Transcript

Bob's Red Mill: Bob Moore

Hey, one quick thing before we start the show, just want to let you know that we've just announced some brand new details about the how I built this summit in October, sponsored by American Express. We're gonna have breakout sessions where you can learn all kinds of skills from acquiring new users to pitching investors. You'll also be able to get the support you need to build a great culture for your company or overcome imposter syndrome. You can see the full schedule of breakout sessions and the main stage show. at npr.org slash summit. And just to let you know our early bird special is ending soon, so buy your tickets before June first to save a hundred dollars. That's one hundred dollars you can put back toward whatever it is you're building. Okay. Here's the show. I got a call in the m middle of the night.

Got up, put my clothes. Jumped in the car. I live just one mile from the mill. And I was lift up on a hill and the mill was down in the valley. And when I came around the corner and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens.

And realizing that that was My business. N PR? That's how I built this.

about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. There they go. I'm Guy Roz, and on today's show, how Bob Moore's passion project to grind his own flower. Turned into a whole grains empire called Bob's Red Mill. One of the biggest names in natural foods.

On the show we've heard the stories of a lot of tech entrepreneurs. But today's story It's about as low tech as it gets. It actually goes back to the Paleolithic era, and a technology invented Essentially by cavemen. Grinding seeds and grains into flour.

And as an actual industry, people have been making a living off of this for at least 10,000 years. So we're not talking about a disruptive idea here. Bob's red mill. mainly sells whole grains and flowers. And not just wheat or corn, but things like millet and sorghum and kamut, and who actually knows what Kamut is? And even though it wasn't his intention, Bob has turned all of that grain.

Into gold, Bob's Red Mill is a$100 million a year business. Go to most supermarkets today and there is a good chance. You will find Bob's Red Mill products just Look for Bob's friendly white bearded face on the package. And what's really amazing about this story

Bob started the company after he basically retired, when he was almost 50 years old. Right around the time he decided to study theology at a Christian seminary in Portland, Oregon. Yeah. And at the time, Bob was not a rich man, but We'll get there.

For now, here's what you need to know. Bob grew up in the LA area during the Great Depression. His dad drove a truck selling Wonder Bread. And around the time of the second world war, all the young men went off to fight. Bob wasn't quite old enough to enlist, but he was old enough to work.

Absolutely. I rounded up a job from from the May Company. in Los Angeles, which was their headquarters, I believe. I got a job in the warehouse. They had a master warehouse that fed the other May Company stores And because There wasn't men around. There the the people that were running the warehouse were all old guys, at least in my mind, they were really old. Um and they weren't draftable.

And I can remember after working at the May Company warehouse for quite some time, I was called down to the office And uh His name was Mr House, and he smoked cigars. And he was ominous that in my mind anyway. And I knocked on his door and of course I thought they were gonna fire me.

And I was just shaking. I was so nervous to go in there. And Mr. Hal said, Well s sit down, Bob. And uh he asked me if I would like to have a department of my own. At sixteen years old. Guy, that was probably the greatest thing that society did for Bob Moore was to give me that kind of responsibility when I was that young. And I

I almost cried uh and he said We will pay you a dollar an hour. Gosh, that was a lot of money at that time. Yeah. But I walked out of his office. I didn't walk out, I flew out. I I was just in seventh heaven And it was probably one of the most magnificent moments in my life. Was having that happen to me.

After Bob finished, he joined the army for three years, and when he got back to Southern California, he met his wife, Charlie, and eventually they had three boys. For a couple years, Bob worked for an electric motors company, and he thought that's what he would do for the rest of his life. But then his dad died unexpectedly. I have a picture of him in my office that was taken the same year he died. He looks as uh fresh and normal as anybody at forty nine years old. Certainly didn't look like he was ready to die. And uh

But he Just keeled over one day, and uh the doctor said he was dead by the time he hit the ground. He had a massive heart attack. And uh To this day I miss my dad immensely. You were, I guess, in your early twenties when he died, um how did that change your your direction at that point? Well Dad and I we're always gonna go into business together.

Well that didn't happen, of course. And uh One day I was driving down Crenshaw Bolvar in Los Angeles. And they had just put up a big sign on a corner that said, Coming soon.

U mobile gas station. And I wrote the phone number down. And called it. 'Cause I wanted to find out. А мач і вош.

