Rewards and Compensation Plans You have a bunch of great employees at your business, and you would love to compensate them for all of their hard work and commitment to the company. Not all compensation needs to be financial. Employees need a variety of rewards and compensation to feel valued and appreciated in their work! Financial rewards, such as a pay increase is the most obvious form of additional compensation, but such… Read More »Rewards and Compensation Plans

Retaining Personnel What you’ll learn to do: Explain how retailers keep the best personnel Once you hire great employees, then it is important to keep them! We live in a time of low unemployment, and unhappy employees have the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. How do the best companies keep their employees? LEARNING OUTCOMES Describe how to evaluate retail employees and provide feedback List some reward and compensation plans for great… Read More »Retaining Personnel

Training New Employees You have hired who you think is the perfect new addition to your sales floor at your new retail home improvement store. No matter how perfect the fit is, the next step is making sure to train the employee effectively to help them feel comfortable in the position, and to insure they are meeting the requirements of your company. Each company will have a specific method to train their… Read More »Training New Employees

Interviewing Prospective Employees In our previous unit, we started to talk about interviewing prospective employees, and the different types of interviews we may use. Let’s expand now on those types. Have you ever gone into a job interview and there are four people at a conference table with a list of questions? This is called a structured or planned interview. In this type of interview, you will be asked the… Read More »Interviewing Prospective Employees

Finding Personnel What you’ll learn to do: Explain how retailers find the best personnel Retail experiencing high staff turnover.  This means that retail owners and managers need a comprehensive strategy for identifying, finding and hiring the best people. Harver, an online blog, lists 7 reasons for high retail turnover here.  One of the top issues is (thankfully) the highly competitive job market.  While wages are stagnant since the 1970s, available work that… Read More »Finding Personnel

Retail Operations and Managing the Store What you’ll learn to do: Define the operational policies and tasks to be implemented in a retail business Good employees are the backbone of any company. In a retail company, employees are the first people your customers meet! Without an excellent workforce, who are happy with their work, your business can suffer. Finding the right person for the right job is a huge part… Read More »Retail Operations and Managing the Store

Putting It Together: Financial Strategies in Retail As we began this module, we asked, “how does a retailer know the right prices to charge to ensure they’re able to manage operating costs and mitigate risk associated with holding inventory?” While this is an important question, it really just served as a way to introduce concepts in accounting like cash flow, income statements, balance sheets, and performance ratios. As you now… Read More »Putting It Together: Financial Strategies in Retail

Seasonality and Cash Flow Seasonality refers to an imbalance in the timing of sales revenue for a given class of merchandise. To simplify this, think about pumpkins and bulk candy, for example. Certainly, shoppers might buy pumpkins and bulk assorted candy throughout the year, but we might expect that these purchases peak in October, building towards Halloween. In this way, the market for pumpkins and bulk candy reflect seasonality. Yes,… Read More »Seasonality and Cash Flow

Ongoing Budgeting Process For effective budgeting, the firm must first select its approach—zero-based or incremental. For zero-based budgeting, a manager needs a full list of expected revenue and expense items for the upcoming season. In this way, they can build their budget plan to show all the necessary information. That said, most retailers use incremental budgeting. To facilitate the budgeting process, the retail manager needs to engage in an ongoing budget… Read More »Ongoing Budgeting Process

Zero-Based vs. Incremental Budgeting Given the pressure to budget effectively, firms scrutinize the process. Ultimately, there are two common approaches for establishing an annual budget: zero-based and incremental. Zero-based budgeting assumes that the budget is built from “zero.” That is, nothing is carried-over or assumed from previous periods. Often, there is a temptation within organizations to justify activity with “that’s what we’ve always done” or “last year, we did this.”… Read More »Zero-Based vs. Incremental Budgeting