Russ: This is the BusinessMaker show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time, and our topic today is growth and success because I have with me the founder and CEO of the world's largest online window covering retailer, Mr. Jay Steinfeld. Jay, welcome to the BusinessMaker Show.

Jay: Thanks, Russ. Good to be here.

Russ: You bet. Well, I guess I should say welcome back because I sat down with you first in September of 2006, and my goodness, even that was a major success story. But today, from what I understand, close to $80 million a year in sales and humming like a well oiled machine. How in the world do you do it?

Jay: Well, I guess one blind at a time.

Russ: Okay, okay.

Jay: We've worked really hard at the customer experience, at trying to make the process to buy blinds, which is surprisingly difficult, to make it surprisingly easy and even exciting, and there's a lot of ways that we do that.

First, you have to have the right people in place that are trained particularly well, but you also have to remove the fear that people have because we provide blinds at basically the lowest price they can get. But to be able to do that, people assume that they're not going to necessarily get good service. They're not going to get expertise. They're not going to get high quality. So how do you do that?

Normally, in most businesses, you can't provide service, quality and price.

Russ: Right.

Jay: But because we use the internet and we use scalable technology, we can do that, but more important than the technology itself, it's more about providing tools for our customers so that, when they come to the site or when they call our call center, that we have 100 people in the call center fully trained to answer calls. They're going to have the confidence to measure themselves, install themselves and make sure that they are getting the right product, the correct product, the best product that they possibly could at the best price.

Russ: Well, I tell you, I've - for those regular viewers, they can tell we're not in our normal studio. I am onsite at the headquarters of Blinds.com.

Jay: That's the Blinds.com-plex.

Russ: Blinds.com-plex. Cool. I tell you. The energy level out here on the floor, both floors, is just abuzz. I mean it's admirable. I mean you've got people really seeming to enjoy what they do here.

Jay: It is always surprising when we're hiring and people walk into our call center, and they look around, and they see people smiling and happy. And they think, "I've never been into a work environment where people seem to really be having fun."

In fact, we have five core values. One of them is to enjoy the ride. We really do have fun here. I personally, every day, look forward to walking into the office. I feel like I've built an amusement park, and I've chosen the rides. I've chosen the gatekeepers. I've chosen all the right people, and we've built a big rollercoaster, and we've built all these different things that, when I come in here, I get to sit on all these rides and watch people having a good time on the rides and know that customers are going to appreciate our positive energy so that, when they call, they know that they're dealing with somebody who really cares about providing great service because that's - it's about providing a transformative experience in a pretty mundane product like blinds.

Russ: Well, I can tell you, just from spending about an hour here today, I was here previously as well. I can underscore everything you said about it being a fun place. I also sense it's one of those places - and I've seen this several times in my business career - where it seems like the employees' own self esteem and happiness with what they do just goes up about 20 percent which, man, definitely helps performance wise.

Jay: No question. There's a book called Drive, and in the book, the author talks about - Daniel Pink talks about three things that are really important, that you have to have a vision, that you have to be getting increased skills and autonomy. If you have those three things, people will feel empowered and will feel like they're not getting stale because they're not.

We're training people every day in some cases. We're listening to phone calls. We're providing skilled help. So that, when customers call, they're going to be hearing somebody who is trained to ask the right questions because people don't even know how to buy blinds.

Russ: Right.

Jay: You have to help them in that buying decision, and when you've got people who are - feel like you really care about increasing their skill, they feel ,when they come here, maybe more respect than they possibly may get at home.

Russ: Well, that might be true.

Jay: I don't know.

Russ: Unfortunately, that probably is true, but you mentioned early on that this is sort of a complex ordering process, and I said those exact words, I think, when I interviewed you five years ago, from personal experience of getting the dimensions exactly right. And it seems like every product sort of installs differently and uniquely.

But I remember, back then, you really focused on making the website be as explanatory as possible in a simple format, and I assume you carry that forward to your call center for those people to be good explainers as well.

Jay: I've been in the window covering business for almost 25 years.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: I started with a store. Actually, two stores. My wife had one store, and I had another store. One was in Westview. The other one was in Clearlake.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: So I had a van, and I went to people's homes helping them choose the best window treatment. I did myself over 10,000 homes, and I did this for a long time, from about 1987 up until 2001, for 14 years.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: And I was working seven days a week, three or four appointments every day, working late at night with the paperwork. I mean the whole entrepreneurial working many, many hours.

Russ: Right.

Jay: For the love of it.

Russ: Well, that brings back memories of the other interview is that I really wanted to know how you anticipated the web was going to be so significant. Not only did you do that well, but you did it very, very early on. Share with our audience the beginning of using the internet with Blinds.com.

Jay: Well, I had no business plan, and I had no vision. I clearly had no vision. Nobody knew. This was back in 1993.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: Nobody knew what the internet - well, some people probably had the vision. I didn't.

Russ: Right.

Jay: It was just an experiment. I had heard about the information superhighway.

Russ: Right.

Jay: I heard about the worldwide web. This was back in the days when there are 1,500 BOD modems that screeched every time.

Russ: Right.

Jay: It took you probably two minutes just to log onto the internet.

Russ: Right. Well, there was even a debate back then whether or not the internet would be used for business, and there were some academics and scientists who didn't want that. Right.

Jay: Absolutely. The big deal was when CompuServe allowed you to use your name instead of a preassigned number in your email address.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: That made national news. So that was pretty cool. So, back then, it was really just what can we do to promote the store.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: The internet seemed like something that maybe could work. Maybe we could expand it, and it was really just meant to be something to schedule appointments. Basically, it was an online brochure.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Had no shopping cart. You couldn't buy anything.

Russ: Right.

Jay: A few years after that, I heard about Amazon. They were just selling books at the time. I thought, "Well, maybe you could sell blinds online." So I thought, "I want to make buying blinds and shades a no brainer similar to what we're doing now." So we called it No Brainer Blinds. That was the original sign, No Brainer Blinds.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: And we did that for awhile, and then 2001, I decided, you know what, I'm making as much money online as I am in the stores.

Russ: How did they find you?

Jay: Well, that's a whole other - but back then, I was doing search engine optimization. I was doing reciprocal links, and I was doing social media. They didn't call it social media, but I was seeking out people, talking about blinds. In my signature file, it would talk about No Brainer blinds, and I was looking at - I don't know if you recall these bulletin boards.

Russ: Oh, yeah. Bulletin boards were big.

Jay: And forums.

Russ: Right.

Jay: And this was - when it was all dot consumer dot home, things like that.

Russ: Right. Right.

Jay: So you log onto these and find - I would spend two or three times a day, early in the morning, midday and at night, looking for any question about blinds that I could answer because I expertise.

Russ: Yeah, yeah.

Jay: So what I've been able to do is take that expertise and move it into the call center now. So the reason that people are providing this kind of service now is because I'm taking the kinds of questions that I know people need answered when they're dealing with buying blinds, and all I do is say, "I know you're looking for this kind of question - answer. So why not just put all that information on the website?"

Russ: Right.

Jay: And put it in a logical sequence so that I know, when people are asking for this product, this question will arise. So just lump all the questions logically in a situation like that.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Now, of course, I've got a big marketing department which one the AMA Marketer of the Year a couple of years ago.

Russ: Congratulations. Congratulations.

Jay: That was a really cool thing.

Russ: Yeah.

Jay: So they knew how to do this way better than I did, but in the beginning, it was just me in my house in Bellaire, Texas on Pine Street right over the garage. It was just me doing all the marketing, everything. Of course, I've never been a programmer. I can't - I'm not technical at all.

Russ: Right.

Jay: So I didn't build a website. So I spent $1,500.00 on my store website. Three years later, in 1996, when I decided you could sell things, I spent 3,000. That's all the money I put in since.

