While The Profitable Retailer has the same format " a collection of tips " as other books aimed at small retailers, the content is much deeper and much more sophisticated. Many books in this genre simply recount the author’s experiences in a jumbled pile of ideas and recollections, but The Profitable Retailer uses bite-sized anecdotes and short essays to communicate several big ideas, such as the short discourse on market position in Chapter 2:
But you’d better be the best at something or profits will be difficult to obtain. . . . Profitable Retailers, however, learn to find unique products and niches that Wal-Mart, Target, and other discounters don’t have.
This is a nugget version of the big ideas from Winning at Retail and Positioning, emphasizing that retailers need to be acceptable at a range of things, but notably the best at something, and that establishing that niche as a market position is absolutely essential. Few business books find the right balance between big ideas and easy-reading, being too academic for a broad audience, too shallow to offer any valuable information, or too bereft of ideas to be longer than a pamphlet. The Profitable Retailer does find that balance, and the the frequency with which Mr. Fleener slips important concepts into an anecdote or plainspoken bit of advice gives the reader a comforting sense that there is little mystery to running a profitable business.
The chapters of The Profitable Retailer each cover a single topic. Each chapter is a short, easy-to-read, self-contained essay on an important business principle, and the chapters are organized into sections that cover major aspects of a business: Strategy, Customer Experience, Employee Relations, Marketing, and Operations. Although the sections are roughly the same size, it is Customer Experience that gets the lion’s share of Fleener’s attention.
The author’s emphasis on the Customer Experience has a precedent outside the book, however. Fleener named his consultancy Dynamic Experiences Group LLC, and one of his most downloaded white papers is 50 Ways to Improve The Customer’s Experience. The same focus is evident in the The Profitable Retailer, where Fleener reminds retailers that “Profitable Retailers know they are in business for one reason: the customer. . . . Profitable Retailers are customer-centric. ”
It seems like an obvious point, since the notion that “the customer is always right” has been a mantra in retailing since the days of Marshall Field over 100 years ago. But too often retailers are focused on something else, like stocking shelves. The Profitable Retailer stresses the importance of the customer and steps beyond ”the customer is always right” to address the customer experience, the whole relationship that a customer has with a retail business. Fleener never forgets the importance of being profitable, however, and there is a limit to how right a customer may be: Chapter 21 tells the reader how to fire an unprofitable customer.
For the staff at Retailing Together, it is the marketing chapters that give us hope for the world, because the author directly addresses some of the elements of formal marketing that retailers are not exposed to often enough, including market position, creative briefs, customer lifetime value, and the fact that advertising is a very small part of marketing. New retailers who get a basic education in these principles are much better-prepared to run a business, and Fleener is able to make the concepts accessible and digestible.
Reading The Profitable Retailer won’t solve all of a retailer’s business problems. The book covers a lot of topics in its 220 pages"far too many ideas in too few pages to cover any of them in depth. But depth it not its purpose, and few retailers would read a book on this subject written as an academic textbook. Instead, The Profitable Retailer is a thorough introduction to the wide range of skills a retailer needs, with enough practical advice that retailers can implement immediately to give them a strong start on the road to profitability.
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