Ken Allred: A Journey of Resilience & Innovation in Transportation & Logistics

Notes

Recorded in the Cottonwood Conference Room at Kiln Lehi

Ken’s former company BTX Global (SLC franchise)

Book recommendation: The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen R. Covey

Summary

This episode features Ken Allred, a seasoned entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in the logistics and trade show industry. His journey is filled with lessons and insights that can inspire entrepreneurs.

Ken Allred shares his early career experiences, from working in a grocery store to becoming a salesperson for a moving company. He emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and adapting to different situations. He shares how he had to reassess his approach to work when he was warned about his sales performance, which led him to a job opportunity with a moving company. His dedication and hard work led him to become the salesman of the year twice in his field.

Allred then discusses his transition into entrepreneurship, where he and a competitor, Mark Willie, decided to join forces to serve their clients better. They recognized that they had different areas of expertise and could provide better service by working together. This partnership led to the growth of their business, which eventually caught the attention of North American Van Lines. However, they decided to part ways due to differences in company culture and continued to grow their business independently.

Allred also shares his approach to competition and alliances. He believes in the importance of forming alliances and working together to achieve common goals. He acknowledges that there are risks involved, such as being backstabbed, but emphasizes that the benefits of alliances outweigh the potential risks.

The conversation also touches on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his business. Allred shares how they had to adapt to the changing circumstances, which involved reaching out to clients and ensuring their needs were met. Despite the challenges, they kept their business open and continued serving their clients.

Allred also shares a lesser-known aspect of his life – his success in Dutch oven cooking. He and his wife authored a successful Dutch oven cookbook sold in various stores nationwide. However, he had to give up this passion when he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Overall, the podcast provides valuable insights and advice for entrepreneurs, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, adaptability, and the power of alliances. Allred’s journey serves as a reminder that success is achievable with determination, hard work, and the willingness to adapt to changing circumstances.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about makers and managers, and how that dual threat combination ends up making money. Starting and growing businesses. Startups to stay ups. It’s a podcast for and about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners and business partners.

Kyle Knowles:
My name is Kyle Knowles, and my co-host is Mr. David White. It’s a Wednesday night and we are chilling at Kiln, Lehi, Utah. And if you’re unfamiliar with Kiln, you have to check them out. That’s K-I-L-N, as in Nancy. Kiln provides way cool, high-tech, creative vibes office space and co-working solutions for individuals and teams. Kiln says they’ve built their communities to inspire, connect and accelerate growth. My opinion of Kiln is that they are the lifetime fitness of co-working office space. Dave, what do you think? What are your thoughts about Kiln?

Dave White:
Oh, it’s so good here. We are right in the hills of Silicon Slopes. And the vibe is vibrant. It’s young. So a good friend of mine is the one that referred us over here. His wife is actually going to be opening a Provo location within the next, I think, September… Sometime in September, so down at Provo. It’s going to be great location. So anyway, these guys have been really good to us.

Kyle Knowles:
This is episode numero uno of the Maker Manager Money podcast. And today we’ll be hosting Ken Allred, who has over 40 years of experience in the field of transportation and logistics. He specializes in exhibit marketing, quality control and logistics management as senior vice president and former owner of the VTX Global Salt Lake City. I will be forever grateful to Ken since he’s single-handedly helped me be successful with trade shows several years ago when I knew nothing about them. And I’m so glad we’ve maintained contact and friendship over the years.

Kyle Knowles:
Ken, welcome to Kiln, Lehi and the MMM podcast.

Ken Allred:
Thank you. Glad to be here. Fun to be in this great place. This really is, has a great vibe here. It’s inspirational. Thank you.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So what I want to talk to you about today is I want to start with you being the 16-year-old stock boy at a grocery store, all the way to owning your own business and recently selling your business. So go ahead and give us the story, the background.

Ken Allred:
Okay, thank you. I was actually thinking about that, too, is that… Tell you a quick story. When I was 11 years old, I wanted to play football and I wanted to learn an instruments. I go to my mom and I said, “Hey, I want to play football, bantam league. And I want to learn the guitar.” With tears in her eyes, I can picture her still standing in the living room saying, “Honey, we just can’t afford to do both. So if you want to do both, you’re going to have to come up with the money for one of them.” So at 11 years old, I actually started working at dry cleaners pulling pins out of drapes for like 10 cents an hour. And it was a lot of hours to get money for a guitar.

Kyle Knowles:
That is a lot.

Ken Allred:
They paid for football and I paid for the guitar. But it started from there. And then moved on into an opportunity when I was 14. A grocery store opened up not far from us. You weren’t allowed to work up front at 14 years old but I could be in the back and I was a stock boy. And those days people could still turn in pop bottles for money so my job was to keep the back room clean and take the pop bottles and put them in the right… Because one brand had their own colors of carton with their name on it and so forth. And I did that. Then just right down the street in my neighborhood, another store opened up and it was a great, great grocery market.

