Don’t Give Away The Recipe

When selling flooring at a full service specialty store, your offerings are often compared to a box store that wishes to place the primary emphasis on the product itself, rather than presenting it as an element of an installed floor. This type of outlet prefers to sell product first, and services only as required, as…

Frequent readers know that I am constantly stating that we learn our best marketing lessons when we look outside our own industry. I was reminded of this again this week when reading of the passing of Allen Bernstein, former CEO of Morton’s Steakhouse. He was the chief architect of their expansion from one Chicago location…

You have interviewed a number of candidates for a job at your store and want to offer one of them a position. To ensure that you offer a salary that will be attractive to the applicant, you ask, “What are you making at your current job?” Or maybe you ask for the applicant’s salary history…

An exercise that I find surprisingly few companies doing effectively is conducting regularly scheduled staff meetings. In my experience, these businesses are letting a great opportunity go unrealized, as this is often the only hour of the week that everyone is gathered together to “get on the same page” with each other. Think of this…

In sports, we hear the term “home field advantage”. When we are visiting a customer’s home or office to measure and estimate, think of the customer as having the home field advantage. You will often find a very different person than the one you met initially in your store. They now have their comfortable shoes…

For a country boy from Chatsworth. GA, that is a big word.   Heck, that is a big word no matter where you are from! After spending the week at one of the largest flooring shows in the world, I can tell you that the only thing bigger than the word itself, may be the challenge…