The benefits of a RTO War Room w/ Joe Milligan

     There are some traditions in RTO as old as time. A good old fashion sell a thon is one of them. Over the years these sales events have progressed and defined themselves to be a major staple in the day to day business of the RTO Industry. War Rooms are a great way to motivate your teams, make some sales, and most importantly grow by renting and moving product. But just how does one prep and execute a sales War Room? And more importantly what really is a War Room? Stick around and listen to Pete Shau and Joe Milligan describe this amazing event in detail.

Sponsored by APRO,  Vox-Pop-Uli, and Jeraud Norman Marketing

Visit us at www.thertoshowpodcast.com 
Email us at: pete@thertoshowpodcast.com

Transcript

Pete Shau 0:07

Hello, and welcome to the RTO show. I'm your host, Pete Chell. And today, man, today is going to be a different day because we're going to talk about something that we haven't talked about in a while, and it's the day-to-day business. And we want to talk about war rooms. And guys, I'm going to tell you right now, the war rooms are so much fun. They can really kind of put you over the edge. And today I have Joe Million with me who's working with Buddy Mac Holdings, Buddy's Home Furnishings. And Joe, why don't you tell us where you're from and a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 0:35

So I'm from uh Poto, Oklahoma, a little bitty town, middle of nowhere. I've been in rent to own about 18 years now. Got into it in the mid-ground and just worked my way up. So just had fun with it and just love what I do.

Pete Shau 0:49

Well, I'm gonna tell you right now, if you guys know anything about war rooms, they're fun depending on what side of it you're on, depending on if you're prepared, and depending on what you really get out of it. Because sometimes war rooms can be so beneficial for what you're doing. And then other times it's just a grind that you got to go through if you're not ready. But what we wanted to talk to you today about is the preparation for war room. What is a war room and how it could benefit you and your team? So, where in God's name did we even come up with the statement war room? Where did that come from?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Well, as long as I've been in rent to own, really what it was explained to me as is it's kind of like being in the military and how you have a a group of generals or or leaders that are in a room and they're literally just leading the war. So they're leading the charge into battle and they're trying to keep their troops inspired and they're trying to make sure that they keep up to speed with everything that's going on. Um and you just you gotta motivate them, move them and keep them heading in the right direction through no matter what comes in the battle.

Pete Shau 1:54

So as a group of people who are standing around and we're all focused, or I should say, you all, right, are all focused on getting everybody working. I mean, when we're to describe a war room in its general sense, a war room is basically regionals or DMs, however your company puts it, and you sit down in a central location where you're calling into your troops, which would be your different stores, your different locations, pumping them up to make sales, and you are in competition in a sense, or no?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Oh, yeah, absolutely, big competition. Because it's it's it's not just the people that are on the ground floor that are fueling the fires. It's like you have regional against regional, you have divisional against divisional. It's like everybody is just there trying to get bragging rights for the next war room. Like, hey, we whooped your tail. Like we have to make sure that we beat them, we stomp them into the ground. It's not just a, hey man, I got two more sales than you know. I gotta literally just obliterate you in battle and make sure you don't come back from it.

Pete Shau 2:54

So, what we're talking about, let's talk about the scoring and why we call it a war room. Because really what happens in a war room is from a central location, we have already done some prep work. Two weeks, three weeks from from that particular point in time is when you start doing your prep work, right? And the idea is to gain, whether it be customers, sales, you're gaining in your rental reps are basically the idea of growing in a specific time frame and a very short amount of time. But your prep work is gonna start what? What would you say? About a month, maybe four weeks, five weeks out?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

If you're really good, then you're you're gonna do it a minimum of four weeks, because you got to have at least four weeks, because you've got to do all of the footwork, all of the gorilla marketing, all of the phone calls, uh, all of the prep as far as getting your product in, getting your materials for everything that you need out into the field as far as marketing. If you don't have your your flyers out for what your event you're building, you don't have time to have those touch points to talk to everybody and make sure that you get in contact with them to let them know this event is coming. All of that lead time, you know, into that four weeks is really just has to happen. Because if you falter anywhere in that four weeks, then then you're going to misstep in the big game. So you've got to make sure that that you have all of that lead time to be able to do it.

