The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Osher: Initiating a company sale yields one-tenth of buyer-initiated prices
“Because anytime you try to sell something, you get about one-tenth of what you get when they want to buy you.”
Osher: Spinbrush was the highest-testing consumer product in P&G history
“And it turned out, and we didn't know this till later, that it was the highest testing product they ever did in the history of Procter & Gamble with consumers.”
Osher: Offered $10M to buy back Spinbrush; P&G leveraged for $75M
“I said, I would, but I'm not willing to pay much money. I'll give you ten million dollars for the whole thing, but I'll close next week. You know, everything else was, they were always waiting six months, you know, and then there would be due diligence. I said…”
Osher: Church & Dwight did a 'terrible job' managing Spinbrush
“But Church and Dwight did a, has done, and did, and has still done a terrible job. They didn't really do anything with it, and everyone else is in it, so when you go to the store, there's 15 different variations of spin brush on the shelves now.”
Osher: Set prices by market willingness to pay, not wholesale cost
“The reason I bring it up is it was a great lesson that I used for the rest of my whole business career, and that is that you set your price on what the market will pay, what's the optimum price for a market, as opposed to what you paid for it.”
Osher: Entrepreneurial confidence comes from small early wins
“It almost would seem as if I'm a courageous person because I'm so willing to open businesses and this and that, and it really does come back to the value of starting my first business at five years old and having businesses successful. All through high school,…”
Osher: Overhead baby toy arches didn't exist before his Rainbow Toy Bar
“Every, every baby in the world uses some form of this now, but back then it did not exist.”
Osher: Most successful founders experience 'entrepreneurial terror'
“And this is it's called entrepreneurial terror, and I think most successful ones included have gone through this at some point, because the buck completely stops with you.”
Osher: Major toy acquirers buy entire product categories, not single products
“If I'm ever going to sell this company, I'm going to need a category that Hasbro or Mattel or one of these companies need because they buy categories. That's what they don't need a product unless it's a lifelong product. They need a category.”
Osher: Spinbrush sold seven units per store daily during Meijer pilot
“We'd put them out, and we were selling seven a day per store, which was just in a different realm of any other toothbrush in the world.”
Osher: Spinbrush scrapped 400K defective units and raised $500K for redesign
“And we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse, and I had to make a decision. This is a consumable product, and this is potentially so big, and if I continue to sell this, it will die. And I went back to my partners in it, my investors, and I said, I'm gonna scra…”
Osher: Spinbrush drove $21M profit on $44M revenue in first 8 months
“And in the first year, we did forty four million with a twenty one million dollar profit. ... It wasn't even a full year. It was probably closer to eight months. And as I said, we made a twenty one million dollar profit.”
Osher: Spinbrush bought 1M batteries daily, trailing only Walmart
“We were buying close to a million batteries from EverReady. A day. We were second only to Walmart and battery purchases at the time.”
Osher: P&G forecasted $120M in Spinbrush sales but cleared $300M
“So they had told their board that they thought they could do as much as a 110 or a hundred twenty million dollars with this product. And I think after a year, they were doing over 300. A million with the product”
Osher: Arcade Basketball drove $6M in sales and $1.5M profit
“So our budget, our next year, we got this chance, and everyone bought arcade basketball, we did six million dollars, and made a million and a half dollar profit.”
Osher: Cap Toys generated $40M to $50M from interactive candy
“And we were probably in the interactive candy back then, we're probably doing 40, fifty million dollars of the candy.”
Osher: Scale reduced novelty battery costs to 12 cents per unit
“The reality is, is that we ended up buying such large quantities of little motors at batteries and gears Where we're buying in the millions of batteries from EverReady alkaline batteries, where we're paying 12 cents a battery rather than 78 cents or 39 cents f…”
Osher: Spinbrush targeted the manual toothbrush market, not high-end electrics
“We really never considered, or worried about, or competed with the high end, which was, some of them were 50 bucks, and we basically saw the manual market. That's where the numbers were.”
Osher: Oral-B's top manual toothbrush sold just 12 units per store weekly
“Oral-B was selling the best-selling toothbrush in the world at the time was their cross-section, which was three 95 expensive toothbrush manual, and they were selling 12 a week per store.”
Osher: P&G divested Spinbrush to clear Gillette antitrust hurdles
“Well, what happened is they, three years into it, they were trying to buy Gillette, and Gillette owned Oral-B and Braun. And the deal was being held up because the tooth, the oral B and the spin brush were a monopoly. It was well over 50% of all the toothbrush…”
Osher: Plumbers outearned other trades in his Gurdjieff commune
“Even when I was a plumber in this Gurdjieff group, I was rich, you know, within the context of my life. I, you know, I had a house and a car and a wife, and I made much more money than everyone else in the group because I was in a business that you could charg…”