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Episode Summary
Your industry just dropped 70 to 90 percent overnight and most of your competitors are hunkering down waiting for the storm to pass. Mark Johnson runs Star Exhibits, a face-to-face marketing and trade show fabrication company in Minneapolis with a 200,000-square-foot building and a shop full of high-end carpenters. By any reasonable read of 2020, he should have been on the casualty list. Instead he ended the year with more cash than he started, never touched the line of credit, and stood up a brand new direct-to-consumer business (myBackyardStudio) on top of the original one. I wanted Mark on the show because the pivot was not luck and it was not heroics. It was a process. We got into how he and his team used their annual blue ocean exercise to identify what they were actually world class at, why they said no to the PPE and plexiglass gold rush even when the shop was empty, how “ideas are currency” became an actual decision filter, the temporary grocery store they built in two and a half weeks on Lake Street after the civil unrest, and the moment one of his shop guys pitched the NHL on an idea while watching a hockey game. Real numbers, real trade-offs, and a clear-eyed answer to the question every owner was sitting in: do I hunker down, or do I lean in?
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## Top 10 Takeaways- When your industry collapses, hunkering down is a choice. Leaning in is a choice. Both are real trade-offs.
- First job is safety of your team. Second job is knowing your runway. Then you pivot.
- Your shop is a machine that needs to be fed. The question is what you feed it.
- Run the blue ocean exercise every year, not just in a crisis. That’s what makes the crisis pivot possible.
- Find what you’re world class at first, then scan the trends. Not the other way around.
- Say no to commodity work even when the shop is empty. Pennies on plexiglass kill your margin discipline.
- Ideas are currency. Treat your team’s idea generation as a real process, not a vibe.
- Test small before you scale. An Etsy listing and a phone call beat a six-month feasibility study.
- Your line of credit is for fighting, not for hoping. Know your runway before you touch it.
- Fight reality and you stay frustrated. Accept it and the pivot becomes possible.
Sound Bites
“We’re not going to put this on our website, but we have customers that are in trouble and we have a shop full of guys who know what they’re doing, let’s go help them board up stores and protect their assets.” (@00:10:36) — Mark Johnson
“Ideas are currency. Can you come up with good ideas and solutions?” (@00:26:26) — Mark Johnson
“I think where my strength has been is, I know what I know but I know more of what I don’t know and I’m really willing to go talk to other people and find out about it.” (@00:47:53) — Mark Johnson
“If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to lean into it.” (@00:53:38) — Mark Johnson
About This Episode
Mark Johnson is the CEO and founder of Star Exhibits, a face-to-face marketing and trade show fabrication company in Minneapolis that he started 28 years ago with his late partner Tom Pachic. He is also the founder of myBackyardStudio, a direct-to-consumer business launched during the pandemic to address the need for isolated workspace separate from home distractions. Mark serves on national and international industry boards and runs the company on a “fast, flexible, fun” operating philosophy with EOS as the underlying operating system. This 2021 conversation captures a real-time pivot story from one of the hardest-hit industries of 2020, with emphasis on the annual strategic planning discipline that made the pivot possible when it mattered.
Resources Mentioned
- Star Exhibits — Mark’s face-to-face marketing and fabrication company. — engagstar.com
- myBackyardStudio — The direct-to-consumer pivot launched during the pandemic. — mybackyardstudios.com
- Mike Osterholm — Epidemiologist who predicted the pandemic in his 2017 book; Mark’s fishing partner and informal advisor during the crisis.
- EOS / Traction — The operating system Star Exhibits runs on, including the annual blue ocean exercise.
- Jim Collins — Hedgehog Concept — Referenced as the framework for identifying what you’re actually world class at.
- IFES (International Federation of Exhibition Services) — Industry data source on the 70-90% revenue drop globally.
- ESPN College Football Playoff — Partnership where myBackyardStudio donated studios to teachers as part of their “teacher mentality” sponsorship platform.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 3 — Owner’s Playbook — Annual strategic planning as the discipline that made the crisis pivot possible
- Module 5 — Predictable Revenue — Identifying new markets that align with existing core competencies
- Module 6 — Transferable Margins — Why saying no to commodity work protects the margin profile
Concepts referenced:
- The One Thing — The “what are you world class at” question that gates every pivot decision
- The Four Value Levers — Revenue, margin, and operating discipline as the levers Mark protected through the pivot
- Free Cash Flow — The metric that let Mark end 2020 with more cash than he started
- Distributable Cash — Owner-level reading of the cash position that made leaning in possible
- Noble Aim — Human-centric design as the values filter on which pivots got pursued