Power to the people :
If all you need is a battery, Batteries Plus has it covered
By Tony Kindelspire, The Daily Times-Call

LONGMONT - You've heard of the guy who liked the product so much he bought the company. Warren Ptacek liked the concept so much, he bought a franchise - and now he's opening his second Batteries Plus, this time in Longmont.

"Everybody needs batteries, and the interesting thing is when we first opened, there were people who came in and said, ‘You're not going to be here next year,'" Ptacek said.

He was talking about his first Batteries Plus store in Fort Collins. That was nine years ago, and he said some of those naysayers have ended up being some of his steadiest customers, coming in every three or four months to stock up.

As its name implies, Batteries Plus sells batteries: car batteries, laptop batteries, smoke alarm batteries, camera batteries, and even batteries for electronic voice boxes.

Ptacek's Longmont store opens Monday in the Burlington Village shopping center, in the former Blockbuster space. There are about 270 of the stores nationwide, including one each in Puerto Rico and Alaska.

"We'd been toying with the idea of opening a second store for a while," Ptacek said.

His son, Jon, came to work at the Fort Collins store, where Warren Ptacek's wife was already working, and Ptacek realized that "to support two families, we need two stores."

Ptacek's background includes being a schoolteacher and working in landscape management.

So what gave him the spark to get into this line of work?

"Denver had just opened two stores, and I saw an ad on TV for Batteries Plus, and I was interested in the ad," he said. "I was looking for a change, and I had a flashlight with an unusual battery. They had that battery."

"Everything from aircraft to Zamboni, or automobile, if you don't have an aircraft," said Tom Balcerzak, a field consultant with Wisconsin-based Batteries Plus. Balcerzak was in Longmont last week helping Ptacek prepare for his opening.

Aside from walk-in traffic, Batteries Plus stores also sell to commercial accounts. Ptacek said about 60 percent of his Fort Collins store's business is retail and the rest commercial.