A Chat With Sue Landay, President, Trainer’s Warehouse

CS: What do you think is your biggest career challenge with Trainers Warehouse?
SL: I would say that was one I identified earlier. It wasn’t working with my dad, that was the easy part. Figuring out how to expand our niche was one of the biggest. On top of identifying educators, [we have been] working with lots of different list brokers and using model lists, consolidated lists, cooperative lists. Those have continued to be challenges. The other challenge for our company, and I don’t know if this qualifies as a career challenge, but as a b-to-b company, getting keycodes continues to be one of the toughest things. When we get an order in from a school purchasing department or from a corporation with 18 different branches and they’re working off a requisition number from a purchase order, there’s no way we can track that back to a catalog mailing. So we’re going to be doing matchbacks — but that’s a current challenge.