If you thought this life passed by very quickly, you should open a small business and watch it fly by. A small business retail owner must get used to the phenomena of having your life literally flash by before your eyes. When you are doing everything by yourself, there is never more than a brief moment to pause and enjoy your latest accomplishment. It can be very exhilarating - or it can be very distressing. You are always looking down the road - planning for the next season. My choice of being part of the specialty food retail industry has limited some of the things we are involved in - like back to school clothing or supply sales. However, summer means tourists and lunching out in much greater numbers than the rest of the year, as well as different access to lighter cheeses and lots of farm fresh vegetables. All the sales planning creativity is more directed to planning more interesting menus and looking for merchandise that supports the easy summer entertaining menus.
And now summer is over, so September will be all about building up our holiday gift and shipping business. We will be going over all last years contacts, sending out mailers to remind them of our services.
September is also a month where we start looking at budgets for next year, and try to figure out which, if any advertising and marketing promotions actually worked this year.
We have finally made the step to purchase a computerized POS (no, that doesn't mean piece of *$@#.), "Point of Sale" system. It is arriving this week, and I am literally turning into the IT department to re-configure the inside of our small store to accomodate.
While I am looking forward to the time savings (especially in weekly data entry, all our sales and inventory information having been previously re-entered after the fact into a computer system), I cannot say I am not just the slightest bit daunted by this actual setup process.
Stay posted ... to co-op one famous astronaut's now immortal quote - "One small step for Laura...one giant leap for Brick Street Market!" Thank you to Neil Armstrong, d. - 8/25/2012, along with his fellow astronauts, for a lasting image of what one small person can accomplish.
