Five Minute Friday: Best Year Yet: Retail Success Strategies for 2025

Foreign. Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys. You are invited. You're invited to the Best year yet challenge 2025. I wanted to use today's 5 Minute Friday just to share a little bit of behind the scenes into what does it look like to set your year up for success in business and how we've seen hundreds of retailers do this year over year. That really seems to drive a lot of excitement, success and accountability. And that is something that we created several years ago called the Best Year Yet Challenge. So the best year yet challeng is always the first week in January and it's an opportunity for you and for the rest of the industry to come together, lock arms and talk about what is working right now and how together we can set our year up for success. So this year the Best Area Challenge. Again, this is completely free. It is open to anyone whether you're a member or not. Of course, if you're a member of the Boutique Hub, you're going to have replay access and few extra perks and giveaways that we'll tell you about later. But this is an opportunity for every single one of you to come together and just strategize on how to make 2020 awesome. So this year, January 6th through 8th, this is what we're going to be talking about. Day one. This is like my nerding out time, but on day one we're going to dig into the ultimate retail business plan for 2025. So we are going to break down. I know you have a thousand to do's. You've got all these things floating around. I'm going to help you break down and strategize what is most important to accomplish in the year. We're going to make a plan of how you're going to accomplish this. We're going to lay this out in terms of your annual goals and your quarterly rocks and how you're going to measure success. We're going to dig deep into the mindsets that you have that are also going to be supportive or a major hindrance to achieving these goals. So that's day number one. On day number two, okay, truth alert. I've nerded out about this book for a long time and it is the book about creating super fans by Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas. And so on day two, we're going to talk all about building super fans. And what does that mean in 2025? We're going to talk about building a business that practically runs itself because you have a steady stream of super fans. Now. You've probably heard me say something like, when you target everyone, you reach no one. And that couldn't be more true in business. So we will of course, not only talk about how to create the super fans, but I also want to talk about leveraging the data that shows you who the superfans are and how to attract even more of them. All right, and then finally on day number three, it's all about show me the money, honey. Show me the money. Retail resilience in 2025, we'll talk all about the retail business metrics that you should be tracking and how to break all of those down. If you've listened to any of my other, like, end of the year wrap up episodes here on the podcast, I have been pretty blunt about how important it is to really understand retail metrics this day and age. What is this saying? Have money in the bank covers up a multitude of sins? What I don't know, that's probably way off. Ultimately what the saying is is that sometimes when the money comes easy, it can a lot of the mistakes that we're making along the way of, of building the money or keeping the money. And so what I really want to make sure that we're focusing on is every dollar you make, I want you to have a plan to keep more of that dollar. So in this day, again, it's all going to, it's all going to be about inventory management, it's going to be about reporting, it's going to be about metrics and not only how you can be focused on these items and really learn to let those reports that you maybe loathe, let them speak to you so you enjoy them that allow you to build a more long term sustainable business. And how do you bring your team in along the way? What can their part be in understanding the retail metrics? You know, 2024 was a different kind of year than we've seen in a while and it forced a lot of retailers to be smart and to be lean and to be more focused on being resilient financially and creatively to build a long term successful business. And that's not anything new to this industry. Retail sees highs and lows all the time. I know so many of you are very resilient business owners that were around during the 2008, 2009 recession. And you've come back and you're like, oh, economic downturn, I've got this. You've lived through it. Those of you who this is new, this is your first one. You're going to learn and you're going to live through the next one. And so how do we take all the collective lessons that you and that I and that our team and that our fellow boutique owners have learned along the way, put our heads together and together set ourselves up for success in 2025. So I hope you'll join us during the Best Year yet challenge again, January 6th through the 8th. Details are all over our show, notes our social media. It's in the Facebook groups at the Hub. It's on our Facebook page. Hopefully you've gotten an email about it if you're on our email list. But I'd love to see you there again. It's free and we are going to just be focusing on making your year the most successful it possibly can be. So that's it. Thanks for joining me today on 5 Minute Friday. I'll see you soon. Thanks for listening, guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.