Webinar on Sales Projections During Coronavirus

All right, well, welcome to SureFront's bi-monthly webinar series. I am your host, Dylan Lowe, the Director of Marketing at SureFront. And for those of you who are new to this webinar series and are not familiar with us, SureFront is an all-in-one app. It's built for wholesalers, which empowers you in a variety of ways. The most important for you guys is giving you the ability to create virtual showrooms and send those showrooms to your buyers anywhere at any time. So we hold these webinars every other week to provide valuable information to our wholesaler community to help them get through this crazy time we're all experiencing. I know a lot of news came out Monday as well, so this is minute-by-minute changes. And today we're discussing sales projections for showrooms, which I know is applicable to many wholesalers attending this webinar. And we have you from all over the country, including Minneapolis, Mark, the Atlanta, Mark, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. We'll also have a Q&A at the end, so please start asking any questions you have now in the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. If you hover over the bottom of your screen, you should be able to see it there. In addition to having these webinars to help our community during this trying time, we will also be providing a limited number of free seats during this webinar on a first-come, first-served basis for the SureFront Virtual Showroom app to all attendees today. So we'll get to that towards the middle of this webinar, give you a quick little demo of that and what that looks like, and then also open up our signup portal for that so you can sign up for free, no cost to you guys. We're very happy to welcome back our panelist from our previous webinar. She is a small business advisor with over 25 years of experience in helping companies get through difficult times as an advisor for the Small Business Development Center. If you're not familiar with that, that is paid for by your tax dollars and sponsored by the Small Business Administration. So we're very excited to have her here today. So without further ado, Ms. Carrie Armstrong.

Thank you. Well, let's get into it. So welcome, everybody. I'm, I'm glad to be back. And we're going to talk about projecting your numbers. Because projections are scary, right? They're totally scary. And I've noticed that in the time I've been with the SBDC, the Small Business Development Center, there's a very large percentage of humans that are allergic to numbers. We didn't particularly feel comfortable doing math in school, and we're like, I really don't want to think about my numbers. Those are scary. I don't know what to do. I don't want to guess. So I'm going to try and help it make— help make it just a little less painful. Like Dylan said, the SBDCs are around. They're in every single state. So no matter where you are, there's an SBDC out there. They are never— there should be never a cost, and there's no catch. It's your tax dollars at work. Here in California, we are funded by the SBDC. SBA as well as the State of California very generously. So if you, if you can't find one in your area, just Google small business development centers. Sometimes there's a T in there for technical as well. They're generally housed at higher learning institutions, community colleges or universities or economic development centers. So anyway, off we go and we are going to talk about numbers. You can see that, Dylan? You can see my screen? Yeah?

Oh, good to go.

