Decked with Jake Peters - Pick the right battles
Hi. This is Ain't That Something, and I'm your host Levi Smith, CEO of Franklin Building Supply. We're an employee owned building material supply company headquartered in beautiful Boise, Idaho. I'm a former ranch kid from Texas who found his way to Idaho and into leading this storied company. We're proud to be part of the fabric of communities we operate in and wanna help share stories of other companies doing the same across this great state.
Levi Smith:In each episode of Ain't That Something, I interview founders or leaders about the stories of companies you may be surprised to learn have either had their start in Idaho or now call Idaho home. In every interview, you'll hear about an interesting cast of characters, learn about daunting obstacles, and be inspired by the persistence it took to succeed. Get ready to be surprised and entertained with each episode of Ain't That Something.
Jake Peters:I said, we need to figure out how to get this correctly manufactured. You know, 6 weeks later, we came back and they said, it's cute. It's cute as clever. It won't work, but it's cute. I said, okay.
Jake Peters:Well, do you know how to make it work? And I said, oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, what would that cost? Well, it's $500,000.
Jake Peters:And I said, go go for it.
Levi Smith:Today, you'll hear the story of DECT, a Ketchum, Idaho based company that is best known for its iconic drawer system product that sits in the back of truck beds. Deck today has more than 200 employees, has sold 100 of thousands of these units, and is American made with manufacturing operations in both Utah and Ohio. So get ready to hear a fun story told through the lens of one of its founders, Jake Peters. Jake, I'm delighted to have you on the podcast today. Before we get into the story about DECT, I wanna find out a little bit more about you.
Levi Smith:How did you even end up in Ketchum, Idaho?
Jake Peters:Well, it's pretty simple. My dad was in the air force, so I was born near Seattle, moved to northern Northern California. When I was 4, my father came home and said to my mother, we have have good news and bad news. He said, what she said, what's the the bad news? And he said, we've been transferred to North Dakota from California.
Jake Peters:And she had been born in North Dakota, so being set back there wasn't really terrific. And she said, well, what's the good news? And he said, I think I can get out of it. And then the next day, he came home and said, yeah. I could not get out of it.
Jake Peters:So I I was raised then from 4 till I was 17 in North Dakota because of the air force thing. Okay. And when I was 17, an old mobile and I relocated to Seattle because I had gotten the ski bug and wanted to ski. So I ended up JUCO and the University of Washington. And then and I went to business school in Switzerland, and then I moved to New York, and then I moved to London, and then I moved to New York, and then I moved to Boston, and then we made a kid.
Jake Peters:At which point, we my wife and I both quit our jobs, and we moved to Ketchum.
Levi Smith:Going back to Seattle for a second. So you get the ski bug. Yep. You go out further west. You're skiing.
Levi Smith:What drew you to go to Switzerland for college?
Jake Peters:It was the best business school in Europe in the at the time, maybe it still is, and it had the highest average starting salary of any MBA program on earth by about 40, 50%, And it was only 1 year. Oh. So I said that that that kinda sounds good to me. And it was an adventure, obviously. And, as it turns out, the Ford Fortune, I think, was the magazine I read about it in, and they called it an academic boot camp, and it was all of that.
Levi Smith:So when you and your wife had your first child, what was the connection to Ketchum? Had you been there before in your ski travels? What what even got Ketchum on your radar?
Jake Peters:Well, when I was living in Seattle, we would come over here come over here skiing. And, you know, I remember every time we drive into Haley, I get in a good mood, and and it just seemed like a nice place. So when we quit our jobs, we got married here just randomly. I proposed on top of the Empire State Building facing northwest, and she said yes. And I said, there's a caveat.
Jake Peters:We gotta move over there. And she was keen on that. So, yeah, so we got married here. And then when we were able to retire in our thirties, we came here not with an intention of moving here with a kid, but 3 weeks after we got here, you know, all the long planning was out the window, and we said, well, this is good. Why don't we just live here?
Jake Peters:And we've been really, really happy living here ever since. That's 25 years now. Wow. That's a chunk of time.
Levi Smith:Yep. What would you describe as really your professional background then? So
Jake Peters:undergrad, then I worked as an insurance broker for 4 years, talked my way into this business school called IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. And then I went to, a bank called Credit Suisse First Boston, which was one of the big Wall Street firms sort of. I worked in New York and London and then back to New York, at which point the Internet was invented. I was a banker to tech companies when the Internet was invented. So if you're covering the tech sector as a banker and the Internet is invented, you can make a lot of money very quickly, and I did.
Jake Peters:And, but while we were doing that, we we realized there were really no tech companies in Midtown Manhattan, but there were a bunch of them in Boston. So we we moved our small group up to Boston. We spent a few years there, and then, like I said, we pulled the ripcord after a few years and moved to Ketchum.
Levi Smith:So you're you're in Ketchum. You've made the move made the move in your thirties, it sounded like. Been in Ketchum for a while.
Jake Peters:39. Yep.
Levi Smith:If I understand correctly, you had a friend who was selling k 2 skis and it it had maybe worked on several sort of iterations of just how to organize, you know, the stuff he's selling and demos a little bit better in in in the vehicle he's driving. And somehow y'all connected, and is that really the the genesis of the the DECT product? Can you take me back to that kind of moment in time?
