Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to The INDUStry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Bryan Pate, doctor Bryan. Bryan, welcome on the show.

Bryan Pate

Well, I wouldn’t say doctor Bryan. Okay. But, I do have a a JD, so I think there’s technically some accuracy there. But thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.

Nitin Bajaj

Pleasure to have you here, and I’d say you earned it, so might as well use the title. Right? So tell us who is Bryan?

Bryan Pate

Yeah. I mean, I think what makes me me is I’m pretty driven. I’m an entrepreneur, type a personality back when we used to categorize people that way. Adventurer, I like to do hard things, and I like to be around other people who like to do hard things. I don’t like excuses. I just like to either succeed or fail and accept either result and continue to drive forward. So I think that’s The I’m asking.

Nitin Bajaj

I I love that mindset. I love the just, you know, one of my favorite, and we’ll come to this towards the end of the Show. My favorite one line is do or do not. There’s no try. Right? And, do it, fail, or succeed, but just don’t say I’m gonna try. It just it doesn’t work.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Yoda Yoda was wiser than we gave him credit for.

Nitin Bajaj

I agree. Tell us what do you do for a living? I typically ask people specific questions, but I know you have at least 3 different lives that I know of. So tell us more.

Bryan Pate

Well, not about that. I have a couple companies. So the first one that we founded back in, gosh, 2007, was based on an idea I had in 2005. It’s called ElliptiGO.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

It’s a standing elliptical bicycle. So if it’s outdoors and our concept behind it was to deliver all the benefits of running outside without impact. And so you’ve most people have seen one by now. We have about 40,000 of them out there.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

But it looks like an elliptical machine on 2 wheels. Yes. And they’re all over the world, and I use it every day. In fact, I’ll go riding here this afternoon, now that it stopped raining down here.

Nitin Bajaj

I know.

Bryan Pate

But that’s our first business. We’ve been running that since 2010. I’m the CEO of ElliptiGO. Mhmm. And then in November of last year, we created a new business around a new product called a giboard. And what the giboard is is it’s a balance trainer that blends together slacklining and skateboarding. So it’s a it’s a small, just over a meter long slack line that sits on top of a meter long deck that looks almost like a snowboard deck. And why I’m excited about it is because it’s really versatile. I I was attracted to it for its balance training capabilities, but now that we’ve really gotten to know it, there’s huge applications in yoga, physical therapy, fitness. Really, anything you can do on a BOSU ball, you can do on this product. And then it brings a level of challenge and efficacy that I think is better than anything else on the market. So we’re super excited about about that product as well. So those are the the things I do for a living.

Nitin Bajaj

And, you know, having used the board myself, I love it. I agree with you that it it just elevates the challenge. Right? Whether you’re just looking for balance, you’re looking to learn how to skateboard or snowboard. It just allows you all of that different flexibility with the comfort that is right right next to you.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Yeah. You’re very low to the ground. Yes. So it’s really eliminated the risk

Nitin Bajaj

Yes.

Bryan Pate

To injury from all those activities Mhmm. Whether it’s the skateboarding, snowboarding, the endo board, which is a balance trainer, the way you slide side to side. Those all have a lot of momentum affiliated with them. This has no momentum. It’s just responding to you where your body is positioned in space and where your center of gravity is, and then it keeps your foot literally within an inch or 2 of the ground.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And so you’re I’ve put over a 1000 people on these boards now, and no one’s ever actually fallen from the instability of it, which is really, really cool because our other product, right now, someone in the world is going 30 miles an hour in traffic, down a hill, listening to a podcast, signaling with The hand. Right? And so we’ve lived with a lot of risk in our Elliptigo business that we just don’t have in this new keyboard business, which is nice when you’re the ultimate underwriter of both of those risks.

Nitin Bajaj

True. I love the combo there.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj

I’m always curious about why people do what they do. Right? So what’s your why in this?

