Three Dog Logistics: Interview with John Kennedy & Pat Veverica

Doris Nagel  0:41

Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur show! We’re broadcasting here from  the Greater Chicago Milwaukee area.  If you’re an entrepreneur or a small businessperson, or thinking about becoming one, this show is for you.

I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour. I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve counseled lots of startups and small businesses for the past 30 years.

The show has two goals, to share helpful information, and to inspire and hopefully make your journey as an entrepreneur faster and easier, and maybe just a little bit more fun!  To help with that. I have guests every week on the show who are willing to share their stories and advice.

This week, we are lucky enough not to have just one but two guests. Joining me today by phone are John Kennedy, the founder of a company called Three Dog logistics, and Pat Veverica, who runs a boutique consulting firm that helps companies with their sales and marketing efforts.

A couple of words about the two of them and why they’re here together.  Pat is the founder and president of What’s Your Plan.  She helps small to medium sized businesses with their growth strategies with particular emphasis on sales, marketing and channel development. She helps give her clients clarity to their sales and marketing and customer service strategies.

John Kennedy is a serial entrepreneur, like many of our guests.  He has strong basic business instincts and loves taking calculated risks. He demonstrated the vision and aptitude for staying a step ahead of the marketplace with a proven track record of success and the ability to scale businesses economically. He broke out from the competition and dominated the category when he created Three Dog Logistics.

Three Dog Logistics is a direct mail logistics company.  It was founded in 2005, and is based in Baltimore, Maryland. It moves large amounts of direct mail through the US Postal Service.

The story started a couple of years after the company was founded, which at that time was called Direct Mail Logistics.  It was a small player in a very big category.  The company had less than 500 k in revenue, and only about 10 customers.  And John was –I don’t want to say frantic – but he was concerned and wondering how in the world do you take the small company and grow it to get a bigger piece of a very large marketplace.  So he partnered with Pat, and their story is what they’re going to share today.

Pat and John, thanks so much for being on the show today. Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur!

Pat Veverica

My pleasure. Thank you.

John Kennedy

Thank you for having us! Woof, woof! [laughing]

Doris Nagel  4:03

John, I think the place to start is with you and how you decided to found the company in the first place.  And what made you decide you needed to do something different after a couple of years?

John Kennedy:  4:10

Well, I’ve been in the printing and mailing business about for 40 years.  I worked for a number of different manufacturers, and I worked for some very large mail shops. And towards the beginning of 2000 was really the highlight of direct mail really prior to the internet kicking in.  I think the highest yearly volume was in 2002.  At that point, the Post Office came out with something called drop shipping discount, where they allowed private companies to move mail from one U.S. Post Office facility to another. And for that, they offered what’s called a work share discount. They weren’t paying you. But what they would do is they would say, okay, they would be normally charge let’s say, 50 cents apiece, to move a piece of mail from Baltimore to LA.  But they would only charge you 30 cents.  That left a delta of difference of say 20 cents per piece.

And as an entrepreneur, I realized you could probably move it for a lot less than that. And since the cost of transportation was a factor of distance, I could probably come up with a business plan that really optimized that type of shipping. The Post Office at that time was giving a flat rate discount. For example, when I mentioned 20 cents from Baltimore to LA, it was the same discount as Baltimore to Philadelphia. But as you know, Baltimore to Philadelphia is a couple 100 miles, versus a couple thousand miles from Baltimore to LA.  So the margin spread was quite large on a very short distance.

Doris Nagel  6:14

So what happened?  Obviously, it was a good idea, but it didn’t last?

John Kennedy  6:50

The issue was dealing with the Post Office on the transportation side.  The post office back then was very unionized, there was a tremendous amount of overhead cost there, and a very inefficient transportation model and way of moving the mail within the post office system.

So just trying to transport mail within the post office was a really big challenge.  But once we were able to overcome that, things really started to click, probably within the first two to three years.

Pat Veverica  7:53

So I think that part of the question was, now that we have these issues resolved, how do we grow or scale the business from $500,000?

