Kevin Harrington Shares His Underdog Story of Becoming an Entrepreneur in his Teens to a 10+ Figure Net Worth

Pamela Bardhi: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Underdog Podcast. Today we have a very, very special guest. I know you guys have had some incredible guests on this show, but today is extra special. We’re here live with the original shark from Shark Tank, the entrepreneurs, entrepreneur Kevin Harrington. How are you, my friend?

Kevin Harrington: Hem. I’m really excited to be here today. I love the underdog story that you’ve created here. So looking forward to hanging out.

Pamela Bardhi: I am so honored to have you, Kevin. I’ve always respected and admired you. And honestly, I’m one of those kids that watch Shark Tank on a binge all the time. So it’s truly an honor. Thank you.

Kevin Harrington: It’s great to be here.

Pamela Bardhi: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor.

What inspired you on your journey to where you are today

And one of my favorite questions that I always lead with. I’d love to hear this from you, is what inspired you on your journey to where you are today?

Kevin Harrington: Well, so my father, much like your family, was in the restaurant business. And I saw my dad work 80 plus hour weeks. His restaurant opened at noon. It was a late night spot. Closed at 2:30 in the morning, six days a week, he was there that entire time. So it was pretty devastating for me to see that, didn’t have time for the family. I said to myself, there’s got to be a smarter way to do this. Now, my dad had just, that was the business he was in. He had multiple restaurants and he was a happy entrepreneur. But it was never going to become a global business that had billions of dollars of potential. And me as a young entrepreneur, I had visions.

I wanted to be successful. But you know, I didn’t want to just be a local entrepreneur, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. And so my father actually mentored me to transcend and go beyond the restaurant business. So I started opening up my own businesses. And I had a driveway sealing business when I was in high school and my freshman year at college. I started a heating and air conditioning contracting company, installing furnaces, air conditioning systems, et cetera. We went from zero to $1 million our first year. This was in 1976, so that’s a long time ago. All right, and so the bottom line is I say that there were mentors in my life. My father, being the very first one that motivated me and helped me become a successful entrepreneur.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing that.

Shark Tank helps entrepreneurs become successful by sharing mistakes and advice

And I was going to Ask you. Like, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Kevin Harrington: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman. Yeah, you know, the typical kind of thing. You, you want to save people’s lives and be a fireman. Right, but as I got older, I realized, well, that’s a very good occupation. And I have friends that are police officers and firemen, et cetera. I wanted to control my destiny, I wanted to own my own business, I wanted to be able to work. I’ll say this, entrepreneurs end up working more hours than you do if you have a job sometimes. But, you know, I think that controlling your own destiny is one of the most important things that I wanted. To be able to do with my time and my energy.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that, Kevin. You mentioned quite a few things, like your father was your mentor. And that was the same thing with me. My father used to.

Kevin Harrington: To be like, Pam, you’re going to.

Pamela Bardhi: Be a rockstar, you’re going to be aader, you’re going to crush it. You’re going to do all these things, and it’s important to have those cheerleaders in your life. So, aside from your father, who were some of your biggest mentors, I was very lucky.

Kevin Harrington: So, Zig Zigr, one of the most amazing people in America. Ah, Zig, when I was following him around and watching him on stages. Zigg taught me about mental preparation, leadership. But also, his best book was the Secrets of Closing the Sale, I mean, he was a salesman. And so here I was making deals all around the world as a salesman utilizing the Zig Ziglr techniques. I think the biggest change from, as I learned, like Zig’s techniques, Zig was all about helping other people. He had an amazing belief in his life.

You can get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want. And so that was how I led my life, dictated my life. Wanted to help others. Today this is, you know, this is what Shark Tank was all about. Helping entrepreneurs, helping them maybe with some money, but in some cases, you know, I help people just give them advice. Because sometimes they’ve got all the money they need, but they don’t know what to do. So that’s one of my main goals, is to be able to help entrepreneurs become successful. By sharing with them the mistakes that I’ve made in the past.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that, Kevin, thanks so much for sharing that. And your career is just so fascinating. It’s just the entrepreneurial journey in general. You had the driveway business, then you got into HVac with heating and furtices. So walk me through like the early ventures of yours.

Kevin Harrington: Yeah, so I was in high school. I was 15 years old and I wanted to buy a car when I was 16. But I had no money and my dad wasn’t going to give me any money. So I started a business and I made enough money to pay cash for my first car. Back then they were 3 or $4,000, but that’s still a lot of cash for a 15 year old. Right, but I made it, walked in and put that down on the car and bought it, right. I’m, driveway ceiling. I’ve knocked on the people’s doors, I said, you see that crack you got there? In Cincinnati, it gets cold in the winter. The water in there would freeze triple the size of the crack by the springtime.

