The Story Of Darman Mfg. Company (2010)

[Guest guest]

Introduction

I spent the time needed to tell the story of my tenure as President of Darman

Mfg. today.

I did this because " my credibility is so important " in regard to what I am

trying to do at the moment.

I felt that perhaps my work history with Darman Mfg. might help with this (my

credibility).

I hope you as the reader both enjoy, and gain some insight into what my work

potential may be, when you read the story below.

The Story Of Darman Manufacturing Company, Inc. During My Tenure As Its 2/3rd

Majority Stockholder and President

I have done a business start-up before in my life… or " almost " done so.

" Almost " means that I did not have to start a business from scratch. I revived a

business that was dying, and was dying for quite some time.

In 1983, for $100,000 I bought a dying manufacturing company with (1) an

obsolete product, (2) an old plant and equipment, and (3) " an almost empty bank

account " .

I bought this business from my father Arthur Darman.

[Arthur Darman had had bought Darman Mfg. Company his father ph Darman's

estate in the late 1960's when he died. ph Darman, an immigrant from Malta

who spoke no English, and had no money when he arrived at Ellis Island in about

1910, was its founder (after soon buying out a " funding partner " ).]

Darman Mfg. Company was purchased from my father " without a dime " of my own

money (as I had none). It was purchased by the company mortgaging its

" paid-for-building " for $50,000 (an amount immediately handed to my father), and

a $50,000 promissory note at no interest paid out monthly for five years. (I

paid my father $833.33 for the next sixty months, and paid the mortgage as well,

all out of company proceeds " as we went along " .)

Darman Mfg. Co., Inc.'s annual sales were about $130,000 annually for the prior

three fiscal years before I bought it. These annual sales were probably the

lowest in its corporate history as far back as World War II.

Darman Mfg. Company, Inc. had suffered through a long slow decline in annual

sales over the past fifteen years or more.

This decline in sales was a result of paper towels and hot air dryers replacing

the cloth roll towel cabinets that are (sometimes) still found in public

restrooms.

Darman Mfg.'s primary product was cloth roll towel cabinets that were sold to

the linen industry. The linen industry hung these cabinets in commercial

restrooms, and made their money on washing and changing the toweling.

When I told people back in the 1983 – 1994 era what Darman Mfg. Co. actually

made a common response I received from many persons was " Who the heck still

wants those? I did not think anyone made them any more " .

The primary reason for Darman Mfg. Co.'s flat sales three years before I

purchased it was just as my father told me before he sold me the company…

" , every product has a life cycle. The life cycle of our primary product is

over. It has been over for quite some time " .

Both my father, and a consultant with an M.B.A. degree that I hired a few years

after I bought the company, told me that " I did not have a chance " as far as

succeeding with Darman Mfg. Co. goes. Both thought such to be " impossible " … or

" extremely unlikely " at the very best.

" Almost nobody wanted cloth roll towel cabinets " to dry their hands on when

paper towels for hand drying became prevalent, and took the commercial hand

drying market by storm in the sixties and the seventies. In some states cloth

roll towel cabinets were actually " unfairly outlawed " from the standpoint of

hygiene. The market for cloth roll towel cabinets in the United States was not

robust when I purchased this company, to say the very least.

In these hopeless business circumstances, and in a high tax state in which

manufacturing companies were " leaving in droves or dying " , I succeeded " in

spades " . And I succeed despite manufacturing a product many thought to be

obsolete… cloth roll towel cabinets.

I succeeded due to the following:

(1) I had a work ethic " second to none " . (Eighty hour work weeks were the norm

for me for the bulk of the first five years or so of the eleven years I ran

Darman Mfg. And in one particular year and a half period of " these five years " I

often exceeded this eighty hour work week by another ten hours or so.)

(2) I maximized the value of a verbal pledge to purchase 2000 towel cabinets

annually from a major domestic linen supplier in advance of a new towel cabinet

design being even started on. (When this verbal pledge of future purchase was

made, it represented about $120,000 in business annually, or about double our

annual towel cabinet production in units at the time.)

(3) I was able to find and secure close to half a million dollars of funding for

this new design via (1) a limited stock offering to people that I knew, and (2)

through S.B.A. financing package. (I was heavily involved on a hands-on-basis in

developing the business plan and accounting data to make this financing occur.)

(4) I successfully upgraded Darman Mfg. Company's towel cabinet design from a

product with a metal outer shell to a product with a plastic one. (I heavily

participated in the design process of this new plastic shell. I worked " as a

team " with a " pencil draftsman " that I had hired in a bar one night. " Pencil

drafting " was almost a must at this time, as personal computers had not quite

advanced enough to support AutoCad yet. Neither this draftsman nor I had any

prior experience in plastic part design. We " learned as we went along " . Our

design was so good a major local molder doing told us " our new cabinet could win

an award for its design " . I admittedly did have our work reviewed by a

professional plastic parts designer before expensive molds were made. However,

this professional made remarkably few changes to what the draftsman and I had

come up with design-wise.)

