It's All Bull - Barry Bull

To do that, Bull knew he needed a point of difference, and this came in the form of attracting recording artists to perform at the shopping centre where his store was located. “I had worked with celebrities while at the record company, and was familiar with working with superstar artists.”

Organising big names to attend—including (pictured) Atomic Kitten, The Wiggles, Shannon Noll—took some time. He also had to convince the landlord, Westfield, to not only allow the performers to come but to market them when he signed them up. “It was a win-win for everybody: the artists came and promoted their new album, the other retailers leveraged off the additional potential customers that came, as did Westfield, and customers had an irreplaceable experience of meeting celebrities they wouldn’t normally get the chance to meet. And it was great for us because we created an enormous point of difference.”

Innovation Challenges

The music industry, especially music retail, changes as new technology is brought into the market. In Bull’s time he has seen LPs make way for cassette tapes, which were both replaced by CDs, and more recently, DVDs. Each time there’s a change, Bull is forced to be more innovative in the way he grows and diversifies the business, particularly with leveraging. He leverages the existing overheads—rent, stock, staff—as he expands the offerings in his store, including adding musical instruments, consumer electronics, clothing merchandise and home cinema products.

Diversifying was key to growth. He was paying fairly high rent so he asked for more space to get more product in. “I realised our core product business, which was selling music, had a shortening life, and so we changed.”

Every substantial business model will be challenged by technology in some way, Bull suggests, so all businesses adapt with the times or risk being left behind. “The technology that was threatening us, which was the internet, was also the technology that was giving us opportunities.” While technology, particularly internet downloading, eroded the core component of his business, it also offered new components-—computer programs and navigational control systems they utilise for other parts of the business. The big winners are consumer electronics, and now, home cinema.

Electronic Interiors, the home cinema arm of Toombul Music, allows Bull and his team to apply their knowledge of home entertainment and music and video to the home, and this new strand now contributes a major profit to the business. “Now that business is very expandable,” he says. “We install home cinema systems throughout south-east Queensland, just from our base in Toombul, and the average sale for that business is $50,000 to 100,000.”

The extra offerings brought more attention to the store, with customers travelling to visit them. Then the awards flowed in. “My vision was to win a national award, and it took nearly 10 years to win it.” In fact, Toombul Music won Westfield’s National Individual Specialty Retailer Award three times. Topped off with a Commonwealth Centenary Medal in 2003 for his business achievements, the gongs added another point of difference.

Not only was the attention great for the store, it was great for Bull’s next reinvention. “All this focus on one store in Brisbane got me on the speaking circuit.” Starting with talks to other retailers in the centre, it wasn’t long before speaking agencies contacted Bull to get him on board to talk about small business success, getting paid in the process.

And when he noticed all the good speakers also wrote books, Bull put pen to paper, publishing A Little Bull Goes Along Way in 2001, then My Little Book of Bull in 2002, and his latest book, The Bullseye Principle, due out around March-April this year.