ORI founder, Mark Jensen, on Episode 229

Mark Jensen, founder and engineer of Off-Road Innovations is on Episode 229. Without a background in off-road, Mark got launched into it accidentally. It’s been a heck of a ride. Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.

4:32 – I lived in the mountains with redwood trees, coming to Toelle was like being dropped in the middle of the desert, left for dead 

11:56– I built an outside-the-box sandrail that was four-wheel drive – essentially the first side-by-side             

20:29 – “You know this would be more suited for the rock crawling world.” I said, “The what? What’s rockcrawling?”

26:45 – every time this rock crawling thing would evolve into something more violent, it meant more failures for me 

38:00 – Those two words, perfect perseverance and dedication to what you are doing, you will overcome!

51:33 – We’re learning a lot from the car, it adds credibility to actually finish races and be successful

Special thanks to 4low Magazine and Maxxis Tires for support and sponsorship of this podcast.

Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.

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• 8:12 [Ad] All Automotive with Matt Clawson
• 8:52 (Cont.) ORI founder, Mark Jensen, on Episode 229

Transcript

[00:00:01.080] - 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:45.280] - 

Whether you're crawling the Red Rocks of Moab or hauling your toys to the trail, Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability. Four wheels or two, Maxxis tires are the choice of champions because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Choose Maxxis. Tread victoriously.

[00:01:13.020] - 

Have you seen 4Low magazine yet? 4low magazine is a high-quality, well-written, four-wheel drive-focused magazine for the enthusiast market. If you still love the idea of a printed magazine, something to save and read at any time, 4LOW is the magazine for you. 4Low cannot be found in stores, but you can have it delivered to your home or place of business. Visit 4Lowmagazine.com to order your subscription today.

[00:01:39.530] - Big Rich Klein

On this episode of Conversations with Big Rich, I'll be speaking with Mark Jensen. Mark is the owner of Off-Road Innovations. That's right, the designer and creator of ORI Shocks. Hello, Mark Jensen. It's really good to have you here today on the podcast, and I'm looking forward to this one.

[00:01:59.240] - Mark Jensen

Hello, Rich. Yes, I think this is going to be interesting.

[00:02:03.350] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, have you ever done a podcast before?

[00:02:06.550] - Mark Jensen

No. No, I have listened to a few, but I have not participated in a podcast.

[00:02:11.430] - Big Rich Klein

Well, here you go. So first question, the easiest question for most people to answer, where were you born and raised?

[00:02:19.620] - Mark Jensen

I was born in Eastern Utah, Roosevelt.

[00:02:23.480] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, up there by Vernal and Deschutes, or however you say it? Yeah.

[00:02:29.780] - Mark Jensen

Actually, my father had a 40 acre cattle ranch in Diola, which is north of Roosevelt, up by Vernal. Okay. Sold the cattle ranch when I was an infant, nine months old, I believe. And the family moved to a little town in California, Cottonwood, where we started raising sheep. That didn't work out, so my father got a job at the lumber mill. This is in Northern California, up by Redding. I was raised in Anderson, California, close to Redding. Lived there until I was 12. At that time, my father was looking for work again and came back to Utah. He moved a few years ahead of the family. Actually jumping rail cars to get here. Wow. Itchhike to jump rail cars to get to Utah looking for work, and found work in Toelle, Utah.

[00:03:28.410] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:03:29.310] - Mark Jensen

In In '66, the rest of us joined with my father in Toeele, Utah, moved here, and lived here for about 30 years until, well, I managed to get a job in machining. I was doing some motorcycle mechanics right out of high school, and that migrated into doing machining work for a company in Salt Lake City, at which time, I don't know, it was for a few years. We spent a total of 30 years in Utah after moving from California.

[00:04:07.740] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. I was recruited.

[00:04:10.840] - Mark Jensen

I'm sorry, go ahead.

[00:04:11.800] - Big Rich Klein

I see. Those early years, you were approximately Was it maybe, what, six or seven when you left Norcal for back to Toelle? I was twelve. Twelve. Okay.

[00:04:22.250] - Mark Jensen

What was that? I was twelve when we left.

[00:04:24.040] - Big Rich Klein

Was there a culture shock going from Anderson, California, to Tooele? I would imagine at that time, they were probably about the same size.

[00:04:32.690] - Mark Jensen

I lived in the mountains with redwood trees and foliage everywhere. Coming to Toelle, Utah, it was like being dropped off in the middle of the desert.

[00:04:43.470] - Big Rich Klein

That's true.

[00:04:44.960] - Mark Jensen

Left for dead.

[00:04:46.260] - Big Rich Klein

Because you could... In Toelle, if you're up high enough, you can look out over the Salt Lake, and it's pretty vast.

[00:04:56.640] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, yes, it's pretty vast. But I wasn't impressed with the lake. I was Mostly overwhelmed with, like you say, the culture shock of being dropped off in the middle of the desert. I really missed my trees. And of course, we have mountains here. I had to find completely new things to entertain myself. In California, I had two older brothers and a younger sister and an older sister. We did some crazy things in California. Of course, in California, you know that a lot of things are outlawed, like fireworks and bottle rockets. So we improvised. We would build cannons out of pipes. I tell you, I think they're called pipe bombs. And we would grind up match heads and launch one of those giant crayons out of cannons down the street. And it turned out to be quite the ballistics exercise. My older brother tried to lure me into building a submarine. We had a little lake close to the house. I considered my older brother, who later became an architect, a little bit loony in some of the ideas. I was envisioning getting into this submarine with my brother, and I said, There's just no way I'm doing this.

[00:06:20.270] - Mark Jensen

I'm going to end up dead. So, the designing and building things was in the family blood. My older brother became a machinist and maintenance man. My oldest brother, second older brother that wanted to do the submarine, ended up becoming an architect, and I stayed in the engineering field.

[00:06:44.490] - Big Rich Klein

Did it work out for everybody?

[00:06:48.020] - Mark Jensen

Yes, everybody went on to be quite successful. Everybody's retired except for me.

[00:06:54.190] - Big Rich Klein

But that's because you're self-employed. We never fully retire.