(5) I greatly improved our internal accounting capability. (I was " a wizard " at

writing Lotus 123 spreadsheets in 1987, and was completely self taught in this

(by reading books). I put all the business books on spreadsheet templates of my

own design in 1987. These were still in regular use by Darman Mfg. over a decade

later. My work was done on a 286 computer, and was " way ahead of its time " . It

actually " embarrassed " our C.P.A accounting firm to take the action of sending

some of their employees to Chicago to learn how to use computers. A person in

this accounting firm told me if my " cash disbursements ledger template could

write checks " , he could " sell it " to some of his other accounting customers. I

could have learned how to do such from the books that I had in my possession,

but I did not have the time to invest in this. I was " running my own business " ,

not " helping his for peanuts " . Oddly, as much as I knew about Lotus 123

spreadsheets and spreadsheet design in 1987, I don't know a whit about Excel

today. After I left the business environment my learning was directed

elsewhere.)

(6) I was behind the " smart purchasing " of raw materials. (At this I absolutely

excelled for a business of our magnitude. I was using a Radio Shack computer to

help me with purchasing as early as 1984. I used " merge letters " , and the

Register, to often get thirty or forty quotes from different vendors for " the

same part " . This was done to find " the best price " for a part of equal quality,

of course.)

(7) I was able to recognizing the successful price point for our primary

product. (This took " a feel " for the market, and what price it would bear. The

market for towel cabinets was price sensitive. It was price sensitive due to an

excess of " fully reconditioned " towel cabinets regularly being sold at $40. per

unit all over the U.S.)

(8) I personally designed and developed a Lotus 123 spreadsheet template that

was given to a number of our major customers in the early 1990 & #8242;s. This

spreadsheet template contained a " sophisticated sales argument " involving " the

total cost approach " using net present value, including " all the math behind

it " . It was essentially a program that our customers could plug their own cost

variables into. It would then automatically and accurately generate " their own

fiscal results in net present value " . (This sales argument compared two

competing purchasing decisions many of my customers faced. This sales argument

was a bit of sheer " genius " , or very close to it. It did make a substantial

difference in our domestic and Canadian sales. It did so by convincing a number

of our customers to replace their older towel cabinet inventory with new

cabinets when their older cabinets came in for repair.)

(9) I acquired some major domestic customers. (My brother Darman was

admittedly a great help with this. Sales is " my weakest suit " in running a

business by far. Sales and " people skills " are related, and I am lacking in the

latter. Thankfully the Internet makes selling far easier than it was " before the

Internet existed " .)

Amazingly, one of our biggest customers for towel cabinets for many years was a

linen supply company that was actually owned by the brother of the only

competing manufacturer of cloth towels cabinets that we had in the U.S. We

simply gave this man " a much better value " that " his brother's towel cabinet

manufacturing company did " . We sold this man's linen supply company many

hundreds of thousands of dollars of cabinets over the years. To do so, our value

and quality had to be exceptional vs. that of his own brother's company.

(10) Darman Mfg. acquired some export customers and markets. (We sold in Europe,

Australia, New Zealand, and other countries as well. Our export market expanded

as a result of our presence at numerous European trade shows as a corporate

exhibitor.)

and perhaps the most important…

(11) I learned to respectfully listen to the thoughts and ideas of every single

one of my employees at all times. (One employee that worked for me came up with

a key design change involving substantial simplification of the mechanism. This

man, a man I have often thought of as " my second father " in my life, literally

saved the company with this idea. His idea saved us almost $5.00 per cabinet in

material and labor. One year we shipped almost 30,000 cabinets, for a savings of

nearly $150,000.)

Less than eight years after I bought Darman Mfg. Co, from my father, it was

doing about $2,000,000 in annual sales. And it continued to do so until I

retired in 1994 in order to " try to find the cure to manic depression " .

For the past three or four years that I ran Darman Mfg. Co., its profits, and

" my salary with benefits " , were both around $100,000 (each). This admittedly

assumes that I count " as my salary " paying my ex-wife $35,000 annually as a

" no-show " vice president.

The success story of Darman Mfg. Company occurred " against all odds " . One of

" these odds " I have yet to mention was the fact that during the entire tenure I

ran Darman Mfg. Company, I was at least somewhat symptomatic of bipolar

disorder.

The stress of " growing " Darman Mfg. Company did take a toll on me personally.

Beginning in November 1987 my bipolar illness suddenly became a lot worse. At

this same time (November 1987), I also became suddenly and heavily addicted to

gambling. (This gambling was specifically " playing poker " , as I gambled at

almost nothing else. This is a story for another day.)

