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The Visionary

• American Gutter Monkeys, LLC • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Most folks go where the puck is. Visionaries? They go where the puck is gonna be.

In this episode, we dig into what it really means to think ahead in business—and how that mindset can drive long-term growth. Dennis and Chris unpack how to build a five-year plan, recognize your weak spots, and surround yourself with the right people (hint: not yes-men).

We hear the story of Marjorie Merriweather Post—a 27-year-old who turned breakfast into big business—and how her instincts reshaped American kitchens. We also talk Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys, marketing wins (and flops), and why hitting every goal might mean your goals aren't ambitious enough.

This one’s packed with stories, strategy, quotes, and a reminder: your vision doesn’t need to be perfect—it just needs to keep you moving forward.

So grab your coffee, sit back, and welcome to Monkey Business Radio.

Chris:

Hello everyone, welcome to Episode 9, Visionary. Today, we're diving into what it really means to think ahead in business and why the people who do are often the ones who change the game, and that's what the visionary is all about going to where the puck is going to be when he or she gets there.

Chris:

We're talking about vision, not the crystal ball kind, but the kind that grows businesses, builds teams and sees opportunities where others don't From Marjorie Post revolutionizing how America eats, to entrepreneurs who pivot when their original plans fall flat. We're breaking down how to anticipate, adapt and aim higher. We'll talk about how to build a five-year plan, how to recognize the weak spots in your operation and why disagreements inside your leadership team can actually be a good thing. Dennis shares stories from the field, including lessons from Cape Cod gutter monkeys and what happens when a friend called them out for not chasing the hardest and the most valuable goals. We have a great show for you today, so grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax and welcome to Monkey Business Radio. Hello everyone, welcome to Monkey Business Radio, episode 8, the Visionary. As always, I'm joined by my co-host, the one and only Dennis Siggins of the Gutter Monkeys. Hello, dennis. Thanks, chris, how are you doing?

Dennis:

Good good. How are you Good good? One of my favorite topics, the Visionary. Yeah, I like this.

Chris:

You got some good quotes for us. I guess today One of the ones you're always kicking around here, or I should say slapping around here- yeah, most folks go to where the puck is.

Dennis:

But, chris, we want to go to where the puck is going to be when we get there. And that's the mantra of the visionary, the person that has somehow trained himself organically to see beyond what most people see, to see a little bit into the future, a little bit ahead of what the rest of us can see. And that's what the visionary is all about Going to where the puck is going to be when he or she gets there. You know, there's the Elon Musks and the Bill Gates of the world, the Warren Buffett how about Jimmy Buffett? Even Jimmy Buffett? Maybe the first person who became a billionaire with a guitar, shorts and flip-flops. True visionaries, but let's bring it down a notch, because the rest of us are mere mortals and we want to become visionary in our businesses and in our lives so that we can accomplish things that maybe we couldn't have otherwise.

Chris:

Okay. So yeah, on today's episode. So we're going to break down how to develop business vision, sort of analyzing your weak spots. Set some real measurable goals that can push you forward. Yeah, when do we start with this? I guess, before you know where you're going, you got to figure out where you are. I guess.

Dennis:

I was approached by an acquaintance at a barbecue and he was recently retiring by an acquaintance at a barbecue and he was recently retiring, just about to retire, and he kind of threw it out to me. He said, hey, can you help me out? I'm thinking about going into the landscape business when I retire. And I said, sure, sure, and we were just having a burger and a beer. And you know, when he retired he wanted to go into the landscaping business. He wanted to buy a pickup truck and a lawnmower and a string trimmer. And I said, well, let's talk five years down the road, you know. And he said, no, no, I just just that's all I want, just me, just enough to keep myself busy. And I said you don't need me. I live on Cape Cod. Look, if you are proactive about your business and all you want to be is a one man operator with a lawnmower and a string trimmer, all you need is 35 to 40 customers and you're going to get there organically within a year or two and you'll be fine. But what about the rest of us? What about the rest of us that want to start a business for a reasonable amount of money? We don't want to go into debt to do it. But we want to grow that business to be very big.

Dennis:

The question that I would ask is and I do this all the time whether I'm interviewing a new potential employee for work within one of my companies or whether I'm working with a franchisee. And the question is where do you want to be in five years? Because if you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do we take that first step? This gentleman that I met at a barbecue, his first step has already been taken. He just wants to be a one-man operator. He's going to be fine. He doesn't want 25 employees and 15 trucks. But to the rest of us I ask that question where do you want to be in five years? And once we have that discussion, we can start taking that first step.

