INTRO ANNOUNCER: Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and special VIP co-hosts. Join in on a great conversation today with one of the world's great influencers, as they showcase the latest tricks and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now, here's Tony D'Urso and his co-host. TONY: Welcome to The Spotlight. I'm your host, Tony D'Urso. Joining me today as my co-host is the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney. She's a fellow podcaster, author, and international speaker whose "living happy inside out" mantra is helping to advance the human race. And if you want more of Maura, check her out at MauraForYou.com. That's M-A-U-R-A, the number 4, the letter U dot com. Hello, Maura. How are you? MAURA: Tony, I am great today. Thanks for having me on as your co-host, and I cannot wait to hear from today's Spotlight celebrity. TONY: Well, good. And, you know, it's so good to have you back from your speaking engagement and vacation in Italy. Molto bene. We're all happy to have you back with us. MAURA: Grazie, grazie. I was happy to be in Italy. Happy to be home as well. Thanks, Tony. TONY: Well, good. For The Spotlight audience, you're listening to The Spotlight, where we focus on highlighting Hollywood stars, sports greats and game changers. If you're a fit, we want your interview on The Spotlight. We broadcast every Friday at 1:00 PM, so please set your calendar to hear from the world's elite. And if you missed the show, don't panic. You can catch every episode on my mobile app. Just go to TonyDUrso.com/Mobile from your smart device or cell phone. And once it loads, all the past episodes of The Spotlight will automatically appear in column one. And column two is my other weekly show highlighting elite entrepreneurs called Revenue Chat. All right, so today we set the stage for The Spotlight to chat with Shark Tank original Kevin Harrington. Now, if you're a fan of TV's Shark Tank or you ever bought a Ginsu knife or anything through a TV infomercial, then you're in for quite a treat. Kevin Harrington has been a successful entrepreneur over the last forty-plus years. He's an original shark on the ABC hit Emmy Award-winning TV show, Shark Tank. He's also the inventor of the infomercial, "As Seen on TV" pioneer, co-founder of the Electronic Retailers Association, co-founder of the Entrepreneurs Organization. And the list goes on. He's launched over twenty businesses that have grown to one hundred million in sales each, and he helped generate over five billion in sales worldwide with iconic brands and celebrities such as Jack LaLanne, Tony Little, George Foreman, the new iGrow hair restoration product on QVC. And the list goes on. Welcome to The Spotlight, Kevin. KEVIN: Tony, Maura, thanks for having me. It's a nice introduction. Thank you very much for that. It's great to be here. TONY: My pleasure. It's our honor to have you join us. I know you've been traveling quite a bit. You've been up, you're short on sleep, and you've made adjustments to your schedule to be with us today, which is so deeply appreciated. Thank you so much for taking the time to be available for us on The Spotlight. KEVIN: Hey, I'm excited. I also was just in Italy also and I was in Rome. Had a great three days there. It was fantastic. And so, love the food there and obviously the scenery, you know, so cool.

INTERVIEW – PART 1 (BACKSTORY & EARLY ENTREPRENEURSHIP) TONY: I know we can talk about that for the whole show, but I know your time is short and tight. So may I say you've done so much in what I consider a very magnificent career, forty years as a very successful entrepreneur? Kevin, could you tell us how it all started for you and include some of your accomplishments along the way, please? KEVIN: Sure. So I'll go back to the early days. I was fortunate. I was one of six kids in a Catholic Irish family out of Cincinnati, Ohio. My father was an entrepreneur and he wanted me to be an entrepreneur. And I started working in his restaurants when I was eleven years old. And he would teach me things about how the place was working and the people and the hiring and the people that were stealing. He would catch, you know, the chef was stealing steaks and the dishwasher was stealing steak knives. And so, you know, he would always bring me around and show me the ups, the downs, you know, enough to know—let's put it this way, I knew as I grew up, I didn't want to be a restaurateur. Okay. But I did start my first business when I was in high school. I started a driveway sealing business, and in college I started a heating and air conditioning company. Then I hit my curiosity overload days because my father coached me and mentored me to keep my eyes open for opportunities. So I said, "How do I see the most opportunities possible?" I became a business broker and then I had two hundred businesses for sale—pizza parlors, delicatessens, flower shops, laundromats, small manufacturing companies, import-export businesses, you name it. But I had the books and records of hundreds of businesses. I knew the percentages of rent, food