Meet Eric Larsen of Larsen Vending

Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Larsen.

Eric, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We were started by Doug Larsen, my father, when he purchased a vending machine with the vacation savings him and my mother had put aside. The machine broke down within a couple of weeks, but the regional manager that oversaw the property really liked my dad, so he kept him on as a vendor. By the late 90’s my dad decided to go full-time into vending and leave his job as an auditor for a gas station chain. From that point till now we have grown to about twenty employees, warehouses in Phoenix and Tucson, and we service close to 1500 vending machines. It was 10 years ago that I became a manager and then the GM of the company. Although we are father and son, and do fight, we make a very capable team of executive managers. We now have an amazing team of talented and dedicated staff who have grown into a tight-knit family. We have branched into the growing micro market segment of vending, which has typically been dominated by the national vending companies. Because we are a zero debt load type of company, we have been very apt at competing with companies that are dramatically larger than us. We offer truly custom design, the best in market fixtures and the best in self-checkout kiosk technology. Pairing that, which are abilities typically held only by the large companies, with our ability to be incredibly adaptive, and also being local, we can compete with anybody. We have gotten to where we are by building a team instead of an employee base, and by developing true and long lasting relationships with not only our customers, but our vendors as well.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it hasn’t been an easy path, I can’t imagine a business that had a smooth sail to success. The side of vending that we do has been dominated by very small (1-2 Person) companies that would appear and then disappear just as quickly. We also had a customer base that was very used to being told fantastic stories about what they would get from their vending machines for revenue. We raised the bar so high, though, that most of the companies that didn’t have any real substance have gone the way of the dodo bird. The most challenging thing though has been the loss of my brother Preston Larsen who died two years ago from an accidental overdose on heroin. That has caused some serious pain throughout our company and family. Aside from that there is the obvious challenges of father and son that can create some tension and differences of opinion.

Larsen Vending – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We have two distinct sides to our company vending in the multi-housing industry and micro markets. In multi-housing vending, we literally stand apart from any other company. What I mean is that there are no substantial large vending companies that will service the multifamily housing industry. It can be high risk and very unpredictable. We have tooled ourselves to be true specialists in multifamily housing vending. As to micro markets, which are unmanned self-checkout stores, we have proven to be a quick study. We have been able to align with wonderful partners like Fixturelite and 365 Retail Markets which allows us to compete with the very best national conglomerate type companies. Because of our background in multifamily vending we have a very large sandbox of skills in our team. We can install or build just about anything, which allows us to be incredibly responsive and adaptable. We have installed micro markets with customers from meet to complete in less than seven days. The industry norm is eight weeks. We sell whatever our customers want, the larger companies sell only what they can get rebates from. Lastly our management team is directly involved with all of our customers, larger companies can’t do that.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Having my wife tell me that she amazed at the level of professionalism that I have developed in our team and our company’s performance.

Contact Info:

• Address: 3824 N. 40th Avenue
  PHX, AZ 85019
• Website: www.larsenvending.com
• Phone: 602-257-8727
• Email: elarsen@larsenvending,com

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