Jake Peters:Right after banking, I spent a decade on automated driving and invented a way to solve traffic congestion on urban highways and worked with something called the San Diego Association of Governments and the USDOT and Caltrans and UPS. And we came up with a really cool solution for the 805 in San Diego. And in March of 11, SANDAG, this capital mart capital funding agency in San Diego offered me a contract to deploy this thing that I had invented on the 805, but they had shortened the route from 44 lane miles to 4. Oh. At which point, I called my friend at UPS, and he said, Jake, I can't put instrumentation on my vehicle for 4 lane miles.
Jake Peters:I said, that's kinda what I figured, Mike. And then I called SANDAG back and said, I quit. At which point, a month later, a guy that I played squash with up here in Ketchum called and said, hey. He wanted to productize plywood in the back of an f 150. His name's Lance Miller.
Jake Peters:He's had a really successful career, after he and I worked together. But anyway, that was his idea with a guy called Dylan Rothwell down in Park City. They had this idea, like, they had discovered that and noticed that there were plywood drawers in the back of a lot of vehicles. Lance was a k two snow snowboard guy. He had a van.
Jake Peters:You know, he was looking to organize his stuff. And they just they found this really, really useful category where there wasn't really a good product. There was Truck Vault, which was made out of wood, and it was $4,000. And if you have Beretta shotguns, I think to this day, you're obliged to buy a Truck Vault. So if you have $10,000 shotguns, you you you must put them in a Truck Vault.
Jake Peters:And then there was also a company called Weather Guard who makes pack wrap, which is just a rectangular metal drawer, but it ends up with a whole bunch of negative space in your truck. And I had this these guys wanted me to try to help them get to the starting line of building a business. Basically did about a year or 2 of work into how could you make this thing and have it retail for $1,000. There's a 1,000,000,000 ways to make the product if you wanna sell it for 2 or $3,000. Right.
Jake Peters:But there's precious few ways to make it make a company if you wanted the thing to retail for a $1,000. Now this is 10 years ago. So
Levi Smith:Yeah. But to have a little bit more mass market appeal to truck owners and others.
Jake Peters:Yeah. And I just sort of thought, hey. We get again, like, we get to productize plywood, the back of an F150. That just blew my mind that that that that opportunity was there. And, you know, we spent a ton of time on the design and and engineering and got an engineering firm in Detroit involved.
Jake Peters:And, you know, that's kind of the process by which we we we tried to make something that was really durable, had really good value for money, but the thing had already been invented. Somebody asked me at a trade show 7 or 8 years ago, well, who invented deck? I said, well, some carpenter 50 years ago. You know, we didn't invent it.
Levi Smith:People had drawers for a long time.
Jake Peters:Yeah. We we just productized it.
Levi Smith:So let me back up for just a second. So do you think you know, as you told the story about how this, you know, really first got on your radar and you got involved, do you think if that project in California had not gotten reduced to 4 miles and you needed to quit because it didn't make sense anymore, would you have just had lunch or coffee with your friend and and said, oh, that's interesting, and gotten back to what you're doing in California? Do you think bailing on the California thing because it didn't make sense anymore, just right moment, right time opened you up to, you know, even going down this path of doing the, you know, jumping on the iteration with your friend?
Jake Peters:Yeah. Probably. I mean, the thing in San Diego just had enormous amounts of, you know, abstraction and ambiguity and, you know, it was it was just crazy. They made me personally indemnify the project. I'm like, really?
Jake Peters:And then Launch was just like, hey. Here's this really simple product with what seemed to be an enormous market. And I said, wow. You go from massive amounts of ambiguity to no really narrow. Like, this is it.
Jake Peters:Like, that's make this product, make it well, hit a price target. That seemed really refreshing to me. That's why we ran with it.
Levi Smith:In in the process, how quickly did y'all move on from thinking about this being a wood product? Like you said, you know, the vault product was out there and and is a wood product, but, DECT as we know it today, obviously, is is a a plastic based product. Help me understand. When did you how how quickly did y'all iterate and and figure out all this wood's not the right material for this. The actual opportunity is making this out of plastic.
Levi Smith:Is that the connection with the Detroit engineers and and facility?
Jake Peters:Yeah. I mean, like I said earlier, there's there's hundreds of ways to make a drawer system, but there's, as far as I can tell, one cost effective way to make it if you wanna have it, you know, sort of broadly available to people. It took 2 years at least to kind of identify both the materials that would work and the manufacturing process that would work and the way that we use the capital tools. So two things about the DECT drawer system. DECT is now CargoGlide.
Jake Peters:Decked is now a toolbox. DECT is now all of the the DICOSYSTEM, nesting cases. It's a bunch of things now. It's not just the drawer system, but back in the day, we were just trying to make a drawer system. Right.
Jake Peters:The sort of the epiphany was low pressure injection molding, which is where you take HDPE, and you can make really big molded parts. That was an epiphany that, oh, wait. That's a cool way to do it. Well, what's the analogy there? Modern nesting pallets are made in low pressure injection molding with HDPE.
Jake Peters:And if you think about a modern nesting pallet that's made out of plastic, it weighs £30. You can put £10,000 on top of it. It lives outside, and it gets run into by a forklift all day. That sounds like the right thing to put in the back of your pickup truck. We then added £75 of steel to the thing.
Jake Peters:So now just imagine you have this 150 pound thing of, you know, molded parts, and you reinforce it with £75 of steel. And the thing was, you know, otherwise going to be used to make pallets, again, that sounds like it's got the durability and weather ability things that attributes that we were looking for. But that took us at least 2 years and a bunch of dead end designs, a bunch of dead end materials.
