The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – National Retail Solutions Offers Innovative Solutions for Independent Retailers

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

National Retail Solutions Offers Innovative Solutions for Independent Retailers NRSplus.com Show Notes About the Guest(s): Elie Y. Katz is the President and CEO of National Retail Solutions (NRS) Plus. With over seven years of experience in the industry, Katz has brought his expertise as an executive in various companies to found NRS. NRS operates the leading point-of-sale terminal-based platform and NRS Pay with credit card processing for independent retailers. With over 27,000 active POS terminals in stores nationwide, NRS provides solutions to help independent retailers compete in the market. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss interviews Elie Y. Katz, the President and CEO of National Retail Solutions (NRS) Plus. Katz shares the story of how NRS was founded and the mission behind the company's offerings. He discusses the challenges faced by independent convenience store owners and how NRS provides them with the technology and insights to compete in the market. Katz also highlights the importance of clean and transparent credit card processing for small businesses. Additionally, he introduces NRS's innovative panic alarm system embedded in their point-of-sale registers, designed to enhance the safety and security of store owners. Katz concludes by discussing NRS's partnerships and future plans to continue improving their product offerings. Key Takeaways: NRS provides independent convenience store owners with a point-of-sale register that offers digital coupon products, credit card processing, and other features to help them compete in the market. NRS's credit card processing solution, NRS Pay, offers a clean and transparent rate with no long-term contracts or hidden fees. The panic alarm system embedded in NRS's point-of-sale registers silently alerts the police in case of emergencies, providing a sense of security for store owners. NRS has partnered with companies like Strata Select, MS Energy Technologies, and Source One Digital Team to offer additional solutions and services to their customers. NRS is committed to continuously improving their product offerings and providing support to independent retailers in various industries. Notable Quotes: "We created the world's greatest point-of-sale register for these independent, convenient liquor tobacco stores." - Elie Y. Katz "Our point-of-sale register offers clean and transparent credit card processing with no hidden fees." - Elie Y. Katz "The panic alarm system gives store owners a sense of security and comfort, knowing that help is just a button away." - Elie Y. Katz "We partner with reputable companies to offer additional solutions and services to our customers, such as signage and canopies for gas stations." - Elie Y. Katz "Our goal is to level the playing field for independent retailers and provide them with the tools they need to succeed." - Elie Y. Katz

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings that and makes it official on the show because it couldn't do without her.

I'm glad she sings that line. I don't have to anymore. Welcome to the Chris Foss Show, folks. The family loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your dad. That time he took apart his favorite watch and he never forgave you ever since, which is probably where I went off the rails with my dad.

We took apart his favorite Timex watch and then we couldn't figure out how to put it together. He's eight years old and he hated us ever since. And he was probably right at doing so. We were awful kids. Anyway, guys, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrisplus1 on the TikTokity, and all those other places on the interwebs. And as always, we have the smartest people, the CEOs, the billionaires. We have another billionaire, I think, coming on the show from Silicon Valley here and presidential advisors, but all the people, the smartest people on this show, damn it, come on the show and they

do their thing. Today, we have a returning guest. Eli Katz is on the show with us. He's with National Retail Solutions, or what we call NRS Plus, and he is the president and CEO of that company. Seven years ago, he brought his many years of experience as an executive in various companies in diverse industries, plus strong leadership, interpersonal and organizational skills to found National retail solutions he operates the leading point of sale terminal based platform in our nrs pay with credit card processing for independent retailers bodega owners comprising over comprising over 27 000 active pos terminals in stores nationwide and he's so busy he can't even get his office to shut up long enough for us to do this podcast welcome to the show ely how are you chris thank

you so much i apologize about the background noise that's okay just fire them later they're all gone including the dog oh yeah i want you do the whole walk actually i'm keeping the dog keep the dog keep the dog take the cannoli the i was watching you walk with your laptop through the whole office there that was fun i know because you said it was a podcast so i figured i can quickly grab a nice quiet space there you go no one noticed so give us your dot com so people can find you on nrsplus.com nrsplus.com you have to go slow enough for people to write it down you know people are old that watch this show you know they're kind of the senior citizens folks not a problem nrsplus.com so ellie give us a overview of your company 30 000 overview what you guys do and how you do it.

So, first of all, thank you for having me. I love the intro. I love the show. Ever since I've been on it the first time, I've actually started listening to it more often. And it's an honor to be here, to be honest with you. Thank you. So, about seven and a half years ago, I was called into my chairman of my company's office. He's the, it's a publicly traded company and they did telecom products, calling card products inside these independent convenience stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores. But basically the common denominator was they're mostly independents. They were actually also doing telecom in, you know, like the big box stores,

you know, the, the famous names that we all know as far as big box, but they're really comprised of 20% of their telecom sales and 80% was being done in these independents. And this is seven years back. Think about where we were, you know, Amazon was still Amazon, but it wasn't the Amazon we know today. And he basically said, listen, we have these independent convenience store people. They're really hardworking, great people. They've helped our business. We've helped their business. But they have a problem.