Pete Shau 4:14

Well, what we did was so we would probably go out six months out. Because I mean, sometimes you can do a yearly calendar. We did six months out. And so in the six month range, we would pick out a time frame and we said, okay, this is probably our most beneficial point where we're probably losing customers or we're losing rental revs in that particular time frame, whether it be payouts, whether it be the summertime, because that's our art, that's the cycle with, you know, rent to own, especially in Florida. I don't know about, you know, in Oklahoma, but we take a beating in the summertime, right? Kids are at home, the expenses go up, you know, the AC bill goes up and they start eating more. And what happens? They get rid of that disposable uh income that they normally spend with us. And so you try to come up with those time frames where you can utilize getting as many people back on the books, as many accounts reopened as possible and taking care of your customers. So we would go our six months out. We would usually do it by December 15th for the following six months, the first two quarters, and we'd say, okay, where is it that we can make the biggest impact? And then we come up with the deals. Now, the deals are probably the best part of it. What would you say in your 18 years has been some of the craziest deals that you say happen for a room that help motivate get some sales?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Boy, some of the craziest. I mean, I've seen a lot of them. Uh, probably the best one I've ever seen was 12 months same as cash. Ooh. I mean, get giving somebody 12 months to pay off a cash price when they've only got a 24-month contract. If you do the math on regular payments, every contract, half of that is the payout, right? For the cash price. Right. So if you give them a whole year, they can't miss it. You literally can't miss your cash price. You got 12 months to do it. That's probably the craziest one I've ever seen. Um, the the next craziest would just be hey, let me give you 20% off of the the actual rate plus 30% off of the term. I've seen crazy stuff like that. But it's it's really all that is is to get them in the door.

Pete Shau 6:09

So we're six months out. We picked the right date. Now we're about four weeks away. Now, this is where you say the prep work comes in, right? We've already come up with kind of an established idea of what we're gonna do. Let's say this time we're gonna do a two-day special. Now, if anybody's ever done a war room, it's usually over two days. It's usually more than than one day, not really like three or four days. I've heard of them going three days, usually Thursday, Friday, and then sometimes I'll squeeze a Saturday in there just because you're like, hey, why, why, why not? Right. But it's usually like a Thursday and a Friday or a Friday and Saturday. And then you get all your guys together. So now we're four weeks out, and what we do is a prep where we say, okay, this is the sale. And let's say we run with the 12 months same as cash or whatever it is that you guys do for your particular locations or for your particular company, it's something that has to be not the norm and so far off the norm that it really is a small event. You don't really want all your customers taking off and having the same thing for like a week or two because eventually it's gonna hurt your turn, it's gonna hurt your profit. But you are enticing them and you're bringing them back in. So now you're four weeks out, Joe. We're four weeks out. Right. What is the prep work at four weeks out before we start getting really in there? Why are we doing it four weeks out?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Well, four weeks out is really it's it's what I consider the soft start. So it's like we're we're starting word of mouth, right? So every customer, every touch point that comes in, we're gonna start talking about it. So it's like, hey, we've got this great event that's coming out at this date, this time. It's gonna be there. We want you to know about it. We want to get you excited early. And then we're gonna continue to talk about it as we go along. But I mean, you're really just that motivation of telling them it's coming, it's coming. And it's it's almost like uh like in a movie when when they're trying to build the climax, right? Build up to it and actually get to that point. That's really what you're trying to do. You're trying to start out soft, entice them a little bit. You don't tell them about the deal yet, but you just tell them, hey, it's coming, it's coming. And then you get a little closer and you start talking more about it. So it just, it's just literally trying to start building that actual excitement behind it.

Pete Shau 8:08

So four weeks out, the way I always saw it was this is the time frame where you're gonna start realizing who you're gonna hit, how you're gonna hit them, right? Are you gonna attack your customers who have had paid-out events? If you're gonna attack customers that maybe had an account, but they didn't finish it or didn't complete their rental agreement, but they did leave for whatever particular reason, trying to get them back on the books or the referrals, somebody who hasn't been with us before, but somebody we're trying to get on there. So we're we're spending that time focusing on it. Like you said, kind of like chumming the water, right? We're just, we're just we're just getting a little bit, right? Just get a little bit. But then usually it changes now two weeks out. Now, two weeks out, it's a little bit more of direct marketing, right? Isn't that where we start really kind of getting into it? Like, hey, this is the time of the event and what's going on, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Right. So, like two weeks out, I would say that you're you're heavily, you're already out in the market. So you're gorilla marketing out there. So you're you're handing out flyers, you're you're talking to businesses, you know, pitching to their the the community in the area, and you're you're starting to make phone calls, right? Because by this time, by two weeks, you're your flyers have already started the land, right? So you want to get out there and actually make sure, hey, did you get the flyer? Do you understand it? Do you know how the deal works? Do you know how much it can save you? Are you are you excited? Are you ready to come in? How many people are you bringing? And like you said, you already know who you're you're pushing to because you you know where you were down at in the market. So so it it every war room always tailors to what you are down on, right? So if you had your customer loss was the biggest issue, right? Or maybe you're still okay on customers, but your ideal loss was the big issue. So you're you're gonna drive towards whatever it was. So then by that point, you know I'm either targeting single agreements or or I'm targeting the returns or I'm targeting the payoffs. But the biggest thing is just getting out there and making sure you continue to build that excitement because now you can talk about the deals. It's close enough. You're not gonna hurt your sales between now and the event because it's only two weeks away. You're not gonna hinder that. So now you can start talking about it.

