Why You Must Make Tough Business Decisions in Order To Succeed
Owen: Hi. My name is Owen Mcgab Enaohwo. Welcome to hireyourvirtualassistant, where we provide small business owners with exceptional virtual assistants. I also have a blog where we have small business owners come to show to give their insights and expertise on what they are doing. And hopefully, share some new tips and strategies that are used by small business owners that you can take to your business.
Today, I’m going to interview Kris Kaplan from Kris and Co. They provide manufacturers with sales force to help them sell their products to retailers in the North East. I think I have sent out an email trying to find out from four business owners what they are currently do in this economy making their business different and how they stay successful. Kris sent me an email that basically hits the nail on the head. Those small business owners must make tough business decisions. Basically you need to make tough business decisions to keep you going. I said, “Well, I should get Kris on the interview and interview him so you guys can learn something from him.” I’ll get back to you at the end of the interview and I look forward to talking with you. Enjoy the interview.
Okay, welcome to HireYourVirtualAssistants. Today, I have Kris Kaplan, right?
Kris: Right.
Owen: It is going to be one of the first interviews I have. What I am trying to do is create an atmosphere for small business owners to come to this blog and get to contact with some successful small business owners. Likewise, learn from their experiences, engage them and figure out how can take the information that the guest has and apply to my business.
First of all, Kris, I want you to introduce yourself to the audience. Give them an introduction of yourself and your company.
Kris: Certainly. It is Kris Kaplan, no worries about on pronunciation. I run a company called Kris and Co in the Greater North East. We provide manufactures of gift work products with outsourced sales team covering New York, New Jersey and all 6 New England States.
We represent about 30-40 vendors at any given time. In my 12-14 sales reps call about 3,000 to 4,000 customers over the course of a 12-month period. Anywhere from a Mom & Pop shop to small local chains, to Barnes and Noble, Bed, Baths and Beyond, and anywhere in between.
Owen: Okay. That sounds very impressive. I want to get more insiders to how you got started in business.
Kris: Sure. My family, particularly my mom, owns a retail store in Rochester, New York called Parkly. I spent my entire youth growing up in this store. One thing I noticed is that all these sales reps came into the store spend an hour there or 2 hours there. They got into their car, went off and did something else.
While I like the business of growing up in that retail environment and gift world. I never really wanted to be inside 8-12 hours a day. I always wanted to be outside. It seemed that being a rep would give me the opportunity to do that.
I started at wrapping first. Then I decided I want to run my own company, pick up some of my own vendors and started Kris and Co about 14 years ago out of upstate New York, and eventually moved to New England.
Owen: Wow. What are the things you learned from being a sales rep? How do you engage the clients? I’m assuming that you represent your clients and talking to the customers, right?
Kris: Right.
Owen: How do you incorporate yourself to your client’s business and actually get out there and represent them?
Kris: Right. It is always the $64,000 question, who my client is. It is the retailer I’m selling the product to or the vendor that whose product I’m selling. There is only one of the two that sends me the check and it’s the vendor.
Owen: Yes.
Kris: Ultimately, they are my client. My main responsibility is to make sure that their products penetrate the market place. We sell directly to retailers. If you have a retail store or a website, an ebay store, a catalogue company. We are the people that provide you with products pre-brand driven. Our customers are the 4,000 retailers spread across the Greater North East.
I get to know them either by existing relationships or by vendors we are currently working with or through driving around Main Street America or knocking on the doors of every Spa, Gift Shop or flower shops, name it where there.
Owen: So, you are doing a lot of networking?
Kris: A little bit. If you are calling one retail store in Main Street America, they probably won’t tell you the other store in town. They want to be the only ones to sell some of your better products.
Networking becomes hard in the general networking terms. We have to work with other sales reps, who sometimes see us as the enemy. But sometimes, they let us know certain things that are going in and around of the retail world.
We have been fortunate being around for 14 years. We have had a number of vendors who have been there longer than us. The customer base was pretty solid in the early stage. We did a lot of trade shows where customers come to us. We have done a lot of cold calling thing, lead follow up, etc. Now we have all the customers we can ever have, we have a pretty solid customer base that grows in a relatively slow pace. There are a certain number of retail stores out there.
Owen: You said something that struck me. You worked with people that might consider you guys as the enemy, or the competition.
Kris: Yes
Owen: How do you get around that? How did you come to the point where you can say, what is in it for you guys and what is in it for us and how we can work together? How do you present that to them?
Kris: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
Owen: That’s a very good answer.
