OK, stand up and try this. Raise one leg up in the air and see what happens. After a little time you start to feel unstable and then what happens (if you don’t put your foot down)? That’s right – you start to make slight adjustments with the muscles in the foot on the floor, with your arms, and with the rest of your body to maintain your balance.
Without the contributions from the rest of your body, you’d be on the floor in short order. So, what’s my point? Your store is the same as you standing on one foot. Things are constantly changing to push you over and you must constantly react to maintain your business stability. When you are missing sales, you react by scrambling to find more merchandise. That usually leads to overbuying and you react by taking markdowns. These constant over corrections will cost your business money and leave you dizzy.
There is really only one thing that will act as your merchandise gyroscope and keep you in balance and that is “open to buy” planning. Open to buy will develop a buying plan based on anticipated sales and desired turn rates that will keep your merchandise at the right levels to support your sales and give you a positive cash flow, month after month.
You can put your foot down (if you haven’t already), but your next project should be the institution of an open to buy system. There are many systems and services available and they will provide you with varying degrees of understand-ability, ease of use, accuracy, accessibility, cost, and support. But there is only one system that is at the top of each one of these variables (except cost) and also offers a Performance Guarantee and no contract.
The balance you need to keep your store strong, growing and adapting to change is MYOTBPLAN.COM. Call us today and let us answer your questions.