Jack Bogard, Founder and Owner of Sanford Sound in Sanford, Maine

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four cy Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned. To repeat it. Kevin helen N believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio.

0:43 That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin helen N. Thanks everyone for joining in again today. I am Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four cy dot com. We are streaming live on talkfotv dot com, and of course we're on Facebook Live. That's at Winning Business Radio, and we're available in podcast after the live show wherever you listen and watch your podcasts. That's YouTube by our radio Spotify, Apple again, everywhere you go, we're there. The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice, really to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices. Those are the how tos, the what toos, the what not tos. To be challenged and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.

1:37 Who are those others Their consultants, their coaches, their advisors, authors, founders, owners, entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, virtually every successful person I've ever talked to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So I say it every week. While we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies all the way up to the Fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win, and to varying degrees, I've seen some fail. I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around and with some who probably should have found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots of success, but some failures as well, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So you're going to hear from me my opinions and insights. But because anybody who knows me, Jack will tell you I have sometimes a hard time keeping quiet. But more importantly, you're going to hear from experts, those consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders, owners and entrepreneurs. And today my guess is Jack Bogard, founder and owner of Sandford Sound in Sandford, Maine. I know Jack through my partnership with MAA. That's the Mobile Electronics Association.

2:53 I'm their quick Plug official sales training partner and Jackson nationally recognized retailer. Here's his bio. Jack Bogard started his business thirty years ago, specializing in custom audio sales and installations for cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, ATVs, including LED lighting, remote starters, and radar detectors. Since then, Jack has grown the business to become a CompuStar Top gun winner and a Top twelve Mobile Electronics Retailer of the Year. He's always been an entrepreneur at heart and has started and run several business businesses excuse me throughout his career, and we're going to hear about those. While running Sandford Sound, Jack was also a firefighter, having recently retired as a lieutenant after twenty five years of service. He's happily married to Christine. They have two adult children, Ashley and Alyssa, a grandson, Maxon who's ten, and a granddaughter, Parker, who's six.

3:42 And that's what it's really all about. Jack and Christine are as, he says, huge parroheads who love NASCAR, camping in the summertime, of course, and spending time on the beach, and they love to travel. He's looking forward to retiring in a few years to enjoy more rum punches on a tropical beach somewhere. Jack, Welcome to Winning Business Radio. Appreciate you being here. Thank you very much for having me. My pleasure. So let's start with again. I joke, but it's important. I mean, it's true. Tell us about your family. Start with your wife, Christine. Well, Christine's my wife. We've been married for well, we've been together for twenty six years. We've been married for the last six. We had a really long engagement. She's great. She's a financial advisor for Fidelity and a company called Charter Oak Capital Management. She is the mother of my two children, Ashley and Alyssa. They are my step children, I should say, but I've been in their lives since they were five and eleven. I am They call me dad.

4:40 I am Dad for the most part. Two great grandkids, Maxon with Ashley and Ryan, and I have Parker with Alyssa and Trevor, and just great. And Christine's my heart and soul. She's my hero. That's awesome. And there's a little bit about Maxon and Parker what they like to do. Maxon is a very avid sports guy. His father is a PGA golf pro and is an avid golfer and because of that he works well with max And he plays basketball, he plays football, any kind of contact sports. He can actually drive and put very very well for kid of ten amazing. So he's a really good kid and he's very smart academically, does very very well in school.

5:29 They lived about an hour from hust Down in Hampton, New Hampshire. That's awesome, all right, tell us about your background. You're up in Michigan. Yeah, I was born and raised in a little town called saugech Michigan. It's right on the West coast, about an hour and a half outside of Chicago. I was born into a family of restaurant touris. My mother and father owned and ran restaurants in nightclubs my entire life, so I grew up in that industry. I can remember as a young seven and eight year old boy washing dishes in the in the restaurants with my mom and dad.

6:09 I unfortunately lost my father when I was very young. I was nine. He passed away and left the business to my mother, and I slowly worked my way up through the ranks of the restaurant, going from a dishwasher to a to a prep cook, to a cook, to a bus boy to a bartender. I did some work on the door and went from the restaurant side of it into the nightclub side of it. And we had your atypical eighties nightclub back in the day with your crazy wild hair metal bands. And you could say I grew up extremely fast and in a different work would so, but you know, so Aargasuck was great. It was right on Lake Michigan. I grew up in the boating industry.