Two Get a gas station. I didn't even think there was enough money in the world for me to do that. But they came through with a figure That seemed Fairly reasonable to me.

And so We put the house up for sale and sold it immediately. And got the money we needed to buy the gas station, and that's what I did. Oh, it was about six thousand dollars. And I can tell you that the excitement of having my own business. U it it it's still with me.

Guy is still with me. It fulfilled every single thing my dad and I had talked about. And only I was I didn't hit my dad. So if you were in enjoying things at the gas station w you uh I should mention you like w sold it a couple of years later and and and got out of LA. Why? Why did you do that? Well, LA had a lot of problems. It was very small.

It was so Intensely uncomfortable. That we talked about Well, now that I have a gas station, we could really move any place. We could get a gas station in any town and we decided Uh that Mammoth Lakes was the right place to go.

The Mammoth Lakes Lodge. had just built a big ski resort up at the top of the mountain. Which I believe is still a very active ski area. And uh so I sold my station. And uh we sold that house. So we had enough money. I think with the time we had about seventeen thousand dollars, which in

Nineteen fifty nine. Oh guy, it was a lot of money. And so and so you move your family out to Mammoth Lakes, um I did. And and how'd it go? Nothing. No business. What it was crazy. There was already a shell station up there that had been there for years and years and years.

And everybody loved him and went there for their gas and for everything else. And frankly A guy by the uh almost one year to the day we just ran out of money. And there's only one way I could go and that's to get ourselves out of there. Wow. Wh I did. And Charlie and I and the three boys took off for Sacramento.

Where I Changed my direction in life. So what did you end up doing so so a a year after this thing failed? One year almost to the day we got down to Sacramento. And I got a job at uh Sears and Robok. In in the hardware department. Selling everything. I mean uh lawnmowers and

All the stuff that was there to sell. W when you moved to Sacramento, what was your family's financial situation? Ha Well, I think we were at the lowest point. We moved in uh we we had a minister of the church that we decided to go to at the time. He was

caretaking uh uh apartment, three unit apartment, and one of the units uh didn't have a shower that worked. And uh he said, well Bob uh can let you and Charlie and the boys live in that for a while and we took him up on it because we didn't have any money. I remember uh the kitchen was very small. And Charlie and I put a a mattress in the kitchen and slept on the floor, and the boys, the two youngest boys slept together On a uh

Uh fold up bed. And Ken the oldest at that time. uh slept in a sleeping bag and that's how we slept. We didn't have any furniture, so that was about the lowest point in our life when we were living On somebody else with the three boys You know when you get down you feel helpless like a baby. Yeah. You don't there's no strength left in you.

You don't even know how to retaliate or fight. We really We needed a helping hand. But I at some point I maybe it was in the early or mid nineteen sixties Um I I read that you came across a book that I I I think it's safe to say probably changed your your life. Wha what was that book? Yes. A book called John Goffey's Mill written by George Woodbury.

I have it in front of me right now. And George was a was a very well educated Archaeologist. He got a letter in the mail it said that he had inherited His family's mill, which is about six hundred acres. In Bedford.

New Hampshire. Well, I mean if you got a letter like that You're gonna go down and see what you had. And that's exactly what George did. He went down to

The mill? And uh spent the next ten years of his life Restoring John Goffey's Mill. But you're still down there. And so this is a like a memoir of his life restoring. And that that book somehow struck a chord with you? What w what why all of a sudden he he makes a statement in the book that the most delightful thing was

Whole grains. When he ground all these wonderful whole wheat flour and whole uh rye flour and corn meal and all this, that the public beat a path to his door. I remember those words I underlined them, uh and tagged them. And showed it to my wife.

If we could do this. If we could get a mill And do the same thing. The public would be the path to our door. And we would be in business.

So you uh so you get really interested in this idea of uh maybe starting a mill and lots of people get interesting ideas and get obsessed with with with um things for a time being and and so what did you do? Did you start to think, Well, how are we gonna buy a mill? Did you start to talk to your wife to Charlie and say let's let's look for a mill to buy? Yeah, I did a lot of talking. I did a lot of talking to Charlie and I and the boys were all in their teenagers by that time and and I got them interested too. And one thing I did was I went to the library and they had a twelve volume group of American manufacturers of equipment. And in there they had uh pages of companies who made flour mills and uh equipment for uh mills and I wrote some letters rather naive because I really I was talking about stuff in the eight eighteen hundreds and uh asking them about stone mills.

