Bonus Episode: I Didn’t Appreciate It Until I Almost Lost It

Introduction:

This week, in a special bonus episode, Greg Wittstock, founder of Aquascape, explains how he invented the backyard pond industry, how he improvised a business model, and how he almost lost it all. After failing at franchising, Wittstock decided to give away his pond building expertise and marketing to landscape contractors in what he calls “a franchise system without a franchise fee.” And it worked. Always candid to a fault, he recounts how the business shot to $59 million in annual sales, why it then stagnated for 10 years, and what he ultimately figured out about social media marketing. Plus: he also explains why his first rule of customer service is: Don’t give them what they ask for. Give them what they want.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Greg Wittstock is founder and CEO of Aquascape.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
I want to welcome you, Greg Wittstock. It is so great to talk to you today. We go back a long time. I met you after the great Bo Burlingham did a cover story about you for Inc. magazine that I was fortunate enough to work on as well, as an editor. We met soon thereafter. We did a couple of panel sessions at an Inc. 500 conference. I don’t know if you remember that.

Greg Wittstock:
Oh, absolutely. That was a great time, and I really enjoyed that entire experience with you and with Bo. That was a very exciting time. And who knew that we are on the precipice of disaster with 2008 coming up a few years down the road from that?

Loren Feldman:
A lot has happened since then. That’s for sure. But before we get into some of that, and I do want to get into some of that, give me a snapshot. Where does Aquascape stand today? How big is the business? How do you describe what Aquascape does today?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, this started out of my passion for turtles, fish, and frogs. I built my first pond back in 1982 and made every every possible problem with that. I went to the library because, of course, this was well before the age of the internet. And all of the books that told you to build ponds were from England and Japan, and they said to make it out of concrete. My first pond made out of concrete leaked, turned green, and even my prize turtles migrated away, Loren, and that was the beginning of my Odyssey. But I was completely not dissuaded with my hobby, and after seven years of ripping out and rebuilding my first pond, that’s when neighbors and relatives started to come over to look at it.

And one day, the UPS guy delivered a package to the front door. I said come around back, and I was in my yard messing with my pond, and he said, “I’d love to have one of these at my house.” And I said, “I can do that.” And so back when I was a junior at Ohio State University, I started Aquascape up. I told my mom and dad all I needed was a strong back, a wheelbarrow, and a shovel, and that I already had a strong back from playing football. And that winter, I got a wheelbarrow shell beneath a Christmas tree. And in 1991, Aquascape was formed as a summertime fun job as I was going through college.

Loren Feldman:
So initially, you were building the pools yourself, how long did that last?

Greg Wittstock:
That was the first two seasons, so 1991 and 1992. I had done a total of 17 water features in those two years. And then on August 2 of 1992, 11 years before the article came out in Inc. magazine, that’s when my business really took off because of the article that I had in the Chicago Tribune. I had hundreds of people calling, and I ended up selling 81 jobs. And that’s when my fun summertime gig became my career. My dad came into the business, which was part of the Inc. magazine article, because there was a lot of family tension back then.

The business really exploded from there, resupplying other contractors to build water features, and that’s through that infamous run from ‘99 through 2002 with Inc. 500 recognition four years in a row and then kind of prevailing with the 2003 article. I think to this day, Loren, I might be the only entrepreneur that’s been on the cover of Inc. magazine with my shirt off, swimming with my fish in my pond.

Loren Feldman:
That’s probably a pretty good bet.

Greg Wittstock:
Yeah. I don’t know if you know this, or remember this, but they shot that in the summer but they didn’t like the lighting. And so they came back to shoot the same picture in October—in Chicago in October, the water is not very warm—I sat in that water for an hour, freezing my you-know-what off, and after all was said and done, they used the original picture. And I’m like, “That’s just so typical.”

Loren Feldman:
You know what, I knew that story—except for the we-used-the-orginal-picture part.

Greg Wittstock:
They used the original. I’m like, “Wow. So typical.”

Loren Feldman:
That is too funny, sort of. At some point you shifted from being predominantly about making the pools to supplying people who make the pools. When did that happen?

Greg Wittstock:
Yes. So, from ‘91 through ‘94, I was just building ponds for other people. Landscape contractors started subcontracting The Pond Guy out to build the ponds, and then they saw how I was doing it. And they said, “Hey, we’d like to try this. Can we buy the products?” And so I ended up getting a U.S. patent at 24, in 1994, for my mechanical skimmer and biological filter for the ponds. And then in 1995, in April, I ended up mailing 26,000 catalogs to a rented list from Dun & Bradstreet. And I think that year I did $191,000 in mail order business, and $424,000 of installs. But the writing was on the wall, because the next year, I did $1.9 million in mail order, and then it just took off from there.

