Boutique Tips | 10 Tips on Ways to GROW your Revenue this Year!

Hello? Hello. Hey, guys. I am coming to you live from Huron, South Dakota, at the junior high national high school finals. National high school final junior high national finals. That's what it is. Two weeks from now, I'll be at the high school finals. So, anyway, if any of you guys are here, which I know there's a lot of Hub members that are rodeo, friends, family, look me up. I'd love to connect and touch base with you, but I wanted to come to you tonight before I went up to the PERF to talk about being profitable. So this is something I'm constantly asked about, and Ashley and I were talking about just, you know, kind of going live within the group and just kind of giving you, you know, some tips. And so there's, you know, you guys, I could break this down into just a few key things, But I have 10, 10 tips for you, and some of them, you're going to think, yeah, no kidding, I need to do that. I just. When in the world am I going to have time? But. Hey, Ellen. How's it going? Hey, Shannon. So basically, the deal is profitability is something that I look at it like losing weight or I look at it like, you know, getting that new job. Whatever it is, if it's a goal of yours, if it's really something you want to do, you've got to spread the word, right? And you have got to talk to your key people and let them know that's what you're wanting to do. Because otherwise, to just say something like, I want to be profitable in 2019, what does that even mean? It. There's not a lot of connection there. There's not a lot to keep you accountable. I. For those of you that are in retail bootcamp or that are going to be going through it, you hear me talk about wiggle words a lot. And I think affordable is a wiggle word. I think profitability is a wiggle word. I think always, often those are all wiggle words. They mean something different to you than they mean to me. Right? So anyway, let me jump in here and give you 10 tips on how to become profitable in your business yet this year. Okay? First and foremost, have a real hard heart to heart conversation with yourself, with yourself about being profitable, about understanding your mission. What are you doing? What are you trying to be profitable at? Right? What is the reason you're in this business? So that's tip number one. Have a real hard heart to heart with yourself and figure out why you're doing this. Because for those of you that have been in this business a little while, you know that it's the ebb and flows of things. Some days are awesome, some days not so awesome. And you've got to be able to motivate yourself to keep moving forward and trudging through this and deal with the haters and deal with the people that want to steal, steal your designs and deal with all the junk that comes along with it. So first tip number one, make sure you understand your why. Make sure you understand why you're doing this. What's going to keep you going? Hey, Shannon or Sharon. How's it going? Oh, my gosh. I haven't seen you for a long time. Good to see you on here. As you can see, I got some sun. The sun finally decided to shine here in Huron. So I'm in my semi right now because it was too loud outside. So I was trying to come to you guys and do this video. Their second tip, so you understand your why. Right? You've. And write it down, make sure you own it. Next you've got to tell your team and who is your team? I don't just mean your employees. I mean your family, your banker, your spouse, obviously your, your, your employees, things like that. But this goes back to what I said at the beginning. It's like if I said I wanted to lose weight, but I didn't tell anybody I wanted to lose weight. When I go after church, they say, hey, let's go for lunch. You know, we're gonna go to the all you can eat pizza place. It's not really falling along with my goals. Right. If you say you want to become profitable and you want to. You. Yes. The term wiggle words. Oh my gosh, Erica, I think those are really important for you to identify some of those wiggle words in your life. But if I want to lose weight and I've told myself I want to lose weight, but I haven't told anybody else. How successful do you think I'm going to be at losing weight? Not very. So make sure you understand your mission and you understand your why and everybody else does too, because there's gonna be nights that you're gonna be pulling all nighters or there's gonna be holidays that you're going to have to stay for. There's going to be events that you're going to be doing that you're gonna need some pickup time at home. Right? You're go. The rest of your team's gonna have to kind of pick up some slack to help you reach these goals. And if you don't have those conversations with the rest of your team guys, and they can tend to get a little out of shape, a little upset, a little envious or jealous or mad because they just don't understand why you're doing these things. Right? But if you've identified these goals that you need and steps that you need to take to make sure that you're living that profitable life, that profitable journey, then they can cheer you on along the way. Okay, so those are step one and two. Step three. Define what success is to you. What's again, success? A wiggle word. What success means to me might be totally different to that boutique that's wanting to do $3 million a year or a million dollars a month. Right? There's girls in the hub that are aiming to do $1,000 a month, and that's successful to them. Amen. Bring it. That's fantastic. But if you want to be profitable, you have to know what that means. And defining your success is part of that. So you might think, well, that's not really a tip, but it totally is. Because if you don't know what your success factor is, you don't know where the bar is. What are you really reaching for? Right? Okay, so that's 1, 2, 3, right? 