6:56 You know, there's lots of boats out there. I worked a lot. I didn't actually have a boat, but we had a ton of ton of friends that had boats, and I grew up on those boats. The boats out there in the Midwest are a little different than the boats out here there. They're more like the boats that you would see in Southeast Florida and Miami, the the big fast cigarette boats in the Fountain, the race boats. And I grew up going extremely fast on the water, and I have a passion for that to this day. So my best friend Jim back home, his family was stock car drivers, So I grew up with them in the racing world, spending the whole week working on the race car and getting ready for the weekends. And and so I like any of those fast sports like that.

7:42 So how does Christine feel about it? She is not a fan. Christine is more laid back. Uh. She was more of the and like you said in my introw, the parrot head to sit back on the beach and drink a rum punch and relax. They get older, for sure, I'm getting more apt to that. But She is not one to like to go fast. She gets scared very well. I've got a Camaro now that is well over six hundred horsepower, and she does not enjoy riding with me in that car because I do like to live on the edge a little. Bit with that so machine like on fast on a stow machine. Not really, No, she doesn't like any of that kind of stuff, to be honest with you. She does le.

8:29 We have a friend that has a camp up in Rangely, Maine, and we'll go up there on weekends. We do that quite often. But she's not one to go full barrel all day long and just go fast. She likes to put She loves wildlife, she loves to see the deer, loves stuff, and loves to watch the sunrise and sunset and that kind of stuff, taking the nature rather than have it go by one hundred mile an hour. So so there's your interest in cars, We got that. How did you make your way to Maine? Another cold place was short summers? Right? So, as I was working as a bartender. Near my town is a big mall, a shopping mall, and the bar that I worked at had a hotel very very close to it, and there was these guys and this is when I was I was older. I mean, I'm kind of jumping forward a little bit, but you know, from Michigan, I went to school. I went to college in Florida and went to USF studied architecture, and then I came back to help my mother because her business was she was having some hard time. She had some she had made some unfortunate mistakes that I had to come back to Michigan to help my mom with the family restaurant. So as I was home, there was these two guys that were in the mall and they sold those styrofoam a company called green Light Marketing, and they sold those styrofoam gliders or those airplanes that you would see the guys back selling in the mall. And they'd stand in the middle of the mall with the kiosk and they'd throw those planes and they do the loop and they'd catch them and then and they'd throw them

10:00 back and they do all that, and it's kind of like a carny thing, and you're telling stuff. And anyway, they would come into the bar every night after they would leave the mall, and I was their bartender and we became friends. They said that I had the right type of personality and I would do very well at that. So they offered me a job. They told me what kind of money i'd be making. I was shocked to hear more than it was much more than a bartender, and I didn't really believe them. But at that point I was in my probably early twenties, probably early twenties, twenty four to twenty five, and I said, what the hell, let's go. So I took a job with them, and we traveled all over the eastern United States and we'd go into a mall and we'd sell these sirophone gliders.

10:48 I started in Dover, Delaware, and them all there was there for two months. From there, we went down to the Raleigh, North Carolina area, worked their way down to Daytona, and then worked our way back up the coast. And we did that for about two years maybe, And we were in the Liberty Tree mall in Danvers, Mass And as we're in that mall, we we talked to the mall manager and he said that he says, you guys should go and uh, there's a mall up in Maine. It's called the Main Mall and he goes, it's we manage that mall as well. It's a very very strong mall. It's really really busy. You guys would do great there, and let's get you up there and do a Christmas gig.

11:30 And the Christmas gig was two much. It was November December type thing. So I'd worked for the company for about two years at that point we came to the main mall. My boss went back to Ohio. I was at that point moved my way up into a more of a leadership role of the company, and I founded a rental Winter Rental in Old Orchard Beach Main. Never heard of Old Orchard Beach Main, but I got Winter Rental and Old Orchard Beach Main and I set up a mall store. And uh as that Christmas season progressed, things with the company started to sour up a little bit and I had met a guy that had a shop in Old Orchard Beach and by Christmas time, he said, you know what, you might want to think about sticking around here for the summer, he goes, And I was thinking about leaving the company. And that's that's how I ended up in Maine. I met a girl in the mall and started with not Christine unfortunately, but I met a girl in the mall and started dating her, and I said, you know what, I'm good with that. I'm going to stay around here and try the summer out in Maine. And that's how I ended up in main.

