ShoppersChoice.com
Founded: 2001
Growth: 177.3%
2005 Revenue: $6.4 million
2008 Revenue: $17.8 million
Employees: 28
What were you doing before you started this business?
Mike: I was working in Des Moines, Iowa, in the hotel business and was coming back to Louisiana. I went through a barbecue superstore and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ We were open about six weeks later here in Baton Rouge. We did that until 2001.
Why trade the brick-and-mortar store for a virtual one?
Mike: A much bigger audience. There are just so many people in Baton Rouge who are going to buy grills and you have three or four other stores out there selling the same product. Your audience is smaller, while now, we’re on a national platform. We sell all over the United States.
Tell us about the growth.
Mike: Our best year with The Grill Store & More, we were at $1.2 million. Last year, we were at $17.8 million; this year, we’ll probably come in at $20 million, maybe a little more, depending on our Christmas season.
Corey: Up until September of last year, we were going for 65% growth year over year. The economy cut us down to 20% and we were very upset about it. This year, we’ll probably still come in around 20%. We’re very frustrated with that because historically, we will have between 60% and 120% year-over-year growth.
How has Shopper’s Choice changed?
Mike: Shopper’s Choice is a big site but we actually evolved into several specific sites. We just launched a homefurnitureguys.com, we have homeappliancecenter.com, so we actually have about 20 sites out there besides shopperschoice.com that are very niche sites. We’re definitely diversifying the company, which is why we continue to grow, even in a down economy.
What’s your business model?
Corey: The idea is that the more specific the site we can tailor to a customer’s needs, the more likely they are to purchase from us. You can go on Shopper’s Choice and say, ‘Man, these guys sell everything.’ Or, if we know you’ve been searching for patio furniture, we’re not going to send you to Shopper’s Choice; we’re going to send you to Ultimate Patio, because there’s no reason to put things we know you’re not interested in seeing in front of you. We drill down even further than that, like we have Bar Stool Guys. While they may only be seen by 200 people a month, 15 of those people might buy. That’s an outstanding percentage on the Internet. The idea is if we know what you’re looking for already, then we’ll have a site that’s custom-tailored to you.
Mike: We also want people to have a customer-service experience that they won’t forget. We fire vendors all the time for not giving the level of customer service that we expect. Coming out of the hospitality industry, I want to bring that to the Internet. If somebody calls in, they get a customer-service representative. They don’t get, ‘Call here, touch here, go there.’ I get probably 10 to 15 emails a day from customers saying, ‘I’ve been wowed through your customer service department.’ We want to be better than anyone else out there on the Internet.
Why have you been so successful?
Mike: If you go to a site looking for a gas grill and you have to weed through 700,000 items, people sometimes get frustrated on the larger sites where after three or four pages they don’t find what they want so they leave. But if you go to a site that’s very specific, they’re going to buy. We’re taking the hard part of weeding through all the other stuff. We’re giving the customer exactly what they’re looking for, and we’re backing it up with the best customer service experience they’ve ever had on the Internet.
And that’s how you became a poster child for Google?
Corey: Google saw how hard Mike and I tried and put us in a Google AdSense Success Story and then they actually used the videos of us on a national television campaign. It’s certainly something that people take notice of.
How has the company changed with growth?
Mike: The hardest thing for us has been keeping the same small company culture; trying to keep everything where when the phone rings, you get a live person. We’ve been back and forth about hiring a company to answer phones for us. Every time you add an employee, you have to think about how you approach each employee. We used to have a lot of turn around, now we hire according to someone’s attitude. I always tell them, ‘Look, I’m bringing you into the family here, and I want to make sure you’re a good fit.’
What have been your biggest challenges?
Corey: I think the first time we learned to look at the bottom line as well as the top line. That was a pretty tough year. I think that’s just growing pains; everybody goes through that.
Mike: We made some changes at the end of that year [2003], because I’m going, ‘I don’t even know if we’re going to make it.’ We made some changes and went back to the basics, and within two or three months, everything turned around. We were very profitable. My vision was, ‘I’m going to be an Amazon; I’m going to have 3 billion products on my site. After that year, I changed that. I said, ‘You know what? You can’t really be an Amazon because Amazon is branded. They’re the Walmart of the Internet. They were there first.’
Is workforce an issue for you?
Mike: Right now, we’re running into being able to find talent in Baton Rouge. Internet marketing is one of the top jobs in the entire Internet, and we can’t find anybody to do that. We’ve actually brought in two people from Des Moines, and two people from Austin. I want to hire within the state, but as we get bigger, we’re running into the problem of hiring qualified people here.
Corey: I’ve started working with LSU to try to develop courses to help students be prepared to be able to do that kind of work. Right now we have two senior level business courses that we share information with. We’re even at that point where we’re trying to reach out and say, ‘Guys, we need the skills set; your students need jobs. Let’s figure this out.’ LSU has been extremely helpful and receptive, and I am excited about our partnership.
What happens when you look back?
Mike: We used to sit up late and night and say, ‘Man, when we get $3 million, we’re going to be ‘out there.’
Corey: Yeah, we’d be like, ‘We’re going to be so rich when we sell $3 million.’ It turns out you’ve got to buy four warehouses and have 10 people working for you when you make $3 million. We thought, ‘Just think when we do $20,000 in one day.’ Now it costs more than that just to open the doors. It’s like, ‘Man, we didn’t see this coming!’
