Podcast episode (Five Minute Friday) hosted by Ashley Alderson featuring Melody (co‑founder & CEO, Max Retail) offering practical advice for hiring, documenting, training, and empowering boutique retail staff. Key recommendations: create a written handbook with opening/closing/midday procedures, document inventory/pricing/markdown policies, use shadowing and coached feedback to transfer the owner’s "secret sauce," and recognize two employee types ("rocks" and "rock stars").
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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.
Hello Boutique Hub community. It's Melody, co founder and CEO at Max Retail and we love being a partner of the Boutique Hub. I wanted to share with you today some tips from my personal experience as a retailer with hiring and training staff. Back in my store I had around 5, 6 employees at a time. Now at Max retail we have 50, so. So the tips that I'm sharing with you now will work for you if you have one employee. And as you scale up, the most important thing you need to figure out is what is your secret sauce? Why do customers come to you? Before you had one employee, you had you. You opened the store, you curated the merchandise and you delivered a specific experience and that is how you built up the incredible following you have today and why you need employees. But how do you teach them your secret sauce? Well, it's going to take you a little bit of work, but I promise there's a huge reward. I strongly suggest you start today compiling your handbook. What is a handbook? A handbook is documentation of the rules. It is the blueprint for how you run your business. See what I've learned, the bigger as my business has grown is rules are good, rules are needed and they provide the structure to allow people to feel safe. So when I'm discussing a handbook with you, I'm saying what are the guidelines that your team needs to know and how can you document them in such a way that anyone can open that book and deliver your experience? A couple pages in my handbook included opening procedures, closing procedures, and what I like to call midday procedures. Obviously opening and closing are obvious to you. However, midday procedures are all the income producing activities that need to be done. Clientelling. We must call our customers so they come back more frequently because our current customer is our most important customer. Shooting social media. This is a part of our day to day and it is not going away and therefore it must be a part of your everyday practice whether you're in store or not. And then of course, styling, steaming and all of the other things that go into making sure that your assortment is getting to the floor as fast as it can. And that it's selling as well as fast as it can. All of these things are a great starting point for your handbook, but we don't want to stop there because today, if you're the one doing all of the inventorying and all of the correspondence for returns, it means that it's time to document those two. We had a page in our handbook for the brand that we carried and how we priced it, whether it was just a markup or whether it was, hey, just, you know, keep it below this price point. Right? So just. I know that sometimes, especially if you're dealing with fast fashion brands, you can price it subjectively, but figure out what's going on in your head when you're pricing and put it down in that document so that if you're not in the store, it's still going to be held to your standard and get to the floor as fast as possible. Markdowns when do you mark down inventory? Are you the only one doing it today? I can tell you that in my store it was only me. I was guilty of this because I was terrified of anyone else doing a markdown too soon or too late. But as I reflect on this, I was a bottleneck. Sometimes there was inventory that had been there way too long and it should have been moved to the sale rack sooner. So figure out what is your comfort level with the markdown and how can you empower your teammates to do it with you or for you. Remember, you don't have to flip on a light switch of from you to them, but you can start slowly by documenting, having them read that documentation, having them watch you shadowing and then role reversing. The next step is you shadowing them. Giving coachable feedback which is so important. And then once they have it, giving them the confidence to do it on their own where you can quality check that work. When you go through the steps, notice the very first one is documentation. It's not fun. I hate writing things down. I could talk all day long though. Good thing we have AI. Now you can go to ChatGPT and ask it to write out what procedures you should have and then you can tweak it. You can voice record and it can translate to a written report. You have so many different ways to do it. Now if this isn't your thing to still get the job done. And I think the other important thing to know is in your store you're going to have two kinds of employees. You're going to have rocks and you're going to have rock stars. A rock is someone who will stay with you forever. They're not looking for growth, but they're consistent and reliable. A rock star is someone who's coming to you to learn, and you're going to need to constantly challenge them, give them new responsibilities and help grow them in their role, knowing that one day they will leave you and do something great. And that's not a bad thing either. So at any point in time in your store you need rocks and rock stars. You need to ensure that both of them have a positive mindset. No negativity, no toxicity. And you give rocks what they need, meet them where they're at, and you give rock stars what they need and meet them where they're at. I hope you found this helpful. Please know that I and the Max Retail Team are rooting for you.
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.
