Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management or Beasley Media Group. Entrepreneur, author and financial consultant, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing entrepreneurial business owners create a vision for the future and follow through on their goals and intentions. Ang Onorato is a business growth strategist who blends psychology and business together to create conscious leaders and business owners who impact the world. Founders Forum is a radio show podcast sharing the real stories behind entrepreneurship as founders discover more about themselves, while providing valuable lessons and some fun and entertainment for you. Now here's.

Marc Bernstein: 0:39

Marc and Ang. Good morning America. How are you today? We are here, we have a very interesting guest today and an interesting business, and Ang and I are here and before we get going we always have a topic of the day. And Ang brought one up that kind of came out of the blue and I'll let her introduce it and we'll talk about it.

Ang Onorato: 1:00

Yeah, so you know, I have a pretty decent drive into the studio and so I get time to just kind of think about things. And today I was thinking we talk to so many entrepreneurs I am one myself came from corporate into business and we talk a lot about quotes and inspirational things, but sometimes it's like you know, it's basic, it's how do we just avoid burning out? You know, when you're an entrepreneur you're kind of wearing many hats, you're burning the candle at all ends. And it dawned on me that one of the things that works for me is finding ways to kind of reinvent myself, my interests, my focus, different service offerings, whatever. And so we thought it would be a good topic today, because we do have a really interesting guest that sounds like I think he's reinvented himself and his business many times. So what about you, Marc? I know you've got many multifaceted thoughts on this too.

Marc Bernstein: 1:48

Well this originally came up. I should put in context that we were talking about the issue of burnout and how you avoid burnout, because you do see it, with entrepreneurs, with business leaders, with anything. Musicians we're going to talk a little bit about musicians today. You see it. Anything Musicians we're going to talk a little bit about musicians today. You see it, and I do, I think, but I so it's sort of reversed, like the answer to burnout, I know, for me has been the constant reinvention, recreation, creating new opportunities, new things to do, which is why I found my interest. You know I'm we're going to talk a little bit about music and musicians.

Marc Bernstein: 2:23

By background, I have creative streak. I went to law school. I was determined not to be a lawyer that did the same kind of work every day, like a lot of the lawyers out there, because I knew I would be bored doing that. And in the financial planning business I found a lot of creativity, new ways to do things. But even now, you know the way, a lot of my marketing and a lot of the way I meet people, as an example, through this podcast and through Manufacturing Group and some other things that I do, that have kept things interesting, I find to me they're the most interesting parts of my business and the people I meet. And we were talking this morning working on some new things, and the more you work on new things, I think, the less you have of that kind of issue. So our guest this morning is Darrell. I'll fully introduce him in a minute. But, Darrell, what occurs to you on this subject?

Darrell Jennings: 3:17

I think the thing that would strike me is do something that interests you, because you're not going to get burned out if it's something that you're passionate about. There's an awful lot of burnout, that really is because I'm going into the office every day. I'm doing the same thing every day and none of us like to do that and none of us like to do that. So I think, finding an area of business that you feel like you can make a contribution to others that have a shared passion, and to do something that's fascinating for you and makes you feel good after you've accomplished it.

Marc Bernstein: 4:02

And I think you are doing that today. So Darrell Jennings great time to introduce him is co-founder and CEO of American Music Furniture Company and I have to say I'm a musician for most of my life and never thought much about music furniture before we had a conversation, as I'm sure many people didn't, so we'll talk about that. So he had a career in IT and telecommunications and following that he co-founded American Music Furniture Company with his brother-in-law, roger Horneff, and brought in additional partners John Farrell and Matt Warner, who joined the company as it grew to become the premier solution to preserve and display guitars and classical stringed instruments, which is something that then I heard that and I said well, that makes sense, but there's reasons for it and it's almost necessity, especially for professional level musicians. So let's start with your story, Darrell, because I know it started with your guitar playing in garage bands somewhere around 11 years old, which is very similar to the age I did it and it evolved into this. Let's talk about how that happened, sure.

Darrell Jennings: 5:11

Correct. I started playing guitar when I was 11. Like a lot of kids in my generation, the Beatles came out and everybody had to play guitar. But I stayed with it over the years and when we moved to Pennsylvania in 1997, I had a few guitars and a couple of nice acoustic guitars. And the first winter that I spent in Pennsylvania I had guitar tops crack. I was devastated. Guitar tops crack, I was devastated.

