Page 35 - Lighting Magazine April 2019

market with the intent of doing more business with them. That’s an outgrowth of how I’ve been trained. I sleep well at night.
I think personal ethics is important to success. You need to be the same person everywhere in your life. I try to be the same person at mar- ket that I am with friends and family. That’s not something they teach in business school! I look at things through a di erent lens.
In Minnesota, reputation is everything. If you were to buy a car in Los Angeles, chances are you’d have no reason to return to that dealership and you probably wouldn’t tell anyone about your experience. In Minnesota, reputation = testimonials. That’s why we are vigilant to keep a clean reputation.
wHaT does THe fuTure Hold for sHowrooms?
The lighting business was mom and pop for so long. I think it will probably go back to a boutique business. There will always be people who can’t tell scale and need to see a xture in person or who can’t distinguish a plated nish from a pol- ished one, you know, the tire-kickers. Just like the clothing business, there are some things you want to try on and see in person.
How do we invent ourselves as boutiques? It has a lot to do with personal hand-holding and people talking to one another. There are custom- ers who want to listen [to your expertise]. We [at Creative Lighting] may be somewhat insulated from what everybody else is doing because we’ve been here for 90 years. Legacy dealers [like us] have a di erent opportunity than start-ups.
We may have to set our sights on a di erent scale. Believe it or not, there are still some things that even Millennials won’t buy online. Maybe they get one to two deliveries a week from Ama- zon – and for everyday items like dog food – but why is it they only buy a couch in person?
It’s not the glory days [of years past]. Your customers are di erent, too. Now you have electricians and interior designers doing the buy- ing. Conversely, I know people who have go en their lighting from a kitchen and bath shop as part of a package — and that’s a di erent kind of hand-holding.
Tel: 847-680-9043 www.matthewsfanco.com