Thank you. All right. So yeah, that's me. I spent 25 years actually in shopping center management prior to becoming an SBDC consultant, and I managed big, big malls. And so that's my background in terms of— and then I was a retailer before that, and I was in the garment industry for a while before that. So That's just me. I've been with the SBDC for over 9 years now, and I just really enjoy helping small businesses to thrive. Right now it's a little bit of a wonky time, right? I think we can all agree that it's craziness out there. And, and, you know, COVID is just wreaking havoc. And if you don't like what's going on, just wait 15 minutes, there'll be a governmental change or something else will be happening. So all of a sudden, you know, we're back to doing something different. So I think different is the new normal. And different very quickly is fast approaching the new normal. Here in California, all non-essential got shut down again as of Monday afternoon. So I'm assuming that my showrooms on that are from California here probably don't have access to their interiors. And we're just gonna keep getting through it, right? So when I talk to people, we were having a conversation about recovery just last week. You know, how do you recover from this COVID epidemic, you know, pandemic? And now we're kind of back to how do you survive it? And then again, how do you, how do you thrive again? And the thing is that the numbers aren't gonna lie. We've got to get down and we've got to get dirty with our numbers. We got to figure out, you know, everybody needs more revenue coming in right now. We need more profitability to happen because even if you don't have more revenue, like, how can you become more profitable? So the go-to always is, well, how do I get more sales? That I need more customers, right? That's what everybody always goes to, that one. That's the, that's the dead giveaway. But I'm going to challenge you to say, do you? You know, I'm sure right now you're probably running at 30%, 40%, 50% capacity of what you normally would run. So yeah, you probably do need more customers, or you need customers to spend more, or, or, or, or, and we're going to talk about that. But we also want to really evaluate when we're making these decisions, we got to analyze our cost of goods sold. We need to analyze the pricing after that, right? So what, what is it costing us to get our goods? Now you guys in showroom setup, some of you are manufacturers yourselves and some of you are distributors of manufacturers. And I'm going to ask you when we get to the calculator, I'm going to need you to actually give me some input because I don't always know what your markups are. So if you can share with me either, either by raising your hand later or by putting it into the Q&A about what you're— what would your traditional markup be from getting it into your warehouse or into your showroom and then pushing it out to the buyers? If you could drop that number in, you would be helping me a lot. We wanna look at profit margins, obviously, right? And we wanna look at sales trends because right now I know a lot of you guys had stuff in your showrooms that you couldn't move and now seasonally it's done, right? Now what do we do? So we do wanna keep, especially now, those things really in the forefront of our minds. Now under normal circumstances when the world is a gre— a groovy place and everybody's feeling it, we'd still want to be analyzing these things. We don't want to just drive our business by the seat of our pants. We want to look at these things and really understand them and then make decisions based on them, right? I'm not sure how many of you have weekly trackers that you're actually looking at. Back in the day, a long, long time ago, pre-COVID, it was OK sometimes to track monthly. And some people got pretty lackadaisical, especially during the fat and happy times. Weekly sales trackers, weekly movement of merchandise trackers, weekly trackers of anything are becoming more and more necessary right now. And I've got some clients that have to track things by day. So depending on where you are at and how you move product, you— if you're not using a daily or weekly tracker to understand where you're at versus last year, and yeah, we know you're down, but taking those last year sales, we're going to project out and then see where you're coming in. Actually, we want to be able to to be able to react in real time when we're not doing what we thought we would need to be doing, or when something outside of our ability is coming in and keeping us from doing something. Because quite honestly, right now we're back in that position of, oh my gosh, do I lay off my people again? Or what do I have to do? Or do I really need another conversation with my landlord? Or how do I— because this is all driving expenses too, right? If you have a— if you have revenue that's just not going to sustain your business. We want to also take your cost of goods sold and we want to measure those by category. So there's a lot of times I'll work with clients and all of their revenue in their accounting comes down to one line, right? Cash revenue just coming