Serial Marketer and Neuromarketing Expert Roger Dooley Shares His Journey to Success

Well, thanks, Shane. I appreciate the invite. Great to be here.

Well, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and spent most of my life in that part of the world. I went to school in Pittsburgh, ended up in South Bend, Indiana for, like, 30 years, and spent a brief time in Knoxville, Tennessee—about five years there. That was my one warm-climate stint. But then, about 10 years ago, I moved to Austin, Texas—a great, high-tech climate. Even though it is the beginning of February when we’re recording this, it’s headed for 80-plus degrees outside right now, so I can’t really complain about that, Shane.

Actually, I am—believe it or not—I’ve been to one Super Bowl in my life, and that was the Buffalo Bills’ first Super Bowl appearance, where they lost on an Aaron field goal, I think. They came back three more years after that, and they lost every time.

Well, yeah, they’re looking better, so we’re good for now. You know, a couple of years, and Josh Allen seems to be getting better and better. We’ll see, maybe in four years—I’m not sure. It’s kind of like being a Cubs fan for so long. You never know; it’s an exercise in frustration.

I was an only child, and lived with my mom and also my grandparents on her side, so it was a small family—no siblings.

I don’t know if I’d identify as such or not. I certainly owe a lot to my mom—there you go. She probably helped me get a great education and made a better life for me. Once I was out, I was free to move and do whatever. In fact, I’m seeing her later today. My first book, in fact, was dedicated to her. She was in on the dedication because, hey, that’s what you do.

Not really, though. I guess it was kind of exciting. I mean, I started high school at 11 and finished at 15—that’s weird. But I started college at 19, majoring in psychology. I worked in rail rally after that, on the front lines for a while. Then, after I graduated, I ended up living in Buffalo because I was involved in car racing—the extreme type that was on ESPN. People were really excited about it, but then I realized maybe it wasn’t for me because I had to travel long distances, far from my family. So eventually, I moved back to the city, and that’s how I ended up in the northern part of the US.

It was just happenstance. I was in college and heard about a set of little local rallies, so I hopped in, found it interesting, and eventually got out of it. But I graduated from that into the big show and ended up running in a few World Championship rallies, where we faced off against Europeans—which was really interesting. At that point, the Europeans were way better than the Americans.

Oh, I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

Yes, I did. I did four years of high school and four years of college. I just started a little bit earlier than most, and that was it. It was kind of interesting—there were certain issues. I wasn’t involved in any competitive sports activities below the normal year. You read the research on that, especially in hockey or soccer, about how birthdates qualify kids for different brackets. Sometimes they’re held back a year and end up older than their peers. That’s how it works. But once I got into the workforce earlier, I felt like I maybe saved a few years of spinning my wheels.

Right. It probably works for academic reasons too.

Exactly. And it’s part of that age. You know, an extra ten weeks of physical development is huge—maybe not just huge, but apparently that exists too.

I was an engineering major, a Chem E, of all things, which actually carried on for a few years after I graduated—not doing any serious engineering. But I like the idea of an engineering background, because I think it teaches you how to deal with the world as it exists. It teaches you problem-solving. If you’re doing any kind of engineering—whether you’re building bridges or designing circuits or a chemical plant—you have to consider everything you can. You can’t assume things are going to go right. You really have to handle all the worst-case scenarios. So, when you get into areas like marketing or management, it’s helpful. That’s good training.

The weird thing, Shane, is that I was a ChemE major, and I had a very early interest in computers. This was back when computers were just beginning to become a thing. I actually spent most of my time with massive decks of punch cards, doing stuff in Fortran, basically at night in empty labs. My classes were suffering because I was having a lot of fun with some of my fellow students—playing with computers, writing programs, doing goofy things and games. I went to my advisor and said, “You know, I think I’m really enjoying computers more than anything else at this point.” And they said, “Chem Sci is a minor deal, but you can get it at Carnegie Mellon with no trouble—plenty of people are doing that. Or you could get a full comp sci major if you wanted.” But at the time, it wasn’t that big of a deal. You know, there’s always going to be a need for chemical engineers. Then I came back later in my career, and my major in chemical engineering turned out very differently at that point. So I was one of the earlier ones. Or maybe not—maybe I wasn’t so locked into the wrong direction.

A tough career choice. It’s a star system, where there are a few photographers who really make it big, and there’s a fair number who sort of grind out a living doing it, and then others who can’t even manage that. So yeah, in that case, it’s a wise choice. And I say follow your passion, Shane, but following your passion isn’t always the best advice—at least from the standpoint of supporting yourself in the long run.

