American Dream Achieved
IBA, as an approximately fifty-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The Story of Alan Regala of ShelfGenie
By Nesha Ruther
While Alan Regala’s background was in engineering, his future lay in entrepreneurship. He studied mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, before beginning a career in corporate America. “I worked for a year in a corporate environment before realizing I needed to go back to school,” he says with a laugh. “I wasn’t ready to be in a corporate environment.” He got his master’s in mechanical engineering at Stanford and realized during that time that he wanted to go into design. After graduation he began working for a design consulting firm in Palo Alto called IDEO.
While Alan enjoyed the work he did at IDEO he never fully felt as if he was getting credit for everything he brought to the table. “It was fantastic work. It was very inspiring and the people were amazing, but I didn’t feel like I was getting paid what I was worth,” he says.
Like so many talented employees who feel undervalued in the workforce, Alan began looking for another way. “One of my colleagues provided me with Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and it made a lot of sense to me,” Alan says. “It opened my eyes to how business ownership can be more fruitful than working for somebody else forever.”
Alan was still young, early in his career, and had a degree of flexibility that he knew would be difficult to come by later in life. He also had a host of product ideas that he dreamt of turning into a reality. “I left IDEO after two years and decided to explore some of my own tech ideas.”
Alan’s foray into entrepreneurship was through a product he called PicoPad, a credit-card-sized notepad with sticky notes and a miniature pen that fits in your wallet. “I manufactured it overseas, visited the factory, wrote my own patents, and marketed it,” Alan says. He launched PicoPad in 2005, and for several years, it performed quite well. That is, until, the iPhone with its accompanying notes app hit the market and essentially made his product obsolete. “There’s not as many Luddites in the world as one might think,” Alan says with a laugh. “I recognized that the need for PicoPad had gone away.”
Thankfully, Alan understood that one singular product was unlikely to make him financially stable for life. “Everyone has this dream about inventing the product that is going to be a home run,” he says. “But in reality, you’re more likely to have a single or a double or maybe even a triple. A home run is pretty rare and you really need to have a whole line of products or be continuously creating new things. It’s very rarely going to be the one thing that makes you crazy rich.”
This pragmatism led Alan to do engineering and design consulting work on the side as he marketed and sold PicoPad and developed other products. “Eventually I stopped creating new products and focused on the consulting work,” he says.
In 2009, Alan and his wife moved to Seattle for her work, leaving him in a moment of transition. “I decided I would either go back to school and get my MBA or start a different company. In the end, I decided to go the different company route because I really liked the idea of having a team of people instead of running the business by myself,” he says.
Alan began looking at other avenues of entrepreneurship. He admits, during this time harboring some stereotypes about franchises. “Initially I thought that you weren’t a real entrepreneur if you were part of a franchise,” he says. “But I realized that model is actually really nice. You have a built-in partner and support system that can help while you focus on the aspects of the business that interest you.”
This change in attitude led him to find a franchise consultant and explore his options. Initially, ShelfGenie was not a top priority. Alan began visiting the different companies his consultant brought to him. “I visited a company in Florida and realized it was not the right fit for me. It felt like a good old boys network and not my kind of people,” he says. “On the way back a contact at ShelfGenie convinced me to stop in Atlanta on my way home.”
Alan’s experience visiting ShelfGenie was transformative. Not only did he feel comfortable in the environment and with the people, but their work directly aligned with his background in engineering. “My experience was in engineering and user-centered design. My time at Stanford and IDEO really helped promote that spirit of innovation,” he says.
ShelfGenie’s custom pull-out shelving and organization solutions are designed specifically for the customer’s space and can accommodate the individual quirks and details of someone’s kitchen. This degree of specificity and individuality appealed to Alan. “ShelfGenie understood that what is needed to create something innovative is to be open to clients first. You need to be able to look at your users and provide empathy for their situation to create the best possible products and solutions,” he says.
Alan also saw that the empathy ShelfGenie extended to their customers was also granted to their team “It has to go back all through the chain. You have to maintain that empathy for your team because they are the ones who are working with clients and are the face of your company. It goes all the way back to the franchisor, and while it wasn’t stated in those terms to me, it was something I could sense from them.”
While today, Shelfgenie is a household name, when Alan opened his doors in 2010 that was not the case. “At that point, it was not an established franchise,” he says. “So there was an innovative, client-focused culture versus one that is all about the franchisor.”
ShelfGenie’s innovative model relies on the fact that they don’t just sell and install wooden boxes, but that they retrofit existing spaces, like kitchen cabinets and pantries, with solutions using pull-out shelving. “It’s not one product that fits a couple of different sizes, everything is custom-built,” Alan says proudly. “What I learned once I started is that we do user-centered design in-home, in people’s kitchens and bathrooms and pantries. It really involves going into people’s homes and seeing how they use their space and what types of items the space needs to accommodate.” With this philosophy at the core of the business, no nook and cranny is too awkward or oddly shaped to accommodate their shelving.
