Episode #222: Why You Need Both Your Right And Left Brain While Running a Business with Krisee and Whitney, Founders of Hayloft Boutique

Hey guys, get ready for episode number 222 and this is one you are going to 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 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. Based in Oklahoma, Whitney and Chrissy Sisters, who are co founders and owners of the Hayloft 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 going to 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 and 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 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 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 gonna 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 gonna be like an even better episode, right?

I agree.

You're gonna get the sarcasm and the crazy dreamer perfect.

Well, guys, I know when we first talked about having you on the show, it was all about how can I 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 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. Get into it. All right, all right. 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, 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 Whitby, that's me. We started the hayloft. 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. You've 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's 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 gonna go with this. Like it's gonna 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 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 little. 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 a $500. Chrissy 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 we 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 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 like, hey, we need a storefront. We need it now. We need a building, and we're all gonna work together.

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 way 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 Chrissy says, I was a dreamer. I was. I was the one that was. Oh, you know, it's gotta look this way, and we've gotta have it this way. And Chris is like, whitney, slow down.

Calm down.

Let's just get the store open, and then we can, you know, 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. 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 gonna 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. We add 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 comments sold 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 pay 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, christy, 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.

Yeah.

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, our 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?

So 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.

And we had good sales with it. We started using. It took 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. This is. 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 Comment 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.

And this was like a year, maybe two years ago. Was it a year ago? Okay. So, like, that problem is 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 doll, 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 there are 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. I think I heard you say main takeaways consistent, right? I heard you say that word several times. Both of you, like, 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 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, picture put in, get yourself ready and presentable, and then do it is just so much.

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, 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, next month, whenever we start switching to fall, we're going to have a few things that only go into the app, we're going to have a few things that only go into the store, and we're going to have some stuff that goes into the live sale bin store, and we're going to 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 weeks. 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 gotta 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 day.

The. 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 Whitney 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. 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 one, even if 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. Yeah.

What really works, especially inventory. I hope that that's something we're going to come back to later because 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 I'm 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 going to prioritize them. Okay, so, Chrissy, like you said, we need to come back to inventory. So right now we're in the middle at the hub of our boot camp 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 department. And so I know that we carry seven for All Mankind jeans. Those are an expensive jean. 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 rotations 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 I 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've 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 straps, this many 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, not 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've got something unique, that not everybody's gonna 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. Would have. 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 an email, you know, and over this much time, all of this stuff is going to sell out. And it doesn't. I don't know that anybody sells out of 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 people.

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 it 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 from 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 gonna 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 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, like, 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 too 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 everything. 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 worked 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, 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 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 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 than somebody else do it.

And we're very blessed with our employees because they have the same mindset of customer service as we do, and they want the store to look a certain way and they, you know, want these things. So when we ask them if, hey, you guys were thinking about another person or these, this is what this person is going to do, a lot of the time they're like, well, I can do that, and I would like to do that. And so they take on those responsibilities. But one thing I have to ask myself a lot is, am I hiring this person so that I don't have.

To do as much?

So Christy will ask me. She's like, okay, Whitney, we're gonna hire this person. And I know that may sound kind of come across kind of bad, so I'm gonna explain it a little bit better if Chrissy will say, okay, Whitney, so this person's gonna come in and take on X of your responsibilities. What are you gonna do with your time? Instead of me being like, I'm gonna go home or I'm gonna go to the grocery store or whatever, before we hire another person, I'm going to be like, okay, well, this person is going to come in and take on X of my responsibilities so that I can do more emails, more marketing, more pictures, more this, that, or whatever. I don't want to have to hire somebody so that I don't have to work as much. Does that make sense?

