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April 30, 2010

It’s a couple of minutes before 10am opening time on a Sunday morning at Bosley’s Davie Street store. Two customers wait outside but a dog on a leash isn’t so patient. He is whimpering and lunging at the glass door, scratching to get inside. It brings the clerk working feverishly at setting up for the day to open the door a crack. “I’m almost ready folks and then your dog can come in for a treat.” The customer with the dog quickly responds with a “thanks, there’s no rush, don’t worry about my dog.”

This is a classic Bosley's scene. The pet food chain has been serving pet owners for more than 30 years (celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2009) and animals are welcomed into the store. It's usually dogs, but the odd cat makes an appearance with its owner as does a parrot or cockatoo. Dogs get offered a treat – or three. They can smell it upon entering the door; probably even earlier as owners report their dogs start tugging on leashes at least a block or two away once they sense the Bosley's store is nearby.

Inside the store, a multitude of dogs and their owners often meld together. Dogs seek each other out with several sniffs and wagging tails. Owners chat, mostly about their pets. It makes Bosley's a fun, friendly place for pet owners to go. And for the pets, it's like a veritable neighbourhood pub for animals. It's one of the reasons Bosley's Pet Food Plus retail chain is so successful today.

The people who make this pet store a wonderland for pets and their caretakers are, of course, the employees. “It's the people who are the company,” says Ken Almond, Bosley's General Manager. “Without them, you have nothing. The managers in the stores, the young people working there, the people in the warehouse, the people in the office, that's Bosley's. If you haven't got good people, you've got nothing”, continued the passionate entrepreneur. “Pets love coming here and therefore their owners are happy. But you know what? The staff know the dogs' names. Not necessarily the owners' names per se, but they know the pets' names.”

Almond's warm, folksy charm belies his savvy business experience and extensive knowledge of what makes a company purr like a contented cat. He worked for twenty years as a public accountant in a national accounting firm until seven years ago. “I was a partner and had worked as a business advisor to companies and a managing partner in one of the firm’s offices. I knew what good business fundamentals were and had experience in managing people. It was a fine career but I had reached a point where I was thinking a change would be good. I needed a fresh start.”

A new direction presented itself when one of Almond's clients approached him about Bosley's. The chain of 23 stores in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island was a BC forerunner in specialty pet food retailing.

“It was the chain for pet food 25 years ago,” emphasizes Almond. “Two partners built the chain and then one bought the other out. It was a very good business until the market changed. Competition from a big box pet retailer made things harder for them and financial problems began to undermine the company. They were struggling and
it was the owner's nephew who asked me to come in to see how the problems could be addressed. I determined that Bosley's needed fresh capital and new directions. It had deteriorated to the point where the company the uncle had created, couldn't be saved. The stores were run-down and needed freshening up.”

Bosley's had good customer loyalty and was fundamentally a good business. Although Almond didn't have direct experience in retail or the pet specialty sector, he was excited about the challenge of turning Bosley's around. Along with the original owner's nephew and other investors, Ken bought the business and stepped in to run it.

“We could see that there were already the elements of success there – great name, great loyalty, great staff. There were 23 stores and about 150 staff then. We had a warehouse in Richmond where we distributed products that we bought from all over the world, but primarily from North America. But the stores weren't up to standard, they were looking rundown and they needed a fresh coat of paint and lots of other upgrading. Some of the information systems needed to be updated too.”

Almond remembers facing exciting but stressful times in his early days at Bosley's helm. “It's different being on the front line. In some respects, it's far easier to advise people. I understand the financial part of business and the things that lead to its success – being properly financed, properly managed, maintaining healthy cash flows and all the financial aspects. What I didn't know was retail,” he says.

“First of all, most of our staff love the business because they are pet lovers. That's one thing that attracts them to a pet store to begin with,” he says. “But up until a year and a half ago, our incentive program was all about sales targets. Staff met their sales targets and they got a bonus. Everybody had targets and they knew them as they are pre-determined amounts, so nothing else mattered to them. They could give bad service and it didn't matter. Eventually they might get counselled out if bad service was too regular and customers complained. But it wasn't factored into the bonus.” The new boss was clearly unnerved by this fact “I thought this was crazy! Bosley's is about team work, so how do we get elements of team work in the incentive?”

To address these concerns, Almond developed a program that factored in all the elements he deemed crucial to Bosley's operation. “We built a complicated and comprehensive program. It's quarterly and the incentive compensation is paid quarterly – none of this waiting until the end of the year. That's the motivation – a monetary reward – and teaching our staff about the important things too. It all comes together.”

He's also stepped back to get a better understanding of where his people come from and what they're looking for as a result of working for Bosley's. “My philosophy is that people that get into entry-level retail aren't necessarily going to make it their life's work. So my attitude is that we have an obligation to teach our employees as much as we can, give them experience and train them to help them in their life's work path. They can learn how important it is to treat people right. They can learn what is important about keeping up a store – keeping it clean, keeping it orderly, keeping the shelves filled, how to run the computer systems, understanding all that stuff – that helps them in their life too.”

