In this episode of Whatever Happened To, Scott Monday unpacks the rise and fall of the world's largest toy retailer. From Charles Lazarus's category-killer strategy in 1957 to the leveraged buyout that buried Toys R Us in $400 million in annual interest payments, the collapse has a lesson that goes far beyond debt and Amazon.

The real culprit: the messy middle. Trying to win on price, quality, and experience, and ending up winning at none of them.

If you're running a business in the $2M to $20M range, this one hits close to home.

📬 The Scott Monday Newsletter — business stories and operator tools, every Saturday: https://scottmonday.substack.com

0:00 - The Memory Hook

0:47 - Quick Intro

1:03 - The Rise of Toys R Us

3:11 - The Crack and the Fall

6:18 - The Operator's Take: The Messy Middle

8:40 - What This Means for Your Business

This is the TBS story — and the four lessons I learned the hard way.

I'm Scott Monday. I run two businesses in California's Central Valley. Trinity Builder Solutions (TBS) was my attempt to move into the commercial stone market after years of running kitchen & bath CRATE. It was a new industry, a new model, and a fresh start at 43 years old.

It did not go the way I planned.

0:00 — Lost nearly $500K on my third business

0:22 — Who I am and what TBS is

0:44 — The TBS story: January 2023

1:06 — First gut punch: key team member resigns mid-2023

1:46 — Proforma off by 2x + COVID/interest rate headwinds

2:09 — End of 2023: $289K revenue, $239K loss

2:38 — 2024: lost even more — the decision to keep going

3:00 — Mid-2025: a hard call on a key employee

3:19 — End of 2025: things start to turn

3:42 — Lesson 1: Forecasting a new business is mostly fiction

4:00 — Lesson 2: External forces will happen — pivot quickly

4:17 — Lesson 3: Starting over at 43 is nothing like starting at 28

4:41 — The hunger gap: dumber but driven vs. smarter but comfortable

5:03 — Lesson 4: Relationships matter in B2B just as much as B2C

5:22 — How we changed our approach in mid-2024

5:40 — Where TBS stands today

5:58 — My question for you + CTA

TBS is not a success story yet. But it's not a cautionary tale either. I'd do all of it again. The 39 months of having my face rubbed into the ground made me a better leader and a better business owner.

If you've ever built something on assumptions that turned out to be completely wrong — I want to hear your story in the comments.

Subscribe for a new episode every two weeks. Real lessons from real businesses, no fluff.

I write about this every week in The Scott Monday Newsletter: https://scottmonday.substack.com

In this episode of Whatever Happened To, I break down how MySpace went from the most visited site on the internet to a $35 million fire sale — in five years. The short answer: they stopped doing what made them great and started chasing ad revenue instead.

I'm Scott Monday. I run two businesses in California's Central Valley and I'm morbidly curious about what makes businesses succeed and fail — especially the ones we all grew up with.

0:00 — MySpace had more traffic than Google

0:23 — What this series is about

0:39 — My personal connection to MySpace

1:19 — How MySpace was built (2003 to 2004)

2:17 — 25 million users and Rupert Murdoch's $580M buyout

3:02 — News Corp sees "eyeball inventory"

3:26 — The $900M Google ad deal

3:46 — Why it was a trap

4:25 — Facebook rises while MySpace falls

5:52 — The core lesson: optimized for the contract, not the customer

6:11 — Is ChatGPT making the same mistake?

7:50 — What this means for your business

9:25 — The question every business owner needs to ask

10:05 — Subscribe and final thought

The lesson isn't just about MySpace. It's about the small decisions you and I make every day that slowly erode the thing our customers love. MySpace wasn't run by idiots. They were run by smart people who made a series of bad decisions — each one looking reasonable in isolation.

Don't make the same trade.

Subscribe for a new episode every two weeks. No fluff, no motivation talk — just real lessons from real businesses you actually remember.

I write about this stuff every week in The Scott Monday Newsletter: https://scottmonday.substack.com