Doris Nagel

As you alluded to, it’s a very big market space, and I’m sure it’s quite competitive.

Pat Veverica

Yes. I recall John calling me on a Sunday — I was actually in a seminar in San Francisco —  and he said something like, “This mutual friend of ours referred us and I really respect his judgment, and I’m calling you because I need to do some marketing.”

In retrospect, those words always crack me up because “do some marketing” can mean anything — from puting an ad in my church program to a total rebrand and making a big splash.  John, what was your mindset at that time?

John Kennedy  8:27

You know, I was always on the sales side of any business I worked in.  I was selling for 40 years. But going into the market, that was a really a big change.   I just thought you call people you know, and you just put up a website. And that was it. I didn’t know anything about marketing. So that was how Pat really got us focused with marketing materials, the website and all the things that really gave us the ability to start growing.

Doris Nagel  9:00

So to find your first customers, you just literally put a website up and people came?

John Kennedy  9:08

I was lucky enough to be in the industry for 20 years prior, so I knew all the players. So that part of it — the sales side — was really the easy part. It was the marketing and converting that was challenging.  I didn’t realize we needed more of a true marketing program until Pat designed it for us.

Pat Veverica  9:26

John, I recall you saying, ”I don’t want to be the world’s best kept secret.”  Direct Mail Logistics at the time was a relatively small player in a huge market, and that made Big Dog crazy.

So he said needed marketing.  What he meant was “ I need people to know who I am and flock to me in droves and pay me handsomely for my services.”  That’s really what you were looking for. Right?

John Kennedy  10:00

Yes.  That’s what any entrepreneur wants.  That’s it!

Pat Veverica  10:06

John actually agreed to fly into Chicago to meet me.  He did a day trip to O’Hare, and we met at a local hotel, I think.  I guess that doesn’t sound real good to our audience, but I think they understand what I mean.  In any event, we sat there and I was just blown away by his natural exuberance. And I was trying to pin him down. It was like trying to nail jello to a wall, which is common with a lot of entrepreneurs.

What business are you in? What is this thing called “mail logistics”? Why are you in it? What problems do you solve? What can your customers expect from you? What’s your brand promise?

We did this for five hours!  And typically, I do it in a confined space — I call it the war room — and no one gets out until we have answers to these pressing questions.  That then allows me then to go off and create marketing plans and programs. But partway through that five hours, he was pretty fidgety. And it was clear to me he was being tortured.

So I finally said,  “Okay, let’s take a break.  Tell me about you, your family.”  He pulls out his wallet, and out come the pictures of three pug dogs.  He starts telling me about how the dogs rule the office, which at the time was his garage.

John, give us a little bit of the background on that.

John Kennedy 11:30

I started the business, I think it was in January, at the kitchen table.  In less than a week, I moved to the dining room table. And that lasted another week, because I was overwhelmed with file folders and things like that. At that point, I morphed up into the attic of this old house where I was living.  I spent a year or so in the attic, where there was no heat. I wore gloves to type, and in the summer, I had a little window air conditioner. But I survived up there and I was able to do it.

From there. I morphed into the garage, after I found that I had to hire employees.  I had three people working in this single car garage that I had converted into an office.  I called it our “WHQ,” our world headquarters. And we had a sign made outside. And we always called it Suite 300, because we didn’t have Google Earth back then, so no one could really check it out that well.  So our deliveries always were addressed to Suite 300.  People don’t want to see a home address, so the backyard garage became Suite 300.

Doris Nagel

I love it!  Well, so you must have decided at some point — maybe it was when John pulled out his pictures of his three pugs — to do a whole rebrand to become Three Dog Logistics.  And I know, Pat just referred to John as “The Big Dog.”  And even on your website, John is The Big Dog.  Talk about how that happened.

Pat Veverica  13:34

First of all, I call him Boss Dog, but everyone else calls him Big Dog.  And I have trained him to call me his Marketing Goddess.  And so that’s continued in our relationship.

