METROPULSE™

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Truck’n from Kansas to Hawaii, via Alaska!

The story of Randy Wischnesky’s odyssey from middle America...to would-be Alaska pipeline worker... to successful, floor care dealer in Hawaii!

Unlike many of us who started out selling “sweepers” door-to-door, Randy Wischnesky (AKA “Rang” because of his unusually long arms and the red/orange color of his hair) took the long way around getting into the floor care specialty business. In fact, selling vacuum cleaners and sewing machines was the last thing on his mind when he and a buddy took off from America’s heartland in a 1961 Ford Falcon station wagon bound for Alaska to make their fortunes on the infamous Alaska pipeline. Unfortunately, when they finally rattled into Anchorage a month or so later, broke and tired, they found out that the contractor they were told to contact was no longer hiring and hadn’t been for some time!

So there they were with $50, a few worthless belongings and a broken down old car between them. The only thing of any value was the sewing machine Randy had brought along. Figuring he could sell it for a few bucks, Randy went looking for a dealer in town. As fate would have it, he stumbled onto a new vac-and-sew business that was just moving into a new facility and was looking for help! Well, Randy fit right in and, since he was the only person on the staff who knew anything about sewing machines, he soon took over the shop’s entire repair business. In the meantime, he also discovered that he had quite a knack for selling.

After a time Randy decided to try his hand at running his own business and opened a small shop on the Kenai Peninsula. By then, however, the brutal cold of the Alaskan winters was getting to him. So, in true Wischnesky style, he decided to pull up stakes and move to Hawaii where he hoped the warm, tropical climate would be more to his liking…and it was. In 1993 he opened Rang’s Sew and Vac Shop in Hilo, Hawaii, and settled down.

Things were going well for him, but he began to realize there was a significant hole in his product line. It seems the shop is located in an older community where most of the residents grew up with the venerable “big E” canister vacs and often came in the shop wondering “why don’t they make ‘em like that anymore?” That got Randy thinking “why indeed?!”

The answer came when he saw an ad for the Metropolitan Vacuum Cleaner Company’s Professional line, in this magazine, with the headline: “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To…We Do!”

He said, “I was blown away when Ken Stern demo’d these units for me at the VDTA Show. They’re actually better than the canister vacs we grew up with—tougher, more powerful, even simpler to operate and that stainless/chrome finish is a real knockout! I knew these would be a perfect fit for my upscale ‘retro’ customers.”

Randy sold through his first order quickly and in doing so has discovered some interesting new sales angles that you may find useful to help beat the competition at their own game. He said, “One of the big buzz words used by several of the ‘high-tech’ upright brands these days is ‘cyclonics.’ This refers to a spinning action of the incoming air column that increases suction like a cyclone or tornado. You can turn this around by telling your Metro customers that cyclonic rotation occurs naturally in any vacuum cleaner (it’s not an exclusive feature of any brand) and is in fact much more effective in a straight-through canister design than it is in an upright with a bent, or otherwise diverted air flow!”

Randy said another trend is toward bag-less designs.

Explaining, he said, “You can easily sell against these brands by reminding customers it’s that wonderful, inexpensive, disposable filter bag that protects their investment against internal damage. No one wants to spend several hundred dollars on a quality vac and then clog it all up in a couple of years with accumulated dirt and dust particles that ‘escaped’ through the built-in bag-less filter! You’ll also get customers who will ask if the Metro unit has this gizmo or that thing-a-ma-gig to which you should answer proudly ‘absolutely not’ and proceed to explain that the more non-essential bells-and-whistles a given vacuum cleaner has, the more there is to go wrong with it. One of the most common is the retractable power cord. You won’t find one of these troublemakers on any Metro product because they are notoriously the first thing that breaks on models that have them! Simply explain and demonstrate that Metro vacs are designed for no-nonsense, high-performance cleaning and, with reasonable care and minimal
maintenance, are designed to last a lifetime…period!”

If you’d like more tips on selling the Metro Professional line, contact Ken Stern at 1-800-822-1602. For detailed information on other Metro product systems, call or visit www.metrovacworld.com

MetroPulse™ is sponsored by Metropolitan Vacuum Cleaner Company, Inc. Dealer inquiries are welcomed at 1-800-822-1602 www.metrovacworld.com

Reprinted from Floor Care Professional, August 2007