No matter what industry you belong to, starting a new business is never easy. Retail stores are no exception — from selecting a location to fine-tuning the products, there are plenty of things to do while keeping perfectly defined track of them. And when many things are going on, it’s easy to forget small but important steps that can make big difference to your business success. This is when you need a reminder about what is left and what to do next for an amazing start.
Apart from having innovative and advanced cloud-based POS, like CISePOS, there are loads of tiny things that can play a vital role in boosting your retail startup. So, before you plan a grand opening for it, make sure you do these 10 things:
Make a Business Plan
The first step towards starting a business can’t be taken without a perfectly defined business plan. A great and explained retail business plan can help you make better decisions and preparations to flourish your dream business. Usually, it is observed that despite having a great startup idea, many of the businesses don’t get the success they deserve. And, mostly, the reason behind business-failure is the weak business plan, so make sure that you pay keen attention towards a safe and secure business plot and plan.
What factors are responsible for the failure and success or a business? There can be a number of reasons including poor customer service, poor logistics and cost management, and others, but the major reason is the lack of a business plan that leads to all the other issues.
Business plans can help you find goals and achieve them while writing down your vision for the company will let you keep all your brilliant ideas together which can be accomplished in the future.
Know Your Mission
What is your mission? You need to be really clear about it! Besides earning the profit, what exactly you want to achieve by operating a retail store?
Earning good is a need, but huge profits can be a byproduct of your business activities. However, apart from the game of numbers, your mission should be more about something that satisfies you to the core of your heart. For instance, it could be as simple as to serve customers in your own unique way and gain an image you always dreamt of.
To do this, you need to look out for what your competitors have to say about their mission of starting the business. Write your mission statement in short on a piece of paper and keep it in mind or paste it on your office wall to operate business accordingly.
How creating a mission can be beneficial?
Creating a mission statement will motivate you each day to work harder and reach your goals. You can also continue to look back to see the great achievements while getting motivated to grow your business more potentially.
It is also essential to keep your original entrepreneurial mindset and grassroots approach to work for best results. This is how you can stay competitive while keeping the reason you started your business in the first place.
Connect to Communities for Building Brand Awareness
Only stuffing your store with a lot of products and keeping the doors wide open cannot automatically bring in customers, you need to put efforts for that. And, in this advanced era of the internet, where people rely on getting information regarding anything or everything online, you need to cash this platform.
Remember, the success of a retail business is in its steady growth. And for playing your part right on this, you need to focus on generating more brand awareness in public. To do this, you need to approach your communities personally. These tactics will help you big in spreading a quick word of mouth even before the opening of your store.
A surefire trick to rapidly increase brand awareness is to make the most use of social media platforms. Nowadays, people have social media accounts on popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, thus reaching them in no time is the easiest way of promoting your business. To make your retail business leading and noticeable, create social media pages on all the channels including YouTube and post videos, text content, images, and gifs on the daily basis to capture customers’ attention. Even the funniest and emotional posts with a meaningful message can engage people with your business big-time.
Be Optimistic Towards Customer Service
When starting a business, you should clearly understand that the success of your business is less about the products and more about customer service. And when you know how to give your customers a unique shopping experience, then they would not be going anywhere else.
So, before opening a retail store, it would be an exceptional step to make a solid plan and strategy on how to maximize an impressive customer experience that customers will only get at your store, this will also help you to get referrals and great word of mouth.
Figure Out Your Finances
When initiating your own retail business you must understand that profits will not start flowing in right away.
We highly suggest entrepreneurs take a detailed hard look at what it actually takes to survive for at least six months on their own because business won’t give them back anything. Yes, here, we are talking about the revenue!
In the start, business will only ask you to spend and wait for the moment where you can have great numbers on the debit side of your balance sheet. Thus, having a source of cash while you are settling down your own business helps you in getting through the startup process with ease.