And, you know, back to the being lean thing, I think the major thing that we do is that everyone at our store is willing to make the sacrifices to keep things running lean so things are more profitable, everybody gets more incentives. You know, there's more raises. At the end of the day, like, everyone here is willing to put in the extra work versus you know, maybe getting somebody that's not necessary or something that's not necessary. You know, we were. Our mom was steaming clothes for like, eight hours a day of before we made the investment for a commercial steamer. You know, and it's like, I just. The biggest thing that I. If I could get across to somebody, and like I said, even meeting with other owners, I think my biggest thing is to make the sacrifices. If you will do what 99% of other people won't do, you will be where 99% of other people will never be. You know, like, for me, it's really about making those sacrifices to get where you want, because, you know, you can do it either way.

And that's kind of like the Dave Ramsey method, which is the program I've gone through. It's like, you live like no one now, so you can live like no one later. And gonna put in the time and the sacrifices. Now think of where you can be later, because payroll is a big expense. It can be a big expense, and you don't want to be in your store roaming around, nagging everybody, trying to find everybody in your store something to do, and then have to send people home without paying them because it's July and it's slow and, you know. So we think long and hard before we hire another.

And I mean, with anything. Me, I'll just be 100% honest here. Me and Whitney butted heads many a times because I didn't like $20 coming out of our account for the boutique cup. I love your honesty. Listen, we don't need 5 million subscriptions, Whitney. Those all add up. That adds up to $200 a month. That's this much, like, no. And so, I mean, I'm just very. If we're gonna spend money on it, there better be value. So we cut other things. We kept the boutique cup. Yeah.

We may cut them elsewhere.

I mean, this is a fight we have to. This day. We'll get on and we'll be like, whitney, what is this? And she'll be like, oh, well, that's for this. And I'm like, we don't need that. No. And she's like, oh, yeah. No, we really don't. I'll cancel it. I mean, constant. I mean, it's just so easy to think that you need things that you don't. And it doesn't seem like much when it's $20 a month, $30 a month, $5 a month. But whenever you get a bunch of them, they add up and they have an impact on your business.

Tissue paper. We had leopard print tissue paper, and we had solid pink tissue paper. And we were wrapping our packages in the, what, 24 cent slice a sheet tissue paper. And so we got to look, and we were ordering tissue paper, and we were looking at the process, and I'm like, well, the pink tissue paper costs 4 cents a sheet. The leopard print paper is really pretty, but that's $0.20 more per sheet. And we're sending out this many packages. Okay, we can wrap the packages in pink tissue paper and put a sticker.

On it, and it'll be fine. Yeah. Now we don't even. I tell them all the time, I'm like, if we're out of polymailers, don't tell Whitney. Go tell my mom. Like, I'm not buying 75 cent apiece poly mailers. We're getting the cheap 15 cent ones. Don't even tell her.

Better, though. Like, that was, like a last year problem.

We're not.

We're not.

I'm not so bad this year, but it's just for me on the lean deal, like, even with the volume that we do, like, there's very small things that we still cut out that we still make sure we're not doing and that we still still try to slim down.

So in my advice, if you're a Whitney and you have these, if you're a big, huge dreamer like me, and that is you, and you are the only person in your business, you better find you a Chrissy, because I have to be put. I get told no on the daily. No, Whitney. Yeah. It's hourly. And I'm just learning to be like, okay, I understand. Okay. Okay. You know, but it is so easy to get carried away with all of these little expenses because I'm the person.

And the shiny things, your customers aren't necessarily there for the shiny things. They're there for you. They don't care if you send them pink paper or leopard paper. They don't care. They are there for you, your business, your style, and your store. And so, you know, I don't suggest going and wadding clothes up and throwing them in a trash bag with poly Mailer, but, you know, if you can make some small adjustments that save a little bit of money, it adds up. It makes a big difference.

It does add up.

It's kind of like at the summit this year, part of Mike Michalowicz's talk was about the theory of small plates and about the more room you give something, right, the more room we'll take for that same thing. So bigger plate, bigger portion. The more we'll consume, the more weight we'll gain. But when you start to eat off of smaller plates, you'll consume less. So even though listening to you guys, your business is successful, it's doing great. But that makes it really easy to consume more in terms of expenses, so I think it's super smart. And thanks for not canceling the Boutique hub while you were at it. Hopefully you got your $20 worth at the end of the month.

I still remember that question.

We definitely did. Like I said, we canceled other things.

Off the boutique cup.

I'm excited.

Definitely on my list of things she needed to Explain.

So you bring up another good point. And I don't remember which one of you mentioned this, but you were talking about July. And I know that there's people listening right now, end of summer, going back to school, that are like, man, this hits me now because it can be slow in the summer. I don't know if it's necessarily slow for you right now, but talk to me about how you approach when, you know a slower season is coming.

We schedule our vacations during July. So, you know, everybody knows, like, if you need time off, try to do it in June or July because it's slower. We, you know, gave our girl. We didn't tell our girls, you have to go home this week, but we gave them the option of if they wanted to take some days off towards the end of summer, they could. That we just need one of them here. So that's, you know, something that we do to kind of lean things up as well. But June and July, our June's actually good.

Yeah, June's.

Our July is like, we do fine, but it's a lot slower. There's a lot more time on our hands. There's a lot more room to get frustrated. I think because you're used to having all these things to do. You're used to shipping lasting until noon. You're used to just a lot of different things that aren't happening anymore in July. And I think it's super easy to get frustrated, but I think it's a time to get your vacation in, make your plans for fall, redo your inventory, clean up your store, clean your inventory room, clean up. You know, just organize everything. Really take that time to breathe.

And don't brace for fall freak out because it's slow, because next month is August, and August is a huge sales month. So I'm not saying I'm the kind of person who. I'm more of a positive thinker. So my thoughts are if you think your July is going to be slow, it's going to be slow. So we haven't been buying summer. I mean, we've quit buying summer since how long ago?

Yeah, no, our inventory gram is all fall.

Yeah, it's completely fall. We have no summer except what's out in our store. And we're getting rid of that. Our job is to get rid of that and put as little of that on sale that we can. So our girls are doing a lot of mirror selfies there. So our online sales are lower in.

July because we don't have new stuff. And our online girls love New stuff.

They don't want reposts, they want new stuff. And so we really plan. Like I'm working on a fall lookbook right now. I start out the seasons really good with like really pretty nice looking stuff. And then we get so crazy busy that it's not as pretty come later, you know, when it's insanely busy. But I work on my fall lookbook. I work on my content, you know, my content creation, my. Right now I'm working on game day Christmas. I just talked about Christmas yesterday. So I'm planning way ahead during this month events. All of that kind of stuff is.

What I'm doing right now. But I would say like in March you need to start preparing for July because you've got some, I mean, I don't know about everybody else's business but us, we have some serious bills that hit in July and our sales in July are okay, you know, but you've got your fall inventory coming in for your big month of August, so you're bringing in more inventory than left. And I just think, you know, back in March you need to start preparing, making sure your vendors know, like, quit shipping me summer in July. Making sure your employees know, like you need some of them here, but if some of them have stuff to go do they can. And just preparing yourself for the fact that there's going to be a lot of money leaving and not a lot of money coming in in July. And I think that's where a lot of people get very frustrated and they didn't expect that, they didn't prepare for that. But I mean, for us at this point in our business, a massive amount of our bills hit in July for fall. And fall is a huge selling season for us.

So you have to financially prepare yourself for that. Yeah, like you need to make sure you have money because money is coming in on your card, a lot of money from market for fall. And then one day you're gonna look at your card and you're like, oh my gosh, I have thousands of dollars on my card and I'm not making any money. And your brain just starts going in a thousand different miles an hour. So you really need to financially prepare yourself for that.

I mean, that's one of my biggest deals with July, to make sure people know to be financially prepared for July.

I think Chrissy, just kind of going back to what you were talking about earlier with your plan that you go to market with. I have to like, I want to drop the microphone so bad when you guys are talking because it's so good. And I wish everyone could hear this, but you're going to market with a plan, you know, three, four, five months in advance and you know what you're going to buy. But then you come back and you're tracking those orders and go, okay, I know I have X, Y and Z on order so that when the bill comes in July, you can actually cover it. Whereas a lot of people make the mistake of looking at it as like a cash basis business of money in, money out in the same month. And that will like cripple you when it comes to slow month.

