How Stan Healed After Being Pushed Out of His Food Business. #052

I don't think I could have had this conversation with you a year ago without saying I've got an ax to grind and try to take a blowtorch to everything. But at the end of the day, it happened.

Welcome to the Kerner office. So today's episode will be a little bit different. I wanted to talk to someone that had experienced a business trauma. Because the more you do business, the more trauma you'll experience. Maybe it's a business that fails, maybe it's bankruptcy. Maybe it's a business partner that pushes you out, a business owner that pushes you out. A lot of trauma that goes on that people don't really talk about. But I want to talk about it because we can all learn a ton from it. So Stan was willing to share his story today of a company that he was pushed out of unjustly and how he recovered from that. What happened from start to finish. How much of it was his fault, how much of it was out of his control. I want to talk about all that. So please enjoy this story from Stan today and let me know if you want to hear more episodes like this. Thank you.

Why don't we get into it? I'd love to hear your story from the start to finish.

This company was a food manufacturing company. And it was never on my radar as what's your career going to be? And. And I was raised by a salesman who was raised by a salesman. And so I tried to get in the real estate business. And I don't want to say that I was probably average at it. And so I stayed with real estate for a while. And then one day I had an opportunity to join my dad's business. He had sold his business years ago. He was in the financial advisory business and went to work for the company, the Bottom. And they were looking for a junior partner for him. And it just made sense. I'd had a baby. I was going to work. My dad, third generation, at the same company. This is probably what I'm really supposed to do, right? I think he and I would both tell you that it was probably the biggest mistake I'd made. I just. That business isn't for me. Look, I have a whole lot of respect for those guys, but it wasn't for me. And so I'm sitting around talking to my wife one night, and she said, I just think you need to leave your job. You're not happy. Go find something else. Go before your kids get old enough to realize that you're unhappy at work. Go find something. And so I walked in the next day to the guy who was managing the office. And I just said, hey, let's make this easy. We know it's not working. Tell me how, tell me what I need to do, and I'm out of here. And so we figured it out. And I went home that night, I told my wife, and she's like, whoa, whoa, you did what? And I had. I mean, I didn't have a resume, and again, not another bright move. But so I went around for about four weeks just calling on people and people I know, hey, you need any help? Anyone that needs any help, what can we do? What do you think I should do? That type of stuff. And a friend of mine.

This was your dad's financial advisory business that you quit?

Yeah.

Was there any awkwardness or ill will there between you two?

My parents are fantastic, and we've always had a great relationship. And fortunately they're still around and. But my dad and I just. It wasn't the best it had ever been at that time. I don't want to make light of people that have greater situations, but our relationship had been better. And he would. I remember talking to a buddy and he was like, he partnered with his dad, and I was like, how do. Is it working? He said, well, I can tell you when he. When he comes over to my house to see the grandkids and we have dinner, I go in the other room. I just don't stay around it anymore. And that's where we had gotten to. And so there wasn't much awkwardness. He knew it wasn't for me. He knew I wasn't happy. And so I think he got worried that what's next? Because as I said, I just didn't. I didn't have anything. It wasn't like, other than mouths to feed, I didn't have anything on the horizon. And so a friend of mine calls one day and says, hey, you need to go meet with this guy. And I knew who the guy was. We think we're a bigger town than. We're relatively small and close. And so I knew the guy was. Went and sat down there that afternoon and at the plant, which was loosely termed. And he said, why don't you just come start tomorrow and start making this stuff?

And so this is the food manufacturing business.

This is the food manufacturing company. He said, I'll. I'll pay you $10 an hour. And I'm like, okay, well, this would at least help bring something in while I'm out there looking for a job and whatever. And I. They Stuck me on dishwasher for about a week. And I'm sitting there going, look, it's hard work. And you're standing all day. And I'm thinking, this isn't what I wanted. I really almost pulled the. When I walked in and they said, go wash dishes, I almost pulled. That's not what I'm hired to do. And I'm glad. That was probably the best move I'd made at that point was not just keep my mouth shut and go to work. And so after about a month of me rotated up, and I think at the time we were making, I think it was a lot to make 10 cases a day, which would have been 120 packages. And we just didn't have the equipment, the manpower. We didn't know what we were doing. And the owner calls us all in. Cause there's three of us in. And he. Or that we're helping kind of separate it into management type. And he said, here's the deal. I don't want to do this anymore. And I guess I'm not even going to put this on my resume. It didn't even matter. And he said, I'm going to make Stan the president of the company, and we're going to put some money in the bank. And if y' all can get profitable before the money runs out, then we'll make a go of this. If not, then we're gonna shut the doors. I'm not putting any more in.

