Inside John's Locker

I’ll write a longer piece about how much I enjoy working with Lou Mongello of Disney Word Trivia and WDW Radio fame…..but for now, I just want to tell you how excited I am about Lou’s latest podcast. It’s show number 42 and you can listen to it by going to the WDW Radio splash page and clicking on the button that says Listen to the Show.

Lou did a great interview with me that he has turned into an extremely informative discussion on Owner’s Locker. Lou has used his Locker for several trips now. He provides details in his show about how he was initially a bit skeptical about how he would use his Locker…but he’s a big fan now….give a listen…you’ll also see why Lou wins podcast awards. He’s great.

JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com

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Well, we knew were dealing with people’s vacations and we knew we had to get it right. So we wanted to test every aspect of Owner’s Locker before we launched the service.

I’m always quick to give others credit for good ideas but I want to be selfish this time and say that our beta trial was my idea and I had a lot of people tell me we were crazy to do it. But to make absolutely sure everything could work smoothly we gave the service away to a group of volunteers. But while I will knew it was the right thing to do, I’ve got to say that I had NO idea that it would be SO successful.

I had been playing with the concept of Owner’s Locker for several years when the opportunity came up in my career to just do it. Luckily my wife and family were extremely supportive. I began pouring more and more energy (and money) into Owner’s Locker until it became a full time project. I certainly wasn’t alone—I had a lot of help. I pulled in a lot of people with good ideas and skills to help develop Owner’s Locker. Graphic artists, web developers, brand managers, IT specialists, friends and the inevitable accountants and lawyers.

The business was completely designed and the walls were covered with complicated flowcharts of how Owner’s Locker would work. We were on our fifth version of the website. Custom bar code tracking software was designed and delivered; a manufacturer of the Lockers was lined up. We even knew what type of van we’d use and what the uniforms would look like.

But something was missing. Was Owner’s Locker simply a good idea? Or was it reality? It looked good on paper. It sounded like a good idea. But did it really work? Hmmmmm.

This nagged at me until one morning while taking a shower, it just hit me. We were going to give the service away to a group of volunteers and prove that it was real and that it would work.

Two other important things happened at about this time. I decided that to really do Owner’s Locker properly we would need several investors and I also began to draw up a list of people I could have join me as a partner. Being a lone wolf was not healthy and while I relied on lots of people, I needed to work side by side every day with someone as passionate about Owner’s Locker as I was.

The name that kept coming to the top of my list was Brian Whitt, whom I had met 15 years earlier when he sold me my interest in Disney Vacation Club. That has turned out to be one of the best things ever to happen to Owner’s Locker.

With Brian on board we mapped out the design of the beta trial. These were the goals:

1. Prove that all aspects of Owner’s Locker work.

2. Allow for a low cost, low risk start-up of Owner’s Locker.

3. Establish an operating track record.

4. Collect feedback about Owner’s Locker from actual users.

5. Establish Opinion leaders.

6. Provide guidance on what our education and marketing efforts should be.

While Brian and I thought the beta trial was a great idea, we were about the only people who did. Many people told us we were nuts to just give Owner’s Locker’s service away. They were wrong. Seriously wrong. I’ll describe the beta trial, how we got our volunteers and detail the things we learned soon.

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Brian and I heard it again yesterday in a conversation with Alex, our web developer: “You know, this business looks so simple….but your website is one of the more complicated sites I’ve ever worked with.” And I was talking with my old boss from my corporate stiff days who’s one of our investors a couple of days earlier. “John,” he said, “this is a VERY complicated business. I didn’t realize the complexity at first.”

Owner’s Locker does appear to be deceptively simple. We drop off your Locker; you enjoy having your stuff; we pick up your Locker and store it until you come back.

But let me tell you…when you pull back the curtain, you won’t find someone pulling levers as in the Wizard of Oz. It’s all high tech and we realize every day that it is very, very detailed and complicated. So intricate that we have a patent pending on our business process!

And the neat thing is that none of this shows. The whole point is that it SHOULD be easy for our Members. Drop dead easy, in fact. We are supposed to take some of the hassle out of vacations and make them more convenient. So everything our Members see is easy. Our site has to be simple to use and the Lockers…well they just need to be where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there.

