Hey. It’s Bob Negen. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore an acronym that I strongly encourage you to make part of your company’s language, part of your company’s vernacular.

So last week, we had a meeting of the Platinum Mastermind group here in our offices in Grand Haven.

And one of the many, many, many, many pearls of wisdom that got dropped at that meeting came from Jessica Slosser. And Jessica is the owner of two pet stores, Lizzie’s and Rocco’s Natural Pet Market in Columbia, Missouri. And she just kinda dropped it in an offhand manner.

And I went, wait. Woah. Woah. Woah. Wait a second. That is great. May I share that?

And, of course, because she’s incredibly generous, she said, yes.

The acronym is COLA.

And COLA stands for customers, orders, lists, and all the other stuff.

So what Jessica has done with this acronym is she has made it part of the way her team thinks. Her team prioritizes their attention and the work they do by this acronym, customers, orders, lists, all the other stuff. So let’s explore it for just a second.

Customers.

The customer should always be the priority.

Who brings money in the door? Your customers.

Yet so many stores focus on all the tasks, focus on all the logistics that the customers get shuffled to the side.

Big mistake. The customer should always come first, and this acronym gives your team the permission and the attention to make the customer come first.

The second is, oh, orders.

If you have stuff that is sitting in the back room, you can’t sell out of the back room.

All the great stores I know when an order comes in, they do everything they can to get it out on the floor as quickly as possible.

Why? Again, you can’t sell from the back room. So a well run store efficient efficiently processes the orders that come in the back door and they get them out on the floor.

Why? Because if it’s out on the floor, your team can sell it and your customers can buy it. Lists lists are all the things that need to get done. And everybody has a different way of communicating the lists.

But, you know, in a retail store, the lists are endless, aren’t they? But every store I know, every good store has a way of communicating all of the other tasks that need to get done. They put them on lists. And then finally, all the rest of the stuff, we’re in retail.

Things pop up all the time. And so there’s always other things that need to get done that aren’t customers, that aren’t orders, that aren’t on that sort of organized list, and all of that needs to be done, but it all gets done after the first three.

So there’s this idea that attention goes where that your team’s attention goes where you put your attention.

That energy follows attention. So what I’m suggesting, what I’m hoping this episode of Real Retail TV, inspires you to do is to make cola part of your company’s language. You need to talk about it a lot. You need to bring people around to it often.

They need to think about it. You need to talk about it enough so that if they stop and think, what should I do? They naturally come back to COLA.

Do this.

Make COLA part of your company’s language, and you are going to be absolutely thrilled with the results.

I promise you that.

So this is the very last episode of Real Retail TV that is coming from this studio. They are tearing down this building, and they’re gonna put up a hotel.

As Joni Mitchell said, they’ve raised Paradise, and they put up a parking lot. Here, they’re gonna raise our office and put up a hotel. But, so who knows what the next episodes of Real Retail TV look like, but here’s what I can promise you. I can promise you that they’re gonna keep coming for you. So take care, everybody. We’ll see you next week.