Bryan Pate

It’s a weird answer. So these both these products came out of my personal need

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

To solve a problem I was having and could not find a product to do it that already existed. And so both of these products that are live within these companies now are in these companies because I wanted the solution. And for sure for ElliptiGO, nothing existed. For a gearboard, I wanted the solution. Another company is developed The gib board. We’re the licensee, so we produce it and distribute it in North America, but a German company actually created it.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

So the so the solution was there to my problem. I was just inspired to take it on not only as a consumer, but then also saw the potential for the market. But both of those two companies really exist because of a need I had. In the first case, it was because I can’t run anymore, and I’ve done a lot of cycling. I’m an Ironman Triathlete, spent a lot of time in a bike saddle, but for me cycling is not as fun, efficient, engaging, sort of as good of a release as running is. Mhmm. And so we’re really trying to recreate the experience of running in a way that I could do it.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And then for the gear board, I I turned 50. I’ve been convinced that once you hit 50, your balance really is one of the first thing that starts to suffer from aging

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And that you can address that through balanced training. And so I wanted a balanced training tool that was really hard and really fun, but also really safe. And what I found Nitin the market was balance training tools that were really safe, but not hard or fun Mhmm. And balance training tools that looked like they would be fun. But I was convinced that I was gonna hit my I was gonna hit that ground hard, if not go through a wall trying to learn how to use them. So I just felt like there was this missing piece of give me something that’s really hard, really fun, really effective, but also really safe. And that’s what I saw in the GIB board when I first discovered it over in Europe. And so

Nitin Bajaj

the story.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Those are those are the reasons. It’s very selfish to solve problems I have.

Nitin Bajaj

And I think those are the best solutions that come out of it because you’re gonna be as much of a critic than anybody out The, and you’re gonna be very specific, very focused on finding that exact solution. And then it’s just a matter of finding other people that resonate with Nitin

Bryan Pate

And have the same problem.

Nitin Bajaj

Yeah.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So Yeah.

Let us give us

Nitin Bajaj

a sense of the size and scale of your operations. You mentioned a few numbers already. You have 40,000 of the ellipticals pretty much around the world. Tell us Yeah. Tell us a little more.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. So Elliptico, we’ve been we sold our first Elliptico in 2010.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And, we do we have operations. We have distribution relationships, so we don’t have operations, but we have distributors in 15 countries.

Nitin Bajaj

Wow.

Bryan Pate

And we’ve sold ellipticals into 63 countries That’s through those distributors and ourselves direct to consumers in those different countries. You have a warehouse in Taiwan, a warehouse here, and a warehouse in the Netherlands. And those three locations really support global operations fairly efficiently.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

So, we’ve got a great team. Half of our employees have been with us for at least 10 years, so we really have a lot of institutional knowledge and expertise within the company. We GIV board is brand new. So we’ve sold maybe 3,000 GIV boards now. That’s pretty amazing. November. Maybe more maybe closer to 4,000, actually. And then we have a warehouse in San Diego. We do all the manufacturing. It’s sort of the opposite of Elliptigo. So Elliptigo is manufactured in Taiwan, and it’s shipped across completely assembled. And so we just put one order in and we get an elliptical. For gi board, we order all the piece parts from different suppliers throughout the US And then we we have a the board itself, just the board, is manufactured about 10 miles south of where I am.

Nitin Bajaj

Nice.

Bryan Pate

And which is so convenient compared to having it The manufactured 10,000 miles west of where I am or 20,000 miles east of where I am, depending on which way you wanna go. And just the time in which we can turn around iterations of designs or board layouts or just solve problems as everybody’s on the same time zone. Things are when we’re in the development stage, boards were literally dropped off same day they were made because the guys who make it live north of the factory. Like, we’re in between their house and the factory, and so they would just be driving home and swing by our office and drop off The port. So it’s pretty cool. So those operations are small, and we’re still hand putting together everything ourselves. Whereas the Elliptigo business is much more what you would think of as a a scaled business in terms of things come across in a container or they go straight to our warehouse, and then they ship out all over the world depending on which warehouse they went to.

Nitin Bajaj

Super exciting stuff.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj

If if I were to ask you, what’s the one big challenge you’re facing? I mean, there is a lot going on. Logistics, supply chain, you know, different kinds of people, shapes, sizes, etcetera. So if you had to pick The big challenge, what would that be?

Bryan Pate

Yeah. The biggest challenge I think we’re facing right now is how to scale elliptic or, gimbal. Mhmm. So they’re so it’s so versatile of a product.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And our expertise is in endurance athletics. So if you wanna talk about training programs for marathons, you wanna talk about, you know, Ironman 15 hour endurance events. Like you and I could sit down and talk about that all day. Mhmm. But I can’t talk about flexibility training, balance training, strength training. I I don’t have a history in those things. Mhmm. I haven’t surrounded myself with the best people in the world at those things yet. And so the biggest challenge is actually understanding what it exactly is that we have and how to present the programming so that people know how to use the tool. Right? Ellipto is pretty easy in the sense that it’s a it’s a blend of cycling and running. So we can deliver a running based training program that ElliptiGo can integrate into. That’s the extent of programming. Here, we have in givorn, we have a product that can be used for fitness classes, purely fitness, no balance, just fitness classes, just physical therapy, just yoga and Pilates or balance training or training for specific sports. And so I’m not an expert in any of those things. And so it’s really The challenge is is sort of educating our team so that we can turn around and produce The programming that the customers need to be able to really take advantage of the product. It’s a big challenge.

