by Nicholas Felten

I am a Priority Advantage member of Morris-Jenkins, which means I pay a monthly fee in exchange for regular maintenance on my HVAC system. It was only because of my Priority Advantage status that I received Mr. Jenkins Told Me: Forgotten Principles That Will Grow Any Business. I didn’t ask for this book. They just sent it to me unsolicited, and presumably to other Priority Advantage members. To be honest, I rolled my eyes when I saw it. The obvious question: “If this book is any good, why are they giving it away?”

To my surprise and delight, this book substantially surpassed expectations. Most business books fall into one of two categories. The first is the “New Idea That Will Make You Wealthy” genre, wherein a scholarly type — who’s been published in the Harvard Business Review and is much smarter than you — makes the case for some theory that you’re going to hear about in a process improvement meeting in a year or two if you work for a large enough organization. 

The second type of business book is the “Successful Alpha” genre. This is authored by a Successful Businessperson as a vehicle to recount their many triumphs. You read the exploits of your social betters in the hope that the success will somehow rub off on you. Studies have shown that monkeys will pay money to look at high-status members of their society, and the Successful Alpha genre is often (but not always) a more refined version of this primate predilection.

The conceit of the Successful Alpha types is that they add value or create wealth when, in fact, they very often do nothing of the sort. They usually end up wealthy — former GE CEO Jack Welch was well on the road to billionaire status — but that begs the question of whether they created the wealth or merely transferred it to themselves. Nicholas Taleb, who warns against rent-seekers, would argue many successful people fall into the latter group.

Mr Jenkins Told Me falls into the Successful Alpha genre. Refreshingly, it’s about a man who, unlike Jack Welch, does not use financial chicanery to make his mark on the world. He does not impress Wall Street and become a fixture on CNBC, nor is he a genius asshole who dropped out of college and is now a tech visionary. He is merely is bona fide local entrepreneur who bought a local business and successfully grew it into the Morris-Jenkins HVAC juggernaut we’re all familiar with, and in today’s bullshit-heavy environment it’s a refreshing read.

At 138 pages, it’s a short read. I started and finished the entire thing with time to spare on a flight to Texas. The author is Jonathan Bancroft who, as you eventually learn in the book’s nonlinear, “Pulp Fiction”-style narrative, is Mr. Jenkins’s son-in-law as well as a longtime Morris-Jenkins employee. Bancroft engagingly uses his life story to give us insight into Jenkins and the culture he’s created. 

But who is Mr. Jenkins? He’s Dewey Jenkins, a navy veteran who purchased an obscure local company with $1 million in annual revenue and has grown that to $100 million. The growth does not involve balance sheet magic, loads of debt, a string of acquisitions, or private equity as many Successful Alpha tales do.

The book does answer a lot of questions Charlotteans will have. Like the ads, for instance. Everybody has seen or heard them and a number of you may even be able to sing the jingle. They’re even prominent enough to have been parodied. How did they originate? Read on:

Chuck [a Morris Jenkins old-timer] looked me over to see if I was listening. I nodded my head quickly up and down, so he continued. “Back then, air conditioning companies worked Monday through Friday from 8:00 till 4:00 or 4:30. And when quittin’ time came, we’d just go home. Wouldn’t matter if a customer had air conditioning or not. We’d just leave. But Mr. Jenkins said that was gonna change. From here on out, Morris-Jenkins was gonna take care of its customers, no matter what.”

Chuck chuckled, low and raspy. He even got his wife and daughters to write a little jingle and put it on TV. Then he cleared his throat and began singing, “Late last night I woke up sweating in my bed. That old air conditioner, it was completely dead. So I called Morris-Jenkins and they very kindly said, ‘You’ll have cool air at your house tonight.’”

In MBA-speak, they utilized mass media to promote their value proposition and increase brand equity. In “Mr. Jenkins”-speak, they offered a better service and they told people about it. But Chuck disabuses us of the notion that the Morris-Jenkins success story was easy or simple:

Then Chuck slowly began turning his head from side-to-side. “Lost every technician he had. Every one of ‘em. All he had left was one technician-in-training, a fella that used to be his warehouse man. Turns out that values and commitments are a lot of fun ’til you have to start living’ up to ‘em. But Mr. Jenkins didn’t back off. Lost money every month for a year ‘til he had put together a crew of technicians that were willin’ to stay on the job ‘til it was done.”

There’s more about the company’s origins. Morris-Jenkins was started in 1958 by a man named Luther Morris. He sold the company — which at that point still only had a dozen employees, vs. over 400 now — to Dewey Jenkins in 1990. The titular Mr. Jenkins started out as a Petty Officer Second Class in the Navy. He and his wife, Reneé, eventually moved to Charlotte “with only 500 dollars to their names.” He went to college full-time and earned an accounting degree while also starting and running his own janitorial company. He started his own tax practice and also taught accounting at UNCC. He sold the tax practice, tried developing real estate and almost lost everything. He worked in sales for a couple of years before looking for a business to buy. Looking for a recession-proof industry, he settled on the heating and air-conditioning business.

Lest you the book has too much homespun, folksy wisdom for a respectable Organization Man to read, there are some good nuggets for all you bank employees too:

• “Marketing is the price you pay for your lack of operational excellence.”
• “A business left to its own devices will become complicated. It just shouts for complexity: ‘give us rules, give us regulations.’ But complexity chokes growth. If we don’t continually focus on eliminating complexity, there won’t be any growth.”

I’m not saying it’s best book ever, or that it will change your life, but it’s certainly better than a lot of tomes in its genre. You could fault it for being too short, but you could also praise its concision. Who wants to spend time reading a hundred pages of filler anyway? You can do a lot worse than Mr. Jenkins Told Me. Give it a look if you’re so inclined.

Nicholas Felten works for a local Charlotte bank.

An excerpt from this book review appeared in the Jan. 13, 2020, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter on local business. Subscribe here for free: