(upbeat music) - Hey there and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast. If you're looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing and ultimately take control of your retail or e-commerce business, then you're in the right place. I'm Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi-award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level. I'll provide you with the strategies, the tools and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started? (upbeat music) - Hey there and welcome to today's episode of the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast. Now, one of the key benefits of having a network is that you hear gossip and I recently heard on the grapevine that a key competitor of one of our 5X retail store owners had cut their ads budget by a whopping 85%. Now to put this into perspective, they had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in ads, which, let's be honest, is really difficult to compete with, right? Now that hundreds of thousands of dollars a month had dropped into the tens of thousands of dollars. Now, don't get me wrong, that is still an awful lot of money. Now, this company had recently gotten a really big influx of cash from investors, and they had been burning through the dollars fast in what I can only assume was an effort to try and push out everybody else through advertising dollars to get that key market share. And this happens when investors want to see a big return on investment fast, or alternatively, the company wants to look good for investors. Maybe they're going for a second round of investment. So they want to be able to show that the money that they got from the first round has been put to good use and they are getting big returns on it. Now, the upside of having huge amounts of money to spend on ads is that if you have the right strategy and if you have the right media buying team in place, it can totally work. You can totally grab full market share in a niche. And you have probably seen it. I mean, for me, the thing that comes to mind as a woman is shape and mint shape where. I mean, they are everywhere. And if you ever get one of their ads or even stop scrolling to look at an ad, you are bombarded by ad after ad after ad. And the whole point is they just kind of work on this strategy where the more you see them, the more likely you are to buy. And if you're not seeing anybody else in that same category because they have bought as much as they possibly can of the ad share, you know, like at the end of the day, it's an option, right? Buying media is an option, just like buying a house. And it is whoever can spend the most money gets the most amount of, you know, gets the gift of pride. They get the most amount of space. But you probably might find it hard to believe that spending that much money every single month and getting great results isn't actually easy. It is actually really hard to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month and continue to get results. Because the upside of grabbing all the market share is that you burn through your audiences really, really fast. And so the only thing you can do to be able to get out to more people is either expand who you're targeting, which is not necessarily what you want to do. You want to always keep it as, you know, as minimal as possible to try and hit those right people, or you have to go to other countries. And so as you can imagine, burning through that money was quite easy, but it wasn't a case from what I heard. This is only second-hand information. It wasn't a case of they actually burnt through the money and they couldn't find new audiences. It's that they burnt through the money and they weren't seeing the results that they wanted. And it isn't always a case of putting more money into ads to see bigger or better or more results. So putting more money into ads doesn't necessarily mean you will get all sales, okay? If your ads agency is telling you that that's the key problem, it probably isn't. What I looked at was they hadn't reduced their spending because they didn't have the customers, they had reduced their spending because they weren't getting the sales. And for me, you know me, I love to see the opportunity in somebody else's downside, when somebody else is going through a rough time and when I say someone else, I usually mean the big brands, when they're going through tough time, what are the opportunities? What can we leverage? And so I thought that would be a great topic to talk about today. What should you actually be spending your money on right now when customers aren't spending as much as they used to or aren't spending as frequently as they used to or aren't spending on maybe the kinds of things that you sell. So what should you be spending your money right now on to get more sales, to get more customers and to get better ROI return on investment? It probably comes as a surprise to you to say that I think the number one thing you should be spending money on right now is marketing. And you're like, oh, hot up, sir. You just told us, you know, these people have cut back their budget because they weren't getting the sales. But here's the thing, right now, those businesses that are tapped out for cash, the ones that you used to spend all their money on ads, well, they're flocking to email and social media because it is free and they are, you know, they are banging out as much social posts as many Instagram stories, many Instagram reels to get all over the Facebook tick toggle. They're pushing social media because it is free and the same with email. They're just bombarding their email lists because it doesn't cost them anything. Now, here's the thing. I'm not saying that you should stop social media or stop email, but if that is the only channel or the only channels that you use to get customers and to increase or even keep your sales, then you kind of think about it. How's that going to work out for you? When companies that have bigger budgets that have more people are putting all their efforts into the channels that you used to rely on, well, you're going to end up getting lost in the noise, especially if you haven't tapped in to your point of difference. If you don't know why people should buy from you, then you're probably