And I wrote about ten letters. And I think I only received a response back from about two of'em. One of'em gave me the name of a fella who they knew had a stone mill. His name was Dewey Sheets, and he lived in Munti Indiana.

And uh he had been in the milling business for m you know, a lot of his life, and Dewey was such a help He Found me. A mill that was to be torn down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So I ended up

For not a whole lot of money. We're My garage Stacked full of old Very ancient stone mills dated eighteen seventy.

eighteen sixty, eighteen eighty. You were bringing like large stone Yeah. Wheels and just all the equipment you you need to grind up grains into flour? That's right. And um and with I guess with all with with the intention of eventually actually getting it up and running and starting a mill, but was anybody, I don't know Anybody that you knew saying uh thinking, this guy Bob is like kinda losing his mind. I mean th this hobby thing of starting a mill, um you know, it it seems like he's taking it a bit far. You know, guy, I don't know why uh I didn't have much resistance. I didn't feel that I had to back up to anybody

Or apologize. I think that I felt it was time For healthier food to come along. Our world needed better food, needed more whole grains, it needed most of the nutrition put back. In the food that

We were feeding people through the grocery chains and uh the whole thing begin to take on A ріel form and make sense to me and when I talk to people, certainly my wife and others, it made sense to them too. So well maybe you should try it. I I guess a after a couple of years you start to save some money and then you were able to buy

Uh my wife started to save money. Okay. And you're able to put I never was good at it. But after a couple of years you were able to move to a a small farm, uh uh like a five acre farm. You have you uh amass all this equipment. This is I guess the late sixties, early seventies at this point. First of all, how did you how was how were you gonna get the cash to uh to f to find the land to build a flower mill on? Well, we didn't build a flour mill. We rented a piece of property that had a building on it. There were so many things that happened in our favor. I got a job.

Uh Penny's J C Penny Company. in uh Reading, California, opening a brand new auto center. And so we ended up in Redding, California. There was a uh delightful old uh Uh Quonset Hut on the south end of town. And uh it was vacant.

And we built walls inside, built a store, a real quaint store with with cedar planking on the walls. We covered the whole front of the building, made it try to make it look like a flour mill, and called it Moore's Flour Mill. And we converted this building Into what was a reasonable uh facsimile

of a mill, and we had three stone mills that we set here and there and begin the process of grinding Flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal. So so this is nineteen seventy four, you open the doors to Moore's Flour Mill with your boys, um and and and what and you're making wheat flour, corn flour, what else? Oh actually we I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now. I we ground whole wheat. Uh there's a lot of kinds of wheat. There's a uh Durham wheat, which is a hard white wheat. There's a red wheat, which is high in protein and makes wonderful bread. Oh and then soft wheat. There's a soft white wheat for uh pastries and and biscuits and uh

So you you you get uh a little knowledge of what grains are and how to use'em, uh then you uh Create uh some recipes and put them in a bag. And then you peddle'em. And that's just what we did. We put uh l large uh windows across the wall i from the store into the mailroom and they they could see it one or two or three mills running all the time. So this was like almost like an artisanal mom and pop kind of

It was it was never designed to be anything bigger than that, I guess, right? No, I kept my job at uh Penny's for two years and Charlie, of course, uh she worked a store And talked with people and she was a great believer in whole grains and uh It was all very nice. We were having a great time. Okay, but you must have still been like kind of restless because

you I guess it was around this time you kinda made a radical shift. Like you decide to retire. Uh one of your sons takes over the mill and then you Take off to go study. At a seminary. That's right.

I had a Intense desire. to learn to read the Bible in the original languages, Hebrew and Koine Greek. And uh we did a little scouting about and found here that Portland where I am right now was one of the greatest spots for seminaries. And uh we uh enrolled in

One of the seminaries here. and uh begin to learn Yeah, Bible in its original languages. This is I mean, this is interesting, Bob,'cause the at this point when you decide to completely change directions and just

go and study at a seminary, you are about fifty years old. So just a little bit older than the age when your father died. Yeah. And this was gonna be this was gonna be your retirement, the beginning of the your sort of winding down from work, I guess, right? Well I I counted all my buckets that I had, and I said to Charlie, I think we could last We could live this way for four or five years.

