Boutique Chat #222 | Why You Need Both Your Right And Left Brain While Running a Business

Hey, guys, get ready for episode number 222. And this is one you are gonna have to take notes while you're listening to because it's that good. Get ready to meet Whitney and Chrissy from the Hayloft Boutique. 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 see? 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. Based in Oklahoma, Whitney and Chrissy Sisters, who are co founders and owners of the Haylock Boutique, a boutique award winner, longtime member of the Boutique Hub, and just overall, two girls who get it big time in business and in this industry and see where things are going, are gonna bring some hard facts to the show today, you guys. These two definitely represent the right and left brain in business which most boutique owners on their own battle with. Right? A lot of people get into business because they love the creative side of things or the buying or the pictures or the branding or posting on social media and going to markets. While in order to be successful, they have to have a healthy dose of the analytical side of the brain. Understanding inventory turn classifications, your P and L, understanding where your profit margins are, above all else, how to pay yourself. And guys, I may go on a soapbox in this intro today because I worry about our industry for this very reason. It is far too easy for people to start a boutique and far too easy for them to overlook the numbers because they feel intimidated by them. But the cold, hard truth of life in business is it's just as easy to go out of business as it is to get into business. And so if we aren't really careful in understanding how hard it is to get yourself motivated or how. I don't want to say how hard it is, but how important it is to do the hard thing to be motivated to understand your numbers. That's what's going to set your business apart from so many others. So I know it can feel intimidating to sometimes dig into inventory reporting or to go through a walkthrough of your boutique and really have a hard understanding of what's my markdown strategy going to be, what turned last week and what didn't, and now what am I going to do with that leftover inventory? But it's those things that make us successful at the end of the day. And you can only do it by understanding one piece at a time and giving yourself grace to learn as you grow. One thing I love that Whitney and Krissy talk about today is how they bootstrapped their business. They came into a 200 square foot facility and then a 400, and then they went on the road to do some vendor shows, and then they went online, and then they did comments sold, and then they grew into a beautiful storefront. But it's easy, as with anything on social media, to feel like you have to compare yourself to everyone else and feel like you have to start out at the top, but you don't. You have to start out where you are and grow where you are and figure out what it takes for you and your business to serve your customer and then for you to become profitable so you can continue to reinvest in your business and grow. Right? All good things come with time. Right? Nothing worth having comes instantly. So I want you guys to really dig into this episode, take some notes. I think you're gonna love hearing, again, both the two perspectives that we're gonna hear today and the real talk about what it takes to work hard to get into the really important aspects of running a lean and scalable business and to see where your business can go in the future and to look at your business not through the eyes of comparison of look what they are and what I'm not, but look at what I can be. Look at what I have the opportunity to become if I start to get familiar and comfortable with what might be a little bit intimidating to me right now. And that's the numbers. Guys, I think you're going to love this one. So please help me welcome the sisters from the Hayloft Boutique in Oklahoma, Whitney and Chrissy. All right, guys, this week we have a two for one on the show, and I'm so excited. Both Chrissy and Whitney from the Hayloft Boutique in Oklahoma. Girls, thank you so much for being on the show with me.

Hey, thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks. It's a twofer.

I love twofers. It means it's just going to be, like, an even better episode, right?

I agree. You're going to get the sarcasm and the crazy dreamer all in one.

Perfect. Well, guys, I know when we first talked about having you on the show, it was all about how can I, like, lift the veil of what's happening behind this business and talk about how it's growing and what numbers matter the most in the business and how to Manage inventory and like how can we get into the nitty gritty meat of the operations side of your business and how to run a lean, profitable business too. So I know we have so many things people are going to love taking notes away with today. So let's get into it.

Alright?

Alright. So first things first, I always want to hear tell me the backstory. Talk to me about heyloft. How did it get started, the name, the sisters and where you were then and where you are today.

Okay, so I don't know if y' all are gonna be able to tell a huge difference in our voices or not, but I'm Chrissy, I'm the younger sister by seven years just to be clear. And my sister Whitney.

Whitney, that's me.

We started the hey Law. It would be my senior year of college. So I was going through my senior year of college for accounting and I was like, you know what, I do not want to be an accountant. Always wanted to start a store. Let's start a store. This is like our chance right now. So let's go ahead and get it rolling and everything. And so of course Whitney, who is the dreamer, was like, yes, I'm in, let's go. So we just kind of hopped in and I'll kind of let Whitney take over from here with it. Yeah.

