Is your business rapidly growing? Are you unable to keep tabs on all your store locations?
There is no doubt that opening multiple locations gives more significant opportunities to reach more leads and increase sales. But it would help if you had a proper plan so that all your locations bring in profits.
Managing different store locations is no piece of cake. If you don’t manage it right, you will end up harming your business instead of growing.
To help you become a pro manager, we have some tips that can help you manage your stores seamlessly.
1. Developing Standardized SOPs for all Locations
You are the mastermind behind your business. And you need to make sure all your store locations are running smoothly without your physical presence.
Therefore you need to implement the same standard operating procedures across all your locations.
You need to have customer communication, work schedule, customer complaint management, product return procedure, and discount offers. And all these need to be implemented across all store.
2. Picking Reliable and Professional Staff
Another thing that counts for the success of any business is the professional and reliable staff. You need to hire people you can easily trust to represent your business. Also, make sure that all the employees are competent and trained to perform their assigned duties.
It would be best if you had periodic training sessions to improve the skills of your employees. Specifically for those who deal with customers every day. These training sessions will allow them to be on the same page regarding your mission and vision.
Another thing that will allow your staff to work competently is how you care about them. Make sure your employees get good salaries, benefits, and incentives. And it can only be done through HR management solutions for your employees.
You can determine the success of any business through customer satisfaction. So make sure that your customers get the same comfortable experience in all your locations.
3. Improving Internal Communications
Have a strong channel of inter-team communication is also essential for the successful management of all your stores. You need to make coordination between the staff of your different locations easy.
You can use POS software to manage all communications in a single cloud-based software. Not only this, but your employees can also have easy access to it anywhere and anytime.
If you have planned out your communication strategy, use it!
A recent study revealed that businesses with more than one location spend 17 hours a week clarifying and repeating average communication.
You need to eliminate redundancy by forming a group chat. And make your employees active there for updates and announcements.
4. Building Team Camaraderie
As your employees are a crucial part of your business, you need to have team spirit. For that, you can bring your employees from different locations together for meetings and exciting events.
Also, you can have team-building activities, off-site outings, and store VS store competitions to keep your employees happy and motivated.
5. Centralizing Sales Data
Having to manage sales data for customers separately is difficult. Just imagine having your teams submit reports manually every week. Hard right?
It will be problematic for you and your team to find a sales record. And you don’t have any filters to search the file you want instantly.
So to manage everything and save yourself from losing data, you need to have one repository. Which is your POS software. It will allow you to integrate all the sales data of your multiple locations in one place. Therefore you can produce accurate and complete sales reports.
6. Automating Inventory Tracking
Since you have multiple stores in different locations that means your inventory is also in different locations. Just like sales data, your inventories also need to be managed through POS software. Because it will allow you to keep track of all your inventory items efficiently.
For instance, if you are running out of stock at one of your locations, you will be notified through your POS software. It will free you from the hassle of sending customers back due to no supply.
In addition to this, if a customer comes up looking for an unavailable item at your store, you can check the product’s availability at other locations using the system. And direct the customer there.
7. Evaluating your Locations Regularly
Technology does provide a lot of flexibility. However, this does not suggest that you no longer have to visit every store to monitor operations.
Therefore you need to develop a visiting schedule to track the operations of all your locations easily. And fix issues, if any.
Whether you are setting up new locations or already have multiple, these tips will put you on the right track. Once implemented, you can have an organized strategy to manage your growing business. And simultaneously drive more sales through efficiency.
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