HATTIE: We're in De Land, Florida, just a few minutes west of Daytona Beach, to find out why it won
The Great American Main Street Award.

(Voiceover) Since 1980, the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street programs have generated over $5 billion in physical improvements, nearly 27,000 net new businesses and more than 100,000 net new jobs.

Much of the work to revitalize business districts is being done by small-business owners, like John and Pete Gregory. John has been selling paint on this street for 40 years, and he's a charter member of De Land's Main Street program.

Step into the Small Business School master class now with Pete and John Gregory.

(Voiceover) Thirty miles from Daytona Beach, De Land, Florida, is full of proud citizens.

Unidentified Man #1: This is a place where people who want to live in a small town can come.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) De Land celebrates its history with the help of Henry Deland, who founded the town in 1876.

Is what we see today, what you dreamed about?

HENRY DELAND: Yeah. Well, the only thing different is I didn't dream they'd ever cut down every one of the palm trees.

HATTIE: (Voiceover)While millions flock to the web everyday to shop and the local village is now a global village, there are still plenty of us who look forward to shopping on Main Street. We love the special feeling that only comes with doing business face to face, heart to heart. Where here is no separation between personal and professional lives. It's where customers are friends and friends are customers and everybody knows your name.

Unidentified Man #2: Well, we started out in February of 1949.

HATTIE: You started pouring coffee.

Man #2: Before you was born. Been pouring it ever since.

HATTIE: Why do you think this group has a good time getting together? Why do you think it's important for you or for anybody else to have breakfast together?

Unidentified Man #3: It's a lot of guys that have a common interest, and that's the promotion of their hometown. I've been here for 62 years and every day your heart beats a little better for making this a better place to live.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Dave Rigsby is the mayor.

You won The Great American Main Street Award.

DAVE RIGSBY: Right.

HATTIE: Why do you think you won?

DAVE: I think we won that because of a community that cared. It takes leadership. It takes leadership from the bottom up, really.

WILLIE BRIGHT: The traffic that you see down here today, you didn't have that eight years ago.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Willie Bright is the city commissioner.

WILLIE: ...and that was our object, to get downtown open again.

MAUREEN FRANCE: The Main Street program is a proven approach to downtown revitalization.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Maureen France is the director of De Land's Main Street program.

MAUREEN: It takes into consideration four points: promotion, design, organization and economic restructuring, basically. But ours is, I would say, beyond that. It's relationship building. You're not gonna be successful alone. You're just not going to be. And, you know, the more successful relationships you can build, I feel that's the secret to the success.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Anchoring the retail area at one end of De Land's Main Street is Feasel Paint & Glass. Established in 1921, it was owned by John and Pete Gregory.

John, tell me how you got into this business in the first place.

JOHN: Well, I started in 1956 with a year-old baby and we lived in a little one-room apartment in Daytona Beach and I worked in a grocery store. And we wanted to move back to De Land, and I found a job here at Feasel Paint & Glass. And that's how it happened.

HATTIE: That's how it happened.

JOHN: That's where we've been ever since, for 41 years.

HATTIE: So, how long did you work here before you had an opportunity to buy the business?

JOHN: Twenty years. And we just had a gentleman's agreement that when he retired that I'd have first chance at buying the business if I could figure out a way to do it, basically.

HATTIE: At that point back then when you had the gentleman's agreement, did you feel he started sharing things with you, showing you parts...

JOHN: Oh, yes. Yes. Very involved with the books and the profit structures and everything.

HATTIE: So that means you had almost 12 years to apprentice.

When it was time to buy the business, did you just go to the bank? Did you mortgage your house?

JOHN: No. We worked out a financial arrangement with Mr. Feasel.

He self-financed it for the most part. We did have to borrow a little money, put up some. But in the meantime, during that 10- or 12-year period that we'd come to an agreement, I was actually buying some stock from him just so that I would have something paid for as an asset and an equity to start out with.

HATTIE: And that was motivational...

JOHN: So that took care of part of the equity.

HATTIE: And that was motivational for you as an employee.

JOHN: Very motivational, yes.

HATTIE: Which may have been one of the reasons you hung in there for 20 years.

JOHN: Oh, yeah, that helped on the patience level, you might say to know that I had something solid. Besides his word, I knew that some part of it was goning to be paid for with that equity.

PETE: Our father was a chain store manager ... 15 years ago . . . the McCrory corporation. We went from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Texas, as a result of his being transferred. And all of us, at one time or another, handled stock, received freight, swept floors, washed the windows, dressed windows. I used to be a window trimmer. Just simply by being there, we obviously got involved in part of that business.