Dennis:

And maybe that first step is purchasing that pickup truck, the lawnmower and the string trimmer, or, in the contractor world, a pickup truck and a tool belt and a couple of chop saws and table saws, that type of thing. But if you don't know where you want to be in five years, then how do you know how to get there? And so I think that's our starting point is, I have a business growth chart that I use for one of my companies and we'll talk about that a little bit later and anyone can step in at any time. If you're a one-man operation and you want to grow to 30 employees and $6 million a year, it's built into the growth chart. If you're a seven to 10 person company and you've kind of hit a ceiling, well that growth chart we can plug you in at any step along that way and show you how to expand to get where you want to go.

Chris:

So I'm not familiar with the growth chart. Is this something that you came up with?

Dennis:

It's something I wish I had when I was 22. But I began to build it over the years and then tailor it to whatever business that we're discussing. So in my case I use it a lot for my franchisees in the home service business the gutter monkeys. It's a home service gutter cleaning, repair, maintenance and new gutter installation business. That's the one I use on a daily basis, but I also tailor it.

Dennis:

I'm working with a client now that he's kind of hit a ceiling at four employees and about 500,000 to 600,000 a year. He's kind of been leveling off in this area and we're working on a growth plan for him. So we'll talk about that a little bit later in this year. He's kind of been leveling off in this area and we're working on a growth plan for him, so we'll talk about that a little bit later in this podcast. But in general, we want to look at our strengths. We want to look at our weaknesses and where we want to be in five years. And the biggest thing is not to look at your strengths, because they're obvious.

Dennis:

Let's look at our weaknesses. Do we have limitations in our marketing and our brand building? Are we a three to five person company and we need more trucks, more revenue generating people, more office staff. Are we limited in the size of our capacity? We talk about the restaurant owner. He has only so many tables, only so many seats, and he needs to turn those lunch tables over twice. And the restaurant owner wants to turn those dinner tables over three times. And then does he want to create more revenue by having live entertainment till 11 at night? Keep that last set of diners around for another two to three hours ordering an after dinner cocktail or something like that. What else can we do within the limitations of our physical capacity Number of employees, the skill set of the employees, and then the big one, our limitations, the self-imposed limitations that we all put upon ourselves at some time in our lives.

Dennis:

It's caused by fear, complacency, arrogance, ignorance, apathy. It's caused by fear, complacency, arrogance, ignorance, apathy. What personality traits do we have that limit our growth? The average business owner is not a true visionary. Like I say, we're not talking about Elon Musk and Bill Gates. You know, look at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Weren't they out ahead of the curve? Yeah Right, their telephone number is the name of the company and now that's their domain name. I mean, it's just a stroke of genius. I don't know who the founder of that company is, but they're great. They really hit a home run with that one. How about bottled water? Yeah, bottled water from the start. Right, Remember Bac Perrier or something like that? Yeah, Bac Perrier or something like that. Yeah, Back Perrier. Who the hell is going to buy water when the alternative is free? Right, right, you turn on your faucet and it's free, yeah there's a great Jim Gaffigan.

Chris:

I don't know if you're familiar with Jim Gaffigan, but there's a great yeah the comic. Oh my God there's a great one about bottled water. It is really funny. If you haven't seen it go.

Dennis:

The alternative is free. Think about the brand building and the marketing to that. 40 years ago they were selling Perrier water because it's from France and they played upon the American belief that anything from Europe must be better than America or something like that. I don't know, but bottled water is a staple in our culture. Now we have this fear of our own water that comes out of our tap, and I personally don't buy bottled water. Now my company does and we put it in the refrigerator out in the break room, but I still go to the tap. This water here, this comes right out of the tap. This does not. It was never in a bottle. But what about your friend Marjorie Post at Post Cereals?

Chris:

Yeah, it was an amazing story about Marjorie Post.

Dennis:

You brought that up before the podcast.

Chris:

Yeah, Enlighten us. Yeah, she was actually heiress to Postum Cereal Company. So if you're familiar with Post Cereals, back in the 30s there was a huge battle going on over cereal, and cereal was a radically new product for Americans. It was the idea of, in early days, that a woman would have to get up and prepare breakfast, and it was a ton of work. When cereals came out and they could just pour something in a bowl, it was a massive, massive win, and so her father created Postum Cereal Company and when he died, marjorie took over and she was only 27 years old at the time and because she had spent her early years in the kitchen, she knew what went on in these kitchens in the 30s and it was a ton of work to do just about anything and particularly dessert.

Chris:

So one of the first things she went after was this company called Jell-O. They made Jell-O in a box and prior to that, the only people that would eat Jell-O is very, very rich people, because you'd have to spend all day cooking down ox hoofs to create gelatin and no one did that other than the rich. So she provided this box of jello where you could make a dessert that only the rich ate, and she sold it to the housewives and they loved it and it became a huge, huge hit and it's such a visionary thing that she had that she realized you know what was the market that she was selling to? She was selling to the woman in the kitchen that was trying to free up some more time to do other things, and it was just a massive hit. So that was a great example, I think, of the sort of visionary.

