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An Interview with Don Mayer of Small Dog
Electronics
Mom-and-pop business might suffer from the rise of the giant corporation but one
son-and-pop shop in Vermont taking off.
Small Dog
Electronics, a reseller that offers both new and refurbished Apple
computers, has been online for some time. They recently opened a
brick-and-mortar shop in Vermont and business is great. Co-owner Don Mayer
talked to MacTribe about the business, social responsibility, and electronic
waste.
MacTribe: First let's talk a little bit about the company. Where did you get the
name?
Don Mayer: I got the name while watching my two small dogs scamper around in the
yard while I was trying to think of a name for the company. It actually had been
suggested to me in a totally different situation by an employee and I said at
that point, "Oh, I'll never name a company that." One of the things I've learned
in business is that I"m happier and usually more profitable the smaller my
company is. Keeping my company limited in size tends to aid both in the mental
health of my employees and myself, so I wanted to keep that reminder ever
present. I was very much aware that there's a sort of universal appeal of dogs
and it gave me endless marketing opportunities.
MT: How many employees do you have right now?
DM: I have 41.
MT: That is nice and small. You recently held a grand opening for your store in
Vermont, right?
DM: Yes.
MT: How is the store doing?
DM: The store is wildly exceeding our expectations. It's almost like there's a
whole bunch of Mac users and people looking for iPods who were just waiting for
us to open the store. Our service department has been swamped. We have easily
exceeded our most optimistic projection by about thirty or forty percent, so
we're very excited about what's going on in Burlington.
MT: Do you think you'll open another store eventually or are you going to limit
it to that one?
DM: I think it's likely we'll expand both sections of our business. We have
multiple different interests going on, but we have two major components. One is
our online and telephone sales and the other is our bricks-and-mortar retail
store. Our plan over the next few years is to move forward with both. I know I
talked a little while ago about keeping the company small, but I've also found
reason to grow it a little bit and that is as I look at my exit strategy and the
need to keep businesses in Vermont—one of the things you find in Vermont is
that a lot of business grow up here and then leave either because they're sold
or something like that, like the situation with Ben & Jerry's and
Unilever—and I think the only way to make sure a company is going to stay in
this location and serve its community is through employee ownership. In order to
get to employee ownership I need to get this company to a point where it's
generating enough cash flow that we can make that kind of a transaction a
reality.
MT: On the website, where it links to your job opportunities page, you have a
line that reads, "To join our world of fun and Mac obsession..." What is the
environment like over there? It sounds like a fun place to work.
DM: It is. We have what might be considered a very special environment where
we're all working very hard all day but at the end of the day it seems like
you've only been here a couple hours. Because of that, we want to make sure that
we do whatever we can to limit stress and make this a fun place to work. The
first thing we do is allow dogs in the workplace. I can literally watch a dog go
from employee to employee searching out a pat or a treat, and watch the stress
go from that employee and into the dog. The stress sort of dissipates with the
wag of a tail. It's an amazing thing. We have as many as twelve or fifteen dogs
here in our Waitsfield facility and maybe half a dozen up in Burlington at a
time. It works great for employees and it works great for the customers, too.
They love to come in and play with the dogs. So that's one thing we do. We also
have an athletic club right next door—which we call the "Not Too Athletic
Club"—where we have exercise equipment and a squash court. We have monthly
massages, too. We do a lot of things to promote employee health.
MT: You also offer a paid day off for employees willing to get into
volunteerism.
DM: Right. I was really very proud of that and then when I went over and met
with the CEO of Ben & Jerry's the other day he said, "Well we give our
employees 40 hours a year," and I said, "Okay, I give eight hours." [laughing]
But yeah it's really important and I think it's been a great program around
here. There's been a lot of benefit to the community. It's not even optional.
Employees must take a paid day off a year to do community service. We
don't spend a lot of time saying, "You can do this and you can't do that."
Basically I ask them to send an email telling me what they've done for community
service on that day. We've had everything from someone helping their elderly
neighbor stack firewood to helping out with the Special Olympics to aiding their
local library or to creating a website for a public school. It's just an amazing
conglomeration of community service that our employees are involved in.
MT: And it all comes back to not just wanting to be a business in the community,
but wanting to be a business that contributes to the community.
DM: Absolutely. We feel that a business has a greater responsibility than any
individual because our footprint in our community and our society is much
greater so we want to measure our success differently than many companies. There
are a number of bottom lines for a company that you can ascribe to—and
certainly making some money is an important bottom line if you want to make a
business—but how you treat the environment, what kind of workplace quality you
have, how you treat your vendors and other people you relate to are all also
vital to measuring the success of a company.
MT: On your website you also highlight donations to "pet charities."
DM: Well let me tell you a little bit of the history of that. My son and I, who
own the company, basically set criteria for what percentage of our profits would
go to charitable contributions. We did this when we first started the company.
At the end of every quarter he used to come to me and say, "You've got $5,000 to
give away," and I'd say, "Oh, great!" Then he'd say, "You have two days to do
that." So I'm sitting there going, "Okay what am I going to do?" I spent the
time trying to find mostly small organizations where I could make sure the money
I was going to give away would actually go to some good instead of overhead and
it got to be more and more of a burden. So one day an employee came up to me in
the early morning when we were having our coffee and said, "What if we give our
customers an opportunity to donate to charities when checking out their shopping
cart?" I said, "You know, that's not a bad idea. What if we went one step
further and matched those donations?" Right then a light went off in my head and
I realized it was a great solution to the question of how I deal with these
funds that I want to give away each quarter. Not only is that solved because I'm
using it as matching funds, but I'm leveraging those funds I'm giving away and
I'm allowing my customers to choose where they'd like those funds to go.