He wanted to make you the president.

Yeah. That was the first I'd heard about it in front of others.

And how many employees?

All in all eight.

Okay.

Some part time. We were all 10, 99 employees. There weren't an email was. I mean, just to tell you how early it was, if an email was sent, it came from my personal email.

Yeah.

And so the first thing we did is there was a lady doing sales, and she was working three days a week. And of those three days a week, she was doing shipping 60% of the time. And both. And we were like, if we're going to make this, we don't need a salesperson basically working one day a week. We need five days a week full time. And so she and I basically moved our desk into the same office. And remember going back to my financial advisory and real estate man, I'm not the best salesperson. We both just decided that if we're going to make a go of this, we have to roll up our sleeves and do what we have to do.

Can I interrupt you just for a second? So how old were you at the time?

Oh, this was 2013, so I'm 43.

Okay, 43 at the time. So you just started washing dishes just to pay the bills until you found something better. This was someone you knew in the community, but the owner. But no one you were really close with, right?

Correct. Correct.

Okay, so you plus seven other employees manufacturing this food. And then how long after you started did he come and make this announcement?

Two months maybe.

Okay. And you were still washing dishes?

Yeah, we had kind of started rotating. That point I was still in the operations part of it I was making back to. I'd have hot butter poured on my hands and gloves so I could mix the stuff up. And we didn't have the equipment, and we had a small. I remember we had a small scale and people were using it. And I think at the time, you could. We could package three packages a minute, and we eventually got that up to 20.

Or what were you making?

It's a snack mix of think snack mix is what we started with. And we could do, I think a lot for us at the time was 10 cases a day. The bug bit me, and we couldn't stay. We wanted to grow. And when he put the money in the bank, I thought, well, I've been pure commission salesperson for 20 years of my life. I've now got money. Yeah, we can stretch the money. And so we had a couple of people leave us because they wanted raises immediately. And I wouldn't do it because I'm like, this is what we need to make the company go. This isn't.

Yeah.

You know, the quicker we spend it, the quicker we're out of business and just basic, simple business. And so we made it go.

And so you pull the salesperson into the room with you.

Correct. And we just started making calls. And, man, for me, it was rough. My first one, I got yelled at. My second one, I called some company in Canada, didn't know who they were, anything about them. And a week later, a fax order comes over for. I think it was a $2,500 order, which was the biggest order at the time from this company in Canada.

Now, are these like, grocery stores? What types of companies are you calling on?

We were a mixture of grocery, independent, kind of mom and pop type retailers, whether it be a liquor store, gift store, a kitchen store, whatever it is. We had a lot of early success in that the grocery came along later. And then we tried also the other avenue which is coming Canada, was they were more gift baskets.

Okay.

And we didn't have a. We wrote the playbook. We didn't have. There wasn't something. And the owner, who had experience, he had already built and sold a food manufacturing company. He just didn't want to be a part of it. And fortunately for me, my wife was wonderful. Every bit of success that company has had, she was. She's as responsible for it as anyone. She basically took care of our kids while I was putting in. I was dealing with the grinding hours of, you know, and forever I would sit back there because I knew we didn't have the money. And I would make this stuff. I'd help make the stuff. Unfortunately, had two people, one of which is still at the company, to my knowledge. We had two people and myself. And we just get back there and teach us how to do it. And at the end of the day, we would say, we don't like where that table's positioned. It's taking us too long to get from the stove to that table. So we go and rearrange it. And then I'd go out and make sales calls and look at financial stuff and all that. And they were fortunate enough, they would stay in clean. And then we just start over the next day.

Okay, so you pull the sales lady in with you, you start making cold calls. You hate it, you're getting yelled at, but you're finding some success. Then one day, out of nowhere, you get a $2,500 order from Canada via fax.

Right?