costs if they were a restaurant, their employee costs, their breakup agreements to get out of leases. And it was like going to college. Having that business. And I sold literally over a thousand different businesses and companies over the next five years. And then what did I start doing? Partnering with some of these people. So this is, I call it my pre-shark days. Okay. Because I was able to sell a business, partner with a business owner, see the ups, the downs, the inner workings. It was amazing. And then one day I'm watching TV. I was doing well, I was successful, I bought a home, I subscribed to cable TV, which just started in 1984. I'm going back now thirty-plus years ago and I'm watching—I got thirty channels and I got to the Discovery Channel. There was nothing on. It was just bars up. And I called the cable company and said, "Hey, I'm not getting Discovery Channel." And they said, "Oh, Discovery is an eighteen-hour-a-day channel. You're only going to get eighteen hours of programming. Six hours a day, there's bars on the screen." And that's when the eureka moment light bulb went off in my mind. Here I am, this entrepreneur, and I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'll put something on that six hours that can make both of us some money." And I went down, met with the cable company, and we started putting products on TV. And that's back in 1984, back to the early days of what's now—this is now why they will call me the inventor of the infomercial, because nobody was doing these thirty-minute-long infomercials ever before that. There were people that had done little spots, one-minute spots, but I had six hours to fill. So I was putting these long shows on products like the FoodSaver, three-hundred-dollar food sealers, and Tony Little's Gazelle and Jack LaLanne juicer and all these kinds of things. So you couldn't—you know, if you're going to sell the juicer, you got to tell the story. You need the romance of it, the emotion, and the testimonials. And so we started doing infomercials. That company went public. It came out at a dollar a share. And we went from fifty-five million to eighty-five million to one hundred and fifty million to three hundred million to five hundred million. And then boom, the stock went to twenty dollars a share. So, you know, it's kind of my really launch into this beautiful world that I've been in now for thirty-some years. And I've had a chance to work with some of the most amazing people in the world, like Tony Little and the George Foreman's of the world, Jack LaLanne and the Kardashians, the Jenners, you name it. We did a lot of shows with a lot of people. And your program here focuses on celebrities. There's a ton of them out in Hollywood that we've been hanging with and doing some crazy stuff with. So it's always a pleasure to kind of connect with you here and get the word out about what I've done. So that's kind of my quick little overview. I'll flip it back to you guys, you know, because I know you've got a couple of questions for the listeners that are out there. TONY: Kevin, that is absolutely astounding. What a history. What a story. That's incredible. Thank you so much for giving us that whole long history here.

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (SHARK TANK) TONY: And can we get into Shark Tank for a little bit and perhaps tell us about some of your memorable moments there, please? KEVIN: Sure. So here I was, and just with the history that I just mentioned to you, I had built all these other brands. I had discovered and built Tony little and Billy Mays brand. And these guys were becoming famous and getting all these big deals and everyone was like, "Oh yeah, I've seen Tony little," but nobody knew who I was, right? So I said, "It's time for me to build my brand." So I started putting out content. And this is kind of now, if you think about the digital age, I wrote a book and the book was "Act Now: How I Turn Ideas into Million-Dollar Products." And that book—I started a radio show and then I got into TV shows and I'm getting interviewed and I did twenty-five radio shows, then fifty. Then literally I was on one hundred shows promoting my book and doing all this. But who was listening? Mark Burnett. Okay. Because I was all over the internet and he was looking for a shark to join the team. And when I got off the phone—Mark called me—I got off the phone with Mark. He wouldn't tell me what Shark Tank was. He just said, "Come on out here." And I got off, I told my wife, I said, "You won't believe it. I'm all excited. I'm going to go see Mark Burnett. He's shooting a new show called Shark Tank, and he wants me to come out and talk to him." And she says, "Kevin, I can't believe that you're thinking about this. Do you know what Mark does to those people on that Survivor Island show? How are you going to be on something called Shark Tank?" Okay. And, you know, I laughed because I didn't know what it was—he wouldn't tell me what it was. And as it turned out, it actually, you know, it's a business show, but the original pilot that we shot, there were