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1063 Sailors

One thousand and sixty three sailors. That’s the crew size for the USS Arkansas Battleship on which my grandfather sailed during World War II. He was on board June 6, 1944 just off the northern coast of France. He was on board March 25, 1945 when the bombing began at Okinawa.

Somewhere in between, this land lubber who had never set foot on a ship prior to boarding the Arkansas was made Officer of the Deck Under Way (OOD) of a battleship at war. He was responsible for the 1,063 lives of the sailors.

“Once you’ve been officer of the deck on a battleship at war, everything else you ever do in your life is easy.” -Phil Conley

Everything else you ever do.

Easy.

No sense losing sleep over which line to order, which media to use for your ads, which employee to hire, which policy to change, which bag size to stock. You’re not OOD of a battleship at war. You’re not climbing up a hundred-story building on fire with a pick axe in your hands. Make your choices and move on.

Days like 9/11 and 12/7 and 4/19 and 6/6 are good for reminding us to put things in perspective.

God bless all who have sacrificed their lives for us.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I’m not saying to blow off those decisions. Do the research. Weigh the pros and cons. Give them the thought necessary. Just don’t spend any time agonizing or worrying. They are just business decisions. Sometimes they make you money, sometimes they cost you. The best thing to do is to be decisive. Make your decision and move on to the next.

Peeing Before the Race

Jeff Foxworthy cracks a wonderful joke about a financial planner who advises that you take half your earnings and shove them under a mattress and the other half down to the track and bet it on the dog “who does his business just before the start of the race.”

You laugh because you know there is some truth in that last statement. The dog who does his business is going to be better suited to run a fast race.

Your race is about to start. Have you done your business?

Have you looked around the store to see what is old and out-of-date, broken and need of fixing? Get it fixed now.

Have you identified the must-have items for your store? Order more of them now.

Have you crunched your numbers to see how much you need to buy between now and Thanksgiving? Get out the calculator and a pencil today and do a little math.

Have you sat down with each staff member to show them what it will take for them to get to the next level? Set aside some time in your calendar starting Monday.

Have you updated your website? Have you planned out your events? Have you ordered giftwrap and bows and bags? Have you crafted your message? Have you plotted out your staffing needs?

The race will start whether you are ready or not.

Your chance of winning goes up when you do your business before the race.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS September is a great time for doing your business. The kids are back in school. There is a collective sigh in September between the Back-to-School season and the Holiday Rush. Make a list of everything you do this September. Write it all down. When you can look at what you did this month, you’ll quickly see whether what you are doing is leading you to a better November/December or not. Plus, you’ll have a good reminder for what to do next year.

We Need More Rock Stars

Not just any Rock Stars – we need Retail Rock Stars. You know the stores I’m talking about. The ones you would be most disappointed if they closed. The ones who always seem to have traffic and buzz and excitement. The ones you think should probably be in a book or something because of how they merchandise the store, how they treat the customer, how they participate in the community.

Retail Rock Stars change the landscape of a community. They become the focal point of the shopping center, whether downtown, in a strip or in a mall. Retail Rock Stars attract customers, but they also attract other retailers. People want to be around winners.

The best way to grow your business is to decide right now that you are going to be a Retail Rock Star in your community. You are going to be the retailer everyone wants to be like, to locate next to, to build a community around.

How? Decide what a Retail Rock Star store looks like and do it.

Merchandising? Yes! Displays that are fresh and ever changing and new and eye-catching.
Staffing? Yes! A friendly, helpful staff that will bend over backwards to delight your customers. And I mean BEND OVER BACKWARDS.
Products? Yes! The latest products, the newest innovations, the fresh-hot-off-the-presses stuff.

The Retail Rock Star does not have peeling paint on the side of the building, an old sign, a tired window display. The RRS does not have old lighting, faded carpets, and a tired, boring staff. The RRS does not have merchandise older than the store’s pet dog.

The RRS is a learning store, learning new techniques for marketing and merchandising and training. The RRS is a trying store, trying new things, measuring and tweaking.

These are the kinds of retailers I want to help build. These are the kinds of retailers this economy needs to get out of the current funk. These are the kinds of retailers your community needs to grow and attract people and business. Yes, your community needs you to become an RRS!

That is the goal of the new and improved Jackson Retail Success Academy.



A HISTORY OF THE JACKSON RETAIL SUCCESS ACADEMY

Six years ago Scott Fleming, then director of The Enterprise Group in Jackson County challenged a full alphabet of organizations with the task of supporting and keeping indie retailers in town. From that meeting the Greater Jackson Chamber of Commerce (GJCC), South Central Michigan Works (SCMW), Jackson DDA, Jackson Local First (JLF), Midtown Association of Jackson, Small Business Technology & Development Center (SBTDC), City of Jackson Economic Development, and The Enterprise Group developed the Jackson Retail Success Academy (JRSA).

JRSA was designed to help start-ups and new retailers with less than five years under their belt get the tools they needed for retail success. For the last five years we have been doing exactly that. Well, kinda…
A number of retailers that took the class closed. They found out while doing the math that their business model was flawed from the get-go and there wasn’t enough market in Jackson to make it. Others were just too deep in trouble to dig out of it. A handful of class members took it to the next level, but for some, the next level was to merely go from struggling to surviving.

Most importantly, we weren’t accomplishing the real goal – to turn Jackson into an indie retail haven, a place where indie retailers would not just survive but thrive. We kept looking for struggling retailers to take the class, super small retailers, the minnows in our pond. We were hoping to grow them into fish.

We were focused on the wrong crowd. Winners attract winners. We needed to spend more time trying to grow whales, not fish. We needed to create more Rock Stars.

Time to refocus.

The new and improved JRSA is starting over with a new focus. We are looking for the whales, the established indie retailers who want to go from surviving to thriving. The curriculum is pared down to the essentials of Rock Stardom. The instruction is updated to include thriving in this most challenging new era of retail where all the rules you knew before have changed.

This is not to say that start-ups and newbies are not welcome. They are. Gladly. The information is only as good as the effort you put toward using it.Anyone willing to put forth the effort will get the results they want. But my focus for JRSA will be to go whale-hunting.

The bait is pretty good.

-Phil Wrzesinskiwww.PhilsForum.com

PS The beauty of the new and improved JRSA is that it is easier to take on the road.  If you have a handful of retailers in your town that are on the verge of Rock Staardom, but just need that push to get over the edge, get in touch. I can cram all 20 hours of instruction into two days that, if your head doesn’t explode, will rock your world.

Powerful Networking

I’m meeting with my US Congressman Tim Walberg in two weeks. He agreed to hold a round table discussion for retailers to talk about the Marketplace Fairness Act and other topics.

(Wednesday, Aug. 21 at 8am at the Chamber office for all my local peeps reading this – please join me)

A lot of indie retailers think you need to be a big guy to have a meeting with your congressional reps. You don’t. You don’t have to give them money, either. You don’t even have to belong to the same party. You just have to be informed, interested, willing to listen and have an opinion preferably based on facts.

Let me repeat that… You just have to be informed, interested, willing to listen and have an opinion preferably based on facts.

Gee, now that’s not so hard.

Do that and you can get a meeting with your state and federal representatives. Once they get to know you, they will begin to trust you. Once they begin to trust you, they will seek you out for your opinion on matters pertaining to your business. They will give some gravitas to what you say. It starts by first forming a relationship.

Yeah, I know, it can be scary calling for a meeting with your rep. But that’s a poor excuse for not making the call. Do the scary thing. Call your rep. Talk to him or her about Marketplace Fairness, about Obamacare, about roads and infrastructure, or whatever issue is on your mind.

Just be informed, interested, willing to listen and have an opinion preferably based on facts.

I am happy to say Mr. Walberg is not only in my network, he’s also a customer.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If I had to pick two, be informed and willing to listen. You can have more influence by listening than you can by talking. Try it. It works.

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?

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!

I Tore Up My Office Yesterday

I freely admit it. I am not an overly organized guy. I hate filing papers away. I would rather just push it aside for later.

We all know later never seems to come.

Back in 1998 I moved into the office I currently occupy. Before then I had a desk on the sales floor in our baby department. But now I was Vice President and I needed to be in the office. We bought some new office furniture and built a desk in the corner of my dad’s office. Yes, I sat with my back to him all day working on my computer, etc.

Dad retired in 2005 and I took over as President. We moved his big desk to his man cave and replaced it with the round table that had previously been in the corner where my desk now sat. I stayed put, tucked in the corner with my messes piled all around me.

Soon my messes spilled over to the round table. Once every month or so I would bring in a big box and purge everything I could, clean up the piles and file/recycle as many papers and catalogs as possible. While cathartic, it was really only a stop-gap. The books in my library were still stacked two feet high. Piles from previous purges sat mocking me. Worst of all, a couple slips of urgent papers always seemed to go missing.

