Business Owner Breakthrough Podcast

Growing from Bootstrap to Bonanza with John and Mark Cronin

October 12, 2021 Pete Mohr Season 1 Episode 22
Business Owner Breakthrough Podcast
Growing from Bootstrap to Bonanza with John and Mark Cronin
Show Notes Transcript

John and Mark Cronin join me today for a conversation on how they grew John’s Crazy Socks from 0 to over $13M in sales in 5 years! Their story is unique and their path involved some luck and setting up the processes that allowed for the opportunity to happen. 

Here’s a glance at what you’ll learn from our discussion in this episode: 

  • What was involved in the journey from Bootstrap to Bonanza?
  • What is a Social Enterprise?
  • What is it that you actually sell? (It’s often not what you think)
  • The importance of giving people with differing abilities the opportunity to shine in your organization.

For more information, or to purchase some of John’s Crazy Socks for yourself, simply go to https://johnscrazysocks.com/ and they will deliver their promise to you!

If you’re ready to transform your entrepreneurial frustrations into freedoms by cutting through the chaos and using frameworks that help you run an even better business and enjoy an even better life, simply go to:   www.Mohr.Coach

Take the free assessment on the top right-hand side of my website and we’ll set up a time to chat!

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Mark Cronin  00:00

What does everything come down to work? Our mission has been spreading happiness, spreading everything we do, right? And here's the key thing that has to be alive and vibrant in everything you do. So you walk in our place, you see a big neon sign spreading happiness. But in every meeting, and every decision we make, will this spread happiness, it affects the way we answer the phone, or marketing or communication, everything we do. And that's a central because increasingly, customers are saying, Who are you? Before I give you my money? What are you going to do with it? How do you treat the environment? How do you treat your employees? how engaged Are you in the community?

 

Pete Mohr  00:48

Hey, it's Pete and welcome to another edition of the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast. It's designed to provide the tips and tools that will help you cut through the chaos of running your business and transforming your frustrations into freedoms for your business and life as a leader. And today, I had the opportunity to speak with a father and son duo mark and john Cronin, who owned John's crazy socks, and their mission around spreading happiness is contagious. They have put together a business about five years ago now and have grown from bootstrap to Bonanza helping social enterprise along the way. So we're gonna dig right into it with Mark and john. JOHN and Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here today on the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast. Welcome.

 

Mark Cronin  01:39

We're glad to be here.

 

Pete Mohr  01:41

Yeah, it's just a, it's just a pleasure. You know, we've heard about your story, and really wanted to get you on for a couple of different reasons that we'll go through here today. But you know, I really want to start off with this idea around. How did it all come about? What is john Sachs? And how did you guys sort of get into the sock biz?

 

Mark Cronin  02:02

Ours started the way I think a lot of businesses do. Right? It started from a bad place from a point of pain. Yeah, it's back in the fall of 2016. The business I had been helping run shut down overnight. So there I was 28 years old. I'm an entrepreneur, which means I'm basically unemployable. I know that feeling. So what am I going to do? So I'm starting some online businesses, and where were you

 

John Cronin  02:32

at, and food dad and I will show you how you can have food.

 

Mark Cronin  02:38

So he's in high school. And here's something that people may not know. If you have a disability, you can stay in the public school system until you turn 21. Okay, that was kind of so john was going to be turning 21 days last year, they were going to say get out. And when you're in school, everything was right there in front of you. Yeah. But once you're done, you're on your own. And what we're looking at I love the

 

John Cronin  03:01

job program and through Joshua like

 

Mark Cronin  03:05

to be liked, and that reality to that. There aren't a lot of good choices available for people with different abilities. Right, john? Boy here he is a natural entrepreneur is am instead of that being a problem. You turned it into an opportunity showed up. I don't see your job by one.

 

John Cronin  03:23

I want to I want to make one.