just posting for the sake of posting. You're probably just sending out email campaigns whenever you've got something to say, rather than looking at the overall sales funnel, like there is top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. So top of funnel is people who don't even know that you exist, or maybe they saw an ad. The middle of funnel are people who are prepared to buy, like they're on the buying journey. They're actually looking for things to buy. And then bottom of funnel is people who either converted or the people who have got things in their cart, they are sitting on your website, they're going back and back again. So your marketing strategy, and this is the second thing I want you to focus on. So in terms of marketing, know why you're different, but also have a strategic marketing plan. So what does that look like for you? That means you have to have top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel ads. And this is where so many people get caught out in the retail and e-commerce world when it comes to spending ads, because they focus on bottom of funnel. Just buy my stuff, buy my stuff, focusing on conversions. But the thing is conversions are expensive. And so if you haven't worked out your customer acquisition costs and your customer lifetime value, if you don't know what you can spend to get a customer, then likely the chances are that you are going to end up getting burnt. And that's not necessarily an agency's fault, and it might not be your fault. But you have to have this strategic marketing plan that looks at all those different sections of the customer journey. So what are you going to get people to, what are you going to run ads for for people who don't know that you exist? Now, one of my favorites is just running video view ads, because you can run them for pennies on the dollar. You can run them for one or two dollars a day just to get them out there, to get people introduced to your brand. Now, they might be reviews. They might be just general how-to's. They could just be videos of, you know, if you sell fashion, it could just be videos of, all the styling videos that are working out. A top of funnel is just getting people to even know that you exist. The middle of funnel, well, actually, that's where I like to throw in things like reviews or testimonials, or something where you're giving the customer proof that you're a real business and that you're going to supply the goods and that other people buy from you. So bottom of funnel is when you're trying to get them through the conversions. And that's where you might be making the offers to get people across the line. Now, I'm not going to say that I necessarily agree with things like 10% off or free shipping. You do you when you work out, when you analyze what's worked in the past and you work out which offers work for you to get people across the line, that's your bottom of funnel. That's when you're spending the big chunk of money to get people to buy. But without having those strategic that funnel in place, what's going to end up happening is you burn through all the money at the bottom and as a result, you don't actually get the sales and the conversions that you want. So you have to have a strategic marketing plan and you have, to me, the easiest thing to do is to analyze what's worked in the past and why did it work? Like, what was it about that campaign or that promotion that worked for your customers? Remember, we want the customers that are the big spenders, the ones who jump into the stuff that is brand new, the ones that are going to line up for stuff. Not the people who necessarily are going to be waiting for things to go on sale. 100% we need them and we work out different campaigns for them. Think about when you ran a campaign and you either made lots of sales or you had a lot of conversions, why did that work? Why, not just how did it work or what you did, but why did it work? And then take the opposite. So one of the things that we do when we run promotions inside of our five X program and scale your store is we have what's called a debrief sheet. It's a simple one page, it'll take you a couple of minutes to fill out, but on that debrief sheet, we have the goals that we had in mind. Did we hit them? Did we not hit them? So one of the questions that we ask is, what didn't you do that you should have done and what did you do that didn't work? So if we start with that first one, what didn't you do that you should have done? So what do you think about that? When you look at your campaigns that you've run in the past, whether they are promos in store or ads, did you actually give that campaign your all? Did you send out, I think we have something like 24 emails in a campaign that go out? Did you send out 24 emails to remind people about the promotion? Did you use your SMS? Did you tease the audience? Did you tease the customers that this thing was going to happen? Did you put your social posts in? Did you update the homepage on your website? Did you put the A-frame border? There are so many parts of a campaign that if you missed some of them, then there's a good chance that you missed out on conversions. So when you're thinking about your strategic marketing plan, think about did you or will you give that campaign your all or did you just post it once a day on social media or did you just send out one email and you call that a campaign and you cross your fingers and hope for the best because that is not a campaign. That is not a promotion. That is a half-hearted effort to do something when you know you should be doing marketing. So when it comes to where you should be spending your money in terms of marketing, think about the fact that your competitors are probably going to be really hammering those free channels. If you have a plan in place that looks at the top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel, you are going to get a much better return on your investment. Think about the campaigns that have worked in the past and or maybe haven't worked in the past and why did they work and how much effort did you put into them? Because maybe there's a campaign that you got a few sales out of, but people talked about it and you know that you did only post once on social media or you only sent one