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CREATIVE INSIGHTS INC. |
New for 2010
Businesses in British Columbia with fewer than 50 employees may be eligible for financial support for the following new training program through the Workplace Training for Innovation Program (more and more):
Improving your retail productivity through innovative merchandising and product-presentation techniques
This training program combines essential components from our Retail Tune Up Consulting (more) and incorporates key lessons from our popular “Now is the Time to Sweat the Small Stuff” presentation (more).
The training will help you:
• Improve productivity. While working on the elements of your business that customers see, hear, touch, smell or taste, we also consider the people that customers see and interact with, and all the ways that your business communicates with its customers. This comprehensive approach will help you improve both individual and store-level productivity as determined by standard retail measurements including sales per square foot, sales per hour, average transaction, items per transaction and customer satisfaction.
• Increase the long-term competitiveness of your business and its workforce. This training is a combination of classroom “theory” and hands-on, structured “practice” work that is customized specifically to your store and your products. The customization ensures that the training time and dollars are not spent on “canned” quick fixes, but on effective, behaviour-changing learning that stays valuable to your business for years to come.
• Support the introduction of new work processes. The “Customer Experience Checklist” that we train your employees to use year-round will help you create and sustain a unique retail environment that adds value to the products you sell. This simple-sounding, but profoundly effective training will become a permanent tool in your productivity arsenal.
This training program is designed to be 3 to 4 days long, spread over 6 to 8 weeks.
New Keynote Presentations
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Now is the Time to Sweat the Small Stuff An action-based motivational boost to your staff and your business |
As the economic clouds clear, it is the time to charge up your team and prepare your business for the ramp-up for increased sales. Now is the time to build a solid infrastructure of good habits – to learn to execute the details that will always make the difference.
Focusing on the basics today will improve morale, staff performance and customer service, and strengthen your business now in preparation for stronger but more demanding times ahead.
With the battle-weary customers, every single customer interaction is crucial to your business. No slack and no second chances. Also, with customers making fewer purchases, they demand more from fewer encounters.
Today’s consumers are more impatient and knowledgeable than ever before, and they have now learned to watch their dollars better than ever. They reward consistency and dependability. They will not buy sizzle if the steak is below their expectations. To deliver, you need to ensure daily execution of the details that have created and sustained great companies – regardless of the economic climate.
Your staff will likely be battle-weary as well. It will be difficult to charge them up again without an action plan to which everyone can commit.
This session delivers an actionable and effective 30-item checklist to boost your business by Sweating the Small Stuff. This action plan will be useable to your business not just today, but for years to come.
A Recipe for Finding and Keeping the Right Employees A new way of thinking and a practical tool kit to charge up your team | |
In the weaker economy, customer-facing businesses have had access to more employee candidates, but that has not solved the much bigger problems of a manager: how to find the right candidates, and how to keep them. As the economy clears, finding and keeping them will become even more of an issue.
Regardless of the economic situation, huge changes are taking place in the workforce and customer-facing businesses continue to struggle to find and keep skilled staff. This problem is partly due to demographics – there really IS a shortage of qualified staff today. An even bigger problem is that many businesses have only a vague picture of what kinds of employees they really need.
Embracing innovative staffing ideas is the solution. Working with a trade sector association, Ted Topping spent several months researching and writing a current “best practices” manual for finding and keeping employees. This session will explain what it takes to thrive today, and will help the participants:
• Build your team around productive, stable employees who offer education and experience
• Focus on the 20 percent of workplace activities that produce 80 percent of your bottom-line.
• Understand how front-end and back-room are different businesses with different staffing needs
• Introduce simple “systems” that can be explained to and quickly followed by new employees
Managing Successfully Across the Age Groups Take charge and create a results-focused work culture | |
Leading a team whose members do not share your – or each others’ – work ethic, values or experience, is an extremely challenging task. Solving the dilemma starts with admitting that the situation will not correct itself. The younger generation will not one day “grow up” and adopt the older generation’s values. The employable-age younger generation is already grown-up and their values ARE different. This situation is even worse if your team members’ values and life experience clash with those of your customers. This session will show how to manage and achieve results in this environment that is not going to change.
Rooted in basic demographics and in a weak economy, the task of finding and especially keeping and managing the staff you really need is more daunting today than ever before.
This session explains WHY we are in this situation and, most important, provides practical, actionable instruction on how to:
• Create a work culture that focuses more on what needs to get done and less on how.
• Accommodate the ways in which people from various age groups approach work.
• Avoid the ineffective carrot-and-stick style of motivation and provide more effective incentives.
• Make production and customer-facing work fun and interesting to the employees.
Ted Topping, keynote speaker, author and retail consultant |
Start and Run Retail Business by Jim Dion and Ted Topping |
| Start and Run a Retail Business | Associates |
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