Hear Them Roar

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DENIS MANNING, OR BUB, as he calls himself, knows that his suspenders and full belly-laugh may not immediately convey business prowess. But he also knows the company he started in the 1970s when he was the only employee has grown to 120 workers with $20 million in sales annually.
    Manning’s business, Bub Enterprises, is top-of-the-line exhaust pipes for all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles with biker-culture names like Jug Huggers and Big Willy. These are pipes built for bikers in search of the perfect roar from an exhaust pipe. “I think people hear our pipes and they say, ‘Now. that is the sound,’ ” says Manning.
    Manning, 61, started building and racing motorcycles as a teenager with racer Dutch Mueller, known as the “Flying Dutchman.” Manning notes that he’s 6 feet 4 inches tall and Dutch was about 5 feet 2 inches tall and “a nut case.” He recalls, “Bub stands for big ugly bastard, and so to clean it up socially he started calling me Bub. It’s an endearing term, really.”
    About a decade after starting out in the Los Angeles area, Manning moved Bub Enterprises to Grass Valley, a place he had been fond of since family camping trips as a child. The bigger change has been the internal expansion Bub Enterprises has gone through over the last decade. “The business was ready to grow,” says Manning. The problem was he felt it didn’t have the expertise. Then Tony Allinger, Manning’s former packaging supplies salesman who had turned to business consulting, pitched Manning his services. “I’m a pretty independent cuss,” says Manning, who was initially reluctant. Allinger pressed on, offering to work free of charge for a month as a trial period.

An Entrepreneurial Spell
    “The minute I said yes, he got up, shut the door and said, ‘You’re in business because you didn’t want to work for anybody. You became a manager the hard way. You didn’t go to school. Nobody taught you how to be a manager. You made all the mistakes learning how to be a manager, and now it’s time for you to be an entrepreneur, and you can’t spell entrepreneur.’ And he was right,” chuckles Manning.
    What was the miraculous advice that turned Bub Enterprises into a full-powered player? Learning the art of delegation was one of the biggest things Manning took away from the experience with Allinger, which lasted three years. After Manning’s years of micromanaging every aspect of the business, Allinger taught him to create reliable reporting systems, encouraging accountability without needing Manning’s oversight of every minutia of daily business.
    “We went part by part, bit by bit and really reshaped my business and made it profitable but also made it much more organized,” says Manning. “As a result, we had a business that we could grow.” That included basic training, such as learning to decipher the intricacies of a financial statement, but also included a new way of thinking. “Bringing on the kind of sophistication that is needed to run this company means you’re surrounded by high-powered people that really do know their jobs,” says Manning. “In the past, that might have been a little bit threatening to me.”
    Manning’s amped-up acumen impelled him to even farther-reaching expansion. “We grew to a point where we simply couldn’t make enough parts or hire enough people,” he says. “Building another building here in town was going to take two years.” Manning started looking at other locations and settled on a production plant in Wisconsin, a move Manning and his wife, Melissa, were initially reluctant to make because it meant getting into debt. After examining the numbers, however, they saw the move made sense.
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