The Levitz Agency

The Levitz Agency 47 years running furniture stores — Phoenix to New York to Dallas. Founded by Michael Levitz.

Now I help independent furniture & mattress retailers nationwide sell more to the customers they already have, and get their time back.

09/07/2026

If your store is open today, I know exactly where you are standing.

Near the front. Watching the lot.

Labor Day is one of the biggest furniture weekends of the year, which means it has never once been a day off for anybody in this business.

Somebody on your floor gave up a cookout to be there. Somebody on your truck is on his second delivery before noon.

They are not doing it for the holiday pay.

I am not going to tell you anything today. Go find those two people before you close and say something to them that is not about the numbers.

Are you open today, or closed?

09/06/2026

I bought every system that promised to remember my customer.

Not one of them ever called her.

Furniture Today ran a piece last week telling home furnishings marketers to connect their customer signals, their business intelligence, their brand experience and their measurement into one system.

That is right. I am not arguing with it.

I ran nine Ashley HomeStores and twelve Levitz Mattress stores at the same time. I bought the systems. We connected the data. I could pull a report on any customer who ever walked through any of those doors.

And she still did not hear from us.

Not because the system failed. The system worked. It sat there holding her name, her delivery date and what she paid, waiting on somebody to do something about it.

The missing part was never the software. It was the call.

A system remembers. It does not care. Caring is somebody picking up the phone on a Tuesday when nothing is on fire, or it is a machine doing it on that person's behalf because the person got busy.

Every store I have ever walked into has more information about its customers than it uses. That is not a technology problem and it never was.

The big guys are not better at this than you are. They just have something that does not forget on the days everybody is buried.

So before you buy one more thing that promises to remember her.

How long has it been since anybody in your building reached out to somebody who already bought from you?

09/05/2026

Hey, I am over here if you need anything.

If anybody on your floor says that this weekend, you lost the sale and nobody is ever going to tell you.

It sounds friendly. That is the trap.

It is a man telling a customer he is not getting up.

She hears it. Probably not on purpose. She walks your floor with nobody beside her, she leaves, and later she tells her sister the place was fine.

Fine is what people say when nothing happened.

The other version costs nothing. You stop what you are doing. You walk over. You say hello to her the way you would if she had just walked into your house, because in a way she has.

That is the entire difference. It is free. And this is the weekend it is worth the most it will be worth all year.

Go stand in your own front door tomorrow morning and watch what your people actually do.

Do you know what your floor sounds like when you are not standing on it?

09/04/2026

Almost nothing that decides your year is up to you.

I ran stores for years where the number that made or lost me money was set by somebody I never met.

Freight. The tariff. A mill in Vietnam. What the Fed does. Whether it rains on the weekend you booked the tent sale.

Container rates eased a little lately, which is good news, and you had exactly nothing to do with it.

So try this next week.

Write down everything that moved your business last month. All of it. Then cross off everything you did not control.

Look at what is left.

It is short. It is always short. Usually it is the floor, the follow-up, and whether the customer felt like anybody in the building remembered her.

That short list is the job. Everything above the line is weather, and you have been spending your week on the weather.

You cannot do anything about the weather.

You have not been doing much about the list either.

09/03/2026

My grandfather had no data and he knew every customer he had.

That was 1936. Seven years into the Depression, in a Pennsylvania mill town.

Leon and his brother Ralph opened a furniture store in Pottstown that year. I do not know what they were thinking either.

Their brother Sam went out to Tucson and opened his own. Sam Levitz Furniture is still there, and it is still run by a Sam Levitz.

No CRM. No attribution. No dashboard telling them which half of the advertising worked. What they had was a book with names in it, and the fact that everybody in that town knew where they lived.

I am not asking anybody to go backward. I would not want to run a store that way now.

But look at what has happened in the ninety years since.

Every tool that came along has been better at finding the next customer than at keeping the last one. Every single one of them. Including the ones being sold to you this year.

The job never changed. Only the size of the book.

Is anybody in your building keeping yours?

09/02/2026

I can tell you the day your customer stopped hearing from you.

It was the day the truck pulled away.

Somebody sat with her on your floor for two hours. Went through the fabric book twice. Your driver carried it up her stairs, set it down where she wanted it, and took the old one out.

Then nothing.

Not a call. Not a note. Nothing, ever again, unless she happens to drive past you.

I am not pointing a finger. When I had my stores, that follow-up was all on me, and Ashley never touched it.

