#17 What 20+ Years in a Successful Boutique Teaches you About Retail + Basketball, with Sara...

Welcome to episode number 17. Today we're joined by Sarah Burks, our director of partnerships and education here at the Boutique Hub. And I can't wait for you to hear this episode because with Sarah, we're going to be talking about her over 20 years in retail, owning a business that was actually in existence for more than 67 years. We're going to talk about the ups and the downs of being in retail, plus the turning point that changed her business forever.

And.

And then at the end, you're not going to want to miss this because it's a big reveal that we've been.

Working on for months.

So stick around. You are going to love this episode. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works, from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub, and I can't wait to chat. Hey, guys, welcome back to this week's episode of Boutique Chat. You are in for a real special treat this week because we've brought one of our own to the show, and I can't wait for you to meet her. She's a dear friend of mine. She is an absolute expert in this industry with so much knowledge and value to share, and. And I can't wait for you to hear more of her backstory. So, Sarah Burks, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

It's pretty rare that the two of us get to sit around and chat like this.

It is very rare. Yes. Yeah.

So if you have not had the opportunity to meet Sarah yet, she's our director of education and partnerships here at the Hub, and she joined us last fall after selling off her business. She's been a successful boutique owner for over 20 years, a business that was in existence for 67, which is unheard of in retail anymore. And she joined us so that she could begin to share her knowledge and expertise with the entire boutique community here at the Boutique Hub. So, Sarah, talk to us a little bit more about McCandies and its history and how you got started in this business.

Well, I'm happy to be here and share this with everybody because I think this is a wonderful story about small towns and community events, community service, retail businesses that work together. And that's exactly what McCandies was. You know, we're a small town, 3,000 people, right about, I don't know, 100 miles from the nearest airport, 30 miles from the nearest Walmart. We were not actually a destination for anything other than shopping because we had some real alive businesses in our community that serviced whatever shopping our community had. And we had people come from our tri state area. So I started there when I was in high school and worked for a lady that she kind of cracked the whip on customer service. And there's a right way to do things and the right way to treat people. And if you didn't do it, you stayed late till you figured it out or you didn't get to come back the next day, you know, she was tough love, tough love. And it was fantastic. I learned so many lessons from her. We all did. That worked for her and she really paved the way to, I think, who I am today, as well as the business owner that I became and actually the mom that I became, I think because there was, there was a right way to treat people. And I always say, you know, we learned everything we need to learn in kindergarten. Treat others the way you want to be treated. And that's honestly what she really instilled as well, you know, and she, she said when a person walks through the door, you call them by name, you drop absolutely everything you're doing and you help them from the start to the finish. They're in the dressing room and you're standing there waiting for them to come out with another option for them to try on. If they took in a small, you have a medium or an extra small on hand ready for them, you know, that they want for absolutely nothing. When they're in the store, you treat them like royalty. And that's, that's the business that we were, we built and that's the, you know, the foundation that it started on and it continued to grow. So yeah, when I worked there in high school, I learned so many different things about women of all ages and generations. And you know, I was 16 years old working with women doing bra fittings. Can you imagine, I mean, nowadays putting a 16 year old girl in a dressing room with a woman to do bra fitting. But that's, you know, that was part of the service that we provided. Did I know anything about, I don't even know if I wore a bra when I was 16. But it was, I mean, in all honesty, you know, it, you learn, you had to learn these skills, you had to learn your job and how you were to work with your customers. And so it didn't matter. If it was a bra fitting or cleaning the toilets or picking out grass out of the sidewalk in the front or merchandising or, you know, once you earned your keep, to be able to actually do the store window, which was a big, big deal, that was a rite of passage. But whatever it was, you had to do it with class and you had to do it with 100% effort. That that's what God put you on the earth to do at that moment and you better do it right.

So that's an important lesson for a 16 year old to learn.

