Profiting From Good Ideas By JEFF WEISS Contributing Reporter It is a widely held belief that everyone has a few good ideas in their lifetime. But ideas alone do not guarantee success when it comes to marketing a product. In order to see an idea get on a store shelf, one must carefully research not only the product itself, but also its potential competition. And even if your product has been meticulously scrutinized, one still needs passion, commitment, and the money to succeed. No one ever said innovation was easy. Overbreak LLC is in the business of ideas. There are thousands of people out there who have good ideas, but not the means to get them to the production line. This is where Overbreak comes in, taking the intellectual property and trademark rights for the invention, developing and manufacturing it, and putting it on the market with a portion of sales paid back to inventors as royalty fees. While most of their products are toys and novelty items, Overbreak seeks any exceptional invention, regardless of whom the creator is. In fact, two of their most recent top sellers were invented separately by a gym teacher in Nashville and a Hungarian general practitioner doctor. “Everybody has one or two great ideas in their life. Most of the time people think they can’t do anything with them or they give up. It takes the passion of getting over those hurdles and making it real,” said Dayne Sieling, president and co-founder of Sun Valley-based Overbreak. “It’s important not to be persuaded to give up after you hit the first hurdle. You need to keep pushing forward, you never know when an idea that was written on a napkin can be a success.” Westlake Village patent attorney Steven Sereboff agrees with Sieling that the nature of the inventor, his willingness to follow through on the concept, and his degree of resolve, heavily influence the likelihood of the product’s success. Good management “Success usually has less to do with the type of idea than the person who is pursuing it. It’s the classic adage that smart venture capital doesn’t invest in good ideas, they invest in a good management team,” Sereboff said. “It’s the people behind the idea that make it happen. It’s the people that see they need to stick with their original idea or maybe they realize that they need to change it. The essence for success for most companies is that they see the big picture, whether they need to shift to changing market needs, or sometimes a product can just hit the first time.” Sereboff also maintained that the timing of an idea is crucial to its realization. A concept might be brilliant, but if it is way ahead of its time it might never see the daylight. “A good idea has to be something so different that nobody is doing it or is likely to start doing it, yet not so different that the market would reject your idea. There are people who have not the next idea but the idea two or three generations away, it can take a human generation to accept fundamental change,” Sereboff said. Of course, since the dawn of time, human necessity has spawned some of the most ingenious innovation. When people are faced with a limitation inherent in an existing product, they often attempt to invent something more fitting to their needs. After their Northridge office was burglarized four years ago, Alexander Bordbar, co-founder of Philex Enterprises Inc. (along with brother Jason), decided to invent a PC-based security system, in order to provide a cheaper alternative to the exorbitant prices systems’ sold for. Without the $15,000 necessary to invest in such a system, the brothers were faced with two options: either remain susceptible to theft, or develop their own inexpensive alternative. They chose the latter. Confronting competition “We wanted to try something better that would work for us. We said what can I do to make something better? You need to research other items and say to yourself this does what I want but it doesn’t have this feature so my product will. You analyze the industry standards, take existing products but modify them,” Bordbar said. “We didn’t just want to invent something, but what we wanted didn’t exist. The non-entrepreneur will say there’s too much competition and leave it at that. The entrepreneur takes it and makes it succeed.” Chances are if your invention can be of service to the world, it has a chance to work. However, one can’t circumvent copious research, nor a passion for the sales and refinement of the product and still expect to succeed. Finally, one must never forget the fact that an invention is practically worthless if it costs too much money to produce. “Good ideas are ones that help others and it has to be something that can be sold at a reasonable price. If you can’t find something that reasonable to manufacture and sell it’s not a good idea,” Bordbar said. “We had a vision but we were already in the tech industry. Some people have an idea for an industry they don’t know and they don’t do enough research. There’s a lot of rags to riches stories but there’s a lot of people who stay rags. You always need to do your homework.”
