Where the Magic Happens
by Sid Raisch
On Wednesday during The Fall Event, Sid gave a challenging presentation titled "The Magic of Streamlining Your Business" and provided a path to making our businesses more simple, more enjoyable, and more profitable. While we can't bring you the full experience of being at his presentation (or the entire Fall Event), we can give you some powerful high points. And of course, if you were fortunate enough to be at The Fall Event, this is a recap to make sure you are working on this in your business operation!
Many of you have nice garden centers. However, very few have really nice garden centers - which I'll define as a nice garden center with the profit to prove it.
As The Group's P&L Study shows, most nice garden centers don't have the profit to earn a profitability award. Only five garden centers received the Best Practice Award for 2014 profitability. If you earned the High Achiever award for profit between 5 and 10% you have a running start. No matter what level of profit (or loss) you achieved there is a path to improvement. Change is necessary if you want to become one of the really nice garden centers.
It's not change for the sake of change. It's making the right changes.
All of us are already making changes - therein lies most of our problems. Changes that don't move the profit lever are exercises in futility. Making the right changes usually isn't harder than making other changes. We have to know which changes to make. It is still not easy to make changes, however it is just as possible to make the right changes as it is possible to make the wrong ones.
If you aren't already on track to earn a 2015 Best Practice Award it is highly unlikely you can do much to affect your outcome by the end of this year. If you want to earn a Best Practice Award for 2016, or just want to increase your profitability another step forward, time is of the essence. Higher profit can only be the result of specific intent and intelligent design. No one has ever earned a profit by blind luck alone.
Developing Specific Intent
Hovering in the low profit zone is neither comfortable, nor sustainable. Low profit doesn't provide for your future. The problem most of us have is that we are not personally motivated or driven to earn profit for the sake of profit. Many of us have a stigma about profit, treating it more like a necessary evil, than like a trusted friend and a path to happiness. "Profit" is not a four-letter word. Count them - there are six. 
One of my best reads this year has been Life is Good - The Book, by Bert and John Jacobs, co-founders of the Life is Good company. One of their best t-shirts proclaims "Do what you love, love what you do". The Life is Good Playmakers foundation proclaims, "You can't share what you don't have." In other words, "You've got to get, to give."
Many of us have accepted low profit as being better as if embracing high profit is a bad thing. The truth is this. If we can earn more profit we can do more good. Enough with the excuses like "it'll just go to the government". While there is some truth to that the good you can do with more profit far outweighs being forced to part with a portion of it. Let's get real - that notion is just a poor excuse for lack of effort to earn a respectable profit.
Hard Work vs. Real Work
One of the essential ingredients to happiness and success has always been working hard. However, we've often taken the positive value of working hard too far and have gotten into the negative consequences of over-working. Working hard is enjoying and passionately practicing our craft. Then there is The Real Work of Retail where we are also running the business side of our business to allow us to continue and to thrive doing the hard work - no matter how emotionally difficult it may be to do so.
Streamline
"There is nothing so useless as doing more efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker
There is simply no more direct path to improving your business than to simplify what you're doing (first), and then simplifying how you do it. Knowing what to remove and what remains is essential. The answers to determining these priorities already exists if we pay attention and make decisions based on the evidence.
Next Monday I'll take this further and introduce some effective tools to help you develop a focused strategy.
Frame Your Mindset
Most of us have a short lull between now and the peak of the Christmas season. Use this time wisely by beginning to work on your plans for 2016 now so you'll have time to take your specific intent to earn a higher profit and match that up with an intelligently designed plan to do so. The first thing to do is to step back and begin with the big picture.
Begin by Getting Inspired.
CLICK HERE to order Life is Good - The Book today. Order extra copies or pass it along to your key people and start developing a like-mindedness that is necessary for implementing your plans. When it arrives dig in. It is a quick read. I completed in just a couple of sittings. You'll finish it inspired to craft your Real Work of Retail plan.
Your friend,
Sid