Episode Details

The franchising consultant they paid $100,000 to get their paperwork done turned out to be embezzling

money and having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. The company collapsed. Eight months

of work, gone. The other four companies they'd been working with also went under. Adam Newman's

response was to keep going — and eventually sell for $31 million.

Adam Newman is the co-founder of Monkey Bar Storage (originally Gorgeous Garage), a garage

organization company his father Jared started in a two-car garage in Boise with a shelf he welded himself.

Adam built it into a 120-location dealer network, hit $31M in revenue the year they sold, and walked away

with an eight-figure exit. He sat down with Stu at a live Startups with Stu retreat near Yellowstone

National Park to break down exactly how they did it.

What he covers:

→ Jared Newman building the first shelf system to organize his own garage — then a neighbor's backyard party of 20+ employees accidentally becoming their first marketing campaign

→ Year 1 revenue of $46,000 with $48,000 in costs — and how a year's worth of severance pay kept the lights on

→ Doubling revenue three years in a row without a single dollar of advertising, purely on word of mouth

→ Taking out a $25,000 SBA loan (with two old pickup trucks and two laptops as their only assets) to start a Salt Lake City dealership — and doing $160,000 in their first partial year

→ Getting robbed by a franchise consultant who embezzled $100,000 of their money, then being saved by the president of the national franchising association — who flew out privately to Rexburg to meet with them

→ How a single sales rep named Reg Allen took them from 8 locations to 47 locations in two years

→ Taking over every dealer's website, marketing, photography, and content — and why that made dealers never want to leave

→ Designing their own overhead rack system by putting Jared "in a box" with tight parameters — and beating competitors on dimensional shipping weight to cut costs

→ Growing the Amazon and third-party marketplace channel from 1 unit sold to a $1 million annual channel in two years

→ Adding a cabinet line after one dealer proved it doubled ticket prices from $2–4K to $9–10K

→ Revenue milestones: $5M (2010/11), $9M (2012), $16M (2015/16), $24M (2019), $31M the year they sold

→ The secret sauce: what Jared did at every install that made customers remember him — not the product — and how it became a systemized revenue driver across 120 locations

🔗 CONNECT WITH STU

Instagram: @stu

Website: https://startupswithstu.com

📌 CHAPTERS

00:00 – Intro: Adam Newman and how he met Stu 21 years ago

04:00 – Jared Newman: farm kid, welder, and the shelf he built to organize his own garage

09:00 – Year 1: $46K revenue, $48K costs, and the backyard party that changed everything

14:00 – Three years of doubling with zero advertising — and the numbers that convinced Adam to go all in

19:00 – The $25K SBA loan, the Salt Lake dealership, and $160K in the first partial year

24:00 – Expanding to four locations, the 2007 housing crash, and the franchising question

29:00 – The $100K franchise consultant who embezzled everything — and the national president who flew to Rexburg to help

35:00 – Building the dealer model: from loose and chaotic to 120 locations with full marketing control

40:00 – Reg Allen: the sales rep who sold 20 dealerships in year on