Biography Edition: James Dyson's Perseverance and Revolutionary Innovation in the Vacuum Industry

Like them , they will not find it easy and they will need oodles of determination and stamina along the way . They will have to run and run hard , which is how my life story began . That was an excerpt from the book Inventions by James Dyson . James Dyson is the owner of Dyson . He's the 100% owner , and the business is worth $14 billion .

James Dyson invented the Dyson vacuum cleaner back in the early 90s . He actually invented it in the late 70s , but it took him like 15 years to actually get it on the market , which we'll go through and it took him 5,127 prototypes to actually get a working model that accomplished what he wanted to accomplish , and it was the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner .

So I think there's three main lessons we can learn from James Dyson , and we'll cover this as we go through . But one is keeping control of your business and your intellectual property . Two is being different . And three is having determination , which you will clearly see as we go through this . So let's start with his early life .

His dad died when he was just a kid and his dad was actually in an occupation he didn't really enjoy and he was about to start an occupation that he did enjoy . And he died before he had that opportunity from cancer . And here's a quote from the book . That was the last time I saw him . His brave cheerfulness chokes me up every time I recall the scene .

It is impossible to imagine my father's emotions as he waved goodbye , knowing that he might be on his way to London to die . 60 years have not softened these memories , nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three children growing up .

So I think this had a big impact on James Dyson , his dad dying early before he could do what he wanted , what he loved , and I think James Dyson took that and just pursued what he wanted to do , which we'll see here . Another thing from his early childhood he was really into running . Here's a quote from the book .

Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier . When everyone feels exhausted , that is the opportunity to accelerate , whatever the pain , and win the race . Stamina and determination with creativity are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties . So this reminded me of the book Shoe Dog about the founder of Nike , and he was also a runner .

But it seems like they kind of both James Dyson and Phil Knight drew the same lesson from running , which is when you're running you hit kind of a wall and you got to push through that wall and get to the other side and complete the race or complete the run .

And that's something that both founders had to really push through a lot of pain to get to where they wanted to go .

And James Dyson basically says , like that's the lesson that he took from running is that he needs to apply this in other portions of his life , especially to business , of being able to push through , have that determination , that stamina to get to where you're trying to go , to get to where you're trying to go .

So James goes to school and he studies designing . He's not sure what he wants to do . He has various interests , he lands on designing and then he ends up determining that he wants to be a designer and an engineer . But he doesn't have any engineering background . He didn't go to school for engineering , he just went to school for designing .

But he's intrigued by the intersection of design and engineering . And this reminds me of Steve Jobs and Edwin Land . You know , steve Jobs was obviously he helped invent personal computers and the iPhone and the iPod , all this technology but he was really into the design of things , making sure that they were beautiful as well as having that technology piece .

And this same thing with Edwin Land , who was the founder of Polaroid , and he was really into , obviously , the technology of having that instant photo , but he was also pairing that up with the design and making sure that the product actually looked beautiful . So James Dyson seems to be in that same camp where he's really interested in that and he gets pulled .

He has opportunities to work with Jeremy Fry . He actually just calls him up and sees , basically reaches out to a mentor , and Jeremy Fry was an inventor , an entrepreneur . This reminds me of when Steve Jobs reached out to Bill Hewitt of Hewlett and Packard and got some help when he was a kid and actually ended up working for Hewlett Packard over the summer .

And Steve Jobs , I think , at one point said something to the effect of don't be afraid to reach out to people . He said that he had never reached out to someone and asked for help and they didn't help him . So .

So I think that's a lesson I should just learn is don't be afraid to reach out to folks for help , because a lot of the times people are very willing to help .

James Dyson is working for Jeremy Fry and here's a few quotes from the book . Here Jeremy Fry , more than anyone else , encouraged me to think for myself and to just do it .

Another quote he loathed arrogance and experts , by which he meant those who want you to believe that they know everything about a subject , when the inventive mind knows instinctively that there are always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made . So Jeremy Fry doesn't have much respect for the so-called experts .