12:36 So where did you get into your first business or not? Where about when? And what was it? You know? Going back, I've always done business type things. I've tried a ton of things in a true entrepreneurial spirit. I mean I've tried. I guess you could say the first business I already did is I polished rocks and sold them on the side of the road at my house, right and I and I'd sell people that like lemonade stands when I did polished rocks. We have a bucket, you know those storage bins. Yeah, some were in this in a basement in my house, in the basement my house, uh, with with that kid in there. Yeah, it was my oldest sons. That's so funny. You said that I. Bought one of those for my grandson Maxin and he was cool, That's very cool. He made a couple of months for my wife. They're beautiful, So I guess you could say, you know, maybe I started there, but my first real dabbling with the businesses had to be when I left Green Light Marketing and I started my thing in Old Orchard Beach. That was my first reel. I'm going to give this a shot. And I was twenty five at the time, twenty six. I rented this little shack thing. It was like a four x four ice shack.

13:49 It was small. I called it Jack in the Box Verre original name, and I sold the same type of stuff I did in the Mall Beach toys and novel two. We had that game that with the Velcral pads that you would throw the ball and stick to the velcral pat yep. It was the very first season that those had kind of come out. So I I just started selling them an Old Orchard and then from there I got into air brushing T shirts and a little bit of artistry stuff and did some airbrush t shirts down there, and then in the winter times, I would just kind of try to do stuff, you know, I locally. I would work flea markets and indoor markets and things like that and try to sell my products. So I es that's I would say where I got my start trying to dabble with things and different businesses, and I've you know, I've tried a few different things. The Jack in the box didn't end up working. So then I became friends with a guy that made shorts made out of flower sacks.

14:51 They were kind of a guy from Canada that i'd met an old Lerchard Beach, and they were very They were those sold I create. I couldn't believe they're the things your life, but they sold like crazy. So I changed the name of the shop to Sacks on the Beach, Sacks on the Beach and Airbrush. Just signed and sold sugar sack shorts for a season or two and I just kept money. Yeah, I made good money. I did well, but it was very season old or tide Beaches is. You start then to June, you start to really do any business, and you work hard until the second third week August and it's done. Yeah, and you know you're working eighty ninety hours a week, but only for six weeks.

15:36 All right, hold that thought. We're going to take our first commercial break right here. Everybody will be back in about one minute with Jack Bogart of Sanford Sound. Thank you you're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now it's your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com.

16:20 Call five six one five zero six four zero three to one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene, presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helene. All right, we're back with Jack Bogart of Sanford. Sound all right, so keep going, Flower sacks, Yeah.

17:05 So on the beach, power sacks, Sex on the beach. So, like I said, I did that for a couple of summers, and what happened was it got to be really frustrating working hard in the summer and then barely getting through the winter. So I decided at that point that I was going to get a job, a real job, was going to grow up. I finally was going to put my big boy shorts on and work for somebody else, right, And I got a job for a company called the car Phone Store, which was a franchise that had just opened or wasn't my hometown, and they're based out of the New England area. I'm sure you've heard of them, and so I started working for them. I interviewed with them and got a job working with them. It was fall of ninety five, and that was going to be a full time, year round job. So I started November of ninety five the Carphone Store and by February of the next year, So February of ninety six, I bought the franchise and I fell in love with what I was doing. At that point. They were doing carphones and remote car starters. That was a side thing they did, so I bought into the franchise. The two guys that owned this particular franchise that were from New Hampshire, they didn't like doing business in Maine. Man. It's very high taxed and there's a lot of things here and they just didn't like Maine and I lived here, and so

18:35 it was the normal progression. I'm like, well, so I bought the business in that February of that year and I stayed with that. The carphone store franchise transitioned into a company called the Wireless Zone, and they changed because carphones was very distinct. Do what do you sell? Well, I sell car phones, and we started getting into pagers and PDAs and all type of other types of wireless communication. So the franchise changed the name to Wireless Zone. And then I started doing more and more and more with the car stereo and the car audio, and I grew the business and that end.

