Strength Through Adversity – One Retailers Post Recession Success
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Strength Through Adversity – One Retailers Post Recession Success:
Learn how to roll up your sleeves and dig into your shop’s data to become more profitable in this episode of Bicycle Retailer Radio. Joseph Du Bois opened his first Trek store in 2006, survived the 2008 recession, and now owns nine Florida Trek locations that have put customers on 50,000 bikes. Using a values-oriented philosophy and sales-driven mindset, Du Bois has mastered the art and science of running a profitable, economically resilient bike shops.
In this podcast, he shares how he makes data-driven decisions to optimize inventory turn and how his shops offer services to offset low product margins. You will also learn what happened when Du Bois downsized three shops into smaller locations, and the formula he uses for managing and calculating his payroll budget. No bike shop owner can afford to miss this episode.
Please enjoy listening to Strength Through Adversity – One Retailers Post Recession Success.
Support the show (https://nbda.com/articles/donation-form-pg511.htm#!form/Donate)
Joe Du Bois and Jane Avery-Du Bois teamed up with Marc Lubin and opened a Trek Concept store in the new Coconut Point Mall in Estero Florida. Their mission was to energize people with our passion for cycling both in and outside our business. Through quality products, superior customer service, and unique opportunities we aim to be the hub of the cycling community.”
The strategy paid off, leading them to open a second store in neighboring Naples in 2008 and 5 more Trek Bicycle Stores across Florida. The stores have made a big impact in the cycling community getting 115,000 customers on 50,000 bikes!
Here are just some of the accolades the stores have been awarded over the past decade:
5-time award winner – Top 100 Bike Shop ( Bicycle Retailer & Industry News)
4 Years consecutively selected by NBDA as one of America’s Best Bike Shops
#3 Electra Dealer in 2016
#5 Trek Dealer in 2016
Looking forward the Trek Bicycle Store will continue to offer the best bikes in the world and invest in the sport of cycling. We will continue to support local cycling advocacy initiatives, sponsor clubs and events, and lead safety and skills workshops.
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Joseph Du Bois
Tue, 8/18 10:41AM • 45:16
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, store, inventory, payroll, business, bicycle, bike, category, years, people, big, product, started, employees, bike shop, sell, point, run, gross margin, customer
SPEAKERS
Joe DuBois, Chad Pickard, Rod Judd, David DeKeyser
Rod Judd 00:10
You are listening to Bicycle Retail Radio brought to you by the National Bicycle Dealers Association.
David DeKeyser 00:16
Hello, my name is Dave DeKeyser, and I’m a bicycle retail consultant for the NBDA is a P2 consult program. You can find more information on that on the NBDA website NBDA.com. You’re listening to another episode of Bicycle Retail Radio. Today we have a really interesting guest’s name is Joe Dubois. He and his wife Jane own and operate nine trek stores in Southwest Florida. They have kind of been through the wringer with starting the business in 2006. By 2008. They had gone into the financial crisis. And Joe with that, but don’t you give us a little history
Joe DuBois 01:00
All right. So, as always, history goes. And I’ll go back just a little bit further, because, you know, I got into the bike industry in the early 90s. Probably like a lot of people who got into bikes, they just loved riding their passion for and just felt at home and bike shop. So I did that for a number of years working for the retailers, basically assuming different roles throughout that period of time. And when it came to us to finally open our first store in 2006, you know, we decided to go with Trek, your truck concept stores, we picked the location down in Southwest Florida. And it was one of that pre-recession. I know, in our previous conversation, I was referred that time or just like, people basically hated her money and they just didn’t care. They just wanted to get rid of it. So like, I think it kind of gave us a false sense of our abilities at that point, because when we opened up, we just hit the ground running and started breaking records with trek corporate. I know within our first five months, we passed the million dollars, over 2 million in the first year. And that’s where I say it kind of gave us this false sense of our abilities because it was that time where money was flowing with everybody. And they just weren’t really thinking,
David DeKeyser 02:14
what was your goal that first year that you hit 2 million?
Joe DuBois 02:17
It was one trick basically told us like, hey, if you hit $1 million in your first year, that’s pretty solid, like you’re doing well. So when we hit it, within five months, we’re like, it’s a little different than what we were thinking, you know when the recession came in 2008. It really started to hit the fan around November. I remember for us and for us, we actually ended up opening our second store about six months earlier. Here we go into the recession. We have two stores, big rents, lack of inventory, and not in a good position as most people were at that time period. So we really need you just Look at what were we going to do that would allow us to survive? Because there was a lot there were a lot of people, especially in this part of the country that was hard hit, and it was freaking stressful.
