A quick introduction, since this is the first thing I have written here. My name is Mitch Schaffer. I opened Mobile Edge in Lehighton, Pennsylvania in 1994 and ran it for 29 years before selling it in 2023. Along the way we picked up a number of honors, including Mobile Electronics Retailer of the Year, and a good many of them were for business operations rather than for any one piece of work that went out the door. That mattered to me. I tried to stay on the cutting edge with marketing and with how the store ran, and I pushed technology as far as I knew how in order to run the place efficiently. I still always knew something was missing.
For those 29 years I ran my store on the same point of sale software. It was solid. It was also antiquated. It did not have modern features, and it could not be connected to anything else, which meant every other thing I wanted to do had to live somewhere outside of it.
So I did what a lot of owners do. Over the years I cobbled together a rudimentary group of softwares that let me do some of the things I wanted to do. None of them talked to one another. Our vehicle check-in system stood in its own silo. Our customer communication and reputation management did not talk to the point of sale or to accounting. Inventory management was difficult at best. Every gap between those tools got filled by a person, by hand, which is another way of saying every gap got filled with manual data entry and human error.
You have probably lived the version of this I am describing. Information gets written down when the vehicle is checked in, then typed again into the point of sale, and one digit of a phone number goes in wrong. Nobody finds out on that day. You find out six months later, when there is a part to talk about and the number rings nowhere.
I always knew there had to be a better way. After I sold the store, I decided to build it. With the help of a friend who is a developer, I started putting together the thing I had wanted for three decades, and over time that became 1sixty8 Manifold: an operating system for retail stores. Point of sale, service, work orders, reputation management, customer communication, and in-store communication, all on one platform, integrated and actually talking to each other. The whole point is to give retailers back hours they are currently spending on retyping and double-checking, and to cut out the vast majority of the mistakes that quietly cost money every day.
As for this blog, here is what to expect. I am going to share what I learned over 29 years of working every seat in the building: installer, salesperson, sales manager, install manager, owner. Some of it will be directly related to what 1sixty8 Manifold does. Some of it will just be tips and tricks I picked up along the way that have nothing to do with software at all. I am not going to pretend the blog is not also a way for me to market what I built, because it is. But the first job of it is to help retailers run their stores more efficiently, make more profit, and send customers out the door happy.
I spent over half of my life on your side of the counter. That is the perspective I am writing from, and it is the only one I have.
If any of this sounds like your shop and you want to see what I built to fix it, send me a note. I read and respond to every one myself.