195: From Aerospace Manufacturing to For-Profit Fundraising? Find out How… w/ Howard Gottlieb of Read-A-Thon

195: From Aerospace Manufacturing to For-Profit Fundraising? Find out How… w/ Howard Gottlieb of Read-A-Thon

Background on Howard Gottlieb of Readathon:

Howard Gottlieb is the founder and CEO of Read-a-thon but in the office, everyone just calls him the Big Cheese. Howard spends most of his waking hours obsessing about how to make Read-a-thon the absolute best school fundraising idea anywhere on the planet Earth. Their goal is to have every elementary school and school library in the world raise the money they need by focusing on reading rather than selling fundraising products.

In the past, Howard has started or turned around 7 different companies in industries as diverse as aerospace, retail, fabrication, and web development. As an adult, Howard’s favorite book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. His favorite children’s book is the Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[1:14] Howard Gottlieb is currently the CEO of Read-a-thon Fundraising Company, which provides reading fundraisers for elementary schools all over the world.
[4:14] Upon tallying the number of minutes that readers have logged in their website, the result came up with over 1.8 billion minutes.
[7:55] Schools don’t have to pay anything to set it up with Read-a-thon.
[9:34] $15k to $20k can be the average fundraising money that a school can raise using Read-a-thon, according to Howard.
[16:42] In college, Howard became a sportswriter at the Atlantic City Press.
[18:59] Howard shares an interesting story of moving to Dallas for a new job in 1979.
[24:20] At 24 years old, Howard was given a life-changing opportunity to run a company.
[30:12] There were a couple of things that Howard did to turn a failing company around.
[32:17] After leaving his job at Screw Products, Howard started his own company called Countdown Aviation.
[37:33] Howard offers good business advice regarding having a supportive spouse.
[39:43] After the first year of Countdown Aviation, Howard wanted to expand so he tried to borrow money from a Texas bank.
[43:16] Even without any manufacturing background, Howard began to start his own manufacturing company.
[45:46] Selling a distribution company did not go well for Howard and he learned a valuable lesson from this experience.
[50:55] Hiring a guy who was a genius in the machining industry and getting a software company to help them with pricing were key factors for the success of his Spacer Company.
[59:40] Selling the Spacer Company was the best and worst decision he made in his business career.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖📚 Favorite Books? Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Crunchy Peanut Butter.
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Our business is unique so we develop our own CMS and processes.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Figuring out better distribution methods to reach every elementary school decision maker in America.

Key Point from the Interview:

“Anyone who wants to do what I did, if your spouse isn’t a hundred percent supportive, don’t do it, because then every mistake, every bad week, can create just disastrous fights that could lead to divorce. If you don’t have your spouse’s complete support, don’t do it.”

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