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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Beth Ewen
August-September 2014

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Higher ground

That’s what the two winners of this year’s
Upsize Growth Challenge are aiming for — an ambitious goal,
and we paired them with a group of experts to help them get there.

The Upsize Growth Challenge, presented by Winthrop & Weinstine, is a contest created by Upsize magazine to match two winning business owners with the expert advice they need to reach their goals. Workshop one, in June, is covered in this issue.

Next up is a public event that Upsize readers are encouraged to attend: The Upsize Growth Challenge Workshop & Celebration, Sept. 26, 11 a.m. — 1 p.m. at The Minneapolis Club. A lively, interactive format will include the experts and winners featured in this article, and an interested audience facing similar challenges themselves.

By Beth Ewen

“Some lessons I need to be told over and over again before it gets through my thick skull,”

says Adrian Coulter, owner of XL Feet in St. Paul and one of the winners of this year’s Upsize Growth Challenge. His store and website sell shoes to men with extra-large feet.

Like what? “The cost of inventory and its effect on cash flow,” he says immediately, the current challenge he’s tackling by developing a new inventory management system. But the list goes on.

“A year before that it was getting credit terms with my vendors,” he says. And the year before that, the most pressing need was getting manufacturers to supply him with shoes.

“There is always a new lesson. You master one thing and then something else presents itself,” says Coulter, the 30-year-old entrepreneur with no formal business training, but rather insatiable curiosity and the drive to ask questions and experiment until he conquers what he needs to know.

When he needed to figure out search engine optimization, for example, he hired a consultant for a limited number of hours and asked to be taught everything the consultant knew. Then he tried things each night, staying up until 3 in the morning, seeing how his Google rank changed with every action.

From zero in sales when he started five years ago, he then sold a couple of pairs of shoes a week, then $6,000 total for his first full year. The next year that number was $100,000. Last year sales reached $300,000, and this year he expects to hit half a million, on his way to $1 million in sales, his goal for 2015.

From zero brands who would supply him with shoes, he landed one, paying in advance for the first shipment and raiding the $8,000 in 401(k) funds he had built up while working for a cellphone retailer. Then he built to three, and now he’s at 35 and growing.

“I’m really curious. I like to find out how things work,” Coulter says. “I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut, so as I’m out there talking to people I’ll ask a lot of questions.”

Coulter could be called the embodiment of the reason for Upsize magazine in general and the Upsize Growth Challenge in particular — each of us as entrepreneurs has a lot to learn, and all of us gain when we share our knowledge and seek help from others who may have a piece we lack.

Coulter is joined this year by Chris Erickson, owner of Benefit Extras and our second winner, and both will share their progress toward their goals at the Upsize Growth Challenge finale workshop, Friday, Sept. 26, at the Minneapolis Club from 11 a.m. — 1 p.m. (We’ll feature more photographs of Erickson in the October/November issue.)

Read on to glean lessons to apply to your business in the pages that follow.

XL Feet has big shoes
to fill – literally – as CEO
seeks larger footprint

By Beth Ewen

His t-shirt says XL FEET in enormous letters, and Adrian Coulter leaps up to present his story to the Upsize Growth Challenge experts. “As you can see, I own XL Feet,” he says, “where filling extra-large feet is no extra-large feat.”

The slogan isn’t perfect when spoken aloud, except perhaps for excellent spellers, but Coulter himself strikes just the right chord — young, larger-than-life and passionate about his business.

“I started the company because 99 out of 100 stores will never stock shoes for guys like me,” explains Coulter, one of two winners of this year’s Upsize Growth Challenge. “They all seem to have the same ugly pair of New Balance shoes that the other two have. Guys like me stop shopping in a store at about 12 or 13.”

Five years ago he started XL Feet, opening a store in St. Paul and a website to sell shoes to men size 13 and up. He’s grown sales to $300,000, a mere $3,000 of that from the bricks-and-mortar store, at the same time building a following of fans and learning the hardest part of the shoe business isn’t what he expected.

“I never thought my biggest challenge would NOT be selling shoes,” Coulter says.

Rather, it’s inventory management, in a business where he has to order shoes a year or more in advance because, as he puts it, “in the sizes I sell — that doesn’t fit into the peaks of the bell curve,” plus the supply chain stretches into China. “It’s very expensive to carry inventory, as I’ve learned.”

His goal is to get to $1 million in annual sales, and he’d like to expand into extra-wide shoes and extra-large socks. He’d also like to develop an automated point-of-sale system for greater efficiency, and is even considering the addition of stores in the U.S. or Canada.

But it’s here the Upsize Growth Challenge experts jump in: Canada, Dean Willer of Winthrop & Weinstine points out, has fewer people than Texas, plus the bricks-and-mortar store is generating just a tiny percentage of sales now.

Should he get rid of the store and concentrate completely online?

That’s a problem for two reasons, Coulter says. First, the more reputable brands of shoes require him to have a store if he is to carry their wares. But more to the point, he believes the store is what keeps him connected to customers. “I’m very emotionally attached.

Guys like me, my whole life, all we’ve wanted is to shop for shoes in a store,” he says.

“Where I differentiate myself is my content. I know how these shoes fit,” he says, right down to those that are good for people with high insteps or the like.

Kirk Hoaglund, CEO of Clientek and an Upsize Growth Challenge expert, seizes upon that statement and urges Coulter to push his expertise even more. “You bring your deep knowledge, which is to know how your guys buy and what their frustration is,” Hoaglund says, citing other specialty retailers that “deeply understand their narrow customer base.

“So why don’t you do that and do everything else third party,” Hoaglund suggests. “There are ways to take the rest and outsource it,” for example, by using amazon.com or another third-party fulfillment company for the online storefront.

“Your value-add is your passion about selling things to people like you. That’s where you have to spend all the time and energy,” Hoaglund insists. “The very best website for people with extra-large feet should be yours — and then all of the other stuff that you do, don’t, because it kills you.”

Al Kaufmann, with BDO, suggests Coulter doesn’t need a physical store to stay in touch with customers; rather he can use his blog to answer questions and establish himself as an expert for solving big-foot problems.

He advises marketing directly to people who need his products, such as reaching out to local high school or college sports teams, for example, and offering to sell them work shoes or winter boots.

Mark Lucke, with Sunrise Banks, cautions Coulter on the demands that come with growth. “Keep in mind the stresses it places on your business to double your sales,” he says, which is Coulter’s goal.

And Rick Brimacomb, with Brimacomb + Associates, suggests affiliate marketing to expand XL Feet’s reach, and urges him to reconsider the store. “I know you like the storefront, but it sounds like a distraction. I’d give that a hard look.”

Deb DuBois, marketing director at Winthrop & Weinstine and the Upsize Growth Challenge marketing expert, suggests Coulter is the perfect candidate to seek free public relations. “Create an event,” she suggests. “Invite people who have big feet to do a walk/run for charity.”

Coulter can work on engagement with the online community, she suggests, by inviting customers to submit videos enjoying shoes bought at XL Feet. “You have a lot of likes” on Facebook. “You have a deep fan base. “People love to support small businesses. You’d be a hit,” she says.

Although he isn’t committing on the spot to take the experts’ advice, on that last point Coulter would likely agree — guys like him are popular. “I’ve had a lot of people say I should start a dating site because people want to date tall guys,” he says with a laugh.

[contact]
Adrian Coulter is owner of XL Feet in St. Paul: 612.554.4044; adrian@xlfeet.com; www.xlfeet.com.

For Benefit Extras,
new goal requires
owner’s soul-searching