If you would everyone grab your cards and put them in the air?

If you would, and you are capable.

Say it with me.

50 for 50.

Not good enough, folks.

50 for 50.

We'd appreciate all of your donations as we persevere through our 50th anniversary.

Thank you so much.

With that being said, thank you, Donna Delgado, and for after our speakers come to us, we will have Akron Roundtable member and president CEO of the Akron Community Foundation, John Garfield, who will be monitoring our moderating our Q&A session.

To submit questions, you are welcome to capture the Asker QR code that should be projected on the screens besides me.

They are also available in your brochure, or you may request a physical card by way of one of our Akron roundtable staff that will be collected near the end of our speakers time.

At this moment, please take out your mobile devices and silence them for the remainder of the luncheon.

We will be greatly appreciative.

We would also like to acknowledge in this moment our program sponsor that is US foods.

Let's give them a round of applause.

And at this time, I'd like to invite Dan Hampu, president and CEO of Burton D. Morgan Foundation, to share about local entrepreneurship in our community, and also Brady Marks, who is program director and morning show host at Rubber City Radio Groups, who will introduce our speaker.

Thank you.

My name is Dan Hampu, and I'm with the Burton D. Morgan Foundation.

We're glad that you're all here today to celebrate with us.

And to start off, I'll just say I'm going to start by just reading some excerpts from this book.

The Muffin Man Chronicles recipes for Entrepreneurial Success by one Steve Marks.

I'm just kidding.

No.

But in all seriousness, thanks to.

Thanks to the Akron Roundtable for inviting us to be a part of this special anniversary.

For 50 years, Akron Roundtables brought together leaders around ideas and conversations that have helped shape our community, and this anniversary year is an especially meaningful one because it highlights individuals whose lives have been dedicated to the Akron community in their work, has gone to enrich it, and there's no two better exemplars of that than Steve and Harvey.

Harvey Nelson at the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, we championed free enterprise by investing in individuals who embody the entrepreneurial spirit.

These are people who see opportunity rather than obstacles.

They take risks despite the uncertainty.

They try to create value for customers.

They try to create value for employees, and they try to create value for the community.

If they're successful, they create prosperity not only for themselves, but a whole bunch of people along the way.

That's deeply rooted in Akron's history.

Our region was built by innovators who manufactured and distributed across the globe, and that remains true today.

Just last month, Ohio was ranked number one by CNBC as the best state for business.

So another thing.

Let's put our hands together.

It shouldn't be a surprise because of recent wins like the National Science Foundation Neo Smart Engine Award, as well as our Akron Polymer Industry cluster, which go to both advanced entrepreneurs and big business and the folks in between.

But as we gain this recognition for our economic competitiveness, our innovation ecosystem and our manufacturing strengths, we're reminded that our greatest advantage is the people.

It's people who are willing to build, entrepreneurs build.

They play, they experiment, they create, they empathize, they reflect, and they do hard things.

But when they do hard things, it's a lot easier to do when you're with one of your closest friends and when you sprinkle it around a golf here and there.

So as we reflect on and have this opportunity to engage in this conversation, thank you to the Akron Roundtable again for our 50 years.

And I'll pass over to Brady.

Thank you so much, Dan.

Hello.

As he said, my name is Brady Marks.

And I have the privilege of introducing the two people you're going to hear from shortly.

Two people that I have known my entire life.

And as you may have come to understand, they have known each other for their entire lives.

Born just a few months apart.

My father, Steve and Harvey have been best friends since they could crawl, but being as competitive as they are, the jury's still out on who could crawl first.

They grew up going to school together.

They were college roommates, and later they raised families down the street from one another.

Of course, the reason you're all here.

Along the way, they built a baked goods empire that has grown deep roots in the Akron community.

The two made sure that as their business grew, so did their impact on that community.

Whether it's launching muffins for mammograms, which benefited women who couldn't afford their breast cancer screenings, or launching No Muffin Left Behind, an annual fundraising effort for the Akron Canton Food Bank.

They have done a lot on top of that.

Main Street has employed refugees for more than 15 countries at any given time at their manufacturing plant.

10 to 15 languages are being spoken.

Their impact has been felt far and wide.

Both of them have served on many local community boards to numerous to mention.

Truly, we would be here for quite a while.

And of course, if you're from Akron, you know all about the Blue Line.

Main Street Gourmet has been twice included in the Inc.

500, a list of the fastest growing companies in the United States.

They've also gotten accolades from the Greater Akron Chamber, Inc.

magazine, a ton of other organizations over their 40 year history.

Nearly 40 year history, I should say.

And there's been a few mention of the books.

Of course, outside of the company, you might not know, but both Harvey and my dad are very impressive authors of distinguished books.

The Muffin Man chronicles that you heard about.

Crazy enough, it's actually a Pulitzer Prize nominated book.

I know my dad paid $175 nomination fee, and he got it entered.

So it's Pulitzer Prize nominated.

But Harvey is a wonderful children's author as well.

One of his children's books won the Blueberry Award.

That's an award that Harvey created.

And crazy enough, his book is the only one in that category.

Which aside, my dad and Harvey built an incredible company.

They took a concept from scratch, and they turned it into a world class, nationally recognized baked goods company.

And they did something not many business owners do, something nobody asked them to do.

They made sure to put more into the community than they received from it, and they grew a company in the right way and in a really, really big way.

