Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Never, Never, Never Give Up: Karl Schledwitz's Billion-Dollar Journey Through Adversity | Manufacturing Series

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Never, Never, Never Give Up: Karl Schledwitz's Billion-Dollar Journey Through Adversity | Manufacturing Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:11
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:14
  adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
• 0:16
  today's guest is Carl Sledwitz, Chairman and CEO of Monogram
• 0:21
  Foods. Founded in 2004, Monogram Foods
• 0:25
  is a Memphis based company dedicated to manufacturing high
• 0:28
  quality protein snacks, corn dogs, precooked bacon and other
• 0:33
  ready to eat products. They focus on innovation and a
• 0:36
  people first culture aiming to deliver continuous growth for
• 0:40
  customers, team members and communities.
• 0:43
  Under Carl's guidance, Monogram Foods expanded operations to 12
• 0:48
  plants across 7 states, grew its workforce to over 4000 employees
• 0:53
  and reached a run rate of more than $1 billion in annual
• 0:57
  revenue. In 2004, Carl Co founded
• 1:01
  Monogram with five employees in the purchase of two local brands
• 1:04
  from Sara Lee. Over the past 20 years, Monogram
• 1:07
  has enjoyed 30% compounded annual growth.
• 1:11
  Before Co founding Monogram, he gained extensive leadership
• 1:14
  experience in various entrepreneurial ventures.
• 1:18
  Carl has started three different companies that have made the Inc
• 1:21
  500 fastest Growing Private Companies list.
• 1:25
  His commitment to strategic growth and employee well-being
• 1:28
  has helped garner recognition for Monogram as one of the
• 1:31
  fastest growing private companies in America.
• 1:34
  Now before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
• 1:38
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• 1:41
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• 2:06
  Now back to our guest today, the Co founder and Chairman of the
• 2:08
  Board of Monogram Foods. Carl, I appreciate you making
• 2:11
  the time to Share your story today.
• 2:13
  Glad to be on. All right, so before we talk
• 2:18
  about present day, I'd like to hear a little bit about your
• 2:20
  path before Monogram. Went to college, got a law
• 2:24
  degree and a license to practice law all the way back in 1978.
• 2:28
  When did the entrepreneurial bug first bite you?
• 2:33
  Well, the entrepreneurial bug hit me when I was a a teenager
• 2:39
  and and my father who passed when I was 18, was an
• 2:45
  entrepreneur himself. And so I think that might have
• 2:49
  been part of the jeans that he passed on.
• 2:51
  But I mean, I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, I would, the
• 2:56
  first time I went to scout camp, everybody wished they had candy
• 3:01
  bars and stuff, which they didn't sell at the commissary.
• 3:05
  So the next year I, I took a locker box full of candy and set
• 3:10
  up a sign and sold candy, you know, to the fellow.
• 3:15
  And I had a captivated audience to the fellow troopers and would
• 3:19
  not be going and doing all the stuff because I was running my
• 3:23
  camp hour tip, tip, tip hours and made tons of money.
• 3:26
  And when, when I was in high school, I'm so much older than
• 3:30
  probably most of your audience. But when integration hit in the
• 3:34
  late 60s, public schools here in Memphis, they stopped allowing
• 3:41
  schools to have school spent sponsored Proms and homecomings,
• 3:47
  you know, and obviously the fear was that my God, a black man
• 3:51
  might dance with a white woman or vice versa.
• 3:53
  So they, they just banned having school sponsored dances.
• 3:57
  So a friend of mine and IA woman classmate, we started a company
• 4:04
  and we would go to the schools and, and independently,
• 4:08
  obviously not without, not with school sanctions.
• 4:10
  And we would throw school dances and and homecomings and and
• 4:16
  charge admissions and made money.
• 4:18
  And both she and I paid our first year of college from the
• 4:23
  money we made for two years running Proms and and and dances
• 4:28
  and stuff for other schools, including our own.
• 4:30
  So, so I, I've been an entrepreneur a long time.
• 4:35
  I worked through college and through law school, not so much
• 4:42
  more entrepreneurial, but I work full time through both because
• 4:45
  as I said earlier, my father passed when I was a freshman in
• 4:50
  college. So part of it was out of
• 4:52
  necessity, but so that's interesting.
• 4:55
  Always been just. Yeah, you spot, you spot an
• 4:59
  opportunity and you go for IT. People who wanted candy bars,
• 5:02
  you brought candy bars the next year.
• 5:04
  That's right. They're they're high school kids
• 5:06
  who still want dances. You guys put on the dances and
• 5:09
  you charge admission. Did you get any blowback from
• 5:11
  the school or the community in setting those up?
• 5:14
  Yes, we were a little aggressive at the time.
• 5:19
  Liquor by the drink was had just come into passage and it was
• 5:25
  the, the, the legal age at that time was 18.
• 5:29
  And so we had, we made more money on our bars than we did
• 5:34
  admissions. And I don't think there was a
• 5:37
  lot of checking IDs at the time. So the blowback was really from
• 5:42
  parents receiving their kids coming home inebriated.
• 5:48
  So that was how we got through that without any liability is
• 5:52
  amazing. But I guess all the statues have
• 5:55
  run for 50 years so. We're free to talk about it now.
• 6:00
  OK, so when did you start? I'm going to call it sort of
• 6:03
  your first big boy business post college, or maybe it was even
• 6:08
  during college. No, it would have been post
• 6:15
  college. I I worked full time through law
• 6:21
  school. I actually ran political
• 6:22
  campaigns and worked in presidential campaigns and
• 6:29
  statewide campaigns. And I did that for a few years,
• 6:33
  including my first year out of law school.
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  And then I started a law practice and didn't really ever
• 6:41
  want to be a lawyer, but didn't know what else to do.
• 6:44
  And so I started in my law practice syndicating properties
• 6:54
  because I didn't have any money and I so I, I didn't have any
• 6:58
  credit, but I would see a piece of property and I would go get
• 7:04
  10 people to put up 1000 a piece or 2000 a piece and, and
• 7:08
  syndicate it and manage it. So I started doing real estate
• 7:12
  deals, which I still to this day do.
• 7:16
  And I actually found a niche that is really kind of the basis
• 7:24
  of what we built Monogram on 30 years later, which is I would go
• 7:28
  to the banks and and deal with their troubled loans.
• 7:35
  It it's funny how banks have an apartment that they call special
• 7:39
  assets and special assets are troubled loans and would try to
• 7:46
  identify workout situations where I could come in and, and
• 7:53
  take over a troubled loan and, and work it out.
