Sometimes the biggest adventures begin with losing a job.
In the spring of 1970, Lee Hendrix was laid off from his sales position with Lockheed when he was 44 years old. With a family to support, I can’t even imagine how scared he was. Like many people suddenly facing an uncertain future, he began looking for another opportunity. His son, Robert, had been working at a business in Marietta called The House of 10,000 Picture Frames, located on Highway 41, and suggested that his father purchase one of the company’s franchises.
Lee sold his MGB sports car and some other personal items and for $5,000, he purchased the franchise rights for Athens and the surrounding counties—an area nearly sixty miles from where the family lived. It was a leap of faith, but one that would shape the next several decades of our lives.
Lee and Robert opened The House of 10,000 Picture Frames in an abandoned dry-cleaning building at 553 Prince Avenue in Athens, Georgia. The old structure had been built in 1869 and had certainly seen better days. Thick ivy covered much of the exterior, and the roof leaked whenever it rained.
Inside, the building had all the character—and all the problems—you would expect from a century-old commercial building. The walls were solid brick covered with thick plaster, making it nearly impossible to drive ordinary nails into them. Hanging framed artwork required heavy concrete nails and plenty of determination.
The ceilings soared twelve to fourteen feet overhead, with antique light fixtures suspended from long chains. The original hardwood floors still contained large openings where dry-cleaning equipment had once stood. Some of the machinery remained in place when the business first opened, serving as constant reminders of the building’s previous life.
It wasn’t elegant, but it had personality. More importantly, it was affordable.
Although he had purchased a franchise, the franchisor offered almost no continuing support.
For the original $5,000 franchise fee, owners received some equipment, a starter inventory, and a few supplies. That was essentially the end of the relationship. Within just a few years, the franchisor itself went out of business. Fortunately, the owners of several House of 10,000 Picture Frames stores refused to let that slow them down.
Frame moulding suppliers generally sold material only in large quantities—often 500 to 1,000 feet of a single moulding profile. That was far more than any small custom frame shop could afford or use.
Several owners developed their own solution.
Frame shop owners from Marietta, Athens, Valdosta, Tallahassee, and Alabama formed an informal buying cooperative. Two or three times each year we’d gather to review new moulding samples, decide what we liked, and split large orders among ourselves. A 500-foot shipment suddenly became manageable when divided five ways.
The arrangement saved everyone money and gave our customers a much larger selection than we could have offered individually. Sometimes the best business solutions aren’t complicated—they simply require people willing to cooperate.
Not long after the store opened, Lee’s daughter, Pam, graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a degree in Philosophy. She and her husband, Greg, moved to Athens and joined the family business.
Lee and his wife, Kitty, also relocated to the Athens area, purchasing a small farm just west of town on Highway 78. One of the property’s old chicken houses was converted into a frame-building shop where thousands of custom picture frames would eventually be cut, joined, and assembled by hand.
As the business grew, so did the responsibilities.
Robert eventually left to pursue other opportunities, leaving Pam, Greg, and Kitty to handle the daily operation of the business. Lee gradually stepped away from the day-to-day management, choosing instead to oversee the finances. After a few years, even those responsibilities were handed over to Pam, whose organizational skills and business instincts became the backbone of the company.
The Prince Avenue store eventually became too small to serve both as a retail showroom and a production facility. While the converted chicken house worked for a time, it wasn’t ideal. Around 1980, frame production was moved into a small building on Oak Street next to Armstrong & Dobbs Building Supply. There, moulding was stored, frames were cut, and thousands of custom corners were joined together for customers throughout northeast Georgia.
Then came 1985.
By the fall of 1985, our lives were changing at a pace that, looking back, seems almost unbelievable.That was the year Pam and I purchased the business from her parents.Within the span of a few short weeks, Pam and I got married, bought our first home, purchased the family business, and were preparing for the birth of our first child. Individually, any one of those events would have been life changing. Together, they were both exhilarating and terrifying.
The House of 10,000 Picture Frames was the first full-service frame shop in Athens.Before “custom framing” was done as a side business of the 2 local lumber yards; Athens Lumber and Tanner’s Lumber Company. Mr Forbes, a grumpy old man, from Athens Lumber Company used to give customers just two choices of mats and frames they could choose from and that was it.
A Brief history of the Athens Lumber Company
- In the late 1800s, Athens was experiencing rapid growth, creating a strong demand for lumber and millwork.