in, sales, um, or it's coming in as commission sales or it's coming in and it's just bulk and we can't see what that is. So I would challenge you to take your sales history, go back in and expand that out, right? So if, if I'm, if I have a shop, showroom and I do lifestyle, right? So I've got some lifestyle clothing, I've got lifestyle home goods, furniture, home furnishings, and accessories, right? And, and that's what I'm representing. I want to break those down by category. And then I want subcategories in there. And why would we do this? You all know why, right? Is because we want to see what's moving. And what, what's not only moving in huge bunches, but also where's the margin spread on these? And what should we be focusing on if we can't, if if we just can't kill it right now on everything, right? Then where should we be spending the time and attention? Where should we be developing deeper relationships with either vendors or manufacturers or buyers or preparing for that backside when we're, you know, fingers crossed, coming out on the other end of this? So the other, The other exercise I have my clients do is, is really take a look at your supply chain. Because right now, I don't have to tell you all, you can't get some of your stuff, right? Or if you have a different vendor, maybe the cost of those goods has gone up. Because, you know, or it's sitting in a container offshore. So, so what is the capacity, right, of your current vendors? What are they able to get to you should you need it? Right? What is the capacity of your current clients? So that's gonna be your buyer, right? Or the retail output that's going out that direction out of your showroom. So what is their capacity? Are they coming back online anytime soon? And when I mean online, I just mean into sales anytime soon. You know, are they, are they vibrant? Are they thriving? Are they shuttering? Are they going bankrupt? Like, what's going on? So we want to look at capacity on both sides of you because you guys are right in the middle, right? And then we want to look at the profitability of adding either new vendors So if you're buying offshore and it's coming in, your, your price per unit, even FOB with shipping and tariffs and everything else, may be quite a bit less than if you were buying made in America. You know, sometimes that happens. And that's not— I'm not— that's not a judgment. That is right. And if that is, is it worth the profitability? Right? Do you have enough margin to be able to get it from this other vendor without it totally tipping over your apple cart? What about adding new clients? Is it profitable to add other buyers and other revenue chains out there that may be able to take your goods off of you and move it through with and still get, you know, the profit that you need. And, and an idea of that is sometimes when people start panicking and they're sitting on a lot of, a lot of products that they're trying to move out, you may be trying to dump it into the box, the big boxes, right, or the discounters. And so if you do that, you're moving, you're moving stuff? And are you paying them to take it off of your hands? Do you need to look at the profitability, the margins there? Are you paying extra commissions to just get it out? How are we doing this? We need to know those numbers. So when we're setting these sales goals, because that's the next thing is we've got to look and see what we need to be doing. And then we need to set sales goals for ourselves, for our sales teams, or however you're moving it, right, your third-party people. So we want to measure your stabilized capacity, like in the good old days, right? Uh, I know we're all yearning for that. So you have your stabilized capacity pre-COVID, then right now you're going to have stabilized capacity during COVID because of restrictions, and we need to identify that. So on this, on this calculator that I've put together, I'm going to show you how to do that. Then we look at, say, what is reasonable growth out of this kind of pit that we've fallen into. So we're down here, we're not doing the kind of numbers that we used to be doing, but we need to grow again, right? It's almost like a startup again, right? And so what does that look like? What do we think that's going to look like? Again, those of you who have heard me speak before, my crystal ball is more like a snow globe. It's just really pretty, but it's really fuzzy. And I can't see very far into the future, right? So I need to be able to to guess, but guess with my professional genius intact, right? And then, and then we need to ask ourselves, if we need this growth, how can we add profitable customers or a product line that's going to attract those profitable customers? And this is all— it's hard, right? And that's why you're in business and you do well, is because if it were easy, everybody would be in business for themselves. But you guys are— you guys are going to get there. We're going to help you get there. Just hang in there. So before we calculate, I am going to hand this back to Dylan. I think he's going to share some cool things with you, and then we're going to get to the calculator.

