How do you know what you're working on is even effective?
The strategy framework that makes me way less anxious about how I spend my time in the business—and the roundabout way I learned it.
Hello again to new subscribers who found this newsletter through Arianne at Aeolidia. I'm Katherine Raz, I write Storefront Revolt, and I own The Fernseed, a plant and flower shop with two locations in Tacoma. I opened my brick and mortar in 2019, and I started this blog in 2022. You can read a little bit more about the who and the why here.
I'm glad to see this list growing in part because it means I get to communicate with other people who are doing this. It's still early days for this newsletter, still 90% me talking up here without a lot of feedback or two-way communication. The bigger the list gets, the more opportunity I have for conversation and including other people's perspectives in the content I'm churning out here.
I'm so thrilled when anyone emails me in response to these posts, so I invite you to comment or reply directly to this email if you feel compelled. I'd love to hear from you even if you're a product-based business and don't have a storefront! We’re all friends here.
If you like this content and you think someone you know would like it too, please tell them!
I graduated college in 2002 with a journalism degree, which sounds way more professional than it looked at the time. I was 22, and my primary motivation was not to parlay my degree into reporting or copy editing work, but to find a job that paid $350 per week and didn't require me to be at a desk too early because I had an alcohol and substance abuse schedule that I wanted to maintain. For about 6 years post college, I did retail and gig work. I could go on about how that taught me more about business and life than anything else (IYKYK), but for our purposes today, I'm mentioning it so you understand that when I did finally decide, when I was 28, to get a grown up job, my options were limited, and I hoped against hope that someone, somewhere, would recognize my ability to write, and hire me to run their communications.
Somehow, despite my patchwork job history, I managed to get a job as a communications coordinator for a storefront theater company in Chicago, editing email newsletters, brochures, and doing box office customer service. The communication I was coordinating was supposed to sell tickets to shows, something I thought would be easy because this company, at the time, was the darling of the Chicago storefront theater scene. Everyone loved them and they sold out everything. When they launched the new season, it was my job to write and send the e-blast (hah), and I remember panicking because their list in Constant Contact had 8,000 subscribers — more than the total number of seats available for the entire run of the show!
“When I send this email,” I thought, “this entire run is going to sell out in minutes.”
So I queued up the email, scheduled send, and waited.
Twenty four hours later, we had sold 12 tickets.
That, my friends, was my first lesson in marketing.
I internalized this as a personal failure. I had major imposter syndrome already (you hired a dog walker to run your communications?), and this was proof I had no idea what I was doing. However, because of my previous experience being broke while maintaining a drinking habit, I was good at scraping the bottom of the barrel. If I had to stand outside with a sandwich board selling tickets to convince these people they hadn't made a mistake in hiring me, I would do it.
Luckily I didn't have to, because a new form of marketing, Web 2.0 as they called it at the time, was taking off. Twitter, MySpace, the blogosphere, the Daily Candy email, chat roulette — maybe I could use these burgeoning web platforms to sell seats. So I did, with some degree of success. These platforms were so new that my desperate attempts to use them thrust me into a momentary spotlight. I actually sat on panels and explained how to use social media to market theater. It was disruptive! I thought I was very cool. But I was also burning out, because I would do literally anything to sell a block of seats, and I had no idea if it was effective.
Enter the nonprofit board members, always eager to tell you how to do your job better. (Hey, sometimes it’s helpful!) Remember this theater company was the darling, so theirs was a hot little board to sit on—and it was based in Chicago, so we had some big players sitting on it. NPR personalities, Broadway producers, famous chefs, and, fortunately for me, the VP for marketing of the Art Institute of Chicago, who invited me over to her beautiful condo one night to drink wine and help me with something called marketing strategy. What I learned in that single session at her place that night changed my career forever.
Before I launch into what that was, I can hear the folks at the back. "Thanks for the trip into your personal career history, but what does this have to do with running a shop?"
Please, allow me to explain.
I am absolutely obsessed with stories of people who backed in to a successful business because their punk rock side hustle grew to the point where they had to take it seriously. Arianne, for example, was helping bands and zinesters make websites, and now she owns a web design company. People like us had to get our MBAs on the job, the hard way, after years of trying literally everything and never being quite sure if what we were doing was effective. In an industry like indie retail, with its already razor thin margins and its taxing requirements on owners, it's absolutely critical that we learn to manage our time and effort by working on things that move the needle and ignoring things that don't.
It's the 80/20 (or Pareto) principle, which asserts that there is an unequal relationship between input and output. Put simply, you can spend a lot of time working on something that doesn't do shit for the business, or you can spend less time working on things with high return. Your job, as the business owner, is figuring out what those things are.
Given our sometimes bizarre paths into the retail industry, many of us didn't learn this in school.
That's where Carrie, my Art Institute marketing mentor, helped me. She asked me to list all the things I was trying to sell tickets to shows. It was a long list. She then asked what my sales goals were. I had no idea. Total sell out? Isn't that always the goal? She laughed. NO WAY.
Look, she said. Each time the Art Institute announces an exhibit, she sits in the meeting and asks 3 questions:
What is our audience capacity for this exhibit?
What are our revenue targets?
What is our marketing budget?
Then, based on those answers, she tells the directors what revenue she believes is achievable.
