Making Something From Nothing: Justin Ross Of Momentum Management On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
I’ve always said you just need to be nice. If everybody would just be nice, then that not only helps you, but it will help others as well. It makes people feel good when people are kind, and it brings good karma and personal fulfillment in the long run.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Justin Ross.
Justin Ross is chairman of the board of Momentum Management LLC. Ross founded Momentum in 2005 bringing 20 years of financial industry leadership, business development expertise and entrepreneurial management experience to his role in the company.
Ross manages corporate development and direction as well as corporate strategy at Momentum. In his role, Ross focuses on advancing the company’s efforts in product development, partnerships and corporate alliances, licensing deals, marketing channels, and sales and support. He is responsible for the company’s global operations as well as development in marketing and innovation.
Since Ross’ founding of Momentum Management LLC, the privately held company has generated positive profits — from its first year in operations in 2005 to today — and continues to realize consistently progressive growth. With his direction, the company’s products, under the brand names Screaming O® and Dynamo Delay®, have experienced increasing sales in the United States and in more than 50 other countries. The company has enjoyed distribution via some of the most respected online retailers including CVS.com, Rite Aid.com and Target.com.
Ross’ skillful guidance has led the company to become the foremost leader in the rapidly growing field of sexual health and well-being — annually a $15 billion industry. Momentum’s success in the space has allowed its partners to enjoy similar achievements in the industry since Ross introduced them to it more than a decade ago. Ross has maintained those partnerships that continue to realize growth globally.
Ross has built a reputation for developing trusted products that have become staples in the sexual health and well-being category. His focus on quality products at an affordable price has helped the company’s product lines enjoy worldwide, award-winning success. In Momentum’s 15 years in business — or 180 months — the company has enjoyed profitability in 177 months and counting, an unprecedented track record in the industry.
Ross is a respected sexual health and well-being corporate leader, representing the most valued and trusted brands in the industry. Key to the company’s success, Ross believes, is the company’s employees, many of whom have been on the job for 10+ years.
Ross’ understanding of the sexual health and well-being space along with his financial expertise have enabled Momentum Management to become one of the industry’s most respected companies. With the ability to scale rapidly, Ross has positioned Momentum for even greater success at a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth. The sexual health and well-being category trend is solidly evidenced by an increasingly higher consumer demand for quality product choices.
Justin Ross holds an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC) where he received the Dean’s Fellow Award. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Irvine. His financial career included positions at investment bank Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, CA, and Millennium Partners in New York City.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I was born in Los Angeles and lived there for the first seven years of my life. We moved to Beverly Hills after my dad, who is an attorney, won a landmark case against the NBA which overturned a long-standing ruling. This was a huge boost to his career and opened the door to signing a lot of NBA and NFL players as clients, so our lives changed a lot.
My parents are both from New York and remain happily married to this day. I have two older sisters and a younger brother — both of my sisters are attorneys now, and my brother is a filmmaker — and we had a very nice upbringing in a privileged area. I was a standout athlete, both as a swimmer and as a basketball player, and went on to play college basketball at UC Irvine while double-majoring in Economics and Psychology.
After graduation, I signed a deal to play basketball for a pro team in Italy for a little while. Once my contract ended, I returned to the United States and landed an internship with CBS casting. I worked in a few different positions for some pretty big casting directors on TV shows and films, and also worked as an assistant film editor with an award-winning director. But I ultimately decided to exit the entertainment industry and change course completely. I was hired on by Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach as a junior investment banker and eventually decided to go back to Business School at USC, where I received my MBA. Shortly thereafter, I moved to New York and spent a brief stint working for Millennium Partners, which is an investment management firm.
I stopped working for a short time after that until I became friends with the owners of a professional soccer team in the UK called Newcastle United. I began working for them, and they sent me to Brazil to handle their direct foreign investments in other soccer teams, both small and large. After about six months of doing that, I came back to the United States with all these ideas in my head about different businesses I wanted to start. Screaming O was one of them, and that’s the one that stuck.
I started Screaming O in my sister’s garage in Century City, and we soon grew to the point where we needed a storage facility to handle the inventory for all our orders. One storage facility eventually turned into eight storage facilities, and now here we are, 18 years later, with a 25,000 square foot warehouse and office space in Torrance.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One quote that I’ve always lived by is, “In the end, it will all be OK, and if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.” Humans and animals are programmed to solve problems, which is good because there will always be some sort of problem or issue that you’ll need to tackle in your life. Everybody has them, so we just need to take it one day at a time and know that it’s not that big of a deal. We’re all going to end up in the same place one day, and it gives me peace of mind knowing that we’re here for a good time and a short time. So, don’t sweat the small stuff too much!