It is, yeah. I told, I told our staff all the time. You do not even know what the skills you're learning right now. Yeah, in all honesty, I didn't know what I had learned until I was, you know, older, when I was put into my master's program in college and I had to speak with adults and I had to get up in front of the room and do presentations and things and I just, I wasn't nervous and I was looking around the room at some of the other kids that were struggling and they had never been put in a position to speak to adults before. And I thought, man, I've been in a dressing room with a naked 90 year old woman. I mean, talking to her about, you know, rhubarb pie or whatever, you know, you just, you get put in really awkward situations and have to make the best of it, I guess. And so. Right. I don't think I learned, I knew what I really learned until later on in life.

You can't really transfer that knowledge to someone else.

Oh, man. But anyway, I just, I look at the life lessons that I learned inside those walls of that store growing up there and what that, you know, how that translated into my adult life and like I said, is even being a mom and how I continued to run the business later on.

So at what point did you decide you were going to come back and you were going to own the store? What was that decision like for you? Did you feel like it was a calling? You always had to come back and own it?

You know, it really was. I did a few other things out of college and coming back to my hometown was, Yeah, I just, gosh, when I graduated high school, get me out right? Where is the highway and I'm not coming back. But then we had kids and it was time to raise a family and where else to be but home? I wanted to be back by my family and back to where I knew and I was going to try to do the stay at home. Mom thing for like, if you asked my husband, he'd say for about a minute. That lasted for about 60 seconds. And within that, the next day I think I had four little part time jobs. And anyway, that didn't last. And I got back into the store and got the opportunity to buy in with the store and just didn't look back. That was an amazing opportunity given to me. And yeah, I felt like that was the right calling. I actually, actually had a business partner that we worked together and it just, it was a marriage, it really was. And she needed me, I needed her. And yeah, the store was our home. We just felt comfortable there.

Let's talk about some of the challenges along the way because going from an employee to the employer, that's a huge shift. What were some of those hard times that you fell on right away learning the ropes of the business from that angle?

Well, you know, growing up and being a co op student in high school, like I was where I leave school and I'd come there to work, you were privy to some information, but not all information. And so then jumping onto the ownership side of it where you had the pressure of everything on your shoulders, that was a big challenge. But at the same time, it was all happening right about the time the Internet was coming out. So this was a store. When I bought into the store, they didn't have email, they didn't have the Internet and everything was done on paper. And of course I had went off to college and came back and I was like, we need to have the Internet, you know, and that was a, that was a hurdle, you know, letting go of some of those key foundation things that the store had been built on for years, you know, and, and jumping over to another crazy side of, you know, the world wide web. But that was a big challenge. And then everything that happened with that, you know, people's buying strategies, you know, changed and you know, where people were getting the information. The old tried and true put an ad in the newspaper. People didn't communicate as much that way in our small town. They still did. But in all honesty, it was, it was time to really look at other options. And that was kind of scary because advertising was expensive. But I would say, I would say that the pressure of that, that was big, the open communication about things, you know, and then the pressure of realizing that people that worked for you, you were responsible for their income, you know, and you were responsible for providing that place for them to work. That was, yeah, that was definitely. That's tough.

That's something people don't prepare you for. I feel like that even in the boutique hub, we've scaled from 1 to 12 employees in the last year. And the weight that puts on your shoulders, in a strange way, what a cool opportunity. But it's a responsibility.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you think about days you want to just, you know, hide under your sheets and not come out. You know, that's two days before payroll and you're not sure you're gonna make it. And these kids, these, these people are telling you all these plans that they have, and Susie just bought a car last month and all these things, and you see her pull in with her new car and you think, oh my gosh, if I don't pay her, she can't make payment. And, you know, all these things that, you know, you want to be genuinely happy, but it is a lot of pressure.

You, one thing that you're so good at teaching and educating the community on is financial management. Numbers, ratios, formulas, all of that talk about kind of the turning point for you in business when that became really important, right?

