anything, but a lot of our clients need that sort of both strategic help, as well as the connections as they're starting a new project, or even if they're an established small company, but they're looking to do their next big thing.

Chris Ronzio (02:05):

There's a lot that goes into this that people just don't get. Like my best friend, I remember wanted to invent this product. He had just had his first daughter, a baby, and he had this idea for like a little motorized device that would rock the carriage. And he is not a product person at all. So he goes into this studio and he's working with a 3d printer. And eventually he just gave up on this because it is hard. So if anyone out there, like an idea person, this is like, get an expert.

Kevin Mako (02:32):

Well, yeah. Chris, I'll tell you. Product development is extremely difficult. That's why we focus as our value add. I've been doing this ever since I was in high school. So 20 years of nothing but this business, but our primary focus was the hard part, right? The design, the engineering, but not just doing it, but doing it at a global caliber so that our startups could compete and also doing it cost effectively because startups do not have an endless bankroll, like big corporate clients do.

Chris Ronzio (02:58):

Right. Right. Okay. So you said you've been doing this awhile. Why this business, why did you start this?

Kevin Mako (03:01):

Well, the simple avenues, I was trying to develop a product back in 1999. I was in high school. It was impossible to find a resource, to get a new idea for an inventor to production. That's all I wanted. I wanted to units in my hand, but it was a new product, extremely difficult. Every design firm or industrial design firm or production design house or whatever else that was either our current size or our current caliber let alone both combined, 90 plus percent of their business is fortune 500 companies. It's still pretty much that way. So it was very difficult to find somebody that could help the small folks from end-to-end. So for me, I looked at that and that's where the opportunity to really flip for me. I said, somebody needs to fill this void. So I started in high school.

I incorporated the business when I went to university. So I went to the Ivy business school. I was second class president there, pick my litter of the jobs, turn them all down, just to try desperately try this. I was $50,000 in student debt. I then went over to Hong Kong university to study supply chain management and manufacturing, all that sorts of stuff jumped out of that. Went back in full-time into this 2007, bam hit with a recession like right out of the gate. I had like six weeks cashflow. So it was deal by deal by deal. It's still to today. No investors, no debt, no financing, a pure organic growth story from me working out of my condo with a part-time industrial designer that was helping kind of develop these products to, you know, where we are today with 30 people across three and a half office as I call it. And over a thousand products developed for clients over the last 20 years.

Chris Ronzio (04:42):

That's amazing. I remember seeing those late night infomercials about like, do you have an invention idea? How do you guys get business?

Kevin Mako (04:50):

Yeah. So that stuff is like, get rich quick schemes and it doesn't work. First and foremost, if you're in the product space, there's only one way to get a product to market a physical product today in 2021, manufacturer, sell product, get user reviews. That is it. There is no shortcut. There is no, you know, Sidespaces no like licensing deals or are all of a sudden you're going to get rich because your idea, or some partner's going to buy in, or you know, some big sports agency with your new sports product is going to give you a bunch of money up front. That doesn't exist. Today it's all about manufacturing and reviews. It doesn't have to be a lot, could be a couple hundred product, like units sold. But the key is you've got to have real users saying, I love this product.

Now you can have all those conversations. Now you can talk licensing, financing, big investment scaling, etc. It just doesn't happen without that. So for us, you know, back to your question, how do we acquire business? What we do is we just provide a ton of information to the startup communities. So we have over a thousand blog articles on our website, all curated by us. All about our experiences working with all these different clients. We've got the podcast, the product start up podcast, which is industry's leading podcast for helping, startups essentially get from sketch to store shelves. And then just us as a team, we help our clients just figuring out the pathway. Most of the leads, most of the calls that we actually filter don't become clients, but at least we can point them in the right direction. And then maybe one day they will, or, you know, maybe one day they'll, they'll move on to a different venture, but either way, it's heavy, heavy information, rich based company, which then drives a lot of business to us to actually work on those products that

Chris Ronzio (06:31):

Top of funnel, content marketing, just be valuable. I mean, as the lesson for anybody that's listening is create valuable content. And then if you're getting in front of the audience and they perceive the value, they get the value, then they just want to work with you. It's as simple as that. And the thing that you said, though, I want to just highlight real quick is getting reviews. It's not just, if you want a product business, it's really it's people ask me the same thing. That's what we did with a software business. It's like get actual customers using the product and then telling people that they like it. And that's really how you propel anything. So I hope people take away big focus on reviews here. All right, Kevin. So you went from 13 people a couple years ago to now 30 people. You've obviously tripled in size in terms of your number of people. What's the secret sauce in your business that you, what was the inflection point that really made you guys start to scale?

