Bob Loback 7:41
Well, I learned, I learned that there is a tremendous amount of artistic talent. I learned that you as a business person have to know how to add value, and how to coexist with those folks. And I learned that, you know, the entertainment industry is not for me. I have to tell you, I think it’s a lot of people I like to mentor people, a lot of people think you always have to find the right thing. It’s just as important to find what is not your sweet spot. It’s really important to fail. Alright? failing isn’t a major portion of your journey. Okay? Because most people think you need to know like that. I’m one of these guys that has to learn, and has to experience. And that’s why I go from thing to thing. That’s why I went from thing to thing to thing. Because I just look at them as a learning experience. And what you take from your failures is, is I think, more important than what you take from your successes.
John Corcoran 8:47
I couldn’t agree more and you say you landed at DHL and you had 15 years at DHL, so obviously it was a good fit. And did jumping from division to Division Two that taught you about entrepreneurship. And did that prepare you in a way for starting?
Bob Loback 9:02
It did. You know I had an accounting background, I started as internal audit director. So I did a bunch of auditing. I found fraud and was in a division and the president ended up firing everybody in the division and he put me in charge. I remember, he came down for breakfast, he said, Okay, a little back, you found all these problems, I got rid of all these guys, you now own it until I get a replacement. It took them about three or four months to get a replacement I lived in. This is the very first year of my marriage to my wife, married for 30 3038 years. And I remember, you know, just Okay, I got to hold this thing together. And, and that’s when I realized, I don’t want to be an accountant anymore. You know, I’d like to be a general General Manager of some sort. I got a promotion and a regional controller and then of the western region and in Mexico. And then they offered me the job as a regional operations director. And so that’s when I made my job. jump from finance into general management.
John Corcoran 10:16
And when did you get into sales? Did you have sales roles? And then any point there was later,
Bob Loback 10:22
you know, it’s really weird. I’ve always been a b2b guy. I love to spoil clients.
John Corcoran 10:33
It must be hard for you right now, because we’re recording this in the middle of July 2020. You get the pandemics been happening for a while?
Bob Loback 10:41
Yeah, it’s hard but you know, I sell seals, we design and sell seals to manufacturing companies. And guess what? their factories you know, and anyway, so I jumped into that and I jumped into Darcoid and you know, it’s been an amazing journey.
John Corcoran 11:04
How did you end up merging four different companies as the way of starting your business?
Bob Loback 11:10
Yeah, well, first of all, I wanted to start a business, but I couldn’t figure out what to start. Okay. And I think that’s true of a lot of a lot of people. You know, they want to be their own boss, they want to do their own thing. They think they got to create the world. But what I was struggling with that, you know, I’d been in an internet startup I’d been in, in a life science research company, where we tested drugs on people, HIV positive people. And so I was finding I was trying to find something that would connect with me. And I wasn’t finding it, you know, in the.com, in 1990, it became the dot bomb. I went through that with an Internet startup. And I was just lucky. So I started talking to somebody I was saying, I want to own a business. And I remember a guy saying, I know a guy who has a business that wants to sell his business. He doesn’t have any family. He hasn’t done any succession planning. And I think he’d get along with you. And I said, Hey, if you know him, please introduce me. Because if he’s a class member, if he’s a client of yours, I want to meet him. And so and that’s how I connected and I connected with the owners of Darcoid. I worked out a buy sell agreement. We shared an office for eight years, l L. Armstrong and I shared an office for eight years. I
John Corcoran 12:40
stuck around for eight years after you acquired the business. So he just didn’t want to own it anymore. He’s just tired or something.
Bob Loback 12:47
He knew it was time. He was, you know, 78 years old. He knew he and he and Frank. You know, they owned it. Frank was the finance guy. I was the operating guy. They knew it was time out. You know, it’s interesting. thing you know, guys in their late 70s and 80s they start getting rid of stuff, you know, you spend your life acquiring stuff, and then and then they spend their last, whatever, getting rid of it all. And so they knew they wanted to turn it over to somebody. I was lucky enough to be introduced to them. We connected, we shared an office, there were no secrets, no secrets whatsoever. He taught me the business. I learned it on my own. And and then that’s
John Corcoran 13:30
how I knew nothing about the seal business when you okay, I didn’t even
Bob Loback 13:33
know I had no
John Corcoran 13:34
idea what a seal was. And you somehow purchased Darcoid, but you also purchased three other businesses that you rolled into Darcoid.
