Denny Gentry
Albuquerque, New Mexico
2000 Galbreath Award

(Transcript of Lecture)

The John W. Galbreath Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurship in the Equine Industry has been presented each year since 1990 to one individual whose success within the industry has been due to the utilization of uncommon abilities or innovative approaches to business management. Each recipient has had a positive impact on the equine industry because of his entrepreneurship, and has gained widespread respect for it. 

John W. Galbreath, in whose name the award is presented, distinguished himself internationally as both a horseman and a businessman. No one else has ever bred and raced winners of the Kentucky Derby (Chateugay and Proud Clarion) and also the Epsom Derby (Roberto). He was the owner of Darby Dan Farm (producer of over 90 stakes winners) and the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, as well as chairman of the board of Churchill Downs. His business interests included large-scale development projects around the world. 

Winners of the Galbreath Award have been: John A. Bell, 1990; James E. Bassett, 1991; Cothran Campbell, 1992; John R. Gaines, 1993; Ami Shinitzki, 1994; Robert Clay, 1995; B. Thomas Joy, 1996; John Lyons, 1997; D. Wayne Lukas, 1998; Thomas H. Meeker, 1999; and Denny Gentry, 2000. Recipients are invited to the UofL campus in the fall of their award year to deliver the annual Galbreath Lecture to students, faculty, and guests, usually dealing with their own experiences and their personal philosophies. 

Denny Gentry was a state cattlemen's association executive who noticed that team roping events sponsored for his rancher-members were so popular that ropers from other states would even pay annual dues to compete. He also saw that, in spite of its popularity, team roping's growth was limited by the fact that the best ropers tended to win most events, which discouraged amateurs and beginners. In 1990, he launched the United States Team Roping Championships and devised an innovative handicapping system for the sport. Annual growth of the USTRC in the 1990s averaged 30 percent and by 1997, there were more than 37,000 paid members. As a result of Gentry's innovations, team roping was the fastest growing equine recreational sport in North America in the 1990s. 

The John W. Galbreath Award is a project of the Equine Industry Program (EIP), an academic unit of the University of Louisville’s AACSB-accredited College of Business and Public Administration. Created by an act of the Kentucky State Legislature, the EIP is the only equine program in North America that offers a BS degree in business administration. Through 1999, more than 400 undergraduate students have taken EIP courses. Other EIP functions, in addition to teaching, are industry research and professional service. 

Copyright 2000, Equine Industry Program

Equine Industry Program
College of Business and Public Administration
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292
Dr. Robert G. Lawrence, Director
Office: 502.852.7617

ROBERT G. LAWRENCE: 

Welcome to the annual Galbreath Lecture. 

When this award for entrepreneurship in our industry was conceived about 12 years ago, we came up with quite a few prominent people who might qualify as candidates – people such as Wayne Lukas, Ted Bassett and Tom Meeker. But we were also pretty sure that there were some interesting people in this industry that we didn’t know, and, for me, one of the best parts of the award has been discovering such less-well-known but equally qualified and deserving winners. 

For examples, Ami Shinitsky was floating teeth on horses when he came up with the idea for a new horse magazine called EQUUS. Tom Joy bought a little harness track in Canada and soon found a government-run casino sharing his market. John Lyons built a small marketing empire training no well-known horses. I think these surprises are the best part of this, and this year is no exception. 

This year’s recipient, Denny Gentry, formed a new membership association to develop and promote the sport of team roping. He saw a sport that was potentially popular, but that needed something that would allow ropers of any skill level to compete widely, like golf. Otherwise, the best ropers would win every event. Second, the sport needed some uniform rules. And third, there needed to be a national organization to keep the records. So in 1992, Denny launched the USTRC – United States Team Roping Championships – with 1,200 ropers. In just a few short years, he had 35,000 members and twice that many classified ropers, over 70,000, from coast to coast. By 1999, the USTRC finals in Oklahoma City ran for four days, had about 6,500 teams of ropers competing, and paid out $3 million in purses. 

