Tending the Seeds of Change
Buy in takes time
Sometimes giving a new idea time to take root is the difference between success and failure.
Getting buy-in from those responsible for executing will heavily influence any attempt at change. Some things just have to happen no matter what and people have to understand that. Many initiatives do better when given time to marinate.
I came across a new line of products I felt would work in our chain of thrift stores, selling mattresses. There were a lot of pros and cons. The company I was working with had little experience in my flavor of thrift but was excited to learn with us.
At the time this wasnāt a common category in this segment of retail. I had reason to believe it would be a win but it was by no means assured.
At the store level, this meant dedicating space on the floor and the backroom, training employees on the product and dedicating precious dollars to inventory. There were safety concerns about dealing with and storing large heavy items. My boss never said so but he didnāt seem to be a believer early on. It meant a lot that he trusted me enough to let the program move forward.
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
We did the big unveil, complete with samples in a meeting run by the President of the company we would be buying from. As I expected some were for and some against. One manager, in particular, was 100% against the idea. He had a whole list of reasons this wouldnāt work. He of course did so very publicly at that meeting and in chats with others in the following days and weeks.
Playing the long game I made the program optional. Frankly, that limited my exposure and allowed champions to bubble up from the ranks. I was prepared for the āI told you soā comments if it did not work.
In thrift, the average price for a single item is really low, just a few dollars. Introducing a new category with item prices in the hundreds of dollars did require a shift in thinking. We didnāt know if customers would be open to buying mattresses at a thrift store. The program had been designed to give customers a high value for their investment. The gamble was whether or not they would see it.
During that rollout I often said, āyou have to sell a lot of tee shirts to match one mattress.ā
It wasnāt long before the stores that opted in were reordering every week. Sales in this one category were driving overall double-digit sales increases in those stores. We were turning goods at a rate even a traditional retailer would have envied.
Mister ānot in my storeā took a long time to come around. His final argument was that he had a mattress store on the parking lot of the strip center he was in and another less than a mile away. That was a valid concern. He stuck with that for the longest time. I never argued his point and let him go his own way.
The numbers didnāt take long to speak for themselves. Eventually, his sales increases didnāt look that great against his peers. Especially after he became the last holdout. Those champions had indeed bubbled up through the ranks.
You can imagine my internal smile when he called to discuss testing the idea in his store. I left him an out so he remained comfortable. A month after he put the program in he was the number one store in that category. In subsequent management meetings, you would have thought he came up with the original idea. That was fine, we all won.
Had I made the new program mandatory on the first day I believe a coalition of naysayer managers would have developed, forcing people to take sides. That would have worked against its success. We might have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of new revenue and a great product for our customers.
When possible, planting the seeds of a new program or process and letting it grow on its own for a while creates the biggest wins. In this situation, store managers that adopted the program early became the champion in their store and to their peers. They enjoyed a bump in rankings for seeing the possibilities early. The cross manager chats that go on every day worked to advantage as sales numbers were the final proof.
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