[00:06:58.600] - Mark Jensen

Right. Well, my My official retirement date was in 2015. Right. 2015 for my day job. I was recruited. I was working as a machinist here in Salt Lake City and manufacturing engineer. I started school. I started school at age 40, which was quite late. I was going to go to the University of Utah. I didn't have the funds to do that. So I started school at Salt Lake Community College. I wanted to get into engineering. Before I could finish, I was confronted by headhunter and recruited for a manufacturing engineering job in Georgia, working for a company, Yoko Gawa Corporation. Who build field instruments for the oil and gas industry. In 1996, we accepted that job and moved our family from here to Georgia, a little town of Sharpsburg. Okay.

[00:08:02.640] - Big Rich Klein

And your job there was producing or engineering the equipment?

[00:08:13.160] - Mark Jensen

The purpose of the recruiting was they were setting up a manufacturing line for differential pressure transmitters. This has a little bit to do with the history of the struts. We never did introduce what company I represent, Off Road Innovation, ORI struts. I was recorded to help set up the manufacturing for the differential pressure transmitter. This is used at oil refineries and offshore rigs to measure the level of the crude oil tanks based on atmospheric pressure compared to the weight of the fluid in the tank. There you can see then why we call it a differential pressure transmitter. I set up the manufacturing line for that along with one of their programmer engineer. It was quite an experience because working here in Utah as a manufacturing engineer, I was quite accustomed to getting things done very quickly. In Georgia, the atmosphere, the business atmosphere was a lot of meetings and the big corporate atmosphere, a lot of meetings and planning and more meetings and more planning. It was frustrating for me because I just couldn't understand why can't we just do it and get it done? It took us more than a year to get this line set up, following all the guidelines, but we did finally get that done.

[00:09:51.190] - Mark Jensen

Also involved in... I was over the entire manufacturing operation in Georgia for at Yokogawa. We also built Vortex and magnetic flow meters for the oil and gas industry. That's my engineering background. While there, I continued my education at Southern Tech University up in Marietta, Georgia. That's my engineering background. I was promoted to mechanical engineer and then senior mechanical engineer. Then unfortunately for me, the quality manager retired, a good friend of mine. My boss said, Well, you're going to be the new quality manager, and there's no pay raise that goes along with it. You're just going to be the new quality manager. That started the more boring part of my career, but it gave me an incredibly good background in the management of a business. For that, I'm eternally grateful. It was It was a great kickstart for the ORI strut business because now I have management experience and manufacturing and machining and programming experience and the quality side of things, ISO 9000 and so on. Okay. So without that, I don't know how this business could have ever gotten off the ground and survived as it has.

[00:11:23.980] - Big Rich Klein

Right. How did you get involved with from the engineering job to ORI, Off-Road Innovations, which is, of course, the strut manufacturer. But there's some background in there that's got to be from your youth or something. You just didn't jump in from the oil industry and decide to make off-road shocks or struts.

[00:11:51.060] - Mark Jensen

Well, now we have to back up again. Okay, let's do that. Let's go back to 1984.

[00:11:55.800] - Big Rich Klein

All right.

[00:11:56.880] - Mark Jensen

While we were still living here in Utah, My oldest brother got me involved with motorcycles, so we would spend a lot of time on motorcycles. While working as a machinist here in Salt Lake City, we decided to build a go-cart. Build a go-cart from old Honda crates. They came in metal crates. We built this go-cart and had some fun with it. From that, it went to building a sandrail. But I was quite interested in four-wheel drive. We built what was Very, what would you call it? Outside the box, a sandrail that was four-wheel drive. And it was actually, I would say, the first side-by-side. It was a two-seater, rear engine, four-wheel independent, full-time four-wheel drive, built with a Honda CB 1100 engine. And I built my own transfer case, built my own gears, did everything from the ground up. That was featured in Dirt Sports magazine back in 1987, I believe it was. We built that and it Well, anyway, we'd go to the dunes often. My wife and I were at the north end of the Saint Anthony Sand Dunes. We were sidehilling this long, long ridge along with a convoy of larger sandrails, along with the one that we had built.

[00:13:35.380] - Mark Jensen

It's quite scary, actually, being off camber like that, thinking we're going to roll down the hill. I said to my wife, Somebody needs to build a more stable suspension system for these hills like this. She says, Well, who would that be? Maybe you should. At that point, we decided, Okay, we're going to work on a shock absorber that will be more stable. At At that point, we started working on a design. I was working with a rotary valve design, something that would be a hill-sensing shock absorber where the spring rate would stiffen on the downhill side and stay loose on the uphill side and automatically change. That leads into my work with Yokogawa in Georgia, where we built the differential pressure transmitters. I was inspired by the idea of how they were using these different pressures to measure fluid level in a tank. I got to think, Well, maybe I could build a shock absorber, and ended up with call it a strut that will to dramatically change spring rate without any external inputs. So it all happened internally, and I used the concept of differential pressures internally in the shock absorber to actuate valves.

[00:15:00.520] - Mark Jensen

The concept worked. We patented it, and I think in 2002, we received a patent on the HillSensing strut. We took the strut to Chandler, Arizona, to our first trade show, probably our only trade show that we ever did, demonstrated it there on a test stand so people could see how this strut, when you lean it one direction, it would stiffen the spring rate. You stand it back up vertical, and would soften up again. Actually, at that time, one of the representatives from Fox came over to our booth, and he was looking at what we were doing. He says, No, that's impossible. You can't change spring reeks automatically without some an external input. Then the use of urethane... Yes, and the use of urethane seals, he says, That will never work. The seals just won't hold up for what you're doing. Well, we'll get into that a little more later, I think, because we did end up having an awful lot of failures with the first design struts. But we did that first trade show. This is in Arizona, and we picked up two dealers. I don't know if I should name them.

[00:16:23.850] - Big Rich Klein

You can, if you wish.

[00:16:25.950] - Mark Jensen

Well, maybe I'll do that. We picked up Troy with Toys by Troy, who was in Phoenix.

[00:16:33.330] - Big Rich Klein

I remember him.

[00:16:33.780] - Mark Jensen

And Todd Little with On Track 4x4. St. George. St. George. He got. So Todd, Jen Little in the beginning, while They wanted to become dealers, but they also wanted to be sponsored. We did that. Jen was the driver of an old flat Fender Willies. And they rock-crawled Supercrawl with U-Rock. And you know the U-Rock changed a number of times. Yes. Ownership during those years, and we would fly out for SuperCrawl every year. We experienced an awful lot of failures. I'll tell you that. We had the HillSensing strut working great. That was working. But what we didn't account on, and that's my fault as the engineer, what we didn't count on is the uphill side would unload. I can't tell you how many times I've received phone calls calls from Todd who would say, Mark, these things are acting weird. It was one Supercall event where I saw them up on Side Hill, on top of a very steep ledge, and she started unloading, and I just put my hand over my eyes, and I thought, Oh, no, no, no, this can't be happening. She didn't roll it, but it was a very sketchy situation. At that time, I did We decided, Okay, I need to do something about the unloading.