So at that point in time I had about an eight month old baby. I had quit working in health care because it was just so stressful. My husband self employed and I had told him whenever you're in business for a year and you're stable, I'm going.

To go teach school because I want.

My summers and I want, you know. Yeah, well that's funny. And so Chrissy calls and she's like, hey, are you ready to open the store? I'm like sure, let's do it.

And my husband's eyes just get so.

Big and he's like, I can see where she's going to go with this. Like it's going to end up being this crazy thing. And so we opened our store with a T shirt and it was a T shirt that commemorated the end of like a seven year long drought in our area. And it said our carts are full and our lakes are too. And our mom and our grandma had a booth in a local craft show. Craft antique store. Yeah, it was an antique store and in Lawton. And so we posted the T shirt on Facebook and we sold a ton of them to just family and friends in our area and we said, oh okay, that's awesome. So let's take this money and let's do another T shirt.

Yeah.

And we did another T shirt, and we ended up putting those T shirts in their booth in the antique store. And that was like, that was what month?

August. You're right. That was in August. So that was kind of before the T shirt was. Before I had called Whitney and said, let's start a boutique. So we did the T shirt and we just kind of had some T shirts in their booth. And we decided further down the road, we were like, let's get our own booth and start our store.

Yeah.

And so that would be in November.

Of 15 of 2015. We started in 200 square foot. Chrissy put in 500$. Kristen put in $500. I put in $500. We opened our booth in 200 square feet in November.

And we stuffed it full. Yes. Like, literally that thing was overflowing. And so I stayed in there every day. So, Chrissy, I stayed in there pretty much every day. I'd leave and go to class and I'd come back that way. Somebody was in our booth all the time getting to know customers. And I think that that's a major part of what made our store what it is today. Because I think if we would have just stuck our clothes in our booth and let the person at the antique store run it, she would have done a good job, but we would have never got that interaction with our customers. So we grew out of that space and went into like maybe 400 square foot up front, Not a dressing room and all that good stuff. Same thing. And eventually we were like, okay, like, we can't. We're busting out of the seams again. We've got to get a storefront. And so during that whole deal in the antique store, we also had our online website and all of that good stuff.

So By August of 2016, we were opening our storefront.

Yeah, it took about eight months for us to get ready to start our storefront. It just was perfect timing, worked out perfect, and everything kind of, you know, just worked out the way that it should. I say that there was a lot of literal blood, sweat, and tears that.

Went into that, but because it did happen really fast. And I remember him, it was May of 16. I told my husband, I'm not going back to work. And he looked at me like, whitney, I am self employed. You have insurance.

And I told my boyfriend, buy us a building. I don't think at that point. No, you weren't. So I told my boyfriend, I said, I need a building. My husband now. But I was like, buy us. There's a building. It's next to another building that you own.

Buy us a building.

I called the realtor. Go buy it. We'll pay you rent.

So, yeah, we pay Christy's husband rent for our building, but so that's where. That's how we got our storefront is. It happened in about eight months. We went from 200 square foot to 400 square foot in an antique store. And then a couple months later, we opened our storefront. And in our storefront, we had a specific look we wanted. Wanted it to be.

And we worked and worked and worked.

And my little boy, Braxton, he came up here, and he carried hammers around and screwdrivers around, and he. You know, it was just kind of a big family deal. Our mom helped. Chrissy's husband helped, you know, and it was our uncle. And it's like, hey, we need a storefront. We need it now. We need a building, and we're all gonna work to do it. Yeah. So that's how the storefront came to be.

I love that you guys bootstrapped. You know, just think about the industry today. I think so many people feel like they have to come in and start this business and go into debt to do it, but you guys literally bootstrapped it every step of the way. And you proved your concept at 200ft.

Right.

And then 400ft, and you built customer relationships every step of the. To get where you are right now. Do you find, like, that's a unique approach today?

Definitely. So, you know, I've met with a few different stores since we started, and the majority of them, you know, have debt and payments and wanted everything to be perfect from the get go. And that is something that I will say me and Whitney struggled with a lot. Whitney wanted everything to be perfect and dreamy and ideal, and I wanted it to be cheap and in the budget and still look nice. And I think somewhere where maybe our business is different is that we were willing to put in the work to do it. You know, even whenever we were in the antique stores, we were doing craft shows, and we, you know, did a lot of salvage stuff for our store. You know, we tore down a barn. We used old wood. You know, we were just really frugal, I would say, with the way that we did it. And it's definitely paid off in the long run.

