Improve Your Management Skills in Time for Spring

<a href="http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?

image=11604&picture=book-tunnel">Book Tunnel</a> 

by Petr Kratochvil

                “I oversee every facet of this store,” said Tiffany S. Chapman, Store Manager of the Follett bookstore at Armstrong Atlantic State University. “I assure that my text manager does what he is supposed to do, that we are ordering the right things and receiving the right things from our corporate office. I handle the local marketing, all the local venders, all the offsite events, all the human resources, and payroll and people management.” Managing a bookstore means taking on a lot of responsibility. It also means more stress, and less room for mistakes. This spring, make the load a little lighter by improving your management skills in three easy steps.

                Be Flexible.  “There is no typical day,” Ms. Chapman said. Because she oversees so much that goes on in the store, she has to be ready for anything. Being a part of a corporation, she has to report to a higher office that looks to her for things like inventory checks where she needs to make sure the stock she has matches what they say she should be carrying, as well as balancing money between the accounts. If something doesn’t add up, she needs to be able to spend the time to figure out what went wrong. Due to a demand in supplies and small electronics, Ms. Chapman requested that the company allow them more space to carry what the students needed. “On Tuesday we had a soft remodel where they sent us new fixtures, which you can see when you walk around the store there are empty spaces,” Ms. Chapman said. A full day was spent assembling and readying the store for the new materials. Don't expect to be working with customers all the time, there is a lot of behind the scenes work that needs to get done too.

                Stay Organized. Follett supplies books to 993 stores between the United States and Canada. The books that are supplied to the stores are based on faculty demand: “Once they make their decisions, my textbook manager places the orders. So that’s an in-store process.” To keep up with the demand, staying organized is crucial. Students rely on the Follett stores to not only be carrying what they need, but to carry the exact edition of book that they need, and if it needs to be shipped into the store, it needs to get there in a timely manner. Not to mention all the other duties of a store manager; keeping tasks written in a notebook or planner is a good way to make sure that not only you will remember what needs to get done, but it helps plan your days so they aren’t unnecessarily hectic. “We will supply it if they want to buy it. That’s what we are here for. We are here to supply a service, not to make money. Make sure that students have what they need when they come in available,” Ms. Chapman said.

                Listen to Your Workers. “Part of my job is to keep my workers on task –and happy,” Ms. Chapman said. The hardest part of being a store manager is customer service, Ms. Chapman explained. This includes the employees and student workers. “I spent six years being the assistant manager of a store up in Ohio where no one else was willing to talk to the customers,” Chapman said. “I would get people screaming at me, from all walks of life, all ages. . . It is hardest to think the customer or worker is thinking badly of the store so that it can impact the store in a negative way.” Learning to listen to your workers when something is wrong is important in keeping the environment as conflict free as possible. The customers will notice if the employees aren’t working together, and that tension can lose a lot of sales. 

For more information on how to keep a bookstore marketable, see Four Steps to Marketing Your Bookstore.

Blurb:

When it Rains, it Pours: Four Ways to Keep Your Calm

• Breathe. Count to ten and chose your words carefully with your coworkers and customers, losing a sale or a good worker is more detrimental to the store than you can foresee. 
• Look for Perspective. Don't let your emotions run rampant. If someone brings up a problem with your management skills, listen to them and reflect: do they have a point?
• Delegate. Don't try to do everything yourself. Let a coworker or student helper take some of the load off. If they make mistakes, let them learn.
• Prioritize. It might feel like there are a million different things that need to get done. Don't do what's easiest first, do what is most urgent. If an order needs to be filled by 5 o'clock, don't wait until 4:30 to get it done.

