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Viscount Pools, Spas and Billiards

IMAGINE RECOVERING FROM THIS: It’s the spring of 2009 and you just spent $25,000 on a two-week radio campaign. In the middle of one of those commercials, the radio station breaks away with this news: Two of the largest employers in your area, General Motors and Chrysler, are declaring bankruptcy.

For Bob Zacharski, owner of Detroit-based Viscount Pools, Spas and Billiards, “That was like taking $25,000 and throwing it out the window.” And yet, even more troubles were about to befall both Detroit and Viscount.

The official unemployment rate for Detroit topped out at just below 30 percent in 2009 — triple the national average at the time. But many felt the actual number was closer to 50 percent if you took into account the underemployed and those who had simply given up looking for work. To stay alive, Viscount had to dig deep.

“As bullcrap as this sounds, it was this passion, this drive to succeed, that true American entrepreneurial spirit that I’m not going to fail,” Zacharski says. “It was a lot of personal hardship and personally reinvesting money back in the company, and those weren’t fun times.”

What surprised Zacharski, though, was how much smaller-ticket items like chemicals made a big difference. Zacharski recalls a day in May 2009 when Viscount had a ring-out of around $10,000. Zacharski was excited, but then his son, Rob, looked more closely at the numbers. That day, the store had served hundreds of customers. That same day in 2006, a single customer made a purchase for the 2009 total.

“We’re an upper-middle-class, blue-collar company,” Zacharski explains. “Automobile workers making $60,000 to $80,000 a year would come in and buy a new spa cover, [During the recession], you saw them coming in and saying, ‘I think I’ll just take the two-pound jar of chlorine because I need to feed my family.’ ”

Even before the recession, however, Detroit had gone through significant transformation. In 1950, the city was 84 percent white and 16 percent black. By 2010, it was the reverse: Eighty-four percent black and 11 percent white. In his years in business, Zacharski has seen a dramatic switch in demographics.

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“Thirty years ago, you were dealing with white Anglos,” Zacharski says. “Today, you’re working with Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, African American and Latino customers. And they all have different needs, wants and desires.”

Like many hot tub retailers today, Zacharski has also seen an influx of customers wanting help with a failing hot tub that was bought online. While it is frustrating to help those folks, Zacharski encourages his team to not lose the big picture.

“When the guy who bought a spa on the Internet tells his friend that some little old guy who works in the store with a whale on the building helped me out, that is a referral,” Zacharski says.

For this reason, Zacharski doesn’t avoid the Internet shoppers and recognizes that, in general, the relationships Viscount has developed over the years keep customers loyal, a concept Zacharski carries into his vendor relationships as well. 

“We’re in bed with really, really good people,” Zacharski says, adding that his vendors have bent over backwards to work with him while things were tough: delivering on demand, making deals on freight, cutting order minimums. “Our vendors make our life easier.”

What we appreciate most about our relationship with the owners and managers at Viscount is the value they place on our total role as a supplier-partner. It’s not just price that drives that relationship, but every aspect of being a valued supplier, including customer service, sales support, taking feedback on product features and innovation, providing flexible credit terms and responding to unusual or special ‘one-of-a-kind’ sales opportunities. We strive every day to earn the loyalty viscount has shown us in the past 20 years.

Paul Stagh, general manager, Emerald Spa Corporation