063: Breathe Right Nasal Strips founder (Dan Cohen)… Unstrips his Business.

Background on Dan Cohen of Breath Right Nasal Strips:

Dr. Dan Cohen is the former Chairman of CNS, Incorporated. Dr. Cohen was the driving force behind the meteoric rise of Breathe Right nasal strips, acquiring the rights to manufacture and sell the product for the medical equipment company he founded in 1982. In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline acquired CNS, including its Breathe Right nasal strips and FiberChoice chewable fiber supplement products, for $566 million.

He Co-Founded Round River Research Corp. to study the healing and psycho-spiritual effects of synchronized music, vibrations, and magnetic fields. He is the inventor of the SolTec Lounge, designed to rapidly induce meditative states with profound levels of relaxation/stress reduction. After 16 years in development, the product was introduced in 2013. This technology inhibits the brain’s vigilance apparatus and directly stimulates the human energy system, facilitating healing and spiritual experience.

Dr. Cohen has a BS from Penn State University and received his MD from Temple Medical School with high distinction. His training is in neurology at the University of Minnesota and he is a Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Doctor Cohen also authored the books, Addicted To My Ego and Co-Authored Claim Your Basic Rights.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[1:19] Dan is a Neurologist, who has passion in Entrepreneurship. He co-founded CNS, Inc., a medical equipment company in 1982.
[2:36] When Dan and his partner started CNS, Inc, they developed an equipment for brain wave analysis.
[3:40] “It was obvious to me after 3 months that this was going to be a total flop.”
[4:25] Dan developed another product, a sleep lab monitoring equipment.
[6:19] It’s important to develop your credibility to the Board of Directors.
[9:50] “I learned from my mistake. We hadn’t done a good job of analyzing how the market would view it.”
[11:03] Dan almost got fired when he started Breath Right, a product that relieve nasal congestion.
[13:04] Procter and Gamble was interested with the product but didn’t believe that they have enough funds to launch it.
[13:42] They launched Breath Right using PR, introducing the products to the media and football players, and overnight they became a $50 million business.
[16:59] “A lot of people think that that business was successful because football players started wearing it, now all of a sudden everything happened…that’s really not what happened!”
[19:26] Dan visited the top 10 wholesalers and they all rejected the product.
[26:30] After the success of the product, Procter and Gamble called and congratulated them.
[26:59] In 1995, they did about $60million and $85million the following year. The $25million came from International consumers and it worried them that their Domestic sales were not increasing.
[30:26] “We didn’t fundamentally understand what was driving the business and what was driving profit.”
[31:06] They sold CNS, Inc. for $566million in 2006.
[33:06] Dan started another project called SolTec Lounge, a technology to induce deep states of relaxation and meditation that leads to stress reduction.
[41:41] Dan wrote a book called “Addicted To My Ego”
[42:25] “Find something that you love to do and do that. Then you are much more likely to be on your life path which will be much more gratifying than if you are doing something you think you should do or other people think you should”

Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖📚 Favorite Book(s)? McElligot’s Pool by Dr. Seuss
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? N/A
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? MS Word
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? N/A

Key Point from the Interview:

“A lot of people think that that business was successful because football players started wearing it, now all of a sudden everything happened…that’s really not what happened!”