In today's episode, we're going to walk you through three mistakes that keep small product
businesses stuck and how to avoid them so you can finally start building
real momentum. If you feel like your sales are stuck
in first gear, then this episode is for you.
Maybe you're showing up on Instagram, perhaps you're boosting posts
sporadically, perhaps running the promotion, maybe you're
going to events or in person markets. But when you look at your
revenue, it's still seems like you're pretty much always stuck in the
same place, somewhere between 1 to 3k a month.
And it's frustrating, isn't it? You're working really hard, yet the numbers
just aren't moving. And at that point, it's easy to start questioning
yourself, is this business ever going to grow? So if
you're in this zone, then this is the
episode for you. We're going to be talking about
the reasons that people get stuck here and how you can
fix them. Because here's the thing, being stuck at this level isn't a sign that
you're failing. It's not a sign that nobody wants your products or the business was
a terrible idea. More often than not, it's because of three common
mistakes. And the good news is these are things that you can
fix. So the first mistake that I see people making is
that they don't have a clear plan. Often when I talk to people
about their business, I will ask them, do you have a plan? Do you have
a sales plan? Do you have a marketing plan? Do you have a plan for
launching new products? Do you have a plan for what you're going to
talk about when. And usually the answer is no. A lot of
people don't have a clear plan mapped
out because they're often going from one thing to the next.
They are bouncing, they're being very reactive. Maybe an
opportunity comes up, so they're answering that, or something else is coming up, so
they're answering that and back. Basically, they
are letting themselves be kind of bounced around like a ball.
Whereas my background in retail, I've been in the business
for 25 years. What I've learned is that the big guys spending
nearly two decades in bigger retailers is that everything is
planned out Now. A lot of people
feel like planning is tough, is difficult,
or not even so much that they feel it's difficult, but more that they feel
like it's restrictive. Maybe you started a business because you're wanting to be creative,
you wanted to express your creativity, and it feels like planning is the opposite
of being creative. But I'm a really big believer that planning
and creativity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they very
much feed in to one another. Once you've got a structure
and a framework and a plan around you, you can actually be more
creative because you know what you need to do and you just come up with
the ideas for it, as opposed to feeling lost and feeling like
you're kind of just being bounced around from pillar to post.
So what I see with a lot of people is that they rely on ad
hoc posting spur of the moment ideas. So they'll sit there on
a Monday and think, right, I really should post something this week. And they don't
really know what to say. They don't have a coordination between their product
strategy and their marketing strategy. And I think for me
that's one of the biggest missed opportunities. Because the thing about retail
is that it varies a lot throughout the year. It's very, very
seasonal. So what your customer wants from you and the kind of
messages that work with them in the summer are going to be very different from
the messages that work with them at Christmas time, or in fact
in January or February. So there's a lot of shift and change
throughout the year. There's lots of nuance to what
people want from you in certain seasons, and there's lots of
different themes and ideas and opportunities to talk about things that are different
month on month. So, for example, very broadly,
what you're going to talk about in February, if you are a jewelry brand,
is going to be centered around Valentine's Day. And what you talk about in March
is going to be sent could be centered around Mother's Day, for example. So those
are just two very basic examples of how what you want to
talk about is going to vary throughout the year. And if you don't
have that all mapped out, it can feel quite overwhelming. Like I
said, it can feel like you're a ping pong ball being bounced around thinking, oh,
I should be doing something, maybe I should say something about Valentine's Day, oh, maybe
I should say something about Mother's Day. And the
upside is that although it does change a lot and it shifts week on week,
and arguably that's what makes it so exciting, it stays
the same year on year. So once you've cracked
that seasonal element to your business, once you've really delved in and understood
what your year looks like, and obviously it will shift, one year is
not going to be the same as another year. But broadly speaking, there are going
to be themes and ideas that work year on
year, once you've got that, you can repeat it. It is
repeatable. The benefit of retail, of
product businesses over service businesses is that predictability
and that repeatability, that opportunity
to scale and grow because you've figured out a system
and then you're repeating it. So,
for example, if you don't have a plan,
you are going to potentially miss some major opportunities
to connect with your customers because you're not going to be zoomed out and
looking at that big picture. For example, I was talking
to a men's gifting brand and this was in May, and
I asked them about Father's Day and it wasn't something that they'd considered.
Now, if you're a menswear, arguably you have
or a male focused brand, arguably you have fewer
opportunities or not such big seasonal opportunities because,
for example, Valentine's Day tends to be more heavily skewed,
broadly speaking, towards female gifting. And obviously Mother's
Day is different. It's not going to work for you if you're a male
orientated brand. However, if you miss
Father's Day because you just didn't look at the year in a
zoomed out way, then that is a major opportunity that you've missed.
And I see it every single year at Christmas. Every single
year, I speak to people in November. I ask them all the way up to
November, even into December, I'd ask them about their plans for Christmas
and they kind of say, oh yeah, I suppose I should come up with something.
Well, this is the thing. You can eliminate so
much of the last minute aspect of retail. You can plan
it. You know, big retailers are planning 18 months in advance, two
years in advance. Now, arguably, yes, that is the extreme version
and it can lead them to be a little less reactive than they would like
to be and a little more constrained. But the you can
plan in advance and the more you plan in advance, the more you're
able to roll with the punches when something unexpected does happen.
If you've done lots of prep in advance, then you
are able to deal with that without it completely derailing
everything. And then the other reason that I
feel that not having a plan is really difficult is because
if you think about all of the different ways to grow your sales. So
for example, episode 264 of the podcast was about four
ways to grow your sales. Without a plan, you can't really ensure that you are
tackling all those four ways consistently and
you can't create a really nicely aligned, up
aligned plan across all of your channels. If
you and all of your marketing channels, all of your selling channels, and all of
your marketing channels if you don't get it mapped out. Okay, so mistake
number two is not having a product strategy.
So in a similar way that people often will tell me they don't have a
plan for their marketing, I would say that
another common issue is that they don't really have a plan for their products.
So I'll ask them, do you have a plan for what you introduce when?
And the answer is usually no. And I'll ask
them, do you know what your best sellers are? That's not always a given. Either
some people aren't really sure or they think they know, but they haven't actually checked.
And the reason that I think this holds people back
is because all of retail, all of
business, I guess, could be boiled down to do more of what works
and do less of what doesn't work. And so if you don't have a plan
for your products, then you are
unable to really maximize
the data that you've got. And yes, if your sales are lower, you might not
have a huge amount of data. But especially if you look at it on a
monthly basis, look at what your best sellers are, you need to understand
what is moving the needle, what people are reacting to and what they're
not reacting to. And I would say that in this first bit of
the business, when you are at that kind of 1 to 3K, you need to
be figuring out what your customer wants from you. So you need to be
figuring out what they're reacting to, what is selling.
And if nothing is selling, if nothing's working, then you need
to go back to the drawing board on a repeated basis,
checking in with your customers, what do they want from you. Trialing things in as
low a risk as possible to try new things to move
on. But you need to try things and learn from them. It's not about
just scattergunning, bringing in lots and lots of different new things. It's about
creating a hypothesis, checking it. Is that what they want? Let's
try something else. Let's tweak it. Let's tweak what the product offer
is. Let's tweak how I'm talking about it, how
I'm talking about the benefits to the customer versus
the features, all of those things. You want to test that over again, see
what the result is, and then move on from there.
So bestsellers, understanding your bestsellers are really, really important.
They, they help give you confidence and they help you really understand what you should
be focusing on in Your marketing, that's another issue that I
see people having is that they think that, oh, well, if something's selling, I
don't need to be shouting about it. Whereas actually you often get much more traction
by really shouting about your best sellers. Because this is all a game of
probability. You want to really focus on what your customer is
most likely to purchase from you, and that may well be
the thing that you sell the most off. So you want to focus on that
and you want to lean into it.
So if you don't really look at your products and really understand
what they're telling you, then you're going to miss some really important clues,
really important green shoots if you like, to help move you
forward. And then the other thing is
that if you don't have a really considered plan for your products,
it feeds back into my first point about no clear plan overall for the
business. Because really your marketing plan and your product
plan are very, very closely intertwined. Because
if you go through and you look at your year and you understand, right, these
are going to be my peak selling times, well, then you want to coordinate your
products. If you're going to bring new products in, make sure that the
products are coming in at the right time, seasonally speaking, making
sure that they are the right products for the right time. And you really want
the whole thing to be tied up together. But if you, you don't have a
plan for your marketing and you don't have a plan for your product, then what
you're left with is two very disjointed activities that
are really time consuming. Marketing's really time consuming. Product development
or product making new products or sourcing new products is hugely time
intensive as well. And if you're not doing it in a coordinated fashion, it can
end up getting very, very messy. And then
the third mistake that I see people make that really holds
them back is related to this idea of
knowing what's working. But if you don't have a
plan and you're doing everything in a very reactive way,
then the other thing is that you don't really
have a good idea of what you're doing, what's
working, and what you need to lean into in the same way that we talked
about for your products. That goes for everything that you're doing in terms of your
sales channels and your marketing as well. So sales
start to feel sporadic. You have good days and bad days with no clear
explanation. Now, here's something else that I would say to you as well.
One of the things that is particularly True, especially at this early stage, is
that everything feels really, really personal. So lots of
people I know will say that I just feel,
on a quiet day, it completely wipes my confidence.
And I totally get that because nobody tells you when you start a business
how nerve wracking it is to create or curate things that you
feel really strongly about, to put them out in front of other people and
to say to them, hey, buy this from me. It
can feel incredibly challenging, incredibly
triggering for a lot of people, and it can feel just
really, really difficult if you're not getting the response that you
want. So what happens is when you're not really
closely tracking your numbers and you're not really closely tracking
your actions, it feels,
it can feel very sporadic. So one week things will do great and the
next week things will go really quiet.
