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Archive for March, 2009

Marketing Main Street In Frederick, MD

I was invited by the Downtown Frederick Partnership to address their local merchants this past week. In addition to a speech, I worked one-on-one with eight businesses as  a mini-makeover. I rarely write about clients but felt compelled to for several reasons.

First and foremost, what is going on in America can be seen on Market St and the surrounding businesses.

No mention of SBA loans, socialism, AIG bonuses, or whining for bailouts.From yoga studio, toy store, furniture, gift, market, pet supply and hair studio they were only interested in what could they do better.

Yes, one guy tried to make his success dependent on how well the city was marketed but my answer to him was that you have to make the city an exceptional experience. That’s what will build word-of-mouth marketing. Jut like a business, you can’t just take out an ad saying, “Come to Frederick;” you have to earn it.

What is so right with Frederick is that you have a town with a history, a personality and a synergy.In the middle of the historic Market Street, you discover a large picture of the town with Union soldiers being welcomed.A paragraph later you find out the Confederates  captured the city a few weeks later and ransomed it for $200,000 or they would torch it.

frederick-rebelsThe banks all chipped in and saved the town, delivering bushel baskets of money at the corner of 2nd and Market St. They didn’t look to the government or anyone else; if they were going to save their city, it was up to them.(In that same spirit, PNC Bank felt so strongly about bringing me out that they underwrote the entire operation.)

a park

Floodwaters descended on the historic area several times and the city had to decide whether or not to abandon downtown.They decided to stick it out and make it work which resulted in a creekside park.

Strolling down Market Street in Frederick, I considered the miscues that could have been taken under the guise of “urban renewal;” like moving all the city services out.They all remain in the historic downtown including the courts and the main library to keep the heart of the town relevant and draw traffic.

Contrast that to the “tear it down” mindset of the sixties or farther back, civic leaders like those in Detroit who tried to draw people away from downtown with the Detroit train station that has since been abandoned because it was isolated.

An organic retail space thrives with vibrant restaurants and interesting shops for the daytime population of 10,000.Sure, in California you could create a “mixed use” space with a giant planogram to engineer a façade of Main Street with big chains like GAP, Subway and Michaels.But here you actually get it with independent retailers; just like one hundred years ago.

Tabletop store on Patrick St.

Tabletop store on Patrick St.

Two Paws Up on Carroll St.

Two Paws Up on Carroll St.

Frederick is one of hundreds of Main Street Programs throughout the United States.These programs revitalize central business districts of cities and towns with assistance from the Main Street Center of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

One of Frederick’s popular programs are their “First Saturdays” where stores stay open late.  Note: not a craft fair or something being brought in – the local merchants are putting on a united front to make coming downtown Saturday night profitable for all.

Many downtowns struggle with street parking and Frederick is no exception. With two-hour meters, people often get tickets – heck I even got one. But they do have four parking structures not far off the main drag and are building a fifth.

When you go there, you have to try Black Hog BBQ simply the best. They were packed and only open 9 months. Also the Tasting Room had the best crab cakes I ever tasted.  The NY Times had a good profile on the town last fall.

Yes it would be nice if they offered free wi-fi in the entire downtown area, better signage and more merchants visible on the web.But for now, I think they are poised for greatness.blackhog2

One more thing, the local paper the Frederick New-Post publicized the event in advance so my event drew a large crowd, and they covered it afterwards.  This is what I experienced with the event sponsored by the Oregonian in Portland a few weeks ago. To mobilize a group of business owners, you have to lay seeds, integrate the event with multiple groups and you come out with success. Contrary to all the hype, newspapers can still deliver that – if they want to.  You want to go the way of the dinosaur newspapers, focus on the junk of society – you want to grow – get involved in helping business.

Frederick is the face of American small business, mom and pop businesses trying to ignore the negative nabobs of negativism in the media, take care of their customers and grow their business; the very best of America.

I’ll be writing more about the lessons learned in Frederick in my monthly newsletter; signup here.

Macy's Poster Child For Zombie Retailer

I was driving to an event last week and realized I hadn’t packed socks. No big deal, saw a big mall with a Macy’s. Easy.

