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COVER STORY

In February 2002, Donna Buice, Jeff Erbeck and John Edwards formed Window Products Management, Inc., Ventura, CA, out of a home office on what most people would consider a shoestring budget: an initial investment of $10,000. Three months later this management company purchased its first window treatments business. Eighteen months later, it purchased its second. Now, three years later, after doubling sales each year, Window Products Management (WPM) is anticipating $5 million in sales.

Is that possible—so quickly? “It’s been phenomenal,” says Edwards. “All along the process we’ve gotten raised eyebrows and people shaking their heads—our accountant particularly. Those numbers are quite real.”

You don’t have to be much of a detective, or have the sharp, inquisitive mind of Ventura native Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason to discover the secret of their success, it’s printed right on WPM’s business cards: “Planning, Implementation & Management.” For our purposes, we’ll add: People. Buice, Erbeck and Edwards agree that they work for the three nicest people in town.
“John, Jeff and I are a good team,” Buice says. “We check each other. I don’t think one person can offer what the three of us do.”

“We have three great people here with very different things to bring to the table,” Erbeck adds. “We’re a good blend. We drive each other. We have goals. We’re a great team. We push each other. We’re dedicated to our customers, and they know it.”

The same can be said for the seven other employees, including three full-time installers. “Our people are great. Our employees have a great reputation. We get calls all the time about our salespeople,” Buice says. “It’s more like a family-operated business.”

Finding, training and keeping good people can seem a monumentally difficult task, but that, too, is handled with planning and hard work. “It’s a chore. We’ve gone through a few, but we have very good salespeople now,” Erbeck says. “I think the key is, we train our salespeople very well. Knowledge is king. The more you know than your competitors the better off you are.”

But it all comes back to planning, implementation and management. “We run our little business like a big business,” Edwards says. “We have a business plan, a marketing plan, an operations manual and an employee manual. We have a very clear vision of what we are and who we are in today’s market, constantly tracking, measuring results and making changes to improve our business. Our marketing has made the phones ring, and we make sure that our customers are well taken care of throughout the process.”

MAKING THE MOVE

Edwards and Erbeck first met when they worked for a national window treatments manufacturer based on the West Coast. During those years they visited literally hundreds of window coverings businesses across the country and brought what they learned from their most successful customers to WPM’s business plan. Buice worked for 10 years as a schoolteacher, challenging students to a higher level of learning. She also brings an administrative and accounting services background and experience with setting up a computerized bookkeeping system.

Today, Edwards is responsible for marketing WPM’s companies. Erbeck trains the sales staff and reviews all products and pricing. Buice manages all aspects of day-to-day operations. Edwards and Erbeck call her the “architect behind the internal workings of the company.”

When they first got together to begin planning for WPM, the three weren’t sure what their first move should be. “We weren’t sure when we first started if we wanted to create a brand new entity. All of us were working at the time so we weren’t under any real pressure to start generating revenue immediately,” Edwards explains. “We started planning, and putting our business plan together, and then a local company became available and we decided to make the move and buy.”

That company was Arjay’s Window Fashions. The company had a good reputation and Edwards and Erbeck knew the owner as a former customer. Under WPM management, it wasn’t long before Arjay’s began affecting local competition. That’s when they were approached by the owner of Mr. B’s Shutters & Blinds.

“The owner of Mr. B’s came to us. We had taken a lot of his market,” Edwards says. “He had been there [in business] for quite some time. It was a typical one-man show, trying to do everything. We kept him on in an employment contract and, frankly, he is happier now and a great member of our team.”

WPM now manages these two window treatment companies, keeping their original identities. But the two companies really are very different. “Arjay’s, to look at our advertising, is a little higher-end looking. The pictures are glamour shots of room settings,” Edwards says. “You go from that over to Mr. B’s Shutters & Blinds. For example, our radio ads have a Rastafarian guy, and it’s kind of this Tommy >> Bahama theme, and our advertising has a talking Macaw saying, ‘We install for free.’ So it’s more edgy and in-your-face than Arjay’s.”

Both companies emphasize sales and service offering in-home consultation, measuring and installation. “Our business plan is to provide a complete turnkey window covering service,” says Edwards. Although as much as 95 percent of sales are completed in the customer’s home, both companies also have showrooms.

“There is a number of reasons for having the showroom. It grounds you, it validates you,” says Edwards. “You can’t do the type of volume we do and work out of your home and be sane. You wouldn’t have a home life. And it’s good for customers when you’re trying to describe how a top-down/ bottom-up works and they can’t quite visualize that.

“We have very attractive showrooms, also two different themes. Mr. B’s looks like a rainforest. Sandra Hilliard, the woman who painted the mural on our wall, also did John Travolta’s home in Florida and was featured in Architectural Digest.”

