How Small Businesses Can Determine Their Financial Value

Posted on February 3, 2013 by bermanevansretail
Let’s say that you owned a gift shop, a restaurant, or a clothing store for five years. Wouldn’t you WANT to know what the financial value of your business is? Of course, you would. But most small business owners have no idea what their business is really worth.
Joe Ritz (pictured below), who owns the Sports and Collector Car Center in Tempe, Arizona, does. Ritz uses computer software that enables him to obtain a current estimate of the financial worth of his retail business.
As Mark Cohen reports for the New York Times: “What he [Ruiz] did not know when he first tried to buy his own repair shop several years ago was how difficult it would be to pin down shop owners on the actual value of their businesses. Few owners seemed even to know how to make a good guess. ‘One guy I talked to about selling said the business had to be worth $1 million, because that’s what he needed to retire on,’ Mr. Ritz said. ‘Another was like, well, let me see, my alimony is $4,500 a month. It was ridiculous. I finally just gave up and decided to start my own shop. Today, that shop has four mechanics working on roughly 20 cars a month, and Mr. Ritz can tell you exactly what he thinks the business is worth. All he has to do is check the latest figure on a cloud-based computer program that synchronizes with his regular accounting software to give him a real-time estimate.”
Read more about this story by clicking the image below.

Photo by Joshua Lott for the New York Times

 

Posted in Part 3: Targeting Customers and Gathering Information, Part 5: Managing a Retail Business, Part 6: Merchandise Management and Pricing, Part 8: Putting It All Together, Technology in Retailing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Online Shopping: Follow the Bouncing Prices

Posted on February 2, 2013 by bermanevansretail
Online retailing enables companies to regularly (instantly, if they like) change the prices they offer — to reflect competition, low or peak seasons, sales of particular items, and so forth. This means, for both buyers and sellers, product pricing is more complex and sometimes confusing. [See our prior post on the topic.] Since the use of rapid price changes is growing, here’s a follow-up post. Can shoppers take more control?
As Stephanie Clifford reports for the New York Times: “With retailers’ Internet prices now changing more often — sometimes several times within the space of a day — a new group of tools is helping shoppers outwit the stores. Rather than requiring shoppers to do the work by entering an item into price-comparison engines throughout the day, the tools automatically scan for price changes and alert customers when the price drops. Some tools, including one from Citibank’s Citi Card, even scour sites for lower prices after a purchase and help customers get a refund for any price difference. Web sites that help shoppers compare prices and track online deals have existed as long as E-commerce itself. But rapid changes in pricing at many major retailers have made it more difficult for shoppers to keep on top of it all.”
Click the image to read more.
Visual by James Best Jr./New York Times

 

Posted in Online Retailing, Part 3: Targeting Customers and Gathering Information, Part 6: Merchandise Management and Pricing, Part 7: Communicating with the Customer, Technology in Retailing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Free Internet Connections at McDonald’s

Posted on February 1, 2013 by bermanevansretail
For years, retailers such as Starbucks and Panera Bread have encouraged their customers to use wireless in-store Internet connections — usually, for free.  Now, we can add McDonald’s to the mix, where Web access is sometimes used in a different way.
As reported by Anton Troianovski for the Wall Street Journal: “Joshua Edwards’s eighth-grade paper about the Black Plague came with a McDouble and fries. Joshua sometimes does his homework at a McDonald’s restaurant — not because he is drawn by the burgers, but because the fast-food chain is one of the few places in this southern Alabama city of 4,000 where he can get online access free once the public library closes. Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. But the price of Internet connectivity hasn’t come down nearly as quickly. And in many rural areas, high-speed Internet through traditional phone lines simply isn’t available.”
Click the image to see a WSJ video on this story.

Photo by Bloomberg

 

Posted in Online Retailing, Part 2: Ownership, Strategy Mix, Online, Nontraditional, Part 3: Targeting Customers and Gathering Information, Part 5: Managing a Retail Business, Part 7: Communicating with the Customer, Social Media and Retailing, Technology in Retailing, Video Clips (non-career) | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment