We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tom and Tani Roberts a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tom and Tani , appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
The need to pivot… sometimes in business you need to know when a change is in the air.. We had several business before, so we sat back and looked at what would be a better fit. We are in a location that caters to family and children. We are fortunate to have several monthly events directed at kids and family time. Our question was “what is missing” and what would be a good fit. We launch a toy store! If running a business is in your blood sometimes you let the circumstance dictate the direction you need to go in. We already had a business in the location so we started to test the market. Adding a toy area to our furniture store… and expanding it over a few months. We had everything ready to switch identities on the side lines. Inventory was arriving, signs made, displays, social media up. We closed one store and opened the new one in 2 day. We are always adjusting but are happy we had no fear!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are Tom and Tani Roberts and have run a successful custom furniture manufacturing business for the last 10 years in San Diego, Orange and Riverside County. We recently made the choice to close 2 stores and our warehouse to open aa local toy store. So happy we did this, we needed a change.
Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.
Yes, we sold a business and made the mistake of letting the new owners start before we closed contracts. We viewed this as a training time but it caused a grey area of product still belonging to us until the close. We had a problem with money missing before the deal was signed. Be smart protect yourself.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Customer service!!! we redid and redelivered and smiled so many times that you don’t want to. We never lost sight of what a bad review could to to our sales. So at times- we bit the bullet to make the client happy!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wishes-for-kids.com/
- Instagram: wishestemecula
- Facebook: Wishes for Kids
Image Credits
I took all of the images myself.