Why did Denny Gentry win the Galbreath Award? Because, thanks to his entrepreneurship, team roping has been the fastest growing equine sport in the country during the decade of the 1990s. 

What was especially intriguing to me is that Denny’s association was established as a “for-profit” company, not along the standard not-for-profit model. Most associations are always hustling for members, trying to raise funds, and dealing in politics. He started an organization that benefited all ropers, but also benefited the horse industry and himself. Now it didn’t come without a lot of effort and work. Denny won’t say much about it, but over dinner in Washington when we presented the award, his wife Connie told me some of the challenges. When you’re expecting about 5,000 ropers and suddenly have about 70,000, your computer needs alone – hardware, software, programmers, and, of course, the money for all of that – presents a huge challenge. Denny was willing to keep going, to borrow money, to take big risks, because, like any true entrepreneur, he believed in his concept and was committed to making it work. 

Let me make one other point. When you talk about 80,000 or 90,000 team topers, you are talking about a lot of team-roping horses. How many ropes, not to mention saddles and bridles and other tack? How many trailers and trucks? And, ultimately, how many jobs are created in the effort to keep a sport like this going? The horse industry survives from a political standpoint in our increasingly urbanized age because of its economic impact.  And that fact is vital to those of us here who work in the business and to those of you who are planning to work in the business.  

We talk a great deal about entrepreneurs here in the business college. Lately, a lot of that talk has been about dot-com companies that were started in someone’s kitchen. Well, I’m happy to introduce someone here today who started a business in his garage and has had a tremendous impact on the equine industry.  

Let me present Denny Gentry.  

DENNY GENTRY: 

Thank you, Bob. You were doing so well there; I was sitting there thinking that you were doing a better job telling about what we did than I could do. I do appreciate it, and I am honored to be here. I was really surprised when I received the call saying that we would be the recipient this year. I said “we” because this has always been a 50-50, mom-and-pop operation. My wife ran the inside and I ran the outside. I wouldn’t pretend to take all the credit for the good things that happened as we went along. 

When I was in college, I was one of those students that bounced around several different universities and changed majors seven or eight times. Finally, near the end, an advisor sat me down and said, “Let me tell you what you need to take if you ever want to get out of here.”  Together, we came up with a degree and I finally did get out. But it was sort of strange because all along, while I had been at those universities, I never knew exactly what I wanted to do or be. I wanted to be associated with agriculture – horses and cattle – but there was nothing there that tripped my trigger. 

I have always been kind of entrepreneurial, I guess, since I was about 10 years old. And I think almost all the true entrepreneurs that I have ever talked to have come off a farm, a ranch, or from a poor ghetto area of the inner city. They were the kids who always had their noses pressed up against the glass, always trying. You see them at 10 or 12 years old – they’re trading. Buying and selling, doing things trying to make things go.  Well, by about 23 or 24, even without a degree, I had a pretty good brokerage business going. But I had an accident and no insurance, and the business went under. I learned a lot of things from that experience but I had to start over again. So then I went back to college, got my degree, and ended up working for the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. But it wasn’t planned – it was all kind of a lucky accident. 

The association’s executive had been terminated for some reason, and so the idea was that this young snotty-nosed kid right out of college would take his place temporarily. My job was to serve until the selection committee was able to select a new CEO. Well, like most associations, this one operated slowly. They had applications coming in from all over the country, from university students and from other association executives. The total eventually was over 400 resumes. I would sift through them, get down to about 10 good ones, and then they’d have a board meeting. That took about three months. The directors would come in, go through the mail, discuss the potential applicants, do some interviews, and then they would leave, saying they’d be back in six weeks for the next batch. This went on for about seven months, during which I was handling the business of the Association. Finally, they made their selection. Since I was doing a decent job for less money than anybody else they could hire, I got the job - by pure luck. 

