Speaker: Steve Mount
How do you feel about being a PayMore franchisee?
Steve Mount: I am truly excited to be a franchisee owner here with pay more and to be a part of the greater pay more family and see the expansion of this brand throughout the country. and this disruptive service that we're bringing to the consumer electronics marketplace. Um It's it's just truly exciting to be a part of it and, and the the growth opportunities are fantastic and the support we receive is great. So truly happy to be here.
What was your background before, and what made you franchise with PayMore?
Steve Mount: Prior to coming to PayMore. I was in the technology field for 30 years. I spent 20 of that in telecommunications and then the most recent last 10 of that in the world of software. And bringing me my project management and program management skills over from telecom was a pretty natural flow into the world of software. And I've got a background in computer and electronic engineering as well. And so I knew the the consumer electronics world very well and something that I followed both, both professionally and personally. and I decided after working in corporate America for quite a while or, you know, in a global corporate scale um that it was time to break out and do something on my own. And I was really, really interested in creating a family legacy and wanting to bring my family into it as well. And so I did a lot of searching around looking for what was going to be best for us. And I came across PayMore and I think it fit very naturally with my skill set with my technical expertise. My knowledge um and well for what was gonna work, work, work well for my family. and after looking at the the economics of the whole thing and flying back to North Carolina and seeing the operations and, and asking a lot of questions, it just seemed to make perfect sense for us to dive into this as a, as a family. So, so here we are store number one, myself and my, two oldest sons are in here working alongside with me along with a couple of other employees that are part of our family as well. And we're going to grow in the greater Seattle area.
Why did you decide to add more territory, and where do you see your development in 5 years?
Steve Mount: So in the first month of being open, the number of conversations that we had with customers in the store or on the phone and learning more about them and the distance from which they were calling from or they were traveling from was was pretty, pretty wide reaching. So a good example is a gentleman from Tacoma who took um 2.5 hours and three buses just to get here to sell us his xbox because he knew he would get a better price here than he would at at gamestop or any other place for that matter. And so, so after hearing these stories and talking to these folks, we knew we needed to expand it or reach greater. We have a great location here in Bellevue. It's central to the east side of the greater Seattle area um right at the intersection of a of a major freeway and a highway. But uh but we need to get deeper out there into the Greater Puget Sound area. So expansion will, will bring us a will cast a wider customer net will get us more customers, even on the other side of Puget Sound where there are, you know, another quarter of a million people. so the reach is great out here and we, we need to expand in order to capture those, capture all of those customers. So, beyond that, you know, seeing this first month of business and the type of material, the products that are coming in and the sales that we're making online, we know that there's a lot more product out there and, we're ready to go and grab it.
