Russ Robertson has a habit of doing things that make other retailers uncomfortable. He shares his financials with his entire team. He calls customers who did not buy from him. He personally follows up on every complaint — not through a customer service department, but himself. These are not quirks. They are the deliberate practices of a retailer who has spent decades studying what actually builds a business that lasts, and who came to Sleep Summit 2025 to share what he has learned.
The Sam Walton Principle
Robertson opened with a story about Sam Walton that most people in retail have heard but few have internalized. Walton, in the early days of Walmart, would personally visit competitor stores, walk the aisles, talk to employees, and take notes. He was not embarrassed to learn from anyone. He believed that the best ideas in retail were already out there — you just had to be humble enough to go find them.
Robertson's application of this principle is concrete: he visits competitor stores regularly, shops them as a customer, and asks himself what they are doing better than he is. He does not do this defensively. He does it as a discipline — the same way an athlete reviews game film. The retailers who stop doing this, he argued, are the ones who eventually get surprised by a competitor they should have seen coming.
"The day you stop learning from your competitors is the day you start losing to them. Sam Walton never stopped. That's why he won."
Radical Transparency With Your Team
The practice that generated the most conversation at Sleep Summit was Robertson's approach to financial transparency. He shares his store's financial performance — revenue, margin, expenses, profit — with his entire team. Not a sanitized summary. The real numbers.
The rationale is straightforward: you cannot ask people to help you hit a target they cannot see. When a salesperson understands that a one-point improvement in average ticket translates directly to a specific dollar improvement in the store's profitability — and that profitability is what funds raises, bonuses, and job security — they make different decisions on the floor. They are not just trying to close a sale. They are running a business.
When everyone sees the same numbers, everyone rows in the same direction.
Transparency creates natural peer accountability without management pressure.
Employees who understand the business treat it like their own.
The Call You Are Not Making
Robertson's most counterintuitive practice is calling customers who did not buy. Not to re-pitch them. To ask what he could have done better. The feedback he gets from those calls, he argued, is more valuable than any mystery shopper program or customer satisfaction survey — because it is unfiltered, specific, and comes from people who had a real experience in his store and chose to spend their money somewhere else.
The practice also has an unexpected secondary effect: some of those customers come back. Not because Robertson asked them to, but because the call itself — the fact that a retailer cared enough to ask — changed their perception of the store. In a category where most retailers never follow up at all, the bar for differentiation through service is remarkably low.
"I call people who didn't buy from me. Not to sell them. To learn. And I'll tell you — some of them come back. Because nobody else called."
The Hard Things Are Always the Right Things
Robertson's closing argument was a meditation on difficulty. Sharing financials with your team is uncomfortable. Calling customers who said no is uncomfortable. Visiting competitor stores and admitting they do something better than you is uncomfortable. These are the things most retailers avoid — and that avoidance, Robertson argued, is precisely why they remain differentiating.
The practices that are easy to copy are already copied. The practices that require genuine discomfort — transparency, humility, relentless customer focus — are the ones that compound over time into a business that is genuinely difficult to replicate. Robertson has built his business on the hard things. His challenge to the Sleep Summit audience was simple: start doing one of them this week.
Key Takeaways for Mattress Retailers
Visit competitor stores regularly — not defensively, but as a learning discipline.
Share your financials with your team. People hit targets they can see.
Call customers who didn't buy. Ask what you could have done better.
The hard practices are differentiating precisely because most retailers avoid them.
Start with one uncomfortable practice this week. Compound it over time.
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