Bob Loback 13:42
Yep. And then I just started verbalizing once again, I wanted to be a Parker distributor. So I started talking to people about I called up the one of the Pirker regional managers, you know, and I said, introduced myself when I’d said if I’d like to be a tarkir distributor, if you have a need for a new distributor, or if you have a distributor that is not doing well, I would like to meet that person because maybe they would want to sell. And he said, I’ll get back to him. And that’s how I found NorCal seal, which was the oldest distributor partner seal distributor, you know, in North America, you know, and then the same thing with the semiconductor I told somebody I was verbalizing that I want to be in the semiconductor fab world. This was back in 2009. And some guy goes, Hey, I know a fab company down in Austin that, you know, there’s a really great guy that’s looking for a new partner. I said, Hey, I’d like to meet him. You know, and it was it’s, it’s for me, it’s always been verbalizing your your your dream what you want in networking. How
John Corcoran 15:00
Was it to acquire businesses in Austin, but you’re in the Bay Area? how did you manage to oversee that business from a distance? And, and how is it culturally bringing the businesses together?
Bob Loback 15:13
It’s not easy. I mean, it was a total turnaround situation. It was a very small business. Now remember, I’m a small business person, I got 60 employees. And what I’m trying to do is create what’s called a small giant, right? You don’t have to be big. You just have to be really good. Right. And, and I am technically focused, you know, I believe in focus, but anyway, so bringing in that culture was not difficult. What was difficult was that I bought it. It was at the bottom, it was dying. I bought it and I had to turn it around. And this is where my daughter Alex, and my wife Becky got involved. They were instrumental. We would fly down to Austin. We will live in Austin for a while. We would work out things we would like to put money in. But more importantly, we put in blood sweat and tears, because that’s what it took. And you had to regain the respect of the suppliers. The people in the customers will know that takes time. What?
John Corcoran 16:21
What were a few of the things that you found that needed fixing when you took over the business?
Bob Loback 16:27
Well, I think I think the biggest thing is that this is where my financial background really kicked in. I mean, the place was, you know, had a lot of financial problems. And so you had to put in, you know, what are the costs, what are the revenue, what are the things that drive financial success? What are you know, ethics, ethics, it was a very ethical organization, but they were like, once they got money, they, you know, they spent it on something else, and it’s You have to have discipline, you have to have financial discipline. So we started putting that. And then the other thing is ethics, your word, if you tell somebody, you’re going to do something, that’s your word, your reputation as a business owner, it’s your reputation. And so you have to deliver on that on your word, you have to make good on your word. As you start to build trust, trust is earned as you earn the trust of big companies, organizations that are important to you. In our case, in CrestTec, it was manufacturing partners. If I can earn the respect and trust of manufacturing partners, then they will start giving us terms we didn’t have terms. We were prepaid; we’d have to pay cash before we would get them to make a part. And so then they started giving us credit in terms because our word was good, because it helps with cash flow. Yeah, and then you can start turning . It’s a long journey. It took three years. But we have great people at CrestTec. Don’t get me wrong, we kept the good people. And we’ve now built it into a really successful small business. That’s great. And now, it says in your bio that you took Darcoid from 5 million in revenue to 30 million. So when you first acquired Darcoid was at 5 million, yeah, it was 5 million prestack was about a million.
John Corcoran 18:32
How did you feel on the heels of the.com meltdown? On the heels of having worked for a DOD bomb? How did you put together financing to acquire a $5 million business having never run your own business before?
Bob Loback 18:49
I financed it on my own? You know, I just I. I’ve never taken money from anybody. You know, and I am pretty conservative. I don’t like to borrow money. So
John Corcoran 19:03
did you work out a deal with the owner that you’re gonna pay him out over time? Is that what I did?