- One of the city’s earliest lumber and planing mill operators was established by Edward S. Lyndon, whose woodworking business eventually evolved into what became known as Athens Lumber Company. The company manufactured doors, sash, blinds, moldings, picture framing and supplied materials for homes and commercial buildings throughout northeast Georgia.
- By the early 1900s, Athens Lumber Company had become one of the principal suppliers of building materials in the area and was involved in many local construction projects.
- During the mid-20th century members of the Forbes family were associated with the management and ownership of the business and many longtime Athenians remember it simply as “Forbes’ lumber company.
By the time Mr Forbes retired there were already several other frame shops in Athens but he always recommended and brought his own framing projects to Pam. He trusted her designs and quality of craftsmanship.
In 1985 Lee was 59 years old, an absentee owner and not interested in seeing the business grow. He wasn’t particularly interested in selling but for years he tangled the carrot of selling the business to Pam. After 15 years in the business Pam had become an expert; customers respected her designs and trusted the quality. Pam was a stickler for details, and inspected every framing project including; dust under the glass, no over cuts on the mat corners and well mitered and joined frames. Over the last 15 years she built an excellent reputation within the community and customers always wanted to see her.
At the ages of 36(Pam) and 30(Bruce), we needed to move forward with our lives so we politely told Lee and Kitty to sell us the business or Pam was going to leave the business – he had no other option.
We agreed on a purchase price of $80,000—$52,500 for the business’s personal property and equipment, and $27,500 for the Prince Avenue building itself. Since the sale would provide Lee and Kitty’s retirement income, we financed the purchase directly through them over twenty years at 10 percent interest. By the time the loan would be paid off, the total cost of principal and interest would exceed $250,000.
At first, that seemed like a reasonable arrangement. Interest rates were painfully high during the early 1980s, and home mortgages had recently climbed into the teens. But as rates gradually fell over the following years, we found ourselves locked into a loan that could not easily be refinanced. Little did we know, buying the business would be only one of several life-changing events packed into a matter of weeks.
Just one week before purchasing the business, we signed a 30-year mortgage for our new home—$73,000 at an eye-popping 13 percent interest. The house should have been a labor of love but there were so many details towards the end – it became very stressful. We had designed it ourselves, with Pam taking the lead on much of the design and layout.
To make everything even more exciting, Pam was four months pregnant with our first child. Between pregnancy hormones, moving into a brand-new house, planning for a baby, and buying a business, it was hard to imagine how life could become any busier.
At the time, I was production manager and part owner of a company in Tucker, Georgia called Sports Section. Every weekday I commuted from Athens to Tucker and back again. Once the business purchase was finalized, I gave my notice so I could begin working, full-time, at the frame shop.
Timing was everything
The order in which everything happened turned out to be just as important as the events themselves.
The bank wanted to see stable W-2 income before approving us for a mortgage. If we had already purchased the business, we would have become self-employed, and the bank would have required two years of business tax returns before even considering the loan.
So we carefully orchestrated every step.
First came the wedding. We needed both of our incomes to qualify for the mortgage. Second, we closed on our new home, using our W-2 forms as proof of employment. Only after the house papers were signed did we close on the purchase of the business.
Had we done those steps in any other order, we might not have qualified for our home loan at all.
Just one week before purchasing the business, we signed a 25-year mortgage for our new home—$73,000 at an eye-popping 13 percent interest. The house had been a labor of love. We had designed it ourselves, with Pam taking the lead on much of the design and layout.
To make everything even more exciting, Pam was four months pregnant with our first child. Between pregnancy hormones, moving into a brand-new house, planning for a baby, and buying a business, it was hard to imagine how life could become any busier.
But it did.
Pam, knowing maternity leave was only months away, hired an employee early enough to be fully trained before the baby arrived. It seemed like a perfect plan. Until we discovered that the woman she had hired was also pregnant—and due on exactly the same date as Pam. Neither of them had known about the other’s pregnancy during the interview process. Looking back, it’s funny. At the time, it was terrifying. But nothing frightened me more than walking into my first day as a picture framer. I knew absolutely nothing about custom framing and our customers sensed it.
I couldn’t have told you the difference between oak and walnut moulding, let alone how to cut perfect forty-five-degree corners, stretch needlework, or preserve valuable artwork. Even more unsettling was the uncertainty. Was there really enough business in Athens to keep a custom frame shop busy year after year? Were there enough artists, photographers, collectors, and proud parents with family portraits to support us for the rest of our working lives?
