Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 24. This episode is gonna be about doing right and by doing right, I'm not necessarily talking about, you know, doing good. What I'm talking about is doing the right thing and how that's really gonna help your business in a few different ways. Um, so, you know, we are in the business of, you know, running successful businesses.

Um, we wanna make money, but at the end of the day, most times, doing the right thing in certain areas of business ends up helping you make more money over the long term. So we're gonna focus on three things. First is, you know, doing right by employees. Second is doing right by customers, and the third is doing right by yourself. Um, so first let's jump in. I think this one is by far, by far, by far, you know, not even close. The most important, it's about doing right by employees. Um, so I'm gonna just give a few, you know, tips on what I think, you know, that means and what you can do to do right by your employees. Um, but first let's talk about why it's important. So when you have employees that are, you know, running your business for you and in the store when you're not, you are relying on them to, you know, do the best that they can do, and you're relying on them to treat your customers right?

You're relying on them to keep your store pretty. You're also relying to them to come to you with ideas. You're relying on them to, you know, be energized about your business, to tell you when something's wrong, to tell you what's selling, to tell you what's not selling. And if you can't rely on your employees, you're not gonna have a good time in business. Um, whether it's a store manager who you're paying $70,000 a year plus bonus, plus commission two, or whether it's someone who it's their second day on the job and they're getting paid minimum wage and they work one day a week, doing right by these people is going to help them be more productive and get them more excited about your business. And also it's gonna get them talking positive about you. Like people talk about their lives to other people, right? People are, they're gonna talk about how they feel about work to their friends and family, and guess what? They're gonna talk about how they feel about work to your customers. So those are super important things. So what does that mean? What am I talking about when I say doing right by employees? Um, I'm talking about a couple things. First of all, like you, I think like we all have to understand that as owners of businesses, you know, that your employees don't necessarily work for you. They work for the business, and you

Also, you work for your business. The fact that you own the business, of course, but you are working for your business. So that being said, like it's not necessarily about that being said, you have to, you know, maybe treat them a little different than people tend tended to treat employees, you know, 30, 40 years ago. It's not about, you know, sternly telling them what to do and berating them when they do something wrong and yelling them, yelling at them when they come out, come in late. It's about creating a environment where people can thrive. It's about creating an environment where people are excited to come to work. So what are a couple little things you can do? Number one, just don't yell at people. Don't call 'em dumb. Don't tell them that they're not, don't tell them that they're not doing a good job. That's, you know, a big thing.

Number two, don't look for the cheapest employee. You can find, don't withhold raises and bonuses just because you can hold those things are gonna do is get you a lower class employee who's maybe not as excited about your business and you'll end up making less money. The couple dollars that you're gonna save by not putting together a bonus program every month or a, or a commission program in your store is gonna be a drop in the bucket to what you're losing in potential sales. Um, and we see that time and time again, the business owners with engaged and active employees are the ones doing the best. They're the ones growing year over year, and it's not a coincidence that it's the same employees of those businesses that we are talking to year after year. There's not a lot of to turnover. And what that means is, you know, there's less time spent on training.

You have someone who actually learned a lot about your business and everybody knows the more you do something, the better you get at it. So someone who's working in your company for three months is not gonna be as good as someone who's been working for two years. They're not gonna know your store as well. They're not gonna know your customer as well. They're not gonna know your product as well. So, I mean, there's a ton I could talk about in this area, but I think hopefully you guys get the gist. Um, the next thing I wanna talk about is doing right by customers. This one is obvious and it's super simple. All it really means is just treat your customers with respect, um, and treat them like they're not idiots. Don't scam them, don't overcharge 'em for things. Um, you know, and I think in retail, what really comes into play a lot is like issues with returns.

And, um, a lot of businesses tend to make the mistake of, you know, sticking by their return policy and it's law. If you have a two week return policy, it is law. What I recommend is if you have a two week return policy and your customer comes in and on day 16, don't even say anything, just take the item back. Or if they do come in with an item and it's four weeks old and you have a two-week return policy, and they give you an excuse and they give you a reason why they couldn't return it, you just tell 'em how you, you really understand and you know, you can't give them their money back, but you're happy to give them a store credit for a future item. Make them feel happy, make them feel like you actually care about them. Because if you don't, what's gonna happen? Probably that customer's never gonna shop with you again. And maybe even they're gonna tell everybody they know about it and they might put reviews on Google and it's just not worth it. The $15 or $50 or a hundred that you are gonna save by off the customer, by sticking to your return policy is going to cost you a lot more in the long run.

Now, there's a lot of things, again, I could talk about when it comes to doing by customers, but at the end of the day, this one's really the simplest one. It's just about, you know, treating them like you wanna be treated as a customer of a business. Um, the third one is doing right by yourself. So this one, I think is the most overlooked. And, and really what ends up happening is if you do right by employees and you do right by your customers, it becomes extremely easy to do right by yourself. So doing right by yourself is, um, a little bit tricky. Why is it looking at yourself and thinking like, what, what can I do to make myself a better business owner? What, what can I do for myself to do right by myself? And I think like there's, you know, self-help gurus and YouTube classes and everything under the sun that you could look at to just continue to improve yourself.

What I would recommend is let's keep it simple and let's just think about it in a business sense. Um, you know, we're not here to be psychologists, but let's just make sure that we're making the most out of our business and making the most money out of our business, and also having that work-life balance. So you don't need to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, if you're doing it in the store, um, you're probably gonna burn out. You're probably never gonna have a great employee to be able to get to the next level. You're probably never gonna be open to open that second store. Um, if you're doing it at home and you're entering, you know, inventory at home in front of the TVs one the Friday night, like power two. Yeah, that's, nobody's gonna complain about that. Um, the other thing I would, I would say to do and do right by yourself is to take a hard look at your numbers on a regular basis and just really be open and honest with yourself and make the numbers be the honesty.

If are you making money? If you're not making money, or even if you are making money, where can you improve? Where can you make more money? Can you improve your gross margins? Can you go to your landlord and ma and save the money on rent? Can you call your cable provider and save $30 a month? Can you call your shipping companies and just get a little bit of a lower rate? Can you call a vendor who gave you bad merchandise and ask for a refund or credit on your next order? And, you know, by doing right by yourself and doing, really what that means is doing right by your business. You'll end up doing right by yourself. You'll end up making more money over the long term. And you'll also end up, you know, just being better off mentally because you won't have all these stresses that are, you know, attached to, to cash flow and, and all these things. And then, yeah, but I mean, that's really it. I mean, it's just a little bit of a different episode. Um, but I hope you guys enjoyed it and, um, looking forward to the next one.