A Chat with August’s Profile, Chris Harris, director, direct response marketing, Becker Group Direct

CS: How many employees work for the company?
CH: I think we’re at about 80-plus.

CS: Do you hire seasonal workers?
CH: Yeah. And that’s growing considerably, too.

CS: What was your background before joining the Becker Group in 2005? Were you involved in the catalog industry?
CH: I had been. I’ve had a fairly interesting background, but it’s always been, I think, around direct marketing or direct response marketing. I actually started off coming out of college working in TV up in New York for the USA Network — working on a live TV show and producing with them, having some success, I mean actually some pretty good success. A great show. Not the most high-brow show in the world, but it was definitely very entertaining and we had really good ratings.
I learned a lot about how important it was to be able to identify who your target audience is, and be able to capture their attention and hold it in a time and a place, and a channel, that’s so competitive and where peoples’ attention spans are so limited.
Prior to that I had been working and going to school down in Washington, D.C., where I had come up with a business concept. I actually wrote a business plan and built this company that I founded right after I left USA Network, to be the distributor of the finest men’s and women’s apparel and accessories through the mail and through being online. We had really good success, a phenomenal experience. I’m very proud of myself. I was very young, and I really had a balance of about $50 to my name when I started off. And we built it up to, we were doing over $5 million in sales and we were juggling over 10,000 SKUs. We were doing quite well. I think we were mailing over two million catalogs at the time.
Although I have to admit, it’s a little embarrassing but at the same time it’s very candid, I made some errors on how and where I outsourced my fulfillment for my warehousing and for all my products. This was a big mistake.
I outsourced; we outgrew our fulfillment services for our regional fulfillment services because we were growing so rapidly. We went with a new company that promised us kind of a turnkey solution for inbound telesales, as well as the fulfillment. Frankly, I was a little young. I was in my late 20s and I was so idealistic and excited, very much the catalyst for the business as we were growing and building this thing. Because I was inexperienced I OK’d some moves for us to go with this fulfillment company, because I was the president and CEO. Which is a bad mistake. They weren’t a good match … they weren’t very ethical.
Essentially, once we got our product down there, they wanted to renegotiate the deal. And they kind of held us hostage because we were seasonal in a sense. We were mailing catalogs and everything and going online and they forced us to renegotiate, or were trying to, the contract. And consequently, they weren’t doing their work. So it had a ripple effect. In the end, after kind of battling through this for six months to a year, we decided that unfortunately a lot of goodwill had been hurt with our customers. It impacted our relationships with our vendors negatively and it hurt our cash flow a lot. So to rebuild, and keep in mind I started this with $50 and we were pushing ourselves as hard as possible to expand, it was devastating to us. So frankly, we decided that we had to shut down.
Next to the passing of my father, this was the hardest thing that I’d ever dealt with. And probably the saddest, because I’d gone out as a young man and raised money to build this business. It wasn’t as if I’d raised money from a tremendous number of sophisticated investors. I had a lot of small investors who believed in me as a person. And we were doing so well and everyone was so excited, when we lost it I felt like I had really let them down. Now I’m blessed to say that I’m in touch with, if not all of them, most of them still. And they understood, but we were all kind of disappointed in how we could make a decision in good faith and it just didn’t work out.
From that lesson I recognized and learned that I could put together, from a marketing standpoint, the bells and whistles, putting together deals, the greatest catalog and Web site … we were very advanced for the time. We were young guys starting this business and going online, using digital photography, actually having our vendors pay us to be in the catalog. We had a fantastic business model. But what I learned that was more important than anything else was that you have to have the back end of your business really, really well-thought through. What I mean by that is the operations and fulfillment side. Because you could be getting a million orders, but if you can’t fulfill those orders properly and timely and in an efficient manner, then you’re going to lose your business or your business will never grow. And I’ve seen it time and time again in my career. But nothing hit home like this, with my own experience with my own business.
So as a cataloger or a direct marketer, I’d encourage anybody to really be constantly taking a hard look at the back end of their business — developing a corporate culture where everybody sees themselves as being part of the sales and marketing team. What I mean by that is, literally everybody in your company can be a touchpoint. So the people picking and packing and shipping your products are handling one of the most important steps in the whole selling process. And they’re representing a touchpoint, because that package when it arrives has to not only arrive in a timely fashion, but look good. And make the person, the consumer who purchased this product, spent their hard-earned money, took the time to research and invest in you in a sense, make them feel good that they made a good decision by going with you. And you’ll continue to get them as a consumer and customer, and they’ll spread good word about you, good information about you. I’d really focus on that as a major point in any successful direct marketing enterprise.