Levi Smith:Just the reality of an iterative process trying to figure this out. Yep. But so you identified early on that you needed to make this at a at a price point that made sense for a, you know, large enough market to to really, you know, spin up a company around this. How early on did you also figure out things like we can't reduce the, you know, essentially, the the payload is not technically correct, but it's you know, essentially, we've gotta make this be able to hold, you know, what the truck bed can already hold. We can't sell this by telling people, yeah, put this in the back of your truck, but now you can only put £500 on top.
Levi Smith:You know, when did some of those things that I think you're known for today and y'all lead with from a marketing standpoint and stuff, you know, how how early did that come into the process, or is that something those type of things did you really discover over a 2 year period where you're 13 months in, you're like, oh, we've you know, we need to make sure we focus on this.
Jake Peters:Yeah. The first set of designers, I won't call them engineers. They were engineers, but the first designers we were working with were guys basically selling time off the clock over at Boeing. You know, kinda we figured out that those guys were available for an hourly thing, and they they they designed some cool stuff, but you really couldn't manufacture it at the right price. Once we finally found some design that we thought was interesting, I said to our to Lance and Dylan and the others that were involved at the time, I said, look.
Jake Peters:We need to figure out how to get this correctly manufactured. And I found an engineering firm in Detroit called Altair. Altair does a bunch of third party engineering mostly for Ford. And I went to them and I said, hey. Here's our design.
Jake Peters:Can you just kinda make sure that it's not gonna, you know, result in a warehouse full of broken parts? And they said, yeah. I said, well, what's that gonna cost? Well, that's $30,000 and okay. Well, you know, will you please go do the engineering?
Jake Peters:And, you know, 6 weeks later, we came back and they said, it's cute. It's cute as clever. It won't work, but it's cute. And I said, okay. Well, do you know how to make it work?
Jake Peters:And they said, oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, what would that cost? Well, it's $500,000. And I said, go go for it.
Jake Peters:Now at that moment, we then had a what what what would now be called the requirements meeting, Like, what is it that about this thing? What does it have to do? And, like, okay. Let's put £200 in each drawer. Let's put £2,000 on top.
Jake Peters:Let's make sure that that 2,000 sort of dynamic, like, we you know, it's it is a vehicle. Right. It's not a static. Yeah. It's moving down the road.
Jake Peters:So you can't just crack when you can't put £500 on it and then it cracks or anyway, all of these things had to be part of the requirements and to their great credit, you know, they introduced the, you know, some basic Detroit engineering metrics, let's call them, to the process, and and they were good at that. And, I ended up hiring the guy, the lead guy, Tim Smith. We call it doctor tech doctor Dact. We ended up hiring him from that place. He'd been there 30 years.
Jake Peters:He ended up designing midsize work, I guess, an employee for us. And the the the miracle I would say of Dact is simply that we these guys in Ketchum found Altair. And we found Tim Smith, and the and the miracle was that Tim Smith had done 2 things in his career that were particularly relevant. He had designed modern nesting pallets out of low pressure injection molding and plastic, and he had been part of the team that designed the truck bed for the Dodge Dakota truck.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:Okay. Well, what's the chance I'm gonna pick up the phone and the guy answering the phone
Levi Smith:Right. That's the guy that you get connected to?
Jake Peters:Is that guy. I guess if you just show up and do the work, sometimes thing good things happen to you, and and that's that was the good thing that happened to us.
Levi Smith:So y'all went through this process where you developed a good prototype, got professional engineers to give you a $30,000 opinion on that prototype, which was it's cute.
Jake Peters:You Cute and clever.
Levi Smith:Cute and clever. Okay. You got you got 2 two compliments. Cute and clever, then, you know, essentially, the the professionals come in and really help turn what the product is today, into something y'all could, actually manufacture and make. So now you've got a good product.
Jake Peters:No. No. No. You don't
Levi Smith:you don't think you have a good product at that point.
Jake Peters:Oh, yeah. We thought we did, but let me explain.
Levi Smith:Oh, okay. Tell me more.
Jake Peters:So remember I said there's £75 of steel in it? Yes. Well, part of those are, 1 inch by half inch 49,000 thick galvanized steel tubes that we put into the mold, and we mold the deck panels around these steel tubes. Okay. Now if you simply place the deck on those steel tubes, it'll be strong.
Jake Peters:But if you mold around those steel tubes, you're gonna get 3 x bang for your buck. So molding those into the deck panels was a huge element to the design and the and the kind of the load ratings that we were going after. The problem with that was it was suggested to us that this was child's play. The the mold maker was, like, oh, that's easy. And the contract molder who was gonna mold it for us was that easy.
Levi Smith:That they can execute this easily?
Jake Peters:Yes.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:And the truth to that was was that that was a 700 level molding class, and we forgot to take all the prerequisites. Oh. Meaning, it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare because for a bunch of very detailed and technical reasons, but it took us 6 months to figure out actually how to do that. And we the only reason we survived was that I was a banker before and I made sure that we just had enough capital remaining after we launched the company to do the amount of changes that it was gonna take to to to make that thing happen.
Levi Smith:So you stuck with the original design, it sounds like, but it took 6 months or so for somebody to figure out how to actually mold that with these tubes. Now it's a huge practical production or manufacturing issue.
