80 x U=/>ellenoire1
This morning while working on the finances for the store I realized something. If 80 of my customers came in and spent $100 I could pay the rent this month.
I can hear you gasp from here… wow, that’s a lot of money!
Yes sadly it is.
I’ll tell you the story, so you will understand.
I have explained how small retail works on this blog before, but I’ll give you another quick version. In a normal retail (in a small company, that is less than 5 years old) year you sell as best as possible and spend all year using up what you saved during Christmas sales until the next Christmas season. You pay the bills, your staff and the little left over is for the boss. If you did your job right you end the year with little or no debt… and start all over again hopefully growing sales every year…. At some point in theory you become profitable that all the time spent pays off.
Last year when I had cancer I spent more than is normal both paying medical expenses, and paying for extra staff to keep the doors open while I was ill. We started this year in a bad place because bad weather and the recession killed our Christmas season. By February the savings were gone, and we have been struggling ever since. We have been digging a deeper and deeper financial hole every week.
This past weekend we booked a festival booth and paid for the booth and a lot of extra stock… but the organizers did not promote the area we were in so we lost a large amount of money because we sold next to nothing. This tore through most of both the little money and the goodwill from lenders that we had left. Sometimes, something little like this is all it takes to sink the proverbial ship.. and take a business down. We are perilously close to being on that sinking ship.
So today while working on the finances for the store I realized something. If 80 of my customers came in and spent $100 I could pay the rent this month. This means simply that with 80 people buying $100 (or 160 people spending $40, or 320 people spending $20 and so on.. ) I could pay back the friendly lender that helped us with the festival, pay the staff, the phone bill, and the rent…. This won’t pay all the debts… but that is for another blog, another day and another equation… today.. it is 80xU= ellënoire wins and gets to go on for another few weeks...
The whole store is on sale, so your $100 will go a long way…
P.S. While I was writing this entry.. a friend just spent $100… so now it is 79xU!!!
