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COVER STORY
Paid
in Full
Roger Gober has quietly built All About Blinds & Shutters into
a market leader.
By Howard Shingle
Photography by Jim Robinette
It
might have taken Roger Gober 20-plus years to build All About Blinds
& Shutters into the dominant window coverings dealer in the
Jacksonville, FL, market, but he’s been ahead of the curve
the entire time.
In 1980 Gober started building vertical blinds in Orlando. In 1985
he moved the company to Jacksonville and began building two-inch
horizontal products—back when they had to have all the equipment
designed for them because so few others were fabricating the equipment
just wasn’t there. During numerous expansions since then, shade
products were added and then three lines of shutters. “We now
build about 1,000 window treatments a week, 80 percent of that we
actually fabricate ourselves,” Gober
says.
All of this is done out of one 35,000-square-foot manufacturing
and retail facility with some 70 employees. You see, All About Blinds
& Shutters is a one-store operation. It’s probably the
largest single-store retailer/fabricator in the nine-state Southeast
region—possibly the largest “one store retail chain”
in the nation under one roof.
That translates into at least a $5 million-a-year business. Its
success is built on customer service, longevity, hard work, maintaining
control over products and sales, innovative marketing—and frugality.
“We’ve never lived beyond our means. We don’t owe
anybody money,” Gober says. “Our facility is paid for.
All our stock is paid for. All our vehicles are paid for. We don’t
want that burden of debt hanging over our heads, so every day when
we come in here we’re not worried about paying our bills.”
The title of this article comes from what Gober says he wants as
his epitaph. “I want to go out of this not owing anybody a
penny.”
But let’s not forget a little self-deprecating honesty, either.
“We have done a lot of stupid things over the years,”
Gober admits, “but ultimately our hard work and our service
toward the customer has been the key to our success.”
SERVICE EQUALS SALES
“Service, to us, is really king,” says Gober. “The
one major job I keep for myself in the shop is to go through every
service call every day to understand what’s happening with
products—what’s going wrong, who’s calling us back,
and reviewing to see who the customer is. We have products that
come in from 20 years ago, and we will still service them. If it’s
warranted, we’ll fix it for free in the shop. Most companies
aren’t in business long enough in this industry to do that.”
To maintain his firsthand knowledge of products and customers Gober
then hits the road for the rest of the day. “I take four or
five appointments a day, so I’m on the front lines every day,”
he says.
His work ethic, however, comes from seeing his mother and father
struggle with a paint and wall covering store, which taught him
an important lesson. “If you’re just going to resell products,
you’re going to get your lunch handed to you. You’ve got
to pump labor in something.”
That’s what got Gober started fabricating, and the result has
been years of experience well beyond anyone else close to his market.
In fact, Gober boasts that the top five people at All About Blinds
& Shutters, including himself, represent 100 years of total
experience. “The experience factor blows competition away,”
he says.
And it doesn’t seem to matter where that competition comes
from. “Our buying power is large enough now that we can build
a shutter for a low enough price point that by the time we burden
it with labor, we might be slightly less than what we can import
it for and just resell it.”
Gober also knows that with his long-term approach to the business,
service equals sales. “We’ve been in business such a long
time, our clientele is a who’s who now in this area. The professional
golf tour is located here, so most of your PGA stars are all customers
of ours. We have a very nice, high-end customer on the shutter end
of the business, and that’s typically going to be your customer
with shutters: houses in the $250,000-plus range. Under $250,000,
there are chances that you are going to do whole houses full of
shutters—we’ve put them in mobile homes before—but
that customer is typically going to be on a very tight budget and
you might do a couple windows in the house in shutters and the rest
of the windows in the house will be in blinds.”
IF YOU BUILD IT . . .
Actually, no more than 40 percent of All About Blinds & Shutters’
business is in custom shutters, but it’s a profitable part.
“In shear numbers of product, we build more two–inch horizontal
blinds than any other product that we sell. In shear dollars, the
shutters definitely match the two-inch products, if not exceed them,
yet we’re talking about building many fewer a week,” Gober
explains. “There are probably 30 percent more bodies in the
shutter department than there are in the two-inch department building
one-third the amount of product. [Shutters] are labor-intensive
if you’re going to do them properly.”
Gober saw the interest in shutters coming, but didn’t feel
comfortable at first building custom wood shutters that had to be
built within a sixteenth-of-an-inch tolerance. So he started building
hollow vinyl shutters: “Cut-and-dry, squared panels, no finishing
required. We cut our teeth on that for about a year,” he says.
