YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Lamb

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-11-06
most recent: 2023-11-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Listen, there's a lot of smart people, a lot of people that work hard, you know. So luck plays a huge role in it. You know, I don't know. I think I'm a good student of life. I pay attention. I see where the problems are. What's the solution to fix the problem? I wish this for my kids. I admire this in other people is who's a good student of the game, a good student of life. Yeah, I'm glad I was there. I'm glad my sleeves were rolled up. I'm glad I was working my butt off. But I've been so lucky to get around great people and have a family that has been involved and stuck with me. And I've been married 31 years. And you're a serial entrepreneur 31 year marriage is probably my greatest accomplishment because the ups and downs of that is remarkable.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's what makes everything so hard about that, except for the fact that we're mobile and we'll go places where no one else will go. I don't have the same economics. That truck doesn't have to do 1.6 million to service the debt and the 18 people that are working behind the counter. Just a different mouset”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think I would have said that a year ago, maybe not even six months ago, but some of the results that our coffee people are having are pretty spectacular”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the idea has been with me for years. I have behind my desk was just, I don't know, 20 renderings, artist renderings of different coffee trucks, cafe trucks, and things like that. Wow. So October of 2020, we rolled a prototype of a very elaborate coffee truck that hit the streets and just a couple of them, and they started doing really well. We put them in a couple other franchisees' hands. The following year in 2021, I think we sold 20. We sold 30 more in 2022. And then this year, we've already got 90 sold out. We're only selling Dacona franchisees right now. Right now.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is flourishing. This started on March 18th, 2020. I looked at my team from that staff meeting, I told you what I said everybody's okay. Well, you start having to reallocate people around.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And we developed our flavor wave to it operated with the end of a spoon, not your finger. And we just went out hard. And the franchisees just came and bored and ideas were flowing. I had guys working here. I think sometimes 20 hours a day, you know, talking franchisees through this fairly complicated software to teach everybody how to do it.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we went after forestallments and deferments. But probably the biggest thing that we did was able to develop a program called Curbicona. It was an ordering platform for mobile. And it was very archaic, but it worked for us.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a staff meeting. I'll never forget that at us meeting. I brought everybody in and said, hey, everybody's okay. We got reserves. You're not going to lose your job. You're not going to lose a paycheck. Stop worrying. Our job here is to service and save the franchisees. So let's get to work. And we had a very multi pronged approach. I had some great people that just went after all the stimulus things that they could possibly get, the PPPs. You know, our franchisees were just not skilled at being able to go through. And we had a hotline and we had multiple people just, we went after all the financial institutions that have loaned money to Kona franchisees. They were all still looking to collect their payments.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was over in like three or four days. Listen, I don't want to were people losing their lives, but the businesses were traumatic, I think. But we pivoted.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's, and that's changed the industry tremendously as far as, hey, listen, you're making a great margin. Let's figure out how to revenue share, give back, and be communal about it.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I always make this comment when a truck pulls up for the first time in a line of kids form on the side of that truck, every kid in his mind says, man, I want some of that. And every adult that sees the truck and the line of kids says, man, why didn't I think of that? Because they do the, and I mean, the testimonies from franchisees are like, I saw a line of kids, I did the math, and here I am.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're doing well enough. But let me turn the tables on it. I was talking to an executive at a big franchise system, and, you know, they've got probably 20 franchisees that pretty much run the company. You know, whatever those people say goes because they're the ones generating a lion's share of the profits for the company. And I don't have anybody doing that. So if a franchisee gets out of line and I say out of line just against the code, I don't need them. It's not like someone's going to threaten, hey, I'm going to get out of the business. And I'm like, all right. Go ahead. So there is that double side to that where I don't get Needy to a franchisee that's pumping in hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue to the company.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can do the math if we want to. You do the cup sales and the flavor sales and you work it backwards, then you realize how stupid you are because you're charging not enough royalty.