David DeKeyser 03:13
How much? How much of a hit? Did you see that after, say, going into 2009? What kind of a hit did your business See?
Joe DuBois 03:22
It was approximately 25% 30%. But this is like some people might look at that. And they say, that’s not that bad. 25% You know, we have 50% or 40%. The part that was a big wake up call for us was up until that point, we really focused on net profit. And when the market fell out, it didn’t really net profit really wasn’t the crucial metric for us to be looking at. And I didn’t know that at first. Like it took a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of reading books, talking to consultants, accountants and just trying to figure out what the hell was going on in our company because like I could see a p&l profit loss statement. And it might say, you know, just an arbitrary number and might say, you know, we made $25,000. But that’s $25,000 worth sitting in the bank. So even though I may, on one hand, be showing a profit, the cash just wasn’t there. And that’s where I knew that was going to be the death of us if I couldn’t get a grasp on cash flow.
David DeKeyser 04:26
So let’s get into that a little bit. So you had made $25,000. It’s not in the bank. It’s obviously on your floor. And that kind of leads into this getting lean kind of conversation. I think that that’s something that is extremely interesting about your business is how many turns you’ve seen and accomplished a huge amount of turns, but you’ve kind of wound that back. Let’s talk about turns and the getting lean and what that means to your cash flow.
Joe DuBois 04:58
Sure. Prior To the recession, our terms were around two could have been, you know, anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5. But it was probably pretty, pretty consistent around two terms. Once we learned really, inventory management, once we really understood cash flow, healthy categories of inventory, we were able to hit significantly reduce our overall investment in inventory. And basically, we took our turns from around two, we’ve had him as high as six. But once you start running inventory, that lean, you’re leaving money on the table, you’re missing opportunities. So we’ve been able to scale that backdown. And you know, right, we’d like to stick in that for a strange could be for 4.5 but we’re usually right around there.
David DeKeyser 05:50
That’s gonna surprise people. You know, a lot of people consider that to be running it a little too lean, but through your ability to really optimize the inventory that you’re carrying in each category, I think is, is how you’ve gotten there. Is that correct?
Joe DuBois 06:08
Yeah. And that’s where when I go back to 809, where we really started to dig into our inventory because that was one of the biggest expenses that we had. It was the biggest thing that was tying up our capital or working capital. So we really wanted to get an understanding of that. And, you know, by doing that, we were able to really apply parados principle, which is, you know, the 8020 rule. So we looked at, you know, where do we generate the majority of our sales from and for us is probably a lot of bike shops. It’s like sales. So we were able to take all of our bicycles and figure out which ones are largest revenue drivers, we broke them down per category, and we looked at average sales that the category was producing, we looked at average inventory. levels, gross profit, and gross margin for that category. And we were able to quantify what our target price should be as far as what our margin, are we selling this product at too low of a margin, are we carrying too much inventory? In this particular category in order to generate a positive cash flow eye-opener for us as we like to chase the road bike sales. You know, everybody feels good when they sell a high-end road bike, a 510 thousand dollars plus road bike, you know, it’s a good day. So we had a lot of inventory dollars tied up in that particular category. And what we were able to figure out was the amount of inventory that we were carrying for the number of sales that it was generating. Every time that we were actually selling a road bike, it was actually creating a negative cash flow for us. So it was kind of like a punch in the gut for us back then. Because so much of our marketing, or messaging, everything was focused on deriving this one category. Have products for us that every time you’re doing it, it was actually creating negative cash flow. That was probably one of the biggest eye-openers for us. And it doesn’t mean that we pull back and we don’t sell rode bikes anymore. But our inventory levels are nowhere, what it used to be where I look at road bikes, and then what we do today, and our sales are higher today than they were then with a quarter of the inventory levels that we had was one of the biggest eye-openers for us really like getting granular with our inventory, understanding inventory turns, you know whether or not we’re, we’re charging enough, because that’s a big thing too. Like sometimes we would negotiate too aggressive with customers. And when I say too aggressive, we would our price would be too low, we’d end up selling product for too low. And once we cross a certain threshold, you went from a positive cash flow sale to a negative cash flow sale. And what we were trying to do at that period of time was minimized or eliminate as many areas that were creating negative cash flow. For us as possible,
David DeKeyser 09:01
and once you did that, you also assuming found categories that maybe you could either invest more inventory in or promote heavier because those categories were actually more profitable.