Ken Allred:
But the best thing about it that I really liked was that it wasn’t just a grocery store, it was a learning habitation for me. The managers, there was five or six key people, that they actually taught us how to be responsible. Which is really unique because so many kids nowadays, they just come in and say and it’s an 8:00 to 5:00 or whatever your shift is. Punch the clock, do your work, get it over with, and go home. And there’s not much quality control in the work performance in a lot of grocery stores, I think, of what people do. But they wanted to make us responsible, and so they held a meeting. They called in a few of us in individually, and I was 16 years old at the time, and started off in bagging. But as we worked our way there and had proven that we were going to stick around, they pulled us aside and said, “Hey, listen. This is how the grocery market works. We have a very small profit. If somebody comes in and steals a can of beans we have to sell seven, eight times that in order to get our money back just to get back even.” So it’s a tight industry.

Ken Allred:
And so they went through the money facts of all of that. And they said, “So what we want to do for you to be able to learn how to manage this business and grow into it, we’re going to give you a little section yourself.” And I took the frozen foods. I was over with the ice cream. And so as being over the ice cream, one thing we noticed is that we actually looked at it and I saw what was moving more as I stocked it. The neopolitans weren’t moving, but your maple nuts, your chocolate thing, or whatever, they were the prime sellers. And so I said, “Why not buy and give more stock value to the space we have for those items that are moving, and less for these others instead of making a perfect roll all the way down the cooler for that kind of stuff.” And it wasn’t too long, a few months later, the manager, Richard Mascarinis, great individual, came to me, said, “I just want to show what we’ve done in just the first quarter or the first two quarters.” And you had percentages, and it had grown substantially, 60-some-odd percent, or something like that. He gave me a little bonus, said, “Keep it up.” And we just kept moving along that kind of theme.

Ken Allred:
And it ended up being a great job there. And so I left for a couple years. I served in LDS mission and I came back and I had a job there. And it wasn’t really what I wanted because that industry is confined to managers having to work, especially those on the lower totem pole, having to work the weekends and the nights, the holidays. You’re stuck with all that kind of stuff. I didn’t want that. And so we have brokers that come in and supply the food, and one of them came in as he was selling and said, “We need somebody like you.” We’d gotten along well, and he said, “We want somebody like you. This isn’t really your kind of a job. Why don’t you come work for us?”

Ken Allred:
And I did, and I loved it. And it changed drastically, because it really was basically an 8:00 to 5:00 job. They gave you a car, car allowance. They give you an entertainment allowance, things like that. And so I was taking buyers and managers out to lunch and we were golfing and it was a fun job, being a young kid at 21 years old doing that.

Ken Allred:
But what I found out is that my manager came to me, Kevin said, “Ken,” he said, “You’re out there, and you’re seeing the stores. Good job, way to go. But man, you’re not selling. Your numbers aren’t going up and we need to get those numbers up.” And so I said, “Yeah, but I’m out there. We’re entertaining, taking to lunch.” “But you’re not selling.” Man, what does that mean? Because I thought I was doing my job and I thought I was just in but I was just in to be good old buddies, because I was buying lunch and going golfing, but I wasn’t closing the deal. And so I worked a little bit harder. The numbers came up a little bit. And then, Kevin came back three months later and he said, “Man, all right.” He said, “You’re not doing it.” He said, “Your numbers aren’t up.” And at that point, I think that was my second warning probably, or the next time, he said, “You’re out of here.” And that was it. And it’s like, no way. I’m 22, 23 years old. I’m a young buck and I can’t do this. I got a wife. We didn’t have any kids yet. I’m responsible. I’m the breadwinner. And it really humbled me.

Ken Allred:
And so I had to go look at myself differently. And I love that poem, The Guy in the Glass. I don’t know if you’ve heard that poem before. Sometime I’ll have to tell it to you but it’s a good little poem about being true to yourself. And so I had to really look at what I was doing. And a job opportunity came up in the paper for a moving company, Utah Mayflower. And at that point in that day and age, we were moving household furnishings. We were moving people who were relocating. We were moving offices that were moving to bigger offices or even closing down and moving out. Or the freeway came in and moved, closed down, these people and forced them out of their homes. And always felt bad about that because we were kind of winning either way. But it was a good job. And within about a year, I was salesman of the year in that field. And it went on for the next year and I was salesman of the year. This is nationwide. And so it was going really well.

Ken Allred:
At that same time, sometime in the early ’80s, I don’t have the years exactly, but sometime in the early ’80s WordPerfect developed here in Utah, was starting to come on. And they were building quite a big campus. But literally at this time as they’re creating their product, we were moving product right out of the owner’s garages to trade shows. And then we had to hurry and get them back because they needed… People needed to be at those keyboards or on that monitor. And so it was a real hot shot.

Ken Allred:
And trade shows were just coming into their own, going into convention centers, and they were doing a lot. They were pushing the product out there and there were some really good shows, CES, for example, really big shows in the electronic industry that they were going to. And so it blossomed quickly. And they became a breadwinner for us. They became quite a big powerhouse for us and we did a lot of shows for them and managed it. We were traveling quite a bit. It was quite successful. And that built my empire. I think there were several years there that I was probably out of town 280 days a year, traveling on behalf of not only them but other clients going to shows.

Ken Allred:
And at the same time, the University of Utah came to us and said, “We understand you can handle high-value product. We have a lot of artwork that needs to be moved around. Would you be able to handle that?” So we got into the artwork museum industry. And I really didn’t know him, but David, the curator at that time, was very, very good to take me in and teach me. And I was willing to learn. That’s the thing, is that I was willing to learn. I think that’s where my mindset had changed from where I lost my first job, being true to myself I realized that I can’t do that again. I wouldn’t want to be put back in that responsibility again. And you do it for yourself, but you also do it for your namesake.

