By Kevin McAdam
VP Sales, One Step Retail Solutions

Taken from a chapter in Kevin McAdam's new book, "Succeeding in the Retail Business During Economic Stress"

Did you ever hear the story about the two lumberjacks?

Both lumberjacks were working on a pile of lumber, but one just kept on-task cutting away at his pile while the other kept stopping throughout the day. At the end of the day the second lumberjack had three times as much wood cut. The first lumberjack, shocked, asked "How did you cut so much more wood, you kept resting all day"? The second lumberjack replied, "I wasn’t resting, I was sharpening my saw."

You see, many people mistakenly see training as an "interruption" to their business and they suffer as a result. Working hard is not necessarily the answer; instead, use the tools that are available to find a way to win despite circumstances around you.

Take the fear in a plunging economy. It can have some devastating effects, or not. I read an article about how many retailers were actually expanding during all the economic woes. They were focusing in on their core strengths, taking advantage of the lower real estate prices to open more stores, and using technology to improve their reach to their core customer segments.

It requires taking the time to understand how to have the right inventory based on your sales trends, to understand how your employees are doing and work to improve that, and then investing in the infrastructure of your business to capitalize on the coming up-swing in the economy.

Look at the internet as an example of how other successful companies have done this. The cool video and other streaming content on the internet today is a result of the infrastructure investment that was made by companies several years ago after the dot com bust. Now those companies and others are profiting from the new content available on the internet, but only available because of that earlier infrastructure investment.

Along those lines I want to share with you some interesting information that I recently read about in Chain Store Age magazine. This issue was full of information on how different retailers were using the internet to broaden their reach to customers, enhance the shopping experience through content, and ultimately increase their sales through this explosive channel of retailing.

Electronic retailing was one of the topics when looking at the lessons learned from the 2007 holiday season and one article dubbed 2008 "The Year of the Shopping Experience." The article went on to describe how successful retailers are looking at technology investments in 2008 that will "support an innovative shopping experience, regardless of the retail channel shoppers utilize".

So how can your point of sale software help with all this? Well, when I see what other retailers are doing on the internet to "support an innovative shopping experience" I think of the intense need to know your customers first. If you don’t know who your customers are, what they are buying, who the best margin customers are that you want to cater to, etc. then your marketing on the internet could be off and fall flat.

Alternately, if you really know those things and market the right content to the right customers who bring you margin and revenue then you have a hit.

Of course, in addition to this great information in the issue on the internet was an oh-so-slight piece of data from the 2007 National Shopping Behavior Study, designed and managed by The Gordman Group. The study once again confirms that the retailers who are gaining share-of-wallet are winning by being in-stock with the right merchandise for their customers.

You just can't beat the right inventory at the right place and the right price, can you? #