Hey. It’s Bob Negen, and welcome to another episode of Real Retail TV.

In this episode, you’re going to get a sample sample of the ideas you’ll get from a retail rumble that happened at last year’s retail success, summit. But before we begin, I want to invite you to a special event that we’re doing on April two, and it’s called the Retail Recharge.

You know, right now, there’s so much negativity and so much uncertainty.

And this event is going to be about all about bringing the positivity, about ideas, mindset shifts, all of the things that you need to get inspired again, to go into any situation feeling good about yourself, your business, and your future.

Enjoy the Retail Rumble.

And a vendor newsletter. We all send lots of information and newsletters and emails and all this kind of stuff to our customers.

We need to also develop these kinds of strong relationships with our vendors.

Send at least once a month, send your vendors a newsletter.

Talk about the upcoming events and promotions that are happening in your store.

Tell them what’s selling now. Do, do a partner of the month. Activate their competition.

Right? So if if, one vendor is a partner of the month, they were are gonna wanna be partner of the month. Talk about an employee of your store and always be sure to ask for what you need from them.

Develop this relationship, and when you go to ask for those things, it’s gonna be a lot easier to get a yes from them.

Wow. Very close for you too, honey. Yeah. Yeah. So you all know about how I feel about this, but my next, retail rumble is don’t charge for credit cards. Don’t let your customers pay the way that they wanna pay. We talked with Nick about this whole idea of loyalty, more transactions per customer.

We did a survey on whiz bang retailers and four hundred and fifty people replied.

Forty five percent of the people who responded to that survey replied that in some way, shape, or form, there were several answers, but, essentially, these are independent retailers. These are people like you who who who know how much it costs to use credit cards. Forty five percent of them said, if somebody charges me to use a credit card, I’m not gonna say anything. I’m never gonna come back.

You are shooting yourself in the foot when you charge people charge people to use their credit card.

Oh. I I had it in my hand that time. Tip number ten, shop other stores with your key people.

This is a good one.

Take them with you.

Again, let them experience what happens when they walk into somebody else’s store. Do they get a perfect purchase? What does the engagement o meter say? What does the store display look like?

So when you go and you are not telling them, but you’re having an experience together, whether it’s a great experience or not a great experience, this gives you guys a chance to talk together and process this information and really start to design and think about what do you want your store experience to be like when somebody else walks in. Powerful tool.

Here’s another powerful tool that really ties into what, Aurel was talking about. This idea of, you know, us making them empowered, making your team empowered. You know, getting, business cards is really inexpensive. But when you give your team members business cards, that shows that you are including them. You know, we did this for years at the Mackinac kite company. In one year, we sort of stopped.

So and then when we started it again, everybody said, wow. I’m so glad you brought that back. Make them feel good. They’re going to hand out your business cards. They will be much more effective am ambassadors of your store if they feel important, and business cards make them feel important.

They feel belonging, that sense of belonging. That’s awesome. Alright. Number twelve, buy into key sales.

This is a good one.

Well, they’re none of them are bad. Right? We didn’t pick bad ideas for the retailer.

I’m just trying to chew up your time.

Yeah. Exactly. You’re doing it. Buy into the key sales, you guys. This means in advance, when you have your annual marketing plan that we talked when you know in advance what you’re gonna be doing, you can go to your vendors and you can buy into at at lower prices, items that you can then sell at a a discount and maintain your margin.

Buy into your clearance sales. Yes. You wanna clear out, you know, maybe the dogs and and bad buys that you’ve had through the years. But you also want to like, you can bring in merchandise that you can sell on your clearance your clearance sales and maintain your margin because you bought into them at an already low discounted price.

So There is an enormous amount of money with that tip she just shared. So the next one is get the monkey off your back. So every time somebody comes to you and asks you a question, what they’re doing is putting a monkey on your back. Right?

The problem becomes yours. And pretty soon the monkey, your back, all the monkeys on the on your back make your back heavier and heavier and heavier. So the tip is get the monkeys off your back. When someone comes to you with a problem, when someone comes to you and wants an answer for something, don’t take the monkey and put it on your back.

Ask them, what do you think we should do? Get them to start thinking for themselves. Because if you don’t empower them to think for themselves, they’re going to forever come and put their monkeys on your back. And monkeys are heavy.

Monkeys are heavy. Do a training program, and they can go, like, find the answers there. Right? Okay.

Number fourteen.

Make sure that the contact info is easy to find on your website, on every page of your website.

One of the things that people really wanna do when they come to your website is they wanna look for your address. They might wanna find your telephone number. They might wanna find your socials that you know, they want your contact information. They want the information about your store, and don’t hide it. Don’t make them go to four clicks down into your contact page in order to get this information.

Make it easily available so that no matter what they’re looking for on your page, there’s a way for them to contact you to get the information that they need or that they can find your store hours instantly when they’re, you know, when they have the desire from browsing your site to come in. They want the info immediately.

One of the most important concepts in staff development and team development is this idea of nonnegotiable standards. And the non and a nonnegotiable standard is by definition a standard that everyone does. The deal is is you do things this way in exchange for your paycheck.

And so a nonnegotiable standard, pick a couple of things that are really, really important to you, and then make sure they get done every single time. Examples of nonnegotiable standards are you attempt to add on to every sale at the register every single time. You ask everyone who comes to the register, are they part of your loyalty program? And if they’re not, you invite them too. So think about what’s bothering you or think about where there’s opportunities.

Think about the behaviors that are associated with it. Pick a couple of them and get serious about making part of your culture. I knew you. I thought you were cutting me some slack, Lily.

I did.

I I looked over there and I saw oh, man. Alright. Alright. Alright. Alright.

Oh, this is one of my favorites, you guys, especially for you. You’re so hardworking. You do so much in your businesses.

Rest is a necessary activity. Now a lot of you, if you might have achieved gone to that achiever stage, you sometimes feel like, if I’m not working, if I’m not busy, if I’m not planning, if I’m not doing, I’m being lazy.

Selfish, somebody said. Same idea. I’m being lazy.

You are not.

You have to rest as an activity in order to replenish yourself so that you can continue to be effective and inspirational and achievement oriented in your business. But if you never rest, you’re gonna be depleted and burnt out.

Great tip, honey. Great tip. Here’s a great tip for you. If you have the Retail Mastery System and you feel overwhelmed by it and you’re really, really busy, rather than saying, I I’m not getting anywhere, just say, I’m gonna make a commitment to one module a month. Forget about December. Don’t worry about in December. But if you commit to one module a month, how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time. If you wanted to make sure you went through the entire retail mastery system, one module a month, whether you’re listening to it in your car driving to work, whether you’re exercising, whether you sit down and take notes, that’s unimportant. But one module a month makes it super, super manageable. I guarantee you at the end of that year, you will be a different business person.

Alright. I hope you enjoyed some of those ideas. And, again, I want to encourage you to be at the Retail Recharge. Click on the button down below to RSVP, and we’ll see you there.