CategorySocial Responsibility

I am grateful to Dan Ziffer and the ABC for the opportunity to participate in this story about working from home. I am also thankful to colleague Jennifer for being willing to be interviewed and to Michael and Minh for their live shots and to some other crew members for joining on the Zoom. Here’s a link to the full story: https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2206H037S00

The story itself is an indicator of changes in reporting. Dan shot the interview with Jennifer at home and myself in our office over 2 days. The content made its way onto radio, TV and online yesterday.

On the topic itself, for us, engagement came about because some people were calling for a return to the city, a return to offices. That didn’t make sense to me so I wrote about it. Dan Ziffer from the ABC noticed that. My view is there is no going back to office blocks full of people. People who can work from home should be able to. People who want to work in an office should be able to.

A couple of Tower Systems POS software customers were referenced in a report by the ABC last week looking at supply chain challenges.

Ronald Voukolos, the manager of Fishing and Outdoor World in Darwin, says he has taken a risk and resorted to ordering much more stock than needed, in some cases a year in advance.

“We’ve always been used to being able to buy it as we need it,” he said.

But with the Omicron variant causing crippling staff shortages and transport issues in Australia and the unpredictability of a broken supply chain, Mr Voukolos says the future has become too uncertain.

“Some of the footwear we sell, we placed orders last year in July to get them in 2022.”

But still, he said he is letting people know they could be waiting three or four months on some in-demand items like drinkware, and plastic shoes from Vietnam.

…

In the bike world, Paul Clancy says customers at Bikes to Fit could be waiting up to two years to buy a particular brand amid a global shortage of parts.

“It’s not just bikes, it’s bike parts, even simple things like tubes and tyres where suppliers are starting to run very low,” he said.

He said that even though the popularity of bike riding skyrocketed during the pandemic, the scarcity of parts has even seen some shops close down.

It’s now “really hard for surviving bike stores”, which are now overloaded with repair jobs, he said.

“We’ve been flat out.”

We are grateful to have been able to continue service of our customers, and to add new customers, all throughout the pandemic. While supply chain interruptions have been challenging, our early stockpiling have ensured we maintained supply throughout.

We acknowledge that today is not a day of celebration for indigenous Australians. We are, nonetheless, grateful.

Local small business retailers are asked to support local schools, community groups and charities on an almost daily basis. While community groups and charitable organisations beat a path to the doors of local businesses, so do individuals engaged on personal fundraising of their own for a cause or for an other individual.

It is tough making the call about which organisation to support or not for there is a real fear that declining will hurt the business. Often, small business retailers do not look for an uptick in business from a charity support decision but they do worry about a decline.

So how do you choose which local business you support?

Requests from schools, charities and other community for donations can be a challenge for any size business. If you do not take a structured approach to this you will find yourself giving away plenty for little or no return.

Requests are often loaded with guilt. People can be passive aggressive in their approach. Often, people requesting help leverage pester power. It can be hard to say no. There are too many stories of retailers giving a gift as a prize, receiving the Thank You poster and achieving no benefit for the business.

Our advice is to manage your philanthropy as you would any business activity.

THE PRIZE / GIFT

Decide the amount in cash or product value or both that you are prepared to donate in a full year, calendar year or financial year.

Our recommendation is you give away cash, but in the form of a voucher to spend in your business. This ensures that value of the gift or prize is greater than the cost of it to your business.

The best mechanism for giving away cash or an amount to spend in-store is to do it by way of a gift voucher. Use your software to manage this as any manual approach is dangerous and time-consuming.

YOUR PITCH, NOT THEIRS

Get on the front foot and write to local community groups outlining that you budget a year in advance. Seek their submissions. With this advice sheet we have included the text of a suggested letter. Please read the letter as it outlines the approach we suggest and why. It is important you communicate this with all community groups.

On the page after the letter is a suggested notice for use in-store when you are asked for donations.

HOW TO PICK GROUPS TO SUPPORT

Focus on community groups that support you. That is, groups with members who support you. The more they support you the better you are able to support the community.

Be prepared to ask where people shop for the items you sell in your business. Ask if they will change in return for your support.

Asking these questions underscores to you the importance of approaching the decision as a business decision.

Be thoughtful and deliberate. Support the groups that support you. This is important as it helps you stay within a budget.

LET YOUR SHOPPERS CHOOSE

If you run discount vouchers and if customers say they don’t want the voucher, invite them to contribute the voucher to a local group – one of three you setup for in the business. Every month, two months or three months, tote up the vouchers and give the group a parentage of the total voucher value ‘voted’ for them.

This idea could be in addition to any giving program you run in the business. It offers a daily reminder of your commitment to local giving.

Grill’d burgers run a program kind of like this where each shopper is given a bottle cap, which they place in a tub to vote on a group to receive a cash donation for the month. The process of groups submitting to be considered is onerous. You can find out more about that program with this link – it is a good place to research what others do: https://www.grilld.com.au/localmatters/

REWARD ENGAGEMENT

In addition to any direct gift, consider an offer whereby anyone who is a member of the group who shops with you accrues an amount you donate to the group. You could manage this through your software. It could be you offer a discount to the shopper as well as accruing a value for the group.