Pete Shau 10:09

Well, now we're gonna talk about what I've seen. And I've seen the other side of a war room now. And sometimes tell you guys right now, I've seen guys when they when they see a big event, they have a tendency to hold back a little bit, right? You're two weeks out. And they're like, hey, Ms. Jones, I got a really big deal going on. I've kind of spoiled it by telling you ahead of time. Now I might think about holding that. What we call in the business, you guys know it, you heard the words, it's sandbagging. We put it, we put it away in our little stash until the event. Now, it does help the customer in a sense that they do get those benefits of the event. But then, in your opinion, I mean, how does that hurt the store if they hold back in that two-week period?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

First part of that, I mean, is that the you want to make sure and encourage them ahead of time that they're not gonna sandbag, right? So, how how we do that is in my my opinion, is making sure that they have a uh have that deal in their back pocket. So you don't want to bring that out to somebody that's they're actively wanting to sell in your store or buy in your store. So if they're actively wanting to buy in your store, then you're gonna want to make sure you do everything you can to close them that day. But you've got that deal in your back pocket. So you can pull that out at any time and you can talk about it and say, hey, I'm gonna save this sale by getting it for two weeks from now. That's how it's supposed to work. But like you said, we got a lot of people that are competitive. I've got a lot of those on my team, and they uh they really take it seriously when we get into these war rooms. And the biggest thing that they do is they uh they hurt their their sales going into it. So you'll see a a dip by just on an average in my market is about 10 sales less per per store going into those last two weeks. And it it really defeats the purpose at some at some point of it, because if you see that happening in your market, it really you're not doing any good. You're giving away prizes, you're giving away incentives, and you're doing things for it, and it's building it up for the wrong reason because you're you're going to get the exact same results you would have gotten over the whole two weeks, but you're gonna cram it all into one day. And it looks great on paper for two days, but it really does give you absolutely zero satisfaction out of it if it happens that way. So you've got to really watch them, harness them back in, pull them back in and say, hey, listen, we still got to get the daily sales, we still got to hit that number. Um, and then we got to still build that excitement along with it.

Pete Shau 12:29

Well, that's what we called looking good, not being good. And unfortunately, it happens because what happens is you save it all for that event. You want to take care of that customer, but in this in the essence, you really didn't build new because you just kind of subtracted from what you had before and then built it all in one day. So it looks good on one day. But then your one day event is really almost marred because you really kind of dug yourself a little bit of a ditch, you mowed it over, and then you just refilled it with what you did that day. Now, talking about prizes, so we're two weeks out, we start doing our real marketing. And the idea is from what I've always understood, is we're doing outside marketing. So we're doing guerrilla marketing, like you said, directly to the neighborhoods that we're around. We're knocking on doors, we're giving out pamphlets, we're doing ED DMs, we're making sure that some people still do yard bombs. And I don't know if you guys ever do it, where it's little little packages of things that you would put in people's uh yard. Sometimes we don't do that anymore. I know post-COVID is a little different. But I mean, getting out there and making the phone calls, but then in the store, it was always here's a handout of the event. I wouldn't really sacrifice the sale I have today to push it over unless I'm losing it, right? Like you said, you kind of put that in your back pocket. Right. But you always want to have as many touch points as possible. But then you said something there. Now, this is a war room. What does that got to do with prizes, my man? What are we talking about here?

SPEAKER_01 13:49

But I mean, if it's kind of like what you you always say to the victor go the spoils, right? So that's a that's a good saying. Yeah, yeah. It's it, I mean, that really is what it is. So, I mean, if you're if you're going to incentivize somebody, you've got to have something to dangle in front of them, right? You've got to have that that carrot in front of them to be able to get them to really produce big results because you don't want to have a war room and not have some big explosion of an event, right? So, you know, you gotta have something. You gotta have it, it can be anything from little prizes like shirts and hats and cups and you know, all the way up to to money prizes, thousands of dollars. You can give them away product that you have that you just literally can't give away to a customer, right? Looks great to them, but it's it helps us on both sides because we get rid of something that's uh that's just been sitting in our market, right? And you use that as an incentive. But it it really is just that. I mean, it's you've got to have something to push them. You can't just talk them into it. They gotta have something to shoot for and go for.