Loren Feldman:
And where are you today? What’s your focus now?

Greg Wittstock:
The focus now is we still build ponds. We like to say we’re the only manufacturer of water feature equipment in the world that actually is out there every day—that’s our R&D department—building water features. Everybody else just makes a widget and says, “Buy it.” Aquascape had a peak sales of $59 million back in 2007. In 2008, we lost $12 million of top line revenue, and we went down all the way to almost $30 million. And we’ve been building it up ever since. And we were ahead of budget for the first quarter of 2022 with an estimated revenue of $72.5 million.

Loren Feldman:
Wow, how many employees do you have?

Greg Wittstock:
About 130, which, ironically, is less than we had back in 2007 when we did even less in sales, but our model’s changed. We’re no longer a mail-order business. We go through distribution. We have call center support, obviously warehouse distribution, the construction business, and everything else, but the primary business is resupplying contractors all over the world—from Australia to England to Africa—our patented products to build ponds.

Loren Feldman:
So what percentage of your business is selling products, versus the installation of an actual pond?

Greg Wittstock:
Oh, geez. $3 million is the local market of $72 million, so whatever that is. Yeah, that’s our R&D. And Loren, what’s really cool is Aquascape has transitioned. Back in the day, we’d mail order, and you could mail catalogs and everything, and people would actually look at the mail, versus just get junk mail. We had a kind of dead period there right after ‘08 for a while, but now with social media, we’re a very, very strong-driven social media company with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok.

Loren Feldman:
That’s your marketing?

Greg Wittstock:
That is the marketing. And as the CEO—this is my 31st year in business—I would say the majority of my personal time is spent on the creation of social media.

Loren Feldman:
I talk to business owners all the time, and I think marketing in general—social media in particular—are such pain points. People struggle with it so much. What have you figured out?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, listen, we caught lightning in the bottle back in the late 90’s when we had our mail-order business. And then, of course, with the recession that happened in ‘08, there also was kind of a downturn in direct mail marketing. And until probably the last three or four years, we didn’t really have a repeatable system like we do now, which is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. And so now it’s just a machine that just keeps growing. Because the nice thing is, we have unlimited content, because we still build ponds. And my primary time is spent visiting my top customers and vlogging, which is basically the way to capture things on YouTube, vlogging their projects.

And I love it, because I get to travel—it’s still my hobby—see beautiful water features, connect with the customers, visit my end consumer, the people who are actually living with the water features. And so for me, it’s a great investment of my time. And I’m not a classic entrepreneur. I’m not good at managing people. So I have a president that runs the place, which is why I’m talking to you right now from Utah, because I’m living out in Utah most of the time now that we’ve got a house out here.

Loren Feldman:
They keep you out of the way. Is that the idea?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, when I’m in the office, yes. I really don’t have a job at the office besides high-fiving everybody and doing the first job of the CEO, which is to guide and guard the company culture. But I do that more and more now from on the road and through social media, because I’m not in the office very much.

Loren Feldman:
Do you need to differentiate the videos you’re creating? Or can you just go to a different pond that you’ve installed every day and create a video and post it on multiple channels? Is that enough?

Greg Wittstock:
No, we do differentiate. Yeah, that’s a good question. So my channel is Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy on YouTube and Facebook and TikTok and Instagram, and I’m really about the lifestyle. So I’m basically showing the beauty shots. The Team Aquascape is the construction show, so it shows how we build these water features. And then we even have Ed the Pond Professor, which is the Science Guy, and then we have the corporate channel, which is just Aquascape, Inc.

So all four of those different social media channels—whether it’s Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook—they kind of follow the line of what the focus of the audience would be. Because sometimes we have consumers looking at it, sometimes we have contractors, sometimes architects, so they can follow whatever channels that they want to, but each one appeals to a specific type of audience that is interested in a specific type of thing.

Loren Feldman:
So the videos about how you actually build and construct these ponds, would those be watched primarily by do-it-yourselfers or by contractors?

Greg Wittstock:
Yeah, and that would be Team Aquascape. So I don’t cover that on Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy, because I thought I’d do the finished beauty shots.

Loren Feldman:
How do you measure the return on investment? How do you know what’s working?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, that’s a good question. There is a somewhat subjective relationship to how many total subscribers and views you get. That’s one way to look at it. But the biggest thing that we have is, we’re kind of like the Air Force doing all the national marketing. And we promote our certified Aquascape contractor network. We see the increase in monthly click-throughs, through finding a certified contractor on our website. And then we hear tons of positive reinforcement from our certified Aquascape contractors, saying, “Hey, our phones are ringing off the hook. People are watching your vlogs and finding them, and then they’re hiring us,” which is, of course, the ultimate goal.

Loren Feldman:
Do you see a big difference, in terms of how many views your videos get? Especially yours—the ones that you make, specifically. Is there a big difference depending on what type of pond it is, or whether the person you built it for is a celebrity?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, we call those collaborations. So anytime we get a celebrity build—to this day, our biggest single video was Shaquille O’Neal. Well, that’s one of the top guys out there, from a marketing perspective. And we shot a number of videos now, and pictured him with his Aquascape water feature at his house down in Georgia, where he’s on TNT. But there’s other celebrities that we do, and there’s also a lot of digital influencers. So these are guys who might have aquarium channels, or reptile channels, or gardening channels. And when we build them a pond, obviously we’re going to get exposure to their audiences. And we see a lot more views on collaboration videos than we do just in the generic videos.

But then, every once in a while, Loren, it’ll get to the YouTube algorithm or the Facebook or Instagram algorithm, and it will go viral. Just a regular post. And really, on those, there is no rhyme or reason. It’s just that we happened to hit the right formula and the right day and got shared by the right amount of people. And then all of a sudden, that video goes viral, and it’s got over a million views in a week.

Loren Feldman:
What impact did the pandemic have on you?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, this is interesting, because when we were talking about setting up this call, you had predicted—correctly—that it would be positive for our business that specializes in people’s yards.

Loren Feldman:
People staying at home but wanting to get outside.

Greg Wittstock:
Yeah. So $72 million will be our record year for sales, and it’s because of social media, where people are finding us, but it’s also because people are investing in their properties. I think anything to do with home improvement right now, whether you’re a carpenter or an electrician or a plumber or a pond builder, it’s positive because people are investing in their properties.

Loren Feldman:
What about in terms of the manufacturing side of it? Do you make the products you sell yourself? Or do you outsource that?

Greg Wittstock:
Yes, it’s all our tools and dyes and our products. Unfortunately, we cannot keep anything in stock—or I shouldn’t say anything—but a huge proportion of our stuff is a challenge to get. I mean, everything from raw materials to labor shortages to we’re just outstripping our tooling. So we’ve been forced to pivot a little bit in the last six months and bring in-house a lot of the finishing of our plastic products. If it’s big and bulky, it’s domestic. If it’s electronic and small, it’s Asia.

The factories over in Asia, they’re huge. They’re producing our specified pumps with our tools and dyes, and they’re doing the same thing in the States, but as you know, there’s a big labor crunch right now, and so we’ve added shifts. So we have shifts that work before work, after work. So we’ve got three shifts going, just to finish the tooling of the products that come in, just on the finishing products. But one of my favorite quotes, Loren, is, “All business is is fixing problems.” And these are good problems to have where we barely can keep up with demand.

Loren Feldman:
Have you tried to bring back some of the manufacturing in Asia to this country, just to avoid the shipping issues?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, it’s not just the shipping, with the 25 percent surcharge. Domestic pump manufacturers currently still don’t exist. Right now, they’re looking at India and Vietnam to replace China with the tariffs, but there’s no real domestic manufacturing going on of those small electronic-type things like that in the States. So basically, the only thing that we produce—which is the majority of our products, from a dollar standpoint—are our filters, the plastics, the rubbers, the liners of the ponds. All that stuff is manufactured domestically. But then there’s raw material shortages. And so it’s, like I said, “All business is is fixing problems.” If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Loren Feldman:
But if I remember from Bo Burlingham’s story, I think one of the things that you built the business on was the notion that you never wanted to have backorder problems. Am I right?

Greg Wittstock:
You have a very good memory. We used to fly our flag at half mast if we didn’t have the product in stock. Two things have changed with that. One, we are no longer directly supplying the customers out there. It’s almost done exclusively through distribution. So hopefully, the distributor …

Loren Feldman:
What does that mean? Who do you sell to then?

Greg Wittstock:
You’re talking about wholesale places that landscape contractors would buy products from, whether they’re rock yards or irrigation houses—places where a contractor and a local market would go to buy wholesale materials. So we have over 500 distribution points just in America alone that have our products in stock. So sometimes those products are out of stock there, and we have to resupply them. But our goal is to always have our products in the marketplace.

