In The Thick of It

Fail fast, pivot quick.

Failure is not fatal or final.

It's the courage to keep going.

Use it as an opportunity to lean into what

works and don't repeat the things that don't work.

And that could be behaviors, that could be hiring

styles, that could be pushing out technologies, features.

But you got to understand where the value creation

is, and you can't understand that without trying.

And once you figure it out, lean into it.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Today's episode of In The Thick of it

features George Baker, operating partner at Rujo Boots.

George has an extensive career that all started

with helping people find the perfect parking spot.

After years of using traditional management

methods, George founded Park Hub to

optimize parking operations with innovative technology

and subscription based models for businesses.

Today, George has a diverse portfolio

of companies he's helped build, including

a leather goods brand, Rujo Boots.

During the show, he discusses the motivation

behind starting the business and the challenges

he's faced along the way.

George shares the importance of finding the

right team, encouraging a culture of collaboration,

and recognizing that failure is not fatal,

but an opportunity for growth.

George, I'd like to welcome you to

the In The Thick of It studio.

Thanks for making the drive over today. Glad to be here.

Thank you, Scott.

Braving the rain.

Well, man, let's start at the beginning.

Tell us, where'd you grow up?

What was growing up like for you? Yep.

Grew up in Dallas, Texas, in

a small community called Highland park.

Growing up was.

Came with its challenges.

Specifically that of I had a

learning difference, learning disability of dyslexia.

And so again, this was 35,

40 years ago, times were different.

And so I was in a, I guess a special school

to help offset the learning differences in which I had.

But that generally set a foundation for later

in my life to leverage technologies for efficiencies.

So an example of that is, prior to

the iPad or anything, there was actually a

device that Apple had, and it was the

Newton would transcribe your writing into letters.

There's also Franklin autocorrect.

This is before is all built

in through AI into various systems.

But my point in saying that at a very

young age, I was exposed to technology to help

crutch, benefit and offset my learning difference, to then

recalibrate me to kind of the standards and later,

as we go through my life or not.

But my point is I embrace technology to find

efficiencies for the shortcomings in which I had.

And as we'll get into here, a little

bit later in your story, I'm sure that

that kind of helped set the foundation.

As an aside, I think that we

are probably about the same age.

And when I was a kid, from

what I recall, dyslexia wasnt a term.

They hadnt really figured it out.

Like they knew that people had trouble reading.

When I was in elementary school, I went

through some testing and they had this thing

that they called scatopic sensory syndrome.

And I had these weird colored, transparent things that I

was supposed to put over my papers when I was

reading them and I was supposed to help.

And I think I did it for like a week and it didnt work.

But were you actually diagnosed with dyslexia at that age

or did that term come about a little bit later?

I was diagnosed with dyslexia through

the scottish rite at that point.

But yeah, that's what I was alluding to in

the comment that it was a different time.

ADHD was kind of referred to as motor brain.

Well, and there wasn't even an h.

Yeah, there wasn't even a. Yeah.

So my larger point was that of the benefits of

outside learning to help enable me to get through things.

One of my kids is dyslexic and ADHD,

and he is severely dyslexic and severe ADHD.

And it presents a lot of challenges.

But its amazing the number of people that are CEO's

of Fortune 500 companies that are dyslexic or ADHD.

And in a way it causes people

to think about things differently, look at

things differently and carry themselves differently.

And it sounds like thats kind of a part of your story.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think to that same point, it's the solutioning and

arriving at a strategy to get to the end result.

And our brains just think differently.

And the lens by which we solution through,

it's referred to as out of the box,

and because of that, often are able to

achieve kind of the unachievable or work faster.

But basically we break things down to its

most simplistic parts and go from there.

Yeah, well, so obviously your learning was probably a

little bit different than a lot of kids.

What was your extracurricular life like?

Were you into sports?

Did you, were you into arts?

Did you have hobbies?

I was into arts.

Hobbies were always kind of outdoor activities.

Sports, not so much.

I've always been kind of smaller in stature, although

I was fast and had kind of good hand

eye coordination, didn't play well into the sports.

So back to the outdoor activities.

I was a scout, cub scout, boy scout.

Ultimately an eagle out of troop 70, which met

at University park, got my eagle in 1997.

We've had a couple of other.

I think we've had at least one, if not a

couple other guests on that were also Eagle Scouts.

I think we've got at least

three eagles, if not four, that.

That work in my company.

And there are a handful of things, I've said this

before, but there are a handful of things that if

I see on a resume, I will give that person

an interview, and Eagle is one of them.

Doesn't mean they're going to get the job.

But if I see that somebody was that dedicated

at that young of an age and was willing

to stick with it like that, it says a

lot about the person, their character, their fortitude.

And so I applaud you for doing that way back when. Also.

Seems like that served you well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think just the.

The fundamental building blocks of scouting and the

merit based achievement for advancement and creating a

safe place to fail, look at failure as

opportunity to get up and try again was

foundational in my leadership and where I am

today, and to those same points is probably

what you recognize within your hiring program practices.

All right, did you have siblings? I do.

I am one of four.

I have three sisters.

I am second to the youngest.

My oldest sister is ten years older than me.

My second eldest sister is three years older

than I am, and my youngest sister, who

I'm closest with, we are irish twins.

We are eleven months apart. All right.

And you all are still close to this day?

All very close.

Although my youngest sister during COVID moved to Denver, the

other two sisters and my sister that moved prior to

her moving were all three mile radius from where we

grew up, where our parents still live today.

Okay, so speaking of your parents, like,

what kind of work were they into?

Were they entrepreneurial?

Yeah, whole family is entrepreneurial.

So that's both sides, grandparents and father.

So my father went to the University of Texas,

graduated in the early seventies, moved to Dallas, entrepreneur

and ultimately started parking company of America, which is

a service management company for parking.

But that started with real estate, managing

a lot one lot, buying a lot.

That lot, one lot became four lots.

Four lots became ten.

So there's a real estate management

company in which they have.

It's called Belclair companies.

Belclair companies owns and manages real

estate all over the country.

There's Belclair management, Belclair leasing and Belclear investment,

multifamily commercial office, and the covered land plays

of the parking lots go to a service

management company called Parking Company of America or

Parking Systems of America.

So you grew up watching people build businesses.

They didn't get up and go do a nine to five.

They created their own.

They created their own.