tanks on the set with real sharks swimming in them. And there was some discussion about throwing some of the people that didn't get funded into some part of that tank, just to add some craziness to the show. But that never happened. But yeah, you know, it was a great transition for me because I had never actually been in front of the camera. I would hire Tony little or Jack LaLanne or whoever it was to do the hosting. Lots of hosts and talent. But it was kind of fun to be on a show like that. I ended up doing about one hundred and seventy-five segments on Shark Tank, which is—there's five segments to one hour. So I did thirty-five one-hour shows. And those things just keep rerunning over and over on CNBC. Now that they have a two-hour block for the last, I don't know, four years now, I guess it is. And actually, you'll now see those in syndication around the world. I think they're running in India, they're running in Australia, they're running in Mexico. I was in Brazil recently and there were two thousand people that showed up to meet me and they said, "Oh yeah, Shark Tank's all over the place down here, too." So, you know, they—it seems like everywhere I go, Shark Tank, it's become this Emmy Award-winning, you know, global business brand TV show. So it's been a great brand. I mean, I'm going on ten years now associated with the Shark Tank brand. So it's been pretty powerful and exciting. And I'll tell you, the thing that blows me away though, is I'll go to—I go to now universities, and I'm part of this—I'm kind of giving back to the entrepreneurial community. So I help entrepreneurs on the college level through a group called the CEO. It's the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization. I'm on their board of advisors, and they have two hundred and seventy-two chapters on two hundred and seventy-two campuses. And so I mentor and coach and work with these young entrepreneurs, all giving back to the entrepreneurial community and just love hanging out because this is where a lot of these new ideas are coming from. It's amazing what's out there. MAURA: That's incredible. Yes. SPONSOR BREAK – SPONSORSHIP INFO TONY: And we're going to go in just a moment. This is The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney joining me as co-host. Just ahead, we continue the chat with Shark Tank legend Kevin Harrington, who tells us about his many successful entrepreneurial activities and gives great advice for you just ahead. But first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Are you the right fit? We're looking for a few good sponsors that are the right fit for our world-class brand, The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso. Does your brand fit in with an audience that likes our interviews with Hollywood stars, sports greats, business experts, game changers, bestselling authors, world-renowned VIPs? If so, please apply and let's see how we can promote your brand to the best audience to help you grow. Email me Tony@TonyDUrso.com. That's Tony@TonyDUrso.com. And let's see how we can help each other. Thank you for letting us contribute to your success.

SPONSOR BREAK – VISION MAP Is it true that a majority of new businesses fail? Check this out. In order to have a successful growing business, there are some vital points that you must know. You must have worked them out thoroughly. They must be synchronized with each other and all employees, consultants and companies that you depend on must know these items and be in agreement with them. If you’re new business is to meet with a high percentage of success, get it free. The Vision Map: Beat the Odds for Business Success at TonyDUrso.com/Vision. Learn how to establish your vision, purpose, long-term objective and master plan, including strategic and tactical planning. Get The Vision Map: Beat the Odds for Business Success at TonyDUrso.com/Vision. V-I-S-I-O-N.

SPONSOR BREAK – FRESHLY I'm busy and so is my family. Leftover pizza and unhealthy takeout isn't really doing it for us anymore. Just ask my bathroom scale. That all changed when I found Freshly. For less than ten dollars a meal, Freshly delivered six meals a week. Always fresh, never frozen, prepared by top chefs and nutritionists using the best, freshest, gluten-free ingredients. The best part is the menu is always new and fresh, just like the food, and it only takes three minutes for me to prepare breakfast, lunch or dinner. And there's no messy cleanup and no dishes. My family loves the choices and the taste and Freshly delivers to my home and my office, so I eat healthy all day, every day. If you're tired of the same old cardboard delivery and takeout, try out Freshly.com today and save twenty dollars on your first order using coupon code VAH639 at Freshly.com. Your taste buds and your scale will thank you, so save twenty bucks today with coupon code VAH639 at Freshly.com. ANNOUNCER: You're listening to The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and a special VIP co-host. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@TonyDUrso.com. Now back to The Spotlight.