Ken Allred:
Going back real quick to the grocery industry, when I went to apply for the job, the closest one, this last one, the one that I really liked out right there by my neighborhood, when I went to apply for it, I met with Richard, the manager. And he said, “Allred,” he said, “Are you related to Harry Allred?” And I said, “Yeah, he’s my dad.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know you but I know your father and he’s a good man. I’ll hire you on his name and we’ll see how it goes.” And that meant something to me, that I got my job because of my father’s good works and his standards. And so that really meant something. So I worked hard, because I knew they were looking at me as they looked at my father. And so that really brought an importance to my inner soul again.

Ken Allred:
So anyway, I think I kept that drive and I wanted to learn and I wanted to succeed at that point. And so we learned how to do the artwork museum pieces. We learned how to protect it. We understood what light it needed and we went after it. And pretty soon that networking your name brand gets out there and that branding becomes larger and larger. And the word of mouth spreads to the point where we were the preferred carrier for the Western Museum Association. And that was pretty well everybody west of the Mississippi that belonged to that association, and we had that business. And so we moved Princess Di and King Tut, Imperial Tombs of China, Monet’s, Van Gogh’s. We worked with Sotheby’s and Christies, and we had a good book of business.

Ken Allred:
And so as that empire grew, several things happened to me, is that we had… And I can’t call it an empire, but as that business grew, we had put a lot of stock into WordPerfect. I remember getting ready for a work one morning and hear on the radio WordPerfect’s been sold off. I was like, “What? Are you kidding me?” And I was like, “What does that mean to me?” Well, that meant that they were gone. Everything was pretty well broken off, sold off, changed. We kept some small businesses that went over to Novell at the time, but very little. And that was hard to come by, and it just all disappeared. And again, I learned from me another valuable lesson is that, man, you just can’t lay all your eggs in one basket. It’s great to have a lot of eggs but it’s great to have a lot of baskets. But man, you want to fill them up with a lot of people. And so that terminology of always keeping that funnel full and filling the pipeline, that’s a true story.

Ken Allred:
If anybody were to ask me about sales, man, it’s hard work. It’s a never ending having to keep it going because things can change. But I’d rather lose one little company, even though I know you don’t want you to want to lose them because I love to build a relationship with my clients. I think that’s the biggest thing. If somebody were to ask me, “What do you feel one of the greatest keys in sales or success in sales is?” I always say, “One of the first ones is trust.” They have to know that you’re going to be there for them, good or bad. Because we have mistakes. We make problems. And they come up, and they’re created in all different fashions. But you have to stand behind it. But most of the time, we have successes. And so you have to stay behind your product. And I think that’s the biggest thing, is being able to understand that when you’re building that relationship and you’re talking to a Kyle, that you build a relationship of trust. That they know that you’re there for them, good or bad. That’s really important. There’s a lot of people in my industry that can move freight. But when the problems happen, they’re not there and they don’t do it right necessarily. And so there’s more than just pricing when it comes to our industry. It has to be there.

Ken Allred:
In our industry, too. And I think I’ve told you this before in the past, is that by the time a company has invested in a trade show, they’ve already spent tens to hundreds of thousands on a booth. They spent tens of thousands or more on a booth space. They spent tens of thousands for flights to get people there. The entertainment, the spiffs, all the regalia that’s going to be given away at the show. There’s a lot of money on the table for a trade show. And one of the least expenses they will spend is in transportation. But man, if it doesn’t make it there in the trade show industry, they’ve lost all of that. So it’s really important that you move with somebody who has the quality and the care enough and the know-how to be able to make sure that it is going to be there.

Ken Allred:
There are so many times we are really a 24/7 office, and we hear about problems after hours. I had one here just minutes before we came that I had to solve. And that’s just how it is in the industry. But again, that’s the factor of who we are and why we are who we are today, is because we are there for our clients before, after hours, and during. And we do do it right. We research it, we know the industries, we are students of this industry and we learn every fashion we can. So it’s important to us.

Ken Allred:
So anyway, what happened is that I was approached by another van line a few years, just a few years, light years, into the Mayflower era. And they came to me and said, “Hey, we don’t have anybody that does what you do. We want you.” And that was good, because at the time I was with Mayflower, there was some financial problems going on with the company and I was told that it might be a little bit tight. So that came at an opportune time, and I moved over to Allied Van Lines, and everything was going well.

Ken Allred:
But again, back in those days when we sold, there was a regulation tariff. But when we sold, we were calling on one individual. One person wore so many hats. They were in charge of the office materials, they were in charge of the computers, they were in charge of the office move, they were in charge of the household moves. They just wore so many hats. And if they had trade shows or artwork, they were usually in charge of that. So you’re calling on one, maybe two, individuals in a company. And this is in the late ’80s, early ’90s. And so the trade shows were coming about but there really weren’t trade show managers. And now, of course, there’s college courses in trade show management and logistics and so forth. But that wasn’t there at the state, it was just coming on back there. And I actually taught for a while but we did short terms on trade shows, when they got round to that section in their logistics classes, which was a lot of fun.