I said I’ll seal it, beautify it and take care of that. I was doing 10 jobs a week at the age of 15 I couldn’t even drive. So I had to hire somebody, I could own a truck and I bought a truck. Hired somebody to drive me around, I did all the sales and just needed somebody to drive. Then I was going to college. My dad said, hey, you’re gonna have to pay for your college, your books, your school, your tuition, your overhead. Where you’re going to live, your gas, your car, your insurance. How do you do that at the age of 18? And you know, how do you do it? You start a business. Because driveway sealing was summertime only what’s year round heating and air conditioning.

So I cut a deal with somebody at the courthouse to get all the new homeowner transactions. And the information on where they live, their phone number. We called them and said, hey, congratulations on buying a house, we have a special gift for you. We’re going to come and clean that furnace absolutely free and give you a free safety check. Virtually everybody said come on out. They just bought the house, they want to know how the furnace works. We’d get in there, we’re working with them, we’re showing them this, that. Oh by the way, we got a more efficient furnace if you’d like to take a look at. All of a sudden that’s how we went to a million dollars our first year.

We’re selling, we’re doing eight and ten sales a week. At one point in our heyday, yeah, unbelievable. But it was very labor oriented and A great business and profitable and made money. I started buying real estate, believe it or not, at the age of 18 and I think I was 19 actually. The first house that I bought, because I had made nice profits and was plugging it into investing now. So it’s important to have good mentors in your life to be able to steer you in the right direction. I know that’s exactly what you do. Part of your underdog podcast is to help people and advise them and guide them, right?

Pamela Bardhi: Yes, absolutely, so I love it. So you had a chauffeur by 15. By 19 you were owning real estate, that is awesome. That is awesome, Kevin. But also the law of reciprocity almost kicks in when you were giving those free safety checks in the HVac business.

Kevin Harrington: Sure.

Pamela Bardhi: And it’s amazing because you’re giving something to someone of value and then they reciprocate that right back. Which is incredible. The power of that’s unreal.

Kevin Harrington: Oh yeah, absolutely, and of course one day I said, I bought a house, I ordered cable TV. And this was back in the early 80s. Of course back then they only had 30 channels. CNN was news and ESPN was sports, I get to the last channel and there’s nothing on. I called the cable company and said, hey, I’m getting 29 of the 30 channels. What’s wrong with the last one? They said, it’s Discovery Channel.

Kevin: I was just going to get into like after the HVac business

They don’t have a budget for 24 hours. It’s only an 18 hour a day network, six hours of downtime, and I said downtime? Wait a minute. That’s an opportunity, I cut a deal to buy that downtime from Discovery and I signed a multi year contract. Six hours a day on the Discovery Channel. This is when we just exploded, putting products and Jack La Lane and George Foreman and Tony Little. You know, all the many celebrities and famous $0.50 headphones. Paris Hilton’s lip plumpers. Kim Kardashian’s first infomercial was a steam iron, believe it or not. I mean, we’d been there, done that, had a lot of fun with a lot of entrepreneurs.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh my God, that’s incredible. Kevin. I was just going to get into like after the H Vac business. Like what was.

Kevin has been in business brokerage and now on Shark Tank

Because you mentioned you’ve also been in business brokerage too, which is really cool. And that whole journey.

Kevin Harrington: So what was important for me, because I dropped out of college, I missed that step. Because my sophomore year of college I had 25 employees, six trucks going out every day, and I’m going to school. I’d get done with school about 1 o’clock, get to the office by 2. I worked till 10, 11 o’clock at night because I was calling people at home at night for the sales. And I said, you know. I became sort of a little bit of a hamster on a rat race wheel of what I was doing. Plus the labor side of that business was something I wasn’t as experienced with. I was in sales, I could sell the furnaces, the air conditioning system.

Getting the best installers was not the easiest thing. I sold that business. And when I sold it, I’m sitting there talking to a business broker and he’s got hundreds of businesses for sale. I’m in his office and I’m looking, I’m like, well, let me see this one. He said, oh yeah, I got the books and records, I got the leases, I got all the percentages. The food costs, I’m like, okay, let me see this one. Oh, I got all the books and records and the sales and the tax forms and a boom, 200 businesses. This was an education unto itself. So I said, I want to be that broker and sell businesses.

I started a brokerage company, much like in real estate. We would sell the building, I got a real estate license, brokerage license. Had 14 salesmen working under me selling pizza parlors, delicatessens, flower shops, manufacturing companies, you name it. But this is my early days, I say my pre shark days. Maybe I was a minnow then, okay? Because I was investing in businesses and taking, you know, helping some of these entrepreneurs. Because they would say, Kevin, you’ve seen the ups and and downs, maybe you can be a partner in this. And so I would invest money and be partners with, with many, different small businesses back in the day. So a lot of fun.

Pamela Bardhi: That’s incredible. And then I can see kind of the correlation of how you got to Shark Tank. But tell me the little story about how got.

Kevin Harrington: Well, so here I was and developed businesses, labor businesses, when I was in high school and college. But then I get into business brokerage and now I was on the world stage of selling products everywhere. Because when we took George Foreman or Tony Lid or Jack Lalane and did an infomercial. It would run in the United States for two years, and what would we do then? We take it to England, Germany, France, Sweden, South America, Asia, and we dub it into all the local languages. So we created businesses all around the world. And my first year in business in the infomercial space, we went from 0 to 55 million dollars in sales. Our second year we were at 85 million do. Third year, 150 million do.