Pete Shau 14:46

Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna back up a little bit and I'm gonna I'm gonna retouch on something you said there, because you said thousands of dollars. Okay, when I do war rooms, we've been cheap. But it really depends on what and and the way that you guys want to do it in your locale and your specific store, because I've heard several different ways that that we do it. Now I've heard that they might offer up low book items that are still in great condition, that they want to give to their employees that perform very well. I've also heard, like you said, we got the cups and the coozies and the swag that we just give out to our guys so that they can really take pride in what they've done. And then I've heard recently that they're throwing money at you if you do a really good job. And I think that's awesome. But let's go back to the nature of the beast. It's really to gain your customers back, right? To get your ideal. But then, like you said, the 90-day idol. So if you guys have anything going on in your store, if there's something that's really hard to sell, if you walk across something that you just can't move, these are the events to move those products that are really, really stagnant, to get your showroom changed around and to put some emphasis on some really good deals, on maybe something that normally would be passed up, because it could be several different reasons. It could be because there's not a good enough cash price on it, there's not a good enough rate on it, or in its essence, it makes for something that's great, but not necessarily something that's wanted, right? You got appliances, you got fridges, you got TVs, that's a daily staple. Sometimes you just don't need that 15-inch, you know, pillowtop king-size mattress because it's just not in the budget. But now it is. And we've been sitting on that for a little while. And now we've waited. We came up with the best time to give the best deal on it. And yes, you might be sacrificing some of your profit. You might be sacrificing some of your turns. We won't get into the depreciation part of it, right? But if it's sitting on your floor, it's it's starting to like build a home there. I mean, you're paying per square footage. Let's get it moved. So, what are some of the things that we're trying to do as far as product concerns? What are we trying to move? I mean, not just 90-day idle, but what are some of the other things that you think we should really try moving in these special events?

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Well, I mean, uh obviously the biggest one is 90 idle, right? Because we have to pay on that. Every day that it's past 90, we're paying more money on it, right? And it's costing us. And we want to make money. That's what we're in this business for, not just to help people, but to make money. And uh, but the biggest things that I like to push for are are things that are everyday items that are a better deal, right? Like in really entice them with it. So if you've got a uh an abundance of any product, it doesn't matter if it's living rooms or bedrooms, and maybe you overstocked in a category, right? That's your key go-to. Like I've if I've got, you know, 15 bedrooms per store and I only need seven per store, I really need to consolidate these and get these out of here as quick as possible. Hey, I'm gonna throw a killer deal at it and and give more incentive to move that, right? If it's just the 90 day, then hey, put a spiff on it. Put put uh some big prize out like we did in this one where we, you know, threw a thousand dollars out there if we're gonna for the person that actually wins that because they sold as much 90 out of as possible. But that's really all selling is, right? Is is what product are you excited about? What product are you putting emphasis on? Um, so it in it's your store, your market, your your business, which one do you really need to get moved, right? Or is it something that's new in your store that you just want to build excitement around in general? Right? So, what if I just got in a new product that's new to the market, nobody's ever rented it before, and I want to build excitement around that. So I'm just gonna use this opportunity to build that excitement and start talking about it. And maybe it's not a different price than it was, but it's something that we get behind and we start moving it. And that's that's where that passion that we were talking about earlier, it's it's that passion is what pushes that product.

Pete Shau 18:32

That's how those people get excited about it because we get excited about it. One of the other things I'd like to add is sometimes when I when I'm doing these events, I want my guys to push the product that have been sitting because maybe they're a little bit too pre-loved, right? We haven't we haven't been able to mark them down at a rate that's really going to get them moved, but they're they're worth it to somebody, just not at the price range that we had it at. And sometimes you've got those refurbs that are the things that's still holding on to a little bit of value as far as not just in your store, but on the computer, right? It says, okay, it says you owe this on there, and you, you know, you're really scared to take that hit. But it's like, you know what? That's what these events are about. Not just moving your 90, but moving the idol that doesn't really just want to move. You know what I mean? It came back, it's it's not as great as it was, but it still has functionality. You've you've taken care of it, you've cleaned it, you refurbed it, you're getting it out there. That's a great time to be had as well, right? And we move those things. And then something else you said, now you always want to scale this to your location, to your amount of stores. So BMH right now, as far as Buddy's concerned, is sitting on about 84 locations? 84. So it's a little easier to say in this war room, we could put together a pot of about $1,000, right? Because if everybody decided to pitch in like, let's say 12, 13 bucks, we're gonna come up with a thousand. So it's not gonna hurt the stores. You might not have that many locations, and that's okay. You might want to scale it back to whatever suits your your position as far as what you can give or cannot give. And it's not always monetary. It could be monetary, but it could be monetary in a different form. It could be gift cards to have a great dinner, it could be a movie, it could be something that an event that's coming up in maybe your part of town. I know that down in Tampa, what we do is we have like the Lowry Park Zoo, we have uh different things that happen at the stress center where it plays or anything like that. And you can always build up to that. I would always encourage you to find out if you really want to have a great war room, ask your people what it is exactly that. That's what they want, right? Because you don't want to give them something they're like, oh, that's great, and then it's not gonna do anything. You really need to get them involved. And one of the games of getting them involved, not just in the sales aspect, is this what would make you really want to go the extra mile? If I could help you, if I could give you something within this particular price range or in this in something that's not a car, right? Right, what would it be? And how would that entice you? You know, would it would it really cause you to go the extra mile and get your people involved? But I think I've talked to Andrew about it, and and I think we've always talked around it. When you start coming into those days, those the last two weeks, and we're talking about what we can move and what deals we're gonna have and what people that we're targeting and and how we're marketing them, you know, you want to get the buy-in. You wanna get your people involved. And that's why I said ask them what motivates them, right? How do you get buy-in on that? How do you get buy-in to know that you know you can always have an event, but if you guys aren't into it, I don't care what you do, your people are the ones that are really working. So, what do you do to get that buy-in from the people, from your employees that say, you know what, Joe is Joe's killing it?

