I've had retailers join Stock Doctor who've been in business for 18 years.
I've worked with people who've run successful stores for 10
years, seven years, five years.
These aren't beginners.
These aren't people who don't know what they're doing, and yet
almost every single one says the same thing after a few months.
Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan.
I'm Catherine Erdly, and this podcast is here to share retail industry
trends, insights, and best practices for you, the retailer who's serious
about building something that lasts.
So the thing many retailers I've worked with have said to me after a few months…
I never knew that you could look at my business like this . and I find that
really interesting, because it wasn't like they were ignoring their numbers.
They were looking at Shopify, they were looking at their best sellers,
and they were looking at sales.
But what I really wanted to delve in today, and what it made me think about,
was the difference between looking at your numbers and really understanding
what the numbers are telling you.
And that's what I wanted to do today, show you the difference between
seeing the surface, and also then the kind of action that you can
take from reading that information.
So most retailers said reading the headlines, not the whole story.
In fact, a lot of people tell me that, "You know, I, I'm all over my numbers.
Every time I get a sale, my Shopify pings, or I get a notification." And I think
that this is one of the, the ironies of modern-day retailing, is that we have
this endless stream of data, but it's not the same thing as understanding what
we actually want to be doing with that.
So do you know your best sellers?
Lots of people will answer yes, they're, they're aware of that.
They see them going out all the time.
They see … They know which ones they're reordering.
But then I guess the next question would be is do you know whether they're selling
quickly enough, whether you should be buying twice as many, whether the
amount that you're buying is actually a help or a hindrance, if there's another
color that you could be trying instead, or what the color patterns are in your
business, whether one p- price point consistently wins, whether you're carrying
twice as much stock as you actually need, or whether maybe one category
or one type of product, maybe even one supplier, is funding the entire business.
Maybe you've got an overdependence on one of your suppliers, and that's
something that you need to address.
These are all completely different questions, and these are all completely
different ways of looking at your numbers as opposed to looking at the top level
When I think about it, I would say that it's the difference between looking
backwards versus making future decisions.
So looking backwards at your numbers is almost a bit like looking at
the rear view mirror, seeing the things that are going on behind you.
Whereas with Stock Doctor, it's almost a little bit like the sat nav.
We're looking at where that information should take you.
So what sold last month is telling you what happened, but you're not paying,
within Stock Doctor, you're not paying someone to tell you what happened.
You're paying them to tell you what that means that you should do next.
So we use data to make decisions.
We say what should happen next as a result of this information.
And that is the real difference.
And that, I believe, is what is allowing us to see these fabulous results
where people are getting 10% more sales on average with 10% less stock
and adding 5,000 pounds of profit to their bottom line per 100K of revenue.
So what do you need direction on?
Well, there's so many different decisions if you break it
down for every single product.
You're thinking, "Do I need to buy more of this? Do I need to stop buying that?
Do I need to clear this, not reorder that, move this, plan for Christmas now,
or put actions in place which means that I won't be panic buying in September?"
And that is where the value comes from in the Stock Doctor program.
This is a white glove service.
In other words, this is done for you.
Someone is going to hold your hand all the way through this.
They're going to run the numbers for you.
They're going to explain it to you clearly.
They're going to answer any questions that you have.
They're going to help you make sure that your data is clean and tidy and
in a really good state, ready for you to make really good decisions.
They're going to give you their insight and their view based on years and
years and years of the retail industry.
And I think this is one of those things about the difference, uh,
especially now that there are more and more tools available with AI.
You can ask AI for input.
You can ask it for what it thinks you should do.
But the question of whether or not it's making a good suggestion, whether
or not this is the right suggestion, is one that is hard to answer.
And one of the ways that you get the answer is by having experience, and
everyone who works in the Stock Doctor program has at least 15, if not closer
to 20 or even 25 years of experience of running these numbers and looking at them.
So what are we actually looking for in Stock Doctor?
Well- When we're analyzing a business, we're looking for things like, is
this stock turning too quickly?
Is it turning too slowly?
Within the stock, what product categories are driving it?
What suppliers are driving it?
Which ones are falling behind?
Where have we got sales that are up on the year but you haven't
backed that with more stock?
So where are you missing opportunities to grow sales?
Where is your cash trapped?
Which categories deserve more investment?
Which deserve less?
Which margins are correct and which ones need to be reviewed?
Where are you running out of your best sellers and that's causing you problems?
What's seasonal?
In other words, which products have a specific lifespan and
which products are evergreen?
Which ones are gonna be selling all the way around the year that
you can really confidently build your marketing plans behind?
And where have buying habits drifted?
So where have items or suppliers or products that maybe were the
mainstay of your sales previously, where have they continued to be the
mainstay and where have they actually shifted and now something else is
showing what I call green shoots?
So areas, pockets of stock that are turning really fast.
How much stock should you be holding?
What should your plan be?
What is your budget for the next few months in terms of stock?
When do you need to bring it in to maximize your cash flow and to
make sure that you're in the right position for your peak months?
These are not questions that you can get from having a five-minute
chat in, with Shopify Sidekick.
These are all r- questions that require analysis and thought and allow you
to really understand what the data is telling you and where it needs to go next.
So in terms of what this allows us to do, we've got clients who have got sales which
are up on the year with 40% less stock.
So this is a huge Uh, this particular client, we were able to really identify
low-hanging fruit, uh, stock that wasn't productive, work with them to reduce
it, not in a brand-damaging way, but to really work through how much stock they
should have, focus on the stock that they did need, and then that allowed
them to, to sell, have sales slightly up on the year, but 40% less stock.
If you think about that for a minute, that has a huge, huge
impact on their cash flow.
