Ian's Bits & Bobs: The Blog

t5np

T5NP*: The First Number is Sales Volume… (and that’s just the start!)

In conversations with owners and managers about the year or business conditions, the topic sooner or later turns to sales volume. There is always a reluctance among strangers to avoid “the number” –  so we tiptoe around with questions about the number of employees or registers or parking spaces instead. Sometimes you’ll hear phrases like “north of $2 million” (but never “south of $500 mil”!)

This traditional reluctance should be a thing of the past. In today’s tough retail environment, networking and sharing are welcomed by more and more operators as a competitive advantage. The more we know, the more likely we are to make better decisions.

So there’s no problem with owning a retail store that sells $850,000 a year, unless and until you dig deeper to see what the other metrics show about today’s operation and what sales have been in the past! Current sales volume is just a number documenting a step on the ladder that many other companies have occupied at some point in their development. Similarly, there’s nothing fabulous about “doing $25 million,” unless and until you look under the hood. There are many famous retail brand names which once boasted billions in sales, but are no longer around.

It’s just ‘a place on the ladder’ … and the important denominator

Sales volume is just a marker of size – a place on the graph or ladder to higher volumes. Sales on its own has little merit with few, if any, lessons to be learned on its own, except maybe local bragging rights. But if that’s all there is to work with I can at least look at the growth (or lack of) in sales over the years and ask the question, “Are the sales going up as least as quickly as the rise in the costs of doing business?” That’s our first Hmmmm….

As we will see in future blogs, that sales volume number is crucial when comparing margin dollars earned from those sales, or labor costs to drive that volume and so on. In fact sales volume is the denominator for several of our standards and comparisons on the retail dashboard from Gross Margin dollars to Labor Productivity. And you want to be able to see improvement in those numbers for your own company over time.

(But we know you still like to compare). 

One of the features of The 5 Numbers Project within Your MarketMetrics is that it will be filterable by business size or geographic region … so you can compare yourself to “others like you” more readily. When there are at LEAST 5 businesses in each category, layered filtering (size AND region) can be ‘turned on’ – our primary objective is maintaining anonymity.

For now though, the first of our five numbers is a really just a marker, which on its own and without “lifting the lid” on the other performance metrics, has limited value. But it’s an essential starting point to our project – oh and useful for local bragging rights too!

So, are you all “south of $500 million” out there? We are!

Next week, we’ll dive into learning more about number 2 in T5NP: Customer Count/Register Rings/Tickets – stay tuned!

*T5NP – this post is the first in a series as we begin to launch The Five Numbers Project

Oct 27, 2018 Comments Off on T5NP*: The First Number is Sales Volume… (and that’s just the start!)
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The 5 Numbers Winning Garden Centers Use (and still have a life!)

Traveling the country working with independent garden retailers, I know that owners and managers constantly wonder how their year compares with that of their peers 300 or even 3000 miles away. The fear of falling behind industry standards is understandable when you are working hard in your own trenches! It’s easy to feel isolated. I get asked, “what are you hearing this year, how are others doing?” a LOT.

As I mentioned in my last post (9-2-18): the good are getting better and winning market share from the less successful. For many years we have focused our business on helping our clients use the numbers that really matter. While there’s a lot more to success than just a few data points, most of the winners do in fact use just a few data points to make the good decisions that keep them winning. That’s their “secret sauce”!

TMI!!

Now that almost everyone has POS, too much info can be the problem, not too little. Data is available on every aspect of the company, from buying strategies to performance reviews. Owners and managers simply don’t have the time to clarify what is crucial from what is just interesting! So they either don’t use the data although they have it, or they get buried in the wrong data. Unless you are going to invest in extra staff to track and analyze all the data, it just puts more work on the same few people.

So how do owners and managers decide which data points matter most?

It’s Just 5 Numbers

Simply, they let us help: we have narrowed the answers down to just 5 Numbers each month. These, together with a few simple but crucial “offspring” calculations, allow retailers to make the right decisions without more office time and endless reports. Some of our clients have been using this approach for over 10 years and are absolutely “beating the street” when compared against the industry in general.

We focus on what matters most in retail. With 60% – 80% of sales revenue being spent on just two costs, inventory and labor, we keep the “numbers” where they matter for time-crunched owners and managers.

From just 5 Numbers our clients can track sales and/or customer growth, margin management, customer spend, labor efficiency and retail profitability.