HATTIE: Why is it that you said to Pete, `Hey, why don't you come in with me?'

JOHN: Well, I figured I'd needed some of his expertise. He had been a store manager with W.T. Grant. Needed to boost my capital a little bit, you know, for funding of it. I just figured that we could do better together than--might make it a little easier than going one-on-one.

PETE: I'd always told him that if anything ever developed here to at least give me a shot at it. And between those various conversations, that's how I've ended up here.

HATTIE: Advice here? Should somebody buy a business that they know a lot about or would they do just as well if they bought a business they didn't know anything about?

PETE: Well, I think if you have an understanding of the buy and sell and customer relation part of the business, I don't think it really matters. If you have that desire to sell, you get the enjoyment out of having helped someone select a product and see them leave happy, that's the beginning reward or the initial reward. And if you have those tendencies and those capabilities, I don't think it matters what business you've got. Whether you buy an existing or build your own or one just happens to fall into your lap, you're gonna enjoy it and be successful at it. You've got to have some enjoyment in what you're doing, and to me, the enjoyment in the retail business is seeing that customer that is content, to happy, to fully satisfied with what they've bought.

HATTIE: What did you learn from the big retailing environment that you wanted to bring with you to your store? And what did you learn that you didn't want to bring with you?

PETE: Well, the large corporations and especially the chains operate on some pretty strict management guidelines, and for good reason. If the district manager of a particular chain has a problem in any one particular store, it's probably a result of somebody not following a particular guideline. And they're both talking the same language when they're talking about that particular guideline; long distance they're talking. A lot of the corporate structure would not fit into an operation like this. The narrow-mindedness of the corporate structure would not fit into a business like this.

HATTIE: Did you ever think 20 years ago that it would be so difficult to run a business today?

PETE: Never.

HATTIE: Don't you think it is getting harder?

PETE: Oh, it's definitely become harder. It's become almost overwhelming. The chain operations -- and we're soon to have a big chain operation move into De Land -- has taken their toll on this end of the business. The other end of the business is manufacturers who refuse to sell to the single-store operations; they sell only to chain operations. You know, you make money buying and you make money selling. And if you're not able to buy, then you've really got a problem.

HATTIE: Now how does a small-business person make the margin when we don't have the volume, we don't have the economy of scale, and we have vendors who won't sell to us because we're only one store? What's our edge?

PETE: The only slight edge that we have is our desire to provide one-on-one, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball service to our customers. There's still a segment of our consuming public, and I think there will always be a segment of our consuming public--it may change percentagely, but there's always going to be one there that wants to go in, have someone greet 'em at the door, someone wish 'em a good morning, see if--be asked if they can be helped, and then ultimately get the product that they're looking for.

TONY: I've been treated by the people of this store very good for many years. They started me in business here when I first came back to De Land. And they helped me get started by...

HATTIE: What do you mean they started you in business?

TONY: They helped me get started in business by setting up an account and saying, `OK, Tony, you have a 30-day charge. Go out, make some money, come back and give us some. Use our products.'

HATTIE: OK. All right. So they sort of bankrolled you for 30 days at a time.

TONY: They certainly have, for many, many years, and the good times and the bad times.

Unidentified Man #4: Well, I started buying here in 1952. If we have any problems, they handle it. And we just had a good relationship all these years. And the main thing, they handle good product. And that's the bottom line. Satisfy your customers.

JOHN: We decide what we're gonna sell. We don't--somebody from up--some higher office isn't saying, `Here's what you're gonna sell tomorrow.' We decide what we're gonna sell. We basically run quality products, number one. And number two, we give service that they couldn't give if they tried. They wouldn't know how to give the type of service that a business like ours does.

HATTIE: What do you mean?

JOHN: Taking care of the customer's needs.

HATTIE: Give me an example.

JOHN: Solving the customer's--that's basically what it is, is the customer comes--the only reason he comes through our door is 'cause he has a problem, and it's our job to solve his problem.

PETE: A lot of people come in here looking for how to do something that end leaving here with product. And...

HATTIE: So you become the teacher.

PETE: We become a teacher, absolutely, every day.

PAT RONCATI: I very much like that one.

Unidentified Man #5: But I like that one better.

PAT: Yeah. That's good.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Pat Roncati is a volunteer working on storefront improvements for De Land's Main Street program. Of course she shops for advice and paint at Feasel's.