TIP: Don’t ever plan to purchase merchandise or signing a lease unless you have enough amount in bank to cover these expenses. This is the only way to go eyes wide open into a new business venture with security and credibility.
Make It Legal
Before even searching for the perfect location for your store, name your business and get it registered, make it a priority.
Don’t compromise on getting proper business permits and license. Also, pay close attention while checking into your insurance needs. If you require employees in your retail business, then getting employer identification number (EIN) is also necessary, it is used to identify a business entity.
High-Performance Team
Giving an outstanding start to your retail business, you must possess a dedicated, creative, and strong team that work on your vision with the great enthusiasm. To take the best work performance from your staff, you need to spend proper time and efforts on creating team composition, task distributions, team goals, communication channels, and etc.
Mostly, the problems team members’ face are, they don’t even know what they are aiming for? They just follow the team because they don’t want to be rejected which in result can damage your workforce management. Each team member should know the purpose, have a sense of direction, and should know who is responsible for what?
It’s your responsibility to tell them the guidelines and rules that they need to follow. In result, you will perfectly execute your business plan by greatly transforming a number of I’s into We, this will the accomplishment for you and your business.
Main characteristics of an ultimate team are:
- Involvement of all the members
- They all put efforts to make the business work
- Each one of them stays eager to serve customers with the best of the best shopping experience
- Rapid interaction among team members
- Informal, unstructured communications, etc.
Find a Location with Good Traffic
If you want great sales, then don’t even think of going cheap when it comes to real estate or a physical location of your store. While choosing the area or location, keep in mind, the more traffic, foot or vehicle, you can garner the better results you will get.
For instance: If you need to pick between two properties, where one of them is with great anchors like Walgreens or Starbucks, the rent will undoubtedly be higher but in the end, your spending will worth it in the long run. And eventually, the extra revenue will presumably outweigh the massive cost of a great location.
Design the Right Store Layout
Each stores’ layout is uniquely designed because customers shop diversely depending on the industry and its complexity.
For example, Electronics and beauty stores require room for customers to play. So, when it’s primarily about beauty products, it’s important for buyers to smell or try samples of beauty products, which usually happens to be crucial. Thus, providing a space to let them check products properly will drive them to your store more often. For electronics, you have to set items in a way that allow customers to compare and test them.
However, to understand this science of correctly defined layout, you should visit the top retailers in your industry to see how they manage the design of their store. It can give you an excellent understanding of which items are conveniently positioned at the register for impulse buyers? What items have the most playing room? And etc.
Remember, product positioning is what your customer thinks while shopping for that particular item. Thus, it is essential to understand how to capture consumers’ attention for your target market.
To mark your presence in the customers’ mind, your product must meet the needs of the target market by understanding customers’ pain to select the right product and providing them the one. Therefore, researching for better product positioning before starting a retail business will keep you safe from potential landmines.
Pick Business Management Software Wisely
Last but not the least, before getting started with your business, it’s important to select the perfect business management software to meet your retail business needs prominently. Take the demo of market leading and competitive POS solutions, and then pick the one that is flexible, advantageous, affordable, and easy to use.
With advancement in tech, now you can also get cloud-based POS, which is accessible from anywhere, anytime, you will only need to have an internet connection that’s it. Now, keeping an eye on each business operation is just a game of clicks!
Why we need to put efforts even before the opening of a new retail store?
As we all know, the retail industry of every country has evolved dramatically over the years.
The industry once primarily consisted of brick and mortar stores. But now, online retail stores are giving tough competition to these physical stores. E-commerce websites emerged as a strong and successful example of online retailers.
This makes it mandatory to keep every single operation of your retail business aligned and well managed before it’s opened for public. We hope that our list of must-to-do things before opening a store will be helpful for you and make you reach your business goals eminently.
If you have some interesting and fruitful ideas and tricks that can be beneficial for retail business owners, share them in the comment section below. We are always pleased to hear from our visitors.