INTERVIEW – PART 3 (ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE & UNUSED SPACE) TONY: All right, we're back with Tony D'Urso on The Spotlight with the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney as co-host. Today's show is with Shark Tank legend Kevin Harrington, who astounds us with great advice for you. All right. Now back to the chat with Kevin. MAURA: Kevin, this is really good stuff. I was listening earlier when you were talking about bars on TV, when all of a sudden Discovery Channel would go out and I'm smiling to myself thinking, I bet there's some millennials out here that don't remember bars because they weren't around. But it was like blackout because there was no programming. And as you're telling your story, I'm listening to not only the fact that you find window openings of opportunity and you just use that entrepreneurial mind of yours to step in. And then I was thinking, you're right. You not only learned how to take advantage of empty space and really profit on it. But then later on, after featuring all kinds of wonderful products and celebrity types, you created another evolution by turning yourself into a celebrity. So all that said, now that you're talking to universities, what is some of the best entrepreneurial advice you're giving to some of the students today with all of that in your background? KEVIN: So I'm going to give you a couple of those little nuggets here in one second. I have to just tell you though, because you mentioned unused space. So this is one of the areas that I focus on. So think about this. You know, Amazon has crushed it by taking books and putting them online. And Uber is giving you an app that, you know, it's replacing the need maybe to call a taxi. But when it comes to lotteries, you still have to wait in line and pay in cash. And so there's a company I just joined their board, it's called Lotto Gopher and you can now buy a lottery ticket online with a credit card. And we launched in California. We're launching in twenty-two more states. We just went public. I was in Vancouver yesterday on the Business News Network talking about this. This is the CNBC of Canada. And so I love getting in on the ground floor. And what made me think of it was unused time. What we do is we go to liquor stores and convenience stores after they close. And they print the tickets out for us and then we put them into people's accounts and it's all done online. And we're using the unused time of a liquor store. Okay. Because at midnight they close and they're printing our tickets. We get eighty thousand tickets can be printed between midnight and 8:00 AM when they open again. And so this whole concept of "unused" is powerful. And this Lotto Gopher, it's a messenger service. It's kind of like the Uber Eats of lotteries because we get your ticket, we print it, we put it in your account, and it's all done without you ever having to leave your home. Because who wants to wait two hours in line when the four hundred million dollar Mega Millions jackpot comes up? Right? So these are some of the things that I just—when I talk to college entrepreneurs, I say, "Look, what you need is to be thinking differently and thinking outside the box," which a lot of them do. But how do you get stimulated to think outside the box? And this is step one. This is nugget number one. Surround yourself with the dream team—dream team of people that have been there, that have done it before. If you're twenty-one years old and you've got an idea, you don't know what to do with that idea, you don't know where to go. You don't know how to raise money, right? You've never done it before. So what do you do? You surround yourself. I have people call me—I get probably two hundred emails a day, and there are probably ten of them asking me for help. At least, I mean, more than ten are asking for help, but ten are asking for me to somehow get involved with their business, right? They want cash, they want advice. They want my Rolodex. You know, why do people go on Shark Tank? They want cash. They want the Rolodex. But sometimes they'll even say, "Look, I don't even need your cash as much as I just need your brain. I need your help." So how do you get people? And so I say to all—you know, when I'm dealing with two hundred and seventy campuses and there's hundreds per campus, there's tens of thousands of students that are entrepreneurs that need help. I can't be on everyone's dream team. I teach them how to go get dream team members and how to pick up the phone and call people in your local community. And it's, you know, there's basic places to start. You start with, you know, with your accountant, with your lawyer, with people that you—if you have a business, I have different businesses, but one of my companies, I have an accountant, I have a lawyer, I use phone services, I use fulfillment centers, I use customer service operations centers, etc. So you start with people that you know, people that you're paying money to and say, "Hey, look, I need some dream team members. Do you know anybody that can join my board of advisors, my board of directors, etc., that's got some savvy?" And I'll just go back to when it first hit me way back, I was building my business. I didn't have any finance people. I ran into a bank president that was retired. He joined my dream team. I couldn't afford to pay him. He wanted fifteen grand a month. He said, "Look, you don't have to pay me a dime. I like you, I'm going to give you some free advice. And