Thank you so much. And I just had a, you know, a quick question on stabilized capacity. So maybe you're at 20% of what you used to be, and you are sure that you can have that throughput, have those sales for the next few months no matter kind of what happens. That's what we're talking about, stabilized capacity, right?

Yeah, so in you guys' world, that would be what it is. You know, you may have some retailers or some buyers that just aren't buying for the next season, and there's no way to put that through it on a point. One, like a daily thing that might resonate with you guys too is, you know, think about a restaurant, right? Where you used to be able to seat 75 people in your restaurant, you have 30 seats outside, the rest were inside, and now your inside is closed. So now you have 30 seats. So, and of those 30 seats, can you use all of them with the distancing, right? Or do you have to— so yeah, we've got to get there. And on that calculator, we're going to talk about how to, how to do that. So for you, you guys have to dig deep into your knowledge base of really who's going to be viable, because a lot of businesses are not going to be— a lot of the buyers of some of these department stores and some of these outlets aren't going to be around. So what do we do about that?

And we'll get to the pricing calculator in a minute too. So if anybody wants to volunteer, Keri's going to show us how to get through pricing calculator. You can click on the button at the bottom. I believe you click under chat, you raise your hand or Q&A. I'm not sure what it looks like on your guys' end, but you can raise your hand. So if anybody wants to volunteer, you don't have to be on video, you can just be on voice. Or if someone's more comfortable, you know, just chatting through the chat box that we have there too, and she'll take you through. You don't have to give us great details of your numbers in case your competitors are on this call or something like that. We'll really just be talking about margins. And, uh, Carrie, you can see my screen, right?

Uh, I cannot.

Oh, you cannot? Okay, let me— let's see.

There you go.

