Andreas Blomst has no problem with strangers calling him in the middle of the night. In fact, he welcomes it. Yes, Blomst keeps his phone with him at all times; but if you’re going to wake this man up, it better be nothing short of a goldfish emergency! As the owner of Tropics, a local aquarium store, Blomst puts customer satisfaction at the top of his list of priorities (even above sleep), by keeping a 24/7 emergency phone line for his patrons. In this interview he discusses the illusive Golden Angel, 400 black goldfish, and the joys of doing what you love.
Business: Tropics (Tropical Fish, Aquarium, Aquarium Leasing)
Owner: Andreas Blomst
JM: Why did you decide to go into business?
AB: I didn’t like my job.
JM: What was your job?
AB: I was trying to get into finance at a large retailer, I worked almost 2 years for them, made good money; but it was not the life for me. I could see where I was going to be 40 to 50 years down the road and it didn’t look very enticing.
JM: Were fish a hobby?
AB: Fish have always been a hobby, started when I was 13, has grown from there. So I figured why not, you know the old adage, do what you love? Give it a shot.
JM: Is this your first business venture?
AB: This is the first retail store. I’ve always had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit. You know, when I was younger I had a detailing company and then all kinds of different things throughout the years; an aquarium service business, that kind of stuff.
JM: How long have you been here?
AB: I moved to San Luis in 2003 to go to Cal Poly, and I’ve been at this location, at this store since September.
JM: What was your major at CP?
AB: Well it started as business administration with entrepreneurship as my concentration. But they kind of got rid of that in the 2005 catalogue, so it changed to human resource management.
The class I needed to graduate was only available once a year and I didn’t want to stay another two quarters, so I switched to H.R. because I had everything I needed for H.R. and I studied accounting and finance as well. I ended up trying to work in finance, really didn’t like…it just wasn’t for me. Some people might like that; it was too controlled.
JM: So, it was already a hobby, you already knew a lot about aquariums. Did it take a lot for you to go from hobby to business; as far as your knowledge base about aquariums?
AB: Knowledge base: no not at all. The thing that was important to go into a business was more the business information, that’s what I needed more of and that’s what Cal Poly gave me. Flat out, I would not have had the confidence to do it if it was not for my education at Cal Poly; no way. My education at Cal Poly helped me do it in a little bit of a unique way. Every fixture in here; every light fixture, every aquarium, every rack you see is completely recycled. I didn’t buy any new equipment, so I opened the store up for about 25% of what it should actually cost. I would never have even had that on my mind if it wasn’t for the resourcefulness I’ve been taught by certain teachers and stuff.
JM: So it wasn’t a senior project or anything?
AB: No, my senior project I’m still working on. It’s another business that we’ll open someday. First thing, I’ve got to get this thing running on its own, but: self-serve dog wash. For my senior project I did a business plan for it and that was kind of in the works, but this, truthfully, was easier, and I had so much going on, I was like ‘I’ll start with a little fish store and when that works we’ll do the self-serve dog wash.’ The self-serve dog wash is what I’m hoping to almost build like a franchise model of and I’d like to get 28-25 strategic locations up and down the coast and sell it to a larger buyer. Petsmart and Petco have been trying for years to get into self-service groomers and they haven’t really been able to do a good job with it. I think if I could present them with a company that is profitable and working and already doing this, I think that they might be the perfect buyer for something like that. This tropical fish store; this is just simply fun and it generates good cash flows and it’s the kind of thing where I don’t ever see myself having a chain of tropical fish stores, it’s too fragmented of an industry. But it might lead to more business-to-business or internet, or something. You never know. You’ve got to find opportunities and go for them.
JM: What’s your average customer profile here?
AB: Ooh, average, that depends. I have a large clientele that’s college based, I’d say probably 60% of the customers are Cal Poly or Cuesta students, so, you know, 18-25, probably 70% male, 30% female. Right off the bat, the other, probably 40%, is completely different. It’s 35-60 year old males, working professionals. Money-wise they’re about equal because the older crowd tend to have the larger system, they have more flexibility to put more money into their hobby; but numbers of people through the door, it’s definitely college students. Hey they’re all fantastic, I love them all. Some days I should be playing 107.3 in here and other days I need to be play 104.5; Definitely different clientele.
JM: What’s the most expensive fish you sell?
