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The Retail Doctor’s Guide To Growing Your Business Webinar

Let’s face it, having a new book out next week from a major publisher is a big thing for me but probably not so much for you.

“There’s no denying that retailers have taken a beating lately. But the smart ones find a way to stop the bleeding and start looking ahead for new opportunities. With his plainspoken style and real-world anecdotes, Phibbs gets back to basics and provides a helpful guide for entrepreneurs determined to position themselves for the next big upswing.” -Rod Kurtz Sr. Editor, Inc. Magazine

In planning The Retail Doctor’s Guide To Growing Your Business, I listened to readers of my popular first book, You Can Compete, who said they wanted updated information on how to use the Internet to boost sales as well as how to look at financials to truly gauge success. If you’ve heard me speak in the past year about social media, this is the book that covers it all in Chapter 7.

Like Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, this book has definite ideas of what you should be doing and what you should avoid doing. Known for my concrete advice and accessible style, you’ll receive insights that can be immediately applied by any reader.

Although I’ve been known for my work in retail, the target audience for this book is any small business owner who is nervous in today’s economic climate.

I’m holding a webinar for those who purchases from any retailer prior to Thursday, May 6 at noon EST will be held Thursday night at 8 PM EST. Can’t make it? I’ll record it so you can download afterwards for one week.

After your purchase, email me at orders At retaildoc.com prior to Thursday at noon EST with “DONE” in the subject line, the company you purchased it from and date. Please note- to participate in the webinar, you will need to log in to the web link we provide you and dial in from a phone line to hear the audio.

Purchase your copy today so you don’t miss out!

The last email I sent out boosted the book to #1 on Amazon business books,but it is a constant battle to maintain momentum.

The more orders, the more your local bookstores will take notice. The more they take notice, the more likely they are to order more copies of the book. With that inventory, more business owners will be able to compete and gain hope, not wallow in the mire of cable news. Here’s the 2 min video created for the book.

Still not sure? You can download the introductory chapter from The Retail Doctors Guide to Growing Your Business here http://www.retaildoc.com/guide/free-chapter.php.

The book launch is a big thing obviously. I have never solely pitched a product and won’t make it a habit, would appreciate you linking back to this or RT or posting on FB to get the word out!

If you’ve started to read the new book and have questions regarding the four personalties and what they mean to your business, please leave in comments.

7 Tips Any Business Can Learn From A Shoe Shine

I had just arrived at the Orlando airport yesterday when I spotted a shoe shine kiosk. While I waited for my turn, it struck me the lessons shoe shine operators could teach any business:

1) Know who you are and who you aren’t. Yes,they have customers waiting but that doesn’t mean they have gum ball machines or other irrelevant product.

2) Make it easy for customers to know what you do. Nothing is more frustrating to customers than guessing what a store carries. Nothing is more frustrating to managers than employees who don’t tell customers all the great programs or services they offer. They shouldn’t have to – it should be obvious.

3) There are no counters, no walls and nothing to interfere with their interaction with their customers. A shoe shine operator is completely exposed and focused. No shoes to shine = no food to eat. Simple.

4) Be visible in your community. If shoe shine operators aren’t busy, they are engaging busy professionals by saying, “Want to look your best?” No 20% discounts and no “sales” – just thinking what their customers ultimately value and reminding them.

5) Engage your customers. There’s most always a banter from the person shining your shoes. They know the more they connect, the higher the tip and more importantly, the sooner their customer will come back. Contrast that to the ice queens you meet in many businesses whether at the doctor’s office, the Macys or local hardware store where you hope you’ll never run into them again.

6) Hustle and focus. They never want someone to feel the wait is too long so they move quickly to do a great job and keep everyone happy. Focusing only on the customer’s experience often means you need to give up going on break, a personal call, anything that will distract from the person standing in front of you – after all, they’re the ones that pay your salary.

7) Thank every one. Whether they are tipped well or not at all, shoe shine operators always thank – its their livelihood.

Oh and if you think I’m just talking about men who shine shoes, a woman I know has been at the Men’s Shoe Department nearly 20 years at Nordstroms in South Coast Plaza, CA after giving up her corporate gig. By using her sales abilities she makes more money, has less stress and more of a feeling of accomplishment when she goes home than she ever did as a financial executive.

A lesson about doing a great job you can be proud of that we can all use.

