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 33. This is the third, third and final episode in the three episode series about employees. The first episode was about filing employees, second episode about retaining employees, and the third episode is promoting employees. If you haven't listened to the first two, or recommend doing so, episode 31 and 32. So in this episode, we're gonna talk about promoting employees. First thing we're gonna talk about is why it's important to promote employees. Second thing we're gonna talk about is how to identify employees who deserve a promotion. And the third thing we're gonna talk about is just how to go about it. So first, why are we gonna promote employees? You know, there's a couple reasons why we wanna promote employees. Number one is for employee retention. We know that people like to continue to advance in their careers. We know that people like to continue to just advance in life and people get bored.

If someone's doing the same job for too long and they're not getting anywhere, most of the time they will end up leaving. So promoting employees just will help overall with retention. Second reason why it's important to promote employees is so that you can delegate more as the owner of a store. If you have a sales associate who is continuing to be a sales associate for two years, and you never make them a key holder, guess who has to open the store every day? Either you or your manager. However, if you promote this employee from sales associate to key holder, all of a sudden you have someone who is now able to open the store. And that gives you the ability to go on another buying trip, to take a day off, to come in late, to do whatever you want, and just one responsibility that's not on your plate anymore.

And if you can teach someone to do something just as good as you can, better, we teach 'em how to do it than for you to do it themselves. So kind of take that philosophy and really think about it in every single task in your business. Second thing we're gonna talk about is who do we wanna promote? So, you know, this is a tricky one because the answer's not always so clear. But the thing I like to think about is you want to keep, you wanna promote the employees who are trying their hardest and who are constantly looking for growth and are, you know, just always able to get to the next level. So in the example we gave before of promoting a sales associate to a key holder, you have the sales associate, they're great, they're just great sales associate. You're promoting the key holder, and for the next three months, she never opens the store late.

It's never a problem. Everything's going great. Guess what? Maybe it's a sign that that person can take on more and that she goes from key holder to assistant manager and with an assistant manager, they do these three other things that the Keyholder wasn't doing, and just them kind of showing you that they're able to continue to handle responsibility is just a sign that they maybe should be promoted. Another person that you should be promoting is, you know, someone maybe who hasn't been promoted in such a long time. Um, even if it's just a promotion in name only. Um, and even if it's just a promotion form of a raise, at the end of the day, if someone's working in a company for, you know, a year and they haven't gotten a raise or promotion, either they're not a good employee or they're good and they deserve a raise because a, if they're working there for a year or more, or, you know, if they're working there for a year and they're not good, you need to get rid of them.

And if they're working there for a year or more and they haven't gone anywhere, like they're either gonna leave you or they're just gonna get bored and, you know, keep it, keep 'em excited, give 'em raise, give 'em a promotion, even if it's in name only. And it's just a fun way to kind of boost everybody's spirits. The third thing we can talk about is how to promote employees. Um, so this one, you know, this is an exciting one because we all know those conversations you have to have with employees where it's, you know, negative conversation. Why are you always coming late? Why'd you do this? Why is there on your phone? Or like, we need to fire an employee. It's super hard. There's tears involved, nobody's excited. But when you're promoting employee, an employee, it's a positive conversation. Everybody comes outta that conversation feeling better.

The employee comes outta that conversation feeling great cause they just got a promotion and a raise. You come outta that conversation feeling great because you just, a either got rid of some responsibility or you made someone happy, one or the other. And it's just a good con again, it's just a good conversation to have. So how so how you do it? Not so important because at the end of the day, it's positive and it's hard to mess up a positive action and conversation. But a couple things that are very important is, number one, anytime you're promoting someone, you have to give them a raise. You must give them a raise. There's no such thing as a promotion. And oh, by the way, you're getting, you need, you're no longer a sales associate or a keyholder and you make the same amount of money. That's not a promotion, that's a demotion.

You gave someone more responsibility with less money. Uh, you made their job harder. And it's just worse. Give money out, not a lot and a lot, just make people happy. The second thing that you may wanna do is, you know, ch change a title, put it on paper, make an announcement to people. Um, you know, you don't have to do this so often, but like, just like how an appreciation for an employee who just got, you know, promoted to assistant manager. Get everybody together, send an email out, do something nice and just recognize an employee. Number one. What that's gonna do is it's gonna make that employee feel good about that themselves. But number two, it's gonna show other employees like, okay, there is opportunity here. I can grow, I can make more money. I can, you know, just have more in this company. So I think again, there's, there's no way to screw it up really. Um, but you definitely want to just like make an exciting moment, isn't it? It is an exciting moment in that employee's life and it should be an exciting moment in your life also. That does it for episode 33. I hope you enjoyed this three part series on employees. At the end of the day, I think it is the most important piece of business is employees. So keep that in mind and, uh, keep fighting the good fight. See you next time.