Relationships with Employees, Customers and Vendors Lead to Success

IGA USA International Retailer of the Year Perspective

 December 8, 2011 

This business was originally owned by my parents and I grew up learning their lessons about retail. Along the way they taught me a lot about the keys to success, and it really seems to come down to building strong relationships with your employees, customers and vendors.

First and foremost, you have to treat your employees right. I believe if you develop your associates and give back to them, they'll make the store. We train our employees through the IGA Coca-Cola Institute to give them the skills they need, then we reward them for their loyalty with employee discounts and for their performance with monetary bonuses. It works because it helps them understand that they have a real stake in the success of the business—today most of our employees have been here from 15 to 30 years, and that's been great for our continued growth.

When you have wonderful associates, they're always looking for ways to keep your customers happy. Our employees treat our shoppers with the personalized attention and respect that is a big part of an IGA shopping experience, but they're also always bringing me great ideas for capturing clientele. Our loyalty card program is an example of that. Our management team works together to create and coordinate perks for loyalty card members like product giveaways, product-specific sales, and discount days. It's a pretty simple program at its core, but the creative benefits they add to it make it really valuable to shoppers.

So that leaves the vendors, and this is an area where being IGA is a huge help because the IGA Red Oval Family CPG partners are always looking for ways to build a strong relationship. They work with me to help me understand what I need to grow our customer base, to create value in our store, and to meet needs within our community. A great example of that is an upcoming opportunity I arranged with our local Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch vendors. When I realized that our community's food pantry had been hit hard by the economy this year, I called up both vendors and we worked together to create donation-based promotions where some of the proceeds from the sale of certain Coke and Budweiser products will go to the food pantry.

When you think about it, it's all about giving your customers a shopping experience they can't find anywhere else, and that's what is so great about being IGA. We get to be who our community needs us to be, only we're even better because we have IGA behind us.

Thanks,

Guy LaPerle
2012 IGA USA International Retailer of the Year
LaPerle's IGA Plus
Colebrook, NH
LDC: Bozzuto's, Inc.