Sunday, November 4, 2012

Honor Your Limitations

Launching my weekend was receipt of this heartfelt email, which I’ve edited only slightly:
Could you consider running helpful posts now that tell people how to best recover from Hurricane Sandy? What to do when your store is trashed, there is no flood insurance, you’re already hocked to the eyeballs, and Christmas season is now. You pride yourself on helping retailers. Here’s where the rubber hits the road. Let’s see you pull your big boy pants on and get some seriously helpful postings from you. People will remember this info a shitload better than your usual punny headline and a couple of research results. You have years of great advice for retailers in your head. Let’s get that knowledge working to really get these retailers in motion and help these thousands of retailers who just got slammed by Sandy. 
     Maybe the last thing RIMtailing blog readers like this one would expect in my response is my sharing news of a just-published research study. Yet again, maybe it’s the first thing they’d expect. In any case, please stay with me.
     A Journal of General Internal Medicine paper looked at whether the increasing number of medical clinics in retail stores is hurting health care. Between 2007 and 2009, traffic at these clinics rose ten-fold among Americans who have private health insurance. There are currently more than 1,300 of these store-within-a-store businesses throughout America.
     Are these clinics attempting to handle medical problems which need specialist care? The evidence is that they are not. As a rule, they go beyond acknowledging their limitations. They honor their limitations, with pride in what they do well and with knowledge of how to refer clients for problems best resolved elsewhere.
     In the same spirit, I honor my limitations. I work diligently to equip myself to give my consultation clients, training participants, and readers premiere shopper psychology advice. My devotion to good retailers succeeding and, now, my concern for the future of communities of merchants devastated by Hurricane Sandy lead to me recommending resources other than myself for different specialist expertise.
     In many cases, a clearinghouse for retailing financing and disaster recovery expertise in the U.S. is your local Small Business Development Center. I conduct my RIMtailing Retailer Profitability Initiative projects in collaboration with SBDCs.
     I realize this post might not satisfy my valued email correspondent.
     But hey, I did write the whole thing without one pun.

(December 4, 2012 update: A Bloomberg Businessweek article indicates that retailers slammed by Hurricane Sandy aren't making adequate use of help available from Small Business Development Centers.)

Click below for more: 
Base Your Changes on Your Strengths 
Know Where to Go for Answers 
Open Up Profits Using Stores-Within-A-Store 
Take Two Steps Forward After Each Step Back

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