Chris:

Talk about the guys on the board of directors and the board of directors right, this is 1914, I think. When her father died it was all men of course Some of them are uncles and they didn't want a woman on the board. The way she got around that, she never actually got on the board. Interestingly enough, she put in a friend of hers, a guy that was one of her business consultants, him on the board and he did the work for her. But it was all her ideas, these ideas Jell-O, maxwell House, and we're going to talk a little bit about in the future, a little bit about Bird's Eye Frozen Foods these were all her ideas. She recognized them as being just completely visionary in terms of getting it to the woman who was actually purchasing these things and not marketing to men. We talked a little bit about that last week as well. Know your market.

Dennis:

So the men on the board of director probably didn't have to make pancakes from scratch in 1914. Probably had no idea how Jell-O was made. They probably were unaware of the amount, just the physical amount of time that it would take a woman with five kids to prep breakfast. Yeah.

Chris:

It's just incredible. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Same thing with coffee, right? Most people at that time would buy their own coffee. They would roast it and grind it. When she purchased Maxwell House, and again, the housewives immediately recognized you know, that's a huge time saver for them. They just open the can, pour it in and boil it. So yeah, it was a huge, huge win. And not only that, but marketed it. There's always this great, you know, there's always time for Jell-O Good to the last drop. Maxwell House good to the last drop. That's still around today. Those were all her creations. So yeah, it's pretty amazing. She's an amazing woman.

Dennis:

You know I have three breakfasts I will either have bacon and eggs, or sausage and eggs, or smoothies, or today I had a bowl of Cheerios. Those are my three Now. Every Saturday and every Sunday I go big. You know we do bacon and eggs and grits.

Chris:

I love grits.

Dennis:

Now it doesn't take that long. But you know, grits are 20 minutes, according to my cousin Vinny, and myself too, and it's a 20-minute prep. You got your grits, you got your bacon, you got your eggs, that's 20 minutes. I don't really want to create 20 to 25 minutes because it's going to take five to 10 minutes to eat breakfast. That's a 30-minute event.

Dennis:

This morning I was up early. Actually I was talking to my daughter, who is a hippie. They have chickens, they produce their own eggs, she has gardens and a small farm that produces berries and garlic and other. She's a hippie and they have three kids. She makes homemade breakfast almost every day and this morning she called me it was about 5.15. We're both early risers so we can do that.

Dennis:

And I heard all the kids in the background as she was prepping breakfast and I said Katie, you're starting a little early today. It's 5.15. You're already having breakfast. She goes no, no, I'm just making it and she was making a special something or other. I forget the process, rather, I forget the process and she puts the eggs, the maple syrup and one other thing. I forget the other ingredient. She scrambles it and she puts it in the oven and then it's all going to be ready in 20 minutes. So that's what they do, and what you're describing with Marjorie Post is a situation where the mom doesn't have to spend 30 minutes making breakfast every morning. A cereal would allow her to do this in five minutes. Right, and the men didn't see that.

Chris:

No, they would never see that. Never see it because they never stepped in a kitchen, you know as being the woman of the house. Even when she came into money she was still responsible for the kitchen. So she was, you know, very familiar with what was going down there and how much time it took again to make something like a Jell-O. It would take you all day to make Jell-O without the actual mix that she created. So it's really kind of an impressive vision that she had when she kind of rolled out these different products and pushed it through this board. Eventually the company became General Foods, which is a huge conglomerate to this day, and actually one of my favorite cereals and it's a great commercial is the Post's Honey Bunches of Oats.

Dennis:

I know the cereal. I don't have it I believe that's Post.

Chris:

It's one of my favorites, so anyway.

Dennis:

Well, marjorie Post is a brilliant visionary, as is the Elon Musks and the Mark Cubans and the people of the world like that, and for the rest of us, mere mortals, we have to create that vision because we don't come by that naturally, the Marjorie Post, she's a one in a million, you know, and I think I'm a little bit of a visionary, maybe I'm a one in a hundred or one in 50, but we have to work at it, you know, and one of the things that I've done is I create a growth model chart and I can adapt this growth model to almost any business. It would take a half an hour to an hour. So if I have a client and, like one of my clients that I'm working with right now, he's sort of bumping his head on this four employees, a half a million to 600. He's kind of been stuck in that area and, listen, he makes significantly good money but he wants to grow the company. So we're talking about two strategies right now and one of them is business growth.

