September 14, 2010

Summer is over blog…

Summer's over.
Vacation's over.
Lame "everyone's on vacation" excuses are over.
Back to business.
Back to work.
Back to sales.

Those are not my words (although I was thinking similar thoughts). No, those were the first words in this sales blog by Jeffrey Gitomer that I read each week. And how appropriate it popped up in my inbox just as I was about to update my blogsite. On July 8^th I blogged about how great summer is, and how much I was going to enjoy the next few weeks filled with vacation time and slower work loads. And oh how I did enjoy that time. But now it is September; and we are about to enter the most critical time in the retail industry… the 4^th quarter.

So, it’s back to reality. We are in the midst of our Spring 2011 selling season, talking to retailers about future plans. And “the big elephant” that comes into all our conversations is the economy. Nobody knows if this will be a successful fall/holiday shopping season. The general consensus is that the economy still sucks. The stock market is up and down like a yo-yo, property values are still half of what they were, and the unemployment numbers are scary. There just isn’t a lot of confidence.

So, what can we (Broner) do? I say plenty. Start by focusing on the positive, not the negative. Our business is up slightly over last year. So what if last year stunk? It is over and we are moving in the right direction. Hats are selling and getting a lot of media attention (have you noticed?). The traffic at the MAGIC show was down. We can focus on that, or we can focus on the fact that we opened over a dozen new stores to our family of customers (a record for that show). But the most important thing we can continue to do is to partner with our retail customers. By that I mean communicate better, understand better, react faster, share more, and “touch” more. The results will come.

In that regard, we have made a major investment in our ability to communicate. I just signed the papers to completely switch our software providers and move to a new format called Profit 21. Without going into all the details, it will allow us to do all of the above. And it will change the look of bronerhats.com and bob’s blog. This will allow our customers to have access to their account information and inventory availability. And we are working to have our consumer “fans” align with our retail customers through our facebook community. Right now we are a “work in progress” on those fronts, but by the end of the year we should see results.

And now it is back to business. One sales person has left and another has joined. We are slowly investing more in our business - a new trade show, another seller, a ten night trip to Asia, a new computer system, and on we go. Buckle up and enjoy the ride, its back to work we go!