[00:18:02.400] - Mark Jensen

So we took the DP3 design and we incorporated a dual chamber designed where we could pressurize a lower chamber. We sealed the piston. It was no longer a flow-through piston, as you see with typical shocks. We sealed the piston so we could pressurize a lower chamber to force the piston shaft up. The more we would pressurize the lower chamber, the more it would pull the shaft in. And then the upper chamber is pressurized to achieve ride height. Now, that worked out quite well for us. However, the problem with the DP3 strut, and the DP3, by the way, DP is differential pressure. Right, okay. And the three was the three modes. It worked as a shock absorber, a strut to support weight. And I don't remember what the other one was. It doesn't matter.

[00:18:59.480] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:19:00.250] - Mark Jensen

Okay. Dp3. And we got a stabilizer, sway bar. Okay. So that was the third. So the tech support issues with the DP3, we started selling these things, and it was just constant folk calls all the time, how to calibrate them for the different angles that the customers would bounce them. It just became a nightmare. I finally abandoned the DP3 It was a free production. We started with the ST model strut, which is a simpler model of what you see out there today. There are quite a few people with We Rock are running them. They're quite popular in the off-road world Now, the ST model developed into the STX model later. We had some issues in the beginning. As a matter of history, just a little bit of background I found on this. While I was working as an engineer for Yokagawa for many years, from 1996 to 2015, I was pretty much out of the off-road world. I was so busy and caught up with my career that we would sell them, go out and ride the motorcycle. I just didn't have the time for that, concentrating on my career. I was oblivious to what was happening in the off-road industry.

[00:20:29.220] - Mark Jensen

I I developed this strut, and I contacted a magazine about it. I wanted to get it introduced to the market. And the person I contacted was nick Kappa. I don't remember which magazine he was. It was one of the Jeep 4x4 magazines. When he looked at the product and the pictures that I sent him, he says, You know this? This would be more suited for the rock crawling world. And I said, The what? What's rock crawling? Like I said, I was oblivious. I had been outside of this world, and it had been foreign to me. I didn't know what rock crawling was. I picture people climbing rocks, but they're doing it in in Jeep. Okay, well, that sounds dangerous. I don't know that I'd want to do that.

[00:21:23.440] - Big Rich Klein

Hence why I became a promoter and not a driver.

[00:21:28.520] - Mark Jensen

Exactly. I was a little bit naive, a little bit naive to what was going on in the sport. I told him I had developed it for the sandrails. That was my background, motor cycles and sandrails. He said, This sounds like it'd be more for rock crawling. So I thought, Okay, fine. We'll sell them to rock crawlers if that's what they want. Of course, Todd and Jen, the struts were acting a little weird for them, like I was saying. Things were going quite well for quite some time. We were dealing with issues of the struts getting high. We had internal seal failures. We had a number of problems like that. I started getting these phone calls from customers who had bought these, and they were racing with them. I'm thinking, now, I didn't intend these to be raced. This is a sports shock. This is just for sport. I was thinking sand dunes, and now rock crawling. I started getting phone calls from customers saying, My struts are locking up. We're having all kinds of problems. I said, Well, what are you doing with them? Well, we're racing on them at KOH, and I asked, What's KOH?

[00:22:49.530] - Mark Jensen

Right back to being naive, I didn't know what King of the Hammers was. People were taking our struts out to the King of the Hammers, racing them. I had internal parts that were made of plastic. You can imagine what's going to happen to a plastic part in the heat of the desert, especially at Moab. So we were having seal failures and plastic parts twisting up and melting into odd shapes. Once again, I was caught off guard, the struts being used for things I hadn't imagined. So we had to fight through that. I was looking last night at a quote from Steve Jobs. We talk about failures of a product. Steve Jobs, I like this. He said, Embrace failure as part of the journey. Embrace failure as part of the journey. Failure is not the end. It's a step on the path to success. Learn from it, adapt, and keep moving forward. I was inspired by that. I thought, Really developing any product, if you don't accept the failures that you have and learn from those and improve, you'll never see a successful end to what you're trying to do.

[00:24:14.660] - Big Rich Klein

Especially when you're doing something that's completely out of the box. I mean, what you designed was not typical shock technology, just like the guy from Fox said. So of course, he didn't think it would work.

[00:24:32.790] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, exactly right. We were told by, well, on the engineering side, Fox said it can't work, it won't work. On the business side, we had friends that were bankers, said, There's no way you're going to make this business get off the ground. You just can't do it with your own money. You need to get investors and venture capitalists involved. So we were told on the business side, we couldn't do it. We were told on the engineering side, we couldn't do it. And then That'll make it even tougher. This is another, if you don't mind me quoting Steve Jobs again.

[00:25:07.920] - Big Rich Klein

No, absolutely not.

[00:25:10.120] - Mark Jensen

We were starting this business right after 2001. We resurrected the idea of building the strut after moving to Georgia. When the towers were hit in 2001, we thought we're going to finish developing this strut to get a business made out of it. By this time, I had seven children. So we're raising seven kids. I'm working a full-time job, and we're starting this business in our basement. I think that's what got you fluid into what was going on here. There was an article on our Facebook about how we started this business in our basement. With our own money, with no investors, raising seven kids. This is what Steve Jobs had to say about that. If you've got a family and you're In the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough. It's pretty much an 18 hour a day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. And unquote. So.

[00:26:23.380] - Big Rich Klein

I can relate to that.

[00:26:26.160] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, you've been down that road, too.

[00:26:27.950] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. I mean, look how many offers road event promoters there were in rock crawling. You know, at one time, there was seven of us across the United States, and that's not the case any longer. I keep telling people, I don't know if I was smart or stupid.