Ken Allred:
Anyway, we started to grow, and I had a competitor, Mark Willie, who’s my partner now. And he and I, in my opinion, we owned a lot of the valley. We had a lot of business. We were moving the business. And when I went and called on David, Mark was calling on David. And it was really just, “Okay, today I’ll call this individual. Today I’ll call that individual.” There were some preferences, but really it was kind of a coin toss.

Ken Allred:
And so I called Mark up one day and I said, “Hey, listen. I’d like to talk to you.” And he, with his gruff manner and everything else and he was a very strong, tough guy, still is. But he had that posterior to where, like, “What do you want to talk about?” And so I said, “Well, just give me 20 minutes.” So we agreed to meet at a place, a rural place, that nobody would see us talking. And I said, “Hey, you know what we need to do is that when David calls you and has a computer that needs to be moved out of the fifth floor, you take care of that. Or if he calls me and says he has that computer off the fifth floor, I’m going to call you and have you handle it because I don’t have any clue how to do that. That’s your expertise. But if he calls you up, says he has an artwork to move or trade shows to move, man, you’re doing that wrong. You need to call me. Because that was my forte.”

Ken Allred:
And that worked really well. And three months later, I called him back up. And I said, “Hey, we need to talk.” And he said, “Why? It’s going great.” And I said, “Yeah, but let’s just talk.” And so we did, and I said, “We just need to be doing this together.” Long story short, over time that ended up happening, and he moved over to Allied with us and we grew that business. And Allied was purchased out by North American Van Lines. And North American came to us and said, “We don’t have anybody that does what you do. We’ll build you a warehouse, we’ll let you move your stuff and do everything from out of there and you can be an asset to us as well.” And so we did that for several years but it just didn’t work, because they were a large, successful company. And they had 100, 100-plus employees. And we were the small company with 10, 12 employees.

Ken Allred:
So we are buying bagels, and going to lunches, and we could do different things and entertain in a different way. We weren’t as as accountable as, “our partners” because we were partners, we were co-owners, as our partners in the larger corporations. And it caused rifts. It caused rifts with other employees because they could see that we were having benefits that they weren’t getting. And we played by a different set of rules than they were playing by. And so it came to a point to where it was better for us to just part ways. And we did amicably and that worked out. And from then, it just really blossomed.

Ken Allred:
And BTX came to us into Salt Lake City and they were just a wonderful, wonderful family. And they came to us and said, “We want to have a representation here in Salt Lake City. We want to know if you’re interested.” And of course, we were. And we joined the family. It’s been, I think, about 24 years now that we’ve been with BTX. And that has been an extreme success story for us. They have supported us in anything we wanted to do. Trade shows were new to them, as well, because really they wanted to ship boxes and get everyday common freight. But we were just in that different niche. But they accepted it, they allowed us to grow with them and they grew within and now it’s blossomed. And there are houses within BTX that do a ton more than we do, and we do a lot. And so as we go and we ship hundreds of trade shows a month worldwide, there are some that have some big houses that do bigger than that. So BTX has really come a long ways.

Ken Allred:
But one of the things I really liked about Ross, the owner of BTX, just to say it, is that as we met with him, one thing I really admired is that he already knew what the foundation was going to be. And as he grew that, brick by brick, he could also see the end. He knew where he wanted to end up down the road. He knew how big he wanted to be. And so it wasn’t like, “Well, let’s just grow and see what happens.” It was planned and it was strategic and very electronic and computer savvy. Which has been very, very positive for us. And so it’s been a really good story.

Ken Allred:
And then, after, like I say, 40 years basically with Mark and I, or more, we were approached a year ago by another company here in Salt Lake City that specialized in international business. They’re a large, large $50 million-a-year company, which we’re very happy to be a part of. And they said, “Hey, we want to merge. We want to be a part of BTX.” They called corporate and said that. And corporate was kind enough to say, “Well, listen. Mark and Ken are our family, and it’s up to them. This is their business and we’ll do whatever they want to do. We’ll follow their lead.” And so we entertained them and we went in negotiations. And they were long. They went on for months and months. And ended up going from a merger to a buyout. “Hey, listen. You and Mark, you’re old dogs. Sometime you’re going to get closer to that, sooner than later. Are you interested in being bought out?” We said, “Yes, we are.” And so we did, and it was amicable for everybody. We’re very happy.

Ken Allred:
And now we’re into another transition, where we’re bringing clients over, teaching salespeople how to take over our jobs, how to do our jobs, letting them understand how domestic trade shows and artwork museum pieces move, and educating them. As well as we are learning and growing on international. And together as a company, it’s a strong dynamic company here in Salt Lake City that we’re proud of. We’re proud that it came to this point. And it’s neat to be entrepreneurial enough to be able to say, “Hey, we started this when we were young kids.”

Ken Allred:
And not without its faults, not without its gray areas, its dark days. COVID killed us, absolutely just dropped us in the bottom. Because everything we do is in a trade show convention center or a museum. And so those became morgues or warehouses for medical supplies immediately. Ghost towns in their own rights. And so we had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shipments all over the country that it’s like, “Man, are we going to get paid for this? Are these companies going to stay in business? Will Merit stay in business? What will happen with this? Will these companies survive whatever this is?” Because who knew what it was. And for our industry, “Can we hold on long enough?” And boy, we had to really go through some teeth pulling until that PPP money came in to hold us through. And it was a tough struggle. And again, another learning curve.