So what happens then? Is that like a turning point?

Well, I open it up and I'm like, who. Who is this company who called it? And finally the lady that sat across from me, and she was. She was right there with me along the way. She started basically the same week I did, so. So we were the two kind of out in front charging, but again, as we grew, just had a lot of good people. Now, that really didn't turn the corner when another order that came in that was 30 cases a half pallet. And I'm thinking, man, this is going to take us three days to make. How are we going to make this? We now really turn the corner is we got into the. One of the national grocers that is in our town in Arkansas picked up on us. And they. And it was, if you remember, I think just before COVID at least around Arkansas, there was a big local food movement. Eat local. And they wanted the grocer, whoever the district head of that grocery was, said, we want something local, man. And they put us in and they gave us prime display and they Stuck. We're made in Arkansas over this. And that's what really kicked us off. And from there we went. We were named. The snack mix was named, was, I guess this grocer, let's say nationally, has 10 divisions. We were named the top new food in our division. And so that took us up to the grocer's headquarters, actually went to Chicago, I think, and we sat in a hotel conference room, and all the buyers from the grocers got to come and spend time with just these 10 products. So that really helped kick us off the next step. And then we brought in a partner and we added seasoned oyster crackers. Then all of a sudden, we're back to square one of how do we make these and how do we use our equipment. Oh, now we're having to introduce allergen control because the snack mix had nuts, so you didn't have to wor. Everything that touched it was nuts. So now we're having to relearn. And we got over that hump. And so about the time we. This was all in 2013, and I think about 20 in 2018, we became profitable. As I like to say, it wasn't. It wasn't anything at all to brag about, but the color at the bottom of the page wasn't red. So we took it as a victory. I mean, look what we were doing. No one's getting rich off that, but we were profitable. And then Covid hit and as. So we were invested to hindsight being 20 20, we were blowing and going em. But we were invested too heavily in grocery stores and independent retailers and all the independent retailers, they just. They took it hard. And then the grocery stores were more worried about getting their staple products in and not worrying about something new to come in. And they really shut down. They quit even taking meetings for a while. They were just. When I left the company, they were just starting to open back up.

You worked for five years, you got profitable in 2018, profitable. 2019, Covid hit, everything blew up. What. Did you have any ownership in the company at this point? What did that look like after the owner just walked away?

The owner had gifted a little bit of stock to a couple of us. A hundred shares here, a hundred shares there. And then I took. We had. We had taken on some additional space. We needed it. We had to build out a clean room for production. And I. I went to the owner and said, instead of taking a loan, let me invest. I'd been after him. I. I knew I wanted to invest. So upwards of. It was just shy of 9% is what I wound up doing. Now I will also as a cautionary tale say I didn't seek advice on is this, I didn't go to someone who knew more than I did to say here's our financials. What do you think about this stock valuation? I took the owner as his word to say, hey, I'm a, I'm at fault, a trusting guy. And I took it as word as I'm working for this guy, I'm down here putting in the sweat equity, I'm going to trust him, that he's going to take care of me. And probably, I mean that, you know, is number one cautionary tale I should have looked differently at, I should have thought differently and taken to some people who knew more than I did about that.

Sure. So you ended up buying into the company because you're thinking man, like I've got four full control over this. I know where it's going. I, I help control where it's going. I want a piece of this. So how does everything go down as Covid hits? What happens exactly?

