Advice Line with Curt Richardson of OtterBox

**Guy Raz** (0:01)
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Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show who will help me try to help you. If you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298.
Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you like help with. Let's get to it. Joining me this week is OtterBox founder, Curt Richardson. Curt was first on the show back in 2019 If you missed that episode and you want to go back and listen, we will drop a link to it in our episode show notes. Curt grew up in a tiny mountain town in southern Colorado, and when he was just 21, Curt bought his own small plastics company. And for years, he had a really rough time of it until he came across a book called The E-Myth, which helped him understand what truly matters at the core. And this insight eventually led Curt to build Otter products, which started out as small waterproof boxes for outdoor enthusiasts. And when the iPhone exploded in popularity, OtterBox was in place to become the dominant phone case brand in the US, growing the company from $5 to $575 million in just five years. Fast forward to today, Curt is no longer the CEO, but he's now the company's chief visionary officer, and we are so happy to have him back on the show. Curt, welcome back to How I Built This.

**Curt Richardson** (4:08)
No, thank you for having me. I remember when we met in Denver. It was a great time.

**Guy Raz** (4:13)
We did, we did a live show together, it was super fun. When you were on that show back in 2019, what did you think the next sort of five years would look like? And of course, what eventually actually happened?

**Curt Richardson** (4:27)
I was out or getting out of running day to day by then, which was something I desired. I think any entrepreneur many times hits a size of a business where it's like, okay, this would be on my skills, this is a great startup, but this has turned into operational.
So I went through a number of CEOs in the meantime, learned some hard lessons there. And we've got a great CEO and great executive team now in place at Otter and seeing some great benefits from it.