And I think I could get my education and once I got that I would get some kind of direction I felt, whether it was spiritual direction or what, and uh would be able to reroute my life into something that was worthwhile. And we both agree that that's what that appealed to us both. So that's what we did. So you start uh at seminary school and uh and w did it did you love it? Did it fulfill all of your dreams and hopes and wishes? No.

Oh no, what happened? Well, it's hard work. When you haven't been into languages guy, it's a tough one actually. I had to do a lot of studying and Charlie was right with me Um What really changed the whole thing

was uh one day we were walking along We were reading uh vocabulary cards back and forth. We had Greek verbs on one side and nouns on the other. And so anyway, one day we're walking down a particular street. And much to my surprise I looked over and there was a a mill.

Mm. And it had been there for a long time. And in front of it was a for sale sign. I couldn't believe it. I said to Charlie I said, Hun, that is an old mill.

We walked over. It was probably six blocks from the cemetery. And I got up went up on the steps. And I looked in the window and I could see bucket elevators, grain cleaners, I could see all the milling equipment. Uh I could not believe what I was looking at and there was a phone number. And I called the number and I got a hold of the guy that owned the property and when I

Told him I was interested He says, What what are we talking about here? He owned a lot of property. I said the the old mill. Mel, Mel, Mel. Oh he said, Yeah, that property. You say, Yeah, we're gonna tear the building down.

And we're gonna have the property as two acres and we're gonna have it for sale. So it's gonna be a really good buy without that old mill on it. I said, what you gonna do? Tear that mill down? And I thought this is just the most fantastic thing in the world. I I can't believe what's happening. So

Well basically I But the same. And Changed my entire life. Let me come back.

How Bob opened his new mill, started to grow the business, and then stood on a hill and watched the whole thing. Go up and smoke. I'm Guy Raz, stay with us, you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. So it's nineteen seventy eight. Bob and his wife Charlie stumble across an old mill about to be torn down, and

They decide to save it. To create a new company. And they call it Bob's Red Mill. А тук срі манс, а гев месел с три манс тоді.

And uh I begin a concerted F. to make my life What I thought I was

With this building now. The building was everything. It was just a a godsend, to be honest with you. I think that's a good term. But how did people Like when when you open the doors after three or four months uh from the moment you bought it. Three months a day and you're you're processing grains and you know how to do this stuff, h how did you get the word out of it? Were you just waiting for customers to show up and buy flour and grains? Well, I had a lot of help. Uh I put uh uh every Tuesday was the food Ads in the local paper.

And I put a two column. Oh. The mill is now Running. Come and enjoy

Fresh stone ground whole wheat flour and I'm a pretty good shouter. Uh I can yell it out pretty loud and make it work pretty well. And uh channel two here. Came out with Kathy Smith. And within two weeks of opening the mill I was on the evening news with Kathy.

Uh saying the nicest things about Bob's red mill. And then I could fill a parking lot in no time. And people were buying your grains, your oats, your like Your flowers just just coming in and buying buying all that stuff.

Yeah, but what else came in was we had a group of markets here called Fred Meyer One stop shopping center. Mm-hmm. And their buyer came in, he was a vice president, and he said, Mr. Meyer would like to open

uh hell food stores in all forty four of his stores. And we'd like to put your products in there. And they gave me a list of the grains they wanted, the flowers they wanted. And of course with the Fred Meyer chain, others came to us safe way, I know. And uh Albertsons and some of those and ask us if we had enough production to keep

Uh them going. And uh without too much effort We Got Uh pretty good business going. And and this is I I guess we should say this is the mid seventies. So this is like really when the health food

Craze kind of starts to take off in America. It's it's a Yeah, we we had a lot of help like Readers Digest came out with an article on brand and why that was so healthy for you to keep your bowels in good order and just one thing right after another kept coming out and uh of course everybody had a TV. And uh there were shows on health and we really began to realize that we had a kind of a tiger by the tail. uh over this whole thing, you know. I'm I there's a lot of revelation in in this stuff. We didn't start out with any huge intent or anything. It just

