30 years helping small businesses punch above their weight.

Slaughter Sale — For the Next Week

“We must get rid of our Buggy and Carriage Stock as we need the room they now occupy.”

The reason-why close: tell the customer why the price dropped so the discount reads as credible rather than suspicious. Paired with before-and-after price anchoring. They were still using this device twenty years later.

Dated from the masthead only. The same archive mis-dated a neighbouring Grentner ad by eighteen years, so treat the year as approximate.

Peninsula Base Burners, Square and Round.

“These are the finest stoves that have ever been brought to this city.”

The earliest ad we can date with confidence — and the smallest. No company, no logo, no offer: just J. H. GRENTNER, 610 Commercial Street, Atchison. A man and a street number. Everything that follows is built on this.

Blattner Out. — J. H. Grentner & Co. of Atchison Buy the Stock.

“The new firm will be incorporated under the name of the Grentner Hardware company.”

Growth by acquisition, on the front page. They bought a competitor’s entire stock to enter a new town — and the Grentner Hardware Company was born from it.

Grand Annual “Majestic” Cooking Exhibition

“A $7.00 set of stoneware given with each range purchased during this exhibit.”

Not a product list — a week-long in-store event, with a free gift bundle and free biscuits and eggs served daily. “Grand Annual” means it was already a recurring tradition. Experiential retail and vendor co-marketing, in the 1890s.

Filed under an 1881 masthead, but the ad itself reads “OCTOBER 2nd to 9th, ’99.”

Bicycles — The Largest and Best Lines.

“We lead them all on WHEELS.”

Bicycles were the new technology, so the hardware store sold bicycles. A genuine category-leadership slogan, running in a second town’s newspaper — and an attached repair shop, because they supported what they sold.

Don’t Stand For It.

“Own your own house and be your own master.”

The land office. No product and no price in the headline — it sells independence and legacy, reframes rent as waste, and offers financing (“easy terms”) and build-to-order. They also paid for professional syndicated ad art.

Filed as 1920; the masthead reads 1910.

A Big, Fine Five-Passenger Touring Car for Only $900

“The very car you have been wanting at a price that does not make you dig too deep.”

Now automobiles, trading as Grentner Bros. A full cost-transparency argument for why the car is $900 and not $1,250 — and a free trial: “We want to take you for a ride.”

We are Distributors in Ogden and vicinity for the Studebaker, Ford and Dodge Cars

“Demonstrations Cheerfully Given!”

Three competing marques at once, advertised in the neighbouring town’s own paper. The name has walked from J. H. Grentner to Grentner Hardware to Grentner Bros. to Grentner & Sons — a legible multi-generation arc.

Some Real Bargains

“1921 model Studebaker Special Touring Car demonstrator — $1350.00 / Regular Price $1665.00”

A hardware store became a car company in twenty-five years. Grentner Motor Co. now runs a used-car department spanning seven brands — real trade-in volume, and price anchoring still going strong in its fourth decade.

Real Estate Bargains

“Roberts & Grentner Subdivision”

A broker’s ad listing lots on N.W. 7th Avenue — the family name on a platted Miami subdivision at the height of the land boom, a year before the bust. This is a third party’s ad and the fine print sits at the edge of legibility, so the reading is careful rather than certain.

Model Airplane Shop Opened by Miami Boys

“Catalogs, containing instructions for building the models, will be mailed upon request or given to persons calling at the shop.”

Aviation was the new thing, so they opened the Florida Model Aero Supply Company. A free mail-order catalogue full of how-to instructions is content marketing and lead generation — in 1930.

Your 1940 Auto Tag Free — With Each Set of 4 Federal Extra Service Tires

“You Pay Only Regular Price”

Four tactics stacked: a free offer solving a real annoyance (the annual tag fee), financing (“Only 50c Down”), a trade-in allowance — and crucially no discount, so the giveaway reads as added value. Branded wordmark, the brothers’ faces as the trust mark, and a leadership claim: “Florida’s Largest Tire Brokers.”

To buy or sell your home call Charlie Grentner

“now associated with D. C. Coleman, Broker, 418 Seybold Bldg.”

