TALKING SENSE
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What about the discounting that goes on in the trade?
Discounting is my pet hate in the trade. If a product happily sells for £20 why sell it for £10 and lose £10 profit? Anyone can be a busy fool. The times I hear about companies (not just in this trade) going pop because they make no money. Well, sorry, but they are a product of their own demise by under selling things. Without sounding big headed we’ve actually increased prices on many RRP’s and still sell plenty of that product. Customer research proved to us that some customers wouldn’t buy a product because they deemed it too cheap and questioned the quality.
As a small shop can you buy big enough?
Yes we can. We have a very good working relationship with our suppliers, keeping them well informed about how we are doing gives them the confidence to invest in us.
One main company that has been a massive help to us is Middy Tackle. We can’t thank the managing director, David Middleton, and Danny Middleton, enough for looking after us and giving us the power to compete if we want to.
www.tandgmagazine.com
As I said, why sell yourself cheap? If a customer asks or spends quite a bit with us we will offer a discount and can still hold a good profit in the products. We’re happy and the customer is happy.
Is discounting necessary?
No! As I said before, why sell yourself cheap? If a customer asks or spends quite a bit with us we will offer a discount and can still hold a good profit in the products. We’re happy and the customer is happy.
If you’ve already discounted the price a further discount seriously hurts your profits. It’s ok saying “but I’ve made 40 per cent on that product,” but start breaking that 40 per cent down into costs. If customer has paid by card you’ve not made 40 per cent have you? That card transaction has just cost you money too and every penny counts!
You have a good online presence – is that something you had past experience of?
We’ve had to learn on our feet, and we’re still learning. Social media, Google etc. is changing all the time which does make it hard to keep up with. But if you don’t keep up you soon get left behind.
We have met a few people through the shop that work with online media and their advice was don’t try and compete with the big players, or try and get things to happen over night, unless you have extremely deep pockets. Keep it simple informative and relative to what you offer and in time you’ll see things happen. Thankfully their advice has worked and we have a good online presence that has not cost us a small fortune, just our time.
With some pretty good shops surrounding you – how do you retain business?
Similar to your question earlier about the big boys, by not directly competing against them. Offering something they don’t. We will check out our competition on a fairly regular basis, and why wouldn’t you? It’s important to bench mark. For instance, we actually went out to buy products as a customer from competitors to see what their customer service was like. We’ve ordered things
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Scott Johnson, owner-manager of Soar Tackle
2 With just 20m2
play with, Scott makes it pay!
June 2017 | Tackle & Guns | 41 to
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