Opening a New Shop (2006.7.16)
In the morning of June 28th 2005, Mr. H and I met for the first time at the Nagakute Public Hall. Mr. H is a “new-shop organizer” who is in charge of supervising us while we are starting up brand-new shops. He was in his late thirties and my first impression of him was, What an ENERGETIC man he is! He was talkative and was very good at making
me cheerful.
On that day, in a meeting room in
the Public Hall, we hold some job interviews together to select part-timers. Fortunately
most of the applicants were good-natured. After our basic explanation of the
company and the shop, we executed easy oral questions and written-type tests.
Then we EXAMINED which woman to choose as our members. It took us half a day to
finish all the interviews and examinations. Our opinions of which applicants to
be chosen were surprisingly CORRESPONDING.
The starting members have been selected. After this, until the opening
day in the end of July, we should prepare the shop.
On the 4th and 5th of July, I drove NOAH around Nagakute Town in order to investigate rival
shops and local facilities. I found out that there were four rival drugstores
within a radius of two kilometers, and that two of them were very strong
rivals.
What can I do to make better shop than them? I was asking myself.
On the 8th, the regular employees (full-timers) who took charge of this
new shop gathered; Mr. H, sub store manager, cosmetic adviser and me. We
entered the new shop for the first time. I was excited.
Inside, there were only installed shelves for goods. Except for those shelves, the VAST space was empty.
We introduced ourselves. The sub
manager was three years younger than I, and was an earnest, hardworking man.
The cosmetic adviser was in her early twenties. She was a competent and
attentive woman.
Now the main players are on the pitch. It’s the time to kick off!
The part-timers whom we had chosen came to the shop on the 11th for the
first time. And we start educating and training them. Mainly, Mr. H did.
He taught how to greet to our customers, how to answer phone, how to operate
cash register, how to make POP (Point-Of-Purchase advertising or price
label), how to display goods and so on.
His lecture was excellent. He was not only energetic himself, but he had
the talent for making people energetic as well. His voice was filled with
vigor and confidence and I saw it influence the members very much. During
this training days, I learned from him how to MOTIVATE people.
After two-week training, the day had finally come.
On the 28th of July, we opened our shop. And for about a month, we continued
“opening sale”. We sold a lot of consumer goods at special bargain prices.
LOTS OF customers came to the shop one after another. We had prepared an
enormous amount of goods and had displayed them, but those goods were vanishing
quickly from the shelves because every customers were taking a lot of goods
into their shopping baskets. We had to refill everywhere in the shop with
the goods all day.
Anticipating that busyness, a lot of staff belonging to other shops had
been scheduled to come to assist us. My main job was controlling them,
giving them jobs. This was the first time I controlled that many people
directly. That was very demanding job, but without their assistance, I
could have never run the shop during “opening sale”.
Thanks to those assisting staff, thanks to Mr.H,
and thanks to the fresh part-timers, the opening sale finished without any big
trouble. And the shop gradually got into settled state without that busyness.
For the first several months, the shop was in the red. In other words,
the shop held a deficit every month. But I did my best so that we got into
the black, executing my store policy.
Gradually, the shop came to put out operating profit. And in April 2006,
which was the last month I managed the shop, the total sales exceeded 27
million yen, and the operating profit was over 1.3 million yen. Of course,
these figures are not enough for this shop. I knew that it was just the
first step before building up prosperity. However, I was satisfied with
these figures in a sense, because I could feel my policy had been succeeding
little by little.
I think every store manager has
his/her policy. They have their own “ideal shop” in their mind. And following
that policy, he or she manages the shop. And SO DID I. In my case, I was very greedy
so there were a lot of things that I wanted to do, but I will write three of
those policies here.
First, I aimed to create a “convenient” shop for customers. Let me show
some examples.
I listened to voices of our customers, and tried to meet their requirements.
For instance, our shop held the garbage bags for Nagakute-Town people and
the ones for Nagoya-City people, but we didn’t sell the ones for Owariasahi-City
people at first. Our shop is located in Nagakute, and is in the neighborhood
of Nagoya. However, Owariasahi is a little distant so the headquarters
of the company might have thought that we didn’t need the garbage bags
for Owariasahi. But a few weeks later, some customers began to say, “Don’t you sell the garbage bags for Owariasahi? No? Oh, I wish you had!” I noticed then that some proportion of our customers lived in Owariasahi.