But he started telling me that every employee in the garage had a dog bed under their desk, and that was required.

Every now and then during the day, the door would open and, I’m sure with muddy paws, these three pugs would come bursting through, run around the office yap a little bit and settle back into the beds.  And I thought that story was a riot.  At that point, I realized we were onto something.

At the end of our five-hour War Room torture session, I said, “You know, I really have a concern about your name. Direct Mail Logistics is a very generic term. And I don’t think people are going to flock to you or find you and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I need.”  I told him he really needed to choose something that’s more memorable.

John Kennedy  14:32

It was white bread.  I mean, I call it white bread in an industry that every other business was “direct something mail something”.

Doris Nagel

Not to put words in your mouths, but it sounds like the object was to create a brand that made people remember you and give you a little different twist to things.

Pat Veverica  15:00

Oh, and it did. And after arguing about it for a couple of days, because I remember dropping him off at the airport saying, “You know, we should really change your name to Three Dog logistics, have a nice day!” And then we argued about it for a few days on the phone.

John Kennedy  15:14

We didn’t “argue” about it  – we “discussed” it.

Pat Veverica  15:26

Okay, we “discussed” it.  But Doris, as soon as we decided on the name “Three Dog Logistics,” the dog metaphors and the dog analogies just flowed.  I remember John shouting, “Yes!  We take the bite out of freight!” And I thought, this is perfect!

Doris Nagel

Oh, my goodness, funny.   So what happened after the rebranding? Because Three Dog Logistics has become a much bigger player in the industry.  Talk about what you did, and what happened as a result of those changes.

Pat Veverica

John, let me lead with how we started it off and reintroduced you to the market. And then I’ll let you take over, because that’s really your success story.

As soon as we rebranded, we started sending out teasers saying, “Direct Mail Logistics has a new name, stay tuned.”  And then we sent out mail campaigns to everyone John knew in the industry, which was pretty significant — he knew a lot of people.

We also sent things to all of the publications, and basically anyone who followed the direct mail industry.  We sent out a great big envelope of information.  We had things that said, “Who let the dogs out? We did!” and “There’s a new sheriff in town,” and we had a pug dog with a sheriff badge, introducing Three Dog Logistics.

We had a lot of fun with it. And we were able to create a lot of stir right at the very beginning. And then the dog metaphors just kept going.  You know, “Are you dog tired of the high cost of postage and freight, we can help.”  I’m looking at my binder now, of all of the stuff that we created.

John Kennedy  17:19

Remember the business card?

Pat Veverica 17:50

We didn’t want to pay for laser cutting, because  laser cutting was expensive then.  So we ordered business cards for everyone and we physically sat down with pinking shears and cut a bite mark out of the top corner out of each business card!

But it was significant because it was something that you would look at and you would show other people. And we initially designed John’s cards to be almost the size of an index card, because he was “Big Dog.”  Although that idea got squashed, because no one knew where to put it once he handed them the card.

The dog metaphors were crazy!

John Kennedy  18:07

I think I still have one of the big business cards – it was massive. It was like three by five, four by six.  So it was big!  And I’d hand this out there and I always would get a laugh. And then I’d follow up with a normal business card. But it was a great opening to any sales call that I would have.  In fact, even our press releases, which came on paper, not electronically, had the bite mark out of them.

Doris Nagel  18:45

Fun!  So, what happened as a result of all of this new marketing and rebranding? Was there a flood of new customers?

John Kennedy 18:55

Well, we just started getting a little bit more traction here and there.  What happened was a couple of things. One was the recession of 2007-2009.  Once the recession hit the mailing industry, the volume just was crippled.  And the only thing that the mail shops were thinking about and direct mail customers was cost – how can we reduce cost?  Because postage is the biggest spend on any direct mail campaign – it’s probably 60 to 70% of the total cost.

So for us, leading with a pitch to reduce your costs was huge.  If you came to customer and said we could lower your costs by X percent upfront and improve your delivery, it was a no-brainer.  So we were able to get customers quite rapidly during that time.  Also we started dealing less with end user customers and did more with the mail shops or mail producers.

