Dan Brettler, CEO of Car Toys Business and Pleasure

Dan Brettler, CEO of Car Toys Business and Pleasure

Dan Brettler, CEO of Car Toys Business and Pleasure Brettler, Dan I am going to introduce the speaker this morning. I want to again that this Dean Speaker series occurs every quarter. We bring in professionals from the business community to speak to our students and inspire us to all the good work that we do in group business. We are privileged to have Dan Brettler to the chairman and CEO of Car Toys. Most of you have purchased some kind of Car Toys. That is good. He has over 1100 employees and 52 stores in four states: Washington, Oregon, Texas and Colorado. They have jumped to every part of the country. There is probably a story with that. At the end he also founded other businesses including Wireless Advocates—wireless services and phones through Costco stores. I am sure that was an interesting story as well. IN addition, Dan has offered us expertise to the community. He is currently chairman of the United Way of King Country board of directors. He serves on the board for Boys and Girls clubs in King Country. He has been co-chair for the committee to end homelessness in King Country. I hope that you will engage with him this morning about his business and about his civic work as well. He is the father of 2 high schoolers Quinn and Max. One in college now actually. Great. Dan, thank you very much for coming. Thank you for the introduction. Good morning everybody, how are you doing? Good so I graduated with a marketing degree 27 years ago so you can see that anything I learned in college is applicable or not but I can tell there is one thing that has not change and that is nobody ever wants to sit in the front row. And that is the case 27 years ago and it looks like that is the case now. It is nice to see everybody. I appreciate the opportunity to share some of what I do with you this morning. Probably can do that for 30 to 45 minutes and then we will open it up to questions as long as you would like to do that. It is interesting to me, how the bio rolled out because it reinforces hopefully I am on topic. I usually speak with my profit business hat on or I speak independently with my non-profit hat on. But rarely do I speak with both the same time. So we will see how that goes. It is interesting, It caused me to developing a PowerPoint last weekend to sort of think about the skills that have crossed over and I suppose that is one of the outputs we have this morning. So what I want to do is give you a fair amount of information at a fairly quick pace. So if it is too fast just raise your hand and ask a question if you like along the way. I thought I would tell you about my two businesses Car Toys and Wireless Advocates, some of the lessons I have learned looking in the rearview, some of the things we are working Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions on going forward as we continue to evolve both of those businesses. Then I am going to show a short video to you involving homelessness that the community has and that will hopefully work as a good segway and then we are going to talk about what I am deeply involved in as well which is the 10 year plan to end homelessness. We will see if we can put the things together form a skill set and output base at the end. So with that here we go. We will talk about Car Toys and Wireless Advocates. Is the working okay for you guys? Ok, thumbs in the back. So at 10,000 feet this is kind of the organization that I run. We have got 2 businesses. Between them they represent about 2700 employees and about 425 million dollars of annual revenue and about 430 outlets 49 actually Car Toy stores in the 4 states you just heard, 381 Costco kiosks so if you go into a Costco today you see what is called a 4 pallet kiosk and it says “wireless phones”. It is not represented as Car Toys. If you look at their badge closely enough it says Wireless Advocates. We try to look like we are Costco employees. We operate as if we are in their living rooms and servicing their members but those are actually our employees. There are about 1700 employees in 381 Costco’s across the country. We will talk about that. We have been growing the business and we will get more detail. This is just kind of a high level look both form a retail channel from Car Toys and also from outside non retail channels and an online business and in Costco we are primarily wireless phones and service. We also support their satellite Direct TV business and we are doing what is called a broadband test with a Clear Wire. So that is just a high level look and when I refer to the word enterprise over the next half hour please allow me to be referring to both Toy Advocates and Car Toy Advocates. That is sort of what I call the enterprise. So in summery 430 places, 425 million revenue, 2700 employees, pretty strong growth. We will talk about the Costco story a little bit. Our core competencies include, we think we know the mobile electronics business. We have been selling car stereos for 21 plus years now. We think we know the wireless business. I was around when phone, I will date myself several times here this morning; I was around when phones first got sold, first turn into Seattle. Most of you probably weren’t born; probably none of you were born yet. Because that was back in 1983 or so. Was anybody born then? No? So I thought. So phones launched 3200 dollars. they had this thing called a transceiver. Transceiver you take for granted. Anybody not have a cell phone in this room? One, one in the back. We know what to get him for Christmas. OS inside that cell phone it is called a transceiver. It is a chip. If used to be about this big. If you think about a car amplifier right, that are about this size these days. It was bigger than most amplifiers you would ever buy and we had to find a place to stick it under the seat or in the trunk and then the hand set was like your old-fashion corded hand stet and it sat on a base station. Back then cars had these hubs for the transmission so you mount the box on the Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions transmission hump. You would have a handset on a cord and you would have a big amplifier called a transceiver that you would have to find. It was 3500 dollars back in the early 80’s when the phone is launched. So we think we know a bit more since the beginning for better or worse. On the Car Toy side we refer to ourselves as specialty retailers. It is all about adding value. It is all about better customer experience and we have got pretty good what we think, in the last two years, certainly lots to learn about the store within a store, big box retail. So that is that kiosk model within a big warehouse club. Of course I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have lot of people working around me. So as an organization or enterprise, we will try to drop down in a minutes. We will try to build the best class retail organization within those two large channels and competencies. We are trying to be a great place for people to work within our industries, just a general because of the tracking of talented employees. It is just critical for anything to get done. We want to be a great place for people to come in a buy from us either place we would much rather have a good experience for people to come in and buy from us. We want you to have a good experiences in something that you feel comfortable telling your friends that you would go back to, that you would send them to. We always need to be fully accountable with the results, do what we say we are going to do. I have shareholders that I am responsible to so for those shareholders we need to deliver that creates jobs that create return on all of our investments. As an enterprise our mission to grow the business at least 10 percent per year both individual and within each sector and combined and then culturally we want to build a best class organization that is build around our customers that every decision that we do should be right for our customers. That operationally executes very well because that keeps our costs down of our transactions to do things right and on time the first time that we retain our employees so it is less expensive to train them than it is to recruit them although we spend a lot of money on training. We continue to become experts. We never want to say that we are experts. We hope that we are good. We just always want to get better. So this is a slide that is always really interesting for me to talk about and sometimes I tend to put the life of running these companies in phases.

View Full Text

Details

  • File Type
    pdf
  • Upload Time
    -
  • Content Languages
    English
  • Upload User
    Anonymous/Not logged-in
  • File Pages
    20 Page
  • File Size
    -

Download

Channel Download Status
Express Download Enable

Copyright

We respect the copyrights and intellectual property rights of all users. All uploaded documents are either original works of the uploader or authorized works of the rightful owners.

  • Not to be reproduced or distributed without explicit permission.
  • Not used for commercial purposes outside of approved use cases.
  • Not used to infringe on the rights of the original creators.
  • If you believe any content infringes your copyright, please contact us immediately.

Support

For help with questions, suggestions, or problems, please contact us