Ken Allred:
And so as an owner of a company, and a company such as ours, is that we’ve been able to adapt and apply that adaptation to going a forward motion. And it just was lucky enough, again, very fortunate, I feel in my life that at the same time that COVID hit, an individual from LinkedIn called me up and said, “Hey, listen. I am your assistant. I am here for you. I will give you three months of one-on-one training to help you understand everything you can about LinkedIn. Let’s get you on sales navigator and I will be with you to help you work every avenue, reach those people you want to do.” And she did. And so it changed our dynamics because nobody was going to trade shows, nobody was going to conventions. Because we couldn’t ever gather in public. And so those were gone. Very tough time for a lot of companies. And we did lose some really good friends. We did lose some good businesses through all of this and they just couldn’t hang on long enough, which was really sad.

Ken Allred:
But we changed and she helped me network to be able to, for us, to gain a lot of storage, a high volume of pallets. So we went from maybe 3,000 pallets of storage to well over 7,000 pallets of storage. And the storage wasn’t permanent, like a trade show booth would be… It was rotational. It would come in and go out every single week. And so you get the money for coming in, you get the money for coming out, you get the money from monthly storage, and that just rotates. And that’s a great business to have. And it just helped us get through COVID with flying colors and move on from there which we’re very, very grateful for. And then that ended up being a foundation, we kept that. We went from 40,000 to 80,000 square feet and had, like I say, 7,000-plus pallets in our warehouse that was rotating and kept us fluid.

Ken Allred:
And then COVID passed on and now we’re back into shows. And that’s moving great. And we’re very, very happy for the success. And we’ve had a really strong first quarter this year. Life is good. We’ll keep doing it, keep motivation. Keep motivating to go on further day after day.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. So what made you decide to go into business for yourself?

Ken Allred:
Well, I’ll be honest with you. I never went to college and I always thought… I had friends that were working for big companies like IBM or whatever. And they were successful, they had good jobs. But then again, those companies have huge layoffs and they were gone. And so they would go and work for several years and then their future wasn’t any more sound than what I felt I was. And I was successful in what I was doing. We were making a ton of money as young kids. And so we bought a home, we were traveling and having a good life. And our family was just starting. And not that I wasn’t traveling, and we were always worried about making sure that life does stay stable for us, but we were successful. Successful more than most.

Ken Allred:
And so I thought, man, I’m already making more money than they are without having a college bill to pay off. And those four or five years of college, or longer if it was medical, those years of college that they were out of work at the time. And so I just kept on saying, “I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing.” I was always envious of them, but I was successful. And it just kept being that kind of a motivational that every year we were successful.

Ken Allred:
And again, we had struggles because, again, companies would disappear. You’d have to rebuild your funnel and get back into work. And that’s one thing I’ve really learned about sales, is that you can’t stop. Because you don’t know tomorrow if somebody else is going to disappear, just like you heard on the news. It just disappears, just that fast. There are companies I work with and somebody will come in and they have a friend who is family or blood that is family and it disappears just like that. And so we have to be always filling that pipeline. And so I’ve learned that no matter how comfortable you can get with the sales you have, you have to always be acquisitional and grab more sales and just keep it going.

Ken Allred:
But I was glad that I did. And then, it came to a point that as I started to approach, I’m 65 now, as I started to approach the 60s… And a lot of my friends were already retiring because they’d been with the company or with companies that got to a point that they had been there long enough to get their retirement. I’m thinking, “Dang, I wish I was there because my retirement is what I make of it.” And we were fine. We were doing fine that way. But still, we also lost money in the market. And so there goes that funding. And not that those guys didn’t either but they also still possibly had a retirement from a company where I didn’t. It was still just me making that money. But I think that actually drove me just to keep working harder because I had to count on myself. And I think that’s the biggest thing is that, and we’ve talked about this, is that you have to believe in yourself. If you’re going to go for a company, you’re going to develop a company, you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that you can do it because if you don’t, you’ll never get there.

Dave White:
Ken, you talked about being, and I love your story by the way. There’s Just so many ups and downs that you’ve had throughout your life in the business world and you’ve had to pivot. You were humbled early on in your career when you were let go. And I find that interesting because we all need a driver. We all need a driver to move things forward. Were there times earlier on in your career with BTX and when you were really heavily invested in the logistics section of your business, are there any life lessons that you picked up besides being humbled? Are there any other drivers that you picked up along the way that you might be able to share for anybody that might be listening, starting their own business?

Ken Allred:
Yeah, there’s a few things. Number one is that I believe in, there was a book actually that started off. And this was probably in the mid-nineties, maybe the late nineties, but I think it was called Co-opetition. And it was a play on being competitive but also networking. Understanding that you can gain more by networking than you can by trying to be solo. There’s a lot to be gained by using the resources of other companies, other individuals. And that’s tough to do because you want it all. But you can’t do it all, nobody can really do it all. And so there are just avenues that sometimes you have to make alliances with people who you fell are your competition. And they have to be willing to do that too and it’s hard to find.