4. Get real about profit. Get real about it. Why? If we are focusing on profit first, we're paying ourselves first. We're taking that profit first. So you cannot put profit last. So that's your step number four. When you are doing your books and you're having your reconciling all your statements and you're balancing up at the end of the week of all of all you've accomplished and you have that extra. That money set there. Don't pay bills first. Figure out where you're going to take your cut, guys. If it's 1%, it's 1%. Take it and be proud of it and happy about it and do something with it, right? Take that profit first. Be very, very strict about it because that you work hard. Every one of us goes to work, we put on our hours, we deal with all the junk that comes along with it. And to say, I'm going to reinvest all of this back into my business, or I'm going to wait until I have some $6,000 months instead of $4,000 months, or I'm going to wait until I hit that $120,000, you know, quarter, whatever it is, and then I'll take a paycheck. Don't do it. Stop, stop, stop, stop. And you guys have also heard me say, stop the insanity. Which is that goes back to some crazy workout lady from the 90s, but stop the insanity. Don't do that. Take your profit first. Be real about profit. Make it a priority in your life and start showing yourself some profit. It's like that person that's wanting to lose weight. They get on the scale, they never see a result. They don't ever see a pound shed or any inches gone. Do they end up sticking with their diet? No, they throw the towel in. They get frustrated. They just, you know, they don't see the reason to go on with this. They want to change something up. Right? So be real about profitability and make it a priority. Make it number one. It's you. You need to put some money in your pocket. You need to be rewarding yourself. Because, you know, Mike Michalowicz at Summit was talking about who your number one employee is, and who is your number one employee? It's the person that shows up and works their ass off and doesn't take a paycheck. That's your number one employee. The person that shows up every day when times are tough or when times are awesome and they stay late. They don't ever ask for anything. Well, guess what? That's you. You. So you're the number one employee. Reward yourself. Okay, so that is tip number four. Tip number five. Customer service and sales training. Train your staff on customer service. Everything from just how to answer the phone, right? Because every time they goof that up, you lose a sale. Every time they lose, they don't address a customer properly. Don't send out an order properly, don't upsell a customer properly, don't merchandise your store properly, which I'm fixing to get into in a second. It costs you sales. So again, going back to this, I want to be more profitable. I want to make more money. How's it happen? Well, sometimes you got to back back up and go back to the basics with things. And, you know, I, for all of you guys, have hear me talk about sports analogies all the time. And I tell my girls where you where the mistake or where the error happened in your game, in your basketball or rodeo or whatever. It didn't happen at that specific time. It happened with about two or three steps leading up to it. That's what caused the problem. Right? Same way with when you miss out on sales and your staff's not treating your customers like you want them. It didn't happen right then when they answered the phone. It goes back to your training. It Goes back a few steps. So that was tip number five, customer service and sales service, Training on shipping, receiving the entire experience. Make sure everybody's on the same page with that. That's how you win, and that's how you make more sales there. Okay, number six, merchandise to sell. This is something that. That I get a little irritated with when I shop because I. Merchandising was such a huge thing to me. And I'm sure you guys walk into stores, you're like, oh, my gosh, this doesn't make any sense. Why would they have this here? Or why would they have all their sales stuff right at the front of the store? Or why, when I go onto this person's website, does it say new arrival, but it's 75% off? And I know I saw it here three months ago when I was on this site. Those kind of things are immediate turnoffs, right? So what I want to say on tip number seven is. Or I'm sorry, tip number six is when you're merchandising, that's what you and I control. We control those things. There's a lot of things in retail we can't control. There's a lot of things that are just completely out of our hands. That's life. But the way we merchandise and layout our store or our website, that's 100% in our control. So when we get those products and we. They're not moving, and we realize two weeks in that they haven't moved on the floor because they're sitting in a bad spot, that's up to us to move, to be assertive and take those and put them in a better selling spot. We talk about this a lot in retail bootcamp as well. Eye level is bi level. So you know, when you're looking at where your dollars are tied up on your floor, assess it and be like, is that a good location? Does that make sense? Are my customers seeing it? Can they feel it? Does it create an urgency for them to grab it and try it on same way on their website? If they buy this, does it encourage them to buy that? Customers that like this, showing them what other customers, you know, like something similar or what coordinates with it. And those are all things that we can control. So I think that's my big thing on tip number six is there's a lot of things in business that are just plumb out of our control. But how we lay out our website and our store and merchandise, things, that's on us, right? So again, that kind of goes back to some of the coaching, because not all the time are we able to do that. So there's plenty of times that we're leaving that up to our staff, so making sure they understand that. All right, now let's get into the guts of things. Tip number seven, know your numbers. What does that mean? Don't just open up your online banking and see that you have money there and assume everything is good. No, you've got to know how to run your reports. There's key reports. We talk about this a ton in retail boot camp as well. Well as in other trainings within the hub. Know how to run your key reports, know what kind of inventory you have, what, what you're discounting, what you're bringing in, what you've recently received. Right. And of course, what you've sold and who's. Who has sold it, when they sold it, what day that was sold, who the sales staff was that sold it. All these kind of things. Your return rate, your. Your actually in your actual inventory turn rate, not return rate, but you want to look at your turn and how many times things are being returned. What custom. What sales staff has the highest rate of return for their products. That's really important. So, yeah, tip number seven, getting to know your numbers, that's a