It just seemed like the right thing. First off, we were eating that stuff ourselves and we were all felt the uh benefits of all this. So that's uh one thing that you're in a business that you believe in, and I think that's uh one of the biggest things that made this thing work. Yeah. So all right, so so Bob, I'm gonna just jump ahead because uh the first ten years of the company were growing Slowly and steadily. You were still pretty small. Yeah. But um

About ten years in, um after you launched Bob's Red Mill in in nineteen eighty eight. Ominous year. Um ominous year. You had a a fire completely destroy the mill. Yeah, I did. And it was intentionally said, it was said by an arsonist. Well yeah, we is

kinda crazy people running around. I didn't know this person at all and uh Uh it it wasn't any like an ex employee or anybody mad or with any grievance or anything. I don't think any of us knew what was coming, and uh boy, I'll tell ya. With that old wooden building that was really old, you know, uh Why, it it really caught fire and it was full of grain. It was a very active company, lots of uh

Paper just everything. Where where were you when it happened? I mean h how did you find out about it? Yeah. I got a call in the m middle of the night. Bob

Bob, your mill's on fire. So I got up and Put my clothes on. Jumped in the car. And uh

Got on down. Uh as I went around the corner, I didn't I lived just one mile from the mill. and I was lift up on a hill and the mill was down in the valley and when I came around the corner and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens and realizing that that was my business. And uh You don't know what to think.

Uh you don't know how to think uh you don't know whether to cry or or what, I just got down there. Uh pretty quickly. The fire chief came up to me who I knew, they used to make inspections of the mill. And he said we got all the water we need. But if you could tell me

What part of the mill is is the most precious that would keep you going in business. Uh I can direct a whole fire uh department at that point. And of course the millstones were the most important part of the whole thing. We walked over to the mill. It was pretty hot there, but you know the and the the fire departments were throwing a lot of water on the on the building, but uh we walked over and uh and I pointed out on the building side of the building where uh the mills were inside. They immediately had a saw. They just whacked a big square hole in it and he planted one of the firemen there on the ground with the fire hose.

Aim through the hole and for the entire time of the fire, uh he kept uh direction inside the mailroom. Which actually saved all three mills. So when the fire was w when the fire was put out And you're you're you're looking at what was left of

Bob's red mill, which I I'm assuming was not a whole lot. Did you did you were you immediately thinking we're gonna just rebuild and and start up again really soon, or did you did you think maybe it's time maybe this is a sign to to pack it in. Well, that's pretty much what I thought. But there were some things that changed my mind uh And even that very night, David, my at that time my oldest employee's wife came down

Uh Eileen was such a lovely lady. She was our b she uh worked at the bank where we banked and that's how David met her. And we took them the two kids on their first date together, uh for dinner. And they got married. We went to their wedding and everything else and David had been with me almost ten years by that time. And that night.

Within a few minutes of my arrival there, Charlie came. And she and Eileen were talking And I overheard them and Eileen told Charlie. Oh, Charlie, I don't know what we're gonna do. Uh we just signed the papers.

On our home. David doesn't have a job now. And you know that sunk in pretty deep. Charlie looked at me. And I guess what she was saying and what I was thinking in my mind.

is that there's probably not gonna be any thoughts of Um not continuing this thing somehow will make it work. There's an awful lot of things that have motivated me over the years And uh A lot of those things came out.

Because of David and Eileen. Uh and the fire. So I felt That I had a

weighty responsibility staring me in the face. And uh there's a lot of things that go through your mind in in those kind of situations and certainly I had every thought you could think of. But you kept it going. You decided to keep it going. We tried first of course to rebuild the mill and that was impossible. Yeah. But I had A warehouse across the street, about a ten thousand square foot warehouse directly across the street.

So even though the mill burned down I had some resources. Uh I was able to save the millstones. So we almost immediately moved across the street. to the ten thousand square feet.

That we But I had the business guy I had Awesome business. People wanted our products. They kept bugging me when I was gonna open a re my retail part, which of course burned up. And um We just kept trying and trying to keep machinery going. Yeah. Remember now I started many years ago with my sons in Redding, California.

And my wonderful son Bob. had a milling operation that we had all built as a family. And he allowed one of my people to go down there and grind

My whole wheat flour and my cornmeal and things like that at night. You know, and then they put it in a truck and brought it back up. So all these things begin to work almost immediately. That gave me uh a pretty good degree of of

Bob, it seems that after the fire is really when the business started to take off. I mean in the sort of the ten years after the company almost, you know, just like goes out of business'cause it's fire. What happened? What what's the reason why? I mean, was there a strategic decision that you made? Was there someone you met? Was there a g uh a lucky break that you guys got that just uh allowed Bob's red mill products to go National and then beyond?

