Ep. 195: Getting Naked & Listening | with Joel Primus

Today our expert guest is Joel Primus, the founder of and creative visionary behind Naked Boxer Brief. The pitch was simple — underwear so comfortable you can’t even feel them — but a lot of people saw it as a risky bet. Mr. Wonderful, one of the hosts of “Dragon’s Den,” the Canadian equivalent of “Shark Tank,” called Joel delusional.

Now, fast forward 10 years: Joel helped raise more than $17M dollars in funding, established retail distribution with huge global partners, and lead a merger with Australian-based industry powerhouse Bendon before exiting in 2018. His most recent company is Kosan Travel, a clothing company that launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns for an apparel product, reaching nearly $1M in sales in 30 days.

Part memoir and part entrepreneurial start-up manual, “Getting Naked: The Bare Necessities of Entrepreneurship and Start-ups” wants to take you through the process of scaling the business, building a team, raising money, and even when a founder needs to consider stepping down as CEO — and, at the same time, the book is going to ask questions that challenge you to interrogate yourself and your dream.

One of the big problems for a lot of entrepreneurs is that they don’t know what questions to ask — they don’t know what they don’t know — and Joel hopes this book can help guide people to asking better questions so that they can start getting better answers, the answers that Joel wishes he had when he was starting this business from his apartment 12 years ago.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“If we don’t pick up the boulder in our lives all the time — that big, heavy, immovable object — then we don’t have to carry it. And to try to make sense of that, I looked at my life like what are the boulders in my life that I’m carrying that I don’t have to? That I’m trying to move that I don’t have to? These things that are completely strenuous, crushing me... what if I just didn’t pick it up?”

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Resources:

• Joelprimus.com
• Instagram: @joel.primus
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joelprimus
• “Getting Naked: The Bare Necessities of Entrepreneurship and Start-ups” by Joel Primus
• Raising Global Citizens

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media