As for the fourther quarter, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I’m afraid we may be pining for the relative sanity of Q4 in 2006. It’s very possible that by comparison we’re going to think that Black Friday and the balance of 2006 was relatively sane compared to what we’re going to see at the end of 2007.
The biggest challenge in the business is just the speed of the business today. There are new brands, new technologies, new ways to go to market, new ways to communicate. The speed is just lightning fast. That’s the biggest challenge: just keeping on top of it all.
The best decision, business-wise, was to diversify and get into the mail order business in 1994, which quickly led to our online presence. Our business had always diversified over the years. We really needed to find a way to grow. The decision we made to try a totally new different channel has allowed our company, and our people, to grow as well.
Some important rules of business I’ve learned, simply put, in any given situation, there’s no one absolute correct answer. There are always alternatives, and I need to be open to the possibilities. That’s my number one rule of business. It really came from my whole life experiences: There are always alternatives, and we’ve got to be looking for them.
I’m very optimistic about the local Spokane market. It’s always somewhat insulated from the major trends going on nationally. When things are cooking nationally, we’ll see moderate growth in Spokane. When things aren’t really going so great in other areas, Spokane doesn’t seem to be as affected.
Regarding the national economy, a few years back when we were members of the Nationwide Buying Group, the owner of Gallery Furniture in Houston spoke to us. He called himself “Mattress Mac” and he told us, “Never underestimate the ability of the American people to spend money” and that really stuck with me.
In spite of the struggles in a number of economic sectors, we’ve got great products. People love to use them and engage with them, and I will not underestimate the ability of the American people to spend money.
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I purchased 2 Polk RTi A3 speakers ($450) from your downtown store on January 29th and was told that if I returned to purchase the CS20 center channel speaker I would be able to recieve the free woofer Polk speaker as advertised. I returned to the store to prepay on the CS20 as your store was out of stock and was informed that I would not recieve the free woofer. I was most unhappy and left the store without prepaying - the reason they gave me that there would be no free speaker is because the 3 pruchased speakers would not be on the same invoice i.e. not purchased on the same day - I thought this was pretty cheesy - I informed Polk Audio of this situation - the above aside I love my new Polk speakers-they are are awesome! Jim Falk at jpf2000@comcast.net.