Founder Focus | Mike Wallace - Perfect Company
Welcome back to a new feature in our Founder Focus series. Our goal here is to chat with the amazing minds we have built relationships with over the last decade and share some insights with you. We hope you glean some valuable information from our friends who have built amazing companies.
This issue features an interview with Mike Wallace, co-founder of Perfect Company, client of Jon Summers, here at White Summers.
Mike Wallace has leveraged his eye for invention to develop, scale, and sell numerous products. He built Perfect Company from the ground up and is well on his way to expanding his portfolio. Take a look at his journey, shared here in this interview.
SAMANTHA:
Tell us a little bit about Perfect Company!
MIKE:
It all started over eight years ago when we first invented and launched a connected, smart-scale to execute recipes. The first one was for making cocktails, then we moved to baking. The company started in the consumer space. We ended up partnering with Vitamix and became their consumer software partner. They sell our scale alongside their blenders in all their live demonstrations. You may have seen it in Costco. Every year we invent and license the new tablet blenders that use smart-scale and recipe technology.
A few years ago, the commercial restaurant industry reached out to us with a lot of interest. We've been in the process of building out our platform for large chain restaurants to deploy and use our software. That's really where we're focused now.
SAMANTHA:
Where did you get the idea to start this company?
MIKE:
Well, I've been a serial inventor and entrepreneur most of my life. It really started when the company before it became what it is now. It was a product inventing and licensing company that focused on consumer electronics and toys. We've done products where we've made millions of them in a single year, and we have a really strong background in interactive electronic toys and software and large-scale manufacturing.
One of my partners and I were in Hong Kong drinking martinis—we had spent 10 years finding the best martinis worldwide--but we couldn't actually make the drink well ourselves. We didn't understand how to make a proper cocktail. We brainstormed this idea, right there, of a scale and an app that would walk you through how to make a cocktail. I called the guys at our office, told them about the idea and about three weeks later we had prototyped a kitchen scale connected to an iPad running an app that made cocktails. We cold called Brookstone, who was involved in some product launches we'd done before. My partner flew out, walked in with a box of booze, made cocktails for an hour, and walked out with an order for fifty thousand units. And that's kind of how we got started down this path.
So, yeah, we’ve filed well over 50 patents now. It's a technology that we've done a lot of different things with. We originally went out with a perfect drink--it was one of the most successful product launches Brookstone has done. The next year we did Perfect Bake, and then decided we're really not a direct consumer company, we're better as a platform.
In the end, we've really been super intrigued by the potential of deploying this type of software in the restaurant space, and so that's where we've been focused since. That’s how the company got started--all around that scale with people at home making their own cocktails.
SAMANTHA:
Tell me a little bit about the restaurant focus of your work.
MIKE:
We're unique because we're truly a full stack company where we can develop hardware all the way up to enterprise and data collection, distributing our platform across a lot of users. It turned out that our best go to market plan was to partner with the largest restaurant equipment manufacturers who themselves, aren’t developing software. We see the world very differently. So, they can be a good partnership. And they have all the connections in the industry, where we had none--it was kind of a perfect partnership.
I can't really talk about the restaurant chains we're working with right now, but we're working with some of the largest restaurant chains in the world. Our first partnership was with a company called Welbilt, who had made the world's first connected fryer. They had sold a bunch of these into a large chain and needed a software partner. That started our march into the commercial restaurant space. After that, we partnered with a company called Middleby, which is the largest player in this space. One of their brands, Carter Hoffman, came to us because they saw this opportunity with smart cabinets, with the emergence of food pickup.
We built the entire software stack that manages the user experience and the integration with the kitchen crew, and they built the hardware. That was something we started a little over a year before the pandemic. The delivery and personal pickup parts of the industry really took off during the lockdown and seem to be staying.
SAMANTHA:
I came across a press release about the takeout locker boxes and I thought that was incredible timing to have started that process pre-COVID.
MIKE:
It was strange, you know, because we have a platform that runs a kitchen for a large quick service restaurant chain. That program was about to expand and then the lockdown happened. We weren't sure what was going to happen. But the cabinets picked up and took that space over for that period, which was great.
One thing we could consider as a benefit from this period of the pandemic is, while most restaurant chains experienced decrease in sales, they found a way to become more profitable by running a little leaner, simplifying their menus, and adopting technology. I think that really made the industry much more interested in looking at how to leverage these concepts moving forward.
SAMANTHA:
How did you start your journey into entrepreneurship?
MIKE:
Well, for me, I never really knew anything else. I tell a lot of people I've never really been employed. I haven't worked for any companies. I was always on the outside creating my own projects, whether it was writing video games or inventing and licensing toys and consumer electronics. It was always something I was just sort of motivated and wanted to do, and I was lucky enough to find way to make a living doing it. It was quite the learning curve over a long period of time, but it's been something I've been compelled to do from early on.
