In blog 70 I talked about how the only constant in retail is change In this blog I wanted to talk about how problems are a gift.

So as I said in earlier, I bought a ton of salt water sandals for the event, now I needed to figure out where I was going to put them all. Our stockroom was really small. I took my jacket off one day and shifted the whole stockroom to make room for the sandals. Even after all that,we were about a few sections short .

Solutions

Jean Claude called me into his office to ask me questions about the sale. I told him I was concerned about the back stock. “Put them in my office if you have to, he said with a grin”. Pretty sure he was joking but I was going to keep that in mind. “Check around the store and see if you can find something to store them in”

I found a fixture room that just needed to be straightened out. The team and I organized it and soon enough we had a large corner of the room for back stock. We would keep a tally on what we had here and check things off as we pulled them. After the first weekend we would have enough to bring them over.

We ended up having a very successful event, sold a lot more than the previous year and I learned something. When planning a large event you have to plan how much stock you need to fuel the event and also where you will store the excess inventory. This happened again later in my career but was a little better prepared because of this lesson

“Every problem is a gift. Without them we wouldn’t grow” – Tony Robbins