Nitin Bajaj

And I can almost see as you talk about these things, my follow-up question to that is, what’s the most exciting opportunity? And I kinda read into that, but I would like to hear from you.

Bryan Pate

Keyboard. You know, it it it really is. The the scale of that market is sizable for instability training in any one of those categories. And it’s new. It’s differentiated. It’s in our control. It customers really respond to it well. We just the last 2 days we were at Ursa, which is the big health and fitness show for gyms. And there’s there’s a gym up in Minnesota that has 25 keyboards and they run classes every day. And then there were senior executives from major gym chains who are buying keyboards for themselves, who are talking to us about bringing them into their gyms in a class situation, and it’s that’s there’s a 100 and something 1000 gyms in the US. Show you start thinking about,

Nitin Bajaj

you know,

Bryan Pate

if you put 20 boards into a third of those gyms, it’s a lot of give away. Massive. So it’s a real opportunity, and that’s just and that show didn’t actually go as well as the physical therapy Show. And there’s, you know, 30,000 physical therapy locations around the INDUStry. And you just, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity, and we just gotta get our heads around how we position it, what are the tweaks we need to make to it to make it really successful in each of these channels, and then how do we distribute into those channels?

Nitin Bajaj

It’s really exciting.

Bryan Pate

It’s cool.

Nitin Bajaj

Yeah.

Bryan Pate

And the direct to consumer stuff is doing great.

Nitin Bajaj

Yep.

Bryan Pate

They’ll give us the time to figure out the commercial stuff.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

So it’s that’s been really nice too. So it’s been very ROI positive from the beginning in terms of sell through. So that’s that’s cool too.

Nitin Bajaj

Congratulations. I mean, that’s that’s that’s a really good place to be in.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. We’ll go from here.

Nitin Bajaj

So if we look back in the rear view mirror and talk about 2 experiences. 1, that really blew your own expectations and became a success beyond your expectations. And on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected was a failure became a lesson.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. So the first one, the lesson learned, our failure The was a good teacher was, Shark Tank. So I think it was 2014 we were recruited to be on Shark Tank.

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

And, we looked at the terms of the deal, and back then they took 10% of your company in equity. And we looked at that, and our company was pretty valuable at the The, And we concluded it wasn’t worth the investment. Then in other words, I would be better off selling 10% of the stock of my company and raising however many 1,000,000 of dollars and then spending that on TV advertisement The I would be taking investment from Shark Tank. So we turned them down and and I explained to them that rationale. And so they changed their policy the next year. They got rid of the equity piece for, participating on the Show. And so we were recruited to participate on the show. We went there very cocky because we hadn’t applied. They had recruited us. We didn’t bring any athletes. We didn’t bring any celebrities that use the product. Mhmm. We didn’t have a great offer so that we were sort of requesting from The. So I guess a great ask from them, and we just thought the product would be cool enough that it was definitely gonna get on the air. And so we went up The, we filmed in the tank for an hour back and forth. Kevin O’Leary rode our elliptical around the tank. It was pretty remarkable. I didn’t know what was going to happen because he’d never touched it. He’d never seen it. It’s a legitimate show in the sense that you have no interaction with those people until you are in the tank. They they don’t do prep work. They’re just rolling through companies. They film the whole season in, like, 6 days or something like that. So it’s just one thing after another. It’s all live. It’s all unscripted. It’s all rolling. And so Kevin just decided who’s gonna try it out. He jumps up. We didn’t give him a lesson. He just jumped on the bike. And so that went really well, and so we’re like, touchdown. But they never aired our episode. So they film about 80 episodes, and they air about 55 to 70 depending on the length of the season. And we had some other unlikely things happen. We had a guest shark, so we didn’t we weren’t being drawn out of the full pool of 80. We were just being drawn out of this really limited pool of 8. So for us, they had filmed 8 companies and they they showed 5 on the actual Show, and they didn’t show us. And that was, you know, a real slap in the face in the sense that I think we we overestimated our value to them and underestimated the amount of assets we really should have brought to the table in in making that happen because I think that could have been a good exposure for The for the product and the brand and could have changed the trajectory of the company. And so since then, I think we’ve been much more humble in what we bring to the table and much more thorough in trying to put ourselves forward in a good light. And if we do go back to Shark Tank, although Shark Tank is way less influential today than it was back in 2014, 2015, But the gear board could be a good fit for that show. We will definitely bring everything we can bring to bear so that we’re successful there.

