Jake Manthei: That is a good question. How do you measure market share? Well, having gone to business school, what they teach in business school are all these case studies of publicly traded companies. Why do they do that? Well, because the data is public. When you work in small business, that is just not the case.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to Make It. Move It. Sell It. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products, and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig:, the CEO of Spiro.ai. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today, we’re talking with Jake Manthei:, the president of Aster Brands, which is a manufacturer of business opportunities for concrete producers globally. Jake, I can’t wait to get into that. Welcome to the podcast.

Jake Manthei: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Adam Honig: Tell us a little bit about Aster Brands. What does it mean when you say you’re the manufacturer of business opportunities?

Jake Manthei: Let’s zoom out just a hair because Aster Brands is weird. What is an aster? It’s a weird word. A little bit about that, we’re a multi-generational family business and I’m the third generation technically, but generation zero is my great, great grandma Constance, who was a flower farmer and she grew asters. Fast forward a hundred plus years and when we were doing some brand architecture, we decided that we wanted to launch multiple brands in different product categories and we said, “Hey, we need something, a brand structure that we could add stuff over time.” We picked Aster Brands because of the family story. But number two, I have two little girls. How cool is it to be able to tell the story to your daughters about a strong family female entrepreneur? That’s where that came from.

To answer your question specifically, what do we do? You’re right. We’re a sales, marketing, and intellectual property company that manufactures business opportunities for concrete producers globally. That is a mouthful. What that means is we invent products, manufacturing systems, that you put concrete into. The reason you do that is because concrete’s heavy, you can’t truck it very far. When we invented our products and sold them locally in our local concrete manufacturing business, we learned that we’re in a rural environment and a lot of people live here and we didn’t have enough capital to put three plants in every single state, so we said, hey, let’s see if we can get a patent, package this as a business opportunity and sell equipment. It turns out we could, and it’s gone from there.

Adam Honig: Maybe you could tell us about one of the applications of this. What are some of these products that get manufactured?

Jake Manthei: That is a great question. Our strongest product category is retaining walls. We have multiple brands, Redi-Rock was our initial brand, and that is a commercial retaining wall product. Each block, think about them as giant concrete Legos. They weigh over 2,000 pounds each. If you think about how in the world do you sell a giant concrete Lego, think about any commercial development where you might have multi-tenant housing and apartment complex, a gas station all in one site, and there’s a bunch of great change and where you’re trying to maximize the number of parking spaces that you need. Said another way, what the product does is sell usable land. We’ll put a Redi-Rock retaining wall right tight on a lot line where you can put your utilities, your water main, storm sewer, those things, directly behind the wall without needing any soil reinforcement and you can pave your parking lot directly on top of it. That’s what got us into the business and since then we can do lots of other things in the commercial space.

Then we have another brand called Rosetta Hardscapes, which is also retaining walls, but it’s all for outdoor living. Think about your home. You want to go hang out in the backyard, you want a patio, a seat wall, things like that, we make products for that. Then we have the third brand that we have in the market with is called Pole Base, which, believe it or not, I’m a marketing major, I picked that name, which is the worst name ever, is the base of a pole. I figured it’d get a lot of Google searches, so it was very literal because that’s how it shows up on construction plans. But if you think about any parking lot at the grocery store or anything, they’re all lit at night. Every one of the poles with a light on top is on a concrete foundation and we came up with a patented system for that as well.

We also have a pretty robust innovation program. We’re working on a new category for coastal erosion. We’re going to call that Coast Armor. We have our first couple of projects at our plant in Florida that we have taken to market, but before we go license it globally, we need to refine it a little bit more yet.

Adam Honig: I can see a big market for that coastal erosion. I live right near the coast, and it’s definitely a big issue all the time, so that’s going to be a growth opportunity, no doubt.

Jake Manthei: I think it could be. I hope so. We’ll find out.

