Ep 197 Mastering Stock and Cashflow in your product Business

So before we get into what is often a, a, a tricky issue for small businesses and any businesses is that managing that stock and that cash flow and knowing what to do when, what's your background and how did you come to what you do now?

So my background for the last 20 years has been working in-house in corporate, um, retail.

I've worked for big high street brands.

Topshop was my main part of my career.

I was there for the best part of eight years, and most recently I was head of department at a local business, um, near where I am in Kent, which is a kid's wear online branded website.

Throughout my career I've worked very differently with stock, so, and managing how you buy stock.

So you've obviously got your kind of the ma- the most common of, um, own buy and own label, um, where you're creating the stock and buying and designing, um, and producing it yourself, but I've also worked with wholesale.

I've worked with marketplace.

Um, I've worked with franchise kind of on the peri- periphery.

So there are multiple ways of managing your stocks, and actually for businesses starting out, there are so many different things to take into account that actually it does become a bit of a minefield and, but it does become easier.

That's all I'll say.

And what would be your top tips for managing your stock?

I think the number one top tip is making sure that you've got visibility of your data and that you're looking at it on a regular basis to really understand what your sales are telling you, and really are getting to grips with why something's working and why it's not working, and I think the why is really important because unless you understand that why, you can't do anything about it.

So it could be something from a print not working.

It could be the fact that you've, for whatever reason, the imagery online hasn't come through as you thought and actually it's not as shoppable as maybe you thought in your head and how you'd planned it.

It could just be a complete style failure and just something that you really just need to walk away from and say, "We tried it.

It didn't work." But conversely, on your best sellers, you really need to understand the momentum of those sales and how the customer, the customer behavior behind that so that you can then react and optimize that, um, a- accordingly.

Um, the other thing that I would really recommend is to make sure that you've got some form of sales forecast in place, and it doesn't need to be fancy and technical and wizzy, wizzy, you know, Excel spreadsheets.

It does need to be an Excel spreadsheet, but to have actually kind of a pen to paper and have something is better than nothing because unless you know what those a- you're expecting to take, you've got no benchmark to ascertain when you're looking at your data whether or not something is good or not.

So-

And also if you have enough stock or not to make those sales.

Exactly.

And kind of going back to the beginning, that's ultimately how you drive your buying budget because you're setting your sales plan, that you then work out how much stock you need to deliver those sales on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and in turn that drives out your buy budget.

You know, there are lots of tools that you can then create basically a shopping list from that buy budget that is, that, you know, becomes your tick list of what you need either by category and by color, by style, for example.

But to have that at the beginning as the foundations of all those decisions as you're trading is a really important tool to have.