Family Run Small Businesses Don’t Have To Close

You can’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, or go online without seeing a story of a venerable business calling it quits. Whether it’s the hardware store outside of Denver Colorado http://www.denverpost.com/economy/ci_14321403 or the gift store in Ann Arbor Michigan http://www.annarbor.com/business-review/the-end-of-an-era—the-john-leidy-shop-closes-after-58-years-in-business/.

Newspapers love to do these types of stories about family businesses, that prided themselves on longevity, have chosen to close their doors.

That is foolish.

Frequently cited reasons are (in no particular order,) the economy, shoppers trading down, trading area not as vibrant as it once was, big boxes, and online shoppers.

Are you looking at the landscape for the luxury consumer and it doesn’t look like it did even five years ago? Have you dumbed down your offerings to try to meet a price point at the expense of more profitable items? Are customers just not coming in anymore? There’s hope, but you have to work at it.

If your store has been around for generations, you have an abundance of goodwill in your community. That can be leveraged.

As an example, if you are a jewelry store, all those rings, watches and graduation gifts count for a lot, yet most jewelry stores are a time machine backward. Here’s what I mean.

When I go to jewelry store in 2010 it pretty much looks the way they did when I first visited them in the 1960s. Jewelry stores aren’t known for carrying a big retail footprint so why do jewelers want to segment every customer to one or two display cases?

For example, why am I still asked the “Pinpoint” approach? You know, “Can help you find something?” Then taken to the one display case of offerings? I may only see 10% of their offerings because their salesclerk has decided it was most efficient for me to look at what I came in for, rather than exploring the whole store. That’s a huge lost opportunity. You don’t know who I may need to buy something for some day.

The best retailers display multiple items together so customers are intrigued to stop, consider and browse. That means changing the way you display things so more of your store is shown in more places. Yes, you’ll have to hear employees say, “They keep moving things on me.” To them I say, “Deal with it if you want a job.”

The other approach I call the “Museum.” That’s where the employee says, “Look around and let me know if you’d like to see anything.” That expects customers to do all the work. Guess what, they won’t and will leave.

With Facebook and all the other social media sites, it is clear customers are responding to friends and trusting their advice. If you’re still expecting customers to come to the mount and have you efficiently explain a setting, you’re missing it. That means changing the way you approach selling your fine jewelry.

Both of those approaches are conducted behind large glass counters where the employee is literally the keeper of the keys. I call it storming the castle. Major banks, hotels and retailers have cut their counters in half, now more like desks than anything. The days of rows of cases that isolate are over. That means changing the way you setup your store.

Along with that is the approach many boutique retailers are using to sell from the side, rather than in front of the customer. It would mean unlocking a case and coming around the counter to build trust with the customer. Not hard in theory to do but try it, it your employees will fight the change.

To compete in 2010 you’ve got to ask the hard questions and then find the answers. Generations of Americans have owned their own jewelry, hardware, and gift stores and generations to come will as well. But it’s not going to get easier – you can’t blame someone else for you not being successful. You have to question. You have to think. And yes you have to be willing to risk trying new things.

As your competitors shutter their doors and online sites proliferate, it doesn’t have to be you that goes out of business.

It does if you’re not willing to change. And maybe that’s what this article is really all about: the willingness to change, to risk; to realize we’re not going back to the go-go 80s the flamboyant 90s or the home-equity fueled 2000′s. Know whatever future we have in retail will be determined by people like you who look at the way they’ve always done business and say, “how about if we…?” They don’t take the easy way out, they don’t leave their community hanging, and they don’t find the media to announce, “We’re outta here,” but rather, “We’re here to stay.”

Best-selling author and speaker Bob Phibbs has helped thousands of independent businesses compete and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine. His new book, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business (Wiley & Sons) has received advance praise from both Inc. magazine and USA Today and can be ordered at http://www.retaildoc.com/guide.

©Bob Phibbs 2010

Toyota Recall & Domino’s Pizza Mea Culpa Destroy Brand Image

Did you catch today’s news that Toyota, the brand many American’s have run to from GM and Ford because they were “better built” than the Big 3, has halted production and withdrawn eight models? Not just came up with a recall to fix but HALTED PRODUCTION of 60% of their products due to an accelerator glitch they don’t seem able to get a handle on. The full story can be read at the WSJ but with such a mea culpa, have they raised our consciousness to such a level that we now question all those years of quality reports? I know I do.

