SADDLE & LEATHER SHOP
WORK-IN-PROCESS.
“You can’t call SCORE soon enough!,” Nancy Barta told you in our January, 2008, issue. This is Part 2 of that “personal tour” through the revitalization of a real business and a longtime Cedar Rapids institution.
In PART 1, we learned about the Saddle & Leather Shop's business history, challenges, people, and why & how they contacted SCORE.
PART 2 discusses the first couple and fundamental steps in any business's activity to revitalize itself.
Revisit PART 1 HERE
Background
The Saddle & Leather Shop of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is THE place to find horse related equipment, tack, memorabilia, books, and clothing in Eastern Iowa. It even has a hitching post.
Notable facts about the shop include:
- Doors opened in 1906; acquired by Nancy Barta's father in 1946.
- Most notable customer: Richard Gere.
- Saddle & Leather is “an institution in the horse world” according to many equestrians
Nancy Barta contacted SCORE five months ago. SCORE has helped Nancy formalize processes like compiling lists of the shop’s competitive advantages, market character, historical sales and profit performance, and marketing and sales options. The process of examining these factors has empowered Nancy and given her more confidence because of knowledge, pride, and tactics she has been able to identify with the help of SCORE.
Finding Competitive Advantage – the Business's Foundation
One of the first things that the SCORE counselor, Greg Tomsic, saw as necessary was the identification of Saddle & Leather's “competitive advantages.”
These are a business's “crown jewels,” the strengths that a competitor cannot match. Having built three successful businesses himself, Tomsic knew that a business's future must be built on the foundation of strong competitive advantages.
It is the place all businesses should begin. If properly captured and applied to sales efforts, knowledge of 'competitive advantages' can result in stunning success for any enterprise. In fact, if done properly, such an assessment virtually assures business success.
Nancy began exercises to surface and rank-order these competitive advantages. She was asked to answer questions like:
- What are the primary reasons your customers say they come back?
- What products or products do you offer that you know no one else can?
- What is your best selling product(s) and why?
- What do your customers say you could improve?
- What do you do that others don’t?
- What remarkable events have occurred in the history of your business... and how can others share in these?
By simply answering these questions and having customers chime in on them, Nancy Barta has put in sharp focus the strengths that can be leveraged to outdistance competitors.
 Intelligently Attacking the Market
The next logical step was to address specific tactics. How could Saddle & Leather focus their efforts? To answer that question, Nancy had to analyze her market.
Questions that aid in this process are:
- What are the characteristics of the people who buy or will buy my product?
- How many of these people (or businesses) are there in the area I plan to serve—geographically and/or virtually?
- How many competitors do I have and how many of the potential customers will each of them get? How many does that leave for me?
- How do I compare to the competitors—how will I beat their deals?
- What unique way can I employ to capture new customers or will I be using the “same old same old” methods? Note: Unique sales approaches often separate the winners from the losers.
This is an ongoing process, but questions like these help any business to know who and what their place in the market is. The most important thing in this exercise is to document the answers and the market tactics that grow out of them. In this way, actions can be tracked and adjusted to improve their effectiveness with time. This practice should constitute a critical element of your ever important “business plan.
For Nancy, knowing the answers enabled her to begin the creation of “winning” marketing and sales actions aimed at business growth.” These actions are now part of Nancy's toolkit.
IMPORTANT TIP: Correct market understanding, sizing, sales strategies and tactics are pivotal to a business's success. They are the best method to determine competitive advantages. SCORE can help you identify and analyze your market position.
The Path to Growth – and the Future
From the beginning of the Saddle & Leather Shop's relationship with SCORE, Nancy Barta has had a pretty good idea of where she needed to go: to the Web. More and more, Internet sales are an integral part of any business’s growth strategies.
The question for Nancy, though, was how to enter that market and with what kind of strategy? Now that Nancy has a better feel for and a documented understanding of her specific market, she has a much clearer understanding of the marketing tactics that will serve her business most effectively on the Internet.
But one final question remains. "How does one forecast the future once one understands the market?" This is the final and most difficult part of the business planning and revitalization process. Do it right and your business grows. Do it wrong and difficulties follow. This most crucial step will be discussed in PART 3 of this series.
In the next installment – June, 2008:
“How did Nancy go about forecasting her future, how does she know that the future will materialize as she has forecasted, and what specifically does this mean to the business's growth and profitability.”
As Nancy Barta states, “The sooner one commits to change, the sooner the business can be enhanced.”
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This is an example of how SCORE helps businesses grow. Without charge, SCORE’s counselors—men and women from all business disciplines who have succeeded in their own right—are helping businesses across the country not only survive but to excel.
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE, IT IS AS SIMPLE AS GOING TO: www.scorecr.org OR calling 319-362-6405.
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