This is a Customer Relationship Business

Ladies and Gentlemen in Pawnland!

I wanted to take this time to share some thoughts we have about our industry and some that we have shared recently with a number of our colleagues and various PCG family members and believe to be our core operational mantras.

So much has changed over the past 30 years in our industry it is amazing to look back and see where we were at once upon a time compared to what we are dealing with today.

30 years ago who would have ever thought that you could buy stock in a public pawn shop company on the NYSE?

There is no question the industry has transformed itself more in the past 30 years than in its prior 3000+ years of its known existence.

We used to say when are the banks going to really get into the pawn business and if you look at the institutional shareholders of ALL of the major publicly traded pawn companies you will find litany’s of groups such as: banks, joint venture groups, hedge funds, investment banks, special equity groups, stockholders and more that are in our industry in a big way today and expanding their presence in our world.

We are in an age old industry that has gone thru some major transitions over the many years of our existence.

All of this brings to my contribution of this blog and to the industry.

The most consistent reverberant I hear across the world as I witnessed up close and up front from personal experience as well as operators on every conceivable level in many different scenarios is the following.

At the end of the day the most successful organizations and winning components of the successful operations we get to witness knows that:

“This IS a Customer Relationship Business”

For many years we watched some of our multi store giants and many independents burn through thousands of employees and rotate personnel like stock in grocery stores.

Witnessing this up close and being operational and watching the side effects for decades have proven a number of things.

The most successful operations that we have been able to work and consult with ALL illustrated some or all of the following traits:

Personnel need to be engaged and love their jobs
Organizations need to create positive work environments – people want to come to work
Organizations create productivity and profit based sharing programs for all levels in the management chain – no limits to what can be earned for honest production
Organizational TREE – starts with the customer and works its way up from there
Management teams or stores that focus on the customer needs, wants, desires and emotions
Operations that understand that our customers are not just simply digits or numbers on our bottom lines
Delivering “best in class” service to fully service our customers’ needs
Understands “Everybody” is special

For those who get this level of chemistry they seem to be weathering the resistance to change and economic swings very well.

One of our group participants many years ago – John Thedford once said “pawn shops never mature with the right folks properly engaged in work they love to do and you keep them there”.

No truer words have been said and it is absolutely team work that makes stores or organizations successful.

In short, always be on your best toes and KNOW that you are making a difference in folks lives every day – we help them keep their phones on, gas in the cars, tuition paid, electricity on and that story goes on and on as we all know.

We are here to help people every day and kind considerate teams are consistently winners.