Tavis Malcolm walked off the Shark Tank stage in 2024 with a $300,000 deal from Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran for 20% of his baby-gear company, Morrison Outdoors. Months later, the deal collapsed in due diligence. Now, roughly a year after the episode aired, Malcolm has taken over as executive director of a relaunched New Mexico outdoor-recreation trade group — while pushing his company into an entirely new, adult-focused product line.
How Morrison Outdoors got here
Malcolm founded Morrison Outdoors after a family camping trip where he and his wife couldn’t find a suitable sleeping bag for their newborn, so he quit his marketing job in 2018 and launched the company from his garage. By the time he pitched on Shark Tank, Morrison Outdoors had generated $4.3 million in total sales, with roughly $850,000 in revenue that year and about $1.1 million projected. Cuban and Corcoran teamed up to offer $300,000 for a combined 20% stake, and Malcolm accepted on air. The deal fell apart afterward during due diligence, Malcolm later told a local news station, though he said he remains grateful for the opportunity.
How common is a collapsed handshake, really?
Malcolm’s collapsed deal fits a well-documented pattern on the show, not an unusual setback. Multiple independent analyses — including a Forbes review of contestants from the show’s first seven seasons and later industry breakdowns — put the share of on-screen deals that fall apart or get renegotiated during due diligence somewhere between 43% and 73%, depending on how “changed” versus “collapsed” is counted. One analysis found that roughly 45–50% of on-screen Shark Tank deals actually close after due diligence, with the rest falling apart before any money changes hands — often because the sharks’ investment teams find the numbers don’t hold up once they dig into the financials.
Investors’ track records vary widely: Barbara Corcoran has actually closed nearly 60% of her on-air handshakes, a notably higher rate than other sharks, who collectively cancel more than 40% of their deals. That makes it somewhat notable that Corcoran — the shark with the better follow-through record — was one of the two investors on this particular deal that didn’t survive.
What Malcolm has done since is also more concrete than a typical “no deal” postscript. He’s now executive director of the newly rebranded New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance (NMORBA), taking over an organization that had lost momentum in recent years. The Shark Tank appearance gave his business a sales boost and also revealed unexpected demand for adult versions of his products, which Morrison Outdoors is expanding into this fall. On the harder side of the ledger, Malcolm says tariffs have pushed up costs so much that more than half of Morrison Outdoors’ annual profits now go toward tariffs and related expenses, since the company’s products are made in Cambodia.
This isn’t a story about a company getting burned by Shark Tank — it’s closer to the median outcome. A rejected or collapsed deal on the show is close to a coin flip, and plenty of companies (Beard King and Grinds among them, per past Forbes reporting) have thrived without ever taking the money they shook hands on. Malcolm’s case stands out mainly for what came next: rather than just moving on, he’s turned his post-show visibility into an actual leadership role advocating for other small outdoor-recreation businesses facing the same tariff and cost pressures he’s navigating himself.