• 7:56
  So I started doing that contemporaneous with my law
• 8:00
  practice. And those were specifically for
• 8:04
  real estate or was it to take over like an entire business?
• 8:08
  Well, both I I did better on real estate.
• 8:12
  I took over a couple of convenience stores, one time a
• 8:16
  liquor store, one time a beer distributorship, most of which
• 8:22
  didn't work to be candid. But I later on I just laser
• 8:29
  focused on real estate. But in the beginning I did a
• 8:32
  peripheral stuff. The the banks will give away
• 8:35
  problems. The the the issue is can you
• 8:38
  solve the problems which I didn't really have the operation
• 8:42
  experience to do what I was doing and and it bit me.
• 8:48
  And you said that this was something then that you sort of
• 8:52
  this idea that you relied on 30 years later to start Monogram.
• 8:55
  Were you buying distressed businesses at that point or was
• 8:58
  that you're still sort of leveraging it to buy real estate
• 9:01
  that you used to so? When, when, when we were when we
• 9:05
  started Monogram 21 years ago, we were buying what we said
• 9:14
  somebody else's problems. And so we built the company the
• 9:19
  1st 10 years buying underutilized assets, which in
• 9:23
  this case were manufacturing facilities that weren't full.
• 9:28
  So when I was raising money, I used my real estate background
• 9:33
  and I remember I took up a picture of a strip shopping
• 9:37
  center that was 2/3 vacant, all vacant signs up.
• 9:42
  And then I photoshopped and said, OK, if you turn those
• 9:45
  vacancies into tenants, grocery store, credit union, Barber
• 9:51
  shop, nail salon, whatever, you take that exact same piece of
• 9:56
  real estate. If it's full of vacancies, you
• 10:00
  can't hypothecate, you can't borrow against it.
• 10:03
  It's it, it's got a negative value.
• 10:06
  You fill it up with creditworthy tenants and instantaneously it's
• 10:11
  worth exponentially amount more. So we were going in the 1st 10
• 10:19
  maybe a little bit longer than that, going and buying factories
• 10:25
  that were 50% or more vacant. And the parallel that I would
• 10:33
  talk about is the tenants that we would go get would be our Co
• 10:38
  manufacturing partners are our major retailers that we were
• 10:42
  doing private label for whether it be Kroger or Walmart or the
• 10:46
  Conagras or Tysons of the world. And just like when you're
• 10:52
  redoing a shopping center to take a vacancy and attract A
• 10:58
  tenant, you typically do tenant improvements.
• 11:01
  You, you change the facade, you, you, you finish it out and you
• 11:06
  make it attractive for someone to come and want to lease that
• 11:10
  space. Well, what we would do is in
• 11:12
  these factories that were over half vacant that when they're
• 11:17
  over half vacant, they have the the overhead is greater than
• 11:22
  their revenue and so they're losing money typically and you
• 11:27
  fill that plan up and it changes.
• 11:31
  But the tenant improvements we would do is go buy new
• 11:35
  equipment, automate an equipment that would allow us to go get a
• 11:41
  private label or retail customer because we could be competitive.
• 11:45
  It was the latest greatest way to make corn dogs or to assemble
• 11:50
  sandwiches or or sliced bacon. And so our tenant improvements
• 11:57
  was was the equipment and. And so was it hard for you to
• 12:02
  get the clients then that to to sort of fill this new capacity?
• 12:07
  Well sure it wasn't easy. I Co founded this company with a
• 12:13
  gentleman named Wes Jackson. Who he's younger than I by about
• 12:17
  10 years, but he had spent his entire career in the the food
• 12:24
  industry. So he had a very good Rolodex
• 12:28
  and a very good reputation that opened a lot of doors.
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  And that's, you know, half the people we hired early on were
• 12:38
  people that he had dealt with earlier in his career.
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  And so that's how we got a lot of doors open.
• 12:48
  So this is Monogram's the third company that you've had on the
• 12:53
  Ink 500 list, right? What were the other two?
• 12:56
  How did those come about? Well, the first one was a chain
• 13:01
  of pawn shops I had in my legal career.
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  I had a client that owned a pawn shop and he called me one day.
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  He said I got, I got to sell the pawn shop and I need you to get
• 13:21
  it, get it out of my name. And I said why?
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  And he said, well, I'm a, I'm applying for a, I'm part of a
• 13:30
  group that's starting a new bank and we got an application to the
• 13:33
  FDIC for approval. And I think it'll look bad for
• 13:38
  me to have had a pawn shop own a pawn shop while I'm applying to
• 13:42
  for a new bank charter. And I said, well, OK, let me see
• 13:46
  if I can help you sell it. And I said, when, when do you
• 13:49
  when do you have to do it? He said by Friday.
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  And this was like on a Tuesday. I said, well, you know, we don't
• 13:56
  have a book together. We can't sell it that quick.
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  He said. He said, well, I want you to buy
• 14:01
  it. I said, well, you know, I don't
• 14:02
  have any money so well, I'll finance you.
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  So within three days I owned a pawn shop and I later sold it to
• 14:14
  a public company. There was actually three public
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  companies at the time that owned pawn shops, New York Stock
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  Exchange companies. And I met a young guy that was
• 14:26
  30 years old that was an accountant by training that had
• 14:31
  been an auditor on the, the pawn shops.
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  And then he'd gone to work for this chain.
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  And I was so impressed with him and, and he, he is an
• 14:41
  entrepreneur extraordinaire. His name is John Thetford.
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  He's written several books and is a a speaker.
• 14:51
  He's now started 5 different chains.
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  But I was so impressed with him and he said, hey, I've got a
• 14:58
  dream of replicating and I could do it better than this company
• 15:02
  I'm working for and start pawn shops.
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  And, and I said, well, I could raise the money.
• 15:07
  That's what I did was raising the money.
• 15:09
  And he, so he, he quit and we raised the money to start a
• 15:14
  chain of pawn shops and we grew it to maybe 80 or 90 and about
• 15:29
  2/3 of them were de Novo where we would start from scratch
• 15:34
  Greenfield and about 1/3 were acquisitions.
• 15:39
  And my role was raising the money and, and helping and, and
• 15:45
  he too, he was the operational guy and had all the systems and,
• 15:54
  and knowledge. And I still talk to him
• 16:00
  regularly. And, and he's on his fifth.
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  He has opened up and started over 500 pawn shop change since
• 16:08
  then. And that would have been in 1981
• 16:14
  when we started the first one. And you know, the, the, the
• 16:24
  biggest myth in pawn shops is people think that it's where
• 16:32
  people take stolen merchandise and, and get an advance against
• 16:38
  it and never come back. The, the, the, the reality is
• 16:43
  the pawn industry is the bank for the unbanked.
