In The Thick of It

I think it's really important, whether it's a family

member or any partner, is to define roles.

There needs to be an opera grading agreement in place.

If this happens, who makes that sort of final decision?

If there's only two of you, somebody

ultimately has to make that decision.

Who's going to be the one responsible for sales?

Who's going to be the one responsible for operations?

You got to clearly define what those roles are.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

No one can do it alone.

When starting a business, Seth Frey, founder

and president of Big Frey, learned many

lessons from navigating through partnerships and changes

in the promotional products industry.

Seth has his family to thank

for his earliest beginnings with entrepreneurship.

After college, he and his brother

started Granny's Goodies, a small business

selling exam survival kits to students.

With more business experience under his belt, he

launched Big Frey Branded Goods and Swag Kits.

Seth advises entrepreneurs to celebrate the small

wins and focus more on

goals rather than short term setbacks.

Tune in to hear more

of Seth's lifelong entrepreneurial journey.

Joining us today on in the thick of it is Seth Frey.

Based in the Chicago area, he's been in

business for a little over 20 years.

His firm is Big Frey and super excited to get into it.

Seth, let's start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up?

What were things like as a kid for you?

First of all, thanks so much for having me, Scott.

I love opportunities like this.

I really like to talk to

solid individuals that like yourself.

And so thanks again for the opportunity

to share what's been going on.

So I grew up outside of DC.

I didn't really want for much.

Mom and dad both work.

My father was an attorney and my mom, funny

enough, she actually was the entrepreneur in the world.

She started up a business a little bit later on

in life, I think, when I was in 7th grade.

But I grew up in the suburbs of DC, swam year round,

had a pretty normal life on the middle of three boys.

My older brother's handful of years older, but my

younger brother is eleven months younger than me.

I always tell him that you were the mistake

to make sure he understood exactly what's going on.

But I've got this amazing

relationship with my brothers.

It's developed my character and who I

am and I'm really grateful for that.

But yeah, so suppers were great.

Growing up was pretty awesome.

I call it sort of living in La la Land.

I know now how fortunate I was to grow

up in a place where the family dynamic was

solid, and that gave us real opportunity.

Even when I started the first iteration of

my business, it was in my folks basement.

How supportive they were.

My business.

Are you cool if I just jump right

into it, Scott tell you about that?

Why don't we give just a little taste, and then

we'll kind of work our way through your story?

I just started a business out of college

called Granny's goodies, which is converted into sort

of where I'm at right now.

And we can talk a little bit.

That was more of a care package business, but

there's some funny stories, which I'll share when we

get to that point of the conversation.

But growing up, it was just, there was a

lot of laughing, a lot of love, a lot

of support that I'm super grateful for.

And I really try to lean into that

experience with my own kids as well.

And as you mentioned, I live in the

suburbs of Chicago right now after going to

college at the University of Wisconsin. All right.

Like, academic wise, what kind of student were you?

Were you, like, super in the books, like, real

buttoned up, or were you a little bit more

free when it came to your studies?

Yeah, you know, I went to a smaller school.

My folks were pretty heavy on the academics.

They, you know, so from the standpoint of,

just make sure you get your work done.

So I was a pretty solid student.

I mean, I went national honor

society, that kind of stuff.

And academics were an important piece, but there was

always a huge balance with sports as well, and

getting involved in some community type stuff, as well

as certainly within school as well.

So I was certainly not a hellraiser.

I wasn't causing big amounts of problems.

But I think my older brother went to

public school, and he had some problems, and

he's a totally different individual than myself.

But my parents sort of pushed us in a

different direction, me and my younger brother, because of

the shenanigans that my older brother got involved with,

and so the experiences that he had.

So I think it was a very sort of.

That also helped me develop, I think, my social acumen by

being within a smaller school, a little more hand holding, because

going to a school where there was 40 kids in the

class, and then when it came time for college, I was

like, I want the antithesis of that.

And I look back and I think that we were

sort of stifled a little bit by living in a

smaller school, but it's probably better for our development.

So we didn't get involved in some of the shenanigans

because then I went off to college and went to

a massive university, and I couldn't get enough of that.

I was going to say, that's a big jump,

going from 40 students in your class to big,

big public school like University of Wisconsin.

Yeah, Madison's a special, special place.

And it was, yeah, I think it was.

I just needed to breathe, and I loved it.

I thought, I know sometimes a lot of my friends were

going, they're like, how could you go to that big school?

They went to much smaller institutions, and.

But for me, I just.

The more, the merrier, the more I got to meet people.

And that aligned a little bit

more so with my personality.

And I loved it there.

Well, that's not only a big jump to go from a

40 person class to University of Wisconsin, but, I mean, it's

not exactly right around the corner from Washington, DC.

It isn't like, what was the, and it's really cold.

What was the, what was the impetus

to go out to the midwest?

So my old man went to MIT, and my older

brother went to Pennilesse, was at the Wharton school there.

And so I saw some of the experiences

by going to visit him in Philadelphia.

He's four years older, and for a whole bunch

of reasons, I'm sure, had to do financially.

And dad wanted me to go to a

place that he had some familiarity with.

And also, I think, was a little bit less expensive.

And so when I had, one of my best

friends was there, I went to go visit her.

I had an aunt that had been before

medical school, had gone to Wisconsin for some

program that was a couple of years.

So my dad had some familiarity with there.

And obviously, it was a lot less

expensive than going to a private institution.

And so that sort of checked the box.

And when I got there to visit, it's funny you

say that about the cold, because I went to visit,

and it was 50 degrees, it was January.

People are running outside, the kids are out and about.

And I'm thinking to myself, it's not that cold.

I can handle this.

And fast forward.

I remember my freshman year.

It's blue skies, the same exact time of the year.

And I took one step out of

the dorm and turned right back around.

It was just ridiculous.

I mean, even there were times, I mean, when

you're going through it, everybody else, and you're young,

so everybody else is sort of enduring the frigidity.

But we would walk down Langdon.

Langdon street is like fraternity, sorority row would walk

down there, and at the end there's memorial union,

which sits on a lake and you'd walk through

the union to warm up before you started walking

up Bascom Hill, which is.

Have you seen pictures of Wisconsin?

That's sort of like the main shot

that they have of the university.

Abe Lincoln sits at the statue

at the top of Bascom Hill.