Kevin Mako (07:20):

So I'm going to first give you a bad answer and then I'm going to go into a specific few things that very much help. The answer that isn't ideal is that it's actually accumulation, a major web of many things. For us as a design agency, it's only when all cylinders are firing and they're working very well and you're operating at like 99% on every tier, that it really creates a snowball effect. And that's what, even before that, you know, how do we go from 1to 5, then 5to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 30, right? At each level. Um, it really, you have to look at your entire organization and really be not necessarily a perfectionist, because we all know that's not ideal for business, but a near perfectionist and heavy on execution and a bit of a workaholic and all that.

But I'll tell you some very specific tips that help scale. That actually made it fairly easy for us to scale. Number one, use today's technology as your company's backbone. It doesn't matter whether you're a product company or a service company, or you're just an independent or whatever else, understanding how technology can help scale your business is key. Before we started growing and scaling, when I was at three or four people, I did everything I could to ensure that the backend systems, everything from the initial phone call that comes in to that CRM software, customer relationship management software, to the backend project management software, all was recorded on the cloud, always recorded real time, always easily viewable, adaptable, improvable as you go down the road, so that anybody at our firm, if we drop it, whether it's back then or today, if somebody's computer falls off the desk and breaks within 24 hours, I will have that computer backup and running on a new machine exactly as they left it.

Nothing in our, our company is not in the cloud, not secured and not processed backed. So that's, that's a big one use technology as your backend infrastructure. Everything that you do should be in the cloud, everything that you do should be heavily, heavily processed, which is the second big one. Processes for everything. When we went to get our ISO certifications for process management, the consultant was working with us to try and get this looked at us and said, you have double the amount of processes then the next most proficient firm I've worked with, and I've worked with firms 10 times your size. And it's actually not been that difficult. We just work with our staff to ensure that everything that they do is written down in a Google spreadsheet. Start there. We can get a little more technologically advanced later and you know, you can make it real time. There's lots of software for it, but just start with a Google sheet, everything you do. When you pick up the phone, what's the script? When you put that customer into your database, what's the script there, and what's the process? What is your sales pipeline? All of these things just have them written in a document and over time, build it, do it with your team and then verify it.

Chris Ronzio (10:17):

You warming my heart. You know I love process.

Kevin Mako (10:20):

Well, Chris, you know, you're good at what you do for a reason. And process is a big one, right? And I'll just leave you with a third one there. And I'll drop it back to you, sorry for going on a bit of a run, but it's really important. Because when you have that process, you've got your technology, which is your foundation, the processes of everything that you do. The final thing is perpetual improvement of those processes via that technology. So every week you're just doing little tweaks, little improvements every month, you're doing a review with your key staff. Every three months, you're doing your review. Ideally, if you can, if you're under a hundred employees you're doing with every staff member and you're figuring out those tiny bit by bit improvements, which start to create that snowball, which creates that massive exponential growth effect across the firm. Especially if your agency style that requires everything to be firing top notch.

Chris Ronzio (11:08):

Yeah and know best practice stays the best practice forever. So if you're not updating things like you figured it out, you've got to just keep refining, keep improving. So I love that you, you agree there. So as you added your first few people, I mean, back in the recession, take me back to, like you said, 2007, you just kick this thing off. Who are your first few hires? What were the first couple things you got off your plate?

Kevin Mako (11:32):

Well, I mean, as, as any new business, the first thing you're doing is everything. So for me, the interesting thing about building a design firm is that, I wasn't a designer myself. So I come from a very engineering, heavy design, heavy family, but I went the business route because I wanted to build this company. And the rest of my family is more on the design engineering side of things. So I had a bit of an understanding about that, but I can't do CAD design and not even remotely to the caliber required, for this level of agency. So first thing, first, obviously you hire the people that compliment your skills. Well, that was an easy one on the first few, right? The first two or three, where it gets interesting is after that, cause at five people really you're essentially running the company.

You've offloaded, essentially your production staff. Then it comes down to how do you actually create this organizational pyramid or chart so that you can start focusing more and more on the only, the highest priority items and nothing else. And yeah, that's where we use technology very heavily to start understanding our processes. And then every time we put a new person into that, essentially re-did the organizational chart, which is happening every new hire when you're that small. Every new hire is a very large difference usually to the company, unless it's just another production worker. And off you grow, but that all has to be built in processes to really understand how they fit in, how they build the mold, because what becomes exponentially more difficult is adding more and more people on top of that if you haven't refined those processes and built in the systems in the back end from day one. The further you let that go the much more difficult it becomes to implement, so there's no reason not to start yesterday.

Chris Ronzio (13:21):

Yeah. I mean to go from four to five people or five to six people, it's like 20% of the stuff we do here is shifting from one person to another, you know, like that is a, a massive gravitational change to a business. So kudos to you for focusing on that. I know a lot of people struggle with delegation and getting things off their plate. And so, you know, you've had to do it time and time again, as the org chart has grown. Is there something that you do that helps you at that or a lesson you've learned about delegation?

Kevin Mako (13:53):

Well, one of the lessons about delegation is all, it's always a big pain in your butt for the first, a little bit. You are going to have, every time you want to add a new, let's say it's an accountant or a bookkeeper, right? By the time you get to the point you can hire a full-time book keeper. It's a bit of a, should I do it? Should I not do it, because I can really do it myself. And we could do it with a freelancer and whatever, the accountant helps with stuff that we missed and whatever else. Do I really need this they're not adding money to my company. They're not adding value to our customers. It's a tough hire.

Chris Ronzio (14:25):

Yeah.

Kevin Mako (14:25):

And as well, that means you're going to have to spend a lot of work over the next month, figuring out exactly how to train that bookkeeper. So that is one where you've always got to understand that you need to look at the light at the end of the tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel is the fact that once you get through that month or two of grind, first of all, they're going to bring experience that you never had, which is going to improve just the way you're doing things. So that's your first win. Your second wind is, you no longer have to do bookkeeping, right? So it is tough. And when you're in the weeds on that first hire, it's always difficult to spend the extra effort. You have to shuffle things around, but when you actually get it done, man, it's wonderful.

And you keep doing this with the tasks that you don't believe as, as the founder or the owner or the manager or whatever else, anything you don't believe as anything other than the most important things, the best value building things, the best things you're doing for both your clients and new client acquisition and the business. You've got to learn how to delegate those. And you've got to go through that hurdle, which on the other side, I can tell you now with 30 people, I would argue it's far easier to run the business now than it was when I was at six or seven people.

Chris Ronzio (15:30):

100%. Yeah.

Kevin Mako (15:30):

In almost every way, less headaches, less financial hurdles, more growth opportunities, better improvements happening because many of them I don't even do anymore. Right? They're happening just organically. Now there's a ton of benefit to putting in the legwork upfront. It's an investment. Really? It is like anything else.

Chris Ronzio (15:50):

And you've like you said, you just gotta be patient. You got to know it's not going to happen overnight. They're not going to take the thing over and exceed your expectations on day two, you have to, you have to let them go through the process.

Kevin Mako (16:00):

Just a quick one on that, case theory says it's, for a professional role at a professional grade firm or whatever, or a high intellect firm, it's two to three years for a new hire to become truly effective at their job. So you have to look at that and say, yeah, sure. In the first couple of months, it might not be so great. After a year, wow, these people you know, they're doing their job and they're doing well. After two years, you start finding, wow, these people are doing things that are really helping in ways I didn't foresee. And by year three, they're a pro, they're really creating kind of phenomenal value, especially if you're ensuring that you're always hiring 'A' players.

Chris Ronzio (16:37):

So as you've made the risks or taken the leap and heightened brought on more people and growing your team, you're obviously increasing overhead and you give them some leeway to learn and to get more proficient at their job. So on the flip side, the revenue generating side, are there some things that have really helped you be able to afford those investments? Like, did you have certain connections or certain verticals or increasing your pricing or, or was there anything you've changed there?

Kevin Mako (17:03):

Uh, somewhat, but I would look at it a slightly different way. One of the very difficult, it took me years to truly learn this lesson. And the lesson was, if you spend far more than you think you should on a really great staff member and extremely talented person, like the training part, the financial part also will hurt for a while until you truly start to see the benefit that that great hire has to your firm. So when I originally started out and I went in with my first part-time industrial designer, I was hiring the cheapest possible human being that was willing to work for me part-time that I could find. He was fresh out of college. He would work project by project out of my condo. And it was slightly above minimum wage, let's say at that at the time.

