It's what's on the menu

By Dick Hughes  

NOVEMBER 19, 2010 12:21 p.m. (0)

Pete Glennon makes a living recognizing a good niche, figuring ways to do it more efficiently than anyone else, staying technologically current and anticipating the next thing.

Walter Ezell makes a living making food look good on menus and making menus make money for restaurants.  It’s the kind of niche business run with a passion that Glennon admired.

Last month, Glennon acquired Ezell’s company, Menu Works, and moved Ezell and his team into CBS Distribution’s facility in a plain vanilla leased building on Sunbelt Business Park Drive in Greer. The combined operation employs 27 people.

The company name, CBS Distribution, doesn’t come close to describing the specialty printing that takes place there, including Ezell’s menus and other marketing items for 1,500 restaurants, and as a niche within a niche, many Mexican restaurants.

Glennon, 64, and Ezell, 61, talked about how they built their respective businesses, how they came together and where they see their collaboration going.

Ezell took over Menu Works from Stephen Johnston, a Clemson graduate student, in 1994.  At the time, Menu Works had 18 customers and Ezell thought he could do it after hours while working full-time as a copy editor at the Greenville News. Within eight months, Ezell saw enough potential to quit his job at the News.

A serendipitous meal at the Monterey Mexican Restaurant on Laurens Road lead to a connection with Mexican restaurants across the country. Soon Menu Works, working with four native Spanish speakers and one fluent American, was doing menus for 1,500 Mexican restaurants, although it is not doing as many now.

“The thing that attracted me the most, aside from the fact they had a built-in customer base, was that they had so many products that they could sell, some of which they were selling and some of which I thought they could sell,” said Glennon.

Glennon and Ezell have added many of CBS’ signature marketing products to restaurants – plastic postcards, promotional placemats, laminated menus in tailored shapes, key tags, loyalty reward cards, etc. – and are brainstorming ways to build restaurant traffic by pushing technology to the limit.

“What I really had in mind was to focus on laminated menus because we know how to do it, and we know how to make money with it,” said Glennon.

Beyond that, he said, “we’ve developed several other products since the acquisition, Walter and I. Walter is a genius behind the ideas of what makes a restaurant tick, and I understand the mechanics of how equipment works.”

They are working on software to make online menus for smart phones that will allow a customer to place an order and enter a credit card number without going to a web site.

“A lot of what Walter is going to be doing is building a blog and talking about things, how to make a menus sell.  We’re going to publish it.  It is going to be part of what is the art, and it will make our reputation. We’ll get plenty of business out of it, even if we are giving away some of our secrets.”

Glennon keeps his business philosophy pretty simple: “Everybody uses the same kinds of things.  If you can figure out what that is pretty rapidly, you know what your focus is and you do it more efficiently.”

After becoming “a student of the trade” as a salesman for a national printer of business forms, Glennon started his own general business forms business in 1974 and by the 1980s saw greater growth opportunities in niches where he could dominate the market.

“One of them was medical clinics, another was lumber dealers, another was United Way organizations, and eventually it became libraries,” Glennon said.

“Then the products began to change and so we changed with the flow and the evolution of technology. Most of the things we used to sell in the 70s don’t even exist anymore.”

Over time, he said, “we got out of the office forms business – statements and invoices and those kinds of think – and we moved into things people could use for marketing.”

Today, two of Glennon’s companies, Lazerdox and Creative DataProducts, are major national players in printing those ubiquitous plastic cards (but not financial cards) in everyone’s wallet and on every key chain and the personalized marketing cards in the mail.

Glennon credits the plastic card business, which grew out of the library card market, with reviving his business.

“Ever since 2004 and all through the recession, we’ve been growing,” he said.  Prior to that, Glennon said, his business was “starting to die” because the product line had become old and because his attention was distracted by other acquisitions.

The company produces two million plastic cards a month, and on a recent day was working on a rush order “for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of plastic postcards” for a customer wanting to get them in the mail before Black Friday.