How we cater to individuals - Entrepreneur's Notebook - Column

Nation's Business, Oct, 1994 by Lois Jackman

The first time I went to buy a wheelchair, the salesman brought one out and told me the price. I paid--in more ways than one. What I took home I couldn't use. It was too heavy and cumbersome. If the salesman had treated me as an individual with special needs instead of as a condition, I might have been a satisfied customer. Instead, I felt victimized.

As I found out, encounters like that were not uncommon. The polio I had contracted as a teenager hadn't slowed me down much as a young adult, but in time my legs weakened, making a wheelchair necessary. However unsettling the experience of buying a wheelchair was, it would become invaluable when I started my own healthequipment store.

Such stores--at least when I started going to them in the 1970s--were depressing, horrible places filled with things people would rather not know about, like specially designed commodes, leg braces, and respiratory equipment. There was never an attempt to make the environment positive, and I am sure other people spent a lot more for goods even less useful than my first wheelchair.

Having never seen a medical-specialty store with a sales staff who viewed people as individuals, I knew there was a niche to be filled.

Years later, I moved to the Palm Springs, Calif., area, where retired people live comfortably, yet I noticed that they had trouble finding the items they needed to cope with aging.

My husband, Bob, had substantial business experience as a CEO in the toy industry, and in late 1991, we started, Yes I Can in Cathedral City, near Palm Springs. The idea was to dedicate a store to the functions of daily living so people with disabilities could regain a higher level of independence.

The business was developed from scratch; we had to search for and find the more than 800 items that now fill a 1,900-square-foot showroom.

The people who shop at Yes I Can aren't victims. They aren't classified as "hip replacements" or "muscular dystrophy sufferers." The store is, essentially, a series of homelike rooms that show how various products can help a person with everyday living. Although we like to hire people with disabilities, having a disability is not a prerequisite to working at the store; caring for individuals is.

We don't have a catalog business, but we do take orders over the phone from customers across the country who have visited our store. And we are proud of a wall of photos of people who have left happy. This highlights a basic principle of retailing, regardless of the business or the perceived clientele: Give people an atmosphere in which they are comfortable and want to do business, and they will return.

It's a lesson a lot of businesses need to learn when it comes to all minorities. Yes, companies have been affected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that law requires accessibility, not attitude adjustment. Many people still translate "senior citizen" into "second-class citizen." People with disabilities suffer indigpities all the time, far beyond the inconsiderate motorist who takes a handicapped parking space.

But America is aging, and people who are healthy today will find themselves infirm in the future. The unenlightened who have looked down on the handicapped are learning that their once-healthy neighbors and friends, in one way or another, are disabled. For the business community, this situation presents a tremendous challenge and opportunity.

If a company can improve its service to the point where all customers feel they receive equal, high-quality attention, the business will ensure a steady stream of patrons. and enhance its long-term prospects. Businesses that give customers individual service will draw repeat customers, no matter how the demographics of a market change.

Yes I Can is proof of that. The store's sales volume doubled in its second year and is expected to rise an additional 50 percent this year. It has gone beyond what Bob and I felt was the local market's saturation point.

But there is something more to this business, something that the guy who sold me that first wheelchair never knew. Business isn't just about bottom-line success, it's about helping people.

Lois Jackman is founder of Yes I Can, a Cathedral City, Calif, medical-specialty retailer. She prepared this account with Nation's Business Contributing Editor Charles A Jaffe.

Readers with special insights on meeting the challenges of starting and running a business are invited to contribute to Entrepreneur's Notebook. Write to: Editor, Nation's Business, 1615 H Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20062-2000.