Joe DuBois 09:16
Absolutely. And, you know, the good thing about understanding the numbers was, it also kept us in check, because I might look at a certain category and they all managers were killing it over here. We’re having good sales, we have a good profit, and it’s creating positive cash flow. Let’s put some more dollars into this. A capitalist to know like it’s okay to increase your inventory to generate more sales, but you have to do it very methodically. And you just don’t increase it so much because you could take a good category and turn it bad if you invest too much in inventory and you don’t have the sales to correspond with that same increase.
David DeKeyser 09:58
Excellent.
Chad Pickard 10:00
Your NBDA membership helps support bicycle retail radio, go to NBDA.com to join or renew your membership today.
David DeKeyser 10:13
As far as the margins that you’re you’re looking at when you’re looking at these categories, Is there ever a time where you feel that the margins are too low to support a category? And if you get to that point, how do you address that?
Joe DuBois 10:28
So I personally used to all the product that is a bicycle retailer sells is a too low margin, it’s not something I can necessarily change. I’m not the manufacturer on the retailer, you know when we look at certain products, some of them you just have to sell in a sense where it creates a complete experience for the consumer. So you know, we keep that in mind. We definitely try to offer other services that would offset the low margin being produced from products. So the Simple is charging for installs. When a customer buys a bike, the old bike shop where you buy a bike today, and we’re going to give you x percent off of everything that you buy just to get he bought a bike from us, or we’re going to instantly give you a kickstand or automatically throwing up bottling cage. We stopped all that stuff. You know, we can’t afford to be losing those gross margin dollars by just giving stuff away, you know, even goes at a deeper level. As far as you know, I always like to talk to my team about you got to value yourself. You know, like we’ve done this for a really long time. We can true a bicycle wheel in five minutes because we’ve done it for 15 years. That’s where it’s something, don’t just give that stuff away for free and value the mechanics time. So when somebody sells a bike and they get a computer and a cage and a kickstand, that’s taking a skilled mechanic time to install those parts properly. Gotta be compensated for it. So we’ve definitely over The years and we didn’t start like this. But over the years, we definitely make sure that we charge for our time, whether that be delivery. Like I said, installations, we like to offer extended service plans, anything to help increase the labor dollars to offset the low gross margin that you get from products.
David DeKeyser 12:19
Perfect. So let’s pivot a little bit to expenses. We’ve talked about cash flow, your categories turn. Now, when we get into your actual expenses, obviously, the two biggest are going to be payroll and rent. I know that you and I have spoken and that you have moved some stores around in order to save on rent expenses. And you had said something in our first conversation that I thought was interesting about going uncomfortably small and having a very large dollar amount for your square footage per dollar sales and 100 If you can kind of get into that because I think a lot of times retailers are looking to be in that perfect location, the A-plus location, I think you call it that that necessarily does not have to be all the time.
Joe DuBois 13:13
No, no. And I just the one thing I do preface as I said, I’ve been in the bike industry a long time, and I’m familiar with a lot of the people that make up the bike industry. And the conversation we’re having today. I was nowhere even at that level 10 years ago, or maybe 12 years ago, it took me a lot of learning. You know, I wasn’t type person barely got out of high school. I wasn’t college trained or anything, but I took a strong desire, I had a strong desire to learn as much as I could about the business. And through that journey, I’ve been able to analyze and learn and understand profit and loss statements and gross margins and return on it. I like it so much. So I just want to make sure like some of the conversations we’re having today. I know for a lot of Bicycle retailers out there, they just might go over their head, or they might not fully conceptualize what we’re talking about. Either most definitely there, I just want to make sure that people understand that aspect of me, but to go into all your debt, you know, and I and I still to this day, trying to learn as much as I can, and try to rethink and reanalyze, you know, how we do business and there’s, there’s most definitely, you know, we do some things really good, but I’m probably gonna be my harshest critic, and I’m always going to see the wrongs that we do. And I think that’s also a very good trait where it just keeps me pushing to try to not be comfortable with our own status quo, and instead just constantly be raising that bar. So I just wanted to put that out there before we got into the rent and what we’ve done because you mentioned a plus location. That was most definitely our mindset for many years as we’ve all heard it location, location, location. And that’s what we did. But we also know that location, location, location costs money, PAC money in the beginning, when we open up in these awesome locations, with big rent larger stores, six 7000 square feet. It was a good