Category Kings

Every so often on Monkey Business Radio, we like to step back and talk about one of the fundamental principles behind building a successful business. In this episode, Chris Collins and Dennis Siggins explore the idea of becoming a Category King—a business that focuses on one thing and becomes the company customers think of first when they need that service.

Using examples ranging from 1-800-GOT-JUNK to Dunkin', McDonald's, and even Blockbuster, Chris and Dennis discuss why focus often beats diversification, how to build a strong regional brand without outrunning your coverage, and why owning a category can simplify operations, strengthen your marketing, and create long-term competitive advantages. If you've ever wondered whether it's better to do everything—or become known for doing one thing exceptionally well—this episode is for you. 

Transcript

What A Category King Means

Chris 0:02

Time to time on this podcast, we like to step back and talk about some of the core ideas behind building a successful small business. Today's episode is about one of those ideas, becoming a category king. Topic came up while we were working on a marketing plan, and it reminded us that some of the most successful companies don't try to do everything. They focus on one thing and become the company customers think of first. In this episode, we talk about the power of building a strong regional brand. Why focus gives you a real competitive advantage and why, if you want to build that regional brand, you have to be careful not to outrun your coverage as you grow. We have a great show for you, so grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and welcome to Monkey Business Radio.

Meet The Hosts And The Goal

Chris 0:43

Hello everyone. Welcome to Monkey Business Radio. I'm Chris Collins, and as always, I'm here with my good friend and business partner, Bobby Downspout of the Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys, or as we affectionately call him Dennis. Hello, Dennis.

Dennis 0:55

How are we doing today? Good Chris. Good Chris. Last time I saw you uh was about two weeks ago. We were in Aruba.

Chris 1:01

Yeah. Yeah. It was trying to kick off the new season, and we have a new topic. We've touched on this before. It's called Category Kings. And here at Gutter Monkeys, we kind of feel that that's what we're trying to become. That's our what we've been striving for with the brand. Bobby Downs about brand and whatnot. About the impetus for this podcast came about. We were doing some marketing work and of course using AI, and it kept referring to this term, category king, which we haven't used in the past, but we found it interesting. But it's a great topic to revisit. It's really what makes gutter monkeys special. And why don't we get into it? So, Dennis, why don't you give us sort of your idea of category

Naming That Builds Instant Memory

Chris 1:36

kings? I know we've talked about it in a little different terminology, but Well, you did the research for the start of this, Chris.

Dennis 1:41

You did that, and you mentioned it to me a week or so ago. And I love the concept of category kings. I never use that phrase, but when you want to own andor dominate or become the top dog in a particular category, I guess that's what you're referring to. I mean, my favorite example is 1-800 Got Junk. I still think it's the greatest name because the name is their telephone number and it's also the domain name, the name of the company, it's their website. I mean, everything. It tells you what they do. They do the junk. You know their phone number. I mean, everybody knows it. I have yet to see its equal when it comes to choosing a brandable name and dominating a category. They created a category.

Chris 2:23

Yeah, they absolutely did.

Dennis 2:24

It didn't exist before Brian Scudamore created 1-800 Got Junk. There really wasn't a category.

Focus Beats The Home Services Rollup

Chris 2:30

Yeah. Yeah. And especially as you look at that, going over that in this plan, is that a lot of home service businesses today are kind of doing the opposite. What they're rolling up all these different companies. They're rolling up their siding company, a roofing company, a window company, and a gutter company all into one thing and trying to sell that to customers and to consumers. And so it's kind of an interesting tact to take because we're taking the exact opposite tact, focusing in on one thing, gutters, gutters only, and doing it better than anyone else.

Dennis 2:56

When Andy and I started the gutter monkey, we were just two middle-aged guys, each kind of flirting with semi-retirement, and we struck upon this idea, the Cape Cod gutter monkeys, and everything grew out of that. But before we did that, I mean, I spent a lot of time. I researched the duck boats up in Boston. At the time my brother-in-law was working for them. Their website is phenomenal. Their company culture is amazing. I've also been huge fans of Elliot and Barry, uh, the Jordan's furniture entrepreneurs who took that company over from their mom and dad back in the 70s. And, you know, we all grew up with Elliot and Barry, you know, way back in the beginning when we started the Gutter Monkeys. It was uh almost 12 years ago now. I remember telling Andy, I want to be like Elliot and Barry. I want to be associated with Cape Cod in the way Elliot and Barry and Jordan's furniture, you know, is beloved throughout New England. Yeah.

Building A Regional Brand People Quote

Dennis 3:49

And, you know, I think we're there. One of my coworkers was out at a comedy show the other night, and uh he he came in the next day. He said, Hey, the comic was uh pulled up the name Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys, and he was kind of poking fun at us for there for a couple of minutes when he was up there. We were part of his act, and we don't even know the guy. And I said, you know what? That's really great. Yeah. Because that that that means that I think we're there. You know, you're you you use the term category king, and I kind of like that category, but I think on Cape Cod and Southeastern Mass, I think we're there. I think we've created a category that encompasses gutter cleaning, gutter repairs, gutter maintenance, and also installation of new gutters. I think we've taken that and we've created a category and it's working for us so much so that you know, sometimes I'll be here listening to the radio when it's raining out, and the DJ will start talking about, you know, you got to call the gutter monkeys because of this rain and you got to get your gutters clean. And when a regional comic works you into his act, that's pretty cool. I was kind of flattered when when Bruce came in and told me that. But uh yeah, 1-800 got junk.

