Summary
Does your product business feel unpredictable, slightly terrifying, and hungry for money?
If so, you’re not alone.
Retail is the fastest growing small business sector, and for good reason. With accessible selling technology and billions of people shopping online, reaching your ideal customer is easier than ever before.
But the truth is that making money in a product business is harder than it first appears. And without profits, your business becomes incredibly difficult to manage and almost impossible to grow.
Fortunately for you, big retailers have spent decades developing methods of monitoring profit margins, forecasting and growing sales and managing stock to maximise their bottom line.
In this book, small-business retail expert Catherine Erdly shows you how to easily apply those big business tools and perspectives to understand your business, get clear on what you need to do to grow profitably, and, ultimately, tame your tiger.
Table of contents
Preface
Welcome
- Who the book is for and how to use it, with an introduction to the fictional case studies that will be used throughout the book.
Chapter 1 – The Anatomy of a tiger
- Why do product businesses become tigers and how do you manage them?
Chapter 2 – The Bite Part 1 – The top teeth
- How to calculate your in-margin, and how to improve it.
Chapter 3 – The Bite Part 2 – The bottom teeth
- What is your out-margin? How can it impact your business and what are some of the factors that may be causing you a problem.
Chapter 4 – The Tail Part 1
- How do you identify the productive stock in your business?
Chapter 5 – The Tail Part 2
- The questions to ask yourself before creating a stock plan.
Chapter 6 – The stomach
- How much are you feeding your tiger? Working out what your fixed expenses are in your business and how to put together a simple plan to make sure they are the right size.
Chapter 7 – What about sales?
- How to grow sales in a profit-positive way, and why more sales isn’t always the answer.
Chapter 8 – Becoming a tiger tamer
- Understanding the key numbers you need to track each month to keep your business healthy. Using the data to learn about what your customer really wants and improve your product strategy.
Chapter 9 – Final thoughts
- If you do nothing else after reading the book, these are the things to focus on.
Acknowledgements
Appendices
Further Reading
About the authors
Catherine Erdly is an award-winning small business retail expert, podcast host, speaker and writer, recently named one of the top 100 retail influencers in the world by Rethink Retail. She has over two decades experience in the retail industry, including 17 years managing budgets up to £400 million for some of the largest names in the high street in the UK and USA.
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