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Frank Messano's Key Moves:
Taking Away Risk for Potential Licensees

 

Frank's Story:

You finally pull in to your destination - the RV park on the coast that you found in a travel magazine. Your RV is loaded up with all the supplies for the grill. The fridge is full of beverages. You step outside to take in the first sunset of your vacation. But there's a problem: You're walled in by other massive RVs, and the sunset is nowhere to be seen.

Enter Frank Messano, ever the problem solver. He found himself in this exact situation. His solution? Go up on the roof! And once he did, he figured that he could make a business out of helping other RV owners optimize the rarefied air atop their tall rigs. So Frank, an industrial engineer, designed what amounted to a roof-top RV patio.

This was no makeshift concept, either. Frank turned his "sky deck" into a high-tech patented system that includes motorized handrails, a whirlpool, barbecue and seating for as many as 10 people.

At first, the RV-manufacturing industry wasn't receptive to making it. "They're archaic," he says. "They just don't do R&D." So Frank established his own company and made a SkyDeck prototype himself. He plied his invention at RV "aftermarket" trade shows. Dealer reps flocked to his booth. It was at one such event that Frank met Jim Teeter. Jim was a vice president at MHC , a California RV manufacturer. He was totally wowed by Frank’s SkyDeck concept, and decided to help Frank get license agreements with large RV manufacturers. The two partnered up and met with great success in establishing licensing arrangements with leading manufacturers. In 2004, revenues hit $2.4 million, and the company now employs five.

Frank and Jim's next big hits: a combination RV and boat; an RV that runs on a hybrid gas and electric powertrain; and a scheme for automating the industry's largely manual manufacturing process.

Frank's Key Move: Taking Away Risk for Potential Licensees.

As an Italian kid, Frank enjoyed it when movie Mafioso "made an offer that someone couldn't refuse," he jokes. And he was just as determined to get someone in the stodgy RV industry to say "yes" to manufacturing his SkyDeck - but without having to bust anyone's knee caps.

Frank and Jim's strategy was to make it ridiculously easy for high-volume manufacturers to agree to produce SkyDecks under license -- by anticipating and overcoming their potential objections one by one.

What if SkyDeck sold well but proved to be unsafe? "With these big players, their real issues are liability," Frank says. So Frank took his prototype on the road for a couple of years and put it into every conceivable physically stressing situation. He even drove it through 80-mile-an-hour winds on the Oregon seacoast!

"So when you finally roll it into the manufacturer, it's a little tattered, but they know that it works - and we can say, 'Do your damnedest to it' and not have to worry that it'll hold together," Frank says.

Frank and Jim also targeted marketing and sales executives at RV makers. "The top salesman is as powerful as the president of a company," he notes. "And when these guys say, 'We've got to have this,' that solves the problem of having a market." By the same token, Frank basically kept the prototype away from internal R&D folks, fearing their "not invented here" biases would work against him.

And by exposing the prototype to poking and probing at regional trade shows and at large RV dealerships, the partners also were able to build grass-roots support among dealers -- who in turn bugged manufacturers to build SkyDeck.

The piece de resistance: SkyDeck would provide its own tooling, so that a licensee would have to invest very little into rolling the first model off an assembly line.

Two major manufacturers signed up. "We had the idea, the technology, the market's enthusiasm," Frank says. "But we needed their factories -- or SkyDeck would basically be a museum piece."

Frank's Bonus Insight:

Include a female perspective. "You have to have women involved in the development of most consumer products," Frank says. "They'll tell you quickly: That stinks." For example, Frank's wife told him it would be stupid to expect women to climb up the outside of an RV to get to a SkyDeck. "They don't want to have to get their feet dirty or put makeup on. So we used an interior stairway. It's an element a guy wouldn't have thought of."