Well actually uh there was. I was told that I'd never go anywhere or be anything unless I became a part of the national uh natural food or industry. Uh so I joined that. It wasn't very expensive. And uh We went down to Anaheim, California where I just got back. That's correct. Yeah. And we got a little ten by ten booth at the back of this thing. And we brought all the products that we were making. There's quite a few, actually, several hundred. And uh I tried to have all natural uh whole grains and every form of'em. We could take one item, corn for instance, and we can make corn grits, we can make f fine corn meal. regular corn meal, coarse corn meal. I ended up with, you know, six or seven products over one basic grain. I did the same with wheat and I did the same with oats and everything else. So I mean it was a unique way of doing it. I wanted everything. I didn't sell as well. Some sold better than others. But when the industry down there in Anaheim saw this

I had some people come to me and they said they wanted it. Who's your distributor? And I said, Well, I don't have a distributor So those people, uh uh the uh the distributors were there at the show too. They went and got their distributor. And they brought him down, they said we want these products. So they took my products on. So almost overnight w we we kinda hit the jackpot and uh we had to go back and work pretty hard to catch up with their orders.

So once you found distributors and and and you started to your product started to really Take off. Um It wasn't that long before you really started to I mean the revenue for your company was growing. I mean I think by two thousand seven Your sales topped.

Forty five, maybe fifty million dollars. Did you I mean, I know you didn't go into this for money and uh but uh but but did you ever look at that number? Did did anybody your CFO ever just say, Hey, look we're this is our revenue and do you ever do you ever just think That's crazy. This this little mill is doing this kind of revenue. Yeah, we do it pretty good.

Pretty good, uh guy. People were always wanting to buy us. I mean it was just uh constant. You were getting offers from companies too? Oh yeah, yeah. Different investors who wanted to invest in me, uh and and actually different companies that just simply wanted to buy me. Uh it was a lot of that. And you just said no? Every time you No, I said no because all right, I wa I didn't it wasn't any money anyway, besides I knew as soon as they bought me out, even though they always tell you that everything's gonna stay the same, that everything changes and and I didn't want my life to change. I I I thought it was really swell. Uh

It was it was a good Good life, uh, guy. Alright, so you have this company. It is now doing uh at least a hundred million in revenue a year. Yeah, it it is. It's it's well well over a hundred million dollars. And I think it was in two thousand ten you

you announced that you want to hand the company over to your employees and they they now own like two thirds of it, right? That's right. And you are also giving away a lot of or most of your money. And s so it sounds like and you've a long time to to go, a long life ahead of you, but it sounds like you are slowly It sounds like you are slowly um aiming to uh to end you know, to end your time here on earth as a as a a poor or a um you know relatively poor guy. A guy a guy with no money. I'm giving it away because I want to.

I mean the Bible to me was so clear to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Now that's the basis of how I think and how I feel. If you do these things. The feeling, the return, your life is is appreciably improved. And I have that feeling. I know what that is. It's a different feeling than I had when I was fifty years old or y'all. Yeah, yeah, of course.

How much of what of what you experienced throughout the course of your life and this incredible success with this company do you attribute to luck and how much to just hard work and your intelligence and your skill? Oh guy. I've always worked hard. I'm crazy. I get about six here I am at almost ninety, I get about six every morning. I go down to my own

Store. uh my own restaurant and have cereal. I don't I don't like anything besides Hot cereal, cooked cereal. And then I n well, I get into bed a little bit early, but uh I work till five or six every day. So I I've always worked hard. So if working hard is the secret to success I've done that. I know what it feels like and I probably never will do anything different.

But y you you talked a little bit about um about about your faith and your your Christianity and I'm I'm just wondering like h how much How much has it guided you, you know, o over the years, like your your decisions and your thinking? Well, I think it permeates me as far as that's concerned. Uh the whole concept of whole grains uh I got from the very first page of the Bible. You know, when you when you go to seminary they start you off with the first page, so

I have it uh with me. Uh uh I can read it to you. Them for food. And I read these words and fourteen different translations and I learned to figure it out in the original Hebrew

It still says the same thing. Simple, unequivocal, comforting. Just made perfect sense to me, uh guy, and and the fact that I could establish a business around it Uh was just U unbelievable and and I I'm not doing too bad at it. Working pretty well. Five more.

