Justin: 1:15

Welcom everybody. Thanks for joining. Today, I'm joined by Tim Bailey, who is the President of Candy Craze. Is that correct?

Tim: 1:24

That is correct.

Justin: 1:26

And how long have you been the President of Candy Craze?

Tim: 1:29

Well, Candy Craze has been in business for 27 years. I founded Candy Craze, so I guess that entire time, but actually I've been in the candy business now for 45 years. I started off working for a family that owned some Morrow's nut house stores back in the 1970s, and that transitioned into a concept called the Nut Hut. And that evolved into Candy Craze.

Justin: 1:53

Wow.

Tim: 1:54

Yeah.

Justin: 1:55

So a long time.

Tim: 1:57

My whole life I've been in the candy business. And, interestingly enough, my grandfather was in the candy business his entire life. He was a candy jobber in Keokuk, Iowa, which basically was a wholesaler of candy. And there really was no connection other than I just think it's cool that, two generations skipped... it skipped a generation, but my grandfather and I both spent our lifetime in the candy business.

Justin: 2:19

I think that's really interesting because I'm sure that there's a lot of people out there that are quite jealous of you.

Tim: 2:27

There's something about being in the candy business it's hard to leave.

Justin: 2:30

I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure it's hard to walk out of.

Tim: 2:33

It's really a fun business.

Justin: 2:34

Yeah, and you've been doing this for a really long time. So tell me, I know that there's a store here in the Fort Smith area, but you're not just local, so maybe fill me in on....

Tim: 2:45

We have, 16 stores totally, but we had as many as 31 five years ago. So all of our stores, with the exception of Fort Smith now, all of our stores are in regional malls and as malls have been struggling, some of our stores have struggled. As malls have become irrelevant, we've had to close some stores. So it's been a challenging last five years.

Justin: 3:08

Yeah. What do you think has really been the thing that you've learned through that

process: 3:14

of these, "the mall" changing and that's changed your business clearly.

Tim: 3:21

Yeah, it has. I think, the thing to learn in this is that concepts, shopping patterns, people evolve, and you have to be willing to evolve with that. And, really that's been the history of our entire business. The reason Candy Craze exists is because the previous concept, the Nut Hut, had to evolve or go away. And so I think we're in a phase right now of evolving. We just recently moved our flagship store here in Fort Smith from Central Mall, which 10 years ago was a thriving, wonderful mall, and today it's a struggling mall. So we've moved outside the mall into a lifestyle center next to Target and we're going to see if our concept has life outside of a mall.

Justin: 4:07

That's gotta be pretty exciting.

Tim: 4:09

Yeah. It's exciting. It's really scary.

Justin: 4:11

Is it? Okay.

Tim: 4:12

Yeah, it's really scary because this is our flagship store and actually has always been our number one or number two store. So, to take that store to leave your home of 27 years and move to a new location is scary. But we've only been in there three weeks, it's been a lot of fun and very rewarding so far.

Justin: 4:31

I had the opportunity to stop by and check it out, which was really exciting. Obviously, I'd seen the other one. The new store it's bigger, it's better, it's brighter. There's more of everything it seems. So I ended up, spending most of my time in the chocolate section, I'll just be honest, but it's amazing the amount of stuff that you have there. Although, I will say I'm a little concerned that you carry something: it's chocolate covered gummy bears. Little concerned about that.

Tim: 4:58

That's so funny, Justin, the first time I saw that on a product list, I thought, "now there's, that's gotta be the stupidest thing anybody's ever thought up." That's one of our best-selling candies.

Justin: 5:10

Chocolate covered gummy bears.

Tim: 5:11

Chocolate covered gummy bears. And if you think about it, gummy bears come in multiple flavors. People like chocolate covered jellies, orange and raspberry jellies covered in chocolate have always been a really popular item. So it makes sense. It just sounds weird.

Justin: 5:27

I'll be honest. We tried them and it is a different experience. It's just this it's this gooey chocolatey thing.

Tim: 5:34

When we were on a road trip one time and my kids had a bag of just mixed up candy and one of my children said, "dad, I just ate two M and M's and a cherry jelly belly, and it's the best thing I've ever had." So, I started doing it and I've decided chocolate covered jelly bellies should be the next thing.

Justin: 5:54

You hear that, jelly belly? Get ready? Start the production. Wow. So that's really... yeah, it was just really a lot of fun. There's so much candy in there and who doesn't like candy in some form or fashion? It's fun to snack on and enjoy.

