Bash Brothers

All Joe Tanner wanted to do with his life, after he was told he didn't weigh enough to play football, was play baseball.

A second baseman, shortstop and longtime professional coach, Tanner, now 82, never considered himself an inventor. But his product, a baseball hitting tee for coaches at all levels, from little league to the big leagues, has been a resounding success. Tanner Tees, with three patents, are ubiquitous in most Major League batting cages and hundreds of other minor league facilities nationwide.

“He literally revolutionized the batting tee market,” says Andy Menard, Joe Tanner's grandson. “He developed a better model.”

The tee is made with a hand-rolled ball rest that limits interference at contact. The tee is also made with high-end rubber, to absorb multiple swings. But one thing Tanner didn't do was develop a long-term business plan or anything that comes with it, from marketing to an Internet presence to a pricing strategy. Those tasks have fallen to Menard and his older brother, A.J. Menard, who bought the Sarasota-based company from Tanner in December 2012. Tanner founded the firm in 1992 in his garage.

“This was very much a grassroots mom-and-pop business,” says A.J. Menard, now a co-owner at Tanner Tees. “(Clients) loved it as far as functionality. They loved that a baseball player made it. We have a brand name in baseball that people know and trust.”

A.J. Menard, 34, has worked at the firm since 2006. Andy Menard, 31, joined the firm in 2012 after seven years in the U.S. Army, where he served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tanner Tees has been in growth mode for a few years, despite the outdated business systems. Revenues are up 61.5%, from $1.2 million in 2012 to $2.3 million last year, and have jumped 140% since 2011. The firm has seven employees, including the Menards' mother, Marilyn Menard, who helps with orders and answers phones. “It's been awesome,” A.J. Menard says, “but there are a lot of growing pains.”

One of the first steps the Menard brothers took to ease the pain was to reinvest profits in the company. That includes at least $1 million over the last 18 months, on everything from product development to marketing and branding. They moved the business from a cramped 2,000-square-foot facility to 10,000 square feet, just east of Interstate 75 off Fruitville Road. They hired a marketing firm, a search engine optimization company and redid the website. The Menards, finally, implemented a software shipping and ordering system A.J. Menard says has saved the firm thousands of dollars in labor costs.

The brothers made a few other quick and key decisions soon after they bought the firm. They raised the price of their core tee product, first from $50 to $60, and soon after that to $70. A price hike is not something they took lightly, but A.J. Menard says the firm was falling into a down-market space that could have devalued the brand. Tanner Tee competes head-on with several giant baseball equipment firms, including Rawlings. “We had to do it because we had to get some retailers,” he says. “We knew we had to roll the dice.”

The price increase also helped the firm get into more baseball training facilities and academies, a market that's fragmented but offers a bigger pool of potential customers than professional baseball teams. The firm has signed up hundreds of baseball training businesses in the past year that now sell Tanner Tees, Andy Menard says, entities that shy away from low-end products.

The next big thing the brothers plan to address at the firm is to add a lean manufacturing-like process to the internal assembly procedures, to improve efficiency. Every tee is hand-tested before it's shipped. “We want to make the tee better,” says Andy Menard, “so the competition never gets ahead of us.”

Follow Mark Gordon on Twitter @markigordon