And their problem is they have all these brick and mortars that are opening up, you know, that are in the community and they are really hurting these independents because these independents are lacking the technology and the insights in order to be able to compete. And we need to give them something to have them compete. So the first version or the first idea was, okay, well, let's, you know, when was the last time you went into like an independent convenience store, you know, your local corner grocery and gave them a coupon, right? We all love coupons. So let's give them a coupon. So we went down the couponing route and we,

I met with a few couponing companies and I met with a few professionals from the industry and they said, Ellie, these independents don't have proof of purchase. And even if they had proof of purchase, they wouldn't even know what to do with the coupons that they collected. Right. I mean, if you look at the little baby fine print, it's like send it to, you know, someplace in Mexico and they'll count it and whatever it was. And they said, even if they were able to do proof of purchase, and even if they figured out where to send it, you know, they're small independent stores. They don't have the ability to sit and wait to get their money.

Right. If you think about it, you know, to you and I, it's 35 cents, 35 cents times a thousand, you know, cause it's like three months worth, let's say. Yeah. that's a lot of money yeah especially for these independents so we created the world's greatest point of sale register for these independent convenient liquor tobacco stores well and part of it was we did a digital couponing product where basically you walked in and i don't have to tell you the sample or example because now it's so common in all the popular stores that you would go to where you walk in,

you give them a phone number and then you get to save money on like a Coca-Cola or a Snickers or whatever it is. And then 24 hours later, we take the money that they just gave to the customer and we put it back into their digital wallet. So Coke is happy because they sold more Coke. The customer's happy because they got to save money at their local convenience store, local corner store. And the merchant's happy because he got to sell more product and everyone was happy and then we go to coca-cola for example and we say coca-cola last month our network of right now where our network is close to 30 000 stores sold 10 000 cokes and we had an agreement that you would give us x amount of dollars and now you owe us a check. So we, we were large enough to be able to wait for the money.

So the merchant didn't have to wait. And then from there, the network just grew as far as the different product offerings. We start offering credit card processing because, you know, I don't know if you are involved in any of your businesses or what you do with credit card processing, but there are so many liars, cheaters, thieves, misleaders, and the list goes on out there.

And these were these hardworking, convenient liquor tobacco store owners who really didn't have time or energy to focus on every single detail of their business. So when their cousin or their uncle or their nephew came in and said, hey, I got the best credit card processing for you. Of course, you're going to take it, right? It's my cousin. I love my cousin. But then you find out six months later, the cousin raises the rates because that's how they make money. We came up with a clean product called NRSPay.com. There's no long-term contract. There's no cancellation fee. We actually give you a free credit card reader,

and that can cost us around a couple hundred dollars. Yeah. And it's a clean rate. So like what we said we're going to charge you today. Six months later is what we said you're going to get charged. And you look at the bill every month and there's no surprise fees.

You know, there's some people or some companies that build the bills so that you really have no clue what's going on. I think you would all agree, the people listening and you, Chris, utility companies are certainly one of those that you really have a hard time understanding how many therms you're buying and how many of it. Credit card processing is up there. And when you start

hiding these secret little fees, whatever it is, transaction fee, statement fee, PCI fee, all these little fees and all these surprises, that's how these cheaters get away with it. Yeah. A lot of times they lock you into really long contracts too. You can't get out. Oh yeah. That's the other thing. I mean, he's your cousin or he's your nephew and he loves you so much, but yet that long-term contract you try to cancel is a $1,500 cancellation fee. Oh, yeah. Or that all of a sudden you're renting that credit card unit. And by the way, I own restaurants. So I'm very familiar with the retail business. I'm very familiar with the customer service business.

And I'm also very familiar with getting ripped off on credit card processing. And I was. To be honest with you, I like the fact that the guy gave me free paper. I was so enamored by that. The free paper rolls for the credit card processing? Yeah. I was so enamored by it. So they gave him free paper.

Obviously, it's not free. He's hiding those charges in my statements. He's jacking up the prices. So that's why NRSPay.com was born. And it doesn't just service those industries. We are servicing everybody that takes a credit card. We got the dongles. We got the online.