Whether you like the Coca-Cola cake from Cracker Barrel, maybe you like a blueberry muffin from First Watch, or maybe you prefer the brownie from Whole Foods.

You've likely had a product from Main Street Gourmet, and I couldn't be more proud of both my dad and Harvey today.

Even if you gave me a false understanding that when you grow up, you get to work with your best friend and do a really cool job.

And on top of that, you get a song.

Do you know The Muffin Man?

Well, you're about to know them both a little bit better.

Please welcome to the stage my dad, Steve Marks and Harvey Nelson.

14,507 BCE Henrietta Gheorghe, the Great's favorite mistress, makes the first muffin in North America.

Gheorghe complains they're too salty.

1964.

Well, exploring a nearby cave, five year old Harvey discovers Henrietta's original muffin recipe.

He has plenty of time to memorize after being put in a three day timeout for running away again.

That was a brief history of the muffin.

Hello everyone!

We are honored and excited to be here today to tell you our story.

Dan, thanks for those wonderful comments about Akron and your organization.

You do some amazing things.

Brady, thank you for that introduction and enthusiastic set up.

I can't wait to hear what we're going to say.

I will say this.

You have been like a daughter to me.

So a very special daughter and very proud of your accomplishments.

I would also like to recognize our wives.

Janine Marks and Kim Nelson are here today.

They are the reason we are here today.

They drove us here.

Seriously.

And obviously they are the backbone.

Any success we have had, we are only hopeful that they will stay to the end because we need rides home.

So it's also great to see so many familiar faces here today.

I know we have the main streak or May crew, the Akron Marathon crews here as well.

They have all heard these stories so many times, but fortunately Harvey and I have embellished them over the years and they'll hardly recognize them.

I'm sure it's such.

It's also great to see such a vibrant business community here today, so it's appropriate that this point in the presentation, Harvey and I would like to list out all of the banks that denied US loans.

You know who you are.

That list will be followed by all of the companies that denied us internships.

So those names should cover most of the tables in the room.

So talk amongst your table to see if you have somebody in their.

But the story of Main Street Muffins and ultimately became Main Street Gourmet contains the good, the bad and the ugly.

I will focus primarily on the good and the bad, and for obvious reasons, Harvey was specialized on the ugly.

Harvey's parents and my parents grew up together and were cherished friends.

Our grandfathers played pinochle together every Monday night for 50 years.

Legend has it that I met Harvey in nursery school when he took a muffin I was eating.

Needless to say, we know each other pretty well.

I am often asked how her partnership is was able to be so successful.

The simple answer I am a very tolerant and forgiving person.

Absolutely.

But somehow we continue to be friends as we grew older, culminating in living together in college in a house where we threw many, many parties.

But we also would tag our bathroom cockroaches with shaving cream so you would get to understand them better.

We also began our business partnership.

At this time.

We were first going door to door, working to get leads for the greatest tin man we knew.

Like if one of our leads for aluminum siding hit, we'd get $500.

Back then that meant a few weeks of blowing $500.

However, our more successful business and I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations have run out.

We were bookies for all the degenerates we knew at the University of Akron and also our degenerate childhoods buddies who are around the colleges around the country.

I can't remember what Steve did with his profits, but I pretty much gambled mine away, learning the important lesson that it's always better to be the bookie.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be in business, to have my own business.

I didn't have any real wage type jobs growing up.

I had a paper route, I washed cars, I mode lawns.

My only real job was that a clerk at a hardware store in Ferrell and writes Ferrell.

And if anybody remembers that one day I was asked to build one of those ortho pesticide displays and I was bringing it, I brought my boss over to show my great work.

When the display started to wobble and then eventually collapse.

I wasn't really aware that ortho was a highly toxic product.

Anyway, after the fire trucks left and the store reopened two days later, I was back to car washing and lawn mowing.

After high school, I went to the University of Akron, obtained an accounting degree, and started working for the CPA firm of Coopers and Labor in their Akron office.

By the way, that time in my life and more is covered in my Pulitzer nominated book, The Muffin Man Chronicles, available at Amazon and wherever books are sold.

I grew up immersed in a small family business.

Nelson Stagg shop for any of you old enough to remember, but you would also remember dial tones and bell bottom pants.

It was a men's clothing store and where I learned all about sales and also having fun at work.

I was always much younger than everybody, so they spent a lot of time entertaining me.

I played a lot of sports back then, but I always liked writing and drawing.

I mean, there's not much I didn't like to try.

At some point in my late teens or early 20s, I just wanted to experience everything I could.

I dabbled in skydiving, hang gliding, whitewater rafting, rock climbing without ropes when I should have had ropes, running marathons, and hitchhiking for months at a time across America by myself.

I also dabbled in college, but of course.

By the way, do you notice that in the slide?

Very nice shorts I got on there.

I also dabbled in college, but of course wanted to experience more, so I talked the engineering co-op office at the University of Akron.

I was majoring in math, not engineering, but I talked him into giving me a co-op position at B F Goodrich in their computer department.

This was back when large companies really invested in people, and I learned to do coding and analysis for the large for the business applications on the large mainframes of the day.

But the lessons I learned there, I mean, to organize and manage large projects paid off big time and grow in our business.

You know, another interesting experience at this time, you know, sometime in this prehistory of Main Street occurred, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was I took a job to live in a group home with 11 to 17 year olds.

It was one of about they had about 12 group homes there.

My kids were the most immature and they had the saddest stories.