[Updated 2/2: The New York Times reports, "At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes. You can read it all here.]

But they’re not the only ones. Have you checked out the new Dominoes pizza ads that basically say their pizza crust sucked for the past 50 years and they had to do something to acknowledge customers’ honest comments? They’ve even created their own website reinforcing again how they had to change. You can watch Patrick Doyle’s message here.

But wait, it’s not just the Domino’s Pizza company CMO and President saying they’re sorry. How about Jr. and Ramon (the District Manager?)’s video apology to a Twitterer’s tweets about a bad experience. Just amazing to watch a DM in Chicago apologize about Dominoes 223 Lincoln. Domino’s may have still been smarting from their disgusting employees in Conover last year and how their response was anything but mea culpa. If you missed that post, its here.

What’s fascninating is they are major companies taking the lead in saying, “Yep, we got problems.” Maybe its due to the influence of social media they want to get ahead of things, I’m not sure but the acknowledgements are almost reveling in their rottenness.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, imagine saying to your sweetheart, I can’t see you anymore because I’ve been unfaithful, not sure when I can stop so stay tuned.” Or, “I know I’ve been unfaithful, here’s the room we stayed at, the bedsheets and notes I wrote – I get it, I’m bad but give me another chance because hey, I’ve got a video.”

Is this where watchdog reporters have led us? Think back to Lee Iacocca’s commercials for Chrysler in the 80′s – he never said, “We sucked and hope you’ll give us a chance.” His message was “We’re doing amazing things.” Of course, the difference is he had high safety ratings, when you have cars that accelerate uncontrolably, you kinda ‘cede that.

Now consumers who have purchased Toyotas and those who will undoubtedly buy them in the future will scrutinize the brand like never before.

Lesson to businesses large and small, if you want to become a larger brand, you better pay attention to the most basic brand promises:

eating our product won’t taste bad or
our products won’t kill you.

It really is the little things that allow you to say those things. Take your eyes off the ball and you’ll be whipping yourself like the judge in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd – hopefully not on the global stage like Toyota and Dominoes. Which could tarnish the reputations of others in their categories and, Toyota’s case, a whole country.

PS – This isn’t like the Tylenol scare which killed 7 people because of a saboteur tampering with the bottles in stores. Toyota has almost 100 deaths due to sudden acceleration – they knew about this as far back as 2006. This won’t blow over.

Business Management Strategy Fail: The Fallacy of More With Less

My mom is from Virginia. She tells stories of growing up with her seven brothers and sisters baking two or three loaves of bread, two or three pies, rolls and cakes for Sunday dinner. Even as a single mom, she often made bread or rolls for us on weekends. I’d watch her as I got older; she never used a recipe. ”Why not?”I once asked.

making-yeast-bread

“Don’t need it, its basic science what has to go in and what proportions.” She was after all a science teacher.

I thought about her baking recently as I heard more predictions of businesses needing to do “more with less” in 2010. In fact a Google search resulted in over six million results. More with less.

If you add more flour to bread dough, it won’t rise. Why? Because the yeast can’t lift the added weight. If you cut the yeast in half and use the same amount of flour, the dough won’t work either. In either case, less is still less – something suffers.

So how can you get more with less? Entrepreneurs are still wearing too many hats; are they supposed to put on another one? Instead of adding staff, are retailers supposed to give existing staff even more responsibilities? Is a store department manager supposed to manage an additional department’s employees?

In all of these cases, something has to give because the reality is, less is still less.

This reminds me of another old saying I heard a lot at NRF recently, “perception is reality.” No, only reality is reality. If I perceive I’m Tom Cruise – sorry – it doesn’t make me Tom Cruise. I think that makes me delusional. Only reality is reality.

Doing less with more, cutting past the fluff and the fat into the marrow, has led to:

Deterioration of basic merchandising and display techniques
Deterioration of hiring standards
Less people on the sales floor
Less training by the few who run the sales floor
An emphasis on looking backwards at data rather than selling in the moment

So what should you do? Make a list every morning of what you want to accomplish. Next prioritize it. Work through your list. What is left each day may be insignificant or major. After awhile, you’ll probably see that many major things were left undone.

I think we’ve seen plenty of “profitable” companies crowing how they are doing more with less. Really or are they just doing less?

For many retail businesses, the bread’s in the pain – waiting to rise to the occasion or sit. What’s your choice going to be?