Suck and Blow versus The Swamp Fox Model of High-Impact Companies

Two Greenville entrepreneurs, Doug Hamer and Brian Higgins, created an extreme product - a gelatin bar drink called Suck & Blow, which is featured as the cover story in the business section of Sunday's Greenville News. They have created a high-impact company to move from "early stages of the rollout... [where they] are currently selling their product in South Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Nevada ... to distributing shortly in other states and internationally in Canada, Mexico and Asia."

In Swamp Fox Insights, I describe a systematic, risk managed process for commercializing innovations. Does Hamer's and Higgins' experience match the Swamp Fox Model?

Visualize A Significant Opportunity: "Inspiration does not magically appear out of the ether of the universe but comes from very human leaders."

Doug Hamer was spending a July afternoon on Port Royal Sound near Beaufort in 2001 [and] ... having a grand time when he simultaneously spied a woman slurping a Jell-O shooter from a plastic cup and a guy doing the old frat-house rendition of "funneling" a beer from a long plastic tube." I immediately thought it would be really neat to put the two ideas together," Hamer recalled.

Assemble Outstanding Leadership: "Serial entrepreneurship is one of the most important elements of a highly innovative culture."

Hamer's first job was delivering the old Greenville Piedmont in his neighborhood near Greenville Country Club when he was 11... He learned from two of Greenville's best-known entrepreneurs Charlie Houser and Leighton Cubbage as an employee of Corporate Telemanagement Group, a long distance company that was sold to LCI International in 1995.

Articulate A Compelling Strategy: "Most successful high-growth companies are built not by introducing radical technical innovations but by using existing components and technologies to create products that precisely meet the evolving needs of a new and emerging base of customers. "

First came the experiments with ingredients and the delivery system. They would buy tubing from Lowe's and mix their gelatin cocktail using Kraft's Extreme Jell-O, vodka and water. "We had to experiment to get the texture just exactly right," Hamer said...

Locally, Suck & Blow is carried by many of the liquor and party stores and is sold at numerous bars, including Wild Wing Cafe in downtown Greenville. "We like it because it goes along with our party atmosphere," said Josh Pair, a manager at Wild Wing. "Wild Wing has a menu that is based on sharing, and these things fit right in. Plus, they're good sellers. Once you see one go out, it's not long before another 10 go out."

Execute A Focused Plan:"Commercializing disruptive innovations is inheriently a learning process, and the most successful strategies usually identify incremental milestones, attract resources necessary to achieve those milestones, and then adjust based on what is learned about the developing market."

They would make upwards of 250 tubes of the concoction and take it with them on trips to the beach, tailgating parties and the like. After a Fourth of July party in 2003, they decided it was time to go into business. "We had made 500 of them for the party, and people went straight through them," Higgins said. "We figured it was time to start selling them."

To make the leap from party curiosities to a marketable product took several steps. First, they would need a way to manufacture the tubes. They would also need a recipe that would be approved by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Tobacco Trade Bureau, a bottling company and a distribution network.

And there was another crucial component: money. Neither Hamer nor Higgins had much of that, and they made what would prove to be a tough decision. Rather than seek out investors with deep pockets who might want to control their destiny, they financed SAB Enterprises on small investments and loans from friends and family and on their own credit cards. It was a model that has led to sleepless nights, many highs and lows, but it has also kept them firmly in charge.

They took Suck & Blow to the Night Club & Bar Show in Las Vegas in March 2004 and were voted one of the top five booths among 2,000 vendors. "We left that show as high as we could be. We knew we had a hit." Hamer said.

The acid test of any model is can it be used to accurately predict reality. The experience of Harner and Higgins in commercializing Suck and Blow matches up pretty well with The Swamp Fox Model's description of how successful high-impact companies are actually created.

Swamp Fox Insights: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in a Time of Profound Change at Amazon.com