When we sold direct and we had direct-to-contractor sales, we would fly the flag at half mast if we were out of a product. We don’t have the ability to do that anymore, because we don’t have the optics to the end consumer because we’re going through distribution. And our goal is just to keep the product line filled up for our customers, because as you would probably expect, when a contractor needs a product, he’s not ordering it a month in advance. He needs it now.

Loren Feldman:
Right. So one of the really fascinating things about Bo’s story way back when was that you figured out that, for your business to succeed, you had to help lots of other businesses succeed. You are selling your products to contractors who, if they couldn’t make a profit installing one of your pools with your products, they weren’t going to succeed and you weren’t going to succeed. So you started teaching them, running seminars around the country, doing whatever you could to make sure that they not only knew the mechanics of how to install the pool, but knew how to do it and turn a profit. Has that gone away? Do you not have to do that anymore?

Greg Wittstock:
Oh, no. We are. Of course, it’s a different world now. We have the Aquascape University online so people can get electronic communications. We have Pondemonium every year. People come in from all over the world for Pondemonium. We’ve been virtual the last two years. We’re excited in August of this year to be live in person again.

Loren Feldman:
Tell us what Pondemonium is.

Greg Wittstock:
Pondemonium is a basically tribal gathering of contractors and retailers from all over the world who would come and make the pilgrimage to Chicagoland where we’re at. And basically, this is where the seminars get taught—everything from how to build a pond to how to do your back-end office and financials and everything else. So our basic philosophy was: When you purchase from Aquascape, it’s a franchise system without a franchise fee. So it’s everything that would go into running a successful business, and we use the blueprint and the model of our $3 million local market construction, maintenance, and retail stores for people to pattern themselves off of. So we’re constantly educating and updating on that, not just through the social things, but through back-end logistics like a website or a portal for them to go on and do their e-learning and then events like Pondemonium.

Loren Feldman:
So even though you’re selling to distributors now, you ultimately do feel as though your business depends on the success of those contractors.

Greg Wittstock:
Oh, distributors are hands-off. They’re basically selling our nuts and bolts, and I’m dealing directly with the contractors, the retailers, and the consumers out there who are carrying our products and buying our products and living the Aquascape lifestyle. So 1 percent of my energy is around distribution, because it’s just basically fulfillment, and 99-point-something percent of my energy is around creating a demand for my product, educating the customers that are going to do it properly. My goal is to create demand for my products and then success for the people installing them.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve never heard anybody refer to a franchise business without the franchise fee before. It almost sounds like an oxymoron. It sounds like a failed business. I mean, why would you want to have a franchise system without the fee, and presumably, without the contracts guaranteeing that people are going to pay you? You’re providing the education without the certainty that somebody is actually going to use your product.

Greg Wittstock:
That’s correct.

Loren Feldman:
How does that work?

Greg Wittstock:
So technically, they could take all of the benefits of us teaching them and training them and everything else, and buy a competitor’s product. But then you have a little thing called brand. You know, when I started in this industry, Loren, there really was no water feature industry. People were, of course, building concrete ponds and going to Home Depot and going to spa stores and jimmy-rigging up filter systems for a pond. But when I started Aquascape, there was no manufacturer of professional grade pond equipment out there. So we’ve not only created the product, but we showed them the process to install our system.

And it’s 20 products and 20 steps, whether it’s a fountainscape, or a pond, or a pondless waterfall. Whatever these decorative water features are that we’re installing, there’s a methodology behind it. You can technically swap our filters for someone else’s filters. But there’s no training. There’s no education behind that, because they’re not actually installing the product. So when I say Aquascape is the only manufacturer of water feature equipment in the world that has a full-time R&D department building and designing and retailing water features and maintaining them, we truly are. So, really 95 of the top 100 water feature builders in the world are using Aquascape systems.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. So you know, it seems obvious today that this has worked, but the notion when you first tried it of providing that education and not requiring somebody to pay you a franchise fee or lock in the purchases through a contract—did you have doubts about whether that would work? What gave you the confidence to create that business model?

Greg Wittstock:
In 1994, I spent all of my profits from 1993—which was at the time $50,000—and invested with a company out of Indiana called Francorp, which was basically a company that helps you set your franchise up. And I spent all my money, and then I said, “Okay, I’m gonna have to make my very first two sales successful, because I need to show that this model is replicable.” So I went to Columbus, Ohio, where I had relationships, having graduated from that school. And I remember talking to a landscape contractor. I talked to a few of them, and I narrowed it down to one guy—a fairly large business, couple million-dollar company—that would be a good representative for Aquascape as our first franchisee.

