For Shannon Greene, interim CEO and Chief Financial Officer for Tandy Leather Factory, 2015 produced a mixed bag of fiscal results. But, Greene believes 2016 will place the company back where it wants to be and a key element will be renewed employee engagement. That, in effect, will heavily impact customer engagement and the entire customer experience.
And hiring quality managers who, in turn, hire exceptional staff is a step in the right direction, Greene noted during the company’s March 11 fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call.
“This company’s greatest asset is its employees,” Greene said, according to Seeking Alpha. “We are a team and without everyone working toward the same goal, the company will not grow to its full potential. Our commitment is to communicate employee value and to create a structure and culture where employees can find careers here, not just jobs. Tandy Leather came into existence because Charles Tandy believed that he could create a successful company consisting of a chain of Leathercraft stores, by teaching people how to do leather work. We need to do a better job of educating our employees so that they can be able to assist the customers who look to us for help. We are currently working on a program to do just that providing to our store associates some basic knowledge of the items that we sell and how to use them. They will be more effective sales people when they are comfortable talking to customers about our products.”
Fourth quarter consolidated sales slipped 1%, to $24.2 million. The Retail Leathercraft segment reported a 1% sales increase. Retail Leathercraft accounted for 65% of the company’ total sales.
“We have moved the number of our smaller stores into larger space,” Greene said. “The concept makes total sense. The larger the space, the more inventories available to customers, which should result in higher sales. However, so far we have not achieved the ROI on those. I hope you will never hear me say we have arrived we can go no further this is as good as we are going to get. There will always be something we can improve upon. 2015 was a challenging year, although I wouldn’t characterize it as a bad one. While our sales growth was not at the level to which we have been accustomed, we still increased sales. Further, we found ourselves behind the 8-ball, so to speak, at the end of the first quarter due to a significant decline in our gross profit margins.”