Bronc-buster-turned-entrepreneur Glenn Grimes keeps it simple
There are a lot of attributes by which Americans have traditionally been defined the world over, among them rugged individualism, an entrepreneurial spirit, an indefatigable work ethic and steely-eyed plainspokenness.
Glenn Grimes could not embody that many-splendored ethos any more authentically if he had been created in a lab. As straight-shooting as he is self-depreciatingly humble, Grimes is the middle coupling between three generations of family ownership at Capitol Glass in Little Rock, the oldest such business in the city, which just finished its 75th year in operation. Along the way, he has shown a deft touch for capitalism, having grown the family holdings through other entrepreneurial ventures that have included a marina and boat dealerships.
As if that were not enough fodder for a plaque in the Red, White and Blue Hall of Fame, the Little Rock native’s first true love was speed, manifested by tearing up and down in go-karts and morphing into a lifelong passion for working on cars.
“We grew up in southwest Little Rock,” he said. “Our house and everything sat exactly where the state police headquarters is now. We had horses and whatever right there. I used to run my go-kart up and down the right of way, which is all freeway now. If you remember the Southwest City Mall, which was before the state police headquarters, they came in and bought all that property right there at that exit, and that’s when my dad sold that and we moved out off of Chico.
“I started elementary school in 1960. I went to Cloverdale Elementary the year that opened up. Their inaugural year, I was in the first grade. Then, my junior year [at John L. McClellan High School] between my sophomore and junior year, we moved to Conway.”
Grimes said part of that move was to get closer to his father’s kinfolk, but there was another major motivation, one that seals his all-American bona fides.
“I had aspirations of being a big cowboy,” he said. “That’s what I did my entire life is ride horses. I rode broncs. I rode rough stock, showed horses. I wanted to compete in the High School Rodeo Association, and you had to be a part of a high school rodeo team. Little Rock did not have one, but Conway had a high school rodeo team, so I competed at the high school rodeo level and did go to the national high school rodeo in ‘72. Don’t ask me where that was that year though. Hell, we’re talking 50-something years now.”
A passion for rodeo and horsemanship notwithstanding, Grimes always knew where his professional path would lead, and it was not ranching.
“I had fun doing it but I knew that wasn’t going to happen,” he said. “My entire life, everybody knew I was going to go work for Capitol Glass. There was never even any question. I wasn’t one of those kids that came out of school not knowing what I wanted to do. I had no aspirations of going to college. I graduated from high school on Friday night and went to work Monday morning.”
In fact, that first day Grimes showed up as a full-time employee was largely a nonevent considering he had been hanging around the shop for as long as he could remember, doing odd jobs that eventually gave way to more substantial work.
“The original store was down on Scott Street somewhere, and they moved into that building at Eighth and Broadway in 1953, where we’re at now. I’ve been hanging around that shop ever since,” he said. “I would do whatever, you know — clean windshields, sweep the floor, whatever.
“By the time I came on full time, it was still a small company. Back then, we probably had one secretary, my dad, maybe five installers. I wanted to work on cars. I just loved tinkering, taking stuff apart, putting it together — always have. Even to this day, I’d much rather work on a car than deal with people in the office, so when I went to work down there, I wasn’t in the office. I was out back, putting in glass.”
At the beginning, the company focused on auto glass and residential work when windows on homes were still made of wood. Sometime during the 1980s, Capitol Glass got out of the home window market and focused exclusively on auto. Back then, it was hard to imagine the technological strides the glass industry would make that have resulted in the deceptively complex windshields of today.
“There’s so much stuff in windshields now,” Grimes said. “You have heated windshields where it warms itself up and melts the ice. You have condensation sensors in them where you don’t have to reach down and turn on your defroster anymore. It’ll automatically kick it on there for you. You have heads-up display, where all of your instrumentation is presented up on the windshield. You have all of your sensors for advanced driver assistance, your lane departure.
“You’ve got pedestrian awareness. You’ve got cameras and stuff that read the roadside. They read miles per hour and adjust the speed. You’ve got adaptive cruise control, where you set the cruise and you’re gaining on the car, and the car will slow down to pace the car in front of you. There’s so many systems.”