As a result, education is a significant part of the business. Bosley's offers educational programs where staff learn about products (written materials made available to them, and on-line and on- the- job training). Almond has made it fun with quizzes to test staff knowledge. Their incentive plan is about sales but equally important the store's performance has to come into play. They assess this each month “when we have senior people who go into each store and evaluate it. How does it look? Are the windows washed? Are the bathrooms clean? Are the shelves dusted?” Audit scores which are a team achievement are factored into each individual's incentive payment.

“Retail changes quickly. Everyday there is always something that comes along to upset a comfortable balance – competition, new products, and a host of new problems. When it's your money on the line – and I was responsible for the money that I and my partners had put up – the buck stopped with me. My decisions had a lot to do with whether the company was going to be successful or not.” He was pensive as he reflected on the magnitude of it all. “I've always been entrepreneurial, trying to think outside the box. I had managed people, being the managing partner of a Price Waterhouse office for ten years. I was used to running a business and managing people, which involves motivation, morale – so I had a pretty solid background for some of the fundamentals.”

The learning curve was also steep when it came to the product specifically. In the beginning, Almond wondered to himself “the pet business – what's it all about? For example, why do you need 20 different brands of food? I learned it was because we had lots of customers buying them. For a lot of pet owners, changing brands of food is very difficult – they get to know a particular product is good for their cat or dog and that's what they stick with it. They don't change that often – that's brand loyalty isn't it? That was a big learning curve.” Almond credits his staff for helping him through this period. “They were very, very good and experienced.”

Then he set about modernizing Bosley's. “We needed an automated POS system to link all the stores with central office. It was integral for managing the stores' inventories and knowing what was selling. What's taking up too much space? What should have more space? That end of the business had to be improved immensely. When I took over, the store managers didn't know anything about systems because all they had was cash registers. We had no clue what was selling in the stores.”

Renovating Bosley's store interiors took place over a longer period of time. “It was obvious to us that we needed to give our stores a new look. We phased it in over a period of four years because it costs a lot of money to re-do a store. It was done a store at a time. Each one would be gutted, re-painted, re-floored, and would get new fixtures.”

Almond also began increasing the level of service at Bosley's by ensuring staff
knew about the products sold in the stores. “We set up educational and training programs to equip our staff to serve our customers better. Part of our great service is that we are known as pet specialists. There are other important fundamentals for a company like Bosley's – being a smaller footprint store serving neighbourhoods for the most part means we need to get to know our customers, make them feel welcome, treat them with respect, greet them properly, and have the education about the products we sell so that people know they can come to our stores and get that information. It's customer service and product knowledge. Our extensive training gives employees the skills to serve our customers better.”

Almond had another ace up his sleeve. He knew he had to do a better job at motivating people. Recognizing some of the inherent strong suits of Bosley's staff is one of the first points he makes. But Almond has also built an extensive incentive program for the company.

Bosley's also has mystery shoppers who come in every few months, which again factors into part of the team score. So regardless of who is on the floor the day the mystery shopper comes in, their score impacts everybody on the team and it is all a part of the incentive program. At each quarterly appraisal, the store manager meets with each staff member and discusses the evaluation. Almond brings that information in as well - “it's a teaching tool as well as feedback. This is how we made customer service and product knowledge part of the incentive program.”

These are ambitious schemes for a regional pet food chain and Almond insists it's all necessary. “We do a lot of things. But you must. For a little 23-store chain, we're really sophisticated in a lot of ways. I would say our staff performance and incentive program is head and shoulders above just about anybody's.”

Bosley's is a private company and Almond doesn't want to divulge competitive information. But he will talk about generalities. “Are sales increasing? Yes, we are having outstanding results. Last year was the best year ever! Driven by the rewards and incentive program, we are doing well. We started by re-building the business a brick at a time and eventually we just got into our own. Finally, so many things came together and we're seeing the results.”

Bosley's wins awards too. The Consumers' Choice Award, an organization that hires independent research to poll consumers about their favourite stores, has given Bosley's many accolades. “We have won best pet store in Greater Vancouver for 11 years in a row. That's a major award. We also win lots of readers' choice awards for best pet store in Nanaimo and Richmond.”

But Almond isn't sitting on his laurels; he's already working on a new development. “We launched a brand new web site. We're still learning how we can use it and communicate with our customers. It's all about reinforcing our relationship with our customers.”

Jumping from an international accounting firm into the fast-moving world of a small retail chain was the right move for Ken Almond. He says he's having a great time with it and under his and his team's leadership the company is flourishing. “It's a wonderful business to be in because it's such a feel-good business for the most part. Pet lovers getting to share time with other pet lovers and their pets – it doesn't get any better than that.”

Written by Beverly Cramp

Reprinted with permission from Retail Connections Magazine April 2010 issue. Retail Connections is published on behalf of Shelfspace The Association of Retail Entrepreneurs

Category: Corporate