EP255: Hiring, culture, and leadership: Insights from Nicolas Breedlove with playgroundequipment.com

I appreciate it, man. I'm really psyched to be here, man.

Absolutely. We are in the commercial playground equipment business. We manufacture, we supply, we design, we inspect, we install commercial playgrounds all over the U.S. We have three different trade names that we traditionally go off of. We have playgroundequipment. com, and through that we... We have a lot of distributor relationships, and we sell to probably around 230 to 240 right now small businesses across the United States, and they purchase and resell our playground equipment under that playgroundequipment. com brand name. And they also install a lot of that equipment. We started the business with a smaller direct-to-market, which is AAA State of Play. So that also sells our... Playground equipment and then the newer company, which is more of a software business. It's still in production release date sometime in the next month. And that's playgrounds. com. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, in this business, it's, you know, the average ticket price for us is probably around $8,000. But it's interesting, you know, I'd say a lot of that is well into the 20s. So people are buying a nice used car price product, right? It's a high-end price there. And a lot of people look at it as a one-and-done situation. It gets them in a lot of trouble. So they, you know, they buy it, they think, okay, it's built for the outdoors, and it is. But you put 100 kids on it every day for a year, and this stuff's going to happen no matter what, no matter how well it's maintained. I mean, your car is designed for a lot of things, too. You've got to take it in once a month, maybe more, depending. But, you know, so, yeah, I mean. As far as contracting out, we've got people, we've got a network. When I first started, I was doing a lot of the installations myself. I would have a computer in one arm and I would have an auger in the other. And I would try and figure out SEO work in the morning. And then, you know, by the time we were ready to dig holes, I'd be out there plumbing posts and figuring out how to put this stuff together. But fortunately, you know, a kid with no construction background can figure it out. But we've got a good network of people, but we're always looking for more guys and girls to help us install this stuff out there.

I hope we paid you. But no, I'm kidding. We always pay our bills. But yeah, I mean, we tend to not do so much of that sub out just because for us, we like to make sure that our people that we use, if they're not in-house, that they're well-trained on our equipment. Otherwise, you know, it's just one of those things where we do want our installations or our... job callbacks to be a one and done. We don't want to have to keep going back. It's not profitable for anybody to keep going, no doubt, unless it's a new contract for, you know, upgrade or something, vandalism unfortunately happened or something like that. But, you know, there are cases where we've had to reach out to contractors and, you know, do those worst case scenarios. It's a lot easier when it's just surfacing. or timbers or landscape and effects, drainage, stuff like that. Those are problems that are a lot easier to outsource. Commercial playground, I'm not going to pretend it's like super simple, but it is not the most difficult thing out there. It is a lot of nuts and bolts and specialty hardware that you can find at most Lowe's and Home Depot's of the world.

cool. That's cool.

never know.

are. They are not great.

Those are a nightmare. I hope I never have to put any of those together again, but we've, a lot of those playgrounds are made in the same factory, the wooden ones, whether they're from Sands or Costco or your local, local guy selling wooden nowadays, even some of the big brands started making it out there in Taiwan, China. And, you know, once they started doing that, the Chinese fur is what they use a lot for that lumber. And it's so thin. It feels like you could lay fingerprints on it. Like, you know. Super soft. Super soft. It definitely feels too soft for a playground.

Oh, man. I went to school for horticulture out in Colorado, and I thought I'd get into—a couple of my family have a nursery here in Indianapolis, and I thought maybe I'd get into that business. And I started going to school, and I was like, I don't want to do this. But, you know, my dad was selling shirts, so he's in the apparel business. They were, you know, working for Block and Eyes Out and Van Hughes and all those. Now they're more like golf. golf adjacent brands, but back then they were selling to farm stores and farming fleets of the world. They did a lot of business with those. And a lot of those big stores just started buying direct from those factories. And somehow or another, I don't know why, but a lot of those guys started selling playground equipment. One did, and then it was like a domino effect. There was all these really, really good salesmen. They were really good talking to people. They were great door to door. They were great just cold calling. They'd do anything. And it's kind of dead to a point nowadays to a lot of people. That's why if you have those real inherent sales skills, man, you can really take off in a lot of industry still. So one guy went in there and my dad was like interested. So he dipped his toes a little bit into it. And then I was, I had come back out of college and I was like, all right, maybe I'll try this. And, you know, it was built for... something completely different. It was like a, it was a weird model. It was, it was a lot of selling over the phone. It taught me a lot of skills early on that I didn't want to learn. And it was just one more thing I didn't want to do, but I knew there was a big opportunity because it was around 2007,2008 or no, heck we've been in business for 20 years now. So it would have been around the recession. So it was six,2006. And, um, There was only one other playground company selling online and they were at Indiana too. And I was like, you know, all right, so let's do this. I knew I didn't want to sell it how everybody else was doing it. I knew online was a possibility. We got in there. I built a website myself and the other company went out of business. They bought too many houses, too many boats, and they left everybody with a lot of debt. And that just came in my immediate escalation. You know, phone calls tripled overnight. And, you know, we were able to double and triple revenue for a lot of years up until, you know, the point, I think around 28,29 million in revenue a year. We might have hit a little bit of a plateau for a minute, but there were some other adjacent factors in there. Like, you know, I was growing too much for my own. I wasn't growing as a leader the way I needed to back then to keep up with the scale we were building. So it got me in a lot of trouble at times. you know, as those business stories go.

