The first order of business was to hire a staff. We immediately had a need for a secretary/ Office manager and I hired Julie on the first or second day. Having never been involved in a start-up venture before, I was unaware of just how much of a start-up we were until I gave her the first task. The night before, I had written out three letters to be sent to potential suppliers...one to those people that Jack knew, one to those that I knew and a general industry-wide letter. I then marked up a Sporting goods directory with who were to get each letter and turned it over to Julie to execute. A few minutes later, she came back to my desk and asked, "um, what do I use to type these up on?" Uh, oh...we didn't even have a typewriter (this was before PC's took over). So, I sent her to Office Depot to buy a memory typewriter and thought that would resolve the problem. She arrived back with the typewriter and came back to my desk..."Where can I find the stationery?" Hmmm....we needed to sit down and make a list of all of the supplies that we needed to get rolling...Stationery, envelopes, general office supplies, business cards, copy machine, etc, etc, etc....yep we were REALLY starting from scratch! So, after putting Julie in charge of all of those details, I set out to hire a buying and marketing staff.
At the suggestion of Ann at Doner Advertising, I called Ellen (Brautigan) Stevens in Atlanta to come interview for the marketing manager position. I had worked with Ellen some years earlier in Atlanta and she had all of the knowledge and tools to set up the advertising function - especially the business side of the retail ad biz. It didn't hurt to know that she pined to move to Florida too!! So, with Ellen hired I continued the search for 3 or 4 Buyers. Realizing that we were creating a new kind of Sporting Goods environment, I wanted to hire Buyers from several retailing disciplines so that we could create our own culture - to hire from just the sporting goods arena would get us a culture of same ol', same ol'. So, I hired a diverse group...Jay from a Mass Merchant with Sporting Goods experience for hardlines, Joe from a small Sporting Goods Retailer for footwear, Kim from Burdine's Department Stores for Apparel and finally Dave for Fishing, Hunting, and Camping. We then added Debbie as an Assistant Buyer to handle the women's apparel. It must have been a pretty good crew, because nearly all of them (with the exception of Debbie who left to raise a family and Dave who left for family reasons) stayed, flourished and were promoted to even bigger roles over the years.
July 4th rolled around and with the initial staff in place, the computer system getting installed, the construction of the store commencing, we had only a short time to purchase the merchandise, develop the buying system, receive and price the goods and get the store open. By this time, it was becoming apparent that Dick Carter was going to be a short termer....once he got the store constructed, it was apparent that Jack was going to bring in one of his old cronies from Herman's to be VP of Store Operations. Dick's vision of the store was more of a warehouse view and we had spent considerable time and effort to convince the Industry that we were NOT a warehouse...but a large Mega Store with carpet under the apparel and a stack 'em high, let 'em fly merchandising philosophy for hardlines. Our trademark open blue ceiling came about because we found that it was going to cost an extra $20,000 to paint the existing ceiling white....and all of the first 30 or more stores ended up with that blue ceiling! Our low price image was going to be reinforced by "not to be beat prices" on commodities such as tennis balls, and golf balls and well positioned opportunity buys like the $10 all leather tennis shoes and the $9.99 wall of sweat clothes featured during the Grand Opening.
Jack and I continued to battle on many issues. As a matter of fact, after we sold the Company to Kmart in 1990 we held a dinner to celebrate the sale. At that dinner, Mitt Romney gave a terrific speech about the founding of the Company and addressed each of the principals. When he came to me, Mitt said, "The Board could never understand how Roy accomplished all that he did. ..Roy would propose merchandising initiatives and Jack would reject them..Roy would propose Advertising initiatives, and Jack would reject them...and then we realized how he pushed all of the initiatives through..." and then he presented me with a pair of heavy duty knee pads! (I still have those knee pads hanging on a wall in my office!). I like to believe that the tensions only helped the creative process and got us the best solutions!
Nonetheless, we DID accomplish a hell of a lot in a short amount of time. The multi-faceted advertising campaign utilizing billboards, television and radio reinforced our commitment to "Sell the sizzle...not the steak!" That is, we sold the concept of the store as the ultimate Sporting Goods destination rather than just advertising items at rock bottom prices. The television advertising featuring comic Louie Anderson as the very antithesis of an athlete was a resounding success. (An interesting tidbit is that the scripts were written with John Candy as the star...when he proved to be wildly too expensive, we decided to use little know Louie Anderson who was to become well know shortly thereafter!) The radio ads were breakthrough advertising and the billboards with a double entendre twist were a big hit. After working 7 days a week including many 15 to 18 hour days, we finally managed to get the first store open. Grand Opening week featured many star athletes including Sugar Ray Leonard, Dan Marino, Dwight Gooden, Tim Raines, and Reggie Jackson among others. The lines of people wrapped around the store and spilled outside onto the sidewalk.
When we started this venture, we projected the first store to do an annualized volume of around $8.7 million. People in the Industry thought we had lost our minds...the average Sporting Goods Retailer did around $1.7 million in volume...no way were we going to open a store doing over 5 times that! In the first year of operation, the flagship The Sports Authority Store did $10.5 million in volume...we were a success at the store level. Now we had to get a bunch of stores open to leverage the corporate costs we had put in place to grow the Company!
That's how it all started! We continued to grow, sold the Company in March, 1990, to Kmart Corporation (that is a whole other story), and really started a growth spurt. I along with the other 3 executives signed 2 year contracts with KMart....50% of our buyout was put into escrow until the end of 2 years. I actually stayed on for 3 years after the buyout and departed in April of 1993 to found KidSource...a baby megastore concept.
Those 7 years ( I count from the time we first started working on the Sports Newco project in 1986!) were some of the most exciting of my business career. I am indebted to Jory for that first phone call, to Scott for his encouragement and counsel and to Jack for the experience..but I am most indebted to all of those that worked with us to make it happen.
And The Journey continues........
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