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Well, so I mean, for for me, for buy-in, I mean, I've I've got the benefit of having a bunch of guys that are really proud, right? So their pride is their motivator. So a lot of it is literally just getting their name in flashing lights, right? So it's you can have a lot of those. I do have some of my guys on my team that it's literally, hey, what can I give to my family, right? What can I do for my family? Hey, you you spoke about incentives, right? One of the best incentives you can give out costs you almost nothing, right? And that's a day off, right? Give them a pay. Day off. Give them a Saturday off that they never get, right? But but those kind of things are really good motivators. But like you said, it's it's absolutely finding out what motivates that individual. Because if you don't know what motivates them, as you're not going to be able to drive them successfully every single day of the year, let alone during this event. A lot of people, it is money. Money's a great motivator, right? But it's a short-term motivator. It's not a long-term motivator, right? Um, that'll fade off. The the biggest thing is is just the love of what they do, right? Um, a lot of them are just really excited to do what they do. We have that passion behind us, and we just it drives us. This is rent to own. If you don't have passion about rent to own, then you're in the wrong business, right? Absolutely. So it's it's gotta be that piece where it's like you really just love what you do.

Pete Shau 22:47

So we spend our time six months out taking an idea of when the best time to have this is. We've gone to four weeks out where we're really gonna start chumming the water a little bit. We're gonna start figuring out the best, the best ways to introduce it and how we're gonna do it and what we're putting on the flyers. Two weeks out, we're really making it happen. Okay. Now we're outside of the event. We're a couple of days out. Do you treat a couple of days out even more different than you would two weeks out? Or are you really doubling down on your marketing now?

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Absolutely, because it's it's like go time, right? It's it's kind of like uh you're you're about to go into battle and you've got to start digging in the trench, right? You've got to start getting prepared, really prepared. So um, for my market, my team, what we like to do every event is we like to go and have a call-a-thon, right? So we we get everybody together in a room and we we first we go over a little bit of training, like, right? Like we role play our situations, we we try to get prepared before we make a phone call. We know exactly what our deals are. We we pinpoint everything from hey, I know that this product is gonna be this price with this reduction. I've got it all planned out, right? We've got our battle plan. That's really what we're looking at. And and once we've got that battle plan down, then we take and we go to war, right? And what do we go to war with when we're doing sales, right? The biggest thing is your phone, right? You're gonna you're gonna start calling your customers and you're gonna get build your excitement along with their excitement, right? So the more that you build the excitement in the room of that call a thon, the more excitement they're gonna have on the phone. So two big factors that I like to take into consideration is one, they don't need to sit down. Rip the rip the chairs out of the room if you have. Okay, boot camp, right? Don't let them sit down because we all know you're gonna you're gonna have a louder voice when you're standing up, right, than when you're sitting down. You're gonna be more prone to smile when you're talking to them because you've got that that actual power behind your voice. Um, and and making those phone calls that way. And the more you build up the excitement, I'll even give away prizes in the actual call-a-thon, like precursor to actually going into the war room, um, and just build them up and get them to actually get those deals closed that night.

Pete Shau 24:58

Now, going into the event, let's say that you're you're a day out or so. What I'm gonna encourage is take a look at your dAP, take a look at your schedule, start clearing it off in the sense that if there's something that's gonna take your management staff away, your sales staff away from their eye on the ball, you need to clear that out. That needs to be that needs to go bye-bye. Absolutely. Unless you have a serious event that has to be taken care of, somebody needs a fridge, somebody has an absolute need that has to be taken care of, customer service always comes first because they're already customers. They're on the books, you take care of them. But if you don't have that, this is a good time to clear off that event because you want all hands on deck. You want everybody, including the delivery specialist, to be there. Now, will they be making sales? I don't know. It depends on how much you've trained them. And that would be a great training event to have them available so that they can see what you do and how you do it as far as on the counter, in the showroom, and on the phones. But let's say that they're gonna be out. What are they out doing? They're bringing people to your event, whether you have somebody standing outside the door with a little sign, or you have them taking care of the customers that are walking in because hopefully you've pushed that event enough to get people out of the walk-in traffic, or answering the phones, because hopefully at that point in time, all the marketing that you've done is gonna come to fruition and they start calling in. At least you have somebody who can answer the phone and kind of direct the traffic. So we're in the event, all hands on deck, we've cleared off the dAP. Do we make any changes to the hours? Do you what do you think? I mean, do you in your timeframe, do you believe that working longer hours or maybe being around a little bit longer is eventful to something like that?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the night, the night before when we're doing that call-a-thon, I mean, it's it's key to crucial to have that extra extended hour to be able to work a little bit more just to get prepared for it. But but even the day of like this is an extra hour that we're gonna be able to benefit from the power, the energy, the excitement of the first day of your war room. That's key. Because you're the reason you only do it for two days is because that starts to die off on day two, right? You you can't keep that excitement forever. So if you go into more than two days, you're gonna you're gonna die off. The excitement's gonna go down, you're gonna be, ah, it's just another day. They're just extending it, trying to get me to buy some more stuff, right? But the other part of that two days is you you've got to have those extended hours because you've got to give them time to get off work. You've got to give them time to get to the store to actually make the deal. You don't want to make any of your customers miss that opportunity. So that's definitely vital, definitely key.