Now, the thing that’s interesting about the association business is that it introduces you to a whole different mentality. You don’t think in hard business terms when you run an association. You provide a service for people and usually the focus is government and promotion of a particular trade or industry. Of course, no association ever has enough money so one of your duties, when you hire on to run an association, is to raise money through membership or through any other means. Now they don’t refer to it the way we do in business. In business, we are trying to make a ‘profit.’ In a non-profit association, it’s called ‘non-dues revenue’ – which is another term for profit. You can’t help but get indoctrinated real fast because they drill you on it over and over. There are a lot of cute ways to raise non-dues revenue, and, at the same time, you also have to raise dues revenue, meaning retain old members and sign up new ones. 

Running the association got me used to dealing in big numbers, with people, with event planning, and all those things. In fact, my sabbatical at the New Mexico Cattle Growers was my basic training ground for the USTRC. All the things I learned there in that trade association were applied when the USTRC was formed. 

The one issue that held my attention most was that as the association executive, I was told to get our people to renew their memberships. So we’d send out these mailers and we would do all sorts of organizational things that are supposed to help bring people in but most of them never worked. Eventually, in the mid-1980s, I came up with this idea that the way to build member loyalty was to come up with something that people really wanted to do, and then convert their interest over to the organization.   

Here was our association. Typical of most cattlemen’s associations in western states, the average age of our members was between 50 and about 65 years old.  You heard the same thing over and over.  “Our membership is getting stale. People are dying off.  We are losing our base.  Where are the young people? Where are all the young sons and daughters?  Why aren’t we getting them as members?”  

We looked into that, and they all seemed to be more interested in entertainment. Dad and Mom were taking care of the cattle business, and the younger generation seemed to be playing. New Mexico is sparsely populated so, for the most part, I knew where a lot of young people were. They were taking the kids to junior rodeos or they were team roping. Team roping in the rural West is sort of like softball. You go through most little towns and you see they all have something to do. Many will have softball fields, but in New Mexico, a lot of small communities will have an arena on the edge of town.  So, I had a bright idea. To raise membership and to get this younger generation of people to come to our Association meetings, we would hold membership team ropings. In order to compete, they would have to be a member of the Association.  

I devised what I thought was a good format for team ropings, and we began to launch these membership events. They turned out to be an amazingly successful membership tool. In fact, they were so good that we began to have people from other states joining the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association just to able to rope. 

Now our basic membership dues at that time were $40 per year. The cost to send each member our magazine was about $29 or $30. If you added in our newsletter and all the other things we did, by the time we got through, the cost of servicing one member was about $50 a year.  Well, “Joe Roper” from Texas might come over to an Association team roping, join once, and then not renew the following year. His membership would actually cost us $10. So the board of directors called me in and said, “This project is costing us money.  We’re gaining members but we are losing revenue.”  

I said, “Okay, what we’ll do is not give any member benefits to these out-of-staters. If they want to compete in our event, they’ll just have to purchase a $30 permit. Then they can rope, return home, and we keep their money. We’ll have had a nice event with no long-term costs to us. “ Well, in no time we were making $10,000 or $12,000 from each event just from these permits.  It was quite eye opening.  

Imagine! Here I am working on about 100 different political issues, and I get this letter from a rancher. It says, “Dear Mr. Gentry: We think you are doing an outstanding job, and we know how much money you’ve saved cattlemen.  We think the Association is great but, as you know, cattle prices are down, there is a drought, and we have to cut back on expenses somewhere. We will be back with you eventually, but right now we are going to have to drop our Association membership dues.” 

The dues that he dropped amounted to $40 a year. Two weeks later, I put on a jackpot team roping and this same man sends in entry fees for himself and each of his four kids – a total of $785.  A light bulb went on. I’m out here trying to sell people something they don’t want for $40 while they’re sending me nearly $800 dollars for something they do want. Maybe I am in the wrong business.   