But unlike traditional industry reporting, which focuses on the topline of Sales Volume, we go down much deeper to see what’s left after inventory and labor costs, or “Gap Dollars” for those in the know.

Gap Dollars, (accountants might refer to it as ‘Margin after Labor’) is like an operating profit. By subtracting the costs that you have quick and relatively easy control over (like Costs of Goods and Labor) from sales, you can see what’s left to pay those expenses which are hard to reduce such as rent, admin, energy, debt repayment and so on.

If that particular number, Gap Dollars, is not increasing faster than the cost of being in business, you’re going backwards no matter what the topline sales numbers tell you!

Share and Compare – Finally!

You may be aware that Dr. Charlie Hall (Texas A&M) has recently launched a national key performance indicators sharing network for growers. We are using the same platform (yourmarketmetrics.com) to create “The 5 Numbers Project” (T5NP) for garden retailers: secure, online, anonymous business comparisons, available at your desktop 24-7.

What’s the goal here? We believe there is a strong desire to have credible national industry data to compare with to see how the industry is doing as a whole, and to track your OWN business’ performance in a visually compelling way that speaks to people beyond the beancounters. We want you to have a confident answer when your loan officer says, “How do you compare with the industry?” or when you are trying to value your company for sale or generational transition.

Best of all, the dashboarding format will give you an easy way to visually SHOW your team the metrics you want them to focus on … so they can help you move the needle where it matters most.

All are welcome!  

Importantly:  ALL independent garden retailers are welcome to join this new industry-wide benchmarking project, regardless of what peer group, buying group or networking group you already belong to. All are welcome … as long as you’re a retailer. (We love our vendors, but unless you have your own garden retail numbers to share (ANONYMOUSLY, of course), then this isn’t the project for you.

The first round of subscriptions will be open only from November 1 – December 23, so you can be onboarded and up to speed before Spring 2019 hits. Every Tuesday for the next 6 weeks here on Bits & Bobs, we will feature one of the 5 Numbers and what it can do for you, and share more about how the platform will work:  stay tuned!

Oct 15, 2018 2 Comments
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Reading The 2017 Tea Leaves

I took a few months off the blogging trail, so we didn’t distract our massive readership from the 2016 election! Then I waited a few more weeks to see what the election had done to the retail garden business and voilà, here we are now well into 2017.

Happy New Year

I do believe it will be a happy 2017 for the retail garden business and the supply chain that supports it. The business signs are quite positive, always allowing for the usual weather challenges and a (mild) cyclical recession predicted for 2018. The fourth quarter of 2016 ended very well once the consumer’s attention was re-focused after the election. Garden center teams or independent garden retailers I spoke to after Christmas said the last two months had been very strong in sales and the consumer’s attitude to spending. Average sale per customer was well up over the last few years and all operators I spoke to focused on the same observations (albeit anecdotal).

Simply put, the biggest, most expensive end of the range of almost everything, sold out first. It didn’t matter whether it was wreaths for the front door, “everlasting” Christmas trees or swag for the mantle, the most expensive selection sold out first. The $2000 everlasting tree sold before the $800 one, the new clever lighting set sold before the cheaper one designed five years ago and the biggest table-runners went first. Even the sadly “footballed” Poinsettias were elevated for a few weeks with the bigger pots and higher priced specimens selling out early.

It is at least 8 years since garden retailers told me that they sold out of cut trees by Dec 18th and no consumer seemed to want a plain, decorate-it-yourself wreath. They wanted them fully decorated and ready to shine. So the end of a dominant election, a record-high stock market and finally, rising household income, do seem to have combined to loosen the purse strings.

Spending Can Be Fun!

From the “Do It For Me” side of the aisle we saw a strong and increased ticket demand for “Christmas Porch Pots,” outdoor lighting, tree installation and interior decoration. All signs of a more relaxed consumer.

So, does this mean a fabulous year ahead as consumers spend like fools? I am not sure about that, remember that the media giveth and the media taketh away, but the signs are very good. Garden retailers can bet on a consumer who is much more open to persuasion than even two or three years ago.

“Your wage rise is my price rise”

Another factor in the mix is the national conversation about the increase in minimum wage either by legislation or just through simple market forces. What this means is that most customers know someone in their circle of family or friends who is getting a raise, so they should not be shocked to see prices increase as a consequence. As one garden center owner said, “For the first time in years, my customers are expecting me to raise my prices, so I am not going to disappoint them!”

