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Transcript

Patching Together a Quilting Empire · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Back in two thousand and eight, Al Done and
0:23
Speaker 1: his siblings helped their mom open a quilt shop in Hamilton, Missouri.
0:28
Speaker 1: We fixed up the building and we got it all
0:30
Speaker 1: set up, and then mom was ready to start quilting,
0:32
Speaker 1: and we opened the doors. And there's nobody opening a
0:37
Speaker 1: quilt shop in a town of one thousand people. It's
0:40
Speaker 1: not It's not as cool as you're imagining. Since then,
0:43
Speaker 1: Al's mom, Jenny Done, has become a huge quilting star
0:46
Speaker 1: on YouTube. The family has turned Hamilton, Missouri into this
0:50
Speaker 1: like Disneyland for quilters, and their quilt shop, The Missouri
0:55
Speaker 1: Star Quilt Company has grown to over one hundred million
0:58
Speaker 1: dollars a year in revenue. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this
1:06
Speaker 1: is what's your problem. My guest today is Alne. My
1:09
Speaker 1: name is Aldone, and I worked for the Missouri Star
1:12
Speaker 1: Quilt Company. What are you now, chairman or something? Were
1:16
Speaker 1: you trying not to say chairman? Oh? I am the yeah, yeah, Okay.
1:20
Speaker 1: My name is Aldone. I'm the executive chairman of the
1:23
Speaker 1: Missouri Star Quilt Company. The Missouri Star Quilt Company sells
1:27
Speaker 1: quilting supplies on the Internet. Square's a fabric batting zewing machines.
1:33
Speaker 1: But the story of the company is not really about quilting.
1:36
Speaker 1: It's about how to combine low tech and high tech
1:39
Speaker 1: to build a wildly successful brand. So I'll tell you
1:45
Speaker 1: that the story starts with me a long time ago. No,
1:50
Speaker 1: it actually it started with my mom. And my mom's
1:52
Speaker 1: a cool mom, like she's she's great mom's mom's a
1:56
Speaker 1: big goofball, right, Like she's the funnest mom to have
1:58
Speaker 1: because everything's everything's fun and a game to her, Like
2:02
Speaker 1: we're broke our whole lives. But I never knew it
2:05
Speaker 1: because it was always let's see what we can get
2:07
Speaker 1: for twenty eight dollars. If food for less, We're all right, kids,
2:11
Speaker 1: go look and we're gonna find it. Like so we
2:13
Speaker 1: come out with like with like nothing. But but for us,
2:16
Speaker 1: it was a great adventure and off we were going.
2:18
Speaker 1: And so that's sort of mom's style, right, She's just
2:21
Speaker 1: everything's a game, everything's fun, everything's an adventure. And and
2:26
Speaker 1: so like when when I'm in business with her, now,
2:30
Speaker 1: that's a great person to have by your side when
2:32
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure it out, right, And when we
2:34
Speaker 1: started doing this quilt company, we started this quilt company,
2:38
Speaker 1: and it was you know, it wasn't supposed to be
2:40
Speaker 1: The quilt company was supposed to be a cute little
2:43
Speaker 1: side business to help mom pay for the house because
2:46
Speaker 1: Dad was working for the newspaper and we were all
2:48
Speaker 1: afraid he was going to lose his job, which which
2:51
Speaker 1: if he would have stayed there, he definitely would have. Right,
2:54
Speaker 1: Well was he doing at the paper. He's a machinist
2:58
Speaker 1: and so he worked. Yeah, he worked for the Kansas
3:01
Speaker 1: City Star, just fixing presses and stuff. And like my
3:03
Speaker 1: parents were terrible with money. Uh they well I don't
3:07
Speaker 1: know if they were terrible with money or they just
3:08
Speaker 1: never add any money. But it sort of went hand
3:11
Speaker 1: in hand. And so we started this company just thinking, hey,
3:14
Speaker 1: it'll help mom. Mom can chip in a few bucks
3:17
Speaker 1: to help pay for the house. And because it was
3:19
Speaker 1: such a low impact effort, we were actually able to
3:22
Speaker 1: start it. Otherwise, like if we needed revenues and monies
3:26
Speaker 1: and stuff I'll put together to get into this, we
3:28
Speaker 1: would have never done it. We shouldn't have done it.
3:31
Speaker 1: Two questions, what were you doing for your day job
3:34
Speaker 1: at the time? End, Like why quilts? So I came
3:37
Speaker 1: out of college and took a job with the Semantic Corporation.
3:40
Speaker 1: So I'm like a nerdy tech guy. I really liked
3:43
Speaker 1: that space. And then in two thousand and eight they
3:46
Speaker 1: fired or laid off me and twenty thousand of my
3:49
Speaker 1: closest friends, and for the first time in my life,
3:51
Speaker 1: I was without a job. And then why quilts? So
3:55
Speaker 1: my mom took up quilting when all us kids left. Right,
3:57
Speaker 1: when you're used to seven kids at home, you got
4:00
Speaker 1: a lot on your plate. And all of the sudden
4:01
Speaker 1: she found herself with nothing to do. And mom went
4:05
Speaker 1: over to the Votech College, you know, a next town
4:08
Speaker 1: over from us. They were doing a class on like
4:10
Speaker 1: making a log cabin quilt, and she just fell in
4:13
Speaker 1: love with it. It's an art form, right, it's an expression.