I kept on promoting these roping events, which were basically run as benefit s for high school rodeo and the Boys Ranch – a charity group for homeless children. But after I’d been at the Association for about eight years, I began to think about making my living putting on these events. In 1988, I tested a for-profit format and I couldn’t believe the response that we got. It was the largest such event ever held in the Southwest, plus it netted about $2,000. There was a lot of excitement, so we went ahead and did it again in 1989 and it made us twice as much. The number of people – and the distance they were driving to get there – let us know that we were on to something. 

Before we jumped into it full time, however, we thought we had better do some analysis of why over 30 years – team roping took off in the early 1960s – no one had ever been successful before. There’d been countless different individuals who had tried to put on team roping events to make money. It seemed as if every old broke cowboy or farmer in the country at one time or another had tried to do them as a business. Yet, I didn’t know a single person in 1989 who was making a full-time living putting on team-roping events.  We identified several reasons why they had all failed. 

The main reason was simple. In each area, there was a small group of folks who roped for fun. Whenever there was a significant event, the pros would come through as a group and overwhelm everyone. The locals would scatter like a covey of quail when a dog runs through, and it would take a lot of effort to get them back.  In team roping, we had pros roaming the country making a living off these part-timers. So, there had to be some way to solve this dilemma. But when you limit participation by outsiders, all you’re doing is cutting out some customers. People tried it but when they cut certain ropers out to establish a particular ability level, they were cutting their market.  What business can ever survive like this? “I don’t want you. I’ll take you, but I don’t want you.” Yet, that was basically what was going on in the business of team roping.  

There needed to be a way that we could embrace all potential customers, regardless of ability level. So, we came up with a number-based handicap system.  What that system did was use combination numbers whereby the worse you were, the better your partner could be, or vice-versa. It is complicated unless you are familiar, but let me just say that it caused people to go out and bring new ropers into the sport.  

So, in 1990 we started the USTRC with a goal of running events in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, since, to me, that was the center of the team-roping sport.  By the end of the first year, we held a finals in Oklahoma City and we had 16 states represented. We actually didn’t get the membership part going until about 1993. We were just putting on events at that point. But I began to think, “You know, this thing is starting to get beyond my capacity.” I was the only employee except for a part-time girl who helped me put on the events. I was operating out of my garage and to show you how unsophisticated we were, I was running address labels on floppy disks and photocopying the mailing list for each event.  I had to go in and redo this floppy every time. 

We were very unsophisticated about it. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a database. But as more and more people came in – we soon got up to about 10,000 – I was in deep trouble. So, we brought in some computer specialists and began to attack operations with a more professional approach than we had. 

Then, as we started to build a little head of steam, we realized that we had resistance in certain local areas. There was a status quo in certain areas, and when they saw that we were fixing to change the rules, especially concerning pros that were making a living off the sport, they decided to organize boycotts to try to stop us.   

About that time, I happened to be watching a business show on TV and a top executive from GE was on. He made a statement that struck home with me…something to the effect that, “If you are going to make a change, make a revolutionary one.”  So, I decided to attack. I began tracking down anyone who put on any kind of roping event anywhere in the United States. Well, from Florida to New York to Hawaii, we located them all and I phoned every one. As a result, we came on board with forty-some states at one time. There was no way that those local groups who were trying to stop us could do it at that point. They could not counter-organize quick enough to prevent us from what we were trying to accomplish.   

We had a snowball effect. We started to hold back a portion of each purse and then put it into the year-end finals. That added money rose every year from $100,000 initially to well over a million this year. That size purse swelled the finals because anyone who can swing a rope at all can’t resist a million dollars in added money. The pot of gold grew big enough that people have to go for it. 

