Hey. It’s Bob Negen. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore perhaps the hardest thing in retail.
So you might ask, what is the hardest thing in retail? Is it working long hours? Is it working thirty straight days during the holidays?
Is it the pressure of paying the bills and doing all those things?
Here’s what I would say. That those aren’t the hardest thing in retail.
The hardest thing in retail, in my experience, for most independent but not all independent retailers is to change.
And what do I mean by that? Here’s a premise I’m going to make, that the vast majority of independent brick and mortar retailers are good, kind people.
They want things to be smooth. They want things to be easy. They want things to be pleasant.
After all, you opened your store not to be stressed out, not to be overwhelmed, but to do something fun, do some something significant, to build something valuable.
But here’s what happens.
What happens is all of a sudden you have to manage people.
And you because you’re a good, nice, kind person, you don’t like confrontation.
And you avoid confrontation, partially because you want to avoid confrontation, but partially because you don’t know what to do. This is my story. Right? So, when I was twenty three years old, I started one of the world’s first kite businesses, a specialty kite store, the Mackinac Kite Company.
First year, I hired my younger brother, Steve. Well, there’s all the family dynamics in play right away there also, but then we grew. We had a nice business. We started to hire people.
And because I was a nice guy, because I was a cool dude, quote, unquote, I just expected that if I asked nicely, maybe said please, maybe said thank you, that people would do what I wanted them to do, do what I asked them to do.
If you’re a retailer and you’re watching this, you know that that’s just not the way it plays out on the floor.
So I had to change.
And I had a moment, I won’t tell you the whole story, but I had sort of this epiphany one day where I realized that my team was not what I wanted it to be. My team was not giving my customers the service that they deserved. And the thinking was if Nordstrom’s can have, you know, dozens and dozens of stores and thousands of employees and give legendary customer service, how come Bob Nagin, who has three stores and, I don’t know, a couple dozen employees, can’t get their their team members to do what they wanted them to do, what I wanted them to do. And it made me realize that I needed to change, that I had to get comfortable being uncomfortable, that I had to hold my team members accountable for doing things the way that I wanted them done and doing them the right way. And if they didn’t want to do that, I needed to to be comfortable doing the uncomfortable things of either firing them or disciplining them or getting them to come back into good.
And from that moment where I had that epiphany until the moment when it all sort of came together for me, it was a full eighteen months, which leads me to my next point. So let’s just assume that you’re watching this and you’re going, yeah, Bob. You know, I’ve got three people on my team who are driving me crazy. Two of them show up late all the time. One of them does never gets out from behind the counter. I’ve got three people who are driving me crazy, and things need to change.
So here’s the two things to think about.
First of all, you have to commit to changing. You have to commit to putting on your big boy pants or your big girl pants and say, I’m gonna do the things that need to be done. Whether that means I have to fire one, two, three, whether it means that I have to work all the hours, whatever it takes needs to be done.
So you have to make that commitment. The strength of your intent is going to determine the results. Now once you’ve made that commitment, recognize that it’s going to take a while.
That took me eighteen months.
That it’s going to take a long time. But once you’re committed, be gentle with yourself.
When it doesn’t work, when you make mistakes, when you slide backwards, when all of these things happen that are part of a journey, don’t beat yourself up. Just be gentle with yourself and keep moving forward. So that’s the first part. Be committed.
Be gentle. The second part is to recognize that if you don’t have skills, you’re not going to be able to get the job done. Now if you have the retail mastery system, you can go into the staff development module and, you know, listen to it, learn it. I had a conversation with somebody recently and what I told them, they had a team that was driving them crazy.
We had this exact conversation and my advice to her was to just listen to that staff development module, all of it, two or three times.
Immerse yourself in the information.
Make yourself a better manager.
Make yourself a better retailer. Because you can do you can be committed, but if you don’t have skills, it’s not going to work.
Now this isn’t about the retail mastery system. You can learn management. You can learn leadership other places. I’m just telling you, as an independent retailer, you won’t find it better any place else. But that’s not what this is about. What this is about is, my assertion that you have to have skills to get this job done.
But if you do those two things, if you make a real commitment to change and you make learning how to be a manager part of that commitment and you follow through by doing the uncomfortable, and you keep doing the uncomfortable till you get comfortable with the uncomfortable, good things are going to happen. You know, you’ve heard us talk we’ve talked about this time and time again, that the customer experience is your number one competitive advantage, and the people who are delivering that customer experience are your team members.
And what I’m suggesting to you is that when you do this work, you’re gonna have a better life. Your customers are gonna have a better experience. Your team members are going to be happier with each other. Everything about your business life is going to be better.
So it may be the hardest thing to do. It may be hard work, but it’s good work.
It’s perhaps the best work. So I am encouraging you. If your team isn’t everything that you want it to be, to make that commitment, do that work, and reap the benefits.
I’m Bob Negen. I hope you found this helpful. If you did, give it a like, and, we’ll see you next week.