And that started with my

grandfather on my mother's side.

So my mother was born in Paris.

My grandfather answered an ad in

the Paris Tribune after the war.

He were a chef at the old Warsaw, which

is a french restaurant in Dallas, down in Uptown,

came over, was the chef at the old Warsaw.

Ended up bringing the rest of my

family, my mother, her two brothers.

They opened up their own restaurant, Patrize, which

operated on McKinney Avenue until, I think, 1989,

in which they closed the restaurant.

And then my uncle reopened it on Lovers Lane

in the late nineties and then closed it in

like 2008, 910 or something like that.

But nonetheless, yeah.

Again, entrepreneurship in the family,

both sides of the family.

And always looked at the world from

a capitalistic approach of how can we?

And you eat what you kill.

So after high school, I think you said

your father went to University of Texas.

You went out of state, is that right? I did.

I went to the University of

Arizona in Tucson, studied architecture.

Funny point here.

As I mentioned, I've got

three sisters, family business.

We're always working in the

family business as a family.

And being the only boy, I rightfully or wrongfully,

I always thought that I was treated differently.

And because we had parking operations, I was

always put outside, and I was sweeping or

striping or managing the parking lots where my

sisters were always on the admin side.

But it obviously taught me great work ethic.

It taught me how to solve and solution ultimately

what I did with a previous business in which

I built, ran, and scaled and sold.

But I thought I was always treated differently.

And so I look at, and I've

got kids now, and there's this.

You learn from your parents, and then you yearn from

your parents, and then you end up returning, right?

And I was in this yearning years, and when I

was choosing my school, my parents arbitrarily said, you can't

go more than a thousand miles from home.

And the thousand miles was arrived at, you

got to be home within a day.

And I wanted to be an architect.

I was an engineer, as a builder.

We're going back to the dyslexia in

the way that I think and build.

And I'm a tinker and a visionary, and

I got into a lot of great schools,

the University of Texas being one of them.

Ou all good architecture schools, but Tucson Arizona, where

I'd never been before, was 960 miles from home.

So you wanted to stretch that as far as you could.

I was yearning.

I was yearning. I.

Early in my career, I actually

traveled to Tucson quite a bit.

I worked for an aviation services company, and

we operated out of the airport in Tucson

and a number of other places.

There was one time I was there getting

ready for an event we were putting on,

and I had been walking out on the.

Out on the tarmac.

And this is probably, I don't know, July or August.

I kid you not.

It was so hot that the glue that held

the upper and lower of my shoe together melted.

And I had to throw the shoes away because

the sole would not stay on the shoe.

I had lighters that would explode in my car

from combustion because the heat was so hot.

But it's a dry heat.

It's a dry heat, but it.

I'm totally kidding.

So it was a jeep, the car that I was mentioning.

And I would take the top off because it was the only

way to try to get around, but it was almost worse.

It was like a hairdryer because of the heat.

Driving in that.

In that jeep with the top off.

Unbelievably hot. Absolutely.

Cooking egg on the ground.

And your only relief was in that same

time in July, early August, the monsoons.

About 05:00 it would pour for like five

to ten minutes, draw down the heat, and

then you'd get through the night.

Nights were beautiful.

Sunsets were amazing.

Stargazing, just incredible.

But there's like that 60 day window from mid

June to mid August where it was just brutal.

Brutal.

What was college like for you?

Were you pretty focused on your studies?

Were you enjoying yourself?

Where I enjoyed myself, I met

some really, really great people.

I was in a fraternity.

I was a vigamma delta, Fiji.

And I used the college years for what

they are for, I guess, to socialize and.

But still academically get.

Get educated.

But now in college was.

Was a lot of fun.

I had so much fun, I ended

up not completing that architecture degree because

that five year turned into six years.

So I used a lot of those credits,

and I switched to regional development, city planning

with a thematic minor of business, commerce, and

environmental design, really focusing on sustainability.

Trey.

Okay, was that pivot?

Just because you're looking at the architecture

program, you're like, it's going to take

me too long to wrap this up.

It was in part that, but also a family has

a real estate company and development company, and so thought

I would leverage that piece of my education with family

business, which I never did and never materialized, I kind

of never really worked for the family.

Had a number of friends that were in architecture

in college and oh, my gosh, like those people

were pulling all nighters all the time.

The course load is just crazy intense.

I don't know how people have time for

anything but the coursework if you're studying architecture.

That was the problem I ran into.

Well, all right, so you finished

school and what came next?

I moved back to Dallas.

I began to work for the

family business, worked in various operations.

So I did not for the real estate

side, I worked for the parking side.

So I ran Dallas Love Field Airport, which was the

city of Dallas, contract, worked with the aviation director.

That was 2000 early two thousands.

Then I began to run kind of a

southwest portfolio of commercial garages for CBRE and

JLL, again for the family business.

And for those who don't know CBRE and

JLL, these are massive commercial real estate companies.

They've got brokerage, but they also own, operate

and manage a number of commercial buildings. Yep.

And so I was actually managing the

garage assets, components of these commercial offices,

which were largely kind of monthly parkers.

But we did open it up for transient.

So daily, daily parking.

And the point of this, and as we

go through my career track progression, early years

prior to college, boots on the ground, family

business parking, understanding the commercialization of how the

transaction occurs at the then time.

There was literally these honor boxes.

It's this metal box holes you'd slip the dollars in.

You could put a dollar in or $10, but the

person on the other side never knew how much it

was until it literally got back to the vault at

the office, in counting in the vault.

But I understood all aspects operationally

of how the transaction occurred.

So ungated lots.

Then I went into really commercialization of

the airport operations and the portfolios.

And then kind of my last stint

with the family was managing sports entertainment.

And this took me back to about

2009 910 and managing American Airlines center.

And the then time it was cowboy Stadium out in Irving.

And this was an inflection point because technology,

specifically iPhone, had kind of come into market.

And this is like late 2000.

Late 2000, this is 2000 910.

And that's when I left the family business

and I started my own business at which

my family and everybody else kind of thought

I was crazy because I began to do

digital transactions for parking, selling parking in advance.

And I was able to do this for two reasons.

One, again, sports entertainment, and

Dallas was red hot.

You had Texas Rangers go to back to back

World Series in 2010 and eleven, you had the

Dallas Mavericks that went to an NBA championship.

