was the best lesson that I ever learned. It was really hard to work to fund the store and run the business outside of hours. The hours were crazy, but I was twenty and thought we could do it all – no risk, nothing to lose, what the hell? The worst we could do was keep working until we’d paid off the rent.
I really enjoyed it. I discovered that customer service was something that was very special if you delivered it properly. That’s the deal. We worked at making sure we had the right product. We would do anything. I would deliver music in the middle of the night. I would take customer orders. People began to know that they could trust us. Debbie would take the orders and then Jeff or I would deliver them in the evening, which was–
BK: unheard of?
BB: We didn’t know it back then, but it was a pretty special service. We were doing it because we wanted the $12 sale so desperately. I started to understand the right service, the right approach, the ways in which you could really endear yourself to lots of customers. It was a country town, so it was easy. There weren’t enough customers, but the ones you had knew you and trusted you.
Then, I did the boldest thing, but it turned out to be very successful. I figured that we were really good at what we did and we’d learned a lot, but it was the location that was wrong – both the town and the location of the store. I saw a music store for sale in Parkmore, Keysborough, which was a proper shopping centre in the suburbs of Dandenong in Victoria. I walked into the store and there, smoking away with his silly cat was a bored retailer. He owned the store but had lost total interest. It was dirty, grungy, smelly and unstocked. The guy had lost the love of what it was about. He’d lost the love of music. He’d lost the love of serving people. He was a classic story of, ‘you’re interrupting me and I hate you all. The reason I’m failing is because you’re all too hard on price. You don’t buy enough.’
So we bought that store. It was a big decision. We were losing money like no tomorrow. I needed to keep working to fund the losses on the store we already had and here I was making a decision to buy another one, leave my piecework and work full-time in the record store. But again, I was twenty-one and didn’t have a lot to lose. So, that’s what we did. That store was turning over $2 000a week when we bought it, which was terrible. Six months later, we were doing $15 000 a week. I still have that graph somewhere. I graphed it every week.
BK: What did you pay for the store?
BB: I wish I could tell you. I just cannot remember. Whatever we paid, it was a great decision.
BK: I’m wondering how long it took to pay back?
BB: I remember back then I thought, ‘If I could make $20 000, life would be wonderful. My own business and $20 000! I remember, once we built that store up, in that year, I made $80 000.
BK: How much was a house worth at that time?
BB: To buy a house back then, thirty-two years ago, about $80 000.
BK: That’s a huge achievement, earning enough to buy a house in the town you’ve grown up in, in a couple of years.
BB: Can you imagine? I’m a country boy. I’m as excited as. But, forget the money for the moment, we achieved that by paying attention to the customers. That’s all I’ve ever done. It’s, ‘What do they need? What do they want? What are they likely to want? How can I get it? How can I stay in stock?’ It was pretty simple in principle. ‘How do I start employing a couple of people? How do I get them to pay attention to the customers?’
In those days, it was simple. Look them in the eye, walk up to them, and say,‘Hi!’ I had such a ball working in that store. During the day I’d work on my own and, if I needed to go to the toilet, I had such good relationships with customers that they would walk in and I’d say, ‘Hey! Nice to see you again. Would you mind the store while I dash off to the toilet?’ I think about the things that I did back then, it was–
BK: Crazy.
BB: But it was great fun. That’s the sort of rapport I had. I was working very hard, but it didn’t feel like work. As a matter of fact, from then on, it’s never really been work, to be honest. It’s never really been work for me. I actually enjoy most of it.So that was the second store.
‘I really enjoyed it. I discovered that customer service was somethingthat was very special if you delivered it properly.’
BK: Did it start to pay out some of the problems in the first store or was it supporting it?
BB: It was supporting it. It was a three-year lease that we took on that Pakenham store and the day the lease came around–
BK: Gone?
BB: Gone. It never made a cent. To put it in perspective, back then, 7-inch singles were $1.99. I remember ringing Debbie one night and asking, ‘How did we go today?’ and she said, ‘We’re going well.’ The total takings for the day were $3.98.That sticks in my mind thirty-two years later. Can you imagine that call? We were in trouble, we weren’t making any money.
But it was true, it was a bad location. It’s laughable. Those one or two stores eventually grew to more than three hundred stores. At our peak, we had Sanity, we had HMV in Australia, we had the Virgin stores in Australia and, essentially, more than one in three records were being bought through one of our stores.And even twenty-five years later, we never, ever, had a store in Pakenham. And Pakenham had grown as a town–
BK: So, it had been marked as never to be forgotten!
BB: Well, no, it wasn’t, because I wouldn’t put one in there. It was just that we were twenty-five years ahead.
BK: There was no market even twenty-five years later?
BB: Yes. Two green guys out of school thought that you’d just open up a store and it would work–
BK: How important is location to retail?
BB: Well, it was my very first, very early lesson – don’t put a store in a town that can’t support it. I put the store in an arcade, which is even worse. Only about three people walked down it every day. But it did teach us a number of good things. Location is very important.
BK: So you’ve taken the step from that one store, you get to the next store.your takings go from $2 000 to $15 000 primarily around service, around interest in the customer.
BB: Back then, it was all about service, paying attention to the customer. We certainly learned a lot more about systems and processes and structures in order to grow, but I’ve never lost those lessons. It’s about the customer – always.
BK: What are the things that you do to know your customer better?
BB: I think there are two parts to that, particularly if we fast-forward to where we are today. One is, you’ve got to stay close to your customer. Now, I have a huge, deep fear that my life that’s become
