[E]ntrepreneur Alan Newman is best known for the three Vermont companies he has founded or co-founded: Seventh Generation, Gardener’s Supply and Magic Hat Brewing Company.
But Newman has been involved in a multitude of other undertakings, including jobs at a healthcare chain, a yacht timeshare business, and the rototiller company that led to the creation of Gardener’s Supply. These days, Newman spends time in Colorado trying to turn around a struggling hamburger chain called Lark Spot. He’s still an active player in Vermont, too; he’s part-owner and promoter of the Camp Meade property in Middlesex, and he invested in a cricket protein company, which recently closed after he decided the insect-derived product was ahead of its time.
Newman, who was born in 1946, attributes much of his business success to the size of the baby boomer cohort that has consistently wanted to buy what he’s been selling over the course of his career. Accordingly, as he turns over ideas for his next venture, he’s envisioning what he wants with the assumption that his contemporaries want it, too: a retirement place that is nothing like the sterile assisted living settings most commonly available today.
Newman spent some time talking to VTDigger about his business experience and his plans for the future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDigger: How are you as a leader?
Alan Newman: I think that was my strength. I am a bad manager, but there’s a difference. A good leader has a strong vision, can communicate that vision, can create culture, can surround themselves with people who are stronger than they are, set the path for them and let them do their job.
That’s what I think I do well. I generally have people around me who love to create order out of chaos, because I love to create chaos. But I have a team of managers who understand and appreciate that and love to create the order.
VTD: How about as an employee?
AN: When Jim Koch from Boston Beer Co. called, he convinced me to come back to the beer business for five years. He made the proverbial offer that was too good to refuse. I put together a business called Alchemy and Science when I was there. I started five separate beer businesses in the five years, and four are still running.
At the end of the period, they didn’t ask if I wanted to stay, and I didn’t ask if I could stay. It always ended that way.
VTD: Why did it always end that way?
AN: What is the word I am always called? It’s kind of like disrespectful, but not. I don’t like to be told how to do things.
I think I know what to do. And quite frankly I found that I have been right more than I am wrong, not that I am never wrong, I am wrong frequently, but I am right more. I just am not big on authority.
VTD: How has this played out in your companies?
AN: When I started to work with Will (Raap, founder of Gardener’s Supply) at Gardener’s Supply, neither one of us had any real business experience. Will was the one who introduced to me the concept that business didn’t have to be a place where you treated people disrespectfully, where you didn’t care what other people were saying. That it didn’t have to be a hierarchy. It was really there with Will that the process started.
VTD: And then where did the process go?
AN: There was an EST-like sort of cult here back in the 1980s called Money and You. As much as I really hate to admit this, it was probably the single most important thing I have ever done. It was a series of seminars about human development about how to unlock your full capacity in business. It drove home a new way of being in business that had never dawned on me.
It taught me to allow both sides of my brain, alchemy and science, to focus on culture in putting together a company. If you get the culture right, the logistics are easy.
It taught me that I had to take responsibility for all aspects of the business if I wanted to be successful. It taught me how to communicate with people. Up until that point I hated detail-oriented people. I learned I can’t succeed without them, and I better learn to embrace people who like cleaning up the chaos I create, instead of seeing them as somebody who is always fighting me.
Money and You taught me that people communicate differently. If you spend a moment figuring out how they receive information, how they give information, it’ll make you much more effective in communicating with them.
This was the game-changer that made me accept business as a lifestyle. I no longer saw it as having rigid rules where I had to wear a suit and tie. It opened up the whole thing to me.
It taught me how to create community in a business environment in a way that I had never thought of business being — getting a group of people focused on clear-cut business objectives and the path to those objectives. It means a mission and set of values to operate within, and how we treat each other, how we treat our customers, how we treat our suppliers.
VTD: Would you have bought into that culture as an employee?
AN: I don’t know. I think I like being the one who makes the decisions, who creates the culture. I’m not really good at fitting into other peoples’ cultures.
VTD: What have you been doing more recently?
AN: My old financial partner from Magic Hat is a private equity guy and had gotten involved in this hamburger business, and in 2017 a friend asked him to see if he could figure out how to fix it.
Being a fast-food hamburger franchise today is tough sledding, so I built a plan around celebrating the Colorado lifestyle, changing the menu up, adding healthy foods, renovating the restaurants, and making them look very different. We’re in the process of doing that right now. It’s going slower than anticipated. I’m there three or four times every two months.
VTD: Why did you take this on?
AN: Two reasons. One, everybody assumes that I have a ton of money. I don’t. If I were to die in two years, I’m really good. But if I am going to last another 10 or 12, I have to make things stretch. This job allows me to maintain my lifestyle and contribute to my retirement fund rather than take out.
Also, I’m a bit of an addict. I like work, I like challenges, and this is a real challenge. One of the hardest things to do in business is to change an entire brand while it’s in operation.
In my job, I have to have everybody focused on the future, not the past, because the business was technically bankrupt. We had 14 restaurants and closed six right around the beginning of this year. We’re focused on right-sizing the business now to get our overheads in line.
VTD: Do small businesses have the same challenges now as before?
AN: Yes and no. I credit a lot of my success to timing. I was born in 1946, on the leading edge of the baby boomers, so behind me has been the largest group of consumers the world has ever seen who share a similar cultural experience of the 60s.
We put a man on the moon; the economy was booming; if you couldn’t be successful in the 60s and 70s, come on. Those days are gone.
But at the end of the day, I believe nothing necessarily just works; you make businesses work. This is one of the Money and You things. If something doesn’t work the way you expected the first time, you try what’s next and make it work.
VTD: What’s your next project?
AN: There’s going to come a time, maybe in the next three to five years, when I wouldn’t mind being in a retirement community.
The baby boomers have never done anything in the way the previous generation did, and my belief is we’re going to create our own way to do retirement and die. It’s all about being in the culture you’re comfortable in.
I was never comfortable in the standard business world, and I am not comfortable in a standard retirement community.
VTD: Would you build this in Vermont?
AN: Maybe in New Orleans. The goal is to get out of here in the winter, and unfortunately the winter is nine months long.
If I could create this retirement community-to-death thing, maybe there is a funeral home attached to it. I’d try to find an operator who does retirement homes. I don’t want to run this thing; I just want to set it up so I can live there. If I do, it’ll be a business that has far greater reach than just me and my little group of friends. I need one more project that has meaning to me.
