How to Make the Most of the Holiday Season: 5 Tips To Close the Year Out Strong

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 and I can't wait to chat. Hey, guys, let's talk about the fourth quarter, the big finish, the end of the game, the highlight, the series finale, the thing that you are in right now that is the most important season of the year, and that's how to finish the holiday season strong. Now, I know this year in retail has been like the gauntlet. It has been a challenge like our industry has never faced before. And so that's why some of the tips I want to share with you today are more important than ever. So let's talk about how you're going to dig in, what the opportunity really is, and how you can make the most of this holiday season as you finish the year strong. Now, the first things first, I want to dig into and that's what are we really focusing on this time of year. Now, it's so easy when you make your plans for the fourth quarter and for Pink Friday and Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, to easily say, I just want to have more sales than last year and to make sales that true north metric that you're constantly chasing. But the truth is, when we chase the sales number, we often fall short of the real goal and that's the profit number. You see, sales do not equal profits when it comes to sales. It's easy to go all out, to staff your business and run a little bit heavy and and to maybe not price your items the way that you should to begin with that initial markup. Or maybe we're so busy thinking about running a discount or a promotion or a sale, a blanket sale in the store just to hit that overall sales number that we totally lose sight of the margin that's made along the way. And all of those things lead into the profit. So my goal, as always every holiday season is for you to have not only more profit, but, but ultimately more peace. That's why we're in this business, right, is for you to have a business that allows you to have freedom and flexibility and to serve your family in all the ways possible. So in order to do that, we have to have profit and we have to have margin in order to have peace. So when you set the goal with your team for all these days that you're after, I want you not just to look at sales, not just revenue, but I want you to look at what is your margin, your maintained margin, what's your average order value, what's your units per transaction, and how many new customers can you acquire? Because that's the huge opportunity in the fourth quarter is everyone's buying something. So even if they spend a small amount with you, I'll say 10 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever it might be, and you have the opportunity to wow and surprise and delight a brand new customer that you can then remarket to for the next 12 months. Man, that's a win. So let's count the wins that are beyond just revenue. That is tip number one. So get clear on your goals, make sure your team is super clear on the goals and you're doing all the activities you possibly can to aim at all these targets beyond just revenue. And maybe you're somebody who doesn't feel comfortable ultimately sharing their revenue goal with your team. Maybe you have a young team or you feel like they just don't understand it. I'm all for open book management. We talk about this a ton in retail boot camp. But sharing all of these other metrics, metrics are another way to get there. So sharing, maintain margin, upt average order value, new customer acquisition, repeat customer rate, all those things, even email list growth, those things are really important to share with your team. All right, the second thing I want you to think about this holiday season is looking back as we go forward to Black Friday, Small business Saturday this weekend, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. I'm sure you have like a ladies night out or a Scrooge night or your last chance gift card sale before the USPS shipping cutoff date comes all these dates before we go forward. The second thing I want to talk about today is how to look back at what has been proven already this holiday season. And that's by looking at Pink Friday. Now, Pink Friday this year was our fourth annual year hosting the opportunity to encourage our customers and to challenge our customers to shop small first before the big guys, right before Black Friday, before small Business Saturday, before all the other holidays come along, let's not let shopping small be a sloppy afterthought, but be the first opportunity that our customers take. It's also a day that we've engineered to really help you guys live out the motto of community over competition. Because a rising tide lifts all ships, right? When two or more stores come together to collaborate, you become a Shopping destination. And we saw countless cities around the country have 15, 18, 25, 32 different small businesses all come together to collaborate on one single day. And the success was massive. It was so awesome to hear your guys stories. So what did we learn from Pink Friday this year? Well, the first thing is the opportunity to host events and and experiences is more important than ever. The best thing you can do if you are a storefront is to get out of your storefront, find someone to collaborate with that bring them into your storefront or you host a pop up and go to someone else's storefront, but get out of your normal comfort zone and host some sort of experience or event with others and collaborate. There's massive opportunity in this if you're someone who's online, host a pop up shop or get into someone else's storefront or salon or tanning space, whatever it might be, but go to the people because people are out there spending money and they're having experiences. They're just doing it a little bit different before than they were before. Now after Covid, we saw so many people take their stimulus checks and invest into things, right? Boats and campers and redoing their house and all these things. And now our economy is shifting away from so many things and maybe the unnecessary things into the things that provide some sort of