Once we got a particular mail shop, they might have 200 customers that they started sending to us. So we were able to grow exponentially, because of the agencies and the mail shops we were dealing with. And we just captured all their clients themselves.  So we didn’t go after individual clients.  We would get an agency or a large mail shop, and then capture all their other clients that just came along.

Doris Nagel

Sounds like your growth was quite rapid.

Pat Veverica  20:34

Very!  When you look at the Inc 500, and how they measure growth, they’re looking for exponential growth year over year.  They take a three-year snapshot. And they look at your percentage year over year. And that’s how they rank you.

And John got on it right after the third year we started doing this. That’s how he ended up being ranked 277 on the Inc 500.  But this is all a story about scaling and using a channel to scale, and it’s a perfect example for your entrepreneur audience.

The other thing that he did was is he took this horribly boring thing called logistics and finally gave the poor people who were on the phone and on the computers all day long trying to find their shipping and logistics provider something fun.

They were getting fun mail from Three Dog Logistics. And the website is fun. And suddenly, John and his staff were inundated with pictures of people’s dogs.  So we had to quickly pivot and put up the Three Dog Blog. Remember that, John?

John Kennedy

Yup.

Doris Nagel

What was the Three Dog Blog?

Pat Veverica 22:20

Oh, people would send him pictures of their dogs, and John would run contests. He featured his own dogs and told their little stories.  He’d show a picture of one laying on the beach, watching for girls.  It was fun, and cute.  So while he was scaling the business, he was also making it interesting to the people who had to interact with the business.

John Kennedy

Remember the boxes that we would send? The marketing boxes with all the all the junk that we put in them?

Pat Veverica

We would send out, for example, a Halloween box. And it was filled with all kinds of fun Halloween paraphernalia.  But it would always include something dog themed, like a dog bone.  At one point, John did dog chains, remember those?  They were chains with the information for the company on it.

We did we really supported the tchotchke business quite heavily those early years.  It sounds like we spent a lot of money, but we didn’t.  And this is at the time when the recession hit. And all of the other vendors in his category had sidelined their ad and marketing spend, while we were actually exploding ours.  We were spending money – not a huge amount — but we were creating visibility when everyone else was sitting back in the corners, licking their wounds.

Doris Nagel

You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that.  Some people may be listening and thinking, well, that was quite a while ago.  Is that still relevant?

I think it’s probably just as relevant today.  I think there’s a there’s a bigger story in there, which is:  when you’re in a recession, it’s so easy to hunker down and take a wait and see approach.  I see that even with talking with potential guests.  I’ve talked to several potential guests on the show who tell me they don’t want to be on the show right now, because they really don’t have anything to talk about.  A lot of people are just hunkered down.

I find that interesting, because if you look back to the last recession, and probably other recessions before that, in many cases, the companies that invested into the recession and took advantage of a challenging time to pivot and do something different were the ones that succeeded.

It’s easy to sit back and wait and see where things go, but that might not be the best strategy.  What do you think, John?

John Kennedy  25:00

That’s exactly right, and that’s what we did.  If you go back to the high point of direct mail, which I think was around 2002, the internet started taking off, and then there was another recession.  Direct mail took another huge drop after that.  And for the last 10 years, the volume of direct mail has really plummeted from what it used to be.

We have two problems in our industry:  one, the volume is decreasing. At the same time, the cost of postage is increasing.   That’s typically the death knell of any industry:  lower volume and higher costs.

Three to four years ago, we saw this was coming.  So we morphed, are morphing still, into more of an e commerce fulfillment type of a company.

And last year was one of our best years ever, even with COVID.  While other companies are downsizing, we have increased our size, we have increased our floorspace, we have done more work with less people. We’ve become more efficient. And you know, we see 2021 as another banner year.

One way we’ve morphed is to move into more health-related insurance work.  In government mandated-types of industries, where these companies are forced to do these type of mailings versus things such as regular nonprofits where they don’t know if they can afford to do mailings.  In these health care industries, you’re mandated to make these physical mailings.  So these are the type of places I want to be in, versus ones that people say, you know, I don’t think we’re gonna spend the money this year.

Another way we pivoted is that we repurposed our TMS, our transportation management software – it’s a very boring name, so we call it Rover. And what does Rover do, Pat?

Pat Veverica

It sniffs out the best rates!

John Kennedy 28:30

With Rover, we had an online freight costing and logistics system back before anyone really knew what a TMS was.

We were mostly focused in on just direct mail — moving freight from one point to another part of the country there.

But we realized that Rover could be used for any product —  it doesn’t have to be just for mail. So Pat created Three Dog Freight, which we used to actually move freight, from point A to point B.  That could be anything from widgets to popcorn, or whatever our clients wanted us to move. So Pat was able to take a tool we already had but re-brand it as something different.  And with that, we went after a little different client base, and that also took off.

At the same time, we also had clients who had parcels.  I’m not talking about e commerce as it is today. Back then, it was product sampling. One of our customers that we were moving mail for asked us to mail little samples of a new product launch.  Of course it was Purina dog food – it had to be dog food, right?  And we realized that’s just another part of logistics, and that the only thing we needed to do was create some type of automated addressing thing for these little boxes.

So we invested into some new machinery.  I mean, it was probably $200,000 of investment, but in the scheme of things, it really wasn’t a lot.  Because it allowed us to morph into a whole new industry we previously didn’t even know about, which was product sample mailing.  And we became probably one of two to three companies in the country that was doing this product sample mailing for new products.  We probably had a good 10 year run with that.

Now things have changed again.  The cost of postage has gone up so much that it’s very difficult now for a lot of the cpgs, the consumer product groups, to afford to mail samples. So they’ve found different ways of sending out new products. But again, this was something that we looked at and realized that we already had the infrastructure and said, “Let’s just tweak a little bit here,” and suddenly we’re into a whole new industry segment!

Doris Nagel  31:27

You alluded to it earlier — the internet has really taken off. And that’s been a huge change for your industry. Talk a little bit about that.

John Kennedy 31:46

Exactly. So with that things have changed into ecommerce. And we had at this time an approximately 80,000 square foot warehouse.  We looked at that, and asked,  “What else can we do with this warehouse?”

So we looked at things such as books.  We’re now a back-end provider for a number of different online booksellers.  So we warehouse the books for these sellers.  We get feeds daily of orders that come through their websites, and then we do all the shipping and mailing.  But this is all part of what we’ve always done –shipping and mailing at a low cost.

So now, we do order fulfilment for a lot of books and other mailings for different companies. But it’s all really wrapped around the same model we’ve been doing for the last 15 years, and we’ve just tweaked it slightly to change with the times.

Now we’re starting to get into more product deliveries.  We have three customers now that we’re doing their full e commerce, where we accept the feeds from the e commerce platforms.  We do the fulfillment, the shipping, the packaging —  all the back end work for a lot of these e commerce companies.

Pat Veverica

Because the reality is, even with e commerce, there’s still an element of pick pack and ship and inventory management.

Doris Nagel  33:13

You’ve still got to get the product to the customer, right? Until we figure out how to beam things here and there like Star Trek, you still need to have somebody drive it and drop it off.

 John Kennedy

That’s right. And, you know, people love free shipping, but it doesn’t exist.  People don’t appreciate that there’s a cost involved — someone’s paying for it.  Fortunately, we are able to keep a low cost because we’re spreading our overhead over many different sectors of businesses, so no one division doesn’t have to absorb the full overhead.

Doris Nagel  33:55

These are great stories and ideas about how you pivoted.  But did you experience any challenges as you grew?

John Kennedy 3410

We were fortunate.  We went from $500,000 in revenue up to I think $30 some million?

Pat Veverica  34:24

Yes.  And Three Dog Logistics was on the Inc 500 5 times.

