We were lucky to catch up with Jacob Bernstein recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jacob, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?
My day starts with coffee and seeing my wife out the door to teach at a school nearby. Before long I’m over caffeinated and completely distracted. I like to clear my multiple inboxes to start the day.
By 10:30 I have given up on emails. I’m pretty sure I’m all set from the last two weeks. Maybe. I’ve been forwarding texts to my store manager sporadically for about half an hour. He’s locked out of our register dashboard for the second time this week. The store opens at 11:00, and we have three more verification attempts before we’re locked out for hours. I know he’s typing the string of six digits correctly, so I call our merchant processor’s customer support.
At 11:30 I’m still waiting for a call back but we’ve managed to get one of our registers functioning for sales. Crisis averted. By noon we’re back to full capacity. I never get the call back.
This is the point in my day, every day, where the mild panic sets in. I check three different inboxes and confirm that they are exactly the same as five minutes ago. I go to pour a new cup of coffee but the pot’s been empty for a few hours. I pull up the register dashboard to check our numbers. It signs me in on my first attempt with no trouble. The store’s been open less than an hour. No useful numbers.
So I “go to work.” That means I drive the quarter mile from my house to our store and sit quietly listening (hopefully) to the buzz of activity. My employees are some of my closest friends. We’ve had almost no staff turnover in ten years. These guys have regular jobs and they are phenomenally good at them. We use a pretty simple hand-me-down responsibility system. Whenever someone is bored they ask their direct coworker to teach them to do something new. Tasks are split by department but in retail flexibility and redundancy are crucial.
I listen to the purchasing manager explain his spreadsheets to a sales person. They’re fairly straight forward purchase orders but this manager likes walking each user through them. He makes the same joke I did when we designed the PO templates: “If more than three of these rows are wrong, just highlight the whole order red and I’ll deal with it.”
I realize then, that’s my job: dealing with the things that are highlighted in red. I don’t hear about low priority problems anymore. When it’s noon and I’m struggling to find busywork, it means no alarms are ringing. While I sit and listen to my staff chatter and work, I marvel at how few things get highlighted in red these days. I think this is the short answer: I am happier owning a business than I was in a regular job. I am happy when I am idle, because it means my business and my friends are succeeding without handholding.
Then the toilet in the basement explodes and I have to call an emergency plumber.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Ten years ago I was living in Saint Paul with my brother. We both routinely shopped at e-cigarette or vapor stores. I was actually working as a salesperson in the industry at the time, while Daniel (my brother) was a service writer at a local car dealership. After work one evening we realized we were procrastinating a trip to the vapor store the same way we put off unenjoyable errands. That’s what our shopping experience had become! At the time I had a particular technical question, something that would take a while to resolve and involve multiple conversations with strangers. We wracked our brains to think of somewhere that could quickly and efficiently solve my problem while providing a positive shopping experience for Daniel. We came up blank.
A year later we opened Imperial Vapor. From the start we wanted to do everything differently. In the decade since we’ve learned to do just *some* things differently. Imperial relies heavily on personal customer service and collective responsibility — the most time tested values in retail. We’ve added a third tenet that’s particular to our business: every single item we stock has been tested and approved by a senior staff member. It seems simple, maybe obvious. When was the last time you walked into a store with 400+ items where each employee had tried everything?
When we felt confident we could reliably stock superior quality products, we turned our attention to a superior experience. We knew our staff were capable, enthusiastic, and charming. But would that be enough to set us apart? At this point we’d dealt with a location move to our current premises at Snelling & Marshall. Two different storefronts had to be constructed in two different locations, and we didn’t get much say or customization in either. As soon as things settled down, we remodeled.
Now we had a store with its own procedures, its own unique look, and a growing reputation for quality. The only thing that could slow our progress was a global pandemic! Joking aside, we were incredibly fortunate to come through 2020-21 with very few health scares and the same small team we went in with. The pandemic, and a brief stint of curbside pickup service, had us scratching our heads. How could we provide the contactless, quick, self service experience that was becoming the norm while maintaining our signature personal touch?
Like many young people we found our answer in technology and adaptability. We can now make sales from anywhere in the store on mobile registers, and organize requests and reservations online. Customers can complete profiles that tell us exactly how best to serve them. Each purchase made in the store automatically applies rewards and loyalty features. These bonuses to efficiency give us the time we need to get to know each client. If you’ve shopped with us before, we’ll know your name and your order the next time we see you. That’s only possible through this combination of classic customer service and 21st century sales methods.
Next, we’re taking this approach to new industries. If you find yourself wandering through a beautifully decorated, speakeasy themed establishment with an attentive personal shopper, you might just be somewhere that’s adopted the Imperial Vapor method. Shopping, no matter what for, is supposed to be fun. If you’re choosing to spend your money, every step along the way should be more than worth it.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
Praise starts at the bottom, critique starts at the top. In retail the only way to gauge success is customer satisfaction. Each satisfied customer is a success, and each team member who contributed to that satisfaction deserves praise. From the one who worked the sale, to the one who ordered the product, to the one who ensured the sales floor was spotless — everyone contributed to the success and deserves recognition.
Conversely, when a customer is less than satisfied it means there is a flaw in that chain. The higher up that flaw is, the more disastrous the consequence, so criticism must prioritize the highest levels of management. A customer is not unhappy because the sales person told them their product was out of stock. They are unhappy because it has not been reordered. It has not been reordered because the purchasing manager had to prioritize other brands with our small budget. I am in control of the purchasing manager’s budget.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The customer is almost never right. I started a retail business when I was twenty years old. I went from working on a sales team to hiring and managing one with no step between, and I found myself believing catchphrases and idioms about retail I had probably picked up from television. I was eager to please and began coaching my staff to never disagree with a client. Try to guide the customer, sure, but never directly contradict! We work in a highly specialized industry, dealing with chemicals and electrical currents and consumable products. Unlike some retail, in the vaping and alternative sector there are right and wrong ways to use the product. However, when we first started Imperial Vapor we were desperate to get our name out there — “every customer is always right” was the mantra. This was a big mistake.
The customer is always the most important.
That’s the correct phrasing. As a salesperson your existence is completely dependent on the customer. But you’re the expert. Imagine you took your car in for service and told the mechanic what you thought was wrong. The next day you pick up the car and ask what the diagnosis was. “I dunno,” says the mechanic, “I just took your word for it.” You’d never use that mechanic again.
The client comes to you because you are always right. It is your job to know the things they don’t want to. The customer is the most important, and you have to establish your credibility by putting their needs above anything else. Those needs include correcting misinformation and helping to fulfill their goals — not simply agreeing with what the customer feels is right.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: imperialvapormn
- Facebook: facebook.com/imperialvapormn
Image Credits
Images courtesy @imperialvapormn