His Dad Welded a Shelf to Organize the Family Garage. They Turned It Into 120 Locations and a $31 Million Exit.

Jared Newman didn't set out to build a company. He set out to clear some floor space.

Five kids means a lot of gear. Skis, bikes, Christmas boxes, all of it piling up in the garage of a house in Boise. Jared had grown up on a dairy farm in Star Valley, Wyoming, learned to weld young, and spent 23 years working for someone else before deciding to do something about the mess. He built a shelf system. Simple, modular, designed to hang things off the floor and get long-term storage up and out of the way.

Nobody planned to sell it. But then a neighbor asked where it came from. Then 20 employees at a backyard pool party walked into the garage and saw it. Three bids came out of that one party. The bishop of the local congregation came over, saw it, and said do my whole garage. Jared never ran an ad. He just did good work and let people talk.

That was 2003. Adam Newman, Jared's son, watched all of it happen, got pulled in, and eventually built that shelf company into Monkey Bar Storage: 120 dealer locations across the country, a product line that grew to include cabinets, flooring, and a patented overhead rack system, and a revenue run rate of $31 million the year they sold. Eight-figure exit.

This conversation was recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat near Yellowstone National Park, and it's one of those episodes where the numbers are worth writing down.

Year One: $46,000 In, $48,000 Out

The first year, Gorgeous Garage did $46,000 in revenue and spent $48,000 doing it. On paper, a loss. In reality, Jared had a year's worth of severance pay from leaving his corporate job (23 years of service, two weeks per year) and had taken a line of credit on the house. So the lights stayed on, the inventory got built, and the equipment got bought.

Year two: $96,000, with about $30,000 going home. Year three: $189,000, about $60,000 net. No advertising. No website until Adam helped build one in year two. Every single customer came from someone who'd seen the garage and told a friend.

Adam was a reluctant participant at first. He came home from his mission, helped weld and install, told himself he'd earn money for college and move on. There was no way he was going to spend his life working for a shelving company.

But then he watched the numbers double three years in a row without anyone trying to make them do that. And he started paying attention differently.

Two Pickups, Two Laptops, and a $25,000 SBA Loan

Adam saw the Salt Lake City opportunity before his dad did. He pushed Jared to invest in a better punch press, an $8,000–$10,000 piece of equipment that could cut and bend steel faster than anything they had. Jared didn't want to spend the money. Adam pushed until he said yes.

Then he told his dad he wanted to open a dealership in Salt Lake. Same answer. Adam found a college roommate, a guy with a finance degree who'd spent nine months in banking and hated it, and the two of them walked into a bank with two old pickup trucks and two laptops as their only assets and asked for a $25,000 SBA loan.

They got it. Ten thousand went to inventory from Jared, the rest to a trailer, tools, and a little advertising. Their first partial year in Salt Lake, April through December, they did $160,000.

That was the moment Adam knew. Not hoped. Knew.

He brought in another mission buddy to help run Salt Lake, deferred school, went down to get them started. He remembers sitting on the couch watching sports, putting plastic caps on hooks for hours every week because it was the only way to get enough product out the door. Goofy, manual, unglamorous. That's what getting a business off the ground actually looks like.

The Consultant Who Embezzled $100,000

By the time the housing market started cracking in 2007, Gorgeous Garage had grown to four locations and was sitting at the franchising question. Two competitors, Premier Garage and Garage Tech, were franchising. The investment to buy in was $200,000–$250,000 per location, with a break-even they calculated at around two years. Too heavy.

Adam, his dad, and their business partner built a board. They brought in Corey Smith, an investor who had been brand manager for Pillsbury's confetti cake, done big things with Heinz and Ocean Spray, then sold a chain of Idaho pharmacies to Walgreens. They brought in Bob, the former CEO of Rockford Fosgate. Both men told them franchising was the right direction.

