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Author: Phil Wrzesinski

Business Boot Camp This Thursday

This Thursday, August 8, 2013, I will be holding a four-hour Business Boot Camp on Marketing and Advertising.

Four hours of world-class information on Branding and how to make yours stand out in the crowd.

Four hours of deconstructing the myths of Advertising, unlearning all those things uninformed advertising sales weasels people tried to teach you.

Four hours of unveiling the mistakes that even the big boys with billion-dollar budgets make every single day.

Four hours of clarifying how ads work, why ads work, where ads work and what you should do make yours work, too.

Four hours of making your ads more memorable, powerful, and effective without spending a penny more on your budget.

Four hours of getting you to think, laugh, and maybe even cry.

Four hours to turn your advertising around and make sure it performs to its best so that you can perform to your best.

Are you in?

Call the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce at (517) 782-8221 to sign up. Cost is only $99.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Yes, you get all that for $99. It should be $2000. At that price you would think there must be something to the class. You wouldn’t sign up – not in your budget – but you’d think the class was more valuable. Isn’t it funny how we give value to information based on what it costs?

If it makes you feel any better, what you will learn cost me thousands of dollars to learn. Plus, I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars testing it to know that it works. The Chamber and I are only charging a small fee because we want to see this spread.

Retail Math is Not So Scary

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.

Two More Freebies For You

Why do I give it away for free? It is part of my Core Values to be helpful.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting paid to sell toys and baby products. I love getting paid to travel across the country and impart some of the lessons I’ve learned to a room full of peers.

I also love helping and sharing. I want my ideas and thoughts to spread farther and wider to help my friends and peers in the independent retail industry. Plus. more often than not, I’ve already been paid.

All of my Freebies are the notes written from presentations I have done. That is why they are short and sweet – so you can print them easily. I could make eBooks more like power points with full-page graphics, tight bullet points and simple messages spread out over 72 pages. But I would rather keep them down to seven pages or less so that I can use them as handouts. Short and sweet so you can print them at home and read later. Short and to the point for you to email and share with your friends.

Since I got paid to do the presentation, I have already been paid to write the eBook, too. Now we just need to spread the word.

Here are two new Freebies worth sharing.

Generating Word-of-Mouth – You know Word of Mouth is the best form of advertising. But do you know the five ways to generate it? Do you know how to get people to talk positively about your business? This Freebie shares all the secrets behind getting people to talk about you.

(Yes, I decided to put it under Great Marketing. Put your best stuff where the customers are most likely to see it.)

Making Your Ads Memorable – Most ads are ignored, because most ads are lousy. The truly remarkable ads are the ads most remembered. This Freebie will show you three things you can do to make your print and broadcast advertisements cut through the clutter and be seen, heard and remembered by your potential customers.

Enjoy!

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Some have argued that by giving it all away, no one will ever hire me to speak. Fair enough. Of course, the live explanations are always more fun and interesting and worth every penny. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t offer to do them.

Is Word-of-Mouth Advertising or Customer Service?

I recently did a workshop in Jacksonville, Florida for PRO on Customer Service. We started with a 45 minute presentation on Generating Word-of-Mouth.

Most people think of Word-of-Mouth as a form of Advertising & Marketing, not Customer Service. They would be correct.

But…

The easiest way to get Word-of-Mouth is to offer over-the-top, OMG, I-gotta-tell-someone Customer Service. Do something so unexpectedly nice for your customer that she has to tell other people about her experience. Do something so unexpectedly generous and helpful that it is the first story she tells her friends. Do something so unexpectedly wonderful and delightful that she wants to talk about it on Yelp and Facebook and TripAdvisor.

Yeah, Word-of-Mouth is about Customer Service, too.

So where should I put the new free eBook on Generating Word-of-Mouth? On my Freebies page under Great Marketing or under Great Customer Service?

Hmmm….

