The State of Work Videocast with Eric Turney (Greater West)
Join us as we explore how a 30-year-old custom merchandise business is transforming itself through AI with Eric Turney, President of The Monterey Company, a Bend, Oregon-based manufacturer of custom promotional products. Discover insights on AI adoption in small business, work-from-home as a privilege, retaining talent on a 12-person team, and why the Pacific Northwest leads the country in employee AI usage.
In this candid conversation with host Anthony, Eric shares how Monterey Company started adopting AI tools back in 2018 with Jasper for content, and now runs Claude models all day long for everything from pricing to product research. He explains why work-from-home is earned during a 90-day onboarding, not a default; how losing two employees in two months taught him the value of listening to his team; and why hallucinations have gotten dramatically better but still demand dialed-in systems before rollout. Drawing on his journey from physical therapy student to sales rep to co-owner, Eric offers practical guidance for small business owners ready to adopt AI without losing the human element.
Feel free to follow and engage with ERIC here:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-turney/
- The Monterey Company: https://montereycompany.com/
- The Monterey Company on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-monterey-company-inc.
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0:09 — Anthony: Why don't you tell me a little bit about your current job, your current company, but also some of the path that led up to that, how you ended up at your company today.
0:19 — Eric: Monterey Company — we were founded in 1989 by Paul Stark. Promotional products. Originally it was the San Diego, Santa Barbara area. As we grew the business, Paul moved it — Santa Barbara for years. Around 2002, he decided to go fully online, right when the dotcoms were fully alive and things were going strong. He went to fully online, shut down the brick and mortar, and that's where we've been for the last 24 years.
I did physical therapy for a while until my son was born. In my senior year, I dropped out of Oregon State, went to Oregon State, and then got a job here for sales because I had a kid coming. And then me and the original founder Paul really hit it off — I really respected him. Ended up buying the business at the beginning of 2024 with two other partners.
1:40 — Anthony: 2004?
1:47 — Eric: Oh, I'm sorry — 2024. Yeah, exactly. Just a 20-year gap. 2004 to 2024 we purchased the business. We've taken a lot of the old legacy models and really streamlined them in ways that we think benefit. There's been, like you said, money we've spent in ways that didn't do anything but cause headaches, and we've learned a lot. And yeah, leveraging a bunch of new tools and ads and ideas.
2:26 — Anthony: And again, what does your company do? You guys make merchandising and apparel, like your hat?
2:37 — Eric: We do, yeah. Custom — we did this hat, we did these sweatshirts. So custom apparel, custom promotional products. Most of the products we contract out are done overseas. A lot of them we do have United States vendors, and it's all over the map. We did a letter opener for Bentley, which was kind of cool, and all kinds of stuff. Coins, pins, charms, a lot of military. B2B mostly that we serve.
3:10 — Anthony: You seem to be kind of an early adopter and open to some change. So can you describe what type of AI tools you've been leveraging, or when did the shift from AI happen for you — when you were curious about something, and how it allowed you to come to a better outcome? What has changed because you now have these things available to you?
3:26 — Eric: Oh man, we could spend all day talking. I love chatting about the new AI tools and all the fun stuff there. We originally started adopting AI tools to write content back in, I want to say, 2018. We used Jasper, which is a tool that helped us write content for our pages at scale instead of hiring copywriters to do it. And we do use some Gemini as well for image generation, and we've played with some video generation tools. But for the most part, Claude is the guy.
4:14 — Anthony: The TriNet State of Workforce Report — we refer to your territory as the Greater West, the Greater Pacific Northwest — has the highest employee AI adoption rate, which I guess when you look at a map, makes sense. Over 65% of employees are using AI weekly compared to other regions of the country. AI adoption is significantly lower when people are concerned about accuracy. With a small company like yours, you probably know exactly where your team lands on AI. How do you get them to use these tools? How do you get them to adopt them? Because people will really use it, but the minute it's not right, they're never going to use it again.
