Busy Work

It’s that time of year.  Orders from the jewellery shows and gift shows are pouring in.  It’s all you can do to unpack, receive, tag and get the product out onto the show floor, before the next shipment arrives.  While rushing to get all of your busy-work done, don’t lose sight of who that new inventory is for.  I’ve said it myself in jest; “if it weren’t for all of these customers, we could really get some work done…”  Look up from your boxes and pay attention to today’s customers. 

Today’s customers are the ones you hope to be selling this stuff to over the next few months.  In fact, go one further.  Give everyone who walks into your store the respect they deserve.  Immediately drop what you’re doing and show them something new that’s just arrived.  That’s one of the best conversation starters en route to exploring why they came in today, and it will help plant a seed for future purchases.

Your New Blog?

After over 230 blog posts (out of the 300 I decided to do in 2012) and over 70,000 words, I’m starting to look ahead to 2013.  My feeling is that The Toddwaz Report might go to a weekly format.  I also have a desire to offer consumer-friendly blogs for you to publish to your clients. 

Blogging is a numbers-game.  Some people are devoted to reading everything on your social network campaign.  Others read various percentages of what you send them, and some never read them, but are always reminded that you’re there.  Now THAT’S top-of-mind awareness!  I’ve been deleting emails from one real estate investment trainer for five years and I’ve never requested “unsubscribe” because I occasionally read something interesting.

By starting your own blog-campaign, you can achieve top-of-mind awareness that would be completely unaffordable any other way.  The newspaper and radio ad guys want you to pay thousands of dollars to be front-and-centre with their audience so that on the exact day that an audience member decides to buy jewellery, you’ll just happen to have an ad running.  Why not generate that sort of awareness among the people that are already familiar with you? 

Then you can spend your advertising budget targeting new customers and building your client-list.  It may sound silly, but think about it… when you advertise, you’re targeting a group that includes your clientele.  If your best clients are being directly contacted several times per month, you can explore new markets.  You can target a young hipsters, the older restyle crowd, anniversaries and men; without fear that you’re missing your current customers.

Let me know if (for a fee) you would be interested in having weekly or biweekly content supplied to you for your very own blog from the Toddster.

Do Some Good

Being in involved in local sport, societies and charitable events is a great way to build loyalty.  I spoke to someone recently who told me that their predecessor had recommended spending your entire advertising budget on local arena boards, sponsoring sports teams and events.  If however you are finding that there are more people coming to you than you feel you can assist, here’s the best way I’ve found to politely say “no” without feeling like a jerk.

Choose one particular cause, event or beneficiary and get involved in a big way.  Then you can say, “I’m sorry, but we’re putting all of our efforts into The Kid’s Kottage silent auction right now; would you like a ticket?”

If you’re not already overwhelmed with your own fund-raising efforts, Toddwaz needs your help.  I’m working on a campaign to collect scrap-gold to support my “Haitian Heros.”  Once I get a counter-card made-up, I’d like for as many of you as possible to collect broken chains, mismatched earrings, dead-clasps and such for me at your front counter.  Steve at Customgold has offered to pay the refining fees so that every bit of gold collected will benefit children being cared for by Haitian Heros.

I will be returning there in February, and will once again be helping-out at orphanages, tent-cities and volunteer-run schools.  The missionaries I work with down there have a bank-account that is specifically used for orphanage and school support.  There is no administrative cost to this fund, as the workers are already established.  When Jana and I go down, we pay to stay there and part of our fee goes to employ one Haitian for each day of our visit.  The organization is The Foursquare Gospel Church, and you can visit their “Relief and Compassion” website HERE.

I will be collecting gold during November and December.  Look for more information coming soon to a blog-post near you…

The Cashless Society

Last night while driving through the prairies, I listened to a CBC radio broadcast from some sort of futurist convention.  One of the speakers addressed the issue of cash.  While cash is traditional, comfortable and easily managed, it is also expensive to print, easily deployed for criminal activities and puts its’ carriers at risk.  The speaker speculated that with today’s electronic money transfer technology, the world could easily go cashless; maybe not in 5 years, but more probably in 25 years.

Big deal.  Let it go cashless.  With credit and debit cards, electronic banking and smart-phone payments at Starbucks already, we’re getting close.  One of the intriguing elements to this possibility is the impact on our industry.  Already there are criminals who dabble in gold and diamonds in place of cash.  The new AML (anti-money laundering) regulations have nothing to do with honest law-abiding citizens.  Every effort is being made to stem the use of cash for laundering proceeds of crime.

If cash is eliminated, I can easily imagine, the investment-diamond industry will boom, and big brother will be watching our transactions with a keen eye.  

My Novel Idea

Amusing juxtaposition of thought and news.  I’m not sure I actually want to try and write a novel.  If I did, I have been thinking that it would be a thriller about a massive diamond discovery.  A DeBeers-like company would ruthlessly be working hard to sabotage the new mine; only to be brought to justice by the daring hero of the story.  In the end the discovery would have been artificially created with the use of lab-grown diamonds by the Russian diamond mining company in order to weaken their biggest competitor.

Well, in reality a story has been published in the Christian Science Monitor about trillions of carats of “impact diamonds” in a crater in Siberia.  The article alleges that Russia has known about the reserve since the 1970s.   The article talks about this prospect upsetting the entire industry, but focuses on the extra level of hardness benefitting the industrial/abrasive end of the diamond industry significantly. 

It will be interesting to follow this story.  Maybe truth will be stranger than fiction.

Gold’s Down $4.90? OMG!

Don’t watch the news.  Those TV producers make such a big deal out of every rise and fall in the price of gold, the Dollar, oil prices and the stock markets.  Why don’t they just show you a 30 or 90 day trend-line for these critical matrices?  Because if you looked at the more vitally important long term trends, you wouldn’t be shocked by these tiny blips.  Also, you wouldn’t feel the need to watch every day to see of that disconcerting 0.0002% drop would correct itself.

Don’t watch your daily sales.  If your performance bonuses or your employee reviews are weekly, monthly or quarterly then roughly half of your days will be above the trend and half will be below the trend.  The most productive way to improve your performance is to focus on selling techniques and the impact they have on individual transactions.  Pay attention to what’s working and what’s not.  Then when bonus or review time comes around you can look at your sales for the period and have a discussion about the experiences you’ve had and how you might change or augment your techniques for the next period.