No one signed up for my June Business Boot Camp on Retail Math. (Well, okay, a couple people did, but not enough for the Chamber to make it a go.)
I think I know why.
Retail Math is scary. So many numbers and ratios and calculations. So much confusion over terminology. Is a credit a good thing, or is that a debit? (I still get those confused all the time.) Accountants and bankers don’t seem to help. They use words like equity and depreciation and accrued this or that.
We don’t like feeling dumb, so we don’t like going to classes and workshops and seminars where we know next to nothing. Yet that is exactly the kind of classes and workshops and seminars we need to be attending. Especially Retail Math.
If you want to be successful and pay yourself what you’re worth, you have to know the math.
Fortunately for you, I have struggled with this myself. So I attended the workshops and seminars, talked to the accountants, spent the time wrapping my head around all those 50-cent words and million dollar concepts, trying to find a way to put them into terms you and I and all the other indie retailers might understand.
I wrote them down in two simple, powerful Freebies
Both contain math. It is math you can do.
Both contain terminology. Explained in a way that will make sense to you.
Both contain ideas and thoughts on how you can use the math.
Retail Math is not so scary once you learn it.
Maybe I cannot lead you to a seminar or workshop, but I can lead you to this water. All you have to do is drink.
-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com
PS For my toy store friends, I took the Financial Statements eBook a step farther. ASTRA contracted with me to write a definitive book on the Financials of an independent toy store called Financials You Can Understand (they wanted to call it Financials Made Easy, but even I knew that was stretching it a bit). The book is a combination of all the math in the two Freebies above along with an explanation of what a typical toy store’s numbers would be and what to do if your numbers don’t match. It isn’t free, but the information is so valuable that you will quickly recover the costs of the book many times over – even if you aren’t a toy retailer. My research has found that the numbers of a typical toy store are quite similar to any retail business that does most of its sales in the fourth quarter.
PPS Full disclosure: I do not get anything from the sales of that book. They already paid me to write it. You, however, will get plenty from it. The only thing scary is how much better you will understand the numbers in your business.