Adam Honig: On one hand, you’re manufacturing these concrete Lego blocks, as you call them, and on the other hand, you’re licensing out because it would be very complicated to ship them, all 2,000 pounds each, from northern Michigan to Boston, where I live or something like that.

Jake Manthei: Yes. That was the thought about licensing it. If you walked through our plant, it’s all steel processing, polyurethane manufacturing, structural testing, things like that. We’re selling the actual equipment that will ship to our guy in Boston, for example. We do manufacture in Boston, so if you need some stuff, let me know. I can connect the dots, and then he will put the concrete in the equipment to make the product locally there.

Adam Honig: You both make and license; that’s part of the business model for everything.

Jake Manthei: Correct. We make it primarily so that we know the product works. If we can make it ourselves, turn that product category into a profitable business unit, the thesis is that it can be reproduced elsewhere. Most of the time, that is true. 

Adam Honig: When you’re providing the retaining walls and the other products that make up the retaining walls for customers, is there anything really unusual that customers have asked you to assist with?

Jake Manthei: You’re looking for some good stories. We’ve had some very interesting things that we’ve done over the years. I’ll give one example. We came up with a new product; we call it our Positive Connection System. It is a way to connect a geogrid material to our blocks so that you can reinforce a slope. It has all kinds of technical benefits, and we’re like, all right, this is new, let’s go get some smaller projects and make sure that all of our math and the structural testing work.

Project number three was a 25- or so-foot tall wall holding up two freight trains. Of course, will that work? Yes, it sure will. All the math says that it’s true. It turns out it was true. It’s been there for probably 15 years and is holding up incredibly well.

But that was something that if you are an inventor of products, you always want to say yes to get things going, and sometimes you’re like, I hope it works; the math says it’s true.

Adam Honig: Yes, it’s like, maybe we’ll just put a little extra on that one just to make sure.

Jake Manthei: That’s exactly right. In all seriousness, we have a really good team of Master’s degree civil engineers, so it wasn’t like a cowboy approach. There was a very legitimate structural analysis, and we integrated things called inclinometers, strain gauges, and all kinds of highly technical stuff to measure if the wall would move or any of that. It performed as the math suggested it would perform. That’s one that’s interesting.

Adam Honig: Probably because you’re in the licensing business as well as the manufacturing business, I know that partnerships are really important to you guys. Has that been right from the start, part of your model, or did you evolve into it?

Jake Manthei: That’s a great question. There are different kinds of licensing, and licensing is different than a franchise. I always like to say, if you were to go by a restaurant chain franchise, your agreement would probably be 300 to 500 pages long. Licensing can be that too, but it doesn’t have to be. Ours is like 5 to 10 pages long, depending on what flavor you’re buying. There are fewer rules, but we’re not licensing a patent and then letting somebody else use that and sell it and so on and so forth. We have all the IP, but we’re actually selling a territory along with the manufacturing equipment and the ongoing license fee is to protect that territory so we won’t set up another manufacturer in X number of counties, or you can think of it as a radius. That’s largely dependent on how far you can economically freight concrete materials.

I bring that up to answer the question and talk about partnership because that’s how that system works, but we’re also selling capital equipment and our agreements renew from time to time. You can’t have a guy that will spend $3 million to $15 million in equipment over time and just say, “We don’t like you anymore, let’s go away.” We often say our agreements are not that unlike a marriage and that they’re designed to be long term. Like any good marriage, they ebb and flow. There are good times and bad times. We meet more people. We make mistakes all the time, but we really try to do four things, and we try to do them really well.

The first thing is we try to set up new accounts. We have 200 customers in 30 plus countries right now, we’re growing. But what we’ve learned is that if we don’t do the second thing well, which is grow our market share, it makes it really hard to set up the next new customer. The second piece is the biggest part of our company, we call it the customer engagement team. This is a team that does technical project support. We work really hard to make our customers’ phones ring. We have a robust inbound marketing program to generate project level leads and then we have the technical support. We do thousands and thousands of technical support calls where we have a team of, again, civil engineers on staff that will help with that. That grows the market over time. We do similar things with landscape products.