This type of program could also be in addition to your core giving program as the value here is driven by sales – hopefully, incremental sales.

EDUCATE GROUPS ABOUT GOOD ENGAGEMENT

Here are things groups you support can do to help your business. You should ask them to do these things:

1. Tell members to buy from you.
2. Write about your business on their Facebook page.
3. Distribute flyers of your offers.
4. Have you speak at a meeting.

WRITE ABOUT YOUR ENGAGEMENT

Once you have a decision on which groups you will support, write about this in your newsletter and on Facebook. Not just once but multiple times. Invite them to provide you with content to publish too. Talk about their good works.

Ask them to write about you too.

Your giving has to serve your heart and serve your business. Going about it in a structured way will ensure you meet your objectives.

Through Covid, Tower Systems has been helping its POS software customers in a range of ways from establishing easy click and collect to easy access from home to pivoting to new product categories.

Now, with lockdown starting to ease in our two biggest states in Australia, Tower Systems has been helping local small business retailers coming out of lockdown, while at the same time helping businesses that have been open throughout deal with changes flowing from others coming out of lockdown.

The help being provided to POS software customers by Tower Systems ranges from the practical to the high level advice kind. It is based on experience across our retail customer community.

Businesses that have been in lockdown have challenges around inventory – both in-store and due to arrive from suppliers. We have a set of advice and guidance designed to consistently manage these situations.

Take in-store inventory, some of it could be considered old. We help identify it and through this guide business decisions that can be made.

Take pipeline product, product due to come to the business. Using accurate and current data, a business can fine tune their focus on new inventory and pick up on opportunities that are new, as a result of coming out of lockdown.

In some situations, locked down businesses open with click and collect that they may not have offered before. We provide advice and help with this, including making shopping online for click and collect easier.

Coming out of lockdown is an opportunity to recast the business, to reset the offer and provide a new focus not only for customers but for all who work in the business. The foundation of any recasting could be laid using evidence from business data curated through the POS software. We can help with this as well.

Tower Systems has helped many local retail businesses through Covid and coming out of lockdown in the past. The services we provide in terms of practical business advice are free for any of our customers, part of the local small business help we are grateful to provide.

The next few months will be challenging for many. Tower Systems is here to help and support as much as we are able.

There has been considerable noise on social media recently when some retailers said they would welcome anyone to their business, vaxxed or unvaxxed. It became heated with plenty of yelling and abuse.

Vaccination is a vexed (sorry) issue. You’re damned if you speak up and damned if you do not. We became drawn into it with retailers asking what we thought, given or reach across a diverse group of retail settings.

We so understand retailers say they welcome anyone as it presents as inclusive. We can also understand retailers saying they prefer shoppers to be vaccinated, especially if they have family and loved-ones who for some reason cannot currently be vaccinated.

While we are keen on fence-sitting, we think with this issue retailers, especially local small business retailers are better off saying nothing because saying something will attract fringe-dwellers and these folks can be demanding, nasty and distracting. We know a retailer who said anyone is welcome and then found tribes of fringe dwellers on their social media doorstep.

By all means have a view for yourself and those who work in the business as it is your workplace and you have obligations. However, we don’t see how that can extend to customers when the government itself does not have a view.

For sure we want everyone who can to be vaccinated, and urgently. If we were in government with the authority, we would try and find a way to force that, for the health and safety of the community. We’d tie it to some funding or benefit, as happens already in child care. But, we are not in government and owning a shop does not give me the right to dictate what my customers believe, no matter how much we see our shop as our little kingdom.

So, for us here in our POS software company, we will have our wish and hope that everyone who can gets vaccinated while, at the same time, serving anyone who comes here for service. And, while doing this, our shops and business locations will remain clean, happy and as Covid safe as possible with masks, hand sanitiser, free face masks and the other steps in place that have kept us safe and trading so far.

Covid has a long long way to go we think. This vaxxed and unvaxxed can shop here pitch is another pot-hole on the road that, when we look back on it, will be a small distraction.

We have offered our Tower Systems small business retail POS software customers a range of collateral and tools they can use to promote click and collect in their businesses. Here are a few of the items we shared a couple of weeks ago.

2021 is proving to be challenging for all retailers, but especially small business retailers, when it comes to supply chain confidence. Covid has wreaked havoc on predicting, in-country logistics, shipping and arrival port congestion.

Christmas 2021 is looking challenged for some retail businesses as a result. This is leaving some retail channels scrambling to resolve Christmas options to keep their shops and websites full and able to satisfy shopper demand.

We have been leveraging our cross channel experience and contacts to help retailers looking for assistance in putting in place contingency plant to buttress their business against the impact of supply chain challenges.

Through contacts, business data and some other elements we have been able to highlight opportunities for retailers to consider that may play well for them, offering alternative for otherwise hard to stock product for Christmas 2021. Right now, in August 2021, it is getting close to too late to put in place reasonable contingency plans. That’s why we have been encouraging retailers to work on this for several months now.

The Covid impacted factory, logistics and related challenges are not new, we all went through 2020. But, they are more intense now, even more so than in 2020. We did engage then. This year, the engagement has been broader and with more retailers.