[00:26:45.790] - Mark Jensen

And your rock crawling sport, which caught me by surprise, as I mentioned, turned into rock racing. Remember the side by side rock racing? Oh, absolutely. And every time this rock crawling thing would evolve into something more and more violent, it meant more failures for me. But it's turned out for the best. We spent the first 10 years of our business, and I think our banker friends were pretty much right, you just can't do it on your own money. We spent the first 10 years living off my wages at Yokogawa, and we made no money for 10 years. Most businesses turned a profit after about the first five We had applied for a business loan and got turned down. We had great numbers on the chart. We showed them our business plan. Everything looked great. We said, Look, we tripled our business over last year. Well, we had sold maybe, what was it, five struts the first year or six struts the first year, and then we sold maybe 18 the next year. Well, that's tripled your business, right? Right. I don't think the banker was too impressed with the simple tripling of your business, but I thought it was pretty neat.

[00:28:09.970] - Big Rich Klein

They don't mind that when you're in the millions.

[00:28:13.400] - Mark Jensen

No. No. So today, we're limited only, like I said, by our manufacturing capacity. We're selling over 2,000 struts a year, currently, which is nothing compared to Fox and King, Radflow, and a lot of our competition, what is there doing? Fox, of course, supplies a lot of the side-by-side, and they've become quite a global company. So I thought tripling our business was a It was a neat thing, but the banker, like I said, was not impressed at all. And we did not get the small business loan. We mortgaged our home. I got a $50,000 loan. Our original intent was we were just going to outsource the parts and have other machine shops make our parts for us, and we would assemble them in the basement of our home. We took out a $50,000 mortgage. We bought a few manual machines, assembly equipment, and contracted a company in Tennessee to make our parts for us. This quickly turned out to be, well, it got us our first production run, but we had all kinds of defects in the parts and late delivery. Batteries because we were such a small production run quantity that we didn't have the leverage with a machine shop to put us at top priority and get our parts on time and good quality.

[00:29:46.270] - Mark Jensen

We quickly realized we'd have to move manufacturing into our own homes. We started machining these struts on manual equipment in my basement. We did this for a few For years, I had a friend of mine at my day job, Yokela Gala, who helped me set up the pressure transmitter line. He agreed to move a couple of CNC machines into his garage. He lived about an hour away from us. I did the assembly and he did the machining. He took over the machining, rather, where I was doing it all on manual equipment. Now we have this combination, assembly being done in my basement, the machining being done in his garage an hour away. This was hard to deal with. We were doing this under a business license that did not allow us to hire people outside. As soon as the business and sales got to the point that we needed to start hiring people to do the work, at that point, we started looking for a permanent location, a factory. Fortunately for us, but unfortunate for Carlyle Tire & Wheel, their factory burned down in Bowden, Georgia. Their entire rubber plant, they made tires for a lot of agriculture and vehicles like that.

[00:31:14.710] - Mark Jensen

Their rubber plant burned down. Their machine shop, which is a tool and dye shop across the street, was intact. They moved to Jackson, Tennessee, and sold their shop. We bought it from them, I think, in 2010. We bought their shop and converted it into a ORIs manufacturing facility, and we're still there today.

[00:31:37.800] - Big Rich Klein

Nice. Some technical questions. I remember when your Shox first came out because Todd competed at our Cal Rock events, and then We Rock, when we changed the name and went more US-based instead of just West Coast. I remember those unloading. The shocks would hold great, and then all of a sudden, they weren't. And those were those early years, we're trying to get that valving correct and figuring it out. And you seemed to get the handle on that. And then the rock racing came along. And like you said, the guys, they would lock up. They got to where they just became more like a two by four, is what it was explained to me. And you guys have cured that. Do you have Is there an application for street vehicles? I mean, can they be used, like on a highway vehicle?

[00:32:39.490] - Mark Jensen

Well, we tell people today the same thing we told them way back when. They do not have Department of Transportation DOT approval. So we tell them, if you drive them on the street, you're on their own. They don't have DOT approval. These are made for off-road use only. However, you're going to see these on a lot of Jeeps and trucks on the highway. The drive to and from. Yes.

[00:33:06.030] - Big Rich Klein

They drive to and from.

[00:33:07.540] - Mark Jensen

Yes, they use them as, what do you call it? That's another term I had to learn, a daily driver. People do mount these on their Jeeps and trucks and some cars, and they become daily drivers. Although we don't stand behind them, because our philosophy here is that not being DOT approved, anytime you change from the factory setup, you no longer have the safety protocols required by the federal government or up to transportation. Our struts are designed to be long travel for rock crawling and for racing, whereas an automobile suspension, you might have what? 3, 4 inches of travel. Correct. And when you put long suspension on the highway vehicle, you're introducing some instability. Of course, they will run with sway bars and things like that to help out. Okay. I think I answered your question.

[00:34:10.510] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, you did.

[00:34:11.690] - Mark Jensen

Except for the two by four thing. You're not supposed to bring that up, Rich.

[00:34:16.690] - Big Rich Klein

Sorry.

[00:34:19.370] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, they would ride on a two by four, like a rigid suspension. Will they call that? A hard tail on a Harley?

[00:34:28.120] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah.

[00:34:29.570] - Mark Jensen

And what would happen is, like I said, at one point, we changed to a dual chamber design, but we're sealing the upper chamber from the lower chamber. The challenge with that was that we had to have a perfect seal between the two chambers, which is almost impossible to achieve in hydraulics. Even with forklift hydraulics and other hydraulics, you see construction equipment. There is some leakage, and it's a compensated for it. It's just recycled through the system. But if our struts had any leakage at all, the upper chamber oil would leak into the lower chamber and it would lock it up. There's no recovery because we don't have this constant loop of recycling the oil and refreshing the upper chamber and so forth. So leaks internally are just not allowed with our struts. The problem is we had to overcome were getting a seal and oil combination where the oil would not attack and deteriorate the seals. In fact, the material we finally ended up with for our seals that we don't advertise, where we get it from or what the material is, didn't actually exist until about 2019. We've always used urethane seals because urethane can handle the pressures that we were seeing.