pre-recession, just because the sales were there and I was able to support it. But once these changed, we started seeing our rent, and we like to keep track of our rent as a percentage to gross revenue, total gross annual gross revenue. You know, when we first started out our rents were in the 8% range, then next year, you know, 9% and 10%. And then every year your lease will have some sort of rent escalation. So we were just seeing this it was constantly going up. So even though we would get sales going higher, the rent was also going higher, and if you had a one-off year, it would throw that percentage very not in the right direction. You know, I know we were seeing some of our rent purchases. As high as 14%. And when you’re running your ramp at 14%, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for actual profit, take-home net profit at the end of the year, this past year this past summer, actually, you know, we had a few stores where all the leases basically were coming due at the same time. So we made the decision to really look at the square footage that we needed to analyze our sales per square foot, figure out what we were doing in that particular area or those particular locations. We looked at our stores that were more profitable, we analyze where those sales per foot were, and we tried to figure out what that sweet spot was for these new stores because we had an opportunity to change our lease, downsize, relocate to do something we weren’t locked in at that point. So we took that opportunity with all three locations and ended up downsizing. We downsized one which was about 5300 square foot store down to 2200. So we caught that one more than half took another location and removed it from about a 5000 square foot space to about 1800. So, again, less than half, we took another store that was right around 4000 and moved it to about 1000 square foot space. And that kind of goes a little bit into what you were talking about before as far as stretching ourselves to get uncomfortable. It was a big lesson for me to learn this past summer, what that process looks like to downsize a store to relocate a store, not just from the construction aspect, but more so the part that surprised me the most was how the staffing process that and how they dealt with it and there was like, it kind of odd but there was like almost like a mourning period for we had this big store. Now we’ve got this little store and we’re forced It was weird. It took about two weeks, two to three weeks post the move for the staff to start to lift the morale. And it was really interesting. I never would have known that I never would have to get it. But it was this adjustment period for them. Because now they can no longer just hoard products like ordered garbage for lack of a better word. You know, they were forced to say, do we need this? Can we discard this? We don’t have all this extra space for all these things, we have to run much more efficiently. So when I mentioned stretching ourselves to a point of uncomfortable. Now is what I meant. It was like we were going to be forced to make certain decisions that we didn’t have to make before because we had ample space. And this was the first time that I was doing something like this and talking to some people. They’re like, Yeah, you do have to expect a little downslide in sales because you know, you’re moving your store, you don’t have the same you know, there’s a disruption to the flow of things. So I took that into account when creating an annual budget for 2020. The surprising part besides the mourning period or the grieving period for the employees was we’ve actually done better in all the locations than we were in a bigger space, like considerably better, which is kind of, you know, it boggles my mind. Because one would think, Wow, if you have a bigger store and you have more inventory, well, then you should sell more. But that wasn’t that hasn’t been the case with us. And, you know, going back to before I mentioned, the parados, printable, that was something that we applied when we were downsizing because we’re like, okay, we can’t have just a $125,000 in inventory, and a 5000 square foot space, can’t have that same amount of inventory in a SpaceX lab. So how are we going to choose what product stays and what product goes? So by applying the previous principle, we’re able to really figure out this is where we’re going to sell the most, this is what we will sell the most of. Now, you know, one advantage that we do have that a single store company wouldn’t have per se, is we have SR stores, we leverage them, we’re allowed to are able to have a store that is smaller, doesn’t carry as much inventory maybe doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and high-end stuff that some of the other stores may have. But they’re at our disposal, we can transfer products from one store to the neck, so we won’t lose those sales. We do have the inventory in hand, but it’s strategically placed with all the different stores definitely an advantage to having multiple locations that we’ve been able to utilize that also another advantage for us to be able to keep our inventory down a little bit. Even if it’s a single store business, you can still apply so much of that.
David DeKeyser 20:49
What do you think is the reason that you’re doing more sales in.. I mean, these spaces are half of the size and the experts told you you’re going to see a little bit Have a drop. But you haven’t seen that one of the stores that we talked about is it’s under 1000 square feet. Is that correct?
Joe DuBois 21:08
That’s correct.