Pete Shau 27:34

And we're creating a sense of urgency all the way through. We're pushing it out. We're making sure the drivers understand that, the collections team, because the collections team, they're doing something a little bit different than the sales team, right? Because the sales team is reaching out to let's say people are no longer on the books, they haven't been around or they're not around right now. And that's where the sales team comes in with their little pitches and their ideas because they're a little bit more polished in that resolve. But then you have your collections team, and they kind of talk to everybody who's already on the books. And if they're already doing that, they're the greatest people to push what's going on to the people who are already there, already on your books, somebody that you see every week or bi-weekly or monthly. They're the people that are going to be cheerleading in that event. And those are the so you really got to get everybody involved, and you've got to create that sense of urgency, not only for your team, but for the customers involved. Because, like you said, I mean, you can only cheer so much before you just die out, right? I mean, absolutely. Sparklers look the best in the first five seconds, because after that, they're gone. Right. And so you got to understand, just like just like Joe said, if if you don't push that event, it can't last forever. You can't have the end of the year sale in the middle of the summer. Yeah. So because it just doesn't work, right? So the sales got to be the way they are. They have to, they have to mean something, they have to be different. Now, in your opinion, as you're doing this and and the event is going on, what do what do you do as a general in the headquarters? And what is the point of calling it a war room? I mean, now what we used to do is we would call into sales and you know, kind of like a little bit of uh, you know, a little bit of smack talking going on, you know, from one store. So let's say you've got five different stores and you're a you're a general, a DM, an RM, and you're in the office, right? What is everybody doing? How does it actually flow and how does an actual war room day work?

SPEAKER_01 29:18

So, so like the war room is literally like a data center. So you're you're taking incoming calls from pretty much everybody at every single store. But you don't just want to take a call. If you take a call and it's just, hey, you know what? You got a sale, great, great job. Call me back when you get the next one. You build no energy with that, build no momentum. Like you said, you got to have the smack talk. So it may be as simple as, hey, you know, you know two stores are rivals and one of them calls up and you say, Man, that other store is kicking your tail. You better go out there and get some more sales because they're just really gonna drive it to you the next one that they do. So you really got to know your people and be able to push them that direction with that competitive behavior. But it's it's really just a matter of just continuing to push those troops. Like what like we said, it's a war room, right? So you're you're keeping them energized, you're keeping them fueled, you're keeping them pushing forward. And that is vital to their success that day. But it's also, they're going to remember this for the next one. They're gonna know that, man, when it's a war room, it's exciting, right? It's fun. We have a great time. We don't just give out prizes, but man, we do stupid stuff too. Like you may call in and we say, hey, you know what? If you sing a song, I'm gonna give you some more shots, right? Or uh, or hey, let me ask you a trivia question. And then we're gonna take that trivia question and we're gonna, we're gonna give you extra opportunities for that, right? But it's it's having fun with it. And the more fun you have, that fun is infectious, and and it really builds off to the troops as well.