if it leads to something that compensates me, that's great." And actually, it ended up doing exactly that. He ended up becoming my CEO, and then he brought on a legal dream team member and an operations guy and a software guy and this and that. So you've got to start somewhere, get that dream team, and you're going to have a lot more success in the process. TONY: Wow, wow, wow, wow. That's incredible. Thank you so much for all that amazing advice. And I did want to say one thing. We talked about the lotto. We talked about entrepreneurs, but I absolutely love one of the quotes from your blogs, which is, and your quote is, "The real way to make all of your wildest dreams come true is by working." That's the quote. It sounds so simple, but it's so true because too many people want to sit and get rich quick or think, "Yes, I'll win the lotto." Yes, people do win the lotto, but the way to really get what you want is to get up and go and get what you want. And that is a powerful quote, I love it. KEVIN: Yeah. And my father taught me that. He worked many—his restaurants. His last one that I worked in with him, it opened at eleven o'clock in the morning for lunch. Closed at 2:30 in the morning after the cocktail hour, late night. And he did that six days a week. He was there the entire time. So, and in addition to that, he had other ventures that he did because he always said, "Don't keep all your eggs in one basket." So, you know, when one might be hurting a little, the other one could pick up the steam there. So, you know, I tell people work—you know, if you're employed, work a good job, but get some weekend wealth by starting a part-time business on the weekend that can build to full-time so you can quit your job and become an entrepreneur. TONY: Very, very smart. And you know, I know you do so many, many things at once. And we talked about your entrepreneur help and giving back to the community. One thing I kind of wanted to focus a little bit on is one of your entrepreneur activities is the Entrepreneur Inner Circle? Could you tell us more about that, please? KEVIN: Yeah. So, you know, a lot of folks would just call and like we're talking right now, you know, about giving tips and things and they would say, "Is there any way that I could get an hour of your advice a day, a week or whatever?" And I just, you know, when you've got thousands of people asking for that and you know that you just can't do it on a personal level, I decided to start putting out, you know, some content. So right now it's in beta mode, but we've tested, you know, the Inner Circle where we put out, you know, people subscribe to a monthly program and we put out regular weekly content of information to give them on a regular basis so that, you know, people that are really smart are looking—they're begging for great ideas, great content, something to jumpstart their processes. And, you know, I have another saying. I don't know who I can attribute this one to. And maybe you've heard it and know who said it originally, but "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." And that's why I think sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone. And I call it, you know, curiosity overload. I still to this day, Tony and Maura, I go to—I go to twenty-five-plus trade shows a year. And I do this because I like to stay in touch with these industries that I'm involved with. You know, I go to the hardware show, the houseware show, the beauty show, the toy fair, the PGA golf show, the fishing shows, the digital marketing shows, electronic retailing conferences, the Consumer Electronics Show. You know, I go to these, I speak at some. There's the Super Zoo pet show coming up and most likely going to be at that one, but, you know, you can't—you're not going to make things happen by sitting at home and not getting involved with ideas and content and people. And so I like to put out content and share it with the Inner Circle, so to speak. And this, like I said, is a beta thing that we've tested. And just making some final decisions on how to roll this thing out. So, yeah, I just, I love connecting with the masses and I say when I was shooting Shark Tank, we'd only see eight people in a day. We'd sometimes film for two hours on one segment. You'd only see five minutes of it. But, you know, these things would go on because they got to call their husband and talk about the deal. And so it just didn't seem very fulfilling because it wasn't in front of a live audience. And, you know, we would film and it would air a year later sometimes. And so, you know, I said to myself, "I want to get out and really get to the masses." And that's kind of what I'm doing nowadays. I speak at many of these events. I do about two events a week. I was in Vancouver, I did an event yesterday, went on national television up in Vancouver yesterday, also spoke to a group of investment bankers yesterday. And now I'm in LA. I'm going to be speaking to six hundred real estate professionals in Irvine, California this weekend. And then I'll be in Nashville on Monday at Great Falls, Nashville, Tennessee, couple hours out of there, speaking to a couple hundred non-profit people that run non-profit organizations and how to think like an entrepreneur. So I mean, there's three events in five days. This is what I love to do. It's connecting with the world. MAURA: Wow. So incredible. You do so much and you keep track of it. You have the best time management I've seen on just getting everything done.