David DeKeyser 21:10
And it’s doing fairly shocking numbers out of a size that’s just slightly bigger than maybe a three-stall garage. Yeah, you know, to put that into a comparison of how much space that is, why do you think that is? Have you? Do you have an answer or an idea as to why you know? The few things. So location does play a part in it. And I’m not going to say that this is a plus location by any means. It’s not a plus location, but it’s in an area that is traveled more and has a little bit higher population to it. So So even though it’s a smaller footprint, geographically, it’s in the right area, even though it’s not like this, a plus real estate, amazing views and everything like that. It’s not like that. So that’s going to be one thing we’ve definitely been elevating are e-bike sales, that definitely plays a part in it, and we still get good road bike sales. So I would probably say, geographic plays a part in E-bikes and road bikes,, those are some big movers for us, but it’s still at the very small store. So I go right back to Alright, well, we can only stock so many bikes on the floor, which ones are we going to stock that has the greatest opportunity to sell. And that goes back to what you said in the very beginning as far as inventory terms. The last thing on you and I spoke about this before, like, you know, when you look at a bike sitting on your racking, that’s tied up money right there that you can’t reinvest in your company, you can’t hire new employees, you can’t invest in the new product, that’s the latest and the greatest, or if you’re a business owner, and you’re doing well and you can pull that out and passively give yourself Have a little bonus. It’s tied up in that product and not based on the sales floor. So I look at everything, all the products like making sure that it’s turned in because inventory is like a luxury to any living animal if it needs to flow needs to bring the oxygen to the organ. If the inventory doesn’t move, if the blood doesn’t move, it died, things die. It’s very important that we’re really focusing on what is turning. I hear people always all the time talk about I’ve got this bike, it’s three years old. I’m like, Why? I don’t even I can’t even understand that like how businesses run with inventory that is years old, and even one year old. You know, we have a thing we’re pretty much right around six months. If that bike is hitting that six-month mark, we got to send it home. We call them ugly babies and they just got to get adopted. We’ve got to send them home and it’s the year we are slashing that price. We are I don’t care Just get rid of it, you can sell it at cost. And there are times I sometimes I’ll even sell it below cost not very often. And I’m gonna try to do it as rarely as possible. But every once in a while, you know, you get stuck with this high-end bike yet $5,000 tied up in this bike, it’s a year and a half old, somebody wants to buy it for 500 bucks under cost. But now you could take that money and reinvest it in a product that you’re going to turn four or five, six times over, move on, get rid of it move on. And that type of thinking is very foreign in the bike industry. It’s very foreign. So those are all lessons that I’ve learned over the years. So I think that that leads us to the next biggest expense is payroll and how for most shops, it’s 20% seems to be the kind of the Golden number. It’s easy to go higher if you have long-standing employees who have continually seen raises and are deserving of those. How do you keep that in check is that obviously your single largest expense? And how do you work with your inventory, airier your payroll and your employees to keep that expense within reason?
Joe DuBois 25:14
So first we start with the payroll budget, we take our data from over the years. And I know in this day and age, most bike shops have a point of sale system, but I still constantly hear from sales reps that from they’re going to bike shops that use a pen and paper. None of this stuff that we’re talking about is really achievable. By pen and paper, like you need a point of sale system and you need to use it. It’s not just a glorified cash register. So we take our data from yours and we break it down every single store has its own goal. And basically it’s a percentage of gross revenue. Now that depends. Most bite shops are you know, they have some level of seasonality to them. Even we do we’re in Florida, but there are still seasons and we figure out like oh Let’s know simple math $100,000 month. That’s our goal we’re going to shoot for, let’s just say 12% for this particular month, so Okay, we got $12,000 of payroll that we can spend for this particular month. So we break it down per month per day and we manage that I get weekly reports. Every Monday, I get a record of Recaps of previous sales, and probably about 40 different KPIs that I look at on a weekly basis. One of them focuses on payroll and lets us know, okay, this is this. These are the sales that we generated last week for this particular store. This was our payroll budget, were they older, or were they under and let’s just say they were over payroll, they had a lousy week, and they’re $500 over the payroll. That store manager will get a phone call. Basically, it’s up to them now that they need to trim payroll. And when I say trim payroll, basically just discussed them hours now. This is achieved primarily. And in order to do this effectively, you have to have a mixture of full time and part-time employees in your store. Because if you’re guaranteeing or a full-time employee 40 hours, and now you start cutting them, it’s not fair to them, you know, you know, as an employer you make and you make a commitment, you know, to that employee, that you’re going to give them X amount of hours so that they can actually, you know, have a life and be able to do things. So that is not at all where we look to initially cut hours. So we’re always going to look at affecting part-time employees first, we’re also going to look at, hey, did anybody get a little lazy, and they start running employees into