Darrell Jennings: 5:51

It was something that could be repaired but you knew it was there and if you knew what to look for you could find it. So I contacted my friend Kent Everett, down in Atlanta. There was a well-known luthier and he has since retired. But he wisely advised me Darrell, you got to get serious about humidification. You know you don't live in Texas anymore. You do get cold winters and it gets really dry.

Darrell Jennings: 6:16

And wood you can think of it more or less like a one-way sponge. As humidity comes into the wood it expands. As it dries, it contracts, but it does a lot more expansion across the grain of the wood than it does along the length of the wood. And when you build something in order to make a guitar strong, you've got wood grain going different directions. So if it gets really dry or really damp, it starts pulling itself apart. So if it gets really dry or really damp, it starts pulling itself apart and that damage can sometimes be repaired.

Darrell Jennings: 7:05

But if you've got valuable musical instruments and a lot of our customers have guitars that are worth tens or hundreds, in some cases even millions of dollars that damage can have a dramatic impact in the value of the instrument. I know many people that are wealthy business people, doctors and lawyers that have beautiful guitar collections and they look at them just as seriously as their stock portfolios. If you look at what's happened to the collectible vintage acoustic guitars since COVID, it's probably one of the better places to have put your money. So being able to properly care for them and keep them at the correct level of humidity can make a very, very big difference in how well that guitar is going to hold up and preserving the value of your investment.

Marc Bernstein: 7:44

So that talks about the need. What brought you to actually start the company?

Darrell Jennings: 7:49

Well, I tried over the years that I was working in my technology career to keep guitars humidified different ways. There's some things that you can do in a guitar case that are adequate if you've got maybe one or two guitars. But if you've got more than that become problematic. Tried humidifying a room, humidifying a whole house. Those have varying degrees of success. But, as you've probably seen, in any house that's got too much humidity in it, in the wintertime you start getting a lot of water on the inside of the windows. The woodwork starts deteriorating. So I had retired, I thought, from my career. My brother-in-law-.

Ang Onorato: 8:34

You reinvented, you didn't retire.

Darrell Jennings: 8:35

I reinvented. My brother-in-law was over. He also played guitar.

Marc Bernstein: 8:39

I was going to say you re-fired instead of retired. That's right.

Darrell Jennings: 8:44

And we were playing one afternoon and it was around the end of the winter season and I was bemoaning the hassle that it was to try and humidify this room. And I said you know, we don't really need to humidify the room if we just humidify where the guitars are. And he looked at me and said we can do that. So we started digging into it. We did a lot of research over about a six-month period on the different kinds of humidifiers that were available. My brother-in-law had owned a furniture store in New Jersey at one time and knew a lot more about woodwork than I did. So he came up with the designs that basically we still use today in terms of grain orientation of the wood and building the cabinet in a way that it can withstand the humidity changes. And there's some real engineering challenges. When you've got 45% humidity inside a piece of furniture and maybe 15% in the room, it's something that has to be accounted for when you're designing and building the furniture. You know he helped me do that and we basically went into business and started building them in my garage for the first couple of years and it was just the two of us. Then John Farrell joined, I think in about 18 months and bought into the business. So we had a little bit of extra capital to work with and we went from there.

Darrell Jennings: 10:14

But we didn't invent the cabinets. There were a few people if you did an internet search back then that were doing them, but it looked like everybody was kind of doing them on their own, you know, as a home-based business, and I had never seen one advertised. So we took out advertising in print and in social media because I thought, well, nobody's going to Google you if they don't know your product exists. Nobody's going to Google you if they don't know your product exists. So we needed to really educate the public that hey, here's a way of caring for your guitars. And the orders started coming in and, you know, began building a backlog. We were able to start the business on a very modest amount of money, just because when somebody's buying a custom piece of furniture, they pay a deposit and you know that gives you a lot of working capital in terms of buying the wood and electronics and the other things that we needed.