email out. And if you had your time again, you would go back and try it with a little bit more effort. And then my next one, which is probably my most important is what are your KPIs for marketing? What are your key performance indicators? What are your goals? What are the numbers that you have to hit for you to be happy? And I've done lots of copy lots of podcasts on KPIs. But when you're thinking about marketing, it's going to be things like your customer acquisition costs. How much are you prepared to spend to get a customer? What's your customer lifetime value? What's your conversion rate? What is your average order value? All of these things, if you don't have them mapped out, even if you're guessing at the beginning, but if you don't have them mapped out, then how do you have any idea whether the campaign is a success? And if you have an agency doing this for you, these are the kinds of figures, the stats, that they should be giving you back. You don't necessarily need to know how many impressions there are. To me, that's a vanity metric. I don't care how many people saw my ad. What I care about is how many people clicked it or how many people saved it or how many people sent a DM. It depends on your obviously on your campaign and your promotion, but what are your KPIs when it comes to marketing? And if you put all of that together and you're spending money on marketing, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to get a really good return on investment. Number one place that you should be spending money right now, even though customers might be a little bit more reluctant to spend is marketing. Now, the second one that I really want you to consider is automation. Now, simple things like, I just mentioned KPIs, automated reporting against your KPIs. Now, you can see these sorts of numbers in your Shopify or your POS or your e-commerce dashboard. Or you could be like me, I spend a small amount of money on reporting software, like I've had expensive stuff that costs four and $500 a month. Right now, I think the one that we've got is maybe in the 30 or 40, and I'm actually really happy with it, using that to pull your data. So right now we use for our ads and for our organic. We run reports through a business called Oviond, no affiliation there, but I can actually do reports based on organic and ads spending separately. And for my organic, what I will look at is how many people have saved an Instagram post? How many people have messaged? We do a lot of messaging through our Instagram posts. The key metrics that are important to me to see whether something has worked. One of the things I just did recently, yesterday, was I went through, based on that reporting, and I pulled out my top one, two, three, four, five, six. My top six posts that people had commented on, and I looked at, did they have anything in common? And you bet they had a lot of things in common. But enough, they were all in some way, shape or form related to how money works in your business. And that wasn't a surprise to me, because I know that for most of you, the money pillar is the pillar that you need to be working on before you do anything else. My system automates the reporting and it sends it to me every single week. I put some time aside and I look at it. At the beginning of every admin team meeting, we go through our weekly stats. That is all automated, it's pulled in and Joey puts it into a little spreadsheet for me. I'm sure we could probably automate that. It's probably a great thing for us to put on the list of things to do, so that the numbers are all just sitting there. So having some reporting software that automatically pulls all of your metrics into one place. And yes, it might cost you $20, $30, $40, $50 a month. But I like to break this down into how many things do I have to sell to be able to afford the thing I want? Does it make sense? So let me give you an example. If my average order value is $47, and I want to buy, or I want to subscribe to some software, that is $50 a month, then to be able to have the revenue to pay for that, I need to sell just over one extra item. And so I think about it like this. If I use the information that comes from this reporting software, is it likely that I will sell at least one extra unit? And the answer is yes, right? If you have reporting software and you're looking at it, the chances of you selling more because you have the data, absolutely astronomical. This is a really good thing that I actually teach inside of the 5X framework, and you're getting it for free, which is when you want to invest in something, breaking it down into how much do I have to sell to be able to afford it? And then it's a really good, one, it's a really good goal to give yourself if you really want something, but two, it's a really good metric to decide whether the return on investment is worth it. 'Cause you might have to sell a year's worth of product to be able to pay for something. Is that worth it? And so that's my little side note. It's a little trick, a little hack that I teach to all of my one-on-one clients, to our 5Xs and even inside of Skillier's stock, breaking big investments down into the number of sales that they have to make to recoup the revenue. And look, this is something that we do. If you wanted to come in and join us inside of Skillier's store, and that product is $1,500, it's a little bit less, but I can't calculate these numbers in my head, and your average order value is $150, then you just have to sit down and ask yourself, is it likely that I will spend, I will sell 10, 150 with one zero year, 10 extra units as a result of what I learn? And the answer is yes, right? Like, pretty much any knowledge that you get is gonna help you to grow your business. So looking at it simply like that, then for me, just breaks down the scariness of a big investment. So when I was looking at software that was five and 600 US dollars a month, I had to break it down. How many extra things would I have to sell? Did I think it would help me sell that stuff? And the answer, clearly, was yes. We were just really lucky to be able to find other software that worked for us. So automation is huge, and you should be doing things like automated emails. You should be using AI and using automation for