7 Days, 4 States, 100 Exhibitors …
AND 2 OUTSTANDING OPERATORS
To give you an idea of how much I travel, in March, I left my home in Florida and was on the road for 10 days, driving 3,600 miles to visit clients and look at convenience stores. That doesn’t count the time I spent on airplanes. The first of April was interesting because, within seven days, I was in four states and attended the MPACT trade show in Indianapolis, which featured well over a hundred exhibitors. Then, I finished the week of travel by meeting and talking with two outstanding operators who shared with me how they were increasing the profitability of their stores and were using tactics I did not see at the trade show. Anyone who has attended a convenience store industry trade show like the MPACT show knows what they are going to see when they get there, which would be all the latest models of tanks, MPDs, software programs, fuel providers, and the exhibits of the food and beverage vendors whose products are being used in the daily business of operating a convenience store. These vendors are the obvious ones I recognize and understand their roles within the convenience store industry. But as I walked the trade show floor, I saw lots of vendor exhibits that I had no idea what their role within the convenience store business was or what their product or service was and how it was going to help a convenience store operator. In my mind as an old retailer who enjoys marketing, I thought to myself: These people need to do something to enhance their presentation to the prospective audience they are trying to serve. But it was not my place to tell them I thought their presentation was pretty lame and to mind my own business.
to how the store should be laid out and how the products should be displayed. By taking control of how they wanted their products to be displayed, it had increased the sales of these products by 30% or more. When I asked them how they did this, they said they hired a consultant who specialized in the selling of retail products to help them understand the habits of a convenience store customer rather than depending on their vendor. I knew what they were telling me was correct because prior to meeting with them, I had already visited their stores and seen what they were talking about. The second operator is probably one of the best operators I know when it comes to selling ancillary products that we used to call “tchotchke’s,” or in layman’s terms “trash & trinkets.” Instead of meeting with my second operator at his office, he said to meet him at one of his buildings next to his office. Upon entering the building, I found myself in a warehouse filled with tools and equipment and some shelving and display cases. The first thing he says to me is: “I want to show you something.” Then he had me stand in front of a normal wire rack display used for selling normal products, but what was different about the wire rack was the upper shelves had been lit with LED lights, and the bottom half had not. He then says, “Well, what do you think”? I said the products that were on the top shelves and highlighted looked great and the bottom half looked blah. Then he walked me over to a cabinet with glass sides and interior lighting and showed me the same thing. Lastly, he pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of cabinets that sit behind the checkout counter in a convenience store and how the items on the shelves had been arranged, which looked great. Then he looked at me and said, “Can you see what a good presentation can do for your sales in a convenience store?” He kept shaking his head as he was talking to me saying he didn’t understand why other operators in the convenience store industry didn’t get it and how something so obvious was not being taken advantage of when it has increased his sales immensely. In meeting with these two operators and visiting their stores, I learned more about how to increase sales in a shorter time than I did in the two days I spent on the trade show floor in a sea of exhibitors. With the two operators, I knew what they were selling, but with the exhibitors, I still don’t know what they are selling. I think these two encounters prove you are never too old to learn if you are willing to go out into the world and see what is working.
This leads me to the two outstanding and interesting convenience store owners whom I met outside of the trade show.
Both of the convenience store owners I met with own about 15 stores, and both are very profitable and extremely sharp operators in their own way.
Since I have been working with convenience store owners for over 24 years, been in hundreds of convenience stores, and met with hundreds of convenience store owners, you would think I would have seen about everything there is to see in a convenience store. But these two operators, in less than an hour each, showed me how they increased their sales, sometimes by 30%, by changing the presentation of what they were selling. The first operator showed me how they took control of the design of the floor plan of the store and arranged the products on the shelves and the height of the shelves and changed the number of skews of the products they were selling instead of having their vendors dictate to them as
–Terry Monroe
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