Think Nationally, Act Locally

Boot Barn has been offering its customers top quality footwear for more than three decades, but after recent acquisitions more than doubled its store count, its in-store fire, security and monitoring systems faced some serious challenges.

The company has built a reputation for selling top quality western, work and motorcycle boots for men and women at price points that range from several hundred dollars to more than $12,000, plus a wider range of casual and outdoor footwear and apparel for men, women and children.

Laying claim to the broadest assortment of boots in California, Orange County-based Boot Barn had developed a successful business model that seemed to require only minimal attention to issues of security and loss prevention.

Stores near and far
And then came the acquisition of stores in markets as far away as Montana and Colorado. Suddenly, the lack of a well-developed LP program and the need for an alarm company able to serve a huge, multi-state retailer became critical.

“We had a local provider servicing all our stores,” says Brian Huff, Boot Barn’s director of loss prevention, “but with the acquisition, it quickly became apparent that we needed an alarm company that could service us on a national level with local [vendor] connections and handle any additional stores we opened.

“As a small local company one minute, and a growing national company the next, it was very difficult for us because we didn’t have the personnel and expertise to do that.”

Enter Stanley CSS, which bills itself as a “national company with local connections.”

Boot Barn’s first priority was fire alarm and burglar alarm monitoring. “With each building we had to determine the level of protection we had and then … determine what we needed,” Huff says. “Stanley did the surveys for each location and worked with local companies [to provide fire and burglary alarm systems] and made the connections with the company’s overall monitoring grid.”

With more than 300,000 customers in North America, Naperville, Ill.-based Stanley CSS maintains 75 bricks-and-mortar offices serving 120 major metropolitan markets. “This is our niche,” says Christopher BenVau, Stanley’s vice president of national accounts for North America. “Other companies rely on subcontractors, but if a client needs a service technician in San Diego at midnight, it’s easier for us to get him there than to convince another company to send someone there.”

For some Boot Barn store locations, an onsite inspection would require a long flight and half a day’s drive. But the monitoring of retail operations made possible by Stanley’s systems have provided Boot Barn with “a lot more oversight of our buildings and locations,” Huff says. “We know when our stores are accessed, and why.”

Seeing and hearing
When retail clients reach out to Stanley CSS for more information, it’s because they have a “pain or a nuisance” that is becoming more unpleasant, BenVau says. “They are trying to solve a problem.”

Typically, potential clients are looking for premises protection, inventory protection, a video application for slip and fall incidents and to ensure employee safety during store opening and closing. Another issue may be a service provider whose systems require staff members to work overtime because alarms can’t be set.

A key point of differentiation for Stanley’s systems and capabilities is its portfolio of online, real-time e-management services — known formally as Stanley eServices. In addition to the data transparency that these eServices applications provide clients, “Our service level is unmatched,” BenVau says. “In the first quarter of 2010, we responded to questions from our 770 national accounts within 24 hours 73 percent of the time. And within 72 hours, we responded to 97 percent of those questions.”

During one recent business trip that would, in the past, have prevented Huff from staying up to date on daily store operations, he reports being able to monitor all 81 stores from his laptop and follow up with questions to district managers about any afterhours activities in stores.

“I can now go to a website and make changes in a minute’s notice, even getting emergency services to locations in the middle of nowhere, and have real-time information about what is going on with those locations,” he says. “We now have the flexibility to train local district managers, which allows me to become a pure manager rather than a hands-on problem solver.”

Stanley provides a scorecard “that lets us know about annual incidents, quarterly installations, service requirements and what we paid for those,” says Huff, who meets quarterly with Dan Valladares, senior national account manager for Stanley CSS, “to discuss Stanley’s performance and whether they are meeting our needs. We are holding them accountable that they’re coming through on their promises.”