I went into the store and felt like I was entering a ghost town. Not due to customers but I saw NO ONE at six service stations. The entire men’s side of the store was devoid of anyone.  I found the sock area disheveled, like someone was supposed to straighten up but was told to “go home – schedule won’t permit overtime.”img_0250

I picked out my socks and went to a register – which  was empty. I strolled back to china and gifts – empty.  Kitchenware? Empty. Back to men’s – there had to be someone.

Sure enough, a woman had flagged down an employee and was being rung up.

The employee greeted me, thanked me for waiting and apologized for the wait.  That’s all anyone could expect.

After five minutes of my waiting, she said she couldn’t get the security tag off and would be back. About that time another guy showed up to be rung up behind me. We waited another five minutes. Now I was upset.  Wanting to ditch the socks but thinking better of a barefoot speaker I went to the cosmetics counter. “Can you help me?”

“Yes sir,” was the answer. The woman apologized and rang me up.  I asked her if this was, as I suspected, common.  She admitted it was which really hurt because she had been there forever, was a commissioned salesperson and doesn’t make anything on merch she rings up in other departments.  She said the employees are trying to do their best but cutbacks have meant nothing but frustration.

For those of you not sure of the enormity of the problem. Here is their store map, the first floor is 70,000 sq ft. macys-mapWe are talking 35,000 sq feet being run by three visible employees!

We’ve heard alot about zombie banks lately.  Welcome to the world of Zombie retail.

This store was dead and it didn’t know it; the racks were strewn with closeout merchandise, customers were trying to buy, employees were doing the best with what they could.

By the way, this is NOT one of those slated to be closed.

Terry Lundgren, CEO gets high marks from the media and PR firms for his Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing at the University of Arizona.  But how can you say we are developing the new retail leaders because people don’t think it is a noble profession on one hand and treat existing customers and employees this way?

How did Macy’s get this way? A recent story in Marketplace says Macy’s “will reward its executives based on how well the company’s stock performs compared to a pool of 10 competitors.” Also in the article, Burt Flickinger  a consumer industry analyst for SRG Insights said, “The department-store sector has been slowly dying for years, and many of the major chains may be dead within a couple quarters. And Macy’s is doing a heroic job to hold on.”

Zombies held on. You want to compete? Look at what you are doing to your customers and employees before stock bonuses or feathering your own nest. Don’t schedule yourself out of existence.

(I’ve written about Macy’s in a couple other posts, most notably about their PR firm here.)

How to HR: Get Rid Of Bad New Hires Within 30 Days

Their First 30 Days Are Their Best So Don’t Settle

Your new employee is going to be at their best during your thirty-day probationary period. This is where you must show the new hire that you inspect what you expect.

If you start out as their friend, you’re sunk.

Your management style is on trial here, and they will find out what is acceptable by how consistent you are at enforcing your standards. So if your new hire is late on day two, realize she is testing you. Make clear to her what your tardy policy is, and that if it happens again, she’ll be gone. If she breaks the policy twenty days later, fire her; she won’t magically get better.

And remember, your other employees are watching you.  If she gets away with it, so will they.

Why else would you let them go during the first 30 days? If they snap at a customer, they are gone immediately. If you find them constantly talking to other employees, distracting them from their work, let them go. If you tolerate any of it during the first thirty days, I guarantee it will only get worse. One bad apple does indeed spoil the barrel.

Make the first month the toughest month with regards to scheduling. They are “low man on the totem pole” so making allowances for their scheduling needs comes after everyone else. Schedule a new hire’s first shift after they are fully trained for a busy Saturday. You want to see if they come in dragging after a busy night on the town. If they do, they should quickly learn they can’t. If they do it again, you need to have a talk. “Don’t you realize that you can’t stay out late the night before and be ready to work at 9 a.m.?” If they do it again, they are gone.

If they call in sick with no replacement lined up, they are also let go.

At a hotel they scheduled new housekeepers on Sundays -the morning after being sold out. If they couldn’t get all their rooms cleaned like the other housekeepers, they boss would have a talk. If the new housekeeper didn’t speed up, they were gone. At a tire store the new hire should start on Monday when all the problems from the weekend need to be dealt with.  They don’t have to be the one dealing with all of them, but they do need to see if their people skills aren’t great, or not.

