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.

I can tell how a store is run before I ever open the door.The sign. The front windows. The parking lot. You can see from...
08/13/2026

I can tell how a store is run before I ever open the door.

The sign. The front windows. The parking lot. You can see from the car whether anybody in that building takes pride in it.

Then you walk in.

Is it cluttered? Can you find a price tag without hunting for it? Is there any direction to the store, or did the merchandise just land wherever it landed?

Then the greeting. Somebody stops what they are doing, walks over, and gives you their attention. Or somebody hollers at you from across the floor — hey, I'm over here if you need anything.

Then all the little things that are not little.

Are the lamps plugged in. Are there bulbs in them. Are the spotlights pointed at the furniture or up at the ceiling. Are the cushions straight and sitting right.

None of that ever shows up on a report. A customer will never say one word about it. They just feel it, and they leave.

Here is the part that is not fair.

The big guys have a janitor crew and people cleaning all day long. Whether one person in that building has any pride or not, you would never know it, because the place is always clean and orderly. They buy the look of it.

An independent cannot buy it. You either have it or your floor tells on you.

How does your store look right now?

08/12/2026

The best store I ever ran was one block from a homeless shelter.

Colletts, in Ogden, Utah. Beautiful store, wrong place. At close we swept the whole building — bathroom stalls, back rooms, anywhere somebody could hide. Every so often one of them would come out at four in the morning and set the alarm off, and one of us would be meeting the police there at open.

That is not why I remember it.

My father bought that company. The general manager hired me to run the second store anyway, against my father's wishes. Nobody told the staff a thing. All they knew was the boss's kid was coming.

I walked into a room full of people staring at me. I could not tell you one word I said in that first meeting.

Thirty days later they were a great team, and we hit every number anybody put in front of us.

Here is the part I would tell any owner reading this.

I did not build that team out of furniture people. I hired out of Nordstrom. Utah Nordstrom had one of the best sales training programs in the world, and you could take one of their shoe salespeople, teach them to sell sofas, and double their income.

They already knew how to treat a person. Product knowledge takes a month.

The company got sold later on. The new owner ran it out of business in thirteen months. Same building, same floor, same block, same shelter across the way.

Different people.

Where did your best salesperson come from?

08/11/2026

I cannot name a single customer I lost to silence.

Neither can you.

Every other loss in a store leaves a record. A return has paperwork. A cancellation has a number. A complaint has your name on it and lands on your desk by Thursday.

The customer who just goes quiet leaves nothing.

Somebody buys a sofa in March. In October they are ready for the bedroom. Nothing in your store knows they exist anymore, so nobody calls, and they buy it from whoever happened to be in front of them that week.

You never find out. It is not in a report. It never comes up in a meeting.

That is why this problem survives in good stores run by good people. You cannot put it on a list you never knew to make.

Mine survived for years. I was not paying attention, and there was no system to catch it. Both of those are on me.

The big guys are not remembering your customer because they care more than you do. They have something that remembers for them. That is the entire gap, and it is the one thing that finally got cheap.

The most expensive thing in your store is the loss that never showed up on a report.

How many people bought from you last year and have not heard from you since?

08/10/2026

The economy is not what's wrong with your store.

Retail grew 5.1% this year. Furniture had the worst year of any kind of store in it.

Everybody I talk to has the same list. Rates. Housing. People are not buying.

Then a couple of weeks ago Furniture Today asked three dozen people who run this business what their top priority is for the rest of the year. Manufacturer presidents. Brand CEOs. Independent owners.

Not one of them blamed the product. Not one blamed the customer.

They named ex*****on. Training. Inventory cost. Technology.

In other words, us.

I missed it too. Not because it was hidden. Because I was standing on top of it.

When you are on the floor every day the problem always looks like traffic. It is easier to count the people who did not walk in than the ones who did and never heard from you again.

Here is what I know now. The big guys are not beating independents on the relationship. They are beating us on the memory of it. They remember every customer. We mean to.

Same goes for any business somebody only needs once every few years.

Alex Shuford at Rock House put it well. The point of AI is "making our people into superheroes." Let the machine hold the follow up, the reviews, the customer reactivation. You go do the part the machine cannot do.

$65.1 billion in the first half. Down 2%, in a year when the rest of retail grew.

That is not a market. That is a habit.

How many of last year's customers have heard from you since?

08/07/2026

Everybody thought he was being generous.

