(Left) Lorna Mountz
As we made it through the first year the strain on my wife was becoming apparent as we tried to run a business out of our home. We decided to rent a small portion of an industrial building at 1080 North 11th Street in San Jose. The rent was $75.00 a month, and we occupied less than 500 square feet. This was a major early decision and a big expense in our first year. By finding a number of local customers in the San Jose area and establishing some resellers across the country we had hoped the business could continue another year.
My mother, Vera came on board as a full-time bookkeeper and my wife, Lorna a part-time secretary, but both did whatever else needed to get done. Shipping, receiving, invoicing, marketing or cleaning up – we all pitched in regardless of task. No one asked whose job it was. We just worked together in an effort to survive another day.
So that I could spend more time on customer development we decided to hire a part-time person to help with tool service, repair, calibration and shipping. Our first employee was a young man named Malcomb McDonald who worked for us for a number of years while getting his college degree. A few years later he came to work full-time as a salesman.
(Above) Vera Mountz and (Bottom) Owen Johnson
Orders were hard to come by early on and each one took a lot of effort and explanation. We developed press releases and sent them to trade magazines for publication. We adopted a spring that looked like a “m” as our logo (it remains our current logo today). Though rough in appearance, we began to create single page brochures, organizing them into folders that bared some semblance of a first catalog. Ever mindful that resources were slim and sales hard to come by, we continued to look for ways to promote the company and its line of hand torque tools.
I recall my mother saying on several occasions, you need to go out and sell “x” dollars to be able to pay our bills this month. It was a great motivator. We were able to establish a small line of credit at Crocker Bank, a San Francisco based bank growing in the Bay Area. This was an important commitment to help us get started.
We began to attract profile customers such as IBM, Lockheed, Hewlett Packard and United Airlines and received more inquiries from our early distributor partners. About a year and half into the business we received an order for a 100 torque screwdrivers from IBM – a day of celebration for sure. I was beginning to worry about how to support these important customers since my job was to bring in the business so we could make it another day.
During that first year, I made a sales call on a former colleague, who had started a local sales company. While there I was delighted to encounter my old mentor from my early days working in San Francisco. I offered him a job to handle inside sales. He graciously accepted. Owen Johnson went on to work over 40 years for our company in a variety of positions that included vice-president. Stay tuned for more of the stories behind Mountz…. click here to go to all the Mountz 50 Year Anniversary blog posts.
Don Mountz
Chairman of the Board/Founder
Mountz Inc.