Post-war, and back into real estate. He advertises as “Charlie” — selling himself as the point of contact rather than the firm. That same first-person personal branding reappears in his ads fourteen years later.

“Our Sales, Our Profits, Our Pace Proved We Were Right in Picking the Packard Franchise”

“It’s a pleasure to sell a car that is truly different and has demonstrable engineering advancements—such as Torsion-Level Ride—that other cars don’t have.”

Packard put Charles and John Grentner — and their words — into its own national franchise marketing. A manufacturer showcasing them to recruit other dealers. This is also the document that finally proves who “Grentner Bros.” actually was.

We’ll Both Lose — If you buy a “Compact” without looking at a Simca

“I’ll lose a sale…and a SIMCA booster (1850 at last count) and— you’ll PAY AT LEAST $400 MORE”

The most rhetorically modern ad in the whole archive. Shared-loss framing puts dealer and buyer on the same side of the table. “(1850 at last count)” is social proof by running tally. And he calls his customers boosters, not customers — brand advocacy, in 1960.

Save $20 to $30 Per Month With the Simca Free Gas Plan!

“BE OUR GUEST FOR THE WEEK-END AT THE FABULOUS DUNES MOTEL. PLUS DINNER AT FU MANCHU. ALL FREE TO EVERY PURCHASER OF A NEW OR USED CAR.”

A three-business co-marketing tie-up — car dealer, motel and restaurant — aimed squarely at out-of-town buyers to remove the friction of travelling to buy. Alongside it, a total-cost-of-ownership argument with a hand-drawn cost comparison.

The Grentner Touch — Here’s How He Does It

“It’s all or nothing, because the public demands that you have all the parts and complete service facilities. To buy a car, the customer must have full confidence in the dealer.”

The business editor devotes a feature to explaining his method. Charles E. Grentner, 46, is the only import dealer in Miami whose sales are rising in a falling market, and has just been elected president of the Miami Automobile Dealers Association. The free-gas plan runs on courtesy cards honoured at roughly 400 filling stations — a loyalty network.

Specially imprinted bags for his customers

“so does Charlie Grentner give specially imprinted bags to his customers”

He borrowed the restaurant doggie bag and gave car buyers branded takeaway bags for their old parts. The branding was novel enough that it became the news item. He was still running the same gag fourteen years later, in a different industry.

Names and Notes

“Car salesman Charlie Grentner is now a restaurateur with Grentner’s For Steak in South Miami.”

Another category, another move. He took over the space that had been Stewart’s For Steak and put the family name straight into the restaurant’s — deliberate brand transfer from the dealership into an entirely new business.

Steak House

“Try the delightful difference at Grentner’s soon.”

A tagline, and a signature dish as owned property: “Grentner’s Hot Baked Apple Ring.” The name appears seven times in a short block. Plus a weekly Monday fashion show — programming built to manufacture traffic on the slowest night of the week.

A gimmick is a gimmick is a gimmick…

“Gimmick . . . thy name is success.”

A Herald columnist ranks his Monday-lunch promotion alongside flagpole-sitting and Bojangles Robinson tap-dancing down Broadway. Earned media by design — a free offer built to be written about rather than paid for, aimed once again at the slow Monday daypart.

Rockledge Lakefront — $450 Down

“Call CHARLIE GRENTNER GUEST REALTY”

My father, two years out of college and newly a realtor. Guest Realty is also where he met my mother — she came in as a receptionist and agent-in-training the following year. Four years after this ad, a man at one of his workshops handed him a failing motel rather than let the bank take it. The ad prints the full payment maths and a veterans’ discount: value transparency, already the house style.

Exit: Gretners for Steak / Enter: Cuisine International

“There are doggie bags, but they’re called ‘VIP Bags’, for Very Important Pets.”

Everyone was opening steak houses, so he left the category. Three dayparts each got their own priced offer — early-bird bundle, main menu, night-owl menu. And the imprinted-bag idea from the 1961 car dealership reappears fourteen years later as “VIP Bags.”

The headline’s “Gretners” spelling is the paper’s own typo.

Miami mishmash — “Another Reunion”

“place is chalking up bigger business than ever before.”

