Podcast: At the right place, at the right time, with the right idea: Jim Brinton's journey

Jim Brinton: Absolutely. I’ve spent my entire life in Seattle. My roots and family are very, very deep in Seattle. It’s been the place where I’ve been fortunate to raise a family and grow a business, and it’s my home.

Bob Tullio: You show your career starting with Evergreen Vending [now Evergreen Refreshments] in 1976. Was that right out of school?

Jim Brinton: Well, actually, that was the official day I chose in 1976. April 1 is the official launch day of my business in 1976, but I actually started in the vending business in about 1974 while I was still about 15 years old. I started the endeavor into what today might be, you know, automated retail, but it was far from automated when I first started.

But I had to choose a line in the sand [to start officially start my business]. I graduated from high school in June of 76, so right before my graduation from high school, I put the stake in the sand and said, “This is the official start of my business.”

Bob Tullio: Tell me a little bit about that journey. How did it come about? How was the experience for you?

Jim Brinton: Oh, it was fun. I kind of created — you know, I tell people — a monster, that has been out of control at times and been in control at times over the next almost 50 years.

My dad had an automotive part resale manufacturing type business, mainly dealing in friction materials in the Seattle area. And, in junior high, I started working there as a shop help, mainly cleaning and doing some of the other jobs that no one else wanted to do. A hot dusty environment.

And I thought, “Hey, I wonder if I could buy sodas and put them in the refrigerator here at work, and make a little money selling them to the employees?” And that’s exactly what I did. And it worked on the days that I was there.

But when I was not, I started to get some IOUs, some missing products without payment, and that’s what led me to believe and say, “Well, what I really need is a vending machine that has items behind locked doors.”

And that’s what I did. I purchased my first can vending machine and placed it in my dad’s business.

Bob Tullio: You found out right then and there that the honor box doesn’t work.

Jim Brinton: That’s exactly it — I did in fact.

It was right when cans had gone from a steel-rim bottom to the aluminum can. and these stacker machines would sometimes jackpot additional products. So, I had my fun right out of the gate, and my brother who worked at the front desk where the machine was always having to rescue the extra product that it gave out and say, “Hey, that’s my brother’s machine! You can’t take those extra cans. You only paid for one!” Anyway, that launched kind of my very first vending machine.

And then soon after, I got my driver’s license and became a driver, dropping off parts for my dad in his business. As I dropped off parts in these different businesses, I would always ask, “Hey, do you have a place to purchase a soda or get a candy bar?” And they said, “No, I wish we did.” And I’d said, “Well, let me put a machine in here for you.”

And that’s how I grew my first route.

Bob Tullio: That’s wild. So, you obviously had an entrepreneurial spirit from the beginning.

Jim Brinton: I did, in fact.

Bob Tullio: That’s great. Now, we’re going to fast forward. Obviously, you built the company Evergreen. Fast forward to Avanti Markets. Tell me about that journey from the beginning to the sale to 365 Retail Markets.

Jim Brinton: Wow. Avanti came about by…  Yes, Jim Brinton was involved in it. But I was looking, I was very hungry to find something better than what the industry was presenting us. That was [at the time] the new vending machine, whether it was one column wider or one more tray in it. It just didn’t float my boat and feel like we were making progress in the right direction.

And I saw this thing called Freedom Shopping. And a friend of mine, Aaron Speagle from North Carolina, had been involved in some of the preliminary development of that product. And I loved the idea that the customer could shop this market and then, at the time, they would check out with RFID technology. And what I found is the concept was awesome, but the process was really flawed. And to think that I was going to have to put an RFID tag on every item — and the right tag on each item — just was not conceivable.

So, we went to work, and this was about the time when there had been some advancement in pretty much all of our products that we purchase — whether food or any product — started to show up with barcodes on them. And we thought, why can’t we do the same concept but use barcode technology? And that’s when we developed and launched Avanti Markets.

We went to market in 2010, and Aaron, at the time, was actually the primary owner of Avanti. I had a small stake in it, but I could see that this had major legs. After about a year of kind of treading water under Aaron’s leadership and so forth, I went to him and said, “Aaron, I’ve got to either go do this on my own, or you need to step aside and let me run with the company. I will reward those that are involved at the time dearly along the journey.”