Jake Peters:Yeah. If you wanna compete with Dacty, I I wish you all the luck in the world because we're gonna go through the I live this way for a reason. You know, there's it was a it was many, many sleepless nights and, you know, how could we do this? And, you know, and and some of it was just insidious, you know, they would the number of things that that went wrong that were tiny little things that ended up having massive created, you know, pretty big manufacturing problems was was not insignificant, but credit to the team because we stayed with it and then credit to me, I guess, because we didn't run out of money doing all the changes. So help me understand
Levi Smith:from that, you you you meet with your friend, you'll you'll, you know, talk about this idea, you iterate your prototype, you find the engineers, you get it produced, you get through the production issues. Help me understand the time frame for that. Are we talking sort of two and a half, 3 years? What what was that time frame before in in your opinion, you really have the right product that you are now ready to sell?
Jake Peters:Yeah. Super simple timeline, Mountain Blonde's for launch in April of 11. We launched the company with molded products and boxes and whatnot in January of 14. So that's called it two and a half years later.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:Those first 1400 drawer systems that we've sold probably weren't perfect. If you had a shell over it, it's probably fine. If you had it outside, it probably wasn't fine. But basically, by by the summer of 14, so now the company is 6 months into its commercial operation, we figured out how to really get it produced correctly and engineered correctly. And that was a big deal because we were gonna open up Leer as a distributor.
Jake Peters:So Leer, the guys who make the fiberglass shells, they had a big interest in distributing it for us in addition to us selling it, off the website, and they got the upgraded version. Okay. And that would have been, you know, kind of the Q3 of 2014. And since then, we've sold 3, 400,000 of these things. So it's been really, really popular, but it was, it was it it was a it was a ton of effort, and we made every mistake you can think of.
Jake Peters:We made a we made a we did a lot of things right. We did a lot of things wrong.
Jake Peters:I will tell you that I think that the the thing that I said to everybody who wanted to come to work
Jake Peters:at the company and everybody who joined the board, who gave us money to invest in it, that the and and if I have anything of value to tell anybody, it's we picked the right market. Right? We picked a market that was big, durable, did not have a lot of innovation, did not have a lot of actual engineering. If you go to the CEMA trade show, it's sort of the ultimate bastion of the fabricated part. It's not most of it's not engineered.
Jake Peters:It's just fabricated. And then the other attribute of a lot of the companies in the automotive aftermarket is the marketing's worse. Yeah. Big, durable, no innovation, no engineering, and crappy marketing. You know?
Jake Peters:Tell me about those kinds of markets. I'm interested in that kind of market.
Levi Smith:You're interested now. You
Jake Peters:know, now you can make all these mistakes. And if you don't run out of money, you you'll probably do fine.
Levi Smith:The inaugural season of Ain't That Something wouldn't be possible without the generous support of Truss Joist, a division of Weyerhaeuser. Truss Joist has been a great supply partner to Franklin Building Supply with their array of engineered wood products, including their Marquee Truss Joist, which you may be surprised to learn was invented and first sold right here in Boise, Idaho. Now ain't that something? Future episodes will drop every 1 to 2 months, so be sure to subscribe to the podcast in your listener so you'll see the next episode when it arrives. But once you have a product that you're comfortable with, it's a it's another thing to actually sell it.
Levi Smith:You can have the best product in the world, but you can't figure out how to market and sell it. So help me understand how you navigate it actually bringing this to market. So you talked about, you know, this opportunity with with Lear. But as I understand it, maybe y'all initially thought that maybe partnering with a company like that or selling it to dealerships was the way to go? Did you shift later to really focusing on direct to consumer?
Levi Smith:How did the marketing work? Because good product, but if people don't know about it and it's not in the right place, it's not gonna move.
Jake Peters:Nothing particularly profound. We we opened Leer eventually and, you know, the 1st 2, 3 years we opened. There are these major national distributors of these kinds of prop these kinds of products that'll get them into can get up to every, you know, dealer in your neighborhood and kind of overnight, you know, whether you have a Ram or an F150 or a Super Duty or whatever you've got, they warehouse them all and can get them overnight. So so we did open distribution over time. You know, we've probably never been less than a third of the business was direct to consumer.
Jake Peters:It's it's more than half the revenue today. The other thing that we had going for us, and this goes back to the market characteristics. Remember I said, we're competing against companies that, you know, particularly 10 years ago, weren't the world's greatest marketers. We were direct to consumer from day 1. When you're buying advertising,
Levi Smith:you know, in a
Jake Peters:big market, the big problem is you're competing against about $14,000,000,000 a year of advertising by the by the big truck companies. For GM and and Ram are gonna shove $14,000,000,000 of marketing down your throat, you know, with one theme, tough. So that's we're trying to boil the ocean against that, but we've got a very distinctive, very different thing. And the good news about the automotive aftermarket was that our return on ad spend in the early years was really, really good because there was not a lot of competition. Yeah.
Jake Peters:There was big TV advertising for trucks, but, you know, we weren't really competing. There weren't really a lot of brands in the automotive aftermarket that were that were advertising. And so, you know, we had several years
Levi Smith:Well, especially direct to consumer.
Jake Peters:Yeah. We had a nice runway for several years where that return on ad spend was great. It's a lot worse now where a lot of these guys have figured out that they, you know, they're gonna compete with us for those kinds of customers and Sure. Hear the eyeballs and stuff. But so it's it was just the blocking and tackling that everybody does, opening distribution, creating content that resonated with people, trying to treat the customer right, you know, have a good fair product without, you know, you know, my mantra in any company I wanna be involved with is high value for money.
Jake Peters:We don't discount it. It's everyday low prices, you know, don't ever put it on sale and just honor the customer that way. Yeah. So I don't I don't think there was anything particularly innovative or or, the lessons learned other than just the blocking and tackling.
Levi Smith:Right. Just doing that well, though.
