Drafting Your Fantasy Team
The only ticket to growth is freedom. The only ticket to freedom for an entrepreneur is a team you trust to follow your business vision. Established businesses fall into certain ruts. Things are moving along and people on your team will leave while others are hired. This can become routine and done without a lot
Software Solutions
Benjamin Franklin once advised tradesmen that “time is money.” While much has changed over the past two and a half centuries, this idea still holds true for small businesses. Most tire dealers are efficient with their time, but there is always room for improvement. If a tire dealership uses an antiquated computer program, or even
A Winning Workplace
Having difficulty finding talented employees? Take a good hard look at the engagement level of your existing employees first. Spending the last 20+ years in business consulting, the past 10 in my own practice, I have too often heard the plea “we can’t find good people” from business owners and/or management personnel. In fact, if
Turning Employees into Salespeople
Looking for new ways to address flat sales and low profitability? Try turning all your employees into salespeople. Regardless of an employee’s position or job description, there’s an opportunity for people at all levels to be salespeople. Here are eight ways to make sales part of every person’s job, adapted from Patricia Sigmon’s new book
How Did We Do Today?
It’s widely accepted that gathering customer feedback can help a tire dealership better meet its clients’ expectations. After that, the clear-cut details start to fade. What’s the best way to gather feedback – and exactly what customer satisfaction data should be sought? And once you have the data in hand, how do you translate that
It’s in the Book
Most enterprises have established operational policies and procedures that address almost every element of their business, from inventory controls to making bank deposits. These basic operational procedures are usually unique to the individual business unit and subject to the discretion of the business owner. However, more often than not, the single most important operational function
Taking the Mystery Out Labor Profitability
Many tire dealers are confused about managing labor inventory in their shops. Much of the confusion comes from the terminology thrown around and because the definitions for these terms vary. I would like to clarify, from my perspective, what I believe to be the proper terminology and formulas for managing labor inventory. Let’s start with
Women Tire Buyers Really Want to be Educated
She walks into your dealership and you already have her pegged. She doesn’t know much about tires, you think, and she most likely hasn’t put any effort into researching them before coming. After all, buying tires isn’t really her responsibility anyway; it’s her male partner’s. She probably just has a lot of spare time, so
Habits to a Highly Effective Sales Professional
First published in 1990, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is one of the best-selling and most influential personal development books of all time. The Seven Habits themselves are a simple set of rules for life and powerful principles anyone can apply to improve their personal productivity and performance. In this article,
Retailers Face Liability Issues with Chip-based Card’s Fall Deadline
Oct. 1 will mark the deadline retail-based merchants can switch to the “EMV,” or “chip card,” credit card equipment without facing potential fraud liability. EMV, which stands for Europay, Mastercard, Visa, was created to stop duplicate card fraud. In attempt to thwart fraud, the EMV chip creates a one-time sale token related to a specific
Rethinking the Tire Store
Here’s a challenge for you: Close your eyes and think about your retail tire space from a consumer’s eyes. Now what do you see? Is it a typical store? Does it follow the same overdone formula with a Great Wall of China service counter, dusty tire displays along the front, poor lighting and a waiting
Leveraging SWOT Analysis
As I teach all of my clients, effectively improving an organization’s sales and customer service effort should begin with an honest evaluation of the company’s current performance to establish a baseline from which improvements can be addressed and measured. One of the best ways to clearly gauge current performance is to perform a SWOT analysis.