big one. I could have actually made an entire video about that. But we go into that retail boot camp, so I'll leave that there. But another part of knowing your numbers, this is really important. That includes subscriptions. How many of us subscribe to something or have a renewal little program that we are in that we kind of forget about, so make sure everything we're investing our money in, we're doing it with an intent for it to help us become profitable. We're doing that. We're investing in something like your hub membership. Oh, my gosh. Your. Your hub membership should tenfold pay you back right in profitability within your business if you're actually utilizing it because there's so much gold there. And so, so often we take out these subscriptions or we, we sign up for something, then we forget about it because I'm, I'm. I'll raise my hand to this too. I've done the exact same thing on a personal level. I'll be like, oh, I totally like to be, you know, learn a little bit about this, sign up for it. Next thing you know, I get a text message come in. A couple Facebook prompts come in from somebody, they need something. I'm jumping over there. All of a sudden, six days later, I'm like, wait, I think I signed up for something. I think I put my credit card into the computer for something. What is it? Yeah, I'm guilty for it too. So do an audit of those things, right? Do an audit of those monthly subscriptions and figure out if they're working for you or if they're not. Basically tip number eight leads into that. Reduce out all these unnecessary expenses. We have a lot of them. I know. We do something that I think is really important and I talk about it a lot in retail. Bootcamp is open book management. And I think if you want to become profitable, really going down through your P and L and itemizing these things out, looking at where your expenses are and thinking, why are my credit card fee expenses so high? Is that right? Why is my phone bill so unbelievably high? Is that right? Could I get a better rate on that? How about my interest or my, how about my Internet? How about my interest I pay at my bank? I spit, you know, do you pay a lot of between interest at your line of credit, your credit cards, things like that? If so, how do we reduce that down? I guess with tip number eight. My big thing is if you don't start analyzing those and at least acknowledging where your money's going, you don't know what to call to cut out. You don't know what to add to, to help you with that end goal of being profitable. Because again, to just make some big umbrella statement that I want to be profitable doesn't really set you in a direction. But if you print out your balance sheet and your P and L and you go through that line by line and you're like, holy crap, look at all the money that I have saved spent on travel. This was me. I did this. I was like, finally one day I looked at my travel expenses and I looked at what it was costing me to go to Vegas the way I was going to Vegas as a buyer. This was, you know, back in the early 2010, maybe I had a real come to Jesus moment with myself saying, all right, do I want to go on a vacation or am I going out for business? Because I was having a really good time and doing an awful lot of stuff out there that I didn't need to. That was cutting into my bottom line and I was justifying it. However I tried. But at the end of the day, I had to turn around and sell a hell of a lot of six packs of, you know, ten dollar shirts to pay for that trip. So anyway, know where your numbers are, know where you're Spending your money, know what you can cut out and make sure you're making a habit of being personal with your numbers. And every time you spend a dime on something, think it through. Is this really going to help me become more profitable? Is this a lazy sale, a lazy purchase? Am I making this purchase because I'm too lazy to really look any further? Here's a good example. In my store with this basement. Beautiful, beautiful basement. It was huge, dry. You could put anything down there. That sounds awesome, right? However, the downside of that is you could put anything down there and it would get lost, right? Because it. A lot of times when it came time to, let's just say, change light bulbs if I couldn't quickly find them, guess what? It's really damn easy to go buy another thing of light bulbs. When we sold the store and liquidated stuff, we found so many supplies down there that. We found so many supplies down there that we're full of our. That. That's where our. That's where our numbers were. That's where our cash was. It was just sitting there. It was just sitting there and we'd forgotten about it. So when you go through and you are wondering where your cash is and you're wanting to become more profitable, but yet it's time to go buy new light bulbs, maybe look around first and see if you have light bulbs. Mike Michalowicz also talks about a friend of his that he was going to. He was going to his shop and helping him become more profitable. Right? And I think that was. Well, actually, no, I'm sorry. The story is he was going and kind of job shadowing and watching and watching this guy run his business because he was very profitable. And they drove by Menards one day and he said, I need to stop there and get light bulbs. Well, he didn't. He drove by the next day, they're driving to the office and he stopped or he's driving by the exit and he says, I need to stop there and get light bulbs. This goes on for like two or three days. Finally, Mike just says, why are you not pulling in there and getting light bulbs? And he said, I make a habit of telling myself I need something and waiting and saying, tomorrow, I will buy that. Tomorrow I'll buy that. Because eventually, a lot, most of the times it's something he realizes he doesn't really need. I talked about this in my last boot camp call. Impulse buys, that's not for you. So if you want to be more profitable, cut out these impulse buys. We are making as buyers. Do we really need 10 different colors of tissue paper as options for our packaging? Do we really need the 4x6 sticker or is the 3x5 okay? Right. Understand these things. Every time you spend a penny, a dime, whatever it is, make sure there's a direct reflect on how that can become more profit, help you become more profitable. Otherwise, we're no different than the mom standing in the checkout line with all their kids that want all these things and they just buy them just to.