Despite my being really " nuts " a good deal of the time from late 1987 until I

voluntarily retired from Darman Mfg. in the summer of 1994, or my being " gone

playing poker somewhere " , and despite a lot of very difficult business hurdles

that I had to overcome, Darman Mfg. Company succeeded. And it succeeded " in

spades " .

Such is the power of a " little bit of genius " , a " ton of stubbornness to

succeed " , a solid work ethic, and a great deal of hard work.

Incidentally, the success of Darman Mfg. is certainly not the story of the power

of formal education. I only have a high school diploma. And I have only

completed one single completed course in college. This course was Accounting 101

in 1983. (My father made this course a " pre-condition " to sale of the company to

me.)

Achieving Two Impossibles Sixteen Years Apart

What the above material regarding Darman Mfg. means is:

" I have done the impossible once in my life " in business.

Perhaps not one person in a million could have grown Darman Mfg. as fast as I

did, given its primary product, and the access to capital and resources that I

had to begin with.

What the above also happens to mean is:

I have a long life history of (1) " the willingness to work " , (2) " the ability to

work " , and (3) " the ability to achieve some rather extraordinary things "

(despite bipolar symptoms when some of these achievements occurred).

A recent blog I posted to my WordPress site titled " Cambridge Who's Who And A

Synopsis Of My Situation (October 2010) means:

" I fully claim to have done the impossible again " . This " second impossible " is:

I have found many cures for a myriad of mental, degenerative, and addictive

illness, when few to none of these cures actually existed before.

I did so with no formal conventional medical training, no formal alternative

medical training, and despite " only having a high school diploma " .

I did so by reading books, and trying a wide range of things on myself… over and

over again… in order to repeatedly refine and validate results.

I did also achieved this `second impossible " by listening to " the ideas of

others " .

This included listening to my thirteen year old son Willy, who came up with " a

much better idea " than I in order to begin to " cure himself " in 2004 (his

baggie).

Finding a myriad of cures for millions of persons with a wide range of different

illnesses by the above would be considered by many " to be impossible " .

Well, it wasn't impossible.

My teenage son Willy and I co-achieved this.

Incidentally, finding the cures for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia,

and the like was the easy part for me.

These cures are all fairly elementary from both a logical and a " common

biological sense sense " standpoint.

Staying alive while finding and refining these cures, all the while knowing

since the spring of 2000 that some portion of the drug industry and I had

already become aware of how much of a threat we were to each other… and doing so

for over eight years on primarily my SSD check, that was the hard part for me.

Over ten years ago I knew I was playing a " chess game " with a corporate monster

for my very life.

I sure hope that the " third impossible " that I report to the world a year or so

down the road is the following:

" I have achieved a won position in my game against Big Pharma. All the world

needs is now is to wait a little more time for the weight of public opinion to

topple them " .

A Wrap Up On the Story Of Darman Mfg. Company

Darman Mfg. Company was a notable success story in Utica, NY during my tenure as

its President. We made the newspaper and TV in Utica NY " more than a few times "

while I ran this company

Darman Mfg. Company is still a viable company today.

I wrote the story of Darman Mfg. Company in an attempt to add to the credibility

that the Cambridge Who's Who organization has recently bestowed on me. (I cannot

thank this organization enough for this.)

I do have a complete set of Darman Mfg.'s financial statements during my tenure

as its President to prove the above. I also have some years " before and after "

my tenure as President in my possession as well. (These statements " prove " the

gist of the above, for all ostensible purposes.)

Anyone that has read this blog now knows that prior to my getting into

self-applied alternative medicine, my professional background was " business

management " .

Conclusion

I sincerely hope that some persons also realize that in all the years I have

spent on the Internet spreading alternative medical truth and understanding, I

have not tried to commercialize anything, or gain fiscally in any way.

Since the fall of 1997 I have given away many thousands of hours of personal

effort on the Internet " for free " .

I intend to give away much, if not nearly all, of my future Internet efforts

" for free " as well. This should show " my pureness of heart " in regard to helping

people. If it does not, perhaps nothing will.

Defining, funding, and managing a healing house to the point of its generating

useful video material for others worldwide is an infinitely simpler task than

what I had to deal with to in order to make Darman Mfg. Company succeed. There

is simply no comparison here.

In doing the above in a manner that is properly funded and staffed, I swear to

the world that I can generate video material that will heavily sway the opinion

of all who watch it.

The influence on public opinion I could rather readily generate if given the

means and " the needed protection to do it " has a very good chance of toppling

Big Pharma.

There is the possible potential of a multi-hundred billion dollar pot of gold in

selling drug company short, or using other " betting against " market devices, if

things are handled right.

Now perhaps the reader may understand why I feel " like a dead man walking " .

Sincerely,

Darman

http://nutrientscure.wordpress.com/