From AFFTA April 29th, 2011:
The American Fly Fishing Trade Association has developed a new business seminar for the specialty fly shop retailer at this year’s International Fly Tackle Dealer show in New Orleans.
We are excited to announce the opportunity for retailers to attend a comprehensive, full day business seminar that will provide hands on instruction in operating a specialty retail fly shop. During the seminar, you have the opportunity to learn and master the fundamental components of how to do business on the internet, competing with the internet, open-to-buy strategies, improving inventory management and productivity, and creating a comfortable store environment amongst many other topics. From this seminar, retailers have the opportunity to emerge with a net full of ideas, concepts, skills, best practices, and a road map for achieving improved profits.
Jay Townley, who has spent 53 years working in specialty retail channels of trade including delivering retail seminars, webinars and retail services to outdoor and specialty retailers will be teaching the seminar. Currently, Jay is a partner and co-founder of VendorLink-Cycling, a supply chain management service that focuses on improving specialty bicycle retailer and supplier inventory profitability. He is also a partner in The Gluskin Townley Group, a market research and specialty retailer consultancy, and is a regular speaker and seminar presenter at numerous trade shows including the Outdoor Retailer. Jay has owned and operated numerous specialty shops and brings his years of experience in researching and working with small to mid-sized independent specialty retailers in developing four key seminars presented at the IFTD show. Those four key presentations will include:
How to do Business on the Internet and How to Compete with the Internet – Competition from both pure-play online retailers and outdoor fly fishing specialty retailers with aggressive online marketing strategies is not going away or diminishing in intensity. The good news is there are strategic and marketing techniques that you can employ to meet and beat these competitors, including making your website an effective marketing and communication tool, and developing a commerce enabled web strategy to extend your brick-n-mortar specialty retailer store to sell online.
Open-To-Buy- Your business can look profitable on paper, but you can still be insolvent if your inventory purchase value exceeds your cash flow. Being inventory poor is all too common among small to mid-sized independent specialty retailers. Open-to-buy is the control mechanism that makes sure you do not over buy.
Inventory Management may be the difference between being just average and increasing your compensation – Improving inventory management and productivity, including utilizing the latest Point-of-Sale systems, is fast becoming one of the few ways left for independent specialty retailers to increase revenue, profitability, and the owner’s compensation.
Creating a Comfortable Store Environment…So Shoppers Stay Longer and You and Your Staff Enjoy Being There! – Making an independent retail store environment “comfortable” is the key to unlocking higher revenue and profitability. Our research indicates that “Operationally Excellent” independent specialty retailers have cracked the comfort code.
Each session will be followed by a question and answer period of 20-30 minutes. The normal cost for Jay’s presentation is $150. By attending the IFTD show, you can attend the seminar for $50. The seminar will be Wednesday, August 17th from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. inside the New Orleans Convention Center.