Tim: 6:09

We've always felt like we're...selling isn't the right word... we're providing fun, and candy, if it's not fun, it really doesn't work. And one of the things in our older concept, in our original concept, that became "not fun" that we changed in the new concept was just the pricing. Originally, we had priced all of our candies, the whole store, to be one price per pound. And that made sense 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, when the cost of a chocolate malt ball and the cost of a gummy bear were pretty similar. But they've diverged a lot. Chocolate is really expensive; gummy bears aren't that expensive. So, in our new store, we've gone from everything being $12.99 a pound, to gummies and jelly bellies and things like that being $8 a pound, so much more reasonable, and then two chocolate sections, one at $12 and one at $16 a pound. Customers love that. It's more fair. You're actually paying about the right price for what you're getting, keeping in mind that you can pick and mix from hundreds of bins of candy. So that's something in our new concept that's an evolution of our concept that I'm excited to see. We're sacrificing a little bit of margin, but we're selling a lot more candy.

Justin: 7:26

So, that's a win.

Tim: 7:26

It's a win.

Justin: 7:27

That's really great. That's really wonderful. So, let's talk a little bit about strategy. You started off as one store here in the Fort Smith area. And then how did you make decisions to start growing? What did that process look like?

Tim: 7:46

I love to tell this story, Justin, cause this is really fun. We opened our first store here in Fort Smith on October 3rd, 1993. And Central Mall at that time was owned by Ed Warmack, the Warmack family. And on the day we opened, our store was wall to wall people, which is not unusual for a new concept in Fort Smith. But one of the people that came to our store that day was Ed Warmack, who owned the mall. He took my wife, Connie, and me out to lunch. And, he said, "what are you doing on Monday?" And I said, "I don't know Mr. Ed, what did you have in mind?". He said, "I'm in,"... we lived in Kansas City at the time. He said," will you be back in Kansas City?" And I said, "yes, we're going home tomorrow." And he said, "I'm going to pick you up at the airport in Kansas City at seven o'clock Monday morning, if you can meet me there, and we're going to go see all my malls. So seven o'clock, I met Mr. Ed at the municipal airport in Kansas City, and we flew to, I think, six or seven malls that he owned at the time. And he had a location in mind in every one of those malls for our Candy Craze store. And we ended up opening stores in five of those malls.

Justin: 8:55

Wow.

Tim: 8:56

Within the course of a year, we went from one Candy Craze store to nine, and then eventually just built from there.

Justin: 9:03

That's wild.

Tim: 9:04

And, really, our growth was not as purposeful and strategic as it might sound... really impressive if I told you that I had all that... but really what was more typical is, we'd open a store, for instance, in Paducah, Kentucky, and the owner of that property, Cafaro Company, said we have a mall that's exactly like this in Clarksville, Tennessee. And if you're doing well in Paducah, you'll do the same amount of business in Clarksville. Sure enough, they were right. And we did the Clarksville store, also. So, much of our growth has been just organic like that. Its relationship with landlords, and then expanding into their properties.

Justin: 9:47

That's a really great story, I think on both sides, right? This element of just to show up and to be escorted around the country and to see a bunch of malls. And that's a unique story. Probably not a lot of people get to experience something quite like that. But then, on the other side of that, is that you also have done it just organically as you've moved into a location. That over time, as you've gotten to build relationships with people, that it's opened up opportunity for you. That's pretty awesome.

Tim: 10:14

People in the Fort Smith area will remember Ed Warmack, he was a perfect gentlemen. I loved the Warmack family. One thing that was really funny about that trip, though, was Mr. Ed and his pilots picked me up in a Learjet at municipal airport, and then we flew...I think the first place we flew to was Lawton, Oklahoma. And we got out of the Learjet and we jumped in like a 1974 Ford Fairlane, no air conditioning, one door didn't work, the windows didn't roll down, and he had a car like that at every airport so that when he got there, you could jump in that car and go to his mall. But, the automobiles were not nearly as impressive as the Learjet,

Justin: 10:54

But, I think there's probably some strategy in that too.

Tim: 10:57

If you knew Mr. Ed, that wouldn't surprise you at all

Justin: 11:00

Probably not important to have super nice cars that you're going to go hop in on a rare occasion. That's funny. So, that was the strategy for how you built a business. So, maybe, let's talk a little bit about your employees for a moment. You have these different locations, you have all of these employees that ultimately report up to you. How do you build and develop those employees to run a business? Because you're not there. I mean, you're here in this location. You've got these other locations. So how do you do that?

Tim: 11:30

When we're hiring people, we're looking for people that... Well, we have a little formula we use. It's hokey, but it works for us. When we're looking to hire or promote people, there's three things we're looking for and the words all start with C. I don't think this is original to us, but we've done it for so long I don't know who I stole it from. So, the first C is competency. We're looking for someone who brings the skills and the necessary, abilities to do the job. And that's a pretty low bar, you know what I mean? The candy business is not real high tech. It's not very complicated. So if you can count and, you know, use a computer and walk and lift a 10 pound box and things like that the competency level initially is not really a real high bar. The higher bar is character. We want to work with people we can trust.