4:15
Speaker 1: It's all the great cool stuff, and then at its
4:18
Speaker 1: core you're making something to keep you warm, which is
4:20
Speaker 1: this very practical thing. And so I called her one time,
4:24
Speaker 1: and she had been making these quilts and she had
4:26
Speaker 1: taken one into our local quilters. And when I say,
4:29
Speaker 1: when I say a quilter, this is the person. When
4:32
Speaker 1: you make a quilt, you sew a bunch of pieces
4:34
Speaker 1: of fabric together and you have a very thin, big
4:36
Speaker 1: piece of fabric now, and the quilting, the process of
4:39
Speaker 1: quilting is taking that fluffy middle stuff we call it batting,
4:42
Speaker 1: and then the backing and you sandwich all that together
4:45
Speaker 1: and stitch around it so it doesn't come part that
4:47
Speaker 1: process we call quilting. And so she took her quilt
4:51
Speaker 1: in to get it quilted, and just like the last step,
4:54
Speaker 1: and you need a machine or something that your mom
4:56
Speaker 1: didn't have for that. Yeah, it's a big, like forty
4:59
Speaker 1: thousand dollar sewing machine. It's got a big throat on it,
5:02
Speaker 1: so we can get all the way into the quilt
5:04
Speaker 1: and do all that stuff. Okay, And so she took
5:06
Speaker 1: it into this lady and the lady said, great, I'm
5:08
Speaker 1: backed up about a year. I'll get it back to you.
5:11
Speaker 1: Let s see it a year. And I was like, man,
5:14
Speaker 1: there's nothing on this planet Earth that needs to take it.
5:17
Speaker 1: You can build a house in eight months if you
5:19
Speaker 1: want to. So she she was relaying this story to me,
5:22
Speaker 1: and I said, if I bought you the machine, could
5:24
Speaker 1: you do this? She said, yeah, I think I could
5:26
Speaker 1: figure it out. And called my sister and the like.
5:29
Speaker 1: That was my market research and so you bought your
5:31
Speaker 1: mom the machine? Did it work? Was that? Oh? Yeah, yeah, okay,
5:36
Speaker 1: Uh yeah we did. We bought mom the machine. Uh
5:39
Speaker 1: you know, took out a second mortgage on my sister's
5:42
Speaker 1: house because she had she had assets. I was still
5:45
Speaker 1: single and had nothing to my name at the time.
5:47
Speaker 1: And because we're in the middle of nowhere, right Like
5:50
Speaker 1: your world doesn't have this up in real cities, but
5:52
Speaker 1: out here, we bought an old five thousand square foot
5:55
Speaker 1: auto showroom for twenty four thousand dollars and then a
5:59
Speaker 1: quilt machine for thirty six thousand dollars. So for a
6:01
Speaker 1: total mortgage payment of like four hundred dollars a month,
6:04
Speaker 1: we had a full business ready to go. And uh
6:07
Speaker 1: we all all the kids chipped in and like we
6:09
Speaker 1: fixed up the building and we we got it all
6:11
Speaker 1: set up, and then mom was ready to start quilting.
6:13
Speaker 1: And we opened the doors and there's nobody right there's
6:18
Speaker 1: it's it's sort of a very underwhelming opening a quilt
6:21
Speaker 1: shop in a town of a thousand people. Uh it's
6:24
Speaker 1: it's not as cool as you're imagining. But uh, but
6:28
Speaker 1: we we launch and and so we had this qute
6:31
Speaker 1: little quilt shop on the side, and then I lose
6:34
Speaker 1: my job shortly thereafter, right, and uh, And I had
6:37
Speaker 1: this idea in the back of my head that I
6:38
Speaker 1: loved around a daily deal for quilters, right and so
6:43
Speaker 1: and so daily deals was it was a thing back
6:45
Speaker 1: then more than now right like what today. Right, It's
6:49
Speaker 1: like the dailiness of it is right now one day
6:53
Speaker 1: only get this great deal on this thing. I'm twenty
6:56
Speaker 1: five and I was super hooked, like I loved them
6:59
Speaker 1: and uh, but nobody had ever built one for my
7:02
Speaker 1: mom's demographic. There was no one that was doing this
7:04
Speaker 1: for forty to seventy year old women that were into quilting.
7:07
Speaker 1: It was all like outdoor gear. Tech gear is basically
7:10
Speaker 1: like the tech kids, tech bros who would build these
7:13
Speaker 1: sites are selling stuff essentially to themselves. That's right. And
7:17
Speaker 1: nobody had built and marketed and message to that to
7:19
Speaker 1: that group. And so I was like, man, this would
7:22
Speaker 1: be cool to try. When I lost my job, I said, well,
7:24
Speaker 1: we got this cute little quilt shop at home. I
7:26
Speaker 1: wonder if I could take it online. So we built
7:28
Speaker 1: we built an e commerce store for it, and uh,
7:31
Speaker 1: and we did. We we put it all together, launched
7:34
Speaker 1: this daily Deal site. Uh and again just crickets, right,
7:38
Speaker 1: Like I didn't launching a Launching a site to nobody
7:41
Speaker 1: is hard. We didn't have an audience, we didn't have
7:44
Speaker 1: we didn't have a customer base yet. But we got
7:46
Speaker 1: it out there and just started building this email cadence
7:50
Speaker 1: to our list of people that were that were, you know,
7:53
Speaker 1: growing it to one hundred people and a thousand people
7:56
Speaker 1: slowly and uh and marketing this daily deal that was
8:00
Speaker 1: happening every day and leading into that as our sort
8:03
Speaker 1: of commerce hook and uh. And it started picking up steam.