Bob Loback 19:07
I did it. Darcoid, I did in and out. Okay. It took me eight years to pay him off. I paid him interest. I paid him a fair interest rate. I paid them every quarter. In CrestTec, I paid cash because CrestTec was 10 years after Darcoid and I’d actually accumulated enough cash to actually pay cash.
John Corcoran 19:33
And, and so you put in a lot on the line there to buy a $5 million business as your first purchase as your first entrepreneurial venture. Never having run a business for never having been in the industry before was going
Bob Loback 19:49
I didn’t put it all on. You know I negotiated it so that I would not lose everything. You know, Becky, and I didn’t want you . We’ve been working now. We’ve been working for 20 to 25 years on the home and had daughters, all that stuff.
We didn’t want to lose it all. Because we didn’t know anything about this business. Right? Yeah. Right.
John Corcoran 20:14
Yeah. And what did your wife say? What did Becky say when you decided to do this? She’s supportive or she
Bob Loback 20:21
so she, she. She said, okay, honey.
There’s a book out there called Honey, I wanna own a business. anybody, anybody that wants to start a business should read it. I know. It’s like 20 years old. It’s a phenomenal business, because it talks about the partnership journey, the partnership journey, and she had had a friend who lost everything, because her husband had started multiple businesses to sign personal guarantees, they lost everything. And so she said to me, okay, You know, so I read the book I said, read this book, honey. First of all, I made her read it because I had already read it. She came back to me and said, I have only one condition. I go, what’s that? She goes, no personal guarantees, smart lady. And I said, Okay, I can live with that. With that. So I looked at it from a risk management standpoint, I said, Let’s, let’s go on this journey. But let’s not put everything in red. That’s not the rule. Let’s not put everything on one number because as a business person, I think the best practice I can advise somebody is to run your business with a healthy dose of paranoia. Always anticipate a little bit, always anticipate the worst that can hurt you because the worst or what is what will burn you. The good the upside? Is icing on the cake. Don’t think about the upside. Now, I’m not saying being a negative person. So I thought about what could burn me. And so I put, I put, you know, I put safety nets in place. I made sure. I didn’t personally guarantee anything. I made sure it wasn’t always my cash. I made sure that I was disciplined and in cost control. I made sure the terms cash flow terms worked, things like that. All right. And I’ve got to be frugal.
John Corcoran 22:29
Mm hmm. That’s great. Well, I know we’re running short on time, the time flew by Bob. So thank you for taking the time to talk with us. But I want to wrap things up with a question I was asked, which is let’s pretend we’re at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys and you’re receiving an award for lifetime achievement for everything you’ve done up until this point. Who do you think and Asian family friends who are the people that you would acknowledge?
Bob Loback 22:52
First of all, I think my mother, I mean, I was raised by an amazing woman. All right. I had a great dad. All right. But you know, my mom was an amazing individual, you know, you know, obviously my wife is phenomenal. I like to talk about how I married up. So I’m married to somebody, like, way smarter than me. And, you know, and so my wife, and then I add, you know, I had a teacher in high school that really impacted me. I mean, and then I’ve had mentors. I’ve had a guy that I worked for DHL for nine years, a guy named Steve Waller, who’s still a good friend of mine, he taught me so much. All right, so, you know, I think it’s important men need men. Men need mentors. Men need men. And it’s it and I think it’s forgotten a little bit. You know, I’m not an anti woman person, but, but guys need to learn from other guys and I’ve had some great, I’ve had some great mentors, plus an awesome wife and mother.
John Corcoran 23:57
Grade. So Darcoid and crystek are the Good companies, where can people go to learn more about you Bob?
Bob Loback 24:03
You know, our websites, you know darcoid.com cresttec.com. I mean, we’re, you know, we’re a business to business organizations, so we’re not a b2c and so we haven’t spent all this money, you know, developing these websites that are phenomenal. But, you know, you go there and contact us. Okay. All right, the best place. Okay. Thanks so much. Thank you, John. Take care.
Outro 24:29
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the Revolution Revolution, Revolution Revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast.