Chris Turner Of Sawyer Twain: Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Be yourself and have your own opinions whether you choose to be vocal on them or not. If you believe in something and are passionate about it, pursue it with everything you have and eliminate any negative energy from friends, family, or peers.
As a part of my series called “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Turner.
After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from Arizona State University, Chris Turner set out to build on his academic achievements and become a leader in the business world. Self-described as a humble innovator who prioritizes a work-life balance, Turner ventured into the niche market of upscale game room furniture. In 2017 he founded Sawyer Twain, a luxury brand offering unique game room furniture, gaming tables such as table tennis, billiards, and shuffleboard, and home and recreation décor. With annual revenues in excess of $12 million in under five years, Turner credits continually creating successful vendor relationships to the growth of Sawyer Twain, which will help him achieve his overall goal of expanding its offering of high-quality products that customers can embrace.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I moved back from Portland to Phoenix in 2017 after businesses I had owned for seven years failed. I took an absolute beating in trying to salvage the company but was unsuccessful. This was an incredibly low point in my life as I was broke and had no clear direction for my next venture. I didn’t want to think about doing anything. I was incredibly burnt out, the last thing I wanted to do was get a job in the corporate world and I was too financially destitute to give any new business venture any thought. I started researching the E-commerce world in general. Granted I was a big participant in this space, as was everyone. But I never quite grasped the profits/margins of sourcing goods overseas and importing them into the states. This led me to get more familiar with dropshipping. If you’re not familiar, dropshipping is where a seller puts products online and accepts orders with not owning the inventory. After an order is placed, you submit it directly to the wholesaler, who ships it out on your behalf. The more I went down the rabbit hole of getting familiar with dropshipping in general, the more excited I got about fully immersing myself in this space. I had absolutely nothing to lose! It was imperative that I could find something that was not overly saturated in this space (furniture, toys, bedding); the list goes on and on. To be honest all of it’s saturated at this point. It really came down to multiple sellers selling the same products and competing with each other’s advertising and marketing initiatives. I needed to find something unique and hadn’t been overtaken by the big box stores or marketplaces such as Amazon & Wayfair- which by the way, we do business on both platforms today! During my exploration into E-commerce, I ended up befriending an individual in the billiards space. He was already an incredibly successful distributor but was adamant that billiards were starving for an E-commerce solution. He would provide the game room furniture for me to get my feet wet. My brother put 5k in an account, and I was off to the races. I immediately began listing on marketplaces (Amazon, Wayfair, Houzz, Etsy). They take a more significant percentage of your transaction, but your business can piggyback on their platforms to get more exposure at a lower internal marketing cost which makes all the sense in the world — the items Sawyer Twain was selling caught absolute fire online, and started selling daily. At the time not many brands were letting E-commerce companies sell their products online. They were very protective of their brick & mortar stores and, quite frankly, didn’t want other companies in their space. I get it! But at some point, progress had to happen. After all, the fact that the section hadn’t been overly running and saturated was beyond belief. It was a driving catalyst for me internally to work my butt off! Of course, there was another factor as well. The idea of shipping a 900lb class 85 table just seemed like an unfathomable task. Once it was shipped, what installation team would be able to facilitate the setup? They were all very reasonable concerns; had I known; it would have been much more irritating. A standard furniture installer can’t set these up. It’s quite the craft; it must be a billiards technician and team that set these up. Their all 3-piece slate tables, and each piece weighs 220 plus pounds. You can imagine the duress the body takes just moving these not to mention all the other aspects that facilitate the final setup. I was met with several challenges. Companies that sold game room furniture wouldn’t work with me. Some were flat-out rude. But this fed the fuel more to tell me I was onto something and needed to drive harder and scale as fast as possible. The same was said about other brands/companies; they wanted nothing to do with an E-commerce partner. It was inevitable because they didn’t want to upset their internal Brick and Morter base.
Eventually, many of them began to reach out to me…and I onboarded them. Today Sawyer Twain works or collaborates with just about every brand in this niche industry in some capacity. Our installer network is massive, exceeding 200 plus nationally. I’ve also started my billiard lines as well: Nixon Billiards and Doc & Holliday. The future is very bright. We’re fortunate to be in the position we are. It’s much more remarkable to think that it all started with just one company; Plank & Hide. I can’t emphasize how grateful I am to have this as a partner!
Can you share the most interesting or funniest story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’m not sure if it’s funny, but I’ve become genuine friends with many of my partners. Not just the owners or senior partners of brands and manufacturers, but the installation teams & laborers. I genuinely enjoy talking to them. They’re some of the hardest workers, period. Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth to catch up and talk shop with them as I once did. But I still keep up with 4–5 regularly that I formed friendships with!
I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Do you have a book in your life that impacted you and inspired you to be an effective leader? Can you share a story?
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie is still tops for me. There are some very elementary lessons that still and will always ring true to me. The four below resonate. I try to refresh the book occasionally as it’s very easy to stray away from the basic lessons below.