Well, nowadays when we're hiring, we only look for the best of the best and a very specific type of the best. We're looking for the builders in our space. It's unique to us. We're looking for people who have 10 to 20 years experience all day everyday doing pad work at a very high caliber that has to work through a gauntlet of stuff in order to work for us. But as I was growing, especially around that 5 to 10 person stage, it was really difficult to say, okay, I could hire an industrial designer for $80,000 and they'll they do decent work, or there's this other guy who's 130,000 and he's a phenom, but it's an extra 50, that's almost another staff. Oh, I could almost hire two designers for the price of this person. By the time you add all the benefits and stuff. Let me tell you, I bit, the bullet time after time after time originally, it was very risky. And as I started to do this over and over, it became less and less and less risky because I knew after a year, usually it was about the point where they really started to jive and perform, they would be earning far more than their weight in gold. And that, that is really a tough lesson as you scale, just get the best and the money will eventually work out.

Chris Ronzio (19:06):

Yeah. It's hard to do the math problem based on what you know today, you really have to look forward to what the person's going to produce and how that's going to grow your business.

Kevin Mako (19:14):

Absolutely.

Chris Ronzio (19:14):

So, great tip there. So, you've had all this success over the last couple of years. What's one thing you're working on right now that you're excited about where are you guys going from here?

Kevin Mako (19:23):

Well, the most interesting thing that's on my plate, specifically right now is that podcast. I just took it over. I've done 10 episodes, the Product Startup podcast. I know it's not really promoting our company, but to me, community has always been a big part of our business. And actually one of the contributing factors to its success, when I couldn't afford the time or the money, we still were doing student invention awards. We were still working with half the colleges and universities in the cities that we operated, originally it was just one city. We still would do like networking workshops and guest speaking things. We'd have our staff doing workshops even for elementary school groups and all that sort of stuff, because I really believed in the overall kind of community around design, not just the business that we were running. And funny enough, leads come from that anyways.

So you might as well just focus on the community stuff, focus forward, do the bigger impact educational things and all the leads in the business and that sort of stuff that will come naturally because you're focused on value, not focused on your next thing. So what's really exciting for me coming up is with this podcast and educational resources and that sort of stuff that we're working on, half of the work that I do as an owner now, is not on the businesses itself. It's actually on the on the community building things. And of course, you know, it took some time to actually have the luxury of both time and money to be able to do that sort of stuff. But to me, that was the whole reason that I started this in the first place. So I get to kind of have my cake and eat it too. I have a business that makes money, but I also am the pioneer and kind of front running this community that is changing the world through their products and their innovation. So it's a, win-win on both fronts, full circle.

Chris Ronzio (21:00):

So you started the business because you're so passionate about this and wanting to bring people's products to life. And now you get to do that with most of your time. So it's amazing that you've put the systems in place the technology, the training process, to be able to empower your team, to be able to afford those A-players and people that bring more to your business and make those investments. So amazing job, such a cool story. Thanks for sharing it here today. So if you want to listen to Kevin and learn all about the product community that he's building, check out theproductstartup.com. Did I get that right?

Kevin Mako (21:34):

productstartup.com.

Chris Ronzio (21:36):

productstartup.com.

Kevin Mako (21:37):

Well product startup podcast, or we're on every player now, at any kind of podcast player. You can check it out or just go to our website, makodesign.com, M-A-K-O design.com. It's linked there. And then you can check out blog articles and other stuff, just if you're interested in the product space, just educate yourself. If you're looking for scaling, all that sort of stuff. You can follow me @entrepreneurs on Instagram, just @entrepreneurs with an 'S' on the end, it's motivational stuff, more on the business side, scaling side. Just happy Chris to be on the show. Cause, you're obviously, you're a rock star. You've built a great corporation as well. Providing a ton of value doing this podcast, very similar thing, just to simply add value to your world. So it means a lot to me that you invited me on the show, so thank you.

Chris Ronzio (22:24):

And what an Instagram handle like, can we just stop and say that is incredible that you have @entrepreneurs, so go follow Kevin. Like you heard from him, he went from 13 to 30 people now, three and a half offices and growing. They do some amazing stuff. So hopefully you can borrow a page from his playbook and put it in yours. We'll see you all next time.

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