Joe Power has simplified his retail management style into two main words: inspiration and friction. Power is a 23-year veteran at Crown Enterprises Inc, an employee-owned retailer with three stores in Northwest Montana and Idaho under two names: The Sportsman & Ski Haus and Tri-State Outfitters.

He got his start working as a department manager and worked his way up to store manager and eventually president. “I appreciate that I have experience working on the floor,” Power told Trailheads in a recent interview, “and I always keep that in the forefront of my decision making on how it impacts our customers and staff.”

“As my career advanced, I realized I can put any situation we face as a business in one of two buckets—inspiration or friction—and figure it out from there.”

Let’s start with the inspiration part. “Our main goal is to inspire our customers to buy and enjoy the products from our stores and inspire our employees to do a great job working for us.”

Regarding the customers, Power and his team keep it simple: Inspiration begins with marketing. “That gets them into the store,” Power says. After that, it’s merchandising, product selection, and the person-to-person interaction in the store.

“Product knowledge and storytelling are prime examples of that,” Power said. “If our merchandising and storytelling are not inspired, we might as well be selling online.” Except for selling products through Locally, the four-store unit does not sell on the Internet.

With its 240 employees, Crown seeks to inspire through a variety of ways. “We try and accommodate them through schedules that work with their lives,” he said. Employees can work four 10-hour days or five 8-hour days. The store also encourages them to take advantage of pro-deals on merchandise so they can get out and enjoy the outdoors.

Crown is owned by its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, and Power says the staff is the retail company’s secret sauce in competing with major players, REI and Cabela’s, which both have stores nearby. “Percentagewise, we spend twice as much on employee payroll as Shopko did when I worked for them. Our employees have expertise in technical categories, like Bike and Ski. Our success depends on them and their stability with our stores.”

Powers’ use of the word “friction” as a management tenant may seem charged, but he applies it to challenges with customers or occasionally between departments.

With customers, the stores identified a problem that wait times in the checkout line were too long.

“We looked at staffing and other systems and discovered that it was actually an IT problem,” he says. “We discovered that our Point-of-Sale towers were too old, and that was slowing things down.”

The stores now replace the towers every five years “or sooner.”

“It’s not that expensive and solved the problem.”

Internally, Powers says friction between departments is rare, and he prefers to deal with it quickly before any bad personal feelings arrive. “We had an issue that involved the receiving, buying and AP departments regarding timely payments to vendors. It was not a personal dispute, but it could have become so. Now we get the bills paid, and no one got angry at one another. We got to the root of the friction, which is my job.”

Trailheads: What was your most recent outdoor adventure?

Power: “That’s easy. In the summer, I fly fish a couple of times a week. We’re 30 miles from Glacier National Park and the Missouri River. I also do a National Park visit every year to either Yellowstone or Grand Teton.

Trailheads: What is on your outdoor adventure bucket list?

Power: I used to hike to fly fish; now I fly fish to hike. I’d love to do both in Peru and see that part of the world.