We've also seen businesses that have increased their sales by 20 or 30 percent
and they've kept their stock level, their total stock level, but the stock that
they have got is much more productive.
We've generated, as I said, around 5,000 pounds on average
per 100K of turnover for clients.
We've seen businesses have their best sales year yet.
We've helped businesses clear years of accumulated stock as well as get really
clear on what their direction should be.
It's not about just pure theory.
It's about what happens when your stock starts working really much harder.
I think one of the interesting things that I get asked about Stock Doctor is
somebody asked me the other day, "Are you more into the numbers and the finances?
Are you more into the product?" Or sometimes people will say to me,
"Well, do I need a stock doctor or do I need an accountant?" And I think
that the, the way that I explain it is by explaining a little bit about
how it works in a big retailer.
So in a big retailer, you have your finance team, you have a CFO, you
have all of the people who are in charge of effectively the accounting
functions, looking at the cash flow, looking at the tax burden, looking
at the profitability of the entire business, looking at the costs.
And then you have the merchandising team, which is part of the product teams.
We are the people who manage the sales strategy, the profit margins, the stock
management, as well as working with the buying team and the design team And my
job when I worked in those big retailers was I would give the CFO the information
about what our profit margins were.
I would tell him what we were buying when, how much stock we were
going to be bringing in so that he could then have a look at what
that meant for the whole business.
But then the other thing that I did was work with the buying team and
the design team, and I would give them my input based on numbers.
So they would be looking at the direction of the business, the, the creative
element, if you like, and I would give them advice and direction based
on what I could see from the numbers.
And that's really the way it works with Stock Doctor.
An accountant is really important.
I always say that a really good small business accountant is an important
person for you to have in your business.
It's a really important relationship.
And if you don't have a great relationship with your accountant,
then I would definitely recommend finding a different one.
There are some really fantastic small business accountants, including my
own, Kylie, at KFH Accounting, who's really good at working with small
businesses and small product businesses.
And you want someone who is gonna be on your side, who is never gonna make you
feel bad about asking questions, who's gonna make it really clear for you.
But ultimately, accountants, they are there to keep you legal, to keep you
out of trouble And that's their job.
They are not there to advise, although most of them are not
going to be advising you on trade.
They're not going to be advising you on product direction.
They're not necessarily even gonna be advising you on stock management,
because one of the things about stock is that accountants will see it as
an asset, whereas in Stock Doctor, we are always thinking about your cash
flow specifically, and we're thinking about how to trade that stock and
basically get the most out of that asset and try and get it turning faster.
So Stock Doctor will be very much focused on the numbers.
They are all numbers people.
They will run all your analysis for you, but they're never going
to be taking it in a vacuum though.
They're very much about trading, about commercial trading,
about making product decisions.
They're there to help guide you in terms of what your stock should be,
how much you should buy, and when you should buy it and bring it in.
So who uses Stock Doctor?
Well, people come to us for a variety of different reasons.
As I said, it's typically established businesses, people who maybe have multiple
stores, or maybe they have a single store.
They are people who are perhaps looking to do new things in their
businesses, like a pop-up or a new sales, uh, channel, and they want
some help putting plans in place.
Stock Doctors are really, really good at scenario planning, which means that
they're great at creating forecasts and plans for scenarios that don't exist yet.
So maybe you're moving to a new store, maybe you're going to do a
pop-up or an event, and you really could use some help with working
out how much stock you need to have.
Stock Doctors are great at that.
They're also really great if you don't have a lot of history, if you're fast
growth, if you're somebody who's just started selling really well right out the
gate and you're seeing really fast growth and you don't know how to plan for that.
You don't know how to get enough stock in place to make sure that you have
got what you need to do the sales potential They're really great at helping
people navigate that sort of growth.
They're also really great at working with people who just really feel like
the business should be more profitable, who feel like that they're overstocked,
and they've kind of run out of ideas of how to manage the stock themselves.
They're great at walking in when you have got yourself into a tangle and
you feel like you've got too much stock and you tried to fix it, but
then you ran out of other things.
Or maybe you're stuck in a plateau.
Maybe you know that this business has got really great potential, but you're not
really sure how to move it forward, and you want someone who's gonna come in and
help you really understand if your stock is working hard enough, if it is doing
what it should be doing, and how you can make it better and how you can improve it.
It's also really great for people who have got to a position where they're feeling
burnt out, uh, or maybe they just feel like there must be more to this, and they
know that they're winging it, and they kind of have got to the end of everything
that they can do f- without outside input.
They want someone now who's an expert to come in to help them sort through it.
So there's lots of different reasons why people come in to Stock
Doctor, but the outcome is the same.
We can help you look at your business.
We can help you put in realistic plans, create an idea of what you need to do to
move the business forward and make sure that your stock is moving as fast as it
can and being as productive as possible.
They want someone-- I would say the other thing that really unites Stock
Doctor clients is that they know that this stuff is really important, and they
just simply don't have time for it, so they want someone to come in to really
hand-hold and to look after them, to run their numbers for them, and to present
back to them each month so that they know clearly what it is that they need to do.
I hope that today's episode has given you an idea of how Stock Doctors can help.
The difference isn't between retailers who look at their
numbers and retailers who don't.
It's really between retailers who collect data and the retailers who know how to
turn that data into better decisions, and that's what Stock Doctor does.
It's a partnership.
We're here to support you.
We're here to really make sure that you get what you need out of the
service and you get the information you need to move you forward.
It's not about having access to magical reports or secret software,
but it's because we've spent decades learning this stuff, learning what
the numbers are actually trying to tell us and how to take action in a
way that actually moves the needle.
If you want to know more about our Stock Doctor service, head
over to stockdoctor.net where you'll see testimonials, more
information about how it works, as well as our latest availability.
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See you next week