Retail Business Consultant

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

So how do you achieve your goals as a retail business? A good place to start is to examine your current retail operations. Our team will look over your business as a whole and help you to create a complete plan to ensure you meet your real business goals.

Retail operations is a broad term that encompasses all activities related to keeping your retail store running and functioning properly. One of the areas that we are going to focus on is process 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 more cost-effectively, and how to make better use of your data to run a lean and effective store.

Some of the big challenges we help 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 retail outlet is layed 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). A POS system will assist in collecting the data needed to get a retail store management system in place, then we’ll ensure you have the tools for accurate reports and analytics that drive key insights for your retail business.

To help you get started, here are some of the main data points that we will track:

Total sales
Sales by store (if you run a multi-store business)
Best selling items
Worst selling items
Average sales per employee
Conversion rate
COGS (cost of goods sold)
Inventory turnover rate
Sales per square metre
Average customer spend
Average customer time in store

This gives us a solid starting point and an action plan of where to move forward to drive your retail growth strategy.

Digital: Automate as much as possible

There’s no shortage of 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 we’ll help you progressively automate as much as possible.

Productivity improvements come from smart retailers identifying simple and effective ways to automate activities and create good staff habits and triggers. We can help you identify and adopt the best fit software that enables you to complete your tasks faster and with much less effort. We work closely with our clients to ensure that the software they use is the best fit for their company for years to come.

The specific software tools and versions you choose will be unique to your business and budget. However, there are three pieces of advice we can give you that will be true no matter your situation:

Automate more than one task. In fact automate as much as possible so you can focus on growing your business further with our help.
Work with trusted brands with proven track records – see our past successes
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 business 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 that is the best fit for your business will help you improve your retail 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 – unlike legacy POS systems, tablet POS systems run on commodity hardware like iPads and Android tablets. Not only does this reduce the initial purchase cost, but it also lowers any support or repair costs because you aren’t forced to replace expensive hardware.

Faster Checkouts and Staff training – newer POS systems are much more user friendly than older ones. Meaning you and your managers will spend less time training new staff as a lot more of the POS system will be easier for the new staff member to pick up on. This will also help your staff checkout faster and create a better experience for your customers.

Robust Analytics – One of the biggest benefits of a POS can deliver is advanced analytics and reporting. These tools give you data about many of the most important aspects of your retail operation.

Streamlines Marketing – For many small retailers, email is the go-to marketing channel. However, building an email list can take some time. A POS can help speed up the process by allowing you to collect customer email addresses and other contact information right at the point of purchase.

Integrations with key business tools – most POS systems integrate with other key business tools like software accounting, ecommerce, and email marketing platforms. This allows you to share data from your POS to these other solutions so you can automate tedious tasks and run more efficient business.

Customers: Shopping Experience

It has become harder for small retailers 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.

It’s an often touted business saying, but it really is cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. How much cheaper you ask? According to the Harvard Business Review, it’s anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.

By prioritising a welcoming and memorable customer experience, you make it more likely that a customer will keep coming back to your store and making purchases – helping your bottom line. By focusing on creating more repeat customers, you will also increase your average customer lifetime value (LTV).

Some general ideas we can do to assist you to improve your customer service experience:

Create a loyalty program that encourages and rewards repeat purchases
Offer amenities like snacks, drinks, free WIFI and comfortable seating
Provide customer service training to your team
Staff your store with positively motivated managers and other employees that naturally perform at a high level
Offer complimentary services based on the products you sell like styling services or crafting classes

Because of our extensive retail experience, we will be able to identify your biggest customer service wins quickly so that you can implement these to see an immediate improvement in your customer satisfaction, sales value and repeat business.

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 store 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 retail 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.

Give Henry Atturo from Provectus Management Consulting a call on +61 408 848 754 to get your retail business assessed.

Call on: +61 408 848 754