• 16:49
  The, the, the, the, the painter who, when he comes and gets a, a
• 16:55
  chance to paint your house, the first thing he does, typically
• 16:58
  he says, hey, I need $1000 deposit so I can go buy the
• 17:01
  paint and stuff and you know, up front and then you painting the
• 17:06
  rest at the end. Well, the reality is a lot of
• 17:08
  times he's taking that $1000 to go get his ladders and stuff
• 17:14
  that he's pawned out of Hock because he didn't have a job in
• 17:19
  between and he had to keep living until he got another job.
• 17:23
  So we used to conduct a pawn shop IQ test and we would ask 4
• 17:30
  questions when we were raising money to investors.
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  And the first was, what do you think the average size of a loan
• 17:37
  is? The second question, I still
• 17:39
  remember this from 30 years, is what do you think the average
• 17:43
  interest rate that we charge is? Third is what percent of the
• 17:49
  merchandise do you think at a pawn shop gets identified as
• 17:53
  stolen? And 4th, what percent of the
• 17:57
  people come back and pay off the loans?
• 18:01
  So Mr. Podcaster here, I'm going to ask you, what do you think
• 18:06
  the answer to that question is what?
• 18:08
  What do you think the average loan price is?
• 18:11
  How many, how many loans are redeemed?
• 18:13
  How many people come back, pay them off?
• 18:16
  What's the interest rate? When we were raising money, we'd
• 18:19
  go to investors and we had four questions.
• 18:22
  We called it the pawn shop IQ test.
• 18:24
  What do you think the average loan in a pawn shop is?
• 18:28
  What do you think the average interest rate is?
• 18:31
  And what percent of the loans do you think are identified as
• 18:35
  stolen merchandise and redeemed by the police and force?
• 18:39
  What percent of people do you think pay off the loans and come
• 18:43
  back and redeem their property so.
• 18:47
  OK. So I'm going to say the average
• 18:49
  loan value is 200. Dollars, OK.
• 18:55
  I'm going to. I'm going to say the average
• 18:56
  interest rate is 19%. The percent reported as stolen,
• 19:03
  I'm going to say is 10% and the percent that's actually paid
• 19:10
  off, I'm going to say is 30%. All right.
• 19:15
  So Anthony? How they do?
• 19:17
  You, you, you failed miserably, but it's consistent with
• 19:22
  virtually everybody that took the test.
• 19:25
  OK. So 1st and, and some of this
• 19:29
  information is a little dated, but the average loan you're
• 19:33
  pretty close. Back 30 years ago it was 100, it
• 19:36
  probably is 150 or are more now. Most everything in a pawn shop
• 19:43
  is electronics, TV being a big part are computers or jewelry.
• 19:51
  And what surprises everybody is what's the interest rate and
• 19:58
  what's the redemption rate? The interest rate varies from
• 20:02
  state to state, sometimes community to community.
• 20:05
  But on average, it's 240%. Oh my God.
• 20:11
  So it's 20% a month. And so everybody says, oh,
• 20:16
  that's so usurious. But let me walk you through how
• 20:20
  it's not OK. Average loans $100.00.
• 20:24
  So I am a pawn shop. I take your ladders or your TVI
• 20:30
  have to store it, insure it. I have to send you notices.
• 20:35
  So the average bank will not make a loan for less than $5000
• 20:40
  and they will tell you that their typical cost of setting up
• 20:44
  a loan on the books is 50 to $100.00.
• 20:48
  So if I was only charging 19% which is what you said, which is
• 20:53
  $19.00 a year, I would be make lending you $100 loan, securing
• 20:59
  that and only making $1.60 a month and I'm having to send you
• 21:04
  notices and stuff $0.50. No, the math would never work.
• 21:09
  The reality though is for $20 it worked for both sides.
• 21:15
  You can come back and you have now made an unsecured non
• 21:22
  recourse loan. I mean a secure but non
• 21:24
  recourse. There's no recourse and you pay
• 21:28
  $120.00 and you can get your TV and everything back and you've
• 21:31
  used that $100 in the interim to make your house payment, your
• 21:35
  car payment or whatever in between jobs or or whatever.
• 21:39
  So as a result, because this is the a industry that's taking
• 21:46
  care of the cash constrained consumer, 80% of the people come
• 21:51
  back and pay off their loans, 80% And then the other thing
• 21:56
  that blows people's mind is less than 1/2 of 1% ends up being
• 22:02
  stolen. So first of all, you thought
• 22:04
  30%, but just think 80% of the people are coming back and
• 22:09
  paying off the loans. Well, if it was stolen, you
• 22:11
  wouldn't come back and pay it off, right?
• 22:14
  So now you're just talking about the 20% that default.
• 22:18
  But if I broke into somebody's house and I stole their TV's
• 22:23
  tomorrow, I could go sell it at any fleeve shop.
• 22:29
  I could put it on any social media site to sell.
• 22:35
  I could take out an ad in the newspaper and sell it with
• 22:38
  nothing. If I go to a pawn shop, which
• 22:41
  most of your listeners probably haven't.
• 22:43
  But when you go to a pawn shop and most locales are this way,
• 22:48
  you are fingerprinted your name and your ID with that TV and the
• 22:53
  serial number and it's turned in daily to the police.
• 22:57
  Well, the, the only place that I would ever have my name and
• 23:01
  fingerprint and ID identify with that solar merchandise is a bond
• 23:05
  shop. If I sell it at a flea market or
• 23:07
  online or whatever, I there's no tracing.
• 23:10
  So that's the last place I want to go.
• 23:13
  So as a result, it is not what the perception of what it may
• 23:19
  have been 40 or 50 years ago. So we've gotten way off into
• 23:23
  pawn shops, but I raised 10s of millions of dollars to start
• 23:28
  that pawn shop chain by getting people to fail the test just
• 23:33
  like you did. And then they get intrigued and
• 23:35
  then they their eyes light up and go collie at 240% APR.
• 23:43
  I'm going to make a killing. The reality is the three pawn
• 23:46
  shop chains that are public, they do very well, but it's not
• 23:51
  what you would think and. It makes more sense when, when
• 23:54
  you explain it like that Carl alone has what I'm going to call
• 23:58
  a significant amount of sort of fixed cost in it, right.
• 24:01
  And that kind of gets washed out in a larger more traditional
• 24:06
  loan so that the interest rate doesn't seem so high.
