Scaling Your Business: Insights from Joe Zentmyer

Brent Peterson (00:01.654)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Joe Zentmeyer. Joe, give us an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and what you got exciting going in business today.

Joe Zentmyer (00:12.598)
Hi, Brent. My name's Joe. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've owned three businesses. And what I have exciting going on right now is that I purchased an aquarium store in the south suburbs of Chicago, and I'm redeveloping it into a bigger and better business.

Brent Peterson (00:31.374)
That's awesome. Yeah, so one of my past clients was Bulk Reef Supply, which they do saltwater tanks. That's awesome. So Joe, today we're going to talk a little bit about process and scaling, and it's great that you have some practical knowledge to bring to the table. But before we do that, you have graciously volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. I'm going to tell you a joke. Give me a rating 8 through 13. So here we go.

Joe Zentmyer (00:36.256)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brent Peterson (01:01.792)
A genie granted me one wish, so I wished to be happy. Now I live with six dwarves and work in a mine.

Joe Zentmyer (01:16.812)
The sound cut out.

Brent Peterson (01:19.038)
No, okay, we'll do it one more time. No, no, it's all right. Here we go. Here we go. Take two on the joke. A genie granted me one wish, so I wish to be happy. Now I live with six dwarves and work in a mine.

Joe Zentmyer (01:22.034)
Sorry.

Joe Zentmyer (01:40.3)
boy, I think I missed that joke, so I'm gonna give it an eight.

Brent Peterson (01:47.566)
All right, no problem. All right, Joe. tell us a little bit about your background, serial entrepreneur, and tell us kind of where you came from and how you got to doing and coaching, like scaling and things like that.

Joe Zentmyer (01:57.258)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Zentmyer (02:07.165)
Yeah, you know, so, you know, for me, it started off when I was young. You know, my father was a very successful executive. So I grew up around someone that was building businesses, learning how to build businesses. And I heard that like every day as I was a young person. And that just really inspired me and made me want to be the same. But then where I kind of went different was

I left the corporate world and I went into just being an entrepreneur and trying to build my own businesses. So I started off, I was at Kraft Foods for 13 years and did a lot of different types of corporate jobs. And then from there, I decided I want to start my own business and I wanted to start it in something that I was passionate about. I joined with some business partners and we started building climbing gyms.

So in eight years, we built seven climbing gyms. So we were very successful at that. And then after that eight years, I decided to sell out of that business and start a new business. And my specialty is kind of like hobbyist in retail. So I continue to work on different types of retail opportunities, even though so many people out there think retail is such a tough place to be. And I think it is, but

I still think there's plenty of opportunity in retail. So that's what I work on now. And I look at all kinds of different opportunities for growth. And then I occasionally coach clients that are looking for help or guidance in their retail businesses.

Brent Peterson (03:52.194)
That's awesome. So I knew in the green room, we talked a little bit about some action steps. tell us a little bit about your new business and how you plan on growing it. And maybe do you have some punch items that you can share with us that help others to follow in your path?

Joe Zentmyer (04:02.418)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Zentmyer (04:08.915)
Yeah, I think, you know, a big thing, especially if you're looking at buying a business or getting involved in a business that's underperforming is trying to look at the systems that they have, or sometimes they don't have. An awful lot of small businesses that are really successful are entirely focused on the owner. Everything goes through the owner, the founder. There's no systems in place really.

And as someone who has a background in corporate world, I can take some of that corporate experience and how to set up systems, how to measure, how to evaluate and take that and apply that to a new business.

Brent Peterson (04:50.54)
Yeah, I've heard that so many times, especially if you're setting up your business to sell in the future that not having the owner tied to the business is so important. What other things have you learned that help the new business owner, especially in retail, guess, grow because now retail is so mixed with online. Do you have anything that you're working on particularly on your new business?

Joe Zentmyer (05:13.811)
Yeah, what I really focus on when I look at retail businesses is I want some form of recurring revenue. And so I'm always looking for some kind of recurring revenue stream. so this aquarium business that I purchased, they did a lot of retail sales, but no service revenue. And so...

from day one as a part of my business plan for acquiring this business, was like, okay, I'm going to expand and build out service. And that was the opportunity for that business. And I think for anyone that's growing a business or looking at purchasing a business, you want to see where the revenue streams could be, not just where they are.