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS The key phrase in there is unexpectedly. If she expects it and gets in, you get a thanks in return. If she expects it and doesn’t get it, you get a whole different kind of word-of-mouth. You have to do something unexpected to get her to talk. Then, after you do it enough, it becomes expected and you have to raise the bar even higher. That’s okay. I know you’re up to that challenge..

1949 Retail Wisdom

I found this old typed memo from my grandfather who founded Toy House in 1949 while sorting through the archives. It was stapled to the top of some mimeographed sheets (remember the mimeograph and it’s purple ink?) of a business plan outline.

I think this alone could be the blueprint of a business plan for many retailers.

For those of you who can’t read the picture above, it says:

Dominance of the trading area is to be achieved. 

Sales are the results of poor buying. 

Never inflate the markup. 

Never stretch the truth. 

No giveaways. 

Stress realism — no Santa Claus with a false beard. 

Further legends only in a truthful manner. 

Never hesitate in refund or credit transactions so as to give the impression of questioning the integrity. 

Tell the story of tools versus novelties.

Although I disagree with the giveaways, there is a lot of sage wisdom in the remaining statements. I especially like the second to last one.

If you want to create a positive lasting impression, don’t question the integrity of your customers. Sure, there will be one or two that try to screw you. But in the end, those will be far and away offset by all the customers delighted by your treatment of them.

Powerful stuff indeed.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I also love how he started with Dominance of the trading area. Never shy about his goals, my grandfather always said “Plan for success.” What is your plan for success?

Showing Your Values

I am digging through old archives of our store. One of the Core Values of our business is Nostalgia. We are putting together a display of old pictures and old advertisements from the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Tim Miles wrote a great post on whether or not you should use how long you’ve been in business as part of your advertising. You know, phrases like “serving your family since 1979.”

My answer to that is… only if your start date has something to do with the Core Values of your store. What happened in 1979 that got you to start serving families? Why do you serve families? Why does 34 years of history mean anything?

Nostalgia is part of our culture. We sell toys and baby products, so we get customers for the birth, the birthdays, and Christmas. We’ve been selling toys for over 60 years so we have multiple generations of customers. Not a week goes by without at least one customer telling me about visiting the old store (we moved to our current location in 1967).

There are better ways to show Nostalgia than simply saying when we opened.

For instance, here is a radio ad we ran back in 2006 about an event that happened in 1965…

Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty-five. He didn’t know if he would make it. Nine months of active duty, he missed his family. And he was an uncle now. His sister had a baby girl, a precious little child for which a stuffed animal from an airport gift shop just wouldn’t do. As his dad picked him up in the family sedan, he asked, “We got time to stop by the Toy House?”  “Of course, son.  Welcome home.” Merry Christmas from the Toy House in downtown Jackson where Christmas magic happens.

True story? Check.
Speaks to the heart? Check.
Consistent with our Core Value of Nostalgia? Check.
Lets people know we’ve been in business a really long time without just saying the date? Check.

Roy H. Williams said branding is every single interaction a customer has with your business plus how she feels about it. Control the interactions, build them around your Core Values, and you control the feelings.

Are you showing your Core Values both in the store and in your ads? You should. It works.
-Phil Wrzesinski
PS Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. We tend to get a far stronger response from our Nostalgic ads and Nostalgic posts on Facebook than anything else we do. Of all your Core Values, you need to find the one that resonates most deeply with your customers, then build your message from that value. One way to find out is to post messages and pictures to your Facebook page showing different values and see what gets the best response.

Bye-Bye Buying (A Grandfather’s Wisdom)

In 1951 my grandfather and founder of Toy House, Phil Conley, wrote his “Twenty-Two Important Retail Fundamentals”. I just uncovered them going through some old files.

Wow!

It was amazing how many of them are still true today. Take, for example, number 18 which is appropriate as many of us start buying for the fourth quarter…

18. That weak departments dissipate their merchandising strength…

  1. By buying from too many manufacturers
  2. By buying from too many price lines
  3. By buying too many colors
  4. By buying too many sizes
  5. By buying too many materials
  6. By buying too many styles

All this adds up to bye-bye-volume and profit.