Well, I'm a pretty competitive person. I don't like to lose. And I'll be honest, there was a number of years that I looked at my financials and I felt like I had completely lost. I actually wasn't even sure I was playing the game. And a few of those times, but that was it. I think it was when I just had a real hard inner talk with myself saying, what are you doing? You know, are you going to struggle at this forever? Are you actually going to just bite the bullet and be the CEO that you're supposed to be? You know, really dive in. And we went to a training one time in Michigan and they talked a lot about numbers and talked a lot about, you know, just what the liquidity of your, of your business is and what your turn rate is and all these things that were, I guess I knew them in college and I remembered studying about these things, but in all honesty, I had not taken the time in my business to implement them because I spent the majority of the time doing window displays and buying merchandise and selling stuff to customers and all these things. And. But I really, I wasn't taking that time every Monday or whatever I decided to do to analyze these numbers. But it was at that time when I really decided to make a commitment. Every week, just like I would check my emails or I would go to a chamber of commerce meeting or whatever it was, I mapped out a morning on Monday. Every Monday morning, about 8 o', clock, I would come in and I'd run these numbers, and I would analyze them, and I'd look at the reports, and I'd print everything off. And we. We kept a binder of the information. And then I also hired and opened a buy planner. And that was the turn. That was the big turning point where I realized what I needed to have on hand to make the sales goals that I. I set. You know, what I thought I was gonna sell or what I knew I needed to sell, and how much inventory I needed to have on hand and what kind of inventory. Because prior to that, I'm not gonna lie, there was a number of years there at the beginning that we go to market because it was fun, and we'd buy it because it was cute. I wasn't asking about the price. I wasn't asking about ship dates or when it was gonna. You know, when we were gonna receive it or if I could negotiate on price or terms or anything. I just. I was having fun. And, guys, it was kind of embarrassing because, you know, you really just thought, I'm a small business owner, and I dress nice, and people like their clothes, and there's all these things, and. Yeah, but when it really got down to. Was just a big. I don't know, a farce, I guess it was just a. It wasn't the truth. It wasn't. We were. I don't. I. Like I said, it wasn't that the business was booming. It was struggling. We were trying to be too much to absolutely everybody. Yes. And that was one thing. When our neighbor business started carrying women's clothing. You know, we talk a lot about community over competition, but when they started carrying women's clothing, it hurt at first, but honestly, I think it hurt our pride in our. And it hurt our feelings more than it actually hurt our bottom line. And we had to get over that. And really look at that. And so when I. When I realized that. That them carrying some women's clothing actually allowed McCandies to go back and do what McCandies did and just stay true to that. Not get so widespread where our cash and inventory was spread so far from one genre to the other that none of it made money that was absolutely huge. So I actually kind of should thank them, I guess, a little bit for, you know, that whole competition thing, because it also was part of this turning point where we realized, look, this is. This is time to really start analyzing everything and be true to. True to who we are and who our customer is. And as you always say, stay in your own lane.

So two Huge turning points. I mean, one where you transition from the art to of retail to the science of retail and you honed in on your numbers. But that Community over competition piece, let's talk about that, because that's a huge talking point in the industry today. And as an outsider, having been to your community, because my husband's from your community and I've shopped in your store a number of times, having those two stores next to each other, yours in the store next door, it made you guys a destination to shop.

Exactly. It goes back to what I said in the beginning. You know, we were 100 miles from an airport, 30 miles from a Walmart. People didn't think, oh, let's just go to that town. That wasn't what people were doing. However, if they knew they could go there and buy men's clothes and shoes and jewelry and women's accessories and women's clothes and we have a beautiful selection of home and gift and floral shops as well, that it made it worth their time and people enjoyed coming there. As a matter of fact, I mean, we have, we had customers that would schedule appointments to come in from all over the tri state area to shop with us. So. So it was because we were a destination and it was because there was competition there or it was basically a race.