Chris 4:53

They created a category. You know, one of the interesting things too about this is that I've kind of learned along the way is that you didn't just fall into this. This has been a thing that you've actually strove for from the very beginning. Absolutely. So it's not your brand is so important, but branding just doesn't happen overnight. You just don't say, Oh, I'm gonna go out and you know create this. It takes a lot of work, 12 years you've been working at it. Yeah, so it's a focused effort to become a category king. It's not something that's just gonna happen, you know. I think it starts with the name. Yeah. Yeah, well, why don't we talk a little bit about something? There's a lot of imitators.

Dennis 5:22

We talk a lot about names here, yeah. There are I mean, marketing and branding, it begins with nothing else but the name. You know, 1-800 Gut Junk is such a phenomenal name. You know, there's two guys in a truck. Yeah, there's uh college hunks, hauling junk, I think. I've seen that out there. But there's nothing that flows off the tongue like 1-800 gut junk. They have like a two-lap lead, and it's a two-mile race. There's eight laps, they got a two-lap lead with that. They're hard, they're hard to catch up to.

Dunkin’ And The Profit Behind Coffee

Dennis 5:51

Um another, you talked about before the show, Dunkin' Donuts. Yeah. And they are a category leader, certainly here in the Northeast, and you know, there's Starbucks out there too. But Dunkin' Donuts, so my dad knew the owners. My dad was in the coffee business 40 plus years. His biggest customer was New England tea and coffee out of Malden. Back when I was a kid in the 70s, 60s, 70s, early 80s, and stuff. I remember then they split and they became New England coffee. I don't know what happened to the tea part of it, but they used to make the coffee, the blends for all of the big boys, including Mr. Donut and Dunkin' Donut. And my dad knew the families, Mr. Dunkin' Donuts, and they're related. And back in the 60s, the two brothers split off. I don't remember the details, but my dad, whenever you got into his car, he was a salesman, there was always boxes of coffee in the backseat. It was Dunkin' Donuts, Mr. Donut, and a few others scattered in there. But I remember meeting one of the regional managers one time. My dad had uh season tickets to the Pats game starting in 73 when they built uh Schaefer Stadium. And every once in a while he'd bring all us kids, and sometimes he'd me and my brother could each bring a friend or something, but he'd bring customers too. And I remember meeting one of the Dunkin' Donuts heavy hitters, and he came to the ballgame with us and he told us I was like in high school or something, he told us about this uh situation in the coffee business. At the time, it cost them four cents to put out a cup of coffee. This is Dunkin' Donuts. And the coffee was like a cent and a half, the sugar and the cream was another cent. And the cup, the lid, and the little stick to stir it was like a penny. The coffee was about a third of the price. When you add in the sugar, the milk, and the cup, the lid, and the stick. So it was like four cents or four and a half cents and thirty cents or something. The profit margin was huge. And yet he was a pastry chef. He had six or seven, he owned a bunch of Duncan Donuts back then. And he used to wake up at two in the morning and he would have to go in and start cooking all these donuts. Remember the guy on the commercial time to make the donuts? Okay, so he was that guy, and yet all the profit is from coffee because the donut, first of all, you have to be a highly skilled pastry chef to learn how to cook all these donuts. You're making the recipes, you're making the frostings and the this and that, and you've got to get in at two in the morning and you got to have things up and running, they got to be ready to go by six. So we'd have to distribute them to all six of his locations. It's a ton of work. And yet you can hire a high school kid and teach him how to push a button on a machine and make a pot of coffee and pour it. And all the profit. He and he told us this back when he used to come to the football games with us. He told us all the profit is in the coffee. But if we don't make the donuts, no one's coming in to buy the coffee. So they were a loss leader, effectively. Yeah. Time has come and gone, and now they're Duncan. They made a clear decision a few years ago to take donuts out of the equation. They're not Dunkin' Donuts anymore, they're Dunkin' with an apostrophe.

Chris 8:58

Which is going to be interesting to see what happened because this is the mistake a lot of these guys make, right? They start out in this focused, you know, he goes a category king and then they try to add new things in. Um, there's a lot of different examples of that in the world. But even 1-800 junk, they did try to expand, but the way he did it is he created a moving company and a painting company, but he didn't roll that into 1-800 junk. He created new companies, category kings, and those interesting. Yep. Yep. So he ended up doing one, I think it's called uh Wow, One Day Painting, I believe is the painting company. They paint houses in one day, supposedly, which I don't know if I'd hire a company that paints my house. I'd want them to take a second day and do it right myself, but but it's probably popular with real estate agents and things like that that need to get a house.

Dennis 9:37

Flip in a house, you need to get it done. Sure, yeah.

Chris 9:39

Yeah. And then uh You Move Me is the other one. It's a uh super fast moving company that does more than just boxes things up. It handles all the other things that you have to do when you go to move.

Dennis 9:49

I would expect a lot I bet a lot of 1-800 got junk's clients and customers are moving. Right. So it's what a neat thing.

Chris 9:56

Yeah, but what was interesting is he didn't roll it into one company, cool. He still kept it as a category king, understanding and recognizing the fact that that's really what makes 1-800 junk such so popular. It's just a straightforward proposition for him. So yeah, it's interesting. And the other thing about Dunkin' Donuts, too, is their regional growth strategy. They started out in New England. They didn't start off, you know, they didn't start franchising out in California. Right. It took years and years before we ended up in California. Uh, Starbucks, a similar thing.

