How an early cellphone entrepreneur took on global retail solutions
By Yousra Benkirane
Brett Beveridge, founder and CEO of The Revenue Optimization Companies (T-ROC), began his entrepreneurial journey as a 23-year-old who sold cell phones out of a van with a college friend. He turned that venture into Let’s Talk Cellular & Wireless, which became the largest independent mobile wireless retailer in the country at the time, with close to 300 stores nationwide. After taking the company public and selling it to Nextel, Beveridge moved to San Francisco and founded Let’sTalk.com, a company that analyzed and rated cell phone and internet services. Nextel also purchased Let’sTalk, and Beveridge joined the firm, helping them grow by another 300 stores.
Three years later, Beveridge wanted to reignite his entrepreneurial engine. In 2000, Beveridge founded T-ROC, a Miami-based sales and revenue accelerator for some of the biggest retail brands in the world. His formula: Supply teams of trained workers who can act as specialists within larger retail organizations. For clients like T-Mobile, Walmart, Samsung, and Xfinity, the T-ROC squads arrive fully qualified to provide services ranging from personalized sales programs to product subassembly.
“They’re looking to increase their brand awareness, their customer journey, and obviously, their market share,” Beveridge says of his clients. “So, T-ROC has put together this ecosystem of people and technology solutions that help our customers achieve their goals.”
Twelve years ago, for example, Walmart took on T-ROC to staff a single Store- Within-A-Store (SWAS) wireless department. The multinational retail corporation was struggling to sell electronics. T-ROC provided Walmart with tech consultation, a high-performance sales team, and end-to-end program management. “If you live here in South Florida and you go to a Walmart’s electronic department, you most likely are talking to a T-ROC-er and not a Walmart employee,” says Beveridge.
Today, T-ROC employs around 8,000 employees and 30,000 contractors worldwide, with clients in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. Most of their overseas teams work for the affiliates, subsidiaries, or divisions of their U.S. customers, like Walmart in Canada and Mexico, or PlayStation in Colombia and Chile.
“We are taking over the entire customer experience,” Beveridge says. “We’re engaging with the customer, we’re establishing a relationship with them, determining their needs, and presenting the right products. Then we just ring Walmart’s register. So, it’s their inventory, their cash, but we manage the entire sales process for them.” Since T-ROC took over, Walmart has seen a 1,000 percent increase in the sell-through rate for their electronics, and T-ROC is now in more than 1,300 Walmart locations.
Next, it wants to get into the product fulfillment business. The company has just opened a 2,500-square-foot logistics warehouse in Doral, west of Miami International Airport. The facility provides shipping and inventory capabilities to broaden the range of services T-ROC can offer customers, including things like product assembly and their most recent technology, the VIBA solution. The Virtual Interactive Branding Ambassador is an in-store device that customers can use to check product availability and reach a live – or robotic – sales assistant. “We’re a growth company,” says Beveridge. “We’ll always be a growth company. And that’s what we think about every day.
