Energia Communications
Elyse Dickerson
The brief history of the life of Eosera began with a foundation that took months to build — not to mention an earwax formula that worked — but it was a pivotal 18 minutes that made the biotechnology company that specializes in ear care products.
And it’s safe to say that today, on Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, that Elyse Dickerson — recently a Fort Worth Inc. 2021 Entrepreneur of Excellence award winner — did more with 18 minutes than just about anyone you might know.
Before Dickerson and business partner Joe Griffin got Earwax MD off the ground and onto retail shelves, they had spent months in a laboratory on the campus of the UNT Health Science Center, where they had leased space. During that time they had worked repeatedly with all kinds of wax and had finally found one formula they had developed that worked consistently on the various kinds of earwax. (Little known fact: Not all earwax is the same.)
Having collected “robust test tube data,” it was time to run a human clinical trial, but the principals of this self-funded project winced just a little when they were told the price tag of this part of research and development: $50,000.
It just so happened, Hollywood-type stuff was about to intervene. Dickerson saw an advertisement for a pitch competition in Dallas, hosted by the Dallas Entrepreneur Center and Comerica Bank.
The top prize: $50,000.
“This is where being an athlete and super competitive paid off,” says Dickerson, who earned 12 varsity letters while a student at Fort Worth Country Day, Class of 1993. “I went to my business partner and said, ‘I’m going to win that thing.’ I spent months on this eight-minute pitch. I ended up being one of the five finalists and got to pitch in front of a panel of judges, and we had literally eight minutes. It was a big room full of people and a panel of judges.
“I got up and pitched, nailed it, and we won the $50,000.”
The Hollywood writers, with their fingers on the pulse of America, would call this whole thing an earry coincidence. (I won’t.)
No, the so-called yellow brick road to entrepreneurial success wasn’t that at all, of course. It never is. Like everyone else’s road, Dickerson’s was paved with potholes demanding the type of agility, perseverance, and luck that was the pitch competition just happening to arise at the very moment Team Entrepreneurs Dickerson and Griffin needed it most.
Dickerson began this journey called professional life at Notre Dame, studying graphic design.
“My plans were … I had no idea what to do with my life,” she says now reminiscing about her days as an 18-year-old undergrad. “My parents said, ‘Get a degree.’ I said, ‘Alright. Graphic design sounds kind of cool.’”
In reality, Dickerson says, she was drawn to the arts because there was less reading, a natural appeal to someone who battled dyslexia growing up. She says she was intimidated by engineering and the sciences, suffering from the lack of confidence and the belief that she simply wasn’t smart enough.
“I was intimidated by engineering and the sciences,” she says again. “I shouldn’t have been, but when you’re young things scare you. So, you stay away from them.”
Dickerson has since cured herself of creeping feelings she isn’t good or smart enough.
Still, graphic design, as it turned out “ended up being a wonderful outlet to build my creative confidence.”
She tried and ultimately passed on the not-so-glamorous fashion industry. “One of my first jobs entailed taking on and off price tags on high-end garments so they could be used in a fashion show. I’d do that eight hours a day.”
Rather than stay on that freeway, she exited. The SMU Cox School of Business was her immediate destination with a focus on entrepreneurship, which would provide the broadest range of business education and fundamentals, she says.
She was part of companywide layoffs not once, but twice, the last time from Alcon in 2015 after 13 years there.
“I thought I’d retire at Alcon,” she says. “People were there 20 – 30 years. It was a family environment … it was a great place to work.”
Her business partner was among those laid off as well.
We find compensation in every disappointment, Henry David Thoreau scribbled once, “if we will be quiet and ready enough.”
Now with a base of knowledge in biotechnology, Dickerson and Griffin decided that’s where they wanted to stay as they forged ahead in business, this time digging out their own path. They talked to every doctor who would sit down for dinner or lunch. What they found out was that earwax impaction was a problem for both older patients as well as the very youngest. And over-the-counter products on the market were not effective.
The arrangement with the UNT Health Science Center provided access to lab devices that “we could have never afforded,” Dickerson says.
