Over the past week or so, a pattern has been emerging... A Pattern of Five!
Seeing the first major patterns then gave me the idea for this message to share today. But before I highlight the major ones that gave me this idea, I will first step back to some basic thoughts.
If you have ever been part of our Retailers' Choice Awards or Cool Product Awards, you know it is a wonderful hybrid of both fun and productivity. Meeting peer Centers at the end of the day to share what each has found and nominating products for awards can be like opening presents at Christmas... OK, maybe not quite that exciting, but close!
All the interactions surrounding each new plant or product help define why each should be considered the best for making the winning impressions. There is laughter, intrigue, and some great surprises along the way.
As a Garden Center Owner or Manager, you are constantly in what we might call "observation mode" as you go through each week, watching in-store traffic, as plants and products move through. And all this is parallel to also studying your POS data, Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Year-to-Date against your budget and plans.
Group Owners and Managers have another important level of observation advantage, what is happening across The Group in peer Centers. The benefit of seeing peer Centers in the same region as well as regions that might be ahead of your area in the seasonal cycles, is a unique position. When are certain categories surging or falling off? When are traffic levels changing? And how does this all compare to or point to what you can watch for just a few weeks ahead in your Center?
The Hampton Inn of IGC’s!
The word CUSTOMER has two 2-letter words that mean everything in delivering an exceptional and consistent customer experience. Your team will learn why they both matter when it comes to the customer and learn how not to be a “Gwen!”
We are excited to announce a whole new level of Awards that we will present at The Fall Event 2024. They have been developed through collaboration within The Group Team, particularly Tim Quebedeaux and Sid Raisch. In the last 3 years, the level of benchmarking through The Group's Annual P&L Study has become more detailed. For years, Group Centers were comparing themselves to Total Group Averages and then against the Best Practices Group Averages.
But, as the terms apply, these are Averages and within each of these groups, there are Centers that are higher and lower to produce the Average. But what about the best-performing Centers? Who is performing best?
The Four Reasons Customers Buy
In this video, your team will learn the difference between having an “A-Team” or the “F-Troup” of customer experience. Does the journey of your customer, at every single touch point, align to your brand identity, support your brand strategy, and deliver on your brand promise?”
The search for knowledge is as old as time itself. Mankind's earliest wonder was on things like how fire worked and how they could use it for their advantage. It is beyond comprehension how the quest for knowledge and level of learning over centuries has brought us to where we are today.
Just considering our industry and the study of Horticulture is a small example. And really, all the knowledge gained about the Plant Kingdom is no minor matter. And the search continues.
Marketing Degradation - Marketing has become degraded to an undisciplined practice of rapid-fire social media posts with messages covering dozens if not hundreds of topics to the point that - there is no real net message, or benefit of creating them.
Let’s begin with the end in mind. The end in marketing is a purchase. I will come back to that notion.
In this video, your team will understand how important it is to arrive at work ready to deliver an exceptional retail experience…every single day. And in order to do that, it has to be from within…an inside job.
The Power of Attitude (good or bad) can dictate the entire day for the team and the entire experience for the customer. Is your attitude contagious or a contagion? Because when the customer arrives at your garden center, they don’t really care about what happened prior to work, or that it’s hot, or that you are two folks down, or the POS is off-line, or a truck just arrived, or a storm just blew over your entire tree selection, or, or, or…
As we have wrapped up spring in most regions the last few weeks, you now have the majority of your Spring 2024 Customer Data available to study. We can see in Week 22 of the WDR, year-to-date Average Sale remains virtually flat with this same week last year. But Transaction Counts year-to-date are down about -5%.
These compare to Average Sale being flat and Transaction Counts being +2.6% as of this week last year. And then end-of-year for 2023 being virtually even with Average Sale & Transaction Counts resulting in near-even sales against 2022.
Part 1 - Introduction: Setting the Table for Success
As Danny mentioned a few weeks back, the Starbucks story was built upon a hyper-focus on the customer experience. The idea of dusting off this video series from Member Clicks and reintroducing it (or introducing it to new folks) would be a great chance to “sharpen the saw” for your training and development goals during the summer.
