[Greatest Hits] How To Go From Knowing Nothing About A Business To Becoming A Pro with Jeff Robinson

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Talking with Jeff Robinson. And Jeff is my buddy for a long time. For about 12 years, he's been the owner of a ski locker place in Aspace in his third location. And it is, he's in a premier location right downtown, right by the mountain. Owner of the ski shop Ajax and revenue over $5 million. It's a luxury locker experience. You go in there and you're not schlepping your, your skis and boots over to the mountain and changing boots to, you know, clomp up the hill and get on the gondola. You're right there, all your stuff is toasty. You know, your boots have the heaters on at night and it's just, you know, plus it's a club environment. You know, you start off saying hello to your friends and, and it's just a great environment. And if you get out to Aspen, you're going to be out there a lot. You know, come by the ski shop, they've got all the best equipment, so. Hello, Jeff.

Hey, Larry, how are you?

Great. So this summer been busy?

The summer has been busy. It's been good. It's been a great summer in Aspen.

And this is your second ski season in your new location and it's worked out better than you expected, don't you think?

Yeah, I know it's a great location as far as foot traffic and visibility and retail. It's just, it's a better location than our last store, that's for sure. And about three times the size, too.

Yeah. Now talk, Jeff, about when you started out. You've had other businesses you came for. You're in Aspen for quite a while now, but you came over from Scottsdale or Phoenix.

I came over from Scottsdale, yeah. And my background before I got in the ski business was automotive collision repair. So I started out with one store back in 93 in a town called Mesa, Arizona, then built another store up in North Scottsdale and then acquired another store in Arrowhead, which is kind of over in Glendale. So we had three collision repair body shops doing insurance billable type collision repair.

And how did you get into that?

Just growing up, I was just kind of a car guy, kind of a gearhead. And then one of my buddies was a really good painter body guy that taught me a ton of stuff. And I did that going through College and got out of college and was working a little bit, studying for my lsat because I was going to go back to law school. And this buddy was working at a body shop. He was a body tech, so he was fixing gars and stuff at a shop. And he started talking to me one day, and he goes, hey, the shop I'm working at is for sale. Well, that's cool. I go, you going to buy it? What are you going to do? And he goes, no. Are you interested in buying it with me? And I'm like, and I'm studying for the LSAT and kind of grinding that out. And I go, you know, it sounds kind of fun. It sounds like a little more fun than going to law school. Let's look into that. So we ended up buying our first shop together in 93, and that's kind of how it all started.

And why were you going to law school? Well, I got a better option.

Well, you know, I wanted to be an attorney, so I like that. Studying in college. And I was a political science English major at Arizona State, and I just really enjoyed that side of it. So that's the road I was going to go down until. Until we did this. And I mean, at heart, I'm a. I'm a car guy. Gearhead. Loved being around cars and all that stuff. So at the time, it seemed like the right move. And it was. I mean, I'm glad we did. I did that for almost 20 years that I had those. Those. Those stores.

So you've always. Was it. Were you set up to go in that direction from high school and growing up, you know, you say you're a gearhead. What does that mean kind of when I say that?

I mean, I just liked working on cars, fixing cars, and then got into the painting. I was painting my own cars and doing the bodywork on them and rebuilding the motors and. And I was fixing up cars. And then the same partner and I, before we bought that shop, we would go to the auction and we'd buy cars, fix them up and flipping them and sell them and make him make money on it. It's kind of how I put myself through college. So I wasn't ever planning on owning a body shop. That wasn't my plan, especially out of college. I was planning on, you know, continuing my education and getting a law degree, so. But it took a turn and went down the other direction. And I'm happy I did. I enjoyed it, and I still miss.

It a little bit.

I love the ski business, but I love being around Cars. And I love that business. It was challenging sometimes with the insurance companies and whatnot, but it was rewarding giving a customer their car back as good or better than when, before it got crashed.

And the thing is, I haven't heard of that concept of putting yourself through college. Flipping cars rather than flipping. I know, flipping houses. Yeah, but flipping cars, I hadn't heard that one.

Yeah, that's.

It worked in a typical type thing. What, what could you do? You know, you're 20 years removed from it now, so it doesn't. Not giving away trade secrets, but must have been fairly profitable.

