Marin Ace Achieves Highest Level of Recognition from Ace Hardware Corporation
San Rafael, CA, July 19, 2017 – Ace Hardware Corporation is pleased to announce that Marin Ace of San Rafael achieved designation as a “Pinnacle Performance Retailing” store for its outstanding performance this past year. Developed as part of Ace’s long-term retail growth strategy, 20/20 Vision, Pinnacle Performance Retailing is laser-focused on Ace’s customers, helping to ensure that Ace stores deliver on its brand promise day in and day out.
With over 5,000 stores in more than 60 countries, the team at Marin Ace is one of only a few hundred Ace retailers to achieve this prestigious Pinnacle status. To achieve Pinnacle Performance Retailing, the team at Marin Ace successfully completed a number of key performance drivers over the past year that help them provide a better overall shopping experience in their local community.
One example of a proven performance driver is “Helpful Certification,” the foundational element of Ace’s “Certified Ace Helpful” retail training curriculum. To become certified, all Marin Ace associates completed training including Helpful 101 and 201 courses, and the store conducted a week-long team-based certification event, garnering top performance reviews from the store’s customers in order to achieve Pinnacle status.
“The team at Marin Ace is incredibly pleased to have earned the status as a Pinnacle Performance Retailing store,” said Jeff Leopold, owner of Marin Ace, “because our goal has always been to provide ‘sizzling’ service for our neighbors in San Rafael, since we opened at the former Terra Linda Sizzler in 2011.”
Business partner/General Manager Troy Welch added, “What this means for our customers is that we are more committed than ever to providing our loyal shoppers with the best possible retail experience; from customer service to product offerings and more; we’re taking ‘Ace helpful’ to a new level.”
Jeff’s wife Michelle shared that Marin Ace has already hit the 2017 Pinnacle Status performance drivers mid-year, ensuring that they will stay at the “pinnacle” for 2018. Troy, Jeff, and Michelle were invited to the Pinnacle Award celebration in Las Vegas last month, and all agreed that Marin Ace would not stay complacent after winning Ace’s highest honor. Michelle stated “we’re even more inspired now to continue to reach higher for continued satisfaction among team members and employees. Giving the best overall shopping experience for our customers has become our way of doing business every day; now that we have built that foundation, we will build upon it to perform even better going forward.”
Marin Ace is located at 180 Merrydale in San Rafael, and is open weekdays 7-7, weekends 8-6. For further information, visit their website at www.MarinAce.com or call 415-479-9393
About Ace Hardware
For more than 90 years, Ace Hardware has been known as the place with the helpful hardware folks in thousands of neighborhoods across America, providing customers with a more personal kind of helpful. In 2017, Ace ranked "Highest in Customer Satisfaction with Home Improvement Retail Stores, Eleven Years in a Row," according to J.D. Power. With over 5,000 hardware stores locally owned and operated across the globe, Ace is the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the world.