Saying No To Extra Services

Dennis 10:21

Hey, Chris, you were talking before about focus on a single idea versus expanding to many ideas. For example, I've always been in the contracting home service business, and I've always believed focus is better. When I was in the contracting world, I was a roofing contractor. I also built one or two or three custom homes a year, but mostly we were in the roofing business, and that's what my clientele knew us for. When we first started the Gutter Monkeys, it was 2014. There was a group of radio stations here on Cape Cod. It was called Quantum, Quantum Radio. They owned four stations. And somewhere about a year or two into my journey as the owner of the Gutter Monkeys, iHeartRadio bought Quantum. They bought out those four stations and just added four more radio stations to their platform. And one of the iHeart bigwigs was out here and he was hearing our commercials and he thought they were kind of interesting. So he took me out to lunch one day, and we he was talking about marketing. And Johnny Cool, who is the voice of my uh tagline at the end of all my radio commercials, Johnny Cool and myself and this rep from iHeart went out to dinner, and the iHeart person was trying to get me to expand my services, to tell the public that, yeah, these guys are former builders, former carpenters, former painters. They can do windows and doors and siding and roofing, and we can. We can do all those things, but we don't want to do them. I remember the conversation so well. I said, no, we want to be known as the Cape Cod Goddonkeys, not the Cape Cod handymen who do a little bit of everything. And to me, that's kind of the next one of the next two or three steps in branding. Number one, choose that great name. Number two, let your clientele know, let your target market know that this is what you do. I believe that's worked for us. Yeah, we do carpentry as a part of gutter installation, for example. When we take old gutters down, if we find some rot behind there, yeah, we're fully equipped with the tools and the and the product necessary to remove rotted fascia board. We keep trim boards on all the trucks and we replace it. We don't want to be known as carpenters. Carpentry is an ancillary skill set that we use in the process of installing new gutters. We also paint the fascia boards. We scrape, we sand, we seal, we paint all the fascia boards and the corner boards before we hang the new gutters and downspouts. But we don't want to be known as painters. We don't want to be known as carpenters. And that's by design. I remember having that conversation where the the iHeart marketing guy wanted us to demonstrate through our marketing on their radio stations that we do more than just gutters, but we don't. We want to be known as those guys. Yeah. I'm not 1-800 gut junk yet, but maybe someday I will. But we want to own the category in Massachusetts.

Chris 13:08

Yeah.

Branding That Ends Price Shopping

Chris 13:09

Yeah, it's interesting. I had a conversation with a young guy. He's got his own little gutter company. He does gutters, he does some roofing, he does all kinds of different things. And he was kind of complaining. He's getting he's bidding for these jobs and gutters and always getting outbid. And he's not in when he does get them, he's way too low, you know, on the price and things like that. He's not making any money. And I kind of went back to a conversation we had, and he was in here at one time before, is that, you know, when you live rent-free inside someone's brain and they need gutters and they pick up the phone and call you, you know, price is not going to be the number one thing on their mind. Right. They got a problem, they want it fixed, and they're going to call the gutter monkeys because they do gutters, right? They're not going to call Ray's landscaping or Bob's Roofing or this other thing. Now, maybe sometimes, but that's not going to be their focus. And I was trying to explain that to him, and he was having a hard time accepting it. And he said, Well, I got a name, I got a truck, I got all this other stuff. And I said, But you don't brand. You're not branding that, right? You're just representing yourself in different medias, social media posts, and things like that. So it's interesting that you came up with this again, talking about it today, is that you know it's so important to have this brand out there because when you're living rent-free in someone's brain, that's part of branding.

Dennis 14:10

I make that huge advantage. Think of what branding is. A brand is we think of it as a known commodity, Coca-Cola. We all have a I got a Coke bottle right here because I like a Coke can, because I drink Coca-Cola once in a while. That's a brand. We think of that. Well, a brand is something that they used to put on a cattle's hip. They would take a hot branding iron and brand his hip. Now he's branded. I am the farmer or the rancher that owns that cow because my brand is on him. And all my other cows have that same brand. Well, I look at branding as that's what you'd want to do on their brain. You want to take a hot iron and brand the name of your company on the brain of every single one of your target market. So as you say, or we always say around here, we want to be living in their head rent-free. We want to be living in their brain. We want our brand to be stuck in their brain. Listen, not everybody wants to be a category leader. In fact, I would say most small business owners want to stay small. Yeah. They want to be a one or two or three-person operation. They want to simplify things and keep it simple. And that's okay. Yeah. Because there's 40 million of those types of businesses here in America that are small owner operated. And that's just fine. But if you do want to grow, if you want to grow outside your neighborhood, outside your town, and outside your region, I think if you have a really great brandable name, that's number one. And number two, be focused on doing what you

Streamlining Trucks Training And Prep Time

Dennis 15:39

do. Right.

Chris 15:39

And doing it well. And there's other up, you know, there's other things that come from that. And certainly complexity comes from that. You know, a lot of these companies have, you know, again, if you're a roofer and a uh gutter guy and you do siding and shinglings, you know, your life is a lot more complex from your office staff to your tools, your trucks, everything is much more complex for you. So that's one of the things here that always have impressed me here is the way this operation runs, gutter monkeys runs. It's very streamlined and it's amazing. And you've talked about this too, how you, you know, it's a great advantage for you in terms of your competitors. You know, your trucks are on the road by six o'clock in the morning, seven o'clock in the morning when they're still loading up because today they've got a rotion job as opposed to a better job.