• 24:09
  I think in a, in a pawn shop loan, if you were to sort of
• 24:13
  chunk out like the fixed fee, right and then charge like a
• 24:18
  more normal interest rate it it would, it would still be the
• 24:24
  same sort of net cost to the user, but it wouldn't seem to
• 24:27
  use your word so usurious. Right.
• 24:30
  And that's that's why the public pawn shop chains returns are
• 24:34
  comparable to banks because you know, the, the, the, the
• 24:38
  dynamics of that are what you just said.
• 24:41
  There's so much front end cost of putting the money out.
• 24:44
  So anyway, that was, that was my first major deal there.
• 24:55
  There was a. Hit the the Ink 500 Fastest
• 24:58
  Growing list and. Yeah, it it got up to number.
• 25:04
  Well, anyway, it was in the top 100 at one time.
• 25:07
  And then the I met through that John Thetford introduced me to a
• 25:15
  gentleman. He's now passed Ed Stanko was
• 25:19
  his name and he was in the rent to own business.
• 25:22
  So Rent-A-Center is, is Aaron's rent you would think about and
• 25:27
  it's the same customer many times that's in the pawn shop
• 25:32
  that the three CS, the cash constrained consumer.
• 25:37
  And so that was something else. We started, we opened up 90
• 25:45
  something rent to own centers along the East Coast and called
• 25:50
  Rent right. And we later sold it to
• 25:54
  Rent-A-Center, which was a public company, still is.
• 26:00
  And that got up to be in the fourth number four on the 8500
• 26:03
  list one time. And so am I seeing, is there
• 26:07
  sort of a pattern of Carl is the guy that knows how to raise the
• 26:10
  money and then he partners up with people who understand the
• 26:13
  operational side of that business?
• 26:16
  Yes, absolutely. And what made you so good at
• 26:20
  raising money? Good question.
• 26:27
  You know, perseverance is is one thing because you get told no to
• 26:34
  a lot. You know, we used to have a joke
• 26:37
  and then when we were raising money for the rent, for the
• 26:39
  value pawn in the beginning, I, I think we raised $5,000,000 a
• 26:45
  week, you know, but we used to say we, we raised 80 million.
• 26:50
  The, the problem is we only collected 5, you know, because
• 26:53
  we would get so many commitments and then they wouldn't come
• 26:56
  through or whatever. So, you know, you, you got to be
• 27:01
  persistent. You'll hear this probably
• 27:04
  throughout this podcast. My signature line on my emails
• 27:12
  to this day is still the same. It's never never never give up,
• 27:17
  which is a Winston Churchill quote from World War 2.
• 27:21
  If you look at my wall, which you can't see up on that wall,
• 27:24
  it's it's there. If you go to my house, they
• 27:26
  never never give up. You know, I modified it.
• 27:31
  If you go to my wine cellar in my home, it says never, never,
• 27:34
  never give up drinking red wine. It would just with my named by
• 27:40
  it because everything else is just still in the OR
• 27:43
  plagiarizing, not plagiarizing. It's just the Winston Churchill
• 27:48
  quote. So being persistent and you
• 27:53
  know, you know, having a good story and, and making it a
• 27:58
  story, you know, when you're trying to get people that have
• 28:04
  money to write a check, you only have their attention span for a
• 28:10
  short period of time and you've got to be different.
• 28:14
  And for me, the pawn shop IQ test was a difference for me
• 28:19
  that showing the picture of the vacant building and telling the
• 28:24
  story of how we were going to grow monogram by filling up
• 28:27
  stories that could relate to it and and visualize and see it.
• 28:32
  So having a good pitch and working it and being prepared
• 28:39
  for it and being. Where did you learn that?
• 28:46
  How did that come? You know I that's.
• 28:50
  You just born with it. I don't, I don't know.
• 28:54
  That's a good question. I mean I.
• 28:57
  I mean, some people like that's just how their brains are wired.
• 29:00
  Maybe they just they see that and it's.
• 29:03
  Well, my, my dad was retired from the Navy, Chief Petty
• 29:07
  Officer. He was a, you know, and he sold
• 29:11
  insurance and first he sold pianos and then he sold
• 29:15
  insurance and, and you know, so he, he was pretty innovative.
• 29:26
  I I think I've learned from him a lot.
• 29:31
  He was a pretty good salesman. He.
• 29:34
  Taught you some things before you pass.
• 29:36
  Like I say I I was a month shy of my 19th birthday when he
• 29:41
  passed away at age 48, so I didn't have a long story, long
• 29:45
  history with him but. Maybe some of it came about as
• 29:50
  just necessity. You're a young.
• 29:52
  Guy and you've got you've got to figure out a way to earn pretty
• 29:54
  quickly. Right.
• 29:57
  Yeah, there's some truth to that.
• 30:04
  So let's see. You guys purchased and
• 30:08
  relaunched the King Cotton and Circle B brands from Sara Lee.
• 30:15
  Tell me how that came about. Well, once again, when you get a
• 30:21
  reputation that you can raise money and you invest in
• 30:26
  businesses and real estate deals, you get a pipeline of
• 30:34
  referrals. And there was a guy that had
• 30:38
  started Monogram a year or so before we came along in 2004 and
• 30:47
  and he was actually doing something entirely different.
• 30:51
  It's hard to believe, but in 2004, 2003, a company like Sara
• 30:59
  Lee did not have a.com. You could not go online and buy
• 31:04
  a Sara Lee cheesecake. That was only 23 years ago, but
• 31:08
  it was at the forefront. And this particular entrepreneur
• 31:15
  had come up with an idea to take advantage of Memphis being home
• 31:23
  of FedEx, which at that point would not true today.
• 31:27
  But in 2003, if you sent a FedEx package anywhere in the world,
• 31:33
  it came through Memphis. And so it was a good
• 31:39
  distribution point. And so he went to Sara Lee and
• 31:43
  said, hey, let me be your distribution arm.
• 31:46
  And he also had a gifting idea, which once again, he was a
• 31:51
  little ahead of his time, but he said, OK, copying the Harry and
• 31:58
  David's or Omaha Steaks, he was going to have the Sara Lee
• 32:03
  cheesecake of the month, all kind of ways to sell Sara Lee
• 32:08
  products. And he was very active in some
• 32:14
  people call it the trinket and trash industry.
• 32:16
  Others call it specialty advertising.
• 32:18
  But you know, when you get a baseball cap with the name of
• 32:21
  your insurance company or a ballpoint pen or a ruler or
• 32:25
  whatever. And he was big in that network
• 32:28
  and had Kroger's, one of his big customers and others.