value. So how you market yourself by way of providing value or experience or some sort of lasting memory or keepsake or again, it's a generational product, whatever it might be. Those sorts of marketing opportunities for businesses are ripe. There's so much opportunity there. But you might have to think, how does my business really fit this mold? What shifts do I need to make? How do I need to innovate? How do I need to grow my brand and elevate my brand to provide this experience? Because the days of just competing on price alone or on trend or product alone, they're gone. It doesn't work because Sheen and Temu, those are not opportunities for us to compete, right? You can't go compete direct with the manufacturer from China. It's wild what they're doing. And I'm not one to give up on a fight, but I am one to say I know when I need to innovate and I know when I need to shift. And I think that we are there and I think we all know that we're there. So how are we going to shift to the way that consumers are buying today? A couple other things that I saw really work over Pink Friday were hype. All of the Pre marketing. If you think about your event that you're hosting or the promotion that you're hosting online, or the sale, whatever it is, you can't just wake up on a random Tuesday morning and go, well, here it is. You know, I saw a number of stores on Thursday night before Pink Friday. Go, what are you guys doing for Pink Friday? I don't have a plan for tomorrow. And I'm like, holy crap. How can you show up tomorrow and effectively promote what you have going on the day of the event? No one's going to show up, right? And then you show up the day after Pink Friday and you're like, well, that didn't work. Well, of course it didn't work because no one had time to know what you were planning and to get excited about it and to create that FOMO around whatever it is you're doing, right? So all the pre hype leading up to the event is absolutely critical to your marketing. You have to hype, hype, hype for at least a week leading up to your event. A couple other things that worked, margin builders and door busters. The opportunity that you have right now to go to your favorite vendor and say, hey, what do you have right now that I can buy low? What can I get really great margin on? Where, where are those items? And then launch those as a door buster, right? The first 50 people get this, or it's a swag bag, or it's a gift with purchase, it's free shipping, over a hundred dollars, or it's bogo, or it's bonus bucks or whatever it is. Like those types of margin builders and door busters where you can put something on sale but still make the margin at the end of the day and leverage these things to get people in the door. They work, right? They absolutely work. And it's not that people need a discount to get them through your door. They don't need you to put your wholesale or your whole store 20 to 25% off. That's not while they're why they're coming in. They're coming in for the experience. They're coming in for the brand relationship that you've built for them. They're coming in because of the fomo. They're coming in because of the promotion. It's again, not just that they need something on sale. It's the brand you've built that precedes everything else. Now, the last thing I would say we definitely learned from Pink Friday is your opportunity to tell your story to the local media. And I think that's something that's often overlooked in our industry. We think like, man, I don't know how to get in the newspaper or, you know how to get my story on tv, I don't know how to do that. So we just steer clear of it. But really, it's, it's not hard if you think about the people, the editors and the journalists who are putting together your regional women's magazine or the TV station, right? These journalists are on such a tight schedule, Such a tight schedule. They're often paid very little, very low budget. Right. And they are desperate for new ideas. So the more you can build a relationship with these people, just cold email them or cold call them and offer them value. Don't ask for something, don't ask for them to come and cover your store, but instead think about, how do I provide value to them? Hey, I have a story on the history of the poinsettia. Hey, I have a story on, you know, the ugliest Christmas sweaters and how to source them. Hey, I have a story on how to dress for your holiday travels on a budget. Like whatever it is that you can provide value that you think that their audience would really appreciate something that's going to hold eyeballs. Because the more the media can hold eyeballs, the more advertising they can sell. That's the business they're in. So the more you can frame it like that and build relationships with your media, the more you can get free earned media and press. And I'm talking massive SEO value, massive long term sustainable traffic value, and just the opportunity to elevate your brand. Like, you don't get on social media alone. So at the end of the day, Pink Friday taught us a ton that I think we can leverage the entire rest of the year and certainly all of the year ahead, all of 2024, as we walk into the new year together. All right, third tip for today. Third tip for closing the year out strong is really making sure as we walk into Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. I know it feels really daunting when you think about all these holidays to go, oh, my gosh, I have to run a sale. You know what's going to be left at the end of the day? If I just keep running a sale on all these holidays, what's left for me, right? And this idea of profit and peace. But I want to challenge you to think about a promotion versus a sale. And when I do that, I like to think about these things in three buckets. Number one, there's bonus sales Number two, there's experiences. And number three, there's markdowns. And the goal when you think about these things in these three buckets is to not sell your diamonds with your dirt. Do not sell your diamonds. The brand new things you just bought, they're new arrivals, they're in the front of your store, they're in the brand new