We ended up over $500 million in sales as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. So that story and that explosive growth, I mean to go from zero to $500 million. I started that with a $25,000 investment in the company that I had saved to finance that business. Not a lot of money, and we ended up having to get lines of credit. But here I am on this world stage. Media, I’m buying. I’ve got six hours on Discovery and a time on Lifetime. On Nashville and on Bravo and on thousand plus TV stations. Well, who was paying attention? Mark Burnett. And Mark Burnett said, hey, Kevin, I’m doing a new show called Shark Tank. Do you want to come out and talk to me?

I said, what is it all about? He wouldn’t tell me, and I said, he said, you got to come out here. When I told my wife, I said, Mark Prett wants me to come out and talk to him. About this new show he’s doing called Shark Tank. And she said, oh, no wonder he won’t tell you, I said, what do you mean? She said, well, what does he do to the people on that Survivor show? Doesn’t he? He’s like, what is he gonna do to you on Shark Tank? Yeah, I said, oh. He told me it’s a business show, but it’s funny, it’s got a double meaning. Shark Tank. So, but, I went and met Mark and they picked me as the first shark. It was pretty cool, amazing.

Pamela Bardhi: It’s amazing. And that show is quite an experience.

You were on 175 Shark Tank segments over a number of years

I was going to ask you what it’s like to be a shark. And how do you identify the best deals as a shark?

Kevin Harrington: You know, I mean, first of all, I was in 175 segments, over a number of years on Shark Tank. And so I was with Kevin O’Leary, the Mr. Wonderful. What was fun about Shark Tank number one was, yes, the networking we did as sharks. Barbara Corcoran, Damon John, Robert Herschevik O’Leary. This is before Mark Cuban. Right, and so Mark Cuban and I would. Eventually we started splitting up the seat, but each one of us sharks had a different kind of expertise. You know, mine was in television, Barbara’s was in real estate, Damons was in clothing, Roberts was in insec security. Mr. Wonderful tended to be multifunctional in a lot of things, but he came out of the toy business. But what was so amazing is the first week the Shark Tank launched.

It wasn’t just what we learned from the other sharks, I got 250,000 searches. For me the very first week of Kevin Harrington. People that wanted to connect with me. All of a sudden my social media started blowing up. You know, and all of that, social media, et cetera, it was pretty amazing, I mean, everybody wanted to. Because they knew they weren’t going to get on Shark Tank. But hey, I can maybe get a hold of Kevin Harrington directly, and that’s what people started to do. And so that’s been my life the last 10, 12 years has been really. I mean, we get tens of thousands of people that come to us, looking for help. Looking for money, looking for partners, looking for advice, looking for mentorship. That’s ultimately what my business model is now, helping entrepreneurs be successful.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that, Kevin.

Kevin Harrington says the smarter the people that you surround yourself with, you become successful

And my favorite question, which is always, the greatest that I always end with is. What would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know now?

Kevin Harrington: Well, I’ll say this. When I was a younger entrepreneur, I was very cocky, pig headed, I thought I could do it all. And to the point of getting burned with the wrong CFOs. All these kinds of mistakes that I made. Once I realized that the smarter the people that you surround yourself with. I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room, right? Y and so I was intimidated early on. I wanted to be the smartest guy in the room, I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do. This is my business, right? No bad mistake. Once I realized you surround yourself with experts, I mean, I have a son that’s 33 years old. Who is really good with finance and operations and detail and contracts, all the stuff that I’m not good at.

So surround yourself with experts to compliment your skill set. Get the best that you can get. You were going to be very successful, because there’s a saying that goes. That if you look at the people you hang out with, take the five or six people that you hang out with. Your income is an average of the five or six people that you hang out with. Because you know, this is, this is all about networking and being successful. And I think that when I finally realized, I want to hang out with successful people. I want to hang out with people that got great connections and all of that. That’s what ultimately, by bringing in a powerful dream team, we had access now to all of their connections. All of their members, and big, big success came from there.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing that. Now you’ve got to let everyone know where to find you and your awesomeness. Where can anyone connect with you, find.

Kevin Harrington: You are very simple, Kevin Harrington TV, that’s my website. I’ve got a bunch of different kinds of free things you can download and stuff like that. And if you want to track us down, even a way that you can put in there. To come pitch us at the same time, and sometimes they get to pitch me. So, Kevin Harrington TV, thank you so.

Pamela Bardhi: Much for tuning into the Underdog podcast today for this very special episode with Kevin Harrington. If you want to check out more episodes like this, please check us out on the underdogshow.com. So that’s it for today’s episode of Underdog. Catch us next week. Always dropping on Thursdays. And remember, if you’re interested in real estate or want to learn how to create more money and magic in your life. Check out meetwithpmela.com comm and let’s chat. Sending you so, so much love.