Jake Peters:I I I guess I should say, I did find Greg Randolph who had been at Smith Optics, you know, the goggle company. Mhmm. He he had been in town at some point during my do gooder phase. I was I built something called the Sun Valley Marketing Alliance, which is just a tourism bureau. I brought him into that thing.
Jake Peters:He drove them all crazy. And then I he was available to work at DECT, and he's been kind of the John Lennon of the brand. He's he's he if you ever laugh at a DECT ad, if you ever think the voice is about right, meaning the brand
Levi Smith:voice Greg?
Jake Peters:It's Greg Randolph. The guy's the guy's been a godsend to the brand.
Levi Smith:Well, I think it's interesting, you know, you've pointed out several times just how serendipity worked in your favor, just finding the right person and what a difference an individual can make, whether it's an engineer or it's, you know, the person on the marketing side. And that kinda helps me shift gears just a little bit here. So I heard earlier in, you know, this this conversation about what drew you to Idaho and why you live in Ketchum today, but DECT is still headquartered in Ketchum. You do manufacturing in the US, but outside of Idaho. Help me understand why you think I mean, aside from the fact that you're there, why does Idaho make for a good place for a company like DEC to be headquartered in Ketchum in particular?
Jake Peters:Yeah. I think the party line is that it's hard to make companies in Blaine County or, you know, you can't find enough people. There's only 20,000 people in Blaine County, maybe 25,000, and it's twice the size of Rhode Island. So as a factual matter, yeah, there's not a lot of people up here, but, you know, we have found plenty of good people. I think the advantage of being in Ketchum is there's plenty of good people.
Jake Peters:There's a lot you know, half the people in Ketchum are just rich folks who can live here and, you know, play all day. And the other half of them are people who love living here and just need to figure out how to put beans on the table. And those are obviously the people I'm working with.
Levi Smith:Mhmm.
Jake Peters:Once those come people come to your company, they probably got an enormous opportunity because there's not a lot of other people that can do what they know how to do. They probably don't wanna move to Tulsa, and you're gonna keep them. So, you know, I think it's backwards. I think Ketchum is perfectly easy. You know, it's a 35 minute flight from Salt Lake.
Jake Peters:Okay? That's not the biggest problem in my life. If we get good people, they're gonna stay. And, you know, the quality of life here is phenomenal. So, yeah, I'm never moving.
Jake Peters:Most of the people who work at DECT and Edgy, the other company I've started recently, you know, they're not leaving.
Levi Smith:Well, I think that's very you know, a lot of people listening to us find that very counterintuitive. So they look at the size of the population and assume that that's the thing to focus on. And if the population is not large enough, there's no way that you could have a company with the caliber people that you need to be able to become who you desire to be. And I think you're articulating it's it's not necessarily about the size of of the of the market in terms of of of employees, but their loyalty and dedication to where they live desire to stay there. And if you can be a really good option for them and they can leverage their skills, abilities, experience, at your company, and you don't have people chasing them every week for another opportunity, that's actually kinda a good mix.
Jake Peters:100%. Yeah. Decked has doubled many times. Right? And they've got, you know, scores of people working there.
Jake Peters:I'm the chairman now. I'm not I don't I'm not the general manager or the CEO of the company anymore. They've got a ton of people over there, and, you know, I don't think that the the turnover is quite low.
Levi Smith:Yeah.
Jake Peters:And I think most people, if you give them some training and you give them some agency and you give them the resources to do what they're supposed to do, they're gonna kick ass.
Levi Smith:Yeah.
Jake Peters:You know? That's just been my experience. I I just don't work around a lot of losers, and I don't think I'm like some, you know, fantastic recruiter. I think it's just I think most people, given the right circumstances, are gonna be pretty good at their jobs. And especially if you give them that responsibility and you don't, you know, micromanage them and bother them all day.
Jake Peters:Okay. So that's what I need.
Levi Smith:Right.
Jake Peters:But I don't think that's very different than any other company. I think the I think the difference is here maybe I I look. The location thing here is simply, yeah, there's this implicit, I guess, problem if you're the employee, which is if you do find land a good job and catch them or or Paley or wherever you're living, there probably isn't 3 or 4 other really good jobs. There might be one other that comes around. But, again, if if if if you like working at the company and you feel like you're doing good work and the company is treating you fairly, then
Levi Smith:What problem is there to solve then?
Jake Peters:Thank you. Yes.
Levi Smith:Right? I mean yeah. You know, and I think that's an opportunity for small towns across the state like Idaho where people can make an assumption that you can only really, you know, build a business or find the people you need in Boise, the broader Treasure Valley, or even at Twin Falls and stuff now. I think the truth of the matter is to your point, there are great people spread out all over the state. They most of them live where they live because that's where they want to be.
Levi Smith:So you already have that going for you. And, you know, that's often not true in big cities. People are very, you know, transitory there. They're not necessarily there because that's the place they picked out on a map or they really have ties to. But in these small towns, the they're connected.
Levi Smith:And if you can provide them a good opportunity, to do good work, pay them fairly, and, help them be proud of what they're doing every day, you can create exceptional companies in these smaller towns, and the narrative that that's not possible or that's a one off or an outlier, I agree with you, I think is really unfounded. Yeah. It kinda reminds me a little bit of what, you know, I tell our people regarding finding new employees even in a market like Boise that's the largest market in Idaho, still small compared to the rest of the US, but the biggest in Idaho. Everybody fixates using the fishing analogy that's often used in in recruiting talent. Everybody fixates on getting a bigger and bigger net and finding a bigger and bigger pond to throw that net into.