“We were self-funding everything at this point,” she says, “but UNT gave us access to their libraries so we could download any medical literature or patent information. We combed through anything we could get our hands on to just try to learn what had been explored and what patents had been field.
“Then we started formulating.”
Catherine the Great of Russia once famously said that, “A shoemaker only knows how to make shoes!” Certainly, the shoemaker doesn’t know the affairs of state. And surely an MBA doesn’t know the complex compounds of the science of breaking down earwax.
Griffin has a doctorate as a toxicologist. So, he had the fundamentals of the scientific process, though the two wound up contracting with a “real formulator” to help part time. However, Dickerson was indeed a full participant in the scientific process, she says, getting her hands dirty.
“This is where I like that idea of lifelong learning,” she says. “I had enough self-confidence to get in there and start reading the literature, ask questions. I was in there formulating with them. I certainly wasn’t leading it, but I loved it. It was like going back to school. It was awesome.”
What Dickerson didn’t anticipate after winning the $50,000 pitch contest was the attention it gave the company. They received a lot of press, which was an enticement for investors to call and find out what was going on in Fort Worth.
“I remember the first call I got,” Dickerson says. “'So, are you raising money … do you have a term sheet … can you send it over?’ I wasn’t raising money. I had no idea what to do. I said, ‘Can I call you back?’”
She says she leaned on friends and connections within her network to consult on things like a term sheet. She said that without fail, they all were willing to pitch in.
“People came out in huge numbers to help us in different ways,” she says. “This friend sat me down and said, ‘This is a term sheet. This is what you should do.’ The best advice he gave me was set your terms and don’t change them. He warned me that every investor or investor group was going to try to change them to make it more beneficial.”
The spirit of collaboration is something Dickerson dives head first into when she is asked for help, she says, particularly women entrepreneurs just like her. She even said she tells her female employees “all the time … I want you to be running your own companies one day.”
After the pitch competition and successful human trials, Dickerson had one more presentation.
The buyer at CVS said he would give Dickerson 10 minutes to present Earwax MD, but she had to come to a hotel ballroom in Florida to do it. Team Eosera wanted to foot in the door at major retailer, and those opportunities don't come around like the rising or setting sun.
“You don’t get any longer than that, so come prepared,” she recalls the buyer saying. “Visions of the pitch competition where I had eight minutes started flooding my brain. I’m like, ‘I can do this. Ten minutes, I can do this. I can sell this.’”
When she arrived, and her time came to present, she was ushered in. Sure enough, there, she observed, a timer. And vendors everywhere. She was merely one of many in an ocean of innovators. When she had completed her presentation, there would be an usher ready to take her back out.
“At the end of eight minutes, I had two minutes left, and I said, ‘Brian, I would love to try this in 2,000 of your stores,’” she says, thinking he would counter with a significantly smaller figure.
“He wound up saying, ‘No, I love it; let’s have it in all 8,000 stores.’”
In three months.
Dickerson wasn’t sure if she didn’t need some of her own product to clear out her ears. It was sheer joy and sheer panic, all at the same time, she remembers well.
“We don’t have final packaging, contract manufacturing, we don’t have anything,” Dickerson says of those days. “All we have is a pipe dream that I just sold.”
She wasn’t about to tell CVS that, however.
She and Griffin figured it out, finding a manufacturer in Florida to build the company’s first 80,000 units and first round of purchase orders. Today, all of it is done in-house at Eosera’s 20,000-square foot headquarters on the South Freeway. From her office, Dickerson says, she can see Alcon, the company whose layoff spurred the creation of Eosera.
That’s kind of fun, she admits.
In all, Eosera has 10 products in ear care now in 13,000 stores, including Kroger as well as online stores Rite Aid and Amazon. They employee 20 and are hiring two new executive positions for marketing and manufacturing.
Of those early days, she says: “We had no idea how we were going to get it done, but we were going to get it done.”
It remains amazing what can be accomplished with a little help from your friends, a heaping helping of perseverance and dogged determination, thinking well on one’s feet, and 18 of the most effective minutes of presentations in recent memory.
Happy Women’s Entrepreneurship Day to Elyse Dickerson and all like her.