Founder of Bob's Red Mill. In 2007, the company moved to a bigger facility just outside of Portland, where they make about 400 different products, still using the old quartz millstones from the 1800s. By the way, Bob actually keeps a mason jar full of the very first product to come off of those stones. Red wheat flour ground in his original mill. More than forty years ago.

And please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story starts back in 2015, when Mike Bolos was working as a lawyer in Chicago. and then move to a new firm and a new office. My new desk was just one of those typical desks that's kind of mounted to a wall. But yet in downtown Chicago I had these beautiful floor to ceiling windows out to my right, overlooking the city. Now we might not all have floor to ceiling windows in our office, but we can relate to the main problem, right? An office desk that is not in the right place. The perfect place to be would be the window. Get this beautiful view, get the natural sunlight. I'm like, there's gotta be something out there for that. What Mike was looking for was a desk a ledge really.

that could be mounted directly to a window. So started looking online, couldn't find anything, and uh that's when kind of like I always like to do I headed to Home Depot and Amazon and started to buy the parts I need to build it. Okay, so first thing on Mike's list. Suction cups that could attach a desk to a window and could support what's on the desk. A laptop, some books, you know, that that type of stuff. So I shopped and I found some good suction cups that you know held about forty pounds, they said.

mounted them with some string that I bought from Amazon and created this really rudimentary almost kind of catbed looking thing. And it wasn't too bad for his first try, but it was bouncy and it was too narrow to really work as a desk. And uh it was at that point that I stepped up and I found the types of suction discs that they use to install commercial grade glass windows and high rises. And I was like, this is perfect. These are ultra durable, ultra strong, and intended for this purpose essentially. Okay, so Mike now had the critical suction he needed to affix the desk to a window. And from there, he built 18 prototypes and finally He had the desk he'd been dreaming of. People started walking by my office and saying, what is that? I want that in my office. That's cool. Where did you buy it?

And that's when kinda the light bulb clicked and it was like, Well, I should really think about mass production and really bringing this to market. And around that time, Mike went to a party where he met a guy named Jason and told Jason about the desk he built. Immediately the light bulb went off in my head. Yes, more light bulbs it turns out Jason Grohowski was a real estate advisor and it was his job to help businesses improve the design of their workplaces. So Jason saw real potential in the desk that Mike had invented. Here's Jason. I've seen how the culture within spaces is changing, how all the new buildings are glass, how Everything is about bringing in the natural light for employees and just productivity and health and wellness within spaces. And so I just got super excited. I was like, we need to, we need to do this, we need to take this to the next level.

Mike and Jason soon started working with a design firm in Chicago and made even more tweaks to the desk. And by January 2017, they had a prototype ready, so they launched a Kickstarter that April and made$25,000 in just the first day. After we close out the Kickstarter, we had to fulfill these orders. So then it was Let's go get this made. They had all of these orders and no manufacturer yet. So a month later, this is May of 2017, they found one in Singapore, and by November, Jason and Mike went there to check on the desks before they got shipped. And I look at the unit and I'm like something doesn't seem right.

and I play with it and the lever snaps. At that point we had 2,000 units already made, all the components made, and we were like, this is something that we can't let out the door. So after a month of sleepless nights and many design revisions, Jason and Mike finally got the lever right. In December, they started shipping their desks from their Singapore manufacturer to their customers in more than 40 countries. They're now both working full time on their company, it's called Desk View, and their desk comes fulbled, so you can install it on your window in just a few minutes. And then

Enjoy the view. We focus so Closely on our computers, all of our workday is just straining our eyes to look at close objects. With Desview, you're actually allowing yourself to relax your eye and look out further. If you want to find out more about Desk View, head to our Facebook page, and of course, if you have a story about something you're building.

Please tell us all about it at build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, go to howibuilthis.npr.org. You can also write us at hibt atnpr.org, and if you want to send us a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with original music composed by Ramteen and Rab Lui. Thanks also to Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Sanas Meshkinfloor. Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.

From NPR.