But you know, from that I learned the lesson to work with customers and employees because really, we're all just still kids with gray hair and bigger bellies.

But one quick story from living in a group home.

First day, first day, a kid named Morris.

He looks up at me and remember, I'm in my early 20s.

I am in great shape and I tower over this kid and he says, I'm gonna kill you tonight in your sleep.

And I looked down at Morris and I said, you go for it, Morris.

I love a good challenge.

So I survived the night.

In the next day, I knew Morris was starting to like me because when he saw me, he looked at me and said, I'm a pee on you tonight in your sleep.

And I thought, wow, things are looking up.

At least he's not going to kill me.

In 1985, my father asked me to join him for lunch and ultimately attend a sheriff's real estate auction.

For those of you that don't know, these are auctions on property with delinquent real estate taxes and open for purchase by the public.

These auctions are very unique and fascinating, and oftentimes you can buy a piece of property for like $25, and sometimes that'd be too much.

You don't be buying property that has environmental issues, easement issues, or other problems.

A property came up for bid, A21 for South Main Street, and the bidding started.

You know how these things go.

At $200, though, it was going once, going twice.

I couldn't believe it.

I worked at 50 South Main Street and I had a fairly good idea where this property was.

I chimed in $300.

We went back and forth and when the bidding crossed $1,000, I remember looking at my father's face, which eerily, eerily resembled the same expression when I crashed the family car at age 16.

Here I was at my first auction, bidding on a property that I'd never seen.

Not a good combination with these types of things.

The bidding went on for some time, until I eventually bought the property for the tidy sum of $5,000, and I remember leaving the courthouse and literally running down Main Street to to see where my net worth was located.

But unbelievably, my $5,000, they just purchased a five story building in the heart of downtown Akron.

Later that week, I learned that the city of Akron put together incentives to promote activity in downtown low interest loans.

Construction grants were just a few.

There was only one catch.

You had to include a retail store as part of the property in order to get all these enticements.

Even with this incentive, I still had the issue of how to pay for this property.

I didn't have $5,000, so I did what any semi irresponsible 26 year old to do.

I opened two credit cards, each with $2,500 of credit and consummated my purchase.

Harvey, who was wandering, lost and confused, was asked to join this operation to open a retail muffin shop on the street level of the building.

We are often asked, what baking background did we have?

Just to clarify, we didn't have Kenner Easy-Bake ovens as kids, if you know what those are.

We didn't have any special culinary skill set.

We couldn't boil water.

We simply just wanted to be in business.

So in January of 1986, much to the chagrin of our parents and disbelief of a lot of people, Harvey and I quit our reputable jobs to become muffin men.

Well, actually, not sure what reputable business I quit, but for me.

When Steve asked if I wanted to renovate a building and start a business, I said of course it would be another experience that I would do for like a year or 36.

Plus, I could do more than I turned out.

I could do more than boil water.

I was a pro at peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I could also scramble eggs, and fortunately, I also had construction experience working a few summers with my friends brother doing landscaping and patio decks.

My main job was to dig postholes with a manual post hole digger.

Turns out that's all you need to do to renovate a 70 year old building that hadn't been used for 15 years, and the roof been leaking for eight.

We assembled the bad News bears of construction crews, and in nine months we got it done.

There's lots of stories, but I'm just going to tell you one about replacing the roof.

We initially thought we just placed the ballast roof material, you know, with new rubber roof.

Easy peasy.

No building certificates needed.

No drawings.

Just rip off the top and roll out the new roof.

I remember it was this beautiful, sunny fall day.

The roofing team showed up and this was going to be our first actual physical task.

I was in the first floor when Paul Gray, the owner of the Young Roofing Company, came down and got me.

He said, hey, Harvey, can you please come up to the roof with me?

I mean, I need to show you something and no problem.

I thought this would be some easy for decision.

So we could see most of downtown from downtown.

From our vantage point of the roof.

I mean, it was really cool scene.

And I said, okay, Paul, what's up?

What's this?

He said.

And then he took a tool and smashed the roof, pieces of the 12 inch concrete slab that was holding up the roof splintered and fell to the fourth floor below.

The years of neglect had eroded the structure.

What does this mean?

What should we do?

It meant we needed a new roof structure.

It meant we had to get it done now, and it meant we needed drawings and permission to build.

And it meant this was no time to follow the rules.

We were pretty sure we had.

We were pretty sure we had the architect that we wanted to help us.

And though we had no contract, not even a handshake.

I called up Chip jerky and told him our predicament, and fortunately it turned out to be the right guy, and he met us immediately and discussed what to do.

Even though we weren't obviously always rule followers, and we weren't used to being told no, we were always clear about doing things right.

So we decided to take down the old roof, have chip draw, safe quality plans for a new structure, and Paul and his crew constructed.

We would ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

And so over the next week, we collapsed.

Old roof to the floor below.

Set up a shoot out the window and threw slabs of cement down to a waiting truck in the back alley, purchased all the material, hired a crane, and began building a new roof.

And I'm not sure if I mentioned before that the roof and crew had never really built a roof structure before.

The end of the story is eventually, the building department is walking through our fourth floor and notices the new structure, the beautiful, well-constructed new roof structure.

And they said, where did that come from?

And I said, oh, that funny story.

Anyways, incredibly, we got our final sign off on opening day with a line of people out the door.

First day with our friends running down the streets of downtown with fliers.