AB: Well, in this store right now we have a golden angel, its $100. We have a clown trigger, it’s about $70. The purple tang in there is $100. Those are about average. There’s lots of real exotic stuff that, generally speaking, we don’t stock simply because of the nature, if it’s a really exotic fish, I don’t necessarily want to keep it in the store for 3 or 6 months. Fish stores are more stressful for fish than being in a home aquarium because there’s so many people coming by, alternating tank mates, tapping on the glass, all that stuff. But we do deal with pretty high-end stuff. Some can easily cost a few hundred dollars apiece. There are a lot of exotic angels out there that can reach $500, $600, $700, to $800. A customer I was just talking to was looking for a Golden Puffer, which $600 to $800 is totally normal price for those guys.
JM: And you can order something like that?
AB: I actually go and, there’s three ways we can do it. One is I can direct import, we have contacts, like for example, in Indonesia, Malaysia, and they actually go out and hand-select out of the wild and ship to us. That’s one way to do it, another is, you can use a middle-man, like there’s large companies in large cities throughout the country that import fish, they house them and allow stores like myself to go down and hand pick. That’s what I normally do, because when it’s something very exotic, you want to see it; you want to see it swim, you want to see its eyes, see its gills, see it eat, everything like that to make sure it’s perfect. And you pay a little more for that but it’s usually worth it in the long run.
JM: Do you have any idea of what your turnover rate is for fish?
AB: Absolutely; obviously since we’re a newer business, it was slower at first. I don’t think we’ve hit our running average yet. I’m trying to think the last I time I checked, it was last month. We do fish inventory monthly and it was pretty high, we’re actually having a hard time keeping stuff in stock. There’s a little bit of a natural attrition rate, so if you factor that into it, you’re looking at about 80-82%; meaning that if I pull in 100 fish, 82 of them have sold within the period of a month. We pull fish in every week, so what it tends to be is, 90 or 100% sell, but we have those ones that are here every week and every week like the golden angel, and he’s a perfect fish, but it’s not everybody’s fish, not everybody can spend $100 on a fish that hides most of the time.
JM: Is it rare? Ts that why it’s expensive?
AB: It’s not rare in the wild, but it’s extremely protected because it’s only found in a few areas of the world. So in the hobbyist industry, in general, only 500 are available every year, so you figure, just in America, we have 10,000 stores that sell tropical fish, you just can’t get these anywhere.
JM: Wow and its only 100 bucks?
AB: And that’s the thing too, online is getting very prevalent; I beat online prices on a lot of this stuff. And it’s simply due to my own ability to hand-pick and very good contact (buyers I work with in L.A.) If you were to purchase this [golden angel] at random, you’d probably pay about $150, but I don’t need to charge that price because, well first, I don’t think the San Luis market will bear it, and we’re totally fine where we’re at. So it’s that kind of thing.
JM: Do you see seasonal fluctuations in what people buy and when people buy?
AB: There are definitely seasonal fluctuations with what people buy. Obviously for college students, December is a bad month, and the summer, from what I’ve heard, is not a great time. As for your year-round customers, November: very big month, January: very big month. When it gets warmer, generally speaking, people spend less time indoors, so they think less about their aquariums. In the winter, you do a lot of sales… in the summer it’s more cleaning, people are maintaining stuff. In the winter, it’s more beautifying, you know, company is coming over, (this is my assumption) or, you’re spending more time indoors so you’re looking at it more, and you want to fix the things that you don’t like about your aquarium. Also we have a tremendous difference in the availability of fish seasonally. There’s a lot of fish that are now available that are captive-raised, a lot of the clown fish, some of the angels and stuff, where they’re actually not taken out of the wild. I’m a huge supporter of that. I love that idea, not only for the environmental impact, but also because, in the long run, you get better, stronger fish, they’re already adapted to live in captivity. Currently it doesn’t make economical sense, meaning a wild-caught fish is cheaper than a tank-raised one, but still every clown fish we carry here, unless otherwise noted, is always tank-raised. Once in a while we get wild-caught ones for certain customers that are looking for genetic diversity in the breeding and such, but the availability changes dramatically. Certain clown fish can be very expensive in the winter, and very cheap in the summer. Certain fish, like for example Golden Angels, they pull about 500 of them out of the wild once a year, you buy them then or you don’t get them. So, summer tends to be the best months. That’s when you get a lot of selection, a lot of beautiful tangs, and stuff like that.
JM: Do you perform any services?
