A cell phone store opened to keep a family together became the largest independent Verizon retailer in the country - after the CEO rebuilt his leadership bench from the top down.
Client-reported figures for Victra only. Not a firm-wide average.
Rich Balot opened his first Victra store to save his parents’ marriage. Riding the growth of cell phones, the side hustle went from two stores to three, and then to fifty.
“I fell in love with deals,” Rich says. “Acquiring companies is fun. Sometimes it can be too much fun, because you don’t want to worry about the business. You want to acquire more businesses.”
The CFO had come from manufacturing and did not know small-box retail accounting, or the importance of individual store P&Ls. He could not give Rich the information he needed to make the decisions that would turn the business around. Rich knew he had the wrong person in the job and dragged his feet on pulling the plug.
“It got to the point where I didn’t want to go into work, because I didn’t want to hear my CFO telling me I was about to go bankrupt,” Rich says. “I’ll bet you I aged more in those three to four months than any other time in my life.”
Rich brought Mark Moses in as his coach and committed to the Make BIG Happen System’s rhythms, adopting a planning cadence and working the gaps between sessions.
Then they got the right people into the right seats. They hired a sales leader away from a competitor, replaced three of the four regional vice presidents, and went a level down to replace sixteen of the twenty-four district managers.
When Rich later returned to the CEO seat, he rehired Mark and went back to the annual and quarterly planning rhythms, with other coaches facilitating so Rich could get into the weeds with his team while a trusted third party kept him accountable.
Victra reached $1.7 billion in annual revenue, more than one thousand stores, and nearly six thousand employees.
From there it grew past $3 billion, as the largest independent Verizon retailer in the country.
"I fell in love with deals, acquiring companies is fun. Sometimes, it can be too much fun because you don't want to worry about the business. You want to acquire more businesses."
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