And we have the same concept and philosophy, which is give the customers a clean rate a simple rate for them to understand no contract that's long and i say no contact that's long because i probably have to say that legally right it's yeah because there is an agreement that you sign yeah it's not like it's not like a five-month agreement it's a it's you know you sign the agreement to sign up you want to cancel in the middle, they cancel. I think that's brilliant, as we've talked about before. Now, you have some new offerings that you guys have added. Tell us about them.

I think one is the NRS Panic Alarm System. And what is that? I forgot where you're located, but I'm located in Vegas. Oh, how convenient for you. Well, I have to process, I don't know, all the cities. By the way, we've got several hundred point-of-sale registers in Vegas. We're one of the top point-of-sale registers in Vegas, right? So just so you know. You can go visit our stores anytime.

But I'm in New York, right? New Jersey specifically, but the tri-state New York area. If you Google bodega crime, NYC, right? Now bodega, for those that don't understand the terminology in California, it's called a tienda in, you know, Midwest, they call them you know grocery you know party stores but if you google bodega crime nyc no joke and it's scary but it's more sick every day there is some type of reported right because i'm sure there's lots that doesn't go reported reported incident that happens in these stores to these hardworking individuals, man encounter. I, right now I'm reading about a bodega owner that got killed, shot in the head because he refused to give the customer a free, what is it? Philly blunt or

whatever they call those things. Yeah. So now this hardworking individual does not get to come home to their family because some mama luke decided that they wanted to be aggressive. in the point of sale register that if somebody walks in or if there's some erratic behavior going on in the store without making it noticeable that they're hitting a panic alarm, they touch a button on the point of sale register and silently it alerts the police department and the police. Wow. That's pretty savvy. So they don't have to be like reaching under the counter and hit someone. They don't have to reach like reaching under the counter and hit the red button. They don't have to reach under the counter. So when someone walks in with a gun and says, give me, open your register,

the natural instinct or the natural action is to touch the screen to open the register. We're talking about screens these days. They're not the old cash register. When they touch the button, the drawer opens up, and the alarm is set, and the police are on their way. So it gives that sense of security. It gives that sense of comfort. It gives that sense of protection for the owner of that store.

And this month, by the way, I was so disgusted, by the way, with what I saw with this recent article. I told my team, listen, we're not making money on this panic alarm button, right? Obviously, it costs us money. There's a monitoring service behind it. It's 24 hours. You know, it costs us to patent it, et cetera. I want to give it away to everybody for free for the next 90 days. Like, just give it to them.

Let everybody use it. Let everybody feel like they give it to them let everybody use it let everybody feel like they have it you know we we send our community outreach team members into the community to visit stores and they visited a store last week and it's on my instagram you could see it it's ricky on the road and the guy was held up they came in from the back of the store he He pushed the button. The alarm went off. They stole the drawer. They broke the drawer. But by the time they got out through the back door, they were arrested by the cops.

That's awesome. Yeah. So I sent my guy, Ricky, on the road to go and bring him a brand new cash drawer as a gift from us because I can't handle hearing these stories. And at the same time, it was such a beautiful thing to hear that they hit our panic alarm. There you go. Now, I know we've got about 10 minutes left, and there's some other questions I have for you,

so you may want to gear your time to that. I noticed there's some other new offerings you guys have. Tell us about the Strata Select. The Strata Select? Partnership. Partnership. So Strata Select? Partnership. So we have several different partnerships. One of the partnerships that we have is when companies that are – okay, if I can just rewind for three seconds.

We have a customer-facing screen that is the most powerful digital out-of-home ad network in the country in the convenience store space. These convenience stores, they're small. That's why they call them convenience, right? Convenience. But they're small format. You walk in. You're looking at the register. You're looking at an ad.

You're looking at the register you're looking at an ad you're looking at the screen the merchant can put their ads up on that screen so the merchant can talk to the customers hey this item is on sale today or this item may be about to expire so let me drop the price and tell everybody about it or this sandwich is a special that we're doing today and then we have these partnerships where you know we have these cpgs and these you know consumer product good companies you know the makers of the different coke and pepsi and and all and doritos and all the other wonderful things you find in the stores and some of the other products that advertise. And they use this partnership that you just mentioned about to find the exact way to target to the right people, right?

So they're not selling ice melt for snow in a Las Vegas store. There you go. That's important. Now, you also partner with AMS Energy Technologies to become a point of sale provider for their innovative portable above ground stations. Tell us what that is. So listen, I just got myself an electric car. It took me a little time to get used to it, to be honest with you. And like many who are listening that have an electric car they'll tell you that you know that they have a little bit of a fear i forgot what the exact terminology is someone once sent it said it to me they have a fear of going out a certain distance away from

a charging station so there's all these different ways these new gas stations are being built. You know, we also got into, by the way, where we're now deploying those electric chargers. But there's other companies out there. We partnered with this company, AMS, which does above ground tanks. Right. So there's some states that are saying, hey, we no longer want you to put a tank in the ground. Environmental wise, not the right way to go. So there's some states that are saying we can't do it, and then there's some places saying it's just too expensive to do it.