Kris: I don’t want to burn any bridges. I am 41 years old. I am probably going to do this for a very long time. I would like to reach out to other rep groups and share what some of our best practices are. I would invite anyone to learn anything we do. It is not rocket science. It is not brain surgery. It is real relationship building, sales 101 stuff.
If there are things that we are doing that can helpful to somebody else, we are the first ones to share it. On occasion, we get some good staff to try doing that. Sometimes it is just about building relationships. If there is a store in town that we haven’t build a relationship with but someone else has. We do something for them and they might be inclined to put a good word for us. You know, Kris and Co are actually really good people.
Sometimes, it is the little help we need. 99 percent of the time it is the products that we represent the products drive at the beginning of the relationship. The sales rep then really develops that relationship. We develop that trust with the retailers. So eventually, whatever we are selling, they are going to buy it.
Owen: So, basically the effort you put is based on the product itself. Basically, the clients already have costumers wanting those products. Have you had an experience wherein you had to market a new product that has not yet been known to the public?
Kris: Yes
Owen: How did you do that?
Kris: We tried to do that, and had to, especially in the early stages. I was 26 years old. I didn’t have sales reps working for me. I didn’t have much in the way of vendors that would let me sell their products. So we had to get innovative.
There was a lot of emerging Bath and Body products in the mid-1990is. We formed a lot of relationship with these start up Bath and Body candle manufacturing companies. The retailers did not know much about Bath and Body products but we carried a lot of it. We made it a specialty and carried it up to this day. Not the big brands but newer, bigger and better versions of those brands.
We are passionate about the products we represent. I never thought I would be happy selling scented candles for a living. I could not believe that we do far more than selling candles. I am a simple kind of guy and like to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. At the end of the day, you sell candles.
I like to believe that we carry stuff that we would use in our everyday lives and have passion for. When we are able to share that passion with somebody even if they are not involved in that kind of product before, it is contagious, they would want to buy it.
Owen: One of the things that I’m trying to ask every entrepreneur I actually interview is, seeing how the economy has changed what exactly are you doing that is different from what you would do a couple of years back?
Kris: Yes, a number of things changed for us after September 2008. I say September 15, 2008. God turned around the economy off, and made what was already completely irrelevant, totally irrelevant. We had a show room, some 2000 sq. feet that we were spending $60,000 per year for rent plus upkeep, plus staff, plus marketing for that. We got rid of that as quickly as possible.
We realized that it would be cheaper for us to hold the lease and make payments for the rent and abandon the whole facility all together. The upkeep was not even being met by profits generated out of there. So we got out of the lease all together. We made our company into a virtual company.
My sales manager lives in Chicago. My office manager lives in Glaster. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. My sales reps live all over the North East. We go to Skype to have a meeting and have face-to-face contact when we used to fly or drive to each other.
We have used “oDesk” and other Virtual Assistant programs out there to get the things done for us that we were normally doing in-house and spent pennies to a dollar to get it done.
Owen: That’s good.
Kris: I hope you won’t air that since I just advertised it.
Owen: No, that’s okay. It’s all about you today. I’m not even going into that. One idea about most people find about entrepreneurs is the idea wrapping your mind around, getting out of the way things are usually done. How you have done it. When you found other ways of getting rid of the unnecessary things and basically made your company into a virtual one.
Kris: We’ve never been a fan of the status quo. I think we always tried to march to our own drumbeat in a lot of things we have done. We have trade shows that we are participating in. We hold gift shows, $55,000 to appear in that show with our booth. 2 shows a year – we cut that out from our budget. In proof that we could still be successful without a showroom, show, postcard mailings, and 2 sales meetings a year got cut.
We went completely virtual with our sales meetings. Now, host a 2-day and a 3-day web-based only sales meeting for vendors to get on from the confines of their house. They can do it in their pajamas if they wish. Show those the new products. Put on a pretty smile. Have a good time for an hour. Then, press the little red button up on the top left of your screen and go back to your regularly psychotic life.
Owen: The thing too is that because you already understand that idea by basically cutting down the unnecessary things and going virtual. Some of your clients might not be at that stage. For a business owner who is trying to convince his clients on this idea of getting things done the whole different way, how do you go about actually getting your clients to understand and actually do a webinar instead?
Kris: First, we had to send in the actual definition of what a webinar is.
Owen: Okay
Kris: We had to help them spell “gotomeeting” and really give them some pointers. Some of them did a great job. A few of them really harness the ability to learn something new. They will not learn how to make a cool PowerPoint presentation with graphics and spinning sound. Unfortunately, if you have a PowerPoint presentation while sharing your computer or “gotomeeting”, all the sound goes away.