collection on your website. Do not put those things on sale. Those are diamonds, the dirt. It's your aged inventory, it's your margin builders, it's your basics. It's the things that you need to move or the things that you bought on purpose to get people excited and get them in the door. That's what you leverage over the holiday season. So when I think about these three buckets, let's talk about first markdowns, all right? Everybody has markdowns. In order to be a successful retailer, you must have markdowns because it's a game of wins and losses, right? Every time we go to market, there's wins, there's things we bought that sold out immediately, maybe even faster than we thought they would, and there's losses. There's the things that we bought because we had three margaritas and we thought Susan was going to buy them, and turns out Susan hated them, right? Or we bought them thinking they were going to fit like X and they really fit like Y and they just hung there, right? Or they came in the wrong color or for whatever reason, they were just a dog, right? The dogs that don't hunt, you got to mark them down, right? That dog don't hunt, mark it down. It's aged, it's overstocked, get rid of it. We have markdowns and markdown schedules all year long. And understanding your own inventory turn and your own markdown schedule will be critical in 2024. It is the number one biggest hang up that I see. The boutiques that are struggling right now, this is what they're struggling with, is what to do with all their overstocked inventory. So the trick with the markdowns is you have to mark them down swift and deep right away when you know it's a dog. How do I get rid of this as fast as I can? And you can leverage this in some major sales over the holiday season. Now, the second bucket I want to talk about here is experiences. This means you can get people in the door without even having a sale or a markdown at all, right? You're hosting Santa, you're hosting an ugly Christmas sweater, you're hosting a guy's night out. And you're giving away a yeti cooler for the men to come in and shop from their wives. You're offering free gift wrapping. You're having a caroling contest, like whatever it might be. Or you are an online store and you're hosting a pop up somewhere, right? And you're having wine and charcuterie, whatever it might be. An experience. People will come out for an experience more than they will some random Tuesday night. Or you're just hoping to meet your goals. So host an experience above all else. When it's Black Friday, small business Saturday, people are out shopping anyway, so make it an experience. You don't have to put the whole store on sale. Now, the third bucket is the bonus sales. And so when I say bonus sale, I mean they give you something and they get something. So spin the wheel at checkout. Free gift with purchase, free shipping over $100. January bonus bucks over $100. Pop the balloon at checkout. Take off Santa's hat at checkout. That seems like it could go south kind of fast. I don't know. That's a whole other type of store experience. Those three buckets. However, markdowns, experiences, and bonus sales are great ways to really again, increase that average order value and unit per transaction and ultimately maintain more of your margin and profit over the holiday season. All right, fourth tip for closing that year out strong. VIP events. VIP events. This time of year, your best customers are begging for for you to make them feel important. Make them feel important, Tell them they're a VIP. You might have a top 10 VIP list, you might have a top 50 VIP list and you might have separate events for both. So whatever you can do to call them out and call them out early. If you did not call them out early this year, make yourself a note to do it next year. It's by hosting trunk shows and VIP fashion shows or just a VIP open house. Or previewing your gift bundles to them or your gift guides to them, or letting them shop your stocking stuffer bar first. Whatever it is, people these days just want to feel important. And you have such an opportunity to do this for them. All right, finally, let's talk about how you're going to use this fourth quarter to finish out the year strong in a way that is really going to set you up for success in 2024. Now, I told you I believe that we are entering into a new season in our industry. It's no, no doubt. I see the posts every day. Things are changing, right? I think I will have a whole podcast Dedicated just to this alone coming up very soon, that I want to hit it here because I think for so many people, change can be really, really scary. But I just want to encourage you that it doesn't have to be really, really scary. It can be a great opportunity. There's so many stores that have survived recessions and election years and changes before pandemics that are still here with us, and they're just innovating, right? They're deciding what the opportunity is going to be for them going forward. So here's what I think we really need to think about as we move into 2024 together. All right, number one, I think we need to know how to lean out our business. And that means what's an investment in our business and what's an expense in our business? When you look at your P and L and you go down the line of. Of expenses, right? And we think about, oh, payroll, oh, Facebook ads, all these things I'm spending money on subscriptions and education. The boutique hub, right? Those are not all the same. There's expenses, which is overpaying for your lease or unused and unnecessary subscriptions. Things that you have connected to shopify that you really haven't even utilized yet, but you're paying for. Those are expenses, right? But there's investments. And investments are things that you invest in that give you an ROI that pay you back. Your payroll is your number one investment, your people, right? Because that's the only way to grow our business is to invest in creating more time. Because money is infinite in this world, but time is not. So payroll is investment. Facebook ads, right? Your ability to really maximize traffic to your store, both in store and online, those