And then I told him, “Listen, this cost me $50,000 to get these two giant binders, which are systems operations procedures on how to run an Aquascape franchise system. Here’s your ZIP codes that I would give you through this acquisition. And instead of charging you $100,000 or even $50,000, which is my cost, I’m going to charge you $25,000. And then you’re going to get me to make sure that your model is successful, because I want to be able to use you as a poster child for other franchisees.” And he said, “Great, you’ve got a deal. And I went to shake his hand—his name was Rick—and before I could pull it away, he goes, “That does include your F150 truck, too, doesn’t it?”

And Loren, I’m telling you, in a split second I realized right then and there that my idea of taking my unique knowledge, my patented products, and selling limited franchises based on ZIP codes, I would not be able to be successful. Because contractors don’t have $25,000, $50,000, let alone $100,000 sitting in their pocket ready to burn a hole in it waiting for a franchise opportunity. And so I remember I’ve always had a lot of coaches in my life, and I went back to a guy who, at the time, was a partner at Arthur Andersen on the consulting side of the business, not the accounting side, which is now Accenture. And he said to me, Loren, the one thing that no entrepreneur, nobody that’s pissed off, wants to hear. And I told him, “My entire idea’s failed. These guys don’t have this kind of money sitting around. I wasted a year of my life and all my profits.” And he goes, “This will be a great lesson. There’s something that’s gonna come out of this.” And I was pissed off. I did not want to hear that.

And of course—his name was Lance Dickinson—he was correct. Because within six months, I had retooled the entire thing and said, “If I can’t sell it with exclusivity of territories, I’ll just give it away. And hopefully, they’ll buy my products.” Now, at the time, nobody was manufacturing professional grade products. But that’s always my philosophy: I’ll give it away, and hopefully they’ll buy it, because I can provide so much added value. And so far, so good. Like I said, 95 of the top 100 pond builders are with Aquascape.

Loren Feldman:
And that contractor, Rick, I mean, he must have had a truck, right?

Greg Wittstock:
He had lots of trucks. He had a fleet of trucks. I wouldn’t say we stayed in touch, but we’ve since seen each other since then, and he kicks himself. He goes, “Man, I should have got that. That would have been a good deal.” But I’m like, “I’m glad he didn’t, because if I would have sold him a franchise…” You know, failure is a great teacher, of course, just like my friend from Arthur Andersen told me. And instead of taking that contract and pushing a boulder up a hill and selling individual franchises, I gave it away and then let the same people in the same market, let the rising cream of the crop go to the top with whoever is going to be successful in that market. And that’s exactly how it works to this day.

And I call it a tribe. I’ll have multiple certified Aquascape contractors in a market, and they end up helping each other, because the pond’s done right, and the customer service is going to grow the pie, versus a pond done wrong and a customer served wrong. So certified Aquascape contractors, I have this great communal tribe of people who are all helping each other succeed in business. Because if the next guy is having success, then it’s going to just grow the pie and the awareness for what it is that we do with decorative water features.

Loren Feldman:
I know a lot of the education that you provided to contractors focused on the mechanics of building the pond. I know you had, I think, a 20-step process that you took people through, but it was also focused on doing things as efficiently as possible. If you can do it in one day, your profits are a lot better than if you do it in two days. Has that changed? Or are you still providing that kind of support to contractors?

Greg Wittstock:
Great questions. Back in the day, I used to travel to 60 cities every winter. I’d do five cities one week, four the next, and just crash for three days, traveling around doing my dog-and-pony show. I don’t do that anymore. Now they come to me. We have the Aquascape Academy online. We also have the Aquascape Academy in person, and I’m sitting there, Loren, 31 years after I started this business, and I’m telling them the exact same thing I told them 30 years ago—with 20 products and the 20 steps and, “Don’t give a customer what they asked for, give them what they want.” And nothing has changed.

Loren Feldman:
Wait, what does that mean: “Don’t give them what they asked for. Give them what they want,”?

Greg Wittstock:
It’s one of my favorite phrases. Because when a customer asks you as a professional coming to your house for something, what they’re really asking you for is your opinion. And if you give the customer what they asked for—a five-foot high waterfall in a flat backyard, because that’s what they asked for—more times than not, it’s going to look like a volcano spewing lava instead of a natural waterfall.

So what we say is, “Well, ma’am, we actually don’t recommend going above 24 inches in a flat backyard because it will look out of scale.” And every time you say this, and you show them the pictures, and you’re presenting yourself as a professional, they just say, “Okay,” and they go with you. But if you don’t have that confidence, that training, that understanding of things, and the customer says they want a five-foot waterfall in the flat backyard and you build it and it leaks and it looks like a volcano spewing lava and the customer is not happy, then it’s your butt in the sling. So the first rule of success with water features is, “Don’t give a customer what they asked for. Give them what they want.”