We had our friends parents in the kitchen helping to mix muffin batter, and we had a rock and roll band, a live rock n roll band, the street.

And we were getting very free mini muffins.

Like we only displayed large muffins to show what they would look like.

But we ended up selling ended up selling $1,000, which that's a lot.

On that day, I mean, it was it was absolutely wild day.

But we also often get asked, you know, where did the recipes come from?

And no, was not Henrietta.

It actually started by looking like 15 to 20 blueberry recipes playing around my girlfriend now my wife, apartment, kitchen and our taste testers were of course the construction crew.

Once they were happy, we moved on.

This process was done over and over until we had like 20 or 30 different flavors of muffins.

And since we weren't chefs and all we really wanted was people to like and enjoy our muffins, we just kept the same process with our customers.

It was like a six month test lab, constantly tweaking each of our each variety until most of our customers love them.

It's amazing what can happen when you ask.

First tell.

About six months into the operation of our retail business, a restaurant owner came to us and wanted to buy our muffin batter, take it back to his restaurant, bake muffins from the batter, and sell them to his customers.

I think we really looked at this situation as more of a threat and underestimated the opportunity.

Short sighted, we looked at it as potentially losing retail business and not diversifying and expanding.

We went forward, but we made it very difficult for this first sale.

Customer.

You'd be here at 5:00 and we close, you bring a check, you bring your own buckets, and if the moon's in the right alignment, we're going to sell you some muffin batter.

Amazing.

And the sky showed up, and you jump through all these hoops and we made our first sale.

He came back the next day and wanted more.

The next day for a different variety.

And the next day.

And finally a light bulb went off.

This was our opportunity.

Within six months we were producing 30 varieties of what we termed scoop out and bake all natural muffin, better sold in frozen 10 pound tubs.

And by this time we had our own buckets.

We began to build our business, picking up restaurants, grocery stores, Delhi's hospitals, and other food establishments.

We added cookie dough and brownies.

Eventually, our name would change from Main Street Muffins to Main Street Gourmet to better reflect our offerings.

During this phase of our business, we received a call from a local McDonald's.

Yes, McDonald's Golden Arches, Big Macs.

But after a chance visit to our shop, local franchise owner John Blick on one of his staff members called us to ask if we were interested in testing a fresh baked muffin program in the restaurants.

In every conversation Harvey and I had with anyone who would listen over the following weeks.

We managed to include a passing reference to doing business with McDonald's.

It was very exciting and we could only imagine the possibilities.

McDonald's asked us if they could do a test with six stores.

They would buy our batter in buckets, scoop them into pants, and bake muffins in their biscuit ovens.

In the summer of 1989, they started selling fresh baked muffins.

Sales were the Antarctic.

The likely reason we paid everyone we knew to buy out almost every muffin McDonald's made.

We weren't necessarily proud of this tactic, but our friends really liked the idea of getting free muffins.

After a few weeks, McDonald's expanded the store test to 15 stores throughout Summit County.

We responded by getting more friends to buy product.

After a few more weeks, McDonald's decided to put the muffins in all their local stores in Summit County, roughly 30 locations.

By this time, we were running out of friends as well as the money to reimburse them.

So grudgingly, we determined we would let true market forces determine our fate.

After a few more weeks, sales were still going strong, even without the undercover customers.

McDonald's was very happy, and we envisioned muffins in every restaurant in America.

They started advertising our muffins on their marquees, and sales continue to climb.

I remember driving by a McDonald's and craning my necks for as long as possible to see that sign.

That will always be an indelible feeling in memory.

So all this growth allowed us to reach our real dream.

To purchase an old fish distributor, building some at fish, a local fish distributor, needed to consolidate back to its Cleveland plant.

But that left us a perfect infrastructure of refrigerated spaces that we needed.

It was also the first time we really had to consider design and production lines, movements through a plant, and how to get the smell of fish out of wet drains.

Though it was a new risk taking on more debt for a larger building, it was really our only chance to keep growing.

You know, it's funny, I just thought the things that popped in my head as I tried to remember these years.

Like getting calls at 2 a.m.

because the mixer broke down, and getting up to help go in and fix it.

Even at a home, even though at home I could barely fix a wobbly table.

By the way, that book that Steve shows you, it's really good for wobbly tables.

That was his joke, so that was pretty good.

Bringing our leaders and managers out on the lawn to discuss building our fledgling business, using the metaphor of climbing a mountain together, focusing on finding equipment that would pump blueberry muffin batter without creating bleeding blueberries.

And I only mentioned that because I never thought I'd be so involved with blueberries.

Putting up a basketball hoop on the dock so we could play basketball.

Fixing a leaky small ammonia system, and how that would eventually be very helpful in the future.

When we had an enormous ammonia system coding using tables from Peachtree into Excel to run our entire business.

My grandfather believing our space was his space.

Like when a pallet of unsharp and golf pencils from China showed up on a pallet on our dock, or one day I went out to the production area and no one's there.

I walked all over the building.

I can't find anybody.

Finally, I go outside and there's my grandfather with his truck wide open, selling $5 suit ties to my whole production crew.

Senator John Glenn.

First American to orbit the Earth.

Visited us, visit us during a political tour.

And when he tasted our blueberry muffins.

What do you think he said?

And he didn't say this world.

He said.

He said, not bad.

Running the hot water before a McDonald's audit so it would be warm in case they checked.

But.