8:08
Speaker 1: And it wasn't uh, not almost any fault of our own,
8:12
Speaker 1: but you know, it started picking up steam. And the
8:14
Speaker 1: things that we were trying to do were figure out
8:17
Speaker 1: where we could find this audience, because I mean, it's
8:20
Speaker 1: funny that the market researches there's twelve million quilters in
8:23
Speaker 1: America and uh and on Facebook, with all of my
8:27
Speaker 1: parameters wide open, I could find about two million of
8:30
Speaker 1: them right, which which you go back to two thousand
8:33
Speaker 1: and eight, they just weren't even like they didn't have
8:35
Speaker 1: an email address. That was something a lot of my
8:36
Speaker 1: customer service people would have to help with. You had
8:38
Speaker 1: to have an email address to order from us. They're like, well, Judith,
8:42
Speaker 1: let me sign you up for a Gmail account. This
8:44
Speaker 1: is what it's gonna do, and we can get y'all
8:46
Speaker 1: set up, right, Yeah, yeah, right, Like finding finding those
8:49
Speaker 1: people was was a little bit of an art form
8:51
Speaker 1: and uh and so that's where a lot of my
8:53
Speaker 1: attention and interest went after that, because we knew if
8:57
Speaker 1: we could get them to our site, like they love
8:59
Speaker 1: a deal, they love a deal, and uh, and if
9:02
Speaker 1: I could put them in here and show them the
9:04
Speaker 1: experience we'd built, that we'd win. I mean, at some
9:06
Speaker 1: like the simple abstraction of it is like there's all
9:09
Speaker 1: this stuff happening daily deals and e commerce and it's
9:13
Speaker 1: growing and Facebook ads, but it's not happening for this
9:17
Speaker 1: giant segment of the population, right, It's not happening for
9:20
Speaker 1: basically older women. Right. Is that essentially your customer base? Yeah, yeah,
9:24
Speaker 1: that's that's exactly right, right, Like, like I mean, and
9:29
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of demographics that still live in these
9:32
Speaker 1: spaces where like nobody has bothered to build a great
9:34
Speaker 1: experience for them. And you know, I was I was
9:38
Speaker 1: plunking around with like stained glass window making my Grandpa
9:41
Speaker 1: makes stained glass windows, but he's he's too old to
9:43
Speaker 1: teach me. And like, nobody's sat down and said, how
9:46
Speaker 1: can I make this experience amazing for a beginner and
9:49
Speaker 1: great to get into, and how how do I continue
9:52
Speaker 1: to support them as they keep going? And like, I mean,
9:54
Speaker 1: you can go industry to industry, and so many of
9:58
Speaker 1: these have been overlooked. If you just sat down and said,
10:01
Speaker 1: can I make a great experience around this, you would
10:03
Speaker 1: be ten times better than the incumbent sitting out there
10:06
Speaker 1: making most of the money. Well, in terms of the
10:08
Speaker 1: great I mean, it seems like one big early move
10:13
Speaker 1: is getting your mom on YouTube. Yeah yeah, so well, well,
10:19
Speaker 1: getting mom on YouTube. So this was this was two
10:22
Speaker 1: thousand and eight that we started going into this, right,
10:24
Speaker 1: and we started putting together tutorials that were just like
10:28
Speaker 1: how do you make a quilt and putting them up
10:32
Speaker 1: on YouTube. And I was recording mom and I'm a
10:34
Speaker 1: thirty year old bearded man at that point, so I
10:36
Speaker 1: knew nothing about quilting still, and she would she would
10:39
Speaker 1: try and record these these tutorials, and because I'm behind
10:43
Speaker 1: the camera, I got to be like, Mom, I have
10:45
Speaker 1: no idea what you're trying to say, like, I know
10:48
Speaker 1: you think you're teaching how to quilt, but like I'm
10:50
Speaker 1: your audience, explain it to me. And so she got
10:53
Speaker 1: making these tutorials. She had this very approachable feel to her,
10:57
Speaker 1: which which even today, man, very few people are teaching.
11:01
Speaker 1: Like the instinct is to go and teach the quilter
11:04
Speaker 1: that already knows how to quilt, because that means you're
11:06
Speaker 1: a good quilter. And so to teach in an approachable
11:10
Speaker 1: way that anybody can pick up and watch this and
11:13
Speaker 1: uh and then join into the clan is is a
11:16
Speaker 1: very rare thing. And so she started going. In the
11:18
Speaker 1: early days of YouTube, that became our entire messaging lever. Right.
11:23
Speaker 1: We we started an email list that was just sending
11:26
Speaker 1: out this video and saying, hey, we released a tutorial,
11:31
Speaker 1: you'll love it, and that was that was it, right,
11:34
Speaker 1: Like they already they knew, we had the daily deal,
11:36
Speaker 1: they knew, and we'd put some of that in there.
11:38
Speaker 1: But but like it was very little bye bye bye
11:41
Speaker 1: and and a lot more like hey, we did this
11:43
Speaker 1: thing for you, we think you'll love it. And it grew,
11:45
Speaker 1: like our our marketing list grew to hundreds of thousands,
11:50
Speaker 1: now it's millions of people. And back in the early
11:53
Speaker 1: days when I was running the day to day, it
11:55
Speaker 1: was like seventy three percent open rate. Right today it's
11:57
Speaker 1: like fifty six percent open rate. It's still an ab surgery. IM. Yeah, yeah,
12:02
Speaker 1: Is it right that your mom broke her leg when
12:06
Speaker 1: you were making a first videout? It out a video? No, no, no,
12:10
Speaker 1: So this is definitely real. And so we pull out
12:12
Speaker 1: this camera and I'm like, mom, just give me, give
12:15
Speaker 1: me a tour of the of the shop. She's like
12:17
Speaker 1: way over the top and doing like little leg kicks
12:20
Speaker 1: and song and dance, and she goes by the quilt machine,
12:22
Speaker 1: which has a big chord that runs from the machine
12:24
Speaker 1: down to the computer that runs it, and got her
12:26
Speaker 1: leg tangled and just like I'm recording data and then
12:30
Speaker 1: just boom, she's down, And like I thought she was
12:34
Speaker 1: just being overly dramatic, right, And so me and my
12:37
Speaker 1: sister are like, get up. Mom. She's like, I think
12:39
Speaker 1: I broke my leg. And I'm like, you did not
12:41
Speaker 1: break your leg, You're fine, and she's like, no, I really,
12:45
Speaker 1: I really did. And uh, And so I was I
12:48
Speaker 1: refused to let an ambulance come to our new little shop.
