That’s Nuts!

These are some days when I spend hours combing through news aggregation sites and actual news channels, looking for interesting and/or funny stories within a business context to write about in this space. Sometimes there will be something I want to share from my oddball life experiences, lessons I’ve learned or taught in business school, or ethical musings that are as close as an old cynic like me ever gets (or should ever get) to discussing philosophy. Sometimes there are days of quiet desperation, when neither the online news sources or my over-active imagination yield anything, and I wind up just writing insulting jokes about people I don’t like and calling it a day. And then there are days when the first headline I run across says “Fake dog testicles made this man a millionaire…”

I wrote a post about this product – known commercially as “Neuticles” – early on in the blog, but if you missed it, the idea is that some pet owners want to have their dog neutered, but don’t want the animal to look or feel any different afterwards. As is often the case with off-beat entrepreneurial projects, the company was started by a man who wanted to purchase such a product but was unable to do so because no such implants existed. Reasoning that if he wanted the product, others might also, he joined forces with a veterinarian and a group of investors and started a company which has now sold over 500,000 pairs of Neuticles at an average of $310 per pair – which works out to $155 million USD in gross sales…

You can pick up the CNN story here if you want to; alternately, you might want to look into purchasing Gregg Miller’s own book on the subject if you can find a copy – the volume, called “Going… Going… Nuts!” sadly appears to be out of print at the moment. Despite its rather unusual product and the problems inherent with making and marketing cosmetic implants for dogs (and other animals), the company itself is really the classic American entrepreneurship story of finding an empty niche and filling it. Founder Gregg Miller’s life story is a bit more eccentric, as one might expect from the inventor of cosmetic testicular implants for dogs, but in both cases I felt there was a story worth repeating here…

When I first read about Neuticles and wrote my original post on the subject I was treating it with a vaguely satirical air; the sort of (hopefully) gentle mockery that one might suggest befits anyone who would spend money on cosmetic surgery and implants for an animal that can and does eat its own droppings. That was wrong of me, and if Mr. Miller is reading this post I most sincerely apologize for any disrespect or implied criticism. The greater truth behind this story is that however bizarre I might have found his invention to be, Mr. Miller was clearly quite correct in his assessment of its commercial potential, and I should not have been critical of it without any marketing data whatsoever…

The belief that just because I find a product to be outlandish that everyone else will also have that reaction is the management error I have often presented in these posts as the “I am the World” fallacy, and I’m not sure I have ever seen a more extreme example of it. I am, after all, a management instructor and business consultant of some experience, and the product in question is bizarre enough that even CNN is treating this as a weird or amusing piece of news. Apparently it bears repeating that one should never reason ahead of one’s data, and also that while it’s true that 90% of all entrepreneurial start-ups will ultimately fail, that does mean that one out of every ten will succeed…

Even if its business concept STILL seems too outlandish for words…