They took out a $150,000 SBA loan to pay a consulting group that specialized in building franchise disclosure documents. The legal work would take a year. At the eight-month mark, the deliverables weren't arriving. Staff at the consulting firm started disappearing. Adam tracked down a recently-let-go employee through an old cell number and called her cold.

The owner had been embezzling. He was having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. The company was closing. They weren't getting their documents.

The attorney they went to was blunt: you're probably not going to get your money back, and I don't want to charge you to chase it. Walk away.

Four of the other six companies caught in the same mess went under within weeks. Massage Envy was in the mix and survived because they were further along in the process. Adam's company had nothing to show for eight months of work and $100,000.

Then the president of the national franchising association, a guy who had built a spray-on bed liner company to 800 franchises worldwide, heard about what happened. He flew out privately to Rexburg, Idaho, to meet with them. He sat across from Adam and told him: franchising isn't right for your business. Stick with the dealer model. And then he paid for an attorney in Denver to build them a proper dealer agreement.

By April 2008, they'd sold their first real dealership. By the end of the year, they had eight locations.

Reg Allen, and What Happens When You Find the Right Person

For years, the dealer network grew organically. Then they hired a sales rep named Reg Allen, and the company changed shape.

Before Reg: eight locations. After year one with Reg: twenty. After year two: forty-seven.

Adam talks about Reg with the kind of gratitude that only comes from watching someone do something you couldn't have done yourself. Reg worked for four or five years and then went off to start his own thing. But in that window, he took the dealer model from a regional operation to something that could credibly call itself a national network.

The lesson isn't "hire good salespeople," though that's true enough. The lesson is what Adam says right after: find good people, put them in the right spot, and let them shine. Don't micromanage the output. Put them where they're strong and get out of the way.

The Secret Sauce

Adam saved this for last, and it's worth the wait.

Early on, the company commissioned a survey. Students called the first 500 customers and asked a few simple questions: do you remember who sold it to you, who installed it, would you recommend the company, is there anything about the product you'd change?

The findings were unexpected. A lot of customers barely remembered the company name. Some called it "the yellow shelving stuff." But almost all of them remembered Jared Newman. By name. They'd say: Jared installed it. He hung everything up. He organized the whole garage.

That was the tell.

Customers didn't actually want shelving. They wanted an organized garage. Jared happened to sell them products that helped with that, but what made them rave was that he stayed after the install and put everything away. He hung the bikes. He sorted the bins. He did the thing they'd actually hired him for, even though it wasn't technically in the job description.

Every competitor installed the product and left. Jared stayed an extra hour and finished the job the customer actually wanted done.

When dealerships came to their five-day training in Rexburg, this was one of the last things taught and the most important: take the time to organize it. That's what they came for. The products just make it possible.

And Adam, true to form, turned it into a revenue mechanism. Dealers were taught to tell customers upfront that the final bid might shift slightly depending on how much hardware the install required. When the customer walked out and saw a fully organized garage instead of just a set of shelves, they didn't complain about the extra hooks on the bill. They were looking at exactly what they wanted.

Reviews stopped mentioning the product. They mentioned the experience. That's the gap. Every company has it, the distance between what they sell and what the customer actually came for. The ones that close it win.

What Stuck With Me

Adam tells this whole story without much drama. The embezzlement, the housing crash, the years of ramen and mac and cheese because the business couldn't pay anyone real money yet. He moves through it like it was just the cost of the thing, which I suppose it was.

What stands out most is the survey. Five hundred customers, called one by one, asked a handful of questions, and what came back was: they don't remember your brand, but they remember your dad. That's not a marketing insight. That's a character insight. Jared Newman organized garages because he liked to, because he cared about the people whose garages they were, and that leaked into every interaction.

Adam built the systems. Jared built the soul. Most companies only have one of those two things, and you can usually tell which one.

The exit number is impressive. But the detail that stays with you is a farm kid from Wyoming who spent an extra hour after every job putting other people's stuff away, and how that turned out to be the whole secret.

Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.