Great, perfect. So, uh, you know, one very important thing is obviously, um, I think California showrooms were just shut down again. Very hard for even those states that have their showrooms open. I think Atlanta is open, I believe that, I know Minneapolis is open, but still getting the buyers over there, whether they have to take a plane flight or travel, I mean, if you're at 50% capacity of having the buyers that you used to have, you're probably pretty, you know, unfortunately, hate to use this term, but lucky right now with that. So, a lot of people reached out to us asking, you know, what can we do to help them in the situation where they can't physically meet with their buyers. So SureFront is kind of an expert app at helping with that. And how we help showrooms and wholesalers is we have a virtual showroom or showcase app within our app. We're gonna make this free right now to sign up during this webinar. If you want to get a head start ahead of me before I'm gonna demo this for about 2 minutes, you can just go to our website, that's SureFront.com, click on the sign up button at the top right, and that will allow you to create an account right now. So we're going to give away a limited number of free seats. Just enter an email address and you can create an account right now. But so what this is, this is a virtual showroom. So you might have, you know, heard some other companies talking about this or people requesting this. This is how you're going to send an actual showroom to your buyers without having to send them your entire PDF, PDF catalog of hundreds and hundreds of pages. So this is the SureFront app that we're in right now. We are in our catalog. If you can see that top left right here, lots of different functions here, but I'm in the catalog function right now. It's very easy to search through your catalog, also very easy to upload and digitize your catalog through the SureFront app. Takes a couple minutes to do. If you can see here, I have, you know, over 2,000 products in this catalog at the bottom there. I can easily flip through these screens, and then I can sort through any of these items that I want. We have various tagging options where we can sort through things. We also have a drop-down or pull-down menu where you can sort through things as well. Or I'm just in the All category here, and we also have some filtering options too. If I want to send a buyer, Buyer A, that wants to see X number of items, then Buyer B that wants to see separate number of items. This is what makes it very useful. I can select those items that I want to send to them instead of sending that whole PDF catalog and saying, go to page 32, you know, line A, section B, tell me what color you want. They can just do it right here. So very easy to do. I just select on those items that I want. Of course, we'll train you how to do this once you sign up, but this is just a demo. Click on this Sell button, I click on Showcase, and then I choose the customer that I want if they're already in here. If they're not already in here, I can also just manually enter their email address. I would enter that email address, click Add. That's going to send them an email, so they don't have to be on SureFront at all. That's what's great about this. They're going to get an email similar to this. This is like a preview showcase, and then they're going to click on Discover Products And again, this will say it's from you, so it'll have your showroom in here, so they're not going to think it's from some odd company. It's going to say it's directly from you. Then they're going to click on this. I'm going to do incognito since I'm officially logged in as a seller, so I can have to log in as a buyer. And this is what they see on the other side, which is— which is— we call it a showcase or it's a showroom. And these are the items that you're sending them. This makes it so incredibly easy. It drops you both down into this virtual showroom. They can sort through these, has beautiful images, any kind of product details that you want to fill out there, and then they just click on those items that they want to get a quote for. They click on request for quote, that'll send them a quote. Again, you both get dropped down to this quote, same kind of thing. This is extremely, extremely important right now I know a lot of you can't physically meet with your buyers, so if you can send them a message, send them an email, say, hey, I have a great way to send you a virtual catalog, uh, sign up for SureFront. You don't have to tell them that, I'm telling you to sign up for SureFront. And then send them this digital catalog, and that's the easiest way, the safest way to get through this. We don't know how long this is going to continue, uh, if showrooms are going to be shut down or open up or shut down again. All we know though is that Typical supply chains, typical throughputs are greatly interrupted right now. So we're giving this away for free. So again, if you want to sign up, just go to our website, that is at SureFront.com, click on that sign up button at the top right, and you can sign up right away. I'll also send out an email after this as well, uh, where you can click on that sign up button. We'll keep this open for the day to sign up for free. And if you have any questions, you can always send me an email at dylan@surefront.com, or just go to our website. We have a little chat button down here as well that you can talk to us too. So really appreciate that. We're going to get into the pricing calculator— sorry, the projections calculator now. So if anyone wants to volunteer, raise your hand, and otherwise we'll just probably just go through the margins as an example. Cool. I'll hand it back over to you.

So apparently I need to unmute myself. Okay. So, all right. Let me share again. Oh, can you please give me permission to share? It went back to you.

Yes. Give me one second.

So while I'm bringing up the calculator, just a little backstory. Dylan and I, connected because he had heard one of my other webinars out there through the SBDC on how to calculate rent relief, you know, with your landlord and things like that. And, and so we've been working on these webinars, and I'm super thrilled to always come forward with Sure Front and do this. And, you know, we're not affiliated with each other. We just have products that— he's got a product that really makes sense for, for you guys, and, and then I have knowledge to help. And so It's been an interesting collaboration, which I greatly enjoy. But just so you know that, you know, we are separate and apart. And I don't work for SureFront. I've had people ask me that later because we do one-on-one consulting that's no charge, right? And I'll talk about that at the very end. And you can meet with me or a consultant at another SBDC and work on things like that that we're talking about here. And, uh, all right, so let's, let's go. Can you see that, Dylan?

Yes. Yes, I can see it.

So I'm just going to stop rambling.

And we'll share this with you. So just so everybody knows afterwards as well.