19:17 Yeah, the financial model in that business changed. Right. At first, there was like a big money from activations and residuals, and that started to go away. Right, They took all the residuals away from us, Yeah, and stuff like that. At that point, the girl that I had met and I were done. We're breaking up and so that relationship was over, and I started doing more and more with the wireless or cars stereos and remote starters and that kind of stuff, and the franchise. One of the things I started doing was I had because of my divorce. I had made friends with these girls that worked in an exotic club and they're like, hey, we should go to your stores sometime and wash cars, and I'm like, cool, let's do it this Saturday. So I kind of started doing this bikini car wash thing and it was a big deal and the franchise did not agree with that, and I can understand why it didn't set well with them, So we started talking about they started telling me I can't do it, and I decided at that point that I said what I had established myself enough. It was probably getting closer to ninety nine or two thousand, and I just said, why don't I transition into just dropping the franchise and I will become Sanford Sound. So there's the birth of Sanford Sound.

20:45 That was always the website that I had on the side with Wireless Zone, and I just kind of negotiated out of my contract with the franchise and bought into just full time Stanford Sound and continued growing my begin A car wash, Yeah, you did. Years I did. I did the bikini car wash for twenty twenty five years, twenty three years. I still do a It was it got to the point where it was the last Sunday of July, and probably seven eight years ago, I dropped the beginning car wash part of it and I did it as a show and shine.

21:29 So I mean, I recall the story, correct me if I'm wrong. It got so big it's massive. Now it's a huge event. Yeah, it's a festival now. And you know, having like moving through of an event like that, trying to do a car wash number one didn't work. The world changed, times have changed. Having that kind of thing around is not as politically correct as it was back in the day. And the show and Shine. I started doing Kei car Wash and show and Shine, and now it's just no more bikini car wash, just show and Shine. And that show has grown and grown and grown. Last year we had two hundred registered cars. I had fifteen, fifteen or sixteen vendors. I've gotten to the point where this festival is so big that people actually pay me to have vendor spaces at my show. I used to invite them and have them come for free, just so I had things for people to do. And now I charge money for them to come because they do very well. Because there's thousands of spectators that show up for that day.

22:39 So is this at your property and use space elsewhere? No, that's right here at my property. You know, we've gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit. But my property now that I have is two acres. I bought this land in twenty it was at the end of twenty twenty. You built the building. No, I bought a building that was here. It was a stoven chimney shop. But before that, I was in a small, little two thousand square foot place I shared with renta center, and it was right next door. It's literally one hundred yards from where I am now, and there's a huge field in the middle. So back in the day when I started that car show, I haven't really moved. I've just done a lateral move three literally three doors down. So we still use that same field in the middle. It's just now instead of on the right of the field, I'm on the left of the field, and it's just it's grown and grown to a point where it's just it's huge.

23:42 And some I don't know how much, but I know some of those proceeds you give. Away, yeah every year. Well, the way it kind of started was the city started to have a hard time with the whole bikini car wash, so I turned it into a charity bikini car wash, and we would raise money for different funds. I had joined the fire department back in ninety six, and because I was involved with the fire department, I had a huge passion for the fire service, so the money usually went like the first thing we raised money was for the City of Sandford's first thermal imagery camera. I made enough money to donate a thermal imaging camera to the City of Sandford because budget didn't allow for them to get one. And then every year I would pick a different charity to give the money to. We have another charity here in town called Graanmtastic, which raises money for kids that are terminally ill they can't get out of a hospital, bet or something, and it would give them laptops and computers so that they could communicate with the outside world. And every year I picked a different charity and that worked in my favor for the longest time because nobody really shut me down because it was anything.

25:01 But they still with traffic. That had to be traffic to deal with, right, they had to be. Yeah, the local business has probably liked it some of that point. Now this show has grown to the point where it's so big now that the hotels get busy. People drive from you know, I have cars at trailer up here from New York. You know, a friend of mine, Ada from Baltimore, has coming up for the show in the summertime. So I mean it's gotten to the point now where it's got national recognition, partially because my involvement with m E A winning twelve what retailer vir for four years now in a row or not retailer via but top twelve, I should I should rephrase thats gotten me some national attention.

