Sports Trade Secrets from Microsoft Small Business
The Top Trade Secret articles allow you to see what a fellow retailer in your retail vertical is doing to succeed. It offers a retailer's insights and "secrets" of success, along with details about how Microsoft Retail Management System helped a business to thrive. So read on!
Business Name: Treads Bicycle Outfitters, a small bicycle retail chain based in Aurora, Colorado.
Gene Hodges, owner of Treads Bicycle Outfitters
of Aurora, Colorado, has been around since 1980
and is now a three-store chain offering bicycles,
accessories, clothing and rentals.
Sports stores and bike shops abound, but only a few will muscle past the competition. We asked Treads Bicycle Outfitters owner, Gene Hodges, if he had any tips — or trade secrets — that he uses in his successful, three-store chain. He offered the following three sports trade secrets:
1. | Build positive word-of-mouth. Advertising has not been particularly effective for Treads, Hodges says. Word-of-mouth has a greater impact in building a loyal customer base, Hodges says. Since the biking community is relatively close-knit, offering great service is essential to building traffic, he says. | ||||||||
2. | Focus on customers' needs. Its company policy: Find the right bike to match a customer's ability, budget and biking interests and you'll get repeat business. | ||||||||
3. | Use technology to improve business. Founded in 1980, the Aurora, Colorado company grew steadily with a mix of in-store business, Web sales and a mail-order operation. By January of 2002, it was a three-store chain offering bicycles, accessories, clothing and rentals. The rapid expansion caused a few problems. For starters, each Tread store ran its own accounting, purchasing, and inventory system on a DOS-based POS system; some had Macintosh software. Chain-wide data integration was impossible, and keeping track of sales and inventory was a headache. Hodges switched to Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS), a point-of-sale and business processes solution, which greatly helped to improve the small bicycle chain's business. Here's how RMS helped: On This Page
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Better chain-wide communication
Today, each of the three Treads stores has its own edition of Microsoft Retail Management System Store Operations. Each store automatically reports its numbers every 20 minutes to the main store. "I'm now getting my transaction and inventory data into headquarters, so I know what to buy and what to send to which store to balance stock levels," says Hodges.
"We've cut down on paperwork and redundant tasks. We now do jobs once for the whole chain, not once in every store and then again at our headquarters."
With the stores' old POS system, Hodges had to wait until all the stores faxed in the previous day's sales results, then re-enter and total them all. "A few times we even traveled 30 minutes to get the data," says Hodges. Now, Hodges is moving toward centralized purchasing, but plans to mix centralized receiving with drop shipments. He wants bicycles to arrive centrally, but parts to be shipped to the appropriate stores. Using his new software features, he and his staff know when each bike arrives, is assembled and sold, he says.
Customized point-of-sale screens
Hodges also praises the customizable POS screens which "let [sales] associates switch back and forth among multiple needs. We use work orders . . . but a minute later, we might be taking a layaway or credit order."
Thanks to the system's easy-to-learn, point-of-sale capability, Hodges also believes he has a far more complete sense of the influx and outflow of cash.
"With automated work orders and the ability to track serial numbers, my team — and the system — know which repairs are ready and which parts were used," Hodges says.
"Retailers should never start out with only an electronic cash register. We all need organization. I would not run a retail operation without a modern POS system," he says. "I've learned the hard way."
Tighter control of inventory
Today, serial number tracking with the new system identifies which bikes are in stock, committed, assembled, available, or sold. All staff can access information and inventories from all three stores.
Check item availability for specific customer requests
Prior to getting the new automated system, coordinating sales between the Aurora stores and those in nearby Parker and Englewood was a major undertaking. "We never knew what was committed on layaway versus what was sold. So we paid sales tax on items we called 'sold' that were really just on layaway," he says.
Also, each store had its own inventory management and sales systems. None worked in sync. "Every morning, managers had to fax in sales data to the main store, which doubled keyboard work, added errors, and took up time," says Hodges. This led to overstocking and under stocking problems. Since each store did its own buying, there was no efficient way to determine whether one store had a surplus of what another store needed.
More time for customers
Selling bicycles and related gear is a personal affair that requires staff to spend as much time with customers as possible, Hodges says.
Microsoft Retail Management System's touch screen provides
detailed information about customers and their purchase histories.
"Microsoft Retail Management System gives us extra face time with the people who keep us in business," says Hodges. "I want my team on the floor, selling and fitting bikes and other gear. Time spent nursing an old system is money you aren't pulling in. We're winning with this new network. It's tremendously powerful."