Hi, my name is Greg Jent. I’m the owner of Discount Mattress Outlet in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
You know what we’ve seen everybody has this self-fulfilling prophecy: business is gonna slow down, and what happens is they start taking action a little prematurely on what they’re gonna do because they think that a recession’s impending.
But when you start cutting back to save money and advertising, you’re creating the scenario that you’ve been trying to avoid.
We’ve been planning for the next recession since the last one. My business partner and I pretend we have a third partner and that person or that. Entity is getting a third of our profits, and we save that just in case something bad starts happening, the economy starts faltering just like it does.
It goes up and down, up and down. We don’t have to change what we do ’cause we have a game plan in place. We know it works. It’s worked for 22 years and we don’t wanna have to stop doing that because now we don’t have the funds to keep going. Sometimes there’s a slowdown in business. And we’re waiting for it to pick back up.
So as I’m navigating it, I’m focused on getting more customers in the door. I do that through my own marketing, do social media marketing, and I do Google ads.
The ones that focus and spend a lot of money on marketing is what we tend to look for our next brand that we put on our floor, and then it helps us.
It keeps the people coming in the door. They don’t always buy the brand they came in for. Sometimes they’ll fill ’em something out, but if it’s profitable, we wanna sell it to them and we wanna sell them what feels good to them. When a customer walks in our store, we tell them “we’re gonna help you find the right mattress, or I’ll send you somewhere that has the right one for you.”
And they come in, they know we’re on their team. We have a process. Usually we find them the right mattress and they buy from us because they trust us.