This Episode: The Predictable Pattern of Retail Growth
Every retailer starts in the same place. And most follow a predictable pattern as they grow. In this episode, I share what I call the Retailer’s Journey, three distinct phases that every independent retailer moves through, and more importantly, how to figure out where you are right now and what it takes to get to the next level.
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Hey, it’s Bob Negen, and welcome to another episode of Real Retail TV. Today, I’m going to discuss something called the retailer’s journey. And hopefully, you’ll see yourself in this episode and you’ll learn how you can move yourself along. I was in retail for nineteen years myself working the floor just like many or all of you. For the last twenty years, all I’ve been doing is Working with independent retailers in my capacity as, you know, the cofounder of WhizBang! RetailTraining. And I have seen this pattern play itself out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. There is a predictable pattern in the way that retailers grow. And I call it the retailer’s journey. And I would encourage you to think about where you are on this journey as I explore the different steps. So the first step, the first phase in the retailer’s journey is this thing called shopkeeper. And when I was twenty three years old, I opened one of the world’s first kite shops, and I knew nothing about retail. I knew nothing about business. I was truly a shopkeeper. And there are a couple things that sort of signify someone being a shopkeeper. The first is passion, and my passion was for my product. I love Kites, I loved everything about Kites, and I thought that if I just loved Kites enough that somehow I was going to Well, I thought I was gonna become rich. But I quickly learned that your passion for your product is not enough to make you profitable. The focus of a shopkeeper is on putting out fires. I didn’t know what I was doing, so there was always a problem. And I didn’t have time to get in front of those problems and solve those problems. I was merely a fireman. The operative concept here is spray and pray. As a fireman I would spray and put out the fire and pray that it didn’t start again. But you know and I know it usually flared up again. The emotions that the shopkeeper feel are overwhelmed and stressed. Don’t get me wrong. Starting your retail business and being a shopkeeper is filled with joy and excitement and you know, and the the great feelings, but it’s also really, really stressful. It’s really overwhelming because you don’t know what you’re doing. And the mindset is a scarcity mindset. Your feeling is there’s not enough. And the reason that you feel there’s not enough is because usually there isn’t enough. You don’t have enough time. You don’t have enough skills. You don’t have enough money. You don’t know what you’re doing. So you live in this world of scarcity because it’s natural. It’s hard to get past that. In the thinking of a shopkeeper is very, very tactical. You’re just trying to solve a problem and move on. You’re trying to You’d get better. You know, you’re not thinking strategically at all. You are in the weeds working in the weeds. And if you’re a shopkeeper right now, please don’t think that that is a judgment on your intelligence, on your potential, Don’t think it’s a judgment. Everybody starts as a shopkeeper. I start as a shopkeeper. Even people who are experienced business people start as shopkeepers. Cathy McKillip, who was a very, very successful retailer. She owned her own quilt store, very successful quilt store, successfully sold it, She is now a WhizBang! certified retail coach. She shared the same story with me. She was a software executive with two hundred people returning to her. But she loved quilting, so she thought, I’ll buy this little quilt shop. How hard can it be to run a quilt store. I’m a successful business executive. She found out just how hard it can be to run a successful independent retail store. Even though she was an experienced business person in retail, she needed to start out as a shopkeeper. So the second Stage, the middle stage of the retailer’s journey is when you become a retail pro. And the retail pro is where everyone should aspire to get as quickly as possible. When you get to Retail Pro, you have a much deeper peace of mind. You’re having a lot more fun you are making money and you you you have essentially sort of fulfilled your retail dream. But the retail pro The retail pro’s passion is not for their product, although you may still have that passion for your product, Your passion is for your profession. You want to be good. You want your store to be good. You want to be a professional business person, a professional retailer. So your passion moves from product to profession. Your focus moves from putting out fires to systems and structures. You realize that for every problem that you have in your business, you don’t want to put out a fire. You want to create the systems and the structures to solve the problems once and for all. And the emotions go from overwhelm to comfort, control, to this thing, this feeling of, I got this. I remember one of our Platinum Mastermind Group alumni telling me that You know, when he finally got to retail pro, he came out for a Retail Success Summit, and he was driving back to the airport And he said, Bob, you know, Tom Petty was playing on the radio, and I turned down the windows and I I just had this feeling of, I got this. I finally got this. And isn’t that an amazing feeling? So that’s the feeling that you get when you become a retail pro. Your mindset goes from scarcity to there is enough. You have the skills. You have the experience. You know where you can get money if cash flow isn’t good. You know, there is enough. You know that you can solve problems. The thinking instead of being tactical, the thinking of a retail pro is working on your business. You remove yourself from the day to day on occasion or regularly or all the time, and you’re working on building a better business. You are now out of the weeds and looking down at your business in a very dispassionate professional way. So now this is very, very, very interesting to me, and I’ve seen it again and again and again And again, it happened to me. It seems that it happens at year two. At year two, you hit this thing that I call the danger zone. So excuse my language, but I call it the oh, shit moment. Right? That’s when you realize that you don’t know what you’re doing and something has to change or you’re going to go out of business. And the reason that I say it was year two is, that’s when it happened to me. And that’s what it happens to just about everybody I know. Year two is when you go, okay. I don’t know how to do this. So now here’s what happens when a retailer is in the danger zone. Between shopkeeper and retail pro. Some people start to place blame. They don’t take responsibility for their success. They Blame it on the chamber of commerce. They blame it on the economy. They blame it on their vendors. They find someone else to blame for their lack of success. And those people are soon to be out of business. It is hard to stay a shopkeeper for too many years before you either burn out or you financially