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Tonight on The Big Idea - the ultimate gut check - entrepreneurs who battled through the worst of times.
I was rolling coins to buy my groceries. Who faced crippling illness and
unexpected death.
In the first few months I gave up and didn't want to do much.
Where did they get their strength when no one believed in them? I'm sitting here
waiting to get welfare to take care of my baby and it just wasn't what I expected
my life would be like. It's the fighters who dug down and came back stronger than
ever. You never know what's on the other side of hardship. Driven by a
million-dollar idea. There isn't anything you can't do.
Their stories, your American dream tonight on The Big Idea. From CNBC world headquarters, join the community of entrepreneurs living the American dream. In this special edition of The Big Idea - Saved By a Big Idea.
Here's your host, Donny Deutsch. Tonight we are looking tragedy straight in the eye to find out what we're made of.
We all face adversary
but what do we do with it?
Are you one of those people who get up stronger every time you're knocked down? Well if not,
tonight we going to get you ready to dig down to the other level because my guests
overcame the worst of the worst.
Everything from financial ruin to illness to death.
They fought back. You can too like my next guest
who faced the sudden death of her husband.
Heidi Ganahl, and founder
and president
of Camp Bow Wow. Heidi welcome to the show.
Heidi, your story is one of inspiration, we've got to go back a bit
talk to me about
you with your husband when he was alive you guys would walk by,
was it near your father's home, there was a certain camp for dogs - pick up the
story.
Yes actually my dad and my husband worked together and their business was
right next door to one of the first doggy day care facilities in the western
United States.
And so I avoided doing my pharmaceutical job most days by hanging
out watching the dogs and thought, "boy this would be a great way to spend my time."
And did you and your husband talk about, maybe you guys would do something together?
Absolutely - we wrote a business plan based on that business so we kind of
fancied it up and added the camp theme and made it look like a mountain lodge and
added the boarding for the dogs so they could actually go to camp
and thought that that would be a great place for people to leave their pets.
So the premise was doggie day care plus where it's like a lodge for dogs.
I love that,
I love that idea.
So you, for your husband's twenty-fifth birthday gave him a gift.
Yes our family got him a surprise to go up in a plane
one of the old stunt planes, a 43 steerman.
A good family friend did air shows and was a United Airlines pilot and did this
as a hobby
and thought Bion would absolutely love this - he was in to extreme sports and
loved doing crazy things like that and unfortunately it didn't
turn out very well. What happened?
My parents actually went down with him to surprise him and the plane did all
the stunts and he had a great time and everything was going well and they went to do
a tip over to kind of
say hello to my parents who were standing there and the plane just dove right into the
ground.
My dad's good friend and my husband both died right on impact. How was life after
that?
It's brutal.
It changes you and it changed our family and
it change the way I looked at life absolutely. How did it change how you looked at life?
Well you learn that life is very short and anything can happen
and Bion and I were big dreamers - we were very entrepreneurial, we had a lot of
energy, we had big plans.
And you know the first few months I gave up and didn't want to do much
and my dogs are actually the ones that helped me through it so
between that and knowing that Bion had such great ideas and I did to, I knew he
would want me to follow through and
make something big happen.
You did.
How do you, because I think your tragedy can't get any worse than that,
so there's obviously this financial ruin, but this is a whole other
level.
How do you not feel sorry for yourself? How do you not
blame the big guy upstairs? Because you can lose faith after that,
it can become impossible to be inspired to do anything,
how did you not drown in that?
Well,
the dogs, it's easy to look at them and see them watching you like "hey, come on, you still have life to live,"
"let's get up and play ball."
Just my family and friends knew Bion and I were so energetic and had such big plans
for our life and had so much energy that I really didn't want to let them down
and I didn't want Bion's death
to be for nothing. Was it kind of then you said to yourself, you know what,
on his behalf, because of him because of our memory and what we used to talk about
that's what's going to drive me.
Yes, absolutely and then I received a pretty big financial settlement
from the plane crash in managed to really screw that up over the next couple
years
so I ended up with
nothing and part of the reason I started the business also was to make
the money back. How much money did you get in the settlement? A million dollars. Million
bucks.
And how did you go through that?
It's a lot easier than you think.
Absolutely loaning
family and friends money, made a couple poor investment decisions had a
big wig financial adviser telling me how to invest the money and it wasn't the right
thing for me to do at the time
and then started another business that was more practical that everybody said
would work when Camp Bow Wow's really where my heart was and I should have
put the money there in the first place. That's where your passion was, but what was the practical business they told you to put your money in?
It was a consulting firm for sudden wealth for folks that receive money, ironically enough.
Talk about the blind leading the blind.
So now,
you get the settlement
and you blow it so you've got zilch, nothing
except a big load of guilt.
So now it's a few years after your husband's death, you've lost your husband,
even the settlement you got you've lost, you've got nothing,
I guess that's the bottom. Yeah, that was the bottom. So what happens now?
So my brother comes to me and says "Heidi, you know
I see you kind of floundering, I think you need some direction, why don't you
go back to the business plan that you and Bion wrote before he died
and try to make it happen."
And I was like, oh my god how am I going do this, by then I'm a single mom, and working
pharmaceutical sales again and barely have time to
do much of anything and so
he said I'll run the day to day and you do the marketing and the business part of it and
we said well let's give it two weeks and see if we find a location that will work and if we don't
we know it wasn't meant to be, if we do,
and we did, and it happened and it was awesome. Give me the moment where you
felt, you could have been feeling Bion or whatever it was, where you go no,
this is my moral imperative, this is going to happen,
was it when you signed that lease, was
there a click moment where you go, ok my life is turning now.
It was when I was sitting on the floor in the middle of my second location
because I was the damned and determined to make this thing huge, I didn't want it to
just be one
camp, I'm a brand girl, I came out of advertising too I'm going to build this thing big.
If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. And so I was sitting on the floor, I was laying tile in the middle of the
night, we had a grand opening the next day for the next camp,
I had no money in the bank the first camp wasn't even making money and I had plowed
everything back into the second one,
maxed out every credit card, rent was due the next day I was like it's gonna
happen, I just knew it was gonna happen.
You've got 150 franchises, each franchise pays you a $50,000 fee, 6% of
the gross,
$6.5 million last year, growing, great concept,
do you ever feel Bion with you? Oh, all the time,
absolutely. What would he say to you today if he was here?
He would be out selling more franchises and making it even bigger.
We just started a foundation too, a non-profit called the Bow Wow Buddies Foundation,
and
I think he'd be equally as excited as me about that and really making a difference in
the dogs that can't afford to come to Camp. Heidi Ganahl, founder, president of Camp Bow Wow.
When your back's against the wall, are you going to give up? Of course you're not! We're finding out what we're made of tonight on The Big Idea.