And it's live. It's an Excel document. So you can calculate in it. It's not just a PDF that then you have to go and figure it out. Now, while Dylan was talking, I was looking at some of the Q&A and some of you were like, well, I'm in this kind of business. I'm in that kind of business. It's okay. This calculator, actually, I had, 'cause I work with small businesses of all types, and originally I had done this specific one for retailers, right? For people that are retailing out, just a business that sells stuff. So the fact that you have stuff that you get, you mark up that stuff and you move it through your channel, it's the same principle. So what's gonna be different is where your stuff is coming from, how much the margin is that you're marking it up, and if there's any other things along the way. So, you know, under normal, under my old world circumstances, you know, Keystone was a big thing. Can somebody share, if you've got a manufacturer's price coming in and then you're marking it up, can you put in the Q&A if you don't want to raise your hand what your traditional markup is? Are we close on this or am I way off? And if you don't want to share, that's fine. But I can walk you through the process principle of where we would go. There were a few of you that said, look, I don't have— I don't— I'm the rep, I'm not the manufacturer, so I don't have cost of goods sold. So hold tight with me, we're going to get through this part of it, and then the second part will resonate with you because we're going to talk about how to actually calculate numbers. So however you get to what your monthly revenue used to be, right? And in this case, in this scenario, we've got Product, whatever that product is, right? But we have product, and it's the product that your cost, your manufacturer's price, you have it, that you purchased it for, that it cost you to either manufacture it or buy it and put it in your showroom. So we want whatever, whatever that is, and you want to break it up. Remember in the beginning I said, look, on your cost of goods sold, let's break this out by categories. So let's make sure that, that we're breaking it out so it really resonates with you. And here's why. If the cost to you to have it there to then distribute, right? We need to know what that is. The markup that we're going to use, uh, for this— this, this was a Keystone, right? So 210%, we're going to mark that up. And so that gives us a suggested price because, again, I was a— I was a retailer before this, so that's why I talk in those languages. But for you guys, it's just a little bit different. So this is the suggested price. So whatever, whatever typically drives your industry, you're going to put that markup in there. So then it's going to give you the suggested price point of what you're going to distribute it at, right? Then we're going to look at our competition and we're going to see what the market will bear, because we don't always have to be the cheapest and we don't always have to be the most expensive. And if the market will bear a better— if the market will bear a better markup than the traditional markup, why would you leave money on the table? Right? So if your competitor in this case, in this scenario, the suggested price is $15.23, for example, whereas the actual price was $18.50 because the competition is selling it for that, so we could push it out at that. Okay? So then we're going to say you look back historically, say how many units of X, Y, or Z, how many units of candles, or home furnishings, or bed linens, or whatever you're pushing through. What were you moving? This is a monthly calculator. What were you moving pre-COVID? Right, so that we can see the flow. You probably already have reports that show you this. But I'm going to challenge you to look at it. And then let's extrapolate that and do some thinking on our own. So in this scenario, we're moving this— these were the units we were moving on a monthly basis. To hit our monthly sales goal, right? Because on average, this particular business was doing $54,000 in external revenue, pushing it out, right? So then because of their markup, their first round, a round of inventory cost them approximately $16,000 in order to get to $54,000 because of the way that they were marking up. Now you can see here, 'cause I went a little fast over it, when we look at what— whatever the industry markup normally would be, and then we're looking at what the actual price could be, right? Sometimes our cost of goods may get better. So in your environment, under your type of business, what are the traditional cost of goods percentages that you would normally shoot for? If it's 20%, then can we— can we get that even lower? If it's normally 30%, can we get that lower? Or on a blended right here, again, this is blended to see, you know, what are we looking at here? Can we get down to where we need? Some of these are going to be too high, right? Because it's not priced right. So, so we need to look at this and say, so what, what traditionally was I doing? All right. Now we're going to come down here. And this is where all of you can use this. So whatever your monthly amount of of sales or revenue was and how you got there. We need to examine that. Now we're going to say in this particular scenario, for $54,000 that were being done in a month, right? This is pre-COVID. So in showroom, right, face-to-face, people coming in during market week, people coming in, making appointments, meeting with you face-to-face, you going to trade shows, whatever that takes in person, traditionally, this model was 90% of this particular showroom was being done, uh, in person, right? And their online, being able to digitally go back and forth with people, was 10% of their sales. Um, so the units here— see, we break this down, right? Because this is going to tell us how many units per month on average we're pushing through. So here's your units. Your unit per month is right there. It's coming from this calculator up here. And if 90% of them on average, because we're playing horseshoes and hand grenades here, guys, we're not getting down into the percentages, right? The pennies. We, what we need to do is we need to get there close enough so we have a driver, we have a KPI, we have a goal, we have a target. So out of the 1,900 units on average we're moving, if 90% of them were moving face-to-face, 1,700 units, 190 of them, almost 200, were going just on their online platform, whatever they were using. So the math breaks down like this. They had— and you look back, you say, how many customers, unique customers, did you move, right? So not how many transactions did you do, but how many customers do you need? Because we need to understand that. And which of your customers— I bet you can run a customer count right now, know who your top 10 best buyers are, customers are, that you're moving through, right? Because you should know that, and I'm sure you do. So here they had 725 unique customers. So that meant If you split that down by the 90/10 rule, right, that's 653 humans that they touched and then 73 on their online that were coming in. Because we need to know these. Why? Because we want to move these needles and we want to move them in a way that makes sense to us. This calculates right here your average dollar per transaction. This is based on your— on this number here, your put out this way, right? So your average dollar per transaction was $74.61. And then it was on average 2.6, almost 3 units per transaction. If we're— this is just math. So it doesn't matter what's up here. It's going to calculate it here so that you can see it pre-COVID. All right. So this next one is the shutdown period. And the shutdown period was before Monday and now is Monday. It's from now because we're shut back down for most of you or for many of you, right? But here's a shutdown period, then here's the reopening period. So right now, you gotta look. And so in this particular case, you see how it flipped, where 90% of the revenue that was happening was being done on some kind of an online platform. And, you know, it was interesting, 'cause when Dylan and I were talking about me doing this thing, I said, "Oh my gosh, how ironic," and rightfully so for him, right, is that they have an online platform that, would allow you to do that, 'cause a lot of people say, well, I can't get online fast enough, and in my regular business, my clientele, a lot of them, that was their biggest problem, is they were brick and mortar to begin with, or face-to-face to begin with, and they didn't have the ability to pivot online and build a whole website and a whole base, and so that was one of the things that resonated with me when I watched Dylan doing his walkthrough on his site, was, well, gosh, you don't even have to build a whole thing. Now, again, you know, we're, He and I are not affiliated with each other. So I'm not trying to sell you anything. But I am saying that that seems like a really great solution, perhaps. So there you have—

