“The Grumpy Man? Where did you get that name?” The number one question that is asked at every event. If I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen the future, I probably would have came up with a better answer. It was a year after finishing college and the job I started right out of the gate (which I loved), hadn’t panned out.
I spent another few months trying to sell life insurance and you don’t see me writing about insurance, so you can guess how that went. Sitting at my grandmothers after lunch one day my dad asked what I thought about taking his and my mothers salsa recipe, making some jars and selling them. With nothing better to do at the moment and having always wanting to own and grow a business I started making plans. The first thing you have to do when you start a company is have a name, so we sat down in the living room one afternoon and started throwing names around.
Sanford and Son was a fun one, but lent itself to having future liability issues. Datil Delite was a name my dad had played with back in the 90’s, it had great alliteration, but no one knew what a datil was. Then there were some pictures my dad had taken while wearing my grandfathers old travel hat, for whatever reason he looked particularly grumpy and the image struck me as iconic. Some variations were thrown around and eventually The Grumpy Man was landed on. It had everything, family tie ins, my grandfather was a pretty grumpy guy, my dad not so much, but the imagery was perfect. Also, with the name The Grumpy Man, we could set some pretty low customer service standards (I told ya’ll I flunked out of sales).
From there we wrote the Legend of The Grumpy Man. Now you know how we came up with the name and the legend, if you want to read the legend for yourself and try to figure out what we made up and what is true, follow this link. And if you want to try the original salsas that got us started follow this link. Next week, I’ll be back to write more about how decisions were made, were they good or bad and how we course corrected.