[00:36:02.500] - Mark Jensen

A regular rubber seal, nitro seal would not do it. We always had to use the urethane. This is one of the criticism Fox had for us, you recall from earlier in the conversation. It won't work because urethane will not work. Urethane is susceptible to moisture and water. It'll break down. Most grades of urethane just couldn't handle constant exposure to certain oils. We did some laboratory testing We finally came up with a oil and a seal material combination where the seals would last for several years without experiencing any deterioration and leaking. We also had a problem with the O-ring In that design, we had to move the O-ring internally from one place in the strut to another location within the strut and call it instead of being a typical O-ring seal, but to become a packing Under high pressure. We finally overcame the internal leak issues where the struts would lock up, and as you say, act like they were a two by four, just a one solid strut. Once we When it came that, I think a lot of those phone calls subsided, and life was a lot better after that, after fixing the internal leak issue.

[00:37:27.290] - Mark Jensen

This is something that... Fox was right. It will not work with what they were seeing, and we did have problems.

[00:37:35.880] - Big Rich Klein

But you've been able to overcome those.

[00:37:38.910] - Mark Jensen

That we were able to overcome. I think, just like Steve Jobs, once again, this is, what did he say? It was like, Perfect perseverance. There's another thing, Steve Jobs. And I keep coming back to Steve Jobs, but he's an inspiring type of guy.

[00:37:57.500] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:38:00.220] - Mark Jensen

And he said, Those two words, perfect perseverance and just dedication to what you're doing. Eventually, you'll overcome the problems you're having. And we did. We overcame it. And you know, a lot of that motivation comes from, we're trying to feed seven kids. And in 2015, I had retired from my day job. And my wife kept pestering me, says, Now, you got to quit your day job and go full-time ORA. You'll make more money with ride than working for Yokega. So finally, I retired in 2015. Now, the burden was this has to work because this is our only means of support now.

[00:38:41.300] - Big Rich Klein

No option. Failure is not an option.

[00:38:44.580] - Mark Jensen

That's right. And you've done business. You know how that goes. Yes. So survival is a great motivator.

[00:38:54.480] - Big Rich Klein

It certainly is. It certainly is. After 25 years of rock crawling, I can tell you that.

[00:39:01.650] - Mark Jensen

Yes. When pride got the best of me, and this is an interesting story, I told my boss at my day job, and said, Okay, I'm going to require and do my business full-time. He got quiet and he looked at me straight in the eye and very serious look on his face. He says, Mark, can I convince you to stay on just another six months? Well, that's when pride kicked in and I said, Oh, no, no, no. My business is such a success and we're going to do this full-time and this is going to be a great thing. So no, I have to retire. I'm retiring. I'm hanging it up. He says, Are you real sure I can't convince you to stay on another six months? I said, No, no, no. I'm going to do my business. He says, Well, okay. We did that. I retired. We had our party, all the hugs and kisses and the cake, did their celebration. Three months later, Yokogawa offered a half a year's pay to anybody that was willing to take an early retirement.

[00:40:12.490] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Very good.

[00:40:13.930] - Mark Jensen

And I was making six figures at the time.

[00:40:19.160] - Big Rich Klein

It would have been nice to stick around to get that bonus, huh?

[00:40:23.070] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, that would have been a nice kickstart for that business. But, yeah, when the boss looks you straight in the eye and he's got that somber look on his face, pay attention. They're trying to tell you something.

[00:40:34.860] - Big Rich Klein

Something that might be in the wind.

[00:40:37.820] - Mark Jensen

Exactly. But, yeah, it still worked out because, actually, my wife was right, and she's sitting here with me, Marie. She's been the love of my life, and she took over and did the books from the very get-go in the business. When she saw us run a business off of a spreadsheet, she said, We've got to fix this. And so she took over the books and helped with the shipping and receiving a lot of the phone calls. She's taking all these phone calls while I was working simultaneously my day jobs. She's trying to handle all the tech support calls from home. You can imagine how that worked. So during my break time at work, I'd be calling customers back.

[00:41:27.470] - Big Rich Klein

Now, if I can understand the your partner, your wife, wanting to take the reins for part of the business. Shelley did that. When I met Shelley in 2009, I was getting ready to lock the doors on We Rock, and and just stop. I mean, I'd had it at that point. The economy was, sucked really bad, and we'd lost a lot of our drivers because they were being affected as well. And I was ready to give up. And Kelly just said, Hey, let me help you on the office end of it. And I was like, You really don't want to put your hands into this mess. And she said, No, let me do it, because she had retired from her job. So it was like, okay, handed it over to her. We cut costs and shoestringed it for a while and built it back up. Having that help is is essential, especially for a family business.

[00:42:34.360] - Mark Jensen

Well, you and I can really relate. Yes. Because both of us, our wife, bailed out the situation and made it bearable to where it could continue forward.

[00:42:46.650] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, because when you're trying to do it all yourself at times, it just gets to the point where you just like, I just can't do it anymore. It's just too much for one person.

[00:42:56.930] - Mark Jensen

So I'll share a personal thing with you. We went through those years of struggle, and like you said, you wanted to hang it up. There were many, many times I wanted to hang up. I'm a Christian man, and I'm prayerful. Oftentimes, I get down on my knees and I'd pray, Lord, I'm not really hooked on this business. If there's any way I can get out of it, just say the word. I'll hang it up and get out of it right now. A number of times, I prayed, If you want me out of this business and just go back to punching the time clock, I'll do it right now. But we kept moving forward, and I think our wives kept us moving in that direction. True. But like I said, there were times I wanted to just give it up and quit. Like Steve Jobs said, if you're raising a family and trying to start a business at the time, at the same time, you just want to... Chances are you're going to give it up. But there's a few of us that just pushed forward and kept doing it.

[00:44:02.850] - Big Rich Klein

Like I said, for myself, I didn't know if over all these years I was stupid or if I was smart. I think there's a fine line in what Which it is.

[00:44:18.250] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, I've seen that fine line. I think I've broken that barrier a few times.

[00:44:23.450] - Big Rich Klein

Right. So your family is involved with the business as well besides your wife?

[00:44:29.940] - Mark Jensen

Yes, my sons helped us build those first struts in our basement. We use the bathtub in our master bathroom as a leak test tank. We would rush boxes of struts upstairs, downstairs between leak tests, and we would heat treat the plastic bypass tubes in our oven. We were stress relieving the plastic It was the ones that melted at K-O-H, at Moab, yeah. We would do the stress relieving in our oven. Washing, dishwasher. We would wash the parts in our dishwasher, send them out for anodize. So I tell you, we were using at least two levels of our home for strut manufacturing and testing and assembly.

[00:45:27.030] - Big Rich Klein

And housing of employees.