What’s your price rise strategy?

So in the spirit of “Sharing is Caring”, who among you has added 4%, 8%, 10% or more to some lines (which lines?) you will be carrying? Most of our blog readers are not in competition with each other, so let’s hear what you are looking for in your price increases this year. Who’s going to start the bidding? Do I hear 5% to start please….?

Photo Credit: Ian Baldwin, taken inside the classy new expansion at Lowe’s Greenhouse and Florist (Chagrin Falls OH),

showing the owners’ confidence in the next few years!

Feb 15, 2017 10 Comments
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Crash! The 2015 National Gardening Survey Returns Us to Reality

An edited version of this story was originally published August 10, 2015 at Today’s Garden Center, the edited / published version can be downloaded HERE, or you can read this slightly-more-candid / pre-edited version, and share your comments below: 

There Is a New Elephant in the Room!

When I first saw last year’s National Gardening Survey (NGS) results from the 2013 gardening year, I was wary  of the massive jump (18%) in total DIY garden spending or 21% rise in spending per household, as that did not reflect what we were hearing from our clients out in the retail trenches.  So this year’s survey, showing a drop of 23% in total spending and 24% less per household, comes as a leveler. No behavior survey is perfect so we expect ups and downs, but we now have data from the same questions for over 30 years and the overall trend is pretty disheartening.

In reality the previous year’s numbers were an anomaly and this year’s report just shows garden spending returning to the doldrums of 2010 to 2012. (Well below 2008.) Now that’s disheartening.

Any Good News?

Yes.  Despite all the distractions available, householders are still “gardening”, though I suspect fewer consumers now use that word. Participation in gardening has been statistically flat for the last 5 years with around 70 per cent of all homes doing something. That is still eighty four million homes, a market many industries would love to have, but we used to be the nation’s sunny spot. Remember, less than 20 years ago, we were America’s “favorite outdoor pastime” with Martha Stewart hauling in great armloads of perennials and 4-5 gardening magazines at the supermarket checkout?

Well that “good thing” has changed to a so-so thing for many. You can almost hear them saying “If I have time and can figure out what to do – is there a good gardening app?”

The dilemma we face is that, despite all the competition for their time and money, householders continue to do something in the garden, but are spending less and less money doing it.  Even as household spending picks up again after the recession, garden spending has not. Has competition reduced unit prices? Are consumers still buying the same number of products as 6 years ago?  I don’t think so. If anything, with the exception of warehouse clubs, the price-driving “big box stores” have increased prices lately. Similarly the Local Garden Centers (LGCs) we know have steadily increased prices and all our clients show an increased average sale per customer (but maybe not from garden products).

Category High Lights and Low Lights

Fortunately, the shining star of the last 5 years – Food Gardening – has held its own and is clearly here to stay. This is the only activity that has steadily increased its share of garden spending since 2005. Everything else has had highs and lows.

Some individual products have done well despite the spending malaise. Cyclical spending such as machinery, as well as “maintenance” tasks like Insect Control rise and fall with need. Yearly spending to keep the property looking tidy such as Lawn Care and Flower Gardening have just declined at the same rate as everything else, but there has been no growth in any of these categories in the last ten years. The survey does not allow for more modern “color” planting using flowering shrubs, grasses and perennials instead of annuals, so this activity  probably continues to rise, which is great news given the higher ticket and extra tie-in products!

“Age Shall Not Wither Them”

It comes as no surprise that over 55 year olds are the biggest spenders of the age groups. This was not always the case. The 55+ group’s spending share averaged 37% from 2003 to 2008  it rose to 44% in the 2009 recession and has now reached the highest ever recorded – a staggering 51% in 2014. So the Lawn and Garden market is even more dependent on the Baby Boomers, just as they adapt to retirement, fixed incomes and health care issues.

At the other end of the spectrum, the recent surge in gardening by the youngest group in the survey, the 18-34 year olds, seems to have faded. Could it be they were tempted to try it and weren’t thrilled with the process or end result?

On Average, Things Are Not Even “Average”

Gardening is clearly not capturing the consumers’ imagination and dollars like it used to do. But because one year’s data is always suspect, we took a look at two sets of data, averaging results from 2009 to 2014 and comparing them with similar averages from 2001 to 2008.