So the way it used to be when we first started was we would drive around a truck, bought an F-250. We had a 53-foot trailer. It looks like a carnival's coming to town. And if you're ever in Falkville, Alabama, it's right across the border. Down there near that, there's a, on 65 South, there's a rest stop, and it's where they built that spaceship, one of the first spaceships that went out in orbit. That's kind of what put them on the map. Anyways, there's a bunch of playground companies right there in that town, and they all do this stuff where they go credit, a lot of high credit areas, and they will sell playground equipment off the back of a truck. And that is the first business. It was phone call sales right off the truck into somebody's playground. Very challenging, especially during that time of the recession. Gas prices, of course, diesel went from like 99 cents to $5. And, you know, all of a sudden it was like, what am I doing here? How am I going to make this work? And, you know, so that was the first business we would drive for hundreds of miles. Just pick up a phone book and start all over.

I mean, you sold it and sold

then, yeah. Wow.

Yes. Almost. It's as bad as it sounds. Hey, it worked. It worked and it still does work. Actually, we've got a couple of distributors down in that area. that are still selling that stuff. And that's, it gets them into a lot of doors. It's, it's, it's one of those skills. It's not the complete skillset, but it is definitely a skill to be able to walk in and talk to somebody and be able to sell them to their face on something they didn't know they wanted and they didn't know they needed. It's a skill.

Yeah. So I switched that up probably within maybe two or three months. I was just phone book after phone book after phone book. I was... I was looking for people. I was looking for SDRs to make calls. I was doing anything I could to get out of that because there just wasn't enough. It was limited by myself, basically. My dad was, he's a great in-person salesperson. He didn't love to make the phone calls. So I was immediately looking for other places. And the internet was really new for that business and nobody was wanting to sell it. And everybody thought it was crazy to be able to sell it. You know, like how can you sell a $50,000 or $100,000 or even a $500 playground online? Nobody's going to buy that. And on my first website, it was a little bit of what I was living at the time. It was, I think it was 19th State of Play was the name of it. 19th State being 19th. Indiana was the 19th State in the Union. I love history. But I was immediately like, well, I can't do that. That's, you know, that's going to limit me to Indiana people. I don't want people in Ohio to hate an Indiana business. No, no, no, no. You got to have something more general. State of Play at the time was a movie coming out with Brad Pitt. It was a popular book, I think. And stateofplay. com was owned by a photographer in the UK. So we went with AAA State of Play. Had a nice ring to it and took off. You know, I was getting calls immediately. One of the first calls I got was a lady in San Francisco. She wanted a geodome climber from some manufacturer out in Missouri. So we immediately started drop shipping from about 20 different factories overnight. But within a month or two, that other distributor I said that went out of business, he started burning everybody and everybody changed their credit terms really quick. It affected me over the next 12 months just because you can only do so much with limited dollars. It's about moving money. And our average sales cycle back then was probably a lot less than it is now. Right now, it's probably 90 days. Back then, it was probably more like 35 to 40. But then you have another 30,40 of bill cycle. So maybe less. But even then, it still limited my ability to be able to sell. Gotcha.

