If a hurricane is coming and forecasters are not sure if it’s going to hit your town, you would be foolish to merely hope it passes you by. A wise man prepares as though it’s going to hit with full force. As the lockdown eases, no one knows if the flooring market is going [...]
As the U.S. slowly emerges from the COVID-19 lockdown, no one is sure what the economy is going to do. It could rebound fairly quickly, or it could take many months or even years to come back. We just don’t know. That’s why it’s important to hope for the best and plan for the worst. [...]
I’m coaching a dealer who has a very successful business with two locations. He came to me because he was working 70 hours per week, including weekends, and was incredibly stressed and on the verge of burning out. One thing that came to light almost immediately during our first meeting was that his phone had [...]
I was on the phone recently with my sister. She and her husband needed floors for their new house, and she had spent several days visiting flooring stores in and around the major metro area near their home. “I visited seven or eight flooring stores, and the showrooms were almost all super depressing,” she said. [...]
Home Depot spent $1.08 Billion in advertising in 2018. There is no way you, as an independent small business, can beat them by playing their advertising game their way. In the previous installment of this series I covered specific strategies to leverage your advantages as a small business when you market yourself. Now let’s cover [...]
As I outlined in part 1 of this series, Home Depot spent $1.08 Billion in advertising in 2018. There is no way you’re going to beat them in the advertising game because they are outspending you thousands of times over. However, there are business growth methods you can implement which the big corporations can’t or [...]
Home Depot spent 1.06 billion U.S. dollars on advertising in the United States in 2018. They were the third largest radio advertiser in the U.S. in 2017, and made it to the list of top 5 retailers in North America in 2017 based on sales. (Source: Statista.com) As of this writing, they have 4,939,108 followers [...]
You’ve spent time, energy and money attracting a prospect, and getting the opportunity to measure and give them a quote. Doesn’t it make sense to maximize your profits with each “at bat?” I’ve been working with floor dealers since 2007, and I’ve found that very few do anything more than simply measure the areas the [...]
In part 1 of this series I made the point that, hopefully, industry-wide solutions to the installer shortage are coming, but that may take awhile. In the short term you’ve got to solve it for yourself, which generally means either hiring installers away from other retailers, or recruiting and training them yourself. Either way, if [...]
On August 23rd I attended the Flooring Installation Taskforce meeting held at the CFI convention in San Antonio. This meeting was hosted by the Floor Covering Leadership Council to help further the mission of solving the installer shortage. Robert Varden, head of the CFI, did a fantastic job presenting the challenges, and providing real, actionable [...]
