News

May 7, 2006

Charles Compton is the owner and founder of Mars Solutions, a Carlsbad-based consulting company that specializes in increasing retail productivity for resorts, hotels and spas. Mars (Marketing and Retail Specialists) focuses on delivering sales and minimizing inventory for hotel shops where sundries and gifts, branded merchandise and skin care products are sold.

In 1995, Compton moved to San Diego and founded his own company. He offers consulting and training services to Skinsational Day Spa in Carlsbad, the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa and 10 Ritz-Carlton hotels across the country, including the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel.

What does your job entail on a day-to-day basis?

What I'm really trying to help hotels and spas do is implement the tools and disciplines that top-tier retail companies use to run their businesses. It's focused on the buying side and inventory management. I also help them with their merchandising, so it's really about how well they display their products. The next piece is the people part of the business: what kind of people do they need in terms of managers, buyers and sales staff and how are they being trained in order to be the most successful in their jobs.

How do you know whether your training measures have been effective to increase product sales?

When I travel to Florida once a month to work with the Ritz-Carlton there, we're doing a follow up in terms of results of revenue, profit and inventory. How much money do you have to invest in inventory to get back the sales that you expect is the question. The most critical piece of the puzzle is finding the right balance. Too much and it equals markdowns, which gets the consumer excited. Too little and you're missing sales opportunities and potentially frustrating the customer. I run into this situation quite a bit. A spa doesn't have enough inventory of its best selling products, so I come in to help them manage the situation.

Why not expand your consulting services beyond spas and hotels?

The spa is a growing industry with incredible opportunity, and over the past few years it's become a really important component to the business of hotels and resorts. But what I've found in the industry is that the people who run the retail side of the business are largely self-taught. They've figured it out along the way, and they haven't necessarily been taught some of the successful techniques that larger retailers teach their staff. Their level of expertise varies, and I come in to help them run the business more consistently. I am training the person who is typically the retail manager at the property on how to buy, sell and give great customer service.

What's the one piece of advice you give clients to help increase sales?

It's not just about selling more products; it's about enhancing the experience. When visiting a spa, there's the expectation that the customer can do some of these things at home. So if you provide good tools and products, and if they want to learn more about the products, retailers need to learn to be receptive to that. If someone wants to go to the spa and be left alone, then they've got to learn to be respectful of that, as well. It's like my inventory theory: not too much or too little. You don't want to be overbearing, but you also don't want to disappear from the scene. That's a part of the art of training people versus the science of how many units per transaction. It's the art of knowing how to sell product to people, when to give them more and when not to.

– Melanie Stevens