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Letter to the editor

Lighting store owner is undaunted by dim sales

Ex-Home Depot executive embraces a new challenge.

By MARK ALBRIGHT. Times Staff Writer
Published March 1, 2008

Tony Brown, owner of Lumenair in Brandon since 2005, stepped down as a regional Home Depot president in 2000 but became bored with retirement.
	[Chris Zuppa | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Chris Zuppa | Times] Tony Brown believes his lighting business will be stronger if it survives the economic downturn.

BRANDON - In his last job at Home Depot, Tony Brown was in charge of 25,000 people and $12-billion in annual sales.

In his new role as owner of a lighting store, his 18 employees did sales of about $2-million in 2007.

For Brown, the dramatic switch from corporate pooh-bah to small business entrepreneur posed its own challenges. But nothing like the housing market collapse.

"It was the worst time to get into this business and the best time," said Brown who paid $1.5-million for 22-year-old Lumenair in 2005. "If we can survive this, we'll emerge far stronger when the business climate improves."

Brown, 56, the intensely competitive son of a high school football coach, never thought he would be relieved to see sales drop 10 percent in 2007. Two rivals went out of business and other competitors are doing worse than he is, their laid-off workers tell him when looking for work.

Home Depot was the mass market force that in the 1990s mowed down the traditional local lighting shop that usually was just a showroom for an electrician. Now Brown hopes to bring a retailer's discipline to one of the handful of lighting shops left in the region.

Electrical contractors do most residential fixture installation these days with materials customers find online or at a big box store. That made home builders the lifeblood of traditional lighting shops.

Once subdivision construction died in 2006, Brown's worst-case-scenario business plan came true. His builder orders dropped to 18 percent from 70 percent. Walk-in retail customers had to take up the slack.

"The key to a good retail lighting store is service, service, service," he said, "So we must treat a customer buying a light bulb like a $20,000 job."

To supplement the top-tier fixtures and library of manufacturer catalogs, he added more fans and fixtures found at Home Depot and matched prices. He deployed three staff electricians for installation. He seized on the outdoor lighting trend, talked suppliers into helping with lifetime warranties and created maintenance contracts to replace bulbs and fix systems that wear out fast outdoors.

A ground-floor Home Depot guy in Atlanta hired by the chain founders and later manager of the first Home Depot in Clearwater in 1982, Brown rose to president of the chain's Tampa-based Southern division. He resigned in 2000 after colliding with new CEO Bob Nardelli, a former GE efficiency expert who slashed costs and customer service that Home Depot is still trying to repair.

Nardelli got the boot after six years. Brown retired to travel, teach his wife, Sandy, to play golf, work on an MBA and get really bored. The idea to unretire crystallized on a golf course. Sandy was beating him again when he misfired a drive.

"She suggested I try the women's tee and was being sincere," Brown said. "That was it for me!"

Brown's neighbor Lee Mellati, a retired tech engineer, found the deal to buy Lumenair. Brown, whose first Home Depot department was lighting, dove in and later bought out Mellati.

He learned buying secrets long ago, like how lighting fixture finish trends follow the plumbing industry.

Some differences running a small business hit like a 2-by-4. First, he couldn't interview employees before the sale was done. So he took a leap of faith. Employees didn't have health insurance, so he provided it.

When sales drooped during a break-even year, Brown, as owner, chose to forgo a paycheck.

Some workers offered to cut their hours, said Jay Lyles, Lumenair manager. Brown refused, suggesting they spend more "quality time" with customers.

He cut expenses (like once-weekly trash pickup rather than three times) yet raised the ad budget for visibility in a downturn.

"I didn't buy this business for one store," Brown said. "I see a chain."

The home front

Selling lighting fixtures, like most retail businesses tied to home improvement and home building, has been in a slump.

- Home Depot, the nation's largest home-improvement retailer, posted its first annual sales decline this week ($77.35-billion in 2007 vs. $79.02-billion in 2006) and released a gloomy outlook for 2008.
- No. 2 in the home improvement industry, Lowe's reported this week that fourth-quarter profit dropped by a third from a year earlier on flat sales.
- Among those that have filed for bankruptcy within the past year are home furnishings retailers Bombay Co. of Fort Worth, Texas, and New York-based Levitz Furniture.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8252.

[Last modified February 29, 2008, 23:22:23]