Dennis 16:18

I talk to my my friends in the trades all the time. One in particular I can think of, and he runs a small business. He has about himself and maybe four, a staff of four. And they're good carpenters, every one of them. Andrew, my friend, is an excellent carpenter. His top two guys are very, very good carpenters, and his laborers are pretty good carpenters. They have a good skill set. And one of the things that's very common, and I've discussed this with my friend Andrew a number of times, is the amount of time they spend in the shop every morning. Now they may have done a roof yesterday and finished it up, and they pull the trucks in. So now they got one truck, maybe the dump truck is loaded with debris. They got to get that to the dump. And the other truck is loaded with all the roofing tools and, you know, air guns and all the tools and apparatus for roofing. They got to get that all out of there because today they're building a deck. And then they got to get in the shop saw, the skill saw, they got to load up and they got to check their list every day because every day you're doing something different. And that morning changeover can be anywhere from one to two hours. And if you've got four guys on the clock, that's anywhere from four to eight man hours spent in the morning just getting ready to go to work. Right. Yep. And you're you're 100% right. We only have two kinds of trucks here in my warehouse. We have three gutter installation trucks and they're big box trucks, and they're fully rigged up and ready to go to install gutters every day. And then we have 12 of these uh Toyota Tacomas and they're service trucks, and probably eight of them are rigged up for gutter cleaning. So my gutter cleaning crews, they come in every morning, they make a coffee, they kind of hang out for a few minutes, they check the list to make sure they have enough elbows or downspouts or whatever they need, and they get in the truck and they go. There's virtually no prep, maybe five minutes of prep. And at the end of the day, when they pull in, yeah, maybe they went through a few elbows and a couple of downspouts or some fasteners. So they just change out, replace, and that truck is ready for tomorrow morning. What we're talking about is streamlining that process. And I've had friends in here, friends in the trades, come in and watch this and say, Oh my gosh, that is so smooth. Right. It is so easy. You just put 16 men out in the field and none of them were in here much longer than five or 10 minutes, and none of them were working hard. They're all getting a coffee and they're hanging out and they're talking about the ball game last night. And yeah, that's another part about it, it doesn't matter whether you're in the pizza business or the restaurant world or the gutter cleaning world or 1-800 got junk. If you streamline, boy, the efficiency is amazing because the model is efficient. But when you've got 20 guys on the field that have been doing it every day for years, it even becomes more efficient. Yeah, it's it's a thing of beauty. That's another one of the benefits of choosing a great name and choosing a great system and then streamlining that process.

Chris 19:08

Yeah.

Dennis 19:08

Well, growth is easy too because you're training the same people to do the same thing all the time.

Chris 19:12

Yeah. So it's a little counterintuitive, and I always find that kind of interesting. So because most of the people we'll talk to out in the world out there will tell you that a small business, you know, you to grow, you have to do all these things, you have to offer all these products and stuff like that. Where it's actually the complete opposite of that. You know, by streamlining what you do, it allows you to grow faster. You know, training, all this stuff, your office staff, everything else becomes simpler

Regional Growth Without Outrunning Coverage

Chris 19:32

for you.

Dennis 19:32

There's a lot of misconceptions in business. You know, I used to kind of chuckle at this one phrase that we've all heard it. People would say, because I've been self-employed since I was a kid. And, you know, uh, I've owned, like I owned a restaurant for 10 years, I've owned construction companies, I've done a lot of different things and fun things. And people will say, hey, it takes money to make money. Well, yeah, that's just, but that's so juvenile almost the phrase. And when you get past that, you have other phrases that are just so simplistic, but they're not necessarily correct. And there's a lot of, let's say, in the trades, for example, I know a lot of guys that are in the trades and they do a whole variety of things like roofing, siding, windows, doors, framing, frame to finish. You hear it all the time. And that's the way to grow is to offer more services. But what you're indicating is there's a different method of growth. And I like that method of growth where you penetration within your region and then expansion outside of your region using the same skill set and not expanding your services, right? Focusing. Because you're right, I want to be that company where if somebody out there says, I need my gutters cleaned, I'm gonna call the gutter monkeys. That's what I want. I don't want him to say, should I call a handyman? Do I call a roofer? No, I I just want to be living in his brain before he needs new gutters, right? Before he needs his downspout blew off the house. We get so many calls because the downspout blew off a house. Right. And that's our first contact with him. We go in, we reinstall the downspout. We usually clean the gutters when we're there, and now we've established a new customer just because, as you say, we've been living in his head long before he needed us. Right. And when he did, we were there. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember the do you remember the shaving clubs over the past 10, 15 years? Yep. It's a tremendous battle. And they're selling you razors. You call in, you go online, whatever the method is as we get more and more sophisticated, and you click it and they deliver your razor blades. You can buy a membership. They'll deliver your razor blades one day a month. They'll do four of them or eight of them, whatever the number is. There were so many of them I can't even remember, but these shave clubs, then they want to get you to buy their after shave and their shaving cream and their lotions and get you on board for a bigger monthly subscription. And then came another and another, and there were five or six or seven of them. And And something like seventy percent of their projected sales dollars was spent on marketing. Yeah, absolutely. Because the profit margin in razor blades is razor blades and shape well, it's big. The profit margin is really high, but what eats up most of that profit is marketing. Yeah. And every time, let's say there were six at one time, if one falls off, the other five remaining each got a little piece of that. Yeah. And now their footprint has grown a little without any additional marketing. And then the fourth one or fifth one falls off, and they each get a little more. I haven't seen, I haven't researched it, but I remember back in the day I was watching these and I would go online and look at these and say, there was a battle in this industry. And in the end, there's only going to be one left. And he's going to be king of this category. I don't see them out there. I don't know if the category faded. I don't know if the Yeah, you certainly don't hear about it as often. You couldn't even turn on a football game without seeing at least five or six or seven of them.

