Adventures with Corndog: Corndog's Fish Store

Well just when I think I have taxes done for the year. My personal return should be done today... I got an email from the state on Monday saying I've been selected for a payroll Audit. Anyone ever been through one? I have a feeling this can only end with me owing money as every I've talked to says basically they always find some way to make sure the auditor justifies the time spent auditing you. I just submitted the paperwork today. We'll see how it goes down. I've been using an accountant to do the payroll for me. So I'm hoping everything is just as it should be.

Never the less, even for running the business legit, it's stressful when you've talked to people you'd trust who say they were doing everything correct also and yet still get slapped with you owe us X.

i'll be interested to hear how the move goes for you Kiroy. I think about the same thing. I'm just worried that I'll expand and make less profit. Right now I'm capping out my space too so to speak, but I'd rather be super effecient with 1k sqft than not very efficient with 2-3k.

Last year ran flat for me sales wise. Profit I was up quite a bit. But overall sales were only about 275k again. This month I'm up quite a bit. I've been running more sales, staying up on the weekly newsletters etc. Basically I'm at last years sales numbers for this month with 30% of the month to go. Spreadsheet projections put me at 36k for this month which would be my best month ever and it's even a short month. We'll see how it goes. Last year I had 3 competitors close their doors from bad sales. I think it was our super long summer was just the nail in the coffin for them. Being Seattle we literally had less rain than the Sahara desert over the summer. Now we've got the most rain ever recorded in a winter since they've been recording... So it makes it hard to predict what I should be doing.

If I buy in to Koi right now there are perks. However if it rains all summer koi sales will be low and tropical fish sales will be up. It's no different for you I'm sure as I know the weather messed up all my clothing retail buddies too, saying it's too hot to be selling sweaters etc.

So I currently have about 950 sqft sales area. I also have a unit like 4 doors down from mine that is storage. another 700 sqft roughly. One thing I feel like I've noticed. If my stock is too heavy in store customers get the impression I'm not selling it. If it's a fish and I have 300 of them in a tank. No one can tell the difference between 100 and 300 honestly. I could have already sold 100 of them that day and people will make comments like "not selling those much huh? At the same time I don't want to only have 2 cans of fish food on the shelf and have it look like we can't afford to have more. I feel like there is a fine line to ride. It seems like the more I have of something the less I sell it. So I have to feed it out to the sales floor slowly. I always explain it to my employees like that old rice krispy treat commercial. Where the customers buys the last one. As soon as they walk out they put 1 more into the sales box. To set up the same trick for the next customer.

I've definitely seen it happen in my store. If I have a big number, they say they'll think about it and come back. If its the last one, they end up buying it out of fear if they realize they did want it, it'll be gone.

So my goal in getting more space would be to offer more variety of products instead of just straight up more products on the sales floor. I too sometimes wish I had a second register. However I feel like each level you go up, more is expected. Like will people bitch more about slow checkout if there are 2 registers and 1 person rings up faster than the other one? All of a sudden they are angry they chose the slow line etc.

So oddly enough I was totally anti promo sales too. Basically like maybe 1 a year on black friday. I was convinced that it trains customers to wait for sales etc also. However over the past few months I've been running some sales. What I found was it does bring more people in my doors. The trick is to run sales on items that have huge profit margins. Then get people to buy other stuff at full price.

My fear was that if I sell stuff as a discount people will only need so many fish right? Like how many sweaters do people really need to buy? But the reality is people overbuy on items all the time. So they might kill fish, decide they don't like them etc. For you it might be that this years sweaters are out of fashion next year etc. What I don't do is put things on sale that are evergreen. So for you that might be don't put socks on discount cause once someone buys 50 pairs, they're set for years etc. But maybe bekinis are a good item to do what with cause it's likely they'll want a different one for next year or be a different size etc.

So I've been doing a promo each weekend with newsletters through email to compliment it each weekend this month. This is by far my most profitable month I've had so far. This last weekend. Fri-Sunday. I ran a promo that all live plants were 50% off. This still allowed me to double my money as plants are a higher profit margin item with low risk. Where as fish have a high risk for me. Between Fri-Sunday we did 7.2k in sales. You'd think it'd all be in plants right? Only $2350 of it was plants. The rest was fish, and products etc. I'm more and amazed at each sale how people do buy the sale items but load up on other stuff while they are there. I did two other sales this month so far and the results were the same.

I think now my problem is finding items to put on sale to get people in without training my customers. Like you don't want plants to go on sale once a month but maybe once ever 3 months would be ok. So you almost need to set a schedule of promos for the year. I think it will change the way I do business. Now when a vendor offers a promo. I won't analyze the promo from a standpoint of how many should I buy and sell at normal profit. I'll be looking at it and see if it's worth investing in to have it be a weekend promo to get people in my door.

I think we all know that sales at stores generate them money. We just think, I don't think it'll work in my store. You focus on the people who come in and only buy the sale item and leave.. And go man this is stupid. But when you look at overall big data you see that it is more profitable. I'm interested to see how it can change other things too like customer recency. Typically before running sales my customers would come in once every 3 weeks. If I can get them back two weekends in a row with back to back sales on different items and they buy extras each time, how is that not just added revenue.

It does hurt to hear the customer say, this sale is so timely I was about to buy one of these. You feel like oh good I just gave away money, but if others are buying too who wouldn't have normally it is totally making up for it. It's not like I've invented the wheel, it's known that this works, I think as a small business I just felt like it wouldn't work for me cause I don't have the buying power/can't get a good enough deal to not loose my shirt. When in fact that was just me making excuses not to find products to do it with.

I had my most profitable day ever this month. Was close to the most sales ever. But highest sales day was a black friday. This day was close but the profit was WAY higher cause I did like a normal sale instead of giving away too much at a black Friday.