But also who just grown there?

That was a good one.

But also how doing the work to meet McDonald's standards.

It ended up giving us a real powerful advantage over competitors our size.

I mean, all this growth, it got us into the Inc.

500, which is the fast 500.

At the time was the fastest of 500 500 fastest growing companies in America, which we also learned that the Forbes for 100, they made money.

The Inc.

500.

You just put the money back in the business, but with more growth.

Eventually it meant time for another move.

But this time we'd we'd build, we would actually build new.

And even though we've taken plenty of risks, this one seemed enormous.

But we made sure we got a street named Offer us Muffin Lane.

So therefore we knew it was definitely worth it.

I can't go through all the details, but all I remember is this one.

It was a Sunday.

The building was almost complete and I had to go there for some reason, so it was 25,000ft.

Now it had a huge refrigeration footprint, had a towering flat flower silo, and I stood in the parking lot and I looked at the building that seemed impossible to be ours, and at first time hit me and I said, oh damn, look how far we've come.

And then I said, oh damn, how are we going to possibly fill this much space?

In 1995, we formed a board of advisors, and during one of our meetings, we brought up the concept of selling the business.

One of our board members was a venture capital advisor.

And when he heard this, he pulled us aside.

And after the meeting, he said, if they if we were interested in selling, they would be very interested in buying.

It snowballed from there.

And before you knew it, we had a letter of understanding.

A lot of thoughts and emotions were going through our minds at this time.

Harvey and I were both married.

We had started families, but there was and things were going great, but there was always the potential of our egg baskets could one day be crushed.

But after a lot of late night discussions, we decided to move forward and sell the company to the venture firm.

Though we would stay on under the new ownership and build the business even bigger.

The buyer, though, also wanted us to merge us with a specialty fish company that imported fish from the Amazon River region, merging us with a fish company.

We didn't understand it, but what do we know about the merger and acquisition business?

We kept asking ourselves, why is fish continually entwined in our history?

So now it's around nine years since we started having a boss that was new to us.

We were still driving the car, but the backstreet drivers, they took some of the fun out of it yet.

Looking back, it turned out to be another great learning experience because we learned to work with financial investors and that turned out to help.

The next couple of times we sold, which of course we didn't know that at the time.

But it was during this phase of the story that we began our next pivot.

I mean, we were aware that it was important to look outside your bubble.

We had a good business.

We had good business strategy, but that only lasts until the environment changes.

And as you know, it's always changing.

So mom and pop restaurants were losing market share to the chains.

Small food distributors were consolidating as well.

And our current business model was selling muffin batter and cookie dough to these smaller players using mostly smaller distributors.

So we had a lot of ideas, but one stuck.

We could see restaurant chains would need to differentiate.

I mean, if they all sold the same blueberry muffin, how would they?

How would that help them against their competitors?

So we knew we were really creative.

We knew we were really flexible.

And enough of both of those to give us an edge over the big boy manufacturers that would not be able to provide the products that we could provide.

So originally we parade into we forayed into custom muffin batter, custom basically batters, but it quickly morphed to custom baked goods.

This meant we needed a whole new structure, but we had to still maintain the cash flow from our current business.

Again, lots to present, but I'll just say my best estimate is it only took us, I don't know, I'd say 10 to 15 years to create processes and systems that made us an unstoppable, custom frozen big good company.

I do have one story.

We realized our customer, our custom customers were going to we're going to be asking for baked goods, the actually baked.

This meant we needed to get back into baking because at the time we only produced batters and doughs.

This is where having financial investors paid off, because we found a small company in the East Coast called Isabella's.

They sold fat free and sugar free muffins into some grocery chains.

And it turned out our our plan is our our plan was to acquire them, do a plan expansion to add the ovens.

And then it turns out there's this brilliant move because we got the cash flow from the Isabella to pay for the expansion, but it also got the ovens in there so we could bake for our new fledgling custom business.

We also solidified, as Brady said, we solidified some of our community efforts, where me and Steve always felt like we were really, really fortunate we should give back.

So, you know, the it was always a win, win win.

It was a win for the community, a win for the nonprofit, a win for us.

And the two most successful were muffins for mammograms, which was a fundraiser with Akron, Akron General Hospital and the other event with the food bank where we'd sell our slightly injured baked goods, baked goods to the public, but also raise money for the food bank.

And yes, as Brady said, it was called No Muffin Left Behind.

Our custom business was growing significantly, but our traditional business was limping along.

We knew we were on the right track, but we also knew it would take time.

The venture firm we sold to was not as inclined to be so patient.

By this time.

They had been in the investment for more than seven years, a long time by venture firm standards, and they were interested in quicker results.

During the summer of 2004, they told us that they had made a large investment in one of our competitors and would be putting us up for sale.

They wanted to know we're interested in buying the business back.

We weren't real happy working for the venture firm, so this was a welcome opportunity.

We had never thought of this as an option and quickly started putting the pieces together for a deal to buy the business back, which really entailed restructuring the loans and being personally liable.

But after several days of negotiation, we consummated the sale on August 4th, 2004.

All of a sudden, it started to become fun again.

Harvey and I spent several hours mulling over the possibilities and getting very excited about the future.

We could be entrepreneurs again.

Gaining our business back changed our philosophy, priorities, and approach.

We weren't worried about satisfying investors or growing just to have an exit strategy.

We started to target accounts that were good matches for us.

