oct-2017

62 63 WINDOWWORLD OF BATON ROUGE window,”he recounts.“I got involved withWindow World in 2002, and what really appealed to me about their business model was the simplicity of the sales side of it.We use price-point marketing: any size,white vinyl trim, double-hung window for $189, installed.Our contract has all the prices printed on it,so it’s a non-negotiation,very straightforward selling process.Thewholemodel works because it’s a really fair distribution of the costs and theworkload.” In addition to its assortment of windows (dou- ble-hung,sliding,casement,garden,bayand bow,and hurricane),WindowWorld of Baton Rouge also carries Therma-TruDoors,a line of Alside Siding,and hurricane shutters.“But 85 to 95 percent of what we sell is high- end,vinyl trim replacement windows,”Roland states. “The two big cities that we serve are Baton Rouge andNewOrleans in the Louisianamarket.We have a showroom in Lafayette andwe have a showroom in Lake Charles.We have a similar operation inHouston, servicing that area,a similar operation inDallas,serv- We’re very organized and we’ve got layers of manage- ment that are not common in our industry. It’s more than just a salesman and an installer doing the work. We’ve got many installers, so we’ve got a level of man- agement above that to supervise and stay on top of it. Our ability to manage that whole process, to make the customer experience as favorable as possible, is where our strength really lies. JIM ROLAND PRESIDENT AND CEO ing the Dallas/Ft.Worth area,and a smaller operation inTampa,Florida.We do some commercial sales and apartment buildings.Our product line is a residential stylewindowand that is often appropriate in apart- ment buildings and condos.We do someHUDprojects, but it’s all in residential-style settings.The bulkof our work is direct sales to homeowners. Because of that direct sales businessmodel,Roland explains that managing the analytics is a verybig component of the company’s day-to-dayoperations. “We’re a verydata-driven company,”he states.“We have our own proprietary software that we developed.We can trackand record every single call that comes in; we knowwhat we’ve got from the newspaper that day, what we’ve got fromTV.We reviewdata and reports, and that’s a big driver on howwe spend our money on advertising.It’s also awayof measuring the perfor- mance of everypart of our business,from the produc- tion side to the sales side.” Not content with merely dominating everymar- ket that it’s in, Roland believes that the company can always get better at what it does.“The biggest initiative we’ve got going right now is improving the customer experience,”he relates.“Our customers, overwhelmingly, are very satisfied with what we sell. When we do everything right, our customers are ec- static; they never really have buyer’s remorse. In the old days of home improvement, you sold windows