Russ: What a story. But in the beginning, I mean it was more of a brochure. So you didn't - you know, you didn't have people with the ability to order blinds. How did they get to you?

Jay: Well, at the beginning, it was just my store.

Russ: Yeah.

Jay: And we were not taking orders at all.

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: I didn't even do it on the phone. After that, though, I would be, again, doing the reciprocal links. In fact, I even put ads on my site to make it look like people were paying for ads on my site. I was taking ads that people were paying for and - paying for on other sites.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Like Federal Express, big companies.

Russ: Right.

Jay: And I put their ads on my site. So it - to create some credibility.

Russ: Sure, sure.

Jay: At the time, I was the only online window covering retailer. So, naturally, I wrote on the website, we were the most popular and trusted online source for blinds because we were the only one.

Russ: Well, I remember you also telling a story about getting phone calls in the very beginning, before you had a shopping cart, and you'd be out in your van.

Jay: Yeah.

Russ: Calling on customers and you'd get a customer through your mobile phone and tell that story. That's quite the story.

Jay: Well, it's almost exactly correct.

Russ: Yeah.

Jay: What happened was this is when we actually started taking orders.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: And, you know, I'm going to people's homes.

Russ: Right.

Jay: To sell blinds in their homes, in home consultant, decorator.

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: I'm a CPA, by the way.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: So, naturally, I'm well qualified to do blinds.

Russ: Sure you are.

Jay: So people would then call into the store, into my showroom.

Russ: Right.

Jay: It was only 1,000 square feet.

Russ: Right.

Jay: And they'd say, "All of our customer service representatives are busy." Of course, I was the only one. I was busy. I was driving my van around Houston."

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: So they'd call me, and they'd say, "Hey, somebody just called from Kansas." I'd say, "Great." So I had this giant mobile phone. They were like bricks. So I put that up there, and then I had a calculator that I put on the front seat of my white Toyota Previa.

Russ: Right.

Jay: I remember the first time I did this. I pulled off on the Southwest Freeway on U.S. 59 right by Greenway Plaza. Pulled off onto the emergency, right in front of what was then the Summit.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Had my calculator on the front seat, had order pads, had pricing sheets and would just take the order, write in all the information on the order form, and then at the end of the day, I would fax it into the office. And I would use one of those big credit card machines.

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: And would do that. And so we would do maybe one sale every other day maybe and then -

Russ: But it was incremental.

Jay: It was incremental. So I was profitable from day one because I had no cost.

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: It was all me.

Russ: Right.

Jay: So we've always been profitable.

Russ: Really cool. Talking with Jay Steinfeld, the founder and CEO of Blinds.com, the world's largest online retailer of window coverings, and we'll be back with more with Jay after this. This is the BusinessMakers Show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

This is the BusinessMakers Show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com continuing on with Jay Steinfeld, founder and CEO of Blinds.com. Now, Jay, you've talked about this focus from the very beginning about making it easier, and you think that's had a lot to do with your success. How do you make it easier?

Jay: Well, our big must win is to make the experience of buying complex products surprisingly easy and exciting.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: That's - and we even measure what is surprisingly easy and exciting. We have a dashboard that has four metrics on it that shows about conversion rate, about time on the site and other things that helps us determine whether we're actually achieving that or not.

So some of the things we do is we've created in house, in our own production studio, about 100 videos showing how to install every product, how to measure for every product, the different features of our different products. So, in case you don't want to look on the website, you can just watch a video that's maybe one or two minutes, and I guarantee, after a one or two minute video, you're going to be inclined to want to at least give it a shot.

Russ: Wow.

Jay: By the way, for those people who don't want to measure and install.

Russ: Right.

Jay: We have an army of installers through the United States where, if you put in your zip code, you can then hire separately an installer or a - to measure.

Russ: Wow. Does that happen very often?