SAMANTHA:
As far as being an inventor, I've always been super curious about people who realize that there is a need for something and create something out of nothing. Where do you think that spurs from? Where do you draw inspiration for realizing that you can create something out of nothing?
MIKE:
It’s been years of working at it and a lot of failure, quite frankly. You know, there's never any guarantees that a product is a good idea. I think a lot of inexperienced inventors really fall in love with their idea. I think one of the most important lessons is to really be able to be objective and really test that idea. One of the things that was key for us, even with the scales, is we spent as little money as possible until we knew it was valuable. Until we had an order, in hand, for fifty thousand units, we spent the absolute minimum, to validate that concept. That's one of the things we try to live by here. Get real customer interest before we invest a lot of money and time into it.
SAMANTHA:
Can you pinpoint some lessons that you learned along the way?
MIKE:
One of the first ones was my first big toy, which was the Power Glove, that shipped in 1990. That was a huge effort with Mattel and Nintendo. It's one of the more famous toys, but it also failed at market. It was incredibly, technically hard to pull off. It's one of the first times I remember really falling in love and not wanting to hear any of the bad news or any of the challenges about the product. I just wanted to push the product through. It had a great first year and then died. I spent five months living in a hotel in L.A. next to Mattel, working on that toy. It was so much work and I put so much into it but in the end, to some degree, it was a flawed product. I think it looked really cool, a lot of kids saw it and immediately wanted it, but none of them played with it for very long. While it seemed like a success as first, long term, it really wasn't. And those are important lessons.
SAMANTHA:
What specifically did you learn from that experience?
MIKE:
What I learned from that experience is that it's very easy to sell concepts to management and get them excited. But that was a concept that we basically just prototyped overnight and brought in and upper management at Mattel just pushed it through. In the end, it was a difficult problem to solve. We didn't know what kind of sensors we were going to use for Finger Bend or to know how it was going to work in 3D space.
We spent most of our time trying to solve technical problems instead of being focused on what would make the product great. If the product has too many technology hurdles it has to jump through, then you're going to spend most of your time working on things that aren't necessarily going to make the product successful. One of the early lessons I found, was that the technology doesn't make the product. You really need to understand the product, the users, the experience and how it fits.
SAMANTHA:
What do you think has been your greatest accomplishment professionally?
MIKE:
I think the biggest accomplishment has been hard, and has taken longer than we wanted, but it would have to be the pivot into the commercial space. I'm very proud of it. I think we've come up with a set of products that nobody else in the industry has, and those are now starting to be validated.
It's been such a difficult journey, because we're dealing with huge customers, and they take a while to move. As a small company, it’s hard to not have things go at the rate you're used to. I really think we're going to pull this off this year and it'll be, by far, our biggest accomplishment, no question about it.
SAMANTHA:
You mentioned how being an entrepreneur can be very challenging. What would you say makes it all worth it in the end?
MIKE:
Well, what makes it all worth it in the end is to see people using the things you've built. When I was in the consumer space, seeing that product in the stores was always the biggest rush. To see something real for sale that people are buying was big. Now, it's watching these stores, crew members, and customers interact with the technology we've built.
It's incredibly rewarding. It's hard. You go through a lot of hard lessons when you put your products in front of people for the first time. But that's the big payoff—to see your products being used. You want to make something that people actually touch and use and appreciate.
SAMANTHA:
How do you deal with and manage competitors, especially in the field of inventing and patenting?
MIKE:
Well, the good news is we typically go into spaces where there are almost no competitors because we're creating it, which is also one of the hard parts of what we do. It's hard to validate or make an argument for what we're doing, even to an investor when it hasn't existed before. That's one of the challenges. Very rarely have we gone into a space that had competitors. We’ve had competitors violate our patents, you know, and so we believe very strongly in a strong patent portfolio and doing all of that.
That has paid off for us. We've managed to defend our space. A lot of people will see the portfolio and choose to partner with us instead of trying to knock it off. It just makes more sense in the end. But we purposely try to choose areas where we have very little competition. If there is competition, we tend to be really good at figuring out how to make ourselves unique and different and better than the competition.
SAMANTHA:
What would you say is the driving force behind your success as a company?
MIKE:
I look at companies who are successful immediately, and I'm very envious, but the most important thing is learning and understanding survival, which takes time. Not everything happens easily. If anything, the thing that's driven us most has been our willingness not to give up and to really fight through some of the really difficult periods and transitions that we've had to go through. I talk to a lot of potential investors, and it's very rare for a company like ours to hang around this long and that makes them pay attention to us. A lot of this is really survival and being smart and figuring out what didn't work and what did work and being flexible. Sometimes it's an act of will for a company to be successful.
Original Post:
By Samantha Gee
White Summers