We were lucky to catch up with Sean Armendariz recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sean, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?
I have worked with musical instruments in one capacity or another for over 20 years. I used to work for two of the largest musical instrument retailers in the country. If I had to narrow down the entire experience into one hard lesson it would be this: corporations don’t care about you. One of my former supervisors said it best one day when he told me “at the heart of this company is an animal that will do whatever it has to to survive.
I was guilty. I drank the company Kool Aid. I believed at one point that I was “one of them” . I was part of something bigger than myself. I was part of the family. I believed that if I took care of the company, it would take care of me. I was wrong.
The main catalyst to this awakening happened one night at the shop that I was General Manager of in 2009. A man walked into my office, and grabbed me by the throat. I gave him 2 warnings to remove his hand from my throat. He didn’t listen. I wasn’t about to give him a third warning. A few seconds later, he was on the floor with me on top of him pinning his arms so that he couldn’t get up. The police came and took him away. To this day I have no idea why he came in, what made him angry or what he thought he was going to accomplish. I did the good corporate follower thing and immediately reported the incident to my Loss Prevention manager. I went home. Two days later… all of the sudden there was a Human Resources investigation going on in my store over something completely different. At least that’s what they told me. I suppose that they forgot that I had in the past had several trainings and meetings with our Loss Prevention people and they showed me in great detail how they operated. If they wanted to fire someone, they would brainstorm together to find the best possible excuse as to how to get rid of an employee quickly and quietly and most of all be without blame. A few weeks later I took a demotion and went back to doing sales.
One day a few months later while I was taking a break, the thought came to me that I should start to think about coming up with an escape plan. I realized that this company and the industry in general was a dead end.
I had been making art work and home furnishings using repurposed and salvaged musical instruments for a few years. I decided that I could start with that on the side and learn more about repairing instruments which had been a hobby for some time. The way I saw it, I could keep my dead end sales job and work repairing and creating on the side since it wasn’t a direct “conflict of interest” for the Corporation vampires.
I thought to myself – If I am going to start a business, it needs a name. The name should be something short, sweet and instantly give you an image of what it is that the company is about. I repair and recycle and repurpose musical instruments. The name should be “Recycled Rock N Roll”.
It felt right. So I kept it.
It still took another 12 years or so to get to the point where the side business became my only business. Covid was the turning point. A different corporation and a different job tittle later, I still had the side hustle but money was ok. I was still doing sales but also repairs of band instruments – which I taught myself. Covid hits, everything shuts down, I took a two and a half month vacation from my job after they told us we had to. When we came back, we discovered that the commission structure had changed. They forgot to tell us that they had to cut commissions and hours and staff in order to continue to operate. So now we had to work twice as hard in less time to make a little less than we had made before. Over all my pay was cut about 60%. They had officially moved me into the low income/ poverty category.
I was talking with one of my co-workers right after this happened. I told him, “We have been doing this job for almost 20 years. 20 years went by like the blink of an eye. If something good was going to happen for us, it would have happened by now. If we don’t do something now before we know it another 20 years is going to go by and then it will be too late to change anything. I’ll be an old man sitting at home wondering how things would have turned out if only I would have taken a chance.”
I decided that day that if I was going to live in poverty, I was going to do it on my own and for myself. I figured, I couldn’t make much less money than they were now paying me to work a job that slowly killed me while I made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the company’s president to put his kids through Harvard and for expensive nightly partying in bars and clubs on the company’s expense account. They finally killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
My wife and I refinanced our house to come up with the funds to open our shop. We decided that we wanted to make our shop like a collection of places we always loved to go to since we were kids. We wanted the community feeling that we got from different coffee shops, record stores, clothing shops and clubs. We founded our business on being completely Anti-Corporate. Basically, anything that a corporation would do, we try to be the opposite.
We put people first. We don’t want to treat people like customers, we want to treat customers like people. It has been a struggle. The biggest struggle of my life. I am always exhausted. I am always stressed out. But, it wont always be like this. And, it’s for ourselves. Not some faceless corporate puppet in an undisclosed compound somewhere far away.
Sean, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Our shop is a strange combination of things. We are kind of like a musical instrument repair shop, and kind of like a second hand store, kind of like a vintage shop and kind of like a music store. Our shop is what I would call a “Musician Lifestyle Store”. I know lots and lots of musicians, and even though they are all different and play different types of music the thing that they all have in common is style. If you are a punk rocker, you are a punk all the time. If you’re into the blues, you dress and walk and talk the blues all the time. Not just when you’re playing a show. We service your instrument and can decorate your house and dress you for your next gig. The thing that makes me the happiest is to see the faces of most of the people that walk in our store. When they tell me how much they love the shop, when they say what a great vibe we have, when they say that they want to live in our shop, then I know that we gave them the same feeling we used to get at the places we loved to hang out at. The corporate machine breaks a little every time we make someone happy.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
It’s very simple. Word of mouth. Word of mouth is worth more than any marketing campaign. More than any national TV spot. If the word on the street is you know what you are doing, then you know what you are doing. If the word on the street is you are a horrible person… We do honest work for honest prices. We tell the truth even when it wouldn’t necessarily be in our best interest. We will not do anything unethical just to make a buck. People see it. People know when they are being lied to, and if they don’t right now, they will sometime in the near future. It’s easier just to do the right thing and to be honest.
My customers have been the biggest help in spreading the word about our shop.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Currently, I am the only employee of our shop. But in the past I have run crews of up to 50 employees. My advice is to treat your employees like people not employees. Don’t be in a hurry to hire anyone. Take your time, ask lots of questions, get lots of background before your make the decision to bring them in. People in general are working because they have to. They need to make money, they need to pay their rent, they need to eat and they would like to be able to enjoy their lives. Give them the freedom to be able to have a life outside of their job. Teach them, listen to them and care about how they are. Know their significant others name, their kids names, their bands name.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://recycledrockandroll.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recycledrockandroll/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/recycledrockandroll
- Youtube: @recycledrockandroll