The big guys are not better at that part than you are. I worked for them. The group that bought most of my stores crashed every service policy we ever built, and their retention is horrible.

What they are better at is remembering. They have something doing the remembering for them.

You have a person who got busy. And then that person left.

That is the whole gap. It is not effort and it is not caring. You have more of both than they do.

It is that yours lives in one person's head.

How many days since your last delivery heard from you?

Everybody wants to talk about the system.The system is the part above the water.I watch people in my lane sell software ...
09/01/2026

Everybody wants to talk about the system.

The system is the part above the water.

I watch people in my lane sell software like the software is the thing. Pick the tool, plug it in, and the store fixes itself.

It does not work that way, and anybody who has run a floor already knows it.

The knowledge is underneath. Forty-seven years of it, in my case. Which customer is worth a call and which one is not. What a slow Tuesday actually means. Why that family bought the sofa and never came back for the bedroom.

None of that shows. It never shows. It is the whole thing.

Data sits down there too, in the foundation, and it matters. But data does not tell you what it means. Experience does. The experience is what tells the build what to build.

So when somebody hands you a system, the question is not how good the system is.

The question is who decided what it should do.

Anybody can buy the part above the water.

08/31/2026

Nobody wanted me in that warehouse.

Upstairs, no air conditioning, Phoenix in the summer.

That was M.D. Pruitt's, my first job in this business. Sorting stock. I got the jobs nobody else would take.

I remember on hot days I would outlast the help. Not because I was tougher than anybody. Because I wanted somebody in that building to notice I was still standing there.

There were no forklifts at Pruitt's. That is why we pushed the sofas up the ramp outside.

Pruitt's is gone now. Changed hands and disappeared. Same thing happened to The RoomStore in Dallas after I ran it. Good stores. Good people. Gone within a few years of changing hands.

Here is the part I did not understand until a lot later.

I have had some of my best RSAs come up through the back end.

Not all of them. Plenty of good ones never touched a truck. But the ones who did knew what a scratched leg costs, because they were the one who scratched it. They knew why a delivery ran late, because they had been on the truck the day it ran late.

You cannot teach that in a Saturday morning meeting.

Some of the best people you could put on your floor are already in your building. They are just not on your floor yet.

Have you got anybody up front who started in the back?

08/30/2026

Somebody bought nine furniture stores this week.

I once ran nine. I can tell you what they did not buy.

Mancini's Sleepworld picked up nine locations. Furniture Today ran it Wednesday. Good for them, and I mean that. Growing by acquisition is real growth, and it is the expensive kind.

Here is the other kind, and almost nobody runs it.

You have already paid for every customer who bought from you in the last five years. The ad that brought her in is paid for. The two hours somebody spent with her on your floor are paid for. The delivery is paid for.

That money is spent. It is gone.

And most stores never touch those people again.

When I had nine Ashley HomeStores across Dallas and El Paso, with twelve Levitz Mattress stores running alongside them, the most valuable thing in the whole operation was not a location.

It was the file. Names of people who had already said yes to us once.

Buying nine stores gets you nine more customer files nobody is going to work either.

How many people bought from you in the last five years?

08/29/2026

I judge a place by the bathroom nobody is supposed to see.

The employee one, not the customer one.

I got that from Carl Sewell. He ran the Cadillac dealership in Dallas and wrote a book called Customers for Life. The part that stuck with me was not the selling. It was the bathrooms.

His customer restrooms were spotless. Paintings on the wall, cleaned every hour.

Anybody can do that. You can do that the morning somebody important comes to town.

The one that told the truth was the technicians' bathroom. Back where the cars get worked on, where no customer ever goes. That one was nice too.

That is not decorating. That is a man telling his own people they are not the part of the business you hide.

I bought eight or nine cars from that dealership. Walked in one time and never shopped anybody else.

I have thought about it a lot, because I was on the other side of it for forty-seven years and I know exactly how a back hallway gets the way it gets. Nobody decides to let it go. It just never has to get done today.

Go look at yours this week. The break room. The employee restroom. The chair in the back with the tear in it that has been there since spring.

Your people have already noticed. They are just not going to say it to you.

The customer never sees any of it. It reaches them anyway, through the person who works back there and then walks out on your floor and decides how much of themselves to give you that day.

The stuff you never got around to is the stuff your people think you think of them.

When did you last walk your own back hallway?

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Arlington, TX

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