Jerry Jones had recently opened up the modern

day coliseum with at and T Stadium, which

then held kind of mecca events worldwide.

So this is boxing matches, this is

Super Bowls, this is all star games,

tennis matches, everything under the sun.

And with the high ticket price and scarcity

for tickets at all of these various things,

World Series championships, et cetera, came a opportunity

to actually bundle parking in advance.

So as the tickets were being sold, I

was working with ticket brokers or even using

the then time Craigslist to offload parking.

And the consumer was willing to pay a

premium knowing they had peace of mind when

they arrived in the second inning or the

second quarter, that they had a parking spot.

And that was that first signal that the

transaction was going to begin to move online.

Preston thats really, really interesting.

And man, as I think about it, its a

pain parking at a big event like this.

And if you know that theres a risk that

you may not get a parking spot at the

stadium and you might have to walk several blocks.

And depending on where you are around

here, its not too, too bad.

But in some cities, I mean, I wouldnt want

to walk a few blocks away from the stadium.

So to know youve got a

guaranteed spot right there, thats huge. Yeah, yeah.

The tagline was purchase, print,

park, know before you go.

And again, that was 15 years ago.

Pretty novel at the end time.

Its kind of commonplace now and then that rolled into

creating a digital record of all of the transactions.

And then again, leveraging that iPhone

device and creating a simple app.

There was like an app craze.

You know, everything had an app creating a mobile

register, mobile point of sale off of the device,

using the LTE carrier backhaul for connectivity.

Again, parking lots don't have a lot of

infrastructure connectivity, which is why they never adopted

technology or late to adopt technology.

And that was kind of that totally random when you

were talking about all the different things that Jerry World,

as I refer to at and t stadium as man,

the city of Dallas, and specifically the mayor at the

time, her name was Laura Miller.

I will always remember her name.

And for this reason and this reason alone, Jerry Jones

is talking to her about putting the Dallas Cowboys in

Dallas because prior to that, they'd been in Irving.

I guess they were in Dallas, the

Cotton bowl, long, long, long time ago.

But, you know, bring the Cowboys back to Dallas

and, and he's looking for money from the city.

And Laura Miller and her sweet little southern drawl.

Says, jerry, I'm not putting up taxpayers

money for eight football games a year.

And, man, how bad did she screw up?

I mean, you talk about you got NCAA

basketball games being played for the tournament.

You've got the boxing matches, you've

got Taylor Swift coming, you've got.

I mean, that thing is getting used all the time.

I remember all of that vividly.

And it was one of the biggest

mistakes, challenges that the city had.

And they're trying to restart that now

by privatizing fair park right now.

And there's a group called Oakview Group that's come through,

has, like, a 30 year master lease on Fair park

to create an entertainment district to do what they were

supposed to do back in the late two thousands.

So I think there's a good takeaway there.

And that is, you know, when opportunities

do present themselves, don't be short sighted

and look at the bigger picture. Okay.

So you're spending a lot of time in parking lots.

How often did you guys have to tow cars?

So about 60% of the Parkers are violators.

Wow. Yeah.

And so how often do you tow cars?

It's a double edged sword.

So, really, the right way is to

immobilize the vehicle, which is a.

Which is a booting methodology.

And now today, there's.

Or a ticket citation.

But it becomes very problematic when

you begin to tow a car.

It's just costly. And it's. It's just.

No one's ever happy.

No, no one's ever happy. No.

Somebody abandoned a car at our office building a while

back, and it was here for over a month.

And finally we were like, what do we do?

And we had to have a towing sign

posted for at least 24 hours before the

towing service could actually come and take it.

And anyway. All right.

60% of people parking in paid lots are violators. Yeah.

That was back in the day.

I mean, that's because there wasn't a lot of.

By the time that you got caught, you were already gone.

Right.

It takes a lot of human

resources to actually monitor that.

Then it becomes so costly.

So you have, like, an enforcement route, and the whole

market was still kind of today just so inefficient.

And that inefficiency led you

into something really cool.

You were talking a second ago about the

timing of technology and your thinking different.

Tell us what came out of that.

Yeah, so, I mean, just with anything,

you can't manage what you can't measure.

And there was no real measuring stick in the

moment in commercial parking until late, and there wasn't

a lot of innovation at all in the space.

So I think 1920 ish, 1924, if I'm

right, the parking meter, coin meter was introduced.

And then it wasn't really until the nineties

or two thousands that any true innovation occurred

in which you began to see kind of

gateway barriers and electronic forms of payment.

And they were so costly, they only got

really introduced into commercial office and then airport

operations for two reason, cost and then infrastructure.

So again, the surface lots in which

I mentioned were these honor boxes.

You didn't see technology really get adopted

until, you know, 2010, 1112 13.

And to that same point, sports, entertainment.

Because of the lack of infrastructure, the throughput

of the, of the vehicles, you didn't see

technology introduced until park hub began to provide

the mobile point of sale there.

So talk to us a little bit more about park hub.

This came out of your frustrations, looking at the

inefficiencies and something that jumped out at me when

we were talking a few weeks ago.

I think you talked about the leakage and

how much in a cash business, how much

actually makes it to the owner versus walking

away in the pocket of that parking attendant. Yeah.

Any cash business, whether that's a retail

or restaurant or in this case, parking,

there's 30 plus percent of leakage or

inefficiencies in the management of the cash.

When you don't have oversights and you don't have

any real receipt of record, it becomes challenging to

reconcile all of the receipts for the day or

month or whatever that might be.

And also, again, the fragmentation of the industry,

and largely mom and pop managed, owned.

Sometimes the oversight was purposeful.

And why also, you had all your

family members managing and running the business.

Okay, so parkmobile, you get this idea off the ground.

Your family thinks you're crazy for doing this.

What were those conversations like

with your parents and grandparents?

Yeah, I mean, I was self funding.

I left the business.

I was using the business as a beta testing of

the operations and just, it's simply what wouldn't work.

And it was multiple years, three to five

years in before really got kind of acceptance

that, oh, this, he might be on this. This has legs.

This has legs.

All right, let's drill into this a little bit more.

They didn't really want you to go off and do this.

They weren't super supportive, but

they were your first customer.

Was there reluctance for them to try it

or were they willing to embrace it?

They were willing to embrace it.

And kind of the proof in the pudding was

really the economics that were arrived from it.

So, again, early days, moving the

ticket, the transaction in advance, know

before you go purchase, print, park.

