Please note that we do NOT have a store on 203rd Street or Fraser Highway (Google and Yellow Pages are wrong)!
But we ARE open for business in a way that we can serve you better than ever!
Conventional wisdom in business is to never show weakness – always come across as “perfectly together”, but I propose that many people may find it refreshing to cut through the nonsense, because everybody knows full well that we're all "only human".
So here’s my humble confession: Our storefront ventures didn't turn out very well. I discovered that I'm no retail king.
On the business end, there were too many employees, too many clients and too much administration for me to keep track of and manage properly.
On the personal end, it was too much work, too much pressure, too much stress. Although I'm emotionally stable and psychologically strong (ie: I didn't have a nervous breakdown), I discovered that I'm not wired for long-term high-stress living.
So here’s the scoop: We’ve closed the stores and have downsized and simplified our business to improve my family’s quality of life and to serve you better.
This way we have fewer clients, but they receive better and prompter service. Rather than dealing with hundreds of clients each month, we now deal with only a couple dozen, so each client is more important to us, and is better cared for.
For many years we ran this hot tub business from home, but the company kept growing and expansion seemed like the logical thing to do. So we went ahead and started doing the whole “storefront thing”, and as we kept growing faster than we imagined, we were even considering opening multiple locations across BC.
But the bigger we got, the less we enjoyed it. The stress and busyness was robbing me and my family of our “joie de vivre”.
After going through some hard times, my wife and I decided we should scale everything way back and simplify our lives.
It's easy to learn how to grow a company but it's hard to figure out how to intentionally shrink one down.
Here's what we decided: Instead of having a storefront with store hours, we would do business by phone & email, and meet clients in person by appointment only.
Instead of hiring staff to manage as many clients as possible, we’ve decided to limit ourselves to taking on only as many clients as we can easily and happily manage without hiring staff.
At first we worried that people may not be interested in this unconventional approach, but the truth is that we’re discovering that people are surprisingly open to the concept -we're actually doing quite well, and customer satisfaction is better than it’s ever been!
Not that the storefront ventures were a waste of time and effort – we learned many valuable lessons, acquired much knowledge and developed all kinds of organizational and management skills, so we're far better off for having done the storefront ventures!
But it’s better this way. Lower overhead, better prices, fewer clients, better customer service, less problems, higher client satisfaction.
I need to take some time to revise/update the other pages on this website to reflect this recent change, but not much is different except we don't have a commercial storefront anymore.
I look forward to hearing from you soon,
Steve Anonby
(604) 787-4441