SPONSOR BREAK – BETTERHELP TONY: This is The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney, as co-host. Just ahead, we're going to find out more about Kevin Harrington as he pours out amazing advice after advice. Plus, he tells you how to get ahold of him. But first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Life is complicated and sometimes we all need a little help, but don't have the time for a full hour-long session or don't know who to turn to. That's where BetterHelp comes into play. With BetterHelp, I can get matched with one of over two thousand five hundred licensed and approved counselors and therapists and get help anytime, anywhere. Totally private. For a flat weekly fee starting at thirty-five dollars, I can connect with my counselor via text chat, video conference, or phone, which is great for me because I'm always on the go and I can go back to previous sessions whenever I want through my secure account from anywhere in the world. It's a great feeling to know that help is there. Affordable, private, and convenient to my schedule. We all can use a little help. Visit BetterHelp.com/VAHealth and register for free. You can try it for seven days without being charged on your credit card, and get matched with a licensed counselor, usually within twenty-four hours. Get BetterHelp today at BetterHelp.com/VAHealth. That's BetterHelp.com/VAHealth. ANNOUNCER: You're listening to The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and a special VIP co-host. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@TonyDUrso.com. Now back to The Spotlight.

INTERVIEW – PART 4 (FAILURE, FEAR & SUCCESS) TONY: All right, we're back with Tony D'Urso on The Spotlight with the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney, as co-host. Today's show is with Shark Tank legend Kevin Harrington, and he continues to give us inspiration and great insights. All right. Back to the chat with Kevin. MAURA: Yeah, Kevin. I'm listening. You don't even have to tell people all that you do because the grit that you were brought up with, with your dad, it just comes right through in every single story you do. You definitely live out your calling. I want to go back to one thing that I bet our listeners want to hear from you. They'll see you as this complete success, as if everything you've ever touched has turned to gold. And oftentimes when people see somebody in your stature, they'll think, "Oh, but not me." What can you say to people out there who are afraid of doing something because they're afraid that I might fail and therefore it's do or die? What do you want to say to these people? KEVIN: Great question. I appreciate it because, you know, when I—it's funny because I have a little sizzle reel that I play. It's 90 seconds and it only has my successes. Okay. There's nothing in there—I don't talk about in 90 seconds. You got to do it quick. I don't talk about failures in that piece. Right. But then when I get the chance to talk to the entrepreneurs, I say, "And guess what? For every one of those successes, there was two to three failures." And then I talk about them and I talk about what I learned from those failures. And so I'm proud to say that out of the five hundred products that I've done, three hundred and fifty of them were bombs. And of the one hundred and fifty that worked, we did very well. But, you know, in the early days, my son, who's twenty-nine, he's been with me about eight years. He had a problem when he first came in because he would get so excited about something and it was his project and he would run it and we would write the script and produce the show. And it's three or four months, hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would go up and it would bomb, and he would be like, "I just can't believe it. I don't understand why. What happened? What's wrong? Why are we in this business?" And, you know, I'm like, "Hey, let's tweak it. Let's try it again. We'll get up, dust ourselves off. If we can't make it work, we got to move on to the next one." Because I say you have to fail fast and fail cheap. And anymore today, you know, I don't spend two hundred grand. We test in digital and so I can actually fail now for like twenty-five grand instead of two hundred thousand. So if I can fail three times in a row for twenty-five thousand and lose seventy-five grand and then hit a twenty million dollar success that's going to make two million dollars or a one hundred million dollar success that might make ten or fifteen million dollars. What's so bad about that model? So that's what I say to the entrepreneurs. You've got to understand that success is being able to deal with failure. In fact, Winston Churchill's got a great line—successful people know that you go from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm. Okay, so that is the true definition of somebody that is successful is to be able to deal with those failures and not lose your enthusiasm. And so I just don't let it affect me anymore. And it's part of trying and trying to make it happen. So once you get over the fact that you've failed and you hit something and you hit that bump in the road and you can get up, dust yourself off and go back and do it again, once you can figure that out, your mindset is a lot better. And then do an analysis of what did you learn from that failure? What could you have done? What will you do the next time? Because I do say sometimes we learn as much, if not more from the failures than we do out of the successes. TONY: That's incredible. Incredible. Thank you on that. And you know, you are on top of the world, Kevin. You can write your ticket for just about anything you want. And I like to go to the big, big picture. You help so many entrepreneurs. You do so much with businesses. But the big broad—what I want to talk about is your purpose. What drives you? What's your motivation? Please? KEVIN: Well, you know, I think I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I did heating and air conditioning and business brokerage, and then at the end of that thirty-year run when I was in my late twenties, I got into this "As Seen on TV" business and I