I honestly didn’t know.
What I did know was this: we had just signed promissory notes totaling more than $155,000, had a brand-new mortgage, a baby on the way, and every dollar we owned tied up in a business I barely understood. It was exciting. It was overwhelming.It was one of the biggest risks we would ever take.
As it turned out, it was also one of the best decisions of our lives.
Starting with Empty Pockets
Owning a business has a way of draining every dollar you have.
After the down payments, closing costs, legal fees, and moving expenses, our savings were nearly gone. One of the first things I wanted to accomplish as the new owner was to establish a solid relationship with a local bank.
The House of 10,000 Picture Frames had banked with the same local bank since Lee opened the business in 1970, so I approached them for a short-term business loan. They approved us for $12,000. That loan became the fuel for our future.
We immediately reinvested the money into improving the store. We installed a new sign, repainted the interior and exterior, replaced the worn carpet, added new display fixtures, added central AC, and built a small kitchenette where Pam could bring our baby to work after he was born. Looking back, it wasn’t a glamorous investment, but every improvement made the store more welcoming and professional.
Then I spent what seemed like an outrageous amount of money on something very few small businesses owned in 1985—a personal computer.
Our First Computer
The IBM computer cost a little over $4,000 and probably had only four megabytes of RAM. By today’s standards, it was almost unbelievably primitive. There was very little business software available, so I purchased Ashton-Tate’s highly respected dBASE III database program and decided to build my own business software from scratch. My computer science classes suddenly became extremely valuable.
Night after night, after working all day in the frame shop, I sat in our home office writing programs that tracked customers, frame moulding inventory, and sales information. The computer stayed at home because there simply wasn’t room—or much reason—for it in the store. Every evening we’d carry paperwork home and manually enter customer orders and inventory updates. It was slow. It was tedious. But within a few months we had created something no other frame shop around us possessed—a computerized customer database and inventory system.
At the beginning of each month I printed an inventory report on our noisy dot-matrix printer and carried the thick stack of paper back to the store. Before selling a frame, employees could quickly check whether we actually had the moulding in stock. It wasn’t real-time inventory, but compared to guessing, it was revolutionary. Many mouldings came from overseas and could take months to arrive once ordered. Simply knowing what was sitting in the warehouse prevented countless mistakes and disappointed customers.
My First Business Lesson
My introduction to business had actually started much earlier.
In 1968, at thirteen years old, I became a newspaper carrier for the Jacksonville Journal. The company expected every paperboy to operate as an independent businessman. Newspapers were my inventory. I purchased them from the company, along with rubber bands, plastic bags for rainy days, and other supplies. Every Saturday I collected money from my customers, paid my expenses, and whatever remained was my profit. I eventually grew my route to ninety-three customers, purchasing around one hundred newspapers each day to account for damaged copies and promotional giveaways while recruiting new subscribers. Those early experiences taught me about inventory, expenses, cash flow, customer service, and marketing long before I ever took a business class.
But understanding business as a thirteen-year-old carrying newspapers is very different from supporting a growing family while making two large loan payments every month. Now there was real pressure and failure wasn’t an option.
Learning Every Job
When we bought the business, we employed two full-time people in the Prince Avenue store who handled sales, mat cutting, glass cutting, and fitting artwork. Another employee worked part-time in a separate building about four miles away assembling frames. Almost immediately after we became owners, our frame builder quit. There was no replacement waiting and I became the replacement with no training.I simply figured it out. It’s amazing how quickly you can learn a new skill when your livelihood depends on it.
Selling was the Hard Part
Building frames didn’t scare me nearly as much as selling them. But, oddly enough, one of my greatest advantages came from an entirely different profession. Photography had taught me about composition, color balance, proportion, and presentation.Those same principles applied directly to custom framing. A frame should never overpower a painting. The mat should guide the eye without distracting from the artwork.
Pricing custom framing in 1985 was almost an art form. There were no computerized point-of-sale systems. Instead, every component had its own pricing chart; Glass had one chart. Mats had another. Frames had another. Backing boards had another. Fitting charges had another.
Standing in front of a customer, I’d flip through page after page while punching numbers into a handheld calculator. One wrong number meant starting completely over. The customer watched every keystroke, wondering if the final total was really correct.
Picture framing was still largely a cottage industry. Many framers worked alone out of garages, basements, or spare bedrooms, and pricing was often whatever the owner thought he could charge that day. Customers frequently expected to bargain. We wanted something different , consistent pricing, and every customer paying the same fair price for the same work.
Frame moulding itself added another layer of complexity. It wasn’t sold simply by adding the length and width of a picture. Each frame required additional material for the 45-degree corner cuts, and wider mouldings consumed even more footage.Calculating those measurements acycurately took practice.
Dressing For Success
Pam was a hard act to follow because of her 15 years of experience and her knowledge and rapport with the customers. As I learned the business, I wanted customers to feel confident they were dealing with a professional. So every day I wore a dress shirt, tie, and slacks.
Designing the frame was only half the job. The harder part was convincing customers that the design—and the price—were worth it. Most customers struggled with spending more than $70 or $80 on a custom frame. Many immediately tried negotiating the price. Custom framing has never been inexpensive because almost every order is built by hand. We had to educate customers about quality while still earning their trust.
Long Days Longer Nights
There wasn’t much downtime. During the day I built frames, assembled artwork, helped customers, unloaded deliveries, and solved problems. At night I read business books, studied management, improved my computer programs, and planned ways to grow the company. Every day seemed full and the evenings seemed too short. Looking back, I don’t know where the energy came from.
The Turning Point
In the spring of 1986 everything began coming together. Our renovated showroom looked fresh and inviting. Our new customer database was growing rapidly. For the first time in years, we decided to hold a major sale. Using the mailing list I had created on our IBM computer, we sent out a few hundred promotional flyers announcing the event. When we arrived at the store on the first morning of the sale, we couldn’t believe what we saw. Customers were already lined up along the sidewalk waiting for us to unlock the doors.That moment told us we had made the right decision.
The business responded immediately. Sales jumped from approximately $155,000 to $235,000 during 1986—an increase of more than 50 percent in our first full year as owners. The long hours, the sleepless nights, the risks, and the uncertainty had begun to pay off.
The House of 10,000 Picture Frames was no longer simply Lee and Kitty’s business. It had become ours. And it was just getting started.
A Letter That Changed Everything
Our second direct marketing campaign in 1986 turned out to be one of the best investments we ever made.
Computers were still a novelty for most small businesses, and I was fascinated by the possibilities they offered. I had figured out how to create a personalized form letter for every customer in our database—something that wasn’t common at the time. Instead of sending a generic advertisement, each letter was individually addressed and printed on our noisy dot-matrix printer. I remember feeling a real sense of accomplishment as the printer chattered away, producing what I thought was a much more personal way to reach our customers.
You never know where a single letter will end up.
One of those letters landed in the mailbox of Barrie Finney, a respected interior designer in Athens. Barrie had worked with Pam on a few projects in the past, and she immediately noticed that this wasn’t just another mass mailing. The personalized approach caught her attention, and it left a favorable impression.
As it happened, Barrie was working on design projects for Athens Regional Medical Center, where her husband served as a project manager. She thought our framing business might be exactly what the hospital needed and arranged for her husband to meet with us.
That introduction changed the course of our business.
Soon afterward, we were asked to frame twenty prints for the hospital. It was one of the largest commercial framing jobs we had received, and we treated it with the utmost care. Every frame had to be perfect because we knew this was an opportunity to prove ourselves.
The timing couldn’t have been better.
Athens Regional was in the middle of an ambitious period of expansion. New wings, renovated departments, and additional medical facilities seemed to be under construction constantly. More importantly, the hospital’s leadership understood that healing involved more than medicine alone. The CEO and CFO believed that attractive surroundings contributed to patient comfort and staff morale. Rather than treating artwork as an afterthought, they made it part of the budget for every new building project.
Because they appreciated the quality of our work and found us easy to work with, they continued to call on us whenever new artwork needed to be framed and installed. One project led to another, and before long we had become their trusted framing partner.
Looking back, it’s amazing to think that the entire relationship began with a single personalized letter printed on a dot-matrix printer.
That experience reinforced one of the most valuable lessons I learned in business: you never know which customer, conversation, or marketing effort will open the next important door. Sometimes success doesn’t come from a flashy advertising campaign or a big sales pitch. Sometimes it comes from taking the time to make one customer feel like they’re the only one receiving your letter.
For us, that one letter led to a relationship with Athens Regional Medical Center that lasted for years and became one of the most profitable and rewarding commercial accounts we ever had.Coming soon ……