Okay, so let me tell you about whenever we go to market, what we do with our orders to prepare for that. And you guys, it is old school. So we take at market we have a notebook, a small notebook that we write every week down in. So it'll say like 51 through 7, 58 through 13, whatever, Sunday to Saturday. And we will write down the brand and how much money is coming in that month. So it'll say, you know, that week, the brand, how much money whenever we get home. And we'll write what it is. Is it tops, is it jeans, is it whatever. We don't do that so much anymore because I know what my brands are sending me now. But in the beginning I wrote down what they were just in a notebook, super easy to keep up with. Whenever we get home, I would go to that month, I'd tally everything up and that's how much money and inventory was coming in. Whenever it came in, we'd check it off and then we'd bring our invoice, our pack, whatever, order slips. They're not invoices, sales orders. We would put those in a three ring binder from market in order of when they're coming to us. And that is, I'm not kidding you, the easiest way to keep up with it. And I mean, just foolproof.

It was easy for me too because I get starry eyed when I go to market and I'm like, oh, look at all these fancy pants. Like, look at all these things that we need for outfits. And they can say, okay, Whitney, your fancy pants budget is done. You can't buy any more fancy pants like you have.

I like the fancy pants.

Yeah, But I'll walk into somebody I'll walk into, I'm like, oh, but those are better than those other ones. Those are really cute. What if we paired these with this? And I'll sell all those and then I'll sell these and they're like, no, Whitney. So now I'VE got to where I'm like, I gotta go look around and then come back and order my stuff. Because I'm like, they're really not gonna let me have any more of my budget. When I'm done, I'm done.

And you guys, if you're a good. I mean, if you're a good account and you have a relationship with your vendors, then they will let you split your orders up. Like, if we go into Easel and Whitney wants to order five pairs of fancy pants, I'm not getting five pairs of fancy pants in at one time. We're gonna split that into three different orders. We're gonna get one in June, one in July, and one in August. And then that's something that I'm very careful to do whenever I go into market. We pull all of our clothes. Whitney walks away. I separate them into sections. We write the. And we have a good relationship with our vendors. So they allow us to do that, and I think they allow the majority of people to do that. The only time I think maybe they wouldn't is if you keep canceling your orders. Maybe. Yeah.

And another reason that's really good to do, too is because, say you go in and you've ordered all of these I call fancy pants, like, paper bag pants that have really bright, fun prints.

And, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And you've ordered eight different styles of these fancy pants, and you get your first pair in, and you sell one pair, and you get your second pair in, and you sell two pairs, and you're like, oh, fancy pants aren't my customer style. Now I have two packs of eight different styles of these pants that I can't get rid of. Whereas if you split them, you know, into months, you're like, you can kind of test the waters and see if your customers are gonna like those, and then if they do, you can reorder them. I had the misconception of, you better get what you get now because you can't reorder it later. There are so many clothes out there that by the time you decide you need some more of some pants, there's new pants out there that you like better. Like, you can reorder clothes.

Like, they.

They just keep coming. And my conception was, I want it all, and I want it all now. Well, you don't need it all, and you don't need it all now. You can wait and see how they go and then order some more later.

Amen. Don't buy all the pretty things. Right. And be a shopaholic all right, you guys, I have enjoyed this episode so much because it's such, like, real meat that is so valuable. So a couple quick things before we wrap up our time together today, which is our lightning round. So, like, one or two word answers, super quick. Okay. All right. Your favorite podcast.

I like Grant Cardone.

I listen to Dave Ramsey.

Oh, so would you say that it's the same is true for, like, book and mentor, or do you have other favorite.

I would say I probably have other favorites. The Grant Cardone podcast isn't always Grant Cardone, so I don't know, but that's probably definitely my favorite. It just gets me pumped up. Has nothing to do with Boutique.

I love Grant Cardone. I had tickets last year to go to 10x. Like, I think he is so awesome.

Yeah, I like listening to him too, but I'm not Chrissy, and her husband's into properties, and so me and Chrissy used to listen to Grant Cardone before live sales, and we would get all.

I mean, it's selling. It's selling no matter what. I mean, whether he's trying to sell a huge real estate deal or you're trying to sell a top, like, it's selling. But if you go to 10x, you let me know. I'll meet you there.

It's a deal. It's a deal. All right, Whitney, tell me about yours. Favorite mentor or book.

I listen to a lot of Dave Ramsey. I listen to his podcast. I read a lot of Rachel Hollis books.

I do read some Brendon Burchard.

I don't do a whole lot of reading because I have a kid, so I do listen to, like, audiobooks and that kind of thing, but my mix of stuff is just kind of all over the place, and I don't really have one particular favorite, so I listen.

To all the Dave Ramsey stuff.

Christy Wright, all of his daughter, all of that.

Perfect. All right, favorite trend at the moment?

I don't have one.

You don't have a favorite right now?

She sees dollar bills hanging on the hanger and not trends. So at that count, that wraps our.

Personalities up right there.

I love it. All right, biggest fear. Snakes. Payroll or Internet trolls?

Snakes, for sure.

Favorite app for the business?

My favorite app for the business is definitely Promise.

Old app. But for my business specifically, right now, I've been using a lot of Canva as far as for content creation. Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, any type of app. Canva definitely counts.

Yeah, that's my favorite right now.

There is the analytical side of the business there and the artistic side of the business there. Perfect. All right, guys. Well, as we wrap up our time together, I want to ask you the final question, which I ask everybody on the show, because I know that despite Chrissy's love of the dollar bill hanging on the hanger, there is more to business than just the business. Right? So talk to me about when you are 30 years down the road and you're retiring and you've sold the business or passed it on or whatever you're going to do with it, and you're talking with your grandkids about the business that you created and the life that you led. What is the thing that you want people to remember most about each of you?

I really want people to know that we truly cared about our customers, that our business was not for dollar sign, that we truly enjoy coming to work every day and talking to our customers and getting to know our customers, and that I want my grandkids to see how hard we worked at building this business and the sacrifices that we made so that they, in turn, can have that work ethic and that they can have that not only work ethic, but the emotional side of truly caring for.

The people that you serve.

I love it. Kristi, how about you?

I would say that I want to be known for the work ethic and how hard work pays off and definitely to the. Like, I want them to understand that hopefully at that point, like, I put my hard work in, and at this point, I'm reaping my benefits of it, and it's something that I want to. I really am focused on. I want to work hard now so that I don't have to later. And I hope it's something that whenever the time comes that I can walk away from and I'm not so addicted to it that I can't. But definitely, you know, I really want to leave behind that we worked hard for our store, for our customers, for our employees to have a job that they enjoy coming to, that we were able to work with our family. You know, I think it's a big deal that I'm able to come to work with my sister and my mom and my sister's little boy. And, you know, eventually I'll have kids and be able to bring kids up here. And I just really want, you know, to be able to look back and have respect for what all we've done and also be able to look back at it and really, you know, be able to tell somebody that we enjoyed it and that it was everything we wanted it to be if you work hard, that it is worth it.

No, I absolutely love that. And I think you're definitely, you're proving that as you go. I think that's so cool. Well, guys, both of you, this was such an awesome conversation and just like real raw what it takes to run a successful business today. So thank you for showing up the way that you did here. But I know you guys have showed up like this for a long time. You've been a part of this, the boutique hub, since the very beginning. So I do really want to thank you for your work in this community and in your local community, too. It is a pleasure to work with you guys.

Well, thank you so much. We appreciate everything you've done for the industry as well.

Thank you. Thank you so much, you guys. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.

Sa.