Brent Peterson (06:04.45)
Yes, I think especially if you're like, I'm so ingrained in just the online world. How do you, how do you help people understand the importance of subscriptions and recurring revenue, especially if you have a retail brick and mortar store, you want people to come back in. Right. So, and I know there's this term that they've coined called e-tailing where you're getting salespeople to help sell things online from the brick and mortar. you employ any of those tactics?

Joe Zentmyer (06:30.347)
Yeah, I guess the term that I would use is just being online activated. And so again, lot of those, a lot of like retail, existing retail stores, some of which are really successful, like the aquarium store that I purchased, very successful store, but had almost no online presence. the brands that were inside the store were brands that were 20, 30 years old and

If you looked at their Facebook page or their Instagram, they didn't have one or it was like a one post a year. so taking a business into right now, which right now is being online and there's a power and a synergy between having like a brick and mortar location where people are gaining experience and having an online forum for people to speak to.

Brent Peterson (07:31.999)
Do you have a reason why you chose aquariums or have you always been interested in that?

Joe Zentmyer (07:37.304)
I've always been interested in aquariums. Like it's definitely a hobby of mine, but really for me, you know, my first business was rock climbing gyms where the participants in that business were my customers. They identified as, they identified as rock climbers. So I tried to find businesses where there was a similar, like people identify as a hobby that

that's in part of that business. Because that's where I felt like I can market towards. And also in that kind of business, that's the kind of employees you hire. You hire employees that are adherents to that hobby. So that tends to be my like unique niche of expertise, finding people that are interested in a hobby.

Brent Peterson (08:29.294)
You talked a little bit about scaling. What's the most important thing to consider when you're just building systems and trying to scale those systems?

Joe Zentmyer (08:32.351)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Zentmyer (08:41.699)
You know, I think before you get to systems, you got to think about people. And so do you have a person or are you yourself ready to set up systems? I think if you're hiring from the outside for people to set up systems for you, it gets very expensive, very fast. And so you have to like be thinking about budget. You have to be thinking about budget and you have to be thinking about like, do you have the personnel to use those systems?

I certainly can remember in my first business setting up some really awesome systems and then finding that they weren't used after two or three months just because there really wasn't enough people in my business, enough staff that had the systems expertise to use it. So even though it's a system and it's a computer or it's an app, you have to have the people there too for it.

Brent Peterson (09:38.678)
And training, I'm assuming training is like such an important part of that to help your employees understand how those systems work. But I think before that, do you need to first have the system before you can train it?

Joe Zentmyer (09:47.849)
United.

Joe Zentmyer (09:53.16)
Yeah, there's definitely a chicken and egg problem there, but it's it's not even just training. It's motivation to. But particularly like if you're in a fast growing business, people are busy. Your staff should be busy. If they're not busy, you probably have too many staff. And so what I found is like you're trying to take people out of their day to day and trying to get them out of like getting their job done and satisfying customers. And OK, now you're going to focus on this.

You know, salesforce. Well, I don't, I don't really get it. I don't really need it. It's a lot of work for me to learn something new. So, so figuring out how to motivate and reward people to go outside their comfort zone rather than just stay with their day to day.

Brent Peterson (10:42.018)
Yeah, you brought up a great point there. I know that every time I'd go to a quarterly day for EO, I would come back with all kinds of ideas that I wanted to do and implement and everybody would go, geez, no more. How do you, like, motivation I can see is such an important part and then maybe giving them in pieces, So maybe it's hard as maybe as a visionary to help them understand all the things they're going to have to do. But giving them the big picture and then telling them here's how the steps are going to get there.

Joe Zentmyer (11:11.859)
You know, I think first of all, giving it there's kind of two approaches I've tried in my business growth journeys. One approach has been like, okay, I'm just going to lay it all on them and we're going to launch everything all at once. And, and this new marketing tool, like it's all going to be turned on and I'm going to just expect everybody to use it. And the other approach is like, I'll just like.

do one small part of this and one at a time and we'll go slow.