AB: Of course! Yeah, we take care of a lot of aquariums for a lot of local businesses and also private homes; 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We respond to emergencies, so it’s all kinds of fun stuff. And it’s funny, we have a 24-hour phone number, which a lot of people laugh at because it’s like a tropical fish store, you know, ‘what you’re goldfish isn’t eating?’ But we’ve had more than one occasion where we’ve gotten a call, Sunday night after ten. The last one we had was a local doctor with a private reef tank at home. The 150 gallon aquarium sprung a leak, 3rd story; it was just dumping salt water. He couldn’t get a hold of anybody and of course we were there, so we went out there, did a full repair on-site, and helped to save his livestock, but you know, countless damage to his home. While we’re not specializing in water-damage clean-up, we have shop vacuums and dehumidifiers to really control the situation. That was just a random unfortunate thing that generally doesn’t happen with large aquariums but, you know, sometimes it can.
JM: Do you have any sort of refund policy, so many days after they purchase the fish?
AB: With freshwater fish we have a 7-day guarantee, and as long as it’s not an aggression death or poor water quality, its’ a simple replacement, and if you want a different fish, that’s obviously fine as well. We have a 3-day guarantee on compatibility, meaning if you buy a fish and you take it home and it doesn’t get along with your other fish, you can bring it back, as long as, you know, it hasn’t been too badly beaten up or anything, you have three days to bring it back and exchange it for anything else in the store, full credit, no big deal, b/c we definitely want peaceful aquariums, that’s most peoples’ goal. And while there are generalities, fish are like people, some just don’t get along. On the saltwater fish, we do 24-hr guarantee. The reason it’s a little less with saltwater is because saltwater is a little more temperamental, not that they’re more difficult to keep, but that you have to have a little sharper eye. So we do 24-hr just as like a get-in-your aquarium guarantee. We’ll gladly feed any fish and tell you how long we’ve had it and where it’s from and everything else. If we maintain the aquarium like a lot of local businesses like we do, then we do a 7-day guarantee, because if we’re maintaining the aquarium, you know, it should be absolutely fine, so you know. Basically, we just want our customers to be happy. Every person that works here is empowered to make the right decision and sometimes that involves giving something away and that has happened, and that’s ok too, as long as it’s justified. We’re not too worried; I’ve definitely taught them not to pay any attention to the bottom line, pay attn to the customers.
JM: How many employees do you have?
AB: We have, actually working in the store, I got one guy actually working, one volunteer, and then we have a service company that cleans aquariums, and I got one guy working there.
JM: What is your most interesting customer story?
AB: We have a service company and we take care of aquariums and ponds. I ran a service company in Santa Barbara which I brought up here with me, and we took care of the pond that was owned by a family that had done well for themselves, they were, at the time, the majority share-holder of minute-maid. It was their weekend home and about the size of your average dorm. They had a 5,000 gallon pond and a river that ran through the property, totally man-made, and we maintained them for them. I never dealt with the home owners; I dealt with the people that worked for them. One Sunday morning, about 7 am, because again, we have a 24-hour number, we got a call saying we needed to come out to the property immediately. So I jumped in the van, headed out there, got out there, and the wife that owned the house was there (I’d never met her before and I knew it was either really good or really bad because they never talked to us directly). She brought me over to the pond and was talking about the pond and it looked great, so I was like, what am I doing here? Anyway, turned out she was having a ball that next week and it had a night-time theme. The problem was we had Koi in this pond that were multi-colored Koi, many Koi are. She wanted only black fish. So we had to take all the fish out of this pond completely and then replace them with black goldfish. A 5,000 gallon pond, first of all, it’s a black bottom pond so you won’t see the fish, and second of all, being a 5,000 gallon pond, you need 300 or 400 fish to even know they’re there. So, she looked at me like ok, well, let’s do it. So, we had a week to do that; we pulled out 10 or 15 foot long Koi out of this pond. We had to set up pools in different areas around town to house all these fish because there is no place to keep them. I called all the suppliers I could get, got every black goldfish I could find, put them in there. It was quite literally a week’s worth of work, we were very proud that we could pull it off in that short of time. She was very happy at the party the following the following Saturday. That Sunday morning, she called me back and said ok, now I want my fish back, which we didn’t anticipate; we thought that she would want the black ones. So then we had to swap them back and we were stuck with 300 big black goldfish. So, that was very interesting and many thousands of dollars later too, because they’re not inexpensive fish, so that was pretty incredible that how there was nothing that would stop that from happening.
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