Chris 22:58

Yeah. And you probably got broke because of spending all their money on marketing. But that is the problem with social media. Like, you know, if you go on social media, of course, they'll tell you the way you brand is you do this. This is what you do. You spend an absolute fortune, you know, talking about your product and all this other stuff. But there's no barrier entry, uh, there's no regionalization. So you're talking across the entire planet. You know, it's just sort of a sort of a, you know, this is the way you do it nowadays. And what I find so refreshing uh from the day I walked in here is this it's just not the way it's done. It's done, it's hard work. I mean, what you've done, branding and stuff like that. But this being able to do it regionally is just so important because it just allows you to, you know, you're not outrunning your coverage. I guess is the term I was kind of using today. Sure, you're right. You're not outrunning your coverage, you're not trying to grow into areas where you're not advertising because it's not gonna do you any good.

Dennis 23:42

Well, if you're not set up, if you're not set up to go there, then you can't service those people. So you're not only advertising dollar as being blown out into the wind, you're also creating a bad image. Right. Because people are gonna say, Well, I called them and they don't even service our area. I don't like those guys. Yeah, it's so important. Another misconception that kind of just snuck in here as we were talking.

When A High Bounce Rate Wins

Dennis 24:08

One of my franchisees was talking to me one time and he said he has a friend who teaches business at Harvard, and our business model is weak in this one area. And he looked into our websites and we have a high bounce rate. Now he teaches some form of business or marketing. I don't know who the guy is, but so my franchisee said, we need to fix this. Do you know what a bounce rate is? Yeah. Okay. I didn't until this conversation. When someone goes to your website, a traditional webmaster would want to get you, the potential customer, to go onto the front page and then click the bar and find an interesting page and spend 15, 20 minutes and go to eight different pages within the website and start to immerse yourself in that website. And if people go to your front page and they don't like it, they leave. That's called a bounce. Somebody went to your front page and they bounced right off of there. One of the things that Andy and I put in our mission statement way back in the beginning when we first started was that the website's primary objective is to validate the marketing that we do in the other areas. It wasn't the steering wheel. The website is the spare tire. So what I find with virtually all of my new customers, if they go to my website, they bounce right away because they found what they were looking for on the front page. They're not looking for gutterology reports, they're not looking for theories and strategies on gutters. No, they're looking for a phone number. That's all they're looking for. They've heard us on the radio, they've seen us on the TV, they've seen our trucks driving through their neighborhoods. They're looking for one thing and one thing only, a phone number, and it's on the front page. So they go to the front page, find what they're looking for, and they bounce. That's not only something that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It's actually the goal. It's kind of got lost in all the hype and whatnot. Right? Yeah. And my best customer doesn't go to my website. He or she knows my phone number because they hear it all the time on the radio. You know, call 508-477-9100, and boom, they write it down and they stick it on the refrigerator. They never have to go to my website. That's my best customer. My second best customer is the one who bounces. Yeah. He just wants to have new gutters. He just wants to have his gutters cleaned. He has a downspout that blew off in the last storm. He's looking for the Cape Cod gutter monkeys, and he finds my phone number on the front page and he or she bounces. That to me is perfect execution. Yeah. So there's a lot of theories and a lot of strategies that some of them apply and some of them don't. Yeah.

Chris 26:55

Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. Again, it kind of goes back to my story about my friend that was doing the uh the gutter business and struggling. Again, a lot of his business is, you know, based off of his website, you know, and he's buying leads and things like that off of the websites, and it's just, you know, it's just all sort of garbage. Everyone who's ever dealt with leads before knows, you know, 98% of the stuff you get is garbage. Oh, it's right out of the phone book. But where are they getting these leads from? They're getting them from websites, you know, and it's just it's just such a mess.

Franchises And Expanding The Right Way

Dennis 27:22

We're still on the topic of category kings. I like being a leader in the industry, and I think we've definitely established that leadership position in the areas that we function. And you know, our medium-range goal is to open up five or six, seven more franchises here in Massachusetts so that we can then go right to the big radio stations in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield and not outrun our coverage. Right, right. Right, exactly. So this is we're just following the process that 1-800 got junk did. Nobody, nobody goes online to look up the telephone number of McDonald's. Yeah. Right? I don't even think there's a phone number. No. They're gonna go out to McDonald's because the kids want to have a burger and they're gonna, you know, that's that's the story there.

Chris 28:11

Yeah, I wonder what the bounce rate is for 1-800 junk's website.

Dennis 28:16

Never thought of that. We do have a 1-800 Gut Junk, and they're only two streets over from us. And they're right near my old building, a building that we used to own and and operate out of. And they have a couple of trucks, and I don't know the owners of the franchise, but I see them all the time, and we all we wave to each other. But uh That reminds me of that great story of dumpsters, you know how the term dumpster came along.