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know you're like, okay, you know, they say franchise systems have to get to 100 franchises before they can float. And I'm at 100, and I'm not even close to float The reality is this we make enough money on, you know, we've gotten at scale and manufacturing scale to where we can make more money when we do sell the product. This year we sold 276 trucks basically. So that's the lion's share of the revenues that come into the, but we're at the point now you're making, I don't know five, six, seven million in royalty. But it also makes us a good steward of the resources. And it makes us very lean, but you add up the flavoring, you add up the truck sales, you add up the royalty, you add up the cups, you add up the this. And, yeah, we've got enough revenue as long as you keep your expenses low.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, not even much in supplies. I mean, at scale it is. I mean, you sell 50 trucks. Everyone's paying you $3,000. It's $150,000. They got five people working in the office. Payroll's about $450.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you got to understand a lot of my franchisees are first time business owners. So let's get QuickBooks set up. Here's your chart of accounts. Let's get you an accountant. Let's form your entity. These kind of things that we kind of handhold all the way through.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When a husband and wife call me or whoever, they call and they say, we love our community. We've lived here for 10 years. Our kids have grown up here. We want to give back or our kids are involved. Something along those kind of lines. I'm looking for someone that I want to be in business with.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm looking for someone that has that nothing turns me off more than the ROI question. I was on a call, I think this year, and someone was, I'm looking at his application, the guy's got tons of money, and I'm like, what are you wanting to get into Kona for? He said, well, I sold a rental house. I was going to put it in the market. I think the market's on the way down. I'm looking for a good rate of return. I thought I would invest in this. I got some friends that I can get to run it. I couldn't be out faster. There's no interest whatsoever for me to be in business with that guy. Yeah.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm real proud of this. I have talked to every single person that owns a Kona franchise. They cannot get into the Kona franchise business to this day unless we have a conversation.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very discriminating in the early days. I would stick a mirror under their nose. And if it fogged up, They're check cleared. They have themselves a brand new. No, I was looking for.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To come up to Northern Kentucky, pulls into my warehouse, which was nothing to look at. It was a little tiny house with a couple garage doors on it, and I had some trucks parked out front. And he said, and I pull into the prestigious world headquarters of Kona Isam. My wife looks over at me. He says, I told you you got scammed. So he comes in, he gets, and he's nice as he can be, and we are who we say we are. And then Mark and his wife get in that truck and drive back to Georgia. And we talked almost every day. And he was, you know, I did $300 a day. I did $350. And then he did some festival or some event and he made $1,000.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the leads would come in and people would call, and we'd talk through it. And I've got so many funny stories from franchisees that are doing unbelievably now, but they were some of the early adopters. And I'll tell you this one real quick. Mark from down in Georgia called me. He was out of work 2008 or 2009. He got laid off. And he decided he was going to get into Kona. And he sent us the $20,000 and then planned to come up to pick up his truck. And he tells the story, and I didn't necessarily know the story word for word, but he tells the story. He goes, I sent our last $20,000. And my wife, who's a school teacher, is just pounding me that you have been taken by a man on the internet, slick talking vacuum cleaner salesman on the internet. And so he drives six hours from Atlanta.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started getting contacted. I did a little bit of marketing, put it out there on the franchise portals, as they call them, you know, franchise.com.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that was probably if there's anything that just set us apart in the early days, is the fact that we had financing and nobody else did.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me quote Forrest Gump when the hurricane hit by a battery and he said all the shrimping boats were all busted up. And he said, after that, shrimping was easy. Ed Reynolds owned a financial institution, a finance company, and he was my partner. I had financing. So after that, shrimp and was easy. So I could find somebody that I would approve and I liked to be in business with. And I'd say $15,000 down. Eagle Finance will finance the product for you. And again, I'm back in everything. So if the deal were to go bad, I get the truck back and then I'd have to resell it.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I thought, let's just keep this all in the up and up. Let's charge a very minimal royalty. And we'll sell the trucks as close to costs as we can. So we just get the trucks out there. Let's just build the brand. And then just like Amazon at some point, we'll look around and say, hey, do we have something that we can parlay on, so to speak? Yeah.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ridiculously The model out there was Mr. Softie would sell a truck for whatever. Back in the day, they would sell a truck for $150,000, make a lot of money on their trucks. But then the royalty was $3,000 a year and you had to buy all the cones in the cups and stuff from them. And they were marked up pretty substantially. So that was kind of the model to go after or whatever. It's an all cash business. So, what I really don't want to get involved in is...”