Well, as an engineer on pollution control and filtration equipment—a fairly prosaic business with a big industrial company that no longer exists as a brand because it got acquired amid so much consolidation in that space—it was, sort of, a good foundation. A few years later, I switched to one of their competitors and moved into a sales engineering position, and then, within that same company, into project management. That was really the transition out of engineering and into more management roles. At the same time, I moved to Knoxville and finished up my MBA at the University of Tennessee, which really altered my career path because the company I was with didn’t offer too much opportunity. I then moved to a company in the South Bend, Indiana area—actually across the border in Michigan—in a product management position. That role was much more heavily marketing oriented, and I really loved marketing. Even in undergrad, I had a great interest in advertising but couldn’t really act on it; however, I did take a course in the Psychology of Persuasion focused on advertising when I was supposed to be studying differential equations. Instead, I’d be reading Advertising Age in the library.

So, it took a few years, but I ended up back in the marketing and advertising space, and that was really a good education for me because we had what I call soft P&L responsibility. We didn’t really manage the plants, but we were responsible for our product line making money. It was a really great experience, and I was promoted to being in charge of strategic planning for the corporation, which at that point was a Fortune 1000 company. I was just 30. That was, for me, my ideal career position for life. I expected, for a fair number of years, to follow a corporate career path. I really felt, “Okay, I’m going to work my way up through the corporation,” because that was the career path you can imagine in your head—you can see the progression, moving from one role to the next. I was in a great position, working with every division in the company and with different companies scattered around the country and the world to develop each of their strategic plans and analyze their competition. From a strategy standpoint, it was a lot of fun. I absolutely loved it, and I chose that moment to bail out and become an entrepreneur.

That decision was probably one of the most wrenching experiences of my life because I had to tell the CEO—who had brought me into the company a few years earlier and had then promoted me to this really cool job—that I was going to depart before my work was even partly done, because I felt I had a good entrepreneurial opportunity. This opportunity was in the early days of home computers. I, along with another individual, had just started a little side gig—a mail order business serving owners of TI home computers, which was, for a brief time, the preeminent mass-market brand, along with Commodore, and you could not find products for these. The big-box stores were selling the computers because people wanted to buy them, and they were selling a few of the software cartridges at that point. This was the era when software came on cartridges, and they didn’t have either the will or the ability to carry anything else. But there were literally hundreds of products for these early computers—peripheral hardware, peripherals, software of all kinds. The opportunity we saw was to offer these products to consumers on a direct marketing basis. We got some early traction while still doing this on our lunch hours and after work, and after about a year, I bailed out to do it full time. That business had a really interesting run—about 12-plus years; we built it into, like, 25-plus million in sales and diversified into different areas. It was really a great entrepreneurial experience, and it also equipped me, Shane, for not being part of that corporate world.

For my first job, I was always part of a big company. There was a human resources department, there were lawyers, there were marketing people—every discipline you could call on if you needed help. But suddenly, when you’re in a very small startup, there’s no help; there’s no HR department. You’ve got to deal with personnel issues, legal issues, and, of course, you can hire outside counsel, but that’s really expensive, so you have to do that selectively. And if the toilet backs up, you’re not necessarily going to call a plumber first—you’re going to try and fix it yourself. So, it was really a great education, and it also taught me how to deal with scaling growth. We scaled through multiple office and warehouse facilities and went through, I think, three significant computer migrations, which were on the order of magnitude. This was truly an entrepreneurial education for me.

Right, and I’ve got sort of a counterexample to that. After a few years, once we were making money, we started looking for additional opportunities in the direct marketing space, because that’s where we came from. We found a company in financial difficulty that had great intellectual property and technology in the lens area, and we were negotiating to buy them out. They had an owner who was apparently key to the business—he had the relationships with the big customers and handled the financial side. We tried to buy out his share, but he wouldn’t give it up, so the negotiations ended. We couldn’t do it with him, and we couldn’t do it without him, so we passed. It was one of those situations where you think, “Yeah, you can’t do it with him, and you can’t do it without him,” so we just walked away.

Well, I guess it changed. When my circumstances with that company changed, we hit what many entrepreneurs do—a major hiccup. Actually, that company began with a major hiccup. Shane, I told you that we were initially focused on supporting owners of Texas Instruments home computers. We looked at the players. Their product was of much higher quality than anything else on the market—it was industrial quality at TI, which was an enormous power in the chip industry, in the calculator industry, and everything else. So we said that we’re going to focus on those guys.