 

Mark Cronin  03:26

Nice. I don't want you to tell me

 

John Cronin  03:28

I say it out loud or obtain it with a dad. I nice father's damping together,

 

Mark Cronin  03:34

which was really cool. That's awesome. Again, like a lot of entrepreneurs try to have a lot of ideas. Yep. Some of them were good ideas. So like what we do second idea,

 

John Cronin  03:46

I thought was a cover idea. Movie, Chef, and Jon Favreau movie about our father, Dan Barney over a food truck.

 

Mark Cronin  03:56

That was pretty cool. And oh, what would we make? Where would we do it? But we ran into a problem.

 

John Cronin  04:03

We can't cook.

 

Mark Cronin  04:06

But then, right before Thanksgiving, you had your eureka moment I get

 

John Cronin  04:11

I want to start veggie stocks. Why shot it find it colorful and creative? Oh, always let me be me.

 

Mark Cronin  04:21

So why socks? How'd we get into socks? JOHN wore these crazy socks his whole life. That's right. idea. And we've figured if other people if john like them that much other people most of we could find our tribe. Nice. So you know, in simplifying entrepreneurship, we went to lean startup route. We didn't spend time with the big business plan. We said let's get something up, tested and run. So we set up a store in the Shopify platform. Got a little bit of inventory. We're bootstrapping. Yeah. So you got to make do with what you have. I totally get that. So took out my cell phone. We made videos always in the videos

 

John Cronin  05:05

I am I took my socks socks off my sock, right?

 

Mark Cronin  05:09

Lots of socks and we'd share those on Facebook cool and word began to spread. So what day did we open

 

John Cronin  05:17

up our swine demonise to Gen X 16.

 

Mark Cronin  05:22

We didn't know what to expect. We got what felt like a flood of orders. And most of them were local. We were on Long Island or town called Huntington outside New York City. Most of them were local. So what do we do with those first orders?

 

John Cronin  05:37

is I have geometries.

 

Mark Cronin  05:39

We got red boxes, put the socks in the boxes, what else have we put

 

John Cronin  05:43

in? As taken note from me and egg candy

 

Mark Cronin  05:46

ojama. right thank you note voted up. We poured in Hershey Kisses and loaded up the car drove around, knocked on doors, and how the customers respond

 

John Cronin  05:57

as endless as as stocked and share with me, when I get a spread,

 

Mark Cronin  06:02

they took pictures. We had people reordering, just to get john to come back to begin to spread. first month we shipped 452 waters had about 13,000 in revenue when you

 

Pete Mohr  06:18

started there, john, and 13,000 in revenue off the bat. I mean, that's a huge first month for somebody, how do you handle that sort of momentum off the bat when you're starting off bootstrapping. And you know, Jon's writing all these thank you notes. You're putting all the packages together. You're doing all this work yourself. What was the next step? And how quickly did you have to change some things around

 

Mark Cronin  06:39

the immediate step was to grab some people to help we turn to my bride your mom yet and said Guess what? It's a family business. You're gonna have to help. We hired a couple of John's classmates. Nice. And as we moved into January, you've learned by doing? Yeah, nobody buys anything in January, because they spent all their money, the holidays. But we got a couple of people working part time for us to help us kind of put in place the infrastructure that we needed, but you still wanted to grow. You kind of wanted to spend money behind the curve. Yeah. And you asked about that growth. We went from 452 orders in December to 186 orders in January, February, we introduced our first awareness song, we put out our first press release. And we grew nicely, almost 900 orders. Wow, that's great. And then in March, we had our first viral experience. And everybody in marketing and business as make us go viral. Yeah. Why would you ask for? The first time it happened to us was on a Saturday, we would drive out Saturday night You and I were going out to dinner. If your listeners are familiar with Shopify, you get your Shopify app and you can put it on your phone and the default you get a little thing. Every time you get a sale. Yeah, my eldest says, it's like a pheromone release.