Others just rehost their pdf. They would flip through the catalog, go through their products and give very boring presentation. A few people called in and they didn’t have anything to show. The truth is that their live presentations probably weren’t any better the year before than their virtual presentation.
We have taken it a step further. We have those meetings on a more regular basis. Even after the trade show, my vendors really want to share what successful trade shows I have. Sometimes, they travel around the country and we clearly say save the $400 in airfare, $200 in hotel room, $1200 for taking me and my company out to dinner. Put some good incentives on the table for sales representatives to get out there and perform. Let’s do this meeting over the web.
Now, it is becoming a standard though but like a few technological things. Our group has tried to remain at the forefront of technology in our workplace. We are very fragmented industry. There is very little e-Ecommerce taking place. There are not a lot of people on Facebook. Some people don’t even have emails. I have 4,000 customers and I bet I only have 1,200 emails. So it is a small moving ship but the vendors moved a little bit quicker. We are happy about that.
Owen: That’s good. One of Buzzwords in marketing right now for business owners is Social Media Marketing. The only situation is that not that many people is on that stage or maybe don’t see the need for.
How do you find the middle ground to still use the whole idea of Social Media Marketing but find the common ground where people can understand what you are doing and use it?
Kris: We are trying to be a little careful with Social Media. It exists. It’s a work in play. We haven’t totally figured it all out. We are at that daily. I have chosen a different route from many of my competition. There is always reference to other countries. They have their own pages.
There are always vendors that everyone used to be friends with and now, they like them. So when a vendor posts something, all of my friends are already like that vendor. So they see it. So we don’t repost something because we don’t want to twitterfy. I don’t think that the repost is as good as the retwit.
I have given up on twitter and I don’t know how it applies to my world right now. Maybe in another world when I start thinking about training or public speaking and want to monetize myself that way. It could be a little bit more successful for me. Facebook, for me, is good with that.
I have taken an approach on my company page wherein weekly I put something good out there for a retailer or another sales representative to help them build their business. There are various topics, such as how to become more successful or time management or vision planning or strategic planning. It could be a repost of an article from a magazine. Sometimes it is from my own stuff. But I put it there about only once a week because there is a lot of data. If you are following me, you don’t want to hear me 4 times a day. If you need to hear me 4 times a day, you’re screwed.
I like to believe that I am helping good people to become better, not brand new people trying to figure it out. There are other better people for teaching them the basics than me.
But on my personal, I post everything. I am a tri-athlete. I’m hardcore of doing Iron Man in July. I post all of my training on there.
Owen: I see you had a blog about that too.
Kris: Yes. I have a blog about that. I am an entrepreneur/ Kris Kaplan. I put that out there one, because I want to chronicle it. Two, because I put one piece out there and somebody said that was really cool. So I started putting more and more pieces out there. I don’t get along people commenting on it, 10 or 20 regularly comment. I have far more people who I would see in person and say that they loved the updates.
So my thought was you probably didn’t really care what I do with my company. But you would be probably more interested in me as a person. As a CEO of a company, you don’t really care necessarily how I formulated my vision, what my strategy is, how I measure my goals, how I execute all that and where we get money from.
Owen: Would you like to share that?
Kris: Share that, but it would not be any different from any business books you can pick up at Barnes and Noble.
Owen: Yes, you are right.
Kris: What I thought would be interesting to some other people was what they were doing in their regular days or lives. I don’t show pictures of what I eat for breakfast.
Owen: You have to put a face behind a business to make your business more approachable. I totally like that.
How can people get hold of you and if they want to get any information from your company, where do they have to go?
Kris: Our website is www.krisandco.com. Everything is spelled out. Kris is with a K.
You can follow me on facebook, Facebook.com/kris.kaplan. I would be more than happy to have more friends.
Owen: Yes. To everybody here, Kris has been so kind to be on the call with me and give you all the information.
If you have any extra questions for him, where do they have to send their questions to?
Kris: They can send it to kris.kaplan@gmail.com.
Owen: Okay. That’s good.
I hope you enjoyed the interview I did with Kris. I want to know what you think.
I want to know your comments and suggestions. Are you having tough decisions in this economy? Are you doing things a little bit differently in this economy so that you can stay successful?
As a matter of fact, you can do that by leaving a comment on my blog. In order for you to get access to more interviews such as this one and get access to my newsletter as well as download my free ebook “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Running a Business in a Cloud”. You can go to my blog and click on the picture of the ebook and it will take you a page where you can enter in your name and email. And instantly download the free book.
Again, I look forward to seeing your comments. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you.
###The End of Transcript###