Dennis:

How do you go from four employees to eight? Because in his world, if he goes from four to eight, he won't double his gross revenue, he'll quadruple it because of the synergistic component of what he does and what we're going to create the business growth chart that I have for my franchisees. Basically it takes a franchisee in my world from a one to two person company and it organically grows him to four to to eight to 12 employees, from two to four to six trucks, and across the top we have the number of support staff, the number of revenue generating employees in the field and then the square footage of warehouse space that you'll need, the number of trucks and the number of parking spaces.

Chris:

It takes all of these into account and we'll pop this up on the podcast and we'll pop it up on the clips that we put up on the internet, Sure. So you can take a look at this.

Dennis:

And one of the key components is your marketing budget, because that is going to dictate how often the phone rings, how many hits you get on your website. The marketing budget is the steering wheel to this whole whole business growth process and what I do. So we had a meeting, a marketing meeting, with several of my franchisees plus myself, plus I bring in one of my consultants in the marketing field, and we had a nice, really good meeting yesterday. And what I take I have a brand new franchisee hasn't even opened his doors yet. He's going to open this spring. He's at step zero. I've got a couple other franchisees are at step two, at step four and each one is at a different place.

Dennis:

But if we all take out the same chart and we're looking at the same chart, we can each plug ourselves in where we are on that chart and my brand new rookie franchisee can look and he can say, okay, I am one owner with one employee and one truck. I need to have one more employee come mid-April and we've set his marketing budget. Life is good. I've got one of my mid-level. He's a four-year franchise owner. You know he's looking to probably increase his sales by $300,000 to $400,000 this year. So he looks at the chart and he knows all right, I'm going to have to buy one more truck and I'm going to need two more employees by mid-summer so that we can hit this next goal for this year. It's good, it's solid, it's easy to read and it's based on theory, but it's also based on our work history.

Chris:

Cape Cod gutter monkeys. 10 years with Cape Cod gutter monkeys. You've grown it from two of you to now again About 30 people in the corporate office? Yeah, yeah, so there's a lot of experience goes into this chart.

Dennis:

And while the chart is not based on trial and error, the numbers within the chart are based on trial and error. Like I said, I wish I had something like this when I was 22. I could have seen the future a little bigger, a little brighter, but when you're 22 and I was a hard working young guy I had a lot of experience cutting lawns as a kid. I knew how to build and operate a small team of people, but I didn't know how to grow a company, and that was where my journey began.

Chris:

Yeah, just to get a small plug in, I guess, for American Cutter Monkeys. But this chart, this is kind of one of the advantages of being a franchise. Franchises sometimes get a bad rap, maybe deservedly so, but this is one of the advantages. When you're coming into this franchise, I mean, you're getting this chart. This chart has been. You know the blood, sweat and tears that went into creating this chart and the numbers in it. This is what you get when you kind of join our franchise.

Dennis:

Well, you know, in getting back to this client that I'm working with, we've been working on this for about a month and what we're going to do is we're going to sit down. We talk probably three days a week. We're going to sit down, this client and I. He's in the consulting space, he's a consultant in the Business consultant A little bit of business, a little bit of politics, sort of a conservative side to the clientele. So the owner and I we're going to probably meet this weekend and we're going to build this chart and design it for his industry. I have to pick up a lot of information along the way to see what are the strike points, what are the key components, and then we're going to make a decision whether 2025, 26 is going to be a stay, with the same number of people, the same individuals, and let's just tighten our belts. We're going to grow a little, with the same number of people, the same individuals, and let's just tighten our belts. We're going to grow a little bit, but we're going to become extremely more efficient. So the top line won't change much, but the bottom line will, or we're going to take some drastic steps go to a bigger office, have all of the employees in-house every day as opposed to working remotely. You know major changes like that, so we're going to make some decisions in the next month or two to see how that goes.

Dennis:

But, as I say, this is a model that I've built that's very flexible. You can use it for restaurants. You can use it for landscapers, contractors, consultants, almost anything and I love the restaurant industry. I was in that industry for 10 years and I get it. I know the value of the number of seats in the dining room. I know the value of a team of waiters and waitresses and bartenders that can turn those tables over and if you can turn them over one more time, instead of having two seatings for dinner, turn it for three. It's dynamic because your overhead is the same right and you're just using the same overhead one more time each night. I've seen it in practice when I was an employee and I've also seen it from the side of the ownership when Babs and I owned the inn for 10 years. We learned a lot.