Right before COVID hit I, I knew we were having some issues with, in doing business with Grocery in terms of their chargebacks and their allowances and everything else that, that you run into when you do Grocery. And we were needing, we had hired a group to help us with sales. So basically we divide the country into three territories. This group each took a third of the country and we, we paid them a retainer fee. There was no commission then we just paid them. Basically we felt that we were getting three for the price of one. But I knew deeper down in terms of us we needed someone to help us manage the, these promotions and whatnot at Grocery. And we had found someone. And the Friday before she was going to start she sent me an email at 4:30 saying I'm not coming to work there. And so over the weekend the, the owner had found someone at one of his other businesses and plugged them in. And so this person didn't have any experience and, and whatnot. Great person, nice person, just wasn't a good fit. And so when Covid hit we didn't work for three weeks. But I made the decision to pay everyone because I knew we had some good workers and I, there was enough fear at that time. I didn't want having to put food on your table for your family to be another fear for people. And so it took a little bit of our cash to do that and we got back up and running and we just had to figure out we lost 50% of our client base roughly because they either close they not a business whatnot. People switch to all of a sudden, not Joe, but I always said if you go to a grocery store with a list of eight things, you're going to come home with 10 and our products are going to be either number nine or 10. You're not going to get our products, but you're going to see, you're going to say that's fantastic, I want that, or it looks good. And all of a sudden people start pulling up in the parking lot, having the groceries delivery, a car having some other service delivered in their house. And, and it just was something we hadn't thought of and hadn't been prepared to do. And that's look, that's on me. That was my role at the company and just, I didn't do it. And so we started building back and started getting back going and people started opening up and we could really see it coming. And so about, oh, this would have been where we were. This would have been 2022. The owner calls me on a Friday afternoon at 4 o' clock and says, Are you still at the office? And I said, yeah. And he's okay, I just checked on you. I was like, well, that's odd, I hadn't talked to you in a while. And he shows up 15 minutes later and says, hey, I've hired a CEO. He'll start Tuesday. And that was the, that was the first I heard about it. And so I, I, I was beat down at that point, looking back and I, I just remember looking at him saying, great, let's get going. Let's we, I need some help.

So the understanding was, what was your title at the time?

President.

President. So the understanding was he was going to come in and help you, not he was replacing you?

No, it was, there was no mention of help. It was just, I've hired a CEO and that was it.

Okay. And he didn't elaborate on any details?

No details. The whole meeting last with me lasted less than five minutes. And then he looked at me and he said, do you mind if we go get everyone else? And I tell them, and I said, whatever you want to do. And again, own 8% of this company, 9% of this company. It's going to happen whether I want it or not. And so the guy started on Tuesday and Wednesday came and he said, you're now off the bank account. That was something that we registered me over the weekend. And then slowly but surely I just started seeing, I just started seeing what was happening. And it took me a while. The. I started saying, I'm helping train this guy. Look, in. In fairness to him, if I had stayed around, he would have never done anything right in my eyes, because I'm looking at it from a different point of view than he is. And I think that. I gather that at that point, if I stayed, great. If I left, who cares? And so I've ended up calling a friend of mine and just saying that, that is, I'd worked with. He's in the staffing business. I said, you find something? And he found me a job at another food manufacturer. I basically do. I do a lot of their customer service work, help modernize them a little bit, and. And that's where we are today.

Okay, so you ended up just quitting?

Yeah. But I can also tell you that it probably wouldn't have gone long if I hadn't gone the other way, because my attitude had really soured. I was worried. I'm a people person. I believe first and foremost that the company's got to be profitable. So with all that said, that's the first and foremost thing. But I believe you take care of your people. And I was worried what was going to happen to them. And so I. I kept in touch with a few of them for a little while. I had lots of. A couple of them a few weeks ago, and. And they just know now. We're not going to talk about the business. We're going to talk about how your kids are doing. How's life? One of them. One of them asked me to help with something, and I said, look, I'm crazy about you. I'd hire you anywhere I was, but I'm done helping that business. And I. It's taken me a while. I think when I reached out to you. It's taken me a while to get to this point. I don't think I could have had this conversation with you a year ago without saying I've got an ax to grind and try to take a blowtorch to everything. But at the end of the day, it happened. And I think you're right. It's. Time helped. And knowing others went through it helped. And at some point, I figured out that, look, I can choose to be bitter my whole life or I can make the most of this. I got a heck of an education working down there, and I think we're putting it to use now, and how we put it to use in the future, I'm not sure. But I do believe that that time was the ultimate healer yeah.

Did. Where was your anger directed for a while? Was it at the owner?

Oh, yeah. The owner and the guy that replaced me. They were. There was about six months after I left, but they were still calling, asking for advice. And one day, the owner. I just said this just sitting right. And I probably said it differently, but we haven't talked since. He lives about a mile from me, but we just. His kids are older, he's older. We don't see each other.

Was there ever, like, a specific turning point where your attitude about this kind of change. Was there ever something that happened that. That really helped or. It was the only time I remember.

