Looking Forward To The Summer!

Well, it seems that summer, or at least spring, has finally made a brief appearance; let’s hope it doesn’t disappear again as quickly as it came!  Hopefully some of you have had a week off with the kids during the Easter holidays, and maybe this week is your first week back at work.  I always think that the week after Easter is a very significant one, as it is the first week of the rest of the year!  (Someone once said that to me without realizing what they were saying – and every week is, of course!)

However, with many of us operating financial years that run from April to March, this week is always near the start of the financial year and time to put into place commission and bonus plans for staff and even the odd wage increase.  Not only that, our turnover generally will gradually increase from here towards the end of the year, with a possible dip in August.  It is also a time for re-merchandising the store after Easter and ready for the summer.

So let’s look at a few things that will help us during the rest of 2010, which I am convinced will be a good one for most of us.  After the disastrous weather conditions in January, this year has been fabulous – my own company is around 25% up year on year from Mid January onwards.

• Ensure you have enough staff for the busy year ahead.  Plan to grow – and don’t be too stretched with the staff you have.  There are plenty of government schemes at present to incentivize us to take on more staff – and even if you can’t make use of one of these; it will hinder your business to be always running at full capacity, as staff will be off sick more- and not have enough time to plan effectively for the year ahead.

• Plan for the football world cup.  This is one of the big events coming up in the next few months.  World cup months traditionally are quite difficult for speciality food retail, but let’s think of innovative ways to target products at world cup parties; snacks, beer, and easy-to-cook food.

• Hopefully the onset of the world cup will also bring the beginning of the BBQ season, so ensure that you are well stocked up on meat, relishes, marinades, sauces etc….  Come on; be positive, it is highly likely we will have a good summer this year, with plenty of hot weather, so merchandise ahead for hot weather foods.  This is something the supermarkets do very well – hey why don’t you get a pallet of charcoal in if you can get a good price.

OK, that’s it from me this week.  I need to go back to testing (and understanding) our new business software system which has taken us all Easter and the week after to install and start operating properly.  Very hard work, but it is going to massively improve the quality of our reporting systems and most importantly give us a greater ability to serve our customers well with CRM.