overtime? Because that’s an easy one where it’s like, Hey, you got 10 hours of time and a half on your payroll last week, you know, let’s cut that. Another thing that we’re going to look at is whether or not they have a bunch of sales that way made last week, but they didn’t necessarily go home yet. So they might be going out in a few days. So those sales, they were made, but they didn’t actually count. So we, you know, I want to know, like, Hey, what do you have in the hopper that’s going to be closing out this marker this week. Because that also takes you got to take that into account when managing your payroll. So, if you don’t weekly, it’s difficult in the early years, I would keep people throughout the entire year more. So everyone knows, like recruiting in the bike industry, the pain of ash, finding good help is, is not easy. So you don’t want to necessarily let go of people, you know when the season starts to taper down, but it took me a few years, in the beginning, to realize like, okay, we’re in the offseason, my payroll is way too high, but I’m going to carry these teammates through the summer, and then they’re going to be ready to go next season. Without fail every single year. I would carry one or two employees throughout the summer for them to leave when I needed the most. And I was just like, why am I doing this, it’s not helping me at all, I would have been better off cutting my payroll back in the at the end of last season and save myself, you know, a significant amount of money. So that was a bit of a lesson learned, we stick to our payroll budget, you know, that is like, none of it is manageable. If you don’t understand your numbers. If you don’t have budget and goals to strive for the thing that I’ve learned over the years, as well as when I first started doing this, we used to, you know, we had we, you know, we had the payroll budget, but I would manage them on a monthly basis. And what ended up happening was we close out the month. Now I have to wait 10 or 14 days for my accountant to send me the profit loss statement, balance sheet cash flow, and then at that point to be able to analyze the numbers, but by that point, it’s the middle of the next month. We’re so far behind the swing, that it couldn’t really affect stuff. By the time, I could actually make some decisions and make some moves. Or the last three, four weeks, if not more of older payroll, there was just costing us 10s of thousands. So when we change the frequency of when and how we measured it to weekly instead of monthly, complete transformation, because now we were looking at it so much more frequently, and we can actually affect the sales or the expenses in a specific month.
David DeKeyser 30:34
I think that’s a really critical takeaway across the board is that you are looking at these KPIs on a weekly or a monthly basis versus a lot of stores. It’s once a year, they send their stuff into the accountant, they get their p&l and a balance sheet for a 12 month period, and it’s way too late then obviously, but your point that it’s too late two or three weeks Or you know if it’s one every week now if you were doing it once a month, and you were already two or three weeks, that’s five, six weeks of a swing and having that knowledge in hand. And I’m assuming that that information is coming from your point of sale. Is that correct?
Joe DuBois 31:16
Yeah, everything starts with that point of sale. So yep. Just like with your accountant, your accountants, and hopefully, people have accountants or bookkeeper that is able to actually generate your statements, because there are so many businesses out there that still just, they run their business by looking at their bank, their bank account, and they’ve got money in there. They say, Okay, I’m doing good. I learned a long time ago that I didn’t want to be a bike shop owner, I wanted to be a businessman. And there’s a very big difference from getting into bicycles because it’s your hobby, versus running an actual business and treating it like a business and all of the data, all the stuff that we’re talking about today, none of it would be palatable. If you didn’t have good data. You got to maintain a point of sale system to a very high level of accuracy, cycle counts, that category helps everything like if you’re not maintaining that, then you’re making decisions based on false data or sloppy data. And you’re never going to run a great business by making decisions off of crappy data. So everything like that was that was a huge thing for us. Also, probably all your 14 2014 our accountant was too lackadaisical with the numbers and what I mean by that is he had this mind this is like this little saying, like, it’s all gonna work out at the end of the year, everything over the last there wasn’t a lot of granular get nitty-gritty with a specific, you know, a specific category on your p&l as well as all that workout. Again, I go back to, we were making decisions with not the most accurate or the most accurate, but the data could have been at a much higher quality. So we ended up changing accountants and I was a practice and a half. And that also helped me start this, this, this road of understanding accounting because we ended up going with an accountant at first that didn’t really understand bicycle retail. So I caution everybody to make sure that you have an accountant but the accountant actually understands price for retail. Because if they don’t, they’re going to say your numbers are really not where they probably are. And that could be good or bad. So you know, we’re able to get an accountant that really gives us awesome optics today. Like the data that we get is so accurate and allows us to make really good decisions. And that was a huge game-changer for us because again, it’s the quality of your data is everyone
Chad Pickard 33:45
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David DeKeyser 34:00