I was arbitraging the inventory.

So it was absolutely risk free to them, right?

So, as an example, they have a lot that

had 100 spots that was outside of a venue.

If I was going and I was selling ten or

20 or 30 or one of those spots in advance,

I was selling it at a premium, right.

And so they may be offering that at dollar 20

drive up, and I was demanding dollar 40 in advance.

And so they were literally doubling their money.

And the business model at the then time

was a 25% rake to myself, so 10%

from the consumer and 15% from the operations.

It was completely risk free to them.

And how did the technology work?

What was the first version like?

Oh, so you're a technologist, right?

MVP.

Not MVP in the traditional sense.

Kind of the complete opposite,

the minimum viable product, right.

So the workflow was such that I would create

a sequentially numbered PDF, one through ten, as an

example, and have it generated for a specific event.

And as I sold them, I would email the buyer this

PDF, and when they would arrive, number one would park in

spot one, number two would park in spot two.

And operationally, the parking attendant might

have been myself would have.

Whatever the sell through rate was, certain amount

of cones, they would be blocked off.

Again, kind of the peace of mind, know before you

go and having the spot when you arrive, whether that

was 30 minutes before or in the fourth inning.

And that was kind of the original workflow.

Where that ended up going was again, leveraging

the iPhone, creating a authentication, so literally generating

barcodes, generating authentication method through infrared scanner that

was attached to the device, using a square

reader to take credit card, but then creating

a digital transcript around everything.

So again, MVP was removing inventory,

capturing that electronically, carving that out

from the drive up traffic.

Drive up traffic still would

use the traditional cache methodology.

Next step was to introduce credit card payments

to create a digital record of everything, and

then authenticate the prepaid pass in real time.

And then the third step is doing all

of that, driving that to real time business

intelligence, so you could understand how many spots

were available at any given time.

So then you could actually shut off a

lot in real time and reroute traffic.

So within sports entertainment, finite

time to maximize opportunity.

When that puck drops, when the act goes on, kickoff occurs,

traffic stops, people will pull in, they're a quarter mile out,

or a mile out, or next to the stadium.

Whenever that time duration, that fuse is going

they're parking so they can get in.

But understanding the inventory in real time

allowed you to move resources appropriately. Okay.

And as you expanded beyond the family operation,

I guess you had multiple customers, if you

will, that are in this workflow.

You've got the end customer, the person that's going to

be buying this parking pass, but you've also got the

operator of that lot that's going to do it.

So you had to build tools for both

sides of the transaction, I would assume, yes.

So the efficiencies are made by

understanding the real time information.

And the hoover for that information was the

device that went in the parking attendant's hand.

So we were a human centric design shop.

So for that, we would change the user interface by

the Persona of the user to that same point.

Parking lot attendant.

The handheld mobile point of sale device was very

self intuitive and was a dummy cash register.

We used an MDM, that's mobile device management,

to lock down all functionality so they could

not send messages, make any phone calls, but

literally use it as a cash register.

But the workflow, human centric design again came

out of Google and Apple was very intuitive.

The reason why we needed it so

intuitive was that there's a lot of

turnover and churn within the parking attendant.

That is often the labor force is maybe their first

time in the parking lot or performing that task.

And then to the same point on the business

intelligence, where all of the efficiencies are gained.

This is where a command center, this is

your finance, this is your building operations.

This is a battle station, which was built for

each of those stakeholders on a Persona driven.

So the finance was really getting financial data

that they could then put into a ERP

or match with whatever accounting system they had.

Operations would have operational data.

So this would be utilization of the parking lot.

This could be performance on the parking attendant.

This could be overall utilization of the

entire footprint versus a specific lot.

This would allow them to manage resources, resources being

police, fire, rescue that are out on the ground.

They could change traffic lights appropriately.

Where before, this was a lot of stuff that was done

through radio chatter, and they would literally have to go like,

count spots in a parking lot, in a golf cart.

And so when you streamlined all of that,

a lot of the efficiencies were made.

And over time, this company grew into something huge.

And we'll talk a little bit more

about that here in a minute.

But in the beginning, I assume

you didn't start off with employees.

It was you getting it done or had you

put together a team right out of the gate.

No, no, no.

Back to MVP, right?

The first iteration of the

reservation first started selling.

I was manually generating the tickets

pdfing and sending them out.

The next iteration of that was using mailchimp.

To do to this, I used WordPress, did some lightweight

ecommerce cart checkout flow that would then automate the manual

process in which I once did that lasted really through

the first three or four years of the business, at

which point I was then began to sell directly to

venues as opposed to parking operators.

So parking operators are managing on

the periphery of a venue.

This like the secondary market.

You guys have seen this.

And then I began to sell directly to the venues.

And when I did this, I shut down my

reservation engine because I began to work with Ticketmaster.

And so I was now began to work with the venues.

Ticketmaster got into the parking game and I

was authenticating their passes that they were producing.

So that MVP that you talked

about, you built that yourself.

Where in all this time did you

learn to code and build software?

I mean, I'm an engineer.

You hack at this stuff and it's not as

difficult, it wasn't as difficult for me to calibrate

and figure out just the way my mind works.

So you run park hub for a long time and I guess talk

to us about what the last few years there have been like.

Yeah.

So we left off at the MVP and I got my

first kind of major client being American Airlines center in 2014.

That led to raising capital to produce a

more hardened product offering, at which point I

raised capital and I worked with the local

development shop to create the first enterprise, MVP.

That was Dilexa, located in downtown Dallas.

That system enabled me to then kind of

grow for the next five or six years.

But I then took the raise more capital and

then brought the outsourced development internal, built an internal

development team that began to manage the code base

and create the later features and functionalities that our

client base was desirous of.

We delivered that in a subscription multi year

contracts that led to ultimately COVID hits 2020.

And we began to diversify where we were selling into.

So we were selling into parking lots that had spaces.

We then began to go after campgrounds that

had campsites and marinas that had slips.

And these are all in markets that specifically

during COVID people were then traversing to and

had the same inefficiencies in which parking did.

They were antiquated.

They were fragmented, manual processes, didn't

take electronic forms of payment.

And one of the things that COVID get cash

out of the system because how dirty it was.

Move into electronic forms of payment.

And so literally kind of overnight, the

technology value proposition went from a nice

thing that would create efficiencies in your

operation and mitigate against cash leakage.