He thinks that you should just invent on your own , just try it out , just do it and figure out things on your own . Don't rely on the experts . And Jeremy Fry takes this and runs with it Because , like I said before , he didn't have any engineering background . But he starts working for Jeremy Fry and they ended up inventing the C truck together .

Jeremy Fry , you know he took this I think James Dyson was like 19 or 20 or so . He let him lead up this invention of the C truck and run that whole side of the business for Jeremy and James Dyson invents it and then sells it as well . Here's a quote from the book .

I still find myself putting into practice at Dyson some of the same things Jeremy did and said when I worked for him half a century ago . He believed in taking on young minds with no experience because this way he employed those with curious , unsullied and open minds .

So obviously Jeremy hired James when he was young and this is something that Dyson does later on in his life . He likes to hire younger folks that are not sullied by experience . They don't have bad habits .

You can just mold them to what you want them to do from the get-go , instead of having to break old habits which I've seen a lot of painting businesses do this hiring young college-aged workers and just mold them into what you want them to be , having a good training program I actually did a college works painting .

That's kind of what they did with us , so this can be a good strategy to take into consideration is actually , instead of hiring like the painter that's been around , maybe has some bad habits , they have , maybe not a great attitude hiring someone young , getting that culture fit and then training them how to do the job that you want them to do to the standard

you want , all right . So James Dyson works for Jeremy Fry for a while , helps launch the C truck . Then he wants to go out on his own and there's a period in time where he's working in his garden a lot and he is using his wheelbarrow and he's like this thing is not any good and this thing sucks . So how can I make this better ? And you know cause ?

He's using a wheelbarrow that had a metal , is made out of metal , has a wheel , um , has edges that were cutting up against the door . If he had to move it , you know , move things through the shed and things would stick to the bottom of the wheelbarrow . The wheel would get stuck in the dirt . There's all these problems that he was having .

He's like I think I can invent something that's better than this . And so he invents the ball barrow . There's a ball instead of a wheel and the container portion of the barrow , uh , plastic type material that when you pour stuff into it , like cement , it doesn't stick to it and instead of like the metal .

And so he invents this ball Barrow and he ends up starting a company . There's several other owners in the company and they go , you know , go into business company and they go into business . They are trying to sell it directly to different stores and they hit some limited success Not much . They kind of hit a plateau .

There's a lot of infighting between the different owners on what the direction should be , and so James Dyson makes the mistake of putting the patent of the ball barrel inside of the company instead of keeping the patent under his name , and he also doesn't control the company because there's several other owners .

He ends up losing the company and the patent because the patent was in the company . So here's a quote from the book . I was penniless again , with no job and no income . I had three adorable children , a large mortgage to pay and nothing to show for the past five years of toil . I had also lost my inventions .

This was a very low moment and deeply worrying for dear D , his wife and me . It was deeply upsetting to my confidence , took a big blow and it would take some years to regain it . And so this this is a his first business is basically a complete failure . This reminds me of what happened to Walt Disney his first business , laugh-o-grams .

He basically loses that and he goes bankrupt and he he also , I believe , lost the characters that he invented as well . So this is a lesson that we need to learn is don't lose your company because you don't have control over it , and don't lose your intellectual property . Now , running a painting business , you might not have a patent .

You may have a patent or things that you could patent , but most of the time it's something like a trademark that's uh , or things that you could patent , but most of the time it's something like a trademark . That's usually the intellectual property that all painting businesses have .

They have a trademark with their brand and you can lose your brand if you don't have a trademark .

And so you know you could be in business for 20 years and then all of a sudden you get a cease and desist letter and a lawyer sending you a cease and desist letter and saying , hey , you can't use your name because this other company has trademarked it , and if you haven't trademarked it , you don't have an argument against that .

So getting a trademark , protecting that intellectual property , is super important . Let's learn from the lessons from the founders of the past here .