 

Pete Mohr  08:14

We have Shopify at our stores. Do we own retail stores? So yeah, I get it totally. All of

 

Mark Cronin  08:19

a sudden it starts going Ding, ding, ding, crazy. I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I'm looking at our Shopify stats on my phone. I'm looking at our Google Analytics. I can see it blowing up but I can't figure out why. And in my hubris, I tell john, well, you know, must be that SEO work I've been doing an online journal called the mighty which had done an email interview with us put out a video so simple video. It's a slideshow video. Last I looked at got 20 million views. Oh my gosh. So we went from doing 50 orders a day to over 1000 orders a day. Wow. Fairly crazy. Yeah. To give you one idea, we were in this old house that had been converted to office space. You know, they say they don't build them like they used to be grateful. It had low ceilings, undulating floors, tilted stairways. And one night, I went up to Best Buy the local Best Buy to get two more computers. So we could have more packing stations, and recruited two of their employees to come work for us the next day. We just had to pack stuff. So you get air for how do you make that happen? We did a lot of things to put it into place for that to happen. But then you got to have some luck. Yeah. And I think in entrepreneurship, we don't talk often enough about luck. And it's not luck, like we're victims and things, right, yeah, have to put yourself in a position. But you can do all the right things and not get that luck, right. And then when it happens, you have to know how to take advantage of it. You got to be there. So So that's kind of how we got started.

 

Pete Mohr  10:01

I love that. Obviously hiring quick. One of my questions is, how did you control the product side of things? Like how did you go from shipping, a few 100 to these 1000s of pairs, all of a sudden, they must have had some ramp up issues and things like that, with regards to that.

 

Mark Cronin  10:18

We had challenges in the beginning, we weren't making any of our own shocks. So what we were doing, we were buying from other suppliers. Yeah. And we were relying on their quality control. We had two tables kind of switch. When we first started, nobody wanted to sell to us, because they wanted us to show we had sales, right? Well, how do you get sales? If I don't have product? It's a catch 22. Everybody wanted it? And they thought, Oh, yeah, it customers. So that was part of it. But you got to have the right infrastructure? Yeah. So we had to have the right inventory process, and systems, we moved into space, are we gonna have a warehouse, eventually what we've done, and this was absolutely necessary. We found a strategic partner, nice manufacturers and sources socks, they do it for department stores and brand names. Because we needed that expertise. Last night, there's a series on Netflix about law rule. And you could see this happening to them. They grew too fast. Yep. They didn't have good people. They didn't have processes in place. And the place blows up. Yeah, right. You've got to have that bedrock. And pay attention to the nuts and bolts, so that you can grow.

 

Pete Mohr  11:37

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I've created this model. I call it the four P's. And it starts with having that right product mix. The next thing is the right process, the next things, the right people so that you can enjoy the best profit, right. And, you know, ultimately, we're business owner. So, you know, we can enjoy a little bit of profit. But one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about here today, too, was the whole idea around a social enterprise. And I know you're really big on that you give back to the community, you've got all sorts of different things going. But tell us a little bit about your social enterprise and what your thoughts are there and how that's a big part of your business, john,

 

Mark Cronin  12:12

it's an essential part of who we are. And I think it's increasingly important for all businesses, you have to have a purpose, which is greater than ourselves. And that purpose can't be over just want to make money. And don't get me wrong. JOHN, and I, we'd like to live indoors. Yeah, you've got to make money to profit, become the CEO, that let you do what you want to do. You have to have that purpose. And you have to know what your values are. We've all just been through an experience, the pandemic, for sure. If we didn't have those in place, we would have been lost. But when that happens, now you have your North Star. Right. So for us, what does everything come down to what our mission? Having spreading happiness, spreading? Everything we do, right? And here's the key thing, that has to be alive and vibrant? in everything you do. So you walk in our place, you see a big neon sign spreading happiness. But in every meeting, and every decision we make, will this spread happiness. So it affects the way we answer the phone. So emails or product selection, or marketing or communication, everything we do, right? And that's a central because increasingly, customers are saying, Who are you? Before I give you my money? What are you going to do with it? How do you treat the environment? How do you treat your employees? how engaged Are you in the community, and it's not treat your customers. If your employees, it's our colleagues, 4 million people quit their jobs in April, three and a half million people quit their jobs in May, because people were now looking and saying, What am I doing? If all you do is have a job and show up and you want to get paid, you're not going to be happy, you're not going to like it, you're going to be disengaged the numbers, the percentage of disengaged workers is decreased when you give people a purpose. When you say we are here for admission, how we're going to do this together, and everybody has to know how they are part of that mission is no cog in the machinery. It's transformative for your customers and for your employees.

