It was a perfect Los Angeles night in early June when the crunch-time pace of the Ten Thirty One Team started to escalate. The amount of banter I heard over the walkie-talkies was getting so excessive that the crew’s frustration of not being able to get their sentences out was also escalating. A line of almost a thousand people stood waiting, with sleeping bags under their arms and packed coolers by their feet. As I walked toward the gates to open up camp, I jumped up on the back of a golf cart to gaze out at what looked like a massive crowd of people who had come to spend twelve hours of what we promised to be sheer terror. This was our most extreme attraction. An attraction that promised a level of interaction that would leave campers vulnerable to being bagged, caged, tied up, and more.
Who would want that? Plenty of people.
“Welcome to the very first Great Horror Campout, campers,” I exuberantly announced through the megaphone. Screams and cheers, as if this crowd of people had just won the lottery, came right back at me. “Camp is open.”
As the gates were unlocked the campers funneled their way inside and checked in to their assigned tents, setting up their home away from home for the long, dark night ahead of them. From there, it was a waiting game until it became completely dark. Nothing would start until then. Finally, over the camp loudspeaker came: “Well, howdy do, Camp Creepers. This is your friendly camp headmaster requesting the honor of your presence at the base camp flagpole for mandatory camp orientation. That means right the fuck now.”
As if the headmaster had a leash on their necks, the mob of campers happily obeyed and marched to base camp. The headmaster was salty, vile, and offensive, from the way he looked—sporting his perfectly tailored tuxedo and shined shoes with a skinned and charred face—to the F bombs and off-color jokes coming out of his mouth. He made it clear there was no room to not listen to him. “The first rule of camp is that I can change the rules at any time for any reason and without notice,” he said, letting campers know he was in charge. And finally, thirty minutes after he started his insanely entertaining and colorful orientation, with a David Lee Roth high kick to the air, he cocked his head back and held the microphone over his mouth as he screamed, “The Hell Hunt starts NOWWWWW!”
A legion of campers jumped to their feet and went running into the dark to start what was going to be the game that would leave a few lucky ones crowned Hellmasters in the morning. They would dive for ribs in cadaver bodies, clip fingers off live characters, get kidnapped in vans, find themselves caged, and everything else a reasonable person would be terrified of. But these people paid for it.
The empire was born.
The Ready, Fire, Aim philosophy is one that dictates immediate action. It means you must take that shot instead of thinking yourself into inaction. It means that you should take many shots before someone else even has their gun out of their holster. Once an idea has grabbed you and your belief, it’s out in the world and, if you don’t capture it, someone else will. This philosophy is about jumping and jumping first. It’s not void of direction or aiming. It’s about starting and aiming as you go . . . It’s about guts.
I wanted to create these very immersive worlds around the horror genre because I wanted more of it and loved it and was already involved with it as my hobby. There was nothing like it in Los Angeles at the time, so I decided to start “firing.” This book is a detailed view of my thought processes, lessons why they worked, and why you can do it too.
As an adult I’ve really started to recognize the impact my mother’s choices regarding her own life have had on me. As a kid I’d see her making bold move after bold move even when the choice would throw her into the abyss of uncertainty and discord. I’ll get more specific later, but the deeper I go into my reflection of where the “Ready, Fire, Aim” in me actually started, the more acute the consciousness becomes that growing up watching that kind of tenacious bravery was a big part of the foundation.
That realization has come to me many times, but never more loudly than on the day I appeared on Shark Tank and secured the largest investment in the history of the show.
The LARGEST investment in the history of the show.
It is already an extraordinary experience to get on that show, and an even more extraordinary experience to secure an investment from one of the elite “sharks.” But this was the largest investment ever given from the most elite, most influential, and most successful shark on the show. Why? Was I lucky?
No! I “chose” it.
Even in the confines of an extraordinary experience, you can choose to act “commonly.” It is more usual for aspiring entrepreneurs to appear on Shark Tank and ask for 250K, 90K, or 175K in exchange for significant percentages of their business. It is the “common” behavior of entrepreneurs on the show. And this by no means minimizes the boldness of those entrepreneurs, as the choice to even appear on the show is a bold one. It’s an intimidating and highly vulnerable place to position yourself, and one that scares many entrepreneurs away.
But my proposition is to be bold to the boldest end of the spectrum. Leave nothing on the field; leave nothing on the table. Don’t be reasonable . . . don’t be rational. What great invention or societal change ever came from being reasonable?
Shark Tank had reached out to me a year or so before I appeared on the show, and I declined the opportunity. Choice. I declined because I was not interested in selling equity in my company, Ten Thirty One Productions. We were growing on our own and I didn’t think we needed it.
Ten Thirty One Productions is an entertainment company that creates, owns, and produces live productions in the horror space. We own the most popular Halloween attraction in the country, among other events and live entertainment brands.
A year or so later, the producers of the show again called me to appear. They wanted to do a Halloween episode and feature a company that could bring a more theatrical flair to the season. I recognized that being on the show would be an incredible promotional platform for my company as we were planning our expansion into other markets and could really use the spotlight that Shark Tank would cast on us.
I still didn’t want to sell a piece of my company, but I agreed to go on the show if they were amenable to my investment price tag being much larger than any amount that had ever been asked for in the past. It was the only way I could go on the show. I didn’t expect any of the sharks to take the deal based on the high investment I named, but I had to make sure that, on the slim chance somebody did, I could live with it.
So . . . two million dollars it was! And only for a 10 percent equity stake in the company.
I completely expected the reception to my two-million-dollar ask to be less than warm. I expected to be held to the fire; I expected to be laughed off the show. I didn’t care. I was going to meet my moment, be bold, and choose a path that would take me only where I wanted to go.
And, as it so happens, Mark Cuban lives boldly too. After a bit of negotiation, he took the deal, and to my sincere shock, became my business partner that day, making us the biggest deal in the history of the show.
I didn’t follow the usual behavior of other entrepreneurs on the show to navigate my choices. I chose to build my story the only way I wanted it to start. There is a whole second part to the Shark Tank experience that we’ll talk about later in the book, which pertains to preparing yourself to be successful in that type of situation, and business in general. But the first part of your success story is going to be rooted in the choices you make, and it is critical that you don’t look to the choices of the general population to navigate. Look to the innovators, the 0.1 percent, the rule makers. Don’t aim to copy them, but choose to be as bold or, better yet, bolder.
Have the audacity to choose to be even more successful than the most successful person you see. Then, activate and activate hard.
You’ve made the decision to “choose” boldly and put yourself on your path. And it has to be a way of life, not a one-off or something that you compartmentalize. This is the marathon, the long road trip that will inevitably be a very intense, emotional, and scary route.
Think of it like a diet. When people go “on a diet,” the inference is that they will go “off of it” at some point . . . and, thus, gain the weight back or go out of shape again. It is those who change their diet or lifestyle who stay healthy and fit. And again, if we look at these percentages, they follow the same curve. The vast majority of Americans are out of shape, overweight, or unhealthy. They are “common,” and those who choose to take a more bold path and stay healthy and fit are sadly “uncommon,” or the 10 percent.
You are making a commitment to create greatness at all cost.
What’s next?
No choice can start to live, breathe, and become a tangible accomplishment without arguably the most important ingredient to a meaningful existence.
You must take action; you must activate.
I cannot stress this point enough other than to have named this book, “Activate,” which was, candidly, what I wanted to call it.
A choice without activation is a dream that is never realized. An idea without activation is a thought that never comes to life. A life without activation is a hamster wheel.