figured out what I want to do. Then I spent the next thirty years doing it. And that's my last thirty years. I've just had my sixtieth birthday recently this year. And so I said, "Now I've done what I want to do and I'm spending the next thirty years of my life teaching others what they can do." And I think Zig Ziglar had a great saying. He said, "If you want to get what you want out of life, help everybody else get what they want." And so that's my next thirty years. And this is what I'm coaching these college entrepreneurs. And, by the way, it's fun and it's good doing it, but, you know, I'm not going to just say there's no benefit because obviously what ends up happening is along the way, when you're helping people, they come back and they want you to join them in some fashion or there may be some equity play somewhere in some of these deals. So, you know, I don't start out in a fashion of "I've got to have equity in this." I start out by saying, "Let me help you." But then sometimes it comes back around and I end up getting involved. So this is why I'm now involved in about two dozen companies and the one thing I don't want to be is the CEO of any company anymore. So I don't run any companies. I just consult, advise, sit on the board, sit on the advisory board. And it's a really nice situation. Today I had a five-hour board call. And it's not without its time and commitments. But, you know, this is what I love to do. And this was a public company. I got a chance to put a couple of nuggets in there. And, you know, it's my next thirty years of my life is helping others do what they want to do. TONY: Wow. Incredible. Thank you. Maura.

INTERVIEW – PART 5 (LEGACY & SONS) MAURA: You know, Kevin, I know that you are short on time today. I don't want you to go without answering this one question. I love this whole idea of where you are right now and that enthusiasm and that energy keeps coming through. Talk a little bit about your legacy and what you're doing with your sons, because I think there's a lot of younger listeners that would love to hear that this Harrington legacy is continuing. And then after that, maybe we could work on telling people where they could find you. Okay. KEVIN: Sure. My oldest boy has been with me now—he graduated Penn State, went to four years of college in business and finance and he got a job for Sprint for a year because I wanted him to understand the world and I didn't want him coming right into the family business. So he did that and then applied for a job inside one of the companies. And he's been with me now for about eight years. But what I do now is—so like right now, I join these boards and these are personal deals that I do, but I give—I bring my son into it and I give him a little of the equity. And so I say, you know, I may give him one hundred thousand shares, ten thousand shares, fifty thousand shares, whatever it might be in this public company. So he's building a little portfolio, he's building his future, but he also gets to see the ups and the downs of this now. And, you know, we've had some that have gone from ten cents to three dollars and from one dollar to twenty dollars. And he's seen some amazing runs on some and then he's seen others go from fifty cents to ten cents. And what's happening and why are these things happening? And then I also, you know, when I bring him into these deals because, you know, when I give the stock to him, he becomes a shareholder. He also becomes part of my team to help me execute on providing services to these companies. So it isn't just a gift. He's also obligated to provide some services because I joined to provide services and I'm providing advisory services while he's in the digital space with me. So he provides digital services as part of our services. So I bring not only my Rolodex, but my family Rolodex, my oldest boy and now my youngest boy is in the production side of the business. So, yeah, I think what's important here is that they get a chance to understand, you know, it's not easy starting a business and growing it and doing it all yourself. But when you can get involved in dozens of other companies simultaneously, and this is now what I'm allowing my sons to do, is they get a chance to understand the inner workings of many different kinds of businesses, and they get to see—I mean, look, at any one time when you're involved with two dozen businesses, there's three or four of them that are in crisis mode and can't make payroll. They got this problem, they're getting sued. They got that. You know, the learning curves of all of these situations are pretty amazing. And, you know, we started the morning off here. Tony's like, "Hey, it's the greatest day of his life." And I wake up every morning feeling the same thing. Even though I know that I'm going to have two guys calling me and tell me that they're not going to make payroll if I don't loan them some money. Okay. And it's like, "Well, guess what? You should have called me before the day before you didn't make payroll. Because the answer is no. That's not how it operates around here. You gotta have a plan of action. And it isn't the day before that I need to hear this." You know, these are the learning curves that entrepreneurs go through. And I bring my family along for the ride so that they can understand the fun and the excitement that goes along with building businesses. And by the way, it's not always so fun. But, you know, even the downsides are learning curves, as we've discussed. So, you know, at the end of the day, I don't like to see sometimes some of them end up just not making it. And, you know, fortunately I haven't had a lot of those. But there's been a few. And that's just part of business. You know, not everybody's going to get the home run. Sometimes you get up to the plate and you strike out. And that's life and that's business. And that's the legacy I want to leave for my kids is to understand how that all works and see it happening on a day-to-day basis with dozens of companies. It's giving them a chance to kind of get that bird's-eye view on a day-to-day basis. MAURA: I love it. Exceptional indeed. Thank you for that.