are investments. If. If you have a handle on that ad spend and on your roas and whatever your agency is charging you is not crazy. Because that's a whole nother conversation. And frankly, that's a whole nother podcast, right? Same for education. I firmly believe when you are investing in yourself and you're learning how to leverage the knowledge of others so that you can get where you want to go faster, that's an investment, not an expense. So when you think about leaning out your business in 2024, you have to separate what's the expense I can cut and what's the investment on my P. L that I can really leverage. The second thing I want you to think about when you go into 2024 is what is really selling and why. Far too often, Sarah and I will get through a retail bootcamp training session and we'll Talk to students that reach out, that have questions, and they'll talk about, you know, just really struggling with sales or struggling with whatever. And one of the first questions we ask people is, well, what's working in your business and why? What's selling? And many times there's boutique owners or retailers that just really don't know, right? They really don't understand, or maybe they don't have their business categorized. They don't have their products categorized in the right way, so they don't understand where the revenue is really coming from. So what product category is it, what brand is it, what size is it, right? And really, what is the opportunity that you're leveraging from it? What is your margin? And are you only making sales on this product once you mark it down? Or what is your actual maintained margin on this actual product over time? Or are you just investing in love shack fancy, but you're only selling it when you market 30% off, right? Those are really important questions to have answers to going into 2024, because buying smarter is going to be critical in the new year. And again, we're gonna have a whole podcast dedicated just to this. The next thing I want to talk about going into 2024 is really important, is what's your inventory status? That's the second question we ask most retailers when we get them one on one is, how much inventory do you have on hand? And I'm telling you what, probably I don't know, I'll say like six or seven out of 10 times. So 60 to 70% of the time, retailers don't know. They don't know how much inventory. And you might be listening and you might not know. And I'm not telling you this to shame you, but I'm just saying, man, in order to know where the risk and where the opportunity is, you must know, how much inventory do I have on hand? What category is it in? How aged is it? What's my turn rate, and what's my markdown schedule going to be? Because markdown schedules will absolutely be king in your business in the next year. The next thing to watch out for as you close the year out strong and prep for 2024 is really understanding cash in your business. You know, we talked about investments versus expenses, but I just want to take that one step further. Where is their cash? So if you think about knowing what your inventory on hand really is, think about those as like $20 bills hanging on a hanger or $20 bills that you have tucked away in a tote in your basement. Because someone told you you should wait and just sell that item next year, right? But it's just sitting there rotting and your money doesn't have an opportunity, your cash doesn't have an opportunity to work for you and to turn for you and to grow for you like interest if it's just sitting away in a tote. So where is their cash hiding that you can uncover? And even if you have to mark it down and slash it and sell something at wholesale and do some destashes, get the cash out so you can reinvent the cash and reinvent, reinvest the cash and really make it work for you. And where is there cash hiding in events that you could be hosting or automated email marketing. You could be doing customer get backs or whatever those automated touches can be that can also generate you more cash. Now on that note, I do want to be careful and tell you this. If you are cash poor and you're needing to get inventory, I really want you to beware of the countless emails that you're getting on Stripe capital and Shopify Capital and PayPal Capital and terms on fair or whatever the offer is to say, hey, here's some free money. I bet you could buy all kinds of inventory with my free money, right? If it's free money, it's too good to be true. Yes, there's a time and place for these things and yes, when you maybe use the Dave Ramsey method and you can pay these things back in full almost immediately, great. Leverage them. Use the 30 days, use the 60 days. But if you don't have a solid plan to pay this back 100% in full soon, I am seeing hundreds of retailers, you guys, hundreds of them. And I probably several of you listening that are paying 15, 20, 30% interest on this money right now. And you're stuck and you're like, how do I get out from this freaking rock that I am under, right? It sounds so good and it sounds so easy and I freaking hate this every time I talk to a retailer and I see this happening, but someone has to stand up and say enough is enough, you guys, right? Like do not take the bait. I am warning you, don't take the bait. And I don't want to shame you. If it's working for you, genuinely, if it's working for you, awesome. If you have a plan to pay it back, awesome, right? That again, Dave Ramsey method in my opinion is great. I believe in credit, right? I believe in credit cards. Dave Ramsey doesn't. But I believe that Dave Ramsey, one of his number one Principles is you must have the opportunity and the know how to pay back debt fast. And a lot of times when we take these capital notes that seem too good to be true or fair terms or whatever terms, right. It often will get people in a trap. So be careful of that. Make sure you try to negotiate your rates. Whatever it is, be careful. If you're looking for cash instead, I would highly suggest that you have a conversation with your banker. If you don't have a banker, find one. A local community bank or credit union is often the best way to go. It's