12:51
Speaker 1: I just thought that would be bad for business. And
12:54
Speaker 1: so finally we load her up into the car and
12:57
Speaker 1: drive her to the clinic and they're like, yeah, it's broken.
13:00
Speaker 1: And so about I don't know, four or five months
13:03
Speaker 1: into this business, Mom's hold up in her bed and
13:07
Speaker 1: my sister Natalie, who was also working for no payment
13:10
Speaker 1: at the time, I was like, well, you got to
13:12
Speaker 1: learn how to run this because we've got to be
13:14
Speaker 1: putting out this product. So okay, so you got your
13:18
Speaker 1: mom on YouTube, you got the daily deals. I mean, honestly,
13:22
Speaker 1: things things start going and like we're growing at about
13:25
Speaker 1: two hundred percent a year um. In the early days
13:28
Speaker 1: we went we went one hundred thousand to a million
13:31
Speaker 1: to four million to eight million. Yeah, it's just it's
13:37
Speaker 1: just going up, right, and uh and it's going up
13:39
Speaker 1: because like, I mean that sounds great. Is it super hard?
13:42
Speaker 1: I mean, is it hard to even to finance? Like?
13:44
Speaker 1: Are you have to buy the fabric before you sell it?
13:46
Speaker 1: Is it? Are there moments when you're jammed up in there?
13:49
Speaker 1: Like are there particularly? Yeah? No, the I mean the
13:52
Speaker 1: tough parts about this are are definitely the finance. We're bootstrapped.
13:56
Speaker 1: Nobody was putting money into a quilt company. Um, and
13:59
Speaker 1: so we're we're like financed off of the very safe
14:03
Speaker 1: space was was when we were buying things and I
14:05
Speaker 1: could just pay it off with my credit card if
14:07
Speaker 1: things went bad, right, But pretty soon we outgrow that.
14:10
Speaker 1: We're starting to talk millions of dollars of inventory that
14:14
Speaker 1: we need to hold. And the way my industry works
14:16
Speaker 1: is you've got to buy fabric six months before you
14:19
Speaker 1: get it. So you look at it and they say,
14:21
Speaker 1: we're going to print this, we'll have it in six months.
14:23
Speaker 1: How much do you want? And you place your order
14:25
Speaker 1: for say a million dollars worth of fabric. Right, So,
14:28
Speaker 1: when we would get the product, we owed the money
14:30
Speaker 1: and we had to turn that product into dollars in
14:33
Speaker 1: that first thirty days because we couldn't afford to pay
14:36
Speaker 1: for it otherwise, right, And so we have to immediately
14:38
Speaker 1: turn that inventory into money. It's to cover our cost.
14:42
Speaker 1: And all the while you're growing at two hundred percent
14:45
Speaker 1: year over year. And so when I placed the order
14:47
Speaker 1: to when I'm gonna sell the fabric, I need to
14:50
Speaker 1: plan for hopefully double the amount of customers I think
14:53
Speaker 1: I think they're going to show up. And then as
14:56
Speaker 1: you're holding it, double the customers again, and I hope
14:59
Speaker 1: they show up because if not, I'm stuck with all
15:02
Speaker 1: this inventory, nobody to buy it, and I've killed my
15:04
Speaker 1: entire business. We literally it felt like we were bet
15:07
Speaker 1: in the farm every three months. So when do you
15:11
Speaker 1: buy the town where you started? Somewhere along the line,
15:14
Speaker 1: you wind up sort of buying up most of the
15:17
Speaker 1: downtown in this town where you where you live. Right, Yeah,
15:20
Speaker 1: I feel like I maybe buried the lead here. We
15:22
Speaker 1: we did buy the town. Yes, that's such a fun
15:27
Speaker 1: part of the story because we're in this small town
15:29
Speaker 1: where where we grew up, Hamilton, Missouri. And we bought
15:34
Speaker 1: just this old auto show room off the off the
15:36
Speaker 1: main street to start. And then about a year or
15:39
Speaker 1: two in this family in town was selling. They had
15:43
Speaker 1: an old antique shop there and it was right on
15:46
Speaker 1: the main drag, and we said we should get that.
15:48
Speaker 1: Um actually she came to us and said, you should
15:50
Speaker 1: get this location. Location location. So we we go in
15:54
Speaker 1: and we buy this old antique store and uh, you know,
15:58
Speaker 1: it's like paneling on the walls and eight foot ceilings,
16:01
Speaker 1: and we we remodeled it. We pulled everything out, all
16:04
Speaker 1: the asbestos siding, and uh, but like we we remodeled
16:08
Speaker 1: this into this great cool space and then turned that
16:12
Speaker 1: into our quilt shop. And now we had this quilt
16:14
Speaker 1: schop on Main Street. But as we kept growing our inventory,
16:18
Speaker 1: we had more and more need for space, and so
16:22
Speaker 1: we bought another small building, an old salon, a hair salon,
16:25
Speaker 1: and turned that into a quilt shop and split out
16:29
Speaker 1: a theme of fabric. It was like Christmas and holiday
16:32
Speaker 1: stuff went over there, and then we filled up again,
16:34
Speaker 1: right this five thousand square foot shop of ours, It
16:37
Speaker 1: just builled up with fabric again, and then we bought
16:39
Speaker 1: the next one and moved batique fabric over there. And
16:41
Speaker 1: so that's why we started and continued to lean into it,
16:44
Speaker 1: even to the point where once we got three or
16:46
Speaker 1: four quilt or different shops open, I was googling around,
16:50
Speaker 1: like I want to know who had the most quilt
16:52
Speaker 1: chops of any town in the world, And it was
16:55
Speaker 1: like some town in Germany had four, right, and like
16:58
Speaker 1: it's not a lot. And I was like, man, what
17:00
Speaker 1: if we got to say, what if our marketing stick
17:03
Speaker 1: was we have the most quilt chops of any town
17:06
Speaker 1: in the world, Like that's worth pulling off the highway
17:08
Speaker 1: for let's be that. And so we we leaned into this, right.