Ken Allred:
We’ve been stabbed in the back, honestly. We have brought in competitors on the aspect knowing that we can’t do it all, only to have trained them and have them go after our business. And don’t keep it because they can’t do it like we do. Again, there are a lot of freight hounds in our industry and they’ll try. They think they know enough, but there’s a seasonality. There’s a veteran ship of working every single day in the industry and being a student of the industry, more than just carrying the freight from here to a convention center and back or between shows. There’s a lot of knowledge in between.

Ken Allred:
And again, a lot of relationship because in the trade show industry, we have what’s called decorators. People who actually run the convention center. They actually hire the forklift drivers, electricians, plumbers, et cetera. And they could be seen as and viewed as enemies because they can carry the freight themselves. But we have to become an alliance with them. We have to create a relationship with them so that we can work with them and they can respect us and we can respect them. And lo and behold, that ends up being that we work together. They give us freight, we yield to them and let them take care of things when it’s appropriate too. And we feed off each other. We trap their freight for them. When a trade show comes in, we’ll bring it into our warehouse, we’ll consolidate it, we’ll take it out to the convention center. And it works both ways.

Ken Allred:
So I think over the years, and you still get stabbed in the back because I don’t think a lot of people have that good old boy handshake agreement that I’ll be trustful and honest with you. And so you have to be careful of who you make those alliances with and you will get hurt sometimes. But that’s the industry too. It is competitive and everybody’s out there for their own. But you find those teams that you can make and those individuals you can make alliances with and do well by. And I think that’s been one of the greatest lessons for me.

Dave White:
That’s good advice.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I love it. It sounds like you’re an avid reader. So what is the book that you recommend to people the most?

Ken Allred:
So that’s a fun question. Reading to me is having a bunch of friends and everybody has their own personality. And you like them anyway but you like them a lot for their personality. And so when you come together, all those personalities come together, books are the same way to me. They’re just a bunch of great personalities. And so you have to look at them as individuals.

Ken Allred:
One of my books, I think I really like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think that was a great book to understand and learn discipline, to understand the art of listening. Very, very important. I can talk all day long. But you know what? If I haven’t heard what they said, it does no good because they’re not listening to me if I’m not listening to them. And so it’s very important that you listen. So there’s just a lot of great habits and the discipline of repetitiveness, keeping it going every single day. That’s a great book. I think Stephen Covey had a hit on that one. I really like that for that reason.

Ken Allred:
And Spiritual Roots to Human Salvation, that’s a real good book too. And to be able to… I don’t know if I said that right but I think that’s what it is. It’s been so long since I’ve read it. But another Covey book. But again, it helps understand the empathy of individuals and hearing their pain points and understanding how through those pain points, you can answer the questions and be of a service to them. So business wise, I like that. There’s a lot of the books I love that I would highly recommend people should read for their own characterization. But yeah, I like Covey.

Kyle Knowles:
Very nice. What was your work-life balance like being a business owner and how did you manage spending time with your family? Did you feel like you had more opportunity to do that as a business owner or less or did it just change over time?

Ken Allred:
I think at the beginning it was way less, actually, with family life, it was a lot of work and a lot of sweat. I remember traveling so much that I would be on the phone in New York, talk to my wife and she’s taking the kids to the soccer games or the baseball games and I’m missing that kind of stuff or this play or that school thingamabob. And there was a lot of missing that, I remember being in New York one time thinking, this is getting old. I’m traveling way too much and I’ve got to learn to be home.

Ken Allred:
And then you guys know this, but it’s not public out there and I have MS. And so I had to learn, I’ve had it now for about 15 years, and I had to learn how to network because I can’t go beat the streets like I used to. And so you have to come up with a way, and that’s where that co-opetition really helps. But you have to network and you have to be able to build that funnel through network. And that networking will ease my life, and it has eased my life by having so many other people working for me and on my behalf, recommending me to other companies, introducing me to other companies, and likewise I to them. It’s a great relationship, a great fair share relationship where we get along really well. And again, that’s like a good book, great friends with their different personalities. We can help each other networking in different ways.

Ken Allred:
Our good friend Corey Schaffer, I love her and she’s taught me a lot. And one great principal principle she taught me too that just came to my mind, Kyle, was that I was making a presentation actually to her company. And we had a big job going down, or several jobs, a long project going down, and I wanted to give her a good guy deal. And she said, “Man, don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got something that nobody else offers in your total service package. Don’t sell yourself short and believe in who you are and get paid for it.” And that was a great lesson and changed my habits again at that time. So you continue to learn from these great people that you network with and I’ve always appreciated that.

Kyle Knowles:
It’d be great to have Corey on the podcast actually. She’d be fantastic.

Ken Allred:
She’s retired and living life to the fullest right now. That’s great.

Kyle Knowles:
For sure.

Ken Allred:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about, going back to LinkedIn, was there a strategy or two that you learned using LinkedIn Sales Navigator? What exactly did you learn and did that help you pivot to the more warehousing or… So I guess those are two questions. One is, what did you learn from LinkedIn, the person that called you up and said, “I’ll help you, be your assistant.” And then how did you come up with the idea to pivot to the warehousing?

