Running a Business

Growing a Business

A blog for businesses with 20 or fewer employees or for people planning on starting one. There are two threads. One for Starting a Business and a second for Growing a Business. Author: Henry McCabe.

Goals- Industry Profiles

In my last blog I wrote about creating Someday Goals. This as a prelude to setting long term goals for what you want your business to grow into and a set of actions necessary to bring about the growth. In effect a ten year Strategic Plan for your business. I suggested that doing so requires some research about what is possible and am using a few blogs to illustrate how you might go about doing your own. Your favorite search engine and local library are your tools. Using the a fictitious Women's Clothing Store as an example I began looking at what level of sales is possible. It seemed a $600,000 goal was reasonable. Needing a little more evidence I looked at some data I had gathered  last year after a lot of scrounging on the internet. The kind of scrounging you can do.  From that I produced this table.

Ranking of U.S. Retail Chains by Sales per Square Foot
From a Survey of Public Data From 160 Chains
Retail		Sales Per
Chain	Rank	Square Foot
Limited	14	$653
Aeropostale	16	$595
J Crew	17	$593
Urban	19	$532
Guess	20	$510
Source: Retail Sails.com March 30, 2012

RetailSails is a New York based research and consulting firm aiming to be the premier resource for fact-based insight and analysis covering the U.S. retail and consumer goods industries. Another source for information of retailing is the National Retail Federation, an industry advocacy organization. When doing this kind of research industry organizations are an important source.

I don't expect a small local retail store will outsell the chains listed, but $400 per square foot right be reasonable. At that level a 1,500 sq foot store would be required to make the $600,000 goal. The current store is 1,200 square feet so a relocation may be required.

There are two other data bases from which I could get more data. Reference USA and AtoZ. Both are subscription  fee based services. My budget requires that I locate free data. Fortunately many library systems, colleges and universities subscribe to those services and make them available to users without charge. My library subscribes to AtoZ so I looked there. Sorry I cannot provide a link but I did find some interesting data. More on that in my next Growing a Business Post.

Find an Expert at SCORE

Planning. The only thing we know for sure about any plan we make is that actual events will turn out to be different. We must not let the attempt to create a perfect plan get in the way of completing one. An imperfect plan is better than none at all.

Answer to last quiz: One from whom you can make profit.

Definition Quiz:  What do we know about data gathered in our research?