Dennis:

Chris, everybody needs an inner circle. I want to sort of throw this out there you and me and everybody on this planet we are the average of the five people we most associate with and relate to. Okay, think about that for a minute. You know, I had a great meeting here yesterday and I brought in one of my consultants. Two of my partners were in the room. It's a good group of people that set the stage for this marketing meeting that we set up yesterday. You're the average of the five people that you most closely relate to, you know, so surround yourself with good people. I'm going to talk about the yes man. Marjorie Post was not a yes man. Actually, she wasn't even a man In a world of men. She was not only not a yes man or a yes person, she flat out disagreed. She went the opposite direction that they wanted her to go, because she saw stuff that they didn't see.

Chris:

Yeah, just to give you an idea, she was married to EF Hutton. Remember him, yep, what?

Dennis:

was I saying when Hutton?

Chris:

talks, people listen. This was his tagline and she and he had a complete disagreement in terms of politics and almost everything. And they got into it over bird's eye frozen foods. Marjorie was on a boat off the coast of Gloucester and they had a duck one night for dinner and it was out of season. She wanted to know how to have this delicious duck. It was fabulous. And they said, well, it came frozen from this guy in Gloucester. And so immediately her visionary thing kicked in and said I can see how his wife's really taking this. So she went and found this guy.

Chris:

Wait, this is not breakfast anymore. That's not breakfast anymore. She's moved on. This is dinner now, right? Frozen food, frozen food. Imagine that. So she got on a boat, went off, went to Gloucester and met this guy it was Clarence Birdseye, and he had gone and worked with the Inuit up in Alaska and had noticed the way they were eating their food. It was flash frozen and it was delicious. They had frozen fish and all kinds of different things, but it was all flash frozen. So he brought it back and he developed the equipment to do it and created, basically, a factory in Gloucester area. His problem was, though, his range that he could actually sell the fish was about as far as it would thaw out, because at the time people didn't have freezers it was refrigerated.

Chris:

Marjorie saw this and knew instantly it was going to be a massive hit. So for the next 10 years, I think, or five years, she fought with EF Hutton over purchasing that company and he would not allow her because there was no infrastructure. Finally she wins out and she built the infrastructure. She built the distribution centers that had refrigerators in them. She built refrigerated train cars. She put freezers into stores and she pushed the refrigeration industry to start adding freezers to refrigerators. And not only did she not, you know, let men get in their way she fought one of the most powerful people in America, probably one of the richest people in America, to get her away when it came to frozen foods and particularly bird's eye. Incredible story. I'm a big Marjorie Post fan, in case you couldn't tell.

Dennis:

Well, I was about to talk about yes men. The yes men. They agree with everything you say. They agree with everything you believe. The yes men they're not going to get you to where you want to be, they're just going to agree with you. Yes men, they won't challenge you, they will not challenge your team, they just go along with what you say. And yesterday in my marketing meeting one of my consultants flatly disagreed with something that I've believed in for quite some time and he brought that up and we had to talk about it. In the end he kind of leaned our direction and said, yeah, I can see that, I can see that. But I'm glad he brought it up because it prompted a discussion. I now know that Warren Pally from Pally Advertising he's not. I've known Warren for years. He's not a yes man. He was here to do his job yesterday and he brought some additional data and information into the meeting and that's why we like him.

Chris:

And we were talking about this early on and it started to make me think about Warren Buffett and Charles Munger, how they work together. But they're very different. They're very different guys. Warren's more of a visionary sort of looking forward in the future and Charlie's more of a nuts and bolts sort of guy. But he had a great quote. Charlie had a great quote. He said if we agreed on everything, one of us would be unnecessary, which is perfect, which is amazingly true.

Dennis:

My next comment here is if two people are thinking exactly the same thing, you can be sure that only one of them is doing the thinking Right, right, exactly, very similar. I've adhered to that for years and I'm glad that my inner circle doesn't always agree with me. Andy, one of my partners. He brought something up at the meeting and I said Andy, I got to disagree with you on that one. Here's how I see it, and you know, this is how our meetings go. We don't want to all sit around and if we're patting ourselves on the back all the time, we're going to get all full of ourselves and we're going to find a leveling off point, yeah.

Chris:

Yeah, Just to touch on. Yes, Men, one more time. I always imagine when we're reading this. I was kind of doing a little bit of research and I can imagine the meeting where there was a meeting at Colgate. One afternoon. They made toothpaste and, hugely successful in toothpaste, they decided to do frozen dinners. So Colgate produced a frozen dinner. Now, immediately when it hit the market, no one's going to eat a frozen dinner from Colgate. That makes toothpaste. It's disgusting or whatever. But I'll guarantee you there was a meeting there where a bunch of people were standing around and the boss said I got a great idea and everyone went sounds good to us. And out the door went frozen food from Colgate which completely belly flopped.