So, you know, initially we were doing the door to door, we were installing and then we were doing online and with them, you know, I'd say immediately we were out on the road, you know, we sell a structure in Minnesota and we'd schedule the install. And we'd go do it. And I go out there with one or two guys and we drive to Minnesota. And a day later we drive to Phoenix and a day later we drive to Florida and a day later we drive to wherever and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles later that year, you know, uh, you know, I did that for maybe two years. That was about two years of my life. And I, I could not keep that lifestyle up. That's a lot of travel, you know, and nowadays, you know, with the amount of jobs there are, you don't. Our installers aren't traveling quite that bad, but some of them still do. They like it. For myself, I don't love the road life that much. You know, I like regional home life.

Yeah. So we were, we started out in an extra bedroom in my parents' house in regards to the website stuff. Immediately hired one of my uncles. He had lost his job right before the recession because they saw it coming and they fired all of their advertising crews. So he actually just retired from us last year. He'd been with us for 19 years. So very unusual. Um, I had to, he and I both thought it would be a, probably a six to eight week ordeal. And he was there from, uh, you know, bedroom. He would wake me up in the morning, sit me down and talk about the orders of the day. Terrible times in my life. But, uh, I remember there was so much fun back then, you know? Um, and then we built out an office downstairs and that was also its own interesting dialogue, you know, hiring people. off of Craigslist and everything else back then. And they would come to a house to interview in a basement. Sounded like a scene out of Criminal Minds, you know. And a few of those people are still at the business, you know,16,17 years later. And they still tell that story of, you know, their friend sitting in the car waiting because they were interviewing in a playground company in a basement.

I know. So. Yeah, we've got a lot of stories like that. And then we bought some property in Greenfield, built a warehouse, kept scaling, just scaling, scaling, scaling. I'd had a couple of meetings with some overseas manufacturers, and I knew there was a lot of opportunity to be my own brand. All these brands we had done business with, they were all okay. But they're all crap in their own way. They all don't do that. They're all owned by, at this point, they're all owned by three or four companies. And the amount of care that they gave back then was even less than they do now. So it was one of those things where I knew I only needed about an inch and I would be better than them. So that wasn't a high bar. Now I need to do more than an inch. But, you know, it was it wasn't a high bar until you realize how much goes into it.

to the show. And then you're like, well, shoot, there is a lot more that goes into all this. You've got ERPs and people and you start scaling over 50 people. All of a sudden, it's a headache. You know, we would cook lunch for every single employee until we probably hit 55,60 people. I hired a chef, a Greek chef to come in and cook potatoes and chicken every day. And then we'd have, you know, something different on Fridays. Yeah, I mean, we kept growing. And during that time, we probably hit a little bit of a wall there for a minute. We had a little bit of a betrayal. I was probably, it was during that first warehouse, you know, we had scaled a lot. We had, you know, grown, grown and grown. And I had given a lot of, you know, at the time I overvalued character signals for, you know, controls. And I would like. I just, I didn't have the checks and balances that I needed as an organization. I had probably 15 to 16 direct reports, which anybody would tell you that's insane. And it's because I, you know, I was a control freak and I didn't think that I could trust certain people. I could trust other people. Got me into a lot of trouble. And I had this, this one incident. We were somewhere around 28,20, somewhere around there in revenue. And he, I had a, an entire business unit. So we had a couple of different business units back then. I had a business unit. He was creating distributors out of his pocket that were actually him or his family. And then he was using those to funnel leads to resell and then get commissions on them from the company and then profit from his distributorships. So he was taking leads away from distributors, pushing them over into his company. And he did all this under a variety of guises. Like he would, he recorded thousands of hours of phone calls with every department of the company. So he would talk to maybe accounting and he would say something like, hey, you know, I got to push this distributor through and it would be a real one because if they don't, we're going to lose this order. And they'd say, well, OK, wouldn't Nick want to do it? Yeah, of course I would want to do it. I don't want to lose an order. And then a week later, he would do that for one of his companies. So he had, you know, the claim in his head and, you know, during all these proceedings for the next three years after he was caught until we finally, you know, settled all of it that, you know, it was he was like building a statement of defense the entire time with anybody. You know, anybody he was talking to was a statement like, oh, well, we gave him these parts for free, so I'm going to do it here. And, you know, he had multiple people, unfortunately, within the organization kind of in on this. It all came to a head. And, man, it was a very costly nightmare. Oh, just the legal expenses probably cost me over a million dollars. It was just, you know, I've never had to keep on file. or record recordings. Like I had no idea I was being recorded and all of my other staff was being recorded. You know, it kind of gave me this weird, weird thing for a while. I was like, you know, somebody would put a phone on a desk and I'm like, what are, what are the, what am I being set up for? You know, what are you, what are you going to try and have me do here? Meanwhile, we're a playground company. You know, I felt like it was, it was so ridiculous.