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's writing the FDD is, I'll say, $50,000, and then all the registrations and all the states, the attorneys that are involved, and it's no easy task.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't know whether to franchise or license or just sell the truck as a commodity and let people just do what they want. Franchising is wonderful because it helps maintain the integrity of the brand.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do, but so it doesn't take much to drop your sales in a neighborhood. I mean, you saw a lot of people not in homes. You think about, you know, there's more for sale signs, especially at that socioeconomic level of starter homes with a lot of kids. And someone says, do you do good in country clubs? I'm like, no, because the houses are too big, too far away from the road, and the kids are in the basement. But yeah, you get little starter homes or something where they're full of kids and the parents want them outside. Get outside. You're driving us all crazy. So that's where you do the best at. But those kids, there's not crazy amounts of disposable money floating around out there. So yeah, we saw it tick down But we have this amazing margins in Kona, so we are responsible with the amazing margins.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got this subdivision in northern Kentucky to an easy thousand dollars a night. This is 2007. 2008 hits, you remember what happened in 2008.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't keep going. So now as kids are going or leaving and parents are leaving, they see the big signs. Conan is coming tonight. You make a little deal with the houses at the edge of the neighborhood. Hey, if you keep this sign up, you know, I'll give your kids free Conan when I stop by. So the signs go up. You do the same path. So you're basically at the same house or the same street almost every once a week”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you it's all about consistency and it's about knowing. So I would go to Crystal Lake Subdivision. I would sign it all up in the morning. So Conan Ice is coming tonight.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You really start making your money after schools. In the summer, you make money all day long, all the way till nighttime. As soon as school starts up, you really start making your money about 3 or 30. We were primarily neighborhood sales. That's what the business model was. And I was trying to get neighborhoods up to $1,000 a night. I got a couple neighborhoods up to $1,000 a night. Through some techniques that we were doing.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In northern Kentucky, we have a 210 day season. I remember these numbers, and I said, well, for inclement weather and blah, blah, blah, you've got about 180 days to sell. If you can make $1,000 a day, you make $180,000, you've got food costs and labor costs and operational costs. You can make, you can net well over $100,000, even debt servicemen to pay the truck off over a five-year period of time. So, I remember calling Ed and I said, Hey, I've done the math, and I think I can get the truck up to about $150,000 a year. And he's like, no way. And I'm like, yeah, I think I can. He said, well, that's you.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With chalk. And David remembers this. And he said, you remember the time we got stopped in that cul-de-sac and it turned into a block party? And I was like, yeah.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I took this fell out by the name of David Jones, and I was training him to be a driver. I think we had three or four trucks at the time. And we pulled into this cul-de-sac, and I said, David, here's the trick. We got to get those two kids right there off that porch. Drove around. I said, go real slow. I said, ah, we're not getting them. I said, let's stop and go out and clean the flavor wave. So we stopped the truck. This is early on because not everyone knew the Kona truck. So I went out. So these kids come wandering down off their front porch and they're like, hey, what do you got there? I said, oh, this is shaved ice truck and da da da. They come in. And then people start because I'm stopped. Music is playing. Lights are flashing. Here comes some people. And I've got a picture this somewhere in my phone because I remember getting back up on the hill and taking a little picture. It was about 60 people gathered around the truck with lawn chairs. I mean, it looked like something out of Norman Rockwell. There's skipping ropes. They're drawing hopscotch on the ground.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's times that, but you know, I don't know. I was having a great time. My kids thought I was the greatest because I'm driving an ice cream truck.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to explain it a lot, you got to tell them how good it is, they don't see how good it is, but this is a good story, actually, because why Jim and I are sitting there talking and probably 15, 20 kids come up. They're all buying conas. I'm serving them out and collecting. I probably made 50, 60 bucks or whatever just sitting there for, I don't know, 10 minutes. And he goes, well, you didn't do bad here. And I'm like, you know, we're laughing or whatever. And I drive away. And of course, it was a little bruising on the ego at that moment, but I thought, tech on it, you know, I'll just, you know. But that, you know, I'm sitting there with one truck thinking, can I scale this? Yeah. But, you know, the responsibilities I've got four kids and a wife. And, you know, everyone knows that guy or you've read about that guy that just, he can't get out of his own way and he just entrepreneurs till he dies and he never hits anything big.