A life of booms and busts leads to one more try

INSPIRING PERSPECTIVES

Each Sunday, the AJC brings you insights from metro Atlanta leaders and entrepreneurs. Matt Kempner’s “Secrets of Success” shares the vision and realities of entrepreneurs who started their dreams from scratch. The column alternates with Henry Unger’s “5 Questions for the Boss,” which reveals the lessons learned by CEOs of the area’s major companies and organizations.

Find previous columns from Unger and Kempner on our premium website for subscribers at www.myajc.com/business.

Sherwood’s tips for entrepreneurs:

— Don’t go into a business you are not interested in.

— Absolutely refuse to fail. Many entrepreneurs fail because they give up from fatigue.

— Be patient. It often takes longer than you think it will for a business to succeed.

— Have another income stream you can rely on while you do research on starting a business.

— If you picked an industry, but haven’t figured out a specific business, visit industry trade shows to get ideas you can iterate on.

Bonus tips for entrepreneurs in their 60s or older:

— Don’t go for something overly complicated that will take more effort, time or money then you are willing to give.

— Consider starting a service business, which often demands less money and effort than retail or manufacturing ventures.

— Keep work travel to a minimum. Older bodies often aren’t forgiving. And business travel usually isn’t much fun on a budget.

TrekShops

Based in Jasper in north Georgia.

He and his wife launched a company in 2011 to make beds that can be quickly assembled and disassembled, aimed often at renters who move frequently. They branched into making decorative exterior and interior lighting systems. Their products are sold in brick-and-mortar stores and online. The business is the latest in a string of companies Sherwood has started, including one called EnviroScent that produces scent machines for stores and hotels as well as scented sticks (ScentSicles) that make flower bouquets and Christmas trees more fragrant.

Jeff Sherwood, 66-year-old co-founder and president of TrekShops. Founder, former chief and now minority stockholder of EnviroScent.

Annual revenue: About $200,000 for TrekShops last year. Projecting $600,000-plus this year. EnviroScent had about $1 million in revenue when he sold most of it in 2010.

Staff: about 10 part timers including his wife (the executive vice president) and his eldest daughter (who heads operations). He is the only full time worker.

His hours: About 70 hours a week.

More information about launching and running a small business is available from the state of Georgia at: http://www.georgia.org/small-business/

“I was 52, starting over again. The challenges are no less when you are older than they are when you are younger.”

“Money makes some people crazy, even people who are goodhearted and not by nature scam artists.”

“You have to be 100 percent committed emotionally to not failing ….”

Jeff Sherwood trained as a zoologist, worked with NASA and launched a string of unrelated businesses. They ranged from selling performance parts for cars to providing video duplication services and producing scented sticks that make flower bouquets and Christmas trees more fragrant.

By 27 he was rich enough to retire. A few years later he was bust.

But he never shook the entrepreneurial bug. By the time Sherwood and his wife reached their 60s, they decided to start a part-time business. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, Sherwood, 66, is working full time trying to make money with his Jasper, Ga.-based furniture and home decor business, TrekShops.

I get bored really easily. I love the creation of a business. I find that in a business I have about a five- to 10-year attention span.

While in college at UCLA he had taken off time to work with animals that were part of the NASA space program. Sherwood saved up $25,000 from the work and invested in a friend’s business selling high-performance exhaust systems for Volkswagens.

I took the sales from like $15,000 a month to like $100,000 a month. We were going to be making a bunch of money. I came into the office and there were a stack of bills. While I was out of town my partner had bought a new Mercedes and a house on the company checking account. The company went bankrupt. I ended up having to go bankrupt because I had personally signed on everything.

Don’t trust your partners overly. Money makes some people crazy, even people who are goodhearted and not by nature scam artists.

My next business (making aftermarket auto parts) went from myself and my partner being the only employees to 275 employees (six years later).

It was the mid 1970s and he was making about $175,000 a year.

I bought every toy I wanted. I bought a boat and a Lincoln Continental. All that stuff was nice but it didn’t make me feel one iota better. I sold (my stake to the partners) for a couple million bucks. I was 27. I thought I was going to retire. I moved up to the Sierra Nevadas. I bought a restaurant, an old funky building in a little town and renovated it.

Manufacturing is about material costs and how much it costs for you to put it out the door. So I looked at this restaurant as a manufacturing company. I was able to create great food at really competitive prices. Two weeks before we opened I invited every teacher, minister, insurance agent, anybody in town who knew people. We fed 600 people for free. It was: “This is what we’ve got. Tell everybody.” We became so popular it was hurting the other restaurants in town.

Then a car smashed through the front of the restaurant, devastating his business. Insurance only covered part of the damages.

I started a video and audio company. We had 500 VCRs. If somebody needed 10,000 copies of a program we would run the tape for them. During 12 of those 15 years we lived comfortably off that business. We were doing really well right up to the day when nobody wanted to buy any more.

The trend toward DVDs undercut the company’s videotape focus.

We piecemealed the company off. It was enough money to move to Atlanta and basically start all over.

I was 52, starting over again. The challenges are no less when you are older than they are when you are younger. When you are older you don’t get quite as weirded out over them because you have been through it a few times before. But you don’t have quite the energy you have when you are 25.

You have to be 100 percent committed emotionally to not failing, no matter what it takes. If you have to work 100 hour weeks, if you have to get a nighttime job from 2 to 6 in the morning.

My wife and I wanted to do another business. (She) took a job working as a secretary on a temp basis. I took a job delivering pizza.

I had come across a company out of Spain that was making scent machines. Nobody in the United States was doing that at that point to my knowledge.

Our first office was in our living room. I took deposits from people and told them the machines are being built.We eventually took over most of the manufacturing ourselves.

His company, EnviroScent, sold to retailers, hotels, event spaces, floral shops and others that wanted to use smells to create an atmosphere.

I received a call from an FTD vice president of business development asking me if I could put the scent of flowers back into flowers. Unbeknownst to most people, store-bought flowers don’t have much fragrance.

I bought like a half a dozen bouquets of flowers and set them in vases on my dining room table and just kind of stared at them for a couple hours.

The obvious places had been tried: Putting fragrance in the water. But it didn’t really put out much scent. Spray the flowers with fragrance. But that killed the flowers. Then the light bulb went off. I created an artificial stem that when put into the bouquet you couldn’t really tell it was there. That’s where I can hide the fragrance. They went over really well.

They created fragrant sticks that would add the smell of Christmas trees to artificial trees.

They were designed to either be hidden in the tree or hang off the tree like an icicle. That’s the name ScentSicles. The folks that owned Popsicle sued us for violation of a trademark saying ScentSicles was too much like Popsicles.

Investors interested in buying the EnviroScent business agreed to help fight the legal battle, which eventually ended with the name intact. He later sold the business to the investors for about $2 million.

My wife was really burned out on this business. We were consistent working 60 to 80 hours a week. She really wanted to retire.

But soon they started TrekShops, which sells beds designed to be assembled and disassembled in less than a minute. They thought it would appeal to renters, college students and others who move often. They expanded into home decor items, particularly lighting.

I was looking for a 20- to 30-hour-a-week job to have fun at. I had no intention of putting the kind of money into this that I did. I probably have $400,000 to $450,000 invested. Being an entrepreneur you have to be a bit of a gambler. If you are not willing to back what your play is, it is very hard to succeed.

I think we will break even this year. My hope is by the time I am 70 I will be back down to 20 hours a week.