It's actually where I proposed to my

wife at the top of Bascom Hill.

She obviously went to Wisconsin, too, so.

But, yeah, so the cold had some familiarity with it,

and I wanted to also get away, and that allowed

me to check all those sort of boxes and.

But the badgers were terrible in

football when I went there.

I mean, literally, I think, won four

games in college in four years. In four years.

I mean, wow. Terrible.

Something like that.

But they have something in Wisconsin called fifth quarter

where the band goes out and starts playing all

these crazy songs and alma mater and dancing and

singing and, like, the students are going bananas.

So we would just go for fifth quarter

and have a whole bunch of fun.

And then my senior year, they brought in Barry

Alvarez, who has been like a God, and Madison

bringing them to Rose Bowls and whatnot.

And literally a couple years later, they went to

the Rose bowl after like 20 years, and now

they are just perennial football, I wouldn't say powerhouse.

They're pretty good.

They always seem to hang. They just.

My badgers just can't get over that

hunt to get a national title.

We were on the precipice in hoops a

few years ago, but we'll get there.

Well, when you're in the Big ten, you're.

You're going up against Michigan.

You're going up against the Ohio State. That's right.

That's a tough, you know, that's

a tough conference to be in. Yeah, yeah.

And now there's even more coming in USCs and the like.

So, anyway, don't get me started

on conference realignment and nil.

That's a whole other podcast.

But, man.

So outside of class, what were you into?

Or were you in a position where you just

kind of did class and hung with your friends?

Were you involved in things?

Did you have a job? Yeah.

So I did have a job.

So I, that was sort of

my first taste in entrepreneurialism.

I had an ice cream truck in college.

Me, myself, and a buddy, we were

trying to figure out something to do.

You bought an ice cream truck as a college student?

We did.

So we bought this ice cream truck and we saw

an ad in the paper because I'm 54 and there

were papers back then, ad in the paper and some

guy was like selling his ice cream business.

And so we're like, oh, that sounds interesting.

So it was basically a truck that was an

old post office truck and it had a freezer

inside and then a generator, talk about unsafe.

That was in this like metal basket off the front

of the vehicle that we put the generator in. Right.

So we had to make sure that we had distance

between us and the car in front of us.

We had a speaker playing, you

know, kids tunes and whatnot.

And we had a friend of ours who was

in the art school repaint the whole thing.

So it had like caricatures of us

on the side, amazing business, huge margins.

And it was great because no kid is

going to get ice cream before lunchtime.

So for college students, we could

be out late hanging out.

And I remember just waking up at 1130.

I'm like, oh, I got to go run the truck.

And we walk outside and we had, it was the

first opportunity to engage with vendors and making sure that

we are pricing things that the market could bear.

And we just drove around different parts of Madison,

Wisconsin and got a chance to really learn.

The people in Madison are just amazing.

Just that is middle America at its finest.

People sitting out on their porch and

their swings, hanging out at night and

buying ice cream and it was great.

I'm guessing that's a pretty seasonal business there.

Certainly. Yeah.

So I had that, that was certainly during the

summer times and then obviously coming up into a

little bit of the fall and then we would

store the truck and we ended up not selling

it but renting it to folks in subsequent summers.

And then ultimately the business sort of,

we were just done with the device.

The truck was dilapidated and it

just, we had enough with that.

But it was a cool experience and a lot of fun

and it was pretty successful to be able to support, you

know, the fun in college during the school year.

And I had, we made enough to be

able to do that, which was pretty neat.

I had some odd jobs.

Like I was a tour guide at one

point, Madison, which was fun to learn a

little bit about the history and share my.

And I was, I loved it there.

I mean, I've created.

My closest friends were from there.

We all live in this five mile radius now

and raised our kids together and it's all because

of that school and which is pretty awesome.

So I love that place.

I'm glad that now I'm growing in

DC and then we moved to Chicago.

I'm glad I'm close enough to be able to go visit. Yeah.

What did you study?

I have a b's in economics.

I had started my freshman year thinking I was going

to go down the path of being a doctor.

And I started taking those classes and

I was like, it is not clicking.

And so after, so you'd mentioned before,

I'd done pretty well in school.

And then when I got freshman year and I bust

in my behind to do well, and it just was

not clicking, I was like, this is not for me.

I need to accept that.

And so I started to pivot a little

bit more so towards the business school at

the time wasn't really that impressive.

And so, for me, I decided to sort of go down

the economic route where I could learn about a lot of

different things in sort of that world, finance and whatnot.

But funny enough, my favorite class was the last

class that I took in college, a marketing class,

and it was taught by a graduate assistant.

And she was.

It opened my eyes to product and pricing

and all the promotions and placement and all

the four p's and all these things. The four p's.

That's right.

All these sort of cool things. And she.

The way that she taught the class, I mean, I

remember this one particular class around Teddy Grahams, and she

just talked about the production of the Teddy Grahams and

the belly button and all the different flavors.

Just all that had come around to that.

And that really got me excited around the marketing side

of things, and it continues to do that now.

And she actually sat on our board of

advisors when we got the business started.

My brother and I started Granny's

goodies a couple years after graduation.

So we were just trying to put together this board

of advisors that would do things for us for free

because they appreciated the effort of the entrepreneur.

And that helped out a ton, leaning into that

network to create a board of advisors for us.

Trey, when you made the shift from, I guess, the pre

med route to economics, did you have a clear sense for

what you wanted to do when you got out?

Or was it like, hey, I'm just going to make

this pivot and I'll figure it out as I go?

Probably more the latter.

I knew I liked the business and the business

side of things, and then that was further exemplified

with the business with the ice cream truck.

I was like, okay, this makes a whole lot of sense.

And I really like the selling side of things.

I certainly did not.

Still don't love the operational side of things.

It's just not my area of expertise as entrepreneurs, though,

as, you know, you need to know it all or

hire people that are better at it than we are.

And so I wasn't really sure what

I wanted to do after graduating.

I knew I wanted to ski, so I went

out to Colorado and skied for the season.

My folks were not happy about that. So is life.

And was out there for the season teaching skiing

and just trying to get, I think, some of

that out of my system, and then came back

and waited tables for a little bit.

I got a job working for, interestingly enough,

kind of going back to that board of

advisors for family friends, but I didn't get

the job through this family friend, actually.

He walked in.

This company was like a commercial security company,

so keypads and key cards to get into

office buildings and that sort of thing.