Why should we do it? So they built this AMS product, which literally is like a convenience store, a gas station, basically almost like a prefab, which involves the tanks above the ground. They drop it in place. So they were looking for the best point of sale register to be able to talk to the things. You call National Retail Solutions for the best point of sale register. There you go. And then finally, there was, you guys teamed up with SourceOne Digital Team for Grand Format Retail Printing Solutions.

Tell us about that collaboration. Yeah, so we didn't want to get into the gas station business with the point-of-sale register because it's an entire new vertical. We were doing amazing and still are doing amazing in the convenient liquor and tobacco stores. And we're deploying over 800 something units a month. You know, anyone who's got a convenience store, usually they call us first tobacco store, liquor store, because of all the different wonderful products and features and offerings, whether it's the website that we offer for the merchants so that they can now get into e-commerce, whether it's the tobacco rebate program that we offer for the people that are selling tobacco so

that they can get different rewards from the tobacco companies, whether it's the license ID scanning that we have, whether it's the find my business, manage my reviews. There's so many different items that we put together and wrapped around at such an affordable price and such an easy to use handholding system, our point of sale register. But then we found that there's a thousand convenience stores that said, Hey, we've got your register. We love your register. Wouldn't it be great if you can also control our pumps so it can be connected? So we said, okay. So we got into that business. We spent a lot of time, energy, and money. We built that vertical. That's why we're able to go with AMS.

But now that we're there, now that we're with these gas stations, there's other offerings, whether it's signage or canopies, you know, or lighting or whatever else it is that we can offer to these gas stations. And we've partnered with some reputable companies to be able to offer those different products and offerings. Nice. So, I mean, the more added value you can bring to your product is the great lesson here. The more, you know, the harder it is for people to walk away from you. They're like, I will, we, we get so much and they do so much for us. Well, you know, we, you almost, you, you almost make it so the client can't leave you. One of my first businesses. You know what? It's interesting because, you know, it's like, it's like, it's interesting because you know it's like it's like it's like dating somebody for 20 years

without giving the ring right we we don't have a contract with the credit card processing and they could leave us any time they want and it's so hard to compete against the liars cheaters and thieves right it's how do you beat a lie yet, most people don't leave us. Most people who run their business, they're smart, savvy people. They know after one month, hey, last month I was paying $200 in fees. And this month with NRS, I'm only paying $100 in fees. Last month, I was paying for a credit card machine. This month, I'm not paying for any credit card machine. This month, I'm not paying for any

credit card machine. So they don't leave us. And that's what makes it wonderful about our NRS. Our offers, our products, our features, our functionality are so specific to help these merchants. And they're so good that naturally they stay with us. There you go. And that's so smart. And when you offer so much, there's no way they can leave either, right? That's the real key. So as we go out, anything new you want to tease out

about what you guys are up to? Anything you're working on or cooking on that you can tell us about? Yeah, the answer is we're always working to make our product offerings better. Liquor stores is an area that I focus on a lot as well on. There's these delivery service platforms with liquor stores that charge these liquor stores a gazillion dollars to be part of it. I don't have to tell you what, you know, some of these other delivery services charge, like restaurants. So we have relationships that we've made with these

national delivery companies that, and you can see which ones we've come up with press releases, you know, and they make it so beneficial for the liquor, tobacco, and convenience stores to get a national retail solutions point to sale register at nrsplus.com because they do not have the high fees to the merchant so that the merchant can sell their products and be competitive, which is the exact reason we got into the business in the first place seven years ago to give these independent, convenient liquor and tobacco stores, not just the ability to be competitive, but to level the playing field. And that is what our NRS Plus unit has done. And listen, thank goodness, proof is in the pudding,

and we keep growing, and we're going to continue to keep growing. There you go. The proof is in the pudding. Well, thank you very much for coming on, Ellie. We certainly appreciate it. Chris, my friend, I love being here. You've got amazing energy. I'm sorry if I started a little slow. It's Friday for me and I've just been back to back.

You know? There you go. Well, you're at least on your way to a good weekend. So thank you for coming to the show. Give us your dot coms one more time so we can find you on the interwebs. Everything can be found at nrsplus.com. N for Nancy or for national, R for retail, and S is for solution.

nrsplus.com. There you go. Thanks to everyone for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschristmas, linkedin.com, fortuneschristmas, christmas1 on the TikTokity, and all those fun places across the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.