Grant Fawson, UVU alumnus, and Mitch Murdock, Assistant Professor of Marketing, co-founded Tilt Industries LLC, a company that manufactures balance trainers for bike enthusiasts. The duo met during Mitch’s first year at UVU, and he soon became a mentor to Grant. Even after the end of the semester, they continued to have a great mentor relationship. One day Grant was showing Mitch YouTube videos of bikers building their own balance trainers out of wood, and the videos were drawing hundreds of thousands of views. A balance trainer (or manual trainer), is used to help improve a biker’s ability to ride manual, where a rider lifts the front tire off the ground and rides on the back tire to handle obstacles and other terrain. Grant thought there might be an opportunity in the marketplace and Mitch agreed. “I told Grant that we could make a commercial product since there was obviously demand,” Mitch said. “From a marketing perspective, it’s the ideal scenario: people have a need, and they’re building something themselves to solve it. There’s no other product like it on the market, so it’s a ‘blue ocean.’ Blue oceans aren’t perfect—they’re great since there’s no direct competition, but they can be bad in the sense that you have to really teach people about the need they have, so there are pros and cons.”

Founding A Company

"Finding the right partners and creative minds to work with and receive feedback from has been an important part of the journey," said Mitch. "Especially when investigating how to design a product that was affordable but also incredibly durable."

“We met with a couple of engineers and started working with them to design the product. We built a wooden prototype to see where it stresses out as you’re using it, and then we had a metal prototype manufactured in China. We figured out what was wrong with that and built a third prototype, and that’s our current product.”

“Through the research process, we tried to figure out how to increase the longevity of the product, because one argument would be, ‘once I learn the skills, and experience significant gains in terms of balance, then the value of the product could diminish over time.’”

“There’s no end,” said Grant. “You’ll never have perfect balance. We have professionals get on it and can only balance for two to three seconds max, and that’s been the case with almost every professional that we’ve had try it.”

“We see that in our research, but it’s harder for the consumer to understand that,” said Mitch. “We made it a multi-use product by adding the service stand because you’ll always need a service stand. We filed a provisional patent on the specific components of the trainer as well as the combination of the service stand and the trainer. That’s the origins of the product.”

“The company was born a few months ago, and we started the preorders a couple of months ago," said Grant. "The research and testing, that’s been going on for a long time, but the company itself is brand new. In just over a month, we sold $40,000 worth of trainers, and we now have enough funds to move forward with manufacturing. The day we opened up our website, sales started growing consistently every day, so online is where it’s at.”

“Our biggest obstacle has been helping people realize this isn’t something you’re done using in three months. Until you can go ten minutes on it, you haven’t made it yet. Our body has fast-twitch muscle fibers. Beginner to intermediate riders use about 30 percent of these, and professionals use about 70 percent. This means that after six months of continuous use, a professional rider could push up to 80 or 85 percent, and a beginner to intermediate could push up to 40 to 50 percent—and at that point they’re no longer an intermediate. That means you’re able to respond to technical terrain, drops, jumps, turns, and everything faster because your muscles are firing without you thinking. For a professional, that means better placement in a race.”

Becoming Part of the Community

"Other than a few prototypes, our product isn’t available yet, but many skilled riders have tried the Tilt Balance Trainer and have given it rave reviews," said Mitch. "The word is starting to spread throughout the biking community largely due to quality relationships with prominent and passionate riders. We’ve been fortunate to work with a couple of awesome influencers. Tyler McCaul is the guy who does insane jumps. He does Red Bull Rampage down in Saint George, and that’s the main type of downhill riding that he does. We also work with Joey Foresta, and he’s a top 20 junior-pro rider. He’s competing all across the world. We’ve been fortunate to work with these recognized names, and to get positive feedback from them is really important. We also connect with regular riders who have a following of 30,000. The mountain biking industry is unique in the sense that these top riders are accessible. You can get in touch with them, you can work with them, and they’re willing to have a conversation with you. Grant will ride with them and develop a relationship, and we’ve been able to produce several videos that have performed well, and in at least one case garnered hundreds of thousands of views. We’re being part of the community the best that we can.”

“When we’re at trailheads and events, when people get on the trainer, they want it every single time, without fail,” said Grant. “Any skeptic, whether they’re a downhill rider, BMX, cross country, they get on it and they’re obsessed with it. We were at an event, and pros would walk by and see our longest running time. They would say, ‘Let me hurry and beat this,’ and they could only ride for one to three seconds, and the record time was 30 seconds set by a 16-year-old. They’d be like, ‘Holy crap, why is this so hard?’ In the beginning, we called our product a manual trainer. People who manual can handle their bike better. The bike stops being something they ride to a tool they’re using. The problem is, when you say manual, there are a lot of people who don’t care to manual. They don’t see the benefits. Not only are we entering a blue ocean in terms of having no competition, we’re going a step further by completely rebranding this product. That’s rebranding three years and millions of views of people seeing this referred to as a manual trainer. We have pro riders who race in the world cup who can manual for miles. I’ve ridden with a pro, and he rides faster down a trail riding manual than I can on two wheels. He gets on our trainer and can only ride it for three seconds. What’s that tell you? There’s still a lot of growth for him, and he can utilize the trainer.”

