Every day can be tough in small business. You can feel like the big competitors are winning and that you can’t climb the mountain to compete. You may not know where to start.
For some, 2020 has been that year, the year of challenges and worry so much that seeing ahead to the horizon can be difficult.
There are green shoots of good news and opportunities in every small and independent retail business that we look at. The key is to find these and to leverage them for more success.
A green shoot is a product or a category of products or a supplier performing above average in the business. Often, these successes have gone unnoticed.
Finding optimism is like mining, you have to look for it, sometimes for a long time. It is there, though, in every retail business.
As soon as you hear yourself talking your business down, STOP. Look at your data, look for the good news. That is what you need to think and talk about.
By looking at your data, we mean looking at year on year, quarter on quarter or month on month comparison data for departments, categories, suppliers or even individual products. Look for growth and once you see growth, think about what you can do with and around the products achieving growth so that you can achieve other growth.
Any product achieving year on year increases in unit sales is a product to be appreciated, nurtured and used to help grow other products that can sell to the same customer.
This is how you grow optimism. Find those small green shoots, no matter how small, leverage them with some small steps and, over time, build more success for your business.
Here at Tower Systems, we go beyond our POS software in our help for small business retailers. We leverage our knowledge to deliver good outcomes for our customers based on their business performance data. We work with them, guiding them, helping them to see opportunities and encouraging them to lean in to green shoots of success.
We are grateful to our small business retail customers for their engagement with son this path to success by cultivating green shoots.