your reviews, for example. So if you have reviewed software, it's gonna be, well, if you go in and set it up correctly, it's going to be sending out those automated emails, those automated follow-up emails, things like your abandoned cuts, that's something that you should be setting up inside of your email marketing software. It's a set and forget. Me, but set and forget, although always come back to make sure that the results that you're getting are worth it. So I say set and forget, but what I mean is, once you put it in place, it can continue to run on its own. It's just up to you to go in and make sure that it's converting at the rate that you want to. And then of course, making any tweaks that you need to make. But automation in our business is crucial. So I will do everything from automating tasks to come to me. So every person who joins us inside of Skeleton Store or 5X gets a personalized message from me, I will just simply record them in the next few days. And as I'm walking the dog or even to sometimes do my grocery shopping, I will just record them. But the automation will send me a notification to my phone that says, hey, Joe has just joined 5X, send them a welcome message. And so I do, the simple things like that, stop you from dropping the ball. And so if you're finding that you're dropping the ball in a number of areas, simply because you forgot or you wrote it down on a piece of paper or you had no accountability, think about how you can automate these tasks. I mean, quite often you will have software that can do this stuff for you. You don't necessarily have to go out and buy something new. You have software, you just need to spend a little bit of time, maybe ask the right questions to find out how, you know, how much extra that software, you know, all those hidden things that you don't know about, how much extra can it do that you didn't even know about? I mean, quite simply our CRM has reporting software that was on par with what we were paying for something else. So being able to just learn that, I mean, that's where the benefit lies when you are not tied up in doing all of the things in your business. If you are so busy uploading products to your website or standing behind the counter or packing orders, you aren't going to have time to look into these other things that will actually make your business run better, cheaper, faster, and actually give you a better customer experience. That is your job as a CEO to make sure that the business is running as efficiently and as profitably as possible. Automation might take a little bit of time to set up, but the benefit is once you've set it up, you get to continue to reap the rewards for weeks, months, even years down the track. It is easy to listen to a podcast like this and think, ah, that sounds like a great idea. I'm going to, Sal said I should automate, so I'm going to drop everything and I'm going to focus on automating in our business. But I cannot stress enough that you need to be concentrating on the one thing that is holding your business back. And if that is not automation, then don't be putting all of your efforts into automation. But if you know that the biggest bottlenecks in your business are that you are not replying to customers quick enough, that you are not processing returns, that you're not sending out email marketing or you're not, you're leveraging a banner card. If that is the key thing that's holding your business back, 100%, put the time aside to be able to put that in place in your business. But you have to always be thinking, is this a key area or a key issue that if I just got this thing sorted, a whole bunch of other problems would just seem to disappear. Let's take reporting, for instance. Now you might not have even realized until right now that you are dropping the ball in this area. Maybe you're avoiding reports because it feels like it's too much hard work to gather all the data. So you just delay it or you know you should be looking at the figures and the stats, but you just delay it or you ignore it and you don't make any decisions because you don't have the information that you need or you make knee jerk decisions. Well, when that happens, let's just take inventory. Inventory is a huge issue for so many retailers. So if we take inventory, for example, if you're not looking at the numbers, if you're not looking at the data, if you're not forecasting, then the flow on effect of that can be catastrophic. You might have too much inventory, which is costing you money. You might have the incorrect inventory put through on a purchase order. Maybe you realized that you need more out of wear, but instead you bought T-shirts because you didn't look at what you needed to be forecasting. You could end up with the wrong pricing on your products. And I see this one over and over again is ordering, but not taking into account that maybe shipping went up or the price of the product went up. Just doing things for the sake of getting things done because you're so busy and so overwhelmed will cost you money in the long run. You may end up with stuff that aren't pulling their weight because they don't like the products that you've ordered in or they're so sick and tired of being asked for something that you don't have, that they just lose their enthusiasm. You could end up with delayed deliveries because you waited until past a deadline to be able to get the stock. And as a result, you're losing money every day that that stock is not on the shelf. Your marketing plan, your marketing campaigns don't go out. I mean, they can't go out if you don't have the stock, right? Unless it's a free sale campaign. So by not actually sitting down and looking at the numbers around inventory, spending too much money, not having the right products, not getting the deliveries when you need it, your marketing campaigns aren't going to go out or maybe they won't get the same kinds of conversions that you want because they're all very, very rushed. So ignoring these things in your business could literally end up bankrupting you or because you didn't want to spend a couple of hundred dollars a year and or an hour each week looking at how your business is functioning. I give you all these tips and I give you strategies on every single episode, but you