• 32:32
  And and he came up with an idea, hence the name monogram to, to
• 32:36
  go to a business. What's the name of your
• 32:39
  insurance company again, add back, add back add back benefit.
• 32:43
  Go to add back benefits and say, OK Anthony, every time you sign
• 32:48
  up a new customer, send them a, a a thank you gift, which would
• 32:53
  be a box with a cheesecake in it and and it would be monogrammed,
• 33:00
  hence the name on the front. Dear Bill Smith car dealership,
• 33:09
  you know, thank you for your business.
• 33:10
  You know Anthony add back benefits and the box would be
• 33:15
  monogrammed be shipped out of Memphis FedEx next day you get
• 33:20
  it the business and which is going to get the specialty
• 33:25
  advertising people to have another thing to sell to their
• 33:29
  businesses beside ballpoint pens and baseball caps.
• 33:33
  But here's a thank you gift that you can send out every time you
• 33:37
  get a new business or if you're. Something a little more unusual
• 33:39
  Which? Gives more of an impact.
• 33:41
  Yeah, you can get a every time somebody buys a house from you
• 33:44
  or gives a listing with you. And so he had gone to Sara Lee
• 33:50
  and they were intrigued and they had lent him some money to get
• 33:58
  this business up and going because they saw the benefit of
• 34:01
  it and he never could raise money.
• 34:06
  So he came to me and I lent him a little money while I had an
• 34:10
  option to buy it. And I met Wes Jackson, my Co
• 34:18
  founder, and I thought he was the sharpest guy I'd ever met in
• 34:24
  as an operations guy. Coincidentally, his wife was
• 34:28
  from Memphis. He grew up in West Tennessee.
• 34:30
  He was living in in Cincinnati, where Sarah Lee's meat
• 34:35
  headquarters were at the time. And he too had an
• 34:39
  entrepreneurial event. And I said, well, I'm thinking
• 34:42
  about taking over this little company.
• 34:44
  He said, well, I don't know if all that stuff will work, but I
• 34:46
  will tell you, Sarah Lee is getting out of the regional
• 34:53
  brand business and they've got 2 brands that I used to run in
• 34:57
  Memphis, Circle B and King, called King Cotton at the time.
• 35:01
  And you can buy them on very reasonably.
• 35:04
  And I could come down and run them.
• 35:06
  And once again, I found my operator.
• 35:08
  And so I wouldn't raise the money to buy these.
• 35:11
  They weren't troubled assets, but they were heavily
• 35:14
  discounted. They were off strategy for Sara
• 35:17
  Lee. They only wanted to do national
• 35:20
  brands, Jimmy Dean's and and ballparks.
• 35:24
  And so they were getting rid of their regional brands.
• 35:29
  And so it was off strategy for them.
• 35:31
  Bought them at a discount. We started with five employees.
• 35:36
  We gave all of the gifting ideas.
• 35:40
  We didn't take Larry Malone kept that None, none of that worked
• 35:45
  for under his. It's, it's hard to do customized
• 35:52
  things like that, especially food at any sort of volume I
• 35:54
  would imagine, right. So now you guys had a, a
• 35:58
  different strategy. You had these brands that had
• 36:00
  some regional sway. Hey, let's put those into the
• 36:03
  production pipeline, use Wes's operational expertise and see
• 36:07
  what we can do. And then the next year we, we, I
• 36:12
  met the Sara Lee people from buying that that was in their
• 36:16
  disposition the equivalent of their special assets.
• 36:19
  And they had a, a factory in Chandler, MN that they had
• 36:26
  bought 4 years earlier intending to turn it around and get in the
• 36:32
  meat snack category. And they had paid 25,000,000 for
• 36:37
  it. They were losing money.
• 36:38
  They had changed their minds. It's a little side note, got a
• 36:43
  little bit of interest, but they were going to roll out Jimmy
• 36:46
  Dean's Jerky and they thought that was a good category.
• 36:53
  That's what they bought the plant for.
• 36:54
  And it was going to become a Jimmy Dean's jerky plant.
• 36:59
  And they did a some focus groups and studies and they decided
• 37:03
  instead of putting Jimmy Dean in jerky, they would put him in the
• 37:09
  breakfast category on steroids. They had already had the Jimmy
• 37:14
  Dean sausage, but they decided we're going to make him all
• 37:18
  breakfast and we're going to try to own the breakfast category.
• 37:21
  And by golly, they did. You know, you, you see all the
• 37:24
  Jimmy Dean egg products and you know, and to this day Jimmy Dean
• 37:29
  sandwiches and etcetera. And so now they had bought this
• 37:33
  plant that they didn't have A use for it's losing money.
• 37:37
  So we bought it from them. Once again the plant was less
• 37:42
  than half empty. It had 110 employees in it.
• 37:46
  This is 2006. We paid 9,000,000 for it.
• 37:52
  They had paid 25,000,000 for it in 20 O one and and we filled it
• 38:04
  up. We got other business to go into
• 38:08
  it, other customers and then we kept replicating that.
• 38:17
  Now we. Say you did that multiple times
• 38:19
  and each time is it like a a distressed or an undervalued
• 38:23
  asset that you're acquiring? Yeah, yes.
• 38:26
  That's your specialty. You look for something that you
• 38:28
  can get a deal on. That was this, that was the
• 38:31
  specialty for the that was the the strategy the first half of
• 38:38
  our 21 year journey. The last 10 years is not been
• 38:43
  that we have been trying to not buy distressed assets.
• 38:48
  They take so much time to turn around and once you get to a
• 38:52
  certain critical mass, it makes it hard.
• 38:57
  So we don't rule it out, but we don't.
• 39:01
  We don't really look at distressed assets anymore, but
• 39:04
  it bode us well. It was the right strategy for
• 39:06
  the time. It it was a great way to get you
• 39:09
  started. And.
• 39:10
  Now and then once you got sort of to that halfway point, you
• 39:13
  stopped looking for those value assets, those distressed assets.
• 39:18
  Were you then starting your own locations from scratch or were
• 39:23
  you still doing acquisitions? A combination, but more organic
• 39:29
  growth than acquisition growth. And so how would you describe
• 39:35
  the landscape of products and services that Monogram offers
• 39:38
  today? So we have a billion 5 revenue
• 39:46
  and it's divided into 3 divisions.
• 39:50
  One is bacon, which we have two plants, 1 cooks the bellies and
• 39:57
  slices raw bacon. The second plant gets the
• 40:03
  bellies from that first plant and makes precooked bacon.
• 40:09
  So if you were to go into and and I've got to be careful
• 40:14
  because our customers don't like us telling.
