In the Spotlight 2

Webster Alumnus Joe Hentschel,
Founder and President of Monarch Restoration and Construction Company

Joe Hentschel founded Monarch Restoration and Construction in the basement of his house in October 1996. The company is now the leading fire and water damage restoration company in the St. Louis area. The St. Louis Business Journal named Monarch one of the area’s fastest growing companies in 2000. At the time, the company had $9 million in revenue and 135 full-time employees. Hentschel, who was named to the Business Journal’s “40 under 40” list for 2002, has recently restructured Monarch to better manage operations. The company now has 35 full-time employees and revenues are forecast at $5 million for the current calendar year.

NB: You recently scaled back your operations because your company was growing too fast. That seems like a good problem to have. Can it really be a bad thing?

JH: Absolutely. We’ve always talked about taking care of the people that we have here, and I’m a firm believer in it, but that’s a little slower process. The work can come in a lot quicker than can the attention that you give some of the people you need to give the attention to. I love these people who work for us, I truly do. And if they don’t know that and they don’t feel that, then the whole thing can unravel. The big thing will be to do the same amount of volume and then grow from there with fewer people.

NB: How will you manage that?

JH: By using a lot more technology, educating our people, training them better and utilizing more subcontractors—reaching out more to specialties, instead of trying to have that all in house. And just kind of getting back to the basics and focusing on each individual and their needs and what they want out of life. They know far better than I’ll ever know what we need to do differently to make them happy and make their career go well.

NB: What insight did you gain from the downsizing?

JH: I learned so much. It sounds terrible, but when you go from 135 people to 35, you learn a lot about yourself. I learned that being completely honest with somebody, regardless of how much it’s going to hurt, is the absolute best way to go in the long run. So many times, I wanted just to say, things are going to be ok, when I knew they weren’t. I had people I ended up laying off who would come in here and shake my hand and say, “I understand what you have to do, and I know that it’s not easy on you.” That makes you get tears in your eyes.

NB: Did the fact that the country was going through a recession at the time help you justify the lay-offs to your employees?

JH: I could have run with it. It would have sounded great, but it just wasn’t the case. Any problems that we had were my problems, they were my fault, the company's fault. None of it was from the economy. It seems like at every corner you turn, you find somebody who’s trying to duck out. Somebody’s always trying to dodge the responsibility, and if more of us would not do that, I think it’d be a lot better world.

NB: You started your entrepreneurial career at the age of 15. What made you decide that working for yourself was the way to go?

JH: I’m not sure where I got that. I come from a very middle-class famiy—my dad was in education, my mom was a nurse. I started out cutting lawns and cleaning gutters—whatever I could do to make extra money. I built a trailer and bought a little 1963 lawn tractor. I got my friends to take the trailer and tractor and drive around the neighborhood and cut lawns. I skipped school in the eighth grade quite a bit to work. My parents found out and, of course, I’d get in trouble, but they knew I wasn’t goofing off. They saw the passion of what I wanted to do—that I just enjoyed that building of a business—so they didn’t make me sell my equipment.

NB: After they’ve had some success in the business world, many entrepreneurs don't see the need for a college degree. What made you decide to pursue yours?

JH: I didn’t go to high school my senior year—it was just not for me. I was bored. College was a given, though. As soon as I got my GED, I immediately enrolled in one of the community colleges. I knew I wanted to go overseas to school to broaden my horizons. I went to Northern Illinois University-DeKalb because they had a program in Salzburg, Austria, which I attended for a semester. After that, I transferred to Webster Vienna for a semester and really enjoyed it.

NB: So as a native St. Louisan, you came to Webster University through the back door?

JH: Right. I loved what I got out of the campus in Vienna. It was almost one-on-one in some situations. The classes were so small, you could speak with the instructors whenever you wanted. I thought, if St. Louis is anything like that, that’s what I need. Webster was a great school for me.

NB: Do you have any advice for those who are thinking about starting their own business? What would you tell them to expect?

JH: Incredible amounts of hard work. You can’t stress that enough. It was nothing to put in an 80-hour week. You have to constantly have a positive attitude because so many people around you really do live by your own positive energy. If you’re up, they’re up, if you’re down, they’re down, so you’ve got to constantly find reasons to be positive, and it’s hard when you're working 80 hours a week and stressing about paying the bills and making the payroll. There’s no easy way, there’s no quick fix.

NB: Is it worth it?

JH: I think it’s worth it if you don’t sacrifice your own personal goals, or your personal dreams. You can never put the almighty dollar first. You can get caught up in the excitement of it at the expense of friends and family and things that are really more important in life than just building a business. It’s not even the money that can absorb you—it’s watching people grow. You take somebody who is not so sure about themselves and the next thing you know, they’re running a division better than you could ever run it—that’s exciting. But at what price? There is a price and you have to decide what you want to pay for that in terms of time.

NB. What's next for Monarch?

JH: We would like to expand to another city and sort of transplant the energy that we have here as a company. I think a lot of people tend to want to expand when they just have the system down, and you’ve got to have that first. But I think it’s more this energy that we have in our people—this excitement, this motivation—that will make us successful. In our business, clients are really traumatized—they’ve just been through a fire or some other catastrophe, and it’s so important that we’re sensitive to that. You develop a special bond with people working with them under these circumstances. It’s nothing for our cleaners to hug a client.

NB: Any extra charge for the hugs?

JH: Hugs are free.