If you’ve ever seen Shark Tank, then you’d be familiar with the premise.
A guest pitches a product idea to 4 investors acting as judges and tries to convince them to invest in their product.
The better job you do, the better the chances of your product seeing mass production and sales.
A guest on Shark Tank, farmer Johnny Georges, had a very useful product he wanted to show off.
He calls the product Tree T-Pee.
It’s a miniature irrigation and greenhouse device for small trees, and the way it works is brilliant even if mechanically simple.
The Tree T-Pee helps to focus fertilized soil and water around the tree’s roots.
That water would otherwise go to waste since trees usually only absorb 10% of it according to Johnny.
Johnny’s Tree T-Pee product pitch would end up saving a ton of water for anyone growing trees.
But he has to convince them that it’s worth their time.
So Johnny does his best salesperson impression and gets to talking.
“Water conservation is what Tree T-Pee is all about,” he says proudly.
Watering a tree like this would normally take 2,500 gallons of water each year.
With Tree T-Pee, that number becomes just 800 gallons.
It costs $2.95 to make one, and he sells them for $4.50 each.
So he makes a profit of about $1.55 on each one.
He’s made 127,500 of them now, he says. The Tree T-Pee is no recent invention.
It started in 1984 when Johnny and his dad were caring for trees on their farm.
When Johnny noticed the little device’s potential, his dad didn’t see the use of it, given how cheap water was at the time.
Roughly 3 decades later, that has changed dramatically, and now saving water matters a lot more.
But the profit he’s making for each one seems shockingly low to one of the investors.
He explained to Johnny that if he wanted an investor to pick up his product, he’d have to charge more than just a $1.55 profit.
The investor needs to pay for manufacturing costs.
Plus, both the creator of the product and the investor need to profit.
In short, there isn’t enough profit margin to justify manufacturing costs.
So one investor declines.
This was not the reaction Johnny was expecting, but he had his reasons for keeping the profit margin that low.
Johnny was selling the product to farmers, and he wanted to keep it affordable.
A pretty noble reason, no doubt.
We take farmers for granted even though much of our life depends on them.
Johnny knows this better than most people, so he makes sure his farmer-friendly product has a farmer-friendly price point too.
Well, this was enough to convince another of the investors, John Paul DeJoria, to pick it up.
“Farmers are the cornerstone of America. There may be a lot of farmers out there that can’t afford 12 dollars per tree. But maybe they can afford 6 or 7.”
DeJoria is a billionaire and philanthropist.
He also cares a ton about farmers and was exactly who Johnny was looking for.
“What you’re doing is right, and you deserve a chance to make it big and do a lot of good,” DeJoria told Johnny
A thankful Johnny shakes hands with DeJoria.
His pitch was a success, and he owed much of it to his late father.
Now tearful, Johnny credits his father, who passed away 12 years earlier, for making him the man he is.
The other investors all agree that his father was a great man. Johnny assures them he was.
Watch how this farmer’s humble integrity won over a Shark Tank investor (and the nation) in the video below!
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