If your business involves product rather than services this is a subject that, at some stage, will be a major concern to you. It is a question that is asked regularly, regardless of how long you have been in the business, primarily because you will almost always ‘hit a new level’ and need to rethink your business strategy.I once had it described to me that the level you maintain should be somewhere between your comfort zone, and whatever scares the *$&”%$*! out of you (choose your own expletive). Basically, if you work from stock, rather than purely from samples, you will need to hold just enough to make you nervous. The psychology behind this simply being; if you are holding too much (i.e. using your garage as a mini-warehouse), you are unlikely to get much sleep; whereas, if you hold an amount you are perfectly comfortable with, you are unlikely to actually move.
To illustrate the point, last autumn Sonia and I had been booked in to hold product displays/stalls within the local offices of a large international company. This meant that we would be available all day, for five days, in office buildings holding around 800 people each. We knew we would have access to a large number of people and our presence would be well advertised. In preparation, we ordered far more stock than we had ever considered handling at any one time.
As I’m sure you are expecting, we did extremely well… at the first two sites. The other three… Well… We could have taken more by sitting at home and watching re-runs. I don’t know if was a lack of advertising at these sites, the time of the week, or the nature of the people working in these particular buildings, but in the end we still found ourselves with more stock ‘than we had ever considered handling’ ~ and I found myself staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, suffering from cold sweats.
What to do? We hustled, cajoled, networked and simply booked ourselves into event after event ~ where we couldn’t find one, we created it from scratch (thus was born Sonia & Scott’s Stocking Stuffer Special, now to be an annual event). We didn’t have any choice really; we needed to move our product. In the end, we found ourselves with so much work, and so many opportunities, we were forced to ‘borrow’ stock from colleagues who needed to unload some themselves.
Moral of the story? Find the outer edge of your comfort zone and then go beyond it. 10, 20, 30%, whatever it takes to make you start fidgeting and bubble-up with nervous energy that can then be redirected into the business. The second point of course being the necessity to actually apply this newly created energy to your business.
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