While many teenagers look forward to leaving baseball practice to go home, one Opelika teenager looks forward to going to work.
Still in his baseball practice attire, Taylor Rosenthal, freshman at Opelika High School, enters the doors at the Round House in Opelika ready to work on bettering his business.
As an eighth-grader at Opelika Middle School, Taylor devised the idea for first-aid vending machines in his Young Entrepreneurs Academy class sponsored by the Opelika Chamber of Commerce.
Fast-forward a few months and Taylor serves as founder and CEO of RecMed, a first-aid vending machine company that was officially granted its patent in October.
“RecMed is a company I created where we make computerized and robotic vending machines that dispense first-aid supplies,” Taylor said. “It functions similarly to a Redbox machine but instead of dispensing DVDs, it dispenses first-aid supplies.”
Taylor, who has been around sports his whole life, began his business with the help of his parents, who work in the medical field. However, it wasn’t until he had a realization that the idea for the vending machines came about.
“I started out sitting out at sporting events selling first-aid kits,” Taylor said. "Then I noticed how much it would cost to pay someone minimum wage to sit out at a tournament for six hours, so I had to find a way around that but still have the first-aid supplies there. So that’s how I came up with the vending machine.”
Since the invention of the RecMed vending machines, Taylor has spent countless hours bettering his idea and business behind the doors of the Round House, an incubator for startup businesses.
Since receiving his patent, Taylor has turned down an offer to buy the company for $30 million, instead choosing to close with a number of partners and investors who helped him raise the funds for the prototype.
Taylor, who won the opportunity to work with the Round House through a class competition, credits the incubator for kick starting his idea and bettering his business.
“To graduate from the class, you had to go to a pitch day, and there were four judges that you pitched in front of,” Taylor said. “They picked one person to compete in the regionals, and I won that. Round House said that whoever won the class they would take in, get them what they needed like business cards, brochures and anything they needed to go to Boca Raton. They helped me get ready for it and get all of the things I needed. They helped a lot.”
However, the Round House founder and Taylor's business mentor Kyle Sandler said Taylor's success stems from his drive, which Sandler said is exceptional.
“We had to kick him out of here on Christmas Eve to spend time with his family, and every minute of fall break he was here at the Round House,” Sandler said. “When he’s not in school or playing baseball, he’s here working on anything from customer discovery to lead generation to where he can put his product."
Taylor's hard work recently landed him an invitation to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, a global consumer electronics and consumer technology trade show that took place at the start of January.
There he had the opportunity to pitch his product to the producers of Shark Tank. The results from that pitch will be released in two months and will determine if Taylor gets an audition for the show.
If Taylor makes it on the show Shark Tank, there is one shark in general that he said he would like to strike a deal with and who he recently saw in Las Vegas.
“Mark Cuban, because he is a big sports guy,” Taylor said. “He walked by my booth in Las Vegas, but he was walking so fast and he couldn’t stop or else he would have gotten mobbed.”
While Taylor described his experience in Las Vegas as “awesome,” he is already planning a trip of equal importance to New York City where he will try and promote his vending machines.
“It’s not a done deal yet, but we are working on that,” Taylor said. “We are looking at a variety of different shows out there, and we’ve been talking to some of the shows about going on, so were just going to see where it goes.”
While Taylor runs his business for the most part, his father helps out with the business and accompanies his son to the trade shows and promotion trips. While not many parents have the opportunity to talk business with their children, Terry Rosenthal has welcomed the business and chance to work with and for his son.
“It’s definitely something a lot of people don’t get to do, and actually I worked for him last week,” Terry said. “He had me at the booth all week talking to people. He was there most of the time, but he did get to go around the show and see some stuff. But it’s been amazing.”
As for the future of the business, the 14-year-old founder and CEO said he does not have any immediate plans to do anything with the company as he continues to see how things pan out.
“We really want to grow it for maybe six to 12 months and then just see where it's at then, see what it's worth and how it's going,” Taylor said.
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