Maximize Your Opportunity!

Let me be the last to tell you all- Happy New Year!


Now that we have that out of the way, on to business. In keeping with the winter/holiday feeling I want to talk about the season, or say more specifically: Tis the Season to be seasonal! At least one of them anyway. This has nothing to do with snow, presents, or increased road rage because driving in snow is a huge challenge to many individuals (primarily the ones who drive in front of me!). The seasonality I am referring to is all about making enough money during the buying season to get you though the inevitable down period to follow.

In business there are a few events that are as reliable as the snow falling outside my window every January. In November and December your sales will normally increase, and then they will gradually decrease in the months that follow before ramping up (or at least becoming a tad more stable) heading toward summer where they will show some signs of falling off again (those summer vacations can be a killer, and not just on dad’s nerves on the car ride!).

Any smart small business owner knows the key in most cases to their survival is to maximize the busy periods so that they can ride out the slower ones. The trick is how do you make sure you have done all you can do in order to maximize your time and captured every dollar that your customers wanted to spend. Below is a check list that you can go over in your mind to see if you gave yourself the best shot. Did you:

1. Have the products your customers kept telling you they wanted? There is no easier way to lose a sale than to not have what the customers were looking for in your store. You should be aware of consumer buying trends and the hot items each year, were you?

2. Have the correct amount of employees to help customers? In a busy store at a busy time of year there is nothing more frustrating to a customer than to be unable to get a question answered or find help at all. A well staffed store will allow you to help as many customers as possible which will lead to more sales. Did you schedule enough people or was that one of the biggest complaints you heard this year?

3. Open when people were out shopping? I can remember my days in the retail jungle and being required as the store GM to be there open to close with some days 8AM-10PM during the holiday shopping period and hating every minute of it. The hours themselves were bad enough but every minute we were open we had customers looking to give us their money. People want o spend money which they can’t do if you are not open to take it. Were you?

4. Have sales that actually looked like sales? In this day and age of online retail shopping and one stop price comparisons you have to step up by knocking down prices. I cannot even begin to count the times I saw a sale sign this year and when I went and looked the price difference was less than 5 dollars. Folks, that is not a sale. If someone figures they can get a product relatively close to that price all year long where is their incentive to buy it from you now? So did you actually have a sale?

5. Give your customers a reason to come back? Getting them in the store once is great, but did you find a way to have them return? There are numerous ways you could have accomplished this and not all of them have to do with free stuff. There are of course the monetary incentives: give them a coupon (Kohls cash anyone?), give them a credit card; give them a percentage off their next trip. Then there are the NON-monetary tricks to have someone return. See those things I mentioned in numbers 1-4? THOSE are the tricks! A well stocked, helpful store that has great sales and is easily accessible to me when I want to shop is the place I am more than likely to return to the next time I have to shop in the future. You can add to that have friendly smiling staff on hand but I would like to think that was a given (although I can name you 1007 times it did NOT happen to me in the last 2 months!).

And there you have it! 5 things you could have easily done to make sure you secured every dollar that the buying public was trying to make available to you when they came through your doors the last few weeks. If you did those things, chances are you did the best you could and while the down months may still be nervous times for you, you will know there was nothing else you could have done from a sales perspective to change your fortunes (there are other things you could be doing that hurt a lot though so make sure you aren’t neglecting the behind the scenes stuff!). If you did NOT do those things we have discussed, those slow times could lead to closed times. Although on a positive note, you won’t have to worry about those 5 things next year at all!