From President to Owner: an Interview with IJO Owner Stephen Barnes

For an exclusive first interview, Michael interviews Stephen Barnes, newly announced Owner and President of IJO about what the changes mean for him, IJO, and the retailers & vendors included in the group.

Stephen Barnes shares his journey from longtime IJO member to President and now Owner, discusses his vision for the future of the Independent Jewelers Organization and what this transition means for retailers and vendors.

This transcript is a snippet from the interview between Michael Burpoe, Host of the In the Loupe podcast, and Stephen Barnes, President & Owner of IJO.

Listen to the full episode either through the embed below or wherever you get your podcasts!

Michael Burpoe:
So, Stephen, we were just talking about the acquisition and then we talked about what's changing. And now I want to talk about the roadmap. You've always talked about how IJO just celebrated 50 years and now you're planning for the future 50 years and that doesn't happen without a pretty strong roadmap. You can't take things day by day. If you're trying to plan for 50 years, can you kind of give an overview of what your roadmap for IJO looks like?

Stephen Barnes:
Absolutely. So you know, the first thing I look at is I want involvement of our members because I think the more that we can get our members involved in our organization. The more that we can get our members involved in our organization, the more we can educate them, the more we can provide resources for them. So that's the first thing.

I do have a growth mindedness to me and my vision is to continue to grow our retail membership side of our organization. I don't ever want to be the largest organization, I just want to be the best, and by being the best, I think it is a collectiveness of all of us pulling together and doing our parts to make us the best. You know what our secret sauce is? It's our members. Truthfully, our members share openly with each other their ideas and different challenges they have and they help all of our members overcome some of those challenges. So for me, growing our member base with quality members that are going to contribute to the overall health of our organization, that's one of my main focuses. Like I said, I don't ever want to be the biggest, just want to be the best.

When it comes to that, I also want to expand our vendor partnerships with a lot of our vendor members. You know we've got a decent mix of vendors, but I feel like there's still some categories that we're a little low in. I want to look at vendors that are going to be great partners or buyers that maybe our jewelers are already using, or maybe that we bring in some that they're not currently using to give them a different mix. We're also going to be looking at ways that we can provide value to our membership by possibly looking at bringing in different brands of vendors that we don't necessarily have right now. So we are setting up those appointments at JCK this summer in Luxury, to be able to hopefully bring some of those vendor partners on as well. I'm also looking at ways that we can provide services to our members, like I mentioned before, whether that's legal services, bookkeeping, accounting services, benefit services, whether that's health care or insurance, retirement plans, things like that.

We're just looking at all encompassing that we can do to just help our members get better, from marketing resources to educational resources, I mean we're just covering every area that we can to try to help our organization grow organically internally and also helping them grow their own businesses.

MB:
And you know what, I really appreciate that the goal is not just growth for IJO, because I could see how very easily it would be hey, let's go from having this many retailers to having THIS many retailers but it's more about the sustainable side of it.

So at the beginning of this interview I had mentioned, I wanted to ask some of the tougher questions because in our last two [interviews] as IJO President, it was more of this honeymoon phase for the first year and a half. I wanted to ask you this: do you feel like IJO is on the right track for those goals? Obviously, you've been President for just a short while and now as Owner, and I know that these things can take a long time. [IJO] is not like a sailboat that you can change anywhere. It's more like a big ocean liner that takes a long time to change its course. Do you feel like IJO is on track for those goals?

SB:
Absolutely. Pretty much over the last 18 months since I've assumed the role of President. My initiative has been very straightforward. I want to really pour into our next generation of jewelers, which we've done. We've had two amazing workshops over the last two years with them doing off-sites, where we're building into them, we're pouring into them with education, with networking opportunities for them to personally grow in their own abilities and being able to go back and implement things in their own jewelry stores to help them grow.

We've also recognized the need for some of our larger volume stores, larger revenue stores, that they felt like they just weren't getting quite the level of education that they were needing. So we, even at this last conference, had a workshop designed specifically for them to give them tools in their tool bags to help them go from, you know, $5 million to $10 million or $10 million to $20 million. So we're definitely trying to pour into our retailers as best we can to help them continue to grow. We've gotten so many new educational tools that we've brought on, technology tools that we've brought on, marketing tools that we've brought on. So we've started initiating all those things.

But, just like you said, this is a pretty big ship and it's not going to turn overnight, but some of those initiatives have already begun to happen. You know, we talk about unity, and one of the things that I feel very confident in is that we as an organization are going to continue to get better and stronger together. I think that the retailers are realizing that our vendors are partners of ours, meaning that none of us are going to be successful without each other. Our retailers need our vendors, our vendors need our retailers. IJO, as an organization, we need our retailers and our vendors. So if we can collectively work together, we're all going to get stronger, and that's what we need is just unifying our efforts to make this industry better.

MB:
I like the thought behind laying the groundwork with education, because that's what I've always been. A big focus of mine at Punchmark is that we can't convince people to just use our product more. We have to explain the why, and then the how.

But at the same time, again another little bit harder one is I feel like you alluded to these larger stores. So some of these, we consider them. You know these power users.

So for us these are these stores that are pushing the limits of e-commerce. You know we're impressed by what they're doing and it's no secret that like 10% of our stores are doing 80% of the volume when it comes to e-commerce, because they've had it figured out.

I can only extrapolate that to IJO and some people, some of the naysayers, might say that there is a focus on this family and it's a little bit more beginner-friendly when it comes to these retailers. You know the education is great but the education is typically you know about like hey, let's build up together. But what about [testing the upper limits]? Do you feel like some of these stores that are pushing the envelope, have a reason to be coming back to IJO under your leadership? Is that the goal? To entice them to return or to see the increased value with IJO?

SB:
100%! Man, that is exactly what we're trying to do.

You know, we, at this last conference in Palm Springs two weeks ago, we had stores that had not been to a conference maybe in a couple of years and they had not seen quote unquote, the new IJO, and what we've been kind of trying to do. And some of those were very large stores, $10 million+ stores and they came [to Palm Springs]. I actually personally got a chance to meet with them and talk with them, and I just wanted to hear from them like, what are some of your challenges? What can we do as an organization to help you get better? And once again, they came to our workshop that we had on Friday and literally after the workshop, they came up to me and they said this is exactly what we've been missing. We're not getting this from anywhere else. This quality of education, these resources that you're providing us with, we are not getting within any of our other organizations.

What we did as IJO is we started looking outside the jewelry industry. You know we all go to different conferences and we kind of hear some of the same speakers. Well, we're trying to diversify ourselves. We're looking outside the jewelry industry and bringing in higher quality speakers, higher quality presenters. Doesn't matter if you're in the jewelry industry or not, but any business owner can apply [these principles] to their business and make their business double, triple, 10x their business using the tools and resources. So that is what we're hoping to do.

And yes, so you know all of those naysayers who may have walked away or stepped away from IJO in the past couple of years. All I can say is come back, give us a chance, see what we're doing differently, and you're instantly going to be surprised at what you see.

Listen to the full interview on In the Loupe. Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday!