On the market impact of facility cost reduction:

When you look at 5,600 stores, $2,000 a month times 12 months, you’re into the hundred plus million dollars. You take 10% of a hundred million dollars annually, not just this year, every single year, that adds up to a significant impact back to stock price. We spend $130 million on electricity and through deregulation, through commodity, through some demand-side management, so if I can save 20% off what I pay into today, what’s that do to my organization? It works out to $25 million dollars savings and that’s every year. Take [an] earnings per share after tax, of nine cents a share. We tried a multiple of 20 which means our stock price should go up 20 times and nine cents to a $1.80, then we have 200 million shares outstanding times $2 a share. We just added $400 million dollars to our market cap. Fairly significant dollars. Those are the things that people get passionate about. No one cares about how much electricity you use, what kind of lights you have. We’re in the business to sell things, to sell clothes, but when you can add that kind of market cap by doing some real simple things and just doing them well, you can make a big difference.

On expanding savings beyond energy:

Our competence is making clothes, soap, perfumes and so forth and taking them to market and doing it very well... Cadence’s competence is taking data, utility data, analyzing it, adding value to it and then putting it in action. When you take something like electricity that’s traditionally a fixed cost that no one really could do much with and you add that kind of value to your organization by managing it, the next best thing to say is what’s next? Is it telephones? Is it trash? Is it this? Is it that?

On picking the right partner:

The big savings are in your relationship management. The key is picking a partner, one you can grow with over time, not so much where we are today . . . What kind of things are we going to [want], what kind of discussions are we going to have in the future? [Cadence has] people in house that understand the market and they’re driving it, but there are people like me out there that understand it because we’re in it knee-deep and it’s got to be a give-and-take between both of us.

On buying market share:

We’ve gotten people that can make decisions passionately about traditional, variable expenses - electricity, gas, telephone, water, sewer. No one is going to care unless you try to factor a true financial number and show the impact back to the organization. Again, $20 million dollars a year, how many sweaters do I have to sell? What’s the liability of carrying those sweaters versus just reducing my energy usage? We’re in a position to take advantage of people buying market share. We’re positioned at the beginning of the evolution of the industry where we could help build mousetraps based on your particular needs and our needs. . . Ninety-nine percent of the people out there don’t have the resources to focus and identify what their needs are yet.