Be Ready for the Lucky Breaks

Aaron Muderick was a fidgety software engineer. While his mind ran over code, his hands moved. Pens clicked, stress balls were squeezed, toys spun. 

None of the clicky, grippy, spinny things were quite right, especially the putty. For one, it was too small, so Aaron decided to make his own. After teaching himself chemistry, trial and error, and a few tests - Aaron succeeded. 

The putty was so popular his coworkers stole it from him. Soon, Aaron sold it to them. 1999 was shaping up wonderfully.

Then the dot com bubble popped. Aaron’s company enacted heavy layoffs, but there was a silver lining. His putty spread to other software companies and those engineers wanted some too.

By 2002 Aaron found a profitable niche, making branded putty for conferences with healthy schwag budgets.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and those promotional budgets evaporated. 

Aaron refocused on his website and reached out to a handful of retail stores.

Two years later a big-time toy buyer called out of the blue and asked if Aaron could have putty ready for the upcoming gift show and toy fairs.  

“At our first toy fair,” Aaron recalled years later, “we were not brand new. We had been in business for twelve years. We knew the formula was the best, we had all these colors and effects that had been tested with thousands of customers. Our pitch was that putty could be beautiful and that people cared that it would be beautiful.” 

And it worked. Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty is a best-selling product with estimated online and retail sales in the millions. 

When she gives advice to business operators, Rebecca Lynn’s number one note is: don’t make me think. Each moment of consideration, thought, or evaluation is a moment to move away from the deal. 

How does a business operator do this? They make everything as it should be. That’s what Aaron Muderick did. He didn’t know his putty would be in hundreds of Target stores, but he did make his product the best it could be and everything was as it should be.

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