One of the earliest forms of what we might call a craft today is Paper Mache. The image of the bee above is an example. A quick search reveals Paper Mache's beginning can be traced back to the 1300's. Today, we could quickly envision a piñata to represent Paper Mache, or an elementary school project. I can remember our girls using Paper Mache to building a volcano for one of their projects (and no kitchen or dining room tables were damaged by eruptions).
I am thinking for Garden Retailing, the idea for Crafting Opportunities could be focused toward both plants and product categories as well as activities outside of the typical spring season.
Part 4 - Sell What THEY Want to Buy - The CHEESE
[Continued from Part 3 - Click HERE to read from Group Blog]
We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this article series. Be sure to click on the link above to review Part 3 or to catch up if you haven’t been following along with each part.
Real creativity, what we may call Creative Juices, must take a special kind of focus and attention. It may require quiet space to really unplug and block out all the typical hustle and bustle you normally experience in the work setting. I decided to ask Tom Kegley what he does to be in the best position for his most creative work. Here's what Tom said:
"In my work, CREATIVITY is equal parts INSPIRATION (concept) and PERSPIRATION (execution). Given this notion of Applied Creativity, I’ll focus on the front end. How does something intangible as INSPIRATION happen?
Part B – “Best Practices Standards” – Physical Facility, Revenues, Payment Types, and Labor Hours
Last week we saw how the Bubble Chart shows us how important the bottom line (Profit) is, over the top line (Revenues). It states, “It is not how much you SELL, it is how much you KEEP."
This story begins as a little coffee shop opened in 1971 in Seattle's Pike Place Market. The story actually began when three students met a few years earlier at the University of San Francisco. The three classmates were Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker. They were all interested in the coffee business. Maybe it had something to do with long hours studying and coffee helping to keep their eyes open. Following their common interest, they visited a little coffee shop across the bay in Berkley which had opened a few years before.
The Berkley shop the three students visited was owned by Alfred Peet, born in the Netherlands, who "cut his teeth" in the coffee industry in his homeland, caring for the roasting and grinding machinery at the small coffee company his father owned, the B. Koorn & Company, located in Alkmaar, Holland.
Congrats to all the Garden Group Centers that reported in the 2023 Profit & Loss Study, a record 86 Garden Centers with 66 of those reporting to at least Part 4 (Inventory Turns & Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment - GRMOII). This is an EBIDTA (Earnings before Interest, Depreciation, Taxes and Amortization) P&L Study otherwise known as an Operating P&L Study. We use this type of Profit & Loss so that we can compare apples to apples, how your Garden Center operates compared to other centers. The Study compares your center to The Total Group, Centers in your Region, Centers that are either Retail or Retail-Grower, Similar Sales Level to you, and ultimately to the Best of the Best Group.
To be able to even think about comparing your business to others, you need to be able to measure what you are going to compare. Reporting to the Garden Center Group Annual P&L Study is a great start! Once you have that accountability in the numbers, the all-important Key Performant Indicators (KPI’s), you can begin to compare your profitability to other centers and begin to ask the questions – how and why did they do it?
During your busiest times, I understand how difficult it is to step back to make observations to develop important perspectives. But for Owners and Managers, stepping back during these fast-paced days can be critical and provide the best insights for making important changes.
This is like a major league baseball manager viewing from the dugout, he is reading every move the opposing pitcher is making and directing adjustments for his team.
Part 3 - Meet Them - Where THEY Are (Not Where We Are)
READ THIS FIRST - This week as we head towards Mothers Day, be thinking about the customers who haven’t been in your store and you won’t be seeing this week, next week, next month, or ever, if we don’t figure out how to REACH them.
Sometimes, great ideas begin... Organically.
And by "organically" I don't mean our first reaction of thinking about your favorite compost or plant nutrient. Instead, I am thinking about an idea that arrives "naturally" or without great effort to create a wonderful new idea.