Bruce Richards started at Watson’s in Indianapolis when he was 19 years old. Now he owns his own Watson’s franchise in San Antonio, Tex. He says getting back to the basics has kept his store focused during tough times.
Why do you think you’re doing well? // From my perspective, it’s pretty easy. It’s nothing complicated. We don’t ignore the situation that we have in front of us with the economy, we just don’t talk about it. And I don’t take the pressure off myself. I don’t blame other things. We have to put more pressure on ourselves. What we do is go back to the fundamentals: We go back to training, and we train, train, train. I do the majority of the training so I have some control over the attitude of the sales staff. Just keeping everybody positive and not looking outward, looking inward and saying, “What could we do to make it better?” So we train on basically everything that I can think of. We train on the product, we train on sales techniques, we do a lot of talking and a lot of role-playing; we’re always role-playing, it keeps us focused on what we need to do and not what’s going on everywhere else.
How important do you think attitude is when it comes to success? // It’s everything. It [the market/economy] is what it is, and if you dwell on it, it’s going to bring you down. Everybody knows the attitude of an organization starts at the top and trickles down. So if I come in [talking about] doom and gloom, it’s going to affect everybody. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to do, I think it’s about staying as positive as possible. Not talking about it doesn’t mean you’re ignoring it, it just doesn’t need to be said. We fill our time and our minds with what we need to do: focus, train, stay positive.
What are you doing to increase your sales? // We have done a couple of changes in our pricing. I know a lot of us spa retailers like to put a cushion in the price so when a customer walks through the store maybe we can sell the tub for $6,000 but we have it priced at $7,000. I’ve gone to straight net pricing. If things are tighter, we need to look like we’re more aggressive. We need to look like we’re more accommodating to our customers’ pocketbooks. It gets their attention.
We’re also doing some in-store promotions. We promote heavily on TV, radio and in the newspaper. That’s exciting and can be great, but we also have to mirror that excitement [in the store]. So we have in-store promotions. We’ll even do some unadvertised promotions to get their attention. We might do a rebate sale that’s not advertised and do some inventory surplus on certain spa models that aren’t advertised. That way when they get in there, we can show them something really special that might make the difference between buying today and buying later.