Ken Allred:
Well, that became out of its own growth because we couldn’t go to shows, we couldn’t ship to conventions. Their artwork museum pieces, we couldn’t do that anymore because that was just COVID thing in the past. And so we had to resort to something else. And we had a warehouse, we had trucks. We wanted to keep our drivers busy and we wanted to keep our warehouse full. And so that just came through natural fruition.

Ken Allred:
But what I learned from that was that you have to continually beat that cycle up. You have to be on LinkedIn and network. You have to reach out to hundreds of people a day to get 10. It’s a long process. I sent out thousands of invitations, thousands of connect requests. And it just takes a lot of repetition. It takes a lot of cataloging. You have to keep that in order. LinkedIn has a service that allows you to keep that in order so you can see who you’ve done and how long you’ve contacted them. And then there are tools that helps you manage those stats. And so you had to reach out to those who were continually short talking you. Because they’d come back and say, “I’m interested, but just give me an idea of what we’re talking about.” And so it was a lot of hits, and it would literally be probably three hours a day at least on LinkedIn every single day, sending out invitations. And then probably an hour and a half, two hours, every single day, especially for the first 60 days, because everything else for us was dead.

Ken Allred:
But then again, as that transitioned, our clients who we have, and we specialize in the outdoor industry. If you were to walk into a major sporting goods store, 70% of probably things that are sold there, for the most part, are our clients in the trade show industry or in the storage industry, we specialize in that era, in that arena. And so those clients started growth because during COVID, nobody was going to work. A lot of people had some free time and they’d figured that out real fast. And so now they’re hitting the hills and they’re hiking, they’re biking and they’re snowboarding and they’re skiing and they’re getting walking sticks and new shoes and paddle boards and all that kind of fun stuff. And man, that stuff. Going out camping. And that industry blew up. And so the clients that we had as we’re networking and new clients as we’re networking, as I was networking through LinkedIn and hitting them back up again because they weren’t going to shows. And so I hit them up through LinkedIn to be more professional because that’s what I can keep track of it. And then they started saying, “Hey, we’re interested in storage. We have so many containers coming in. We have, our growth is shot through the roof, thank goodness.”

Ken Allred:
As some companies do in the medical industry. There are certain industries that really thrived through COVID. And so that through natural fruition came to us to where we could go ahead and it was just a matter of time. And still they started also filling our warehouses up, which again, was very good. But we picked up a bunch of new large accounts too, nationwide. But it really was beating the streets. You had to be on that network and you had to fight it. And then you could go out, you could actually reach back out to, because it was home every single day, you weren’t working. I couldn’t go in the office because I had MS and we didn’t know how bad this was going to be. With my autoimmune system being way down, I had to be really careful. So we had a troop in the office that kept the gears rolling. And good on them, they were strong. They were there beating the streets every day. They were there fighting the fight in the office, keeping it going. And I personally really appreciated that because I couldn’t. I just couldn’t take the chance.

Ken Allred:
And so I was home. And so after that long LinkedIn half a day or better process, then it was reaching out to my personal clients. “Hey, how you doing? What are you doing? How you making it through all this? You hanging in there? You’re going to be there?” That kind of thing. “Who’s there? Who’s not there? Who’s sick? Who’s not sick?” We lost good people through COVID. We lost people that just couldn’t fight it. Weird, weird, weird situation in life. What a change to our culture worldwide. But that’s how it was. It was all working. It was business. And it still had to happen. We still had to look towards the future. We didn’t give up. We beat it. We stayed open. We fought and fought and we made it work. And we’re very grateful for it. Feel very blessed.

Dave White:
So what’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Ken Allred:
So we had a very successful Dutch oven cookbook out on the market for years. It was called Kettles and Coles, K for K for Ken, C for my wife Cheryl. And we competed and won competitions all over the state and it got invited to the world championships and fared really well in there. And then I started making recipes Dutch oven wise and put together a cookbook that came out through a fun method. And this cookbook, I took this little cookbook to Sportsman’s Warehouse. They were great enough to take it on. And Jim Durphy, the buyer over there said, “Yeah, let’s give it a try.” Man, we couldn’t keep it on the shelf. It was just great. We had it in Walmarts and Ace Hardwares and just in sporting good stores all around the country. And it was a lot of fun. And so we did that for a long time.

Ken Allred:
I had to give that up when I was hit with MS. I just couldn’t do that anymore. Couldn’t be around the heat and couldn’t lift the ovens and stuff. So we gave that, which was a blessing to my wife. She was like, “Hallelujah. Not that you have MS.” But man, that’s a lot of work. Dutch oven cooking isn’t easy cooking. And it’s not good for you. It’s fat food. And so you got to be careful because there ain’t nothing good about Dutch oven cooking really, other than the taste. It’s not good for you but it tastes great.

Kyle Knowles:
Nothing better than peach cobbler out of a Dutch oven.

Ken Allred:
[inaudible 00:40:19].

Dave White:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
Yes. So is that book still on the shelves somewhere or?

Ken Allred:
No. I actually, with my health and everything, not knowing how that out outcome would be, I actually sold the rights to all that. It’s gone. It was gone. It’s been gone for probably 12 years or something.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s amazing.

Ken Allred:
And I’ve never seen it since, which is sad. But yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Oh. Well, that’s awesome. So we’re rounding up here but let’s go through the lightning round. We’ve got a lightning round of questions. They’re very, very easy. Favorite candy bar?