Access control and security systems.

He walked into my cubicle and was like, I can't

believe that you got this job, and you know me.

And so I was just.

I knew the name, and I just went through

the normal route to get the job and was

there for about ten months, eleven months.

And the way that they went about

their business sales to their existing clients

wasn't a real important piece to them.

But I love that part of the job.

Trying to sell them clothes on that.

And I went to leadership and said, hey, I'd love to

sort of spearhead this sort of element of the business.

I think you're missing out on a revenue stream here.

And they're like, hey, listen, that's not

really what we're trying to accomplish.

If they want this enhancement, then we're here

to help, but we're not here to sell.

Well, they changed that a couple years later.

But at that point, I just realized my brother had been

wanting to expand an existing business, and I decided that at

that point, maybe I should go do it for myself.

And that's sort of where I got

started with my brother early on.

The fact that you got that job and you knew

the guy and you didn't go through him, he found

out you worked there after you had started.

Man, what a testament to you.

And, like, you didn't need that.

Like, they hired you for you, not for him. That's huge.

That's huge. I agree.

But I'll tell you this, Scott, I would

tell my kids, go to the contact, right.

100%.

I don't know if that's.

Yeah, I mean, I hear you, and thanks for that.

But I think we're in a world now

that with LinkedIn and with relationships, like, lean

into those because folks want to. They want to help.

And I think that was the point of Gene

ended up sitting on our board as an advisor.

When we got started, he and his right hand,

along the lines with some other folks, sort of

sat on this board of advisors, which was really

helpful to get things going, but, yeah.

So the ice cream business

was your first entrepreneurial venture.

Did a little work for someone else for a little bit.

Talk to me about Granny's goodies.

Is that what came immediately

after Granny's goodies got started?

Basically, in my parents basement.

It was sort of the second iteration of a

business that my younger brother had started at Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is an interesting place at the

time because it was a public institution.

You could buy the names and

addresses of the student body.

You can't do that now, but you could buy them

at the time until he would send out mailings to

parents to see if they wanted these final exam bags

that he was selling that were called Granny's goodies.

My grandmother, this woman, grew up in New

England and was very prim and proper.

So it's ironic.

We called her granny, but we

named the business after her.

And so when I finished up at this one

entity, then Josh said, hey, why don't we create

a little, much more robust entity with Granny's goodies?

And we got my grandmother on

television, and we got our, like.

We leaned into the PR side of things as

much as we could, and we had this adorable,

like, little lady that was marketing for us.

Anything that we could do to try

to create eyeballs for the business.

And the Internet was just at its infancy.

This was 92, 93, and 94 ish time.

So we were just getting started with that.

Most of it was snail mail and 800 numbers.

And the business, I mean, it took time.

It took time to create awareness.

We tried to going the route of

selling these exam survival kits, these boxes

of blow pops, gummy bears, candy bars.

Those were the granny's goodies.

And we had different versions of those.

We had gone and sold those directly to mom and dad.

And that was a tough process for a litany of reasons.

A, to market to them.

B, to process onesies and twosies. It just.

It was challenging.

It wasn't really creating the kind

of critical mass that we needed.

And then we ultimately started selling to student governments

and helping them raise money through the sale of

care packages so they could market to the student

body or to the parents at all different institutions.

And we would do this as a fundraiser for them.

So we started doing that.

But they were in school, they

weren't there to work for us.

So it became challenging operationally

to do some of that. Scott.

And then there was an article written about us

in the Washington Post and a law firm called

up and said, hey, I read about you guys.

I've got these interns that are going

to be working for me this summer.

Can I send them a granny's goodies?

And that totally pivoted our offering away from the

fundraising model more into working with the corporations.

And my brother and I, we were in business

together up until about 2000 when my wife and

I had our first child and moved to Chicago

from DC, which is where she's from.

And it was really challenging

the partnership that we had.

I mean, we were buttonheads.

We weren't making enough money

to ruin our personal relationship.

So we were working in a couple of markets at the time.

So he sort of took one, I took the other.

We sort of rebranded me as big

Fry and him as another entity.

We took those markets and that's sort of the area for

the last 20 years that I've really had sort of leaned

into is helping companies build their brand on campuses.

So hiring, you know, the process that they go through

to hire kids from the career fair phase to come

work for them for the summer, that sort of ties

into that law firm working through the summertime.

So we do that not so much in the legal

space, but more so in the Fortune 1000 space.

That is sort of been the point.

We really sort of mastered that piece.

The challenge that we had had as a small

business was that there's a lot of companies that

sell swag, hats, mugs, t shirt, pens and pads.

And so if we're going in and selling to a Fortune

100 company, if we do enough business, what was happening?

Is that the guy, our competitor, that

had that marketing relationship be like, hey,

hey, you're in a contract with us.

You can't work with those guys anymore.

Sometimes we had a good advocate.

They would carve us out and say, hey, well, we're

going to work with these guys because you all don't.

Your vendor doesn't do a good job for us.

Other times we've been pushed out for the last.

Me and my team have gotten to a point where we

really did some good job of qualifying, making sure can you

buy from us before we start getting excited about opportunity, we

need to do a good job in qualifying.

That's an evolving process for us

as the business has grown.

Take a step back.

When it first got started, we were just trying to grab

all the kind of business that we want we could, right?

I mean, we wanted to stay afloat.

But we kept on running into these problems.

But I would say six out of ten times we were able

to continue to work with the entity that we were pitching.

Now we've gotten to the point, and I'm so grateful

that the business has grown to the point where we

can be choosy about who we partner with.

And we ask these questions so

that there's no expectation gap.

And also that my team doesn't waste time

giving lots of creative ideas because we invest

a lot of time and resources, real dollars,

in running focus groups to be experts understanding

what the kid in college is looking for.

When they go to a career fair, what

are they going to take and hold onto?

We study that we invest in focus groups,

we write reports and white papers and the

like, so that when we're pitching a prospect,

we know what that audience is looking for.

But we're not going to give away the

secret sauce unless you're ready to engage.

And we've got some, we made some changes to make

sure that we don't give away the secret sauce.

A and B, if they're not willing to invest

this prospect, then they should go find somebody else

that they can get these ideas from.

I mean, we've just unfortunately been burned and

entrepreneurs get excited about opportunities and sometimes blinded

by those opportunities and need to be careful.