a great way to build a relationship. And then when things come along like post Covid and we had the PPP money and all the stuff, the loans that were going around, right, it had to be done through a banker. So if you didn't have a relationship with a banker, you were kind of stuck. So it's really important that you really find a local bank, you build a relationship with them, talk to them about where to get cash on a line of credit because those terms are often a lot more favorable for you, the business owner. All right, very last tip as you finish your year out strong and you get into planning for the new year. And now I want to tell you this. The first week in January, so January 2nd, 3rd and 4th, it's my favorite week of the year because it is our planning week here at the Hub and it's an event that we call the Best Year yet series. It's completely free and it's all about mapping out your new year. And one of the biggest topics I'm going to hit on during best year yet this year and I want you just to be thinking about it right now is I feel like in our industry we have put so many different people's types of success on a pedestal, right? Oh, you have to be a live seller. You have to be an E commerce store. Oh, you have to have multiple brick and mortars. If you have multiple brick and mortars, then you also have to have an E commerce store, right? Have to, have to, have to. But you know what, what do you want to. What do you want to. That is way more important and defining success on your terms, that is the ultimate goal in the new year. I am so, I'm so. I don't know what the word is. It's not frustrated, but I'm sad. I think I'm sad when I see so many retailers today that are just plum burnt out. I'm. I'm heartbroken for them and I'm sad for them. Because I know what it's like to be burnt out. I know you probably also know what it's like to be burnt out. It sucks. It's so hard. And I think that we've gotten ourselves burnt to a crisp because, a, we came out of COVID like, with our hair on fire and our industry blew up and now we're like, oh, the faucet's shutting off, our industry's changing, we're having to innovate. It's stressful. And we're finding ourselves in perpetual burnout. I've done a lot of reading and research and just thinking and strategizing on this recently, and you're going to hear me talk a lot more about this during Vester yet again and at the Boutique Summit in the next year, talking about the different types of burnout that our industry is facing. But I think one of the biggest solutions to the burnout we're facing is just simply taking a step back and asking ourselves, what is success on my terms? What's my definition? And then of all these things that I'm trying to do, I'm trying to be on TikTok and I'm trying to be on Pinterest, I'm trying to have a group and I'm trying to send emails and all the things, I just want you to ask yourself, is this a hell yes for me? And if it's not, then it's probably a hell no. And I think we have to get brutally honest with ourselves about what is a hell yes and what is working and what do we want our success to look like and feel like. What are we all in on? And we have to, at least for now, I will say just at least for now, just put a pause on trying to do too many things right. Our own hub team, when we sat down recently to plan out 2024, our leadership team, our word of the year is going to be focus. And in the word focus, it's us cutting back on a ton of things, things that we wanted to do, events, extra events. We wanted to host extra, you know, courses and just different things. We wanted to create extra content, we wanted to create extra groups of people. We wanted to serve. We're cutting it all out because we have to focus on what's most important, and that is serving our members who are here day in and day out. And so while that sucks, there's a lot of things we're gonna have to say no to. For now. No, for now. Not no, for forever. Right? But no, for now. There's so much freedom in that. And it's like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. And I know for sure our entire leadership team's shoulders. So I hope if you go through that exercise, you have that same experience and you feel like there's freedom in knowing that. That less can be more. Right? Less can definitely be more. And your definition of success is not going to always be someone else's. And that's okay. Right? So at the end of the day, there's all kinds of opportunity ahead of you this year to close the year out strong, and I cannot wait to freaking celebrate all of it with you. I want to hear your success stories as you close the year out strong, but I also really want to celebrate with you as you start to innovate and think about what's going to come in the next year and the opportunity that's there for you to just drill down and do what you do best. Right? This is your time to really make a go of it. To share your excitement and your gratitude and your energy with your customers and remind them of why they love to shop with you. Not just over the holidays, but all year long. Not shaming them into shopping with you, but genuinely being so excited that your energy radiates and they're like, I want to be a part of what she or he has to offer. That's the energy I want to be in. That's a space I want to be in. That's the experience I want to have. And no Sheen and no Temu and no Amazon and no TikTok shops and no other crappy big box store can give me this same experience. Now is your time to leverage exactly that. So you guys, I am so excited. This is your time to shine. I am so proud to be able to pour into you and work with you and to celebrate your wins, but also to strategize on those losses because tomorrow's a new day. So cheers to you. Cheers to the fourth quarter. Cheers to what you're building in 2024. I can't wait to get on best year yet with you and to strategize even more. But for now, go rock your holiday season and I will be right back here next week with even more. Have an awesome Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, and Happy Thanksgiving weekend, 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.