Well, there are a ton of worthy goals for you to pursue in your store, but only one is number one. Any ideas? Of course you want to increase sales, hire better personnel, train them better, improve your displays, redo your store layout, motivate your people, develop a better marketing strategy, but number one always has to be to make more money.
And here’s the dirty little secret to doing just that. It’s really easy. Improve your turnover and you’ll make more money. The more you turn, the more you make. If you’ve read these posts over the years, you’ve seen that often.
Retail is a bit of a juggling act. You want to maximize sales and that’s what you spend most of your time trying to achieve. But at the same time, you must continually try to improve turnover. The only way to control turnover (and consequently your inventory) is with open to buy planning. Since open to buy is based on the two elements that drive your store – sales and turnover – using it puts you in a perfect position to make more money.
Now if you’ve been using open to buy – a good one – it’s been telling you what to do all along. So, not only do you need to use open to buy planning, you need to pay attention to what it’s telling you and follow what it says. If you do that, you’re a shoe in to reach your Number 1 goal.