Before

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I blew it all up. It was time to get out of the corner. I removed the round table. Replaced it with a long, rectangular table that will serve as my desk for now. Moved my computers and printers. Cleaned and dusted. Put an old hutch on the credenza behind my desk. Filled it with books.

Today I will be going through every pile, every drawer, every nook and cranny. A place for everything and everything in its place. I don’t expect to have everything done today, or even this week. But eventually I will have a newly organized and newly designed office.

Will I be more organized going forward? I can’t say for sure. But I knew I would never be more organized doing everything the same old way. Albert Einstein gets the credit for this simple thought…
If you want a different result, you have to do something different.

I’m doing something different.

After

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS The lesson in all this is to evaluate everything you are doing and the results you are getting. Not getting the results you want? Do something different. Not getting the traffic you expect from your marketing? Market differently. Not getting the kind of referral business you expect? Train your staff differently. Not getting the margins you want? Price your products differently. Not as organized as you want to be? Set up your organization differently.

How Much Are You Investing in Your Business?

The Jackson County Chamber and I are teaming up to offer the best segments from the Jackson Retail Success Academy for all Jackson area businesses (and anyone willing to make the drive).

Three classes. Three four-hour days. $250 investment in your business (or $99 per class if you cannot make all three or are not a retailer.)

Inventory Management and Financial Health for Retailers
Thursday, June 27 (9am to 1pm) 

Every retailer knows that Cash is King. But do you know how to get more cash in your business to grow your kingdom?

This Business Boot Camp is designed strictly to help retailers understand how to manage inventory and expenses and, most importantly, your cash. You will learn simple formulas that the smart retailers use to keep the checkbook fat and happy. You will learn the Do’s and Don’t’s for keeping your inventory fresh and moving. You will find out where your cash is hiding and how to get more of it.

We will discuss things like Open-To-Buy programs, financial statements, the proper numbers to measure, how to price your products for profit, and the simplest way to get the most out of the inventory you sell.

Yes, there will be math. The important math. The kind of math you have to do if you want to be successful. What will surprise you is how quickly and easily you will learn the math and see the results.

(Note: to get the most out of this Business Boot Camp bring your previous fiscal year’s Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss statement. You will not be asked to share, but it will help you do your own math.)

Shareworthy Customer Service for Small Businesses
Thursday, July 11 (9am to 1pm)

We all know Word-of-Mouth is the best form of advertising. But do you know how to get people to talk about your company?

This Business Boot Camp will teach you the fundamentals behind generating Word-of-Mouth from your customer base. You will learn how to exceed customer expectations in such a way that they have to tell someone else. You will learn how to create a culture in your business that wants to delight your customers at every turn and raise the bar of Customer Service so high that you turn clients into evangelists.

Whether you are a retailer, a service provider, or any type of business, you will walk away with four ways to generate word-of-mouth, a new approach to hiring and training, at least one planned staff training, and a better understanding of what it takes to offer Customer Service that makes people want to talk.

Word-of-Mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising. This Business Boot Camp will be one you will be talking about for a long time.

Branding and Advertising: Reaching New Customers in Today’s Market
Thursday, August 8 (9am to 1pm)

The advertising that got you results yesterday isn’t working today. Today’s market just can’t be reached. Or can it?

This Business Boot Camp will teach you the fundamentals of marketing that work in any day and age and how to apply those to this day and age. You will learn what moves the needle in advertising and how to craft a message that gets your potential clients to take action. You will learn the biggest myths of advertising and how even the largest companies throw good money away every single day. You will learn how to get the most out of your advertising budget (even if it close to zero).

Advertising cannot fix your business, but if you have a good business model, you will learn techniques that will grow your business the right way and keep it growing for years, no matter what kind of business you run.

Contact the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce to sign up. It will be the best twelve hours you spend on your business this summer!

Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If you are struggling in any one of these areas, you should sign up for that one class Ninety-nine dollars for four hours of top-level, hands-on instruction is the kind of no-brainer investment you know you should make for your business.

PPS If you don’t think you need any of these classes then you should definitely sign up for all three. Last night as I did a presentation for the Quincy Chamber of Commerce, one of the organizers lamented that it was only the businesses who were already doing well that showed up. I reminded her that was why they were doing well. They kept showing up.

Do You Know Who You Are?

Do you know who you are? No, not you. Your business. Well, okay, and you, too.

Did you know that as much as you try to keep your business separate, your business is really simply you?