He was doing math.

Mattress Mack put free ice cream in his store and a place to bring the kids. Every operator I know looked at that and called it atmosphere.

It is not atmosphere. It is frequency.

Here is the problem in our business that nobody says out loud. Somebody buys a sofa and you do not see them again for years. Home furnishings is one of the longest purchase cycles in retail. You get one shot, and then the door closes for a long time.

Unless you give them a reason to walk back in before they need anything.

That is what the ice cream is. Not kindness. A reason to be in your building when they are not buying anything, and every one of those visits is a chance to be remembered.

The big guys spend money to be seen. He spent money to be visited. That is the one an independent can actually afford.

You do not need his budget. You need one reason for somebody to come back in when they are not buying anything.

Do you have one?

Here's exactly what the scorecard measures. No mystery to it.Get Found — when they search, do you show up?Get Trusted — ...
08/05/2026

Here's exactly what the scorecard measures. No mystery to it.

Get Found — when they search, do you show up?
Get Trusted — do they believe you before they walk in?
Stay Visible — are you on their radar between visits?
Capture the Lead — when interest becomes a lead, do you catch it?
Bring Them Back — are you turning one sale into more?

Most owners score fine on the first two. Almost everyone bleeds on the last two.

That's not a criticism. It's what happens when you're running the floor, the deliveries, and payroll on the same afternoon.

90 seconds tells you where you stand.

A lead answered in 5 minutes is up to 21 times more likely to buy. The first store to respond wins about 78% of the time...
08/04/2026

A lead answered in 5 minutes is up to 21 times more likely to buy. The first store to respond wins about 78% of the time.

Most independents I talk to aren't short on customers. They're short on catching them.

The web form nobody checks. The missed call at 4:50 on a Saturday. The Facebook message that sat two days because the associate who watches the page was off.

That's not a traffic problem. That's money already in the building, walking back out.

I built a free scorecard that finds the one thing costing you the most right now. 15 questions, 90 seconds, no pitch attached.

Your Market notebook is not a plan. It is a souvenir.I filled one at every Market I ever went to. High Point. Las Vegas....
08/03/2026

Your Market notebook is not a plan. It is a souvenir.

I filled one at every Market I ever went to. High Point. Las Vegas. Dallas. Tupelo. Over about twenty years.

One of them I came home from with a plan to renovate the leather gallery. I had the whole thing worked out before the plane landed. I was sure about it.

It never happened. Not because it was a bad idea. Because our thank you notes had stopped going out.

That was it. A small problem with the follow up after the sale. It ate the week. Then it ate the month. The leather gallery went on the back burner, and the back burner is the graveyard.

Nobody loses money at Market. They lose it in the six weeks after.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then. The leather gallery did not lose to the thank you notes. It lost to the fact that the thank you notes needed me.

Thank you notes. Follow up calls. The customer who bought a sofa two years ago and is ready for a bedroom. All of it real work. None of it work that needs an owner.

Somebody reading this came home last week with a plan. The back burner is not a delay. It is a decision.

Is yours still on it?

It's simple. It's easy to forget.It's the thing you know you should do and don't — the follow-up call, the review you ne...
08/01/2026

It's simple. It's easy to forget.

It's the thing you know you should do and don't — the follow-up call, the review you never asked for, the past customer who's due right now.

It doesn't take a bird brain to remember.

But there aren't enough hours in the day, and the floor doesn't run itself.

So let AI do the remembering. Follow-up, reviews, customer reactivation — the work that gets done at 2am while you're asleep.

More time with your customers. More time getting paid.

Take the free scorecard and find out where you need the most help. 90 seconds, no pitch attached.

Don't be a bird brain.

I've watched family home furnishings companies I worked for disappear.M.D. Pruitt's, where I got my start. The RoomStore...
07/29/2026

I've watched family home furnishings companies I worked for disappear.

M.D. Pruitt's, where I got my start. The RoomStore. Good stores, good people — gone within a few years of changing hands.

The ones that lasted all had the same thing in common. Not the biggest ad budget. Not the lowest price. The customer felt taken care of, every single time, and came back because of it.

Forty-seven years, and that pattern never changed. Relationships outlast promotions.

The one thing is the same as it was in 1979 — the relationship. What's different now is the tool. I use AI to keep that relationship alive at a scale no owner could do by hand.

Let AI handle the busywork. You handle the one thing.

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Dallas, TX

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