When I saw Charles Stenftenagel identified in an article in the Food section of the New York Times a few weeks ago as the person who’d come up with the name ‘yumberry’ for the juice of the yang-mei berry grown in China, I squirmed like a lab rat with a needle to its brain, because I owed the man an apology. So here goes…

Dear Charles,

I screwed up. I held onto the transcript of your interview because what we covered in our conversation could have fit into any one of half a dozen chapters of the book, it touched on so many of the ideas I wrote about. So your stuff didn’t go into the chapter files, and by the time I realized the omission, the book was already in layout.

As a master improviser yourself (and a former student of the legendary musical theater director, Bill “Ballsy” Balsbaugh) you surely understand how my lallygagging was a fundamental mistake. Bad edit.

This post is both my apology and my adjustment. I appreciate all the time and thoughtfulness you gave our interview, and mention it often in my speaking engagements.

I hope all’s well with Tierra-Derco and that your travels are bringing you many worthwhile adventures. Please send Jan my love. Hope to see you soon.

Best regards,

Mike

II.

Charles Stenftenagel’s family owned and managed Sten’s Sales & Service, a small but prosperous lawn mower and outboard motor shop in Jasper, Indiana. After earning a degree in Theater and Communications from Southern Illinois University, Charles married his high school sweetheart (and fellow SIU student radical hippie war protester) Jan. They moved back to Jasper where he and his father, Jim, became partners in a series of entrepreneurial adventures.

When the Patoka Lake Reservoir got built near Jasper, Charles and his dad tried introducing sailboats to the local populace, but the locals weren’t having it. These people were water skiers, bass fishermen and drinkers. They wanted boats with motors and no swinging booms to knock them overboard while they’re tapping a keg or cleaning a largemouth. Sten’s sailboat biz never got out of the dock.

The improvisational businessperson is nothing if not resilient. In six months, Charles converted their sailboat inventory into ownership in a liquor store, the Wooden Keg. Next, he and his father expanded the parts business of the family lawnmower business and began refurbishing lawnmower and powerboat engines and parts. Within ten years, he had bought out his father and he and his new partners had re-branded ‘Stens’ as a separate parts and re-manufacturing business and built it into a $22 million a year enterprise. Twice, Charles was named Indiana’s Small Businessperson of the Year.

After selling his interest in Stens, he launched Earth Made Mail Order, which sold high-end European-made garden tools to the American market. “I wanted to introduce American buyers to European gardening culture,” he says, sounding very much like the same man who wanted to bring sailboats to Jasper, Indiana. Earth Made’s primary distribution channel was Garden.com, for whom it sold 80% of the garden tool inventory.

After the dotcom bubble burst, Charles acquired a Canadian garden supplies wholesaler, Tierra International, and in 2004 bought another company, Landscaper Pro. After further building out its product line through a couple more acquisitions, the company is known today as Tierra-Derco International. Tierro-Derco wholesales hundreds of garden products and will have its best year ever in 2008.

III.

“Growing up as I did our family business, I got a feel for how things worked. For how things were made,” says Charles Sten.

He takes risks, but is well aware of the odds. “I’ve had successes and I’ve had failures,” he says. “Overall, I’ve had over a hundred different business concepts, and I can tell you that ninety percent of them had been tried by someone before. A typical entrepreneur is successful with one out of ten ideas.”

“The most important lesson I’ve learned but not always lived out – listen! Listening is the hardest thing for a business person, especially in sales. Eighty percent of the time salespeople fail because they don’t listen. They think they do, but they don’t. You want to tell people about the product, but in doing so you’re blocking out the customer and their concerns.”

“The most important part of selling: ‘Shut up most of the time.’”

“Nothing is more beneficial to a businessperson than experience in retail. You get to know the market because you are the market.

“When we started Stens, I spent six months on the road, visiting every single one of our customers, sometimes up to sixteen of them a day. That’s when the ideas start happening for how to make the business go. “

“When it’s clear you’re not going to make a sale, let it go. I’ve had people tell me right in the middle of my sales pitch that they only carry our competitor’s products. Time to go. There’s going to be another opportunity, but not today.”

He notes the way product development cycles have changed, and how an entrepreneur must operate differently because of that: “A new idea has to be developed so quickly, or it will be developed by someone else, or stolen, or you’ll miss the market,” he says. “I literally run through the trade shows in Europe looking for exclusives on new products. I can have a new product in my catalog in January. By March, Home Depot and Wal-Mart will be selling knock-offs.”

“The personality of the presenter is important.”

“I’m a data person. I need to let the data soak in.”

“In college, improv scared me to death.”

“You have to know when to trust your gut. Your experiences in life and your knowledge of people give you the power to trust your gut.”

“Decisions get closer and closer to split-second all the time. Today I can get a prototype for a new product from China in two weeks. When I started Stens, it would take three years.”

“I’m nuts,” he says.

