6 Ways to Manage Multiple Retail Stores in Different Locations
When your retail business keeps growing and your customer demands are increasing, you may be thinking to expand to multiple locations. That would be a great idea, because you’ll have a great opportunity to reach more prospects and generate more profits. However, managing multiple retail stores isn’t as easy as imagined. You need proper planning so that all your stores bring you profits. Here are six tips you can implement to help you manage multiple outlets in different locations.
1. Standardize your operating procedures
You may not be present directly to monitor each of your stores at the same time. However, you must be able to ensure that all your retail store activities are running smoothly. Therefore, it is important for you to standardize your operating procedures. The policies that you make must be applied in every store; from working hours, customer communication, discounts determination, to return and refund policies. Make sure that the great experience your customers get in one store is just as good as in all your locations.
2. Hire professional and reliable staff
You should have reliable people who can represent you to manage your retail stores. Make sure that you hire competent staff who can work professionally. Periodic training needs to be done to improve the ability of your staff, especially for those who deal directly with customers every day.
Embed your business visions and missions in all your staff so that they can work to meet your business expectations. In order for your staff to keep performing well, you need to pay attention to their well-being. Make sure that they always receive salaries, incentives and allowances in a timely manner. This can be easily done if you use an HRM system.
3. Build strong inter-team communication
The key to successfully managing multiple retail stores is strong inter-team communication. Make it easy for your entire team to be able to coordinate with each other even though they are in far-flung locations. Take advantage of the use of technology such as a Cloud-based ERP software that allows your team to manage the same documents in one system. Each person can access any data in real time without having to interfere with the work of others.
4. Store all your sales data in one repository
Storing sales data including customer information separately is very inefficient. Each team must submit sales reports manually to you and of course this can’t be done frequently (usually weekly or monthly). You will also find it difficult to find the sales data you require because you accumulate too many files and you can’t filter them based on certain categories.
The easiest and most effective way you can apply is to save all your sales data in one system. An automated sales management solution allows you to integrate all sales data from all your locations. It also provides complete and accurate sales reports generated in actual time.
5. Automate the process of tracking inventory
Having multiple stores spread over several locations means that you keep your stocks in separate locations. Just like your sales data, all your stocks must also be managed through the same system. This will help you manage your entire inventory more efficiently.
An inventory management software can help you track stock availability across all stores through a single system. If there are items a customer is looking for that aren’t available in one store, you can easily look for them in your other stores through the same system.
6. Conduct regular retail store evaluations
Using technology does give you a lot of flexibility. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to come directly to each of your stores. Instead, you still need to monitor all your stores directly regularly. Conduct regular store evaluations, including your staff performance, customer satisfaction, store facilities, and so on.