So I think we’ve kind of got the operations under our belt here, if somebody is listening to this, the secrets of the world have been revealed, I think it has as to how to become more profitable and run a better business. There’s so much that we’ve covered and it is very obviously at a very high level. But I think that we’ve covered the important things about the business. The last thing that I want to talk to you about is the idea of what happens when somebody comes into the store, and how your employee ends up selling them a bike and this is a part of the business that I think gets overlooked a lot. And you have some of the most interesting information in that regard. And when we’ve spoken before you referred to your business as it’s not necessarily a bicycle shop, or just even it’s just said it’s a business but you also say that it’s a sales organization. And that’s a correct Well, I was gonna say just to count Have ease out of this conversation on that. And I think that this is probably the most critical part of the whole deal is that when a customer comes in that they get sold, and that they’re not just walking around, or somebody just chatting to them about bikes, your employees know that they need to close those sales and that sales are everything
Joe DuBois 35:21
100%. And that ties directly into your last question when it comes to managing payroll, because as I said before everything, and we base it off of gross revenue. So one way to make your payroll percentage go down, or your rent percentages go down is to increase your sales. And I always think of it as like you’re flying an airplane, and you’ve got all these different levers to pull. So you got to make sure you pull the right lever, push the right button, otherwise, you crash or you can you know, take off, you know, fly, managing, you know, payroll budgets and rent expenses. That’s one But as far as getting that culture, that mindset into our teammates that, yes, it’s awesome. We get to work in a bicycle store, we get to get people on bicycles. It’s exciting. It’s our passion. It’s fun. That’s great. Absolutely great. However, we’re a business first and foremost, we’re here for profit. We’re not a nonprofit, we’re not a charity, we are here to make money. With that being said, everybody in the company is in sales. Like literally if you say hi to a customer, you’re in sales, you know, you can affect positively or negatively that customers experience and whether or not they decide to do business with us. So getting that mindset in that was probably something we did years ago. That’s very important. And that’s not really normal, common. Alicia wasn’t that common back when we started doing it? I think it’s becoming more prevalent than people are realizing sales, how important sales are in places where retail, but it wasn’t always like that. So, you know, we’ve invested Heavily different sales training programs over the year over the years. And really just, it’s our objective to make sure that customers coming in our store for a reason, they’re not just coming there to kick tires or to waste time, you know, they’re there with an objective, you know, we don’t want to just sell them, the one thing they came in for, we want to understand exactly how they’re using the product today, tomorrow, maybe six months or a year from now and make sure that we sell them the complete package. That is where we strive for. And I go back to before how I said that we, you know, I have weekly KPIs, you know, or 40 of them, that I get a report every Monday morning. A lot of those have to do with the different products, the different add on dollars, the add on units, the labor, like all these different things that we have, we’re measuring that weekly, and not only am I seeing those numbers, all of my store managers also see these reports and it’s broken down per store. So they know exactly where they are in regards to either their historical numbers from a previous time period or their other colleagues in their stores, but sales, that was another one of those aha type moments because I always understood it. I always understood the importance of sales. And I was always kind of mesmerized when I would see certain salespeople in bicycle retail that would just seem so fluid and so natural at it. And they’d be able to take a customer and use certain words in their presentation and their pitch, their sale, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And they’d be able to move that customer from one point to the next and then ultimately to purchase. The sales process has always been fascinating. I always kind of viewed as, it’s like science, you know, you bring in psychology and how you position yourself. There’s a whole nother conversation that we can get into, but instilling that in all my teammates, that’s where the magic really starts to happen. Because that’s where you really Start to elevate gross salespeople start feeling better people start earning more. You know with us also, the majority of our salespeople are on a compensation model that offers nice base pay plus commission on top of that, and that has been something that we’ve worked on and tweaked over the years to find the right model for us jet the big game-changer for us because I want hungry salespeople. I want people that live in a better world, they are driven for earning more money. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that means they don’t care about the customer. We have clearly established values that we have to operate by. So having integrity is paramount to everything. So when you apply the values, the right compensation model, the right teammates with a culture that really focuses on being a sales organization, and truly understanding that yes, I am in sales and sales is not a four-letter word. When you can get to that point you can really start to see some incredible things happen. And by no means were we like that in the beginning by no means it took us many years to get to that point. But if yet anybody listening to this could take any nugget, getting your team to believe and understand that the core level that everybody is in sales as a sales organization, you can, you can dominate your market, you can screw up with your payroll, you can have to hire rent, but sales, sales can make up for a lot of mistakes.
