RWR real world retail of Knowledge WEALTH
With a chain of three stores, owner Dean Magnesen has parlayed Sound Warehouse of Utah into a 12-volt goliath that always stays hungry.
WORDS BY TED GOSLIN A
fter meeting Dean Magnesen, the first impression one’s likely to get is that of an unassuming, kind, grandfa- therly figure with big ideas. The flip side to that coin is that while he is all of those things, he’s also as shrewd a
businessman as Andrew Carnegie or Warren Buffet. Like those aforementioned captains of industry, Magnesen understands that to make it big, you have to think big; enter Sound Warehouse of Utah, back-to-back Mobile Electronics Retailer of the Year. Since 1979, Sound Warehouse of Utah has been wowing cus- tomers with a combination of extravagant-looking facilities, quality service, and dead-on marketing strategies. But these techniques, much like Magnesen’s foray into 12-volt, didn’t happen overnight.
Liquid Turns Solid In 1970, Magnesen was involved in the music business; he sold records for a record distributor. “We basically sold every label except for Capitol and Columbia. Then the whole record business changed from selling an album, group, or label, to highlighting only the top 100 chart-topping groups and turned boring. I was about 21 at the time.” From there, Magnesen found himself selling consumer elec- tronics working for a distribution company until 1985. He and his partner at the time formed a liquidation business that col- lected receivable by running massively indebted companies out of business. That business ran until 2000. During the midst of the liquidation and distribution work,
Magnesen decided to open a store to capitalize on three boom- ing industries at the time: home stereo, waterbeds, and car stereo. But like most fads, one faded early and the strongest of the remaining two would reign supreme. “The waterbed deal was kind of a craze and it went away, then
our 12-volt started increasing in sales. We didn’t have physical space to do justice to the home theater business, so we decided to get out of home stereo and focus on the 12-volt business,” he said.
Radio Determines Radius As his 12-volt business flourished, Magnesen saw another
opportunity based on his location. Since he opened the original store in Salt Lake City (SLC), which is in the middle of a large
38 Mobile Electronics July 2014
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