Well, guess what happens? When their market grows and they’re successful and they’re profitable, it not only makes it easier to set up the next new customer, but it also creates a demand or a question, “What’s next?” We created an innovation program and we’re constantly working on new product categories and making the existing product categories better and so on and so forth, but we can only do those three things well if we’re a great place to work. We spend a lot of energy on just being a great employer, working on culture and building that culture around a purpose, a strong set of values and really clear ten-year, three-year, one-year and 90-day targets. We work really hard in that space to make sure that our team knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, how it lines up with the long-term plan and how that helps our customers. 

Adam Honig: I definitely want to talk about the purpose and how it relates to the organization, but I want to go back to working with partner customers again. You talked about wanting to improve market share. How are you measuring that? It seems like it must be really hard to know that.

Jake Manthei: That is a good question. How do you measure market share? Well, having gone to business school, what they teach in business school are all these case studies of publicly traded companies. Why do they do that? Well, because the data is public. When you work in small business, that is just not the case. We’re not measuring market share in terms of what percentage of this category we have. We look at it based on how many square feet of product we are moving every year and whether it is growing. Anecdotally, of course, we know all of our competitors and we follow that. We often just look at simple things like how many employees they have on their website versus us. It’s pretty primitive stuff on that level, but I can tell you, when you look at that versus some of our competitors, it’s just a lot more.

Adam Honig: Are you doing that for your customers as well? Part of the goal was to help them create market share, as I understand it as well. Is this something that you’re working with them on, or do they already have their own process for it?

Jake Manthei: What we do in that space is we have a pretty robust per account program where we’re measuring, through Spiro, of all things, that we’re integrating into our program specifically. We’re measuring how many projects, how many contractors, how many civil engineers per account, per geography, and then we’re just constantly working to grow that. That’s how we do that specifically. But again, to your point, it is very hard in the small business environment to say, yes, we have 37.3% market share. I don’t know how to do that. We just do it based on improvement and the things that we can see.

Adam Honig: As long as it’s more tomorrow than it was today, we’re going in the right direction. That’s the philosophy here.

Jake Manthei: That’s exactly right.

Adam Honig: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. Jumping back into the purpose a little bit more, you guys strike me as a very purpose-oriented company. Is that something that’s been also passed down through the generations? How did that evolve?

Jake Manthei: We are, again, a multi-generational family business. Just a quick thing, my aunt has spent probably the last 20 plus years putting together a family history, and for Christmas 2023, she gave all of us a 400-page book of the family history. Having grown up in my family, all you hear is the urban legend. She went back in the ‘80s and interviewed my grandpa and her brother on a tape recorder, and she converted that into the story. I’m about two-thirds through the book and I’m getting to read my grandpa and his brother, the founders, in their own words, the stories. I can tell you, they aren’t exactly the same as the urban legends, which has been fun. But our family has a very strong, long-term, faith-based purpose. They teach in business school again, and most people listening to this I’m sure have heard this, that the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. 

Adam Honig: I think they give that to you on a laminated card when you go in on the first day, actually.

Jake Manthei: Day one, that’s what they teach. I went through that environment and I probably thought that was true for a long time. But the older that I get, the more I think that is the worst possible thing you could ever teach business school students. That’s like saying the purpose of a human being is to breathe.

We’re all sitting here on the phone, everybody listening, they’re breathing every day. If my sole purpose is to breathe, that’s not very compelling. Well, in business, of course, you need to make profit. That’s like oxygen. Slowly, the older that I get, the more I see they’re just straight up financial targets. Although they’re fun, they’re less compelling.

We came up with a purpose statement that is “to change the world in a concrete way.” That’s obviously a play on words. We’re selling business opportunities in the concrete product space, but we can tell stories based on how we physically changed infrastructure around the globe with our Redi-Rock brand, that’s fun. Or Rosetta, we’re actively selling families the opportunity to spend time together in their backyards, that’s cool.

