Why It's Never Too Late To Take A Professional Leap: A Conversation With Entrepreneur David Thurston

**Jill Wagner** (0:00)
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Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the MoNews podcast, a special interview edition for you today. I'm talking to entrepreneur David Thurston. He and his wife Alexis built a hair color brand called Pulp Riot. It's the fastest growing professional hair color brand in beauty history. 23 months later, L'Oréal bought it for $100 million, and they walked away.
Four years later, David and his wife launched another hair color brand called Danger Jones. It's already sold in 43 countries, and David wrote a book all about his journey, why he decided to walk away from L'Oréal, how he has redefined what success and leadership look like, especially in creative industries. That book is called Spiral Staircase, Why I Stepped Off a Rocket Ship to Build a Cathedral. David, thank you so much for joining me today.

**David Thurston** (1:58)
Jill, thank you so much for having me. I'm so looking forward to connecting today.

**Jill Wagner** (2:03)
I loved your book. It is extremely inspiring, and I loved how you talked not only about your wins, but also your losses or the times you just didn't necessarily succeed. We'll get into all of that during this conversation.
But briefly, for anyone who is not in the beauty or hair color industry, can you just quickly talk about Pulp Riot and now Danger Jones? What exactly are these brands?

**David Thurston** (2:29)
Sure. Both of them have a few things in common. First of all, they're hair color brands, and they're available in the professional channel, which means if you go into your salon, it might be that your stylist is using these products in the salon on you.
The big difference between the two is that Pulp Riot had a little bit more of a thrust toward vivid colors. When I say vivid colors, I'm saying when you walk down the street, you see somebody with purple, blue, pink, and green, an alternative company that appealed to 18-22 year-old girls with fishnet stockings and Doc Marten combat boots. That was Pulp Riot. Danger Jones is something that came later. It's a little bit more sophisticated. It plays in a little bit bigger arena. It has a little more focus on blonding and toning in natural colors, a little bit more mainstream. Those are the difference between the two.

**Jill Wagner** (3:27)
Okay. Got you. I actually asked my hairstylist because I just got my hair colored, if she had heard of the brands and she said, that's what she said actually, so it makes sense. I'm just curious in terms of the name of your book, The Spiral Staircase, and I have the book here. How do you define a spiral staircase? Obviously, we know what an actual spiral staircase is, but what do you mean when you say spiral staircase?

**David Thurston** (3:53)
Well, like a lot of your listeners probably out there, they probably have a normal corporate job or they're looking for more in their life than they have right now.
I think a lot of us have in common, we're looking for higher levels of success.
I like to think of trying to get more success not as the pathway to success, that's a common term. A pathway makes it sound like there's some yellow brick road, you're just going to walk right down to find this thing called success. I think it's a climb and it's not a straight shot up. Because a spiral staircase, you could only see one or two steps in front of you. You can't exactly see where it's going. So on my journey and I think a lot of people's journey, you are climbing and climbing, trying to get more, trying to be more successful. But it starts to take you in a place you never even saw coming when you first began your journey up the staircase. But here's the deal with the spiral staircase. It has two rules to it. The first rule is, is that every single time you take a step up, it's uncomfortable because you're leaving your old comfort zone for a new uncomfortable zone. But rule two is the biggest unlock for me on my journey, and hopefully your readers understand this. That is, is that after just spending maybe two weeks, maybe a month on that new step, it becomes your new comfort zone. That's how you go around and around up the spiral staircase is taking these steps into discomfort as you climb upward. But eventually, that new step becomes your new comfort zone. So the thing I'm fascinated by is, why is not everybody climbing their staircase? And I think that it really comes down to fear.