All right , so he leaves that ballbarrow company , but before he had left he was working in the factory to develop the ballbarrow . They're producing those ballbarrows to develop the ball barrow . They're producing those ball barrows and they were having an issue where the factory was getting too dirty to function correctly .

And so he figured out that the other factories that did similar things would use this cyclone to suck up all the dust . And these cyclones were big . But he got the idea when he was vacuuming his house he's like trying using one of these Hoover vacuums back in the day , and they had a bag in the Hoover vacuum . But the Hoover vacuum kind of sucked .

Well , I guess it did suck , but it wasn't very good , I should say . So the Hoover vacuum didn't have much pull on it and then the bag would get full very quickly and you had to go out and buy another bag . They just weren't very good products .

And he was wondering if he got the idea of maybe if he used the cyclone in the factory , made it smaller and put it inside of the vacuum , that it would actually function better . So he gets this idea , he actually pitches it to the company the ball barrel company before he leaves . But the board , the other owners , thought it was a stupid idea .

They're like no , if there was a better way to build a vacuum Hoover would have done it already . So they basically , you know , tell him to kick sand . So he gets kicked out of the business and he still has this idea for a cyclone vacuum . And so here's a couple of quotes from the book .

Here was a field the vacuum cleaner industry where there had been no invention for years , so the market ought to be ripe for something new . For the following 15 years I lived in debt .

This might not sound encouraging to young inventors with an entrepreneurial spirit , yet if you believe you can achieve something , then you have to give project a hundred percent of your creative energy . You have to believe that you'll get there in the end .

So he goes and he's trying to develop a prototype for this vacuum , trying to get the cyclone smaller into a vacuum .

And during this period , you know he has a family and he's he doesn't have any income and he's he's coming off of the failure of his first business and so they're basically using , you know , taking out debt and to get by , and you know it ends up taking like 14 , 15 years before he actually gets a prototype that's on the market that he's making money from .

Um , here's a quote from the book craziest of all , during the first 30 years of our marriage she agreed on self-ins unselfishly and so typically of her talking about his wife to keep putting her signature to endless bank guarantee forms in front of solicitors signing away our possessions .

If we had defaulted on the bank loans , we would have been evicted from our home . He's just in his shed and his backyard developing these prototypes . He's just in his shed , in his backyard developing these prototypes .

He ends up developing 5,127 prototypes over several years until he finally gets a usable prototype that works , does what he wants it to do , and he thinks it's ready to go on the market . Now the next part is getting it to the market .

So first he has the idea okay , I'll license the technology to a company that already has the infrastructure to build this and I'll just make money off the license .

So he's going around to all these different companies and trying to sell the license , and so here's a quote from the book I learned that none of them was interested in doing something new and different . They were more interested in defending the vacuum cleaner bag market , worth more than 500 million dollars at the time . So he's getting a lot of no's .

Actually , he's getting a lot of maybes but nobody's committing and he's having a lot of trouble trying to sell this , even though this vacuum that he developed is way better than anything on the market .

Companies are kind of stuck with this current industry where you have that bag Because a lot of these companies were making a lot of money from the bags , like selling the bags , you selling the bags , instead of just doing a one-time sale where you just sell the vacuum and that's it . You sell the vacuum .

Then you have the basically recurring revenue of the bag selling the bags to the consumers as well . So there's a lot of entrenched interest there .

But he continues to try to license this to different companies , trying to license this to different companies , and there's one he actually gets successfully licensed in Japan and they start giving him royalties off of that , but they ended up paying him like way less than what he probably should have gotten because their financials were kind of not being done correctly ,

and so he's just running to issue after issue . He's not really making much money and he just keeps going and trying to get this licensed . At one point another company says no , they don't want his license .

But then they ended up copying his , his design from , and in this time he did have a patent that was in his name , but another company still stole the idea . And so he ends up taking them to court and suing them . And it takes years for in the courts to get this resolved . And at 12 years in he was about to give up .