• 40:19
  Their name but. We would recognize some of these
• 40:23
  brands. Yeah, if you went into one of
• 40:25
  these national coffee chains or food fast food chains, many
• 40:30
  times we're providing the precooked bacon that goes on
• 40:34
  their sandwiches. And if you go into a retail
• 40:41
  store, we might be making their private label.
• 40:46
  And the other thing we do is Co manufacturer.
• 40:49
  So we make product for other people's labels.
• 40:56
  So if you look at any of the public companies, and we do
• 41:04
  business with most of them, but if you look at the Tysons, the
• 41:08
  Hormel's, the Conagras, you'll see that they, depending on the
• 41:15
  company, they'll make anywhere from 50 to 90% of the products
• 41:20
  they make themselves, but they will have other people make 10
• 41:25
  to 50% of what they sell. Why is that?
• 41:28
  Why? Why?
• 41:29
  Why do companies use that strategy?
• 41:31
  Why not keep it all? Why not one extreme or the
• 41:33
  other? Keep it all in house or farm it
• 41:35
  all out. Well, there's a variety of
• 41:40
  reasons. 1 is let's say company A has a small amount of meat
• 41:51
  snack business or they're going to they're going to try to get
• 41:55
  in meat snack. They can't justify having a
• 41:58
  factory for that small amount. So they'll Co man and and
• 42:03
  they'll be at a factory that's got 10 other companies doing it.
• 42:09
  Another is speed to market. Sometimes you say, hey, we're
• 42:15
  going to come out with a new frozen appetizer product.
• 42:20
  We, we do this all the time. Well, they don't.
• 42:23
  It takes 18 months to build a factory.
• 42:27
  And so if they don't have a factory that can do it, they'll
• 42:30
  have somebody else do it. Speed to market, innovation,
• 42:36
  economies of scale. Now more and more of times
• 42:40
  they're doing it because they want the capital investment to
• 42:44
  be off their balance sheet. And so there's a variety of
• 42:49
  reasons, but it Co man is growing more and more of the big
• 42:53
  companies are having more of their portfolio Co manufactured
• 42:58
  by somebody else. Do they typically just do that
• 43:01
  when they're starting up a new product line and then if it's
• 43:04
  successful, they'll try to bring it back in house to get some
• 43:09
  more economies of scale? Not necessarily.
• 43:12
  Once it's running smoothly with Monogram like, let's just let
• 43:15
  them keep running with it. And and and they also want
• 43:19
  redundancy. So for example, we, we, we make
• 43:24
  a corn dog for, for a national brand and they have their own
• 43:28
  corn dog plant, but they don't want everything under one roof.
• 43:33
  They like the, the, the, the, the safety and security of
• 43:36
  having a secondary location. So that, that can sometimes be a
• 43:40
  benefit. And, and then it can flex too,
• 43:43
  you know, so if you, if you are running promotions and you've
• 43:50
  got more demand than your factory can handle, having a
• 43:53
  secondary location that can flex can be a benefit.
• 43:57
  And so there's there's a lot of reasons.
• 43:59
  Yeah, that makes sense. Carl, what is it that you guys
• 44:02
  are doing so well? Obviously, there are other
• 44:05
  companies out there that provide similar services.
• 44:07
  What sets you guys apart? You know, you hear this so many
• 44:16
  times, it it, you know, it, it, it can become cliche or pride or
• 44:19
  whatever, but I truly believe that culture is our secret
• 44:23
  sauce. We have a never give up
• 44:26
  attitude. We try to put the customer
• 44:30
  first. We try to have a reputation
• 44:35
  that, that of doing what we say. We, we call it candor done
• 44:40
  right, a kind of Southern colloquialism of, of you know.
• 44:44
  And so we, we, when we get with a customer, we grow with that
• 44:50
  customer. We got a great track record
• 44:52
  because they get comfortable with us.
• 44:55
  They can depend on us to do what we say.
• 45:00
  Food safety is critical in this space.
• 45:03
  You can imagine if you're, and I've already mentioned it, just
• 45:09
  so example, we don't do any Jimmy Dean products.
• 45:13
  So I don't want to do it. But if you if you were Tyson and
• 45:17
  you owned the Jimmy Dean brand, you know, it's a, you know, they
• 45:23
  got a, it's a billion dollar brand and they don't want just
• 45:29
  anybody touching that. They don't want their.
• 45:33
  They don't want their name associated with some sort of a,
• 45:36
  you know, a listeria outbreak for.
• 45:38
  Example correctly so food safety is critical and and and food
• 45:43
  quality is right up there as well and dependability and and
• 45:48
  so there's just you got to build a reputation up and so.
• 45:53
  So with so many employees, I mean you've got a few thousand
• 45:56
  employees spread across several different locations.
• 46:00
  How do you instill and build that culture across such a a a
• 46:07
  diverse set of workers? Yeah.
• 46:11
  So it's, it's something that's an everyday project.
• 46:16
  You know, you, you start with communications and you know,
• 46:22
  you, you got to have constant communications and you got to
• 46:26
  have an air of transparency. Your team members need to
• 46:31
  believe what you say. And, and we try, we have a, a
• 46:37
  goal not to have any secrets or surprises.
• 46:42
  And, and so I, you know, I tell people this isn't, you know, bad
• 46:51
  news is not like wine. It doesn't age well.
• 46:55
  You know, it's better to get the bad news out and get it over
• 46:59
  with and, and let everybody know because if it's held back, then
• 47:04
  people think, well, what else are they holding back?
• 47:07
  Or, and you know, it's then it becomes a surprise.
• 47:13
  So try to be no secrets, no surprises, constant
• 47:20
  communication and getting everybody to, to believe in the
• 47:27
  values we, we have behaviors that we value and they're,
• 47:32
  they're not just on placards, which they are everywhere, but
• 47:37
  we start meetings out a lot with them.
• 47:39
  You know, one of my initial shareholders still is one of my
• 47:45
  largest shareholders started the company Pit Hide started the
• 47:49
  company AutoZone and he had his grandfather had actually started
• 47:57
  a food distribution company and called Malone and Hyde.
• 48:03
  It was the second largest in the country of the world and they
• 48:09
  asked Pit. He was an original still around
• 48:11
  Mr. Hyde is and he was a founding initial board member of
• 48:17
  Sam's and Walmart's. And later when Walmart started
• 48:25
  getting into food business in the beginning there wasn't food
• 48:27
  in Walmart stores. Pet Hide had to resign because
• 48:32
  now he's a competitor and he looked at what Sam had done and
• 48:40
  gladly in his book said I copied his ideas, which started
• 48:46
  AutoZone. Because if you go back 30 years,
• 48:51
  the auto repairs and the auto parts stores were all mom and
• 48:57
  pops and it was a very fragmented industry, just like
• 49:02
  the pawn shop was a very fragmented industry and and and
• 49:06
  few chains came in with the auto parts was a very fragmented
• 49:10
  industry and he wanted to streamline it.
