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Born in Grants Pass, Lowell Gibson has run NiceBadge in town for the past 20 years.
An active member in the local community, Lowell took sometime this summer to talk with our host Brian Pombo about the challenges NiceBadge has faced since the start of COVID-19 and how they’ve adjusted.
A big thank you to Lowell for being on the show and for being our first interview on the podcast.
Checkout NiceBadge ➡️https://www.nicebadge.com/
Transcription
Brian: Lowell Gibson is president of NiceBadge.
A 5th generation Southern Oregonian. A missionary kid raised in Japan 14 years. The chair of BR&E, VP of Gospel Rescue Mission Foundation Board. Treasurer of the SOREDI Board.
He loves Southern Oregon and his community. Loves riding his Harley, fly fishing on the Rogue, golfing, floating the Rogue. He’s also extremely pro business.
I’m very happy to have him here today on the Grants Pass VIP podcast.
Thanks for coming on Lowell.
Lowell: Thanks Brian. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Brian: So who are you and where would people know you from?
Lowell: Lol. I don’t think I’ve been on the wanted posters in the post office lately, so that’s good.
I bought the business here in 2000. I was born here, then I raised in Japan, came back for a while, left to go to college. Finally came back in 2000, bought the business and I’ve been here since.
I think the community that it is we all get to know each other in different circles. Within the business community. I’ve been involved with the chamber with a lot of pro business and economic development organizations, of course, Rotary and a few other places like that.
Brian: Why Grants Pass of all places in the world?
You moved back here in 2000, why here?
Lowell: The simple answer is, I like Grants Pass.
It’s my hometown. It’s a good place to raise a family. I was up in the Salem area, and just the weather up there is a little bit gray. It may not necessarily rain, but you know, down here, it’s either going to rain on you or the sun shines out and I kind of like that. And like I said, it was a great place to raise my kids. And it’s a small community so you get to know a lot of people. You know, there’s a lot of good in that.
Brian: Tell me a little bit about why you bought this business?
Lowell: Yeah, I used to be in the restaurant business. I own the restaurant and heating and cooling, I sold insurance for a while.
This business was owned by my mom. She had bought it in 85. And by 2000, she had grown it to a business that had about 13 employees and she was wanting to retire. I was looking for something different to do at the time. She said, “why don’t you to take a look at it, see if it’s something you’d like.”
So I did and of course, moving back to Grants Pass really appealed to me. So I bought the business, moved my family back down here and my mom retired. Here it is, you know, 20 years later still here.
Brian: You’ve been doing this for 20 years. Is it an industry or a position that you recommend to others at all?
Lowell: Wow. So when I bought the business is much smaller, the company was, and we make name badges. It’s bulk of our business, but we do other things like promotional products and signage and sandblasting.
There is definitely a lot of that being done around the country. With the internet, we were able to start selling nationally a little bit easier with our website and you know, using SEO.
To grow it, you have to have a lot of customers because what we’re selling is smaller items.
So we have over 40,000 business customers across the country. And it takes that many just to do the volume we do and keep 27 people employed.
It’s doable.
I think the hardest part is to grow it from nothing….like my mom, she took it from nothing, you know, one employee, part time employee to 16 employees.
That was probably the hardest part of the company, that initial growth phase.
For me, it was taking it from that point, and expanding it and finding ways to market on a national level.
I always think it was a little easier. She says that would have been hard for her to do so it’s probably just whatever our strengths are, but it’s a good industry. It’s a tiny little industry as far as the national landscape goes, and there’s a lot of mom and pa engravers across the country last I knew there was over 5,000 within our industry organization, there’s probably more than that.
So it just, not too many make it to….and not saying we’re large but make it to even our size and so it is a very small, little antiquated industry.
Brian: Would you recommend it to others?
Lowell: It depends on what you want. If you want a job or you can, work out of your house or garage and maybe your significant other and you can probably make a living at it.
If you want to grow into a larger company with employees. It takes a lot of marketing.
I know that’s your strength, but it takes a lot of marketing to sell engraved products on a national level.
You can saturate your community, especially in a small community like ours, rather quickly in which you need more to grow. And so for us, we had to go national, you know, a little bit international, but mostly mostly national.
And marketing has been the toughest part of that. So if you’re willing to put the time in and grow at a, you know, we grew at a 27% growth rate for most of the last 20 years. But it was a lot of work to pick up customers across the country.
Brian: Earlier, you were giving me a tour of facilities here and tell me a little bit about this. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how this last year has affected your life and business with COVID-19?
Lowell: Yeah, you know, I’ve been self employed 31 years and I thought I saw it all.
In 2008 you know….at least different years I remember it being really hard and this happened and it was like nothing any of us in business had ever seen before.
I feel like I was ready this time, in ’08, I feel like I didn’t quite catch on quick enough. This time I felt like I was ready.
We quickly adapted, as much as we could.
Our national business in name badges dropped by 40, 50%. And we typically do about 5,000 badges a day so that’s a big drop for us. So we started making partitions you know, sneeze guards or partitions for banks and restaurants and coffee stands and something we easily can do.
