Our Shark Tank Experience

Cold audition

It was some time before Christmas of 2014 when Erik (Hopperstad, PRx Performance President) called to tell me that Shark Tank auditions were going to be in Florida the day before we were supposed to be there for a conference. He asked me what I thought and I was already on the airline’s website to change our tickets!

We arrived for auditions in January of 2015 not knowing what to expect. We were one of over 700 other hopefuls that showed up that day. The producers told us it was going to be an easy in-and-out and not to expect any kind of follow-up. We’d have one minute to deliver our pitch and make it stick!

Well, we apparently made an impression because we heard back within a couple of weeks. We were asked to make an audition tape. We had a blast filming!

Erik Hopperstad, President and Brian Brasch, CEO filming their audition tape

For our audition, we wanted to tell the story of where and why our products were created. A popular maker of CrossFit equipment was urging people to turn their garage into a gym. Well, that concept doesn't work for us in North Dakota so we came up with a line of products that fold up out of the way when not in use...thereby transforming your garage into a gym AND still allowing you to park your car in there. #ownthewall

That worked. We had a film date! Oh wow, we had a film date!

No idea what to expect

As a small startup, the amount of preparation you have to do to get ready to go in the ‘Tank’ is crazy intense. It’s like pitching to a venture capitalist…except instead of culling your pitch to one VC, you have to prepare to go in front of five! And each of the five has different things they look for when sizing up a possible investment. So we tried to prepare ourselves for any one of the curveballs they could throw at us.

The next few months were spent figuring out our pitch, working with the ABC team, and then finally practicing practicing practicing our intro to the Sharks. We can’t believe we were able to answer their questions with any semblance of coherency. Just shows what the brain can do under such intense pressure!

That pesky non-disclosure agreement

Erik Hopperstad, President and Brian Brasch, CEO filming Shark Tank

So we filmed in June of 2015 and were under an extremely stringent non-disclosure agreement. We were allowed to share with our spouses and that was it. Here you’ve got the best news of your life and you can’t tell anyone! We couldn’t even share that we’d filmed, much less that we’d gotten a deal.

Fast-forward to February – what a ride!

We got official word in January that our episode was going to air, but didn’t get an actual air date. We heard in early February that we’d be airing on the 26^th and could start actually telling people about two weeks prior to our episode airing. That’s when things really started to kick in to high speed! We had been talking about doing a website re-design and decided we really wanted to put our best foot forward for the influx of traffic we’d see. And then inventory. How do you prepare for something on this scale?!? We felt like we were in pretty good shape until ABC called us about noon on Thursday, February 18^th to let us know our episode had gotten bumped up and would be airing on Sunday, February 21^st instead of the original February 26^th date.

So yeah. We were still days away from putting the new website live, we hadn't contacted any press yet, we had to redo all our social posts with new dates, and we had planned to have inventory come in the week of the show, not prior. I think we all had our mini-meltdowns when we heard the news and then just got to work.

We quickly re-scheduled the viewing party we had just gotten lined up, put the website redesign on steroids, contacted our vendors to get our materials here as fast as possible, and basically just tried to keep our heads above water for the next week or so!

The Viewing Party

We invited friends and family out to a local brewing company (thanks Drekker!) to join us to watch the live airing of our episode. What an amazing and fun night! It was wonderful to be surrounded by so much love and support for the big reveal. Everyone cheered when we got our deal and cheered even louder when we put up this photo that Kevin O'Leary's (our shark investor) publicist sent us!

A buffed up Kevin O'Leary

The next chapter

After the episode aired, Kevin filmed a special video to congratulate us on our deal and with the message, 'go make me some money!' So our plans going forward are to do just that. We've got several products in the research and development pipeline and are excited to have additional resources to devote to that. Spoiler: Watch for our kickstarter coming soon for a product we know is going to be our most popular yet!