Pete Shau 30:49

So basically we have we have what we call generals, again, the arm, the DMs, they're in there, maybe the divisionals are in there. And so your store makes a sale, they call in. And as they call in, whatever your point system is, because you're gonna have a point system and it could be one point per sale, it could be five points per sale, it could be different aspects of the sale. You got a new customer, you've got a specific ideal gain or a specific rental rev gain, or did you get that customer on a payment schedule that benefits the store, like a perfect pay? So you have your system and they call in. Now they're competing against each other, but it's usually in the form of prizes. Who can achieve a prize or who has the more chance of getting these prizes? And it's very scalable. So if you have one particular location for some people that I do have that listen to the show that have one location, what you would do is you would take your individual employees and you say, Hey guys, don't let Ben beat you. Don't let Jenny beat you, don't let Bob beat you. Whoever is the best salesman will probably get the better prizes. If you have two or three stores, then you scale it in that sense. You got store one, you got store two, you store three. Those are individual teams and they are going to fight for the correct prizes. And basically, like you said, bragging rights. I'm the better store. I made this happen. I grew most. And then you can go into a region. Well, I've got seven to ten stores, they're fighting for each other. If you have more than one region, now you have regions against each other and stores that you can put in competition, stores that might be bigger, right? Stores with higher revenues, put against stores with have lower revenues. So a low revenue store against a low revenue store to make it make it viable, right? But then you have the bigger revenue stores that can talk smack to each other and make it happen. And then the scale of the prizes really depends on a couple of things. Number one, how many you get. And number two, the quality, I think is always important because you can get three sales or three new customers, but you sold three sets of lamps. I don't know if that's really a great thing, right? And you also want to make sure that so you want to have a reward system that kind of benefits a lot of different things. Let's say customer gain, let's say rental revenue gain, let's say a perfect pay, or what we say is it like an auto pay situation, or maybe you were able to sell that particular product. And you, if you have one store, you pick out the product, you say, I've got four people, whoever sells this first. If you have multiple locations, you can say, I've picked one item in every location that's been either lingering the longest or it's it's it's just not been working for us. And I'm gonna tell everybody at that location, whoever sells this or a store, hey guys, you five stores have the opportunity of selling this. And if you can sell it, you're gonna get, like you said, it could just be a day off. Right? Anything. It's it's the bragging rights. And then pushing that forward, and then of course, you have a two-day event. So you might want to make something for one day or something for two days, or one for each day. Now you're gonna have to pick out what you see would be best depending on the people that you have, depending on your locations and the customers that you have, depending on the product that you have, but you got to figure that out. And that's that's usually the thing. Now, we've got six months out planning. We've got four months out where we're really kind of toning it in. We got two months where we're doing terrible marketing. Like we're just out there just giving, we're just giving them to the masses. We're telling everybody we see, you need to come. Okay. We're days beforehand and we start working on that. We really, really, like you said, what's the best weapon? It's a phone, right? We're calling everybody, we're making it happen. We're we're just letting it out. The event's happening. Now you're pushing your people along. You're giving them the goodies. You're like, yeah, you just won this, but man, you're still short on this. And oh, Bob over at store six, man, he's about to, he's about to get it. I'm just letting you know. Right now, he said he's gonna whoop you, right? So you get through all the smack talking, your two days are over. How do you present the spoils in a way that would make somebody want to really do it again? Because you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to oversaturate a war room because you you can only do it so many times, like you said before, you kind of warn it out. It's it's kind of yeah, you don't want to do it to the point where it's not worth it, right? So I would say at most maybe two times a year. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

I mean, you don't want to do it more than two times a year.

Pete Shau 34:58

Right. So how would you, Joe, how do you do how do you present the spoils of war to the victors in a way that that's like, you know, I mean, do you add trophies to it? Do you try do you put it on Facebook? Well, how do you do it?

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Uh, for for me, I mean, I have a I have an internal communications as far as, you know, we we basically use we WhatsApp, right? So we got a WhatsApp group for every part of our our region. And it's it's literally throwing their names out, throwing their their, hey, this this was first place, this was second place, this is what they took home, this was their their loot, this is exactly how well they did, um, and then rank it down through there. But but the bigger part is talking to everybody about it, you know, calling your stores, making sure they know how awesome they did, all the way down to the the bottom. Like it doesn't matter at the end of the day if John drove home 25 deliveries in one day, and and you've got you know, Jim down here at the bottom that drove home 10. And Jim's a little store, so 10 is really freaking awesome for him, right? So you gotta make sure you celebrate that still. But it's the other part, I think what's important, going back to the war room pride, is is making sure that it's something that's obtainable for everybody, right? You you don't want to give something and say, hey, the big stores are gonna win everything. Because then the little stores will never compete, right? They'll just have a regular day. You got to make sure it's relevant and that it's scaled properly to where everybody has an opportunity. So that's the biggest part of it. But the other part is making sure that you publicize it because you got to put it out there in front of your peers. Because if the little store kicks the big store's butt, I mean, you got to celebrate that in front of the big store because the big store is gonna be next time you go to that web war room, they're gonna be raring to go. They're gonna be ready. They're gonna want to kick that guy's tail because they can't believe they got beat in the first place.

Pete Shau 36:50

I think that was that was one of the reasons why I wanted to make sure that sometimes the quality of the sale is just as important as how many sales you get. Because you do have those smaller stores that have less traffic, they produce less volume in the sales aspect, but it doesn't mean the quality isn't there. It doesn't mean their COD isn't there. Right. And it doesn't mean that it in percentage-wise, that was a good day for them as well. I completely agree with that. If you have Slack, if you have Teams, if you use WhatsApp, it's a great time to put that on internally. And then sometimes take those pictures, which, if you're not taking pictures of everything, you're just not doing it, okay? Nowadays, it's just social media is concerned. If you're not taking pictures, it didn't happen. And you gotta put it out there. And whether it's on the social media pages of the Facebook or your social media pages or whatever it is, and how you celebrate those wins with everybody, because at the end of the day, everybody wins, right? No matter how you look at it, you've got to celebrate the one, the one deliveries, and you've got to celebrate the 10 deliveries, and you gotta celebrate the 25 deliveries. And you've got to do it all in a sense that at the end of the day, at the end of a war room, we're all on the same team. We're all here to make it happen. But it's about business, it's about pushing the business further. And the more time that you take to put into this, the better results that you get. And we want to tell you right now, from years and years and years of standpoints, war rooms are one of the best ways to make that happen. It's not the only one, but it's one of the best ways to do a friendly competition in between and really get your teams involved. Because I like to think that when you have those big events, it's also a good way to team build, right? I mean, you kind of get that team building event going on. Do you think that you created some good bonds through some of the war rooms that you've done in your days?

