Q&A with Bob Munroe, IdeaPaint
Bob Munroe has spent much of his career climbing the corporate ladder, landing in the 1990s as president of Reebok North America, which was based in Canton prior to its acquisition in 2006 by Adidas. With the acquisition, Munroe had a chance to leave corporate America and took it, jumping to small startups. He landed at Ashland-based IdeaPaint in 2009, where he serves as president of the 24-person firm. The company markets paint that works like a dry erase board, allowing users to write on paint-covered surfaces and then erase their comments. The company just announced that it will be sold nationally by home improvement superstore Lowe’s. Here, Munroe talks about how he came to join the tiny paint company and what the firm’s marketing strategy has been.
After you left Reebok, you joined a startup out of New York called Mission Skin Care. What attracted you to that position?
Some of the senior executives at Reebok left the company and formed venture capital businesses. One of them, Dennis Baldwin, a good friend of mine, started a firm called Breakaway Ventures, which invested in Mission Skin Care. That company sells athlete-engineered skin care products. We built Mission up from nothing and eventually launched a total of 17 products. I did that for two years. By the time that I left, they were in 10,000 stores and it’s a successful and growing brand. I moved on to another Dennis Baldwin company, IdeaPaint, which Breakaway first invested in in 2008.
To what do you attribute IdeaPaint’s growth?
IdeaPaint has some tremendous advantages. Our basic positioning is that we’re better than a white board for three basic reasons. The first one is versatility and flexibility. We can introduce color, odd shapes and sizes — we can go places white boards can’t. Secondly, we have an environmental advantage. Even the best white boards wear out, at which point they have to be ripped down and thrown in a landfill. But with our product, rather than rip out an old board, you can actually just recoat it. Our third benefit is our cost. At about $4 a square foot, we’re less than half the price of a high performance white board.
How much are the founders still involved with the business?
The original founder John Goscha left the company in the spring 2010. He remains on our board of advisors and he’s actually involved in a new venture now, something totally unrelated to IdeaPaint in the lightbulb area. He still stays connected with the company and helps us with consulting on product. The first two gentlemen he brought in, Jeff Avalon and Morgan Newman, are still with the company.
What’s it like for you as the outside business guy to interact with the founders?
First of all, I’d say that it’s very positive, but there are a lot of interesting dynamics. Part of it is the age difference. They’re all in their 20s and I’m 50. So we bring different perspectives and experiences to the table and we really feed off of each other in a way that is a lot of fun and very productive. At the time that I came into the company, it was oozing with potential, but we really had been unable to get it to move at all.
What’s the toughest management lesson that you’ve had to learn?
What I’ve learned is that you have to manage to results, not to style. To have a lot of people who all look the same, act the same, dress same, might appear to be easier and more orderly to manage, but it’s actually a tremendous disservice to your business. The world at large comes in all different shapes and sizes and personalities and if you have a workforce that reflects the general population, you’re ultimately going to resonate more with your target consumer.
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Is Breakaway the only VC investor in IdeaPaint?
There's another one called Fireman Capital Partners. In total, the company's received $15 million in venture capital funding.
That seems like a lot for a little paint company.
Well, we're not that little anymore. We were little when I joined, but we're actually growing quite well. We've been doubling and tripling all of our metrics for the entire time I've been here. We expect to do somewhere in the $15 million to $20 million range this year.
What was your launch strategy? Did you focus on specific markets first?
We focused on commercial first and our commercial business includes work and school. In the commercial area, we developed a number of national distributor relationships to help us expand and sell into that class of trade. That's where our focus was in 2008 and 2009. As we entered 2010, we started to refine the commercial side of our business. We then started investing more money in the working models, and started investigating new territory, which in this case, is the home market. And that started with a small Lowe's test initially. Now, we're in all Lowe's stores.
What have the challenges been in penetrating the commercial market? Is it difficult to get the word out?
There are different challenges for different pieces of the market. One chunk of the commercial market is the new construction and renovation segment. That work is often being influenced by an architect or a designer. So one way to that market is to call on the architecture and design firms in the country and educate them on the benefits of IdeaPaint so they write our product into their specifications. Our primary partner in that space is a wall coverings distributor called MDC.
What about reaching the consumer market? Is that driven largely by mass marketing?
I think the partnerships in that case will be in the form of delivery. It will be based on the retailers that we select. So our focus really on identifying the consumer we want to reach and finding out where they shop. That's why we picked Lowe's. We were targeting the do-it-yourself mom and Lowe's had the best fit for us initially. I do see us expanding to more retail over time. And perhaps even doing some direct response efforts over time. I happen to think that our product would lend itself very well to TV, whether it's a two- or three-minute commercial or a longer form infomercial.
So many people have good ideas, they start businesses and they don't get anywhere. What was it that you and your team did to get over that hump?
I think it was the fact that the founders recognized that they weren't progressing as fast as they wanted to and they were willing to try something new. Also it was the influence of the investment money that came in. Dennis Baldwin, one of the investors, was the chief marketing officer at Reebok. He had a lot of ideas of what could be done and should be done.
Check out this video clip of Bob Munroe demonstrating IdeaPaint:
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