March 3, 2025 • 50 mins
Jack Bogard, founder and owner of Sanford Sound, in Sanford, Maine, talks about his entrepreneurial journey from Michigan to Florida and the East Coast to Maine.
Jack started his business 30 years ago, specializing in Custom Audio sales and installation for Cars, Trucks, Boats, Motorcycles and 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 12 Mobile Electronics Retailer of the Year.
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Jack started his business 30 years ago, specializing in Custom Audio sales and installation for Cars, Trucks, Boats, Motorcycles and 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 12 Mobile Electronics Retailer of the Year.
Winning Business Radio is broadcast live Mondays at 4PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Winning Business Radio is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Winning Business Radio Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/winning-business-radio--3075598/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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(00:21):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
To repeat it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Kevin helen N believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome
to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio.
That's W four cy dot com and now your host,
Kevin helen N.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
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.
(01:14):
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
(01:35):
and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.
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
(01:56):
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
(02:17):
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
(02:42):
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.
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
(03:05):
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
(03:25):
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.
And that's what it's really all about. Jack and Christine
are as, he says, huge parroheads who love NASCAR, camping
(03:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
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,
(04:34):
I should say, but I've been in their lives since
they were five and eleven. I am They call me dad.
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.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
That's awesome. And there's a little bit about Maxon and
Parker what they like to do.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:21):
kid of ten amazing. So he's a really good kid
and he's very smart academically, does very very well in school.
They lived about an hour from hust Down in Hampton,
New Hampshire.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
That's awesome, all right, tell us about your background. You're
up in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
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
(06:03):
as a young seven and eight year old boy washing
dishes in the in the restaurants with my mom and dad.
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
(06:24):
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,
(06:49):
but you know, so Aargasuck was great. It was right
on Lake Michigan. I grew up in the boating industry.
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
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
So how does Christine feel about it?
Speaker 3 (07:47):
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
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Bit with that so machine like on fast on a
stow machine.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Not really, No, she doesn't like any of that kind
of stuff, to be honest with you. She does le.
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.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
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,
(09:21):
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
(09:41):
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
back and they do all that, and it's kind of
(10:03):
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,
(10:27):
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
(11:09):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
So where did you get into your first business or not?
Where about when? And what was it?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
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
(13:39):
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.
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.
(14:00):
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,
(14:21):
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
(14:43):
box didn't end up working. So then I became friends
with a guy that made shorts made out of flower sacks.
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,
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
week August and it's done. Yeah, and you know you're
working eighty ninety hours a week, but only for six weeks.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Thank you you're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin
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Speaker 4 (16:57):
All right, we're back with Jack Bogart of Sanford. Sound
all right, so keep going, Flower sacks, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (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
(17:26):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:12):
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,
(18:57):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Yeah, the financial model in that business changed.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
At first, there was like a big money from activations
and residuals, and that started to go away.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
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.
(19:49):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:33):
I transition into just dropping the franchise and I will
become Sanford Sound. So there's the birth of Sanford Sound.
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
(20:56):
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
(21:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
So I mean, I recall the story, correct me if
I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
So is this at your property and use space elsewhere?
Speaker 3 (22:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
You built the building.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
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
(23:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
And some I don't know how much, but I know
some of those proceeds you give.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
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
(24:11):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:53):
favor for the longest time because nobody really shut me
down because it was anything.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
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
(25:31):
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.
I became friends with a guy named Michael Van Horn
(25:53):
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
(26:15):
he talks about everybody in the industry. So that gets
a lot of recognition for for me here in little Sanford.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
So how big of town Stanford, twenty.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
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
(26:46):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
I was gonna ask about that.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
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,
(27:21):
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
(27:44):
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
(28:06):
draw from other areas, you know, because I saturated the
market essentially.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You know.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
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
(28:52):
you what are you doing differently? He said, I don't know.
Nobody wears shoes. It's an awesome market, you know.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:41):
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.
They're side by sides and I've even put system of
(30:01):
the Stowvieals. So it's just got to always be thinking
of those kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
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,
(30:46):
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.
They've been up all night long. So I transitioned that
(31:06):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:50):
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.
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
(32:12):
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
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
I didn't know this happened when you told me this
the first time.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
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
(33:18):
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
(33:39):
great time all night long. All right to the door.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Pause right there, we're going to take our second break.