We became a requirement for a

lot of a lot of businesses.

And so then that led to some good

steady growth and ultimately hired a investment bank,

Houlihan Loki, to shop the business.

And we transacted in 22, early 22, about two and

a half years ago with LLR partners out of Philadelphia.

Okay, so you built a very successful business and had a

great exit from that, but youre not one to sit still.

What came next?

So first thing was right after that, at

22, we rebuilding the executive team, and I

moved to chairman of the business.

And the purpose of LLR acquiring it was use the

park hub technology platform, the client base for rollup.

We bought a lot of businesses since, and with that, I kind

of got out of the day to day of the business.

And ultimately, as a kind of pure entrepreneur,

I began to get bored or not bored.

I'm a builder, and so kind of all

along the way, I've always done investing into

the startup ecosystem and the community.

And in 21, I invested in a business called Ruho.

Ruho is a direct to consumer

e commerce cowboy boot business.

So I began to look at that

in 23, and they needed some capital.

So I began to help them put together kind of

a package to go to market to get some capital.

And they were really where the parka business

was in 2015, in which I mentioned earlier,

where I had Dilexa as my outdoor outsourced

development shop for the technology, Ruho had an

outsourced agency managing all of their revenue operations.

They were two and a half years in business.

They had three to 5 million in revenue.

They had over 10,000 boots sold that previous year.

And just in general, I started digging in.

And as I look at businesses, I look at opportunity.

Opportunity being total addressable market. Right.

So the market that I was playing in parking was

a $40 billion market, which I thought was huge.

Cowboy, western.

$130 billion.

$130 billion a year gets spent on western wear.

On western wear, 50% are in boots. Wow. Right?

That is staggering. Unbelievable.

So then I began to poke around and

really get smart on western wear and the

opportunity around it, and massive tailwinds.

Tailwinds being driven from pop culture.

You've got Beyonce singing country music now, and

you've got Cole Hauser really driving and the

entertainment side with Yellowstone, and you got 1883.

And all of this western wear has gone mainstream.

You know, it's really referred to as

modern western as we speak now.

And, you know, as I was sharing earlier,

it's no different than what we saw in

the seventies and eighties with the urban cowboy.

But my larger point is the rancher farmer

utility of cowboy boots or western wear really

went mainstream and became a fashion statement.

And so you can now wear your cowboy boots with,

you know, a t shirt, or you can wear a

cowboy, a western wear brand, not with flip flops.

But I saw that opportunity, and I began to lean in.

All right, I think I know the answer to

this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway

because I've got a follow up to it.

Are you a fashion guy?

Are you a designer?

Are you sitting down at night or spending

your days, like, sketching out designs for boots?

Am I a fashion guy?

Not by trade, right?

But as in anything, you listen to the

market and you see where the dollars are.

And I've been chasing those dollars

and understanding what they want.

And the output of that is, yes, it's

been designing of things that they're desirous of.

And so where I've taken the business is once there was

36 men styles that they were offering in 13 women's.

Women's was about 12% of the sales.

88% of the sales were coming from the men's side,

and 80% of the men's sales were really being driven

through, like, five to eight different styles of the boots.

So what that really told me.

And those were all exotic leathers.

So the catalog was deep and wide, and

the business had done really, really well in

introducing that and getting acceptance in the growth.

But, yeah, I look to where,

again, back to Persona, right?

And then, you know, find a lookalike audience, and

you survey them in a lot of different ways.

There's a lot of noise, but when you filter

out the noise, you understand what they want.

And, yeah, you know, that looks like designing, getting

to Leon, Mexico with the manufacturer and whether that's

like, hey, I want the boot to look like

this because you know that it's selling from maybe

a competitor or literally getting down to working with

a specific skin and saying, hey, I want to

produce a full quill boot, ostrich boot.

But, yeah, it's in part designing.

But you, you have to have that, that vision,

whether that's you're selling boots or building a technology

company or energy drink, you got to have a

beginning and an end, and you're scaling it.

You're climbing a mountain.

There's a lot of ways to get there.

You always have to have a north star.

Where I was going with my question earlier, I think

that hearing your story, I think something that you've been

really good at over the years is seeing a market,

seeing an opportunity, but bringing in the right experts to

help you really take things to the next level.

And so I guess talk to us a little bit

about what does the team at Ruho look like today?

I am in the thick of it now.

Welcome to the program.

We are moving from agency to internal team.

What that looks like is building

out a revenue operations, revenue operations.

And my world consists of

sales, marketing and customer support.

Top of the funnel, where all of the traffic that's

coming into the website, how is it getting there?

What are the channels that are doing?

What are driving it?

What are the conversions of each of those channels?

That's the marketing piece, the customer

service piece is listening to those

customers on quality, comfort, fit.

What else do they want?

So expanding the lifetime value of the customer.

So that's really going from selling boots

to creating a western wear brand.

And that looks like exotic boots,

exotic leather boots and leather goods.

So actually, I want to back up for just a second.

You started off as an investor and you

found your way into becoming the operator.

Is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah.

Sitting in the investor seat.

What was it that made you say, hey, I want to jump in.

I want to take the reins.

I want to be the one to lead this

business along the entrepreneurial journey and a builder, being

a founder and going through the paces of growing

a business, there's a lot of pattern recognition that

you see as an investor.

I look at how big is the market and how

much of it is penetrated and where the competitors.

When doing that, I generally, historically, you bet on

the team or the founder or the entrepreneur.

In this case, I saw the opportunity, the

growing market where they had gotten their growth

and really looked at bigger vision, the totality

of the opportunity of the growing market.

And that looked like beyond boots.

So meeting with the ownership and selling them, then

on that vision of creating a modern western brand,

heres how were going to do it.

Putting together go to market strategy, getting their buy in

and then jumping in and now executing on it.

Preston, I guess how much time did you have

between being the day to day hands on the

wheel at park hub to actually running and operating?

Ruho so I got out of the day to day

of Parkov and I think it was September 22.

I began really digging into the Rujo opportunity

in August of that year, the following year.

So August of 23 and got into the business and

60 days ago, January, February of this year into Ruho.

So man like you spent your time grinding and grinding

and grinding for years getting your other company going.

You had a good exit and you'd beat your

head against the wall a million times I'm sure.

What made you say, you know what,

I want to do this again.