I think it comes down to the details of the system and what exactly you're trying to accomplish, which way you go. Generally, a system like, say, an upgraded human resource management system, you probably want to go real slow on because it's integrated into your payroll. You don't want to screw that up ever. Maybe like, you know...

social media management program, hey, you can kind of roll the dice a little more on that and try to go fast because going wrong with it, you can fix pretty quickly, and it's generally not that expensive. So it really just sort of depends on the dynamics of the situation.

Brent Peterson (12:38.338)
know that you talked about some enthusiasm by employees at work and keeping them motivated. What about like an entrepreneur? know that you, maybe you were an aquarium enthusiast, but how do you get enthusiast into being an actual business person?

Joe Zentmyer (12:51.637)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Zentmyer (12:57.611)
Yeah, you know, it's a good question. mean, certainly like for what I do, it's really common that, you know, like when I was running rock climbing gyms, you hire rock climbers and they love climbing, they don't really love working. And you have the same issue with aquariums as well. You have people that are really into fish, but not so into working. And the tough part about it is

You just have to go through people. You know, you have to be willing to experiment and hire and find the right person. And what I have found is like, I'm passionate about business. I enjoy a business. enjoy kind of putting the puzzle together as an entrepreneur and getting the different pieces to work. And if I'm around the right employees, they start to pick up that same passion and then they start to enjoy making things work.

for our business. But that takes time. Trying to hire it upfront, it's really tough. But really just trying to find staff that connect with you and then being ready to kind of move on and find the next person when you have to.

Brent Peterson (14:14.828)
And how about then the scale part of it and keeping the focus on your business and not maybe more on scaling and working on the process and all those other pieces. How do you balance that out?

Joe Zentmyer (14:32.971)
You mean balance like like personal life, professional life balance, profitability versus growth or yeah.

Brent Peterson (14:39.854)
Yeah, not so much that but yeah like expansion of your team versus the team development versus growing

Joe Zentmyer (14:47.211)
Yeah, I mean...

I think from an entrepreneurship, you're always looking at downside versus upside risk. And if you're looking to build another location and you're like, I don't have the staff now, so I'm going to be hiring new staff for this new location. OK, you're making a roll of the dice there. You might open that new location and it might be a disaster because you hire a manager.

You do all the interviews, you do everything right, and they're just not good. so that again, it's whenever you're looking growth, you got to be measuring downside versus upside risk. And also at the same time, you got to be looking at, well, if this location just doesn't do well, what does it do to the rest of my business? Am I out of cash in one month or am I out of cash in five years?

You know, and, you know, if you're personally financing this business, are you, ready for that risk? Do you want that risk or not? if you have investors, have you been talking about those risks? Have you been communicating about it? if a partner, same thing. and so it's, it's really about being able to measure and think about downside and upside risk and being realistic about it. You know,

our egos get in our way of our decision making all the time. We all think we can make it work. But when you look at downside, you gotta be assuming you don't make it work.

Brent Peterson (16:31.414)
Yeah, that's awesome. Joe, we've been burning through time like crazy here. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Joe Zentmyer (16:44.875)
I just love people to reach out to me on LinkedIn and link with me. Go to my website and contact me and sign up for my newsletter. If any of you ever need any advice or just want to talk, I'm there and I'm available. I love to talk about business.

Brent Peterson (17:04.43)
Why don't you go ahead and tell us your website, tell us how they get a hold of you and who you are on LinkedIn.

Joe Zentmyer (17:08.139)
The website is, yeah. So on LinkedIn it's just joe that Meyer and then my website is snaggletoothgoby.com.

Brent Peterson (17:18.516)
and a snaggletooth that come from a reference to Scooby-Doo.

Joe Zentmyer (17:22.576)
So a snaggletooth goby, it's a fish that's in Hawaii that climbs waterfalls.

Brent Peterson (17:29.544)
all right. Well, I live in Hawaii. I'll have to go. So I'm on the big island. So I guess I cocky falls would be the closest one I could get to. There's not a lot of waterfalls here, but I'll have to check it out. That's awesome. Great. Well, Joe, it's been a great conversation. And I learned something about the snaggletooth goby. Yeah, that's awesome. I will make sure I get the links on the show notes. And it's been such a great conversation. Thank you, Joe Zentmeyer. Thank you.

Joe Zentmyer (17:39.403)
That's right, that's right.

Joe Zentmyer (17:48.552)
You did.

Joe Zentmyer (17:59.669)
Thank you, Brent.