Levi Smith:And I tell them, you're just using the wrong bait, and the right bait should be for an individual who looks at what we're offering and the opportunity come to work for us and says, that's for me. You're not gonna solve the problem by, you know, going out and chasing quantity. You need to go find the individuals. I talk to people about, you know, crafting a better, you know, glass slipper. Go find your Cinderella instead of getting enamored with the numbers and the and and and how many applicants you're getting and how big a pool that you're able to, you know, go after, and I think you're making that same point in a city like Ketchum.
Jake Peters:Yes. It it it's worked for us and whether we're you know, it's for others to talk about whether we've created the right environment for employees. It's for them to talk about that and not not for me. But, you know, like I said, I I, yeah, I just think most bright people you just I just reject the idea, I guess, that there's, you know, that there's a Roger Clemens for every job. You know?
Jake Peters:That there's some phenomenal person who's, like, could is, like, 10 times better than anybody else. Most people, again, if you find bright people who are motivated and you give them the resources they need and you give them the responsibility and leave them be, we we we've had good luck with that.
Levi Smith:They'll do well. You'd you'll do well.
Jake Peters:That's kinda how I wanna do it. And, you know, and if if we feel like we need to be staring at them and micromanaging them, then, yeah, then probably we got the wrong fit.
Levi Smith:Right.
Jake Peters:But but that has you know, but it's okay. So you move on. It's just You
Levi Smith:said buying the right people in a city like Metro, I mean, you have a lot of advantages.
Jake Peters:Yeah. And if you wanna be in a place, you can figure it out. Yeah. It's look. The inner look at us.
Jake Peters:We're talking on a Zoom right now. You know, you every place I can think of has high speed Internet. You know, that's an absolute game changer. I got 6 cameras looking at a factory in Ann Arbor anytime I want. Right?
Jake Peters:I got you know, I can talk to any customer. I can get on a plane. I can be anywhere tomorrow from middle of nowhere, Idaho.
Levi Smith:Right. Completely different world from 15
Jake Peters:These these are made up problems. They're not you can solve them if you want to.
Levi Smith:So before I get into what you're doing now, because as you said, today, you're you're the chairman of Deact, and you've got a whole team of employees that we've just been talking about are doing great work there. One thing I do wanna touch on is y'all had a commitment to really keep manufacturing in the US, and Greg and his marketing team do a good job of communicating that. Can you help me understand the the why around that with so many companies? I know there's this whole sort of reshoring movement, but your story's before that. You've had it here from day 1 and kept it here.
Levi Smith:What do you see as being, you know, the the main reasons for doing that? Why it's advantageous to keep manufacturing in the US a place that, you know, you can get to with the connection through Salt Lake.
Jake Peters:Yeah. There's I'm involved with 4 factories. So 3 of them are for DECT and one of them is for a company called Edgy. 2 of the DECT factories are in Defiance, Ohio. The reason they're in Defiance, Ohio was, when we began manufacturing that product, we were using this process called low pressure injection molding.
Jake Peters:The largest contract low pressure injection molder in the world is in Montpelier, Ohio. It's Ron Ernsberger in a company called 2020 Custom Molded Plastics. We bought the molds. He had the presses. Initially, he put all our parts in boxes for us and shipped them for us, and then we we kinda took baby steps and we built a little facility where we, you know, we would take the parts, turn them into a SKU for you and your Ram instead of a Ford.
Jake Peters:Eventually, that became a quarter million square foot facility. Then we built our own molding facility a couple years ago where we took all that molding in house. That's another 70,000 square foot building. The beauty of Northwest Ohio, kind of the the rust belt, if you will, when I showed up in 2011, 2012 looking for vendors, if you were still in business, there were three things about those companies in that part of the world that distinguished them. Because keep in mind, tons of those kinds of companies went out of business in the recession.
Jake Peters:Yeah. These guys had low cost. They were super high quality, and they said yes to everything. So I showed up in 2011, and now those are the attributes. Everything you're looking for.
Jake Peters:Great quality, low price, say yes to everything. And I show up with this dream of an idea, you know, and now I'm the biggest customer at the stamping plant. I'm the biggest customer at the molding plant. I'm the biggest guy at the 3rd party molder, the biggest guy at the corrugated company. But those people had great expertise, great amounts of capital and know how because they've been doing this for a 100 years.
Jake Peters:It's literally like, you know, Christmas for me. Every time I go back there and I'm back there once or twice a month, it's just the the expertise is phenomenal. The dedication is phenomenal. I've got a stamper who I probably bought 10,000,000 parts from. I don't think he's ever made a bad one.
Jake Peters:Wow. These are really, really good people. But, again, the reason we're there is because we had that we started the company there because of the we were very close to the big low pressure molder guy. Okay. Still friends with him.
Jake Peters:Those guys did great work, but we grew we kinda outgrew them, and they're a contract molder, and that's what you're supposed to do. You're just supposed to grow into your own molding facility even though it's 20, $3,000,000. We're in the Southern Utah because we bought a company called CargoGlide. And you made
Levi Smith:that we haven't talked about that yet. You made that acquisition. Was that last year?
Jake Peters:No. It's in, it was in 2022. Okay. 22. And those are great people and those are, you know, the the guy who started that thing is a friend of ours, and he, you know, he wanted to be in that part of the world.
Jake Peters:He started that company 15 years earlier, 10 years earlier, maybe. We still have it. The the folks are still working there. We've automated it a lot. We we tore it up and put it back together.