Ang Onorato: 11:12

So it's so interesting that you I love that you do marketing to kind of educate your. You know target market and the everyday, you know person that has a guitar, but you've also attracted some very high profile customers as well. So I don't know if we want to talk about that has a guitar, but you've also attracted some very high-profile customers as well. So I don't know if we want to talk about that after the break, but we'd love to kind of get into that story too. How did you expand? I'm sure some of the people that you work with may not be on social media looking for what you produce, or maybe they did, I'm not sure.

Darrell Jennings: 11:38

Well, I guess a couple of ways. One is I had met and become friends with Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi just through a personal contact, and so they were one of the early adopters and were kind enough to let us use their photo with one of our cabinets in an ad, established relationships with Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville and Rudy's Music in New York, which are two kind of destination music stores that a lot of you know, very well-known musicians go to, and you know we had our cabinets in their stores and you know they saw them, and so we were able to get a number of so you put samples actually out in the stores.

Marc Bernstein: 12:27

Yes, okay, gotcha.

Darrell Jennings: 12:28

Yeah, we thought, well, you know, these guys are not furniture stores. So we would do an arrangement where we owned the piece of furniture and we would ultimately sell it, but we wanted to keep it there in the store for a year or so. Ultimately, let somebody buy it, and then we'll get you another one. Ultimately, let somebody buy it and then we'll get you another one. And, of course, as we're building these over the years, we're making them better and better.

Marc Bernstein: 12:51

Do you still do that? Do you still keep the samples in the stores?

Darrell Jennings: 12:59

We've got a few stores where we've got samples around the country, but we've really gone more now to an affiliate program where we can tie their website directly into ours and we're able to serve them much better that way and makes for a smoother channel of market for us.

Marc Bernstein: 13:16

Nice. We have just about one minute before commercial, any interesting stories, celebrity people you can talk about that have purchased your.

Darrell Jennings: 13:29

Well, jason Isbell is a customer. He actually bought one off the floor at Carter Vintage. Walter Carter called me up one day and said well, jason Isbell just came in and he wants a cabinet, but he wants this cabinet. Like well, he just won a Grammy. So, yes, absolutely, sell him that cabinet, we'll build you another one. And not too long after that he bought a very famous 1959, I believe it is Les Paul called Red Eye, and so we ultimately built a cabinet for Red Eye as well. That was just a single guitar cabinet.

Marc Bernstein: 14:11

Interesting. Well, with that, it's great timing because it's time for a commercial and we'll be right back on Founders Forum.

Announcer: 14:17

Vintage and fine luthier-made guitars and stringed instruments often increase in value. Recently they've outperformed many other investment vehicles, but preservation is critical to maintain the value of fine musical instruments. American Music Furniture creates handcrafted furniture to display, preserve and access your musical instruments. At the spark of creativity, their products include luxury guitar stands, wall hangers, humidity-controlled display cabinets, equipment, storage, custom built-ins and more. Clients include well-known professional musicians, as well as individual and corporate collectors of fine musical instruments worldwide. If you own fine guitars or similar stringed instruments, preserve them for your use and continue to achieve maximum value on the resale market. To learn more, contact American Music Furniture about your music room design or visit their website at americanmusicfurniture. com.

Marc Bernstein: 15:15

We're back on Founders Forum, Darrell. Before the break we started talking about your successes and the things that happened and some celebrity customers that you have. I'm sure, like all businesses, it wasn't a straight line to success. I'm sure, like all businesses, it wasn't a straight line to success. I'm sure there were challenges along the way. What kind of things did you face that got in the way of your success initially?

Darrell Jennings: 15:40

The main things that we were focused on from early on really were building a very high quality product. So you know we were constantly working on our finishing technique on the woods that would work best for the cabinets. We actually got a patent filed and was awarded for a door design, because when you have humidity inside the cabinet that's greater than the humidity outside, it can cause the door to warp. And we contacted our finishing supplier and said, well, what can we do to prevent this? And they said, well, nothing. So we thought, well, if we can't keep the humidity out of the door, maybe we can encourage it to get into the door further, because the problem was where the dry air and the moist air met. So if you can push that closer to the surface of the wood, it's less of a problem. So we did a door design that helped mitigate that. So I won't say we've never had anything work, because anyone that's ever worked with wood. It's an organic material.

