Overcoming Failure to Find Success with Tim Shaffer

Perseverance and staying true to core values are essential elements for any business to become successful. But along the way, difficult obstacles and failures are unavoidable. How can we turn these challenges into stepping stones for growth and improvement? In this episode, I have Tim Shaffer, Co-Founder and CEO of SearchTires. We discuss the importance of supporting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the model he created to help consumers find the best local prices on car tires. Tim shares how he learned from early mistakes to build a simple, user-friendly platform that solves a real consumer need. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Overcoming Failure to Find Success with Tim Shaffer Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes in the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the things I’ve alluded to in some of my past episodes is this idea of four barriers to success and when I talk about these four barriers, there’s other versions of it, I generally think of awareness, action, persistence, and then, of course, dealing with some kind of a setback or dealing with some kind of a failure often, people oftentimes have to readjust. My guest today is Tim Shaffer, he’s the founder and CEO of SearchTires and has a really interesting story about kind of implementing all of that to go after a specific niche, a specific corner of our business world that he feels really passionate about. --- Tim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Stephen. Look forward to it. Definitely. Now, let’s start out with SearchTires. So, first, obviously, when I talk about this awareness action and then persistence or sacrifice and then failure, the first thing is awareness and action so what made you decide that you wanted to start a business on your own and then what made you decide that searching for tire prices was going to be the objective of your business? I come from a tire background. I worked in corporate America for 15 years in that background. Late 2009, I was in Colorado and I’ll never forget it, I was in a hot tub and I was skiing and another guy behind me was talking about Kayak because Kayak just came out and how he found flights on Kayak or something or something, and I’m thinking I’m in the tire business, why don’t we have something where people can look online, agnostically, at all the prices and then pick the place they want to go to? And so that’s how I came up with, so that was the awareness that we really need a tool like this because it helps people save money and more and more as the prices go up. The average price of tires is $700 a set and we save people an average of $180 a set of tires. So, I wanted to implement that even back then, but then the next step you’re talking to is the big step. I have the idea, how do I go do it? Because you’re afraid. It’s like, holy moly, this is a great idea, how do I overcome the fear of coming out of corporate America, which is a lot of work, but the stability is there, compared to on your own, so I inevitably built this kind of out in the background while I was working, and, in 2012, I went out on my own and started to – started on this project, I should say. Yeah. So, one of the interesting things that people often talk about is niching in businesses and one of the areas where I see this manifest a lot is, of course, when people talk about their target audience and a target audience like, okay, I’m here to serve, you can use traditional demographics or, increasingly, people use psychographics, but your niching seems to be less about who you’re selling to in the sense of I’m looking for people that have this psychographic experience, the person that, I don’t know, goes golfing and watches certain programs on TV and more the micro niche within the human experience in that you didn’t go and try to tackle, say, all auto parts or all transportation or something huge. You stuck with tires. What made that successful? And does the idea of niching work the same way with respect to who and what? Yeah, that’s a very good question. So, a couple things. At the same time I went out and I did this, started on this project, I also started a marketing company for marketing other things, not just tires because I knew I needed to have income while I was building this out. So I actually left and started a couple businesses at the same time and the one business was able to support the other one. So, in saying that, with the with the tire industry, why it’s attractive to me because it’s something that I know very well and I’ve seen it in action for so many years. I know directly how I can impact people every day. So the niche is everybody who buys tires, which, by the way, is 360 million people a year, it’s $58.8 billion market, so that’s the market size but that’s not what I’m passionate about, I’m passionate about – the funny thing is that I don’t sell anything. I’m a price comparison thing and we derive no money from it. It costs me money to do it but I think it’s a valuable tool to have people save money. Now, that being said, people are probably thinking right now, you can’t do it for free the whole time and that’s right, yes, that is correct, so the thing that we do have that’s not pointed to any specific person name, phone numbers or anything, we do collect data. So, you’re making model of cars, what kinds of tires and different sections they’re selling. Now that’s the valuable part of the business, And, again, it’s agnostic so I can support every retailer and I can support every tire. It depends on what they want. I’m just going to give them what they’re looking for and then they make the selections themselves. So, that’s kind of how I’ve come to this point because I don’t know if you want to get into it now but there is a failure aspect to this before I’m where I’m at now. Yeah, and so that’s like the next two in that four-step model is after awareness, this is what I want to do, taking action, that hard step you said before, then there’s the sacrifice of I’m going to put some energy into it, I’m going to give up something else, some kind of a short-term pleasure, usually, and then, finally, there’s that overcoming some sort of failure, well, some form of setback could be more general. So, you had your experience where you started this company as well as several others. Yeah, what went down that kind of made you have to go over those last couple of hurdles? If you’re passionate, you’re resilient. You can make it. It’s for sure. I mean, it’s the resilience part, and you’re going to have failure. Anybody that doesn’t have failure, that’s just not realistic. So, in the first iteration of the SearchTires, I had another iteration I come up with, I built it all out, spent all this time and a lot of money building this iteration out and I launched it in 2013. I had all kind of press, all in the tire magazines, I got a bunch of retailers to sign up, and, in two years, it failed. And it failed because I was trying to please the customer and the retailer. I was trying to please both. And it’s kind of hard to go for two ways. So it kind of worked but it was really never going to have the success long term so, basically, I shut it down. I shut it down 2016, kept marketing what I’m doing, and then I come out with a new iteration of SearchTires where I said I’m clearly just going to help the consumer and the local brick and mortar. What I mean by local brick and mortar is that these e-tailers have jumped into the market. They’ve taken 12 percent of this market and they ship tires to local tire shops to install them so what they’re doing is they’re taking that money away from the retailer that’s paying for community taxes, they’re paying for rent, they’re paying for local people to hire, Little League baseball teams and all that stuff, so they’re essentially taking that gap up so what I did is I said, well, I want to come up with something that’s driving it back to where someone can look for a tire and go get it put on today. They don’t have to wait to ship them, none of that stuff. They go get it done today in their local community. And so that’s why I call it the community-based platform. And since we did this and we launched this, we launched it nationwide probably a little over a year ago, the people that have taken onto it, it’s phenomenal. I look at it, the growth and stuff like that, it’s super exciting, I’m super passionate about and I get to help people save money. At the same time, local retailers get the up as well as get the customers and, now, we’re getting ready to go into a next iteration that’s going to be even better and we’re going to put more behind it because we can, and it’s just going to help more people. And I always tell people that in my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve really been an entrepreneur off and on since I've been 15 or 16 but I went to work for corporate America, but I’ll just say this, resilience is part of it, failure is going to be part of it, but never chase money. It’s always the worst thing. I always say that I’m just trying to build the best product I can. If I build the best product I can, the byproduct will be money.Share on X But that’s not what you concentrate on. You concentrate on building it to help people. It’s like that one guy from McDonald’s that says convenience will never go out of style. So if you’re creating something for convenience for someone, that’s going to be the best thing. So, speaking from where you are now, are you glad that your first iteration of your business failed so that you could kind of reassert that and come up with something that really seems to match your values around bringing back that community retailer and being a responsible member of the community with your platform? One hundred percent. If I didn’t have that failure, I would not have known how to pivot and make it right,...