When I was 8 years old, our family business was still small and struggling financially. Earlier that year, my dad flew to New England to try to buy the rights to a new brake design with a $10,000 check in his pocket; the most that we could afford to pay. The trip was a success and he bought the design. After engineering our own ideas into it and building a dedicated manufacturing line, Tapco introduced the “Professional” series of brakes. Later this series name would be shortened to “Pro”, but it’s still an active product line.

He used his own image in ads and brochures, so by that time my grandfather (ever the self-promoter) had made a name for himself in the industry. To introduce his new product line, he decided to create a marketing campaign based on two generations of our family. The ads would have a double meaning. He chose me to be featured in the ads with him.

With the promise of a new catcher’s mitt upon completion, I had my first (and only) modeling job. It was a neat opportunity and an experience with my grandfather that I’ll always treasure.

The photos were used in brochures and full page ads that were run in all the trade magazines. After that, my grandfather and dad would bring me to tradeshows and have me talk to customers while operating the brake (which I was pretty good at, as long as I was only using 12″ long pieces) in order to demonstrate how easy it was to use. That experience proved to be invaluable when I was much older and working as a Regional Sales Manager for the company. I was able to operate the brake better than any of my sales reps. At 8 years old, in my mind I was famous!

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Side Note: When attending a tradeshow or convention, to promote himself, my grandfather would always have himself paged over the loudspeakers, “Windy Marsh from Tapco please pick up a white courtesy phone. Windy Marsh, pick up a white courtesy phone.” To this day, I still think that’s brilliant.

Since it’s so important to me, I decided to give this topic a post of its own. Much of my late grandfather’s identity and public persona were directly linked to the company he founded, Tapco. His personality was larger than life and he was a big self-promoter. Those two traits, along with his great vision for the future are things that helped him become a successful entrepreneur. That’s not the same as a great business man. He’d eventually need my dad for that, but that’s another story.

For as long as I can remember, besides using his own image in brochures and his nickname for product names, my grandfather used the Tapco logo on all sorts of promotional items: watches, pens, pencils, notepads, tape measures, shirts, pants, hats, jackets, money clips, pocket calculators, and pocket knives amongst other things I can’t recall. If you can name it, there was probably a version made adorned with the Tapco logo. For so long, my life was inundated with all things Tapco. It even seemed that my grandfather’s wardrobe was entirely furnished by Tapco. It was both silly and brilliant at the same time.

The Tapco Logo – Known internally as “The dancing letters”

For more than 30 years, at trade shows, he’d wear a bright green sport coat (the company’s color) that he would tell people was “money green”. People began to stop by our booth at shows just to meet him or shake his hand. Because Tapco’s tools were entirely mechanical, we were particularly popular with the Amish.

One time, while I was traveling with the area sales rep in south-eastern Ohio, the rep and I stopped at an Amish bakery which sold hand-made outdoor furniture in addition to baked goods. While he was inside buying a pie, I waited outdoors by the furniture. A salesperson approached me and asked if I needed any help. He noticed the Tapco logo on my shirt (see what I’m saying?) and said, “Tapco, huh?” I said, “Yes, it’s the company I work for.” The salesperson replied, “Do you know Windy Marsh?”

When my grandfather died, I wanted to create the design for his headstone in order to honor his memory in two ways. First, was by having a headstone that would standout amongst the others, like he did in a crowd. Secondly, with the kind of “brand recognition” he had, I wanted to keep his name and his company’s logo linked. The granite has a greenish hue to it, but we couldn’t get anything approching the color of “money green”. I also wanted to make each letter a separate piece, but the headstone company said it would lead to it being vandalized. Here’s the resulting design:

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It definitely stands out.

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The title of this post may lead you to believe that I’m referring to lying, but I’m not. See? The title is deceiving. People who know me personally and professionally know that I feel it’s of great importance not to lie to your customers, co-workers, or employees.

That being said, I think there is a use for words designed to confuse or deceive when you’re having a private business discussion in public. I feel no obligation to assist eavesdroppers in knowing details about the inner-workings of my business.