• 49:12
  Well, he took all of the learnings that he had from Sam's
• 49:16
  and including the wearing the uniforms, having the having the
• 49:21
  pledge and having the charge in the morning meetings.
• 49:24
  And so he borrowed all of that. And I've tried to borrow that
• 49:29
  from him and, and AutoZone and you go to our offices here in
• 49:35
  Memphis and we try not to ever call ourselves the headquarters.
• 49:39
  We call ourselves the support center.
• 49:42
  If you go to Autozone's office building, downtown Memphis is
• 49:47
  called the Store Support center. They don't want to be thought of
• 49:50
  as the ivory tower or the headquarters where decisions are
• 49:54
  being made and and shoved down into the stores around the
• 49:58
  country or in our case, the plants around the country.
• 50:02
  We wanted to think, hey, we're here to support you.
• 50:04
  We start our meetings out reminding everybody in the
• 50:07
  support center here that if it wasn't for the hard working men
• 50:11
  and women working in much worse conditions in in, in plants and
• 50:16
  temperate weather or temperate temperatures that are doing
• 50:20
  manual labor, we wouldn't have a job.
• 50:22
  We're here to support them and we want that mentality now.
• 50:26
  It doesn't always work that way, but you got to start that way.
• 50:30
  So it's constant, never ending. I like that, you know, you see
• 50:38
  another company that has a culture that you want to emulate
• 50:42
  and so you learn from them, right?
• 50:43
  You're not trying to recreate the wheel.
• 50:44
  What can, what can we borrow? What lessons can we pull from
• 50:47
  there that we can institute for ourselves?
• 50:52
  So I want to shift gears on your for a moment, Carl, and ask you
• 50:55
  about a serious challenge that you've overcome in your life,
• 50:59
  whether it's personal, professional, maybe a
• 51:01
  combination of the two. What was it?
• 51:04
  How'd you get through it and what what did you learn kind of
• 51:06
  coming out the other side? Well, I've had a lot.
• 51:10
  I I would start when I was a freshman in College in 18 and my
• 51:14
  dad passed away and, and my mom was not in the workforce and I
• 51:21
  had a sister that had just graduated from college.
• 51:24
  And so I had to start working to pay for college and, and, and,
• 51:30
  and help my mom and I learned a lot there in that quickly.
• 51:38
  And when I got out of law school in college, I'm once again older
• 51:48
  than most of your audience, but I, I was an anti war protester
• 51:53
  in the Vietnam War. You know, I've organized
• 51:56
  protests around the country and, and marched and, and more
• 52:01
  protest than you can shake a stick at.
• 52:03
  My hair was shoulder length and I was a professional protester
• 52:08
  is what some people would say. But I got involved in politics
• 52:13
  through that process, registering students to vote
• 52:16
  and, and getting involved in political campaigns and working
• 52:20
  with labor unions and, and, and the like and continue that
• 52:26
  through law school and manage campaigns in, in, in law school
• 52:30
  and, and right after and result of that in 80 when I graduated
• 52:37
  from law school at 78, I managed to campaign for a year and then
• 52:41
  started my law practice a year later.
• 52:44
  And one of my first clients was a, a, a, a local congressman
• 52:48
  here. Your viewers would recognize his
• 52:52
  son If you watch Fox, Harold Ford junior, because he's the
• 52:57
  the the the lone Democrat on on Fox News, the number one watch
• 53:01
  program in in America, absolute sports.
• 53:04
  And his father was a very prominent congressman.
• 53:09
  He junior obviously later succeeded him.
• 53:13
  And the one of the campaigns I'd run was the butcher campaign for
• 53:18
  governor and he lost and then later get had his banks go
• 53:24
  under. And I was doing legal work for
• 53:27
  the banks. I was doing legal work for the
• 53:28
  congressman and next thing you know, I get caught up and the
• 53:33
  congressman gets indicted and I get indicted as a Co conspirator
• 53:36
  because I've been his lawyer closing his loans.
• 53:40
  And that started in 83. First indictment.
• 53:44
  I was 86. One trial lasted 5 months, one
• 53:48
  trial lasted 3 months. I went through three trials.
• 53:51
  I was facing 110 years in prison.
• 53:54
  And so I went through some rough times.
• 53:58
  And then in 80, it's still going on.
• 54:03
  In 85, my wife gets diagnosed with a terminal disease that
• 54:08
  fortunately was a misdiagnosis. But we went through months of
• 54:13
  thinking she only had two years to live.
• 54:16
  So I've been through some adversity.
• 54:19
  You know, my mother used to say adversity builds character.
• 54:23
  And I, I finally told her, I said, we've got enough
• 54:25
  character. I don't need any more adversity.
• 54:28
  And so I'm literally, I took my fundraising talents, whatever I
• 54:35
  had them and raised money from my own legal defense.
• 54:38
  I mean, I, I had to spend, you know, my lawyers were on my case
• 54:44
  16 years. So from 83 to 99 I was fighting
• 54:50
  my legal problems while at the same time I was building
• 54:54
  businesses and in a very high profile legal situation with a
• 55:01
  sick wife. So never never give up was vote
• 55:08
  me very well. You've got some battle scars.
• 55:11
  I do have battle. Battle scars, yeah.
• 55:13
  So you're building businesses, Your wife gets a terminal
• 55:17
  diagnosis, fortunately later proved to be incorrect.
• 55:22
  But in the moment, that's what you're believing it to be.
• 55:24
  And your, your name's being dragged through the mud.
• 55:27
  Your you've got these court cases going on.
• 55:30
  Like any one of these things is enough to like fully consume or
• 55:35
  occupy or bring somebody down. What were your sources of
• 55:40
  strength during these times? How did you get through all of
• 55:43
  this chaos? Well, I I remember my father was
• 55:54
  a disciple of now I'm forgetting his name, Carnegie and the Power
• 56:06
  of Positive Thinking. And I read that book in high
• 56:12
  school and in college and, and my father used to take those
• 56:17
  motivational quotes and put on his bathroom window when he
• 56:22
  shaved in the morning because he, he said, I got it.