Loren Feldman:
You could make an argument that you’re kind of the Henry Ford of the pond industry. You figured out how to do this in a way that could be repeated and turned into an industrial solution. But you’ve had challenges along the way. You mentioned one of them from the Inc. article, and that was the relationship with your father, who helped you get off the ground, who ran the business with you. But then you guys had a falling out, and he actually went off and started a competing business at one point. How did that end up?

Greg Wittstock:
Well, wouldn’t we all love to have a crystal ball. We always think God has a sense of humor. But my dad was an engineer. He had a great skill-set, but I really believed in the vision—which is still strong to this day, which is about the lifestyle, living the Aquascape lifestyle. So where my dad focused on the engineering and the technical specifications of the water features, I focused on living the lifestyle. I said, “Listen, our customers aren’t going to want to putz around with their filters. They’re going to want a low-maintenance ecosystem water feature that they can have a glass of wine or a beer and sit with at the end of the day, or a cup of coffee in the morning, reading the paper.” And that was really the successful, winning approach.

So he went off and tried to really spend the time focused on the design and the engineering of the product, where I focused on living the lifestyle that, of course, happened to have a product as well. The push and the angle was not the product. The push and the angle was the lifestyle. So for nine years, we really didn’t talk. That Inc. article that came out really kind of exposed that relationship.

But that article came out in 2003, and in 2006, my dad called me and said, “You know, I’m ready to sell and join your team again.” So in 2006, we ended up purchasing his business, and my dad came back into the business. We put him exactly where he should have always been, which is well needed in the company, and he was on the engineering side of the business. And he did that for a couple years, and then went down to Florida, where he could play golf more and enjoy the weather. And he was bored down there, so he started Pondfather Water Features. And to this day, as a 77-year-old guy, he’s still out there building ponds down in Florida.

Loren Feldman:
That’s amazing. And your relationship was repaired?

Greg Wittstock:
One hundred percent. We do not talk business. We talk Buckeye football and photography. But yeah, our relationship is great today. Thank you.

Loren Feldman:
That’s great. I’m really glad to hear that. Talking about challenges, you had your heart set on building a $100 million company. And my recollection is that you kind of got ahead of yourself a little bit and got over-extended. Did that coincide with the recession period?

Greg Wittstock:
One hundred percent. This is where you also have a guy who has a sense of humor type of thing, like I said earlier. Because everything I touched turned to gold for the first 16 years. And then year 17, which was 2018, I did the exact same things I did in year 16, and I had $12 million less to show for it because the world changed. I’m gonna tell you the hardest thing was not just the downfall of the sales revenue back in 2018.

Loren Feldman:
Do you mean 2008?

Greg Wittstock:
2008, that’s what I mean. But it was 10 years, I would say, afterwards, where we didn’t really have a replicable machine, from a marketing standpoint. Because by that time, mail order had been done. Until social media really started taking off again, and things started growing again. So it’s just been the last few years. I had about a 10-year window where it was just kind of single-digit growth there. And now all of a sudden, it’s back to double digits again.

Loren Feldman:
I think you first started to struggle before the recession hit. Is that right?

Greg Wittstock:
No, in 2006, sales were $59 million, and in 2007, they were $59 million. So it was flat. So I had always had double-digit growth for the first 15 years. And then, the 16th year was flat, and the 17th year was 2008 when everything crashed.

Loren Feldman:
But you had a period where I think you brought on some new people and the culture changed a little bit.

Greg Wittstock:8
The biggest mistake that I made was I had only managed a company that had had double-digit growth. And so when things evened out in 2007, and then the wheels fell off the bus in 2008, I brought in a turnaround guy, and the turnaround guy had no connection to the teammates at Aquascape. I was unsure of myself. At the time, I would have been a 38-year-old kid. And I didn’t realize the importance of culture and team, even though I thought I did. And we brought an outsider in, and he didn’t know the people. And he was Chainsaw Al Dunlap, or whatever you would call it. And he lasted about a year and a half.

I saw what was happening to my team, and I met him for breakfast, and I let him go on the spot. And I’ve never looked back since then. I promoted my controller, who became my CFO, and she’s been my president now. She’s been with me for over 20 years, and she was the one who kind of financially guided us through the economic downfall. And she runs the show today. The managers report to her, but most of my management team, Loren, went through that period with me. So we’ve got a pretty strong management team that’s been there 20-plus years.

