Thursday, December 30, 2010

It's a matter of expectation...

I don't want to be one of those guys who pops up and says, "We're doing great, what's wrong with you guys!" (If being within 1% of last year is "great.")

I hate those guys.

Like I said, boardgames were a good seller this season, and that was a lucky thing. (More about that, next entry.)

I'll say it again, if I've said it a hundred times. It's not the actual sales that matter, it's what you expected the sales to be. Not only is your overall mood and motivation affected by the expectation game, so are the real blood and guts results.

That is, if you overestimate, you'll overspend -- both on overhead and on cost of goods. (The opposite is true, also -- but that's much safer place to be. Underestimating sales, you can easily recover from simply by picking up the phone and ordering more.)

Preferably, you want to be in a kind of sweet spot of having adequate overhead and product, with the flexibility to do more or less, as the days unfold.

I'll have more about what I ACTUALLY expected sales to be this Christmas in a blog for tomorrow night.

You'll probably get tired of me talking about it -- but, this really is the end of a long week/month/year, and it really is time to take stock of where I've been and where I'm going.

2 comments:

Duncan McGeary said...

Where I still get it wrong these days, it trying to reach the wrong "sweet spot."

But since customer behavior is unpredictable, this is unavoidable. You can't run a small business without some risk.

But usually, I'm off by only so much as I can make up for later, by recalibrating the "sweet spot."

That's different from earlier in my career, where I tried to force the issue much more, piling on when things were hot, cutting drastically when they were not.

H. Bruce Miller said...

Of possible interest: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/30/ebooks-paper-books-barnes-noble-nook_n_802835.html

B&N says it has sold more Nooks than any other item in its history and now sells more e-books than "real" books on its Web site.

I'm quite pleased with my Nook so far.