Yeah, I mean, every car was different. Sometimes you'd buy a car at the auction, you didn't think it was hit as hard as it was, you'd run into other problems and need more parts. So that job then, that one may not be as profitable, but. No, usually I don't want to say you could double your money, but you could make a couple grand on a car by buying it, fixing it up and selling it. And you know, and it was a month or two long process because you had to do all the title work and all that stuff and then fix it and then put it on the market and find somebody to buy it. So it was, you know, it was a, it was a fairly long 2, 3 month process per car, but. But it was a good investment. We stick our money in it and go through the process, sell it and make some money and well, you learned.

You got a taste of being in business for yourself too and not having a limited income.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And we even leased a little space. We even had a little shop that we worked out of. So it wasn't a full blown body shop, but it had everything that we needed to do the repairs on the cars that we were buying.

So when did the idea come to you? I'm going to put myself through college doing this. I was either go get a job.

At a restaurant or something or do what I really like to do and that's get my hands dirty and work on cars. I'm like, I'd rather do that in the afternoon after classes than go work at a bar or restaurant at night. Trying to make some extra cash to put myself through school.

What motivated you as you were moving up? What were you attracted to other than cars in general, but in life, what were you thinking your life would shape up to be? What attracted your attention?

Well, I kind of always knew I kind of wanted to do my own thing, had owned my own business and not really I couldn't imagine Myself really working for somebody, I was always had the kind of that entrepreneur itch. So it just kind of happened over time. And then once I got into my first store, I really knew that was the direction I wanted to go and kind of expand and expand into a different area up. And when I did my second store, we built it, it was in a higher end area. I enjoyed working on higher end cars and that was a little more affluent area. So we were working on, you know, BMWs and Mercedes and Porsches and stuff like that, rather than my other shop where we were working on a little lower end car. Even though the process is exactly the same and you got to do exactly the same thing every car, I just enjoyed being around some of those higher end cars and clientele and any kind.

Of experience you went through early on that told you you didn't want to grow up working for what gave you the, the signal on the highway that I don't want to be working for somebody else all my life. It's always interesting how that signal comes to us. You know, it comes to some people and some people that signal, it never occurs to them that they can actually get through life and not have to work for someone else.

You know, I, I think a big part of it was I really admired my grandfather and he always owned his own business and he was really successful and he ran his own business and know had a lot of flexibility. Even though he worked really, really hard. I think it was being around him and working with him, growing up and doing things and doing projects with him that kind of. I just kind of saw that and go like, I kind of think that's what I kind of want to do too. So that might have been kind of the light that I saw way back when, when I was young.

What was the hard thing about being in business for yourself? Did you have to kind of develop some new skills or reorganize your thinking or make some adjustments to be successful in that thing?

No, I wasn't afraid to work hard, put the time in and do whatever it takes to be successful. You know, some of the challenges are employees. Sometimes it could be cash flow. Figuring those things out, growing and having the capital to grow, those were some challenges. But, you know, I, when I started doing it, I decided I was going to do it. I was going to work hard and do whatever it takes to be successful.

And not everybody gets to that ever actually makes that decision, do they? No, but it seems like, you know, it's like this business is hard. You know, life is hard. And it's like, you know, how do you do it? It's just so hard. It's like, well, it'd be hard for me too if I did it the half blooded way that you do it. You know, trying to cut corners and making everything 10 times harder than it needs to be. When you make up your mind to just go do starts to get a lot simpler, doesn't it?

It does for sure.

I've heard that phrase, do whatever it takes to be successful. Did you actually have that thought in your mind or is that just kind of a description? Is like, you know, the confidence that you could get. A lot of people will stall out, Jeff, because they say, well, I don't know this, I don't know that, I don't have, you know, like funding, you know, like how do you go get funding? You know, this and the other. And all the answers are out there. People have figured it out, but they don't get past the point of understanding whatever it is. You don't know somebody else out there does know. And why you. Just because you are ignorant today on a particular subject or you don't know how to do something today doesn't mean that tomorrow you couldn't have it all figured out because someone showed you how you know. How did you figure your way through a lot of those early stages?

I remember starting in 93. Fortunately my partner had a good background in the business, so he was kind of my mentor and, and we worked together for the first couple of years. But going into it, I knew absolutely about zero about billing an insurance company and how the whole process worked with the insurance company owning a full retail style body shop. So to be honest with you, I just kind of wrote his coattails. He taught me everything I know and I learned everything from him. But within a year I knew everything and how it all worked. So it wasn't. It didn't take me 10 years to figure it out. I figured it out pretty quick. But I was lucky that I had a mentor and a partner that knew what he was doing. Although he was learning some things too at the same time. He had never been at that level, but he had the background and had been around it enough to know that we could do it and be successful at it.

