The entrepreneur | Four practical tips for a better balance in your…

Manage your purchases smarter with four practical tips. Retail Trend Observer Fred Rutgers will help you on your way.

1 Measuring is knowing

Your commercial property is usually a given. Unless you are moving to a larger or smaller building. You have to do with what you have. But do you know how many square meters or linear meters of shelf space you have in your store? And if you know, do you have any idea how much space you have available for the different product groups in your range?

Suppose you own a shoe store. What percentage of the total space do you have for women’s and men’s shoes? How much space do you have for children’s shoes? How much room do women’s high heel boots take up and how much room do you have for service items like shoe polish and laces? Take the stallion and map it as accurately as possible. The more detailed it is, the better and express everything as a percentage of the total available space.

2 Take a full inventory

It is in any case good to do it more than once a year when preparing the balance sheet. Pay attention! Make this inventory according to the same product classification as in point 1. If you are in fashion, then if you have shown the evening dresses separately in terms of space, you should now also count the evening dresses as financial stock at purchase value. Again, the more precise the better!

3 Dive into your POS system and find out what your turnover is for the selected product groups

So again spread over the groups as for 1 and 2. Unfortunately, I see that too many entrepreneurs can make this distribution difficult because they have made their checkout groups very rude in terms of layout. Don’t you have a special cash register group for each product group at a specific level? Now is the time to change that immediately. Almost any cash register should be able to handle this. It just takes discipline to do it. And it is really vital! How do you best manage your business if you don’t have actionable data?

4 Now put the numbers in a row

Now it will get interesting. What percentage of your free space have you made available for each product group? What percentage of your capital have you invested in each product group? And what percentage of your sales do you make with each product group? In many cases, you will now be shocked! Each time I do this check with entrepreneurs, I see that it is often very unbalanced. Product groups that an entrepreneur finds interesting or interesting often get more space and consume more capital than is justified by the turnover made with them, and vice versa. This nice rep with his fluent conversation seems to have managed to steal more storage space and social capital from you than can be justified on the basis of the turnover generated. It’s too hard for you to restore balance.

Are you having difficulty doing this and don’t know how to balance this by product group? No problem! You can also apply steps 1 to 4 within a product group. Just keep track of revenue by product for a few days within that product group (you can do this manually). You’ll see: you’ll soon be taking the girls out of the store. And hey, on sale. Because then you can probably better use that expensive space and your scarce capital for something else.

I wish you much success and fun with this. You will see that with this knowledge, you will also manage your purchases differently and smarter after a while so that you will eventually get more sales and profits. And isn’t that why you’re doing all this?