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Okay, we need to talk. It's time to make your business easier.

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I know that you feel overwhelmed. I know that you're getting burnt out.

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And honestly, there are habits that are really easy to put into place that I feel like I need to share with you. And in this video, I'm going to talk about three habits of successful boutique owners.

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If we haven't met yet. Hi, I'm Emily Benson. I am a boutique consultant.

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I've been doing this for a long time. I've spoken on many stages. I've helped many of your favorite boutiques get started, grow and scale. I'm your boutique owner's favorite boutique consultant. And I'm just going to go with that because happy summer.

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There are absolutely three things that you need in terms of habits and content creation and just how do you make life easier because as a boutique owner you are doing so many things you have so much on your plate whether that be accounting to inventory management to like taking out the trash right you are expected to do so many things but how do we streamline that for you how do we create habits that will let you be successful

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without a lot of hardship. I think that's the biggest rift between people who end up giving up and then people who really do go on and make their boutique their full-time job. This is what I am really excited to do and really interested in helping more boutique owners have longevity. We've seen over the past five years the boutique industry go way up up with new people and then come really hard down because of that influx of multi-level marketing companies and just like people thinking, oh, it's so easy to just like buy clothes and sell them.

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And I mean, it kind of is, but it also is not. It's not easy to do it for long term.

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People forget that this is a business. Businesses should make money. You should be profitable. You should be able to grow and scale in a way where you can support yourself You can support your family and even maybe hire some people maybe even scale way bigger than you Expected or frankly make extra money to

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support your family and call it a day It gets to be whatever you want when you start a boutique most likely you didn't go to college for this most likely likely you haven't even worked in a retail space.

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Now, I do have a lot of you guys who do come from retail, do come from fashion, but also so many boutique owners start.

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They come from nursing, real estate, teaching, even just stay-at-home moms, which that's a full-time job, right?

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They come in and they think this is going to be easy.

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I'm smart. I'm organized. I can get things done. I am efficient. I'm friendly like if this sounds like you please tell me in the comments below and if this honestly sounds like you hit subscribe because this is the person I want to help and want to talk to you just don't have the education that I have and that's okay because I want to teach you and that's what this is all about. The most unsexy habit is first. So let's talk about it.

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Consistency.

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Consistency will kill your business if you don't stay consistent.

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I have so many people come to me, they say things like, I'm worried I'm not going to be able to keep up with my business, my marriage, my kids, my life. Maybe you have a full-time job. You feel like you get a ton of information everywhere.

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and you're just trying everything.

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But honestly, like for a person like you, you just want the step-by-step.

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Do this first, do this next, do this third, and you'll get good results, right? That's what you'd like, But it's hard to find that out there.

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And I think there's a lot of people who will say like, oh, just stay consistent on social media, just post every day. But like, honestly, yes, that's important. It's also not as important if you don't have great product or you don't have other things in place so to stay consistent is just plain hard for humans that's why if you're trying to like go live every day send

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emails five times a week like have your store open seven days a week 12 hours a day like that's a good consistent also might be too much and And it's going to take you a long time to sort of realize that you're burnt out. That's too much. And you don't need to do that.

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It's very easy to get thrown in to all this stuff, stay consistent for a while, and then drop out.

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You're dropping out because the plan and the habit that you put in place, like all the structures and systems in your business, don't actually help you create consistency. They give you more work to do. So what I like to do with anyone that's starting a business, starting a boutique, is say to them, what is the most important thing to you?

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If it's time with your family, if it is working out, if it is your full-time job, what is the thing that's most important?

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How do we reverse engineer your boutique's calendar, your boutique's launch schedule? Schedule, whatever you're doing with it, your market schedule, so that it maximizes you and your impact on the business because we need you fresh. Like we need you in good shape and staying consistent is being fresh and staying on top of things. So by reverse engineering what we're doing, we can come up with a plan that works I'm going to tell you right here, some of it's going to work and some of it won't.

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Even some of the things I tell people to do, they don't work. That's just life. That's business. But what I will say is, for the retail industry, there are professional standards that we do like to adhere by.

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to start growing scale our business.

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This happens a lot and it really stresses people out.

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very few of us were raised with entrepreneurial parents or influences on our lives that really said like, yes, go start that business. Like, yes, go do that. A lot of our parents or whomever like raised us and the environments we're in, we're not supportive of that. And maybe like right now, your family is not even supportive of you and what you're doing. That's automatically going to drop your confidence. And that's the second habit that I think most really successful boutique owners have in spades.

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Even if it's a little bit of fake it till you make it, confidence is what is going to be presented to your customer.

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It's the reflection of who you are, what your brand is, and what's going on. Listen, and you, it might not even be like you have to show up on camera. This isn't me at all saying like, oh, you have to do live streams every day and show your face.

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Do I think it's great to show your face? Yeah. Do I think you make real connection with people and build a community faster, therefore making more friends to make more money? Yeah, I do. But that confidence has to come from you. It can't be like fake confidence. It also can't just be like yelling at a camera and like, you know, putting on a big show. I think people really can see through social media. They can really see through the screen at who you really are. I think for most of us as boutique owners, we want to have the confidence to show up in our business the way that feels best to us. I don't know about you. For me, that's on camera. For me, that's using my voice. For It's not always using my body, but sometimes using my body. Having the confidence to step out, to stand out, is not only just about you and the photos and all that jazz. It's also about the confidence of what to buy for next season. It's also about the confidence for what trends to look for and how to understand how does that trend affect your business. This comes in a lot make us vulnerable. I actually feel that the deeper conversations we have in boutique world, the more we can get to the like the root cause of things and like really help you be successful in your business because so many of people are looking for like the strategy and the thing and I'm gonna tell you it's about the intuitive confidence and and the strategy around consistency but it's also from the data. I hear boutique owners all the time say I want to know what to buy for the future but I don't know how to decide that. I don't even know how to project what I'm going to make in terms of money going forward. How do you know what money you're going to make if you really don't know how the market's going to be, or how your customers are going to react to things? The third habit of highly successful boutique owners is that they understand their sales data, and their sales data informs their buying practices.

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absolutely is a strategy and absolutely is not being taught by anyone. There's very few inventory strategists, retail strategists, I personally know, who are teaching people like you. You have a boutique business or you have a small retail business. You are not a big, big, big company that needs a huge inventory management system or needs huge selling reports. You're like, that's too big for me. But also doing things on spreadsheets and even understanding what the numbers mean and how they affect everything, all of that together, it's also a lot to manage as a small business owner. The biggest issue I find with people that are dealing with knowing their sales analysis, understanding how that affects their buys going forward, I've heard clients say things like, Like inventory management gets harder as I grow. Like how do I invest in smart ways so that I'm working smarter not harder on like growing my inventory? I also have heard so many people concerned just about cash flow and how inventory gets purchased and actually paid for and how does that all work? How does your business support is really what so many people are asking me. And here's the thing, if you have a year's worth of data of sales, right? So let's say you started your business a year ago, you're on Shopify, you're selling in your store, your pop-ups, whatever, like brick and mortar, doesn't matter. As long as you have data, we can download that data and upload it into my brand new software, My Buy Plans, and get you a buying plan in 15 minutes or less. Yeah, okay, so let me skip into this. I have to skip into all of these changes. If you want to learn more about all of this and the tools I've created, the solutions I've created, and the membership community that I have where I can support you more, staying consistent, being confident, and of course, my software that helps you create your buy plans, you can check out this video for more information. See you on the next one!