It's so much fun.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Value creation for all stakeholders upwards to shareholders,

downward to one, first employees, then kind of

the consumer outward to the market.

Like I love that.

When you can put that conscious capitalism right and when

you can put that together money is great but it's

the value creation in the job creation and watching and

believing in especially in early days and startups when you,

you can believe in a and you can bet on

a and you thrive and mentor and advise in a

team and they achieve things that they never thought that

they were capable of like that.

That stuff's awesome.

Same reason you run a business, right?

You take a chance on the, on the guy

and or the girl and when you get to

see them level up like that's awesome.

It really is a great feeling.

It's a really great feeling.

In fact even today in the building some people

we got to give high fives and celebrate some

little wins that, that will lead to big wins,

gotta celebrate little wins and you can't do that.

When you get scale it's just not the same.

And then just fundamentally from running a

business at scale you're running for efficiencies,

you're not running for speed.

And I say if you want to go fast, go

alone, if you want to go far, go together.

And there's nothing better than a scrappy small team, sub

10 million a team that's like three to eight people.

And you've got that North Star and you're able to

motivate that team around a vision, mission and purpose.

Its special.

Going back to your previous company I imagine you probably

did have ideas about other things that you might want

to go and do at some point in the future.

Did you ever think that retail, that clothing, that western wear

would be the thing that you would go and do?

No, no.

But it's so clear and I'm having a great time.

And again it's business is business.

Once you get, once you got product market fit and you

understand unit economics and you can really manage to a purpose

and you can mobilize a team it's very clear.

And it doesn't matter if you're.

You're selling boots or parking spots, but operationalizing that

piece for scale is really my sweet spot.

So you say business is business, and I want you

to expand on that, because I'm looking at this going,

okay, you built a company that was b, two b,

two c, and you're dealing in a very.

In a digital world.

And today you're operating in a b,

two c world, selling a tangible good.

And it's also one that takes very skilled labor to do.

Well, what has that transition been like?

Enlightening.

So the craftsmanship of the boot is

made at a manufacturer in Leon, Mexico.

Leon, Mexico is a very special place in

the fact that 80% of the world's boots,

world's boots are produced in Lyon. Right.

So once you kind of get past that and

you're able to work with a manufacturer and you've

got the right productization of what you know can

sell, and we've noted, how do you get there?

Bringing in advisors, bringing in specialists, and really listening

to the market, that's like 90% of it.

And then the next piece of it is, how do you sell it?

Right.

There's a lot of ways that you can

sell things, but the beauty of e commerce

is that it is absolutely measurable.

So, as I was producing business intelligence, selling

the business intelligence into parking, it was because

you couldn't manage what you couldn't measure.

By understanding the measuring stick, you could

create and arrive at the efficiencies no

different than understanding and curbing consumer behavior.

Right.

It's rapid.

A b testing.

Lean into what works, lean out what doesn't work.

And that's where you focus humanity.

We're creatures of habit.

Once you can identify that person, and that person is

18 to 34, that buys my boots, I go find

you in other places, and I go serve you passively.

My boot in Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, today,

soon here, shortly, direct mail in your

inbox, your mailbox, or in digital tv.

And I'm hitting you where you are.

And then I'll drive you to my site,

and I'll have different call to actions, different

specials, for whatever lover I need.

And as you move beyond boots and you move into

accessories and apparel, it's not about selling you the boot.

It's about selling you the lifestyle.

And I can go get you a t shirt for $20, or I

get you a pair of boots for 350, or I can get you

a wallet for 150, or I get you a belt for 100.

But nonetheless, once you're in my system and

you become that brand enthusiast, you come back.

Yeah, you talked about measuring things

and knowing which styles to tweak.

Are you at the point now that you know,

hey, if I spend ten grand on Facebook ads

that it will return x amount by this date? Yes.

So the answer is yes.

But that sales equation, I know for boots and I've

pushed out belts and I'm going to push out wallets,

bifolds, trifolds, card wallets, and I'm pushing out clothing.

So that'll change over time.

But again, when you're able to mine data and

you're able to leverage data, and more specifically now

with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that's from

the data side, that's not to mention all of

the imagery that I'm able to do in saving

on photography and all of these other things.

But leveraging technology in this world,

in this ecommerce world, it's fascinating.

And again, business is business.

All right, you talked about the size

of the modern western wear market.

Do you see Ruho expanding the size

of the market or do you see

Ruho taking share from other established players?

When you look at market opportunity,

you have total addressable market.

You have sellable market, and then

you have the serviceable market.

The serviceable market, we will expand

and get into the addressable market.

The total market is growing by virtue of the

tailwinds of pop culture in which we hit earlier. Right.

So the market opportunity is expanding.

And to answer your question specifically, it's going and

cannibalizing competitors opportunities, but not at the same rate

as trying to go get the new opportunities.

It's interesting you talk about the pop culture and

there are a number of people who, if you

had asked me a handful of years ago, hey,

would you ever see that person wearing cowboy boots?

Id have said no. No way.

Theres no way that person will ever

own a pair of cowboy boots.

And sure enough, I can think of a handful

of people that are proudly wearing their boots today.

So it is a crowded market.

And one of the things that really blew me away

when I went out to your site for the first

time, and I told you this right before you started

recording, I hadnt heard of Ruho until we connected.

So of course, the first thing I did was go look at you.

I couldnt believe the price point that

youre selling a quality boot at.

How are you able to do that when competitors

are charging a good bit more and being successful?

And is there a play long term to drive that

price point up or how do you see that going?

Yeah, so two reasons that were able to

do that and ownership is in exotic leathers.

So because of that we're able to

leverage their buying power at our size.

And to that same point, in being direct to

consumer, we don't have a lot of overhead.

And so we take those two factors and we

pass those on to our customers and our enthusiasts.

And so we produce a better boot at a better price.

And is there upward pricing opportunity?

I think so.

But we're still early days in the journey

and we are now looking at, as opposed

to increasing pricing in the boots, expanding the

offering to our customer base and selling them

additional stuff and creating that lifestyle brand.

All right, let's talk a little

bit personal life for a minute.

At what point in your entrepreneurial journey

did you get married at the beginning?

Well, always an entrepreneur.

So I got, I got married in 2012.

Right as park hub is getting off the ground.

Right off the ground.

And then we had our first child in 2013, 2nd child

in 2015, and that was in the thick of it.