Dennis:

So I can imagine that meeting was probably filled with yes, men, it's the only way a product would get made. You remember Hag from high school, old high school friend of ours. Well, his younger brother, Robbie Harrington, is a friend of mine from Framingham. He's a good egg, known Robbie, since we were young, young kids and Robbie is a brilliant entrepreneur. The term entrepreneur has become so overused in our culture today and really Robbie is an entrepreneur among business owners. He's a giant.

Dennis:

I remember we were about three years into our current operation when we were still a single company, the Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys, and I was talking to Robbie one day and Robbie was kind of keeping an eye on us. In the very beginning he talked about getting involved financially as a silent partner. We didn't need money, we didn't need a partner. It wouldn't have been a good match. But we're still friends and we still hang out and we still talk. About three years in he said to me how are things going? You know how has business? Business is going good. I said we're doing A, B, C and D and yeah, we're really doing great. And he said, geez, Dan, back in the beginning, before you even kicked it into gear, we had a meeting and you would mention these two other things. And how are they going. And I said, wow, we really haven't moved in that direction at all, because, boy, we're doing great over here. And he actually said you're really dropping the ball. He said, because I think those are the two areas that that number one are the most difficult and number two present the most potential for growth. He said so I really think you got to clean up your act and don't be so lazy. Wow, Okay, Now I'm in the midst of maybe my third career of building multi-million dollar businesses and this guy told me exactly what I probably didn't want to hear, but I needed to hear, and it kind of woke me up.

Dennis:

And the next day I was didn't want to hear, but I needed to hear, and it kind of woke me up. And the next day I was talking to Andy about it and we kind of took a look in the mirror and said, yeah, we've been patting ourselves on the back a little too much here, and a person that I know and I've known since childhood, who's a very, very dynamic guy and a good, honest man, but he's not a yes man, he kind of woke us up and we started moving in those directions. One of them was real estate, purchasing the proper piece of real estate, and that really got us going and it led us to the building we're in right now eventually, which is exactly what we needed. That's the thing is. Don't surround yourself with yes men. If you want to be a true visionary, a true entrepreneur, look past the yes men, Surround yourself with honest people. As I say, we were in a team meeting yesterday and it was very interesting because I was prepping for this podcast here today. I made a special effort to see how people agree, disagree, how things are brought up and you know what? We had a lot of agreement and we had a lot of disagreement in that meeting and in the end I think we came up with a really good solution.

Dennis:

We're 10 years into ownership and operations of this company that has now grown into six almost seven locations now and I think we're doing well. But we've completely revamped our marketing program. And the thing is, our marketing program has actually been an award-winning marketing program. We've been recognized repeatedly over the years via the Massachusetts Broadcasters Association, and several other legitimate organizations have awarded us some of their top awards in marketing. And yet we're revamping it because we know we're growing bigger and in a different direction than we used to be, and that's the benefit of not surrounding yourself with yes men. You know we have some good consultants that we work with. We have a lot of radio people that we work with, and that's who was in at this meeting yesterday and it went well. So I think what we're doing is we're positioning our company for a bigger growth and a larger curve than we've ever had, and you can't do that with yes men. Being a visionary is one thing, but bringing other people who have visionary skills into the team is also very important.

Chris:

Do you want to touch a little bit on being a visionary. So what about the idea that not all visions come to fruition? So at some point you might realize it was a great vision, it was a great try, but it's not quite working out for you. So you had that experience. I'm sure you've had that experience at Cape Cod.

Dennis:

I would say I've had that. If you accomplish all of your goals, you're not setting the bar high enough right? Haven't we all had goals that fell short or just fell flat? It doesn't mean you failed. I remember one marketing attempt at some printed material. It seemed to be good on paper, it seemed to hit our target market and it didn't. We ran it for six months. We weren't getting the results. You know what? You scrap it. Okay, we set goals for our marketing program and we want to generate X amount of revenue or X amount of phone calls or hits on the website, whatever it is, and you can't tell in the first month. You know, branding takes years and years and it comes out of repeated marketing efforts. And that one in particular that I can think about it just fell flat and after six months I was spending, I think, $2,500 a month on this. I pulled it back in and I put it into additional at that time, I think was radio advertising, because we were killing it on our radio advertising.

Dennis:

Anybody that has owned and built a company and grown a company that is continuing to grow, at least to some degree, is a bit of a visionary, because you almost have to be to break through that first $1 million ceiling. Only 7% of all businesses ever break $1 million for a year, and I think it's 5% of all businesses 1 in 20, ever has back-to-back million-dollar years. So the first time you break a million, you do it again the next year. You are now in the 5% of business ownership, you are a 95 percenter. And then but those are the ones that now say all right, I want to get to 1.5. I want to get to 2 million. How do I continue to grow when all of my competitors are, let's say, running $300,000 to $600,000 a year operations and I just broke the million-dollar mark? And now you're on that road to really become an entrepreneur, because now you've got to figure out how we get to $2 million. You already broke the rules.

