We recently connected with Marty Boyer and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Marty thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you have a hero? What have you learned from them?
My grandfather, Anderson “Andy” Moore is my hero. In fact, it’s hard to write his name without tearing up. Some of the lessons that he imparted to me.
– Self-reliance: If it is to be, it starts with me.
– Contribute: Be part of the solution.
– Work hard: It doesn’t matter what problem you are trying to solve, grind.
– Listen with you eyes and ears: He never explicitly stated this, but I inherently understood it. You can learn a lot by simply paying attention with both eyes and ears.
– Details matter: Doesn’t matter what you are doing, the details matter.
I’ll never capture every lesson perfectly, but these have all stuck with me.
Marty, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Theatre House is a mail order and e-commerce theatrical supply shop that is registered as a vendor to over 70K schools in the United States. We sell theatrical supplies, ranging from makeup, props and costumes to fabric. Our goal is simple: People are trying to share their stories and we do our best to equip them to share their stories. We have a saying inside our building, “make it true”. Our goal is to help make the customer wishes true. In the world of e-commerce, automations and big brands ruling the space, we’re like the 1960s. We pickup the phone, respond to messages and do our best to be personal in a world that is less than personal today.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When the lockdown started in 2020, we noticed that we were selling a bunch of elastic. The next thing you know, during the lockdown, we sold hundreds of thousands of yards of elastic. It’s basically the only thing we sold in the spring/summer of 2020. At first, it was like 10K yards. Then it was like 50K yards. While it won’t make you rich, it kept us in a healthy position to continue on.
Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?
Theatre House was a business that was dormant for six months. A friend of mine bought the building and the business went with it, but it had been ignored for some time. Our goal was to “turn on the lights” and communicate with our customers. The acquisition part was easy, but ungluing all the burnt bridges and systems was near impossible. I made an early decision to not look at any of the historical data beyond capturing contact information. The reason was simple: Where do you start and stop? We threw away eleven pallets of paper and didn’t look back. We chose to not hire any of the previous team members either, it wasn’t because they weren’t valuable, but rather because we wanted to define our own new.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theatrehouse.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetheatrehouse/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheatreHouseSupply
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thetheatrehouse