Oftentimes, this involved not only creating and installing custom-made shelving but also helping customers reorganize their space in order to improve both its form and function. “99% of the time people will see an ad for ShelfGenie in the paper and think ‘Oh it’s a pull-out shelf,’ but in reality, we were doing a lot more for the customer than they initially realized. It wasn’t until we would come in and ask the right questions that they would realize that there was more we could do to optimize their space,” he says. “It was a lot of conversations like, ‘Oh, you use this thing a lot, but it’s in an awkward space, if you actually move it over here and orient it this way, you can free up the space for other things you like to use.’”
This method of engaging with customers respects that they are the experts of their home, and have the best understanding of what they need, while the ShelfGenie team is the expert in optimizing space to accomplish those goals. “Our approach was to combine those two areas of expertise and create a new system with the existing cabinetry that can make the space work better. That way the customer doesn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars remodeling,” Alan says. “That creativity was my favorite part. I loved working with clients and being able to wow them and create something better than what they thought was possible.”
While Alan’s background in engineering made him well-suited to this work, it was still an entirely novel experience. “Going into people’s homes and working one-on-one with clients is very different than anything I had done before, so there was a lot to learn from a sales perspective,” he says. “I could do the actual design and problem-solving part of it, but I was learning how to listen and understand what someone needs, understanding what questions to ask and how to make them feel comfortable.”
When it came to familiarizing himself with making sales and running a business, Alan didn’t hesitate to look for support. “I spoke with the franchisor and I asked them what I was doing wrong, I read sales books and listened to audiobooks,” he says. “The first few months of running the business was learning how to sell.”
By January of the following year, Alan had finally gotten his sea legs under him and began to generate leads. One way in which he was particularly successful at bringing in clients was through home shows. “ShelfGenie’s product is very visual,” Alan says. “When you see it in person or even on video, you’re like ‘Oh man, that looks amazing. It would be amazing if I didn’t have to get on my hands and knees to get what I need when cooking.’ So home shows were the best way to engage with people, not only visually but kinesthetically because they could play with the shelves.”
In addition to home shows, Alan turned to mail as a revenue generator. “We did several different types of direct mail, newspaper, internet, emails, SEO, pay-per-click, and social media.” Alan knew that trying a wide variety of avenues and often trying them repeatedly, was the best way to see what customers reacted to.
“Our home office had come up with TV ads and they spent a lot of money on the production of these commercials, but no one had much success with it, so everyone thought ‘Oh TV ads don’t work.’ But years later I tried TV on my own, doing things a little differently and it actually worked,” he says. “We found that with marketing you always have to question if it’s the medium or something else, there are so many variables that go into marketing so you really have to do your due diligence and figure out what works.” In the mysterious case of the TV ads, length proved to be the defining factor. The 30-second commercials the home office released were not long enough to give the customer a strong sense of the product, while Alan’s longer ads painted a clearer and more compelling picture.
Using that valuable piece of information, Alan secured segments on local shows like New Day Northwest and Seattle Refined, which allowed them five or six minutes of airtime. This strategy worked especially well because the show’s host could ask the kind of questions the customer would want answers to. “These types of ads were much more engaging and similar to a home show,” Alan says. “But to reach that point we had to experiment, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and be scientific with our efforts.”
While it can seem intimidating to spend money on a process of trial and error, for Alan, the information it yielded was critical to finding success. “One mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is that they’re afraid to spend money on marketing, but at the end of the day, it’s about having an ROI. As long as there’s enough resources to help customers or fulfill orders, you should have an unlimited budget for marketing that provides a good ROI,” he says.
Another challenge that took Alan time to overcome was hiring. “It took me a number of years to even understand the hiring process and how to bring in the right people and train them well,” he says. “At the beginning, we just needed people so the bar was very low: we were like ‘Just breathe on this mirror.’” Because hiring and training a sales force was new to him, Alan didn’t initially onboard good fits for the team.
Understandably, this did not yield the best results. “For years, the performance of our team was very low compared to my individual performance,” Alan says. “I thought that my results would always be better because I was the owner, and it wasn’t until five years in and I had an employee that was a really good salesperson that I realized ‘Oh this is possible.’
From that point on, Alan set about reconstructing his team from scratch. “I created a whole new team and finally got good people who would not only stay but bring in better people. I think the key was not being desperate,” Alan says with a laugh. “That seems obvious but especially if you’re in home improvement or some kind of service industry and it’s hard to find skilled people, you just want to latch onto whatever you can get. But once you get some momentum and have a strong culture built and aren’t in that desperation mode, it’s easier to be picky. You can have a pipeline of interested people who come to you and say ‘I know ShelfGenie and I would love to work there,’ which is a great feeling.”
Once Alan recognized this, he could begin to identify the characteristics he wanted in an employee. “You need someone who isn’t sales-y, but approaches it from a mindset of helping the client. That combined with persistence and not giving up, being willing to follow up and follow through,” he says.