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Notes. What triggered the expo? Was it just natural evolution? Let's get this expand here, expand there. Just opportunities came and you just jumped on it. Yeah.

As we grew and figured out and the shops became successful, I maybe it's time to do another one. And then had the opportunity to acquire another one that just kind of came about. So it was just kind of time and the timing and economy doing well.

Did it turn out the way you expected?

Yeah, it sure did.

In terms of income and opportunities and things like that.

It did, it did, yeah. I mean it provided a really good lifestyle for me for a long time. Having that career, what does that mean.

A really good lifestyle?

Just an income and, and the life that I had. You know, I was married, I had three kids. They had a great lifestyle and a successful time.

Now what got you excited about. When did Aspen come on your radar? Was that your first experience with a, you know, a ski town?

Well, I grew up skiing, but yeah, living in a ski town. So, so I got out of the, I sold the body shops in 2008 and just took a little time off. And then I was skiing in Aspen, had just gone through divorce, skiing in Aspen with my girlfriend and we were just talking to people and we were having a great time here for a week and everybody's telling us how great the summer is and we're like, okay, I'm sure it is, I'm sure it's beautiful. And I'd never been here in the summer. So we were just driving home, back to, back to Scottsdale and we go, you know, maybe we should just rent a place for a couple months and just come spend a couple months in Aspen and see what it's really like. Hike and do all those fun things that you do in Aspen and ride your bike around and enjoy the great weather. So we rented a place for a year rather than three months just because it was more cost effective because it was going to be so expensive around a place for two or three months here. So rent a place for a year, skied, had a good time. And that's when I had, when I started getting to know the ski town, the ski business a little bit, had a locker over There with you. This is before I owned the shop and rented a locker from Alex. Yeah, business. Yeah. And anyway, renew the lease, stayed another year, bought the ski shop. I wasn't doing anything and. And I saw potential in the shop and. And the guy that owned it wanted to get out. So I'm like, you know, I'm not really doing anything right now. I see the potential and your business model with the locker room, slash ski shop, slash tune shop. And I go, I think it's huge potential. He wanted to get out, and so I decided to buy it from him. And it's. That was back in 2010. This will be our 11th season with the store. So it just kind of. That was my first taste of it being in Alex's shop, but ended up buying it from him when I met you. And that was 11, 11, 12 years ago.

A lot of being in business is figuring things out. You know, when people listen to these podcasts, they're wanting to, you know, they're listening for, what did you do? How do you do it? You know, I'm. You're in a state of confusion. But some. A lot of these things unravel themselves pretty quickly. Like, as you said, you can go from an industry, a business where you know absolutely nothing about it, but, you know, you have an interest, you're not afraid of working, and if you just pay attention and you don't have to be taught everything over and over again in a year, you can become a master of the game. You know, most things are like that. In fact, I found that you can get pretty good at just about anything in 90 days if you saturate yourself with it, but especially in a year. And so just having that approach, a professional type approach, we're not going to have this as a hobby thing. This is going to be a business. We're going to treat it like a business. We're going to expect a business income, a business result and dependability and profitability and all of that. Having that mentality, looking at opportunities gives you an incredible advantage over the people who just see it as well. We got a store and we do this and the other and kind of take what comes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was lucky enough when I. When I acquired the store. I inherited a couple really good employees that had really vast knowledge of the ski business, had been doing it a long time, you know, and one of them really taught me a lot that I know today. Technical and the technical side of the business and stuff. And I be honest with you, Larry, going into the ski business Was kind of like when I went to the body shop business. I knew a little bit about it and it was a business and I knew I could figure it out, but I really didn't know that much about buying hard goods and what I should buy and difference between the boots and the sizes and all the different things and the construction of skis. And should we do clothing in this little store that we got, which we tried, which was kind of a failure. We should have never tried to do clothing. There just wasn't enough room. We should have just spoke. So it took me a couple, two, three years to really dial in what our niche was and to get the thing profitable, to get the locker room full, to get people to know where we were. Because we were on the backside of a building. People didn't. If you didn't know where we were, you know, he had a tough time finding us.

But.

And so it took a couple, a couple years to figure it out because it is seasonal. So listen, you got five months to kind of do your thing and then you've got this time off and then you do, and then your, your next year comes around. So it's not like you're doing it year round even. I mean, you're still running your business year round, but you're really in there dealing with people for those five months of the ski season. So after about two there in our third year, we filled the locker room completely full, acquired another space in another locker room and then filled that one and had a waiting list with very little turnover. Got a really good reputation of the ski tuning. I had, you know, obviously some great guys tuning for me. They knew what they're doing. We had a great reputation there and really got a very small space rocking and rolling. As you know, you've been in that space and you know, it was pretty, pretty tight, but we, we did a lot in that space and it became really successful.