Nitin Bajaj

Brian, before you move on to the next thing Yeah. Really appreciate you being vulnerable, you sharing this because it’s I mean, it’s been a while, but it’s still never easy to, you know, openly admit, what you could have done better, what was a mistake. And, yeah, just just be so open about it. So I really appreciate

Bryan Pate

It bugs me to this day. I mean, I it’s still something that sits in the back of my head, not every day. I mean, for a while, it was every day. Right? Every single day. But now it’s periodically. Mhmm. It just just eats at me, like, oh, we really blew that. That’s a one shot deal.

Nitin Bajaj

Yeah.

Bryan Pate

And friends of mine have been on the show. 2 good friends of mine have subsequently went on the Show, and, it had an impact for them. And so it was a lesson learned. It’s a good it was humbling. It’s good to lose every once in a while. Yes. Painful as that is. Mhmm. And then a success story, really, really cool thing is there’s a very famous American runner named Mev Mev Keflezki. So amazing individual, incredible life story. I I think they will make a movie about him at some point, but, he’s the only person pretty sure this is correct. He’s the only person to win an Olympic medal, the New York City marathon, and the Boston marathon. The. And so he’s as accomplished a runner as America has ever produced. And, in between his so he won Olympic medal and then he won the New York marathon and then he got hurt. And he’s basically was dropped by Nike and had to go over to Skechers. It was a it was a it was a saga that he went through, but he came Bajaj. And one of the things he did as he got older in 2012, he started using the elliptical

Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

Bryan Pate

For training. And, in 2014, at the age of 39, so 2 years after he started using it, he ran his fastest marathon ever to win the Boston marathon. He was the 1st American to win the 1st American male to win the Boston marathon since 1983, so it’d been 31 years. And it was the year after the Boston Marathon bombing, And I was there in 2013, so I very much remember that experience. Meb was there. He wasn’t running. He was hurt, and I think it’s not an accomplished it’s not it’s I guess it’s it feels good that we were able to deliver a product that had a positive impact on somebody who was able to do something amazing. So I think that’s one of the things that that is an accomplishment of the company that we really feel proud about. We have a poster of Meb, you know, up on the wall. I mean, he’s and he’s he’s just a really fantastic human being. And I’d say the best thing that’s come out of the experience with Elliptigo is interacting with people like me, people who are truly the best in the world at what they do and getting a chance to know them as someone beyond what it is that they do has been really, really neat, and there’s a few examples of that. But that I’d say is a success story.

Nitin Bajaj

I love that story, and I also love your humility with, you know, as you say The, as you recognize this as a team effort, and and not just, you Show, have a business. And so I I love that. I appreciate that.

Bryan Pate

And it’s so true. I mean, the the team is the reason we’ve been able to be as successful as we have been. I am just The cog in this in this thing. Yeah. So thank you.

Nitin Bajaj

Love that. So this brings us to my favorite part of the show. We call it Okay. One line life lessons, and I would love to hear a few of your online life lessons.