While Alan agrees with many entrepreneurs that hiring is one of the biggest challenges to running a business, he is also adamant that it can be one of the biggest accomplishments. “When you find people who are a good fit with your culture, it’s amazing,” he says. “Having an amazing team is the best part of running a business. Because then when I’m on vacation, I know the team is doing everything. It reminds you that this is the dream. So hiring is two sides of the same coin, it’s the most challenging part, but it’s also the best part.”
Alan owned and operated his ShelfGenie for 14 years. This provided a unique opportunity to not only grow as a business owner but to watch the franchise itself grow up around him. In this way, Alan was able to add the knowledge he acquired to the larger ShelfGenie infrastructure, so it could benefit other franchisees the way he had once benefitted. One example of this was the home shows that had been such a success for Alan. “I had been telling people in the system to hire an event manager so they can do way more events in addition to the big home shows, like fairs, festivals, and smaller events,” Alan says.
This balance of autonomy and community is what initially attracted Alan to ShelfGenie and what kept him there for over a decade. “I felt like I was autonomous in many ways and could build my business freely, but if an innovation was made the franchisor can spread it to the rest of the system,” he says. In this way, ShelfGenie was a network of individual units that could rely on one another for support.
In October of 2021, Neighborly, the world’s largest provider of home service brands, acquired ShelfGenie. It was through this purchase that Alan began to consider exiting the business. “I went to a ShelfGenie conference and there was a speaker from Neighborly who talked about preparing your business for sale,” Alan says. “I contacted him afterward to chat briefly about my business. It always stayed in the back of my mind that I should have my books clean and ready in case an opportunity arose.”
Two years passed and in 2023 Alan made it a personal goal to solidify his training and systems so that he could either sell the business or have it run autonomously without his day-to-day involvement.
That summer, Alan was contacted by a friend who was interested in buying an existing franchise. “He offered to value my business and I was really happy to sell for the price he determined,” Alan says. The pair reached an agreement and even signed a letter of intent, only for the deal to fall through in August.
Alan had mentally relinquished control of the business and come to terms with selling only for the deal to go nowhere. After that time and effort spent, simply running it again seemed like a step backward. He decided to put his ShelfGenie on the market.
Because Alan was part of a larger franchise, he had options for how to sell his business. “There was a national broker who wasn’t local, there was a franchise network I could have used, and I also had the option to use my own local broker. I had never sold a business before and knew I wanted to do things the right way,” he says. “I wanted to be helped through the experience because I myself was inexperienced.”
Some people come to IBA through recommendations, some people have first-hand experience with their quality of service. For Alan, all it took was a simple Google search to confirm their reliability. “I found them online and saw they had over a hundred five-star reviews, which is really rare. I reached out to Gregory Kovsky and spoke with him directly.”
One thing Alan values above all else is communication. “When I was running ShelfGenie, I was very firm that if people contacted us we needed to get back to them quickly and not leave them hanging,” Alan says. “So when I met Gregory, I liked that his communication was so strong.”
Alan also valued that IBA is the oldest brokerage firm in Washington and all the in-house knowledge that is acquired during such a long lifespan. “IBA had a lot of credibility and in speaking to Gregory, it was clear that he was very knowledgeable. I also appreciated that he, as the owner, was the one to contact me directly. Meeting him I really got the confidence that I didn’t have with anyone else.”
IBA’s expertise paid off, and Alan was able to make a smooth and seamless exit. “I don’t have any other experience but I’ve heard from friends of mine who have sold businesses, and there is a clear difference in the level of competence,” he says. “I worked with Sally Bergesen and we were firing on all cylinders and everything felt very smooth. It was also a very collaborative experience with the buyer which was great because I didn’t want it to be any kind of fight. That is one thing IBA does really well, they’re fair to all parties. They’re not trying to take advantage of someone or have it be a win-lose situation. They want it to work for everyone and they want everyone to have a good experience.”
For Alan, the American Dream has always meant independence. At every opportunity, whether it be leaving corporate America or not choosing a certain franchisor, he has sought his independence and autonomy. “I have always valued the idea of being responsible for your own success. That’s why I couldn’t do corporate work, or I didn’t feel like I was being paid according to my worth,” he says. “I knew that I didn’t feel that same energy working for other people. Having my own business, I worked way more than I ever did anywhere else (at least at the beginning), but it was always more rewarding.”
“So for me, the American Dream has meant opening my own business, being successful on my own, and writing my own future. Selling it was the cherry on top, to be able to exit and say ‘Wow I created this thing and it did really well,’ I can look at my business and know that it fed my family and paid for college educations and all this other great stuff,” Alan says proudly.
For now, Alan is enjoying the fruits of 14 years of labor but is excited to take the next step. “I’m leaving that open for now, but I’m thinking of doing some business coaching or consulting. I’ve even been working on my business card,” he says with a laugh. “I love anything that gets me excited and gives me energy. And being able to use some of my experience and knowledge to help others seems like a good step for me.”
After achieving his own American Dream, perhaps Alan’s next step will be helping others achieve theirs.
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio and is a Lead Writer at Bond & Grace.