can't implement them all. You have to look at where is your business at right now? Where do you want to go? And what is the thing that is holding you back? We will always ask you, what is the thing that is holding you back? And then my question to you is, well, how much time do you spend trying to sort that problem out or trying to get past that obstacle? If you think marketing is your biggest problem, then how much time do you spend every single day fine tuning your marketing? Looking at those results, setting KPIs, looking at where the campaigns that have worked in the past and why they've worked, and if the answer is not very many, then don't tell me that marketing is your problem if you're not prepared to fix it. You get a choice, you can only wing it up until a certain point, but there will always come a time when you hit a plateau or maybe you even start to go backwards. Because if you don't step up and take control of your business, then who will? It doesn't matter whether you are turning over $100,000 a year or $100,000 a month or $100,000 a week. If you own the business, it is your responsibility to make sure that it is a profitable, sustainable asset. Okay, Sal ran aside. The three things so far, two things so far, and I'm about to give you the third, that I think you should be spending on money right now, is your marketing is looking at ways to automate your business. And the third one is the one that everyone is talking about, which is AI. Here we are, a good CEO is always looking at their wages line on their balance sheet. I mean, do you know what percentage of your overall costs your wages are? And as much as it pains me in tough times to say this, you have to look at your staffing costs. You have to be analyzing your staffing costs, which in retail, it should be sitting at around the 15% mark. If you're looking at your staffing costs, then you need to work out, are you paying too much? Are you paying too little? Are the team that you have right now doing their jobs? Are they worth the money that you're paying them? It's important because you want your team to be smarter than you. You want the people that you hire to know their job way better than you do. You also want to keep them engaged and you want them hitting targets. You want them hitting their KPIs because the truth is there are a lot of boring jobs out there. And if you can make your workplace one which is fun and sometimes fun is just having goals to strive towards, then that's going to keep you, that's going to keep your employees motivated and engaged and they're going to continue to sell for you. But there are a lot of boring jobs that get pushed to the side or get deferred or just get forgotten about because people just don't like doing them. And that is where AI can come in. So some of the places that you might think about in improving your business processes with AI might be something like photography. So if you are a brand and you are currently outsourcing a lot of your photography, then maybe you could cut some of those costs by using AI. I mean, we all know we can use AI to generate pictures, but if you are a brand that resells other brands, if you're a store that resells other brands, I love AI for being able to change out models from the stock photos that are supplied with, from your suppliers. So the stock photos that you will get inside of a Dropbox, you can take those same images and put them on maybe a person of color. Or if you are in the fashion industry, you might clearly be able to see that that color does not work on someone with brown hair. And you're like, well, actually, if I put this on a blonde model, the chances are that I'm going to sell wool because people will see that it looks great. So something like changing out the models with your stock images that suppliers give you that are based on your customers. So if you have a huge customer base of people of color, but your supplier is sending you images on, you know, a tall, leggy blonde, then that's not going to resonate with your customers. Being able to use AI to customize the products for your best customers is going to put you leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors, because they're going to just be using the same stock images. So to me, photography and call that photography, but photography and imagery is one of those key areas where just for, you know, for $20 or $30 a month, you can see big changes in your conversions by changing out those images to be ones that your customers relate to. Now, another place that I love to see AI is conversational customer service chats. Now, what is a conversational customer service chat? Well, we all know bots. We all know when you, a chat bot, when you go onto a website and you're like, where is my order? And it comes up and it says, you know, did you want to know about this? Or did you want to know about this? Or did you want to know about this? And it just gets frustrating because you're typing things in and the answer is never there. Well, a conversational customer service bot actually allows you to upload a knowledge base and it will have a conversation with your customer. It is remarkable how will these work? Yes, they have to be trained. Yes, the systems have to be sort of set up, but we want to talk to people. Even if the bot speaks like a person, we feel much more in alignment. We feel like as customers, then our needs are being met. They're less frustrating than the old chat bots. So keyword here is conversational customer service chat bots. So maybe that is something, if you get a high volume of customer inquiries and they can work on email, they can work on messenger, they can work on your widget on your website, they can work through SMS, all those kinds of things. If you get a high volume of customer inquiries, it might be something that you might want to investigate because again, for a small amount of money to set it up, how much are you going to save by having a whole person free? And even better is a thing called speed to lead. So in the marketing industry, we have a thing called speed to lead, which is how quickly can you get to answer a customer's question? Or how quickly can you get to talk to a customer? And so if you have these programmed conversational bots that have access to a