SPEAKER_01 38:33

Oh, absolutely. Not even like just on your actual personal team, but you you build it with the people that are calling in because you're in the war room, you may be taking a phone call from somebody else's store in another market, right? But you're still gonna drive them and be excited for them and push them the same way you did your team. So you're going to build up a little bit of a bond with them at that point. And then you've got the the generals themselves, right? You're all in there goofing off, having a good time, trying to celebrate, trying to stay excited, and you're gonna build a bond that way. But at the end of the day, like you said, it's it's about the business, right? So a win for the company, when everybody gets together and actually builds that wind, you can't help but have a bond built, right? Like we all achieve that, not just not just store whatever, right? But we actually all achieve that together. And that's the biggest thing. So if your goal was to build to gain 45 customers and you guys gain 52, man, that's everybody did that. One store didn't do that. It happened with everybody. So it it absolutely does.

Pete Shau 39:34

I'm gonna give you guys a couple of words of advice. This is from Pete's years and years of of war rooming from different companies, so to speak. I mean, it's all in the rent-to-one industry, right? But one thing that I think if you have the opportunity to do, you should do is the first bit of advice that I think a tip I should say is sometimes it's good to have a belt or a trophy that goes around. And well, your trophy could be uh tailored around maybe your company name, it could be tailored around your company mascot. It could just be tailored around the fact that you had a war room. It could be a belt, it could be a design of a plaque, it could be a big trophy. So I win it this time, then Joe beats me next time. That creates the rivalry. He gets to display it in his store for the next six months, and then six months later I beat him, or maybe he beats me again and he gets to rub that in. You know, hey, two years in a row, baby, you know, four, four different uh war rooms and nobody's gonna be able to take me out. And I want to say that's one of the things that it nobody gets to hold on to it, but you get to take your picture with it. Everybody gets to enjoy that and it keeps uh motivating uh your different staff members. And then I'm gonna always say, get your people involved, but get your customers involved too. It doesn't need to be a secret that it's a war room. You can always tell them, listen, Ms. Jones, I got one of these big events going on, and you're gonna make some really, really, really, you're gonna have a chance to get some really good deals. Truth is, I'm in competition with my guys down the road, and I need to win. This is the best time to get references involved and to get families involved. And you can also make an event out of it. So a worm just doesn't necessarily mean it's about sales. It could also be about the relationships that you build with your customers, and you can have food, or you can have games, or you can have situations where the customers come in and actually just stay for a little while, but it's a great time to get them involved in the sense that listen, I have this worm going on, I've got one sale left. Who do you know that needs something? And if you have those customers, you've built that rapport. I mean, these are people that you're talking to hundreds of times a year, sometimes, you know, their family. These people, so it's like you talk to them and you can get them involved and they can help you in that way. It builds a relationship not but only between you and them, but them and their community members around you and say, hey, listen, Joe does a real good job for me. He's gotten me this an appliance at a really good deal. And he says, Last war room, I got this one thing that I really couldn't afford, but it was a really good price. Now's the time you need to buy. That's a time to take advantage of it. Joe, I really appreciate you being here on the show. Is there anything else that you want to add as far as war rooms are concerned? Any last tips and tricks from Joe Mulligan?

SPEAKER_01 42:07

Well, I kind of like the direction you were going with that. I mean, in some of the pr past war rooms, what I've actually gotten our customers on the phone, right? Have them call the war room, you know, be on the phone with them, let them see what the excitement's all about and get let them celebrate their moment of helping you get something for your family and your team, right? So, but it it is, it's that big, that big excitement. And it's it, it, your, your excitement is infectious to everybody that's around you. You can't help but be excited. So the more excited your people are, the more excited you are, the more excited your customers are, the more successful your event is going to be. And that's what it's all about.

Pete Shau 42:43

Wise words from Joe Mulligan, who is working for Buddies Home Furnishings out in Oklahoma. Guys, we really appreciate you listening to the show. If you guys have any questions for Joe or myself when it comes to war rooms, hit us up. You can go onto the website at thertoshowpodcast.com, or you can hit me up directly at Pete at the RTOShowPodcast.com. Don't be afraid to follow us on Facebook or Instagram, and make sure you subscribe to all the shows that come out either on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, wherever you can find us. And I'm going to tell you guys, like I always tell you, keep your collections low, get your sales high. Have a great one.