Justin: 12:24

Yeah.

Tim: 12:24

I tell people right off the bat, "I promise you can trust me. If I violate your trust, you need to go to work for somebody else. But it's really important that I know that I can trust you, because the currency of our relationship is going to be trust." And once that breaks down, I don't have the confidence to work with you anymore. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. And then, the third one is chemistry and that is, not the periodic table of elements, but can we get along? Are we compatible enough that you can tolerate my quirks and idiosyncrasies and vice versa? And once we get that, and it takes... sometimes, it takes a while to get that person. But once we get that, we don't let those people go. We do everything we can to take care of them. We have an employee that's been with us for 33 years as a district manager. I hired her. She started off as a store employee at the Nut Hut in Muskogee, Oklahoma, back in, however long ago that was. Our office manager's been with us about 25 years, our local store manager has been with us 20 plus years. We have another district manager has been with us 25 years. So we get people and when they prove to be the right person we just figured out what it takes to keep those people and not let them go. It makes my job so easy. I'm working with people that have been in this business for a long time, who I trust, who I enjoy working with and who I can delegate tasks and authority too.

Justin: 13:57

That's wonderful. So how how do you typically help to build that trust? What are some of the activities or things that you would go through to encourage that trust building?

Tim: 14:08

I think I have to establish trust from my perspective first. I mean, the first thing you do for everybody is : if, payroll is due on Monday, payroll is done on Monday. If your rent is due on the first of the month and rent is paid on the first of the month, you just always do what you say you will do. If you promise something to someone and you're able to fulfill that promise, you have to do it. And then, you give your employees a list of things that are expectations that you have from a trust perspective, and you just have to hold those people accountable to that. The story that I like to tell all of our employees...anyone that I hire, I always tell this story when I talk about character and trust. When I was 16 years old, I went to work for Joe and Ainell Newman in Morrow's Nut House store in Independence, Missouri. And Mrs. Newman is my business partner to this day. She's like my mom. Mr. Newman passed away about 10 years ago and their children of both proceeded Mrs. Newman in death. So Mrs. Newman's like my mom, and when she was training me in the Morrow's Nut Hut store we used to roast nuts. We had cashews and peanuts and pecans, but the most expensive nut we had was a a macadamia nut and you would put these macadamia nuts in a basket and dip them into a vat of coconut oil and roast them. And Mrs. Newman said, "whatever you do, you put those macadamia nuts in the oil and you count to 15 and you take them out. If the phone rings, don't answer it. If a customer comes up, just say, I'll be right with you. Never leave the macadamia nuts." Cause they'll burn. If you leave them in there for 3 seconds they're ruined. So, maybe like the second time I ever worked by myself, I'm roasting macadamia nuts. The phone rings and I just, I thought, "I can answer the phone. I'm smart enough to remember this." Went and answered the phone, completely forgot about the macadamia nuts. And I started smelling something. They'd probably been in there five minutes.

Justin: 16:06

Oh my gosh.

Tim: 16:07

So, I pulled them out of there completely black. And I had maybe 15 pounds of macadamia nuts, and back then they were selling for $12 a pound. So I'm thinking, "Oh no." My brain is going, "how can I dispose of 15 pounds of macadamia nuts and nobody would ever know? I can't flush them down the toilet. I...if I put them in the trash..." I couldn't come up with anything. So, finally I just called Mrs. Newman. My conscience was just really bothering me. I figured, "I'm going to get fired either way. I might as well tell her what I did." So I called her and I said, "you're... you are going to kill me. I remember you telling me never to leave the macadamia nuts but I did, and I burned them, and I don't know what to do. So I'm just calling you." And she said, "no problem. I've done it myself. And now I know I can trust you cause you didn't lie to me."

Justin: 16:55

Wow.

Tim: 16:56

And I tell that to my employees all the time, is that: you can drop a bin of candy. You can burn the macadamia nuts. You can give somebody change for a hundred when they gave you a 20. I've done every one of those things. You won't get fired for that, but if you lie to me, if you try to cover up a mistake, then I can't trust you. And if I can't trust you, how can I continue to do business with you? So I think just telling that story and letting people know

upfront: 17:23

It's okay to mess up. You're going to make mistakes, but let's just be honest with each other.