That's just an experience share for some of

the folks that are listening in, I want

to make sure that I share that.

So it sounds like I'm going to

guess that most people in the promotional

item space, they're kind of order takers.

Like, hey, give me 1000 pins with my logo on

it, give me a couple hundred of this or that.

But it sounds like you guys

take a very consultative approach.

And it's not just, hey, how many t shirts do you need?

Is that a fair way to describe it?

I describe it as we don't sell transactionally.

It's more programmatic.

So I share a picture of a pen and I'm

like, okay, if you're looking for this pen for cheaper,

there's so many companies that you can work with.

But if you want to know if this is the pen

that's going to work on campus or, you know, amongst your

trade show efforts, that's going to be impactful, that's not going

to be thrown in the trash, we're your guy.

To know when to use this pen, at

what pen, at what point in your process.

That's sort of the programmatic side of things.

That's how we've differentiated ourselves so that buyers

can say to their leaders, or procurement, hey,

we need to work with these guys.

But sometimes procurement gets involved, and they

say, we're looking for the cheapest thing

because these guys can get it.

I mean, this happens to this day as well.

We made some pretty material changes this past summer about

how we partner with, how we engage with prospects to

make sure that we don't give away our ideas.

And if they want to partner with us, then they

have to make an investment with us as well.

Going back, just kind of

stitching the timeline back together.

So after school, you did move back to DC, and did

you say that your wife is from that area as well? So.

My wife's from the suburbs of Chicago.

She came to DC to work on Capitol Hill.

She worked for a congressman from Florida for a

few years and for a large consulting firm.

And then we sort of reconnected, got

married, had our first of three daughters.

And then, like I said, so me and

my brother were butting heads a little bit.

And so I was like, you know what?

I want to move to the midwest.

It's just way more my temperament.

And I wanted that opportunity.

And so Karen wanted to get closer to

home, and her folks were there, and all

my buddies were there from Madison.

And so I started to sort of be this sales entity.

And it's funny, we wanted to create a compensation

scenario that would be fair for me and my

brother to compensate him operationally for the work that

he was doing sort of running the business.

And then my compensation came

purely from my sales efforts.

And what ended up happening was that I started to take

off with the sales, and he was spending so much time

managing the operation, which is what he hated to do.

It just didn't provide the he needed to

sell to for the business to be successful.

And so we just decided, hey, this

is causing friction between us personally.

And we just decided to separate the entities.

And we had gotten an SBA loan, which

helped us get going, which was awesome.

And we sold a little less.

We just sort of split that in half

and found banks that were in each of

our locations that would absorb those sort of

outstanding notes, which weren't anything super crazy.

And I remember that SBA loan sitting in there with

this bank when we first got started, and I was

like, what percentage of these loans do people default on?

About 90%.

You are kidding me.

Yeah, it was at the time was massive.

The number of defaults.

The program now is certainly different than it was in

the early nineties, but nonetheless, we didn't default we paid

it off, and so I felt really good about that.

We have so many amazing resources

to start businesses in this country.

We are so lucky.

I see what's going on in the rest of the world. It is.

My God, this is where you want to start a business.

It truly is the land of opportunity.

It truly is.

If you have the drive, the desire, the idea,

and it has to be a good idea.

The system is set up to support you. That's right.

That's right.

I actually, I'm sure it's similar.

I mean, I know this exists all over the

country, but there's a program at our local high

school called Incubator, and it's juniors in high school

that get an opportunity to start up a business.

They come with the idea and then

all the different iterations of the business.

And so I'm a mentor, along with a bunch

of other folks, you know, in this class and

been doing it for a bunch of years.

And it's, it makes me realize, to

your point, how much opportunity is available.

And I tell the kids, just because somebody

already has come up with the idea doesn't

mean they've got a monopoly on it.

You could be better at manufacturing that

particular item or that service offering.

That's the great thing about this.

Just find your niche like we have in

that sort of talent acquisition area, because there's

lots of folks that sell a promotional swag.

I think we all just need to find the

area that we're experts and can articulate that offering.

You bring up a good point.

Just because somebody has done this thing doesn't

mean that there's not room in the market

for somebody else to come in.

And this was at a much, much, much greater scale.

But Apple.

Apple, they weren't the first with an

mp3 player, but they did it better.

They weren't the first with a smartphone.

We had the Palm trios and the

blackberries and all that, but, man, they

revolutionized the world with the iPhone.

I remember tablet computers, PCs, these big toughbooks,

or whatever they called them, they sucked.

But the tablets had been around forever, and

Apple comes out and they just did it.

I think youre absolutely right.

Theres definitely room for people to build

on other concepts and make it better.

I want to go back to you and

your brother kind of making that split.

So grannys goodies, I guess that name,

that brand died at that point.

Is that fair?

So when we split, so wed established all these

supplier relationships because my business were a distributor of

a half a million products create these relationships, and

when me and the brother split.

He went off to, while he was working in

the same industry, he found a strategic partner that

could do some of the operational things for him

that he didn't, so he could focus on selling.

So he didn't really need those vendor relationships.

So for me, I was like, well, I don't want to do that.

I want to run my own book.

And I ended up creating a

corporation called Granny's Goodies of Illinois.

And I dba big fry doing business as big Fry so

that I could go to those vendors and just say, hey,

I've just send the bills to this new address.

So I didn't lose my

credit relationships with those entities.

And at the time, they didn't really care.

So Granny's goodies. Yes.

No one goes to market as Granny's goodies

anymore, but it's actually the, you know, the

name of the corporation, the legal name. The legal name.

That's right. Yeah.

And in terms of your brother's business, are

you selling the same things today and selling

to the same type of buyer?

Like, do you guys compete?

Fair question.

Totally different buyers.

He, after 20 years, ultimately came back to sort

of running his business the way that I've been

running my business, sort of running their own book

and AR, AP Banks and all that stuff, because

there's don't have to give a margin.

But after we had about a year of, took a

little bit of time for us to be able.

First we had to focus on being brothers because

it was a rough break over about six months.

And then we went on this golf trip

and it re engaged us, which was awesome.

So now we talk about business all the time.

We share ideas, talk about issues related

to all different areas of the business.

And as entrepreneurs, like our personal lives,

are interwoven into our businesses, just how

we go about our days.

I mean, I was on vacation

and don't really have vacation.