Of course, most motorists do not consider the many systems wrapped up in the glass in front of them when a rock chips the windshield, but for Grimes, the years have made the company’s services steadily more complex, requiring extensive training to ensure pinpoint accuracy.
“It’s like a rifle scope where you’ve got that shooting zeroed in at 200 yards. You take that scope off, and you put a new scope down on it. Can you expect it to shoot at the same spot? No, you’ve got to sight that scope in,” he said. “Well, it’s the same thing when you take off the old windshield and you put in a new windshield, you know? If the bracket it attaches to is a millimeter off, that’s 3 or 4 feet at 50 yards, so that’s why all this stuff has to be recalibrated really carefully.
“You’ve got automatic braking on these cars to keep you from running over a car in front of you, OK, that have to be pointed at the car properly. If this camera’s pointing too high, what’s it going to do? It’s going to allow you to get too close to that car in front of you before it ever sees a car. If it’s a pedestrian, same thing. It’s going to miss that pedestrian if it’s not pointed in the right spot, and then you’re going to run over somebody. People just don’t realize how technical it is, and honestly, there’s very few glass shops that have the technology to do it. We’re one of them.”
It is somewhat ironic to see the high level of technology at work in the Capitol Glass shop, considering how tech averse Grimes’ father, Jack, had been in other areas of company operations.
“Dad is just a hardworking, middle-class owner who ran his business and took care of his customers and was happy with that,” he said. “Well, after you’re there for 40 years, you kind of get comfortable. He was still writing every ticket out by hand when he retired in 1990. Shortly after that, we got into the computer age.”
Taking over in his mid-30s, Grimes was not just motivated to bring office systems into the digital age; he also had the ambition and energy to want to grow the company, building on its longstanding reputation for quality and expertise, tailored for modern audiences.
“In the 1990s, I became a certified auto glass instructor, nationally qualified,” he said. “I taught continuing education courses to insurance agents who had to have a certain amount of continuing education. That was kind of twofold; it was to educate, obviously, that there’s more to putting in auto glass than a guy with his name on the side of the truck.
“It also gave me an in to meeting most of the insurance agents in central Arkansas and putting names and faces together. It honestly gave us a good leg up on the competition because the agents all knew me and they trusted me, so when their customers called them and said, ‘Hey, I broke my windshield. What do I need to do?’ they’d say, ‘Take it to Capitol Glass.’”
Grimes’ lifelong expertise and overall business smarts have routinely been stretched as new challenges have presented themselves in the life of the business. Glass today is not only impregnated with more technology, but the combination of possible features that can be built in has meant a greatly expanded inventory to keep track of, far more than most shops can keep on hand.
“As cars in general have become more technical, the glass has done the same thing,” Grimes said. “When I started, there were basically four windshields that fit almost every single General Motors car, whether it be Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Pontiac — whatever. Today, there are some cars that have up to 25, 30 different windshields that fit that same car, same year, same model — everything — depending on what accessories they have on that car. You’ve got 20 different things that could be in this windshield and a combination of any of them.
“In years past, GM had a two-door sedan, two-door hardtop, four-door sedan, four-door hardtop plus one pickup windshield. Five different windshields would cover 95 percent of every General Motors running down the road. Now five different windshields won’t even cover one car, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of models of cars.”
The multiplying levels of complexity and the addition of various other business ventures would eventually lead Grimes to make up his mind to sell the glass company to help reclaim some work-life balance. Instead, his son, Aaron, approached him somewhat unexpectedly about keeping the legacy business in the family. Glenn said he was surprised by the offer, given that Aaron already held his degree and had started his career in pharmacy.
“Well, he’s not like me at all,” Glenn said. “I always tell everybody, you know, I’m just a dumb old man. All I was interested in was working on a car and riding my horses. I did OK in school, but I wasn’t my son, who graduated at the top of his class, got his doctorate and became a pharmacist at St. Vincent’s — and he’ll tell you he can’t put on a lug nut.