He buys the Airways Motel on NW 36th Street — entering lodging — while reporting record volume at the restaurant and calling off a planned sale. Autos, restaurants and hotels, all running at once.

Movin’ On

“Bellamy and Grentner together own and also operate the Miami Airways motel on NW 36th Street”

The hinge. After eleven years the restaurant sells, and the family moves into airport motels — father and son operating the Airliner for its owner while co-owning Miami Airways with him. Operating-for-equity progressing into partnership.

Grentner Communications Inc.

“Registered Agent: GRENTNER, CHARLES E. — 4155 N.W. 24th Street, Miami”

My grandfather’s advertising firm, on the state record: filed 29 June 1979, dissolved November 1988. And look at the address — 4155 NW 24th Street is the Airliner Hotel. He ran the agency out of the lobby of the property it marketed. Document №628333.

My parents incorporate Investment Realty Services

Charlie Jr and Kay put a name and a corporation around what they had been doing since 1969 — finding struggling property, helping, then taking it on. It is still in operation today, forty-seven years later. Most of the businesses on this page are long gone; this one never stopped.

Self service motels viewed as ‘the wave of the future’

“I’d say it’s the wave of the future for 80 percent of the hotels and motels.”

The model goes national on the Knight-Ridder wire. Three properties running, three more in the works, and security marketed deliberately — dead-bolts and two keys per room, “a feature that Grentner’s hotels stress in all of their advertising materials.”

Save $: make the bed

“What it amounts to is an economy system, but it’s a better system.”

Occupancy doubled after converting to self-service, then held at 80–100% year round. The pitch is pure unbundling — cut what guests don’t value, and upgrade what they touch (“the best towels on the market”). Free in-room HBO as the differentiator, in 1981.

Ex-Nursing Home Becomes Motor Inn

“YOU HAVE The only KEY!”

A key-shaped Self Serv Motor Inn logomark and a real tagline that does double duty — it states the operational fact and sells the emotional benefit. Rates posted on the roadside sign, and a loyalty ladder: discounts from the third night, rising to 10% from the seventh.

Tourism Ad Plan Suggested in Stuart

“All advertising campaigns are a gamble. You hope you’re shooting at the right media, reaching the right market and putting across the right message.”

He pitches an entire town a $140,000–$200,000 destination-branding campaign — 36 billboards spaced every 10–15 miles to intercept drivers already in Florida, four candidate taglines, a slide deck, stated KPIs, and a co-op funding model of $5 per room and $1 per seat. This clipping also reveals Grentner Communications Inc., the Miami advertising firm he ran alongside the hotels.

Bucks By The Bay

“It had gone belly-up four times, but that’s really our game — we take losers and make winners out of them.”

The fifth hotel. The Runaway Bay Club is bought and immediately renamed The Inn on the Bay — shedding a failed brand as the first act of the turnaround — then marketed with a $34 bundled package of bed, breakfast, barbecue, booze and a bay cruise.

Welcome to Charlie’s dockside

“This menu can also be served upstairs in Windows on The Bay at lunchtime only.”

Two years after buying a property that had failed four times, it is running four named brands at once — The Inn On the Bay as parent with its own sail logo, Charlie’s Dockside Lounge, Charlie’s Dockside Restaurant and Windows on The Bay. And the ad prints the entire priced menu, oysters at $2.95 to a rib eye sandwich at $5.25: price transparency doing the selling, and one kitchen cross-sold across two rooms.

Town needs new name, hotelier says

“We’ve been projecting the wrong image for 40 years.”

He campaigns to rebrand an entire municipality, pays $400 to insert a flier into the local paper, and builds a straw ballot into it to be mailed back to his own hotel. Direct-response marketing and first-party data collection — the same business his great-granddaughter would be in.

No heartbreak for many Brevard hotels

“We have a lot of repeat business from Europe.”

Independent Brevard hotels holding their own against the high-rises and the chains — with the Internet just starting to level the field. Quoted as Jessica Grentner, third generation on the 42-unit Luna Sea.

Signs of the times — Stores take poetic license with monikers

“Luna Sea MOTEL / Bed & Breakfast / ECONOMY RATES”

The pun earned the motel free editorial coverage in a regional daily, photographed alongside the county’s most memorable business names. Brand-name-as-marketing, and it cost nothing.