But if you peel the onion back a little bit further, the purpose what keeps us growing, investing, creating jobs is so we can help change lives in a concrete way. If you think about a company as a group of people, our thesis as a family has been, any organization greater than one probably has a lot of problems.

What we didn’t talk about was Aster Brands is one of five business units. When you look at our portfolio or enterprise, we have over 450 employees now. If you have a lot of problems if you have two employees, there’s a lot of problems at 450. If you want to change lives in a concrete way, what do you do about that as an employer?

We’re starting to do things to put that “change the world in a concrete way” to put that to work. We are adding we call them success coaches. We have two or three of them on staff now. They are master degreed Christian counselors. The thesis is that if somebody is having a marriage problem or a problem with their kid or substance abuse, we have people in our company that can walk with them hand in hand to work your way through that.

Now as an employer, to me, that’s changing a life in a concrete way. We can give you story after story and example after example of marriages that have improved or been reconciled or kids that went through a hard time that came through it. That to me is why to grow a business, it’s stuff like that, and if you can get more people on that kind of a population changing the world in a concrete way and yes, you need profit to do that, that’s the oxygen to be able to do that, but it’s not the purpose.

Another thing that we’re doing right now is that we made a deal with our health insurance provider, as well as a local healthcare provider that wanted to grow. We have a bigger office building than what we need, so we converted one of the suites into a medical office. Now, we offer on-demand healthcare for our employees.

It’s things like that, they cost money, they’re not the cheapest thing to do, but when you look at that, it’s materially improving the lives of the people that work here. What’s interesting is everybody has a hard time attracting and retaining people. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that we go down that path, the easier it gets to attract people and retain people and things like that. It seems to be working for us.

There’s nothing wrong with, I guess, on one hand, the purpose of business being to maximize shareholder value, but I don’t know. I don’t need a better house. I have a good house. I’d rather invest in people and make a difference.

Adam Honig: I think the question for me is always: maximize shareholder value at what point in time? We could be trying to maximize it for today. We could be trying to maximize it for your grandkids. You have two very different strategies depending on the point in time, and if your point in time is essentially just the horizon, then that’s what the purpose is—to always maximize it. 

Jake Manthei: There’s nothing wrong with that, and business has to grow. They also teach that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. I’m super pro-growth, and we’ve grown a lot. It’s the why. Why do it?

Adam Honig: Let’s talk a little bit more about hiring, though, because on this podcast, we get a lot of people who say that it’s a very challenging environment to hire. Would you say that this  approach has been helping with that?

Jake Manthei: It helps Aster Brands tremendously with turnover. We have a 3% turnover rate, which I think is pretty strong.

Adam Honig: I think that’s very low, yeah.

Jake Manthei: It also helps attract talent, for sure. Our business is such that we have customers all over, so as time goes on, we’re more and more remote. We have employees in Europe and scattered all over North America; we have a plant in Florida; we have northern Michigan locations; and so on and so forth. The benefit of that is that our job growth isn’t always limited to geography. 

At the same time, it just so happened that, as recently as yesterday, I went to my executive peer group; I’m a Vistage member, and the speaker was the author of the book Winning the Talent War. What I learned is that America, on a macro level, is 8 million jobs short right now. 

I think that a growth area for us is getting better at telling the story that I just told because I think we can better build our pipeline because right now—and this wasn’t the case three years ago—it’s hard to get the candidates. Once we get them in, they don’t leave.

Adam Honig: A recent guest on the podcast was the chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers. He said just manufacturing alone is short 2 million jobs. 

Jake Manthei: I believe it. 

Adam Honig: I know that there’s been a lot of effort to raise excitement about the industry and try to get younger folks involved. It’s getting them in the door; that’s often the challenge. 