One account we targeted was a fledgling natural food grocery chain called Wild Oats, with 20 stores in Colorado.

We worked very hard to try and procure this account.

It started selling them some customized muffins.

Slowly and systematically, we became one of their leading bakery suppliers, supplying them with dozens of different products.

A few years later, though, we received some alarming news.

Whole foods, the leading natural foods chain in the United States, was going to be buying wild oats.

We didn't supply Whole Foods, and if previous history was any indication, Whole Foods would gobble up wild oats and convert everything over to their system, which meant we would lose our largest account in one fell swoop.

We went after Whole Foods with everything we had, the whole company hoping to win them over.

Ultimately, we were successful with a few products and then a few more and a few more, and slowly we became a valuable resource, the Whole Foods.

Soon, our product catalog quickly reached dozens of products in their system, resulting in millions of dollars of sales and a top new customer.

As we added new products, though, our capability was also enhanced.

This capability was fueled by a novel concept that is well documented in a book that you might have heard about, The Muffin Man Chronicles, available at Amazon, and rubber books are sold.

Everybody getting a good look at that.

Okay.

During one sales presentation to a large prospect, we were asked if we had the capability to do granola, but we had never really made granola before.

We weren't going to let inexperience be a factor for us.

Of course we can make granola.

We told them thus a novel and interesting concept was born, which we called fake and bake.

Once we had a solid process though a making granola, we circled back the Whole Foods and our other accounts to see if we could sell more products to our existing customers.

A basic tenet of any sales organization.

Granola became a real boon for our business, a new category that was growing by leaps and bounds.

So Steve mentioned, once we brought it back, it was fun again.

We had doubled sales during the time with the venture capitalists, but we weren't as profitable.

That changed about three months.

Yeah, it's amazing how much harder one works when it's your baby.

So there was a lot of there was a lot of growth in this next phase.

But I want to.

I'd rather focus on two items that I think can help any, any leaders in the audience.

The first, that one of the things we learned was get a board of advisors.

I wrote a short article for Smart Business and how We did it.

Feel free to contact me.

I'm very happy to share it.

No, I don't have any slides.

Like some Barnum and Bailey guy I know.

By the way, this is not a board of directors.

It's over.

Finance is over the business.

This is a board of advisors that are.

It's a group of people that have been there and done it, and they share their wisdom and experience with you.

It's great to get an outside perspective.

For instance, at one of our meetings, one of our rises said, we don't know our customers.

By the way, this is many years in the business and we think we're doing well.

And we were floored.

Then he shared his tool and we said, oh, maybe we don't any.

We end up using this tool.

And it worked.

Within a year we had five new custom customers, some of them over $1 million per year accounts.

But in other words, takeaway at that time was our devotion to grow in our people, especially our leaders.

We always tried to have fun, but we were always very serious about building people as individuals and also as teams.

The concept I want to share from this time.

I was called, we called it strength and conditioning.

So if you want to be healthy, like you don't work out for two days straight and then go a year before you do it again, you work out consistently over a long period of time.

So instead of a two day team building seminar, we chose for any leader that was important to me or Steve to participate once a week in a sack meeting.

It was only 30 minutes long.

Our first task was to answer the questions from Patrick Lesions book the advantage.

The first question was why does Main Street Gourmet exist?

Our answer, which literally only took us about six months to get down into one sentence.

We are the fairy godmothers for custom baked products for our customers.

Anyways, fairy godmother memes.

Whoops.

Oh, no.

Anyways.

Fairy godmother Fairy godmother meme showed up everywhere after that.

And that common theme.

It gave us a common purpose.

And we created a common, creating a common theme and also creating a common language.

Those are the two best things that two of the great, really good things that come out of doing something like an sassy meeting.

So the format evolved into this choosing a book, reading maybe ten pages a week, everyone providing their takeaways.

We'd list them all in these large sticky notes.

We'd ask how we could do it at work.

We'd send a recap, and we'd do it over and over and over again.

And when you do that consistently over time, that's how you create this common language and a common language.

It helps alleviate all the friction, which again, it speeds up getting things done.

So let me give you an example.

What do you think about when you think of sidewalks.

So I'm going to give you give you an example.

There was a college there building all these buildings.

They're building dorms.

They're building office space.

But they build all this stuff.

They throw the grass down and they wait a year, and after a year there's paths.

And once the paths are there, then they put the sidewalks down.

They know where they should go.

So how did that work?

How did that work at work?

So let's say someone comes to my office and they're suffering from paralysis from analysis.

And I would just have to say sidewalks.

And then they'd go, oh, yeah, I guess I can get started.

We can adapt from there.

Yeah.

And it turns out, by the way, saying sidewalks and them understand what I meant.

Yeah, that was much better than saying you stupid idiot.

You're suffering from analysis from paralysis or paralysis, from analysis.

Whichever one is the right way of saying that.

Switching gears a little bit, this, I think, is a picture of me leading the Columbus Marathon, right?

And, well, there's my foot.

You can see my foot.

But Steve cropped it because I was a little ahead of him, so that hasn't been proven.

I have personally run actually crawls a better term and a dozen or so marathons over the last several years.

My wife, Jeanine, is actually running 28 marathons.

We've only run one together, one race together.

I won by 29 seconds, but that's not important.

Significant but not important.

I am always amazed that the spirit of the event and spectators embrace a marathon that goes through their community.

People come out of their homes and cheer on runners.