The average household spending from 2001 to 2008 was $435, but from 2009 to 2014 it was $359. This explains why many LGCs (even the best) are still not seeing their sales top those of 2006 or 2007. It also validates the move by the sharper operators into other categories, departments and services as they see core gardening products stagnate.

Remember the NGS asks householders about garden spending irrespective of where they shopped. So if the whole retail sale is down and the national chains are increasing their share of a shrinking pie, it puts even more pressure on the LGC channel.

Unlike other recoveries after recessions, garden spending is not expanding as the economy improves.
“But My GC Peers Are Doing Well Now”

Yes. The surviving independents who weathered the recession are looking forward to some good years. The operative word is “surviving”. Think how many LGCs and greenhouses are no longer in business in your area or on your contact list. Did all that business go to the big guys?  Obviously not. The NGS tracks spending at all retail outlets, not just LGCs, in 16 activities from Lawn Care to Water Gardening. Results show flat to declining purchases over the last 10 years in everything but “Food Gardening”, irrespective of where they shopped. So most LGCs “growth” is probably from categories outside the NGS scope such as gift/décor, patio/outdoor living, food, apparel, Christmas, installation and so on. A good P.O.S. project might be to compare core garden department sales and customer count, before and since 2009.

What IS Going On?

The NGS data shows:

Total garden spending peaked at $39.6 billion in 2002

Spending per household peaked at $466 also in 2002

Participation peaked at 91 million households in 2005

If ever there were three statistics that called for “Re-Inventing Garden Retail”, these are they, yet we have clung on to the same model hoping for a better economy, more housing starts, improved weather, new politicians or whatever.  The garden retail model has worked so successfully for decades; consumers driving to a store (when they are open) and in their spare time(!) being told what to do and buy, then going home and hoping for success. This is clearly not the way forward.

Now think about how the consumer’s “spare time” has changed. In 2002 there was very little (if any) broadband internet, on-line shopping or streaming video. In 2005 there were NO smart phones(!), while Netflix mailed DVDs, Google was a start-up desktop search engine and Facebook was for Ivy League students!

Think of the burgeoning choices consumer now have to spend their discretionary time and money – most of it involving staring at a phone, tablet, computer or a TV.

The new Elephant in the gardening room might be “screen time”, estimated to be at least 12 hours per day for the average American adult.

So Is the Glass Still Half Full?

Absolutely.  Americans like gardens, they just don’t like “gardening.”

How did that happen?  The world seems to have defined gardening as hot, messy work that involves commitment, knowledge and some mysterious intuition, not to mention the expense and risk of failure?  Hmmm, that sounds like cooking too!   How did they manage to make cooking so exciting and desirable?

We have allowed others to define our image which, as any politician will tell you, is not a good strategy.  But despite this image, eighty four million households are gardening, with probably a few million more wishing for the end result.

We have to change the image. We need to talk about at-home entertaining or home grown veggies, family time with nature, kid’s projects, saving Monarchs, relaxation and escape, or pride in property enhancement and style. We should take nothing for granted and look at everything as an opportunity.

End-Game?

If you are looking to retire in 5-10 years, why care?  You will probably be OK as an owner, though employees might not be thrilled with the strategy.

But if you are building a saleable asset or a business for the next generations, the time to start changing is overdue. No one (least of all a consultant!) truly knows the future, but leveraging your skills and reputation into a garden-success-resource center or “village,” based on a wide range of services seems attractive. These might include conventional retail, with design-build indoors and out, at-home maintenance, garden-coaching plus mobile everything including real-time diagnostic services. There will obviously be great niches in up-scale life and outdoor living centers or gourmet food and cooking/brewing centers. I see a strong niche in all-natural, organic/local, environmental activities or decorating/party planning or a complete do-everything-for-me center. There are opportunities in agro-tourism, apparel, weddings, cafes, community centers and whatever your local market can relate to.

The timing is perfect now that “local” is in vogue as consumers turn back to their communities. Meanwhile most LGCs have under-used land and buildings, empty seasons, talented teams, under leveraged borrowing capacity and a safe, strong balance sheet.

But as the National Gardening Survey has shown for ten years now, there is no time to waste. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines….!

What can you DO?  Some Calls to Action from the 2015 NGS:

Food Gardening Solution Centers:  Food gardening is the only garden category with consistent growth since 2008 but the plant portion of that spend is a small part of the total spend. LGC must get into the “Food Gardening” business not just the “Food plant” business and become the go-to retailer for every aspect from irrigation to raised beds (“Raised Bed” soil was a big seller at Home Depot this year) to canning supplies. All backed by how-to classes on You Tube and tasting/cook-off events. Celebrate your local-ness with local food how-to knowledge!