- Always Remember people’s names.I know from my perspective that if someone remembers my name, they instantly gain more respect and attention from me as they obviously value our initial conversation. I think it lets everyone know they matter😊. I always try my best to do this regardless of what the meeting pertains to…work, social, etc.
- Be Quick to Acknowledge your mistakes. Nothing will make people less defensive and more agreeable than you being humble and reasonable enough to admit your own mistakes. Having strong and stable personal and professional relationships relies on taking responsibility for your actions, especially your mistakes. Nothing will help end tension or a disagreement more than a swift acknowledgment and apology on your part.
- Begin on common ground If you disagree with someone, you start on common ground and ease your way into the difficult subjects. If you begin on polarizing ground, you’ll never be able to recover and may lose ground with topics on which you agree.
- Do Not Criticize, Condemn or Complain “Any fool can criticize, condemn or complain- and most fools do.” He continues to say that it takes character and self-control to be forgiving; this discipline will pay significant dividends in your relationships with people.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes! Yes! We’ve been very fortunate with Sawyer Twain, enabling us to launch our own billiards and game room brands that are new to the market! Nixon Billiards and Doc & Holliday. Nixon is imported from overseas, and Doc & Holliday is made in the USA. We’re also expanding into furniture that can complement our current offerings.
Awesome! Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s talk about what you are doing now, and how you achieved the success that you currently enjoy. Can you tell our readers about the business you’ve created?
In hindsight, it was hard and took many hours from doing anything else. I was very driven because I genuinely had nothing to lose. I worked 16-plus-hour days, seven days a week. I’m still excited about the industry, and the process of building and implementing new ideas that come to fruition makes it all that much worthwhile. I encourage everyone to insert themselves into something they’re genuinely passionate about. It’s cliché, but it doesn’t seem like work!
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We’re genuinely E-commerce driven, and it’s incredibly rare for this industry. We just evolved into having our warehouses in the past few months. But they were not existent the first five years. So we were always reliant on our partners to dropship on our behalf. There needs to be a lot of trust to have a successful dropshipping business.
What was your vision when you started this business? What’s the WHY behind the work that you do?
Well, I touched on this in my opening monologue. But I really had nothing to lose! I was financially destitute, and the fear of being in that position was very motivating. It drove me daily. That and I knew I was onto creating an exceptional niche within the national game room furniture market.
We’d love to explore the traits that help you achieve your success. What were the mindset obstacles that you had to overcome in order to reach the place of earning a million dollars? Can you tell us what you did to overcome them?
The biggest obstacle was doing everything by myself. I would work around the clock, which was immensely challenging the first few years. Though we did do over a million in gross sales annually.
What were the external obstacles that you had to overcome in reaching these milestones? And how specifically did you overcome them?
I think to scale and expand; I needed to eventually get help to have people take things off my plate. This is very difficult because getting other people to see your vision or have an inherent passion for your business is tough. This took a lot of time to grasp because I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t partake and share in my enthusiasm. The reality is no one will care about your business as much as you. So there’s always going to be turnover until you find the right individuals who can assist. I can say today I’m thrilled with my internal team, who have taken the lead on a lot of my initiatives!
Was there ever a point where you wanted to give up on your journey to creating a million dollar business? How did you work through that panic point? Please share a story.
I think the actual million in gross sales came so fast that I didn’t even acknowledge it. Granted, it’s cool, but the runway was and is still massive in this specific industry and E-commerce in general, which is billions. I think the fact that I can still see enormous growth gives me a bit of tunnel vision regarding what we currently capture from a monetary sense. Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad we’re fortunate and prosperous. But if I start telling myself a “job well done,” the job is over. The fact that it’s not, makes it much more exciting to keep driving. I’ve never quite understood the benchmark of goals. I think they can discourage and hamstring growth once they’re obtained. The climb or implementation of new products and marketing initiatives is constantly in motion and changing.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Without a doubt, I’m incredibly grateful to Plank & Hide for believing in me to expand their line to a national level in an E-Commerce capacity. Without them, this indeed may not have been possible. As I mentioned they were the only company that initially did business with me, and I can’t thank them enough. My brother deserves a giant thank you as well as many others!
We are sure that you are not done. What comes next? What’s your next big goal and why? What plan have you put in place to achieve it? Why is it a stretch for you? What will achieving it represent for you and for others?
Starting my brands has been incredibly fun and exciting- from creating renderings and concepts to products and beyond. Watching the vision become an actual realization of something you’ve created is cool!
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Be yourself and have your own opinions whether you choose to be vocal on them or not. If you believe in something and are passionate about it, pursue it with everything you have and eliminate any negative energy from friends, family, or peers.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I have a great family and friends and am very fortunate to spend time with them and do everything above. However, it would be great to have a few frosties with Dave Portnoy, Charles Barkley, or Peyton Manning.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.
Chris Turner Of Sawyer Twain: Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
