With a can-do attitude and a recognizable product, Shawn Maynard’s heating, cooling, fireplace and hot tub store hasn’t been feeling any of the effects of a down market or slow economy.
Why do you think your sales are up? // I think that the market being down is, in some weird way, better for us. We’re pushing the whole “vacation at home” concept. It’s too expensive to drive somewhere, the housing market is down, so people are stuck in their houses. They’re fixing their houses up and that’s affecting our sales in the various businesses.
Are you offsetting your hot tub sales with other products? // We do fireplaces and heating and cooling. Lots of [those] things are seasonal. Hot tubs are the least seasonal thing that we have. Fireplaces are there when everything else slows down and that helps us maintain the employee base and infrastructure.
Everything seems to die after Christmas for a month or two. We focus on service during that period. People aren’t buying but they’re okay to do service then, so we try to keep everybody employed that way.
Do you have any advice on weathering the storm? // I think that the tough times come for everybody, and a time comes when you have to choose if you’re going to be content to decline at the same rate as everyone else or if you’re going to work really hard to keep the status quo, which takes market share from all your competition. When it gets slow, when it gets tough, you just redouble your efforts and make it happen. And that’s really hard to perceive as a retail store because you’re just waiting in your store for people to come in, so you have to change your entire paradigm and go get ‘em.