Jay: It doesn't happen very often, but for those people who are just a little afraid or doing it, that service is still available. We make nothing on it, but we want to provide - for those people who just don't want to do it or don't have the time to do it.

Russ: Right.

Jay: So other things we do - we - one of the problems that people fear, one of the things they fear is will you mismeasure. So we've got the videos, but this year, we started something which has been working amazing. It's increased our sales 20 percent since we started.

It's called the Sure Fit Guarantee, and what that is - this is like Zappos.

Russ: Oh.

Jay: Where Zappos says, "You try ten pairs, and if you don't like them, return them all for free." We do the same thing. We are the Zappos of the blinds market.

Russ: You mean like if I was buying, and I made a mistake and said, "Oh, I measured wrong."

Jay: That's correct.

Russ: You would still take it back?

Jay: We will still take it back at no cost and replace it at the right dimension. Now that is foolproof.

Russ: Yeah. It is.

Jay: So anybody who is worried about mismeasuring, the Sure Fit Guarantee.

Russ: Right.

Jay: It doesn't cost extra to do this.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Now, not every product has it, but about 95 percent of our products have the Sure Fit Guarantee on it.

Russ: Wow. How frequently has it been happening?

Jay: In the past, there was only a one percent error rate.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Now it's only two.

Russ: Okay. Wow. So.

Jay: It's amazing. We've got a 20 percent increase in sales but only a two percent or an incremental one percent increase in the error rate. So hardly anybody mismeasures.

Russ: That's impressive. That's impressive. Now.

Jay: There's some other things that we do. One, we - of course, we're training the people extremely well. They go to factories to see how blinds are made. They're trained on how to ask the right questions. We have something called the Blind Finder that we developed. It's right on the Blinds.com site, and it asks the same questions that I ask when I went to people's homes.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: So I knew the questions to ask like, "How much light do you want to come in the room. Do you want it to be dark? Do you want to be able to pull it up so that you can see your view of the mountains or the lake or whatever it might be?"

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: There's a series of five of six questions. So you answer those questions and then, boom, you get two or three products that are like the perfect product for you. And people who go through that have a 60 percent more likely chance of buying than people who don't.

Russ: Oh.

Jay: Because they have been given objective, unbiased advice.

Russ: Wow.

Jay: The same advice that we would give, but by using a computer, somehow, people believe it a little bit more. We also just generating - created an iPhone app.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: This iPhone app is cool. People then say, "I'm not sure what it's going to look like." So what you do is you just - you download this app called the Window Shopper or just put in Blinds.com.

Russ: Okay. Right.

Jay: And you take a picture of your window, and a blind instantly pops into your window. You can see different kinds of blinds in different colors right in your window. Nobody else has this.

Russ: How long has that been out?

Jay: That's been out just a few weeks. It has gotten tremendous reviews and a lot of notoriety. And people say, "Well, now, I don't even need a designer to tell me. I can see it myself."

Russ: Can they actually order from the app, too?

Jay: What you can do is there's a - you can press a button, and it will just call us to order if you want, or what you can also do is you can put your measurements in, get a price and upload it into our website.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: And we have a mobile website, too. So it uploads it into the site and then it allows people to go into the site and then order it if they want or order one blind at a time.

Russ: That's impressive. Now I'm just amazed with the growth that you keep talking about, too, and, you know, the economy is not really hot right now. And I would think even, you know, new home building is not very hot right now which would make me think that the incremental opportunity for window coverings is not real hot right now.

Jay: Well, generally, that is true.

Russ: Okay.

Jay: The housing market is doing horribly since about May of 2007, 2008. That's when it just started crashing.

Russ: Right.

Jay: We had this trajectory that was just going crazy, and then all the sudden, boom, it hit a ceiling. But what we did is what we said we're going to make this experience better. We're going to transform the industry, and, in fact, our business for awhile was flat for a year and then it took off again.

