If someone visits one of our stores, but isn’t ready to sign an agreement, we don’t wait for them to contact us when they’re ready. We send them a note thanking them for their visit, call them, and schedule an appointment. We eliminate any opportunity they may have to think about doing business at another RTO dealer.

Listen: podcast with Scott Brown and Louis Garcia

Louis Garcia (left) and Scott Brown don't believe in waiting for things to happen. They create their own future.

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Most rent-to-own operators use marketing and advertising briefly after their stores open and then hope those tools work,” Scott Brown explains. “They have no real way to track those methods and determine if the tools help their businesses grow. Louis and I realized that we have no control over people. What we do have control over is ourselves and the personnel at our stores. If we sell ourselves, we’ll build lasting relationships that lead to loyal customers.”

To achieve those lasting relationships, Scott Brown and Louis Garcia combined their 30+ years of RTO experience and created their own sales system. Simply put, their system tracks a list of about 2,000 potential customers for their four Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area ColorTyme stores. It’s then up to store personnel at each location to send thank you cards, make follow-up calls, and schedule appointments with customers.

“If someone visits one of our stores, but isn’t ready to sign an agreement, we don’t wait for them to contact us when they’re ready,” Garcia says. “We send them a note thanking them for their visit, call them, and schedule an appointment with them. It communicates to every potential customer that we will make time for them and truly value their business. We eliminate any opportunity they may have to think about doing business at another RTO dealer.”

The system works for Brown and Garcia’s company, Epic Ventures. Since their first store opened in Landover Hills, Md., in November 2004, Brown and Garcia acquired three more stores in Baltimore in 2005. For the first quarter of 2007, revenues are up 25 percent. And that’s on top of the 40 percent increase in revenues Epic Ventures saw from 2005 to 2006.

“Each of our stores has about 290,000 households within a three mile radius of the store. My expectation is to capture 1,000 of those customers and we’ll have an extremely profitable company.” Brown said. “Some of the highest revenue stores in RTO are in this area. We wanted to join those stores because it’s obviously an area ripe for success, but also to offer customers a choice because the RTO market isn’t saturated with competitors. Our customers deserve high quality merchandise paired with the highest standards in customer service.”

Brown and Garcia at the recently completed its 2007 ColorTyme Winter Operations Meeting in Dallas, Texas.

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Brown and Garcia first met while working for Thorn International Rentals in Kansas. Over the years, they worked for Rent-A-Center and Remco together as well. At company conventions and meetings, Brown and Garcia always filled their free time with dreams of splitting the revenue of just one of the stores they were running for other companies. Brown left RTO for Merrill Lynch in 1997 to pursue a job with less travel and to establish roots for his family. It was at Merrill Lynch that Brown realized he wanted to be one of the people on the other side of his desk, investing his wealth.

In 2004, he made a call to Garcia, who was in Austin, Texas, working for RentWay, to ask who he knew that was interested in ColorTyme’s franchise program. He called Garcia not only because of their friendship, but also because he wanted to capitalize on the burgeoning Spanish-speaking population in Baltimore and Washington. He didn’t expect Garcia to jump in as a partner himself.

“After being in the corporate world for so long, I was ready to do something for myself,” Garcia explains. “I’ve really grown to like Baltimore because of the diversity it offers. Our Hispanic customer base continues to grow at the Landover Hills location, but people are the same everywhere. Our Hispanic customers want to feel comfortable in the stores and they expect a great product delivered with excellent customer service.”

Garcia’s operations expertise works well with Brown’s marketing background to cultivate great customer service. Though the pair expects high performance from the team of professional salespeople they hire, they also reward them with salaries 30 percent higher than the average industry rate.

“You know, this business really is about people,” Brown says. “I’ve seen it in many forms - from my relationship with Louis as the backbone of our business, to our teams at each store, to Bob Bloom at ColorTyme who supported us from the beginning and helped us acquire three more stores.”

Brown and Garcia are on track to open their fifth store, in Washington, D.C., sometime this fall. The partners plan to open one store a year until 2010. That puts them at the eight-store mark with a $10 million company by the end of the decade.

“We’re not hoping for success,” Brown says. “We’ve planned for it.”