Powerful stuff. Stay true to who you are. Limit your customer’s choices. Give them the best options. Remove the clutter. Don’t over-buy.

In today’s retail climate we feel compelled to offer more and more because the Internet offers more. Yet, we will never be able to match the offerings of the Internet. Instead, the more we should be offering is more thoughtful choices, more carefully chosen products, more practical solutions, more intelligent offerings. We need to help our customers cut through the clutter by knowing everything that is out there and why we chose to sell these particular items.

There are already too many options causing analysis paralysis in our customers. Remove the options that don’t make sense and don’t fit your customer’s needs and your inventory will sparkle and shine just a little better than before. The only bye-bye’s will be when you help a customer carry her purchases to the car, usually followed by a Thank You!

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Choices are good. Don’t get me wrong. Having options for different needs is also good. But the biggest way to eat up a chunk of your cash is to buy too many choices and too many options. Keep it down to a Good, Better, Best (or better yet a Best, Bester, Bestest) selection and your cash flow and profits will improve.

PPS Yeah, I’ll talk about a few others down the road. There are some really good nuggets in there, like this one…  7. That good basic stocks plus strong reorder numbers, plus realistic timing, plus selling – not order-taking – will increase volume and profit anytime.

No Ads or Better Ads?

The most common complaint about television and radio is that there are too many ads. If that was really true, Satellite radio and premium TV would have killed advertising-sponsored broadcast media. They haven’t and it doesn’t look like they will.

But the complaint still sits there and begs the question… Is the problem that there are too many ads or is the problem that most of the ads on the air today suck?

We don’t complain about too many ads during the Super Bowl even though there are more ads than any other sporting event of the year. Instead we watch closer. We critique the ads, rate them, show them to our friends, go watch them on youtube, and read what others have to say about them. We don’t complain because most of the ads are better than what we normally get.

The truth is that most ads do suck. Most ads are boring, unoffensive drivel that doesn’t move the needle. Heck, it doesn’t even get you to pay attention and listen.

It doesn’t have to be that way. At least not for your ads. You can start producing better ads right now and something amazing will happen. Your ads will not only work better, they will stand out head and shoulders above the rest of the noise.

Roy H. Williams, aka The Wizard of Ads, wrote two pieces about creating ads that anyone who advertises should have taped to their wall. The first was posted back in 2009 and is every bit as relevant today. The second was just published in last week’s Monday Morning Memo.

Bookmark them. Read them. Print them. Read them again. Follow them. Your ads will stand out. Your ads will work harder than ever before. Your ads will never be part of the too many ads on the air complaint. Instead, your fans will be saying, “I wish more people advertised like you do.”

That means they are paying attention and listening.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Soon I will be launching a new eBook in the Freebies section on simple ways you can make your ads stand out amid the clutter. Think of it as a companion piece to the two Roy articles above (that I read regularly, over and over and over.)

PPS Before you start crafting your message, however, I highly recommend you read what Tim Miles wrote here first. He’s one smart cookie. His clients do better than industry averages across the board.

Own Your Mistakes

You will make mistakes. In business. In relationships. In parenting. In life. Own them. Admit you did them and learn from them. The worst thing we can do is try to find someone else to blame or be in denial about it.

This applies to guys like Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez who cheated with drugs in baseball. It also applies to you and I when a customer has a complaint. If you look for it, you can usually find something you could have done differently that would have kept the situation from ever happening.

I’m owning my mistakes. I recently received my evaluations from a couple talks I did for the toy industry last month. I got shredded. My friends and fellow store owners were nice to my face, but the anonymous comments from the surveys were brutal.

They were dead on, too.

I bit off more than I could chew with those two workshops. I tried to do more than the time would allow. I cut out things that would have been helpful to try to squeeze in a couple worksheets that just didn’t work in a big room format. I spent too much time on the worksheets and not enough on the instruction behind the worksheets. I didn’t make all the points I was supposed to make as well as I could have made them.

I blew it. And I apologize for anyone who attended those sessions. Not my best hour(s) on stage.

Here is the cool thing. By owning up to my mistakes, I can learn far more than if I were to deny them or find someone or something else to blame. The next time I am asked to present on either of those topics, I now have a far better idea of what to do and what not to do. I know where to put the emphasis and where to beef up the examples.

When you have a customer complain, that is an opportunity for you to learn. Why is she complaining? What could you have done proactively to make sure she would have no reason to complain? What changes to policy and procedure can you make to keep this from happening again?

When you make a mistake with an employee you can learn better ways to handle that issue in the future. Screw up in the training? Admit it, fix it, and move forward. Screw up in communication? Admit it, fix it, and move forward.

Own your mistakes and you can learn from them.
Own your mistakes and you can grow from them.
Own your mistakes and you will find your customers and employees far more willing to forgive you.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Negative criticism is tough to handle. I know. I have always had a big issue with it. What changed was when I looked at it as a chance to improve. Then the criticism became an opportunity. As soon as I was able to say, “Yes, I did that,” I was able to learn from it and move on. I’ve already tweaked those presentations, learned my limits and found better ways to get the idea across. The audience last weekend agreed. As hard as it was to own up, it was well worth it!

Beware the Cocaine

This Thursday we are having our one and only big sales event of the year. We call it the Summer Fun Sale. My buddy, Randy, calls it the Make It Go Away Sale. Yes, it is a clearance sale where we mark all the slow moving merchandise, the dogs, down about 50%, put them on shelves in a special section right in the middle of the store, advertise the heck out of it, and turn those slow movers into cash.

When we implemented our current POS system in 1999 and discovered all the dogs we had in our merchandise, that Summer Fun Sale was huge. We set records from ’99 to ’01 for single day sales, surpassing the busiest Black Fridays and Saturdays before Christmas in fewer hours and at half price. It was crazy.

Today our buying is tighter. Our inventory is more under control. The only dogs are soft and furry and sell really well. We still have a few slow movers and we still have our Summer Fun Sale, but it will generate about 30% of the business it once did.

The downside is the effect. The sale, when it was huge, was so exciting. The influx of cash was a godsend to our cashflow. The traffic, the excitement, the smiles all felt so good that when the party ended we wanted to ramp up another party and do it again. It was addictive. Like cocaine.

My dad lamented the other day that this year’s sale just won’t generate the same kind of cash it did a dozen years ago. I reminded him that we also didn’t spend as much cash on merchandise that didn’t sell. And we won’t be taking such a hit on our profit margin because of tons of markdowns, either. Short-term the sale isn’t quite what it used to be, but long-term the numbers are much better.

The hard part is the allure of the instant cash, the allure of the excitement of the big sale. Part of me wants to mark down more stuff, just to make the sale bigger. Part of me wants to give away good merchandise, products that will sell at full price, just to get the cash. Part of me has tasted the fun of a big sale and makes me want to slash prices deeper to get that taste again.

Yeah, it’s addictive.

Here’s your friendly, sober reminder. A clearance sale is a means to an end. The end is to rid yourself of merchandise that wasn’t going to sell at regular price. Plain and simple. Turn the dogs into cash. Don’t give away the workhorse, too, just to make the sale bigger. Only the dogs.

Some years you have more dogs, some you have less. Resist the call of the cocaine to make this sale bigger and better than ever. Don’t ever measure your clearance sale to a previous year. Make it only about moving out this year’s dogs.

You’ve been warned.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS We prefer a big, one-time clearance sale of select items over a year-round clearance room or sale rack or a blanket percentage off everything. The sale rack only trains people to wait for the markdown. The blanket percentage off everything means you’ll sell more of your good merchandise at prices lower than necessary without getting rid of the dead-weight products. Those kinds of sales feel good, but so does morphine and cocaine. The big sale gets all your Transactional Customers in at once to move out the goods you want to move and gets you a shot in the arm of some cash. Just be aware of the side effects.