We'll be back in about a minute with Jack Bogart.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:07):
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(34:28):
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Speaker 2 (34:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
We're back with entrepreneur and business owner Jack Bogart of Sandford,
Sandford Sound, Sandford, Maine.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
What are some of the other tangents you've you've found
along the way.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Like in reference of businesses and things that I mean, it.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
The little side businesses. Yeah, all come back to my
heart and my passion, Yeah is cardio and stereos.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
And that was the tie, and I lost it for
two seconds. It's the cars, right, It comes aback.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
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
(36:01):
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.
If you go to work and do something that you enjoy.
And I can honestly say that there are not days
(36:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
With people, with nice people, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
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
(37:01):
like I promised my mom, I don't go to work.
I do what I love every single day.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
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.
(37:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
It would just stop for the.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
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.
(38:34):
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.
(39:16):
You know, that's double what I was doing in my
other location in four years.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
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
(39:50):
in that middle of trying to recruit and find the
right salesperson. I have one great guy that works here.
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
(40:14):
Mercedes and some Porsche, and you know, we get high
in vehicles and even the ones that aren't high end,
you know.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
To somebody's baby.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
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.
Multitude of things can happen, you know, they can break it,
they can cost me a ton of money to repair
(40:43):
what they've damaged, or they just don't know what they're doing.
And so I need a skilled tech.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
You don't just figure out and put a new one in.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
They're all be a fabricator.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
Fabrication, right, you need.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
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,
(41:56):
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
(42:17):
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.
You know. So it's hard to find the right person
to expand the business the right way.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
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
(43:11):
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
(43:34):
little perks and things that I do for the guys.
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
(43:56):
ten and then they traditionally move on, but they all
say it was the best time of their life.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
So you know, and then the sales role, right, you
need somebody to help with help you with Tim, right.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
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.
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.
(44:32):
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
(44:55):
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.
I'm not looking for a clerk. I'm not looking for
somebody like a Walmart that just rings in the bark.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Right we say an order checker, not an order tacker.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
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
(45:35):
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,
(45:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
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
(46:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
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.
Uh So, who in the listening and viewing audiences should
reach out to you?
Speaker 3 (47:04):
And why? So?
Speaker 4 (47:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
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
(47:34):
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,
(48:00):
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
(48:21):
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.
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,
(48:42):
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?
Speaker 4 (48:52):
So not maybe because you can't get the plans anymore.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much. And you,
like you said, the time went really fast.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
If you've got.
Speaker 4 (49:39):
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
(50:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (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
(50:43):
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
The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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(00:21):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
To repeat it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Kevin helen N believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome
to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio.
That's W four cy dot com and now your host,
Kevin helen N.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
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.
(01:14):
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
(01:35):
and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.
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
(01:56):
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
(02:17):
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
(02:42):
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.
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
(03:05):
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
(03:25):
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.
And that's what it's really all about. Jack and Christine
are as, he says, huge parroheads who love NASCAR, camping
(03:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
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,
(04:34):
I should say, but I've been in their lives since
they were five and eleven. I am They call me dad.
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.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
That's awesome. And there's a little bit about Maxon and
Parker what they like to do.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:21):
kid of ten amazing. So he's a really good kid
and he's very smart academically, does very very well in school.
They lived about an hour from hust Down in Hampton,
New Hampshire.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
That's awesome, all right, tell us about your background. You're
up in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
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
(06:03):
as a young seven and eight year old boy washing
dishes in the in the restaurants with my mom and dad.
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
(06:24):
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,
(06:49):
but you know, so Aargasuck was great. It was right
on Lake Michigan. I grew up in the boating industry.
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
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
So how does Christine feel about it?
Speaker 3 (07:47):
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
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Bit with that so machine like on fast on a
stow machine.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Not really, No, she doesn't like any of that kind
of stuff, to be honest with you. She does le.
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.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
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,
(09:21):
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
(09:41):
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
back and they do all that, and it's kind of
(10:03):
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,
(10:27):
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
(11:09):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
So where did you get into your first business or not?
Where about when? And what was it?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
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
(13:39):
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.
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.
(14:00):
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,
(14:21):
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
(14:43):
box didn't end up working. So then I became friends
with a guy that made shorts made out of flower sacks.