And you can feel, therefore a lot of.
There's a, it's a real roller coaster for a lot of founders. They feel very
personally upset when things are quiet. They say
to themselves, oh, I must be really bad at this. People really hate what I
do. This is such a bad idea. Everyone thinks it's a joke, what I'm doing,
all of those things. And it just really feeds
into this cycle of not having a plan and not having a structure because
it doesn't feel, you don't feel like you have the right to
have a plan, or it doesn't feel like this is something that
you should do, because this is. You're maybe not
giving having enough confidence in the business to say, right, no, this is what I'm
planning to do. Because the nervousness I see from a lot of people is that
they feel like, well, if I make a plan and I don't hit it, am
I going to feel even worse? Whereas what we're really talking about here is
not so much, oh, you can only have a plan if things are going
well. But we want to try and shift as much as possible
from a subjective point of view to an objective point of view.
And this is the benefit that I have from my long years of experience
in the retail industry and two decades in big retailers,
is that they have to be completely objective.
And what I mean by being objective is that that they
really put a plan in place and then
every week they're looking at the plan and they're seeing whether or not
they've hit it on what they need to do to adjust it. So it's about
a process. And obviously in big retailers
there is much less room for people to be so caught up in
that kind of personal, oh, I failed or I've done something wrong. I mean,
obviously everyone has personal feelings and people have
selected products that haven't worked and that can feel really difficult too. But
ultimately what it's about is the setting a goal, setting a plan
in place and then reacting to it. And that's what I'm talking about
when we're thinking about being more objective than being
subjective. And what can happen if you get too
caught up into the emotion of it? You start making
knee jerk reactions. So, for example, you launch
something it hasn't sold, you think, oh, maybe I should take some money off it,
discount it, instead of thinking, right, okay, did I do
enough promotion? It's almost like we get these negative feelings and
we want to just do something to try and alleviate them rather than actually looking
into it and saying, right, what was the actual plan? So
it's, it's also something that I would really stress that
the benefit of having that plan is that retail
fluctuates a huge amount. It fluctuates a lot, month to month.
But as I've mentioned before, it's on an
annual cycle. It does repeat. So learning things like when
you're going to be quiet can really help with that confidence building and
really help you understand when you're going to naturally
be quieter and then get to helping you get ready for the busiest times
as well. So if you set yourself a
plan, then yes, of course you may have weeks and months where
you don't hit it. But it's still better to have that plan in place
than for you to be so caught up in the emotional
side of it that you really end up
almost beating yourself up if things aren't going so well as instead of
thinking, right, what do I need to do now? What can I try next?
So what I would suggest that you do is take the
time to set those goals and make some time
to, Even if it's 10 minutes a week to really look at, right, how am
I doing? How am I selling? How am I
doing compared to my plan? What's working, what's not working? And
which of my sales channels are really are performing for me.
And it, I totally understand why people don't
do this because it can feel very upsetting if you look at something
and you think, wow, actually I'm not really selling that much or this is not
what I thought it would be. But I really do believe
that there's a lot of power that comes from really
knowing the truth of your situation. Whenever I've had
times in my Business where I've stuck my head in the sand and not really
addressed what's going on. I've always felt so much better
when I've taken the time to sit down and really go through things and get
an actual accurate picture. And also, I can't tell you the number
of times that people will have sit down and run their numbers and
actually they're better than they thought they were. In fact, somebody
in the club mentioned that they had always thought to
themselves that they would feel like they'd done well when they hit a certain
revenue number. And it turns out because they'd been not
looking at these things, they were feeling stuck and in denial. They hadn't
looked at their numbers and they'd actually hit the revenue number that they'd been aiming
for. But they hadn't realized it because they hadn't looked, they hadn't engaged because
they caught up in these feelings of insecurity and
just not feeling like they, they wanted to engage with the numbers because
they were scared of what they might show them. So if you're stuck
then around that 1-3k month,
1-3k of sales a month level, then it's probably not because you're doing
anything wrong. It's because of
these particular mistakes that I see people
make. Those are things like, for example, not having a
clear plan, not having a product strategy, not having visibility of what's
working and all of those things that keep you on a
sales plateau. So the good news is, is that every single one of them is
fixable. You can definitely take the time to work
your way through and. And maybe it's sitting down and
sketching out a seasonal plan. Maybe it's identifying your bestsellers,
maybe it's starting a sales check in with yourself. But
whatever you choose, make that one small step towards helping move you
past that plateau. And if you'd like some more support with this,
then we have the retail sales game plan. The doors are open
for this course. It is the first time I'm running this course. I'm really
excited about it. We are going to look at everything that you need to
put some plans into place, some structure, some
strategy and help you really get a grip on with how to grow your product
business. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next
week.