From September 2006 

Backed-up data gets Louisiana business back up

By Liz Parks

At the age of 28, Chad Harris was gutsy enough to buy a bankrupt business by charging $50,000 to his American Express card. The bank wouldn’t give him a loan so he gambled he would be able to have a blowout “going out of business” sale to pay off the charge. Harris won, and continues to operate what is now The Garden Gate, a retail home and garden center in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, La.

A little more than a year ago, Hurricane Katrina submerged The Garden Gate and destroyed Harris’ home, forcing the family to live for six weeks in a storeroom above the business. The only power was supplied by a generator; Harris had to install a shower, and for a while the family dined primarily on citrus from their back yard.

But this time, Harris did not have to gamble, nor did he have to wait months for the $300,000 insurance settlement that allowed him to rebuild and reopen his business. That’s because Harris had replaced a UNIX-based POS system with Intuit’s QuickBooks Point of Sale software and hardware that syncs with QuickBooks Financial Solutions.

Because he had backed up all his QuickBooks data -- inventory, weekly sales, customers’ names, addresses and phone numbers -- Harris could “literally, right from the POS software, print out my inventory list, hand it to my insurance company and they cut me a check right there.”

Harris had suffered through lost or destroyed data before, so he had gotten into the routine of regularly backing up his business data, using a 1 GB memory card and his cell phone as a flash drive.

A friend who doesn’t use QuickBooks lost all of his data to Katrina. He told Harris that “he knows he’s owed about $400,000 from his clients but he doesn’t know who owes what and says he doesn’t know how to figure it out.”

After digging out from Katrina, Harris faced another challenge. “We can hit the road, file bankruptcy and start over again, or make one concentrated, everything-we’ve-got effort,” he recalls telling his wife. “I had a feeling that rebuilding in New Orleans would pay off.”

Just two of his 12 employees had returned to New Orleans by that time. Where others might have given up on the city, Harris and his wife, Beth, saw “a great adventure” opening before them.

With the help of employees Amos Kelly and Sara Chandler Draper, his wife and sons Aiden (11) and Ashton (9), Harris reopened The Garden Gate on Oct. 1, 2005, six weeks after Katrina struck.

Coal and bread
“We were the first business to reopen and both the people who had shopped us before and the people who hadn’t turned into shopoholics,” Harris says. “As consumers, we did the same as other local businesses reopened. If there was a local store and it reopened selling just coal and bread, we would all go there and buy as much as we could because we all needed cash and we needed people to buy from the local stores.”

Although it might seem logical to assume that business would be soft in the wake of the hurricane, that hasn’t been the case for Harris. “We have done more business than ever before,” he says. “June, July and August, for example, are always our worst months because of the heat [but] we were 100 percent over last year’s sales in June.”

Sales certainly have been impacted by the fact that so many other stores have yet to reopen. But, while a landscaper by trade, Harris also is a natural marketer, and he used the data stored on his QuickBooks Point of Sale software to stay in touch with his customers.

“I can tell you how much each of my customers spend on a weekly basis,” he says. “And because I keep phone numbers as well as addresses for all of my customers, we were able to make phone calls to everybody to see if they were O.K., if they needed help, etc.”

Today, The Garden Gate’s database is up to 13,000 active customers who make purchases at least once a month.

Child’s play
The POS system was so simple to use that, once The Garden Gate reopened, Aiden Harris rang up each sale, typing in the names, addresses and phone numbers of new or relocated customers.
“Aiden has been running the POS system since he was 8 years old,” Harris says. If you can teach a kid, you can teach anybody. It’s friendly, it’s not difficult and, if you have a question, there is a help button.”

If you still need help, he says, Intuit’s tech support “will immediately and very quickly walk you right through it,” he says.

Steven Aldrich, vice president of strategy and innovation for Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit, says more than 50,000 small retailers use QuickBooks Point of Sale and integrate it with QuickBooks Financial Software. He estimates that retailers who bring in over a million dollars a year in sales, as Harris does, can get a return on investment from QuickBooks Point of Sale in three days (for a retailer doing $100,000 a year, ROI might take two months).

Post-Katrina, Harris has moved his data to a network operated by an application service provider, allowing him to access the data from anywhere.

In the end, says Harris, “Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to me. It made me prioritize my life. It made me work really hard and really focus. And it made me say there isn’t anything that is going to stop me: If you can come out of this, you can come out of anything.”