New signs must be smaller

“We’ve been hindered without it.”

After the 2004 hurricanes took out dozens of Cocoa Beach signs, a stricter ordinance cut the maximum from 300 square feet to 84. Luna Sea ran a canvas banner while it waited — a replacement ran $8,000 to $30,000.

Luna Sea Bed & Breakfast Motel

“The motel is operated by a third generation of motel owners in Florida.”

The paper wrote that my parents bought it. They didn’t. In 1975 it came out of a real-estate workshop my father ran in Brevard — an attendee said the bank was days from taking the place, and that if we wanted to try to save it, he’d simply hand it over. We took it. That’s how a family in the hospitality trade ended up in the hotel business: not an acquisition, a rescue.

Hotel, restaurants cook up a deal

“It’s an innovative new spin that not only benefits the traveler, but also the local community.”

Instead of a lobby continental breakfast, Luna Sea guests ate cooked-to-order at the Sunrise Diner or Roberto’s Little Havana — about 120 vouchers a week at each. Three family-run businesses, one deal. The same instinct as the 1961 Dunes Motel tie-up, forty-five years later.

New candy store sells sweets in Cocoa Beach

“We did a lot of research and development to decide which chocolates to bring in.”

Loco Cocoa — fine chocolate, Mayan drinking chocolate and local artists’ work, opened inside the motel and run with my parents. A second small business bolted onto the first.

The printed headline reads “Coach Beach” — the paper’s own typo.

Local Resort Maps expands territory, adds Vail

“Since the map came out in May 2008, we distributed more than 250,000 copies. The popularity made it very obvious that there was a real demand in the area for this caliber of map.”

The Vail expansion alone added more than 50 new map pick-up locations — every one of them a local business getting found by visitors who’d never have walked past it otherwise. The brand was Resort Maps at the time; it later became Discovery Map.

Montreal buyer scoops up Shuckers Waterfront Grill

“People will be happy to know they’re not going to knock it down…why mess with it?”

The trade press puts the deal at $32 million for the restaurant, a 120-room inn and the marina. The Miami Herald, reporting the same day, said the price was still unknown because no deed had been filed — so the $32M figure is The Real Deal’s, not the Herald’s.

Shuckers Bar & Grill sold to Canadian firm

“The seller is a company registered to Charles Grentner, who bought it in 1984 for $2.7 million.”

One sentence closes a thirty-two-year loop. The property had failed four times before he bought it in 1984 for $2.7 million — “that’s really our game, we take losers and make winners out of them” — and 1819 79th St Causeway stayed in the family until it sold to Montreal’s Jesta Group. Reported by Nicholas Nehamas.

Take Marketing More Seriously!

“The biggest mistake I see small business owners make is not taking their marketing seriously enough. They often believe it exists somewhere on the fringes of operations when in fact, success is often achieved when a more integrated approach is taken.”

One of a hundred experts asked to name the biggest mistake small businesses make. Mine was the family answer, five generations deep: marketing isn’t a fringe activity. The Grentners were running in-store events, free-gift bundles and co-op campaigns in the 1890s — the businesses that lasted were the ones that took it seriously. Credited as Jessica Grentner of Net Results Consults.

How AI Is Driving Revenue Growth Through Smarter Sales, Communication, and Marketing

“What we’ve done for SMBs is level the playing field. A solo consultant using Delivr can now build audiences and run campaigns that would have taken a team of 10 at a large agency just a few years ago.”

Thirty years after a Florida Today reporter wrote that the Internet was starting to level the field for independent hotels, the same sentence — about the same fight. On training AI: “incredibly effective and protective when you’ve trained it with clear boundaries and expectations.” Reported by Matthew Kayser.

My Junior Associates

“That’s the whole inheritance: you learn it by doing it, early.”

I run my companies from our Growing Homestead in Montana, helped by two Junior Associates who attend my entrepreneurial homeschool. In 1961 a Miami society column ran a photograph of my father captioned “Kids Working” — he was fourteen and ran the filing system at the dealership; his sisters typed and assisted. Sixty-five years later, same arrangement, same idea.