I'm not really off the grid,

just making sure things are moving.

I made one of my goals this year.

If I wanted to get off the grid, I could.

And so now it's a little bit more on me.

Like, we've built up the team.

I've got this amazing team that's now able

to focus on all elements of the business

so I don't have to be around.

I'm so grateful for that.

So I guess that's really more on me, but yeah.

So it took a little bit of time for us.

Now we talk about everything.

I can't say that we do business together,

and I learned a lot from that.

Sometimes entrepreneurs, we get blinded,

as I mentioned, like opportunity. Right.

And I've had other businesses in the same time

that I've done things with big Fry and I've

just realized that I'm bad at partnerships when I

just don't play well with others.

And sandbox, it's just, I've tried and it just always

seems to go in the wrong direction and I don't

know I'm gonna if it's obviously that's me.

And so now I'm just like, okay, like, you

play over there and I'll play over here.

And nothing that led to like anything crazy upsetting.

But sometimes I guess my point is, is I

didn't do a good job vetting the partnerships and

crossing the t's and dotting the I's legally.

And when things going sideways, if you

don't have operating agreements in place and

partnership agreements, then things can fall apart.

And so there was a little bit of that.

But now my relationship with Josh is awesome

and I love talking to him about business

because he thinks the way that I do.

But it's another perspective and he

only looks out for me.

He doesn't want anything but for me

to be successful and vice versa.

When he comes to me with an idea or

a challenge, I can be honest with him and

say, dude, think about what you just said.

Other people may not say that you can be a little bit

more blunt with, at least I can be with my siblings.

Is he still back east?

He's in DC.

Still in DC doing his thing.

He's got a great business going

and there's lots of opportunity.

The business and the swag space is massive and sort

of to your point, some people are order takers and

they go out and they can get you 1000 pens

and they don't really care about price point.

They're just looking to make their margin.

And for me, I try to do things a little bit more where

we can provide real ROI for our clients and we've got some models

to be able to do that sort of thing as well.

So I just happen to sell swag.

I like all the other stuff around it. Right.

Thats where we make the money, Preston. All right.

Kind of drilling down on this

topic of doing business with family.

You said something a minute ago thats important.

So im going to recap that first.

So you said you know yourself well enough to know that

having a business partner is not a good fit for you.

Take that out of the equation.

What advice would you give to someone who is

looking at going into business with a family member.

Okay.

Well, I think it's really important whether it's, well,

family member or any partner is to define roles.

There needs to be an opera grading agreement in place.

If this happens, who makes that sort of final decision?

If there's only two of you, somebody

ultimately has to make that decision.

Who's going to be the one responsible for sales?

Who's going to be the one responsible for operations?

You got to clearly define what those roles

are and make sure that there's going to

be a little ebb and flow either way.

I mean, that's just the way it is.

You're going to lean on each other, and that's

a huge benefit to having a partner, is that

there's somebody there that's as passionate as you are.

It's got to be equal.

Investments got to be parallel.

What that relationship looks like.

If you have 75% ownership in the business, then

you're on the hook for 75% of it.

You get 75% of the profits. Great.

If the business is going the other direction

and there's $100,000 that you got to make

up your responsibility for 75,000 of them. Right.

I think that needs to be clearly defined.

That's really important in any sort of partnership

because people get all excited and things are.

When things are going great, awesome.

It's just things could be going great,

and then someone could become very.

I use the term khazarily, like piggish.

They just try to take and take and take and take.

You just need to make sure that how

you have those sort of things defined.

I remember just watching that movie with Facebook and

what went on there with shares and those behaviors.

And when there's lots of money at stake, people become very

different when there's a lot of money at stake or even

when there's a little bit of money at stake.

So I think that's a really important piece.

That operating agreement is essential because sometimes if you

can't get through that, then you're going to have

a problem moving forward in the relationship.

So that's, I think, probably the key thing, certainly

making sure that you've created a financial plan with

projections, that you understand what operationally that looks like,

what the marketing plan looks like, and all these

things, whether it's a small business or a massive

business, it's just they all have the same basic

elements to it.

My first sort of advisor, the guy that I worked

for who said, I can't believe you got the job

without asking me when I told him I was leaving.

He sat me down and he's like,

you're going to learn about balance sheets.

You're going to learn about p and L and all that stuff.

And he made a little diagram for me and he's like,

there's the goes into and there's the goes out of.

That's how a business operates.

You need to have more money coming

in that's good and going out.

And if you keep with that sort of model, you're

always going to be headed in the right direction and

you got to be willing to make investments and your

partner needs to be aware of that.

And that investment needs to be made at

certain points based on whatever your plans are.

The other thing is have regular quarterly meetings so you

can talk about, hey, this is how we're progressing.

I think it's really important to

put together like key performance indicators.

Like what are those things that are really,

we're going to be focusing on from a

marketing perspective, from a revenue perspective?

I had an uncle who was a successful guy and he's

like, you plan your work and then you work your plan.

And that element, I think is really important that folks

look at again in the partnership model, if you're going

to be a sole proprietor, if you just need to.

I think entrepreneurs, and sometimes I

get stuck in this too.

Like I need to take a step back.

How are we doing?

But the other thing is to be, is to

appreciate and have gratitude for the successes as well.

We get so caught up in the stuff and

it's like, wow, I'm able to support my family.

I'm able to support people that are

working for me and their families.

I get so much from that

because I think that's really important.

Like what you said about celebrating the wins, even

the small ones, because I don't know about you,

but I find myself getting lost in the losses.

Losses isn't really the right word, but this is

full of so many ups and downs and I

tend to, I tend to dwell on the downside.

And you've really got to celebrate those little wins.

Even if they're small, you've got to celebrate them.

I agree with that.

Yeah, we're tough on ourselves as entrepreneurs.

We work hard, we're passionate about

the things that we do.

And small business owners, unlike for me, I go

and sell to these large entities and if they

don't accept our bid and they hire some other

entity, like, that's no sweat for them.

They're looking for the numbers.

But like, if you don't accept our job that's

impacting my team and where our successes lie.

So I take that to heart.

Like, what do you mean where?

So I'm always asking, hey, where did we fall short?

Sometimes it's, hey, Seth, it's a price thing.

Typically, it's, I've got an

existing relationship, you know?

And I think the important thing to what you

said, scott and I try to work really hard

at this, is when we don't win.

