Sweetwater: Chuck Surack. How a Customer Service Strategy Built a Billion Dollar Online Pro Audio and Music Company.

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Chuck Surack** (3:21)
I've always believed everyone in our company, whether it's a sales engineer or the receptionist, is either adding credibility or taking credibility away from our company. And I got to have people always adding credibility. We empower everyone in our company to make the right decision to do the right stuff.
If someone would come to our store or phone in to the receptionist and say, my keyboard quit working, they're empowered to replace it. Every employee that I hired, I would tell them, you'll never get chastised for doing the wrong thing.

**Guy Raz** (3:56)
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Chuck Surack went from mixing music in the back of his mom's VW van to building the billion-dollar music and audio equipment giant, Sweetwater.
There are a lot of ways to build a retail business. You can compete on price, you can compete on selection, you can promise faster shipping, bigger discounts or endless convenience. But Chuck Surack took a completely different approach. He believed that before anyone bought a guitar, or a microphone, or a keyboard, or a recording interface, they should have a conversation. Not with a chatbot, not with a commission salesperson trying to close a deal, but with someone who actually understood instruments and recording gear. Someone who played in bands or spent time in recording studios, who understood signal chains and synthesizers, and could help a customer figure out not just what they wanted, but what they actually needed. That philosophy became the foundation of Sweetwater. It's a company that's managed to become the largest online retailer of musical instruments and professional audio equipment in the United States. Despite competition from retail giants like Amazon and Walmart, every customer who calls Sweetwater is assigned a dedicated sales engineer. Every one of those salespeople goes through months of intensive training even before they ever answer the phone. Remarkably, Chuck never tried to win by being the cheapest. He truly believed that extraordinary service, not offering discounts, would be the key to building lasting relationships. Over time, it was.