It’s with this in mind that I subscribe to my late grandfather’s “1% rule” and have adapted it to other areas of my business. My grandfather used and taught his executives to use this rule when discussing business in public places, such as restaurants, elevators, etc. It was particularly useful when we were out-of-town at tradeshows and often in close proximity to customers and competitors.

The Windy Marsh Rule of 1%

If you make something for $1 and you sell it for $2,
you’ve made 1%.

Makes perfect sense.

UPDATE: To answer some questions about why we specifically used the 1% rule: Our company was in the building products industry, which is notorious for having very small profit margins. There are many large companies in this industry (Alcoa, Certainteed, Owens Corning) who could easily drop $100+ million to tool-up and make competing products to our own; thus lowering our very large margins. In order to keep people from wrecking our segment of the market, we’d give them the distinct impression that there wasn’t any money in it. If anyone ever overheard us talking about making 1%, they’d probably think, “Wow, now that’s a tough market to be in. Let’s stay out of there.” It seems to have worked.

The best boss I ever had was Tom Rachfal. He was the Vice President of Sales when I was a Regional Manager for Tapco. I heard that he left the company not too long after we sold it. He always treated me fairly, with respect, and never gave me any grief over my family connection to the company; although I worked really hard to make that a non-issue.

One of the things I miss most about working for him is when he’d get a piece of information about a customer of mine and if I wasn’t in my office when he walked down to give it to me, he’d leave it on my desk with a note saying “Mark – WTF?”

How can you not like a guy that is so direct?

My last post got me thinking about my grandpa. My grandpa was quite a character. People either loved him or hated him (most loved him); there was no in-between. His real-life personality closely resembled Rodney Dangerfield’s character in the movie Caddyshack.

Sometime in the late eighties he came up with this idea of having “pads” (like pads of paper) made from one dollar bills. He’d stop by the bank on his way into the office and bring back several thousand dollars in crisp newly-printed singles and have his secretary make pads of $50 with a cardboard backing. He really enjoyed seeing people’s reaction to being tipped with currency torn from a pad. Many people would question it’s validity. Once, a convenience store owner in Florida refused to accept it as payment because he thought it was counterfeit. As a side note here, I carried his “wallet” (a camera bag stuffed with five thousand singles in pads) through Europe on a trip with him in 1992. In return for this good deed, I was almost strip-searched at the airport in Gdansk, Poland.

Once the novelty of people’s reaction to that (the bills, not the near strip-search) wore off, he began picking up two dollar bills from the bank and padding those into pads of $100. Since $2 bills are somewhat less common, he received an even bigger reaction. Then after a while he began signing his name on them! In the last few years of his life, due to his failing health, he spent a decent amount of time in the hospital. He’d have us go down to the hospital gift shop and buy out their candy supply so he’d have something to give the nurses and doctors when they stopped by his room. The hospital staff would make a point to stop by often to grab some free candy and a signed $2 bill.

During one particular hospital stint, he started telling the nurses that if they folded the bill they’d become pregnant. Depending on their individual circumstances, some would intentionally fold it, some would do everything they could to ensure it would not get folded. Word of this travelled through the hospital and nurses and other employees from other wards would specifically seek out my grandpa to get a signed bill so that they could fold it.

My grandpa was known everywhere for this one and two dollar bill thing, and as a way of showing their respect for him, the guys who worked in our engineering department created a limited edition commemorative brake (a main product of one of our companies). Below is a photo of the original version of the Pro III brake that we sold at that time:

The teal part is called the anvil. On the special edition for my grandpa, they anodized the anvil in “money green” to represent the green sport coat that my grandpa always wore to tradeshows. It was another one of his trademark items. All the text and graphics are laser-etched on the brake. Sorry for the poor quality of the photos, they were taken with my first digital camera (a VGA Casio) almost nine years ago. The green was actually not so lime in person; it was much darker. I think they made a hundred of these brakes and distributed them to our best and oldest customers. I wonder if anyone ever actually used one of these for work?

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This is a photo of me and a good customer in 1997. That seems like a lifetime ago. Close observers will notice that this is the only photo of me on this whole site. Wow, I look like a dork there. My hair resembles Big Boy’s.