Jake Peters:You know, we increased quality, we think, by a lot. We certainly you know, the one thing we did do to be, you know, blunt about it is that it took them 6 or 7 hours of labor to build that product, and now it takes an hour and a half of labor to build that product because we brought in the manufacturing resources that were, you know, that we know how to bring to bear.
Levi Smith:Right.
Jake Peters:And that's kind of that story. And now we've started the edgy factory in Ann Arbor, similar reasons.
Levi Smith:So you transitioned out of the day to day into the chairman role with Deck Twin? What when was that transition for you?
Jake Peters:You were 22.
Levi Smith:And today, you've mentioned it a couple times. You've got this other company, Edu. And before we wrap up today, wanted to find out what got you in to to this product. Why are you excited about this product? I'll let you tell people what it is, but you've got something that's not nail clippers, but nail cutters.
Levi Smith:I hope folks understand why you're on to this this new thing with Edgy.
Jake Peters:Yeah. Edgy is spelled edjy, j for Jake. Edjy because that URL cost $4,000. It was available. Right.
Jake Peters:And edgy cost $600,000, so I don't even understand why.
Levi Smith:You didn't think that's worth one letter?
Jake Peters:Yeah. Yeah. Save $596,000. So Angie is the world's first single blade nail cutter. So your nail clippers, which you own several, you don't know where you bought them, you don't know what brand they are, You know, you use them once a week.
Jake Peters:You can't find them. How do you
Levi Smith:know so much about me, Jake?
Jake Peters:Yeah. Yeah. Correct me when I'm when I've guessed wrong. Yeah. I I got involved.
Jake Peters:There was a again, another little company in Ketchum that was making a reverse lever clipper. I got involved in that company for 15 minutes before the founder of that company threw me out and fired me. By the way, he had every right to do that in his contract with me. But, you know, I I looked at that thing and that was clever. And so I just put it in the back of my mind.
Jake Peters:And while I was working on Dact, I would just think about other things that you could do to improve on that product. Again, we're a single blade nail cutter. A nail clipper takes 200 pounds of force to crush your nails. That's how it works. It's not they are not sharp blades.
Jake Peters:They don't cut your nail. They crush them. And the reason the clipping goes so far away is because you just propelled them across the room with 200 pounds of force. Right. What we have done instead is we use one really sharp, hard blade.
Jake Peters:It's probably the sharpest, hardest blade in your house, and it will cut your nail with £10 of force. Okay.
Levi Smith:So
Jake Peters:it's £200, it's 10. We're going to capture the clipping.
Levi Smith:Not fine across the room.
Jake Peters:Yeah, it's the lever is in its correct orientation. It feels good in your hand. And the market for this product is 3,000,000 units a day. The product was patented in 18/81 by Hyman Matts in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wow.
Jake Peters:And we've reinvented the category in Ann Arbor and we're making them there. And we've we've sold 60,000 of them in the 1st few months.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:You know? And our goals are simply we'll sell a 1,000,000 a year and a 1,000,000 a month.
Levi Smith:And is this all direct to consumer? Do you plan to, you know, work through other sales channels or is this just all all direct to consumer online?
Jake Peters:Kind of baby steps right now. We're selling iPhone 1 now.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:April April, we'll be selling iPhone 2 and we'll open Amazon.
Levi Smith:Okay.
Jake Peters:Then we'll have a toenail version in, at Labor Day. Probably by this time next year, we'll be at retail. You know, we'll open retail and international. It's it's, again, big market, durable market, no innovation, no engineering, and crappy marketing. Right?
Levi Smith:Well, like you and I have talked about before, before, I mean, there's so many opportunities in these little nooks and crannies, and that you know, what gets everybody's attention is, you know, what's happening in biofintech and technology. Is it is it broad general category? You know, we're in the building material supply business. People don't think about innovation there. Right?
Levi Smith:But I think you and I both believe a lot of the opportunities are in these kinda latent categories and these nooks and crannies that is if you obsess over over creating a much better product, tool, or process, and I mean obsess over it in the way that you've described in this podcast, if you obsess over it, something that hasn't really be been improved or innovated on in, you know, a 100 plus years, you've actually got a pretty good shot at coming up with something dramatically better, figure out how to manufacture it, sell at a right price point, maybe found it in a small company, you know, in a small town like Ketchum where you got good people that want to do that work and good manufacturers and, you know, you've got an opportunity there as an entrepreneur.
Jake Peters:I think the punchline to what we're doing is the Internet. Like that's the glue that allows you to be a 100 places at the same time. You have access to any information, expertise. You know? We're on the phone with, you know, PhD metallurgists in Sweden, you know, trying to figure out how to bend a blade and get it hard, and how do we grind it correctly, and how do we polish it, and kind of the same stuff the buck knife guys was was talking about.
Jake Peters:I'm a knife guy too. I just sell the compound curve thing to cut your fingernails instead of a general purpose knife.
Levi Smith:Right.
Jake Peters:But all that expertise can be It's accessible. We can execute on that in Boise. We can execute that in Eagle. We can execute on that and catch them. We there's just nothing between anybody who's listening to this and success as long as they pick the right battle.
Jake Peters:And, you know, if you wanna make a new nail or you wanna make a new adhesive, you wanna make a new whatever, you can do it. You know, I just don't wanna compete against Google. I I I don't wanna compete against, you know, OpenAI. Right? I wanna compete against guys who got complacent.
Levi Smith:A 19th century nail clipper model or plywood boxes in the back of a truck. Yep. Yeah. And I and I think your point, what people get enamored by is the thought of competing against these technologies and companies and stuff that they're most familiar with. Instead, turn to products that you're most familiar with, that you use every day, you know, it personally or professionally and think about, man, has this changed in a long time?