[00:45:30.760] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, your question was our family getting involved. Our sons did help us do a lot of that assembly in the beginning. Kirk, and Russell, and Eric, my three sons, Even Nolan. It's the first four of them. Nolan, Eric, Russell, and Kirk all worked with us on these struts. Andrew has a big family. Andrew is the youngest one. He was the one that was born in Georgia. He took a different tact. He went into accounting. He just got his graduate degree in accounting just this year.

[00:46:06.160] - Big Rich Klein

Very good.

[00:46:07.560] - Mark Jensen

But the other boys, Kirk, from the very beginning has been my tech support. He and Russell started their own business, Jensen Brothers Off Road in Salt Lake City. So they have a brick and mortar business in Salt Lake now, and Kirk still does tech support for us. So he's paid to do that. He's an actual employee of the company, aside from doing his own business. One day, let's see, I just turned 70 this week.

[00:46:40.500] - Big Rich Klein

Congratulations. Happy birthday.

[00:46:43.180] - Mark Jensen

Thank you. I don't know, Are you going to be happy? I don't know.

[00:46:47.900] - Big Rich Klein

You have to look in the mirror and answer that one yourself.

[00:46:52.570] - Mark Jensen

I am still walking under my own power. I'm still vertical, as they say, so we're doing good.

[00:46:58.420] - Big Rich Klein

Perfect.

[00:46:59.430] - Mark Jensen

Now, one thing I didn't mention in the whole course of this is that, what year was it? About 2019? We kept hearing from our customers. We were using our customers as guinea pigs to test these struts. In 2015, But we bought a Polaris Razor and used that for testing. We had a '99 Jeep TJ. We also used the original DP3 struts for testing. But by and large, we were using our customers to test out improvements and design changes. We were finally encouraged by one of the ultra four racers that we sponsored to buy our own race car. He said, You will learn a lot more owning your own race car than having your customers test your product. So we did. We bought from Let's Roll Off Road in Mesa, Arizona, Andrew McLafflin. We bought his ultra four car.

[00:47:59.290] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, the IFS IFS car? Was it the IFS or the straight-axle car?

[00:48:04.300] - Mark Jensen

We bought the IFS car. Okay. Yes, we bought his ultra four unlimited class 4,400 car. The Rock Crush. So we didn't start out small. We decided to go right out, go for broke. Bought his car. We tore it down, made a lot of improvements to it, put our struts on it. By the way, we took off the ADS shocks, weighed them, and put our struts on, and actually dropped the weight of the car, 230 pounds. Wow. By going to the struts. The ADS are quite advanced. They're very good, very good shocks. It's one of the go-to shocks for off-road racing. We put our struts on the car and we started testing our own, doing the races. We went to King of Hammers. The third year that we raced, 2024, which was just this year, Wait a minute. We're still 2024. We're losing track of time. We finished Hammers, 39th position out of 40 finishers. 117 people started and only 40 finished. We were number 39. That was quite a success. We've done a number of fast short course races with our car and learned that it was quite a popular with our customers when the struts coming off of a big jump land hard, blows the seals, the oil sprays on the engine, and the struts catch fire.

[00:49:40.570] - Mark Jensen

That's something that most of our customers just don't like.

[00:49:45.630] - Big Rich Klein

Well, I can imagine that.

[00:49:49.830] - Mark Jensen

So struts that blow up and catch fire, that was not a good marketing point. So we fixed that. In fact, we have a new version of the strut we're calling Generation 3 that doesn't blow up and catch fire. Gen 3. Gen 3. Actually, I'm flying to Georgia this afternoon to assemble the first ones, oversee the assembly of the first ones, and they're going on a race car, and they will go into the next race. Now, we're the only ones that exploded them and caught fire. None of our customers had that issue, but we, because we're testing them and we put them through some really severe use.

[00:50:32.130] - Big Rich Klein

Well, then buying the race car was a great idea.

[00:50:35.430] - Mark Jensen

It was. It really was. It was a good thing to do. Not cheap. No. You need to pass this along to your customers, Rich. If they plan to make money racing, they're smoking something.

[00:50:49.730] - Big Rich Klein

Right. No, that's true. The old adage is, you know how to make a million dollars in racing? Start with two. Yeah.

[00:50:58.410] - Mark Jensen

Start out as a Right.

[00:51:01.030] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, exactly. But as a testbed, I can imagine that it's the way to go because the feedback for the engineer in yourself is better than getting it second-hand.

[00:51:17.620] - Mark Jensen

Well, that's true. The report you get back from your customers are, Well, the struts failed. Well, what were you doing? What happened? Do you have video? So the feedback goes best when you're experiencing it yourself.

[00:51:32.600] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly.

[00:51:33.150] - Mark Jensen

So we're learning a lot from the car. And the other thing that's really good, when you use your own product and you're testing your own product, and especially if you get into racing now, you Rock Crawling, and us with both rock crawling and ultra-four racing. If they see you finish races and actually be successful, actually see a few podium finishes, then it adds credibility be to the product. So although there's no money in racing, as far as product development goes, there's a huge benefit in the credibility it lends to your product and customers, and not just with off with products, but with anything. When they see professionals using a product and being happy with it, then they say, well, if a professional is good with it, then it's got to be good for me, too.

[00:52:26.450] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And that's one of the things that we learned a long time ago with the rock crawling, is that the enthusiast, maybe they didn't want to go out and compete, but they wanted their rigs, their trail rigs, to look like, act like, and perform like the competition rigs.

[00:52:52.490] - Mark Jensen

Exactly. So I had the engineering side, and I had the quality side of the business down pat, and my wife helped us with the business and the books. But that, the marketing side is something we were lacking. How do you promote a product? And racing does it. Word of mouth is a great thing. We never advertise, but word of mouth helped us. But I think one of the things that's helped us most has been able to post on Facebook and on our website, these things are being raced and they're actually succeeding. Our customers see that. They see all these sponsors sensors on the stickers on the sides of cars. Well, I want to have that on my car, the recreationalists, or as you say, the enthusiasts. I do the same thing for my own for myself. I want to use and buy products that are endorsed by big name professionals.

[00:53:56.260] - Big Rich Klein

Right. You know, as the tire companies used to say, especially with NASCAR, you went on Sunday, sell on Monday.