As a POS software company with a wide and deep relationship with its customers, Tower Systems is grateful for the opportunity to serve retailers in this way, to help with practical advice and connections beyond what could be usual for a POS software company. There is a POS software connection though, since it is the data curated by our POS software that can reveal opportunities outside of what has been traditional for a business when they are looking to fill an unexpected product gap.

Thanks to other business interests we have, we are fortunate to have access to good data as to factory and other challenges for products in a. range of categories. This is helpful for us as we can share this with our customers. Sometimes local suppliers are not as forthcoming with data as to delays. Retailers want information so they ca n implement a plan b. Some suppliers are scared they will lose business, which is odd as they would lose it anyway with such late deliveries.

Hey, it’s the weekend. We hope it’s relaxing and recharging. If you’re in part of Australia that is in lockdown, take care. We are. we’re focussed on that light up ahead, and we know it’s not a train. It’s summer filled with laughs, BBQs and some beers. In the meantime, at home this weekend our BBQs and beers will be just us, but that’s okay. Take care folks …

Our POS software for op. shops, charity shops and community group shops helps these vital community enterprises to be of greater service in their local communities.

We have served in this area of POS software charity shops, community group shops and op. shops for many years. Our portfolio of shops in this space includes church bookshops, community enterprise garden centres, traditional Aussie op. shops, charity run produce businesses and more. It is this diverse charity business engagement that helps us provide software that is commercially useful and community supporting.

Embedded in our op. shop POS software are facilities these community group businesses can use to connect with their members, and through them, connect with the wider local community.

We handle GST requirements for these types of enterprises as well as unusual approaches to pricing. We also make it easy for people to learn the software, to help them deal with the variety of volunteers who often play a key role on the operations of these businesses.

Understanding the varied needs of the charity run businesses and pitching what we offer to those in the business as well as those on a committee in control of the business, Tower Systems is grateful to be of service of these organisations and the mission they pursue here locally and well as overseas, where several charities we serve raise funds for.

We are grateful to serve these community enterprises with POS software made for charity / op. shops that helps in many ways, including:

1. Easy shopper loyalty. We have found the cash-off approach in our loyalty tools works better in community enterprise retail. People understand money. A receipt showing an amount they can save on their next purchase gets, usually, at least 20% of people spending more that visit.
2. Manage inventory your way. You can sell by barcode, products code, department, category within department, price point. You can sell, measure and report at the level point appropriate to your needs.
3. Easy to learn. We have found that in community enterprises easy to learn / easy to use really does matter. Volunteer turnover makes this essential. We can record training specific to your needs and make these videos available for future volunteers.
4. Secure. You can lock down parts of the software to secure them for management access only.
5. Checks and balances. This software guides processes. It also provides hidden tracking so you can investigate should the need arise.
6. Club / group marketing and support. Leverage clubs and community groups with offers and pricing just for them.

While not ideal for every op. shop / charity shop / community group shop situation, our POS software is worth considering. We won’t pressure you. rather, we will show you what the software can do and leave you to make your decision in your own time.

Using our Aussie made POS software, local retailers are able to connect with local community groups including schools to engage in fundraising campaigns. Built into our POS software are facilities that can drive shopping by members of community groups, shopping that can result in donations back to the groups with which they are connected.

These are smart tools that we have seen fundraising for local schools as well as a diverse mix of community groups.

By engaging with the members of groups a local retailer can broaden their shopper appeal. The community group benefits, the members benefit, the business benefits and the community benefits. That is where this community group engagement works well – the breadth of benefits delivered through a retailer leveraging the POS software community group marketing tools.By bringing structure and consistency to this, retailers can let the members of the group drive the benefits for their business.

We are grateful to the retailers and community groups that have helped us over the years to tune these tools, to enable us to make something flexible for a range of situations.

Requests from schools, charities and other community for donations can be a challenge for any size business. If you do not take a structured approach to this you will find yourself giving away plenty for little or no return.

Requests are often loaded with guilt.  People can be passive aggressive in their approach. Often, people requesting help leverage pester power. It can be hard to say no. There are too many stories of retailers giving a gift as a prize, receiving the Thank You poster and achieving no benefit for the business.

The approach we have available through our POS software helps the business be consistent, connecting fundraising back to support for the business from members of the group asking for your support.

EDUCATE GROUPS ABOUT GOOD ENGAGEMENT

Here are things groups you support can do to help your business. You should ask them to do these things:

1. Tell members to buy from you.
2. Write about your business on their Facebook page.
3. Distribute flyers of your offers.
4. Have you speak at a meeting.

Here at Tower Systems, through our POS software for local retailers, you have access to facilities that help you connect locally, by supporting fundraising for local community groups. We are grateful to be of service in this way.

As a business that meets the criteria for being essential, our office is open. This is being run with around 20% of the usual office based staff, which the majority of our people are working from home, as they have done from the start of 2020.

Having the office open helps us provide better service to customers as we have access to a broader suite of tools than can be provided from a pure home office model.

We are grateful to our customers for their support and we appreciate the new customers we are welcoming every week.