Article Excerpt:
TWST: We would like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Conn's and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Mr. Frank: Our company is actually over 100 years old. We started as a small plumbing company around 1890. In the late 1960s, we began to expand into a multi-store type of organization. We were a single store until the 1960s. Then in 1994, we were about a $100 million company, pre-taxing about $3 million. At the time I became the CEO, I had been employed with the company since high school in 1957, so I knew quite a bit about the company. I have watched it grow and have been a vital part of that growth since 1994. The numbers speak for themselves. We will approach $700 million this year in total revenues and our pre-tax will be many multiples of the $3 million pre-tax that we were doing 10 years ago. The people that we compete with are companies that primarily sell major electronics and some small electronics. We also sell large video equipment and major appliances. In addition to that, we sell bedding and lawn and garden products. We have a large credit deployment and we finance about 60% of all of the merchandise that we sell. We're often asked, what is the profile of the customer who you serve? We don't choose to profile customers. We have refrigerators that sell for $290 and refrigerators that sell for $6,000, and the same with televisions and other products. So we feel that everyone who lives in America is a potential customer of ours, and we want a program that will serve their needs, both from a product and a credit standpoint. We compete with every large national box there is, in every market that we are in. We are primarily in Texas and Louisiana with 56 stores. Texas has a large population of 38 million and when you couple that with Louisiana's population, geographically and population-wise, we're larger in those two states than most nations in the world. We cover a lot of geography and population. We compete with stores like Fry's, Sears, Best Buy, Circuit City, Lowe's and Home Depot. I cannot think of any national company that we do not compete with. Our strategy is to build relationships with consumers as opposed to making a sale. We want a life-long relationship. We feel like the value over the lifetime that an individual makes purchases for the kinds of products we sell is worth about $200,000. Therefore, we really don't want to sell just a TV, just a washer or just a microwave. We want to sell them everything they need in their home with the products that we handle. Therefore, we nurture that relationship with a number of strategies that we include in a comprehensive in-house audit of each sale we make to a consumer to make sure that it has been sold properly, delivered properly and installed properly.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CONN
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