Yeah. And Kristi says I was a dreamer. I was. I was the one that was, oh, you know, it's got to look this way. And We've got to have it this way. And Chris is like, whitney, slow down, calm down. Let's just get the store open and then we can do this. And I'm like, wait a second. No, because we need these kind of racks and we need this kind of inventory, and this wall needs to look this way. And it really doesn't. It really doesn't. You know, you want it to look nice. But we did start our business with zero debt. We didn't have any debt.

I mean, we still have zero debt. We have a credit card that we can pay off immediately. We just use it to get points. But, yeah, we run zero debt.

Yeah.

I want to talk about how you do that in just a second. I want to talk about what your opinion of a lean business is and maybe some strategies that you learned along the way. But before you tell me about that, tell me about the mix of your business in terms of your sales channel. So online brick and mortar vendor shows, like, where's your time spent and your revenue mainly come from?

Well, our revenue right now is split almost 50, 50 between our storefront and our online. And when we say online, we use comments sold. So we do have an online web store through comments sold. We have our app, we have our storefronts, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. We do roadshows. I think that's pretty much it. So our storefront web store app is the bulk of our sale.

Yeah, so we do. Whenever we first started, it was majority storefront. We were running our storefront. We had a Shopify website, and then we would do live sales. We still do live sales. At the time, we would do live sales, and we would just send a link to that collection, and then everybody could go online to our website and buy there instead of directly on the live. We eventually switched over to comments sold and started doing the live sales where they could buy right there on the live. And that's whenever our brick and mortar and our online business kind of became 50 50. Definitely. It didn't become 5050 off the website. So our website was a major struggle.

Funny story about the website is I wanted a web business. You know, I saw all these boutiques doing this huge revenue online, and they had fabulous, you know, Facebook ads. And I'm like, we've got to do that. We just have to, you know, if we're going to get an online presence, we have to do it. And I spent so much time.

Kristen would get so mad at me.

Because I would spend so much time working on this website and taking pictures and we hired photographers and we did it ourselves.

And we. I wish y' all could see my face right now.

Yeah.

And I was like, chrissy, you know, we've got to do this. We've got to spend the ad money. Give me ad money. I know I can make this work. I know I can do it. And I worked really, really hard, and I did have sales, but it really wasn't justifying what we were spending for those sales. And so Comment Seoul came out and I'm like, y' all gotta check this out. Like, this is. This is sweet.

Like, this is really gonna do it.

And we started using it, and it did do it and it did work. And it is now exceeding our storefront sales. So, you know, that's when our online business really started working. And then we got the app and.

We, you know, so with our app, I will say we. I don't know if they're still doing this or not, but we were lucky enough to get in on it early enough that we didn't have to paid for our app. It's paid through our sales. And I don't know, you know, if that's still going on or not, but I'm very thankful for that because if Whitney would have been like, krissy, we gotta get an app. You gotta spend all this money on an app. I would've been like, no, we saw how the website went. We're not doing that.

Yeah.

But we love our app now. Absolutely love it.

Yeah. And honestly, our website, we do not sell hardly anything off of our website. The only thing we can sell off our website is makeup junkie bags. And those just sell themselves. Literally. That is almost the only thing we sell off our website. So we really push people to our app. So when I say online, our online sales are live sales and app sales. It's there and it looks really, really good.

What do you think it was that actually made the change? Because I think, again, I want to, like, avoid this misconception that if you have comments sold, all your worries are going to go away.

Right.

It's a tool, but that tool has to be paired with a strategy. So what did you start to do when you got comments sold that made the difference?

Let me tell you what we did. We started really using comments sold in January of last year. Right.

Oh, my goodness. I didn't know what to tell you.

And we had good sales with it.

We started using.

It took a lot of time to train our customers how to use this. It was a lot of. Okay, Becky, click the link. Okay, click the link, you know, you have to click that link to pay. We're not going to send you an invoice in your email. And over and over and over again. And our customers finally got it. And once they did get it, they loved it. But that training took a long time. February, we used it. March, we used it. Our numbers were great. And then we started having some trouble with it, which we live in Southwest Oklahoma.

It was Shopify's inventory wasn't integrating with comments. Yeah.

So there was a problem with Shopify and the inventory wasn't. So we quit using it in April, and we thought that we could do invoicing ourselves. And we would put barcodes on these little cards, and we would sit in the floor of my mom's house, and we would barcode, barcode, barcode, and send all of these invoices through Shopify. And come May, we were back on Comments Sold because it was just too, you know, after you've gone to that and see how easy it is to do comment selling, it was just, we've.

Got to go back to it.

You know, we've got to figure out how to make this inventory issue work. And Comments Sold worked so hard to get that problem fixed, and we were able to go back to use it in value.

This was like a year, maybe two years ago. Was it a year ago? Okay. So, like, that problem's long gone. Yeah. Yeah. But I will say the thing that I think Comet Sold made the biggest difference for us with was taking care of the invoicing, because we were already doing those live sales, and we were in front of our customer and we were getting lots of viewers and making that interaction with them and trying clothes on. So that is one thing that we would do. We do outfits. So whenever we go live, most of the time it's a styled outfit. And so we were already doing those, sending them to a website. And for our customers, that was just too much for them to watch the live. Go to the website, click a few buttons, and check out. So whenever we got onto Comments Sold and they could comment right there on the live sale, it was kind of competitive. It was kind of showy and all of that. That's whenever we really saw the difference. That's where Comet Soul came in and helped us. It made it to where they claimed it right then. There wasn't four buttons they had to click where they could get lost or distracted. It kept their attention there on the live. And I think that is what really made the difference for us. So whenever you say the misconception that Comet sold is just going to fix everything. It's not. It already fit into our business, and it already worked with what we were doing previously. It just improved it.

And I can add on to that, too, is if you are going to do five sales, and that is something you want to be successful, you have to be consistent. Your customers have to know when you're going live, and they have to know that you're going to have stuff that's going to fit them and that the quality is what you say it is, and you're going to ship it when you say you're going to ship it and you have a decent return policy in case it doesn't fit. And that's one huge thing with online. You can't just go live and say, I'm going to sell all this stuff because it doesn't work that way. You know, you have to plan for it. You have to tell people when you're going live, what are you selling? Give them a teaser. Your customers have to trust you. And that's hard with online because there are so many of those scam boutiques out there, you know, where you buy something and then you get it and it'll fit a cabbage patch, you know. So I think that's one thing with live sales, is that they can see, oh, that shirt fits her. That shirt's gonna fit me, too. But when they get it, it has to be what you said it was gonna be. So lifestyles don't work for everybody, and that doesn't fit everybody's business model or everybody's sales plan. But for us, it works really well.

And they're a lot of pressure.

They are.

They are a lot of pressure.

Not everybody likes to show up live, right? It is when you hit that button, there is no going back once you are there. Now, I think I heard you say main takeaways consistent, right? I heard you say that word several times. Both of you, like you, you chose a path and you showed up consistently, but you were educating your customer and you were styling for her, like you were being a leader for her style versus just trying to serve her a product. Which I just wanted to make that distinction because I think that's so important for businesses today to understand. Boutiques don't just sell products. If someone wants a product, they can go to Amazon and get it right. It's probably not going to be what's pictured in the picture, but, you know, you can go there. But boutiques are there for a reason, and it's much different how Long or short are your live sales?

We try and keep our live sales about an hour, only the big ones.

So we have a Saturday morning one, that's an hour. We have one during the week that's an hour. And then we have some at lunchtime that are around 20, 25 minutes. Yeah, we go find a lot.

But again, there's two of us. So since we're partners, if Chrissy's gone, I do most of our lives, our big lives, we do together. But if you don't have somebody to help you, it's really hard. I cannot imagine having to do a big live sale by myself. Yeah, like, that just scares me to death. Beyond getting in the inventory, getting the inventory ready, prepped, pictured, put in, get yourself ready and presentable, and then do it is just so much.

And get your attitude to show up.

Yeah.

And get your attitude and check.

After you've done all of that stuff, you're just like, oh, my gosh, I don't even want to do this. But I told everybody I have to do this. And so having somebody to help you is really, really important.

Absolutely. Talk to me about the logistics of the live sale, because I think this is where some people are curious. I know you guys do a great job of managing inventory kind of by trial and fire right through the storefront. And on the live sale, can you go into again how you manage inventory in those different locations? And then also because you have an app, are you pushing new arrivals through the app first or what's kind of your process when you launch something?

Okay, so I'll start at the beginning of our inventory. We have an inventory room that boxes come into that are unopened, and they stay in there until they're able to come back to Cheryl, which is our mom, to be opened, tagged, weighed, steamed. We have a commercial steamer. Best thing we've ever gotten. We hang everything up and steam it, and then from there, it goes into our processed inventory room. From that room, we're able to pluck our inventory and decide where it's going to go and when. So most of the time on, like this morning on Tuesday, we have our Saturday live sale picked out. We have our Wednesday morning live sale picked out. We have our live at lunch today picked out. So we pull all of those and we put them on racks, and then we'll go through and picture them. Whitney will upload the pictures, put the description in, and get them into the live collection. And then right now, we are doing it goes live sale app store. And that has worked great. For us, up until maybe, maybe a month ago, coming this next month, whenever we start switching the fall, we're going to have a few things that only go into the app, we're gonna have a few things that only go into the store, and we're gonna have some stuff that goes into the live sell bin store. We're gonna have some stuff that goes live sell app store. So I know that's a lot of tracking to keep up with, but for us to sell in so many different avenues, we kind of have to split our inventory that way. And I will say, like, honestly, I do not know how online only stores do it. Like, if we only put our stuff online. And this is something that me and Whitney have had many arguments about. I want that inventory gone as quickly as I can get it gone. I don't care how it sells, I don't care where it sells, but I want it sold within two years. And Whitney wants the website to look pretty and the app to look pretty and to have options for her ads. And neither one of us are wrong. But for our business on running Lean, it's just not an option for us to hoard inventory. It's got to go out. So that's why you see us splitting inventory so many different ways, is because we just want it sold at the end of the day.

And my attitude has changed towards that a lot because at first I was like, I need. I need to buy all this inventory because I'm going to sell this many on a live sale. I'm going to sell this many on a Facebook ad. I'm going to send an email, and I'm going to send this and I'm going to sell this many. And y', all, we need to buy eight packs of this item.

And when you thought that an email would sell like four sizes, like, she was like, we're gonna send this email and we're gonna sell four smalls, four mediums, and four larges. And newsflash, we would sell like 1.5. And the 0.5 is the person that bought something else that wasn't in the email.

Yeah.

So we had some hard inventory.

Learning the way that I wanted things to go, they didn't go that way. So I. So I learned that, okay, Whitney, you're being crazy. Like, you are living off in crazy land. Like, it's great to think that way, but reality will hit you like a.

Ton of bricks and it doesn't work.

And you will find yourself sitting here with a ton of inventory with your mom and your sister. Looking at you like, what are you.

Gonna do with it now? Bag it up, take it to Goodwill? I don't know what you're gonna do.

With that, Winnie, but that was your idea and you need to get rid of it.

Okay.

Okay. So my attitude has changed over the past year. Tremendously on my expectations, but I am a dreamer. My husband is like, whitney, get your head. I love where your head is in the clouds. But, like, let's bring it down a notch. Like, what is realistic and what can you actually do? And so I have learned a lot.

About what really works, especially inventory. I hope that that's something we're going to come back to later. Inventory is something that I think makes a huge difference in our business.

And I can say, what happened? So what worked really well for me as far as inventory is Chrissy segmented the store, and she said, okay, Whitney, you have four shelves that you can put makeup junkie on. When you get room on those four shelves, you can order some more. And you have this much room for jeans, and if you get holes in your jeans, we can order some more jeans. And so very visual. So that did help for me. As far as inventory goes, I think.

You are speaking, like, every boutique owner in history's real life problems right there, because we all have, like, the all the pretty things syndrome. Like, you see it and you want to buy it. And of course, I'm gonna sell four pieces in the email.

Four sizes, right?

You are definitely not alone. So my mind is squirreling as I'm listening to both of you talk, because there's like, five questions I want to ask you right now, but I'm gonna prioritize them. O Chrissy, like you said, we need to come back to inventory. So right now we're in the middle at the hub of our bootcamp program. And a huge portion of it is how to read reports. And what we're finding is so many people don't even know how to find the reports, download the reports, read the reports. Nobody knows their inventory on hand at beginning of month or end of month. Like, there's just a huge miss in this area. So break it down for me of what reports are you running and how. Like, what tools are you using to track your numbers and inventory?

