A short YouTube interview (host Chris Collins, guest Eric Parmenter) about improving business performance through customer service, persistence in sales, leadership-by-example, pricing strategy, and product differentiation. Eric shares anecdotes from his liquor store and other ventures to illustrate focusing on customer experience, taking responsibility for mistakes, training staff by modeling behavior, and deliberately being different to create a destination store.
Chapters
So there's pressure, but.
Our philosophy in the wicker store is like, if all else fails, we'll have really nice bars at home.
Chris Collins here. And, you know, it's all about business performance. And this week we had a guest in our mastermind group, Eric Parmenter, who is a great entrepreneur, owns Rocking Popcorn and a liquor store. And he's had many business adventures in his life, from restaurants to actually selling encyclopedias, which is a really hard thing to do door to door. But he's a great inspiration. You're gonna learn a lot. It was really fun.
One of my favorite questions, what's your goal? Anything you do, what's your goal? I mean, we carried the stuff out here, we stacked it up. What's our goal?
What would separate the really good salespeople?
Average.
What traits?
Persistence.
Can you teach that?
Sure you can. People have persistence. I mean, you cry till you eat your baby bottle.
Everyone's scared. Everyone comes in and they're scared to ask. I'm scared. I go to a store, I'm like, I don't ask. They think I'm stupid. 50 year old man. I've done all kinds of crazy shit. I still get nervous about that. People are nervous. So it's a matter of like going and trying to talk to the people and get them to chat. I had a customer come in the other day and he spent two grand with me and he was buying eight bottles of Remy and 20 boxes, bottles of Buchanans. And he dropped one of the Remy's and he's like, well, I'll still pay for that. I'm like, dude, you know, just thank you. That's ours. We take responsibility. But I want to make the experience for the customer. Not that we never run out, but they can't have it be like, oh, I can't move the bottle. Because it's something like, it's gotta be just fluid, easy. We're a destination. People like coming there, it's easy. There's a problem, we fix it, you know, so it's just. It's really that simple. It's just like looking people in the eye and talking to them.
Because price just, that's. You get up on price, you lose one price. There's just nothing happening.
That's true. There's a saying by Lee Iacoccan that says something like, if your goal is to be the lowest price, you've already lost. Yeah, there's nowhere to go from there.
Once somebody's spending $65 for a bottle, they're spending 65 for a bottle. Yours at 55 doesn't. They're not gonna go, oh, buy this one. It's 10 bucks cheaper. Yeah, they're.
They're.
They already are people.
They would have been down if they were worried about that.
They spend 65.
Yeah, we do. We talk about that with alignments a lot because, like, guys will say, like, you know, we'll tell them you should sell your alignments for 129. And they'll be like, well, I went to 109. And it's like, once you're past 100 bucks, like, you're just.
It's the same thing.
But if you sell 200 of them, 20 bucks times 200 is a huge upside for you. But you've got this weird thing in your mind. But if I'm like, I'm gonna go kind of there, but I won't go all the way.
But if I have Wi Fi or a comfortable chair that's clean, I'm good.
Yeah.
I mean, I'll pay 20 bucks.
I don't really teach them. I just do. So for me, and they all. What's great is my staff, they really like me. I'm so blessed. I have the best team. I'm a firm believer. Actions speak louder than words. Like I said before, I despise cliches. You know, I love actions. So you can say the little cliche thing about being motivated and about how you do this. You have your whole list thing in the back office that you read. Just go do that. Yeah. And have them watch. Because people watching things can emulate that. People reading it and then trying to figure out what that means and doing that, there's so many levels of chances of screwing it up. But if they just watch me go do it, they have a chance.
If you really want to succeed and you want to achieve things that are unbelievable, you want to live up to your full potential and create a quality of life for yourself, your employees, everybody around you, your family, then you're gonna have to be different. And I know you're looking at me. I'm different. I've always been different. I don't want to fit in. And that's one thing that Eric and I very much have in common, is we're not trying to fit in, but we are trying to be different and create a scenario where we're adding value in a different way, where we're thinking of business ideas in a different way and just overall doing things in a different way and not getting caught up and the norm and the average.
How much of your success do you think is because you don't care about being different and you're gonna do it your way?
All of it. For us, what we do that's different is just like this product. We find the products that are unique and different, you know, for us. You know, we're good at business, we run our business, and, you know, we pay our bills and, you know, so forth. And there's just a certain baseline in the industry of how we do it. For us, the difference that we do is we try to find the unique product and have a unique knowledge and have a difference that we can blow something up like that. But that's what that. So that for us, cornering the market is more of just trying to find. Exploiting that one product that everyone else has or can get, but they don't learn how to do it. They're not doing anything with it. But it's one of those things that it's a difference that they don't get anywhere else. And my store is now a destination because people know that we have something. Yeah. So I'm a firm believer that you just got to find that. That little weird. And it's always. It seems like it's always weird. People go, oh, well, you know, I wasn't supposed to do that. That was what the weird kid did in high school. Turns out the weird kid was like Bill Gates or something. I'm a firm believer of what people tell you not to do. You do that.
Thank you, Eric.
You did.
We learned about customer service. We learned about being different. Just the passion that Eric has for business is inspiring. How to be a great leader and pricing and your mindset when it comes to that and everything else we learned, it was a blast. Remember, it's all about business performance. And thanks for watching. Tell them your philosophy on marriage.
Oh, yeah. So if corporate law, business law was anything like marriage oil, you would never start a company. I mean, it's like there's no fucking right.