Dennis:

Nine out of 10 of your competitors are smaller shops and you're the big dog. How do I get to that next level? How do I get to 2 million? And then that's when you hit this business growth model, because no one's ever been there before, nobody in your region has ever built a $5 million a year home service company in your field. And you don't know.

Dennis:

Like how many trucks do I need? How many? How much square footage do I need of warehouse? You know you're in the restaurant business and you're't know like how many trucks do I need how many? How much square footage do I need of warehouse? You know you're in the restaurant business and you're killing it. You know, especially during COVID, things got kind of tough. And yet you know, one of my customers down here on the Cape Cod is Seafood Sam's and they absolutely blew the lid off it during COVID because they had a plan that no one else had True visionaries, these guys I don't know if you've ever been to Seafood Sam's, but the food is good. The owners are brilliant, hardworking blue collar guys, but they've found the secret and they've done really well. Covid was a growth year for them.

Chris:

These guys did really well, yeah, there's some interesting COVID stories like that. There's one story actually from Wrigley Gum. I don't know if you knew how Wrigley Gum Company, now that we know today, comes from this baking powder company, and this enormous pivot that he made and in a single year turned the company around went in a completely different direction.

Dennis:

So when you asked about failures and goals that were missed and how do you rebound, I think I have, on any given day, about 10 metrics in my world. You know some of them is sales within this company, some of his gross sales in this company, that there's so many metrics. You know, every month there's metrics and I would say if I can hit five of those metrics, that's good. If I fall short on two and then three just don't occur or don't change at all, that's a good month. You're never going to hit a home run every single time. But how about a goal without a timeline? A goal without a metric is a dream. A goal without a timeline or a metric is nothing more than a dream. So set realistic goals, set challenging goals and listen if you miss. You miss it just means maybe you set the goal too high or maybe you hit a bump in the road or a wrench got thrown in the way and it slowed you down a little bit. But reestablish your goals. We had a rough year during COVID year 2020. We still grew, but it was a small, small amount and I was kind of disappointed. We had a shutdown for three weeks, from March 23rd to like April 15th we opened back up again. We were having a good year. Then one of my coworkers got COVID and the CDC protocol back then was shut it down for two weeks. So we shut it down and we lost two more weeks. In the end we had a growth year, but only by a small, small amount, like two to 3%, real small. The following year we boomed because we reestablished that we are still a growing company and we kind of grew almost for two years because we almost flatlined for that one year. So we had a big, big year and then we just went back to our normal growth pattern. Covid was just one of those hurdles that we didn't anticipate at the beginning of 2020. And we dealt with it. I think COVID helped us. I remember in the very beginning this is kind of interesting I think In the beginning of COVID around mid-March, when the governor of Massachusetts started shutting things down and the economy was just going right down the tubes, I was in a meeting with one of my radios, or three of my radio stations.

Dennis:

They all operate out of the same building. It was a Codcom here on Cape Cod and I advertised on three of their four radio stations and as I was finishing up making a couple of radio ads. I was coming down out of the studio and Tim, the general manager, asked me to sit in on a meeting, which I did, and at the end of the meeting I didn't really say anything, but they were talking about, I mean, restaurants were just pulling their ads because restaurants were closing. The auto industry, which probably accounts for 20% of the radio station's advertising dollars. They pulled the plug. I mean they lost more than half of their advertisers. And when I got back to the office, my accountant, my banker, all said these PPP loans.

Chris:

I think are available.

Dennis:

And my wife asked me about that and I said call the bank, look into it. We don't really need the money, but look into what it's all about. Because my accountant and my banker each mentioned it and I said if you have to spend more than 30 minutes, we're not doing it. And we didn't do it. What we did do, I probably was advertising on 10 radio stations. At the time I called all the station owners and managers, all my people that I knew, and I knew they were going through some tough times. So what I did was I offered to purchase additional radio spots and I asked them what can you give me for a rate on these radio spots? And they actually gave me. I was already dropping X amount in the radio and they gave me almost the same amount for 15%. So I actually doubled my radio footprint for only 15% more money. And we signed like three-year contracts. So as COVID was ongoing, we had a bigger footprint out there and the following year they held the same price for the same amount. Now we're done with COVID. It's behind us. But I got a massive, massive marketing footprint out there and I'm paying about 55% 60% of what the going rate was, and it carried me into the following year. So COVID we were able to turn COVID into a bonus for us because a lot of my competitors they couldn't get aluminum, they were in the gutter business. They could not get aluminum.