Justin: 17:30

I think that's a great story and a perfect example of how important it is, to be honest and to have grace for people. So, I think that's really awesome. Wow. And just to that end, I interviewed somebody recently who I'd asked, who would you recommend to have come on the show? And he said you, and he said, "now that is a man of integrity." So it speaks volumes about the importance of trust to you and how important it is to you to pay people on time and to do those things that you say you're going to do and do them when you said that you're going to do them, unless there's something really preventing you from being able to do that. So that's really, it's wonderful and what a good word.

Tim: 18:15

It sure it takes the stress out of doing business. I mean, business is hard and making money is difficult under any circumstances, but if you're always looking over your shoulder wondering whether someone is being honest with you or whether they're playing games or trying to deceive you, that's a really hard stress. So we don't have much of that. And, even though we do show grace, we show very little grace towards dishonesty. There's just not much of a threshold there to work with.

Justin: 18:45

That's really great. I think I'd like to talk maybe a little bit about the culture of your individual stores. And, obviously, we talked about the trust and how important trust is to building culture. What other culture elements do you have, that are maybe important that you'd want to share?

Tim: 19:04

You mentioned that when you were in our store, you had fun. It was a fun experience. Fun is part of our culture. And that really starts, did not start with me. It started with Joe and Ainell Newman. And when I went to work for them in their Morrow's Nut House store... maybe the second or third week that I worked with for them, we were working on a Friday night. In the store, they just took me under their wings. They didn't have any sons and they had a couple of daughters and they liked me right off the bat. So they would take me out after the store closed and we'd go grab a bite to eat and have fun and no matter what we did in the store, we were always having

fun: 19:43

always joking, always laughing, finding the humor in every situation. If you had a customer that said something or did something, funny...sharing those stories with each other. So part of our culture is to really have fun and it can be a little stressful at times. The other day, when you came in our store, we had two big shipments of candy that we had been waiting on. We were expecting one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, and they both showed up on Friday. And Saturday is our busiest day and we wanted to get that candy out. I mean, we're running around like crazy trying to get all that candy put out. The store was busy, so it was really important to me while I was there to try to break the stress of that by just keeping it lighthearted...by having fun by opening a box and saying, "Oh, wow, here's dark chocolate ginger. We've never seen that before." And so fun is part of the culture. We play fun music in the store. We try to make sure our customers are having fun. So, I'd say that's a big part of it.

Justin: 20:47

I thought one of the things I really appreciated was, that fun element, but also, despite the busy-ness, your employees took time to greet us and to spend time with us and make sure that we knew how the...what the process was for picking out candy and everything else. So, even despite the busy-ness, people were still encouraging and helpful and, at the same time, enjoying what they were doing. So that was really inspiring.

Tim: 21:11

Yeah, our customer service strategy is an acronym around the word "guest". So, guest is G and G stands for greet. I just greet people when they come in the store. It doesn't have to be hokey, you don't have to say anything real formal, just, "hi, how's it going?" works. People need to know that you acknowledge them. So you greet people. One thing that's so... U stands for use good manners. That's so important to me. I grew up an Air Force brat, and one thing my dad insisted from us was that we be respectful and use good manners. So you should experience in a candy crazy store... you should experience, "sir. Ma'am please. Thank you. I'd be happy to." Chick-fil-A has almost trademarked the phrase, "My pleasure." If there's a phrase that I'd like to trademark from our business, it's the phrase "I'd be happy to". For instance, the customer might say, " I bought a bag of candy, but I have two kids at home. Could you split that into two bags?" I suppose I could say sure. Or no problem, but my response is "I'd be happy to." And I really am happy to do that. It's, not to be hokey, but it really is my privilege and my pleasure to serve people. So using good manners. So, G-U- E, E is explain how the store works. Our store is self service, and sometimes I like to tease people and say, "this is a self-service store. So if you get bad service, it's on you," and people like that. It's funny. But we do have to explain how the store works. It's different, it's self service, but it requires a little bit of explanation. And just a couple of weeks ago, I had a customer.... I actually walked into our store on a Sunday to buy a gift for my neighbor for a birthday present. And I observed a customer say to the employee, "I'm so frustrated. I don't know how this works." And of course, I mean, I just jumped into employee mode and helped that person and I told the employee later, "That can't happen." You can't have a person in our store who doesn't understand how it works. So explaining how the store works. S in the word guest, S is for sample. I know you got several free samples cause I was watching my wife give them to you and she's the best at that. But part of the fun of coming into a candy store is getting to sample things that maybe you've never tried before. And, it's really genuine. It's not just so that you'll buy more candy. It's really to make the experience fun and for you to feel like a guest in our store and then T in the word guest is just thank you. And it's really important that customers understand that we sincerely appreciate their business. If you don't come and shop with us, I'm going to be flipping hamburgers in a couple of months because I don't know how else to make money. So, it's really important when you come into a Candy Craze store that you leave the store knowing that we really appreciated your business. So that all sounds good. Getting people to execute that is a lot of work.