But back to the beginning. As the number of people in any association grows, the work that they generate also grows. For example, we got to the point where we had 36,000 paid members. If each one were to call the office just once a year, that is 36,000 calls, and a lot of them called every month. You get into automated answering, more phone systems, more employees. Everything you can imagine multiplies on you. Well, that is what happened to us. We were going along putting on these little roping events, and all of a sudden here come thousands of people. We renewed memberships on January 1, and we had to pick up the mail in tubs. We hired extra help, but our computer system only had three terminals. And, while we were in-putting membership information, the whole system crashed. Basically, we learned information and database management the hard way, from the ground up.  

One of the points I should make is that when you start in a business, you can’t always guess which way things are going to go, so be flexible. 

One other aspect of this business that was somewhat unique, and which made it quite marketable, was the competition that got everyone involved in team roping. They joined because they wanted to play our game. And, when they joined, they provided a market for other things – peripheral-type businesses, if you will.   

We needed communication so we started a magazine. There were plenty of companies that wanted to reach our market. When we started, there were three manufacturers of aluminum trailers, now there are 13. You just name it. Saddle companies. Horse sales. Before long we were doing over a million dollars a year in publication advertising. Then we started an affinity credit-card relationship with MBNA. Licensing. Logos. Database sales. All these revenue sources spin off this membership business, and you all know how that works. There are lots of ways to spin that off.   

We built the organization by starting with little groups of people at the local level, then the state level, and then the regional level. They now have six or seven regional events all over the United States, plus the national finals. 

As you go along, you imagine that you are being innovative and revolutionary until you find out that there have been people there before you who did a better job than you did.  The founder of B.A.S.S., Inc., became my hero. Anyway, I went over there and began to ask what those guys did on sponsorships – ”What are you doing over here?” and “What are you are doing with this?” You try not to reinvent the wheel. 

In 1998, my wife and I sold the USTRC business to an investment company in Tampa, Florida.  We felt we had survived the real steep growth period, and that growth was beginning to flatten a little – not to a point where it would decline but to a point where it might flatten off for a while. We were also at the stage where you need to decide either to leverage your company or to sell it. I had also been in the association business for almost 20 years, and I felt that doing anything for that long is likely to get you a little off target. And I felt as if I were getting a little off target, so we decided to sell the business, and we sold the USTRC with an employment agreement. 

Now, understand that it’s not a great honor when someone buys your business. It simply means that they think you are not doing as good a job as they can. That’s why they buy you. They always think they can do a better job than you were doing. And if you understand that, then you are okay. 

But the reason we are here is the equine business. That’s what I wanted to be involved in, and that’s what we wound up doing. And we are happy to have made it in that.  But the longer I was in business, the more I realized that whether it was a pig, a horse, or a sheep, or whatever – business is business. All the things that I didn’t want to learn when I was in college, I wound up learning anyway because I had to. The strategy that we had was a little different because we came at things from a non-profit point of view. It’s funny. When I was running the non-profit, the directors were always saying, “We’ve got to run this thing like a business.”  Well, it dawned on me when I started that I had to run my business like a non-profit.  We reversed the field a little bit.  

Today, there are about six guys making a full-time living with team-roping events. Five were trained by me and the sixth says he followed our lead. There are 19 others who are making a significant portion of their income from the production of events.  Of those 19, we trained 14.  We never kept information to ourselves. We’ve helped as much as we could; I think it’s great for the industry. And team roping is going to do well because we’ve accounted for over 50,000 children between the age of 7 and 13, all of whom will be in the marketplace in the next five years. Although the organization is flat right now, it’s fixing to take another jump in the next four or five years.  

I brought my wife into the business about three years after I started.  She had been a human resource specialist and had worked for Mark IV Industries on their acquisition team. She specialized in our employee relations and did most of the management. My wife ran the inside and I worked outside – the events, the phone calls, the big picture, and the shoe-leather stuff.  It was a great advantage. 

My wife and I had tried four or five different businesses almost from the time we first got married.  We knew we wanted to be in business at some point.  Even though she was doing great in her job and mine wasn’t bad either, the system is geared to the business person. Once you understand all the differences for individuals who work for wages and individuals who have a business and what those subtle differences amount to – path and structure – it is pretty hard to turn back.  

I thank the University of Louisville for selecting me as your recipient this year. I thought this was strictly for racing people, but I was pleased to be selected. I think it helped our industry convince sponsors, and many others who may have questioned whether USTRC was a flash in the pan, that we were for real. I think people are starting to get the picture that the entertainment end of the equine business is not going to go away, whether it’s team penning, reining, cutting or any of those things. It may be the future of the equine business from a volume point of view. As long as pari-mutuel racing generates millions of dollars and television exposure, it will be a part of the business that is going to stay.  But the other entertainment sides of the horse business that relate to the common man having fun are also going to continue to be very good. 

Thank you very much.   

QUESTIONS: 

Lindy Zeller, Equine Club President

Question: Has the sport of team roping been able to attract corporate sponsors outside the industry? By that, I mean other than suppliers to ropers? 

Gentry: We’re starting but it is a slow process. Corporations have advertising agencies, usually with budgets that they have controlled for years.  For an agency, if you can dole out the money and the company seems happy, there is little incentive to change things.  A new business or event asking for sponsorship support is seen as stealing a portion of the budget. Consequently, cracking firms outside of the supplier market has been a bit tough. But now Chevrolet and certain breweries are beginning to get involved, and they are really consumer companies rather than suppliers. It will happen but it takes volume, and television exposure.  And television isn’t a factor yet. 

Question: About how many of those 70,000 ropers that you had classified in those first few years were women?   

Gentry: Oh, gosh, let me say somewhere in the vicinity of ten percent. But it is actually the largest growing segment because women have figured out that the handicapping is positive for them. And they are figuring out something else very interesting. Large peer committees – 1,800 of them across the country, set the USTRC classifications. The committees are made up almost exclusively of men, and these men have a tendency to be easier on females. Some women ropers are starting to understand that they have a real advantage. If you thumb through one of our publications, you will likely see at least one winning female roper on every page. Men have that built into them. If they believe they are superior and can afford to give a little, they usually do. 

Question: Are there other equine sports, or even non-horse businesses, for which you think this approach might work?  

Gentry: It’s interesting that you asked that question because I have done consulting for at least a dozen groups. I would point out the Professional Bull Riders (PBR). The PBR is the fastest growing business out there right now because they are, number one, association based, and number two, profit based. They have 13 dates on television sold, and they have non-supplier sponsors running out of their ears, six of a half million dollars or more. Calf ropers started an organization. Barrel racers talked to us about their new organization in Georgia. Our handicap system has also started to cross over because it works for two people. There is a golf association in Dallas that is doing two-man golf using our system instead of normal handicapping. So, yes, I think it’s going to have application in a number of other areas.  

Question: Could you describe your handicapping or rating system for us?  

Gentry: What happens in most sports is that the top-level competitors get too skilled to compete with average competitors. The response of most sports is to segregate out the best players – the “cutting-tool” approach. The problem with that approach is that it limits and isolates participants. Our system was designed to let everyone play by using a rating system, whereby a beginner is a “#1” and a top pro is a “#9.”  Since there are two ropers in each team, we combined these two numbers together, set divisions, and defined the ability level by combining their two numbers. For instance, you are a ”#1” (a beginner) while someone with more experience might be a “#3.” Our divisions total 5, 7, 9, 11, and the pro level. If you want to rope in a number 7 division, and you are a “#1,” you could rope with a “#6” or anyone who is lower than a “#6,” but you couldn’t rope with anyone higher than that. We numerically set the ability level of each competition, and then peer groups determined the ability level of individuals.  

