Making Something From Nothing: Don Schoendorfer of Free Wheelchair Mission On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Trust God. On a personal level, I wished I’d done this sooner in my career. Thankfully, by the time I started Free Wheelchair Mission, I’d mostly learned this lesson, though I’m still not perfect. I have found God to be the very best leader anyone could ask for and I’ve put my trust in him to help our organization flourish.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Don Schoendorfer.
Dr. Don Schoendorfer is a biomedical engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and humanitarian who lives in Santa Ana, California. Armed with an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, Don spent nearly twenty-five years in the medical device industry, designing cutting-edge innovations resulting in more than sixty patents to his name.
Don’s humanitarian work has garnered numerous awards and accolades, including ones from The White House, the United States House of Representatives and The White House Congressional Medal of Honor Society. When he is not busy tinkering with his inventions, Don enjoys spending time with his three daughters, two amazing granddaughters and a Siberian Husky named Tolbi.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in a small town called Ashtabula, Ohio with my parents and two older brothers. My dad was a machinist, so I had plenty of exposure to building things. We didn’t have much in the way of money, so I also got acquainted with fixing things around the house instead of buying new ones. I loved to tinker at a very early age, taking apart electronics and building various contraptions like go-carts. My brothers’ hand-me-down Erector sets were the most fascinating things in the world to me and I’d play with them endlessly. One Christmas, I was in heaven when my parents got me my very own set. While my parents didn’t show a lot of emotion and we had our share of problems growing up, my dad faithfully took us to church every Sunday. They did their best to raise us, despite the challenges. I’m grateful to my parents and many others who encouraged my love of engineering. This passion would eventually lead to me accomplishing my childhood goal of getting a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One of the most impactful life lessons for me wasn’t necessarily a book or film, but rather was a story told by a pastor at church called “The Fool’s Game.” As the story goes, the fool is a person who wants to do something good — for the world, for God, for society, for whatever — but he’s got this long list of things that he must get done first. He also has another list, one full of things he really wants to do someday, and that list is getting longer, too. As soon as something gets checked off the first list, another thing gets added, and the list never gets any shorter. There’s always one more thing to do, one more thing to cross off, and then he dies. He spent his entire life playing The Fool’s Game, and he lost. Upon hearing that story, it shook my world. I realized this is exactly what I’d been doing in my life up until that point. I realized I’d been the fool and my life had to change.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
As a biomedical engineer, during most of my career, any truly new idea would have to go through a great deal of rigorous testing, eventually with human subjects. The sheer weight of this process meant that new ideas would have to be filtered out very early on due to cost, impracticability, or often just the science. This meant a lot of work upfront before something even was tested. So, when I came up with the idea of creating low-cost, durable wheelchairs for the developing world, I sort of did the opposite of what I’d been doing in my prior career. I kept things simple by building prototypes myself in my garage, using off-the-shelf parts such as mountain bike wheels and the white resin plastic lawn chairs (like the ones you might see in Home Depot). In the long run, this strategy of keeping things simple and laser-focused on this one solution to a very big problem is a big part of why we’re still going, 21 years later.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
Thankfully, by the time I moved forward with my idea of building low-cost wheelchairs in 1999, the Internet, while in its early stages, had some good information to help with my research into this area. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as robust as it is today, so I still had to ask a lot of questions and make a lot of phone calls. These days, however, it’s easy to do internet searches for patents, products, and companies in just about any field or industry. At the same time, much to my surprise in 1999, there were actually very few others doing it. I’d assumed for 20 years or more that someone “must have already thought about” building low-cost wheelchairs for the developing world. So, in my case, that assumption was wrong and I’m sure it is for many who have wonderful ideas, but never pursue them thinking they’ve already been done.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
When I worked in industry, or at the early stages of Free Wheelchair Mission, the answer to this question may have been different than it is today. In the biomedical field, as I said earlier, it costs a lot of money to test new products. So, it’s not as easy for the small, independent entrepreneur without a lot of funding. The patent laws have also changed quite a bit in the past 10 years or so, so the first step might be to find a good patent lawyer to give you guidance. The process to find good manufacturers, on the other hand, still seems to be the same — ask a lot of people a lot of questions, look for advice and recommendations, and then be very thorough in your review of each option. The decision to find good manufacturers is one of the most important ones you will make, so take a lot of time to get this part right. In terms of distribution, with Free Wheelchair Mission, we have a bit of a unique model in that we distribute our wheelchairs through other partner humanitarian organizations around the world. This model has provided us with an on-the-ground presence across 94 countries — something that would have been cost-and-time-prohibitive for us to do ourselves. So, creatively look for cost-effective ways to get your product in front of as many customers as possible, as quickly as possible.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
- Invest upfront in your mission statement, your unique value proposition, and your core messaging. At one point early on, I was told to, “Get your story straight, because if you succeed, you will tell it thousands of times.” This was good advice. We’ve told our story thousands of times. For a donation of less than $100, someone with disabilities will receive a new wheelchair and their life will be transformed. This is a powerful and long-lasting story and we have more than 1.3 million of them to tell. I also wanted to cast a mission statement that would outlive my presence in the organization so that, even if I wasn’t leading the charge, our mission would continue.
