Hey, is Bob, and in this episode of Real Retail TV, I’m going to share with you a subtle shift that I learned that really saved my business. All right, hey, everybody, I’m out here in Miniswarez Nature Preserve, walking my dog Tucker, and, you know, I want to share with you something that I learned the hard way so that hopefully you don’t have to make the same mistake that I made. And I’m going to share with you a subtle shift that made all the difference to my business and I hope will make to yours. So let me tell you a story.

When I got into retail, when I opened the Mackinaw Kite Company, I knew nothing about business. I had no business experience. I didn’t know it was unconscious incompetence. And but, you know, I had an enthusiasm for kites.

And so I thought I’d open a kite store, you know, how hard can it be to run a successful independent retail store? You know, my very naive thinking was I shop, therefore I can run a store. And so I opened the Mackinaw Kite Company with $2,000 and no experience. And, you know, I started in that first year, I hired my younger brother Steve, who came my junior partner, who ended up buying the Mackinaw Kite Company from me.

And in the beginning, we weren’t very good. But we did a couple of things very, very well. One is we had really strong marketing instincts. And marketing is one of those fundamental skills that you need to have if you’re going to have a successful store.

Right and we weren’t sophisticated, but we intuitively knew that we needed to generate excitement. So we bought all these big, beautiful kites, and we would have shows across the street in a park across the street from our store. And, you know, we had these beautiful show showcase. One of our kites, the giant was 18 feet by 20 feet high.

You know, I mean, it was just I mean, that was a dimension. There was a parafoil. So, you know, that would generate excitement excuse me. People would come into the store.

And then our second skill, fundamental that we were really good at was selling. I mean, our conversion rate was incredibly high. You know, our average ticket was, you know, we had really maximized it. We had, you know, we Up.

Yeah we just did everything really, really well, you know. And what we did then is the basis for the Retail Sales Academy now. So we did two things really, really well, but nothing else. Well, at all.

And that’s really the essence of this episode, is that there are 11 fundamentals that you need to know the skills that are sort of, you know, built into those fundamentals. And so we kept growing. We had a great reputation. People came in, they loved us.

We gave them a great experience. And so then we had to hire people. And one of the things we learned pretty quickly is we didn’t know anything about managing or leading people. I had this naive notion that if I just asked people nicely to do things and because I was paying them, that they would do them exactly the way that I wanted them to be done.

And it created a lot of frustration, a lot of frustration when people didn’t do what I wanted them to do. And then one day I remember very, very clearly I had the realization that it was my fault, that the frustration was because the frustration, the things that happened because I didn’t have that fundamental skill of management, it was my fault that if things were going to change, I had to change. I had to learn how to be a better leader. I had to learn how to manage my team members.

And so I went out and I bought books and invested in courses and went to seminars and became a better manager and a better leader. And so it went from frustration to, you know, having a real sense of mastery. And this is important. This is the subtle shift that I’m talking about.

So before I understood this shift. From I am frustrated, let me put out the fire, too, I am frustrated. What is the problem here? What don’t I know?

What skill do I need to acquire? What fundamental piece of my business knowledge is missing? Before I made that shift, I was in the mode of spray and pray spray to put out the fire, pray that it didn’t flare up again. But the shift is if there’s a problem, it points to something I needed to do.

You need to do to not just put out the fire, but to solve the problem once and for all. And so that solved that particular problem. But what I didn’t know was there were a lot more fundamentals that were sitting in front of me. And so, you know, we would have problems with cash flow.

Here’s an example. And I know so many of you have had this exact same problem or maybe are having them right now. So every year we made a profit and we were expected to pay taxes on that profit, but we never had any cash in the bank. And you know why?

We never had any cash in the bank? It’s because we didn’t know how to manage our inventory. So our cash was stuck in inventory. We like to say our cash was sitting on the shelves, not in the bank.

And that’s because we didn’t have that skill of buying, of understanding how to manage our inventory correctly. And our store often was a wreck. Right? the stock room was a wreck.

And we might clean it up one day and two days later be in terrible shape. And it was because we didn’t have this fundamental skillset around store operations. And I’ll tell you what, really. And it was incredibly frustrating because Steve and I felt like we had a great business that was doing great things.

We grew every year. We had a really good reputation on the street, but it just didn’t feel quite right. And it was incredibly stressful. But then I met Susan and Susan had been trained on how to be a retailer.

Right? she was a department store executive. She went into a training program right out of college. And I remember the moment clearly, I was like, oh, my goodness, somebody actually taught her how to do this.

I was trying to learn the hard way, figuring it out on my own. You know, there were no books on retail management. I had to read generic leadership and management books, and Susan brought an entire skill set. And so all of a sudden when she started to show us the fundamentals, when she became our buyer and showed us what an open to buy did and what it could do for us, all of a sudden we went from never having cash to having cash.

Wow, what a revelation. When it comes to store operations, you know, how do you keep your store in great shape? You know, when it comes to merchandising, when you go to a trade show, what are you doing? Here’s what Steve and I used to do.

We would walk around a trade show and go, oh, man, that looks hot. Let’s buy a boatload of those. Word wasn’t a boat, you know? And then we go a little farther, oh, man, that looks awesome.

We’ll take six dozen of those. Oh, free shipping. We’ll take 12 dozen of those. So we had all of these.

We were doing all the things a store owner needs to do, but we didn’t have the fundamental skills to have it done right. And like I said, it was really, really, really frustrating and we probably would have stuck with it. But when Susan came and sort of took her skillset and added it to the skills that Steve and I had already developed, it took our business from being really, really a frustrating experience, stressful, a lot of spray and pray, a lot of sweat and things out to really something quite spectacular. Why?

because we made this shift from I need to solve this problem or I need to put out. Fire to I need to solve this problem, what skills do we need to develop to make this problem go away once and for all? So that’s the subtle shift. The subtle shift that I want to encourage you to recognize is when you become frustrated, don’t try to put out the fire.

But to ask yourself, what skill do I need to solve this problem? The shift from putting out a fire to solving a problem once for once and for all. And it’s all about fundamentals. You know, frankly, that’s why we created the Retail Mastery System, because we didn’t want other retailers to have to go through this long, arduous process of figuring out the skills and understanding what needs to be done, what are the fundamentals.

And, you know, it’s been incredibly successful for so many people, maybe like you who had successful business or who have successful businesses who love you. You may have a successful business. You may love what you’re doing. You may have a great reputation in the community, but you’re really frustrated because you’re not getting what you feel you should.

You’re not getting what you feel you deserve for all of the hard work that you’re putting in. So that you’re frustrated. Don’t try to put out the fire, try to understand what you need to learn to solve the problem once and for all. All right.

So I would love, as always, to hear your comments. Put them down below. I’m Bob Negen and we’ll see you next week.