 

Pete Mohr  14:35

Yeah, absolutely. I live and breathe that every day with the people that I work with from a coaching side of things to is we set up those structures for that exact same reason. I mean, everybody in the organizations got to live that right.

 

Mark Cronin  14:48

You know, and for us. At the end of the day, we're not really your socks. The socks are the physical manifestation of our part. isn't our story. Love that? And it always were with a sock store? We'd be in trouble. Right? I told you we didn't do that business plan. Eventually we went out looked at the competitors. So I've counted, there are one gazillion socks. If all we're doing is selling socks, you wouldn't be talking to us. There you go. Yeah. It's not just fabric. It's actually it's a transaction. It's an experience. It's building a community. It's still the connection. Love that. That's what enterprise lets you do.

 

Pete Mohr  15:32

I've really enjoyed our chat today, Mark. And john, thanks so much for being a part of it here today. And I want everybody here to be able to reach out and get a hold of you. Do you want to just let them know how to get ahold of you? Or maybe how to buy some John's crazy socks?

 

Mark Cronin  15:48

Where can they get socks?

 

John Cronin  15:49

I sheis. Crazy. socks.com.

 

Mark Cronin  15:55

Right. And here's what you got to know, when you buy from us. You're helping us employ people with different abilities, more than half our workforce has the ability to help us get back. Me. Here's a really cool thing. JOHN, you're a special member gas.

 

John Cronin  16:10

Good. Am I better medic, Evie, I really cool. And I know we waste now. $100,000

 

Mark Cronin  16:20

donated $100,000 in Special Olympics 450,000 for our charity partners, but most of all, you buy from us, we're gonna make you happy and you can help spread happiness. Love that better than that.

 

John Cronin  16:35

So what's possible, showing what's possible so

 

Mark Cronin  16:39

that people can get a hold of both? The general email for the company is service at John's crazy socks calm. But real people read these emails, we read emails, we respond to everybody. If we can help you, you let us know.

 

Pete Mohr  16:55

So thanks so much again, guys. It's been a wonderful conversation. So much learned here today. And I'm sure everybody listening has taken away a lot too. So make it a great day. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Well, what a great story, some of you know that we own some shoe stores, and we sell socks as well, and all this sort of stuff. So the idea around this socks with a mission, the social enterprise spreading happiness, there's so much to be taken away here from john and Mark's conversation today, how they built from bootstrap to Bonanza, some of the challenges they faced how they got lucky. And I think it's interesting to, you know, that sort of conversation around the fact that we need to create our luck, and we need to be ready for when luck happens. Not everybody's going to have it. But you need to be ready when it happens. So that you can take advantage of that sort of growth that they experienced. I just loved all the ideas around how they did what they did to make their business survive and thrive through that deep growing area. And what they're doing giving back with every pair of socks, and helping you know, the Special Olympics at $100,000 and other enterprises at $350,000 over the last five years. I mean, that's a lot of money to give back over the last five years. And that's the first five years of their business. So excited to see what Mark and john will put together in the future for their business. So a little different conversation today. But think about some of these things that you can put in action. How can you get involved in the social enterprise and think about when Mark was talking a little bit about what does it mean? You know, they're not in the sock business. They're in the business of spreading happiness. What business are you in? And what are you doing for your clients? And what are you doing for the world in that case, so that you can have an even better business and entrepreneurial life. I mean, after all, you lead your business and it shouldn't be leading you remember, clarity creates confidence and confidence ignites momentum and you know, the talk around the clarity of spreading happiness created that momentum. So if you liked this podcast, please share it with your friends. You can really help me out by rating and reviewing this episode and most of all subscribing to the podcast so you can hear future episodes. For more information on my coaching and my leadership programs. Visit www.mohr.coach or you can email me directly at Pete@Mohr.Coach and you can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all the social channels as well. So until next time, make it a great day.

 

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