You know , 12 years of trying to get this vacuum on the market , uh , and he was about to give up . And then finally his lawyer was like okay , you , you know the . The company wants to settle , and so that was a huge win .

Um , and then he ends up he decides , instead of licensing , I'm just going to build this thing myself and distribute it myself in my own business . And distributed it myself in my own business . And so he actually partners up with Jeremy Fry at one point . But then Jeremy Fry gets old and he wants to get bought out .

So Dyson ends up owning the entire business and then distributing the vacuums , building the factory himself and distributing the vacuum cleaners , and he finally gets the vacuum on the market . It's like 1993 . And so it took him like 15 years from when he started developing the vacuum to when he actually got it on the market , which is crazy .

The amount of determination that would have taken is just , it's unbelievable really .

And he does go with the name Dyson for the name of his company and he thought that this would be a good way to differentiate himself from Hoover and the other vacuum companies , because the other vacuum companies were like no name or like big corporations there was no individual , there's nameless corporations .

And he thought if he put his own name on the company and the way he sold the product was just like hey , I'm an inventor , I invented this new vacuum , this is how it works . I think it's a pretty good product . It took me no-transcript the course of his life . And Dyson is still creating inventions .

Like there's an invention where a hand drying invention they invented basically the hand dryer that has a blade of air instead of a heated air dryer .

Like instead of putting your hand under , like that hair dryer that heats the air and pushes it out , they created like this blade of air that is not heated , so it's more energy efficient and it's actually works better because the blade of air just cuts the like basically shaves the water off your hand . And they have several other inventions .

And he is still 100% owner of the business and I think there's a lot of three key lessons here , like I had mentioned at the top of the episode , one is keeping control of your business and your intellectual property . So he learned from the first failure of his business where he lost control .

He learned from the first failure of his business where he lost control . Once he started Dyson , he maintained 100% ownership , which is basically unheard of for a billionaire or a billion dollar company to still be owned by just one person , which is just kind of crazy .

That doesn't happen very often because most of the time these types of companies go public and so there's a lot of different owners . And so he kept control of his business . And then he also learned the lesson of making sure he was protecting his intellectual property , putting the patents in his name instead of the company's name .

And so the things I think we can learn from here is make sure you keep control of your business , that you are the you know at least having 51% of the controlling interest of the business so you can make the decisions .

Make sure your operating agreement is set up in a way that you have decision-making power and the business , and then also make sure you're protecting your intellectual property and for paying businesses , that's your trademark , and if you do invent something , make sure you patent it .

And the second lesson , I think is , you know , be different Dyson , in his branding he named the company after himself . He had a very down-to-earth approach which was very different from all the other vacuum cleaning companies and his inventions were also very unique to him .

He put in a lot of work to get those inventions dialed in and correct and and um and valuable . And so that's the second lesson . And the third lesson is the determination . Obviously this . He had a huge amount of determination 14 years , 500 , 5,127 prototypes .

He was in debt , he was potentially going to lose his house at certain points with his you know , and and put his family at risk . So he put a lot on the line and he kept going , despite all the time it took for him to get this done , which is just crazy how much determination he had to make this work .

So if you're ever struggling in your business and you're like and things aren't working , if you keep going and keep problem solving , because if you think about the way that he did his invention for the 5,127 prototypes , he does what he calls the Edison method , which Thomas Edison would try one of his inventions .

If it didn't work , he would change one thing and then try it again . Then change another thing , try it again . If it didn't work , change one thing . And so he took that same methodology and so that's why there are so many prototypes , because if it didn't work the right way , he would change one thing and then try it again .

That didn't work , change one thing and try it again . So that iteration over time

helped him dial in the thing , and so obviously you might not be inventing things like he is , but you can apply that same idea to processes , refining your processes and your service-based business and your painting business , to make sure that they're dialed in and they're producing the results that you want them to produce .

All right , overall , I definitely recommend the book Invention by James Dyson and with that I'll see you next week .