@ GameFace

There is no doubt in my mind that the year 2013 will bring many interesting, fun, and crazy businesses into the Shark Tank. To start off the new year, GameFace enters the Shark Tank with a peel-away face-paint product that comes in all different styles and colors.  Asking for $450,000 for 25% in his business, Doug Marshall lets the sharks know a bit of good news and bad news. To start with the good news, his margins are pretty solid as he makes around $2.00 per unit sold. However at the same time, he only brought in $102,000 last year and is only working on this part-time. Not only that, but he only profited $32,000 on those sales, and would like to use most of the sharks' money to pay himself a hefty salary over the next three years. With this, Daymond and Robert are quick to drop out. But what happens next is just utterly confusing and surprising.

Kevin offers $150,000 for 30% and a $300,000 loan with a royalty fee attached. Lori then pops up and says she will invest the full $450,000 for 40% of the business, and when she asks Mark to join, Mark turns it into $1,000,000 for the entire business, keeping Marshall on an $80,000 annual salary for the next five years. None of this made sense to me though, and I think I know why. 

Here's what I am struggling with. Immediately after Robert and Daymond said they were out because they weren't interested in giving this man money merely to pay himself, Kevin, Lori, and Mark seemed to have had no problem with this and all made their offers. But why would they be interested in this deal, especially for the amount of money they were offering? I mean, it's a rare occasion to hear $1,000,000 be offered in the Tank, let alone be offered to a man with only $102,000 in sales and a desire to pay himself. What is this madness?!

I love the product. I can see it in every stadium, field, and arena across the country, and even internationally. But $102,000 in sales just doesn't trigger an offer of $1,000,000. It just doesn't happen. So what did happen? My call is that this comes down to editing and cropping. Of course, what we see when we're watching Shark Tank is a stripped down version of what actually happened. Some pitches take up to an hour, which is longer than an entire episode! And although normally I praise the show's editors for a doing a phenomenal job, I think they messed up a bit here and left out a bit too much. It was so unnatural and out of the blue for the three Sharks to start shooting out offers immediately after Daymond and Robert finished pointing out the flaws in the deal. There must have been something that happened in between that got ears perked and made the Sharks hungry. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense. This of course is my personal explanation for what happened. Perhaps one could say that Kevin, Lori, and Mark either didn't care about the salary ordeal or just loved the product so much that it didn't matter to them, but I don't think either of these are too likely. Anyway, GameFace (which is a great name) ended up successfully countering Mark and Lori and walked out with $450,000 and an annual salary of $80,000 for three years, in exchange for a 35% stake plus a 10% royalty until the investment is made back. Great deal, interesting story, and looking forward to seeing whether this product is "a hero or a zero". Overall Performance: 6

(By the way, do you think Doug Marshall still has that piece of mask on his nose? I could not stop laughing and wondering whether he knew it was there the whole time! Good times!!)