By Patrick Avenell

Despite completing the purchase of two Retravision businesses in the space of seven days, The Winning Group has denied it is aggressively expanding; instead saying it is just being opportunistic.

In an interview with Current.com.au this morning, chief financial officer Aaron Links said the purchase of the McKnights Retravision business in Victoria, which wasn’t operating any consumer facing stores, and the Ron Handley Retravision outlet in Indooroopilly, in Brisbane, which is being converted to an Winning Appliances showroom.

“These things come up and there are a lot of these opportunities out there,” Links said, referring to the stores left without a buying group after the collapse of Retravision Southern. “We look to see which ones fit our culture and our customer service level.

“This was obviously a great location and it’s something that we thought was a good opportunity that was worth picking up.”

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The Winning Group purchased Ron Handley Retravision from a company called Trio Appliances. One of three shareholders of Trio Appliances, Mel Spiteri, will continue in his role as general manager of the relaunched Winning Appliances showroom.

Links said this conversion should be completed by 1 October 2012.

“We’ll have some rebranding and a bit of fit-out to do. It should be early October that it will be up and running as Winning Appliances,” he said.

When it was put to him that Winning Appliances showroom and Retravision stores had very different in-store displays, Links admitted that there was a bit of “tidying up” to do to meet the The Winning Group’s brand aesthetic.

“A bit of work has to be done,” he said. “We’ll do a bit of tidying up and present it the way that we present our Winnings stores.

“We pride ourselves on how our stores present, so we’ll making some alterations to put our branding in place but also to make sure the displays are in a fashion that we think our customers will be satisfied with.”

Links approximated that The Winning Group currently has 450 employees.