25:51 I became friends with a guy named Michael Van Horn many many years ago. I met in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, and he promotes my shop and my and what I I do regularly. And you know, he used to have a newspaper, a rag magazine that he put out for the industry and he still does his you know, podcasts and different things digitally and gets he talks about everybody in the industry. So that gets a lot of recognition for for me here in little Sanford. So how big of town Stanford, twenty. Two thousand people is the Yeah, it's not big, it's not big. Fortunate that I've done this for thirty years now, and I think partially, you know, I'm in the store a lot. I'm not here every day because you know, I did have my fire department responsibilities. But people love to come and see me, and and they love that low and and I've taken it and changed. We don't just do cars anymore. Yeah, I do restaurant, commercial sound and restaurants.

26:59 I was gonna ask about that. Yeah, yeah, I do a lot of that. I've I've gotten my name involved with all the restaurants in the Seacoasts and the Gunk Whitt and Kenny Bunk and Kenny my Port and Wells. And once you do one or two of those restaurants, all those restaurants know each other and they all talk, Hey, where'd you get your stereo or where'd you get this? And so I do you know, I just did a sports bar with twenty two TVs and sound, and I've done I do some houses. I do guys man caves. I do some really big stuff. I did the park here in town, Goodall Park. Goodall Park is where they play the baseball league. It's New England Collegiate Baseball League plays there. I did all the PA and the sound in that whole stadium, the brand new high school they just got built. They hired me to do all the sound in the football field. So that's what's given me. There's only twenty two thous people for me to draw from. So how do you stay in business and grow for thirty years? You have to draw from other areas, you know, because I saturated the market essentially.

28:10 Well, I'm gonna say, I'm going to say two things because I'm always talking about mindsets and you know, in my business. So first of all, you didn't you didn't look at that twenty thousand dollars, twenty two thousand population and say, wow, there's not much here. No, you're entrepreneurial, you know brain So I saw opportunity, not right restriction. You know. It's like the old like the old story that you've probably heard, I've heard of a million times. But they send this guy to like the plains of Africa to tell shoes and he fails miserably and comes he calls the home office. They bring him home and he said he failed because no one wore shoes. So they sent another guy. The other guy kept calling for more shoes and more shoes, more shoes, and they said, what do you what are you doing differently? He said, I don't know.

28:53 Nobody wears shoes. It's an awesome market, you know. Oh yeah. And then I'm always thinking of things. Yeah, you know there there there's always a side thing that comes to my mind of oh I could do this, and and I watch other businesses and other people do stuff, and I'm like, well I could do that, and and uh, you know, I've I've changed the business. You know. Led lighting became a thing, and you know, you either got behind it or you didn't, and I got behind it. We do a ton with you know, lighting boats. This is a huge boating area. So I mastered my craft and putting radios in boats and went to the marinas in this area and and touch base with all the marinas and the and the lobstermen and the fishermen and everybody likes music. We all like music. It's relaxing, it's it's just it's it's what people enjoy. So you can put music anywhere. I do stuff at camps on the lakes.

29:58 They're side by sides and I've even put system of the Stowvieals. So it's just got to always be thinking of those kinds of things. Yeah, Titan murdering. Where when we visited them at one of them A shows in Nashville, there was this big John Dear tractor on their yard because they're putting some kind of system in it for the guy that's driving around, you know, yeah, out and down all the all the weed or the not wheed it would be corned or something whatever they down there. But so funny. But being that entrepreneury, you know, that kind of guy that it's always thinking. You know, Sandford sound in the in the audio, and the sound has been the go to from the beginning. But I've gone off on some tangents over the years, and you may or may not have going to touch on some of these. But you know, when I did my bikini car wash for the years, I was utilizing girls from a strip club, I guess for lack of better terms, I quickly realized that those girls are extremely unreliable and they don't show up in time.

31:02 They've been up all night long. So I transitioned that into using more like model type girls. And then I started thinking about it and I said, well, why don't I just do that myself? I mean I could, I could run something like that. So I started a company called Team Elite, and I hired I had twenty five girls that worked with me, and I got contracts with NHRA at Epping Dragway. I got contracts with NASCAR because I'm a huge NASCAR fan. I go to the stocks so all times, so I knew people there and I was friends with a guy from New England fights, and I built that side of the business to I would, you know, if you go to the races and there's always a pretty girl that wants you to sign up for this credit card, You're gonna get a free T shirt, you're gonna get a free cushion to sit on in the racetrack and stuff. But we just want your credit card.