But how do you know what's realistic? I asked her.
You create a marketing strategy.
A strategy! You don't just fire on all cylinders, close your eyes, and hope. That's what I had been doing, and forever felt like I was failing. (Does this sound familiar to anyone?)
Carrie defined four components in the process: goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics.
Goals: the overall outcome or project
Strategy: the broad approach you'll take to achieve your goal
Objective: the measurable steps you'll take to support your strategy
Tactics: the specific tools or to-dos you'll use to get there
I used this framework in every future job I had, and I use it today at Fernseed. It helps me immensely in first defining what our goals are, and I use the 80/20 principle for that. Where can we expend minimal effort (20%) on something that has a big impact (80%)?
Some ideas from my business, as an example:
Charge for our potting service. We're potting 800+ plants each month for free. If we charged between $1-5 for this service, people would pay, and we'd make money on something we're already doing. (We did this last year.)
Offer floral subscriptions. Give customers the option online of a one-time floral bouquet purchase, plus the option of subscribing — getting that bouquet delivered regularly each month. (We're working on this in 2022.)
Bundling air plants (one of our highest-grossing products) into a gift box online. (We did this during the pandemic, and are re-launching it in 2022.)
Offer our floral products as wedding flowers. We're already a fully staffed flower shop. Why not tackle weddings and events? (We started this in earnest in 2022.)
Some of these goals are pretty straightforward, and don't take a multitude of steps. But some are more complex, and that's where Carrie's framework has continued to help me.
Here's what it looks like in practice, using a real example from my current business.
Goal: Make wedding & event flowers a core revenue generating category for the business
Strategy: Make Fernseed a stand-out floral option for people planning weddings in the South Sound who are motivated by simplicity, budget, and supporting local economies
Each strategy can have multiple objectives, so here are two examples:
Objective: Create a more robust wedding landing page on our website that clearly defines who are target market is, what products we offer, how we work, and what differentiates us.
Tactics:
Outline what that page looks like — what information needs to be included?
Include a lead generation tool, like a downloadable look book, that captures visitors' contact information for follow up.
Use our email and SMS automation software (Klaviyo) to automate browsing and abandoned cart follow-up communication specific to weddings and events.
Objective: Reach out to venues to get placement on their preferred vendor lists.
Tactics:
Generate a list of all venues we've received inquiries about, as well as a list of venues where we've already done flowers.
Participate in venue open houses.
For each objective, you want to identify a (let me get real startup jargon-y here) key performance indicator, or KPI. KPIs are the metric(s) you'll use to define success for each objective.
For our wedding landing page, our KPIs are:
Number of leads generated from the landing page contact form
Number of contacts in the Klaviyo automation flows, generated by the page metrics
Starting out, I kind of have no idea how many leads we're capable of generating here, but I can take a stab in the dark. Maybe 10 per month?
By estimating these numbers, you can also estimate what your financial return on your time investment might be.
Let's say we convert roughly 15% of our wedding inquiries into customers, and that an average wedding generates $1,200 in revenue. If we get 10 inquiries per month via our new landing page:
10 x 15% x $1,200 = $1,800 per month in wedding business added
The great thing about defining these goals, objectives, and KPIs, is that after you do something, you can go back and measure how effective it was. You'll have an ever-improving idea of where to spend your limited time and energy as a business owner, because you'll know what is actually producing results.
This does 3 things:
Provides you a better sense of where to spend your effort now and in the future
Gives you an actual sense of accomplishment when those things actually move the needle
Helps you say no to time-sucking ideas that don't align with your goals
In other words, you'll have a way better understanding of what your 80/20 is.
You can use this framework for non-revenue stuff, too. One of my 2022 goals is to improve employee engagement and retention, difficult in an industry where expected turnover is a dismal 65 percent. Some of my objectives in service of that goal are: better employee discount, staff visits to suppliers, a more consistent and transparent review process, and doing staff picks.
Am I doing a great job of defining and sticking to my goals framework always? No. But it gives me an organizational north star to navigate by, which is helpful in the day-to-day. Sometimes the objectives and tactics are so obvious they doesn't feel worth writing out, but if I do, it helps me identify and add tangible to-dos to my calendar, like organizing a field trip to a supplier, or taking a half day to organize how employee reviews work. Then when I carve out time to do those things (instead of breaking down cardboard), I feel like I'm working toward a goal, not just spinning my wheels doing admin stuff.
We had a couple of slow days in the shop this week, and our Instagram engagement is just... flat. So I had this idea: run a giveaway! Not a bad idea, right? Besides, we have some slow-selling inventory we could move by doing it.
But how does a giveaway plug in to what my goals are for the year? Wouldn't it be better to use this slow time to work on the wedding landing page? Or tweaking my employee review process? Or if we do a giveaway, wouldn’t it be better to do it in service of one of our existing goals?
If I believe that the goals I've identified, and the educated guesses I've made about the revenue we can generate if we stick to them, then I don't have to panic on a random slow sales day. To that end, this is really a Small Business Management Anxiety Reduction Framework. I hope it's helpful to you.
And seriously RIP Daily Candy.
I would love to hear from you! What planning frameworks, if any, do you rely on to run your storefront business?
What was your job history and personal background before opening your shop?