We have the equipment here we make it in-house, the turnaround time is good. And my staff did amazing at transitioning from what they normally did to to some of this other stuff. Thank goodness for that.
So instead of being down 40, 50% April and May we were down about 8%.
Last month, we were up so it was just a matter of doing whatever it takes to keep everybody employed, keep the doors open and keeping our customers happy.
Brian: Absolutely.
What’s your top selling product?
Lowell: Now, or prior to this?
Brian: Both.
Lowell: Name badges. 80% of what we sell has been named badges and through February to March.
Right now, I think name badges is still a top seller. We do a lot of grocery chains and then all the Albertsons I think we have 300,000 employees 20 different logos, you know, Safeway, Vons and others.
So we have a lot of bank chains that makes a lot of customers and so name badges is still our… proportionately speaking their biggest seller.
But the last three months, the partitions, we’ve sold thousands of these partitions, and that’s probably been about 37%, 36% of our business.
So it’s not our biggest seller, but man it sure has helped us fill that gap on the name badges.
We also do awards, signage, sandblasting. A lot of promotional products, just different things, but the go to has always been name badges
Brian: What are you most excited about in the next six months or so?
Lowell: Like all all the other businesses out there, probably the community, you know, we’d like to know what’s going to happen?
What is normal or the new normal or whatever you want to call it?
What does that look like?
From a business standpoint, we look at our numbers. I look at my numbers daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. You’re comparing it with last year, you’re comparing it with your peers.
And that’s how you project, that’s how you determine what your needs are, where your spending is.
Then this happened and everything went out the window.
There is no norm at least there hasn’t been or the new norm.
I like numbers and charts, this makes it really difficult. There’s an asterix on everything for the past four months.
I would love to see some resemblance of, I don’t even need consistency, I just would like to have the ability to project.
So tell me what’s going to happen, are we, you know, are we going to open, are we not going to open, I just need to know what to expect, so I can plan accordingly.
And I know that people might say, I’m a bit of a control freak, because I like to plan so much. But it just makes it a lot easier to do my business if I know what’s going to happen.
If there’s gonna be another outbreak or a phase two or whatever, just tell me so I can plan accordingly.
But obviously, nobody probably really knows.
Brian:That pretty much comes with the position. You’ve got to be a little bit of a control freak.
Lowell: Lol…Yeah, you do. That’s true.
Brian: If we were talking like a year from now, if you were to just guess, just kind of project, and you’re gonna look back over the last 12 months.
What would have had to happen for you do feel happy with the progress in your life and business?
Lowell: I’ve been really apprehensive since March.
Rightly so, I should be, you know, every day. I mean, like the news, you know, we’re my friends in business, we’re watching the news. Something would happen, the governor says something and I get like five texts, you know, from friends of mine.
So we’ve been constantly monitoring the state of the state and the country moving forward.
I am pleased, and I don’t want to sound too optimistic because I know….who knows what the rest of the year, the second half holds. But I’m pleased with how the company and myself and all of us got through the last you know, four months, three and a half months.
And sure there’s things that we could have done better but I’m very happy with what my staff and I did.
Like I said, in ’08, that was huge lesson for me. I didn’t react quick enough.
This time. I feel like we did. I feel like we did pretty good.
We transitioned, we pivoted, we got desperate and you know, there’s no safety net, we’re talking about that. It’s like, there’s nothing that’s going to bail us out, we have to find ways to get the business.
And I just told my staff at a meeting the other day, I said, you know, I don’t want to get too confident, but we did pretty darn good for this last little phase. We still have the rest of the year to worry about. But so quick answer is, we will continue to pivot and change and adapt for the rest of the year and then we’ll see what next year holds.
Brian: You have any obstacles that you view within the next 12 months other than a situation?
Lowell: We talk a lot about that in the business community, about hiring. I just hired two people. They’re doing great, so I’m happy about that.
But a lot of my friends are having trouble hiring.
You know, it’s interesting times for all of the reasons that we know. I worry a little bit about that.
We tend to keep people, we don’t have much of a turnover. So it’s not as big of an issue for me.
Supplies have been great. We haven’t had too many issues with that.
So no concerns there.
Most businesses we already have access to funds, if we have to build or I’m not too worried about that we’re in a pretty good position with our building and all, equipment.
Obstacles? Just the unknown.
You know, I keep going back to that. I know nothing that really scares me or worries me too much.
Brian: Is there anything you’d like to see happen locally, whether on a political level or anything of any sort of thing you’d like to see happen soon, or hope will happen soon, especially within the Grants Pass area?
Lowell: Because it is my community. I care a lot about what happens in our community. As you mentioned, I’m very pro business.
So I’ve always worked with the Chamber of Commerce and other pro business organizations.
I will do whatever I can to help businesses in the community. Which is why I chair the business retention and expansion, which were there to help businesses.
You hear a lot of businesses talk about their concerns.