Dennis:

My wife was running our inventory system at the time and we were dealing with warehouses from all over New England to Perth and by New Jersey to Colony, new York. We were driving all over. We had to do the driving because the trucking strike was shutting down the trucks so we were working twice as hard for normal growth. But we did it. We built up our advertising and our marketing footprint. We also went from probably warehousing maybe $30,000, $35,000 worth of inventory to maybe $150,000. Because whenever we could get it we just overbought. It's aluminum. It has no shelf life, it doesn't go bad.

Dennis:

So again, looking ahead, looking as far ahead as we could see, my wife came to the conclusion that we need to overstock on inventory and we did. We actually had a couple of franchises at the time and if they're going to run short we want to cover them, make sure that they can still get their work done. I had competitors calling me up asking to buy some of my stock and I said I just can't sell it to you. And they were offering anything, anything I'll pay whatever you want. And I just flat out and I know these guys, some of them are friends and I said I can't do it. I not only have my own operation, but I got two franchisees that are depending on me if they can't get their inventory. And you know, we established a new platform, raised the bar on the amount of inventory, raised the bar on the amount of marketing dollars and we've still adhered to what we learned during COVID.

Chris:

Yeah, so it's kind of a reoccurring theme. We're touching on this in the last couple of podcasts as well. There's periods of times where everything looks pretty bad. Everybody else is panicking, but real visionaries they keep their focus, keep their eye on the ball and they can actually do well in these times Not to touch on the Postum cereal company again, but they were in the cereal business and when the wars hit World War I, world War II the government took all the wheat, all the sugar too, all the sugar.

Chris:

So they're out of sugar. So how are they going to make money? Wow, the way they made money is they still realized that after the wheat is harvested you still have to mill it. So they bought all the milling companies. So that's how Post and Kellogg's and all these people ended up milling their own wheat and things like that, and they made a ton of money doing it during the war, because now they're milling grain for the government and getting paid to do that. So these are the sort of things when we keep touching on this point. Visionaries can make money in all sorts of different environments because they just have this view of. They don't let a down economy or whatever get in their way.

Dennis:

Well, yeah, chris, I mentioned before I've got maybe 10 metrics every month that I could look at Growth of this profitability here, marketing budget over here. This is a lot of metrics that I personally can use to measure success within the walls of the building that we're in right here. And as I look back at the crash of 08, remember Y2K, followed by 9-11? One thing after another, they really disrupted our lifestyles and our economies. Go back, to, chris, when we were kids We've talked about it. In the 70s, we impeached a president. There was double-digit inflation in the 70s.

Dennis:

The oil embargo oh you couldn't get gas in 73 or 78. Right, if you want to shut an economy down, take away the gas. Then you get into the 80s, which was very good, very good economy. We got a little bit spoiled by the early 90s. Bank closures on homes were starting to kick in. There was the crash of 96. Then we had 9-11. We had Y2K, the crash of 08.

Dennis:

There's always always going to be stuff out there. There's always going to be interruptions to the economic process and you want to be ready for these. You want to be as prepared as you can.

Dennis:

One thing we talk about a lot here, chris, is be low debt or debt-free. If you're debt-free and your company's debt-free, you're a little bit bulletproof. You're kind of insulated from some of the things that can knock some of your competitors out. And if you come into a thing like COVID I know one of my competitors and I have a friendly relationship with a lot of my competitors. I just called them up one day and I said look, I want to thank you for sending me a lot of this work. I'm getting phone and they're younger than me by 20 years and I've known the family and they say we know you're going to take good care. We don't even want to be in the business anymore. We can't get aluminum. We're pivoting and we're going in this direction. We're sending you our customers.

Dennis:

So when you get a COVID or a crash of 08, anything like that occurs, there's a likelihood that if you survive and a lot of your competitors don't, you're going to pick up their work. It's an opportunity for you, as the business owner, to take advantage of. Yeah, it's kind of a reoccurring theme here. So let's wrap this up, chris. I want to just kind of throw these couple of ideas we've talked about. Remember if two people are thinking exactly the same thing, you can be sure that only one of them is doing the thinking. Next is a goal without a timeline. A goal without a metric is nothing more than a dream. And finally, if you're accomplishing all of your goals, you're not setting the bar high enough. Yeah, that's a good one. And with that, thanks for listening. No, monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast. All right, we'll see you next time.

Chris:

Thank you for tuning in to Monkey Business Radio. If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to subscribe, like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us reach more aspiring entrepreneurs like you, and if you got a question or topic you'd like us to cover, leave a comment or reach out to us on social media. We'd love to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review if you found the episode valuable, and make sure to share it with anyone who might benefit from our tips and stories. We'll see you next time. This podcast is produced by American Gutter Monkeys LLC. Build real wealth through business ownership. For details, visit us at AmericanGutterMonkeyscom.