31:58 We know your SOID security number and stuff inside this form. And it's very very hard to say no to a pretty girl. Well that was me. I did that for a long time. I would. I would contract these girls to do that, the ring card girls at fights and MMA fights and boxing matches and things. So I was doing that on the side as I was running the audio business and doing the firefighting thing. On you know, twenty four On twenty four off twenty four on four day off type. Then yeah, and I sweet and my family all kind of always at once, and I built that company up. My wife extremely tolerant woman for putting up with that for years for sure, you know, but you know, I never realized like nightclubs would pay me a percentage of the door. Yeah, I didn't.

32:52 I didn't know this happened when you told me this the first time. Go ahead, the nightclub would pay me a percentage of the door to bring a bunch of girls to the club. I felt like a pimp, but I'm really not a pimp. But there was no sex involved. But yeah, they came to bring these girls to the bar and they would have to have fun. All they had to do is have fun. And if there's pretty girls in the bar, the guys come. And so they paid me to bring those girls to the club. I bought a limousine and that was my transport. I'd lettered it all up with team Elite Models and blah blah blah, and we'd pull into the nightclub in front and I would open that door and fifteen gritty girls would get out, and it was like, oh my god, what's going on? Go in they'd give us a VIP table and you have a great time all night long. All right to the door.

33:43 Pause right there, we're going to take our second break. We'll be back in about a minute with Jack Bogart. Thank you. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenett on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews. Or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night. While it has great local coupons for all sorts of things in your area, no matter what, when or where.

34:28 If you're looking for something, YP local search can help you find it. So go to YP dot com or download the app to search local, find local, and save local. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helen In presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helene. We're back with entrepreneur and business owner Jack Bogart of Sandford, Sandford Sound, Sandford, Maine. Uh. What are some of the other tangents you've you've found along the way.

35:11 Like in reference of businesses and things that I mean, it. Was definitely a tie to uh back back to well yeah, talking about lighting and sound and audio and and uh yeah, see these opportunities that others happened. The little side businesses. Yeah, all come back to my heart and my passion, Yeah is cardio and stereos. And that was the tie, and I lost it for two seconds. It's the cars, right, It comes aback. It's always been cars. Yeah. And you know, I go off on these tangents and do these other things, but I always come back home, right, and I always come back to the car. I grew up around cars, told you earlier. I grew up around boats, and I just I really love what I do. And I can remember my other when I was a kid telling me because like I said earlier, I went school to be an architect and I just didn't like it. It wasn't it wasn't me. And my mother said make sure you get something that you enjoy, do what you like, because you're gonna do it for the rest of your life. So it won't be like you're going to work every day.

36:17 If you go to work and do something that you enjoy. And I can honestly say that there are not days here that are tough. But I love what I do and I enjoy it. It's awesome. I work on beautiful cars, I work on beautiful boats. With people, with nice people, you know what I mean. And you know at this point, now I'm sixty. Now well you know I'm gonna be sixty in a couple of months. You know, all those little side things that I did for a while was me throwing out different things, trying to figure out what's going to work. And I always come back to this and this is this is my passion, this is what I love to do. And like I promised my mom, I don't go to work.

37:04 I do what I love every single day. So yeah, it doesn't mean it's not difficult at times, like for example, you well it's a good news and bad news. I mean, you grossed a million for the first time in twenty twenty four. That's fantastic. First of all, what do you attribute that to. The biggest thing I think I attributed to is you know, I bought a building that's eight thousand square feet, so I got much larger. You know. I was in a small two thousand square foot shop and I put my retirement papers in for the fire department in January of twenty. I made an offer on this building. In January of twenty my retirement I put I was going to be done in April first. Because a joker, so I said April first, before day my last day. I put an offer on this building, and then COVID hit March twentieth or March seventh, and the world stopped as we know it.

38:05 So buying this building took a long time. I didn't actually close on this building until the end of December of twenty. It would just stop for the. People. The banks weren't loaning money, people in hospitality were Restaurants were closing, hotels were closing. It was a very unstick It was unstable times. So I bought this building in twenty and then every year my business got better. Now we all know in the n R of industry. People the outside world may not realize that, but for us people that are in the electronics industry or anything like that. Twenty one twenty three were the best years anybody could ever have had. People were getting free money, they were they didn't have anything to do at home, they were buying toys, they were putting arrows in those toys.