Owner’s Locker has two secret weapons behind our curtain: our website and our warehouse management system. The warehouse management system is our custom-designed barcode tracking software. Every time your Locker changes location, it’s movement is tracked by our scanners. It also organizes all of the data entered into our site by Members about their visits and tells us which Lockers need to where and on what day. It can even tell us which van to use and which resorts to visit in which order. And here’s my favorite function: when your Locker comes back into our warehouse, the systems measures its “velocity” and, if you have been coming a LOT, it tells us to store your Locker in a location toward the front of the warehouse so it will be easier to get to next time!

We are also very proud of our website which has been designed to make it easy for our members to use. Easy to sign up. Easy to schedule or change a Visit. The website collects all of the data you enter, shares it with our warehouse management system, charges you the appropriate amount and then communicates all of this to us and you. It’s the website that sends you all of the e-mails confirming your visits, letting you know your Locker is about to be delivered and when it has made it safely back to the warehouse.

The most complicated part of the site is something you’ll never see and that is the billing. With most e-commerce sites, you buy something, you get charged and that’s it. The Owner’s Locker site has three different types of charges to deal with (the one time Membership Fee, the recurring Annual Plan fee and the extra Visit fee. Add to that the multiple Locker discounts off the Membership Fee and the Visit fees.

The conversation Brian and I were having with Alex yesterday involved tweaks to the site to address Members who order additional Lockers. We realized that unless we did something, the Lockers would have different Anniversary Dates. Can you imagine asking our Members to try to remember that Locker 1 had a free delivery for the year starting June 15 and locker 2 had a free delivery for the year starting August 3. The obvious answer is to pro-rate the Annual Plan charge for the additional Locker so that they both have an Anniversary date of June 15. That makes it easy for the Member but it means quite a bit of behind the scenes programming on the site to make that happen automatically.

Another challenge for Alex but better that he has a tricky issue to program for than giving our members fits, don’t you think?

JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com

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The short answer to both of those questions is “no.”

A lot of people ask us how far in advance they need to sign up. Maybe they assume that there is some sort of 30 day deadline or something like that. That if they leave it until the last minute, they won’t be able to sign up for Owner’s Locker. Not true.

It won’t surprise you to learn that we want to make it easy for people to become Members of Owner’s Locker. If someone is on vacation, sees our van or someone carrying a Locker and thinks, “Gee, I need one of those,” we don’t want them to have to wait until their next trip to WDW.

So you can sign up for Owner’s Locker anytime---even if you’re already at your resort in Orlando and we’ll have your Locker to your resort the next day at the latest. We get a lot of calls from people while they are on vacation and I love signing people up over the phone from their room. My favorite story, though is the day I saw Brian flying out the door with an empty Locker saying he would explain later. He'd gotten a call from a Member who was in the parking lot of their resort about to head for the airport when they realized they needed another Locker pronto. Brian to the rescue.

It’s not just a quest for Members that’s involved here, though. The whole point behind Owner’s Locker is convenience and treating people the way WE would like to be treated.

When we were building our systems, Brian and I discussed the issue of deadlines and decided that we just wouldn’t have any. After all, we are dealing with people’s vacations. And we both hate that “gotcha” feeling you get when you wind up paying a penalty because a deadline was missed.

The issue really came up as we discussed what the cutoff time would be for scheduling and changing Visits. Should Members have to tell us ___ days in advance for us to have their Locker waiting for them? Well, we looked at each other and both said, “no.” That’s one of the reasons we use bar codes and have a highly sophisticated scheduling and tracking system. We think you should be able to tell us about a Visit any time—even if you’re already at your resort. And we feel that you should be able to modify your Visit at any time as well. Plans change, waitlists come through, people change resorts. And we didn’t think it was fair to charge people extra for last minute changes. We just pushed the developers to come up with a system to handle all of these possibilities.

And once we had this capability built for Visits, it was easy to use it for signing up as well. So sign up any time you want!

But are we sure that new Members don’t have to give us 30 days notice? Yes we are sure…..but I’ll tell you where that 30 days comes in…..and it will help me answer the second question about signing up. And that is that it is never too early to sign up.

While we want to be as convenient as possible to our Members, we also like to know as far in advance about when people are coming and, in particular, when people want to join. The first Visit is a lot of work for us as we have to build a new Locker and get it ready for the new Member’s first Visit. So we would prefer that new Members sign up as soon as they decide they want to use Owner’s Locker rather than waiting until the last minute.