So we were a manufacturer at this point. So he was creating, though, like it would be as though he created a distributorship out of his wife's name, for example, or his brother's name. But he didn't even use his brother's name. He used John Doe. And then he just, he was actually the business owner of that unit in, let's say, another state, Pennsylvania. Right. So then instead of giving those leads to the distributor in Pennsylvania, which that's what we do, we give all of our leads out to distributors. He would take all those for himself, resell that product, make the commission internally at MVB. And then also he would make the end end profit at that other company. Yeah. And his argument there was then that since, you know, finance allowed him to do it for this distributor over here, why not over here?

very schemey. Very schemey. Yeah. Took a lot more to think about it and execute it. If he had just applied himself to the business focused, like he could have made a lot more money.

Yes. You record when you're physically recording people in certain States like Illinois, California, et cetera. And we have, we had, People in those states, absolutely. When he is intentionally, you know, writing down names of distributors that are false and they're wire fraud on that, there's all sorts of... I got you. And then he, you know, at the end of it, there was different things that was, you know, he put his computer in a microwave, put all his phones in a microwave. You're... You're destroying company. You're trying to get rid of a paper trail at that point. I got you. You could argue, absolutely, that there would be. But, I mean, there's no prosecutor that wants that kind of case, though. Because that's not pretty, right? They don't want anything to do with that. At the end of the day, that all ends up being civil. Yeah.

It was a long, drawn-out thing.

I think for me, like, you know, as a younger person, I wasn't really bought in our core values. And sometimes when I see him like at companies, I think, God, that's such bullshit or excuse me. But that's such bull, right? Like, I don't believe it sometimes. Like I look at the, you know, some NFL team or some whatever, some big company. And you're like, there's no way. Get three employees to name their core values. They don't know them. And, you know, the more I bought into that and living those out quasi-religiously, and I go to church every week. So I hate saying that, but you have to really believe it to the core. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And I didn't at the time. I didn't think about it. And once that happened, I kind of had to do some soul searching. It hit my ego. My ego was broken, you know, and I didn't want to talk about it because it was a problem one way or the other. And it was my fault. Those are two things I don't like. And, you know, I think the biggest thing that I did to structurally I could have done is I could have been more prepared as a company to scale. And I could have said, you know, this is what we believe in. This is who we are. Like right now, you could ask me, who are my customers? Why do I do this? And I know exactly why I do this, right? Like I build a playground so I can give a kid. a place to take risks, right? Calculated risks. And it's a safe spot with guardrails that they can take risks, right? I do this for distributors or I do this for the end users, the playground owners. So they can, that's where community begins, where you meet your neighbors. It's where that spark of initial community begins, where kids learn each other's names. That's why I do this. And the last reason is my people. and our distributors so I can give them some better way of life. They can, whatever that means to them. Right. And so those, those are the wise back then. I had no idea. I thought I was doing this to sell playgrounds and make money. And, you know, and that is the point to a point we're all in this to make money. We're all to a, to a small degree. And sometimes if that becomes the driving factor, I think I got a little lost in it. And so I could have, I could have reset myself a little bit better.

I mean, do you think if

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, once we set up that company with, with core values and then once you. implement a lot of other structural changes related to that, you know, whether it's we have our daily huddles or your team tacticals, your department tacticals. It's a lot harder to escape being that type of person in that type of environment. You know, I mean, I think there's always a chance to have a bad hire, right? And as a small company, I couldn't have an HR department, right? But now I have an HR department. It's a great group of people and they still have bad hires. Stuff happens. But those people are usually spotted out within the first 30 to 40 days. And then they're either decide to get on board or they're gone. You know, and I want people here for a long time. I mean, I had, like I said earlier, I have had people here, a lot of people past 10 years. And I continue to have a lot of people past 10 years. But we've got people, you know, a lot of warehouse workers. And unfortunately, sometimes that goes with not a lot of time. Yeah.

That was one of the, that was probably the big awakening for me. I mean, you, we end up having a lot of, you know, I think the bad hires that we go under. One bad hire, they say, like, there's a lot of people that'll put a dollar amount to it, right? It's three times their annual salary is what it costs you, I think. Right? And I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I think there's, like, as we've scaled, and I've needed real directors with real backbone and real, like, experience, I'm a huge believer in everybody can grow up and become anything they want to be. Like, I'm not the huge believer in college. I don't think that it's perfect for any scenario. I think doctor, if you're operating on my body, I want you to be certified. But if you're selling my playgrounds, I don't need you to have a degree. If you're in charge of my operations, I don't need, but I do need you to keep educating yourself and continuously improve. You know, I need you to figure out that one thing that you're not great at today and be better at it tomorrow and the day after and the day after. And I had a lot of people who just weren't right for the role. I think that probably cost me more than anything over the years was just not having that courage to just say goodbye to some people that helped me scale quick enough. And it definitely cost me a lot of money over the last probably five to eight years.

think so.

Joey Coleman, yeah.

Yeah, I've met Joey at a few events. He's a very terrific speaker. What book was that, though? Never Lose an Employee Again.

Yeah. There are some interesting character assessment softwares out there, Culture Index and others, where they do a really interesting job. It's a survey. Every employee takes it. It kind of just helps you align with their stress levels, assuming that they answer appropriately, and how they're fitting into their role and where they feel like it kind of helps you align. Is your vision? match what they're doing and does their daily flow match what you think it should be? We use it as a gauge of employee health. Initially, we do use it to try and fit that person into a role. If they're an operator, an architect, there's a variety of different character placements in which they kind of qualify people at. And based on that, we assume this person's going to have a hard time making a decision. Are we going to accept that in this role or not? Is this the kind of team that we want to build? You know, and it helps us kind of better understand. It's not the end all be all. Sure. But it definitely helps you give a good idea of these pieces work really good with these pieces. Can we explode with this group of people or will it implode?

In terms of hiring, I think that, you know, in the initial, in that initial thing, I think going with your gut, I know it sucks long-term, but man, but also you'll have to go with your gut on both, both ways, you know? That's the thing, hiring and firing. And if you're not willing to do that, then, you know, you need to try and find somebody else to do both because you've got to be able to fire. And a lot, that's where a lot of guys get in trouble. And that's where I got in trouble in the beginning was you, you hire your friends, your family, people closest to you as hard to fire those people because that ruins Christmas. I wasn't invited to Christmas for like seven years. So, I mean, you know, but that's just choice I made. But there were bad employees. I couldn't have them around anymore. Now, did they want to take responsibility? No. But my responsibility is to the others and myself, not just to them. So I think that's my biggest thing is, you know, before you hire anybody you know, think everywhere again. There's somebody else out there with that skill set that can do it. somebody else.

You're not the only one

Yeah. One way that I looked at it earlier on was, so Dan Martell, he's an author. He wrote, I think it's Buying Back Your Time. Buying Back Your Time, Joe. Yeah. And he's got that interesting philosophy, you know, if you can hire it out. And, you know, I think it's a good exercise to do, if nothing else, is looking at what you do on a daily basis and say, is this worth my annual salary to be able to do this? Or if I hired this off and spent 50 grand to hire this off and I didn't never had to do this again. And this person did this. Is it worth it? And if it is, it's probably worth it because you can probably build out an entire job around that. And if that's the case, you know, how much can you do before, you know, and does it need to be perfect? Because if it needs to be perfect, it's not worth 50 grand. Right. You know, and you shouldn't be doing it anyways. You should really be thinking about why are you doing this and why does it have to be you? You know, why can't anybody else do this? You know, and it took me a long time to say, okay, I don't have to do this. I'm going to let go a little bit. I'm just going to ease up. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm a big believer in progress over process or, you know, over perfection.

No, I have not.

I like that. That's good stuff.

Book I recommend. I'm reading two books right now. One is a torrential. Way too long. It's the biography of Walt Disney. Oh, okay. It's a long one. The other one is Software as a Science. It's got, I think, four co-authors. So we're doing that new software book, and that's just helping me more kind of understand the subscriptions and stuff like that. One of the authors is Dan Martell. I've got a lot of them recently just because he was on my mind from that. But yeah.

Absolutely. They can always find me on LinkedIn. It's N-I-C-O-L-A-S-B-R-E-E-D-L-O-V-E, Nicholas Breedlove on LinkedIn. And you'll find me and just message me there and a team member will get it to me. But I'm pretty reactive when it comes to requests like that. We've got a good team behind me, fortunately. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to do much.

I appreciate you, man. All