[00:54:05.690] - Mark Jensen

There you go. Yes. So that's an aspect of the business I had to learn the hard way. You know, my, one of my sons, Russell, was involved in... He was a marketing director for KSL for a number of years. He's now going full-time in his business. But he's the one to talk me to going into Facebook, and I'm Facebook, what's that? That's another one. Okay, I had no idea what rock crawling was. I didn't know what a K-O-H was. And so now, years ago, he was throwing this new concept at me, Facebook. I said, Facebook? This is a business. I don't want to be involved in social media and all that. And he convinced me, you know you have to be on Facebook if your business is going to succeed. So he set that up. And then there's this other thing that came along, Instagram. You have to be on Instagram. I'm sure you're involved in all that, too. I don't know if we're luckily like me, but we're in deep and there's no getting around it.

[00:55:09.840] - Big Rich Klein

No, I grasped it early. Again, it was my son that said the same thing. He was like, hey, we're going to make this work. We've got to, especially after pirate, the bulletin boards, especially pirate, was great in the early days. But Facebook, with their algorithms and the reach that they had, was so much greater than pirate. I mean, pirate, you got just to the four-wheel drive industry. With Facebook, you got to people that might be motorheads that would be interested in our sport. And so we were able to grab a lot more people from Facebook. So social media was one of those things that I jumped on board pretty early with. Not as early as some, but early enough.

[00:56:08.380] - Mark Jensen

Yeah, so I can't say that we don't advertise, because if you have a Facebook page, you're advertising. True. And my son, that I was talking about, talked me into Facebook. He's a search engine optimizer, professionally, SEO. So you start combining. Having seven kids is a big advantage, because each has a different expertise. Right. Our tech support guy is a graduate from automotive technology at the university. And Russell is a professional SEO, so put a lot together. You have to have kids. You crop-crawlers out there that don't think having a farm is important. You have to have kids because, well, for one thing, they're going to take over your business one day, and they need to know how to do it.

[00:56:56.780] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly. But, yeah.

[00:57:00.070] - Mark Jensen

Yes, we reluctantly got under the social media scene, but it's worked out for us quite well.

[00:57:08.710] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. And what do you see for the future?

[00:57:14.160] - Mark Jensen

For the future, I'd like to someday retire and just do this as a sport.

[00:57:20.080] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:57:20.840] - Mark Jensen

I think it's a great thing that your hobby and your passion becomes your bread and butter for your business one day. But the downside to that is you spend so much time on this business side of it that you forget about the hobby and the recreational side of it.

[00:57:39.330] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly.

[00:57:40.670] - Mark Jensen

I'd like to hand off a lot of responsibility to our kids and to other hires. My son-in-law is operating the factory in Georgia. I'm living in Utah now with my wife. We came out here to expand the business. We bought nine acres of property here in subdivided it into five lots, and rezone it to commercial and industrial. So one of those lots we're keeping for ourselves to expand the operation that is in Georgia to here when we'll manufacture other products here in Utah. So you ask about our future. Yes, I had retired in 2015, but I'm far from it.

[00:58:25.360] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:58:25.950] - Mark Jensen

We're still very, very actively involved in it. Sudden inflation really took a bite out of our plans. And 2020, we just got hit with a huge spike in inflation. Covid took a hit. We lost more than half of our crew with COVID. We're still trying to hire these people back, our new employees. A good number of our employees, when we were to hit with the lockdown and shelter in place mandate as a manufacturing facility, we were severely hampered to what we could do. We could maintain our inventory. That was all. Everybody else had a shelter in place. Several of our employees approached us and said, We want to go home. We don't want to expose as well as to COVID. So more than a half of our people were gone, still trying to hire and replenish that crew. We are in the active hiring. And it's helping. We bought some new equipment, trying to keep up with orders. That was really, really tough during COVID, because, like I said earlier, orders didn't slow down. But we lost half of our people, more than half of our people, and trying to maintain that. And then with this massive inflation that hit starting in 2020, we could not keep our employees because now they're demanding much higher wages to deal with the inflation.

[00:59:58.240] - Mark Jensen

So that's also keeping the size of crew down. We gave at least 20 % increases in pay across the board to most of our employees. It's hard to have the number of people that we need when we have to pay them incredible wages.

[01:00:16.380] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Without making your product so expensive that people aren't going to buy it.

[01:00:23.660] - Mark Jensen

We couldn't raise the price of our product. It's already expensive. It's complicated. The struts that we make are very complicated. Like you said, they're outside the box. They're not a typical shock design. We don't make anything in China. There's one part that we buy from China that goes on our dual field kit that we're going to be out sourcing from somewhere else here very soon. And that's the only thing we get from China, but nothing in the strut comes from outside the US.

[01:00:54.610] - Big Rich Klein

I think that's important. I think there's a lot of people that are like minded as well, that Manufactured, not just assembled in the US.

[01:01:05.330] - Mark Jensen

Well, you look at most of the things you're finding online right now, even in the off-road world. A good share of it is manufactured in China. I guess I'm one of the old holdouts. We're still holding out. We're building everything. The materials, we buy all the raw materials. Everything comes from the US for the struts. It's just something I've stuck with from the very beginning. I want to keep it that way. It won't make us competitive. We've had people in Malaysia copy our struts. They never did get it launched. Well, it wasn't not a success. And that's where customer loyalty, I think, has helped save our company. A lot of our customers refuse to buy a counterfeit. So that's helped us. And so I I don't think you can today find the counterfeits here because it just didn't take off. I think because of loyalty to the American brand. Not to mention the fact that when I looked at the parts that the counterfeits were using, I looked at my My son's and I said, Those struts are going to overheat and the seals are going to fail. I could tell just by looking at pictures of the parts that they did not learn from reverse engineering our product.

[01:02:29.060] - Big Rich Klein

Right. All they did, they didn't use the right materials, correct? Yeah.

[01:02:33.980] - Mark Jensen

So we keep a lot of our processes close and quiet, secret. Like I said, the seal material, the oils, and the processes that we use, we just keep that proprietary. There's only so much that they can reverse engineer, and they couldn't copy it completely, and their struts will overheat. And there's nothing they can do to avoid it. And we know that. So we stay close to the American brand.

[01:03:09.280] - Big Rich Klein

Perfect. Excellent.