Bryan Pate

Yeah. So, I like this part as well. The first one is to tell the truth all the time about everything. If the world did that, I think we’d all be in a much, much, much better place, and I think it can start with each individual. And what I have found is that it ends up always being the right answer As uncomfortable and as hard and as scary and challenging as it can be to literally always tell the truth, it has never steered me wrong. So that is a life lesson that took me 40 some odd years to learn, but, it has proven to be accurate. Mhmm. I think another life lesson for me, Show a phrase I like, pull my weight, pull your weight. I think that in any endeavor I’m engaged in, I feel an obligation to contribute. And it’s been hard for me, I think, to assess just how much I need to contribute to any given part of society, whether it’s climate change or my company or my relationships with my wife and my family and my friends, obligations to charitable organizations, and those sorts of things. And I’ve sort of distilled it down for me to pull my weight, that I don’t have to be the number one giver to every charity. I don’t have to be the number one friend to all of my friends. I don’t have to be, you know, the best employee The is possible because I can’t do all of those things. But what I need to do is pull my weight. So if there’s a problem that I’m contributing to, I need to stop being part of the problem. If there’s, The going on at the company that needs my help, I need to contribute to the level that the company needs. Right? I need to pull my weight. So I have to pull everyone else’s weight. Other people can pull their own, but I gotta pull my own weight. So that’s that’s a little bit of life lesson for me. A third one is care. So I think I’ve learned it’s important for me to actually care about what it is I’m doing, what’s going on in the world, the state of affairs of not only my family, but my community, my state, my country, and my planet. Right? So I think that I really try to care about what’s happening Nitin once you care about it, it becomes a lot easier to pull your weight towards a solution to contribute to making whatever the situation is better. And I think indifference is easy. Sometimes being indifferent to the state of affairs is an easier path. It creates less emotional sort of drag and baggage, but I think it insulates and numbs you from the rest of society. And ultimately, you end up it’s better off to care and try and fail than to be indifferent and watch things get worse without you trying to improve them.

Nitin Bajaj

Love how you how you really put it together. That’s awesome.

Bryan Pate

Cool. My The, 2 other sort life lessons. Keep things in perspective is something I’ve learned. So at the end of the day, it’s sort of the inverse of care, and it’s something that if it’s an entrepreneur listening to this, I think they’ll understand the ability to hold 2 totally contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. Like, in business, if you start a business, the most likely outcome is failure. Okay. What business it is. I don’t care how good you are. Most likely outcome is failure. However, in order to succeed, you have to be completely convinced that you could never fail. Right? So you have to recognize, like, oh, my most likely thing is I’ll fail, but I can never fail. And so at the same time as it’s important to care, it’s also important, I think, to keep things in perspective and recognize that nothing out there is actually that important. Right? Like, if Ellipto goes away tomorrow, the world will keep spinning. The sun will come up. The planet will move on. No one will know who I am a 1000 years from now, period. No matter what I do, no one a 1000 years from now will have any idea I existed. And so as a result, I don’t have to get that worked up about every little thing that is not going right. So I think that’s that’s an important,

Nitin Bajaj

that’s an important

Bryan Pate

yeah. It really is. Because otherwise, you could work yourself into a frenzy and and really implode. Yeah. And, I think the last one is the importance of growth and sort of constantly pushing yourself not to prove any external thing, but really to keep yourself curious and sort of learning and becoming better. Keep trying to get better. Like, never be sort of and never is a a tough word to use, but Mhmm.I think there’s value in constantly challenging yourself, especially in things that you’re not particularly good at.

Nitin Bajaj

And that brings me back to the whole purpose of the gift board. Right?

Bryan Pate

Yeah. Because I was yeah.

I’m not good at balance. Right? I needed something to train with The balance. And it’s so great. I mean, the gig board’s a great example. It’s like, I’m actually okay at the gig board now. It’s so fun in 6 months to see progress. Right? Like, during COVID, I learned to juggle.I’d never juggled before. And when you start out juggling, you don’t know how to juggle. You can’t juggle. You can’t get 3 balls in the air at the same time. It INDUStry feels impossible. But then every day you do it for 10 minutes and pretty soon you got 3 in a row, then you got 7 in a row, then you got 14 in a Show. And, you know, you’re once you get to a 100, you’re like, okay. Now I can juggle. It’s a stupid little thing, but it’s like it just reinforces that growth mindset The, you know, just because I suck at something today doesn’t mean I’m gonna suck at it tomorrow. And for me, that’s an important thing to continue to reinforce.

Nitin Bajaj

And I resonate with that. Right? You have to push yourself out of that comfort zone because it can get addictive and you wanna live The. And we’re not

Bryan Pate

meant to live there. There’s no pain in the comfort zone. There’s no failure in the comfort zone. There’s no discomfort, frustration, any of those things. Yeah. But, ultimately, you wither away in the comfort zone, I think.

Nitin Bajaj

Yes. You’re sitting there to die. I mean, that that’s Yeah.

Bryan Pate

That’s all you’re doing. Pretty gross, but that’s how I think of it.

Nitin Bajaj 

Withering away.

Nitin Bajaj

Yep.

Bryan Pate

Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj

Brian, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for making the time to be here to share your journey, your story, your struggles, but also more importantly, your successes with us. Really appreciate it. Congratulations again on all of your successes and to many more to come.

Bryan Pate

Hey, man. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

That’s very kind.