I talked about this with the part-timers and I judged that we NEED to have
Owariasahi garbage bags. Then I put it into practice quickly. I made the
contract with the Commerce and Industry Association of Owariasahi and displayed
the garbage bags of the city in the shop. The result was not bad. The customers
living in Owariasahi were pleased.
Like this example, sometimes customers want to get commodities or medicines
which we don’t have in our shop. In that case, I investigated whether the
goods were able to get or not, and if the answer was yes, I ordered it
and sell to the customer. When the customer said, “Thank you” for that,
I felt happy.
For other example, I put our sale-advertising papers ON THE ENTRANCE GATE so that no one could miss the bargain goods. And moreover, I put the ads
IN EVERY SHOPPING BASKET for customers so that they could take them out and look at the information carefully.
In most shops, the ads are just hung over the passages at high position,
but then they are difficult to see and the effect of the ads would be reduced.
So I tried to SHOW the ads to our customers and LET THEM KNOW the bargen
goods for their convenience.
I prepared some leaflets for explaining about Nagakute, such as a facility
map or a trush-dumping manual, so that we can answer to our customers'
question about this area appropriately and promptly.
When spring approached, a lot of customers who wanted corrugated cardboard
boxes came because they needed them for packing. I made the place where
we stock cardboard boxes near the entrance so that we could hand our customers
those cardboard smoothly.
I believe that our shop had contributed to our customers' convenience in these ways and that convenience led to reputation and increase of sales.
Secondly, I attached great importance to the “point card system”.
If you have a point card of our drugstore, you can get one point for every
100-yen purchase. Saturday and Sunday are “double point day”, when you
get twice points. And when you have collected the enough points, you can
exchange them for premium goods. We have a great variety of premium goods,
so you can enjoy choosing your favorite premium.
I considered it important to let our customers RECOGNIZE this fantastic system. This system could be the KEY to the differentiation against our rival shops.
To collect points, customers need to make the "point card". So it is very important for us to inform our customers of the card and let them make their own cards. I often ANNOUNCED with inner-shop MICROPHONE about the card system or double point day.
And I told all employees that we should try our best to kindly inform every customer about cards or points. Then every employees tried hard to explain about the card to our customers at the checkout counter. Their effort was wonderful, and so was the consequence. The number of customers who tried to collect the points in our shop increased day by day.
I nominated one of the part-timers as premium-displayer and I had her display
attractive premium goods as much as possible on the shelf. Hopefully, these displayed premium goods will excite the customers' curiosity
and stimulate them to enjoy collecting the points.
The more customers tried to enjoy collecting the points, naturally, the
more our sales went up. It was, so to speak, a virtuous circle. And I LOVED
to see the customers’ pleasing face when they got their favorite premium
goods.
And thirdly, I try to explain the purpose of the job and SET A GOAL for
the employees. You know, if we don’t have purposes or goals, we may feel
that the work is tedious. But if we have them, the mission is going to
be challenging and exciting. I believe that one of the most important job
of store manager is to LET EMPLOYEES UNDERSTAND their PURPOSES and GOALS
of their work, and to motivate them to try TOGETHER to hit the target.
As for the cards, as for the sales, the employees worked very well and
they achieved their goals beautifully. It must have been very hard work
for them, but I believe they have got the CONFIDENCE in their ability of
their job.
And through this period, I believe, the shop has developed the power to
exceed rival shops.
In April, my boss SUDDENLY gave me new mission at another shop in Nagoya,
and I should leave the Nagakute-Kita Shop in May. It was earlier than I
had expected, but this ten-month period was indeed my dream come true.
For more than three years, I had longed to start up a new shop in my hometown
Nagakute. The company gave me that great opportunity. Here I express my
gratitude to the company and my bosses who had let me challenge the dream.
And there is one more thing I can say through this experience.
“Where there is a will, there is a way,” that is.
