How to Sell Your Business According to David Lekach

When creating a business or a product, many factors affect the way that you’re going to be targeting your audience, specifically on how you’re going to market your brand. What makes your brand different from the rest? Why choose your product compared to the others? These are the questions you must answer for yourself about your business before your customers can ask themselves. 

David LeKach, founder of Dream Water, a natural sleep aid, joins us on this episode of making bank to discuss the importance of innovation when it comes to marketing, along with how to sell and capitalize your product. Putting in long hours and going through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, LeKach is no stranger to growing a business.  

Learn how David became a successful company with very little capital in a competitive field, along with how you can apply his experiences and advice to your own business!  

Marketing Your Product 

Once you’ve got your product created and invented, the decisions that follow have to deal with how you are going to market your product.  

“Well, for us, it wasn’t about being in the stores. It’s how you’re in the stores, right? Those are two very different things,” says LeKach regarding the product Dream Water. Putting emphasis on how the product sold itself with the marketing tactics implemented rather than just getting it into the retailer was important to selling the actual product, to turn potential customers into buyers.  

By using strategies that apply research from sales perspectives and including displays and positioning factors, your product can push itself out on the market and ahead of your competitors. By simply being aware of what is working for you opponents and other products similar to yours, you can learn what your audience is receptive to and alter that to your product. For example, LeKach watched what five-hour energy did and piggybacked off of that when he modeled his own marketing plan for Dream Water.  

When marketing the product, focus on the selling points that make it different from the rest of the competitors’ products. “The fact that we didn’t have to be refrigerated or anything like that helped us from a beverage perspective,” says LeKach. The drink they were selling came into retailers with unique packaging and a product that was different than what was already out there. Playing this up added the extra edge to the product.  

Marketing is competitive, and an everchanging cycle when you’re trying to be the best out there. It requires a lot of research, understanding of the consumer, and brand building awareness, and definitely won’t happen overnight.  

Your Product Should Sell Itself 

“We were always very hyper resourceful, and I always used to say that what we were good at opening the door and Dream Water itself would do the selling.” Sleep was a universal need that was often a struggle for some people, and LeKach recognized that as he started the business. His company found a spot for their product using the need for sleep as its main selling point – something that was undeniably important. By creating a relatable product, you essentially start marketing the product as satisfying a need.  

Part of the innovation of Dream Water was that it wasn’t like any other sleep products. “It was innovation within a category and a function that is necessary and needed by everyone, not by some people, because even if you don’t have sleep issues, you know, we were the number one health and beauty.” LeKach and his company knew that what they were producing was important, and something that could change the lives of people. With that recognition, they worked on communicating what their product did beyond packaging and display.  

This is a process that changes in an instant. Marketing the product constantly takes tweaking and restarting, creating new methods and designs and learning from which ones work and which ones don’t. Continuing to innovate your product is growth. Sometimes, even the small changes of perspectives can give you the direct feedback that you needed for your business to work smarter and harder. 

Capitalizing Your Product 

When it came to capitalizing Dream Water, a lot of it came from friends and family, or high net individuals that became like friends and family. “I’m still very friendly with a lot of my mentors and investors…I always took that responsibility very seriously.”  

When money was in the equation with his relationships, LeKach made sure that there was a balance. “My threshold [was] will this amount of money mean that you’re going to hate me for the rest of your life?” By putting his relationships before the finances, David managed to keep great relationships with his investors and mentors. There’s an importance in creating partners that will want you to succeed, but to go beyond that to help you reach that success.  

LeKach also dealt with retailers when trying to capitalize Dream Water. There was a point with Dream Water and Walmart where David thought the business was going to be done with. Although there was no debt, they weren’t making much money. Instead of panicking, LeKach went through the weeks, and the weeks turned to months. With each passing day, thinking that the business was done for, LeKach didn’t give up.  

Through that time, LeKach learnt that everything is a growing experience. He got out of his slump and pushed through it, eventually becoming successful and expanding his company and business. Each time he thought he was at the end, the next day happened. And eventually, he reached his goals, just not in the way that he expected to at first.  

LeKach wouldn’t have guess that his first sip of Dream Water would lead to this entrepreneurship journey, but he welcomed each experience and grew as a leader. Between learning how to market and sell business, you too can grow your business and create products that are leading the industry.