How to find a competitive edge

'You've got to think over-the-top customer service'

Nearly four decades ago Patti Peters left Connecticut, hit Ronan, and found herself faced with the choice of heading west or north.

She and her then-husband, trusting a ranger who said the Flathead was a must-see, picked north.

"You know how sometimes one second can change your life," she recalled.

That one second in Ronan set into motion a chain of events that shaped Peters into a professional who today is helping companies stay in business through economic turmoil tougher than most have seen in their careers.

Actually, what Peters has learned is pretty much common sense.

"Whether you have one or 100 employees, you've got to think over-the-top customer service," Peters, who founded The Mountain Trader in Kalispell in 1972, said last week. "It's got to be a mantra, you've got to train to it. The better you train internally, the more customers you'll bring in. Customer service is the competitive edge."

Peters now lives in Sonoma, Calif., but travels to the Flathead frequently to help established businesses and entrepreneurs through her Business Resource and Training Co. - often donating her services.

Back in the early 1970s she'd had a bit of training herself before she and her husband left their teaching jobs in Connecticut and landed in Kalispell. She was turned down that summer for a job at Flathead Valley Community College, but they hadn't seen the last of her.

Eventually she helped start a program there to usher low-income women into the workplace and parlayed the one-year grant into seven successive years of refunding.

Business lesson No. 1: "Once you set your eye on a goal you have to be relentless in pursuing it," she said. And change directions only when you finally hit the wall.

Cultivating collaborative partnerships was lesson No. 2.

That fall she and her husband decided to start a business, any business. They landed on publishing a shopper, but had no idea how to go about it.

Lessons No. 3 and No. 4: "We started something we knew nothing about," she said, "and we didn't do our due diligence on what this place was like."

Everyone turned them down for a business loan until Paul Wachholz, then a banker, 'saw the vision and saw the tenacity on my part." He took a gamble on the East Coast couple.

Peters confessed that advertisments in their first issue were completely fabricated. But they slogged on, hounding businesses for ads and fabricating only as necessary. Lucky for them, Bob Ewing was one of the businessmen they annoyed. He had owned a paper in Mexico and agreed to teach them everything about the business in exchange for their promise never again to darken his door with a request to buy an ad.

Half a year later, after extreme in-the-trenches schooling, he handed them an unsolicited ad.

"Getting a full-page ad from a well-respected businessman in town," Peters remembered, "that was my MBA."

She uses that real-life business degree to help others walking the walk now.

Ron Scharfe, who opened Uncorked Wines last July in the Blue Cow car-wash building, is one of them. She offers him tips to keep his wine and cheese displays fresh-looking and the store interesting. He brings in high-quality wines at prices from $8.50 a bottle on up, a niche he believed would do well in the Flathead, he said.

"I've always wanted to have a specialty wine store, have a place where people can learn about wine, where you have a variety of wine that you can't go to a grocery store and get," Scharfe said.

"Patti has been in some business her whole life, and we set each other off," he said. "When she goes into stores she likes to see fresh, new marketing and merchandise. She wants to see a new display."

So Uncorked features a new wine almost every week, puts together a creative display by label, or showcases a great buy. It's interesting, but they also make it easy for people to shop there by walking them through questions that drill down to the right bottle of wine.

That's important to Peters. You have to make it easy for people to do business with you, she said. And you have to be willing to give back.

"In your heart you need to be willing to remember where you came from," she said. "You have to make your customers your ambassadors."

Well-trained staffers are potentially a company's best promoters, Peters noted.

Shape business hours to customers' convenience, not yours; survey them on their customer experience. Talk to neighboring businesses on how to generate customer traffic on your street. Pull in the staff to evaluate products and services; talk with them, too, about the bottom line.

"If you're not going to make the mortgage, ask the staff what we're going to do so everyone can keep a job. There are a million ways to keep working," Peters said. "Find your voice in time to speak up and effect change."

But if the hard decision to close must be made - after making every feasible cutback - be smart about it.

"If there's not enough support to keep open, you might have to close with dignity and respect," Peters said. "And that has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with the economy."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com