At the same time, we created an ancillary company called Breakroom Provisions, which Aaron took over to run. [Editor’s note: GlobalConnect purchased Breakroom Provisions in 2024.] And I took over Avanti and then ended up owning 100% of Avanti at that point.

So, for the next 15 years, basically, until Avanti was sold and merged with 365, it was just under my ownership and leadership to grow that company. But, I took care of everyone who was involved from the beginning just because it certainly has changed the industry and changed my life.

Bob Tullio: That’s great. And what were the biggest challenges along the way?

Jim Brinton: Well, should we start with the biggest challenge? The biggest challenge came on July 4, 2017. Now, you got to realize, Bob… There are a few businesses like this out there, and I was basically a non-technology-background owner. I knew enough about technology to be dangerous but far from knowing anything about coding or anything kind of behind the scenes.

And, all of a sudden, on July 4, 2017, we got a phone call saying that we’d had a very serious attempted data breach. And to me, that was the most sinking feeling in my life. And it had nothing to do with financial value for Jim Brinton, what the next day was going to look like for Jim Brinton. It had everything to do with my customers.

So many of them had bought into what I brought to this industry and the concept, and their whole lives were basically at stake. And so, it was all hands on deck. We got through it really amazingly unscathed. The bad guys from Russia thought that they would catch us sleeping at the wheel on July 4th as the Americans were out celebrating. Well, what they didn’t realize was that 90% of my markets were black on July 4th because they’re in places of business. And so, they had no customers to steal the data from. So, the thing is, I’ll tell you, I count my blessings every day that it happened on that day and not some other day.

That was my biggest challenge.

Bob Tullio: And then I take it after the data breach attempt in 2017, you probably took some pretty significant steps to shore up security and shore up the technology side of your business. Is that the case?

Jim Brinton: We did, Bob. Not that we weren’t really engaged and so forth before that. How we got notified of our data breach was actually one of our big customers. T-Mobile called us and basically said, “Hey, we’re seeing a lot of some weird data coming across our network here, and we think it’s coming via an internet connection to your kiosk.”

So, we checked into it, and sure enough, we discovered it through that. But, at the same time, as good as they were — and they were really, really concerned over what was going on and so forth — like six months later, T-Mobile had one of the biggest data breaches in the country.

It just goes to show you even with the very, very, very best measures in place to try to prevent things, which we felt we did have in place — and that’s why even though the bad guys got to us a little bit, a successful phishing attempt through one of our technology developers, we knew exactly where it went back to, and he had been phished — the best way around it is to make sure you have prevention in place so that if something does go wrong, that you have a way to immediately meditate the problem and to be able to do something about it immediately. All the governmental agencies that investigated our data breach came back and basically said — even from Visa to MasterCard and so forth — that the way we handled it and the way that we recognized it, dealt with it and so forth, was probably one of the best they’d ever seen anywhere in the country.

So the thing is, is where they could have assessed us fines and all kinds of restrictions and so forth, nothing was ever assessed or any restrictions put on us because of the way we handled it and how prepared we were.

The other challenges along the way have just been as I sat and white-boarded this back in my conference room in Seattle back in 2009 and 2010, as far as what does the product look like? How does it act?

I was so naive really at that point as far as saying like, “Oh, this is all our operators really need, just these few reports.” It became so much more complex from that. And these were all complex things that it was really easy for Jim Brinton to sit back and basically say, “Hey guys, I need the software to do this and this and this and this.” And with not knowing really the background as far as coding and how all the one thing interacts with another thing that affects another thing and so forth. So that was probably the biggest challenge.

And then what led me to even consider doing this integration and merge with 365. What concerned me was not coming from a technology background — I just didn’t want to wake up one day and realize that it was the new AOL. That I had been on top of the world at one point, and on the next day, I was sitting there saying, “What just happened? I just got leapfrogged.”

Bob Tullio: Two questions related to challenges. In my opinion, I would think it was operators were on one side of the fence or the other when it came with micro markets. They were either excited and enthusiastic and all over it, or “This is just not going to work! This just makes no sense. We can’t trust people.”

