Five Minute Friday: The Six Layers of Business
Ashley Alderson breaks down a six-layer business framework, from foundational operations and branding up through products, team, sales strategy, content, and marketing. She advises checking your to-do list against these layers before spending money on marketing.
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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 and I can't wait to chat. Hey, you're back. I'm so glad you're here. Today is an important episode. If you ever feel like a squirrel and you're like, I have 10,000 things to get done all at once and I don't know where to start. I don't even know how to prioritize all the stuff on my to do list. Today's five minute Friday is for you. So let me give it to you like this. A few years ago when I, you know, just kept hearing on repeat from retailers, I'm so overwhelmed, I don't know where to start. I need to work on this and this and this. What I started to notice was retailers really focusing in on certain areas of their business, like, let's just say the marketing aspect of things, but totally neglecting other critical parts of their business like their pricing strategy or inventory management. As humans, I think we tend to gravitate toward what we're most comfortable with and that's what we really lean into. And then we kind of just like bury our head in the sand in other areas. I, I've been there. I have buried my head in the sand in so many areas of this business and then learned the hard way that that was really a bad choice. Like I needed to just dig in, get into the messy middle and uncover what I didn't know so that I could figure it out and get better. And so several years ago, when this became like a recurring thing and I started to hear the same questions over and over again, but really missing important critical elements of business, I thought there's got to be a better way to coach this that makes it really easy for you to understand and follow and gives you a strategy of how to attack the most important roles in your business. And so what I came up with was I call this the six layers of retail. And I think about it like building a skyscraper or some people on our team like to refer to it as lasagna. I'm going to build the six layers of lasagna. Whatever is more memorable for you, I don't care. But if I'm building A skyscraper. I have to start with a really solid foundation, right. In order to keep building it tall. Otherwise it's going to to get wobbly, it's going to shake, it's going to crumble. Because I don't have much of a foundation. And I think when we're building a business, a lot of times that naturally happens. Like we're building the plane as we fly it and we forget a lot of the really important parts in the beginning. So that's why that foundation piece, I'm going to tell you in a minute, comes first. Or if it's lasagna, like, you got to have the pasta and the meat. Like, you can't just have crunchy cheese, which everyone loves crunchy cheese on top. But lasagna wouldn't be lasagna if it were all crunchy cheese. There's more to the recipe. So here's what the six layers of retail are. And the next time you are looking at your to do list and you're feeling like a squirrel and wondering where to start, you really have to start by assessing of these six layers, where am I weak and where am I strong? And where do I really need to go in and rebuild some foundations so I can get back to enjoying the crunchy cheese layer, which is marketing and traffic. So it goes like this. The very bottom layer, the foundation, the meet the basement, is your foundation layer. It's called foundation layer. That layer includes operations plans, your branding, and your operation as a CEO versus an entrepreneur. So in this layer, you know who your customer is, you're doing surveys, you have customer Personas, you're building your brand, you're understanding, understanding how you can be more productive as a CEO and not a try to DIY it, entrepreneur. Like, you've got to be the CEO and you've got SOPs, operations plans, and you know how to answer the bus rule. Like, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would happen? That's layer one. Layer two is products and profitability. So things like inventory management, point of sale systems, understanding your markdown strategy and your pricing strategy and your profit first strategy. All the numbers critical. We cannot bury our head in the sand anymore in this layer. So second most important layer, layer number two, that's lasagna. That's. That's the pasta. Right? All right. Layer number three is your team. So you're probably going to be a solo entrepreneur for a while, and that's great. But in order to scale, eventually we're going to have to ask for help. Even if the team is external. So a banker, an attorney, an accountant, whatever it might be. So how am I growing, optimizing and maximizing a team that can support me in growing this business? Layer number four is all about sales strategy, online, live, selling, in store, training my sales associates, merchandising. What is the strategy and the why and the how in my selling? What is the process? What is the sales funnel? What does it look like? What questions am I asking when my customers walk through the door? There are right and wrong ways to do that. So that is the sales strategy. Layer number five. This is maybe the cottage cheese layer. I don't even know if this were lasagna, but this is the content, strategy and planning layer. Notice I didn't say this is just content. Social media, like just post the things, right? No, it all starts with a plan. So this is understanding the metrics and the data behind my marketing. How many people do I need to have come in at what average order value, at what conversion rate in order to meet my sales goals? We have to have a strategy and metrics behind why we are marketing. Not just throwing up four posts on Instagram a week and hoping someone sees them. That will never work. So there has to be metrics and measurables behind everything and a strategy of what actually engages people. So that's layer five and finally layer six, that's the crunchy cheese layer. That's the top of the building, it's the rooftop bar, it's a party. And it's marketing, it's traffic. And that includes social media, email marketing, text marketing, public relations, and paid ads. So if you came to me tomorrow and you said, ashley, I really want want to run paid ads, I'd say great, have you address these other layers in your business first. And if I understand you don't know your customer, you really don't have a very solid brand. You don't even take your own photos yet. You're just using stock photos. You have no team, you're trying to DIY your way forward. You're just keystoning. If those things are not solid first, you are not ready to run ads. You can't just enjoy the crunchy cheese without doing the work below first. So that's the six layers of retail. Everything we do at the Hub is based off of that. Whether it's membership or retail, boot camp or anything we're teaching, it goes back to those layers. So go to your to do list, evaluate it. What layer does each of these to do's fall in? And really ask yourself honestly, where am I weak and where am I strong? And where do I need to maybe focus first other than the crunchy cheese layer? All right, that's it for five Minute Friday, you guys. If you want to learn more, this is what we do inside of Retail Boot Camp. Step by step by step, we go through every detail of every layer. Retail Bootcamp only opens in January and in June, two semesters a year. And once you're in, it's live group coaching for 14 weeks every single semester. You never pay for it again. You're RBC or for life. So I'm gonna share that wait list and sign up sheet so you can get notified the next time the doors open in today's show. Notes. Thanks for being with me guys. Enjoy. Enjoy your lasagna. 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.