Both Arjay’s and Mr. B’s sell lots of shutters these days—about 50 percent of business, divided almost equally between wood and vinyl. Horizontal blinds, cellular shades, vertical blinds and woven woods top the list of their other best-selling products—all custom-made, nothing stocked.

“We are right at this moment interviewing and looking to bring a drapery person on,” Edwards says, “more because when somebody calls us we want to be able to take care of them and we don’t want to say ‘No’ or refer them to someone else. We realize we need to be full-service to protect ourselves. Business Trend Analysis out of New York noted a 3.3 percent increase in hard treatments last year and soft treatments only increased by one percent, so it’s not because we feel like we’re missing out not selling draperies or that it’s going to be a double-digit gain for us. It’s more about protecting our turf, so to speak.”

NO MYSTERY

WPM’s marketing plan is aimed at making the phone ring and calls for fairly aggressive advertising. The company earmarks five percent of its sales budget for advertising, which includes yellow pages; newspapers nearly daily, and weekly in the most-read newspaper locally (Ventura County Star); coupon books; magazines; radio; direct mail and home shows. For the last home show WPM sent out 1,600 complementary tickets to previous customers.

“We are always marketing on all different levels,” Edwards says. “That’s not to say that we blindly throw money at advertising. Donna tracks every single sale that goes through. For example, if a salesperson turns a piece of paperwork in and the little box isn’t filled out saying exactly, precisely where that came from, that paperwork goes back and the salesperson gets a phone call. They’re told we can’t process this, the paperwork isn’t complete. So it’s really no mystery to us. We don’t have to sit back and scratch our heads and say, Wow, I wonder where it’s all coming from. We know where it’s all coming from. And each avenue is given a respectable amount of time to work and if it doesn’t work, we don’t use it anymore.”

Arjay’s and Mr. B’s also have Web sites (arjayswf.com and mrbsblinds.com) designed to be informational. “We hear it all the time that people checked us out on the Internet, and that’s a great thing that someone has done that before you go on a sales call because they’re already comfortable. There’s pictures of us [on the sites], our biographies are there, contractor’s license, all the information they should be looking for before they do business with somebody,” Edwards says.

Although WPM is looking at $5 million in sales this year, it’s not quite double last year, which has been its growth rate the first three years. If direct-mail responses are any indication, the company is seeing fewer sales leads from new home sales and home mortgage refinancing. The local economy is slowing, Edwards says. For a few years the area was in what he calls a “raging wildfire” of real estate sales. It’s not really bad now, it’s just not as “insane” as it was, he says.

Looking ahead, WPM is planning to build local business alliances to attract sales. For example, the biggest window replacement contractor in the area has its own showroom and WPM will be placing displays there.

DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT

WPM’s primary customers are homeowners in Ventura County and the surrounding area. Known as the Gateway to the Channel Islands and for its Spanish Mission San Buenaventura, the area covers a wide demographic. “In one day our salespeople could be selling blinds in a starter track home, then later calling on a multi-million-dollar home overlooking the ocean,” Edwards says. “We take care of every customer with the same high level of respect and enthusiasm.”

Typically, the average job for Arjay’s or Mr. B’s is eight to 10 windows in a single home with an average invoice of about $1,500. But they both are full-service companies. “We have no issue with selling one blind at a time,” Erbeck says.

“We’ll drive across town to put a 24-inch-by-24-inch mini-blind in somebody’s bathroom if that’s what they want. That’s what we’re here for. We want to build such a great company that somebody goes to their neighbor and says, Don’t even think about it, you have got to buy from these people, it was great, the pricing was great, they showed up on time, the installer was super . . .”

There are plenty of other retailers in the area trying to service this business, “and it is competitive,” Erbeck adds. But WPM focuses on going out and doing the best job that it can. “The key to our success is that our planning, our implementation and our management—our infrastructure—works very well here. The phones get answered, they’re answered quickly, appointments are set immediately, you don’t get a recorded message that says, ‘Hey, we’re out helping great people like you. Leave your name and address and we’ll get back with you.’ By the time they get back to them, we’ve already been out to their house.”

When it comes to the Big Box home improvement stores, it becomes a question of who is competing with whom. “With respect to the Big Box stores, if you see our advertising, we put a bull’s-eye right on them,” Edwards says. “We say compare us [to them]. Look at the throughput or the chain that has to occur for a sale to go though: They sub-contract their installations out, the installer goes out and pre-measures, the measure has to come back, the salesperson has to work the quote up. Oftentimes, we will actually go on a sales call, sell the job and install the product before the customer even has the quote back from [a Big Box]. It’s just not as tightly managed with as much professionalism and enthusiasm as a business like ours. This is our total focus. There just ain’t no way, no how that a Big Box store is going to compete with us.”