Reset Your Retail Business for a Successful 2012

It's a new year. And that means a fresh start. Sure, nothing is different on January 1st vs. December 31st really. But our minds go through a mental reset, allowing us to purge everything from the prior year and set our mind to a brand new year full of possibilities.

But all those possibilities in your mind are useless unless you reset your business too. What does resetting your business entail?

Start with a plan

Have you assessed your sales from last year? Your profitability? Your gross margin? If not, how will you know where you're going this year? The most successful businesses are successful because they have a plan to get to where they want to go. You wouldn't start a diet without a goal weight you wanted to achieve. So why aren't you setting a goal for sales, for profits or for gross margin.

Clear out the clutter

The new year provides an opportunity to get rid of all the junk you've been accumulating. And junk can be everything from excess inventory you didn't sell (but somehow 9 months later you believe you still can sell it), visual props and elements that are stacked to the ceiling in your storeroom, or a cash wrap so piled with papers that your customers can barely find room to put their merchandise. Clutter in the form of unsold merchandise diminishes working capital. And clutter in the form of, well clutter, diminishes the experience your customer can expect from you. January is typically a slow retail month so what's preventing you from doing a little spring cleaning a couple months early?

Re-imagine your store experience

Go outside onto the street or into the parking lot and look at your storefront. What do you see? Now open the front door and look inside. Take a good hard look. What catches your eye. And what doesn't? So often we get into the day to day machinations of our business that we lose the forest through the trees. Most often when helping clients, the first thing I do is reset the store, literally moving nearly every fixture around to make the store flow better and to make the customer shopping experience more enjoyable. When re-imagining your store experience, think about signs, music and lighting too.

Get re-engaged

It's tough to stay engaged everyday. We get busy and all those important to do's go by the wayside. We spend all day working that we don't have the energy to do what it takes to go the extra mile. Retail is tougher and tougher these days, and the extra mile can make all the difference between success and failure. Customer expectations around store experience, value, price and merchandise selection continue to rise. How are you going to re-engage to help not only achieve but surpass those expectations? Pssst. I'll share a little secret: Empower your employees to help. You'll have two or three or four hands to do the work, and that means you've reduced your need to do 100% of the work (and you've probably made employees more happy but giving them the added responsibility).

It's still tough to be a small business owner. But there's no better time than now to reset. So get on the launch pad, and set a trajectory for your business that reaches for the stars.

How are you going to reset for the new year?

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