Justin: 24:24

Yeah. Is there a training process that you take people through or is it just that there's always a manager or whatever close by hop in or how does that work?

Tim: 24:34

Always. Unfortunately, a lot of times our employees may be working by themselves certain times of the week when it's not busy. And we don't have cameras in our stores. We're not spying on people. That's more information than I want. I don't want to know that. But really, the way you learn that is...culture can be taught, but not really. Culture is absorbed. And so, if I want people doing that, they have to see me do it. They have to see our district managers do it. They have to see our store managers do it. And, can I tell you a story about culture?

Justin: 25:12

Absolutely.

Tim: 25:14

So, here's where I learned this. I think I knew this, but I couldn't quantify it before, and here's where this really hit home for me. We were in Little Rock a number of years ago, our kids were playing team tennis and we were at a tennis tournament at Burns Park, kind of downtown Little Rock. It rained some in the afternoon. So the kids matches got postponed and we got out of Burns Park about

9: 25:37

15 or so, and we hadn't had dinner. So, we went to the closest fast food restaurant who I'll re remain, you know, anonymous for their sake. Walked in. There was an employee there who was really not in a good mood. We were trying to place an order and she was just completely rude and not helpful. And I wasn't in a great mood. I was hungry. And I just turned to my wife and kids and I said, "you know what? I don't think we're going to shop here. We're going to go someplace else." And my kids were like, "dad, don't do this."

Justin: 26:11

"on principle, dad?"

Tim: 26:13

"We're starving, don't do this dad." And I said, "no, I'm sorry. I just can't give these people my business." And the lady didn't care. So we left and I'm trying...we're in downtown Little Rock. I'm trying to think, "okay, who's open this time at night?" And I said, "Hey, there's a Chick-fil-A, across from Park Plaza. We're going to go there." So we pull into Chick-fil-A. By the time we got there it was like five minutes till 10 o'clock on a Saturday evening, they close at 10 o'clock. We went in, we placed our order. We got the typical Chick-fil-A service. This is downtown Little Rock. There's a young 18 year old kid serving us. By the time we sat down, they were mopping the floor around us, but we were still getting the typical Chick-fil-A treatment, "is there anything else I can get for you refresh your drink? My pleasure." And, so, as we were leaving, I asked the young man that was mopping the floor who had just asked if we needed a refill on our drinks ...I said, "how do you guys do this?" He said, "I don't know what you're talking about." I said, "I'm in downtown Little Rock. It's 10 o'clock at night. You guys are closing. I know you're anxious to get home. You're still giving me the same Chick-fil-A treatment I get everywhere I go, how do you guys do this?" And he said, "It's just who we are. Just everybody does it a Chick-Filet, this." I said, "do they make you do that?" And he said, "No. It's just what we do." And I realized at that point, the culture was so ingrained from the downtown Little Rock store, all the way to Truett Cathy in Atlanta, everybody in Chick-fil-A has absorbed the culture of Chick-fil-A to the point where it wasn't a trained thing. It was just...it's just who they are. And I thought, that has to be the same for Candy Craze. You can't teach this stuff, you just have to live it and you have to live it in front of people. I'm just thinking, boy, as a parent, this is convicting. You want your children to be a certain way and the old "well, don't do as I do, do as I say," No, that doesn't work. You have to live the culture for people to absorb it.

Justin: 28:18

I think it's so true. and as I process what you've been saying, and I think about culture and I think about maybe someone who's new starting out where you were 33 years ago... what would you tell them? How would you encourage them to... like you said, it's not so much taught, but just ingrained in the behaviors. What would you tell them?

Tim: 28:41

If you can, not everybody can do this, but if you're able to: position yourself next to people who are... who possess the character and the personality and the attributes that you would like. If you can, place yourself around those kinds of people and just let them rub off on you, that's a great strategy because... I'm really good at customer service. I just am. I don't mean to be arrogant when I say that, but that's my specialty. I love serving people, but I was not that way when I was 16 years old. I worked side-by-side with Ainell Newman.For years, and I watched her do this and I would see the response of customers. I would see the level of sales that she would do, and I just imitated her. I thought "this works. I just want to be like her." And so, if you can place yourself around people who are good at what they do, and then just learn from them.

Justin: 29:53

you were talking about not being good at customer services at 16, but if I recall correctly, you burnt the macadamia nuts to answer the phone, so that's pretty good customer service.

Tim: 30:02

I probably thought it was my girlfriend calling me or something. I don't know.