MT: How do you decide which charities you call your "pet charities?"
DM: We had a small committee consisting of myself, my wife, Hapy, and Hapy's
wife, and we frequently sit down and talk about who we should add. We try to
concentrate our giving in several areas. I get probably a dozen or twenty
inquiries for charitable contributions every week, from worthy organizations
that may fall out of the criteria that we're using. But we want to talk about
issues of human rights, issues of hunger, issues of women's rights, issues of
dogs' rights and welfare, issues of gay and lesbian rights, and issues of
protecting the environment. So these are the criteria we use as we evaluate
where we're going to give our money and then we say, "What organizations within
these criteria do we want to support?"
MT: As far as I know, you're also one of the only retailers who includes
alleviating the e-waste problem in your company's philosophy. Why is that so
important to you?
DM: We very strongly believe that protecting the environment is one of the
measures of our company's success. When we bought our facility here in
Waitsfield, it was on the Vermont list of toxic waste sites. We spent a lot of
time and a lot of money cleaning this place up. We pulled truckloads of drums of
petroleum products out of here and basically converted a junkyard into a park.
This is a strong commitment we made to the environment. At the same time, we
have always been involved in sort of the trailing edge of technology where we
buy used computers in bulk from Apple and refurbish them or part them out.
During that process, we always end up with waste. During our early days, it's
sad to say, we put them in a dumpster and took them to the dump. But as we
investigated and learned, in a conscious effort to understand our supply chain
and waste stream, we said, "Whoa wait a minute, what's in the products we're
taking to the dump?" And then we discovered that the CRT monitors had maybe ten
pounds of lead in them. We discovered that the switchers had mercury in them and
that the circuit boards had other dangerous materials in them. So we said, "We
cannot do this."
MT: What did you do instead?
DM: We began to investigate opportunities to properly and on a sound
environmental basis recycle the electronic waste that we're generation
ourselves. We located a company in Massachusetts, it's one of the only companies
on the east coast that does environmental recycling, it's called
EnviroCycle. We made an
agreement with them that we would bring them our waste. We even had to vet them
a little bit to make sure that the products weren't sold to anyone who would
take those products overseas or something like that, so we signed a contract
which said that the products would be destroyed on site. We did that primarily
just for the waste stream that we were generating. And then we said, "But what
about all the stuff we're selling to our customers?" Customers buying a new
machine would often come to us and say, "Oh, this machine is so old it's not
really worth anything, what do I do with this?" At that point I thought we
should make it easy for our customers, or anybody for that matter, to recycle
their electronic waste. So I said, "Let's open this up and offer ourselves as an
electronics waste recycling location."
MT: How did you set that up?
DM: We located another company called
Good
Point Recycling which actually runs what you might call a breadtruck
service. They have a truck that goes around to Vermont businesses and collects
electronic waste and then transport it down to EnviroCycle in Massachusetts. So
rather than us filling up a truck and taking it down there, we now have somebody
to do that for us. But every day customers bring us electronic waste. It can be
everything from a television to a microwave oven to a Mac computer they bought
from us years ago. We weigh it and charge them twenty-five cents a pound, which
is about what we get charged for doing the recycling. We have a big—I call it
a car tent. Basically it's one of those canvas garages. We fill it up and then
when that's full we call Good Point Recycling and they come by and empty it out
and we start over again and fill it up again.
MT: That's cheaper than I imagined. Only twenty-five cents a pound?
DM: Yup. I think a lot of the criticism of computer manufacturers is that they
put all these restrictions on what they recycle. Apple has been taken to task on
their recycling and I think it's great that they stepped forward and said they
would recycle computers if they're sent to Apple but they require you to buy
something in order to qualify for that recycling. That seems a little lame, and
they haven't raised awareness at their 150 retail locations. Even companies you
don't think of as being socially responsible, like Circuit City, have electronic
waste recycling depots or bins at their facilities. There's definitely more
environmental awareness that has to occur at Apple. We always felt that as an
Apple reseller we could push that.
MT: So it's not that expensive, especially for a company like Apple, but again I
guess it's all about how you look at the idea of "the bottom line." You can have
one bottom line that the shareholders love or you can have multiple bottom lines
that appeal to a wide range of investors and socially conscious consumers.
DM: Yeah, I don't think Apple understands that. They do a lot, which is good in
terms of environmental stuff, but I just don't think they understand. They could
even charge and people wouldn't complain. The cost of recycling is relatively
small. I think it's strange that they haven't stepped forward on that stuff.
Maybe they will soon. For us, the product we sell is not as important as
our social mission. I think i can speak for virtually all of my employees: we
find that being a company with a social mission makes working a lot more fun. It
sustains us. It's great. That's why I feel that social responsibility and
business go hand-in-hand. It's not a question of it costing, it really pays off
both in terms of employee loyalty and productivity as well as the bottom line.
Visit Small Dog
Electronics
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©Copyright 2008 MacTribe
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