BusinessReport.com

POSITION: Owner

COMPANY: O’Neill’s Music House

WHAT THEY DO: Piano retailer

REVENUE: $1.5 million

NEXT GOAL: To help people realize their musical dreams.

Jack O’Neill didn’t choose the piano business. It chose him.

The New Orleans-born O’Neill was in New York in the early 1970s, pursuing a singing career with a wife and three kids in tow, when his dad took ill. His mother phoned from Baton Rouge: Come home and help run the family business—O’Neill’s Music House—for a few months.

“I’ve been here ever since,” says O’Neill, the only authorized dealer for Yamaha pianos in the Baton Rouge marketplace. O’Neill’s, on Perkins Road just east of Bluebonnet, has been in business for 55 years.

“J. Paul Getty said if you want to be successful in retail you’ve got to have products, ideas or services that are in total demand,” O’Neill says. “Pianos are not a total demand item. I would never have chosen the piano business to be in.”

That said, it’s been a fun business with its share of “wonderful moments,” he says. O’Neill has never been interested in becoming a “music store” in the conventional sense, with drums, guitars and all the rest. Pianos will do just fine.

“I don’t have the energy to do that,” he says. “I want to play with my grandchildren and play golf.”

O’Neill won the Baton Rouge City Golf Championship in 1955 and 1961. He sang tenor in the choir in the New York church where minister/author Norman Vincent Peale [The Power of Positive Thinking] preached, though O’Neill prefers performing musical comedy.

As for O’Neill the businessman, he hews to the message of the store’s longtime slogan: “O’Neill’s: A Trusted Name in Music.”

“When you go into a store today and a salesman starts waiting on you, you say, ‘I’m just looking,’” he says. “Now why do people say that? They don’t want to be persuaded to do something they don’t want to do. When they say they’re just looking, what they’re looking for is a facilitator—as Zig Ziglar would say, they’re looking for an honest salesman. And so it’s your job to get to the point where you don’t just make a customer, but after that, that person is so pleased with the way you waited on them that you get referrals. It’s good to have somebody to give you referrals.”