database of knowledge, they can answer straight away. They're not waiting until somebody comes in at 9 a.m. the next day. Meanwhile, that person has gone off and bought from somebody else because they found the information somewhere else. So I think that if you have that high value, high volume of customer inquiries, that this is something you should definitely look at. It seems like way too many words of customers in there. Way too many C words. The other thing that I really love AI for right now, and there are lots of packages that bundle these things together, is SEO optimized product descriptions. Now, I have been talking about using AI for product descriptions for probably two years now, and AI is just getting better and better and better. But when you think about it, your customer is going to be different to someone else's customer. What they value, the reason they're shopping with you, remember that ties all the way back to what we're talking about in marketing, just because we want the same thing, doesn't mean we want it for the same reason, or we want to shop with the same kind of store. So I might want to go and buy an armchair, but I want to go and buy an armchair from a company where when I walk into the store, I feel greeted. They're going to walk me through the different fabrics and the different colors. Now, the next person might just want an armchair that is in stock. They're less fuzzy about the one-on-one personal service. And so knowing why your customer shop, which stops with you, allows you to optimize the product description, so the answers to their questions, whether that is, come in store and sit with one of our team to find the best, whatever it is you're looking for. Or it might be, we keep this in stock for immediate delivery or immediate pick up. Now, you're both selling the same chair, but your customers want it in different ways and for different reasons. So being able to optimize those product descriptions might get you the sale over your competitors. And even looking at AI to generate personalized, automated, thank you videos. Now, I did say just before that every person who comes into any of our programs, whether it's a scariest or all of my next framework or a mastermind, I send them a personalized video. Now, I probably could personalize these. The good thing for me is the numbers are at a point where I can just do them, like I said, while I'm walking the dog, they're not huge amounts of numbers. But if you're sending out dozens or even hundreds or even thousands of orders every single week, you can't do this at scale. And the great thing about AI, it does blow my mind, but you can send a personalized, automated, thank you video. So you can record a video maybe as the founder and say, hey, Selena, I just wanted to say, thank you so much for shopping with us. We really value every single sale. We are ethically motivated. We're a purpose-driven brand. And I also wanted to let you know that we have planted one tree as a result of your purchase. So thank you for keeping our business alive. Thank you for keeping the planet alive. And I really hope you enjoy your purchases. You only have to record that once. And AI will slot the person's name into the conversation. So AI can 100% streamline your business. It can increase your customer loyalty and it damn well can increase your sales. And it is really easy to get stuck in the, ah, AI is just a new, bad mindset. And we've all seen bad AI. It is really easy to get stuck in the, ah, AI is just a new, bad mindset. But if your competitors are getting different, more unique, more personalized, more customized product images for their customers or their product descriptions have been optimized for why their customers are going to shop with them. Or if their customer journey is better than yours, because their conversational AI bot is handling customers inquiries in real time, not the next business day or three days later on a Monday, the truth is as much as it hurts, your customers will shop elsewhere. These days people aren't prepared to wait to get what they want. Now, running a business in tight economic times is challenging, we all know that. But what it forces us to do is to reevaluate, to streamline and to generally make our businesses more efficient. So if I can quickly recap the three areas that I think you should be looking at, where you should be spending your money right now, now that customers, you know, you might find that cash flow is a little bit tighter or the sales aren't what they used to be, marketing. Marketing with a plan, marketing in those top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, and also making sure you have KPIs. I think you should be automating. I always think you should be automating, but right now if you can reduce your staffing costs through automation and even through AI, which is our third one, if you can be reducing your staffing costs to get better, cheaper, faster, then it's time to put the effort in and look and see how those work for your business. So marketing, automation, and then that third one is AI. The truth is AI is here to stay. It's only going to get better. It is only going to learn more. And right now, if you wait to get on board the AI train, then you are going to be left behind. So right now might just be the time that you need to be focusing on that. So start looking at the opportunities that are out there for the taking, analyze your business, find that biggest constraint. And if these three things are key to you being able to grow your business, then I suggest that you go ahead and look at investing in them. All righty, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. If you haven't left a review, I would love it if you can leave a review, take a screenshot, tell me where you're at as you listen to this episode. And if you've got something that you would love me to talk about, feel free to drop me a DM and let me know. All righty guys, thank you so much. I'll see you next week. Bye. (upbeat music) - So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me @vcelynandite and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores, just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. I'll see you on the next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
