Doing Things His Way
I was talking to the owner of an auto parts store the other day. His store is in a town of about 5,000 and is very profitable. He remains profitable because he is constantly changing his business to deal with the changes from his competition. In the same town was a store owned by one of the large program groups. The program group corporation took over the store a few years ago from some partners that couldn't make a go of it. A few years later the corporate store closed. I must assume that the store was not making money for or the corporation would have kept it open. After the corporation closed the store, representatives of the same corporation contacted the owner of the profitable store. These representatives tried to convince the store owner to take over the failed store or to convert his profitable store into their program group.The whole idea is insane. Twice people have tried to make money running a store the way that the program group says to run a store and both times they failed. Now they are asking somebody who is making money doing things his way to change and do things their way. That means that will tell him that he must spend an incredible amount of money on one of their signs boosting their business image. They will tell him what parts that he must buy and what items that he can't sell. The will tell him how to lay out his store. They will offer him many add on options from the corporate plan all of which cost big bucks. They will force him to buy their store POS system which makes it easier for them to control his business. Every one of these things that he must do limits his ability to make more money. To be fair, for every store owner that does things his way and prospers there are more that fail and they usually fail quickly.
Labels: changing a business, doing things his way, insane decisions, Program group, Store POS System
Special one time orders
A common special one time order is the yearly order for lawn and garden items. Come spring time when love is in the air you had better have sent in your spring order for lawn and garden items long ago. Otherwise, you are going to take a beating on freight charges. A first cut for ordering a part number is to order what you sold last year less any that might be left over from last year. The next step is to look for lost sales on the item and to maybe order more to cover any lost sales on the item from last year. You also have to look for supersedes and order the new part number if the old one has been superseded. Your STORE POS SYSTEM should have all of this information immediately available for you in a format that your supplier can use. Finally, you have to look at your latest bank statement and figure out what you can afford to order.
Another type of special one time orders is as follows. A wholesale supplier may offer their customers special prices on fast moving items with an extended payment schedule. For example, they might offer a 10% discount on some minimum purchase of lighting items and the terms might be 30-60-90. That is, you pay 1/3rd in 30 days, another 1/3rd in 60 days and the final 1/3rd in 90 days. Assuming that you don't have plenty of extra cash, you want to make sure that you sell what you ordered before the 90 days is up so that you can afford to make those payments. Here again you would look on your STORE POS SYSTEM at the sales of the specially priced items over the same 90 day period last year. Depending on your financial strength and sales outlook, you might order more or less than you sold last year.
Labels: lost sales, sales history, Special one time orders, Store POS System
Buying a Cash Receipt Printer
Invoices are a cost of doing business. However, you might want to think about also using paper tape receipts for cash customers. It is a simple calculation to figure out if adding a paper tape receipt printer to your STORE POS SYSTEM is a good investment. When all is said and done, you have to figure that you will spend about $300 to buy and install a paper tape receipt printer for cash sales. Beyond that your expense for paper tape is nil compared with invoices. You take the price of your invoices in pennies and divide that into 30000. For example, if you pay $.02 for each of your invoices then you would get 30000/2 = 15000. That tells you that you would need to run 15,000 cash receipts to make the printer pay for itself. Since any STORE POS SYSTEM will tell you how many cash invoices you run in month, it is simple to figure how many months it will take for the cash receipt printer to pay for itself.
Labels: invoices, paper tape receipts, Store POS System