17:11
Speaker 1: It was sort of happened by happenstance, and then we
17:15
Speaker 1: realized that we had this really great thing on our hands,
17:18
Speaker 1: and uh and leaned into it. Now we're fourteen quilt
17:20
Speaker 1: chops and we have three restaurants. We have a sleep
17:24
Speaker 1: and so sort of retreat center that you come with
17:27
Speaker 1: your girlfriends for a slumber party and spend a week.
17:29
Speaker 1: And we have we have a man's land where you
17:32
Speaker 1: park your husbands they sit and watch, you know, sports
17:35
Speaker 1: and playpool while your wife's shops and like, we have
17:39
Speaker 1: all we built this entire experience around it. That sort
17:42
Speaker 1: of stemmed from the fact that we had cheap real
17:44
Speaker 1: estate here because nobody's opening commercial enterprises and two that
17:50
Speaker 1: that like we were willing to go through and like
17:54
Speaker 1: build an experience that nobody had ever really done before.
17:57
Speaker 1: It's not a big box. It's like a town that
18:00
Speaker 1: we sort of cobbled together into this thing. It's cool
18:04
Speaker 1: and how much of well, how big is your company now?
18:07
Speaker 1: In terms of revenue, we're north of one hundred million.
18:10
Speaker 1: We uh, we we get up there a little bit.
18:12
Speaker 1: It's fun it's about four hundred employees. Uh, we're yeah,
18:17
Speaker 1: it's full time. How much how much of the revenue
18:20
Speaker 1: is from people coming to your town? About eight about
18:25
Speaker 1: eight million, I'd see, Yeah, it's it's not it's not
18:28
Speaker 1: like it's it's somewhere around five percent. It's not a
18:30
Speaker 1: ton and uh but like it's it's media enough that
18:35
Speaker 1: like it represents such a small check of revenue, but
18:38
Speaker 1: it's like an outsize, like ninety percent of our marketing
18:41
Speaker 1: message is built around this town and the people here
18:45
Speaker 1: and the customers coming right right, well, and your mom right,
18:49
Speaker 1: So instead of being just some like random place where
18:52
Speaker 1: the fabric is cheap, You've got like your mom, who's
18:54
Speaker 1: an actual person in this actual town, in a real shop.
18:57
Speaker 1: Like it seems like that is a huge part of
19:00
Speaker 1: the of the the town that you have bought and
19:03
Speaker 1: of your mom. Right, it's like a real place and
19:05
Speaker 1: real people. Yeah, I mean mom, Mom is our key
19:09
Speaker 1: for sure, right, which is which is tough because like
19:12
Speaker 1: I mean, I always talked to her. I'm like nobody
19:14
Speaker 1: lets you know, sleeping Beauty have a bad day at Disneyland.
19:17
Speaker 1: You've got to be on You're smiling, you're happy, you
19:21
Speaker 1: know for thirteen years, you've got to really shine keep going.
19:25
Speaker 1: I mean, we get such distance out of this online
19:29
Speaker 1: because you're not buying from a faceless warehouse. You're buying
19:32
Speaker 1: from us. You know us. You can come and talk
19:35
Speaker 1: to us, you can come and give us a hug,
19:36
Speaker 1: you can come out and visit. And you got a
19:39
Speaker 1: question like we'll come and chat with you about it,
19:41
Speaker 1: which which you don't have in most businesses. Amazing story
19:49
Speaker 1: and so fun. We didn't even get into any problems,
19:52
Speaker 1: but we will in a minute after the break. Now
20:05
Speaker 1: back to the show. So, okay, So congratulations on all
20:08
Speaker 1: your six um. But I'm right, it's interesting. It is cool. No,
20:17
Speaker 1: it's a it's a wonderful story. It's a happy story.
20:19
Speaker 1: I'm happy for you and your family. But I'm also curious.
20:23
Speaker 1: I mean, like, what are you pushing on now? So
20:26
Speaker 1: what we're working on now, let's see, there's probably two
20:28
Speaker 1: or three things that I think are super interesting. One,
20:31
Speaker 1: we we bought a second town, because once you have one,
20:36
Speaker 1: the first thing you want is a second town. So
20:39
Speaker 1: seven miles to the south of US is a town
20:41
Speaker 1: called Kingston, and it's population three hundred people and they
20:44
Speaker 1: literally have no revenue, right, there's no budget for the town.
20:47
Speaker 1: There's nothing there. Um, it's it's just a few houses
20:51
Speaker 1: in our county courthouse. And then I'm trying to like
20:53
Speaker 1: get the Missouri Department of Transportation to let me do
20:56
Speaker 1: a run walk trail. And my wife's building a you know,
21:00
Speaker 1: we're putting in like a like a rec center because
21:04
Speaker 1: out here, you know that it's not the culture isn't
21:07
Speaker 1: built around fitness and health and stuff, and so there's
21:09
Speaker 1: a lot of distance still to go on that and
21:11
Speaker 1: to convince people to move out here. We have a
21:13
Speaker 1: lot of branding and messaging to do around that. The
21:16
Speaker 1: challenge inside of that is, like we need more warehouse employees.
21:20
Speaker 1: We're probably fifty employees short of where we need to be,
21:23
Speaker 1: and so we're trying to solve like the housing challenge here,
21:27
Speaker 1: which is there's been no new development since the seventies,
21:30
Speaker 1: and nobody really wants to develop here because why would you,
21:33
Speaker 1: And so me and my sister, I'm like, I'm like
21:35
Speaker 1: trying to build a subdivision and I'm googling where do
21:38
Speaker 1: roads come from? How do street lights happen? Now, that
21:41
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, just trying to stumble through it. So
21:44
Speaker 1: that's so like the physical the physical in town retail
21:48
Speaker 1: like multi town experience stuff I think is super interesting.