fail. But now the other group of people that hit shopkeeper and go on to retail pro are people who say, wait a second. Yes. Things aren’t working the way that they’re supposed to work. But what that means is that I have to, you know, roll up my sleeves and get to work. I need to figure out how to become successful. And they do that by several different ways. One is they get how to information. If you’re a shopkeeper right now trying to become a retail pro, you need to invest in the retail mastery system. I don’t know any other way to say it. But it’s all of the skills you need to become a retail pro, all in one package. So it’s how to information. It’s practical skills. You know, you’re out there working every day. You’re learning leadership on the fly. You’re figuring out how to manage your inventory. You’re learning these practical skills on the fly. I’m gonna go back to the retail mastery system and say, not only are you learning these practical, you know, these skills on the fly, but if you have the retail mastery system teaching you in conjunction with the experiences that you’re already having running your business, your growth is going to accelerate significantly. And while you’re growing, while you’re figuring things out, while you’re learning from the retail mastery system, or wherever you learn the skills from. Every time you have a success, your confidence expands. Confidence is everything. And when you start to learn, when you start to grow, everything good starts to happen for you. The third and final phase is this thing that I call entrepreneur as artist. And this is when you’ve sort of transcended being a retail pro. People who are WesBank certified retail coaches tend to be entrepreneurs as artists. You’re an entrepreneur. You love doing things. And all of a sudden, you’ve got your business on rail. You might become a little bored. You might be looking for something else to do? You see, you’ve got your store dialed in. You are a true retail pro. You’re ready to do something else that might be even more interesting. So the entrepreneur as artists, their passion is for possibilities. They’re thinking bigger. Not only are they out of the weeds, but they’re seeing the world from thirty thousand feet to use the airline analysis analogy. The entrepreneur’s artist, their focus is on leadership, and vision in what my colleague, Dan Sullivan, calls unique ability They like to do the things that they like to do. They like to do the things that bring them joy that make a difference. The emotions they they experience are joy, excitement, playfulness. Now being an entrepreneur is play. You know, the shopkeeper is all wound up in doing the work. The entrepreneur as artist sees it all as play. The mindset of the entrepreneur as artist is abundance. It’s freedom. They have enough money. They have the team. They have the structures. They have the systems. It’s all working the way it’s supposed to work. So they are now free, free to do what they want to do. And their thinking is very, very strategic. They see the bigger picture, they see where they want to go, they have strategies, they employ the strategies. Everything works the way it’s supposed to work. And if that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to work, they have the skills and the confidence to go back and make it work. So how do you move from retail pro to entrepreneur as artist? The first thing that I wanna say is, you don’t have to. I’m suggesting you really need to move from shopkeeper to retail pro, but a lot of people get to retail pro and they have you know, manifested their vision. You know, you may wanna have one store with five, ten employees, super loyal customers who love you. You’re making a nice living. You’re paying for your retirement. That’s all you want. And if that’s all you want, that’s okay. You can stay at our pro, at retail pro. But if you want to become, a entrepreneur as artist. You need mentors. You know, you need to invest in coaches. You need to vest in the best conferences. You need to come to the Retail Success Summit. You need to fill your mind with great ideas. You need to expose yourself to, you know, to other ways of thinking. Another way to make that shift into entrepreneur as artists is to join masterminds. You know, the Platinum Mastermind Group that we lead is a group of the smartest retailers in that anywhere. And so imagine, you know, you getting together with me and Susan, and, you know, a dozen, you know, a dozen or so super smart retailers. You sit down in the room. You think about it. You solve problems. You share best practice. This is. You expand your mind. You know, the late jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, A mind once expanded will never return to its original shape. If you join a high level mastermind, And of course, I’m pitching you on the Platinum Mastermind Group. I love the Platinum Mastermind Group. And if you’re a retailer, there’s nothing better. But there are lots of masterminds that you can join. You join a mastermind and you participate fully, your mind will stretch. You will get better. It will lead you down the road to being an entrepreneur as artist. In the final thing and this goes for everybody, in every stage of their retailer’s journey, there’s self development. You cannot become a bigger, better business without becoming a better person. So regular self development is part of this journey. It’s things like how do you manage your time. How do you manage your mindset? Are you mindful about how you’re feeling? Are you developing the personal skills that you need to be successful? One of the modules in the Retail Mastery System is called Personal Business Skills, because you cannot be an entrepreneur as artist or even a retail pro, if you don’t have the skills that you need to manage yourself successfully to build your business the way that you should. So the question is, where are you And where are you going? You know, this retailer’s journey is merely a tool to establish a reference point. If you are much, much closer to shopkeeper, well, you know what you need to do now. If you are a retail Pro, but really are getting a little bored and you wanna move into entrepreneurs’ artists, that’s great. Now you know where you are. It’s a reference point And I hope I gave you a couple of little tips on how you can get there. So I hope that you found it helpful. And if you don’t have the Retail Mastery System yet, and you want to accelerate your growth by all means. Make that investment today. It comes with an unconditional ninety day money back guarantee. If it’s not everything I’m bragging it is, well, ask for your money back. If you’re a retail pro and you’re looking for inspiration, you’re looking to expand your mind, you’re looking to associate with some of the smartest independent retailers on the planet, by all means. Call the office. Let’s have a conversation about the Platinum mastermind group. We here at WhizBang! Retail Training, we exist to serve you to help you. You are the reason we come to work every day, and we would love to help you on your retailer’s journey. Hey, it’s Bob Negen Lolly. Hey, Hey. It’s Bob Negen, and in this episode, if you’re anywhere, how am I? Now. Yep. Just let me keep playing with it. Okay? Yes.