PAT: Jim, can I take this home with me?

JIMMY McKETTA: Sure can.

PAT: All right. Very good.

JIMMY: I'll check them out for you, Pat.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Since 1980, Jimmy McKetta has helped customers like Pat choose the perfect paint. He explains how a computer can help.

JIMMY: We can take anybody's color chip--any customer can bring in a shoe or whatever they want to bring in, and we can put it through the spectrometer. And then we ask the computer questions, and then as--by going through the different steps, it will actually give us a formula, shoot it out down here on a piece of paper, and we take it over to the counter and mix it.

HATTIE: Have you been working with paint before there was such a thing?

JIMMY: Yes. Yes. I've been here 17 years.

HATTIE: You don't look old enough. You don't have any gray hair.

JIMMY: Oh, yeah.

HATTIE: You must be having fun. You've been here 17 years.

JIMMY: Seventeen years.

HATTIE: OK, so how did you do this before you had the technology?

JIMMY: Well, we'd go to the color system. We'd try to find two--I always try to find two colors that are very similar--one may be to the yellow; one may be to the red--put the two of them together and try to get a formula that will blend fairly well.

HATTIE: OK, but somehow in your--somehow you've discovered or people have discovered that you have a gift for this.

JIMMY: Right.

PETE: You keep plugging away and plugging away and plugging away until you find somebody that can learn--not necessarily do this type of work, but somebody you can teach to do this type of work. I recently have run--advertised for employment for someone to be one of my lead men doing the storefront-type work. Of the 30 or so applications I've taken, I think I've got three on my desk that I've considered interviewing.

HATTIE: Why are 27 applications not acceptable?

PETE: Number one, the application doesn't look good. It's incomplete. Their answers are vague.

HATTIE: Are you shocked?

PETE: Well, no, I'm very accustomed to it because this is the way it's been now for a number of years, last eight or 10 years anyhow. You don't see quality applications. And as far as I'm concerned, that's a depiction of what you may get if you hire that person. If it's an incomplete application, you probably have an incomplete applicant. I hate to say this, but one of the biggest things I run into is the high ratio of alcoholism involved with a lot of my applicants. One of the first things I do is to look through an application to see if I want to go any further with it. My next move is to send a copy of their driver's license to my insurance agent; they run a DMV report on them. And that's how I know about the alcoholism.

HATTIE: Have you actively recruited your family?

JOHN: Believe it or not, I've never asked the first one if they wanted to work here. That's what they wanted to do.

HATTIE: When did you start working around here?

VINCE: First week of high school in the 12th year.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) There are 15 employees at Feasel's. Some are technically family members, like John's son Vince and his wife Sue. But as Sue says...

SUE: We know all the families and kids. And, yeah, it's like one big family.

PETE: There's no one answer to all the problems that you face with an independent business. And there's no one decision that's going to make you successful. It's a combination of things. And it's not just my decisions or John's decisions. It's decisions of the people that work for us. Every time we hire someone, we tell 'em that, `Our plan for you is for you to retire here when you're 62 or earlier if we can come up with the money.' And that's an attitude we have about hiring people. And as a result of that, that attitude has brought to us some very, very special people; people that aren't making a lot of money, but people that I think really enjoy their job, they enjoy dealing with the public and satisfying the public, and their reward, I think, is similar to ours. They enjoy going home at night having satisfied someone and having done something that is important to someone else. And, you know, the paycheck comes later.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Although we spent most of our time in Feasel's, many other De Land merchants were happy for us to stop in.

Now, tell me about your customer, and are these dolls selected...

Now why would I want to buy this...

Unidentified Man #6: First of all...

Unidentified Woman: Small-business people are the heart and soul of the community. Our downtown is the heart and soul of De Land, and if you aren't involved in the total community, it's not just your city center, it's the heart of your community, and you've got to keep it strong.

MAUREEN: Main Street De Land is an advocate for business. The businesses we recruit get tender-loving care. And we don't leave 'em hanging. After they're here, we want to nurture 'em. Naturally, it's easier to keep a business than to attract a new one or recruit a new one. So we try to help 'em from the very beginning when they walk in the door and say that they're thinking about opening a business. We get them through the government red tape and, you know, help them--give them facade grants to help them fix up the exterior of their building, or maybe get them a new awning or a new sign, whatever it takes to get 'em. The proven approach is definitely to have a balance in your retail mix.