“Grant is an avid mountain biker—it’s his passion—and one area where I’ve seen people fail in business is when they don’t have an inside man,” said Mitch. “You work harder when you’re passionate and you know a lot more about the ins and outs of the consumer group, price points—things like that.”

“Mitch is easy to get along with,” said Grant. “The cool thing with Mitch is he’ll take the gloves off and dive in. With a lot of people you try to bring on board, they don’t want to do as much work. They’ve made it in their career, so they’re in the position where they’ve already worked hard enough, and they don’t want to work harder. They don’t want to be all-in, and Mitch is very different. He says, ‘Let’s dive in and make it happen,’ and we have a unique relationship where I want to do the same thing. I’ll take whatever risk I need to take. For me, if I can pay my debts off, then I’m a happy man because I can ride and work at a bike shop.”

“It’s all about developing the product and creating value,” said Mitch. “If we’re able to do that, and the market accepts it, then that’s success for us.”

“Some people might list a dollar amount, but for us, it’s about building a cool product,” says Grant. “My wife and I both ride, and we’ve taken the year off from hitting fun trails to just focus on skills building. Mitch came up with our slogan: ‘Riding Refined.' That’s really what we want to help others do.”

The Value Of Mentors

“Mentoring should be happening,” said Mitch. “If it’s not happening, then faculty probably need to develop better relationships with their students. I guess this could depend on the kind of class that you teach. Because I teach digital marketing, I teach concepts that you can actually apply that week in your job. When you’re teaching something that’s applied, and getting to know what your students are working on, they might say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to figure this out.’ That provides a topic to discuss in class. If you have a huge class where you’re teaching 350 students and you’re lecturing, that sort of process is never going to take place. That’s something faculty can do. Students can actually go to a professor’s office, and that rarely happens. I have an open-door policy, and I’m here most days—“

“Although I’m usually the one there,” Grant jokes.

“Exactly,” Mitch laughs. “Some students take advantage of that. It’s really rare, except for at the end of the semester when they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m trying to get an A but I’m at a B+.’ You can get so much more out of me than that. I’ve had students contact me that I taught years ago reach out, like one just hit me up yesterday asking me how to negotiate on salary. Why? Just because I had talked with her a few times on a few things and she was like, ‘Here’s a person who’s willing to help me and might have the knowledge.’ A student who had never been in my office wouldn’t reach out to me. They’re going to miss out on some expertise, and they might make more mistakes. You need that mentorship. I wish I had more mentors, and the ones that I’ve had have been amazing. I think students can do better at that.”

“You would hope that professors would have experience and high-level thinking that could help guide strategy. With a mentor relationship, that can help young entrepreneurs avoid a lot of missteps. It’s not even necessarily coming up with the optimal strategy; it’s just helping to avoid some serious problems. Once you get those out of the way, then you’re almost halfway there. The students come in and bring the enthusiasm and energy, and in Grant’s case, industry knowledge and work ethic. You combine those together, then something like Tilt Industries happens. It’s more likely to happen here than at other universities, largely because incentives for professors are different everywhere else. Research is the primary focus at most institutions, where at UVU, we’re applied. We try to be more connected to the business community, so we’re more aware of opportunities and how business works.  The cool thing is, in my classes right now, if my students don’t have their own business, their sister or brother has a business. We live in a very entrepreneurial environment in Utah Valley. If collaboration isn’t taking place, it’s not because of the lack of opportunities. There are a ton of opportunities for professors to collaborate with students. Students talk to me all the time, and I don’t take all of them up on their business, but you can still provide a lot of guidance.”

“In regards to strategic decisions,” said Grant, “it’s so easy to come up with an idea super-fast and get it out there, and professors can help hone that and calm you down a little bit. They help you be more like a rifle than a shotgun. They help you be more on point.”

“That’s part of our working relationship,” said Mitch. “Grant pushes forward as fast as possible, and I’m pushing back saying, ‘Let’s think on this.’ Then we continue forward, but you have to have both, because from my perspective, if I was starting a business on my own, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are. We’d still be in the early phase. It would be executed really well [laughter], but it wouldn’t be this far along. You have to balance that. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Half the battle is just getting it out there and having something that’s viable.”

“We didn’t make a million dollars the first day, and my instant thought was, ‘Well, this really sucks,’” said Grant. “Mitch was able to say, ‘Well, no we didn’t, but we made $15,000 the first day, that’s huge!’ Where our website sales are on a steady increase instead of exploding, it would be easy for a young person to say, ‘Oh this sucks.’ But Mitch is able to say, ‘No, that’s over a million dollars in a year. That’s a killer setup.’ That really helps.”

“You can think about how, as a professor, you want to create an environment where students can learn,” says Mitch. “An entrepreneurial venture is the best way to do that. Regardless of what happens from this, I will walk away with a ton in regards of what I can apply to the classroom and teach students. There are tactical things that I wasn’t very familiar with that I learned through this process, and Grant will come away with tons and tons of learning experience. It’s an awesome way to create a learning environment. That’s what we’re trying to do.”