Te company name actually has its roots in the warehouse that was used to store product when the first store opened in 1979, which is still used today.
Online With a Vengeance If you ask Dean Magnesen, he’d say
with merchandise we have in stock and move on. Anything that makes the experience for the consumer better, I’m all for it.” Each store has six or seven installation technicians and sales people, plus one store
manager. The ratio between install and sales staff is 1:1, keeping all employees spe- cific to their individual roles, while they occasionally help clean and restock product. The size of each store ranges from 5,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet. A sepa- rate install facility is included for the SLC store, less than a five-minute drive away; it houses up to five installations at once. Due to volume, Magnesen has to occasionally call in part-time installers to aid with the additional workload. “We have a small group of installers who have worked for us in the past, which makes a huge difference. They’re trained to know the product and installs, just like the rest of the team. Everyone can speak intelligently about all prod- ucts,” he said. There’s a reason behind the staff’s strong product knowledge. They’ve had a good
education. Magnesen schedules regular product trainings with his vendors, having already had 10 this year before the month of June. The company as a whole is overseen by an internal group of four people, including
Magnesen and his wife, Jennie, who is a co-owner. The other two internal managers are Comptroller/Buyer Howard Yokoyama and Promotion Manager Matt Powers.
Go Big or Go Home When a potential customer first pulls up to a Sound Warehouse location, the first thing they notice is that it looks bigger and more extravagant than the businesses around it, according to Magnesen. That’s not a coincidence. It’s part of the company’s core idea of wowing the customer on every level. This of course starts with the name,
that word-of-mouth is perhaps the strongest marketing tool a store can have. Ten he’ll give you several other tools he uses to spread the word. Considering he opened his first store in 1979 when radio was dirt cheap ($10 an ad, according to him), using radio and TV ads was a no-brainer. But with the Internet came the need for a strong online presence. Tis is what inspired him to create what has become a dominant online presence. “We still get good results out of radio. Millions of vehicles with AM/FM radios in them. But the single item we track best are our classified ads through www.ksl. com, the local radio station’s version of Craigslist,” he said. “If you go into the car stereo, audio video section of the site, you’ll see our banner ads. Tey keep fun- neling people into our website.” Of course, the staple of an strong online presence is having a strong web- site, which Magnesen definitely does considering their 3,500 click-throughs sent from KSL on a monthly basis. “Our initial goals were just to have a
good website. It had to be graphically attractive. It had to be current and easy to navigate. Once we felt we had accom- plished that, the next goal was to send people to our website. We’re fortunate to have the KSL website, which is owned by the Mormon church and gets millions of hits every day.”
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