There are so many things that we don't know that tied

into that decision making that could have nothing to do with

the bid that we put on paper and the pitch that

we gave it could be they decided to pull the budget,

the CEO knows somebody else, or they already took care of

it, and we didn't know nothing.

That was our fault.

And so as for me and my business,

when things don't go the right direction, like,

okay, where's the next one coming from?

Like, the machine has always got to be moving forward.

And to me, it's, how do we get to the finish line?

We're in the middle of a job and something goes awry.

Okay, we gotta fix this.

Let's get this to the finish line.

It's not about finger pointing

and who made the mistake.

Certainly we're gonna raise our hand and accept that.

But the customer, yeah, they want to

hear that, but then they're gonna want

to know what's corrective action look like.

And so for me, I'm just constantly, whether that's a sale,

whether that's a problem, how do we get to the finish

line in a way that's going to make everybody happy?

Because I just.

I don't want to be right all the time.

I just want to be happy. Right. Seriously.

That's why a lot of times when I'm sitting

in meetings and something's gone awry, like, I don't.

I'm like, so tell me what's going through your mind?

Where did we fall short? Okay. Because people just.

Sometimes they need a vent.

And that's the other thing.

I'm like, I just keep my mouth shut

because sometimes they give you the answer.

You are spot on.

Sometimes people just need to vent.

And I can't tell you how many conversations I've gone

into over the years, and I've learned the hard way.

I've gone into conversations with a client that

I knew were going to be difficult conversations.

And I've kind of got my ammo to go back and,

okay, I hear you telling me that I did this, but,

you know, what about this this this that you did?

And, man, I found that if I will just shut

up and listen and empathize, it's not 100% of the

time, but more often than not, if you just listen

and empathize, it completely changes the tone of the conversation

and the direction that things end up going.

Absolutely empathy.

When Covid kicked in and everybody was at

home, my business, which was really built around

events, I mean, I just saw it going,

obviously in the very wrong direction.

And in 2008 and nine, when Lehman brothers fell

and we had that debacle with real estate and

whatnot, I was, like, in the fetal position.

What am I going to do?

But this time around, I was like,

okay, I'm not going to do that.

And what I did was I set up calls with

my largest clients, and I just sat down and said,

hey, what's it like over at your house?

I got my three daughters that are

here, two that are home from college.

We're, like, doing this. We have game night.

Like, what's it like over there?

And the more I engage with them on a

personal level, and, like, so what's it like?

What do you got going on over there?

What sort of challenges are happening?

It literally sparked a whole

new direction of my business.

And funny enough, going from just, like, selling the swag

to going back to the granny's goodies days with these

boxes that we now sell, these swag kits that are

used for all different types of engagement strategies, whether it's

a new client that comes on board.

Our boxes are all branded for my client with the

name of the recipient that's getting the gift in blaze.

But, like, all these things only came

about because I was having these conversations

empathetically and just trying to listen.

And they told me, we've

got everybody's working from home.

How am I going to get them their materials that they

normally can just walk into the closet and grab pens?

And it started with office products and

then led to, okay, now I've got

these thousand interns that are at home.

We're doing these remote programs.

How do we creatively stay engaged with them?

And I'm literally listening to them like, oh, my God.

I've got this solution that we continue to sell these

care packages over the last 20 years, but just as

one of a gazillion different products that we had now,

this vessel was able to be delivered globally, and we've

been able to do some pretty neat things with them

and just expanded upon that.

And that all came about because I got my

mouth shut and just tell me how you're feeling.

And sometimes we've got to eat the

sandwich when we make a mistake.

But they'll tell you, you know, they want, who knows?

They could be getting pressure from the higher ups.

And when we make mistakes, like it is what it is,

like, what are we going to do to make it better?

Yeah, without a doubt. All right.

Something that has struck me.

You're a small business, medium sized business.

I think that's fair to say. Right.

But you said earlier, like, you're

selling to the Fortune 1000.

What kind of hoops do you have to jump

through be able to sell into these large.

I imagine they're pretty much

all publicly traded companies.

Like from a compliance standpoint, like we've got

a handful of larger customers and man, about

once a year with some of them.

I get this survey and they want to

know what we're doing about this and that.

And a lot of it's pretty easy stuff to deal with.

We've had a couple that have come through.

I'm like, you know what?

We don't want the business that bad.

We're not going to deal with this.

What's that like for you?

I think it echoes some of the things you're

talking about for us as we've started to get

more involved where I don't want to just relinquish

the business to the preferred vendor that's in place.

Like I said, we sort of qualify now earlier

on, and now there's a master services agreement that

comes from the entity, statements of work, which are

just quotes that sort of the terms are rely

upon whatever that master services agreement are in place.

So when we establish a relationship that typically

is going on, there's a legal entity.

Again, I'm not going to go through that

exercise unless I know that there's some opportunity

on the backside like you had mentioned.

And then for us, we establish some.

Just because a large company sends me a

master service agreement which is boilerplate for them,

they could be working with vendors that are

a thousand times the size of us. Right.

It's the same agreement.

So they recognize, they being the client, that

we're going to go and we're going to

mark up that master services agreement.

I'm not going to acquiesce to their terms.

And if it doesn't work out, then it doesn't work out.

That's sort of where the business is at.

Like you had mentioned, Scott, like, the juice

ain't worth the squeeze, if you will, and

that's starting to serve us better.

I've never realized.

I certainly have learned instead of me

going and hiring an attorney, I feel

like I'm the in house attorney now.

I'm, like, reading these terms and marking things up.

And if there's some things that are even

a little bit more delicate, then we'll get

legal support to help out with that.

I had gone through the exercise for the

first couple of those and realized the areas

where they're willing to negotiate and whether or

not and what to look for in that.

Again, I think as entrepreneurs, the more experiences we

have, good and bad, and this is one of

them, that's sort of how we grow.

So the master services agreement, and then there's a

whole element for us now because we do lots

of transactions that go through a buying platform.

Ariba is a popular name for one.

So we'll get.

What's that Cupa like?

Yeah, there's a bunch of them. Yeah, tungsten.

So our clients require us to engage in that capacity.

And then there's, you know, there's some basic insurance

rules that, you know, that we need to make

sure that we have gotten tied in.

Again, this is all sort of part of the

master services agreement, but these are welcoming opportunities.