David DeKeyser 40:30
And to be clear that you’ve gone outside to bring in sales training, and we can leave this as a little bit of a tease I think because we could go into this for days we there’s an article on the NBS outspoken newsletter that you can find online. That kind of covers a little bit more of this but as a teaser, to maybe get somebody to go read that what percentage of a sales increase you feel you’ve seen from instituting an outside sales program. You and implementing that in your business.
Joe DuBois 41:02
When we first implemented it, it was noticeable 20%. You know, like literally within a month, maybe six weeks after implementing the training, after getting the staff to go through the training, it was noticeable. And the reason why I went outside the bike industry was, at that point in time, I just didn’t feel that any of the sales training was at the level that I wanted it to be. And I was not knocking any of the systems that were there. There was a good foundation, but I didn’t want an okay sales training program. I wanted a kick out sales training program. And there were some hurdles with that. There were definitely some hurdles adapt because a lot of my team had a hard time possibly connecting the message because they weren’t necessarily talking about a bicycle every time. Actually, none of the time they were they weren’t talking about a bicycle. It was more of a general sales platform. But when they could get past that when they learn to get past And looking at the technique being applied, and the words being chosen. Once we started to do that, it was awesome.
David DeKeyser 42:08
Well, I hope that people’s eyes popped out of their heads when they heard 20% that that’s a big number. And I know that I’ve when we’ve spoken in the past that the sales training was a very important part of this whole equation. I think we’re pretty much out of time. And I really hope that anybody listening to this has their mind whirling around right now of things that they could apply that you’ve heard here today. So anything that you kind of want to go out with here, Joe, as far as the people that are listening, if there’s just one last kind of a quick bit of advice for them to make their own business more successful and to emulate your success.
Joe DuBois 42:49
I need for one we do a lot right. But by no means are we doing everything perfectly. Like I mentioned that before. And there’s so many things that we need to do better jobs at becoming me really curious about your business and fostering a hunger to have a greater understanding of why certain things happen in your business. That’s where so much of this started for me, the shit hit the fan in 2008. I had no idea why I couldn’t pay my vendors, why I couldn’t pay myself why I had to cut my staff, I had no idea like, on one hand, everything was looking great. On the other hand, it looked like the date my days were numbered, just because I didn’t understand business. And when I really started understanding the business, and accounting, specifically accounting, and I was very intimidated by numbers, I was never I never consider myself a math person when I said, screw it, and let me really, you know, jump into understanding business and how to run a good business. Everything changed from there. So yeah, we talked about a whole bunch of stuff on the call. You know, I’d be more than happy to hop on a call with anybody if they had a question about anything or email talking business. I love it. I can talk business all day long. Yeah, just get curious about your business. That’s the foundation, get curious about your business and just know, it’s that belief system that you have on yourself. You believe that you’re gonna run a kick-ass business, you’ll figure a way to run a kick-ass business. And you know, if you don’t know. So I think I would wrap it up with that.
David DeKeyser 44:16
Perfect. Thank you, Joe. I think that that’s a really key thing. And most people are in bicycle retail because they love retail. They love bicycle retail especially. And if they can fine-tune their business practices, they’ll be able to stay in a business that they love. So learning about the business isn’t something that you should just kind of let go by the sidelines. It’s important if you want to stay doing what you love doing and you should be compensated well for it. So thank you very much, Joe. And hopefully, we can do this again sometime. And for everybody else who’s listening. We’re glad you tuned in. Thank you.
Joe DuBois 44:52
Thank you.
Rod Judd 44:52
This has been bicycle retail radio by the National Bicycle Dealers Association. For more information on membership and member benefits, join us @nbda.com
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David DeKeyser and his wife Rebecca Cleveland owned and operated The Bike Hub in De Pere, Wisconsin, for nearly 18 years. In 2018, they sold the business and real estate to another retailer based in a nearby community. David now writes the Positive Spin series on Bicycle Retailer and Industry News and he writes articles for the NBDA’s blog, Outspokin’. David also provides business consulting through the NBDA’s P2 Consult Program.
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The NBDA has been here since 1946, representing and empowering specialty bicycle dealers in the United States through education, communications, research, advocacy, member discount programs, and promotional opportunities. As shops are facing never-before-seen circumstances, these resources offer a lifeline. Together, we will weather this. We at the NBDA will not waver in our commitment to serving our members even during this challenging time—but we need your support.
Now is the time to become a member as we join together to make one another stronger. Whether you’re a retailer or an industry partner, your membership in the NBDA is one of the best investments you’ll make this year.
Learn more about the benefits of being a member and join now.
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