- Invest in yourself and your people. Have people you trust and admire do a 360° review of you. A year or two after starting our organization, I had people do 360° reviews of me to find my strengths and weaknesses. This helped me early on to identify my gaps and look for people who can fill them. Also, I looked for help from people who have the heart to help us. Without the heart and the passion for our mission, they were just employees.
- Be tenacious. If I knew I needed something, I wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. I also ignored the folks who said, “it cannot be done.” The more persistent I was, the more people wanted to help me. They thought, “Well, I guess I should help this guy to get him off my back!”
- Take as little credit as possible and fail often. Anything less than this leads to attitudes that will hinder success. For every success, identify those who had the most to do with the success, and affirm them. But, also realize that failure is necessary. I accepted the fact that if I fail, others on the team will benefit from my failure. The path to success is paved by rocks of failures.
- Trust God. On a personal level, I wished I’d done this sooner in my career. Thankfully, by the time I started Free Wheelchair Mission, I’d mostly learned this lesson, though I’m still not perfect. I have found God to be the very best leader anyone could ask for and I’ve put my trust in him to help our organization flourish.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I personally haven’t worked with invention consultants, so I cannot speak to that. However, if you are inventing something in a field you know well, you might decide to strike out on your own first until you get to a point where you have key decisions to make about product/feature choice or whether to file patents. However, as I mentioned, in today’s changing patent environment, I would consult with a patent attorney if your new idea is going to require this kind of protection. One way or another, be prepared to invest a lot of money if you intend to obtain strong, defensible patents.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
For the most part, in the biomedical field, bootstrapping is much more difficult due to the high cost and long period of time needed to develop new products in that field, especially those that will require FDA approval. Prior to starting Free Wheelchair Mission as a nonprofit, I had been working with my partner on a skin patch that could be used in diagnostic applications. It would collect sweat that could be sent to a lab to diagnose a variety of conditions. We thought it had huge potential and secured outside funding from a large medical manufacturer. We spent more than five years developing and testing it, then five more years eventually getting it to be FDA approved. We spent a lot of money to secure a family of patents to protect the ideas and we’d spent tens of thousands of dollars to set up a solid business structure. Eventually, the company that invested in us got impatient. Not only did they pull our funding, but they also had the rights to our patents. Much to our shock and dismay, they took all our patents and we had to shut down the company. This was an extremely painful lesson that I would only truly understand later with the “Fool’s Game” and then being called in another direction to start Free Wheelchair Mission. While our nonprofit was “bootstrapped” for the most part, we do have outside “investors” in the form of our volunteers, supporters, and donors. Thankfully, for the most part, they are just as passionate about our mission as we are. They are willing to invest their time, talent, and/or treasure in our cause. So, based on the hard lessons learned, my advice would be to develop a network of smart people you can trust to fill in your gaps and get as far as you can without having to rely on outside money coming from people who aren’t as passionate as you are about your mission.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Well, going back to the Fool’s Game, you don’t have to be “successful” in the eyes of the world before trying to make the world a better place. We all can contribute to making the world a better place starting here and now, in whatever capacity and whatever gifts we each may have. It’s been a blessing and honor to have been called to start Free Wheelchair Mission. We’ve now provided more than 1.3 million wheelchairs to those living with disabilities in 94 developing countries. Each wheelchair we provide transforms the lives of the recipient, their caregivers, their families, and their whole communities. It enables the recipient of the wheelchair to go to school, go to work, get medical care, and see family or friends. We literally have more than a million stories of transformation and each one is unique. It’s been an honor to witness and share these stories.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
The answer is right within your question: “movement.” We would like to inspire a movement to provide movement. To give the gift of mobility. An estimated 75 million people around the world live with disabilities but are unable to get a wheelchair. It’s a worldwide humanitarian crisis that has been going on for decades, but unfortunately that few know about. It can be solved within even my lifetime. Our mission is to irradicate immobility. Mobility moves us — in more ways than one. We would love to have as many of your readers as possible join us in this mission and they may visit our website to learn about the many ways they can help: www.FreeWheelchairMission.org. You can also read about the story behind Free Wheelchair Mission in my new book Miracle Wheels: The Story of a Mission to Bring Mobility to the World. Miracle Wheels shares the story behind the “miracle wheels” that have transformed the lives of millions of people with disabilities. Miracle Wheels is available on December 6 on Amazon. All net proceeds from the book will go to benefit the ongoing work of Free Wheelchair Mission.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
One perhaps obvious choice would be someone like Elon Musk. He grew up in South Africa and may have seen some of the people we serve in his home country with our wheelchairs — those living with disabilities who often must crawl in the dirt or be carried wherever they go. He’s also an engineer focused on solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. With about a third of the cost of Twitter, he could help us completely eradicate immobility. Approximately that level of funding would provide new wheelchairs to the 75 million people around the world who are desperately waiting for them. This is a solvable problem and we have a proven solution. With the help of someone like Elon or others in the tech industry, we can do this. I would love to share our story with him as I think it would resonate.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Don Schoendorfer of Free Wheelchair Mission On How To Go From Idea… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