38:55 And we all had extremely strong years. So that helped. But my sales have gotten better every single year. And I closed twenty four with my first year that I grossed over a million dollars and with four guys, three to four guys. That's we hustled. It's a big accomplishment. You know, that's double what I was doing in my other location in four years. So success now is kind of the bad news a little bit, because you need you need staff now. Yeah, and so you're actually hiring you need a sales associate and you're looking for an installation technical. So I'm at that point now where staffing is. It's hard to get the right staffing. Work ethic in our country has changed durastic the amount. You know, this is a blue collar work, this is a trade job, the install side of it, right, and you know, so I'm in that middle of trying to recruit and find the right salesperson. I have one great guy that works here.

39:57 He does awesome, but we're busy. We need more and then installations, and I trying to find the right technician and the right guy. You know, you're not just working on anything. You're working on people's cars. We're working on Mercedes and some Porsche, and you know, we get high in vehicles and even the ones that aren't high end, you know. To somebody's baby. Yeah, it's somebody's car. Man, I don't care if the guy's driving a Ford Escort or he's driving a Dodge Ram truck or what he's driving. That's his that's his Ferrari. And you can't just let anybody work on that car.

40:38 Multitude of things can happen, you know, they can break it, they can cost me a ton of money to repair what they've damaged, or they just don't know what they're doing. And so I need a skilled tech. And there's a lot of in some cases, right, you know, for the audience's sake, there's a lot of skilled craftsmanship that goes into that. Right. You don't just figure out and put a new one in. They're all be a fabricator. Fabrication, right, you need. To be an installer, troubleshooter, problem solverware shooter, tru You need to know how to take a car part properly without breaking it. You then have to look outside of the box and figure out where in that vehicle can I find to mount an amplifier, Where can I build a subwle for enclosure, because the subblefers all need a certain amount of airspace.

41:27 I quickly for a second. Yeah, any listeners or viewers, if you haven't checked that out, go to Sandfordsound dot com and look at the gallery and you'll see what he's talking about. Go ahead, all right, we do fiberglassing, you know. I mean, I'm in a market in Maine where it's a little different than some of these guys like Ada in Baltimore, and my friend Jason and Columbus and some of these other guys in some of these you know, Jason Krantz in Vegas. These guys have different vehicles than we have here, but it's still the same thing. You still have to figure out out how to put stuff in these cars and do it right. And now today you gotta be you got to no software. You gotta know how to program you gotta know how to do things. We're using three D printers, we're using C and C machines, and your average high school kid doesn't know how to program a CE and C machine or a three D printer to make a bracket to mount a tweeter or two to fit it in the dash of a twenty five ram.

42:27 You know. So it's hard to find the right person to expand the business the right way. But for the right person, you offer a tremendous opportunity. They're going to love what they're doing, working with their hands or making things or building things, and it's I mean, they can probably do what they love right, Oh my god. Yeah, they're a sound person, a car person. That's perfect for them. You talk to any one employees, talk to any of the people that I've had work here at the pat that have left. Yea, as my wife says, they all come home. Every single person that's ever worked here still comes in here and visits me on a regular basis and talks about how this was the best job they've ever had in their life. The hardest part about this job is reference to it, and that would be the you know, retaining good help. You don't retire from here. It's not like you're working for the Navy or the shipyard or Fratt and Whitney. And I have a huge pension plan and a huge medical benefits and I offer four oh one K. I offer very competitive wages. I treat them. There's a lot of little perks and things that I do for the guys.

43:38 But you know, some of these guys that are starting out a young family, you know, they need medical insurance and they need more. So that's the hardest part about a small business is being able to compete with that side of what people are looking for. So, you know, I get a guy, they last four or five years, six years. You know, I had one guy who was ten and then they traditionally move on, but they all say it was the best time of their life. So you know, and then the sales role, right, you need somebody to help with help you with Tim, right. Yep, I need somebody for Tim and I upstairs. You know, at that point now where I want to work on the business and not business. And I don't know if everybody understands that statement, but you know, there's two different sides.

