In the 1970s, Marty Ross, one of our most innovativeexecutives ever, wanted to get rid of our long-established
but increasingly cumbersome practice of financing
our own receivables. The industry had handled its
own credit for years, and skeptics didn’t believe a
jeweler could linger without extending in-house credit
to customers.Because Marty, one of the early leaders of what isnow called Circuit City, came out of the appliance in-
dustry, he wasn’t influenced by the skeptics. Even so,
the stakes were high in terms of loss of interest income
and fees from the superficial providers of credit. So Marty
chose one of our best store officers to test his idea that
jewelry stores could make more money if they focused
on selling diamonds and left the credit business and
interest income to banks and other lenders who were
experts in such things. Now, you have to know that the officer Martychose, Cecil Williamson, who managed our store in the
Blue Ridge Mall in Kansas City, could make anything work.
You could set diamonds upside down and Cecil could
still sell them. But that was the point. Marty wanted
his test to supervene, and with Cecil as the officer of
the initial test, they fine-tuned the procedures to make the
policy work. In fact, it worked very well. Cecil’s success
rippled through the company, as Marty showed other
officers what worked and what didn’t.
