Candid Winmark Leader John Morgan Has No Filter by John Mowers
We picked up a sizable position in the last two days in a very unglamorous business with quite compelling financials. I thought this interview with the CEO was interesting.
John MorganThe always candid John Morgan on building Winmark, investing in Canterbury, and pulling off one of poker’s all-time bluffs by Sven WehrweinSeptember 20, 2013
Looking back, John Morgan calls it the “worst six months of my business career.” In March 2000, he stepped into the CEO role at Grow Biz, best known for its franchised lineup of Play It Again Sports stores. Brought in at the invitation of Jeff Dahlberg, the departing CEO, and Sheldon Fleck, a 10 percent investor in the company, Morgan found a mess.“They needed me. Badly,” he recalls. “They thought everyone was telling the truth [about the state of the business.] They didn’t know the truth.”His first task was to stop the bleeding. At the time, Grow Biz, renamed Winmark Corporation in 2001, offered six different franchise concepts. Quickly, Morgan sold one, Computer Renaissance, a seller of used computers, and dissolved another, Retool, a group of stores selling used tools. He kept Play It Again Sports, Plato’s Closet, Once Upon A Child, and Music Go Round, and most recently added Style Encore. In 2013, Winmark’s store count will top 1,000 franchised stores none are company-owned, while retail sales of its franchisees will be more than $900 million.