[01:03:12.070] - Mark Jensen

So we're pretty happy with that. Yeah, the business overall, I think, has been a great success for us. I've had a number of my friends that started businesses and abandoned the idea and went back to punching the time clock, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not trying to belittle those who work a career and save up and retire and have a happy life. There are those of us who just have to have our own business and do it our own way. Maria and I put this together. We persevered with it. We took what was to be our retirement, our 401k, our IRA. We cashed all that out and Build a business with it. That's a huge risk. And as you know, the statistics, I think 90 to 95 % of small businesses fail within the first five years. If you can make it past that, you're It's been great. So when you're raising a family, there's this incredible, incredible risk to starting a business and quitting your day job, hoping that your business will go. Like I said, 90 to 95 And then, a ton of people just don't make it, and they have to go back to working for someone.

[01:04:35.140] - Big Rich Klein

And some of us are not good employees for other people.

[01:04:40.420] - Mark Jensen

I would like to think I was a good employee, but I see your point. I'll just keep some of those days quiet.

[01:04:48.050] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I would never worked for, whether it was another business of my own or another business for more than five years.

[01:04:59.930] - Mark Jensen

Okay, Rich, I'm going to share something with you. Okay. I don't know how much time we have here.

[01:05:04.220] - Big Rich Klein

We have as much time as we want to take.

[01:05:07.060] - Mark Jensen

You're going to edit anyway. Now, you haven't had to bleep out anything, I said. I'm careful.

[01:05:13.290] - Big Rich Klein

I never said that this was a family friendly podcast. Sometimes it's not.

[01:05:22.240] - Mark Jensen

But when I started working at Yokega as an engineer, like I said, I was recruited by a head hunter out of Utah, moved to Georgia. Our parents were very upset with us for us moving the grandkids away from them 2,000 miles away. I started working at Yokega. We had machine shop supervisor at the time. This goes back to your point about we're not always doing things the way we're told to do, or not always making friends by being independent thinkers and to be on our own. Well, I had that independent thought process. And maybe a little bit of pride, once again, we had one of the shop supervisors in the machine shop, they had a problem with the Vortex flow meter, the half-inch meter. This is based on pipe size. A half-inch flow meter was not working. I had a lot of problems with it. So they called on me to research and find out what was wrong with it. Machine Shop was blaming the assembly The assembly department was blaming the machine shop for bad parts. I started digging into it and I could see where there were some actual design issues with the Japanese design that I had to correct with the headquarters in Tokyo.

[01:06:46.570] - Mark Jensen

Then I could see problems with the machining that they weren't taken care of. Machine Shop supervisor, I told him, We need to do this. We need to use this type of tooling to ensure more accuracy in this flow meter. And the supervisor said to me, well, Mark, we've been doing it this way for years, and it's been just fine. And I said to him, Mike, you've been doing it wrong all those years. We need to change. So I didn't make a friend that day.

[01:07:21.780] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, sometimes being honest is not always comforting to the person you're being honest to So, man, we don't always make friends. Correct.

[01:07:34.780] - Mark Jensen

But anyway, got past that, and I did manage to resolve the problems with a half-inch flow meter, and we got it working. So I think it helped where I was able to point to problems of assembly, problems in machining, and problems in the design. But his reluctance to change, that's human nature. We've been doing it this way for several years. It's always been okay for us. Well, you've been doing it wrong for several years. And that was not a tactful response, I'm not sure.

[01:08:15.820] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome.

[01:08:17.610] - Mark Jensen

You take the good with the bad.

[01:08:19.320] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly.

[01:08:20.280] - Mark Jensen

But as far as our future, we plan to expand. Ori struts are not going away. They're only getting improved. Like I said, I'm looking at the Generation 3, the Gen 3 model Reservoir strut here heading out to Georgia this afternoon. And we're going to stick that on our race car and see if we can make this thing perform better in the whoops. That's another word I had to learn. What's a whoop? So being isolated from the off-road world for several years, I had to learn a lot of new acronyms and new terminology. So, whoops, and the packing, that's another word I had to learn. But it's a learning process. Even though I was an engineer, I didn't know what I needed to know. I didn't know what I didn't know.

[01:09:20.930] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly.

[01:09:22.470] - Mark Jensen

And until I experienced it myself, I couldn't fix these things with my own product. So we're there. I think we're doing very, very good now. We have a lot of podium finishes. Marty Emerson has been winning a lot of tough truck competitions back east. Kevin Taylor, we sponsor him. He's also Ultra 4 Unlimited Class. He's getting a lot of podium finishes now. It's in first place. Nick Ryke and Jake Pike are doing a lot of the rock bouncer with SRRS. They're getting a lot of podium finishes on the struts, and they're loyal customers. All those failures from the years past are starting to pay off. We've learned a lot. If we had given up, this product would have fated away, or business would have fated away, and I would have gone back from punching the time clock. There's no shame in that. Life is a learning experience. I'm just glad we were able to pull it off.

[01:10:30.610] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. And that's a great segue. Mark, thank you so much for spending the time this morning and having this conversation with me about your life and family and product and your adventures in manufacturing and being a business owner and a now a racer?

[01:10:50.330] - Mark Jensen

That's on my bucket list. I need to drive one of the races. It's not too late to start at 70 years old?

[01:10:57.940] - Big Rich Klein

No, not at all.

[01:10:59.280] - Mark Jensen

No? Okay. Walter Evans, I think, raced until he had 74.

[01:11:04.210] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. And he's got a storied career.

[01:11:08.020] - Mark Jensen

I'll give it a try.

[01:11:09.490] - Big Rich Klein

There you go.

[01:11:10.950] - Mark Jensen

Perfect. All right. Thanks, Rich, for taking the time with us this morning. Marie, you need to say hi.

[01:11:17.700] - Big Rich Klein

Hello, Marie. Hello.

[01:11:18.940] - Mark Jensen

I don't know how she's patiently stayed quiet all this time. She's been writing little crib notes to me on the side here. You I need to talk about this. You need to talk about this. She's been quiet in the background, but she's here.

[01:11:34.910] - Big Rich Klein

Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Marie.

[01:11:38.620] - Mark Jensen

You're welcome. All right. Thank you again.

[01:11:40.640] - Big Rich Klein

Okay, you guys have a great day. Thank you.

[01:11:43.210] - Mark Jensen

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

[01:11:45.670] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have, or if there's anybody that you have that you think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams and live life with all the gusto you can. Thank you.