Since then, step-by-step, he took on more control of building custom
shutters. First came the popularity of brow-top, slant-top and arch-top
windows. As long as he was working in solid materials—wood
or solid vinyl—the panel rails could be curved or angled to
fit any window. But once he got into specialty shapes he found he
had to begin applying his own finish—there’s just no way
to match the finish of a custom component to a pre-finished panel.
It made more sense, then, to just finish the whole panel himself.
That’s when All About Blinds & Shutters began ordering
raw goods and forming its own panels and doing its own finishing.
It’s also a control thing. To do custom products right, you
have to control all the details and, except for custom draperies,
few other products have as many details as shutters.
“If you get five windows in the same room, one window is 59
inches long, one window is 59 1/4 inches long and you might get
one as long as 59 3/4 inches long. You’re custom making those
products to every single window—and I don’t know if these
numbers jive—but the 59-inch window might come in with X number
of louvers on it, and that 59 3/4-inch window might have an extra
louver in that panel and it might have different sizes for the top
and bottom rails. So now I have five windows in somebody’s
room and one of them has more louvers on it than the rest of them,”
Gober says.
“When we do a shutter job for somebody, before that job goes
into production, it goes into the computer and we get the printouts
back on it. We look at the printouts and we line up all the printouts
together because what will happen is you might get a louver being
added or dropped, or you might get a top rail or a bottom rail that
varies substantially, or you might get a divider rail that floats
as much as an inch.”
“There’s a thought process that it’s easy to enter
the [shutter] marketplace,” Gober says. “But, you better
not be doing anything beyond squared panels. You better not be doing
anything beyond two finish colors, because the moment you have to
start applying the paint, and you have to start doing the angles,
you’re opening yourself up to a huge possible loss if you screw
up a job.”
TAKING A HIT
There’s an area of Gober’s shop that he refers to as The
Wall of Shame. Actually, its stacks of shutter panels representing
tens of thousands of dollars worth of unacceptable or returned product.
“We’re human,” he says. “Some of them are salesman
miss-measurers. Some of them are factory problems. Some of them
are the wrong paint or stain colors—especially stain colors.
And some of them are due to fickle customers.”
Gober tells the story of one four-time repeat customer who ended
up in divorce. Neither the husband nor the wife showed up at the
closing, and All About Blinds & Shutters had to eat a $10,000
shutter job.
And then sometimes, he says, you just can’t explain to a customer
why a shutter in a west-facing window doesn’t seem to block
as much sunlight as a shutter in a north-facing window. “You
try to be nice about it, but if you can’t convince them that
they should accept that product, ultimately I’ll back up and
say, ‘You know, I’m sorry you’re unhappy with it.
The only thing I can do at this point is to take it all down and
refund you on it.’
“The way I look at it is I’m never going to make that
customer happy. I have to take the hit and walk away from the job.
First of all, if they complain to their neighbor and say they had
the worst experience and All About Blinds couldn’t make me
happy, but they took everything down and gave me my money back,
then where’s the problem? Then, they can go and buy from my
competitor and he does the same job and won’t make six trips
out to their house to try to keep them happy and tells them, ‘You
ordered it, it’s yours.’
“That’s part of this industry. You better be able to suck
up a loss like that. Yeah, we take a hit every now and then, and
it might take 10 years to pay off for you but, boy, does it pay
huge dividends down the road.”
READY FOR READY-MADE
Even today, Gober is trying to stay ahead of the curve, looking
for his next customers. “The immediate dollars are what’s
important, it seems like, to everybody. The money to be made in
this business is really made 10 years down the road,” Gober
advises.
“The ready-made customers don’t seem important, in a sense,
to most people because they are not going to make any dollars off
of them. But that ready-made customer is your custom customer 10
years from now. We used to get in and do the real low-end in those
communities and those people—somebody I sold a $59.99 vertical
blind to back in 1985—just moved into a $2 million house and
I’m putting $20,000 worth of shutters in
the house.
“We’re trying to figure out how to recapture that market
right now, and we’re figuring about the only way we can do
it is to go into the ready-made business. So we’re thinking
about opening a second shop adjacent to ours—we’re going
to build another 30,000 square feet at the back of our property—and
in one of those units we’re going to put in a company where
you can come in in the morning and give us your dimensions and you’ll
have your blinds by 12 o’clock, but it will only be cut-down
ready-mades. But we’ll alter the lengths.”
The pay-off Gober is working towards is turning the ready-made customer
into a custom client. “Ten years from now, you better have
had that person in your shop at some point. And then, of course,
keeping it adjacent to our main shop they’ll make the immediate
affiliation to the custom end of the business.”
All About Blinds & Shutters does some typical advertising—mainly
newspaper ads. But Gober is concentrating on two more inventive
and effective means of marketing—one involving The Big Six
consortium. To learn more, visit www.DWConline.com
for this Web-only story.
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