Five Minute Friday: Measure What Matters

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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.

Hey guys, welcome back to 5 Minute.

Friday and I want to share a.

Really important quick tip with you today. All about one of my favorite business quotes, period. And it's measure what matters. Measure what matters. Now in retail specifically, there are a few most important things to measure and I, I want to make sure that these are on your radar and you're taking action on them each and every week. The first thing to measure is all things related to inventory. Inventory on hand, your classification, performance, your markdowns and discounts taken, your aging reports. And measuring all things inventory comes from your point of sale system. So this might be Shopify or Heartland or Lightspeed. Right? So when is the date with your numbers to measure what matters? When it comes with inventory, it's gotta be the same time and the same place every week. The second area to measure what matters is your sales performance. Again back to your point of sale system. You're looking at your sales per category, your overall sales, your margin on those sales. Right. And all the related average order value units per transaction. Sales by brand, sales by size. We could get pretty detailed and nitty gritty by sales, but keeping an eye on especially your average daily sales. So you know, hey, by noon, how am I performing with my sales goal for today and what actions do I need to take correctively to make it happen? So measuring what matters, same time, same place, every single week with your sales. The third category which is directly tied to the first two is traffic. So looking in Google Analytics is so important. Making sure Google Analytics is connected to your website and your point of sale system. To know how much traffic am I driving every week through social media and through my email marketing, through my Facebook lives or even to my app, right? So wherever I'm accepting traffic, if it's storefront, it's to my app, it's to my website, am I measuring what matters? Do I know how much traffic it takes me in a period of time to achieve sales in a perfect period of time or the same period of time? Perfect period of time. Who's talking? All right, so that is the third category to measure what matters. Fourth category to measure what matters is your profit and loss. So we can talk about inventory, we can talk about sales, but now how do those numbers match up to where you're reinvesting those dollars in your business? The expense side of the business. Right. Or the investment side of the business. Because there is a difference. So in QuickBooks, what is your date with numbers? Same time, same place, every week to measure what matters. And who can help you with this? If you feel overwhelmed and this is something you don't want to do on your own, it's really easy to get somebody to help you do some online bookkeeping. QuickBooks Online starts at $10 a month, right? So it's not barrier to entry. To measure what matters each and every week, let the numbers tell you a story so that you can go back and make the investments and go to market and do the fun social media stuff and do the merchandising and the things you probably love to do more than measuring the numbers, but the numbers have to tell you a story in order to do that effectively. All right, fifth and final thing to measure what matters is your team's performance against your goals in the same period of time. So if you've been a member of the Hub and heard me speak, or if you've been in retail bootcamp and heard Sarah and I coach, I compare this a lot. And Sarah compares this a lot to coaching a basketball team. We're basketball families, after all. So if you're the coach of your team and you're telling your team the goal is to win the basketball game, does your team know what is the current score? What quarter of the game are we in? And heck, what basket are we even shooting at? And if we want to win the game and it's the fourth quarter and there's two minutes left and I know I'm on the court playing, what's my play to get the ball through the hoop. So you're the coach of the team. Are you measuring what matters in terms of your employee performance against your goals in a period of time? If your goal is to drive more traffic in a period of time and one of your team members is working on email marketing with you, did they have a goal tied to your overall traffic goal in terms of email performance? Right. Are they getting a 10% lift in traffic? Are they getting a 5% lift in open rate? Are they getting a 5% Lift and click through rate? However, you can set up a goal that is tied to your overall company goals and then measure and hold accountable your team to measure what matters. So hopefully at the end of today you walk away with this saying stuck in your head. And that is to measure what matters, right? Because if you want to see something stay sale and not grow, simply don't measure it. Because it won't. That's your five minute Friday. Hopefully this is helpful. Let me know over on the Gram at AJ Alderson or at the Boutique Hub. Or please leave a review. Hopefully you subscribe and these quick tips each and every week are helpful to you. I'm so glad that you're here again. Thanks for listening and I'll see you back here next week.

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.