44:22 I don't want that have to be an active salesperson in the business. I want to work on getting new people in here, new business, new ideas, things like that. And when I'm short staffed with a store that's a four thousand square foot showroom, you know, I could at any time have twenty people on my sales floor. There's enough parking that's it's crazy. So it's a lot for one guy. Tim does absolutely amazing in the sales field, but there's nothing you can't You can only stack people so deep I need I need a qualified salesperson to to help do that. And finding the right person is you know, in this industry, you have to be a salesperson.

45:07 I'm not looking for a clerk. I'm not looking for somebody like a Walmart that just rings in the bark. Right we say an order checker, not an order tacker. Need I mean people come in here because they want to know. If all they needed was a clerk, I could be an Amazon or a Walmart. People come in here and they want you to know. They come here, how does this dash camera work? And what does this mean? And you so you have to know everything about every product that's in the store, and you also have to know how to design a car audio system, using the right components for a car and do it knowledgeably. And so it takes a special person to do it. You know, we train, We do our best if I have the right person, the right person that fits that mold of what we're looking for, a fun and energetic, outgoing, well groomed, mannered kid or or a man or woman. I can train anybody if as long as they can they can retain what we teach them. Yep.

46:08 Again, if it's somebody that loves audio, m hm, they'll get it right. We're cars, I mean cars, yes, and cars I. Mean our boats or motorcycles. I mean everybody loves those are toys, right, I always say I'm in the toys for toys business. Yeah, I mean I'm putting toys in people's toys and it's it's great, it's but you got to do it knowledgeably because they're gonna go to the next shop, they're gonna walk, they're gonna go somewhere, or they're gonna do their own research and they're gonna buy it on Amazon, and then they're gonna come here with a box and say you help me put this in, you know, and. You said, nope, nope, nope, no, uh yeah, that's what I teach. Nope. Yeah, So let me ask you a couple of closing questions. This went fast uh for me anyway.

46:59 Uh So, who in the listening and viewing audiences should reach out to you? And why? So? Certainly those in the you know, Sandford main area, but those outside may want to pick your brain. Why would they want to call or get a hold of. You, because they're they're tired of their boring, redundant job that they're doing. Now, we never do the same thing day in and day out, so if you're it's fast paced. But if you're looking for a change, you're looking to do something that every single day you're not making a part or you're not doing the same thing over and over and over, and you like that change. You can you can multitask and and you want to learn a new field, come and see me, you know, anybody. We pay competitive wages, so and for the right person, you know, maybe and help you some of your fuel costs to get you here. So it's not just Sandford, you know, if you live in southern Maine, you live in southern New Hampshire. Even I'm twenty minutes from Massachusetts border. So you know, come and see us, come and talk to us, give us a call, or just stop in the store sometime and just walk around. And so, I mean the store is open to the public. It's like the world's largest man cave. Come walk around and check out the store and you'll see why you would want to be here.

48:32 It's a lot of fun. It's it's almost like you're going to amusement park when you walk in here. It's there's so many things to do, you know, Tim. Saturday afternoon, Tim was riding an electric bike around the store. That's his drops. I'm going an electric bike and he's riding a bike at work. I mean, who can say they do that at work? So not maybe because you can't get the plans anymore. Right, No, I still have a lot of it, make all that stuff at Christmas time. That's funny talking suffers and yeah, I can still fly a pretty mean plane. So well you'll have to teach me. Well, listen, thank you so much for being here. The best way for people to get in touch with Jack is right there on the crawl. It's Sandfordsound dot com or JACKB at Sanfordsound dot com phone numbers there as well. It's two O seven four nine zero four nine hundred. Jack, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it.

49:25 Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much. And you, like you said, the time went really fast. Yeah, it does, it does. Good conversation. Thank you, Jack, Thank you very much, and thanks everybody for listening and watching. This is a show about business, sometimes business challenges, certainly business growth. If you've got. Concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company, whether your sales team is you or very small, or it's very large, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio, or you can drop me a note one of my many email addresses. I always say Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com. Our company is Winning Incorporated. We're part of Sandler Training. We develop sales team teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Hey, we're not right for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you to producer and engineer John One. Thank you one for another job well done. Be sure everybody to join us next week Monday, March tenth. We'll do it all again. Until then, this is Kevin helenan.

50:20 You have been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host Kevin Helen. If you missed any part of this episode, The podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio w four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helen in and Winning Business Radio