Ashley Alderson (Boutique Hub) explains a six-layer framework to diagnose and scale retail businesses: (1) Foundations (brand, CEO productivity, operations); (2) Products & Profitability (pricing, inventory, financial reports); (3) Team (hiring, training, firing, optimization); (4) Sales (in-person scripts, merchandising, e-commerce conversion); (5) Content Strategy (planned, goal-oriented content and traffic plan); and (6) Marketing (email, PR, text, paid ads, traditional channels). She cautions that traffic/ads alone won't fix foundational leaks and promotes Retail Bootcamp — a college-style, twice-yearly course with live coaching — as the place that teaches this full progression.
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Foreign. Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub. I'm and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, let's talk about the six layers of business and how this pertains to your retail business and what it means when you're trying to troubleshoot if things are working, if they're not working, and where should you focus to get your business to scale to the point you really want it to be? So let me set you up with this. Over the years when I do coaching one on one with retailers and I'm asking them, you know, what do you think is working? What do you think is not working? Where do you think you should focus? I often hear retailers gravitate toward, well, you know what, I just need more traffic. I just need Facebook ads and that'll solve it. Now granted, traffic does solve a lot of problems, but if you have a leaky bucket in your business, traffic will not solve that problem for you. You'll be pouring traffic in and not capturing any of it in sales conversion and you'll just be wasting money as it pours out the other side. So because I hear this question honestly so often, this is why at the Boutique Hub and in retail bootcamp, we focus on a strategy called the six layers of business. And so I wanted to share this with you today so that when you're analyzing like where do I need to focus, what's working and what's not, you can go back and ask yourself, where does this problem that you're facing fall? And where do you need to go back and rebuild the foundation of your business to be strong enough to seal up that leaky bucket so that you can pour the traffic on top of your business. So it works like this. When you think about the six layers of business, I want you to think about just building a skyscraper of a building. Building a very, you know, strong, tall, sturdy building. That only happens when you have a very solid foundation layer. So we're going to start at the foundation of your business and build its way up through six layers. So the very first layer is this foundation layer number one is literally called foundations. And it encompasses three things. It encompasses your brand. So who's your customers how's your brand? How are you marketing to them? Like, who are you? What problem do you solve? It encompasses your personal productivity and operations as the CEO of your business. So are you actually leading like a CEO? Are you hustling like an entrepreneur? And then third, it encompasses your operations plans. So what are the systems, the processes, the procedures, the overall outline and strategy of your company that is keeping your company held together? So that's foundation number one. Number two is products and profitability. In layer number two, we would dig deep into understanding what are the reports I should be running both in terms of cash flow in QuickBooks, but also in inventory management in your point of sale system. And then ultimately, how do you pay yourself? Right. Because if we aren't doing things like pricing our products effectively or understanding our retail reports, again, we're probably just pouring money into the business and seeing it flow right back out and we aren't keeping enough of it at the end of the day. So that's layer number two. Hey, are you on the list yet? I know you want to be on this list. You don't want to miss this list because we are deep diving into your business college style. Not 101 style, not 301 style, 501 style. And that is inside of our college level course for boutique owners called Retail Bootcamp. Now, many of you may have already taken Retail Bootcamp, because the cool part about this course is not only do you get to watch it at your leisure, but then join us for for 14 weeks of live group coaching twice a year. That's 28 weeks of live group coaching every single year. Once you're inside of Retail Bootcamp, you're always inside. So you get that same two semesters of group coaching every single year for as long as you want to join us this year inside of Retail Bootcamp, I can't wait to go back to deep dive into the six layers of your business strategically, step by step. What do you need to grow before you're ready for the Facebook ads and digital traffic, which we definitely cover? First, we have to make sure, how's your pricing? How's your profit? How's your inventory? How's your team management? We're going into literally every single topic of your business throughout Retail Bootcamp. So it only opens twice a year, January and June. Make sure you're on the wait list again. Once you get in, you're in for life. Why didn't college allow us to do that? Right? Whatever happened to all that college debt we had? That was silly. I can make Way better use of your time inside of retail bootcamp. So I hope you're on the list. Get on the waitlist right now so you're the first to know when you when we open the doors of our 2025 session. I can't wait to see you inside of retail boot Camp. In layer number three, it's all about team, team. Who are the people that you are bringing on this journey with you? How are you training them, onboarding them, optimizing them, firing them? Is your team making your life easier or harder? We talk all about how to optimize your team in layer number three. Layer number four is pretty fun. Get into the fun part. It's all about sales and selling. So in person. Sales, sales scripts, sales strategy, sales processes. It's all about merchandising. So brick and mortar merchandising, online merchandising, photo shoots, live sale merchandising, and then it's all about e commerce. So how are you selling online? How to optimize your website, how to build a higher conversion rate, how to really make sure that the words that you're using and the way you're presenting your brand is actually good enough to sell a product. Layer number five is my personal favorite. I like to nerd out here. And it's all about content strategy. Notice I said strategy, not content. A big mistake I see a lot of retailers make is waking up on a Thursday morning going, okay, crap, what should I post on Instagram today? Or, oh, gosh, okay, crap, what am I gonna. What am I gonna send an email about this week? I know I need to send an email, but I don't know what to send. We have to do the what before we get to the how. So, yes, you're on Facebook, Instagram, whatever. We can talk about how to post on all those places efficiently and effectively. But really, what are you going to post? And the plan and the why behind it has to come first. So in layer number five, we lay out a real content strategy, a traffic plan so that you know where you're posting, what you're posting, and how you're posting. And then finally, layer number six, this is the cherry on top, and this is all things marketing. So in layer number six, we can focus on email marketing, public relations, text marketing, paid marketing, traditional marketing, postcards, radio, print ads, all of those things. And again, paid marketing, like I said, Facebook ads, meta, TikTok, and Pinterest ads as well. So when you think about your business in that progression from the ground up, I would just encourage you to make a list 1 through 6 and label them with what I just gave you. And then on a scale of 1 to 10, just rate yourself. On a scale of 1 to 10, how am I in this category? If your business is not growing to where you want it to be, if you've hit a plateau, chances are one of these categories is significantly underperforming. So go there and double it down. Again. It's not just traffic. It's not just marketing. That is not the be all, end all answer. If you don't have a great team, or if you have not personally optimized your time as the CEO of your business, or if you have no operations plans and y' all are running around like chickens with your head cut off, you've got some work to do there. And when you shore that up, then come back and pour the traffic back on top of your business. So, guys, I share all this because this is why we built Retail Bootcamp. This is exactly the progression and the strategy of what we cover in Retail Bootcamp and it's what we do twice a year, every week, every year, live coaching for 14 weeks inside of Retail Bootcamp. So of course I would love to invite you to join us. I'd love to invite you to be a part of it. Or I would just love for you to start looking at your business through this lens so that you are building a stronger business from the ground up. All right, please let me know if this was helpful. If you've thought about your business in this way before. As always, feel free to leave a review of the show or send me a message on Instagram, but I hope that you've subscribed, I hope you've leaved a rating and review, and I hope that this content is always helpful to you and your business. Have a great rest of your day and I will see you back here next week. Thanks for listening, guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.