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my gosh, I pulled into one of these cul-de-sacs. And as soon as I turned down and I thought, oh, for the love of God, Jim lives at the end of this cul-de-sac. I go down to the end of the street and he comes out. I'm like, ah, gee, many Christmas. And he's like, lamb, what are you doing? And I'm like, you know, he comes out and he's just in a Armani suit and he's like, Lamb, you used to drive a nice car and wear a nice suit. What's happened, brother, is the economy just, and I'm like, Jim, this is a pretty, I mean, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt. This is not the worst thing in the world. You were in a, in a...”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I listen my buddy's harassment. You know, kids loved me, but my buddies were harassing me in the way. They were heckling.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I guess you would say progressively, I'm 100% confident. As the more meat you put on the bone, the more you realize this has got some legs. So the truck shows up, you start working the truck, the customer reaction was so good. You're like, okay, there's something magical here. We've got to figure everything else out. But at the core, it's working. I've got a winner here. Now, just don't screw it up.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, and the variations are legendary. The very first flavor wave would fold out from the truck. Okay, so you picture this thing folding out from the truck and it's made out of aluminum. So in essence, Guy, there was a two-foot aluminum edged sickle, as I like to say, driving through neighborhoods. What could possibly go wrong with that? Then the next generation, we had a handle where you could close it from the inside, but no one closed it. And then it would drain into all the flavors, the excess flavors would drain. You know, variation, variation, variation until let's work on embedding this into the truck. I hate to say stuff like that because then people realize how maybe unintelligent I am.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, give me more of that. That was a moment that I thought this has to happen. So you work on the economics, you figure out the flavoring and how you can dispense it in a way that it's not crippling financially where kids are putting, sticking their mouths under the spout and pulling them on. So you've got to design the flavor wave to where the kid's head, an eight-year-old's head won't fit in there. This is”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But here's the moment that I had it. So I'm talking to Ed, and he's got two sons that are hilarious. And I think they were nine years old at the time. And I said, hey, boys, let me ask you a question. I said, a truck comes down the street. It's a shaved ice truck, snow cone truck, or whatever. And it pulls up and they hand you a cup of fresh, unflavored snow, and you get to go to the side and put as much flavoring on as you want. What's your reaction to that? And they both, I mean, you're giving me the keys to the magical syrup.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you start talking to kids about snow cones or even shaved ice in some way, either you go to a hut or you buy a pre-made product and there's the complaints are it's never enough juice on it or it's not exactly the flavor combination that I wanted, blah, blah, blah, these different things. And so the idea was, hey, can you get the economics right to where you can turn it over to the customer to put as much syrup on as they want?”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, some palm trees, some little characters in the sun and the sand for the kids to like, and then tropical music playing, Calypso music playing, and just these ideas just kept coming and you're just, but it all, again, comes back to you want this experience.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then Tony was so talented, he was also able to kind of help me, you know, map out the look of the outside of the truck. I want a tropical truck. I just don't want tropical colors. I want a scene on the truck. I want the escapism when someone comes up to that truck for 10 minutes. I want them to be on a tropical island.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That attitude. His name's Tony Marquetti and doesn't have to. Sell me too hard, you know. His name's Tony. My name's Tony. I'm like, is this God talking to me? And did you?”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's all kinds of fabricators up there. I went up there. I spent a couple days. I went around and visited several fabricators and introduced myself, told him my idea. I was probably the fifth person that day that walked in and had a screwy idea. So I found a guy that I was really going to go with. He was very professional. He was a big operation. But then one guy was a very small operation, but he was, I really liked him. And so I actually, I called him to say, hey, I'm not going to go with you. I'm always respectful when I get bids. Hey, I don't think I'm going to go with you. And he said, why not? I said, well, you know, I told him why. And he said, Tony, neither one of us are going to make a lot of money if we only build a couple of these things. He said, but if we get in there and figure it out because you're going to need somebody to go through the ups and downs in the beginning, but if we can figure this out, because this is what I don't want to just build you a truck. I want to get in business with you. And, you know, I just love.”
2023-11-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kona Ice: Tony Lamb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT