Burnaby Now - May 21, 2008

A cellphone for all seasons

Mobile mobility: Damon Jones is general manager of Glentel’s retail division. The company is a leader in providing wireless communication across North America, its stores and outlets growing by leaps and bounds.

Owning a niche has proved a winning formula for a Burnaby company. Glentel has spread across the country, redefininghow mobile telephones are sold.

“We’ve built a pretty solid model,” explained Damon Jones, general manager of Glentel’s retail division. The secret to Glentel’s success lies in its flexibility and adaptability. Somewhere in a Glentel store is a product that suits every age, income level and brand preference. Unlike the carrier-specific stores, Glentel lets its customers choose, whether its Rogers, Fido, Bell or another carrier.

For each, they have all the major brand names: Nokia, Blackberry, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, just to start. They have stores in malls and stores within other stores, managing to make sure that almost everyone who at some point goes shopping will pass by one of their locations. And Glentel has different faces, growing by adding existing stores to its roster. In 2007, the company opened more than 85 stores, increasing the size of its retail division by one-third and becoming Canada’s largest cellphone multi-retailer.

Glentel’s business division operates through 18 centres across Canada, setting up integrated wireless voice and data management systems. Its roots are in a single glass shop in New Westminster, a business started in 1946 by the family of Tom Skidmore, Glentel’s president and CEO. Vancouver born and raised, Skidmore has expanded that business into an international corporation that covers wireless communications and the automotive glass industry in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Glentel is a growing telecommunications company that is worth more than $200 million. When Jones arrived at Glentel in January 2000 as a regional manager, the company only had 12 Wireless Wave locations.

“We were a very small organization.” He was promoted to his current position, general manager of Glentel’s retail division, in 2003. Since he arrived, Jones has watched the company grow and spread across the country. “Almost every year, we significantly grew the store count with Wireless Wave.” The goal was 100 stores, what Jones says is “the magical number,” a point they’ve now surpassed. The concept spread with the acquisition of TBooth/La Cabine – formerly their biggest retail competitor – a couple of year ago that added 49 locations across Canada overnight. TBooth/La Cabine now has more than 60 stores in malls in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta.

Exploring other ways to grow, Glentel has worked out a deal with Costco in which it sets up shop inside the wholesale giant’s stores and sells cellphones to customers from instore kiosks. They currently are in about63 per cent of Costco’s Canadian locations, Jones said, with up to 15 more setting up by the end of the year. “As we expand these locations across Canada, Glentel grows with them,” he said. But, Jones admits, retail through Costco compared to their traditional mall setting is a phone of a different colour, so to speak, because the potential customers are different and Costco has its own corporate brand and identity.

“It is quite different,” he said. “The employees, we have to look at them from a different perspective, what fits that unit. “This allowed us to open up and set up shop in a different environment all together.” The partnership is working out well, Jones said.

“They’ve allowed us to run the business as we see fit,” he said, although he added that they do follow Costco guidelines. “We not only have to live up to our expectations but to theirs. They really value their customers as team members.” Glentel is picking up information by watching how Costco does business, Jones said. “We can take some of those lessons there and apply it to the other (Glentel) businesses,” he said, explaining the appeal of the company, which also keeps statistics on its customers and how often they shop. “Costco (has) just a very dedicated clientele,” said Jones. “They have a good and solid client base.”

The partnership is a different experience for Glentel. Costco stores are warehouses, and customers are more likely to be family-based and have higher average incomes.

“We’re almost like a product on the shelves (in Costco), but we have employees too,” Jones explained. Glentel’s mall-based stores are small, bustling and energetic, drawing customers who are young, possibly students or just starting careers. But even within the subset of mallbased stores, not all Glentel locations are alike. “They all have a look like they’re all (individual) businesses, not owned by the same company,” Jones said, explaining this is particularly important when there is, for example, a Wireless Wave and a TBooth in the same mall.

They might be owned by the same company, but they’re geared towards different markets. Each has its own brand, its own look.

At Wireless Etc., which has 63 locations, there’s a different dress code and the store has a different look compared to the “hip” atmosphere at Wireless Wave where customers are those who often have to have the latest gadget, Jones said. TBooth falls somewhere between the two, appealing to customers who might not be as “tech-friendly” as those in their late teens or early 20s. Yet they are similar enough that some staff go back and forth between the stores. Having so many different faces takes constant training of staff to work with varied customer bases. Glentel is still opening more locations across the country.

“There’s still lots of opportunities in the Canadian marketplace to grow the two retail store businesses,” Jones said. “We’re open to looking at other models or other opportunities that come our way,” he said, adding that, at this point, they didn’t have any in mind but are just expanding what they have. As for heading south of the border, that hasn’t been ruled out but it’s not in the immediate future either. “We still have a bit of work to do in the Canadian marketplace,” Jones said, noting Glentel may expand into other big box retailers. “There’s lots of opportunity here.”