And as most entrepreneurs would say,

my wife is the rock.

She is an amazing supporter, champion of me and the

business, frankly, and could not have done a lot of

the stuff either financially or mentally without her support.

So I imagine that in the park hub days there

were plenty of great days, but there were plenty of

really hard days too when you got through that and

you said, hey, heres what I want to do.

I want to go dig in deep on this boot company.

What was her response to that?

Can I be involved? Really? Yeah.

She isnt very much into fashion and yes.

So she wants to be a part of this journey.

She wants to help on the marketing side, but

she thinks that theres a lot of opportunity with

exotic leathers into purses and she wants to design

purses and so she, she's all in.

And do you all work well together?

Yeah, I mean we've never formally worked in the

business since together, but I mean, I think we

work very well together and obviously in our family

and dividing the roles and responsibilities there for sure.

I know a lot of people that husband and

wife, great marriage, but working together is in a

true vocational context, wouldn't work out so well.

Yeah. Stay tuned.

Okay, so over the years, what are some of

the things that have contributed to your success?

I think one is listening and exerting kind of

humility and really being sober around what I don't

know how to do and bringing in advisors and

services to help kind of offset that.

Specifically early days and you know, 2014, I had a

formal, I formalized a board when I still owned the

company prior to raising capital to help me navigate things.

To that same point, creating advisors and listening in.

You know, a lot of, a lot of founders,

they say they listen and they won't change.

I humbly say I'm a very good

listener and communicator, and communication is key.

And kind of all along the way, translating up to

the board stakeholders, kind of what's going on within the

business, and to the same point, translating down into the

business, knowing what to say, what not to say.

So communication and listening.

Okay, that's really interesting.

You formed a board when you didn't

have to, you didn't have investors.

It wasn't part of the new charter of the company.

What prompted you to do that?

And then how did you go about

choosing who you wanted on that board?

Prompted me to do that, is, I just felt

like it was the right thing to do.

And I think as a young entrepreneur, I was like, oh,

I've got a board and I've got these people on it.

That's kind of what was driving that. Right?

And they were, they were independents and

they were, they were appointed and, yeah,

that's what drove me to do it.

And I think it helped, frankly, as I was raising

capital to help the investor base feel good, comfortable around

their investment of the professionalism and the approach, methodical approach,

in which I had put the business together to that

same point, not only that, carved out 20% of the

business for employee incentive options.

So I was incenting advisors and directors, and I was

incenting internally to the team on what we were going

to do, and everyone was part of it.

Clay, and how many people did you have on your board?

Uh, five.

And I had another five advisors.

And how did you go about selecting those board members

for the gaps, blind spots in which I had?

So finance was one of them,

entertainment was one of them.

And I had also an advisor that was in automotive.

I had an advisor that was in prop tech.

I had an advisor that was in kind of finance equity.

I had an advisor that was in supply chain logistics.

I had an advisor that was in mobility and transportation,

but just areas and sectors in which I knew that

the business was either in or would approach into Preston.

And how did you go about finding these individuals?

Were they people that were already in your network

that you knew, or was it asking around?

It was asking around one of my

back to communications, listening all along the

journey, formally being mentored or advised.

I would always, I always had this concept, you always

leave the meeting, hey, how can I help you? Right.

And I need two introductions. Right.

And there's two introductions, same thing.

You leave the meeting.

How can I help you? Two more. Right.

And then, so the multiplicity of the network

that I got and everybody kind of knew

what I needed, what I wanted and then.

So it kind of just percolated out of that. I love that.

Compounding the network. Oh, yeah.

Introduced me to two more people.

Introduced me to two more people. That's a.

It's a really smart way to.

Smart way to build a network.

How often did you meet as a board?

Quarterly.

At least quarterly.

And then kind of depending on business needs, maybe.

I called a board meeting a couple times a year.

So probably at a minimum four, maybe up to eight.

Preston and were there, you talked about wanting to have

people that could help you in your blind spots.

Were there ever times that they just kind

of called something out and are like you're

heading for major trouble if you don't.

Course correct here.

Yeah, yeah.

In later years, as the board actually did get

formalized through so I raised four securities ABCD.

The board did get formalized over

time and specifically later years getting.

So I was building hardware at one point.

Removing hardware from the business model was really

brought to light for a couple reasons.

One, hardware is really hard, but two, from

a business sustainability and valuation, we wanted pure

software and so removing hardware from that. Yeah.

Going into Ruho, what are some of the

experiences from park hub that you think you

will leverage or experiences lessons learned that you'll

leverage in building this, this brand, building teams,

structuring of securities, bringing in capital.

The world is very different now and my

raising capital should not be an issue.

Telling the story, framing it right, measuring

the business from the right KPI's right.

I think the biggest lesson learned is translating the business for

what it is, not what I thought it would be.

Trey, what does your day to day look like today again?

I got two boys.

My wife and I, we take our kids to school every

single day and we try to pick them up together.

Every day I go down to

the warehouse, meet with the guys.

I run the business through EOS,

which is entrepreneurs operating systems.

Specifically traction by Gina Wickman.

So that helps a lot just with all forms of communication

up and down and what's going on in the business.

So I hold an l ten meeting every Tuesday at 1030.

This is where are able to share for we

have it's an hour and a half meeting.

We share company news, customer news.

We then kind of go through our quarterly goals.

Are they on track? Are they off track?

If they're off track, do we need help?

Do we need to drop those down to an issue?

We spend about 60 minutes on issues.

Issues aren't necessarily issues for the business.

These are could be opportunities, but we ids

those that's identify than we discuss and solve.

Amazon could be an example of an issue.

Is Amazon a marketplace in which we want to move into?

We really identify what does it mean for the business?

We discuss that and then we solution around it.

So EOS is something that's come up

a number of times on the podcast.

And for those who want to dig deeper, check

out our toolbox episode with Kurt Swindall, EOS implementer

who helped our firm get it up and going.

So how much different do you think your day to day

is going to look in like twelve months, 24 months?

The work smarter, not harder.

I worked very hard the first time I did this.

I did a lot of things right.

I did a lot of things wrong.

I am confident I can work 50% of

the time with 120% of the output.

So I say all that to say, balancing

work life is really important to me specifically

kind of through that first journey.

And so I hope I can continue to

achieve greatness, scale the business and maintain the

lifestyle, family lifestyle in which I have.