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
During my first year in business school at USC, I was having a really tough time. I was 35 pounds overweight, stressed out, and thinking about dropping out of college. Then a friend of mine gave me some Tony Robbins CDs, and they really sparked a flame inside me to do well. Once I started practicing the exercises and techniques from his teachings, I lost the extra weight and started getting top grades in school. I did so well, in fact, that I became a Dean’s Fellow Award recipient, which led to me getting half of my scholarship money back from USC. So I credit Tony Robbins (coupled with a song by Eminem, “Lose Yourself”) with inspiring me to turn the ship around and start pointing things in the right direction.
Ok, super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
Well, thanks to the Internet, everybody has the resources available right at their fingertips to research everything they need to know about a particular product or industry. Of course, researching and doing your homework is one thing, but implementing an idea is something entirely different. There are a lot of different components that you have to keep track of, like market size, doing a competitor analysis to see who your competitors in a particular market are, what the barriers are in that field, and so on. But I think one thing that is really useful is something called a feasibility analysis, which basically takes a lot of the components of an idea and allows you to see how realistic that idea is.
When I started, I had several ideas for different businesses I might want to pursue: one was for a water company, one was for a surfboard company, one was for a stone company, and another was for a furniture company. Ultimately, the idea to focus on adult toys proved the most interesting to me because the barriers to entry there were relatively low compared to the other products or markets I was thinking about. I started checking off the boxes on what the competitive landscape looked like and how much money I needed to get started, and the rest is history.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
That’s the great thing about living in this digital age of ours — fortunately, almost all the information you could ever need to know about existing products or markets is widely available on the internet. You just have to get out there, start Googling all the topics that are related to your idea, and find the info that’s relevant to you!
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
First, you need to identify the product or service that you want to start selling. Then, you’ll want to identify who the customers are in that market, who you would be selling those products or services to, and what the value would be.
In terms of filing patents or trademarks, there are a lot of attorneys that are easily accessible and who will handle that part for you; that’s just a cost service at that point. There are two types of patents: a utility patent and a design patent. At Screaming O, we have several utility patents that cover the utility of our product. It’s a lot more all-encompassing than a design patent because a design can be changed. Even though we have patented several trademarks, we often have to defend them when encroached upon.
As far as finding the right manufacturer goes, again, the Internet is a very valuable resource that allows you to buy pretty much anything from anyone. You can also hire an audit company that will go out and do a physical audit of a manufacturing plant or factory, and that’s something I would probably recommend doing before you send off your check.
Trade shows are probably the most valuable way that we got customers and resellers initially, but obviously, pursuing the end consumer requires a different tactic. We go after the consumer through distribution channels and using the Internet to get customers or end-users. In-store promotions can also be an effective marketing tool.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Plan to play long-term games with long-term people
- Don’t engage with cynics or pessimists; their beliefs are self-fulfilling
- Learn how to sell and how to build
- Hold yourself and others accountable
- Plan for success, and if you believe in something strong enough, you don’t quit
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
I think I’ll go back to that feasibility analysis…
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I think that if it’s a startup and it’s your baby, then you’re going to have to do it on your own. Consultants can only do so much, and you’re still going to end up having to do the bulk of the work anyway, so you might as well do the homework and the leg work on your own. With all the free resources we have today, you can redirect those dollars that you would have spent on consultants towards all of the other things you’ll need for a start-up. Also, I wouldn’t take any seed money — especially early on — because they’ll end up taking a huge chunk of the business.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
That’s the million-dollar question! Since I came from the investment banking world, I would only recommend that you take on private equity or outside capital if it’s strategic and if it will help you grow. If you can grow organically on your own without taking the money, I recommend that you do that. Later, if you show a big ramp up and you can get a strategic partner to come in, then by all means, that’s the right move to step up to the next level.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Introducing products that society wanted but didn’t really know how to get, enhancing intimacy, and bringing couples together in a fun and friendly way. Also, I think Screaming O has helped to make the world a better place because not only have we built a great team that sells great products, but we also have a wonderful group of people that continue to get out there and spread the word that sexuality is OK — that it’s fun and healthy.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’ve always said you just need to be nice. If everybody would just be nice, then that not only helps you, but it will help others as well. It makes people feel good when people are kind, and it brings good karma and personal fulfillment in the long run.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I’d like to see Tony Robbins and thank him for making a difference in my life. The different exercises that he shared and the energy in his voice certainly turned me around and made me a better student and a better person than I was before.
Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!
