flying through the airwaves and into your podcatcher it's the jersey jack pinball podcast hey what's going on pinball and welcome to the jersey jack pinball podcast today we've got a special treat in store for you the pinball enthusiast the supporter of pinball and jersey Jack Pinball. Mr. Jack Guarnieri joins us. Jack, welcome to the show. How are you? Ken, I'm really doing well. Thank you. I appreciate being here. Oh, it's always good hearing from you, Jack. And today's a pretty special day because on Saturday, January 1st of 2011, that's 10 years ago to the day, you went on another podcast. It was the Spooky Pinball Podcast. And you announced something that was ground shaking in the industry. I did, and it was a big surprise to Charlie as well because he didn't know it was coming. Well, what did you announce exactly on that day, on that Saturday afternoon? Well, actually, so you recorded this podcast on Friday, which was New Year's Eve, correct? Right. And then it was played on Saturday the 1st, but what was that special message? The message was that I was starting a new company called Jersey Jack Pinball, and the name was suggested by a bunch of our customers based on my pen name from Replay Magazine and Charlie just kind of lost it. He was very, very excited as was I and the reaction was amazing. Now did Charlie know when you were going on the show that that was something that was going to be discussed? Was that the reason for you coming on? Because you guys have an established path. You guys are friends, right? We're friends. Charlie was a longtime customer of Pinball Sales. And we were just going to shoot the stuff about the industry and what was going on and things like that. And I'd been on the show probably a couple times before that. And he asked me to be a guest. So he didn't know. So I went back, Jack, and I was reading the show description for the Spooky Pinball Podcast show number 10. And it says, quote, Jack Guarnieri visited the pinball podcast to drop what's quite possibly the biggest news for pinball in the last decade. Yes, it's the first ever public admission of Jersey Jack pinball. This is quite literally the show that changed spooky pinball forever. Thanks, Jack. So it sounds to me like at the time pinball was welcoming of another pinball company. And it even looks like that announcement influenced Spooky's announcement later down the road. Talk a little bit about that, about how you're coming into the industry, because what I certainly understand is that in a lot of ways, your vision in starting the company is considered as playing a major role in moving the industry forward and its continued evolution. Well, it's very humbling to hear that, and I get it, and I get it a lot of times from a lot of people very often, and it's very humbling but Ken you have to realize in the beginning I wasn't really thinking about that I was thinking about how can we really design and manufacture great games and that was the focus of what I wanted to do and then as people believed in me and the vision they joined the company and as a team we went forward and we created our first game which was no easy feat to do, but we had a lot of ground roots support. I mean, we had basically GoFundMe before GoFundMe existed. And I know with your past, I mean, you were an operator, you were a distributor. Explain a little bit or talk a little bit about how that experience was able to kind of correlate to the start of a pinball company because, I mean, there's so many moving parts. I mean, no pun intended, there's so many things that are in place. At any point, did you feel overwhelmed or were you pretty confident moving forward that when you got involved in this venture that you were going to see it through? I felt every moment of my being through the whole time that I would see it through. And thank goodness I had other people that believed the same and we were united in that effort. There were a lot of roadblocks put in our way. And like any venture, in the beginning, there's a lot of excitement, but you encounter different things and you overcome them and you find solutions and you keep going. And that's what we did on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis to create that first game and get it out the door to our customers. And we're going to get into the games in just a second, but you spoke about those people that were so important to you with starting the company and getting it off the ground. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about somebody that was extremely important at the beginning and is currently extremely important and that your daughter Jen Yeah Jen really should be wearing the badge of co of the company because she was there before when I had the idea and all I got from her was encouragement and support. And she was my left arm through the process, and she really spoke to all of the customers as we went along. And it was really something that I didn't expect or know would happen, but she just stepped up and she rose way above the occasion on so many different levels of what we needed done in the company. How was it working with a family member? I would imagine multiple hours and multiple days with very little days off. I imagine that you'd spend a lot of time together. I know how it can be, especially now and with the crazy year of 2020, families sheltering in place, spending a lot of time together tends to reach a boiling point at some point or at times. Ever have any adversity like that with with your daughter? We never, never, never, never. And it's it's it sounds funny to say that in some ways, for good or bad, there's some of the same brain in her head as in mine. And her intuition for a lot of things was really spot on. Different product development ideas, different rollouts, different ways to communicate with the customer base, different ways to support the customer base. A lot of different ideas came from her, you know, as did other people. but Jen the situation that we had in the office was my office connected to her office by a window that would move open and closed and invariably was pretty much slid open all the time except maybe when I was on the phone too loud or she was on the phone too loud it was very unusual that the window was closed The offices always had doors open and things like that. And so it was a very creative, very fun, very nurturing type of environment. That sounds great. We take a look at the game catalog, and it seems that Jersey Jack Pinball always does something that has not been done before. And I know in past interviews I heard you speak about some of those innovations and how you had them years prior, and it was just a matter of time before you were able to implement them into pinball machines. But if we look in the year 2013, we had Wizard of Oz, which had a large 26-inch LCD in the head. In The Hobbit in 2016, you have an LCD on the play field and in the back glass. Dialed in in 2017, you implement a camera that's able to take the player's picture. That camera has been on every release since. Pirates of the Caribbean in 2018, Willy Wonka in 2019, and now a machine that's really hit the industry hard in the best way possible with Guns N' Roses in 2020. Yeah, and you do have to remember the little crystal ball on the Wizard of Oz, which was a monitor. That was a little secret aimed right at the player. So if you were standing next to the game, you really didn't get to see what was going on in the crystal ball. That was just a little secret for the player. And I think imagination, you know, we know pure imagination, the song Willy Wonka, and I think imagination is really limitless. But the technology, the engineering part of it, the monetary part of it, the timeline part of it, those things have limits. And you try to match them up. We can't do everything at once, maybe nor should we or could we. but we certainly can add in more things as time goes along. And, you know, just even looking at the cost of things, from the beginning the cost of certain things have risen dramatically. Right. And, of course, certain other things have diminished, you know, to pennies where they were dollars. So we're constantly deploying more technology, more fun, more innovation in our games and we're giving our customers what they don't even know they want yet now designers are very well known in pinball whether it be on the physical play field side mechanics and even the software side let's discuss a little bit about the the current team at jersey jack pinball as a whole watching everybody work together is pretty amazing i think recently i explained it almost as as a symphony it's amazing um the cooperation having people together collaborate whether they're physically in the same location. And, you know, we all know what COVID has done to some of that, but passion is there. And today it a lot different to communicate I mean certainly JP in Holland and we have other people around the world working on games and they all get along beautifully They all play off each other and it's a great symphony to see. It really is. And you get a result. You know, you could play it. You could play the result of that effort that's there. You know, it's like fine dining, and you have the chef and all of his support staff all working together to make a great meal. Now, during the course of this 10-year adventure, which is still continuing, you brought on some partners, and that was with Brett and Leonard Abbas. Talk a little bit about that relationship because that's pretty interesting. Yeah, I love them, and it was one of Jen's ideas. We were looking for funding because I started the company upside down with customer money and some of my money. And in early 2015, our financial people were looking to advise me to recapitalize the company so that we didn't have to rely on customer deposits and things like that. and Jen was the person that told me to get in touch with the Abbas family. Jane, Leonard's wife, had become really a friend. I love her. And, you know, every year there would be a phone call, or even sooner than a year, at pinballsales.com between Jane and myself, and, gee, what do you think Leonard would like to play? and we'd get a game down to their house and we'd have it set up and we would do service over the years and we would take care of them as if we want to be taking care of ourselves. And I reached out, not knowing that they might be interested, just in a way, in a gentle way to say, you know, I know you know a lot of people and maybe you know people that would be interested in getting involved with a pinball company as an investment. And immediately I got a note back from Leonard, and I hadn't really had a lot of direct contact with him up to that point. And he said, yeah, you know, I know somebody that might be interested. If you could get me some information, I'd be willing to sign whatever you want me to sign to keep it secret. and I said, you don't have to sign anything. We have a relationship. I trust you. And the rest is history, really. I mean, I came into the company as my partners, and it was an amazing event. It's still amazing to me, the passion and the love and the energy that they have. Brett and I talk a lot. Leonard and I get to talk. But it's a great relationship. And they've, you know, thank God they came into the company, and I'm thankful for that every day. And I'm happy, you know, when father and son work together and father and daughter work together. Exactly, exactly. It's a great collaboration. It's a great collaboration. We have such respect for each other, And it's been a dream come true. It really has been. Kudos to you for bringing and offering an opportunity to pinball enthusiasts, too, people that are really passionate. You said it earlier about pinball and about the games and about the people