Talking about working smarter and not harder.

Like, man, do you have like two or three examples

of things that you have done to work smarter? Yeah.

Number one, the things that are

important likely aren't urgent, and the

things that are urgent aren't important.

So triaging kind of tasks and with the same

point, compartmentalizing or time blocking for task switching.

So on my calendar, I literally have blocks of time that

are dedicated, let's say, to ruho or to YPO or to

personal or to park hub or to any other venture that

I'm involved with and being where my feet are at that

given time and exerting all of my mental capacity for that

specific task, as opposed to being 50% on and 50% off.

And that goes more specifically

when I'm with my family. Right. My kids.

And there's nothing worse than being

called out by your child.

Dad, were you listening to me?

Because you're on your phone.

Because I'm trying to respond to an

email that was not urgent nor important. Right.

So really compartmentalizing in task switching and focusing

on the moment and not this idea that,

oh, I'm the best multitasker bullshit.

Like, no, do what youre doing at the time very,

very well, and then flip to the next thing.

Flip to the next thing.

Flip to the next thing.

As our leadership team going from Q one to Q

two this year I asked everybody to read or reread

a book called essentialism and I dont know if youve

read it or not, but ive read it.

Its probably my 3rd, 4th, 5th time through it.

And that idea of multitasking, it just doesnt work.

Work.

And I think it's so right.

And man, I loved what you said about

being, I'm going to phrase it differently because

this is kind of how, how I've been

thinking about it for the last several years.

It's so important to be present.

And years ago, I'm not big on New Year's resolutions,

but years ago my New Year's resolution was to be

more present because there have been way too many times

where at dinner my wife is waving her hand across

my, my eyes and saying, hey, you know, I see

you, but are you actually here with us?

And I'm not perfect at this by any

means, but I'm very, very conscious of trying

to be present wherever I'm at.

And I imagine there are probably people in the organization

and people outside the organization that they sent me a

slack and they're waiting on a response 4 hours later,

or they sent me an email and I haven't responded

for a day and a half.

And it's not that I'm ignoring them, it's that if

I'm in a meeting, I'm really trying to be present.

And if I'm being honest, I

stray from that here and there.

But I think it's so important, like you

said, just to give yourself to whatever it

is you're doing at the time.

Completely, completely.

And that you, you will find again, the, the works.

The smarter out, the smarter, the more mindful you

are with that, the higher output that you'll have

and the, the more peace of mind and clarity

you'll have and you'll just, you're not as exhausted.

Yeah.

Have there been any major surprises

along the way with Ruho? I mean, I guess there's

all, there's always surprises, right?

And it's like a, it's like a rubber band, right?

The more you stretch the rubber band,

the easier it is to stretch.

Like, yeah, there's always a surprise, but

once you kind of reach that kind

of optimal resistance, it's not a surprise.

It's like, oh, this finally happened.

Here's how we're going to solve it. Right?

Like, oh, yeah, this was bound to happen, right?

So we could breakage in a process, upset

customer, whatever that might be, like, oh, yeah,

of course that's going to happen.

But, like, it's how you deal with it, right?

As opposed to it's being a firefighter,

as opposed to being a arson investigator.

Once you know what's going on, it's like, oh, this

is how you solve it with your first business.

You built it and you scaled it.

You're now getting this off the ground.

Do you enjoy the starting or the scaling?

More scaling.

Easily scaling, yeah.

I've started a couple of multiple

businesses before, kind of park up.

It's the scaling piece that I'm really getting excited

about, and that's from the job creation to the

creation of processes around systems and the measurability, the

hacking at opportunities, leaning into what works.

Like I mentioned earlier, I like that piece.

I don't know.

I think it's less than 10% of businesses that get

started actually achieve or have longevity over three years.

So I'd much rather take a business that just needs

to scale and scale it, then try to start a

business and be a number and then scale.

You are third generation entrepreneur.

You got two boys.

Would you recommend this life for them?

Absolutely.

Do you guys talk about it at home?

I mean, they see it.

They see it.

I mean, that's why we're here.

America's a land of opportunity, right.

If you're not capitalizing on that than

just a limbing in the system. Right?

And yeah, I know I teach that in a

lot of ways, and I'll revert back to kind

of the foundationally and fundamentally within scouts.

So I give back a lot.

I am cub master for my boys, pac 71.

That's giving back from, one, my journey to eagle,

but two, just embarking kind of knowledge imparting to

60 scouts at Bradfield elementary, including my boys.

So again, merit based achievement, safe place to fail.

That's part of entrepreneurialism. Right.

I work with my son, my oldest son,

he's got a app called Green Light.

Green light is I use it for

the idea of him understanding financial management.

So he gets $10 a week.

He can invest these dollars.

It's gotten him understanding the difference between private business, why

can't I invest in park up or ruho or something

like ethic, has these crazy underwear that he wears, versus

meta, which he's very familiar with, with his oculus or

Tesla because he sees them on the street in Amazon,

because they show up every single day.

But the idea of giving him microtransactions

and seeing how those, the fluctuation of

those, the volatility of those pricing to.

What's the difference on the private side.

So, no, definitely he sees it.

He's, you know, my, again, I worked my

butt off early days with my first son.

He was in the office.

He saw the team grow.

He was part of the parties, Christmas parties,

the small micro celebrations that we had.

We want a big client, yada, yada, yada.

Like he was part of it alongside

other family members, of team members.

So he sees the entrepreneurialism for sure.

All right, Ruho is off to a really great start.

You got some new product lines coming down.

What's next? Oh, man.

It's scaling.

It's creating the, it's creating the brand.

And, and I'm confident that it'll.

I am building this to build a,

build a lifestyle company and brand. And. Yeah.

Is there anything we didn't get into that

you would want to share with the world?

Any knowledge, advice?

Fail fast, pivot quick.

Well said.

Failure is not fatal or final.

It's the courage to keep going, use it as

an opportunity to lean into what works and don't

repeat the things that, that don't work.

And that could be behaviors, that could be hiring

styles, that could be pushing out technologies, features.

But you got to understand where the value creation

is, and you can't understand that without trying.

And once you figure it out, lean into it.

George, thanks for coming on and sharing your story.

Appreciate it.

That was George Baker.

To learn more about Rujo boots, visit rujoboots.com.

That's Rujo boots.com dot.

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

guest on in the thick of it, email us at introunderstory us.