They pass up refreshments, fans play music.

It's just a festive atmosphere that's hard to duplicate with any other event.

My wife and I wondered why Akron didn't have a marathon in 1999.

I went to the city and asked that question.

I walked out of that meeting in charge of a marathon.

When you look at the barriers to entry of developing such a successful event, we learned that there are three money, community support and government support.

My family has started a foundation, so we decided to use the funds to start the marathon.

We knew the community support an event like this.

They always have.

And the third is government, which is always the patriarch of any event.

Our mission provide a world class marathon that galvanizes the community, promotes health and fitness, brings national attention to the region, and ultimately benefits charities.

On September 26th, we will be celebrating our 24th year.

We now organize a race series spanning three events across the summer.

We have an incredible CEO and baton and an amazing staff who are here today.

The Main Street Gourmet Crew is here today to buy the.

I know the we're going to go table by table.

I know the Akron Marathon is is proud of our accomplishments as I am.

We've been recognized one of the top 50 marathons in the country.

We have raised more than $6 million for charitable, nonprofit organizations.

Our events created a benefit to the area in excess of $6 million annually.

I have one marathon story.

Fortunately for you, it starts on the 26th mile.

I was running the Boston Marathon.

I think I was in my 40s at the time, and it was near the end, and this guy kept coming up and challenging me, and I'd come up and I try to, you know, go ahead of him.

He kept coming up.

Finally I couldn't handle anymore.

And he went by me and on the back of his shirt it said 80 and still running.

So that's my humbling marathon story.

Back to the muffin business.

In 2011, we decided that it might be a good time to sell part of the business and take some chips off the table.

We hired an investment banker and went through the ugly process of putting yourself out there.

It came down to two companies a slick New York private equity firm and a startup by two guys in their mid 30s named Clover Capital.

The New York firm was the highest bidder, and we tried to like them.

We tried really hard, but we were intrigued by the startup.

It was good chemistry and we knew that they'd be good partners.

It was also their first deal and it had to work for them.

So in 2011, we ultimately sold control of our company to that startup while continuing to run the business.

So we made the right choice.

You know, we learned from past that our the sale was like getting married and find the right partner was top priority.

So but it's funny how you figure that out, but sometimes it's like the simple face to face interactions that tell you the most.

And for me, it was the first time I met Dave and Alex, the two young private equity startup guys.

You know, we had a sort of get to know you dinner we did, which we usually did typically the night before we did like a dog and pony show for our investors.

And at some point in the conversation, gambling comes up.

And I said, Asians gamble more than Jews.

Me and Steve are Jewish, David and Alex raising.

And David says, you don't see a Wynn in Jerusalem, do you?

And I knew right then I liked those guys.

So and this turned out to be a fun time.

We had a great group of investors.

We had really great leaders and team members.

We had a great strategy, and we had done a really good job of creating processes and infrastructure.

So once again, time to plan for the future.

We needed more space.

And so the expansion plan began, and while we were at it, we decided we might as well find and install a new ERP system.

I remember saying, hey, I guess if we're going to have a baby, we might as might as well have twins.

Yeah.

And after taking on two huge projects at once, I recommend not having twins.

But once again somehow persevered.

However, one event during the expansion may have been the catalyst for me and Steve to ask ourselves, what's the end game?

Part of the expansion involved our ammonia system.

That was the engine for our refrigeration.

We had compressors, ammonia tanks, condensers, all resided in a separate structure outside the building.

So anyways, on a Friday during construction, they were doing the new roof of that part and the roof was not completely finished.

And they just the roofers thought, we'll just tack on some shingles, we'll close up and we'll finish this on Monday.

Unfortunately, on Sunday we had an unbelievably horrible storm.

The temporary tacking didn't hold and our compressor room was flooded, so it takes a while for the freezer alarms to for the freezer to heat up and get the freezer alarm.

So it really wasn't until Sunday evening we knew something was up.

So then we had to go get an ammonia tech.

We get into like this a Sunday night, get an ammonia tech, get an electrician in.

We had to get all the water out, especially around all the electrical equipment.

We had to ice down the compressors to get the ammonia back to the compressors, which meant we had to drive to a local gas station back and forth to buy out all their ice inventory.

Then we had to start up this massive condenser without the variable drive, given the warning that it may destroy it, and if it destroys that we have no refrigeration, then our ammonia tech had to do some magic ammonia dance to get the ammonia back the compressors.

And it turned out we had one last chance at 530 in the morning and make it work.

And it was like, do we risk it?

It was like, do we call off production?

That starts at 6 a.m.?

Do we implement our plan to move $2 million worth of freezer frozen inventory to another storage facility?

Are we getting too old for this?

After the freezer episode, we were pretty convinced that it was time to sell again, and ultimately the board agreed we had grown significantly.

Sales were in excess of $40 million.

We put ourselves out there in two large Chicago based private equity firms.

We're competing in order to purchase our business.

A private equity firm called Shore Capital flew in on their private jet and wowed us Slater with yacht trips along the Chicago River.

As it turns out, we would have several excursions and dinners on that yacht, which eventually prompted a response from Harvey.

I don't want to go on that yacht again.

I think that's where the phrase no complaining on the yacht actually came from.

But the due diligence process was very intense.

No stone unturned.

I think at one point they actually asked for our 23 passwords.

It was that kind of an ordeal.

But in September of 2019, we finalized the sale.

A month later as planned.

