Skokie Paint

Behind the counter at Skokie Paint stood a filing cabinet, and inside it was a folder for many of the store's customers, so every time a familiar face came back through the door somebody had to go find the right folder and leaf through the papers for several minutes while the line grew. Peter Ryczek had bought the store to spend his days with customers. He was spending too many of them in a drawer.

A painter, a retailer, an estimator

Ryczek has been in the paint industry all his life. He started painting in high school through a friend whose father owned a union painting shop, then worked retail at both Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore stores while still taking the occasional painting job, and eventually moved into work as a union estimator and project manager. Somewhere in the estimating years he worked out what he missed about the retail floor, and it was not the paint.

"In retail, my goal was always aligned with the customer's: to provide them with the best paint for their project."

A breakfast with Steve

So he started reaching out to old contacts, and one of them was Steve Hochwert, the owner of Skokie Paint, a business named for the town of Skokie, Illinois that had been well established there for many years. Steve was ready to retire, which made the timing close to perfect for a man looking for a way back into retail. They met for breakfast, and Ryczek made his interest in acquiring the store clear.

The arrangement the two of them landed on was ideal. Ryczek would come to work at Skokie Paint, and his pay would go toward the purchase of the business, which let him learn the ins and outs of the store from the inside while building the financial foundation the acquisition needed. On January 1, 2022, they completed the transaction and he became the owner.

Thirteen years of software and one filing cabinet

One of the first changes he knew he wanted to make was upgrading the point of sale. The store was running a system thirteen years old with search so poor that finding a previous transaction turned into an expedition, which is the whole reason the filing cabinet existed. The paper was not nostalgia. It was the workaround.

"It was stressful to have a line of customers waiting while I searched for their details like it was decades ago. I knew this was costing us business."

The line starts moving

Later in that first year as owner, he made the full switch, and the difference showed up first in the search bar.

"Being able to search across everything is phenomenal. More and more, the paint store is taking responsibility for record keeping on behalf of their customers, and being able to provide great record keeping creates loyalty. When I'm working with a customer, I can find their sales immediately."

As he types, the system filters that customer's transactions in real time, which moves his lines faster and, every bit as valuable, shows the person on the other side of the counter that their history is in good hands. Automatic emailing of receipts and statements has made many of the store's commercial accounts much happier and saved a great deal of time on top of that.

Room to grow into

With his technology in place, Ryczek has turned his attention to finding more ways to grow. He counts himself early in his career and his goal is to expand the business further, and since taking over he has hired an employee he calls incredible, someone who has taken a significant portion of daily operations off his plate and freed him up to grow the business rather than manage it.

Skokie Paint had been a fixture in its town for many years before Ryczek's name went on it, and the part of the business that changed hands on January 1, 2022 was never the paint. It was the record of who bought what, and where that record lives decides whether an owner spends his morning in a filing cabinet or on the floor with a customer. Ryczek is spending his on the floor.