Loren Feldman:
You refer to him as a turnaround guy. What did you think was the problem he had to solve when you brought him in?

Greg Wittstock:
I had been used to managing a business that had double digit growth, that all of a sudden went flat, and then the wheels fell off. And I didn’t have the self-confidence nor the know-how to kind of manage the financial crisis. But my CFO, like I said, stepped up to the plate, which is why eventually, she replaced him quite soon after that in 2010, as the president.

I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a marketer. I’m a promoter. I’m a hobbyist. But now I believe I have that skill-set added to my repertoire, because I went through it. And certainly the team has that skill-set, because we’ve been through it. So we managed the downturn. We managed the grind, which was very difficult. 10 years of kind of flat sales. And now we’re enjoying the upside again, knowing that behind every mountain top there’s a valley.

Loren Feldman:
Tell me about the grind. How did that affect you? How frustrating was it that you couldn’t get back to the double-digit growth for 10 years?

Greg Wittstock:
I was scared in ‘08, and then I was frustrated from ‘10 through ‘18, or whatever. And it was because we were doing everything we possibly could, but I didn’t have a formula for bringing on new customers. Now, we’re beating them away with a stick, because we just have this incredible presence on social media. And people are finding us, and people are spending money and investing in their properties. So the bottom line is, we have a replicable marketing system, and we also have the demand for our products again, that was a little bit lulled with the economic downturn, and then people weren’t investing in their properties like they are today.

Loren Feldman:
How did you figure out the formula initially on social media? I mean, it’s not like social media didn’t exist before 2018.

Greg Wittstock:
Well, I guess, really, because it’s kind of the age of the influencers. I would say, in the last five years, Loren, is when digital influencers really started to pop up in big masses. They had something that I wanted, which was eyeballs. I had something which they wanted, which was water features, and I would exchange my water features for their eyeballs. And that exposure, I mean, I remember the first time I built a pond for Logan back in the end of 2017. I gained 10,000 subscribers overnight.

Loren Feldman:
So you kind of fell into it. It wasn’t a strategy initially. You just built a pond for the right person.

Greg Wittstock:
Well, I built a pond for the right person, and then I kept building ponds for the right people.

Loren Feldman:
Right, right.

Greg Wittstock:
And yeah, I didn’t come up with a strategy, but I said, “Vlogging is big.” So it was really the vlogging, and then the offshoots of the vlogging were the Instagram and the TikTok and Facebook. But kind of one hand washes the other. I mean, in the last month, I’ve gained over 500,000 new followers.

Loren Feldman:
Just in the last month.

Greg Wittstock:
In the last month. So I took my library of content on my YouTube channels, which I’ve now done over a thousand vlogs between those three channels, and I packaged it in a deal and sold it to a third party, who then repurposes it on Facebook, and they’ve been going gangfires—that only happened a month ago. And in the last month, I’ve gained half a million followers with past content: YouTube content edited for Facebook.

Loren Feldman:
You know, I’ve never heard of that: the idea of selling content that’s been up for a while to a third party that repackages it.

Greg Wittstock:
They edit it, so if I have a 10-to-12 minute video on YouTube, it’ll be a three-to-five minute video on Facebook. They put ads on it or they sell to advertisers.

Loren Feldman:
That’s how they make their money.

Greg Wittstock:
That’s how they make their money. And then, any money that comes from ad revenue is just icing on the cake. Of course, the cake for me is eyeballs to our content, which drives demand for our product.

Loren Feldman:
And that’s their business. They do this for other people as well, obviously.

Greg Wittstock:
Yes, that is their business. Yeah, it’s a firm out of France that has worldwide offices. And most YouTubers don’t have a presence on Facebook, because they tend to be younger. And it’s not just Facebook. It could be Snapchat, Instagram.

Loren Feldman:
And did you find them? Or did they find you?

Greg Wittstock:
This was kind of funny. I literally dropped my business card in at a conference, and they kept calling me, calling me, calling me. And I thought, “Whatever.” And then I had a buddy who I had built a pond for—another influencer with 3 million followers on YouTube—sign up with them. And he goes, “You gotta look into Jellysmack.” That’s the name of the company. So because he had such success, I basically returned an email from guys soliciting me from a trade show. We sold it for a couple hundred thousand dollars, our content. And now, when it went live, I’m winning because I’m getting new eyeballs. And they’re winning because they’re getting ad revenue.

Loren Feldman:
That’s really interesting.