Don’t worry, there are plenty of employees who work well with rules, standards and boundaries.  They are the ones who will lead your business out of the recession.

Again, the idea is to get them used to your standards, then everything else will be a breeze. Yes it costs a lot to train an employee but you have to weigh the cost of losing customers if they stay.

You Can Compete

This post is from my first book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting.  It is the culmination of three decades of work highlighting a proven method every business in any market can improve the bottom line.

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Publicity the Right Way and Wrong Way for Retailers

Publicity, you can never have enough that’s why I had Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound on a imagesteleseminar recently.  One of her points was that you always have to be looking for opportunity.  She told the story of a Wisconsin Five and Dime store owner who, while reading the Milwaukee Sentinel saw a quote, “The dime store is dead.”  The right thinking owner took a black magic marker to a sheet of paper and sent a fax to the reporter, “We’re Not Dead.” The reporter drove up to the store with a photographer to interview the owner and got a front page article. That is great publicity.

What’s bad publicity? Thinking a sorrowful story will bring in customers. It won’t.  However, the media will eat it up.  A & E’s We Mean Business did a makeover with a woman who had maxed out her home equity to support the business and ultimately lost it.  That makes great TV but what does it say to your customers?  We aren’t going to be around long.

Another story I watched on MSNBC showed a business owner saying she didn’t have the capital to fill orders for her products.  She had pages and pages of orders she was holding. She should have gotten 50% down so she could create the products but she stubbornly showed her predicament.  What message was she sending to her customers – the ones who were waiting for orders? Not getting anything soon. And what message was she sending to perspective customers? We’re a risk.

The media is getting tired of telling more gloom & doom stories.  They are hungry for your positive story now.  They know their readers or viewers  want to hear about winners, how you can succeed, what innovation you’ve done, how you’ve used something like Twitter to build your customers’ loyalty.  They only cover what people make them aware of.  You can change that.

Do the work for a reporter, what is the angle you can offer? What is something everyone struggles with regarding your product?  Instead of thinking about an event or a publicity stunt you’re having, what is the story only you can tell to that reporter?  For example, how will the Economic Stimulus plan effect you?  Are you upgrading your POS system to capitalize on the accelerated depreciation? Then tell them why – what will it do for your customers.  That’s the right type of publicity.

Or how about today’s WSJ story by Geoffrey Fowler, Socks Don’t Match? How About A Subscription? where an entrepreneur came up with an online solution Blacksocks.com to men’s socks being eaten in the dryer?  Genius publicity!

You never know where being proactive to draw attention to your business will lead – but you do have to decide whether you want to appear wounded or victorious.  It’s the difference between people watching You’ve Got Mail where Meg Ryan loses the store or rooting on Mel Gibson in Braveheart. If I were you, I’d pick the later.

Big Business Lowers The Bar – Pays Bonuses

AIG spending millions to people who don’t even work there any more. Now people are clamoring for the return of bailout money.  CEOs making huge bonuses even as their companies flirt with disaster. How did they get this way? They lowered the bar.  And lowering the bar makes losers winners.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, an article by Phred Dvorak entitled Poor Year Doesn’t Stop CEO Bonuses, we learn of several CEOs  who made money because, “some CEOs were able to profit handsomely last year even as their companies — and their shareholders — fared poorly by traditional measures. In some cases, directors also tweaked performance targets to make goals easier to achieve.”

This is a common thing to do in big business apparently and one smaller businesses should be aware of – setting the bar too low.

When you are managing a sales team, it is important to set meaningful benchmarks for performance.  The days of, “Bless her heart, she tried,” are gone.

Setting sales goals requires knowing how a particular store has performed over the past week, month and year. Same for a salesperson.  You must give them something to stretch for but must be achievable.

Setting a bar too low by saying something like, “well in this economy, if they just didn’t lose business would be good,” rewards the weak.  You want to sell more? You want to be profitable? You want to be in business next year?  Raise the bar.

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