How to build a powerful Retail dashboard to x2 your sales

Some recent meetings with retailers have highlighted a serious issue among business owners.

Those who had a dashboard were able to make the right decisions, had a lean stock and were increasing sales by 5 to 30% each year.
In some hot product categories, sales were able to double!

If they did not have a dashboard to look at (and most did not), they did not know exactly what was happening in their business.
On occasion, they had a dashboard but it was the wrong one.

What do we mean?

1. The indicators that the management was looking at were not the relevant ones
2. The frequency was not right
3. There were no decision making following the review process
4. The dashboard had too much information and/or the data was structured in such a way that it was hard to read and the management was not reading it to make decisions

At the next management meeting, bring critical thinking and set up the right dashboard for your business.
Remember that a brick and mortar dashboard will not be identical to an online business dashboard!

It can take us 2 to 4 hours to help deliver results if you are a small business.
The investment will pay for itself in 30 days in most cases. 

The purpose of this email is not to provide THE dashboard you need to implement but at least to give you an idea of the minimum data you want to look at. 

Let's not waste time or money in setting up this dashboard.
The sooner it is implemented, the sooner you will be making extra sales and generate a higher profitability.
It will help you pay for the retail high fixed expenses from rent, stock and salary. Can you afford to let your profitability down?

Indicators you should review every 2 weeks or every month even if your boutique does $200 000 or $300 000 in sales per year.

• Total sales per store 
• Total sales per product category
• Total traffic in the store / per week - per month
• Conversion rate ( number of transactions/ total traffic )
• Average sales per transaction
• Average unit per transaction
• Total discounts per product category per month
• Sales per staff
• Staff meetings: Validate product knowledge and sales techniques
• IMU (initial mark up), MMU (maintained markup or gross profit), GMROI (gross margin return on investment) ...

NB - Product category= dresses, trousers, skirts, knitwear, pumps, sandals, necklaces, bracelets ...

The categories you select and the number of categories you look into are critical to your retail success.
Set up around 8 to 12 product categories (at a level 1 analysis) if you do around $300 000 in sales. It is alright to look at 25 to 30 categories if your store does $1000000 in sales.

We can easily work together and set up the right product categories in less than 4 hours in you provide us with history data and you are a store doing less $1 M.
In addition to the category structure, you will benefit from a lot of advice to grow sales and profitability. 

In addition to tracking history data, make sure you establish your planned sales for the next 6 to 12 months and review those numbers monthly.
Have such sales forecast done by product category if you are serious about optimising sales and profitability.

Finally, analayse and plan per month and per product category the Stock/Sales Ratio. For example, to have the Stock / Sales ration for the month of July, divide the Stock level in $ expressed at Retail Value on July 1 by the Total July Sales. 
For people using VAT as we do in Europe, have both numbers (Stock value and Sales) to be expressed VAT excluded or included.

Take action today and you can increase sales and profits this year.

Happy Retailing, onwards and upwards.

NB We work with our US partner on delivering for over 30 years an open to buy plan / merchandise plan to independent retailers. As we work with you alongside the expert, you are never alone in managing your buying. You can rely on a Retail Expert to support you on all the important decisions in the business.
Apart from the OTB plan, we deliver a break even analysis, a cash flow projection, advice on buying, selling, managing suppliers and many other retail business insight to imrpove the store's performance.

Book your appointment 1-2-1 here.

Resources

1. The Art and Science of Buying - A video you cannot afford to miss if you want to have the right product at the right time in the right qunatity.