Greg Wittstock:
This is why content is so important too, because it’s evergreen marketing. A pond that I built or videotaped five years ago, someone’s going to find for the first time this year, and that past work is going to pay dividends now.

Loren Feldman:
So what’s your thinking today? There was a time when you were convinced that you were going to hit $100 million in annual revenue pretty soon. And that was an important goal to you.

Greg Wittstock:
Yes.

Loren Feldman:
A lot of time has passed. It hasn’t happened yet. It sounds like it’s going to happen. Is that still a meaningful goal to you? Do you care?

Greg Wittstock:
I do. I wouldn’t say it’s as meaningful, but I know that the potential is there, and that was always what it was. It wasn’t about the dollar figure. It was about the potential. And by the way, before $100 million came, I said, “This is a $50 million business.” So when I started, my idea to give away franchises—my first business plan—was, “This is gonna be a $50 million business.” It quickly grows. I surpass that. And so my next milestone was $100 million. If I could go back in time, I would never want to go through the experiences, the valleys, that I went through. But I never really appreciated—in fact, when I did $59 million, Loren, in sales, back in ‘06-‘07, I was pissed off that I didn’t do $60 million, right?

And now, when the economic downturn happened, and then the grind happened, I was just appreciative that I still had a business. I mean, I started this business and was able to do $59 million because of my love for turtles in my backyard pond. How cool is that? And I didn’t appreciate that when I had done that. I thought, “Of course, this is what happened.” And then when I almost lost it, that’s when I appreciated what I actually had. And so I’m never going to lose that appreciation, whether I’m doing $72 million or $100 million. The number was always more about the potential, what it can do, and I still believe that strongly. It’s easily automated, our business, especially internationally, but the downturn made me appreciate what I had, and I didn’t appreciate it before.

Loren Feldman:
I bet you end up talking to young entrepreneurs who remind you of yourself, who have that drive to to hit a big ambitious goal. Do you share this with them?

Greg Wittstock:
So the majority of entrepreneurs who I talk to are people who want to have a profession about what I’ve done in this industry. And so, this is where, of course, I give them the techniques about not giving a customer what they asked for, give them what they want, and such like that. But what I’ve said for a long time—and this is 2008 we’re talking about that I went through—“Focus your energies on helping other people get what they want. If you can help other people get what they want, you get what you want.”

So I want my customers to have successful businesses, which means you don’t put a five-foot-high waterfall on a flat backyard. If I can help them be profitable with their business because they understand their financials, if I can help them succeed, then my business will be successful. And so I share a lot with aspiring entrepreneurs if I’m talking to a business class at a university: “Stop focusing on what you can get. Start focusing on what you can give. And if you give enough, and other people get what they want, then you too will get what you want.”

Loren Feldman:
So the last thing I want to ask you about—I don’t know if you remember this—but we did a panel discussion at an Inc. 500. I want to guess it was in Savannah, but I could be wrong about that.

Greg Wittstock:
I remember Savannah.

Loren Feldman:
It was a discussion about what entrepreneurs should do with their money if they manage to take some money off the table—and if they are fortunate enough to be able to invest some money elsewhere, and not just in their business. And if I recall correctly—please correct me if I’m wrong—but I think at the time, you said that you had taken some money off the table, and you were putting every last penny of it into TiVo stock.

Greg Wittstock:
Oh my God, you are hilarious.

Loren Feldman:
Am I right?

Greg Wittstock:
You are 100 percent right. I took my entire 401(k), which, whatever, I don’t remember what it was at the time. I was so smitten by the brand new technology TiVo, which is basically a DVR today. They were the pioneers, and everybody just knocked off their software. I took my entire 401(k), quote-unquote “retirement plan” and put that 100 percent into TiVo stock, which was not the wisest thing, but it also wasn’t a huge, huge amount of money at the time. But yes.

Loren Feldman:
Did that work? I mean, they got bought or something.

Greg Wittstock:
Well, I can tell you it’s probably a breakeven, because my wife went behind me and diversified our portfolio.

Loren Feldman:
I love that.

Greg Wittstock:
Fortunately. So she handles the money, Loren, to this day. She runs the household, and she handles the money. Fortunately, I’ve been able to pull some money out. We bought a second home out in Park City, Utah. I’m spending most of my time traveling from there, but I’m 51 years old. I can’t imagine not doing this at 61, 71, or even 81, because I’m just having so much fun.

Loren Feldman:
Greg Wittstock, thank you so much for taking this time. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Greg Wittstock:
Hey, good reconnecting buddy, and thanks for having me.

Loren Feldman:
My pleasure.