You only have so much energy to give to your business. You only have so much energy to teach your staff, merchandise the store, work with the customers, pay the bills. You can’t do it all. So you prioritize. There are the things you have to get done. Period. The necessary stuff.  Then there is everything else. With limited time and energy what part of the everything else will you do?

The stuff that is important to you.

If orderly and organized is important to you, you will spend your limited resources on straightening, organizing and getting your staff to do the same.

If having fun is important to you then you will find fun things to do or do things in a more fun way. You’ll encourage your staff to join in the fun.

If education is important to you, you will spend time reading, watching instructional videos, teaching others.

If staying active is important to you then you will find things to do that get you out of your desk chair and out on the floor. You’ll be directing traffic and assigning tasks to anyone who looks the slightest bit bored or inactive.

If punctuality is important to you then you will be standing by the time clock waiting for the staff to arrive, devising games to get them to show up on time, firing those who are chronically late, and posting clocks all around your store.

If innovative is important to you, you will be updating to the latest technologies, using the most modern design features, trying new things, encouraging your staff to follow the trends to help you stay ahead of the curve.

Whatever is important to you – your values – will be where you spend your limited resources after doing the necessary stuff. Those values will then become your store’s values, and eventually your store’s reputation.  More than your product mix, more than your services, this will be the most true differentiating factor that sets your store apart from everyone else’s.

The key is to know what those values are, and openly embrace them. Not only will it help set you apart, you will end up attracting more customers who share those values. Those are the best customers. The most loyal, the best recruiters for more business.

First, however, you have to know who you are.

Check out this worksheet I designed to help you figure out your own values and those you most closely share with your store. Here are the accompanying notes.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Once you identify your values that also fit your store, you will have a blueprint for every decision going forward. Does it fit with my values? Yes, do it! No, don’t do it. It’s that simple.

PPS Yeah, that is also the foundation of Tim Miles’ First Order of Business. (In his naming contest I was a runner-up because I called it “The Order of Business”. I won the bacon!) Do this first because everything else depends on it.

Information Gotta Be Free, A Good Salesperson is Priceless

What did we do twenty years ago when we wanted information on a certain product we were considering?

Anyone remember?

There was Consumer Reports. There were other magazines that might have done a review or two. There were your friends and family – a much smaller circle before Facebook helped us all reconnect.

And there was the salesperson. The gatekeeper. The controller of knowledge.

A Good Salesperson knew all there was to know about everything she sold and quite a lot about the stuff she didn’t sell. A Good Salesperson knew all about you, too. What you liked and didn’t like. What worked well for you. Your preferences. Your desires. A good salesperson let you through the gate, showed you what you needed to know, and found you the perfect fit.

When you found a good salesperson, you kept her. You went back to that store for the information, the suggestions and the personal touch. Oh sure, sometimes you got the information and bought elsewhere cheaper because of a deal too good to pass up. But you understood there was a price to that kind of knowledge and more often you were willing to pay for it.

The Internet changed all that.

Information is FREE. Wikipedia said so. Jeeves said so. Yahoo said so. Google said so. Information is free and plentiful. Not always accurate, but always out there.

Today we can pull up dozens of review sites, complete spec sheets and instructions, hordes of testimonials both good and bad all in a matter of seconds. Today we can walk into almost any store in America and know just as much or more about the product than the gum-chewing clerk waiting on us.

The Internet brought the level of available information up. But at the same time,the level of professionalism of the salesperson went down. I partly blame Albert Einstein who said, “Never memorize anything you can easily look up.” It is so easy to look things up now that salespeople stopped knowing.

Except what does that tell the customer when your salespeople are looking up the same information the customer looked up last night at home?

The other thing we’ve lost has nothing to do with the Internet. Our salespeople have lost the ability to connect.

Information gotta be free. And it is. The difference now between “selling” and “clerking” is the connection. Go back up and read that paragraph about the Good Salesperson. Those last six sentences are why showrooming is such a big deal. Salespeople have forgotten about connecting. Customers feel no connection so they gather up all the free information they can and shop wherever they please.

Want to combat showrooming in your store? Spend your money hiring good salespeople who want to connect. Spend your money teaching them how to connect. Spend your money, your time, your effort getting to know your customers better.

The Internet will never be able to compete with that.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS In a few days I’m going to be showing a bunch of juvenile product store owners how to connect and sell. Shortly after that I’m going to post my latest Freebie – Selling in a Showrooming World. If you can’t make it to Vegas, be sure to look for the new eBook. Just like all the information I’ve posted… It’s FREE!