Now, before three years ago, I was on the

side of like, oh, I don't want to make

too much noise, because if it comes to the

master service agreement, I can't service this enterprise.

But over the last few years, we've created full

programs across 500 to 25,000 employees with account managers.

We know how to do it just like our biggest

competitors know how to do it, and we're more nimble

and so, but we're evolving and we make mistakes and

we, you know, I'm at the point with the businesses

where, which is annoying, personally, where I'm investing.

It's not trickling down to Seth, right.

Because the investment's going within the walls

of the business, and we're spending more

marketing or spending more here.

I'm like, I'm doing all this work.

Like, where's the benefit for me?

But that's just so short sighted right now.

And I recognize that my ego is

screaming, saying, hey, me, me, me.

And so I've actually got, I'm in a, like

a peer to peer sort of entrepreneurial group and

sit down with these guys and gals and they're

like, this is exactly where you need to be.

This is exactly what goes on.

Like, businesses go up and the owner,

whatever, doesn't reap the immediate rewards yet.

But then it's going to come into play.

And so it all kind of goes back to

like, let's just get to the finish line.

Like, I'm doing fine.

My family's healthy.

We get to go do fun things.

We get to go out to dinner

and all that kind of fun stuff.

So I'm so grateful for that.

But those are just things that we're going through right now

that I hadn't before to become more of a CEO and

less of the, like, guy selling and the guy, like, now

I'm just like, there's too many questions coming to me.

Like, managers.

You guys answer those questions, and I don't want to deal

with, I gotta be out or I'm gonna, you know, I

need to go to the doctor or whatever it may be.

I mean, those are important elements, certainly.

I want to just try to move the ship, and

I can't do that until I've got better people at

it around me at those areas to just help them

manage it, but help establish the rules.

And I, like I said, we're sort

of evolving as well, so it's cool.

I got more passion now for the business

than I ever have, which is fun.

I want to talk a little bit more about family.

You were already in business with your brother at

Granny's goodies when you got married, is that right?

That's right.

And what kind of conversations did you

and your wife have about the entrepreneurial

life, the risk that comes with it?

Was that even, was it a factor?

Was it a conversation at all, or

was it just kind of like.

No, she just kind of accepted it and knew

what she was getting into when y'all got married.

Good question.

So Karen's father, who served in world war two and

was a teacher in the Chicago public school system during

the summers, he and his brother started a day camp,

and then they grew this camp, and they bought some

property out in the suburbs, and they stopped teaching because

they really grew this day camp in a big way.

And so Karen grew up in this entrepreneurial lifestyle, couldn't

go away during certain times of the year because I

was recruiting for camp and that sort of thing.

So for her when I don't think it was

a shock to the system, and she's been my

biggest fan, and that was a really important piece.

So I don't.

In reflection on that, there wasn't any

sort of issue, although I remember having.

She reminds me of the time that I told her that,

yeah, we were going to go see the Grateful Dead perform,

and you just told me, oh, I quit my job and

I'm going to go start my own business.

It was like, I mean, I think

when you're, for me, I'm young.

I was young at the time, 22.

I was like, I'm just going to do it.

You know, my parents are being supportive of it.

Karen wasn't like, completely out of line with it.

I mean, it wasn't draining

her financially in any regards.

But as the business started, you know, as our relationship

solidified, and this was before we got married, I.

But then we got married and you have kids,

and I think that's what led to me and

my brother splitting was because we just had so

different financial goals at that familial obligations.

He wasn't married.

I had a kid on the way, and we

needed to be able to support that family.

And that sort of ultimately led

to that version not working out.

What are the sort of things that keep you up at

night these days and have those things changed over time?

I'm working really hard at managing some

of those character defects that I have.

I've got this.

And I think as a child, my parents,

who are super loving and always supported us,

didn't really talk to us about finances.

And so there was, it's not a fair thing to say,

but for me, there was a level of trauma there.

So that when I had to start figuring things

out with Karen, I didn't know where to turn.

I just didn't, I didn't know.

And that brought a lot of fear.

And so now when I wake up in the

morning with these financial insecurities, which are totally unsubstantiated,

and I know that that's just my ego and

those fears that stem from growing up.

And I've got friends and colleagues that are like, dude,

look at the numbers, look at the reality of things.

But I just wake up in that capacity.

I don't know if it's like getting older, I

don't know because I have three daughters and I

want to make sure that they're okay.

And the way I grew up and whatever, maybe

I think about that, I wake up in the

morning, like, did I do the right thing?

Could I have sold this person?

What about these guys?

Like, we have so many clients that I want to.

My natural instinct is like,

gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.

As much as I can, Im in service as much I can.

I dont want to lose out because I didnt

put the right system in place to stay engaged.

But the reality of it is that buyers

move on, peoples change, regimes change, within organizations,

and I can only control my action, which

is pick up the phone, Orlando, sending a

note and engaging empathetically and hopefully that those

opportunities present themselves and do good work.

And so those are some of the things that keep

me up and certainly making sure that my team's okay.

Just hear about some awful experiences that some

of my friends have in their work environment,

and I'm like, I do not want that.

I want people to come to work and be excited.

And I hear about that from them,

like, oh, I love this job.

This is the best job I've had, and

I have a lot of pride around that.

So that's way more important than

the money, at least for me. Absolutely. Money will come.

Absolutely.

You talked about going through the

financial crisis in zero eight.

The pandemic, I think, is still fresh for most of us.

Have there been some other oh, crap

kind of moments along the way? Yeah.

I mean, recently losing some big clients, which had nothing

at all to do with what we do, how we

do it, just some regime change and some, when we

start doing more work with folks, then in my world,

procurement gets involved and they care less about the service,

and they only care about the price.

That's their job.

And that commoditizes our offering.

They don't see that.

And if I don't have the right advocate within an

organization to share why they want to work with us.

We had a couple of those happen.

We've had some clients file for bankruptcy

after we've delivered a bunch of goods. That sucks.

And left you holding the bag, I assume.

Left is holding the bag. Yeah.

And we've done a bunch of work with them, and

now we're, like, on the hook, and it sucks.

So this has been, like, this year

in particular has been one where, like,

we're evolving, but we're running in.

We've had, like, this year, like, just bring it on.

Bring it all on now, right?

So that, and we learn, like, the

goods, experiences, the bads, like, we're qualifying

better, we're making better choices.

