Today we’d like to introduce you to Tommy Mills.
Tommy, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in Somerville where I got my street smarts then my high school years in Holbrook where I found my lifelong friends. I worked at Thom McAn selling shoes through my first three years of college, 2 years at Massasoit Community and a few months at UMass Boston. I dropped out of College in 1991 to move to Hollywood to be an actor. I had no acting experience. My best friend and I drove across the country and on our way to CA, stopped in Vegas. I loved it. Instead of going to Hollywood I got obsessed by Vegas and learned how to play every game, as well as a love for the nightlife.
I had created a bunch of drinking games as a teenager, so I felt I could create gambling games. My friend and I decided to drive back when he got homesick. My plan was to go home, get a job, finish school and save up enough money to go back to Hollywood and really give it a try or if it didn’t work, move to Vegas and figure out a way to “get in.” I had to get a job to afford college, since my parents wouldn’t pay after dropping out. While bouncing between jobs at shoe stores and Papa Ginos, I got a call from my old boss at Thom McAn who was now managing at Lechmere (defunct large electronics store). He said he knew a guy that was a security consultant who was paying him a few bucks to go to bars and restaurants where he could eat and drink for free, but had to write a report about the experience. They had a bar that required a guy in his early 20’s to go and he thought of me. So shortly thereafter I did my first “mystery shop.” Needless to say I didn’t take it as serious as I should have and drank a bit too much. I realized the next day I possessed a great skill. I could get drunk and still remember everything the next day in great detail. My mother would be so proud…haha
I started doing this on a regular basis and slowly began to get bored of doing the same few places over and over again, so I asked the owner Howard how we could get different things to do. He told me that I could try to sell for him but that he would only pay me minimum wage with small bonuses for meetings and then commission if I made a sale. At this point I had become a manager for Staples and was tired of the retail grind. Plus, I was a horrible employee, tormenting my managers in my defiance of all rules.
Sorry to everyone, especially Mike DeSanto. At Staples, I was exposed to traditional mystery shopping. We had two visits done per month per store and manager bonuses were based on the results. I thought if I could get an account like this I would be rich! Not so much.
I began making calls and 3 years later, roughly 1997 had nothing to show for it. Finally, one day Howard and I went to his local pharmacy in Norton, Massachusetts to pick up a prescription and drop off the results of a mystery shop we had done for the owner. He told us he had a college friend who was a “big shot” at National Amusements (Showcase Cinemas.) I began calling “Jeff:” on almost a daily basis. Finally, I got the “I’ll give you a meeting if you’ll stop calling” call. It was our first big break. We won 36 shops per month with the promise that if we did well, it could be 10-fold. I also realized that he gave us locations in New York, over the coming months I began driving to New York on the weekends to do mystery shops down through Long Island and up into Westchester County. Sleeping in my car at night and trying to recruit mystery shoppers along the way, without coming off like someone running a scam. Having Showcase as a reference, things began to pick up a bit, but I had gotten married and my wife expected faster results. I asked for a break until 1999. This year we had met many other people doing the same thing through the newly created mystery shopping providers association. I heard that K Mart had developed software that they were requiring their mystery shop provider to use when working with them. So Howard and I borrowed money from our parents and began the process of building our own software.
Two years later it came out, SASSIE. The first all web based mystery shop software. The company jumped forward in 2001-2003. We then made a deal to allow the developing company Surf Merchants to license it out to others, ultimately making it the globally most used software. In 2004 Nevada required all mystery shopping to be done by a licensed PI.
Howard got the license and soon thereafter 50 of our competitors began outsourcing their business to us. I saw the opportunity to go after my Vegas dreams, so my wife agreed to move to Vegas with our 3-month-old twin girls to see what I could do. Over the coming 15 months we went back and forth to Vegas three times at 90 day stretches. I made some big contacts, most importantly a top Pepsi executive, AJ. He opened a lot of doors for me as I spent many nights with him just waiting to see who we might meet. By 2006 the relationship between Howard and I had grown sour, so we agreed to separate with me buying the mystery shopping from him and him keeping the Security Consulting. About one year later, I asked my current partner Mike Mershimer to come in and help with operations as I went out to sell again. Mike and I found each other at the right time, as I was in need of help post Howard and he was considering heading back to the corporate world. He came with a big name in the Loss Prevention sector. Over the coming year we became partners and HS Brands was born. In 2008, I decided to consider expansion internationally because of fear that the US bubble would break. Over the next 9 years we would expand to India, Argentina, Australia, China, Lebanon, Italy, England, Hong Kong and most recently Thailand. We now refer to ourselves as a Brand Protection Company and have plans to expand our services and open a few more offices around the globe.
Has it been a smooth road?
There was no book on successfully running mystery shopping companies. I didn’t have any schooling or training to help me. My partner and I imploded putting the entire company at risk. I had no money during the start and no money for close to 10 years as we tried to turn it into something. I had no background in international business and still wonder if I know what I’m doing every day.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Brand Protection is to mean: Mystery Shopping, sending in a person acting as a customer who then reports back on the actions of others and the occurrences during their visit. It can be bar spotting, watching bartenders. It can be for price checks as well as merchandising.
Loss Prevention, being hired to do third party operational and loss prevention audits.
This could include investigations, interrogations and developing of LP policies & procedures.
Software as a service, we provide our software to our customers so that they can internally collect data similar to the data we collect giving them more data to make better decisions.
We are best known for our work with casinos, where we are probably the largest provider in the US as well as loss prevention services where we are again one of the largest providers.
We are set apart from others in the combination of offerings. No company offers these three distinct pieces on a global scale and also possesses the PI license in NV.
I am most proud of developing SASSIE, our ability to expand globally and just generally that we have grown beyond my wildest dreams.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Boston is fantastic is so many ways. We are the smartest city, old and new all at the same time. It has helped me most being a part of the Entrepreneurs Organization and meeting some of the smartest and more creative people in Boston. Their stories and experience have helped me navigate problems I had no idea how to handle and also push me to dream bigger.
The only drawback is the higher cost of talent, but that’s a pretty good drawback.
Pricing:
- The average mystery shop pays about $15 and the average cost to a business is about $50
- Companies collect too many different pieces of data from too many different companies. We show how spending less but spending it correctly is the path to success. Our CSat programs run about $7-$9 per store per month on average compared to double that of our competitors who charge for a lot of unneccesary analysis.
- Any company with an internal LP team should use a third-party to compare. Typical LP audit is about $250.
Contact Info:
- Address: 200 Foxborough Blvd., Foxboro, Ma 02035
- Website: www.hsbrands.com
- Phone: 800-723-1150
- Email: info@hsbrands.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSBrands/
- Twitter: @hsbrandsintl
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?trk=hb_tab_home_top
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