We never anticipated what happened. What we had had before was an arrogant group of professional ropers who wouldn’t even speak to people with lesser skills. But due to sheer numbers, we created an inverted competition pyramid where a number 7 roping division might pay out $285,000 while the pro division paid $20,000. The pros decided that if they started bringing a few of these low-numbered guys over to their house and training them, they could win the big money. We started to worry about that, but then it dawned on us. Here’s a guy who has never competed in any horse sport in his life. He comes in trained and wins six or seven thousand dollars, a new belt buckle, perhaps a saddle, even a new truck or a horse trailer. He’s hooked. We have a roping member for life. Sure, he’ll get a new handicap, but when his number went up, it meant the pro had to find a new one. And, because we had multiple divisions, each pro might be training three or four amateurs all the time. That process works over and over again. It was an unexpected way that new membership began to feed in.   

Question: Did your business when it was growing suffer from a lack of capital or was it the least of your problems as memberships poured in? 

Gentry: The problem with a new business is that you never have money when you need it. You may need five new people, or a new program, but you are invariably behind the revenue growth curve. They say if you survive that growth curve, you’re good from then on. It was a trick for us because, as I explained earlier, we were getting involved in new areas in which we had no experience – accounting, legal, computer programming. We tried to educate ourselves but, eventually, we just started borrowing additional money and hiring professionals to take care of all that we could. We became armchair lawyers, armchair accountants, and even armchair programmers. 

Obviously, we had to develop relationships with bankers, since we decided to borrow as much as we could rather than seek investors. There seemed to be a kind of a common thread that ran between people that I knew who had been successful in business. Most of them didn’t borrow too much capital for inventory or assets. That was one of our goals when we started that we would not put much in assets or inventory. That even guided us a little as we developed the peripheral businesses, such as the sales of goods – shirts, caps. We contracted it and took royalties rather than own inventory. 

Question: You built this as a mom-and-pop, very customer-oriented organization. Now that it has been sold to a major corporation, what do you think is the likelihood that they will continue to provide USTRC members that level of service? 

Gentry: The answer, obviously, is that as soon as the corporate executives realize that they are not running a manufacturing business, they are running a service corporation, they should be fine. If they don’t, they will fail. We built it as an association even though it was a for-profit business. Now, they come in and they are looking at the bottom line. There must be a balance with a service firm. Our theory was that we did not take much from where we interfaced with customers. We concentrated on peripheral businesses and revenue levels from areas that the customer didn’t see. We felt like, if you do that, you can stay a long time – 20, 30, 40 years. Now I gave the new company my business theories, but I am absolutely certain that they’re going to want to find out on their own.  And, in fact, I think they have already experimented a few times. If they cut expenses in the wrong areas, pull too much income off, the competition will eat them up. There’ll be something new that will come out there.  My wife and I made the decision when we sold that under no circumstances would we go back and take over or start again if things were in shambles. Now, we might do something of a similar nature in a different industry, but, hopefully, not the same thing. 

Question: When you were starting out organizing this smaller venture, did you build with advertising or direct mail? How did you market the business? 

Gentry: My theory was – and I learned this from the association business – if you were doing a solicitation for membership, you took your entire database and you solicited it.  This is the same technique used in political campaigns except that in associations and political campaigns, the percentages are different. In political campaigns, it’s something like a 10-to-1 ratio. That is, if you want 10,000 responses, you have to mail to 100,000 names. In the association business, it’s more like 35 percent. If you mail 10,000, you’ll probably get about 3,000 responses.  So, initially, the way we promoted was with direct mail off of our database. Then we started in magazines. If they were our events, and I mean events that we produced, as opposed to only sanctioned, not only did we use the regular media, but we also used direct mail. If we wanted 5,000 people to show up, we had to do a 20,000-piece mailing.  Well, a 20,000-piece mailing is expensive.  A lot of the independent producers wouldn’t do that. As a consequence, their events remained at one level while the events held by the mother organization grew. Our direct mail had a direct correlation to the size and the profitability of the events. 

Again, thank you very much for having me.