• 56:25
  I got, he knew he had to knock on 10 doors for every Prudential
• 56:29
  life insurance sales he made, you know, and, and, and it, it,
• 56:34
  it, it isn't easy. He would say, coming home one
• 56:38
  day where you knocked on 13 and you got 13 no's.
• 56:41
  And so he, he was believed in the power of positive thinking
• 56:46
  and he preached that the Dale Carnegie and all of the, I'm,
• 56:54
  I'm forgetting the name Dale Carnegie courses, but also
• 56:57
  whoever was the author of the Power of Positive thinking.
• 57:00
  But so I, I would like to think that I kept my commitment to
• 57:07
  positive thinking throughout all of it.
• 57:10
  I also had a goal to never get bitter.
• 57:14
  You know, it would have been easy to hate the prosecutors.
• 57:19
  And I used to always believe that if you let bitterness sink
• 57:23
  in, that they had won. And so I was always trying not
• 57:32
  to be bitter at at those who I was going up against.
• 57:38
  But hey, listen, it's the power of positive thinking, and I
• 57:41
  think it's something that you can learn.
• 57:47
  I don't think it's given that it's just something you inherit.
• 57:55
  We all know we don't like being around negative people.
• 58:00
  So one of my things that I've told people is I've tried to
• 58:04
  build these businesses is I don't want to hire anybody with
• 58:09
  a negative attitude. And if I do, I want to get rid
• 58:15
  of him quick. The, I think it was Rick Pitino
• 58:21
  used to talk about building his basketball teams.
• 58:24
  He called it the, he called it the Brotherhood of the
• 58:26
  Miserable. You know, if he got a basketball
• 58:29
  player with a bad attitude, you know, it's like cancer, it
• 58:33
  grows. And so you got to cut it out.
• 58:36
  You've got to get rid of that person.
• 58:39
  So positive energy is, is, is one of the behaviors that we
• 58:45
  value at monogram and we we say if we got somebody with a
• 58:49
  negative attitude, let's get rid of them.
• 58:52
  Norman Vincent Peale is. The thank you very much.
• 58:56
  I'm sorry. My father was a Norman Vincent
• 58:58
  Peale disciple and actually went to New York and heard him preach
• 59:03
  a couple of times because he had his a church and but I I never
• 59:09
  heard him speak, but it Norman Vincent Peale.
• 59:11
  Thank you. And, and I love what you said
• 59:14
  there, you know, the power of positive thinking.
• 59:15
  It can be learned. I think sometimes we fall into
• 59:19
  this trap of like, oh, I'm just naturally an ornery person.
• 59:24
  I'm naturally, you know, pessimistic and I'm just going
• 59:27
  to, I'm stuck to be this way. That's that's how God made me.
• 59:32
  You you can't be naturally introverted.
• 59:36
  A lot of great leaders are introverts.
• 59:38
  Everybody is naturally, I think can be an introvert or
• 59:43
  extrovert. I think it's harder for an
• 59:44
  introvert to learn how to be an extrovert.
• 59:46
  It's almost possible for an extrovert to learn how to be an
• 59:50
  introvert, but to have a positive outlook, it can be
• 59:56
  universal. It doesn't matter whether you're
• 59:57
  an introvert or an extrovert. You control that whether you
• 1:00:03
  wake up in the morning determined to try to have a a
• 1:00:09
  good day. You know, one of the Boy Scouts,
• 1:00:13
  which I was fortunate enough to grow up Boy Scouts, is, you
• 1:00:17
  know, to do a good deed daily. And you know, if you have that
• 1:00:21
  attitude, you, you can achieve it, you know.
• 1:00:29
  Carl, I've just got one more question for you, but before I
• 1:00:31
  ask it, I want to do 2 things. First of all, everyone listening
• 1:00:34
  today, you love the show, you love this interview, you want
• 1:00:38
  more of it, go ahead and hit the follow or subscribe button on
• 1:00:40
  your favorite podcast app. Now, I'm also going to let you
• 1:00:43
  know the best way to get in touch with or follow, follow
• 1:00:46
  Carl Carl's story. Easy for me to say.
• 1:00:49
  We've got his website, whichismonogramfoods.com.
• 1:00:52
  Anything else you want to point folks to either as a way to get
• 1:00:56
  in touch with you, to get in touch with the company, to
• 1:00:58
  follow any of your brands or causes?
• 1:01:01
  No, I'm open my my e-mail is karlwithakkarl@monogramfoods.com.
• 1:01:08
  And I love telling the monogram story.
• 1:01:11
  I'm very proud of it. I'm transitioning to chairman of
• 1:01:15
  the board going to be announcing my successor in the in in the
• 1:01:20
  next week or two. What's he it happened to be a he
• 1:01:26
  transitions out of where he's at now.
• 1:01:28
  And and so I'll I'll be spending a lot less time on the
• 1:01:32
  day-to-day. That process already begun your
• 1:01:36
  monogram. But hey, you, you get a lot of
• 1:01:39
  pride of authorship when you start something and I'm very
• 1:01:45
  proud. So always happy to share.
• 1:01:48
  Share the story. That's great.
• 1:01:51
  Carl, last question for you, as you look to the future,
• 1:01:54
  obviously your role is going to change somewhat, but still very
• 1:01:57
  passionate about Monogram. What is it that you're most
• 1:02:00
  excited about for the future of the company?
• 1:02:05
  You know, I'm, I'm really excited about continuing this
• 1:02:10
  legacy of giving back to the communities where we live and
• 1:02:13
  work and being considered a great place to work.
• 1:02:18
  And I'm also excited about the money that the shareholders and
• 1:02:23
  team members that own the company are going to make.
• 1:02:26
  I don't mind being bashful. I, I'm a capitalist and so I
• 1:02:31
  enjoy making money and, and enjoy making money with and for
• 1:02:36
  other people. So that that excites me when we
• 1:02:40
  we've made a lot of money so far, we're going to make a lot
• 1:02:42
  more. That's great.
• 1:02:44
  And Carl, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing
• 1:02:47
  your time and your story with us today.
• 1:02:48
  I really appreciate it. Well, and and I'm going to look
• 1:02:53
  up what add back benefits does because you know, every company
• 1:02:58
  can benefit from from finding little ways to make a little
• 1:03:02
  extra and have a competitive advantage.
• 1:03:05
  And it sounds to me like that's what you're offering people.
• 1:03:08
  So hats off to you as well. I appreciate that little plug
• 1:03:12
  there at the end, Carl. Thank you.
• 1:03:13
  Thanks. All right, folks, that's a wrap
• 1:03:15
  on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
• 1:03:18
  Thanks for. Learning this today, appreciate
• 1:03:20
  it.