John Kennedy

It’s pretty difficult to get there even once or twice.  You have to have hundreds of percents of growth just to make it the following year, year over year growth.

Doris Nagel

And you’re not in one of those unicorn, high tech kinds of things. You’re in a very mature industry.

John Kennedy  35:00

We’re very fortunate with our business model, because we don’t have to hold inventory on our books.  All of our inventory is supplied by the clients.  We do strictly the back-end logistics work.

The death of most businesses is cash flow — waiting on receivables, and all of those issues of getting paid — bad debt, things of that nature. We designed it, with Pat’s help, to make sure that everything’s paid upfront.  So we have zero receivables —  meaning that, before it leaves our shop, all the postage is paid upfront.  We wrap our service and our costs of producing it into one cost.  So the client is gets a cost of $3.80 per piece, part of that $3.80 is the cost of shipping. Part of it’s our overhead, part is our profit.

But we’re able to keep our costs as low as possible, because we don’t have the issue of cash flow.

Pat Veverica

And along with the cash flow challenges came questions about whether to have brick and mortar.

We agreed very early on in our relationship not try to invest a lot in brick and mortar. John was a little disappointed, because I think he envisioned trucks and planes and trains and automobiles and stuff. But I think that eventually, you did have to invest in some brick and mortar.

John Kennedy 36:29

We were very cautious.  So many businesses get in trouble because they sign long-term leases.  They go into debt with payments and machinery, things of that nature. We were again fortunate because of our cash position.  We paid everything upfront, and we’ve never had any debt. We’ve never had a long term obligation. So we were able to absorb any downturns.  They were barely a hiccup in our operation, because we were fortunate.

Doris Nagel

So you never went out to try to raise capital and seed money in series A and Series B and all that?

John Kennedy 37:18

The series money came in from my pocket.  Because when you do those fundraising rounds, A,B,C and D,  you sell yourself to the devil. These people aren’t lending you money because they like you.  They’re doing it because they own part of you. And you always have to give away something for the money – there’s nothing for free, either from the banks or from the venture people. And then you lose complete control.

Pat Veverica

And speaking of no bricks and mortar, John also did it without hiring a sales force.

Doris Nagel

How did you do that, John?

John Kennedy 37:54

As I told you before, we weren’t going after 1000s of customers.  We were going after hundreds of customers that have 1000s of customers themselves. So we were able to build relationships with these agencies. And after we landed an account, I turned them over to our customer service reps.  We invested in the customer service reps, who really had the day-to-day contact with a client.  Versus a sales rep who might be only looking for a certain type of client, we were looking for a big fish that had a lot of little fish attached to it.

For that model, you really don’t need a sales force always hunting for fish. We wanted only the big ones.

Pat Veverica

But a startup, a salesforce is probably the most expensive outlay for a startup.

Doris Nagel

It’s an easy place to go wrong, too. Because if you don’t hire the right person, you’re just hemorrhaging a lot of cash, and not having a lot to show for it.

Pat Veverica

Exactly. And speaking of some of the challenges of growth, I got a call one Saturday and John was babbling about some incident in the Holland Tunnel. And this is one of those famous hiccups that you’ll always remember as an entrepreneur, but John, you should tell the story.

John Kennedy 39:24

So it was Saturday, and I was at my beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. I get a call from our dispatcher saying, “John, I think we have a problem.  I think there’s a problem with one of our trucks hitting the Holland Tunnel Bridge. One of our trucks broke apart, and there’s mail all across the Holland Tunnel, we’ve shut down the tunnel there.”

I said, Oh my God!”  I was just envisioning this  and what would happen with all  of our customer’s mail.

So I get in my car and drive three and a half hours up to New York.  Oh, my heart was pounding! On a tractor trailer, there’s close to a half a million pieces of mail, and I was envisioning mail all across the Holland Tunnel blocking everything.  When I came around the corner there, and I saw our truck there, it broken in half and literally just snapped. And I was thinking, oh, what’s gonna happen there?