Marc Bernstein: 16:42

That will happen, but it certainly cut way, way way down on it Interesting, so necessity, was the mother way, way down on it Interesting, so necessity, was the mother of invention, in that case, Absolutely, and we also continued to look for technology that would work well on our cabinets.

Darrell Jennings: 17:02

We offer a dehumidifier. That is a membrane that was originally built by Mitsubishi that when you run an electrical current through it, it will take H2O on one side of the membrane and basically break that apart and push the hydrogen out the back and that lowers the humidity in the cabinet when you do that and that lowers the humidity in the cabinet when you do that. So for people that were in tropical environments, for example, we've got customers in places like Singapore and Australia where their problem isn't humidifying more, it's you need to humidify less, and we've been able to accomplish that. We've actually been working with Hard Rock Cafe because they've got some problems with their stage clothing molding in tropical locations. So they tested one of our cabinets and said, yeah, this does the job, so we're hoping to get some more business from their locations.

Marc Bernstein: 18:03

I would think they'd have a need. In regard to their guitar, they have some expensive guitars in there as well.

Darrell Jennings: 18:08

Well, they do. But again, it depends on, well, where are these located? Are they in tropical places or cold places?

Ang Onorato: 18:14

Which many of them are, or the desert, or you know whatever. Yeah.

Marc Bernstein: 18:18

Well, we've got hard rocks around here. We certainly have humidity around here, that is true, that is true. So, not to dwell on the celebrity aspect of this, but I am curious, you said there were million-dollar guitars plus million dollars. Have you worked with any of those kind of people, and are they more investors or more celebrity players?

Darrell Jennings: 18:39

Well, yeah, typically they're more investors. Most of the people that are making a living with a guitar aren't taking those wildly expensive instruments out on the road. It's too dangerous to have them stolen or get damaged. But, yes, we've done cabinets for some wealthy individuals that you know.

Darrell Jennings: 19:05

I remember doing a delivery to a gentleman here in Pennsylvania and you know, walked into his music room and there were well, there was one guitar that I know was over a million dollars sitting on a stand and that was only one of many, many guitars that he had. So you know, if you've got a big investment in guitars, this is a great way of really taking care of them and we really look at what we do is it's like putting a frame on a painting If you've got a very expensive, very nice painting, you're not going to go down to the local frame shop and get something cheap to put on it. We want to build a cabinet that is at a quality level and quality of finish and materials and everything that's going to complement what's going inside, and I think that our customers appreciate that and it's helped us both in closing sales but just in getting our company known as a brand.

Marc Bernstein: 20:02

So I know you're growing, and let's talk about your three-year vision. If this were May of 2027 and you were looking back on the last three years, what would have to happen, darrell, for you to feel like that was a successful three-year period, personally and or in your business?

Darrell Jennings: 20:20

Well, we have seen our. We saw our ability to grow kind of cap a couple of years ago, and it was not that we weren't getting more demand. It was just a matter of how quickly could we build these using the techniques that we had started with in our garage in our first couple of shops. And so we decided if we're going to really make a change, we've got to come up with a better, faster way of building these without impacting quality, or, if we did, impact quality to make it better rather than worse. So we've just moved to a new manufacturing model.

Darrell Jennings: 20:57

Over the last few months, our cabinets in the first quarter were all done at a new facility and at the same time we are now opening a showroom design studio, because over the last several years a lot of our biggest projects have been built-ins. So we'll get someone that's renovating a house. We're doing one in Palm Springs now. That will be for 80 guitars and that's not something where you're going to have a piece of furniture they fit in. This is doing a whole wall, and what we're really trying to do over the next three years is to continue to grow that side of the business but also bring out more products that fit in the music room.

Darrell Jennings: 21:39

Today we do the, obviously, the guitar habitats that are basically pieces of furniture that hold guitars and guitar states, but we also do guitar stands. We're doing a very high-end, really beautiful guitar hanger and we do chairs built by George Nakashima Woodworkers and have offered those. But anything that's going into a music room, whether it's for media storage, storing instruments, whatever it might be, that's part of the experience of playing and enjoying music. We want to be able to provide that to our clients, either directly, by building it ourselves, or by licensing other people's designs, which we've done in a couple of cases already or working with third parties, the way we work with Nakashima.