But while we want to encourage people to sign up as early as possible, we don’t want to penalize you by making you pay for something months before you’ll see it. Again, we wanted to be fair. So, when you sign up, you will not be charged your Membership Fee until 30 days before you arrive for your first Visit. This way you can go ahead and sign up when you make your reservations or even before and not get charged. You can also use the site and use the online inventory function to list the things you are going to put in your Locker.

We think that’s a fair way to treat people. This is not a short term relationship we want to build! Just ask that family in the parking lot. Boy were they releived when Brian showed up with another Locker.

JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com

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Brian and I had breakfast with Deb Wills recently to map out ways we could work together. We had never met in person, but she and I had spoken on the phone quite a few times. I recognized Deb from the photos of her that are everywhere (she had to look for the guy in the purple shirt). To save you the trouble of reading the rest of this, let me just say that even though we’d never met, I instantly felt comfortable enough to greet Deb with a hug and kiss on the cheek rather than shaking hands---yes, she’s that nice! When you meet her, you instantly think “warm”, “honest”, “confident”, “trustworthy.”

In case you live under a tech rock and don’t have a computer, Deb Wills runs the phenomenally successful site, AllEars. It’s where just about everyone it seems turns for reliable guidance about Walt Disney World. Want to check out one of the resorts?—here’s the place. Want to see what’s on the menu at one of the restaurants?—you’ll find it here. Techies call it content and let me tell you, AllEars has it. And it’s not just quantity. It’s most definitely the quality of Deb’s content that makes her site so popular.

Deb could write a book about creating a brand—but she’s probably too busy writing other books such as her new one, “Passporter's Open Mouse for Walt Disney World and the Disney Cruise Line which she co-authors with Debra Martin Koma.” She has been so successful in building a brand around herself; I’m tempted to say that Deb is as well known as her site. And the interesting thing is, she’s not doing this by being a self promoter. She’s just being Deb—an energetic, dynamic, savvy businesswoman who’s fiercely protective of her site and its reputation. And it all comes naturally. She doesn’t try to be warm, straightforward, helpful, authoritative and trustworthy. She just is. And it shows in everything she does.

I occasionally like to share my experiences in working with some of the really nice people we share space with. I’d like to tell you about getting to know Deb Wills and you’ll see what I mean in the paragraphs above and why we felt like we had known each other by the time we actually met. Let’s just say Owner’s Locker had to jump through a few hoops before that breakfast got scheduled!

It won’t surprise you to know that as we were preparing to launch Owner’s Locker, establishing a relationship with AllEars was rather high on our radar screen. So Brian and I started pretty quickly trying to find a way to establish an advertising/sponsorship arrangement with AllEars. To say that this was easier said than done would be an understatement. But I say this in a good way as you’ll see.

I’ve got to tell you that she is without a doubt, the most careful person about accepting advertising that you can imagine. And this isn’t a bad thing at all. Deb just doesn’t want anyone with advertising dollars to have access to the people who trust her and rely on her site.

It was a bit of chore to even get through to Deb at first (and since I now know that she turns down nine out of ten people who want to advertise on her site, I can see why). And getting past Deb’s elaborate screening process for potential advertisers is, shall we say, tough.

When we did get in touch, she was extremely gracious and patient as she listened to my description of Owner’s Locker. She was intrigued but said up front that she had a rigorous program of checking out potential advertisers. First test passed. She didn’t tell me to go away.

Next she asked a LOT of questions about our facility, security, licensing, etc. and she wanted to review the terms we have our Members agree to. Second test passed.

As it turns out, there were several additional levels of scrutiny we needed to go through and the funny thing is, we weren’t even aware of a couple of them at the time! Deb Wills is VERY thorough.

But even after we had successfully passed all of these tests, Deb wasn’t quite done yet. She wanted to try Owner’s Locker herself because she wanted to be absolutely certain that we provided the type of service that was consistent with the quality of her site. Well, she’s tried it and I’ll let her say what she thought of us. But we did have that breakfast and we are now a proud advertiser/sponsor on AllEars. We even made it into Deb's Digest, although I do wish Deb had used the slim-o-matic function on her camera before she took this photo!

Whew, we made it…and you know what? Brian and I loved every minute of it. We’re proud of Owner’s Locker and we treat every Member and every Locker like it belonged to Deb Wills. But more importantly, we treat every Member and Locker the way WE would like to be treated. We’re trying to build a brand, too and Deb Wills sure does set a good example for us. Thanks, Deb!

JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com

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