How to make your Chartered business sustainable and profitable with Provectus systems and plans.

5 reasons to hire a Chartered business consultant

1. Advice – We can help you with most aspects of your business. With the experience of helping businesses such as Red-dot to turn around sales and manage their retail store to be the household name that they are today you know that we have the experience needed to help you get your business back on track.
2. Manage changes – Once we have assisted you to come up with a plan we will help you ensure these plans and changes home to action. 
3. Tech and implement best practices – Consultants are often the leading experts in the fields they work in. We are no different having helped many Chartered businesses  and have helped them to ensure that
4. Fresh perspective – We can bring a fresh perspective on your business, so having an outsider come in and offer ideas can be tremendously helpful.
5. Deliver training – You can hire a consultant to share knowledge about almost anything. While we might not deliver the training personally we will ensure you pick the best fit for training in your company.

One of the areas that we are going to focus on processes improvements and optimisations that will make and deliver the biggest cost and time savings back to you. The other is strategies for helping you streamline processes, acquire and retain customers most cost-effectively, and how to make better use of your data to run and effective Chartered business.  Some of the big challenges we help Chartered business clients overcome include:

• Strategy – envisioning where to play, how to win and bringing the resources together to make it happen.
• Digital – Defining how and where it can add value across your business.
• Tech – Ensuring a frictionless customer journey
• Customers – Delivering more meaningful and relevant customer experiences.
• Operations – Transforming performance for brands & retailers.
• Layout – Making sure your Chartered is laid out to best maximise sales, customer flow and visibility, including product location, lighting, display and more.
• Assets – Optimising commercial potential for retail property developers, landlords, and investors.
• Loss Prevention and Cost Controls – Reducing stock losses, increasing staff productivity, identifying excess costs and implementing better cost controls.

Below are just some of the more obvious areas where we have expertise. Please contact us for a discussion on what other challenges and roadblocks you are struggling with to find out more after seeing some of the things we do below.

Strategy: where to start

You need to understand and establish clear baselines for your business KPIs (key performance indicators). We will collect the relevant data with you and ensure that you know the best way for your Chartered to collect this data, given this is the best place to start. 

Digital: Automate as much as possible

There’s no shortage in tedious and time-consuming work when you are running a small business. Whether it’s keeping track of expenses or managing employee hours by hand, with our help you’ll progressively automate as much as possible. Here are three pieces of advice we can give you that will be true no matter your situation:

1. Automate more than one task. In fact automate as much as possible so you can focus on growing your business further with our help.
2. Work with trusted brands with proven track records – see our past successes.
3. Try to choose tools that integrate and work together. This allows you to enhance their functionality by sharing data between them.

Digital: Data-Driven Decisions

With the right tools in place you will no longer be flying blind and can begin to manage inventory from a data-driven approach. Since every Chartered is different, we’ll give you some general ideas for insights these tool deliver and decisions they can help you make:

• Understanding stock turn & lead times
• Ensure you always have your best selling items in stock
• Eliminate or reduce the amount of your lowest selling items by putting a promotional process in place
• Identify your highest margin items and put plans into place to sell more of them
• Uncover inventory shrinkage issues so you can put a stop to them
• Identify your lowest margin items, and  put a process in place to package them with higher margin items

Tech: POS Systems – how to pick the best fit for your business

Implementing a POS system if required that is the best fit for your business will help you improve your Chartered business no matter the size. So what is the benefit of letting us help you find the best POS system for you?

• Lower IT costs
• Faster checkouts and staff training
• Robust analytics
• Streamlines marketing
• Integration with key business tools

Customers: Shopping Experience

It has become harder for small Chartered business to compete on price, but instead of getting stumped or discouraged, get creative. What can you do to compete? What can you offer that online platforms cannot? Our Advice: rather than focusing on price and margins, create an amazing in-store shopping experience. There are two main areas of your retail operations that a top-tier customer experience can influence and improve: brand loyalty and customer acquisition.

Operations: Improving your conversion rates

By nature improving the main data points mentioned earlier with the systems and plans we put in place will drive higher returns on your investment. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your store within a given time frame that makes a purchase. This metric is important to operational efficiency because it is an expression of your ability to attract the right shoppers, then you’ll know if you are spending your marketing dollars efficiently. If you can’t sell to more of your customers on the value of your products or services, then you’re essentially wasting good potential customers on poor sales and marketing techniques. Provectus has a unique audit and review process that identifies immediate areas for improvement in your Chartered business and sales personnel conversion rates.

Operations: Sales training

Small changes in your customer service and sales process can make massive differences to your profits. We will identify if formal sales training that requires hiring a training firm or a consultant to visit your store and provide sales training to your team is needed. If you choose the in-person route, options include hosting a private training for your team, or running a publicly accessible event. Lastly, there are also courses for sales, many of them online, that build some understanding before live training consolidates and improves the execution of on the floor sales processes. The benefit to choosing someone to come in is that the quality of training your team will receive. There are a number of quality firms and consultants including ourselves that you can access to ensure your staff are competently trained. Our processes will assess your team and work with you to decide if a public training session is for your staff, hiring someone else to come in to train your team or if you are able to handle training yourself (see informal sales training).

Operations: Informal sales training

Outside of formal training, the ongoing informal training is a critical part of your Chartered business.  Observing and identifying small areas of improvement is invaluable and something we excel in teaching your team how to do. Training your team how to handle difficult customers, tricky situations, unreasonable customers and unusual situations by exposing them to these situations and early and creating a process for them is a critical area for your staff.

Layout: The right product in the right place

The way you set up your fixtures drives customer flow which determines what we call the ‘hang time’ in your store, you want to ensure that customers shop the whole store. There is an art to visual merchandising and displaying products next to other products which encourages both upselling and add on sales. They way you promote your goods at point of sale also is a critical factor in selection and purchase decision. With over 40 years of retail experience let us show you how to create a theatre that increases customer spend.

Assets: Optimising Inventory Management

Inventory is the heartbeat of your retail business. It touches almost every aspect of your operations, and as a result, it’s ripe for optimization. We’ll help you assess if your inventory seems more like black hole than the source of all your revenue and assess the effectiveness of your retail management systems. The right tools will give you insight into key areas of your inventory like sales performance, costs, gross margins and more. Setting up systems and automation for your inventory such as having effective triggers to re order stock once they hit a low level. The data-driven insights and overall ease of use that these tools bring to something as complex as inventory management can deliver huge operational efficiencies for retailers. Is it Now Time For You To Improve, Expand Your Retail Operations? With years experience helping retail businesses grow and expand we love helping Australian business owners enjoy running their business for far less stress. We work with all size retailers from small sub million dollar turnover outlets to retail chains and have built store sales to over 100 million dollar turnover in our roles.