Sometimes it has to do with the city, the county or the state, you know, regulations or processes. And I’m an advocate for the businesses. So when I talk to the folks in the public sector, I’m always very clear, and they’re probably tired of me talking about it, but they just have to remember that the backbone of any community in ours is the businesses, the small businesses.
because of us, there’s jobs, there’s taxes, people are buying houses, paying property taxes, paying their income taxes, and that’s how we fund the public sector.
And I know probably everybody knows that, but I like to just remind everybody that we have to be pro business as a community.
We have to make sure that the businesses in this region will flourish. We have to be profitable. So whatever the community does….it’s just my soapbox, I just want to remind them that make sure that you know you do things that you vote in laws or, even levies you know, just always keep in mind the businesses are affected.
And if the businesses don’t do well in our community, we as a community, all the good things we enjoy, you know, the parks and everything else. I think it suffers.
So that’s, like I said, a broken record. But that’s my take.
Brian: No, absolutely, that’s great.
Is there any other questions that I didn’t ask that you’d like to answer?
Lowell: Sometimes you get a chance to speak to different groups.
Lately, I’ve been saying business is simple. And I know it’s not, I know it’s very complicated and there’s thousands of things you have to decide.
But overall, it’s simple.
You know, I tell my people here that are big boundaries are legal, ethical and moral.
Whatever we do. It’s going to fit within that, within that.
There’s a lot of, gray areas, but you have to know as a business, what your core values are, you know, if people say, oh, I heard about them.
Well what did you hear? Was it, you know, it’s a terrible place to work or yeah they rip people off. You have to know who you are as a business.
And I know that businesses are made up of people, myself and my staff, and that should come out to your customers.
So the other thing is, do run a business, I always tell some of the up and coming ones, whatever it takes, you know, whatever it takes to get business you do within the legal ethical moral boundaries, of course, but don’t sit there and wait for the business to come to you.
If you have to go out and get it, if you have to walk the streets.
I always worried about not being hungry, in business, right?
Because there’s been times where I’ve been really hungry, you know, I need business. I need to pay my bills, and I would do anything to get business, sometimes it gets a little easier.
I find myself a little bit lacks, I don’t ever want to get to the point where I’m not hungry and I encourage other businesses. Don’t sit around and wait for people to come to you if you have to go door to door, you know, drum up business.
In at the end of each day, myself, my managers we ask ourselves, okay, what did we accomplish today?
What do we do today?
Was it just a lot of busy work?
Or did we actually do something over and above that to help our business grow?
If we don’t grow, we die, right? You have to grow.
So whatever it takes, and I know it’s a simple concept. Maybe it’s a little old school, but it is something that I always feel like I have to remind myself and my people here. We’ll do whatever it takes to take care of our customers, take care of my employees and try to grow the business.
Brian: That’s fabulous.
What could any of our listeners do they want to find out more about you and Nice Badge?
Lowell: Yeah, website is, NiceBadge.com.
Why? Because we make a lot of nice badges.
Our company, the corporate name is Recognition Specialties.
A lot of people locally still know us by that name.
I started using Nice Badge maybe less than 10 years ago, because nationally we’re known by that.
And again our website is NiceBadge.com.
You can call us anytime at 541-476-3166 or we’re here on 17th in Hardback. So, we’ve been here for a long time, you can come by and I’m sure my amazing staff will be happy to help in any way.
Brian: Well, Lowell Gibson, thanks so much.
Thank you for being a part of the Grants Pass VIP podcast.
Lowell: Thank you. My pleasure.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Lowell Gibson, what a great time I had hanging out with him and getting to meet his staff.
So when I first showed up there at NiceBadge, I’d never met Lowell before. But I happen to know Nancy who was behind the front desk, and she was very warm and helpful. And as soon as Lowell came out, he introduced me to everyone else that work there, or at least that was there at the time.
Everyone was really easygoing, and very nice, very kind. Overall warm reception.
Now another thing about Lowell, I appreciate his ingenuity. It’s clear that he’s been able to survive through the ups and downs of the economy.
Here we are in 2020 and he’s been able to get through the COVID-19 situation by actually providing these guards and other things that can help people when it comes to the disease and it’s something that’s in demand.
He rose to the occasion to provide something that the market wanted which was really neat.
Another thing about Lowell that was very clear, he’s very passionate about doing his job, and the fact that he knows what he’s good at and what he isn’t good at, and he hires out what he isn’t good at.
That’s just very commendable that he has that type of passion. And oftentimes, when people get to the top, and they’re doing really well, they kind of put on the brakes and kind of relax.
It’s neat to see that lol still has his head in the game. He keeps in contact with other people in the community and has been a resource to a lot of people.
The coolest thing is he’s been able to connect me with a lot of people that I don’t know in the community will be having more and more people that I haven’t met before and maybe you haven’t met that you’ll get to meet via this podcast.
So be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. And if you know anyone that you think would be a good guest for our show, even if that person’s you go to GrantsPassVIP.com and drop me a line.