Surefront.com.

You can get— there you go. Surefront.com. That's funny. So, so here we go with 90% out there. Now, we also know that we only push through on average right now about 178 units. Significantly down from 1,900 units. And that was people's— that's people's reality, right? You can go back and look at March, April, and May and see what percentage down you were over pre-COVID and start looking at that. You take your raw numbers and start and plug this in. This will tell you, right, there's your— so this was the average sales. This was what was happening. There's your average customer count. So we went from 700 customers down to, you know, we're Looks like we're almost missing a digit there, right? And that's the, that's the cold, harsh reality of what's going on. And, um, so the interesting thing here is look at there, that salesperson might've been doing a really good job though of getting the buyer to add something else on or the customer to add something else on because that dollar per transaction went up. The unit per transaction went down, but perhaps maybe they were selling something that's a higher unit price. Right? This is all coming from your numbers. So we're not making this part of it up. You have it. And then it shows in showroom because there was a blip in there that you could have somebody meet with you maybe early March, and then before you got shut down, and then your online, all your online transactions and how that, how that happened, even it was just via emails, right? Down here, this is where we're going to get into the pre-op— this is the projection part. This is the guess, right? The scientific wild amazing guess, or however you want to label that. We're going to swag here, but we're going to swag with the genius that you have. So this is the target, right? This is where we want to go. So if we're trying to budget into this, if we're trying to even set anything to aim for, we want to put in here, what do we think we can do based on what was happening here? And clearly here is not enough to pay rent. Right? We need to look at all of our overhead and all of our other expenses. What do we need to get to? If we need to get to at least 50% of what we were doing before in order to get into that break-even or that more healthy place. So, so let's say we're going to target 50%. Now we can change this number any, any which way we want to. That would give us half of the sales, half of the revenue per month that we were doing before. And then we say, you know what, our business is working really well on an online platform, and we don't want to throw that out and go back to just normal, right? What we want to do is have an and. We're going to keep what's working now and fold back our other good best practices that we had before, because as we saw, all of a sudden we had showrooms opening and now they closed again on Monday, right? So that part is, that's that variable. So the growth of being able to sell online, I'm telling my retailers this too, like that's That's the stability. Or restaurants, it's about the takeout and the delivery. That's the stability right now. So keep that moving in a really positive direction so that this variation, this very variable that you can't control as much, can come back on as it does. So here we're going to— we are going to aim for 70% of all of our business to be done online, right? Because we're all doing this, right? And this is online. And you've got SureFront, you've got your website, you've got email and all that kind of stuff. So if we do 70% Now we have something to aim for. So we need to aim for 600, 650, 660 units to go out over your online platform. Now with your sales team or yourself, whoever is pushing this, can you do that? What, what vendor out there, what client out there, what buyer out there has the capacity and the need for your stuff to get it pushed this way so that you can spend your really critical time on the people that can make it happen. So I know we have some sales reps on this call because I saw it in the Q&A. You can reverse engineer this and say, if my commission needs to be X and I need to move this many units to get to this number, who should I be talking to? Who is my golden goose that's going to buy this way, right, that I can push this through? So there's your— if you're going to do in showroom, hopefully, you know, right now today this might not be that accurate, but maybe going forward you're going to— 30% of what you do is going to be showroom or market week, whatever, because maybe you're going to downsize and not have a showroom that's available all the time. I don't know. Right. But look, you can change this. So, so here's your 50%. It's 50%. And it's calculating 50% of pre-COVID time. You come in here and you calculate it at 30% and see what that looks like and say, uh, yep, maybe that's more of a reality right now. I can move 400 units. So you can come in and play with this. You can say, what does it look like as I grow and get to 70% if I stay with the model of 70% online, 30% in showroom? And how many units does that mean? And how many customers do I need, right? I need 500 customers coming back every time uniquely buying, right? So, so now we have an idea of how to, how to put this together and put and formulate a strategy, because hope is not a strategy. Hoping that it's just going to be okay one day is not going to get us there. So if you feel like you're drinking from a fire hose right now, just relax, breathe into it. It's okay. We're just going to kind of take a deep breath because there's one more step, right? We're going to come over here into your revenue projections. Right? So if your revenue projections here are the $54,000, right? And we already said, we think we're going to run it at 50% to see if we can get there from here. So we're going to take that. We're going to say, okay, this is month one. Right? Month 1, month 2, in this first year of recovery. And then there is year 2 and year 3. What do we think? We can add these percentages. We said 50%. How long can we hold on? This is what it looks like, right? This is what it looks like. And then we start growing it. Can we, can we ever get to 75%? Can we get out of that this year in a 12-month period? Maybe yes, maybe no. We can come in, though, and start altering this. Here is year 2. Can we get, Can we get to better? This— can we get to holiday season and start seeing an uptick here in our throughput? What are we doing? Or your seasonality, whatever that looks like, right? So, so when, when, when does it start to come back? When does it start to spike again so that we can actually run our businesses and take a deep breath? Now, there's another part to this that we're not doing, because you take this and up against your new world of expenses, right? And we start cash flowing and doing full projections. This is only projecting revenue at this point, but you need to project your cash flow too. So that's a whole different other thing. And we're not going to get into that because you guys would totally need to go stop your day and, you know, have a spa day if you could get into a spa. So here we are, Dylan. These are projections.

It's extremely, extremely helpful. And, you know, that's— I think we're probably a lot of us are, you know, gotten through the initial emotion and shock of this and trying to figure out what tools to, you know, take a stoic look at all of this. And these are the kind of tools that people need. So I really appreciate Carrie. And the other thing that I was thinking of too is, you know, a lot of the businesses that we talk to, and I would imagine the ones that you talk to as well, Carrie, is that, you know, even in your calculator, I know those are all just guesstimates and numbers. Also, we're gonna have a small Q&A section after this. So if you have any questions, please ask them in the Q&A icon right now at the bottom of your screen. Is that you projected that, you know, your online sales might be less than they were before, which could be possible. But as we've been seeing trends, if you read any, you know, business news articles that are coming out, and what I've seen with people that we work with is that a lot of the business has been surging online. So you probably will have more online business than you ever had before, and it's probably going to remain that way for a long time. You know, that's why a lot of these companies are, you know, their stock prices are doing crazy. You know, companies like Dropbox or Slack or, you know, Zoom, these companies give you online tools because people are projecting that these companies are going to be around for a long time. And even once a vaccine comes out, everybody's going to get used to, oh, I don't have to travel anymore to conduct my business. I don't have to travel anymore to buy goods from showrooms. So I think those companies that get onto an online platform, whether it's SureFront or not, are gonna feel the fastest recovery, I'm guessing. And that's just from the articles that we've been reading too. So I don't know if that's been your experience as well, Carrie.