Chris 28:37

You told me. Go ahead and tell me again. I forget. It was really interesting. There was a guy named Dumpster, basically. And he he owned a bunch of trucks, and basically he would take uh, I think it was New York City or someplace, but he would take, you know, construction refuse off of you know construction sites, right? So he'd haul it all out. And uh the problem was he had to have a guy sitting there in the truck waiting for the guy to fill his truck up, and sometimes the guys were on break. Oh, right, okay. So basically he took the back of his pickup, uh, back of his dump trucks off and left them and came up with a way of hauling them back onto his trucks and driving off. You know what they call them now?

Dennis 29:05

Uh roll-on roll-offs. Roll offs. Yeah, roll off.

Chris 29:07

They're called roll-offs. That's what they're called in the waste industry. So he came up with that. No kidding. Wow.

Dennis 29:12

Yeah, that's funny.

Chris 29:13

So didn't know that. His name was Dumpster. And I think the story went, and I'll have to check on this, but uh the story went is basically he came up with the company and everything like that, and he was gonna call it, you know, Joe Blow's, you know, refuse removal service or something like that, right? And someone said to him, he said, Wait a minute, your name is dumpster. You know, what it's dumpster. So okay, well, he called the company dumpster. That's where the name came from. It was actually patented, I believe, and trademark. I'm sure it was the trademark has run off on it. But uh yeah, talk about a perfect branding name. But that's what he did. He specialized in just roll-on, roll-off dumpsters and uh guess the rest is history for that, created an entire industry off of that.

Dennis 29:52

There's a comic out of New Jersey. I I forget his name, but my son really likes him. And oh my god, I can't believe I forget his name. But funny guy. And one day I was watching him on Comedy Central, and he says, as I was driving down the road, and a big old dump truck passed me with ladders and all kinds of stuff piled up there, and this definitely looked like a vehicle that was being worked. And on the side of it, it said Fiedler's Roofing. Oh, yeah. And he says, it hit me, Fiedler's Roofing doesn't ring a bell, but he says, Fiedler on a roof should be his name. And I just thought that is very funny. And yes, that should be his name. Yeah, yeah. So close. He was so close. But dumpster, I mean, that's that's funny. Yeah, yeah. That's how it kind of came about.

Pricing Power From Trust And Scarcity

Dennis 30:35

I want to go back to the coffee thing because there's an interesting piece of coffee that I became aware of. When I was in high school, I worked at a Howard Johnson's and I used to scoop ice cream, and I was a waiter and a dishwasher and a cook. I did everything over there. And I was at that restaurant for four years. It wasn't a great job, to be honest with you, but it was high school, and that's what we did. And in the 70s, it's tremendous inflation, as we've discussed so many times, and you see it everywhere now when you look for it. And I remember coffee went up in price. It went up 40% on the commodities market. And we used to charge 25 cents for a coffee at Howard Johnson's, and overnight they marked it up to 40 cents. And this is when my dad told me about the cost of coffee. You know, a cup of coffee cost a penny and a half, and the sugar and the milk cost a penny and a half, and the cup and the lid cost a penny and a half, but he said the cup of coffee sells for 25 cents. That penny and a half that accounts for the coffee went to about two and a half cents. And the price of sugar and milk or cream didn't go up, the price of the coffee in the lid and the little stick didn't go up, and the price of all the water that you're pouring that makes it nothing else went up. So the cost of a cup of coffee, the coffee went from a penny and a half to two and a half cents. And the total cost of that coffee went delivered went from you know four and a half cents to five and a half cents. But Howard Johnson's took the opportunity to raise price from 25 cents to 40 cents. And I remember people were so unaware, as I was, I was 14 or 15, you know, when I was working tables in the dining room, and the price of coffee had just gone up to 40 cents. And there was a little sign on the tables letting them know this because they hadn't made the new menus yet. And everyone, no one complained. They said, Oh, yeah, I get that. I I understand that. Coffee just, you know, on the commodities went through the roof. And the cost of coffee is such a small percentage of the price of the cup of coffee. But that was one of those, you know, critical things. And, you know, Howard Johnson's, like probably a lot of restaurants, took the opportunity to raise their price. We had a huge increase in aluminum cost post-COVID. For years and years, we would pay about 93 cents a pound for our large coils. These are seven, eight hundred-pound uh round coils of aluminum that we use to make gutters. And the price or the cost of aluminum went from 93 cents a pound to four dollars and twenty-five cents a pound post-COVID in about a seven, eight month period. It just kept climbing and climbing. We had to raise our price. The price went from under a dollar to more than four dollars, it went up over four hundred percent, but nothing else. I mean, labor went up a little bit. So we didn't raise our prices 400%. We raised them about 25 to 30 percent. And that was to cover the cost of the aluminum and a few other little things that had gone up. But but yeah, in the coffee world, I remember coffee went up literally a penny per cup, and the restaurant I worked at raised its prices 25 cents. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris 33:43

Interesting. It's kind of interesting to kind of tie it back to category kings, is that you know, Howard Johnson could probably get away with that, right? That's the power of that brand. I mean, your mom and pop coffee shop probably wouldn't get away with a 25% or a 50% increase. I'm sure they increased their prices. Sure. They could not take advantage of it, but that's the power of being the Howard Johnson's brand, right? It's it's just the you know, people, it's Howard Johnson's, it must be okay. I'll pay 40 cents for it.