At one point, I made a concerted effort. I've got to quit coming home at one end of my life and call it what it was, just this sitting right. Well, it happened. And so that helped. And then I slowly started making different changes. I said, okay, 20, 23. I'm gonna. I'm gonna do some type of exercise every day this year. Okay. When I crawl in bed at night, I'm gonna. I'm gonna quit staring at the phone and seeing what social media brings. And I'm gonna pick up a book, and I'm gonna start reading again. And it was just little. What helped for me, which just little changes along the way that you think might not help, but you got a lot of work in front of you. You just gotta kind of compartmentalize it and pick up something and just go to work. And eventually it's. The task is taken care of. And that's. I don't want to look. There's. I'll be up front. There's still days I want to pick up the phone and text the guy and cuss him out or whatever you say. But I joke in my mind, then I'd have to erase the board that says you've gone this many days without an incident. And I don't want to erase the board right now.

Yeah. What happened with your shares?

I sold them. He offered. He said you could keep them here. And I just. At that point, I wanted to be done with it and look that that company may become the next Frito Lay. And I'm looking on the case study they're talking about for 50 years. But I'm still convinced, for me, I did the right thing. And I know my former partner, she left a couple of weeks after I did. And I think she still has her shares, but just struggles to receive information and whatnot. But it's. I was. Me, personally, I was ready to get out. I was done I knew, look, if, if I were still there, heck yeah, I'd still own the shares. I wouldn't have given them up. But I'm not there anymore, and it's a different deal. And I watched. I watched some of the expenses go up and saw some other things that I just was like, I don't want to leave my money here. And so I. I have no contact other than seeing the product every now and then and seeing a few people that, that I had worked with every now and then.

Is the CEO still there? And then. How's the company doing today?

He's still there. I still talk. I mentioned the sales group. Every now and then I'll talk to the sales group, and they're in a different part of the country. We just call to catch up every now and then. And I get work from them that the sales are going up, which, it's a good product and they should go up, But I also think it's a function of time. I don't want to take any. Look, I don't want to sound jealous, bitter, or anything like that, but I knew going into some of the accounts they've gotten into. We started three and four years ago, and we were told on the front end, it's going to take you three or four years to get there. And, you know, of course, I'm always said I was too dumb to know anything about the business. I'm like, yeah, I know you've done this 30 years, you're telling me three or four years. We can find a shortcut, we can find a way to get it there in one or two. And here we are three or four years later, and guess what? They're getting in the business. And so I think the advantage that we had as a startup company with no one with experience, we were all too dumb to know better. What we knew was hard work. We got into a major grocery store chain. I think it darn near broke the company just getting in there. But we got in a major chain because I sent an email one afternoon to the buyer. I found the buyer's name on LinkedIn and just said, and eventually we got in and I got a call from the distributor yelling at me, saying, you don't do things this way. This isn't the way it's done. And I'm like, whoa, what do you mean? Our job's to get our product onto grocery sales. We did that. Yeah.

But people's like, you're going around me.

People don't do it this way. And I'm like, well, okay, we're at the end of the day. Four plus four is eight. Six plus two is eight. We. You do four plus four. We did six plus two. We got eight. Who cares? Yeah, that's it, you know.

Well, I mean, I commend you, Stan. Like, it sounds like you've made these little comments across the last half hour that shows that you're taking accountability. You've been angry, you're mostly better, but it's still lingering. Like, I totally identify with that. It's really easy to say, you know what, this one thing happened and I just turned the corner and I just, I don't even, I don't care anymore.

But it's.

And because I've had similar experiences and I still kind of do, you know, I like it's better, it's gotten better, but it's not all the way gone.

Right.

Still there. But if you don't take accountability, you will be miserable and toxic for the rest of your life to some extent. And it sounds like from your comments that you have done that.

Yeah, I think so. I think the one thing, look, I ultimately, and I want to get back to running a company again, but I think if you and I had this conversation, I would have said, I think we had a year, two years ago and said, I want to do it to get back with those people and to show them what I can do. I want to do it for me and my family now. You know, it was something that, look, I love working with people. I love watching our crew do things they didn't think they could do or do things they haven't done before and pushing through those barriers to realize that because there's no one there helping us. There was no one saying, you need to do this, you need to do that, you need to. There's no textbook. Yeah, we made friends along the way and I could pick up the phone and call the company, you know, across the country and say, hey, we're having this. Go on. Can you help us? But at the end of the day, that was a five minute conversation. We had to be the ones to do it. And it was a lot of satisfaction watching these, this group of people get there. And that's where I hope to get back to someday. But again, it's not to. It's not despite anyone or prove something, anyone. It's to prove something to me.

