Tony Little Interview

TCC: Do you think that you need to be in the right place and right time to grow success?

TL: No, I don’t think you have to be in the right place at the right time. I think you got to know when it’s the right place and the right time. I think that people have to see the opportunities when they’re there. Many of us actually have times of opportunity, but we don’t see them. I’ve always been a person that says yes first to almost any project and then I figure out how to do it, what the profitability is and if it doesn’t fit me, then I say no. But I never say no first.

TCC: You had a story about Bud Paxson and his son owning a gym, would you call that seizing an opportunity or the right place and the right time?

TL: I wouldn’t say it’s seizing an opportunity, I would say it’s making an opportunity. You know what I’m saying? Because I spent probably a year trying to convince Home Shopping Network to let me on the air and let me do my videos and everybody turned me down. So, I had to then think outside the box and say, 'How do I do this?' And then I found out that his son owned a gym. Well, then I see an opportunity. Opportunity to help him do his gym business and opportunity for him to give me an audience with his dad. I made my own opportunity there. I’ve also found that in my career nobody sells me as good as I sell myself, and that’s because I believe in myself. I’m just a big guy. People say, 'Oh you’re positive all the time.' I had a call-in when we were doing a new commercial on a Fox show and the person said, 'It’s all good and you’re so positive and everything. My wife left and my son’s doing this and I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it.' The first thing I can tell you is these are horrible things. The second thing I can tell you is with that attitude you won’t get out of it.

TCC: So you’re saying it’s all about the attitude?

TL: It really is about the attitude. It’s your attitude that paves your life and that allows you to go where you want to go. It’s not somebody else’s attitude. It’s the way you think, it’s the way you believe, it’s what you want, and it’s your goals. But you have to go back to the simple times of understanding once you change your mindset you can change your life. If you’re in a bad environment and you change your environment, you can change your life. There are just certain things you got to do first. I think that your mindset has to be changed first.

TCC: You were electrocuted twice, you almost died from drowning, you were in four accidents (which one was right before the Mr. America contest), your father committed suicide, all the surgeries and you were broke. What was the single hardest thing to triumph from?

TL: It’s funny, I would have thought the hardest thing to triumph from was when I had the two hundred stitches in my face and I was going to lose the Gazelle infomercial, which was something I believed in and wanted to do. But I made that. Again, I made that opportunity. I left Ohio, talked to the president and made a bet, which allowed me to, not only win a brand new Porsche, but to also continue in a billion and a half dollar business opportunity, because I didn’t let him say no. But that really wasn’t the hardest mentally to me. Even though it was physical and it looked like it was career threatening.

The hardest mentally to me was when the IRS sent me a letter [in 1997] and said, 'You owe us 1.1 million dollars and we want it now.' [Laughs] That was a little bit harder for me, because it was like, mess with them and you got to figure out a way to come up with that kind of money. That was a tough time. That was where again I took action, immediately. I sold my mansion.

I had two kids who were probably six years old. They were like, 'Daddy why are you selling everything?' I’m like, 'Because we’ve got to move on.' I made the decisions right away, that the only way I was going to be able handle $1.1 million and 10% interest every month or whatever it was, was to take drastic measures and handle the problem. Where as other people might sit back and wait, hoping that something comes in. You can’t wait, because then you’re going to be in worse trouble.