Dennis 34:06

Well, the other thing is we were on the mass pike. Yeah, that helps they have no competition. Yeah, there wasn't a food court back then. You just pull in and you've got a Exxon station for gas and a Howard Johnson's a restaurant, and then we also had like the ice cream and the counter section if you just want to grab a cup of coffee to fly. Yeah, and that was always busy too on the mass pike. But but yeah, they we didn't have any competition, so they could almost charge whatever they wanted, and they kind of did. They were definitely pricey, but that's the way highway rest areas and service stations are.

Chris 34:36

Yeah, they're all gone today. Actually, there's still a couple of hotels around, I think, like the Hojo's, yeah.

Dennis 34:41

Yeah, I think same thing with uh friendlies. Yeah, they they took a beating about 10 years ago, and I don't know what happened to them. They were kind of a category leader back here in New England because they started out, I think, in Wilburham.

Chris 34:52

Yeah.

Category Kings That Failed To Pivot

Chris 34:53

But occasionally, if you are a category king, there does come a time where fate hands you something you have to change. Correct. You know, right? You can't just keep going on the you know, Blockbuster was a category king. Like if you're gonna rent a video back in the day, you went to Blockbuster. There was nobody else. There might be mom and pop around, but there was nobody else. And yet handwriting was on the wall. Yeah, that that technology was changing and they did not change. They did not become the Netflix, which they probably should have. And that's kind of a good idea. Well, you do have to pivot, you know. Category King doesn't virtually guarantee that you're gonna own that category forever. It can venture out. Remember um Prime Computer?

Dennis 35:27

Yeah. A lot of people outside of New England, even Massachusetts, didn't know Prime, but they were growing rapidly in the 70s into the mid-80s. And my sister, my oldest sister, worked there. She was a brilliant software engineer. And she never actually took a computer course. She was a math major out of Assumption College in Worcester, and she's a brilliant mathematician. And she just gravitated right into computer programming. And over time she grew and her reputation grew. She did a lot of stuff like what you did, Chris. She worked on short and medium-length contracts for different companies. Some were startups, some were looking to branch out, but she was very young, probably a VP at Prime Computer, and they kept pushing the hardware over the software. And they didn't know what Bill Gates knew. They didn't know that Microsoft was coming around the corner. And they had gun to mini computers. We went from mainframes and they kept getting smaller, but even mini computers are giant compared to, you know, by today's standards. And the general philosophy amongst the brain trust in that company is that computers can't get any smaller. And so they had these giant, bulky things that took up an awful lot of room on your desk, and in the room on underneath your desk, and over in the corner were these giant pieces of equipment that would vanish within a couple of years.

Chris 36:52

And that was the end of Prime Computer. Yeah, it was sad because I worked for Wang Labs during that period. Sure. Of course, they were selling mainframes and minis and thought the world was going to be s mainframes and minis as deck did. A lot of these companies did IBM. They all believed it. The weird thing about that was I was working on a PC group. So we had a PC group. And uh they never gave us any credit or never really pushed us because no one believed that PCs were going to be anything. And at the time, I believe we were probably selling. We were the only company actually that were allowed to sell and use IBM technology and our PCs because they had so many patents themselves that were weighing patents. So we could have been PC Junior of the day, you know, which launched the whole PC industry. But everyone, like you said, wanted to be in the minis, they wanted to be in the mainframes and small computers. No one's gonna need who's gonna need a computer on their desk? I think Ken Olson said that from DEC. No, why would anyone need a home computer? You know, that doesn't make any sense. So yeah. Well, the internet hadn't been invented. Yeah, Dell Computer came along and all these guys. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. So yeah, you do have the pivot. If things aren't going your way, a category king doesn't guarantee that you're gonna be category king forever, but certainly gives you a leg up on your on your competitors when you uh establish that brand, establish that category.

Dennis 38:03

So when you are a category king, especially like 1-800 gut junk, they're not only a category king, they created the category. So first comes the innovators, then comes the imitators, and then comes the whole rest of society. And the category king, in this case, we'll take 1-800 gut junk, they created the category and they've held that position. Yeah. You know, McDonald's did too. But over time, you know, Burger King and Wendy's, you know, they they take big, big bites out of that. It's hard to hold that position of the category king. And McDonald's did create the fast food industry. They created the drive-thru for food. And then came Burger King, Wendy's. I mean, how many others out there have drive-thru windows? Dunkin' Donuts. Almost every one of them has a drive-thru window. But holding on to that position, as we just talked about, look at the technologies. Yeah. Some leaders in that industry crumbled immediately because it's a technology-based business. Yeah. And once one little thing, you know, the old movies we were talking about, Blockbuster. Once you can get them in your home, I'm not going out to the mall to rent a few movies. And I remember when the kids were little, we'd we'd go out and you rent five. Yeah. And, you know, and then you go back every Friday and you change them in and you got your movies for the weekend. Yeah. We don't have to do that anymore.

