nickshanagher

A colleague of mine showed me a flier that Mike Greene had used to promote his book - Failure Breeds Success - and I thought that his book looked like a useful modern version of Think and Grow Rich, the iconic self-help book from Napoleon Hill. Greene is well known in the news and convenience industry through his leadership of consultancy him! Starting out working as a paperboy for a newsagent, he went on to become a Martin McColl manager before stints at Spar, Cirkle K, Shell and Jet. I have heard Mike speak and been in the same room as him often but we have never spoken. However, I had a hunch that his self-help book might appeal to business-minded retailers working in our trade right here and right now. My hunch was right. Failure Breeds Success is an accessible version of Think and Grow Rich. It is steeped in Mike's personal journey, which is through the news and convenience trade to millionaire status. He gives you a road map to success - a map you can hand to a...

Sometimes local shops are ahead of the game when it comes to shopper trends. And sometimes they are not. As a general rule, people don’t expect to be marketed to by independent shopkeepers. But there are many exceptions. This column is for the exceptions: Those retailers who are always searching for great products to share with their shoppers. But it is also a challenge for those who don’t push the boundaries of their assortment of products. Mike Brehme is an entrepreneur that I had never heard of until last month. He spent 23 years building up the tea brand Clipper to sales of £50 million before he sold it in 2007. Along the way he pioneered the UK market for green tea, Fairtrade tea, and organic hot drinks including herbal and fruit infusions. For most of the time since he sold Clipper he has been working on a new product, a hot drink that is not tea or coffee and that will sell better than fruit teas. This spring, in London, he unveiled FruitBroo, a range of “insanel...

There is an amazing fact near the start of Decoded, a new book from marketer Phil Barden. The average person takes 1.7 seconds to process the information in an advertisement in a magazine. But this does not really matter because all good marketing needs is this 1.7 seconds. People are programmed to respond quickly to the hundreds of thousands of things they “see” every day. If the marketing is right for what we are looking for, we will find the products we need. Even if we make mistakes, as we all do, all the time. But if we “were to reflectively think about every purchase decision in the supermarket, it would take so long to do our shopping that we would starve to death.” Barden’s work builds on the field of behavioural economics pioneered by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow demonstrates that the way people behave is not as economists would like to think. In a chapter on optimising the path to purchase, Barden shows how good m...

Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, provides good insight into its success secrets in an interview with Fortune, just published, that retailers should read. In a company with 78,000 staff members, it says voluntary staff turnover is 9 per cent compared to an industry average of 100 per cent plus. At departmental manager level it is 3 per cent. What makes this possible? "Everyone belongs to a team. Labour is a fixed cost not a variable cost. If a team can generate revenue that exceeds a budgeted margin between the revenue and the labour cost, they share in the gain. Every 30 days it is in their paycheck. If they build sales or save costs, the productivity they create is shared with them. On average in the last year it was over $1 an hour in their paychecks from gain sharing, which they created through their own efforts," Robb told Fortune's Geoff Colvin. There is an important principle in here that you can use in your business. You need to operate with discipline ...