OUTRO & CONTACT INFO TONY: This is The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney, as co-host. Just ahead, Kevin shares more insights and tells you how to reach him. But first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. [Sponsor breaks omitted for brevity] TONY: All right, we're back with Tony D'Urso on The Spotlight with the Ambassador of Happiness, Maura Sweeney, as co-host. Today's show is with Shark Tank legend Kevin Harrington. All right. And now back to the chat. MAURA: Oh, I just wanted, Kevin, I really want to thank you for what you've shared with our audience today, because I think there's a lot of people pie in the sky. Everything is great. I'm going to be like a Kevin Harrington. Thank you for your willingness to open up and really give some behind-the-scenes stories, because that is the reality of the good, the bad and the ugly of doing all that you do. And you really don't get to slay the giants until you're willing to get into the ring and do it multiple times. So that was really helpful, I'm sure, for more than one listener. And then I was just going to say beyond this, would you kindly let our active audience know how they can connect with you, how they can reach out to you? KEVIN: Yeah, sure. Thank you. And it's been a pleasure being here today, guys. Thank you. I think we had some great questions. And hopefully our audience listening has had a little inside look at what I do day to day. And if they want to reach me, have a question or looking for help, they're trying to raise some capital, looking for a dream team member, I'm Kevin@KevinHarrington.TV is an email they can reach out to or they can just go to my website, which is KevinHarrington.TV. And there's ways to leave messages there too. So, you know, there's some downloads you can get on my website. And I pride myself in trying to get back to people within forty-eight hours because it depends on where I'm traveling, what I'm doing. But, you know, I'm pretty good at responding back to emails and such. So hope anybody out there that needs a little boost, I'm looking forward to hearing from them. TONY: That's amazing. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing your email on The Spotlight. Do you realize Kevin Harrington just gave you okay to send him an email? So please be respectful. No spam. He's very serious. He runs very short on sleep. But if you have something important, please reach out to him. He has just opened up his doors. That is incredible. Thank you so much for that, Kevin. KEVIN: Well thanks guys, I appreciate it, Maura. Great to be here today. And Tony, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Take care guys. TONY: All right. Thanks, Kevin. MAURA: All right. Thank you again, Kevin. Such a great interview with Shark Tank original, Kevin Harrington. Thank you very much. I love it. TONY: Thank you Kevin. Thank you, Maura, this is astounding. Great advice. And this also comes from someone who's interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs and successful people. This is a truly stellar interview. Exceptional. And Maura, I want to thank you for being such a great co-host. Your zeal, your zest for life is infectious, and we look forward to your smiles again on another episode of The Spotlight. Thanks so much, Tony, and thank you, Kevin. This has been an awful lot of fun. Have a great afternoon. KEVIN: Thank you guys. You too. Really a pleasure to be here today. Take care. Have a good one. TONY: Thank you. Thank you Kevin. To our Spotlight audience, thanks again. It's our honor to have you listen. All right. Keep your focus on success and we'll see you next on The Spotlight. ANNOUNCER: We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of The Spotlight with Tony D'Urso and his special VIP co-host. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, 1:00 PM Pacific Time on the Voice America Influencers Channel. Now enjoy the weekend.