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I think nurturing that relationship is huge and that’s a big part of the pawn process that we teach when we come in and do that pawn health assessment. We’re looking at how are they interacting with that customer, because if you’re not perfect with that customer interaction, you’re going to have challenges and you’re going to potentially lose them not only to another competitor, but you may lose them to online.

Marketing is a big one. One of the things that I think the guys that are successful at right now are using social media pretty well to market, they’re advertising obviously online, they’re effectively using eBay and Amazon and some of those places to sell some of their merchandise. But I think there is a huge missed opportunity in the advertising to your current customers. And, what I see every day is you have the pawn customers that are religiously coming in to get money for their items, and, then you have the retail customers that are coming in to see what new items are hitting the floor every single day. How much marketing do we do to get them to cross over? In most cases what I see with our clients is they don’t do much or anything to get those clients to come on over. And, there is a huge opportunity along with text messaging as well. People might change their email address regularly, they definitely change their home address in this industry, our customers. So, but they tend to keep that phone number, so if you can give them text alerts and say, “Hey this is our special promotion here” or “Your loan is due today” that’s huge for them. Gives them a nice reminder and it’s going to get you a nice uptick in retail and interest collected on your pawn loans.

The things that I see are the folks that have kind of gone out of their way to work with their communities and really try to change the perception of this industry. So, we’ve had some clients that are really solid and are trying to change the perception of the pawn industry, and helping them understand that listen, we’re not the guy that here to rip you off. We’re a place where you can turn to get cash fast where you might not have that option anywhere else. And so, a lot of charities, giving to charities, being part of the community, that is really huge for us and we’ve seen a fair amount of increase in activity in recent years and that’s a good thing.

For us, we’re typically in a shop, when we do like our pawn health check, we tend to be out there for one to two days for a single unit, and for multi-units, under ten we’re there for three to four days typically. Then the larger chains obviously more than that, but we’re on site and we’re looking at the customer interaction. We’re looking at how do you work with a customer? How do you qualify the loans? How do you take the items in? Are they putting them in the system properly, which can play into effect if you are selling online and you have something that’s coded wrong in the system. Then we look at how the business is making money, how is it spending money? What kind of money is coming in versus what’s going out? Do they have a full understanding of their actual business model? And so, that’s typically anywhere between two days and a week out in the locations.

The biggest things that I recommend, that I see, that I think needs some help in areas, is understanding the performance of your location. And some of that starts with just understanding the key metrics. So, we take a long look at the metrics of the business and how it’s performing. The other thing is you have to look at your business model. So, has your business model changed? Are you down in retail? Which, if you don’t know your numbers, you won’t know that piece of it. So, you have to understand are you down in retail? If you’re down in retail what’s causing that? And once you’ve defined what’s causing that, let’s say it’s because you’re not selling any merchandises online, then what do you do to get online? And if you’re a pawnbroker, and you haven’t had any experience in this, and you don’t know the services that, you know PawnMaster or some other place offer, then how do you or who do you go to, to get assistance and help with that? And so, I think those are some of the biggest things pawnbrokers today need help with to reverse some of those trends.

The biggest changes I’ve seen is competition moving in. There are the subtle competitions such as your neighbor opens a pawn shop you know a mile away from you. But, it’s the competitors that we’re not looking at that are killing us, which is the Craigslists, the eBays, the Amazons, and also there’s other things out there in the market place that are, you know people buying consumer-to-consumer instead of retail-to-consumer. And so, that’s hurting us. There’s also more places – back in the day, probably six or seven years ago when the Payday Loan industry was higher, people had other opportunities to get cash. Now, I think we can capitalize on that, because that industry is a little bit under fire, and we can go after that more so now than we could before.