Ang Onorato: 22:31

I was just going to ask you how you you know we talked a little bit before the show about how you have found the people that have now become part of the company. You know, how do you bring them in, so I'd love to hear that real quickly. But it sounds like, based on this vision and the different applications of this, of your products, I'm almost thinking you need to grow much, much bigger. So, you know, I'd love to hear you comment on that, like, what's your vision in terms of, or, you know, how have you attracted the people that you have? And then, how do you see being able to not just from the manufacturing side, but just bringing enough of that craftsmanship to, to be able to attend to all of those things that you're mentioning?

Darrell Jennings: 23:07

Well, I find that creatives find each other and we've certainly seen that. Our art director we hired from BDDW, which is a very high-end furniture maker here in Philly, and she came in and I think she'd been there about two days and said, well, when can I start critiquing the finish now? And uh, she quickly took over finishing and the finishing got dramatically better. Uh, and then she, you know, began staging the photo shoots and doing the photo shoots herself. Uh, she came to us on LinkedIn, you know, just approached me on LinkedIn, said I think what you're doing is cool. You know, can I come talk to you?

Darrell Jennings: 23:49

The guy that's doing our sales and marketing is an SEO expert, but he's a guitar player. He'd been following us on Instagram We've got, between Instagram and Facebook, about 50,000 followers and you know he loved what we're doing and he actually put together a plan showing us here's how I can help you grow your company. And he came in and he actually walked in the door on a day that we were looking at. You know, do we need to lay off some people? Because sales had gotten a little soft for a few months and I had to call a board meeting and say, well, we've decided to hire someone, like what? But it worked.

Darrell Jennings: 24:25

You know he came in and really helped us redo the website and get more people finding us. So what? I want to be able to offer custom solutions so that if you get the client that's got 80 or 100 guitars, we can do a solution for them as well. And you know we do that now. But you know, with opening a showroom and a design studio and having changed our manufacturing over the last few months, that's a lot to swallow all in one take. And you know I think this year we're going to feel good if all of those things are firing on all cylinders by the end of the year, and then the next two years are going to be about finding what are the things we add to the portfolio and what are the best ways to reach out to customers both in the US as well as around the world.

Marc Bernstein: 25:28

What do you imagine you'll need? You mentioned adding people. How many people do you imagine you'll need to add over the next three years for that to happen, for you to accomplish that vision?

Darrell Jennings: 25:38

You know, at this point we're just adding people as we find we really need to. You know, at the moment we aren't doing any hiring because we've got enough people to accomplish what we're trying to do. But if we see that there is a need or that someone is out there, you know, we can certainly work with them, either on an individual contractor basis or as an employee. We've done that in the past.

Marc Bernstein: 26:03

So we have a minute left to ask you our closing round questions. Time flies, as we always say when we're having fun on the show, which we do. First, your legacy. You know you're creating something really unique here. You had a great career in IT. What do you think about? What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind?

Darrell Jennings: 26:20

Well, two things. One is, I should say, leap forward. There are today, you know, something in the range of six to 8,000 guitars out there that are being preserved in cabinets that we built. That wouldn't have existed had we not gone out my garage at my brother-in-law's encouragement and started this. The fact that people be making music on those guitars after I'm gone, that's a good legacy for me. The other legacy is, you know, I'm the old guy in the company now and I love that. We are a company of young people, young creatives, and it keeps me young, helping with something that they really are moving the yardsticks on, and I just look forward to their success, because that's my legacy is, I help to bring those people together and give them a venue to explore their own creative passions.

Marc Bernstein: 27:16

It's a wonderful way to look at it and speaking young people. If you could speak to your younger self, what advice would you give you?

Darrell Jennings: 27:25

Do this sooner. You know I seem to do everything in life backwards. Do what interests you I think many of us do.

Marc Bernstein: 27:32

You mentioned earlier. Do what interests you. Do what interests you sooner.

Darrell Jennings: 27:38

You know, don't be like Darrell. Don't go out and start a company at 60 years old. It's been fun, but you know it would have been even more fun if I had done it at 30 or 40.

Marc Bernstein: 27:49

That's great advice to yourself and to everybody listening, and with that we thank you all for being Founders Forum today and we're going to close out our show and look forward to seeing you next week.