Mike:
Hey everyone, this is Mike Sullivan. Thanks for joining us again today on MO.com, where, as usual, we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs to bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful.
Joining us today is Tom Lindberg from Sir Grout. It’s a grout and tile cleaning company with a successful franchise model. Tom, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start out by telling us a little bit about your background and kind of leading up to your involvement in Sir Grout.
Tom:
Sure. I started out of college working in the consumer products world. I started with Union Carbide, working on the Prestone brand, and moved up through the sales ranks, national sales manager, and then I moved into the marketing arena, became Director of Marketing and then Vice President of International, went through a couple of buyouts, myself and several other folks that the company bought the Prestone brand and ran it, doubled it in three years. We sold it to Allied Signal, which then later became Honeywell. So my background has been good because I’ve gone from both large corporations, publicly run, on the stock exchange I mean, to a small or medium size company, the Prestone brand was around $300 million to being an entrepreneur myself. The best thing that happened to me along my career was when Honeywell acquired Allied Signal, again all the same people moving through the chain, managing the same brands, I got in their leadership program and got a much more in-depth general management background with my sales and marketing skills, including Six Sigma, which is a quality and process improvement program.
