The Conversion Of Skip Kelly

Last summer, Skip Kelley was running a small-time home-remodeling business. Then he found Mr. Build.

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Security. Ego. Love. Fear. Greed. That's just what they had hit him with, Skip Kelley thought, staring at the slide on the wall of the rented motel conference room.

"People don't buy on logic," the teacher said. "Psychological tests have shown that they buy on emotion 75% of the time."

Kelley knew that first hand. Last spring he had been independent, free to run Kustom House Co., his $324,000-a-year remodeling business located north of Boston, however he chose. Thomas Tyska, the regional director who sold him his new Mr. Build franchise, had touched four of the five emotions in his pitch.

Look at the problems you face, Tyska had said: mistrusted by the public, caught in a price war, threatened by the entry of such giants as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co. into your markets. That was fear. Then came security, ego, and greed. But just imagine. You can be part of the No. 1 team in an $80-billion industry. With a national brand name like Coca-Cola or Hertz. With illuminated outdoor signs like the golden arches of McDonald's, moving billboards like Sears trucks, radio and television ads like Century 21. What, Tyska asked, would that be worth to Skip Kelley?

It was a polished pitch, starting with an 18-minute video on the triumphs of franchising and ending with a textbook handshake, dotted-line close. And Kelley was an easy sell. Kustom House had been growing steadily, if slowly, for the past 10 years, but Kelley's ambitions and frustrations had been growing as well. "Only used-car dealers have a worse reputation than home remodelers," he would lament. "I've built Kustom House into a professional operation, but to the public I'm still not different from the guy running around with a

Kelley started with a Skil saw in a pickup himself but now at 42 with more than half his lifetime invested in his career, he wanted something more. He wanted credibility, visible proof of his accomplishments and standing. "Credentials," he would tell his wife, "I've got to get credentrade journals -- Professional Remodeling and Kitchen and Bath Business -- poring over their glossy pages late at night, after the last nail had been driven and the truck put away, looking for the key. He had even toyed with the idea of franchising Kustom House himself, if he could ever get more than a few dollars ahead of the game.

Kelley stumbled upon Mr. Build International in his reading -- and was instantly sold. But it wasn't the concept that primarily impressed him, although the idea of a national brand name with television advertising and signs and such fit all his dreams. Instead, he bought the chance to associate with Art Bartlett, chairman and chief executive officer of Mr. Build -- the man who built Century 21 Real Estate Corp. into a franchise phenomenon. Century 21 ads had filled Kelley's TV screen for years; the company's signposts and golden go-getter blazers popped up wherever he looked. Starting in 1971 with a single office and $6,000, Art Bartlett had turned Century 21 into a colossus: 7,600 offices coast-to-coast with $20 billion in housing sales. Then he retired in 1979, considerably richer, after selling the system for $90 million to Trans World Corp.

The choice, Kelley decided, was simple. He could get on the bandwagon, or he could get left behind. "I was afraid not to buy," Kelley admits. "What would happen to Kustom House if Mr. Build got a beachhead in my town?"

On October 22, 1982 -- for a $7,900 flat fee, 6% of his monthly gross, and $300 a month for a national advertising fund -- Skip Kelley became the first remodeler in New England to buy a Mr. Build franchise. "We aren't going to teach you to do your business; we're just going to teach you how to market it," Tom Tyska promised. "We're going to teach you to think like a businessman."

Mr. Build was still too new to New England to have opened a formal headquarters by the time Kelley's first marketing lesson was scheduled. There were no regional offices yet, and only two regional staff members: Tyska, a monogrammed and manicured Century 21 veteran who commuted from Connecticut in his Mercedes-Benz; and his secretary. So the class convened in a rented motel conference room instead, and the international offices sent Ira Messing, the designer of the training programs, to teach.

Messing is an anomaly in the system, one of the few Mr. Build International executives who didn't come from Century 21, and one of the few who ever drove a nail for profit. He is also one of the most messianic, fervently convinced of the truth whereof he speaks. "Our remodelers see themselves as craftsmen; most are extremely weak in business sense and don't know how to apply the disciplines," Messing says. "It's very difficult. You can't teach a college course in marketing to someone who has only been through the ninth grade. We've got to take a guy, give him a program, and motivate him to get in his pickup and go try it. We give him the ammunition, but he has to fire the gun."

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