What had happened was that our driver, who was relatively new, was approaching the tunnel, because he was gonna make a delivery to one of the big postal facilities right there.  But he made a wrong turn. And when he made the wrong turn, he came around the bend and was trying to get back on to the entrance ramp of the Holland Tunnel. But the problem was that he didn’t see that the height of this tunnel was, let’s say, 17 feet, and our tractor trailer was 18 feet tall.

So when he went into tunnel, that literally took the top of our trailer off.  Fortunately, he wasn’t going that fast.  So it was a slow bend, and the trailer just collapsed. Fortunately, all the mail that we had was well-wrapped. And it was it was on pallets, and it didn’t break up in a big mess, and a tow truck company was already there unloading it.

So overall, it turned out to be relatively tame.

Fortunately, it was a generic truck that we didn’t have any markings on a thing!  It could’ve been much worse!

Doris Nagel  42:25

That’s quite a story!  John, looking back as you’ve grown the company, what do you think of as your biggest achievement?

John Kennedy 42:35

I think it was the ability to grow it from just a concept that I have to what it was, and still is a great, growing business. And to really enjoy the ride that I’ve had.  I’ve been very fortunate and blessed for many years now, having the business, and being successful at it.  And it’s just been a wonderful thing to know you’ve made an impact in a very large industry, one that I’ve been involved in for so long.

I realized how important it is to understand what marketing really is.  I was always just a salesperson. I thought, “Oh, you just sell.  Who needs marketing?”  But running a business is really so different than just selling as a salesperson.

Pat helped create a brand for us.  I never understood before what I really a brand was until Pat developed it for us.

Pat Veverica 43:30

When I look back on all of these years, I have to admit it was the most fun I’ve ever had in my career. It was a lot of work, a lot of pain, but it was a lot of fun.

You know, he got on the Inc 500. And then he did it four more times. So five times on the Inc 500 and Inc 5000, which is just remarkable. He took the company from $500,000 to $32 million in 2019 in revenue.

I remember him saying, “Oh, I need to do some marketing.” Well, he needed a little bit more than that.

But the way I measure success is quite simple.  In those first years, he told me he was tired of being the world’s best kept secret.  And said, “Let’s do something about it.”

I saw success when his huge competitors looked over their shoulder and said, “Wow, where did these guys come from?”  And he didn’t do it with a huge spend.

So my message to entrepreneurs is, without a lot of marketing spend, you can make an impact. I used to describe startups as two guys with a really good idea in their garage.  And the challenge always was they were really good inventors and visionaries.  But at some point they’d look at each other and say okay, we have this great product. We think a lot of people are going to buy it now.  But what if they don’t? Now what?  I think I was the “now what” for John.

Doris Nagel  45:00

It was a recognition that just because you build it, they may not come.  And you may have to do a few other things in order to help them.

So, John, what you’ve accomplished is amazing. What’s next for you? And what’s next for Three Dog Logistics?

John Kennedy 45:26

For Three Dog Logistics, we really morphed into this insurance, e commerce, government regulated industries that really can continue our growth over the next couple years.  What comes next? I don’t know.  But we’ve definitely been able to constantly shift from a straight direct mail, paper and an envelope world, to one that people are in e commerce, to people getting government mandated mailings.  And we’re riding that wave as long as possible. And hopefully, we’ll continue on.

For myself, personally, I’m on this a wonderful glide slope. I’ve sold my majority interest in the company to the employees.  And I’m on a nice glide slope, because being an owner for 40 years, it’s difficult to do a hard stop.

Doris Nagel  46:31

That’s another learning, which is figuring out how to exit a business and do so gracefully in a way that’s rewarding, right? Where are they going to find another Big Dog?

 John Kennedy 46:49

The Big Dog is still there for now.  I still have relationships.  And I’m able to look at the much bigger picture and not have to worry about the day to day operational aspects of the business.  Those operational details —  it’s constant, you know, your healthcare, your taxes, whatever.  I’m glad I’ve stepped away from that, that details of the business. And personally, I can do things that I’ve always wanted to.  I have a six-to-eight week road trip planned, hopefully in June, to go camping across the country.  I have many, many places I want to see.