Ken Allred:
Butterfinger.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite musical artist?

Ken Allred:
James Taylor.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite cereal?

Ken Allred:
Raisin Bran. No, take it back. Shredded Wheat. Frosted Mini Wheats.

Dave White:
Frosted. That’s the key, right?

Ken Allred:
There we go. I don’t eat it but I love it.

Kyle Knowles:
Mac or PC?

Ken Allred:
PC, unfortunately. Nobody believes me in that, but everybody shuns me. But PC/

Kyle Knowles:
Google or Microsoft?

Ken Allred:
Microsoft.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or cats?

Ken Allred:
Dogs.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Ken Allred:
Les Mis.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome.

Dave White:
Those are great.

Kyle Knowles:
Those are great answers.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you so much, Ken, for being on our first podcast. This has been fantastic learning about your background. And I think just to tie a bow around this, since the podcast is called Maker Manager Money, would you consider yourself more of a maker or a manager?

Ken Allred:
Well, in my industry, I think you have to be both. We’ve had to be operationally and managerial all at the same time because we just haven’t had the staff. It’s always been something, if we want it done, we have to hold onto it. And so we’ve had to go out and make the sales and then manage those sales and then really manage the people. But you can’t stop selling. And so we’ve always had to be the makers of the money but we’ve had to manage every dollar we’ve got through operation processes pretty well.

Kyle Knowles:
It sounds like you and Mark were a good pair because you both were creative and visionary but also could run operations.

Ken Allred:
Yeah, we have a lot of opposites, but boy, those work well together. And yeah, he’s been a good brother over these years and we’ve had a good time.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, and I understand after the sale you were staying on for a year, so right now you’re looking for your replacement. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re looking for and what some of the people that have been applying to fill your shoes, some of the experiences you’ve had there?

Ken Allred:
Yeah, we are. I’m hoping I might be able to stay on a little bit longer than a year but we don’t know quite for sure. But it all depends on how my health goes. But it’s been tough because you want your clients to be in good hands. And so it’s been really tough. But we will continue to do so. But we do have really good staff that we’re trying to teach. And again, it becomes to that discipline of how hard are you willing to work because it’s not an eight to five job. And that’s where we see in a lot of culture right now, that a lot of people in almost any field that we hire just don’t want to put in anything past eight to five. Comes 5:01 and we have more lead that we want to stay. And not that a lot of them are still helping out after hours but it’s tough to find people who realize in order to make the business, they have to earn it and fuel that fire.

Ken Allred:
Zig Ziegler always told the story about putting the wood in the fire and you just can’t have the heat up. You have to build it up and keep it going. And that’s how it is in sales and that’s how it is just in our business, in any business really. And so a lot of people will come in and just not want to work more than the 40 hours a week and we have to find those people that have that spark and that desire to put it in. Because you can’t be successful nowadays if you don’t. You can get by but you can’t be successful.

Ken Allred:
I have a quick story. It just came to my mind actually. Oh, I thought about it earlier, but it just popped up again, is that when I was a young boy I had a grandpa that I really liked. And I know my dad didn’t get along with him but I think that was more the father son rebellious type attitude. But I really liked him. He was good to me. At a young age I just remember sitting on his lap and he’s teaching me how to count and add and subtract and things like that. And I remember one day… He was a farmer down in Gunnison. And I remember one day we were out in a cornfield and we were harvesting the corn. And boy, in the day we’d go out in the cornfield and we would just play all day long. It was fun. You could hide and seek and just disappear in that maze of the cornfield. But there’s a lot of things that move around in the cornfield and when it comes start getting dark at night, it gets dark. And those sounds sound totally different in the dark than they do in the daytime. It’s just the shucks of corn moving around with the dry weeds and the wind. But at night it sounds like something’s out there.

Ken Allred:
And so as we’re shucking corn, I was a little kid, I was only like 11, 12 years old, 11 years old I think. And we were pulling that corn off and my brother was there and I think my cousins were all there and my grandpa and my dad. And it started getting dark and I started getting scared. And “Grandpa, Grandpa”. He gave me a really good moral. And he said, “Kenny, if you just get on your brother’s shoulder…” I have an older brother named Randy. He said, “If you just got on your brother’s shoulder, you can see anything you want to see. You’ll be able to see where I’m at.” And I’ve always taken that as a moral lesson to life. If you just lean on your brother’s shoulders. And so that comes back to networking. If you rely on those who are in your industry that are there to support you, my BTX family, my office team, my personal family. If you just get on the shoulders of your brothers, you’ll be able to see where you want to go. And I think that is important in that whole co-opetition attitude, the whole networking attitude, the whole alliance of being able to work with others, trust them and develop that. I think we grow better and faster and stronger if we work with each other. Just a thought.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s fantastic. Well, thanks so much for taking some time.

Dave White:
Absolutely. It’s been an honor to just sit here and listen to you and give your life experiences. It’s great.

Ken Allred:
It’s been fun to chat. Good to see you guys. And this is fun. Like I say, this is a cool vibe. This is a neat place. I like it. So it’s been fun being here and hey, a podcast. It’s a first. I like it.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, I’m glad that you could be our first guest and thanks again for being so generous with your time.

Ken Allred:
Bet. Thank you very much.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, thanks Ken.