About a couple of months after I bailed out of my cushy corporate job—into the world of, you know, paying your own health insurance and everything else—TI said, “Oh, we are going to stop selling home computers completely and get out of that business.” And, you know, talk about a scary moment—that was it. Fortunately, we had already begun to diversify into Commodore. We said, “Okay, we don’t want to have all our eggs in one basket,” even then we were diversifying already. And so we just really ramped up that and said, “Okay, we’ve got to do this.”

The good thing about their departure was that there were so many owners of those products out there that there was a strong aftermarket for a few years, and the big-box stores completely dumped them as soon as TI pulled the plug—they just dumped all the product they could. So it actually was good for our business for a little while, but, of course, it was not a long-term growth opportunity.

After a period of time, Commodore became our major business as we were then transitioning into the world of IBM compatibles—the then DOS computers, ultimately Windows computers based on Intel chips. And that was interesting. The competition was very different there, but we were building a strong, strong business. At one point, we had already brought in another partner who had expanded us into system sales—a more B2B type of selling—and we had become the biggest education computer seller in our region, in the Midwest, where we were the exclusive computer supplier to places like Notre Dame and such, and we were building these computers under our own brand. So that was interesting—a lot of fun.

But at that point, Commodore was still a major part of our business—our cash cow, really. Commodore, through a horrible series of internal mismanagement ventures on their part, went out of business. They were in trouble for a while; they declared bankruptcy and ultimately failed. And even worse, they took their technology with them. At that point, they had the Amiga, which was better than Apple’s technology. It was a better graphical computer than Apple was at that point. But again, due to abysmal management, the Amiga died with Commodore and pretty much left the playing field open for Apple. Not that Apple might not have prevailed eventually, but that pretty much cleared the field for them to win, and that really put us in a world of hurt, because that was our second major market to vanish.

Ultimately, our one partner continued on with the business—we had also had, I guess, a second. The scariest moment, or the second scary moment—it might have been the scariest moment of all—was when I was sitting in my office. This company had built a really nice office and warehouse facility on a riverfront location, not because we were so incredibly profitable that we could buy the most expensive real estate available, but because there was an industrial development in our little city that happened to have a few riverfront lots available, and they were looking for people to buy in. So we said, “Okay, we’re in. We’re in,” and we built a really nice facility.

One interesting transition, Shane, was that our previous facility had been your typical, profitable industrial facility—a beat-up warehouse that was really sketchy. The offices were ramshackle, the warehouses ramshackle, but we grew our business in it. When we had our new facility, our employees would bring their families in to see where they worked. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, when you realize that you have created something that instills pride in your employees—where they can say, “Hey, I’m proud to say I work at this company. Look at this!” (their spouse and their kids, or their mom and dad; whatever makes you feel good)—it’s very rewarding.

But anyway, I’m sitting there when a certified letter arrives from the bank, which—pro tip—is not usually a good thing. They were asking me to show up within, I think, 24 hours at their offices with $1.5 million in cash (change) from my personal money because I was personally guaranteeing the company’s line of credit, which they decided they no longer wished to extend to our company. I did not have that kind of money—I didn’t have even 10% of that in cash. The company didn’t have the money to pay down the note. And this was an incredibly scary moment. Even scarier, Shane, my wife received the exact same letter at home, and she immediately had visions of the bank taking our house, our savings, our kids, our dog. This was probably my entrepreneurial low point—just saying, “Wow.” You know, this had been such an amazing run, and out of the blue, we might have lost not only the company but everything.

The good news is, we went through that horrible workout process with the bank, where all those friendly, smiling faces of the bank vanished, and we got new people—people who were not friendly. There’s a book by Tom Wolfe called A Man in Full (it’s a long read) that has an amazing description of a workout session for an entrepreneur, where the bank takes him into a horrible conference room with the sun shining in the guy’s eyes, a dead plant in the corner, and serves him coffee that was brewed about three days before, all to set the stage to basically scare the pants off him so he’ll pay off his note. Our experience wasn’t quite that graphic, but that’s essentially what you go through.

We went through that, but my partners and I buckled down, worked really hard, liquidated inventory, increased sales in the areas where we could, cut costs, and did some really painful headcount reductions. Ultimately, we got rid of the bank, and none of the three partners at that point had to cough up any personal money. So all was good in that respect, but that was really an education. After that, I’ve avoided personal guarantees on stuff because, if some things are just unpredictable, I didn’t feel when I did that that it was a risk worth taking. Even at the point when we got the note from the bank, I wasn’t feeling bad about the situation—it was just that we had a very friendly local bank that had been sold to a big bank headquartered in another city; their new parent had different criteria, and we did not meet those criteria. And it was okay—we were done with them. It was a real experience. So, pro tip: avoid personal guarantees whenever possible.