Levi Smith:If the answer is no, then it's it's likely that there's a latent improvement and dramatic improvement, you know, out there, but you've gotta do the work to unlock it. And to your point, today, with global connectivity, accessing the information and experts you need has never been easier in the history of humankind, and you can do it from anywhere.
Jake Peters:And just call people, you know, and when they don't call you back, keep calling them. You know? But, you know, hey. I'm hey. I'm a guy in Idaho.
Jake Peters:You know? So I need to I need to talk to you.
Levi Smith:We maybe have that going for you because I think there's still a little bit of intrigue and mystique around Idaho. Right? So someone's like, what in the world? Someone called me from Idaho?
Jake Peters:Yeah. 208 number will get their will get their attention. You know?
Levi Smith:It may be the first time they've ever seen that area code on their phone.
Jake Peters:Yeah. 209 is main, you know, that's just as just as random. Right? And and unexpected, but just keep at it. Like, you don't it's not gonna be we're an iPhone 1 with edgy.
Jake Peters:You know, we're we we've got to truly an iPhone 2. You know, we didn't the good news is we launched with iPhone 1. We didn't kill the company. People seem to like the product. They're gonna like iPhone 2 even more.
Levi Smith:Right.
Jake Peters:I'm just talking about any product rev, as you know. Right?
Levi Smith:And not the persistence. Right. And the critical eye.
Jake Peters:Yeah. If you find a product manager who thinks their product is great, run the other direction.
Levi Smith:Yeah. You
Jake Peters:know, because because those people don't need it. They those are who you wanna compete against.
Levi Smith:Yep.
Jake Peters:Right? The guy who or the woman who thinks this is this is the greatest thing ever
Levi Smith:Well, they think they've arrived. They they've gotten to the destination essentially of product perfection. And if that's your mindset to your point, that's not the right person to have on your team, and that's also pick the right battles. Right? And a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, very innocently, naively may pick the wrong battles.
Levi Smith:And if you're gonna invest all this time, energy, sweats, you know, blood, treasure into something, picking the right battles is critical because then when it gets a point where you need to just continue to stay at it and you've gotta be persistent, there's a reason for doing so and it and it's and it's rational to stay at it. But if you pick the wrong battle, persistence is there's no real valor in being persistent in the wrong battle.
Jake Peters:And the last thing I would probably have to say is simply I spent 15 years thinking about nail clippers. Right? Now I was working at DECT a 100% of the time, but I would have been involved with the company earlier.
Levi Smith:That was your daydream. You're daydreaming about nail clippers.
Jake Peters:Yeah. And I like just yeah. We came up with 5 or 6 different completely different ways to address that tool and that problem to solve, and all of it is patently obvious. Why does a nail clipper only have one curve and yet your nails have 2 curves? Shouldn't the nail clipper also have 2 curves?
Jake Peters:Why is the lever on the wrong end? I'm you you could call our product a reverse lever clipper. I'll say it's a correct lever cutter, and I'd say everybody else who makes one's got the lever on the wrong end. Just there's so many basic things. And if you just put it in your brain and marinate on whatever product you think needs to be innovated, If you spend enough time thinking about it and having that marinate inside your brain, you you could come up with 3 or 10 things to make it better.
Levi Smith:And I tell folks, if they're not if they don't feel like they're good at that now, the only way to get better is to practice. Just keep thinking about it. Keep marinating on it. Keep coming up with other ideas. I suggest to people that they, you know, sort of take, you know, products that have nothing to do with one another and just go through an exercise where you have those products collide.
Levi Smith:So now you're thinking about, well, what a nail clipper and a calculator have to do with one another? I don't know, but it's gonna stretch your brain to think about how those two products have anything to do with one another. And you can start to train your brain to think more creatively and to iterate, you know, to your point over a decade or 15 years, come up with some ideas and you get to a point where you're able to execute on them and and something
Jake Peters:And here's the here's the blow your mind idea. Engie's patented. What?
Levi Smith:Yeah. That that's even a patent you could have gotten is it it seems surprising in some ways.
Jake Peters:Isn't it's insane. Yeah. 3,000,000 units a day for a 150 years. This thing was invented 16 years after Lincoln got shot. And and exactly if I showed you the patent drawing from 18 81, it's in your drawer right now.
Jake Peters:Unchanged, a 144 years.
Levi Smith:What's the type of patent you know those patents people put up as wall decorations? Those are products you can disrupt.
Jake Peters:Yeah. That's maybe the best way to start a company. Just just walk around and find those drawings and go like, oh, how you know, to find the one that's dusty.
Levi Smith:Right. If you have to blow the dust off, that's Yeah.
Jake Peters:That's
Levi Smith:your target. Well, Jake, I really appreciate you taking the time today to help us learn a little bit more about you, but about DECT. I think you're, the way that you think about products, what you're working on now, and and why you think Idaho and and Ketchum are a great place to be doing all that. So I really appreciate you sharing with us today.
Jake Peters:Yeah. My pleasure. It was really nice to talk to you again, Levi.
Levi Smith:Thanks, Jake. Thank you for listening to this episode of Ain't That Something. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast in your listener and sharing the podcast or this episode with others. Thanks again to our season sponsor, TrustJoyce, and to our guest for graciously sharing their time and story. So go start, create, or build something surprising so I can share your story.
Levi Smith:Until next time.
Creators and Guests