Find Your Edge in Three Easy Steps

<a href="http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=

25734&picture=child-and-books">Child And Books</a> by George Hodan

Georgia has an 8.6% unemployment rate, according to the Georgia Department of Labor. If higher unemployment breeds a much more competitive market, how do you find an edge to keep ahead of the race? Not only do locally owned book sellers in Savannah have to compete against the nearest Barnes and Noble, but against online companies like Amazon.com. “There’s nothing that they’ve said that any one of their competitors can’t claim. Who’s going to say ‘we don’t have good customer service’ or ‘no we don’t have experience’ or ‘no we don’t know what we’re doing or ‘no we’re not professional,’” said John Powers, a professional marketer for over 20 years. “There’s too much competition just to think you can hang your hat on one thing . . .there’s too much going on.” Finding out what is unique about your bookstore can be difficult, but there are three easy steps that can change how you present the look of your store and even improve your sales.

            Identify your top five customers. Though telling people that you are reliable or that you have good customer service can be cliché, see if your customers are willing to give a testimonial about your store:  “then it becomes emphatic,” Mr. Powers said. It’s easy to sell yourself, but harder to get people to believe your marketing scheme unless someone outside your store can back up your statement. But more importantly, Mr. Powers said, “take each of those top five clients, not the top revenue, but the best clients that you have, take each one of them to lunch one day next week and ask them why they do business with you and they will tell you what your edge is.”

 Set Yourself Apart. Once your best customers have told you what they love about your store in particular, you’ll need to market that information. For more information on marketing, see the article Four Steps to Marketing Your Bookstore. Though we live in an age of technology, don’t go right for the computer screen, or email: “People are so flooded with stimuli now—email is a hard way to sell because it’s just like snail mail, you’re thumbing through your mailbox looking for what you can throw away.” Mr. Powers recommended something all together forgotten--faxing: “Because nobody sends faxes anymore.” Most businesses haven’t gotten rid of their fax machines, though they remain silent most of the day. When people do receive a fax, they tend to look at them because information isn’t flooding through them. Another technique is something that Mr. Powers specializes in—business to business dimensional mail. After using it for more than thirty years, he has yet to see it fail: “You’re not sending coupons for 20% off furniture or your next rug cleaning. In business to business direct mail, the objective is to get somebody to talk to you. You’re not going sell anything in direct mail, you’re trying to facilitate your approach.”  

 Capitalize on Being Local. Mr. Powers described a locally owned bookstore as an intellect small based business. “Those are the kinds of things where there is an appreciation among people if you can let them know of your availability,” Mr. Powers said. In a locally owned store, there is a feel for the community that doesn’t exist in a corporate store. Barnes and Noble can sell books by a Savannah author, but people prefer to get them from a local store. E. Shaver, Booksellers capitalizes on this point by being the exclusive distributor of The Oglethorpe Press. Even attending a book signing is a different kind of event. If there is a Savannah author doing a signing at Barnes and Noble, they have to compete with the hundreds of other things going on around them, like people trying to get a Starbucks coffee or look at the new e-reader. Mr. Powers said, “You can have the same signing at a local store like E.Shavers where the only people that are there are riveted on that specific book.” There is also the time old argument that when you buy local, the money stays in the community, it doesn’t go corporate. “Plus the fact that local bookstores aren’t about the 750 copies of the newest James Patterson novel,” Mr. Powers continued. With small businesses, owners get to know their clientele. With a corporate bookstore, there are a number of part-time employees who know how to operate a computer and tell you if a book is on the shelf or not. “They don’t know what you’ve read before, they don’t know what you like, and they’ve never spoken to you. The owner of a smaller business, that affinity with the clients . . . you walk in, they go, 'I knew you were coming in, I’ve been holding this for you, you’ve got to read this because I know this matches your tastes.' That’s the edge to me.”

Blurb:

Find Your Edge: Mr. Powers gives a few examples on dimensional mailing.

• I might do something as crazy as sending somebody a 12 inch piece of 1x6 lumber. And say, "If your bookshelves are looking like this, you need to come see us." 
• Go somewhere and buy a bunch of shoe soles. Have some kind of theme that revolves around, "You won’t wear these out looking for what you want at our store."
• In reference to a magic eight ball: “Is this what it feels like when you’re looking around a big box store?” 
• Send out some el-cheapo dusters and say, "Don’t bring these to our store, we like our dusty little corners."
• Maybe send out a miniature blanket. The message is, "Nobody ever cuddles up with a good Kindle.”