I retired, with Harvey staying on to help with the transition.

We both served on the board with several yacht trips along the way, so although a different type of partner, we were really fortunate to pick the right partner again.

This time we knew it as a partner to to shepherd our baby to the next level, and that's what they did.

Steve and I remained on the board through but through Shore Capital, which is headed by Justin Ishbia who now happens to be part owner of the Phoenix Suns and soon the Chicago White Sox.

We grew through organic growth, using Main Street Gourmet as a platform and then buying bakery companies around us.

The larger company became known as Sweet More Bakery, which we were able to sell for the fourth time in May of 2025.

And I'm still amazed that we went from about 100 to $125,000 our first year in business, to like a muffin shop on Main Street to a national baked goods company that's now got revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's been quite a journey.

But before we add before, Steve, I just want you to notice that we're celebrating.

But Steve wanted a carrot, so he was more healthy than us before we end and most likely receive a standing ovation.

It's possible.

I want to say something about Akron and what a great place it is to start, build and grow a business.

People in our community truly care and have a sense of pride.

That to me is more than just hometown loyalty.

When we hear the word Akron on our TV, our ears perk up and we want to know what it's about.

When somebody says something negative about Akron, we take it personally and it feels like a dig against us.

Harvey and I had the ability to move our business to many other areas.

It was never a consideration.

We are proud to say we are from Akron, Ohio, the muffin capital of the world.

So.

So one quick thing.

What what does one do once they retire from making muffins?

You know, in my case, besides golf and cigars and of course, telling my wife how lucky I am that she lets me live in our house.

Besides that, I seem to like to write poems.

So we're going to end with a poem that I wrote to hopefully give you the feeling of taking on an adventure.

Hopefully you'll say I wasted my time on muffins.

It's called we will spit into the hurricane.

I can't sleep tonight, but that's a good thing.

Fireworks are exploding in the midst of a hurricane.

Rain and wind pummel me.

But I am impervious.

I have a dream.

Me and one of my best friends.

Have a dream more than a dream.

A future adventure, an epic battle against the gods.

Zeus and Jehovah supplied the warnings.

And at the same time, the fuel.

We're too young to know the real odds, too full of ourselves to think we could lose an arm or leg or our lives.

Bring it on, I say.

No walls, no mountains, no Goliath's are going to hold us back.

We will spit into the hurricane.

We will catch the fireworks in our hands and turn them to confetti.

We were show the world we are children no more.

Thank you.

Thank you both to Steve and Harvey for one wonderful, enlightening presentation.

I remember inviting them to the foundation back last summer to make the ask for them to speak today.

Harvey's response?

Yeah, we could do it.

We could wing it.

Steve, I don't think he's got a good night's sleep since it's true.

So a couple questions that we have time for.

The two of you have known each other since childhood and were college roommates.

What made your partnership work?

And what did you have to learn about disagreeing with someone who is also a lifelong friend?

I'll chime in.

First, you heard the part about forgiving intolerant person, so that would know.

But I think we act as each other's advocate.

If we don't agree on something, a major project, we don't do it.

It's as simple as that, I think.

I mean, at first it was, you know, it was tougher, but we were like brothers and we, we we cared for each other, respected each other, and eventually we worked out.

We we both eventually compromised.

And and I think really once we could separate what we did, what we were good at.

Once we figured out what we were good at.

Helped a lot to.

And we were willing to respect each other on what we were good at.

Perfect.

You briefly mentioned diversity of your workforce.

What inspired that and why?

What do people misunderstand about the contributions of refugees and immigrants in America?

Well, I. Kelly Lubbock Forshella.

Who's out there somewhere?

She's our HR.

By the way, I want you to know Kelly started off.

This is a great story because Kelly started off opening cans of like, corn or something, and she now getting her.

I don't even know how far in school, but she's been our HR.

She's running HR for the whole company now.

So unbelievable.

So you guys should give her a hand because it's unbelievable.

And she's also she's also the one that was involved with the International Institute of First.

And when she told me about it we said yeah let's do it.

And it has turned out to be it's turned out to be awesome to see people from all over the world.

We didn't do it to be benevolent.

We did it because it made sense for our business.

You talked a little bit about philanthropy and giving back to the community.

What do you look for regarding operations, sustainability, and impact when you make a contribution to a charity?

Well, most of the charitable endeavors that we've done, we've sort of spearheaded ourselves.

We wanted to have control of it.

So whether muffins for mammograms, no muffin left behind.

We had various other kind of events that we sort of spearheaded.

So it was important for us to control the narrative, I think.

And but I'd also I'm in the more personal, I mean, the stuff that I've been involved, like food Bank and you've been on the board.

When you get involved with something, then you typically the getting involved, being part of it, then the money comes after that.

I mean, typically I then I'm very philanthropic to the organizations I already know.

It's it's harder to do it if you don't know.

Perfect.

Two last questions because that's all we have time for once.

When is the sequel of the book coming out?

Excellent question.

The good one.

I'm going to be writing that one.

And what is your favorite?

It was available on Amazon.

You did mention Amazon.com.

And then what is each of your favorite muffin?

Oh, my favorite muffin is the better morning muffin.

It's a blend of carrots, walnuts, raisins, coconut, and spices.

But the real reason it's my favorite is the highest gross profit margin muffin we made.

I didn't have a joke for that, but it's zucchini nut.

Please join me in thanking these wonderful gentlemen.