Okay, so I'm going to be 100% honest here. We do not run a monthly report on, you know what, how much money do we have in jeans? How much money do we have in shirts? How much money do we have in makeup junkie? And all of that. We are Very hands on in our business. So for us, that's something that we can walk through and see. And then at the end of the year we recap over. But I feel like for the majority of businesses that would not work. But we have kind of our own departments. And so I know that we carry seven for All Mankind jeans. Those are an expensive gene. We don't need to have more than three runs of those jeans in the store at a time. You know, I know we have our makeup junkie shelf. And I think that even with reporting, it's very important to do a store walk through and see where you're actually standing with it. And we do have a inventory like rotation schedule that we do. So we know, like I said, I want stuff in two weeks to be gone. So for me to waste my time on reports for a two to three week turnover just doesn't work for me. And I know that that's the minority and probably not the answer you were looking for. But we do it goes through our store in sections. And so we know whenever we get down to three pieces, we put that on sale, we order more. And we, we know that if we order two packs of something that it'll be gone in three weeks. So that's just kind of where we stand with it. And we do our ordering at the beginning of the season. We're not really ordering real time. We get the front of it in at the beginning and then we process through it and run it through our system the whole season and order in as needed.

The report that we do have though is our mom is our bookkeeper and she is the best bookkeeper out there. Like I out there. She does our numbers every single day and she breaks it down by like our inventory for that month, our shipping for that month, our fees, our office supplies, supplies, advertising, how much money we're spending on displays, donations booths. So we don't break our inventory down by category, like jeans, tops, whatever. But we do know how much money we spent that month in inventory.

Yes. So yeah. And we know, you know, we take a percentage of ourselves and put it back for inventory. And whenever it comes time for buying, I do have a checklist of what I'm looking to buy. I know that I'm looking to buy 20 runs of jeans and the sizes. I know that I'm looking to buy this many tank tops, this many spaghetti strap, this me long sleeve, this many, you know, this brand, this brand, this brand. I know exactly what I'm ordering for. So on that aspect, that's hard for me to relate with just because like I said, we're turning so quickly that those reports would be dated by the time I even looked at them. But I will say, like, some things that we've learned with inventory is to under buy. And again, that's something that me and Whitney didn't see eye to eye on. I want to under buy, I want gone. I want our customers to feel like they got something unique, that not everybody's going to have it. I want that urgency. Whereas she wanted to have stuff for a long time and you know, somebody see it on someone, to be able.

To come back and get it, be.

Able to run an ad with it and all of that. But for our business, it just didn't work. And I think that over buying inventory, in my opinion would be the biggest mistake we've ever made. And if we would have had debt would have been. It would have been very hard to overcome.

It really would have. And my thoughts behind that was, okay, Facebook doesn't show everybody everything all the time.

So I'm going to post on Facebook.

I'm going to post on Instagram, I'm going to send, send an email, you know, and over this much time, all of this stuff is going to sell out in it. And it doesn't. I don't know that anybody sells out anything 100% of everything. If you are like, you go girls.

Yeah, way to go. I mean we do just because we put it on clearance. We have a $10 rack. We have a lot of things we do to clear inventory out. But just kind of to recap over the report aspect of it, I do think for the majority of people that it's probably really important to have your open to buys and your reports. For me and how, like I said, how active we are in our business, it just doesn't work for us. You know, we've tried it and it just wasn't of value to us. But I could see where it would be very important for the majority of.

I think we're probably talking about two separate things because I hear you saying it's not valuable for you, but at the same time, basically what you're doing is still getting a report and your own version of an open to buy because you're going to market saying, I'm going to have this many tops and this much denim. Like you're still planning it out by class. So in a sense you're still doing it just maybe has a little bit different title on it. And I think what's really a value that you said, is your mom is the most awesome bookkeeper you could have. And she's running those numbers daily. And I think sometimes people just kind of gloss over it, like, well, I don't need to look at those numbers. You know, I see what's on the floor, I see this or I see that. But you do have a really good handle on it. Despite it maybe not having a formal name. It sounds like, do you guys look at. And I said, you go through and you're looking at like, what have I sold through? There's a couple left. And that's how you're addressing your markdown strategy, which really like looking at your daily sales and your markdown strategy together go hand in hand for you, don't they?

Yes.

And so one thing we also do is our barcodes are we always have the date that we purchased it, how much we purchased it for on our tag, and we kind of have it coded in a way that we understand. But that's something too we can look at. We can say, oh, wow, like this needs to go or, oh, wow, this needs to stay a while and how much it cost us. Whenever we get ready to mark it down, we know right there how much it costs for us to get. And you are correct about, like, I do have my own open to buy and I do have my own buying schedule. And I think that it's important for people to realize that they don't necessarily have to get all fancy on the computer with QuickBooks and do that. They don't have to have all these reports that automatically generate. And I think that's more where I was going with it. We're more visual reporting.

Yeah.

And we do have a really good grasp on our numbers. So I went to school for accounting. Our mom went to school for accounting before she decided to be a teacher. And so our numbers are really like locked down. But on that same aspect, if you're just looking at numbers, you're going to miss so much. Like our store walkthrough is by far the most important thing that we do. Just because we walk through, we can see what's selling. Most importantly, we can see what's hanging there. There's a lot to learn from what's still hanging on your racks after three weeks.

Yes.

Also, by asking our employees, what's selling for you? What are people asking for? What are people looking at? Did we have what they were looking at for? Do you have any suggestions? Because they're really your front line and they, your customers tell them more than they'll Ever tell you?

In my opinion, I think you're absolutely right. That's your number one sales resource, isn't it? Your team and so many people don't even ask them that question. Are you guys pretty active? Like, talk to me about with your team. Do you sit down and do, like, strategy with them weekly or talk to them about what's coming in or allow your team to provide style education to one another so they can better serve your customer? Yes.

So I do all of our, like, content, our promos, our online social marketing and all of that stuff. So at the beginning of every month, I create a content calendar, basically, and it says, okay, we've got. These are what our live sales are going to be. We have a new product coming in. Brighton has a promo. So this week your promo is Brighton sunglasses. And we give them a goal to meet. If they meet that goal, they get like this. What is it? Whoever sells the most sunglasses gets a free pair of sunglasses. And then the next week may be a promo that says, spend $100 on tops and get one for free the next week.

Maybe that they're always in the loop on the promo that's coming up. They know, you know, not to advertise the promos to customers to soon.

They.

We do try to meet with them monthly. Maybe we could do better about that. But something that I talk to them all the time. Yes, all the time we're talking to them, like, almost to the point where.

I'm like, I'm sorry, I really feel like I'm nagging at you. But, like, we've got to talk about this.

And they do. I mean, they're really good at communicating with us too. Our employee that we've had the longest, Sierra, she's really good about texting. I mean, she'll be at home at night and text me like, hey, I totally forgot to tell you, but so and so is looking for xyz. And I'm like, oh, okay. Thanks for letting me know. But I mean, I just think that interaction with them, even though ours is more casual, that's the way that I prefer for it to be with our employees. My bosses that I liked the best were very casual, and I feel like I work the hardest for them. So that's something that I try to pass on to our employees and I try to give them space to let them do their thing. I didn't hire them to do my thing. I've already got my thing covered. I need them to do their job.

Exactly. A lot of incentivizing. We Give them a lot of goals and we let them know when they reach those goals and all of that. So that helps.

Alright, so let's go back to being lean for just a second because you're talking about having employees and obviously you guys have been growing your team recently and the more you grow your team, it's an investment that's going to give you this roi, right, to make more sales. But in order to be lean, it doesn't necessarily mean you're cutting expenses. You're just looking at things through the lens of investment versus expense. So talk to me about how you guys do that in your business. How do you decide what's an investment and what's an expensive expense?

So in our business, we're very careful to be sure that we need it, absolutely, positively have to have it before we go out and do it. So like with employees, for instance, we needed an employee for a long time before we hired an employee. And for us it didn't necessarily hold us back to not have that employee because we just put in the extra hours and made the, the sacrifices to make it work. But they are an investment and they do have an roi. But my biggest thing is that just hiring an employee and expecting them to be an ROI isn't going to happen. Like, you have to need it, you have to have something that they're bringing to the table. Yeah, you have to train them. But I think that it's very important to make sure that you absolutely need it and that you're not just starry eyed thinking, I have this business, I need six employees. If I have six employees, I'm going to make this much money, we're going to do this many sales and it's going to be great because I think that that's a very toxic mindset. And so it's a really hard line to walk because at one point you can't grow unless you have help. And on the other side, if you try to grow too fast, it's going to hurt and there's going to be a lot of lessons learned. So for us, I think that we kind of straddle that line and push it as far as we can without before we jump on to get it. And that's with anything. That's with buying inventory. We stretch our inventory as far as we can before we jump in and order more. We stretch our employees as far as we can. We offer them incentives. We do as much as we can to get around not having that extra person. And that's something that they like because they like to have their hours. And, you know, a lot of times whenever I have a conversation with them, they would rather come in and do xyz.