Yeah. And there's actually some advantages to having a small space because it causes you to be cost effective or make sure. Well, first of all, nobody can lay around. There was only Steve was going to take care of whatever chair was in there. So you couldn't come in and sit down because Steve was going to be in there.

Right.

And yes, that's, that's true.

There was only about four seats in the whole place.

Yeah. So if anybody was in there, they're going to be working. And then it was real obvious, you look around, if this merchandise is not moving, it wasn't going to escape your notice, you know.

Yeah.

Why are we giving that much space to that kind of merchandise? Nobody ever asked for it, nobody never sell it. You get it out of there, get something else in there.

Exactly.

And there's some real advantages to small spaces, especially when you're learning, especially when you're getting started, that's for sure.

Yeah. Everything in that shop had a place, and I mean everything. And it had to be put back right where it was at. We had to be really efficient there. We couldn't have a lot of clutter and mess and things needed to go back right where they came from. Every boot had a certain spot that it went to. Every ski, all the rental equipment went into a certain spot. So we had a lot of stuff inside of that 1100 square feet going on. But you're right, advantage wise, it makes you be efficient. Obviously you're keeping your rent factor down, which is huge, especially in a town like Aspen.

Well, the thing about that, like J. Paul Getty said, the thing about keeping your expenses down, he said the, I think he called it the tight wad or the guy who is tight fisted on his expenses. He said the advantage the guy has is that he's got more margin for error. You know, when things go wrong or cash flow goes down, he can take the bumps a lot better than the guys living on the edge. And you just learn how to be efficient and. But so much of the time when we're small, everybody is small, is just inside them thinking about how can we get bigger, how can we get bigger, how you know, more space and that depending on the time, unless you've maxed out where you are, that's not really what you need to do necessarily.

No, not at all. I mean we, that little shop was doing really, really well when I was approached because somebody wanted, needed and wanted my space to expand. I wasn't planning on selling or moving or anything like that until I was approached. And then I was offered the right amount of money and found the space across the street which was a better space. I'm like, you know, I'll move over there. There again, it was going to be three times the size, a lot more rent, but I knew that we could make it work and be successful over there too. And it's been a fun move. It's been fun changing the way we've done things. We've got more room, different equipment, a brand new locker room. It's been a fun process.

But setting up a new store is always going to be more work than you anticipate, isn't it? Because I noticed like last year as you moved into that new thing, you'd already moved once and then you move again. It just seems like, I mean, you guys is just on and on and on.

It seems like the last few years my life has been moving.

But yeah, you know, because you were, you know, the, the second location we were last year was right across the street from my condo and it's like at the end of that truck was out there unloading and loading all the time.

Yeah. You know, fortunately we knew that was a temporary pop up spot because we had to wait for the lease on the new space before we could gut that thing and do a full remodel on it. So that was just kind of a temporary, almost kind of a, a season off for us. But we didn't want to lose our momentum as a ski shop in a locker room. We wanted to have a presence. So we did a small amount of hard goods. We didn't do any tuning that year. We had a small locker room just to keep lockers for our current locker members if they wanted one and just wanted to have a presence in town that we, we hadn't gone away, the shop wasn't gone and that we were. And so we could also promote the new store, the new locker room and what we were doing in the new space. So that was a lot of work moving in there. And then, and then obviously the design, the build, you know, we demoed the thing and did all the construction, trying to get it done for ski season, having problems with delays and not, you know, last, the last couple years have been tough and getting guys to finish the job and stuff, but we got it done. I mean, we were working all the way up to Christmas, finishing things into the holiday season, but we got it done with a lot of work from a lot of guys. And I can tell you that this year, right now, it's going a lot smoother than last year.

Yeah, that's one thing those listening. You know, if you're starting a business right now, next year is going to be smoother, folks. You know, you know, when you start, you don't know what you don't know and you're in the process of learning what you don't know.

Yeah.

And every situation or in every location has its own little group of factors that you have to work through. But the second time around, then you can, you know, you're through the initial orientation and you can start to refine and improve and build momentum, which is what you're doing now. And what I'd like to say, Jeff, is congratulations on making three Locations a success and really growing and set a, you know, a spirit of growth and positive vibe in all three locations. And that's a credit to your leadership.

Thank you Larry.

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