You closed? Make the most of it.

Jeremy McKinley
Oct 30, 2020
10 min read

We are in an unprecedented time. The coronavirus and resulting Covid-19 illness have effectively kept most of us at home, and while we’re doing the right thing in effort to “flatten the curve,” many retail establishments have been ordered to close or are closing due to lack of customers. Some may not be able to come back from this, and unfortunately their doors will not open again. For others, this will be a challenging time, but one in which strategy, tenacity, and ingenuity can help weather the storm. We’re here to help if we can.

Remember back a few weeks ago… seems like years rather than days... many businesses were having great first quarters, on track to having record first quarters is what I’d heard from some. If you are like most retailers across the country that now seems life a lifetime ago. Whether you’re fortunate enough to be open right now or have been forced to close your doors, there is opportunity here.

Throughout my career, I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve had an owner or a manager of a retail establishment tell me “I’m too busy working in my business to work on my business!” Often, my first answer to that statement is “Hire better people and you’ll have the time!” but that is a story for a different day. I do get it though, and it is hard to carve out the time to do things to improve your business, or even just to make things a bit more efficient, when you are slammed with customers. But guess what? You have nothing but time right now. If you aren’t using this opportunity to work on your business while you can’t work in it… well, you’re doing it wrong.

Eventually, we will emerge from our homes and start living our lives again. On both personal and professional levels, this collective experience will undoubtedly illicit changes in our lives. There will be short-term changes and long-term changes, and you owe it to your business to use this time to set yourself up for success in advance of when we are allowed to resume “real life” again.

So, what can you do?

Later in this post I have some suggestions for you, but before we get to that I want to address the elephant in the room: you likely have dozens if not hundreds of things on a list, or multiple lists, waiting for you to get to. You likely don’t need anyone to tell you what you need to be doing. I get that. And if that’s the case, let me give you some advice that might help you get a few of those things done while you’ve got the time.

If you have your list handy here’s what I want you to do… run through that list and find five things you can get to right now. They don’t have to be the most important or even the ones that will give you the biggest benefit. We’re just looking for “Uncle Mo” right now- a few things that can get knocked off the list relatively easily so you can get some forward momentum going.

Great. Now, pick one. Just one. Put the rest of them away and focus on that one. I don’t care if it’s “get the weeds out of the parking lot” or “paint the bathroom” - just focus on one. Stop reading this and go start it. Right now. Come back when you’re done.

"It's the job that's never started that takes longest to finish." - Samwise Gamgee, Lord of the Rings

Ok, that felt good, yeah? Maybe you even finished a few things before you came back to read the rest of this post. The point here is that it’s stressful right now, and in times of stress we often feel paralyzed. Sometimes there’s just so much going on in our heads that we can’t even see the simple things we can do to help ourselves out of our stress. Now that you’ve got one or a couple things knocked off your list and have some momentum… dive into the rest of that list. You’ll be better for it when we’re back to normal and no longer have the time.

But wait. What if you don’t have a list? Or what if your list is so old that it’s out of date? Or maybe you just want someone to tell you what to do (in times like this, I don’t judge). Like I said earlier, there’s opportunity here. I have some suggestions for you.

The Basics:

I invite you to read a post I recently penned about customer expectations and my vasectomy (yes, you read that right). Check it out if you have a few minutes.. and I know you do. In that post I mention how most retailers really need to focus on the basics and meet their customers’ basic expectations before moving on to other more “shiny objects.” As outlined there, those basics are:

A clean and organized store
A knowledgeable and empowered staff
Reasonable pricing
The products customers want are in stock or easily orderable
Easy checkout and easy returns (yes, that is two, but they go together)

If you do nothing else during the downtime that you have, really dig into each of those five basic things. Let’s break them down a little:

A clean and organized store

Is your store really clean? Would your grandma think it was clean? (My grandma is the queen of finding things that I thought I for sure swept under the rug. I can tell you, if I think it’s “good enough,” it isn’t.) Now is a great time to do a deep cleaning.

How many times do you get asked where a certain product is? If you’re being asked where something is, there’s a chance that your store is not organized as well as it could be. Have you worked on your spacing or adjacency lately? When was the last time you moved your product around to make your flow better? Now is the time.

Some things you can do to improve the cleanliness and organization of your store:

Clean the bathroom. It always needs it and customers judge your store by it
Paint that thing you’ve been putting off for years.
Contact your brand partners and see if they have any new displays for you. These are often free or sold at a minimal cost and can increase sales of products by 50% - 100%.
Create three piles: save, give away, and throw away. You don’t need to go all Marie Kondo on the place, but you know what needs to be done. Do it.

A knowledgeable and empowered staff

Communication, whether in heyday or hardship, builds relationships, mutual respect, and morale better than anything else. This is more important now than ever. Whether you’re in a position to continue paying your employees even if they can’t come in and work (thank you if you are!) or if you’ve found yourself needing to furlough or lay your people off, keep in touch with them.

For those employees who are still receiving some sort of compensation, this reinforces their value to your business as well as your long-term commitment to their well-being. Capitalize on this idle time by helping them become the most knowledgeable staff possible. Provide them with ways to continue learning about product or policy or company history or customer service or anything else that will make them better employees when they return.

In situations where continued pay is not feasible, still keep the dialogue open. It’ll cost you less later to bring them back than to hire and train a completely new staff.