So what we're doing is, in spite of a terrible, dismal housing market, we grew 30 percent this year. We had the best year ever, and we expect to grow 30 to 35 percent next year, too. We're going to do close to 80 million this year. We're looking to do close to maybe 90 million next year, and we believe we're going to get to 150 million in about three to four years.

Russ: Oh, my god.

Jay: And that's just organic growth, and that's be the online blinds market is in its infancy. If you look at all of the research reports, you know that online adoption has been accelerating.

Russ: Right.

Jay: In our business, it's only about six, seven percent total blinds.

Russ: Ah, okay.

Jay: So you've got this big three, $4 billion industry and then you've only got six percent of the people buying online. Our goal is not to expand the entire market. Our goal is to take the small online market and expand it.

Russ: And increase that. Ah.

Jay: And by making it easy and also advertising not just online but offline -

Russ: Right.

Jay: For instance, what we're able to do is bring people online because most people think you just have to go to a big box store or get a designer or go to a mom and pop store, but I was a pop.

Russ: Right.

Jay: I had a - I was a mom and pop store, and I know what that's like. So I'm taking that experience and putting it online what I know people need to make decisions to trans - literally transform the way people think about buying blinds.

So one of the things we've done is we started advertising nationally, through Dave Ramsey, Dr. Laura and numerous -

Russ: Radio advertising. Wow.

Jay: Big radio endorsed and we've got almost all the big names talking about us.

Russ: Can you tell orders come in shortly after that?

Jay: Oh, absolutely. We have a radio dashboard that shows every host that we use. We use about 20.

Russ: Yeah.

Jay: And we can directly attribute every sale to each host.

Russ: Wow.

Jay: Now you can't really do every sale, but you can directionally understand what it is.

Russ: Sure.

Jay: Because we ask every customer, "How did you hear about us?"

Russ: Sure.

Jay: And they tell us which host they thought of or whether it's a repeat. And, by the way, 62 percent of our business comes from a repeat customer, and this is the business that's kind of a commodity.

Russ: Right.

Jay: Where people believe, "It's a blind. I can buy it anywhere."

Russ: Right.

Jay: But 62 percent either are - is a repeat customer or somebody referred from a happy customer. That's a pretty big percentage.

Russ: Well, it's huge, Jay. Yeah. I can certainly feel your passion. I can feel the excitement here. What's in store for the future? I mean where do you take it from here?

Jay: Well, we believe that transforming the industry, which I've said is our goal, to make it easy, and the next thing we're going to be working on - we've already started on this. And we believe, in the not too distant future, we're going to be doing virtual in home consultations.

Russ: Okay. Tell us about that.

Jay: I'm going to be leading this charge and helping people learn how to do an in home consultation and not leave the office.

Russ: Okay. So we're talk -

Jay: So we're going to be using Skype, Facetime.

Russ: Okay, okay.

Jay: And whatever technology the customer has either with their laptop, their iPhone.

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: And this is one of the things we're going to do.

Russ: So the customer literally could be showing you a picture of the wall that has the window that they're looking for a cover.

Jay: Yes. Absolutely.

Russ: Wow, wow.

Jay: If they have a measuring question, they'll just stick the phone up there or they'll put it up to the window and say, "Here's how I'm measuring. Does that look right?"

Russ: Right, right.

Jay: Say, "No, just a little to the left. Yeah, perfect." That's exactly how to do it. So we're going to guide people to transform. When this happens, if we can crack that code, oh, it's going to be crazy."

Russ: Well, I'll -

Jay: It's going to be unbelievable.

Russ: I think it already is kind of unbelievable. You're doing an outstanding job, Jay, and I'm just really impressed. And I really appreciate you giving us an update for Blinds.com.

Jay: Thank you. It was great to be here.

Russ: You bet. You bet.

Jay: Thanks, Russ.

Russ: Jay Steinfeld, the founder and CEO of Blinds.com. This is the BusinessMakers Show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.