Justin: 30:06

That's pretty good. Let's talk a little bit about products and services and I think primarily products. I'm just curious, how... like candy... this is one of those things, like, how do you choose? You've got... the store is insane. There is, I don't even how many different types of candy do you have?

Tim: 30:26

Yeah, there's 252 bins in our local store that you were in the other day. There's 252 bins of self-service candy. So 252 different types of candy. And then, there's a couple of hundred, smaller bins of individual count items like pop rocks and ring pops and Astro pops and things like...

Justin: 30:48

...pocky. Apparently we had to have pocky the other day as well.

Tim: 30:51

Yes, those are really popular. So, how do you find all these candies...

Justin: 30:58

yeah, and then how do you choose, how do you choose which company to go with?

Tim: 31:04

There's a lot of loyalty there. There are some manufacturers that were really loyal to. All of the ones we're really loyal to are made in the USA. And that's not a requirement. We do have some candies in our store that are made in Australia. We have a kookaburra licorice, it's one of my favorite products, it's made in Australia. It's the best licorice on the planet. I can't find anything better than that, so that's why we carry it. But there are some manufacturers that we've done business with for 40 years, that we're really loyal to and they're really loyal to us. They take really good care of us. So we try to buy their product line and we support their business and they support our business. One of them is Albanese Confectionery Company in Merrillville, Indiana. They manufacture a lot of gummies and they manufacture a lot of chocolate products.

Justin: 31:56

Amazing. Those gummies are amazing. So, the best gummies I'd ever had were in Germany, by a company called Beren Treff. And they were amazing. However, I met you a couple of years ago and we, I think we were talking about gummies and you said, I've got these really good gummies and I'm thinking" there's no way" but they are really good.

Tim: 32:14

They are. And the German gummy bears are really good also, but a typical Gummy selection might have four or five flavors. The Albanese gummy bears come in 12 flavors and every flavor is fantastic.

Justin: 32:30

Yeah. And they're not just watered down flavor, either.

Tim: 32:33

Yeah, they're really intense flavors. And I've toured their factory multiple times. which is a super fun experience. You can actually tour their factory online. If you want to just go to Albany's confectionary.com or whatever it is, and...or go to the food show or How It's Made, and you can tour the Albanese or the Jelly Belly factory on them. So Jelly Belly is another company we've been loyal to for a long time, and we carry a large selection of their products, all made in the USA, all extremely high quality. But then, here's the other thing I figured. If something sounds really stupid to me, it's probably going to sell.

Justin: 33:21

Chocolate covered gummy bears.

Tim: 33:22

Chocolate covered gummy bears. Sour Patch Kids, when they first came out, I"Oh, that's so stupid. Why would they want to eat something that's so sour? You can't even enjoy it." Yeah, we couldn't keep them in stock.

Justin: 33:35

My kids are huge into the soury stuff.

Tim: 33:38

We've been carrying, for the last couple of years, a line of cotton candy that comes in a tub and some really fun, unusual flavors and the best selling flavor of cotton candy is pickle. And we didn't even want to order it. And I said, "no, it's so stupid. We need to order it." And we can't keep it in stock. It's the best seller.

Justin: 34:00

Pickle

Tim: 34:01

Pickle flavored cotton candy.

Justin: 34:03

What will they think of next?

Tim: 34:05

People like things that are out there and fun and crazy. So, most of it is trial and error. We bring things in. Our suppliers and our manufacturers share knowledge with us. They'll tell us, listen, this product is working everywhere. And I know that it's going to work for us, if it does other at places as well. Much of it is just trial and error.

Justin: 34:29

I think candy's one of those places where we give ourselves freedom to have a little bit more fun, where we're willing to say, "I'll try something a little different, it's candy! Why not?" Versus, "I don't really want to have peas and carrots." It's like, that's not super exciting.

Tim: 34:45

There is actually a candy peas and carrots,

Justin: 34:48

Of course there is, of course there

Tim: 34:50

is. We've all been working through the stress and the difficulty of the pandemic that we've been going through, and there's... it's just been tragic for some people. For many people, it hasn't touched their lives at all, but there's humor in everything. And it struck me maybe a couple months ago that the worst thing that could come of this would be if everybody lost their sense of taste. That would really be hard on my business because now you don't need 12 flavors of gummy bears or 40 flavors of jelly bellies, or pickle flavored cotton candy, everything tastes like nothing. And so all you need is one jelly bean, one gummy bear, and one cotton candy. It would completely ruin my business because everything we do is based on flavor and texture and even smell. Boy, to open up a box of pink grapefruit sour balls is a wonderful experience. When you open that box up and tear open the bag, the aroma that comes from that is just fantastic. And if you couldn't smell that, or... when you open the bin, you can smell it. If you couldn't smell it would, it would take away from the enjoyment of it. Isn't it interesting that some of the things we take for granted our senses, smell and taste? How often do we stop to give thanks for taste or smell? We just take them for granted. But I know people that... I have a friend right now, who's going through the COVID thing. He's positive. And he said, "the worst part of this is I can't taste anything." That would be horrible.