Jim Brinton: Bob, you are so accurate. And, unfortunately, there were way more people on part B than part A.

Let me tell you a quick little story. When I launched Avanti, I was president of the USG Buying Group. Brian Faley, the USG president, allowed me time to present this new opportunity product that I was going to be bringing to market. And later on, people came — I mean, this is years later on — people came back to me and said, “Hey, Jim, I have to admit, after you did that presentation out there, a bunch of us got together and kind of said, like, ‘What is our president thinking about thinking? Like, we’re just going to open up vending machines and put products on shelves and in coolers, and we’re going to have a business the next day?’ And we were all so wrong in that.”

So sometimes, the most unusual or amazing things end up to be a gift horse, and this was one of them. And it was just fun at putting this entire thing together, and then having people come back and basically say, “Hey, you you’re right. This really did change my business.”

I had so many letters from individuals who are still friends today that reached out and basically said, “You didn’t really change this industry. You potentially saved this industry.”

And I’m not taking full credit for that by any means. I just happened to be in the right place in the right time, and I had an audience that I could connect with, and that would listen to me. Plus, I was an operator myself. So, this was a very selfish thing of saying like I was trying to save my own business too.

Bob Tullio: How big was your operation when you got serious about Avanti?

Jim Brinton: Okay, my operation had, remember I launched Avanti in 2009, and you remember what happened in 2008 and 2009: It was the housing crisis or a financial crisis. My business had dropped from about $15 million down to $13 million. And then, over the next 10 years, we added about $25 million worth of micro market business.

Bob Tullio: So, you guys really took off. You were a tremendous beneficiary of the micro market business, and Seattle is the kind of place that accepts innovative technology, obviously.

Jim Brinton: Yes, it is. Although we were in Seattle and Portland and other areas as well. And you know, we had a lot of naysayers customers who we had to kind of get to turn the corner and that. The fact is, it really was one of those things that really did make a difference. It was fun to see. And yes, we benefitted from it, but the fact is, as these other operators benefitted from it, it was kind of the old story of saying, “Hey, the reason Avanti is successful is it wasn’t developed in some back room by some engineers that say, we think we know what the product needs to look like.”

We were sitting there at the table and saying, “Guys, this is what’s going to make it easier for us to do business at our locations — if we make this change, that change, add this benefit, take away that,” you know, those problems. And so, it really did have a benefit being an operator at the same time.

Bob Tullio: I can’t tell you how many operators I’ve interviewed — and maybe you’ve heard a couple of them. Dean Prather was talking about how he and his business partner went to a NAMA Show several years ago and saw a micro market for the first time. They shook their heads, and they said, “Okay, you guys do what you do. We’re gonna do what we do.” And like so many, Dean recognized when he lost a huge location to a micro market, he realized that this is something that he had to deal with. And I think that happened for a lot of operators out there, don’t you think?

Jim Brinton: Correct. Oh, exactly.

You know, one of my best friends in this industry was one of my first customers, and that’s Mark Stein. And on almost day one, as Mark Stein would do for a lot of his friends in the industry, he would acknowledge and try a new product. Unfortunately, my kiosk ended up in the corner of his office for the first two years until some customers or some competitors of his started putting micro markets out in his market and affecting some of his business. And at that point he says, “I better get serious about this.” And then the rest is history, obviously.

Bob Tullio: I’m sure that the irony has not escaped you that we start with a vending machine, which is a locked machine where payment occurs, and it gets you access to the product. And now we’ve gone full circle to a locked cooler or locked cabinet where you make the payment, and it gets you access to the product. I mean, it’s kind of an interesting circle, isn’t it?

Jim Brinton: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, as I shared at NAMA this year, it kind of feels like I kind of went full circle even in my life where I started with, you know, this refrigerator with a tin can mechanism for money inside of it. And I ended up almost 50 years later, with kind of these products now back on the shelves and in the coolers and just a different type of POS that went along with that purchase. So, it’s funny how things kind of relate to each other.

Bob Tullio: That’s it for now. Look for part two of the Jim Brinton story on March 25.