Mart Green
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Mart Green’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I'd say early mistakes that I learned was sometimes I knew that I didn't have the right person, but I kept just hoping it would work out, making that hard decision to sell somebody a different career. So I would say early on I did not let people go as early as I should have, even though I knew I'd hired wrong because I was learning how to hire.
So obviously my skills weren't too good at doing that in the beginning. I learned through the process that actually it's a double negative. One, I'm hiring somebody that I don't need, is not able to do the job. And two, they're not getting ready to go to their next opportunity.
Well, thank you, Craig. And you've given me a lot of advice in my life. So I have less than five I get that from.
Yeah, that'd probably be when I was 19. And the situation was Hobby Lobby did start in our home. I was nine years old when my dad went and borrowed $600. And so when you borrow $600, you got to use child labor and free labor. And so mom was free labor and we were the child labor. So we glued frames for seven cents each. And this is how Hobby Lobby grow slowly, one store at a time.
And I was actually at college and I called my dad one time and I was just talking to my dad was an entrepreneur. He talked about open a barbecue stand and different things. And none of that was interesting to me, but he talked about Christian bookstores. And so I called him back a week later. So are you really going to do that someday? He says, well, if you'll come home, I'll help you get a loan.
So I was going to college. He wasn't helped paying for it. So I was going to semester, working a semester. So I'll just go home next semester. I'll work and I'll try this thing. So when you're 19 and you start a new business, you realize everybody's looking to you for all the questions, all the answers. It's not always easy because they're looking for the boss.
When I didn't give the answer they wanted, when somebody come in, they didn't get the answer they wanted, well, I want to meet your boss. And I'm like, well, I'm the top of the list. I am the leader.
Yeah, yeah. So that's why I said a little bit crazy. So I came home. I have no clue what I was doing. I learned a little bit from my dad, obviously.
Yeah. First, it looked like finding a location. So I drove through Oklahoma City, our hometown here, and I found a location. It was 6,000 square feet. At that time, I thought that's too big for a Christian bookstore. So my dad said, well, put office supply in. I hate going to office supply. That was before Office Max, Office Depot, all this. And so now I have to learn the Christian industry.
And now I got to learn office supplies. At 19, you don't know much about either one of those. And so I was thrown into the fire and Trucks would back up with all this stuff. I had no clue what a hanging file folder frame was, all that. So I'm curious, you had no experience. Well, I had 10 years. I remember I started at nine gluing frames. So you're a frame gluer.
Yeah, I do.
The importance of people, getting the right people. And then when you're 19, you're just looking for somebody who comes in the door, and then you get a little more discerning. How do you find the right people? Obviously, it's easy to find people your age. When you're 19, you wind up hiring people not too far from your age. Well, sometimes that works, sometimes it didn't.
So then how do I attract somebody with more maturity, more experience than I had? Mm-hmm.
Well, in the end, you have to empower them, I think, and stuff like that. So they have to believe that. So you're looking for people. You find out they've got skills, they've got competency. the things that you're looking for, and you say, hey, come on, let's take a risk together. So you have to convince them why they wanted to work in retail. Maybe they had retail experience in other places.
Maybe they had a bad experience, whatever. But I learned early on, if I didn't empower them, it wasn't too hard, though, when you're 19, right? Because most everybody has more experience than you do. And so the good news, it was easy for me to empower others because I needed to learn from them. And I did learn a lot from my dad. I don't even want to honor that. I got to work under him.
I got to saw him work. He had been in retail all of his life. He worked in high school years in retail. So I just learned a lot about people, how to take care of people. Yeah.
Yeah, I'd say early mistakes that I learned was sometimes I knew that I didn't have the right person, but I kept just hoping it would work out, making that hard decision to sell somebody a different career. So I would say early on, I did not let people go as early as I should have, even though I knew I'd hired wrong because I was learning how to hire.
So obviously, my skills weren't too good at doing that in the beginning. And so that would be one early lesson, again, that I learned.
And so that's where I made my mistake. So yes, I hired some really good people, thank goodness, but I hired some that weren't. And again, I just think, oh, they'll get better. I'll try. Or again, just the disappointment of having to tell them that they don't have a job because you hired them, you brought them on. So you feel that sense of obligation. But I learned...
through the process that actually it's a double negative. One, I'm hiring somebody that I don't need, is not able to do the job. And two, they don't, they're not getting ready to go to their next opportunity. So I realize, you know, sometimes letting people go to their next opportunity actually is a favor both to myself, right, as well as to them.
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