21:52
Speaker 1: I really like that as an opportunity. I like it
21:55
Speaker 1: because it's a little bit harder. But but like there's
21:57
Speaker 1: no saturation in that branding message, right, Like if you
22:00
Speaker 1: heard somebody somebody bought three towns and turned it into
22:03
Speaker 1: a quilting trifecta. Like it's just more interesting and everybody's
22:07
Speaker 1: not doing it, so it's worth going to see. Okay,
22:10
Speaker 1: so uh buying slash building another town. That's one of
22:13
Speaker 1: the one of the things you're working on. You said
22:16
Speaker 1: there were two, What's what's the other one? I mean,
22:18
Speaker 1: I'm just chewing on what content looks like for my
22:23
Speaker 1: industry in the next iterations, right, Like, if you think
22:27
Speaker 1: about content, I think about in three buckets where there's
22:29
Speaker 1: like education, entertainment, and inspiration. And we got inside of education.
22:35
Speaker 1: You know, there's like a thousand different ways to do
22:37
Speaker 1: education content, and we picked ten minute tutorials for quilting,
22:41
Speaker 1: and like we have nailed that, but there's the fifty
22:44
Speaker 1: other ways that content can be done that like we
22:47
Speaker 1: have yet to address or build into. And that's the
22:49
Speaker 1: other thing that, like, I think, is a huge opportunity
22:52
Speaker 1: and worth us staring really hard at. I think we
22:55
Speaker 1: should own you know, the twenty minute. If you're into quilting,
22:59
Speaker 1: what do you watch while you're sitting on the treadmill
23:01
Speaker 1: on Netflix? Right, It's it's that kind of stuff, And
23:03
Speaker 1: I'm like, man, we would kill that. I want you
23:06
Speaker 1: to tell me a story of something where you brewed up,
23:09
Speaker 1: something went wrong, something didn't work. I mean, I'm sure
23:12
Speaker 1: there's a million of those. Yeah, Okay, no, I mean
23:15
Speaker 1: I mean I've got two big failure stories that I
23:17
Speaker 1: think of when I think of what we what we've
23:19
Speaker 1: done here, right, And the first one was when we
23:21
Speaker 1: built a warehouse and we built we built our first warehouse.
23:24
Speaker 1: We did everything out of our five thousand square foot
23:28
Speaker 1: auto show room that was our warehouse, which which it's
23:31
Speaker 1: easy to organize. I mean, you get a lot in there.
23:34
Speaker 1: It was a lot going on, but for a big
23:35
Speaker 1: company that was sending I think we're like thirty million
23:38
Speaker 1: a year before we moved out of there. I mean,
23:40
Speaker 1: we had a lot of inventory and no forklifts. Just
23:44
Speaker 1: our poor guy am and was just moving stuff. So
23:48
Speaker 1: we built this warehouse and I was like I was
23:51
Speaker 1: too cheap to know that you're supposed to hire like
23:53
Speaker 1: partners and consultants to help you do this stuff. And
23:56
Speaker 1: so I just I found the only guy that like
23:59
Speaker 1: would build off of my notepad drawing and didn't stress
24:02
Speaker 1: out about like not having blueprints because I was like,
24:06
Speaker 1: it's a big box, and he's like, well, where do
24:08
Speaker 1: you want the toilet? I was like, do a wall
24:09
Speaker 1: that's ten foot here and it would be lunch room
24:12
Speaker 1: and toilet and all. You know, Like I'm just trying
24:14
Speaker 1: to solve it in two minutes because I had a
24:15
Speaker 1: thousand other things going on. So anyway, this guy builds
24:19
Speaker 1: a warehouse, and simultaneously I had built all the software,
24:23
Speaker 1: like we had a little team. I wasn't me alone,
24:25
Speaker 1: but like we'd built all the software for this company,
24:28
Speaker 1: and so we had to build this new fulfillment software
24:30
Speaker 1: now again because I thought that we were so unique
24:34
Speaker 1: and so customed that we couldn't get anybody Like we
24:37
Speaker 1: can go and buy a thing off the shelf and
24:38
Speaker 1: pay somebody to do this, we had to build it ourselves.
24:41
Speaker 1: And then like I ordered the racking, right, the Pallette racking,
24:45
Speaker 1: and they were like, hey, for ten thousand dollars, we'll
24:47
Speaker 1: set it up. And I was like, ah, I'll save
24:48
Speaker 1: the ten grand. I'll set it up myself. I know
24:51
Speaker 1: how to do that. So I get this pallet racking.
24:52
Speaker 1: Me and Dad are there until three in the morning.
24:54
Speaker 1: And then we also had a hundred computers we had
24:56
Speaker 1: to set up in there for shipping stations, all this stuff.
24:58
Speaker 1: And I'm a computer guy. I know how to do this,
25:00
Speaker 1: and so I'll order to put it all in there.
25:02
Speaker 1: And then the big day comes and we go to
25:04
Speaker 1: move everything over and everything breaks and it like it's
25:07
Speaker 1: a disaster and like completely down. We can't ship orders
25:12
Speaker 1: the phone, like we've got eight thousand tickets in our email.
25:16
Speaker 1: The phones are ringing off the hook. Nothing works, and
25:20
Speaker 1: it was terrible. And I stuck around for like two days.
25:23
Speaker 1: We tried, you know, we get it cobbled together. They're
25:25
Speaker 1: almost getting stuff out, everything's still broken. And I remember
25:29
Speaker 1: I went to my I had a mentor at the time,
25:31
Speaker 1: and I just went to his house in tears. It
25:33
Speaker 1: was just like what do I do? Man? Like I
25:37
Speaker 1: like this is too hard, this is too hard, and
25:40
Speaker 1: just to like just to land the specific warehouse story,
25:46
Speaker 1: like yeah, is there a lesson there, No, it just sucked.