The team is learning, they're

collaborating in a better way.

So sometimes business, I think I've had the fortune

that we've had good years and we've had not

so good years, but all in all, we sort

of, like, are creeping up, and that's a testament

to the team and listening and learning.

But, yeah, I mean, we lose clients, it happens.

So I'm trying to look at it as though,

and this happens, Scott, but it goes back.

Like, I want it all.

Why they leave us and I find out it had

nothing to do with you, it still ticks me off.

It's a double edged sword.

We've obviously lost customers over the years, and the

overwhelming majority of the time it's because, hey, they

were acquired by this other organization or they're just

changing the systems that they're working on and this

thing that we supply them with to move their

data between the systems.

Well, now there's different systems and we

don't really work on those systems.

And on one hand, it's like, man, I worked hard

to get that business and I didn't lose it through

any fault of my own, and it sucks.

But on the one hand, I would almost

rather have done something to lose the business,

something that I can learn from and correct.

But, like, these are things that I can't control.

I can't control that you got acquired.

I can't control that you chose to

implement a new ERp or whatever. So, right.

I think when you're in business long enough,

we can focus on those sort of things.

And what I'm trying to do now is, okay, now

I got more bandwidth, now I can go after these

other opportunities because I'm a true believer that if you

do good work, it will come back to you.

And again, for me, I'm trying so hard not

to focus on how do we do this week?

How do we do this month, how do we do this quarter?

More of like, are we getting to the end game?

Are we headed in the right direction?

So maybe we're going to go like this, but

we're ultimately going to get up here, right?

That's sometimes hard to swallow, but if it

gets us there, you know, then we want

one of my advisors, like, you've already won.

You've got this beautiful family, everybody's healthy.

You get a chance to do.

I love to ski.

You get a chance to go ski and you've got

a business that keeps running like you've already won.

You hear about there's this grasses greener syndrome, I

think, that we're all trying to get toward.

I remember I wouldn't want to read the Wall

Street Journal because I'm not that guy, right?

It was just my ego is screaming now.

It's like, all right, that's awesome.

I want all entrepreneurs to be super successful so that,

you know, they can reach whatever their dream is.

Because for me, like, I'm so blessed.

I'm so blessed with where I'm at with my family,

most importantly, and I can do those sort of things.

And I got good kids, and they're engaging,

and I wish they would take over the

business, but they're not there yet. I'm not ready.

Daddy, that really.

You talk about that comparison and, you know,

didn't want to look at the Wall Street

Journal because you weren't that guy.

And, man, I've talked about this before a

number of times, but I struggle with comparison.

And I've got friends I went to school

with, people who have been crazy, crazy successful,

and, you know, financially, they've achieved way more

than I will ever achieve.

They've risen to all kinds of great positions.

They've built all kinds of great companies.

And on one hand, I'm like, oh, geez, I want that.

But then again, I think about, like, what

they had to go through to get that

or what they're living with today.

And I'm like, I don't really want that after all.

I'm actually just fine right where I'm at.

I'm getting to do things my way. There you go.

My path is not their path, and that's okay. I'm happy.

And so comparison is an ugly thing that we

all, I think, get trapped in at some point. We do.

All right.

What is the hottest item in the swag game today?

So we run all these focus groups.

And for me, what's amazing about

this generation is they are so

technologically savvy, so we're constantly fighting.

Here, I'll show you my favorite item.

This is sort of latest regret.

So, this.

It looks like you're sort of standard, you know, stylus

pen, but you open up the top, and it shows

this piece that cleans out your airpods, right?

And then this little piece right here cleans

the entry point to your phone right there.

And then you can actually pull out the

whole piece and get it out here.

And this cleans inside the case of the airpod. Oh, wow.

Right?

So it's, like, multifunctioning for the students.

They just love it.

And, you know, for me, it's inexpensive, and

it's, you know, that sort of thing.

So this.

Lots of, you know, retail branded drinkware.

But for us, you know, our biggest seller are these

swag hits, because it puts a collection of things.

It's like a way for our clients to engage

with whatever audience they're looking to engage with.

And there's a personalized element to it.

And that's where I think our society

is, is to provide personal experiences. Right.

How much more can we do that?

And so we've sort of been able to do some of

that and we continue to evolve that element of the business

but that's giving us opportunities to get in the door.

And as it relates to entrepreneurs that are trying

to get their businesses started it's what can you

do to so somebody pays attention to what you're

doing and be resilient and diligent about your, you

know, your offering and your action.

And for me I was listening and I remember that

aha moment with the kits and now I'm having calls

of people that are there oh my peer got this.

Can you tell me a little

bit about that sort of program?

So that referral base is way more beneficial to us than

some of the marketing that we've tried in the past.

There you go.

Well Seth you've been at this for over 20 years now.

You've been through a lot.

You've ridden the ups and downs.

What's next?

My goal is to spend a month in Colorado so

that I can do that sort of skiing thing so

I really want to continue to build my business to

the point point where my particular business where it's at

we're starting to tie in some technology to our internal

operation so I don't know where that can go. I'm 54.

Some folks at this stage are starting to think about how

they can get out but I'm looking to get in.

I'm like what can we do that can be more engaging?

I mean we're sort of like I said we just we've

crossed over this precipice to now be able to offer what

the big boys can offer so that's really exciting.

I used to be fearful of that I used to be

able to sell it but not be able to deliver it

now we can deliver it so that's really exciting so for

us it's continue to engage so one of the things that

for us is and I've got a couple of sales folks

that are doing it so our kits typically up to this

point have been all corporate in that element but what we're

starting to do is to sell it to higher education so

when a student gets Akin high school gets into the University

of X they'll get a personalized kit filled with like a

pennant and a lanyard and something pertaining to the school to

help close the sale so to speak to convert from admissions

into enrollment and there's about to be a huge population drop

off so the school is gonna become really competitive and these

kits are so we're starting to get into that world which

brings a whole different level around licensing and things along those

lines that we're learning about.

But that's what's next.

That's where we're at.

Well, Seth, thanks so much for sharing your story.

Appreciate the time. That's for sure. It was fun.

That was Seth Fry, founder and president* of Big Frey.

To learn more, visit bigfrey.com

That's f r e y

If you or a founder you know would like to be a

guest on In The Thick of It, email us at intro@founderstory.us.