IV.

Charles Sten’s business life is a testament to the power of improvsation.

He listens.

He understands that a high percentage of failure comes with the entrepreneurial territory, and that the most important thing is to let your failures be springboards for your successes.

He can be deliberate, but he edits quickly and decisively.

He trusts his gut feelings, but only because he has acquired the knowledge and experience to do so.

When he has identified his theme — the family business, the re-manufacturing business, the gardening business — he expands on it, and explores it aggressively.

The performance continually evolves and heightens. Editing a scene is okay. Diminishing it is not.

Timing is more vital than ever, but there’s still plenty of time. It may seem like the blink of an eye when compared to the past, but in the Networked World, two weeks is a lot of time.

He is not afraid of his fear. What scared him to death in college he has mastered today.

Listening to Charles Stenftenagel describe how he conducts business is no different than listening to any artist describing their art. He could be John Lasseter talking about animation or Elaine May talking about theater or Pablo Casals talking about the cello or Larry Bird talking basketball. It doesn’t matter whether our medium is watercolors or the juice of the yang-mei berry or a catalog full of garden supplies — our art, in the only analysis that matters, is what we make of our our lives.

Be nuts.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in those 20 years, but we picked up like it was just yesterday back in Jasper, Indiana, when we were dreaming about the bigger world away from there, and aching to get at it.

Well, here we are. Still aching, but with the aches in different places. And I am so profoundly moved and humbled by what my friend has done, and how he has chosen to live his life.

Grammy has made it his business to help people who would otherwise die alone under a bridge somewhere have their last days be good days. He has made it possible for human beings who would otherwise be forgotten to be remembered, made it possible for love to have one last chance to live on.

He has raised millions of dollars for programs and facilities that care for the dying poor. He gave me a tour of the Abbie Hunt Bryce Home in Indianapolis run by Visiting Nurse Service (VNS), Inc., for which he helped raise the funding and is the staff physician. He introduced me to Betty, a resident there who was the happiest person I met all day. She wanted to dance. Residents come here with no caregivers, and no place to live. Upon moving in, they have both. Over fifty volunteers from the community cook meals and provide services to the Home.

At Wishard Hospital, I sat in on a class in palliative care Grammy taught to third year med school students. He tried to get them to feel for people and families with end-of-life decisions to make, but it was not a very feeling audience. He had them read aloud poetry (which he then repeated from memory) by writers whose spouses had died. When the students read the poetry, it was empty and unemotional. When Grammy read it, it was straight from the heart.

He offered the students this insight: When someone near the end of their life says to their doctor, “Do everything you can,” maybe they are not talking about hooking them up to machines in the ICU. “Maybe,” he suggested, “what they’re saying is do everything you can to contact my family. Do everything you can to save me from dying alone, out on the street. Do everything you can to find a Veterans check I’m owed and give it to my sister. Do everything you can to keep me off the machines. Do everything you can to listen to me, because I have something to say.”

On the cellular level of our biology — and a process called apoptosis that allows our entire physical makeup, every cell in our body, to die so that new cells can grow — we all experience death on a daily basis. The death of each cell holds the potential to initiate the life of a new one. Stronger cells grow in place of weak ones. Healthy cells in place of diseased ones. Or the reverse can be true. The choice is most often ours to make. In letting the fate of a person’s death bring bring about a better reality, Grammy is simply honoring a fact of our shared biology.

He told me about a patient named Cowboy Smith, originally from Chicago, a homeless man who lived under a bridge in Indianapolis when they first met. Grammy brought him an electric generator to help him through one extra harsh winter. When Cowboy finally had to check into the hospital where he was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, he was at first wary and defensive, but Grammy got him to open up, and Cowboy ended up singing the blues in a beautiful voice for the staff. When he began disappearing from the hospital for a day or two at a time, Grammy learned that he was picking up uneaten food from hospital trays and taking it to his dog, Cowgirl, who was still living back under the bridge.

Grammy tracked down Cowboy’s son, a Harvard graduate with a doctorate in Divinity, and he and Cowboy re-united after being estranged for many years, and Cowboy got to meet his son’s new wife. He introduced Cowboy to a writer, David Wendell Moller, who included Cowboy’s story in his book, Dancing With Broken Bones.

On Cowboy’s final day, as he lay dying in his bed at the Bryce Home, someone asked, “Where’s Cowgirl?”

Grammy sent for the dog. When she arrived at the Bryce Home, where she’d never been before, she ran straight to Cowboy’s bed and jumped in next to him, and rested her head on his chest until he died.

It has never been more apparent than it is today that we are in this game together. Most of us have many freedoms for choosing how we are going to play it. My friend Grammy plays it with his own particular gifts of calling attention to what would otherwise go unnoticed, feeling what would otherwise go untouched, listening to what would otherwise go unheard. And little by little, in a thousand subtle ways, the game changes, and something new and better comes to life.