Drive Traffic: After 10 years of declining customer count, the immediate strategy for most LGCs should be to drive more traffic using a combination of competitively priced, driver-item products and categories that extend the season such as apparel, food, bird, homebrew, indoor gardening and so on.

Go Mobile:  Many younger consumers are interested in gardening but are very dependent on their mobile device. LGCs MUST invest in making their website and marketing methods “mobile friendly”. Generation Y is trending towards smaller independent retailers but only if they can find and use them on a mobile device!

Know Your Numbers: Analyze category trends (unit sales, dollar volume and customer count if possible) since 2006, just where IS the growth? Is it in gardening or all those other categories?

Look in the Mirror: Take a long hard, unemotional, objective look at your company’s image. Does it still look, feel (smell?) and operate like a 1995 GC? Profitable means more than just pretty!

Be the Answer Place (for New Gardeners):  Take a clear strategic look at what it will take to become the local community “One-stop, first-time garden/landscape success center, including “Do It For Me”. (Editor’s note: you probably aren’t as friendly and approachable as you think you are!)

 

*As a reminder the NGS is an on-line survey by Harris Interactive of a statistically representative sample of householders, drawn from a data base of 7 million households. The survey was carried out early in 2015 about a householder’s participation in and spending on gardening in 2014. The data is compiled into a 260+ page report, (available from The National Gardening Association). The NGS’s 30+ year’s history, gives us a huge database of consumer participation and spending.

Aug 17, 2015 16 Comments
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Caught With Your Plant Prices Down?  

Knowing that most people have more important things to do than to read blogs at this time of year, I will keep this brief (who cheered at the back?!).

PLEASE, PLEASE take the time to visit* your big box competitors to look at the pricing of their key items. Some owners and managers do this as a routine strategy but if, like many Local Garden Centers (LGCs) that I see on my travels, you are underpricing the competition – read on!

Two years ago I raised a flag for those clients who were unaware that the Bonnie Plants brand of 4 inch veggies at both Home Depot and Lowe’s had broken the $3 barrier – a barrier many LGC owners and buyers were afraid to cross. In 2013 Bonnie prices were around $3.48, last year they went to $3.68 which also looks like the national price this year too.

Yet I still see many LGCs asking under $3, often well under $3. When I ask why they would underprice Home Depot with such a hot item the usual reply is a lack of awareness of big box prices. Others say that the landed cost to them is just over a $1 so they were getting plenty of margin or the staff didn’t like to charge such a high price on such a low-cost item. (Hmmm, do they know the cost of the actual coffee in that $4.50 morning cuppa?)

Reality Check:

The Bonnie Plants brand is probably in over 6000 home improvement stores nationwide and has done an outstanding job to raise the price expectation on a product many viewed as an incidental. (One retailer told me a few years ago that his entire veggy department was less in sales than his Geraniums.) Then along comes the Grow Your Own boom and the TV Food Channels and suddenly that “incidental” is in demand. And big companies know a thing or two about demand curves. They have actually increased a product’s “Known Value”! How rare is that in this trade? Thank you!

So, thanks to these retail giants the American consumer is now conditioned to pay not less than $3.50 for a small veggie or herb plant. Why would any garden retailer miss out on meeting that customer expectation?

No part of this discussion takes into consideration the assumed better plant quality in LGCs (sadly not always the case) or the LGC superior service, often quoted to justify a higher price in other plant material. This is “Opportunity Cost” thinking.

When the market leaders, with more than 30% of the business, put up their prices, improve their fixtures/merchandising and use national ad campaigns to support that brand, why wouldn’t everyone else in that line of business ride along? How many Gross Margin dollars are LGCs leaving on the table?

That’s the Opportunity Cost and any shortfalls should be mentioned by owners at “review time”….

Few LGCs would try to undercut a big box store price in garden supplies, grills or Christmas trees so to do it in the hottest green goods makes no sense to me. Ride the wave and bank the Gross Margin dollars, there are plenty of other products to lose money on!

Have a great spring!

*Editorial Note: I used the word “visit” (vs. looking online) because at time of writing the online price for those 4” veggies on the Home Depot website (for three zip codes across U.S.) is $4.98  – go figure!

Apr 1, 2015 13 Comments