Justin: 36:33

And you're right. We do take it for granted and in your business, that's everything.

Tim: 36:38

Yeah. It's everything I'm out of business if people can't taste.

Justin: 36:40

Yeah. You go from 230 bins to five

Tim: 36:44

So now we're going to have bins of spinach and brussels sprouts and things... well, and it's good for me. I might as well eat it.

Justin: 36:51

Might as well have it now. That's not as much fun as the candy.

Tim: 36:54

No, it's really not.

Justin: 36:56

Wow. As I think about the culture that you've built and just... you're infectious. It's so much fun to be around you. And I would imagine that your employees feel the same way. How often do you get to go and spend time with your different stores and employees?

Tim: 37:14

In a normal year, and this has not been a normal year, but in a normal year, I make a commitment to get to each of our stores a minimum of once a year, but preferably two to four times a year. And, we have a store in Las Cruces, New Mexico, so it's a long ways away, but it's one of my favorite trips to take each year because we own a motor home. Candy Craze owns a motor home and my wife and I will jump in that motor home and take a trip to New Mexico every year. We have fun along the way and get to our store in Las Cruces and spend a few days there visiting with our team and enjoying nature in New Mexico. That's one of the parts of my job that I love. And this year has been a disaster for that. We have not... we have taken the motor home out a few times, but we've not visited stores like we normally do. It's just not safe. And we've been so overwhelmed trying to figure out how to manage our business through this season. You know, I've jokingly said, this is the second year in my career where I've actually managed a nonprofit organization. It is no fun.

Justin: 38:30

No, I can't imagine.

Tim: 38:31

It's not any fun at all.

Justin: 38:32

A very different type of stress and a very different strategy. I'm sure that goes along with the challenge. And I think maybe there's some solace in it. Maybe there's, I don't know, maybe there's a network of folks that you've talked to, but other people are going through similar things. And I think that's at least a positive, because it helps provide perspective and an angle that you don't necessarily see...that someone else can say, "Hey, you know what? We went through that. And here's what we've been doing in order to cope with, or deal with, or, to change our model or whatever it might be." And then, just in your case, you've made the decision to open a store outside of the mall to try something different and to see how that goes.

Tim: 39:15

Yeah. It's risky, but doing nothing is even more risky. So I read, if you want an interesting book to read...?

Justin: 39:26

I'd love one.

Tim: 39:27

...a book called Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. I like to read and I'm always reading something, but there aren't many books I've read multiple times. I have read Necessary Endings multiple times. I even have it on my phone as an audio book, and there are certain chapters I have to go back and listen to because I need coaching because it's really hard for me to stop doing something. And the book Necessary Endings gives us the coaching we need to say "this doesn't work anymore. It's not healthy anymore. And I need to stop doing it in order to start doing something new and different." So that's a great book. I would really encourage anyone to read that book. It's applicable to your personal life, your professional life, spiritually, any aspect of your life. There are things that you need to stop doing in order to be able to start doing something different. And this decision to leave the mall was... the hardest part of that was to stop being in the mall. And the rest of it was not that difficult, but it was the ending of the location in the mall that was really gut wrenching. So, a good book.

Justin: 40:45

That's a great recommendation and thank you. Because so much of what we need to do in that scenario isn't that we're giving something up, but it's having the perspective and the mind shift to say, "I'm replacing it with... I'm getting this new thing." Versus, "what I can't have." " This is what I get to have." And that's when you make that mind shift and that change that really does open up the world to you and becomes encouraging versus maybe this depressing idea that I have to give something up.

Tim: 41:16

It's not just that I'm giving something up. I have to stop doing something, but I'm giving it up in order to take up something new or to start something new. And that's where... that's what breeds life. When you're managing something that's continually in decline and there's no hope, there's no real hope, that is going to change, that's exhausting. But, if you're managing something that's difficult and stressful, but there's hope that it can be better. That's life-giving.

Justin: 41:53

It is for sure. You go through that moment of experiencing and see the hope in something... all of a sudden it lights a fire underneath you and you're willing to put up with something even though you probably wouldn't have before. You're willing to say, "yeah, it's okay. I can move forward and I can do this. And there's a light at the end of the tunnel." And that's encouraging.

Tim: 42:13

Yeah. It makes it easier to get up in the morning when you have that kind of stress, as opposed to, " I'm going to go show up and I have no idea what to do."