Jake Manthei: I also think it’s a business opportunity. For us, we’ve put some metrics on these things, and the metrics are innovation metrics. Every single company in our network has this problem. I’ve interviewed them myself. You ask them, what’s your biggest problem? Attracting and retaining talent. If you zoom out and think about that a little bit, what are they really saying? They’re saying that getting more people in is hard. How do you get a higher return on the people that you have? Well, that’s an automation opportunity. We’ve looked at all of our new products and put metrics per product. How do you get a higher revenue per man hour? Let’s look at that metric and design it into the manufacturing process. We’ve also looked at revenue per square foot of floor space. The other thing that’s happening is that it is incredibly costly to add building space and square footage right now. We think about it now in cubic feet, not in square feet. We try to make everything vertical. We’re looking at every one of these problems as creating business opportunities for those who are looking to grow. We see a lot of upside in some of these shortages.

Adam Honig: I’m hearing a lot of Obstacle is the Way philosophy coming out. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book, which is very meaningful to me.

Jake Manthei: I’m not, but it sounds amazing. I’m going to Google it right now.

Adam Honig: Yeah, I know, it’s an amazing book. I wish I could remember the name of the author right off the top of my head, but it’s about the stoic philosophy and about how every challenge is actually presenting you with an opportunity to get better or improve. It’s awesome.

Jake Manthei: I’ll buy it and read it. Thank you.

Adam Honig: We’ll put it in the show notes, I’m sure, for people who are interested in it. Jake, this has been awesome. It’s so great to have you on the podcast, learning about your philosophy, the business, and the types of products that you guys are making. I’m really impressed with the way that you’re super thoughtful about all this stuff.

Actually, there’s one more question I’d love to get to. I forgot about it earlier, but I asked you whether the purpose of the business evolved or whether it started with later generations. I’m super curious about the evolution of that.

As somebody who works in startups, starting a company is like a tooth-and-nail fight to get to something. I wonder when you get bigger whether that’s when you layer in more purpose, whether your ancestors layered it right in from the beginning.

Jake Manthei: It’s been there since the beginning. We’ve wordsmithed it a lot. But if you go back to my grandpa and his brother, their one-liner is, “Man thinks and the Lord leads.” Everything they did, it was okay, let’s figure out how to give back out of the success if we’re fortunate enough to be successful. They looked at their taxable income every year and gave 20% of it away every year. That was right since day one, which is a big number. That number has ebbed and flowed over the years, but we come to my dad’s generation, a big part of their purpose as well was being philanthropic.

They got very involved in different faith-based ministries and humanitarian organizations overseas and have done all kinds of interesting work. In our generation, what is emerging, our application of that is more about how do we invest in our local community with the employee population that we have in front of us? We spend 80% of our time at work. It seems like that’s a great opportunity in and of itself.

Every generation has applied the principles a little bit differently, which is neat, but the heart and the spirit of it was there since the beginning.

Adam Honig: That’s great to hear. It’s definitely very inspirational, I think, for a lot of people to see how you can bring that through the generations in the business. 

Jake Manthei: Well, I forget who said this. It was one of the, unfortunately, probably a politician. But the only reason we’re able to do what we do is because of those that came before us. We stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.

The piece that I like to say on that and when my dad stepped into retirement, what I told him is, don’t expect me to do what you did, but you can’t expect that we’ll pick up where you left off. It looks a little bit different, but the values and the principles, I think, are really important to maintain, to honor, and to grow.

Adam Honig: Right on. Jake, I really appreciate your coming on the podcast. It’s super great to have you. Just as a reminder for listeners out there, every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast is available at spiro.ai/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Jake, do you think we should tell people to give us a high rating for this episode?

Jake Manthei: I think this is the best episode that has come through today.

Adam Honig: I think so too—the best so far. We’ll see what happens next.

Jake Manthei: That’s right. The future is bright. The future is bright, Adam. Keep doing it. 

Adam Honig: Thanks to everybody for tuning in, and we look forward to talking to you on the next episode.

Jake Manthei: Thanks, Adam.