Chris 39:23

Imagine the corporate staff they had sitting in those buildings and no one lifted a finger to do anything about it. I'm sure there's people in the building screaming at the time, you gotta do something, gotta do something. I actually an interesting one just popped into my brain. I wish I can remember the guy's name, but uh, we were at my um son's graduation at the RPI, and one of the speakers was the guy who invented the photovoltaic cell that was used in cameras at Kodak. And uh he had the whole story. It was a fascinating story. Actually, we should talk about that someday on one of the podcasts. Absolutely fascinating story. How he fought, you know, for Kodak. You know, this is the gonna be the future. We have this chip. I invented it. You have the technology, you have the patents, you own the whole thing. Here's what's available to him. And he could not sell it to the company. The company remained as a film company pretty much right up to the end. He ended up leaving in the end. But they could have ruled the digital camera market, and Kodak just would not do it. They could not get off of film. They were making so much money, there was such a high profit on film at the time. And overnight, boom, instantly gone. Whole film industry wiped out. Amazing. Yeah. And all those little blue photo booths. Remember those little blue photo booths and all the parking lot. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, you could photo. Photo mat, photo mat.

Dennis 40:32

Right, right. You could drop your stuff off, and some of them had one hour. Yeah, there's a category king for you that's not around anymore.

Walmart Amazon And Modern Convenience

Dennis 40:38

I know. Even now, look at uh Walmart is going into the um the Amazon business. They're delivering everything to your door. I'm doing a renovation project at my house. We ordered, I couldn't find these really beautiful um faucets for the uh bathroom. So it's a double sink, so I needed two of them. Found them on Amazon. Beautiful brush nickel, they're just kind of a really unique shape to them, and that's what I wanted. I found them on Amazon. We ordered two of them. They were at my on my front deck, dropped off on my front porch the following morning. Yeah. And boom, we're up and running again. Yeah, it's incredible. It's what they can do is amazing. Ordering the knobs, I couldn't find the knobs that I wanted for the new shelving and stuff and the and the new cabinetry that we were building. You just go on Amazon and I order a box of 25 knobs. I think I need 12 or 14 of them, but if you buy and buy the bag, they're real cheap. So, all right, let me just get a bag of 25. Boom. It was dropped off yesterday. Yeah. So yeah, it's amazing this technology, and it's changed retail drastically. Walmart has weathered the storm. Uh, they're still the number one retailer in the world, and now they're doing what Amazon does. They'll deliver anything to your home.

Chris 41:52

Yeah, yeah, it was kind of weird. I've doing a lot of uh remodeling at my house as well, and I'm looking for molding, a lot of different moldings and stuff like that. And it's an old house that's got some strange molding, you know, it's all old wood with different dimensions and stuff like that. It's not not I'm amazed all the time because I'm searching for different pieces of molding, different pieces of lumber and things like that. And Walmart's coming up with deliveries and like three-day delivery from Walmart. I can go out and get a two by four, 16 footer from Walmart. And the price is pretty reasonable. And it's you know, it's PFJ, you know, the uh pine finger-jointed stuff, you know. Yeah, order from Walmart. It's crazy. But yeah, Category King, yeah. I mean, they owned it, you know.

Dennis 42:28

And Walmart is still the leader, and and so Walmart and uh Amazon. They are the retail giants, and somehow they both exist. Yeah.

Chris 42:35

Which is kind of another interesting aspect, I guess, and kind of running out of time here to talk about too, is that Category King does allow you, once you've established it to the point where you just own it, it does allow you some leeway then to kind of expand into other areas.

Unexpected Perks Of Being The Leader

Dennis 42:48

I can say so, with all my companies that I've owned, my current company, the Gutter Monkeys, and all of our associates' uh gutter monkeys, has been the best in so many ways. Just so many ways. And being the owner of that business in that category has given us, Andy and myself, my lifelong friend and business partner, we have had so many beautiful, amazing things that have just landed in our lap that we simply did not expect. And that's a story for another time. But yeah, when you have a regional industry leading business like we do, it's great because you make good money and we hire good people. We're able to pay our people well, we create jobs every day. You know, we're a part of the business community because we buy a new truck every year or so, every two years, we buy a group of trucks. It's a wonderful thing. But there's another thing that often happens is things that were not available to us. Like we go to the ballgame all the time. We've never bought a ticket to a ball game. We'll go, one of our clients is taking us to the Red Sox game. And um, and you're I think you're going, right? Is it? Yeah, I hope so. There's a bunch of them coming up.

Chris 43:56

Yeah.

Dennis 43:57

I've got tickets to the Eagles in Boston Garden just through the contacts in my business, and I don't go asking them for this. These radio stations and TV stations, they know me after a while. And yeah, we go to ball games, we go to we got a bunch of stuff coming up that's covered by them. Yeah. And it's just because we're a fun group of people. We're always we spend a lot of money marketing with them, and the return that we get is just great. It's just really cool. And and we can kind of end on that. Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. All right. Well, it's a great show.

Chris 44:29

Good to have you back, Chris. Yeah, it's nice to be back. Uh, we're gonna try to get a couple more episodes in. We got a couple of guests coming up, so that'll be fun. Guests are always fun. Okay. All right. No monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast. That's right. We'll see you next week.

Final Thoughts And Listener Requests

Chris 44:46

Thank you for tuning in to Monkey Business Radio. If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to subscribe, like, and follow us wherever you get your podcast. It really helps us reach more aspiring entrepreneurs like you. If you got a question or topic you'd like us to cover, leave a comment or reach out to us on social media. We'd love to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review if you found the episode valuable, and make sure to share it with anyone who might benefit from our tips and stories. We'll see you next time. This podcast is produced by American Gutter Monkeys LLC. Build real wealth through business ownership. For details, visit us at American Guttermonkeys.com.