Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jon Jenkins. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jon, thanks for joining us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

Being a family based event company, most of our first team members were family, literally. Growing up in a small family business presented unique challenges. As teens we were already working without even realizing it, it was just what my family did. But as we grew, acquired additional events and needed more help it was challenging. Our line of work required dedicated, knowledgeable people who are available on a temporary basis-maybe a few weeks a year. We are very fortunate to have assembled a team of people who have the skills, availability and love being a part of the team. Our team members are spread around the country, yet we come together and it’s like we see each other every day. I learned long ago that I couldn’t run this company without great people and I’ve found them..

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I grew up the son of an antique dealer. That meant getting up at the crack of dawn on some weekends and going to a show with my dad, even as young as 5. There was a great show in Ann Arbor Michigan that set up at 5 a.m. and I remember riding in with my dad one morning. The promoter was a legend in our business named Margaret Brusher. She was probably in her 50’s at the time and was. as tough as they come. As we were riding in one morning, she greeting my dad in her raspy voice “good morning Steve”. I asked my dad, is that the horrible lady who makes us get up this early and he said yes. Fast forward 50 years, and now I am the horrible person who makes people get up early. We produce some of America’s largest and most successful antique shows and flea markets. Our current venues are Springfield, Ohio, Nashville, Tennessee and our latest venture/acquisition is the West Palm Beach Antique Festival in Florida. Over the years a few million people have attended our events. We pride ourselves in creating vibrant markets for our vendors and great experiences for our customers. While selling is obviously the goal for our vendors, we also take the customer experience seriously. We like to think of ourselves as the social directors of the Antiques Roadshow community. Many of our events serve as extended family/friend reunions.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

About 10 years ago, we had a show in Connecticut that had changed locations. It had been moved to a quaint fairgrounds in Litchfield County. The new location was well received by vendors and was sold out for its debut. Due to a scheduling snafu, our normal tent company could only provide the tents, we had to put them up. These are commercial tents, not pop ups and require a lot of labor. The tents went up fine, but the night before vendor set up, the area was hit with a microburst and most of the tents were literally blown away. Some as far as a half mile. $300,000 dollars in tents were destroyed. This happened at 5 p.m. on a Thursday. It was the second weekend in June and tent availability was next to zero between graduations and weddings. I remembered and old contact in Massachusetts, about an hour away. I got on the phone and miraculously he had tents available. My entire staff stayed up all night and we had the tents ready for dealer set up the following morning. I’m not sure to this day how we made that happen.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Ah, Covid. We were very fortunate in that our main event in Ohio we only missed one major event. Ohio was unique in the fact that each county health director had a great deal of autonomy in making decisions about what could or could not happen. Our county health director had decided that events were essentially retail businesses and our directive was to operate with the same rules that applied to brick and mortar retail. But the key moment was our show in Nashville. The city had closed our facility (the Fairgrounds) and we were forced to look for another venue. Nashville has a great downtown convention center which would normally be out of our price range. Their CEO was someone we had known as he started out in the hotel business and had run a hotel that we had used years before. The convention center had just gotten permission to host events and I was their guinea pig, foolish enough to produce and event mid-pandemic. The protocols were strict and we had to come up with a system to insure there would be no more than 750 customers in the building at any time. We implemented a timed ticketing system, so instead of buying a ticket for a day, you were buying a 2-4 hour block of time to shop. There were a few wrinkles but the show went off and made a little money. It would have done much better, but a flurry of last minute vendor cancellations due to covid concerns really hurt the bottom line. But there was a silver lining. Due to the ticketing system, customers were forced to indicate what advertising method made them buy a ticket. For the first time I received complete demographic feedback from an entire show audience. When I analyzed that info, I realized that for my business, traditional media was a waste of money, the only things that made sense or had any return whatsoever was my email list, mailing list and social media boosts. After that show, I cut everything else out and dumped all my resources into those three categories. In the last three years, my attendance for that event is up 70%. That was a valuable lesson that continues to pay. Thanks Covid.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jenkinsandco.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/westpalmbeachantiquesfestival/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpringfieldAntiqueShow

Image Credits

Jenkins&Co/Lisa Maughmer