25:51
Speaker 1: And then we figured it out and fine, And still
25:53
Speaker 1: fulfillment is the hardest thing that you'll ever do any commerce.
25:56
Speaker 1: It's the worst thing. And like, so much of my
25:57
Speaker 1: time energy is still in that, Like, should you not
26:00
Speaker 1: have just paid somebody to like do some of the
26:03
Speaker 1: things that you thought you could do yourself? I mean,
26:05
Speaker 1: so if I were doing it again, and we did
26:07
Speaker 1: do it again, we immediately then started on other warehouse.
26:09
Speaker 1: We've got like two hundred thousand square feet of warehouse
26:11
Speaker 1: in there now and uh, so we immediately started this
26:16
Speaker 1: other one and uh and we paid a guy, a
26:18
Speaker 1: consultant to come in and design it and place all
26:21
Speaker 1: the stuff and pick the flows and do all that stuff.
26:23
Speaker 1: And like, I mean, really, really the lesson out of
26:25
Speaker 1: any out of any business person's experiences, start using the
26:29
Speaker 1: leverage that you've built so that your life gets easier. Right,
26:32
Speaker 1: And I've got an assistant now and she does a
26:33
Speaker 1: lot of you know, and I and like, then you
26:36
Speaker 1: you you have enough money to hire consultants. But when
26:38
Speaker 1: you're bootstrapped, I think you you don't feel like you've
26:41
Speaker 1: earned your way into a lot of that stuff yet,
26:43
Speaker 1: because we didn't have enough money to pay, like my
26:47
Speaker 1: mother a decent wage, and so why would I ever
26:50
Speaker 1: think we could pay somebody to come and do this.
26:52
Speaker 1: And I had to do it all myself. And so
26:54
Speaker 1: like the lessons learned are just leverage, it's it's using
26:58
Speaker 1: the assets and the knowledge and the skills that you've
27:00
Speaker 1: built over time to do this. It's the hard part
27:02
Speaker 1: about starting a company as a twenty six year old
27:05
Speaker 1: schmow that doesn't know anything, is like I had no leverage.
27:08
Speaker 1: I had to build it all up through these really
27:11
Speaker 1: hard moments. But yeah, that would be a hard moment.
27:14
Speaker 1: The other hard moment where I felt like I failed
27:17
Speaker 1: was the UH was actually when I when I stepped
27:20
Speaker 1: out of the day to day of the company, because
27:21
Speaker 1: like I was, I started at twenty six, grew it.
27:25
Speaker 1: This company grew really fast and got really big, and
27:27
Speaker 1: soon I was managing hundreds of people. But I wasn't
27:30
Speaker 1: a great manager. I'd never been managed in a in
27:33
Speaker 1: a big thing like this. I didn't know what you're
27:34
Speaker 1: supposed to do. And so what I built was an
27:37
Speaker 1: organization that was a hundred employees that were all extensions
27:40
Speaker 1: of my own hands. And I would ask for like
27:42
Speaker 1: daily reports, like what'd you get done today? And I
27:45
Speaker 1: was trying to keep tabs on if you were working
27:46
Speaker 1: hard enough, because I wasn't going to get screwed, You're
27:48
Speaker 1: not going to take advantage of And so I found
27:50
Speaker 1: myself just exhausting myself, micromanaging and being a really crappy leader.
27:56
Speaker 1: And so the you know, like that that moment where
28:00
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you find yourself like you're yelling
28:02
Speaker 1: at people and you're not normally a yeller, and you know,
28:05
Speaker 1: you you start lobbing bombs back into your business to
28:08
Speaker 1: blow it up so that you you're needed and you're
28:10
Speaker 1: good at fixing these things. If if it's broken, I
28:13
Speaker 1: really see how need to die, like how much they
28:15
Speaker 1: still need and uh, and what you should be doing
28:18
Speaker 1: is being very comfortable working your way out of your
28:20
Speaker 1: own position and spitting in your chair for a couple
28:22
Speaker 1: of months having nothing to do, and then go do
28:24
Speaker 1: other big stuff. But I wasn't there yet, and so
28:27
Speaker 1: like that was that part really really broke and was
28:30
Speaker 1: really hard emotionally, and uh, and my my fix for
28:34
Speaker 1: that as I went and like you know, scaled myself
28:37
Speaker 1: up emotionally through through some coaching and UH and therapy
28:42
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and then UM, for me, the
28:44
Speaker 1: outcome was I ended up needing to step away from
28:47
Speaker 1: our company UH from the day to day, and we
28:49
Speaker 1: hired in as CEO, and my job became to support him,
28:53
Speaker 1: and I had to learn how to now be a
28:54
Speaker 1: good governor to manage the manager. And eventually I'll learn
28:58
Speaker 1: how to be a good owner who manages the governors
29:01
Speaker 1: who managed the management. Um. But I'm not quite there
29:04
Speaker 1: yet and so we're still working our way through that.
29:06
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, those are those are those are the
29:09
Speaker 1: scary ones that I think of when you say, what
29:11
Speaker 1: was a hard moment? In a minute, it's a lightning round.
29:20
Speaker 1: Including the most fun you can have in Hamilton, Missouri
29:24
Speaker 1: is making quilts is not really your thing. That's the
29:34
Speaker 1: end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Great, Okay,
29:39
Speaker 1: let's do a lightning round. Give it to me man,
29:41
Speaker 1: I'm ready, okay, okay, Um. What's the best thing about
29:46
Speaker 1: working with your family? The best thing about working with
29:51
Speaker 1: my family, I think is just having having a very
29:55
Speaker 1: common thing that keeps us pulled together as we all
29:58
Speaker 1: get older. Right like most most families, I think it's
30:01
Speaker 1: just turns into Sunday dinner if you're lucky, and we
30:05
Speaker 1: still put ourselves in a room and try and be
30:06
Speaker 1: creative and come up with great things and solve problem
30:09
Speaker 1: and stuff, and that's that's really fun to me. Worst
30:12
Speaker 1: thing about working with your family you got to fire
30:17
Speaker 1: him sometimes. Have you fired? Have you fired family members? Yeah?
