In January 1947, the Colonel retired from the regular army with 14 American and foreign decorations. He was 29 when he returned to the Gregory farms. A long line of his forebears had been content to work the land and they had prospered, but the Colonel already had a different approach to prosperity. He wanted to develop products that, unlike wheat, rye, and barley, would be free from the pricing constraints of agricultural commodity markets.
One afternoon, on a tour of the Gregory reserve, he found himself studying acre after acre of flourishing white hickory trees and thinking about a dinner conversation in Cairo five years earlier. He cut down a tree, sawed it, and chipped it into small bits. Then he sent a generous sample to the two Egyptian officers, telling them that more was available at a modest price. Some time later, they sent him his first order for $28 worth of white hickory smoke bits.
"I knew there was a need for it," the Colonel says, "and I knew the market was a lot bigger than two friends in Egypt, if only I could let the right people know."
The Colonel drew heavily on his dirtfarming self-reliance and set to work concocting the right blend of "romancin' and merchandisin'." He sent for a variety of industry directories published by trade associations, private companies, and the federal government. Before long he had a list of meat packers, sausage smokers, food processors, charcoal manufacturers, and many others who could be potential users of white hickory smoke bits. "You'd be surprised how much information is available for free if you take the time to look" he says.
The Colonel's wife, Helen, describes what happened next: "One afternoon, Stone came home with a big sack of hickory bits. At the time, we had three children and they were still pretty young. Stone sat them down at a table in front of the television and told them to fill these little cellophane envelopes with hickory bits, put on his business card, and then staple the two together. It was a regular production line. I can still see the kids sitting there with their feet dangling off the floor and their heads barely poking over the tabletop."
The Colonel took his samples back to the office, hired a part-time assistant, and spent the next two weeks organizing his customer lists and mailing 2,000 letters with samples to the president of each company. "I only deal with the top man," he says. "Life's too short for anything less."
In the same letter promoting the unparalleled excellence of Gregory's white hickory smoke bits, the Colonel also asked for some advice. He wanted to develop a company logo, something that would give his products a little color, a little romance. "I felt there were two things most people think of when they think of a Southern farm," he says. "One's a Kentucky colonel with a wide hat, mustache, goatee, and a string tie. The other's a mule. But I couldn't decide what to use, so I asked these presidents which one they liked. Why should I pay some consulting firm to ask for me?"
It must have been one of the more unusual letters a company president ever received. But its combination of gritty determination and old-fashioned honesty did the job. The Kentucky colonel image was elected unanimously, and ever since, the smiling southern gentleman has graced all of Colonel Gregory's sales literature and letterheads.
Along with the ballots came more than 100 orders for bits. The Colonel hastily constructed a wood processing and storage shed and built his own hickory chipper from old saw blades and other spare parts lying around the farm. The facility was completed just in time to show visiting customers and to produce enough bits to meet the first shipment dates.
Five years after he shipped those first orders, the Colonel estimates that he was chipping his way to annual sales of between $50,000 and $70,000. To his way of thinking, this wasn't a bad return at all, because his homemade brand of market research, advertising, and promotion only cost him about $3,000. "Sales have been growing ever since," he says. "Now, it's a nice six figures."
Based on the success of the White Hickory Smoke Bits, the Colonel fashioned a highly personalized business stategy that he has repeated time and again. Its motivating idea is the complete confidence in his own abilities, and its chief characteristics are his determination to do as much as he can by himself, to extract the greatest benefit from what is at hand, and to offer honest value -- no gimcracks, gewgaws, or modern flapdoodle.
He also matches the bluntness of his marketing with an equally straightforward billing system. His terms on any product he handles are 2/10/net 30 and no volume discounts. If a customer doesn't pay in 30 days, the Colonel calls him collect every day until he does and then kisses him goodbye. "I can have a past due account," he says, "but only once. Everybody gets one chance. If you go back on your word, that's it. Life's too short. Remember, you haven't accomplished a thing until you have a check in your hand -- a good check."
In 1953, five years after the introduction of hickory bits, the Colonel tried his hand at diversification and got burned. It started on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The Colonel was working at his desk when a man stepped into his office and amounced himself as one A.S. McQueen of Johnston City, Tenn., inventor of a revolutionary tobacco curer. Most Virginia-grown robacco is heatcured for five days in smokehouses. McQueen said that his curer burned sawdust only and could save farmers a lot of money in fuel costs.He said he needed $500 to have a prototype built, but no one would give him the money. The Colonel agreed to finance the prototype. "A month later," he says, "McQueen showed up with this contraption stuffed into the backseat of his old Hudson and tied onto the roof. We wrestled it out and fired it up. It worked fine."