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,
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
week August and it's done. Yeah, and you know you're
working eighty ninety hours a week, but only for six weeks.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Thank you you're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin
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Speaker 2 (16:37):
And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene,
presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in
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is Kevin Helene.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
All right, we're back with Jack Bogart of Sanford. Sound
all right, so keep going, Flower sacks, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (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
(17:26):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:12):
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,
(18:57):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Yeah, the financial model in that business changed.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
At first, there was like a big money from activations
and residuals, and that started to go away.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
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.
(19:49):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:33):
I transition into just dropping the franchise and I will
become Sanford Sound. So there's the birth of Sanford Sound.
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
(20:56):
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
(21:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
So I mean, I recall the story, correct me if
I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
So is this at your property and use space elsewhere?
Speaker 3 (22:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
You built the building.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
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
(23:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
And some I don't know how much, but I know
some of those proceeds you give.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
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
(24:11):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:53):
favor for the longest time because nobody really shut me
down because it was anything.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
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
(25:31):
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.
I became friends with a guy named Michael Van Horn
(25:53):
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
(26:15):
he talks about everybody in the industry. So that gets
a lot of recognition for for me here in little Sanford.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
So how big of town Stanford, twenty.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
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
(26:46):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
I was gonna ask about that.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
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,
(27:21):
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
(27:44):
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
(28:06):
draw from other areas, you know, because I saturated the
market essentially.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You know.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
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
(28:52):
you what are you doing differently? He said, I don't know.
Nobody wears shoes. It's an awesome market, you know.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:41):
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.
They're side by sides and I've even put system of
(30:01):
the Stowvieals. So it's just got to always be thinking
of those kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
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,
(30:46):
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.
They've been up all night long. So I transitioned that
(31:06):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:50):
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.
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
(32:12):
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
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
I didn't know this happened when you told me this
the first time.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
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
(33:18):
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
(33:39):
great time all night long. All right to the door.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Pause right there, we're going to take our second break.
We'll be back in about a minute with Jack Bogart.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:07):
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Speaker 2 (34:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
We're back with entrepreneur and business owner Jack Bogart of Sandford,
Sandford Sound, Sandford, Maine.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
What are some of the other tangents you've you've found
along the way.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Like in reference of businesses and things that I mean, it.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
The little side businesses. Yeah, all come back to my
heart and my passion, Yeah is cardio and stereos.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
And that was the tie, and I lost it for
two seconds. It's the cars, right, It comes aback.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
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
(36:01):
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.
If you go to work and do something that you enjoy.
And I can honestly say that there are not days
(36:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
With people, with nice people, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
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
(37:01):
like I promised my mom, I don't go to work.
I do what I love every single day.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
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.
(37:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
It would just stop for the.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
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.
(38:34):
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.
(39:16):
You know, that's double what I was doing in my
other location in four years.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
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
(39:50):
in that middle of trying to recruit and find the
right salesperson. I have one great guy that works here.
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
(40:14):
Mercedes and some Porsche, and you know, we get high
in vehicles and even the ones that aren't high end,
you know.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
To somebody's baby.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
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.
Multitude of things can happen, you know, they can break it,
they can cost me a ton of money to repair
(40:43):
what they've damaged, or they just don't know what they're doing.
And so I need a skilled tech.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
You don't just figure out and put a new one in.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
They're all be a fabricator.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
Fabrication, right, you need.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
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,
(41:56):
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
(42:17):
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.
You know. So it's hard to find the right person
to expand the business the right way.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
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
(43:11):
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
(43:34):
little perks and things that I do for the guys.
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
(43:56):
ten and then they traditionally move on, but they all
say it was the best time of their life.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
So you know, and then the sales role, right, you
need somebody to help with help you with Tim, right.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
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.
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.
(44:32):
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
(44:55):
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.
I'm not looking for a clerk. I'm not looking for
somebody like a Walmart that just rings in the bark.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Right we say an order checker, not an order tacker.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
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
(45:35):
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,
(45:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
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
(46:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
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.
Uh So, who in the listening and viewing audiences should
reach out to you?
Speaker 3 (47:04):
And why? So?
Speaker 4 (47:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
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
(47:34):
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,
(48:00):
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
(48:21):
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.
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,
(48:42):
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?
Speaker 4 (48:52):
So not maybe because you can't get the plans anymore.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much. And you,
like you said, the time went really fast.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
If you've got.
Speaker 4 (49:39):
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
(50:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (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
(50:43):
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
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