Today we are talking briefly with Mark H, a small business owner Arkansas. Mark has started a few diferent businesses in and around the Mid South. Hs the owner of Level 7 Chemical company, a chemical trading company in Conway Arkansas, offering all kinds of chemicals for water treatment and commercial and industrial uses, as well as food ingredients, and supplies for industry and business.
1- First, let’s find out a few details. Tell us about your early life
MH: I grew up in Memphis TN. My mother always worked outside the home usually has a secretery or in admin type jobs. She worked at Sharp manufacturing and at the Donruss bubble gum plant. My father worked for Illinois Central Gulf Railroad and always had second jobs doing landscaping and building retaining walls out of cross ties. They were both resourceful people and I learned a lot from them about life. I attended Overton High School for the performing arts, and then went on to college at Memphis State University, now University of Memphis. All through school and college I worked. My first paying job, other than being recruited to help build cross tie walls, was at Market Basket just down the street from our home in the Parkway Village” neighborhood.
My wife Anne and I met in college at Memphis State, now Univiersity of Memphis. We have been married for over 30 years, and have 3 wonderful sons.. Anne and I worked at FEDEX in college and operated a small landscaping service co too. We mintained landscaping at many commercial businesses and apartments around town. Later we sold the landscape business, and I started selling real estate for a while in Memphis . I was also in the Air National Guard for several years after high school and during college.
I also had a route type job selling cleaning chemicals and water treatment chemicals for Certified Labs. It was 100% commission, and we used our own vehicles. I wore the car out traveling all over Memphis, Shelby County, and other nearby places where there were either manufacturers or other buyers of water treatment chemicals or cleaning products. After about 9 months in, I , and my car had had enough and I started looking for a higher paying job with a regular pay check and hopefully a company car.
Thankfully, I found a job with a solvent and chemical company and went to work in their Memphis branch out on President’s Island , a large industrial park on the Mississippi River. I had a good year there and learned a lot. The main think I fugured out was that I had found my career. I really enjoyed selling raw material chemicals and solvents to end users. I just had not quite foudn my home yet.
A year to the day later I started a job at a competitor with a larger product line, selling more organic and inorganic chemicals, and with a much larger territory, When I got that job we moved our growing family to Arkansas
2- Who influenced you to start your own businesses?
MH: I had a lot of influences in my early life as far as starting businesses. A few of my early influences were my father, an aunt in Monroe LA, uncles from both sides of my family, and also people I worked for in Memphis. I was mentored for a while by an executive in Memphis that helped run a local SCORE – Service Corps of Retired Executives group in Memphis. Even now I can recall advice he gave me as we talked when I was in his home, or working for him doing landscaping at his place in East Memphis. He cautioned me early on to make sure a business was properly capitalized, and that a business had to develop processes early on to make it succesful. My wife was also a great part of our businesses. She ran our business.
3- Do you remember when you first decided to step out on your own and start a business?
MH: I remember working for myself very early in life. Nothing big. Even as a kid, I would walk around our neighborhood and find odd jobs to do. I would do things I guess most kids would do, rake leaves, cut yards. I also remember finding a big pile of carpet samples from a carpet store, and walking door to door, and selling them as welcome mats. Sometimes you have to get creative. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time. Later on, after marriage, when I was running my landscaping company, Scenic Landscape, I recall having being short a few people on a truck one day and having to cut a particular yard in East Memphis that was on an old city owned golf course surrounded by older, beautiful homes. The home was owned by Mr. Bruce, a man that was the president of a large manufacturing plant in Memphis. We had spoken a few times about business and he had impressed me . It was a brutally hot and humid day in Memphis and had rained a few days earlier, and the lawn was very hard to cut. I remember looking at that house and thinking I wanted to own a home like that one day, and wondering how that would ever happen just cutting yards in Memphis. The next week I put the landscape business up for sale, and started a class to get my real estate license. Looking back, I really wish I had learned to manage a business more efficiently and effectively, and known how to run a business and to just add a second source of revenue, like selling real estate, to my landscape company. Those would have been very complimentary together. Landscaping would have done really well along with real estate sales. Our landscape business had started producing some decent cash flow, but as they say, hindsight is 20-20.
4- Tell us about recent business experiences.
MH: Over the next nearly 20 years, after leaving Memphis, I worked for a large national chemical distributor than later a large international chemical distributor covering some large accounts
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