HATTIE: The Gregory family has sold paint on this street since 1956. John and Pete have owned Feasel's since 1977. What I learned from them is, if you plan for your business to exist for your entire working lifetime, you must see it as part of something big, not as a stand-alone entity.

(Voiceover) The success of Feasel's is dependent upon the success of De Land's Main Street. When Florida Victorian Architectural Antiques and Muse Books and the Doll Parlor do well, Feasel's does well. The structure of anything that's alive is cellular. It has seen and unseen dependencies. It's chaotic and ordered at the same time.

So the Main Street program, with its planning, meeting and marketing efforts, is the structure. The chaos happens every day as merchants serve their customers, refer customers to one another, make many decisions all for the good of the whole.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) At Small Business School.org there is self-help study for people who want to start a business and for those who want to grow the business they have. To learn more about this episode choose the overview. You can read every word you're hearing today when you choose the transcript. And go deeper with the case study. There's streaming video and access to interactive study guides throughout the site.

PETE: My best friend should be my competitor; we need to be talking with each other. We have bigger competitors to fight than each other. And by joining forces and joining heads, you know, we can generally come to a better resolve on what we need to do on a more local basis. And I'm not talking about prices or types of service. I'm just talking about how do we get along? How do we deal with sales tax issues with the state? How do we deal with any issue with the state of Florida? Or codes within the county, codes within the city. How do we deal with that?

HATTIE: What do you think the role of a small-business owner is in a community?

JOHN: Well, I think it's being involved in things like the Main Street program, the Rotary or the Lions Club or, in my particular case, the Kiwanis club, being involved with something where you're giving back or where you're giving, period, not necessarily giving back. Just where you're giving something when--it just makes a better person out of you, and if that can happen, your business is gonna be a better business.

HATTIE: Maureen, as a Main Street director, my guess is that you are a marketer for them.

MAUREEN: Without a doubt. Selling is what you got to do, you know.

HATTIE: So if I'm a small business on your Main Street and I'm a member of the Main Street program, you're out there working for me.

MAUREEN: Without a doubt.

HATTIE: What are you doing to bring me business?

MAUREEN: All kinds of things: promotion. I mean, we're raising funds for different projects that are gonna bring people downtown. Of course, you know, we do that through a lot of different means. You know, one of them, of course, is our mailings that we do, but we do a lot of creative ways for fund raising and...

HATTIE: What kind of mailing do you do?

MAUREEN: Well, we do, obviously, our newsletter on a regular basis. But we also solicit funds through direct mail. We have a wine tasting every year for our Athens Theater project, and we send out a lot of invitations with cards for donors to respond. So we do definitely a lot of mail, not just to our members, but beyond our downtown district also.

HATTIE: I want to ask you if you've ever have had a time when you wanted to punch him out or you wanted to punch him out?

JOHN: Are you kidding?

PETE: Why would we?

JOHN: Are you kidding?

PETE: Never, never.

JOHN: Never. And we've never even told a lie, either. There are times you would not want to be around in the past.

HATTIE: Well, who's the one who does the yelling? And who's the one who does the leaving?

JOHN: I think we both yell a lot and we both leave a lot.

PETE: That's a good one. You got us on that one. I want to tell you, if it wasn't for that, the air would probably not have got cleared on a lot of issues and we may not be standing here today. And it takes a little bit of everything to run a business, and it takes a little bit of that.

Unidentified Man #7: Here she goes.

Unidentified Man #8: Here, Chip. Stay close.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Oh, that's Gypsy, Pete's very best friend. She's wherever he is, and that includes work. We've seen this before. Don't work where you can't take your dog.

(Voiceover) Are there reasons a small-business owner would want to move to De Land?

MAUREEN: (Voiceover) Henry Deland's vision for De Land was that it be a cultural and educational mecca.

And I think we've really become that, and that's important for a lot of people. It's definitely a drawing card for people to own a business here, and also to live. It's a high quality of life when you have a university like Stetson University here and the commitment to culture. We have, I guess, seven or eight little museums here. So we have a real good variety, and it's a wonderful quality of life, but it's also a very good environment for small business.

HATTIE: Our viewers have given us so many ideas, we want to start sharing them with you.

(Voiceover) One viewer writes: `Did you know that, by law, the federal government must spend 23 percent of approximately $200 billion with small businesses?' If you produce a product or offer a service the government could purchase, go to sba.gov and choose business opportunities. From this page research the possibilities. Learn how the government buys, read about the Federal Acquisition Regulations and how the government defines small business. Under "Marketing Your Business" you can even register your company.

Come visit De Land, or move your business here.