So if you were to talk to someone in your shoes 10, 15 years ago, like where you were 10 years ago, what would you advise someone to do to help avoid this or Better protect against this.

Well, first of all, talk to someone that fully understands business ownership. Don't take the owner for their word. Look, we all have two things. We have money and time. And the owner had the money, and I had the time. And I look around sometimes, and I think that time got taken advantage of, and that was time that was away from my kids and away from my wife. And I'd come down here to where I am right now and spend half the day on the phone. And, I mean, you've done it. And I look back and I'm like, all for what? We had all agreed that, man, we want to get the company up and going before we start claiming huge salaries. Because the minute we claim a huge salary, that becomes a big expense on the company. And let's make sure we can pay the company first before we pay ourselves. And so I thought I was doing it the right way. I remember talking to one of the owner's buddies one night, ran into him at a restaurant, and he just said, I want to tell you something. You need to protect yourself. And I thought he meant. And maybe did, but I thought he meant from a stock side. Make sure I had some ownership in the company. I'm not too sure he didn't mean that. Look, there's something going on behind the scenes. Make sure that you're better protected. Mm. I mean, this is the place I was going to retire. You know, I finally found it. Everyone wants to find that place you work at for so long. And inside, I was just blind everything. And I think you really got to open up. I had someone one time tell me, you need to board of directors in your life. You need one that is for your business and one for your personal life. And you just meet with them once a quarter and kick off ideas. I didn't do that. And I think if I had, the things might have been a little different because I would have been looking out for me. I was always looking out for the company instead of looking out for me. Yeah.

Quality of yours will serve you well in your own business.

Right. Right.

You'll be able to turn that. What might have been a weakness in the moment into a strength in your own company that you fully control.

Right. And it's. You're right. I think I mentioned earlier the education. Once you get over the one. Once I got over the bad and I could see there is some good. I started seeing it when I went to this new company and. And I would start watching the way they were doing things. I was like, oh, that's a whole lot better than the way we did things. Then all of a sudden you see something like, wait a minute, we did that better than this company does. And I think it happens. Just another set of eyes on something and it's not, we're great. There was plenty of failure to go around, but I was able to see some things that we had done really well that kind of flew under the radar and. But things that need to be done and eventually help get this company to see. Do things some different ways. And I think that really helped set me down the right road of okay, not everything you did was bad. If everything we did was bad, the company, the previous company, would be around today.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know it's. The feelings are mixed because you see the company succeed and you're not a part of it, but at the same time, you see it succeed and you are a big part of it. You help build that foundation. Right. So.

Right.

I hope. I hope you can at least feel some of that as you see the company move on without you and then you could channel some of that positive energy into your own company.

Yeah, there's a little bit of it. Not. You know, thanks for saying that. I think you just. And it's back to your question of the advice you have for someone else going through this. In my opinion, it's going to take some time. Don't try to force it. You know, I think if I had to try to force something on, my head was still spinning about what world's going on, I'd be in a much worse place now. But talk to people. Take look, take pride in your wins. That's. I talked to a lady in St. Louis that kind of helped me in my resume for a while and she said the one thing that I can tell from you, you're not taking any pride in your wins, but you also like to take pride in watching people do good things. And that's what you've got to talk about. That I thought, you know, that's really. It's real easy to sit there and dwell on the bat. And when you're. If you're in an interviewer, you're in any type of negotiations, dwell on the bad. But to find the positive and start going towards that is really, I think what helped me.

Yeah.

Well, Stan, thank you for your time. This was super good.

Hey, Chris, thank you very much. It's nice to. Nice to meet you and I appreciate you. You asking me to do this and your kindness on to a stranger a few years ago.

Of course of course.

All right. What'd you think of Stan's story? Please let me know if you want to hear more stories like this. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. Please be sure to like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.