“Well, about three years ago, I was going to sell Capitol Glass because something had to give, and that’s when Aaron came to me and he said, ‘I want to come back and run it.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll give it a chance.’ I guess it’ll be four years this coming spring. He still works at St. Vincent’s, but he’s running [Capitol Glass] now for the most part.”
Today, Grimes exudes a peace that comes from perspective and experience. He speaks in reverent tones about his father, who turned 100 last fall, and swells a little talking about how Aaron has grown the company by 10 percent and has designs on more. While his entrepreneurial spark burns just as brightly as ever, he has also enjoyed finding a lower gear, the better to take in the things going on around him.
“I’m fortunate,” he said. “I’m 7,1 and I have no desire to retire. I mean, I’d be dead if I retired. You know, you’ve got to have a purpose in life, and purpose is not sitting on the back porch, beer in hand. You’ve got to keep going — got to keep going.”
GLENN GRIMES ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP
“Running a small business is not easy. What so many people don’t realize is when you own a business, like I’ve always said, you’re the first one there, you’re the last one to leave, and you’re the last one to get paid. Everything and everybody else has got to be paid before you get paid. You would think after 50-something years of me doing this full time, I’d come and go as I please or whatever. Well, it don’t work that way. Before Aaron took over, I was still the first one there and the last one leave, still putting in 50, 60 hours a week on a slow week. You’ve just got to be willing to do that, and so many people, they want the rewards, but they don’t want to put in the work to get it done.”
GLENN GRIMES ON THE FUNDAMENTALS
“Success is a slow, steady grind. You can’t make $100 and spend $101 or it’s not going to be long before you’re upside down. That’s one of the most important things, especially in small business. You have to be disciplined with your finances. You have to have reserves because there’s going to be downturns. I don’t care what business you’re in. That’s what gets people in trouble; they’re blowing and going, they think everything’s great, and they run out and spend, spend, spend, and then the downturn hits. Now what do you do? That’s the reason many of them don’t make it, so don’t get greedy. You may not get rich a year from now, but you might be rich 30 years from now. A lot of people don’t want to see it that way, but you’ve got to have patience in business.”
GLENN GRIMES ON ACCEPTING CHANGE
“I never had any trouble at all working with my dad. We pretty much had the same philosophy about everything. My son and I don’t necessarily have the same philosophy about business. When he came back, we talked about it, and I said, ‘OK, I’m not going to immediately say no to anything you want to do.’ I still had control of it, but at the same time, I needed to listen to him. You’ve got to be open to communicating with each other, and I had to learn how not to be so dogmatic about things, you know — this is the way we’ve always done it. I had to get away from that and let him do things the way he wanted to do it, and it’s been really good. He’s doing super well with it, and the more I back up and look at some things, it’s like ‘Yep, you’re right. I should have done that 25 years ago.’ Like they say, if you don’t change, you’re going to go away.”
GLENN GRIMES ON VISION
“A lot of people want to become Walmart, but they have no idea how to get there. Before you jump off into business, do your homework. Know what it’s going to take to succeed. For instance, if you grow too fast, you’re going to lose quality control. A lot of companies shoot up like a rock star. Then they come down real fast too. Also, when you start your business, don’t put all your eggs in that one basket, you know — ‘Oh my gosh, I landed a big account, I’m rich.’ Well, next week, that big account hires a new buyer, and he’s got a friend in your business. Now what are you going to do? So have a plan, and have a backup plan. Take care of your employees — that’s a big deal. Most of all, when things are tough, pick yourself up and keep going. The sky’s the limit for any entrepreneur if he does it right.”
GLENN GRIMES ON COMMITMENT
“With the number of hours you have to work and the dedication you have to have as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to love what you do. I mean, you can’t wake up every morning and say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to go back down there again,’ because you’re not going to put in 60, 70, 80 hours a week if you hate it. Why would you? You’ve got to love what you’re doing to spend that kind of time and effort. I mean, you’re not going to get rich overnight starting a small business or whatever. There’s a few but not as many as those who are just making a living working for themselves, and there’s not a thing in the world wrong with that.”
Photo by Lori Sparkman
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