We're seeing that. You know, it just, we don't live in what I call an or society anymore, an O-R, right? It's gotta be an and. And figuring out multiple channels to get your product into the hands of the person who makes the decision and pays for it and pulls, you know, opens their wallet is so critically important. And we just have to be so willing to try quickly to modify our own behavior, understand the changing behavior of our vendors and our end users. Because it's constantly changing. You know, before pre-COVID, we had 3 months to contemplate whether or not we really wanted a website. We could just kind of ponder. Like, I don't know about you guys, but I don't have any time ever right now to ponder. Like, it's a go and it's a test. And then it's the ability to test and then pull back and change if we need to. So I modified— we had— thank you, you guys that put this in here. So we're looking at 2.5%, you know, 250% markup is what I got from most of them, where COGS is usually around 33%. So when you look here, see, look what happens. This is— so this is built so that you can look at it. If you've got this actual COGS here, would be calculating based on what your, um, what your actual pricing it at, right? It's coming off of this E column right here. So what you're actually pricing. So in this case, this one is, it's not priced high enough, right? If we, um, we need to move that up. Actually, it's costing too much, right, for you. But the blended doesn't, because down here your, your COGS is 17%. So, so again, blended, you're at 32. So there you go, right? We're right on the money for, um, So going back into my memory banks from when I worked in the clothing industry and in the garment industry, it helps. But, um, let's talk about questions. Who has questions? That, um, that—

and thank you guys for, for, um, and most of our beginning questions were, uh, you know, does this apply to me? And as you were saying the beginning of this, uh, you know, you can use this calculator no matter if, uh, if you own a factory or you buy from suppliers overseas or you're just a sales rep, this— you can use this for projecting any one of your numbers. You can modify this amazing calculator that Carrie has created.

Yeah, and Dylan too, you know, working with an SBDC consultant, they would be able to come in or even with myself, you know, if you're here in California, we can modify things. I, you know, I really believe in creating and modeling the numbers to take the specifics that in your business you actually have and moving it through the numbers. And because everybody has a little bit different situation, and there's not a single business out there that I haven't been able to model projections for, whether it's you guys, whether it's retail, restaurants, memberships, it doesn't matter, we can model it. It just takes a little bit of thinking, and then you have a roadmap to kind of follow. And play around with scenarios, because projections are all about, like I said, horseshoes and hand grenades, and what does the scenario look like.

Great. I mean, I think most of the questions were around there, you know, what was this calculator. We're going to share this with everybody. Another person said they were on a call in the middle of it, so can they get the calculator. So we're going to share it later today with everybody. Again, if you want to start selling completely online, completely digitally, We're opening up the ability to sign up for SureFront, our virtual showroom, for free. So just go to surefront.com. We have it open right now. You can click on the sign-up button at the top right, create an account. It's a very simple process. All of your information is private. This doesn't, you know, allow all of your competitors to suddenly see what you have. This allows you to get online and start selling and showing your virtual showrooms and showcases to buyers immediately. You know, again, thank you so much, Carrie. We're going to share this presentation, the calculator, and your information as well so people can follow up with you in case they can't, you know, write this down too fast. And, you know, you've done 3 of these now. You've been an incredible help. I really, really appreciate it. And Carrie, thank you so much, and thank you to everybody for attending, and stay safe out there, everybody.

Good luck, guys. And yeah, come make sure you're using all your resources, including, you know, SBDC, everything else. And to the guy that wants to sell his discounted sofa online, you know, you know, some things aren't gonna sell online, right? Maybe you can, maybe you can't, I don't know. But we— but, and we have to think though, right? It— I used to tell people, we're all smart enough to figure out how something can't happen. Right? As a human being, we already know how it's not going to work. And I think the difference between good and great are the people that can brainstorm to think about all the ways something could happen, put a strategy behind it, run multiple trains down parallel tracks, get it down far enough, and then jump onto the train that's going to get you there. So that's, that's my philosophy of how I come at things. So I would challenge all of you to do the same thing.

Thank you so much, Keri. Really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody.

Goodbye.