Justin: 42:23

Yeah.

Tim: 42:24

That'll wear you out.

Justin: 42:26

I'd like to come back to your employees. You talked a little bit about you'd go and spend time with them. How do you do team building in a remote environment? Do you do it on an individual store basis? Do you do it somehow collectively, like once a year? What's your process?

Tim: 42:41

It's a combination of those things. When I visit a store, it literally is just spending time in the store. Putting on an apron. I like to wear aprons. I'm putting on a Candy Craze apron, working the sales floor, alongside the salespeople and the store manager, being a part of the business with them, trying to demonstrate what it is I'm asking them to do to live the culture. So that's part of it. We have a really neat tool in our company. It's called Sweet Talk and Sweet Talk is, I guess it's like Facebook or Instagram, maybe it's a combination of those, but it's proprietary. So it's, you can only access it if you're a Candy Craze manager or employee, and Sweet Talk is that collaborative tool where, if you're the store manager in Hot Springs, Arkansas, you can post pictures of your store. You can tell stories about your customers, you can ask for help, share ideas. And the other stores, though they may never meet you in person, they get to know you through Sweet Talk, like Facebook. And so you have that collaborative platform to work together. That's a really neat tool that we have in our company. It's private and proprietary. And for the most part it's should be business oriented, but people will put prayer requests on there or share personal things sometime. And I don't discourage that, because it's relationship building. So that. But really the best tool is time in person. But, having said that, we've all gotten used to Zoom. Well, we've been using Zoom in our business for five or six years. It's how... so I have every week I have a scheduled Zoom meeting with my district managers who are remote. So I don't get to see them in person, every week. But every week we meet face to face by Zoom. And it's pretty amazing, really, once you get about five minutes into a Zoom meeting, you forget that you're not in the same room together. So, it's actually maybe even more close than you would be in person, especially now, you have to sit six feet apart, but you're face-to-face in a Zoom meeting. And so our district managers Zoom in with their store managers regularly and, but they're in their stores regularly also. I have a district manager in Nashville and she's within an hour drive of four other stores and she's in those stores every week. So it's that face-to-face person-to-person interaction.

Justin: 45:24

Yeah. I want to get to the point where we wrap up here in just a few moments, but I'd like to ask how do your employees communicate new ideas or share new ideas about how to improve Candy Craze? What's your process for that?.

Tim: 45:42

It's probably not as good as it should be, but Sweet Talk, the Facebook type platform I talked about is probably the primary way to do that because you can show pictures of things. Somebody might've been out at a store and, not our store, but another store: they saw something, they snapped a picture of it, put it on Sweet Talk. And that's probably a good way. One thing, at Candy Craze, is we have a real open phone policy. When you get your employee handbook, on the first or second page is my name, my phone number, my email address and employees can call me for any reason. That's really important from a compliance standpoint. If anyone ever feels like they've been discriminated against or harassed in any way, they're obligated to call me or Shannon, who's our office manager, whoever they're most comfortable with. So as you get to know people, they feel pretty comfortable talking to you and our managers, particularly. And again, many of our store managers have been with us for 10 or 20 years. So we have longstanding relationships. And it's not unusual for them to just call and they want to talk to me. They've got an idea to share, almost all of our good ideas come from the people who are working our stores, because they're experiencing things firsthand. I can sit in my office and it's just not the same as being in the store, seeing what works and what doesn't work.

Justin: 47:12

Yeah. I think one of the things that stood out to me when I was in the store the other day is that you are right there. As you said, you had your apron on and you were unboxing candy. It was...

Tim: 47:24

It's my favorite job.

Justin: 47:27

One for the band and two for you?

Tim: 47:30

Two for the band and one for me is probably more accurate, but that's my favorite job. And that's the job they hired me to do 45 years ago with the Morrow's Nut House and it's still my favorite job. I like the physical activity of unloading a truck. I mean, I don't do this hardly ever, but that was a fun day. I've thoroughly enjoyed our new store. I'm working there probably 20 hours a week. And that's not typical for me. When our store was in the mall, I was there almost every day, but not working per se. But I've really enjoyed the new store and, yeah, putting stock away is about as much fun as it can... as you can have in a Candy Craze store.

Justin: 48:07

I just want to say thank you for coming on the show and telling us a bit about Candy Craze and how you see the world and the positive things that you're doing within the community and the culture of your team. It was just a lot of fun, so thank you.

Tim: 48:22

You're welcome. That was what I was going to say. This has been a lot of fun. I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

Justin: 48:25

Thanks so much. And, I guess we'll wrap up.

Tim: 48:28

Great. Thank you, Justin.

Justin: 48:30

Take care.