It’s common at Surf-n-Sea in Haleiwa

Eddie Crawford - Store Manager 

While conducting my regular manager’s Success Rally at Surf-n-Sea on Sunday morning, the manager, Eddie Crawford shared a very interesting story with us. He said that he received a call from a local bank, American Savings (he thought). He said that a very pleasant woman told him that they were doing an Economic Outlook Survey, and asked him if he would answer a few questions. One of the initial questions was, “Looking ahead to 2008 do you anticipate sales to be the same as last year, down 10%, or down 20%?” Eddie laughed and asked, “Where’s the up option?” Eddie said that she was taken back by his reply and said, “Nobody is answering like that”. A few minutes later she asked about staffing; “Do you plan to maintain the staff you have, cut back by 10% or cut back by 20%?” Eddie again asked, “What about increasing it, that’s what we want to do?” She said, “Oh, I forgot, I’m talking to the optimist”.
Surf-n-Sea survived the Gulf War in 1991. When “911″ hit it was business as usual at Surf-n-Sea while others placed “Going Out Of Business” signs in their windows. When there were two major landslides shutting Haleiwa off from the rest of the island, sales kept right on climbing. Eddie has good cause for his optimism. January 2008 just closed with a huge increase over 2007. 

Success Rally
I have been meeting with the staff at Surf-n-Sea in Haleiwa for close to 15 years. I have seen (and even caused) many changes in that time frame. One of those changes has been an increase in sales that is close to 10 times from where it was. Another change required a willingness to get outside of their current comfort zone and embrace my system of Pro-Active, No Pressure Selling.

“Aloha”
Salespeople began greeting customers and attending my monthly Success Rallies. Next was a willingness to provide all new employees with their own copy of my book Retail Selling Made Easy. The Morning Report then came along, and Surf-n-Sea was one of the very first companies in Hawaii to get it, even in its initial raw form.

What Recession?

As rumors about a recession begin to circulate in the retail community, my advice is to tune them out and become an optimist like Eddie Crawford, owner Joe Green and the pro-active staff at Surf-n-Sea. It’s Easy! You can do it too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Client News:. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.