Doris Nagel

Looking back, and this question is for both of you, what advice would you have for other entrepreneurs?

John Kennedy  47:29

It’s a credit to Pat, but understand what marketing is all about. It’s not just selling, it’s really creating the brand. It’s creating a strategy, keeping focus on your strategy, and keeping it refreshed all the time.

The world has changed so much now.  Now everybody’s on Instagram and Facebook. And we’re not as active on that as other people are. But I think in this new world, you’re gonna have to understand all of those Instagrams and Tick tocks, and I don’t even know what the other ones are.

But what hasn’t changed is the need to have a true marketing plan.  Pat gave us marching orders.  Look, this is what we’re going to produce. This is how we’re going to promote it.

And do a lot of guerilla marketing.  Like John’s boxes that he sent out, they were phenomenal. We still do those boxes today. And we still get calls, every time we send them out there. People say, “Oh, this is the best.  No one’s sending anything anymore. You know, we wait to get your boxes”  We go to the dollar store and buy all kinds of junk.  But people just absolutely love this stuff. They give it to the kids, maybe.  But if sending a $5 box means you’re on the top of the list with your customers, that’s well worth it.

And don’t you don’t need to have these real expensive advertising campaigns. Be creative and don’t follow the trends of everyone else. Try something different.

Doris Nagel

Not to put words in your mouths, but one of the things — you’ve alluded to this, John — that there are so many different ways you could market your business.  You could spend your entire day tweeting and blogging and pinning on Pinterest.  And  I think it’s probably true for me and for a lot of us entrepreneurs, we are very guilty of the bright shiny object syndrome. It’s part of what scratches our creative itch.  So having somebody like Pat on your team is helpful.  Someone who says, forget that bright, shiny object over there and keep your focus over here, and stay focused.

John Kennedy  50:19

Today, your competition is not just the people in your own city or your state.  It’s worldwide now because of the internet. So whatever product or service your need, there are people who can market it to you anywhere in the world now, because of the internet.

That makes is  so difficult,  but yet so exciting that your customers can be anywhere.

Pat Veverica 50:44

I think entrepreneurs today are much more sophisticated than they were, then. And they have to be, and I give them all the credit for that.

But at the end of the day, it still boils down to some of the most basic questions:  Why did you build what you built? Regardless of whether it’s a widget or a service, or a piece of software.  And what business problem does it solve? And who’s going to buy it?

I’ve even told clients in some of those War Room meetings, who cares about what you just did? And they’re stunned and alarmed. But if you build it and they don’t come, then what are you left with?

We find ourselves with clients actually going backwards and doing that homework that didn’t get done before.  Like market analysis.  How big is your addressable market? And what value do you bring to the table that would cause people to pay you handsomely for your product or service?

Doris Nagel

If people listening in are interested in learning more, either just to bounce ideas off or want to know more about each of your company’s services, what’s the best way to reach you? Pat, let’s start with you.

Pat Veverica

My website is www.whatsyourplan.biz.  And I can be reached at pat@whatsyourplan.biz, or by phone at 312 751 9196. I’m happy to take your calls, and will give you probably some bossy free advice.

John Kennedy  52:21

The only way to find me is through my email at johk@threedoglogistics.com

Doris Nagel

Thank you both for being on the show this week. John and Pat, it was a delight having you thank you again for your time and your all your insights and and some of the great stories.

Pat Veverica

It’s been our pleasure.

John Kennedy

Thanks, Doris.

Doris Nagel

Thanks for listening!

You can find more helpful information and resources on my website at globalocityservices.com. There’s a library there of free blogs, tools, podcasts and other resources for entrepreneurs.

My door’s always open, and I’d love to hear from you. Email me at dnagel@lakesradio.org. I promise I’ll get back to you.

Thanks again for listening. Be sure to join me again next Saturday at 11am Central Time/noon Eastern.

But until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!