A truly empowered staff may require a bit more upfront time and attention, but it’s what is expected in today’s retail. Your customers don’t want to cause a scene and have to ask to speak with a manager. They want the person they are talking to, right then, to have the ability to make it right. It’s up to you how you want to handle this, but I can tell you that one pissed off customer will cost you way more than allowing your employees to take a return that might be a few days after your stated policy, as an example.

If you choose to tackle this Basic, and I encourage you to, here are a few ideas to get you going:

Edit or rewrite your employee handbook or policy manual. Make it as simple as possible.
Don’t have an employee handbook or policy manual? Write one. Try to keep it to no more than three pages.
Find out if the brands you carry have training materials you can share with your employees.
Write the story of your company and share it with your employees.
Catalog all of the manufacturer warranty and return policies. Figure out which ones you can take advantage of and which ones you need to do better on. Have your employees weigh in.
Ask your employees for their input on any and all of these.

Reasonable pricing

Notice the words I used. Reasonable pricing. Believe it or not, you do not have to have the lowest price in town to run a great business. Your customers know that there are differences in price. They understand that they might be able to find it less expensive online. And they may even show-room you and do just that. Let them. Be nice and help them with all the info they need. They’ll remember. As long as your price is close and you’re taking care of the basics, you’ll get the sale. A few things you might consider here are:

Check the pricing on your top 10, 20, 30, 50, heck even 100 items and compare those prices to competitors and online. Are they high? Are they low? Are you making what you need to make on them?
Take a really close look at your suppliers. Are you getting the best prices possible? Are there suppliers out there that might be better? Now is the time.
Find out what your top products are. Do you know?

The products customers want are in stock or easily orderable

Imagine finally getting out of your house and heading down to the local pub for your favorite beer and finding that they don’t have it and don’t know when it might be back. That would suck. With shortages and disruption in supply chains, it’s a distinct possibility. Take this time to do what you can to make sure you’ve got what people want when they come back in.

Back to the top products. Does your point of sale system allow you to run a report? When was the last time you did it? Now is a good time.
Contact your suppliers early and often. Give yourself the best chance to get what you need when you need it.
Be a futurist. What products do you carry (or not carry yet) that you expect pent up demand for?

Easy checkout and easy returns

Otherwise known as “make it easy to say yes.” It should not be difficult to buy things in your store. And it should not be hard to make a return. Things are going to be different when we come out of this, but it’s not going to be a revolution of change. I predict, rather, a speeding up of the evolution of some of the things that we’ve seen coming for a while.

Your customers, at least initially, are going to want to see things such as cashless payment systems, the ability to order from a kiosk, seamless delivery and pickup options, and click and collect services. In fact, according to one recent study, 87% of shoppers prefer to shop in stores with touchless or robust self-checkout options during the Covid-19 pandemic.” I expect that number to drop as we come out of this, but still believe that touchless options will become a mandatory customer expectation in most retail settings moving forward.

It is your job now to figure out how to make it as easy and as safe as possible for your customers to shop with you. We’re here to help. A few things to get you started might be:

Look into your cashless options. What does your point of sale offer?
Are you using Google Pay, Apple Pay, or other such payment methods? If not… why not?
Can you do self-checkout in your store?

So, those are the Basics and it’s important that you get them right. Here is your job for the next couple of days…

Re-read the ideas
Choose five things that you feel inspired to do and write them down.
Make a plan, with dates, to do those five things.
Work your plan.

EXTRA CREDIT:

Get the Basics sorted and you’ll be ahead of the game. If you feel good about those or want to go for some bonus points you can work on the following:

The brand

Now is a great time to work on your brand. I’m not talking about a logo or color palette. I’m talking about what you really are as a brand. Why do you exist as a business? What is your purpose, your calling, what are the things about your business that define you and make you different from your competitors? This sounds complicated but it really isn’t, and when you get it right it serves as a set of guideposts that you can bounce all your decisions off of. There are many ways to go about this exercise. And though we don’t have the space to go through all of them here, the thing to remember is that your brand is what you want it to be. You can ask yourself a few questions to get you started:

Why did you start your business?
If you had to tell someone why your business exists in one sentence, what would you say?
What value do you bring to your customers?
What do your customers think of your business?

Marketing

Marketing at a time like this is very difficult. If you’re closed, of course you want to continue to reach out to your customers and let them know what’s going on with you; but, you also know that you can’t drive them to your stores right now, so the messaging might have to change. In this downtime, keep looking for ways to streamline your communication and proactively nurture those relationships. Here are some things that you can do now that will set you up for success later:

Clean up your email list. Run a report and clean out the dead wood.
Create those email segments that you’ve been meaning to.
Schedule your automated email campaigns.
Plan a grand re-opening.
Work with other businesses on your street to create an event for when things get back together.
Remind people about your gift cards and how those are a great way to support you now and enjoy later.

So, that turned out to be a lot! You can see now why some of these things, while important, are hard to get done when you are busy with the day-to-day running of your business. Even now when you’ve got the time, it can be hard to get going on projects. The stress of this particular situation can be paralyzing, don’t let it be. Now is your time.

Pick five things you want to get done.
Pick one.
Make a plan to get it done.
Work the plan.
Repeat.
Do some extra credit.

If there are some things on your list, or perhaps some things on this list, that you have questions on or aren’t sure how to get started, we’re here to help. Hit the link below and contact us. We’re happy to talk through things with you and help you get a plan in motion. We’re all in this together.