Rapid Fire 30-in-30: Company Stores with Rich Patterson (a skucon 2018 Production)

At skucon in Las Vegas, our Chief Content Officer, Bobby Lehew, conducted a few back-to-back, Q&A sessions on the subject of how to use digital tools to drive sales. We called it “Rapid Fire, 30-in-30” and featured 30 questions posed to industry experts. It was a fast-paced and informative session intended to provide high impact answers in a very short amount of time. Our first installment was with Jake Malishkevich of Promodealer on how to drive sales through click campaigns and social media advertising. This segment features Rich Patterson, founder of Patterson Brands, on the subject of company stores.

Born and raised in a small town in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, Rich graduated from Simon Fraser University in 1992 with his Bachelor of Arts in Communications. He worked in government and the private sector in senior public relations & marketing roles — most notably as Roots’ marketing manager. Since 2005 Rich’s own company has been transforming client brands into elevated and engaging products, designs, and packaging.

In this session, we discuss topics such as:

• Should you consider company stores as a service offering?

• What types of customers and margins are possible with stores?

• Are stores really profitable or are they always only loss leaders?

• The best and worst store experiences.

• The difference between the types of stores such as corporate stores versus pop-up stores.

• Contract or no? If so, what’s in a successful contract or agreement?

• Service fees: Do you charge for service fees? Fulfillment?

• Commission conflicts or challenges with compensating salespeople for stores.

Thanks to Rich for sharing his expertise and for always being such a helpful and encouraging member of the commonsku community