because it does make a difference, I would imagine, when you're playing a major role and you guys are running a pinball company. Well, if you got together, and we didn't do it. If you got together with some VC people or angel investors that didn't understand what a pinball machine was, it probably wouldn't work. They would be only looking to make money, which there's nothing wrong with making money, but when you have a startup and you have kind of a turnaround to add a startup at the same time, people are interested. They could take their money and buy stock and many other things or do other things with their money for different returns. But this is not just the purpose of making money. And I have to say, and I know I sound like an idiot, but as an entrepreneur, the main focus of me starting the company in the beginning certainly was not to lose money, but it was not to make money. It was to make great gains. And I knew if we accomplished our mission that the money would come later on. And that's the focus of what it is. If you're only guided in any industry, if you go to my restaurant analogy again, if you have a bean counter in the restaurant, not literally counting the beans but counting the money, and they're always focused on let make the most money off this steak let make the most money off this and they don put the passion into what it is They don select the best cut of meat or they don have fresh ingredients and it frozen Your customer base is not stupid They know that the food is frozen or it's fresh, and they're willing to pay for a better quality product. And certainly I feel the same way with our games. I mean, we're not looking to overcharge anybody, and we're looking to provide a great game full of innovation and fun, make you smile. There's a cost to that. It costs money to do it. That's a balancing act for everybody in the company and every kind of company does that today. I'm really pleased and proud of the team we have, all of the team in the entire company. It's just something that's very humbling to me and very satisfying for me to look at 10 years into this. It's just amazing. Now, recently, you took part in a major move when you took your manufacturing facility from Lakewood, New Jersey, and you relocated it to Elk Grove Village, Illinois, which then allowed your design team, which was in Illinois, to work under the same roof. What was the thought process behind that move? I think it corrected a mistake that I made back when I started the company. Certainly, there are all kinds of companies that have headquarters, different places, you know, Apple headquarters in Cupertino, and they make their product all over the world. But, you know, this is pinball, and it's good if the designer, engineer, programmer, technician, somebody in customer service can actually just walk over, talk to somebody, take a look at something, and find out what's going on, rather than go through Skype calls or FaceTime calls or emails or different things like that. It's better team building to have everybody together if it's possible. It was a good time doing it the way I did it. I don't really regret it. We produced some really great games. But I think in the fact that you have how many buildings do you want to pay uh taxes and rent on and things like that to consolidate everything and have everybody under one roof i thought it was a lot better idea in the time and was right so we did it what can pinball enthusiasts and supporters of jersey jack pinball expect out of the next 10 years well our best games are ahead of us i would say that i'm you know i've said many times you know i've written articles about my blood type is b positive so You couldn't start something like this and have a negative thought or not have a sunny-side-up day. It's always fun. Even problems that you encounter, if you look at them the right way, you could turn the frown into a smile and make lemonade out of a lemon. The best things that we're going to do are ahead of us. We have a good base to build on. We have a lot of experience. We did a lot of things the right way. We did a few things the wrong way, as any company would do. And you focus on the positive and eliminate the negative, and you move forward. And you make great products that people love forever and ever, and they cherish them. You know, I'm very humbled every single day by the pictures and emails, and I see Facebook posts, and I see a lot of things on social media that have Jersey Jack pinball machines, how they actually made a difference in people's lives, which is something amazing to think about because we don't make heart-lung machines or anything like that that keep people alive. But what we do is we bring fun to the world, and certainly going through 2020, the world needed a lot more fun brought to it. And I was really happy and thrilled that a lot of our customers were able to get their hands on our games. I'm thrilled at the reaction. So all of our games have been so great, and we'll keep doing that. Our promise is that we'll keep innovating, we'll keep making great games, and we'll keep supporting our customers and our players all over the world for many, many, many years. It's outstanding, Jack. You are an iconic, respected individual in the community. I know I speak on behalf of a lot of people when I say thank you for your drive and your passion in helping to grow the hobby and moving the industry forward. And congratulations, Jack, on your 10-year anniversary for Jersey Jack and Ball. Thank you, Ken, and I really appreciate you being with the company. I want to wish everybody a happy, safe, and healthy new year going forward into 2021. And I can't wait to get back out and hug everybody and see everybody at all the shows, and we're all looking forward to that. So thank you very much, too. I'm looking forward to recording the 25th anniversary podcast in 15 short years. You got it. Thanks, Jack.