30:21
Speaker 1: I fired my little brother. He wasn't showing up. So
30:23
Speaker 1: then his sweet wife of three little kids calls me crying,
30:27
Speaker 1: and my mom calls me and says, you did not
30:28
Speaker 1: just fire your brother. My pride stands up. It says,
30:31
Speaker 1: absolutely I did. And you know, well it's hard man,
30:35
Speaker 1: because like he actually came back and we figured it
30:39
Speaker 1: all out. He worked with us for a decade and
30:41
Speaker 1: it's great. How has being a YouTube quilting star changed
30:46
Speaker 1: your mom? Very sincerely, I would say, I would say
30:53
Speaker 1: anytime there's any level of fame that comes into somebody's life, right,
30:59
Speaker 1: you start to shift some of your inputs a validation
31:03
Speaker 1: and that's a challenge. Thankfully, she's got a great heart
31:06
Speaker 1: and is very willing to like go back to center
31:08
Speaker 1: with me, But she gets really used to people clapping
31:12
Speaker 1: for and telling her how amazing she is and how
31:14
Speaker 1: great she is, and that'll change somebody. What is one
31:18
Speaker 1: thing besides going to Hamilton and buying quilting supplies that
31:22
Speaker 1: everybody should do when they go to Missouri? Um, let's
31:27
Speaker 1: see what's something everybody should do? Covin ride some motorcycles
31:33
Speaker 1: with us. We play motorcycle soccer at the fourth of
31:36
Speaker 1: July celebration every year and it's maybe the most fun
31:39
Speaker 1: I've ever had in my life. How many quilts have
31:41
Speaker 1: you made in your life? I am working on my second.
31:48
Speaker 1: If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying
31:51
Speaker 1: to solve in five years? Well? The big I think,
31:53
Speaker 1: the big one, the big one that weighs on me
31:56
Speaker 1: in five years is what do we do with this company? Right?
32:00
Speaker 1: And it's I mean the options are IPO How cool
32:03
Speaker 1: would it be to ipo a billion dollar business in Hamilton, Missouri?
32:08
Speaker 1: Or its sell it's some private equity folks that are
32:11
Speaker 1: going to maximize profits and and who knows what will
32:14
Speaker 1: happen in the town or do we keep private and
32:18
Speaker 1: just live off our fat ibadah checks that will continue?
32:22
Speaker 1: We'll turn this thing into just being a cash cow
32:25
Speaker 1: and generate money. Um. And and there's different weights that
32:28
Speaker 1: come with all those right, like if I hold onto it,
32:30
Speaker 1: never cash out. Like I'm great at buying low, I'm
32:33
Speaker 1: bad at selling high. And so I like, I worry that,
32:36
Speaker 1: you know, did I try and ride this too long?
32:38
Speaker 1: I think I think in five years that's what I'm
32:39
Speaker 1: staring at and saying, Mom's, mom's sixty five now, like
32:43
Speaker 1: she she doesn't want to wait for another twenty years
32:46
Speaker 1: to get a payout. Like what do we want to do?
32:48
Speaker 1: And how how do I represent everybody's interests and help
32:51
Speaker 1: us all feel like we accomplished a thing. I think
32:53
Speaker 1: that's the big one that I'm trying to solve. This
32:56
Speaker 1: is this is like the hardest thing I've ever tried
32:59
Speaker 1: to solve. And I think anybody has sold a company
33:01
Speaker 1: has probably stared at the same thing, and very few
33:05
Speaker 1: people I think, I don't know a lot of people
33:08
Speaker 1: regret it. A lot of people regret selling and sort
33:11
Speaker 1: of letting it. I think if I sold the company
33:13
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the town like they move
33:16
Speaker 1: out of here and it's all a ghost town in
33:18
Speaker 1: vacant buildings, it's not much of a legacy to leave.
33:21
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I don't know, man, it's this
33:24
Speaker 1: is a this is a very real one that I
33:26
Speaker 1: don't exactly understand how to solve. Yet, what's your mom think? Dude?
33:34
Speaker 1: My family, My family is fantastic because they love me
33:37
Speaker 1: and they say whatever you think. El like, like, you know,
33:40
Speaker 1: if I gave mom a million dollars tomorrow, she is pumped.
33:44
Speaker 1: She's pumped, you know. And I'm not trying to create
33:47
Speaker 1: a million dollars. I'm trying to create hundreds of millions
33:49
Speaker 1: of dollars and so and so. Most of the weight
33:52
Speaker 1: of that is sort of is sort of set up
33:54
Speaker 1: and felt by me. It's not it's not for mom.
33:57
Speaker 1: There's no right answer. This is this. It's a nightmare
34:00
Speaker 1: one because if you're right, everybody loves you. You did
34:03
Speaker 1: a great thing. Your life's work is is preserved, and
34:06
Speaker 1: the legacy is enshrined. And if I'm wrong, it's a
34:10
Speaker 1: huge disaster. Big dummy. I ruined my family's outcomes and mine.
34:15
Speaker 1: How could I? It's the worst. Welcome to the life
34:18
Speaker 1: of family businesses. Even when you win, you feel like
34:21
Speaker 1: you could still lose. Yeah, how to present? Aldon is
34:33
Speaker 1: the executive chairman of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Today's
34:37
Speaker 1: show was produced by Edith Ruslow, engineered by Amanda kay Wong,
34:41
Speaker 1: and edited by Robert Smith. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll
34:44
Speaker 1: be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.