Welcome to day 2: Understand How Your Business Works.

The Retail solved Blueprint to teach you everything you need to know to confidently grow and scale your brand, build a connected community of loyal evangelists, and multiply your brand's impact, sales, and profits.

If we are meeting for the first time, my name is Dan Lohman. I’ve had the privilege of mentoring and working with hundreds of brands from pre-revenue to multi-million dollars in sales. This a culmination of the best strategies that are working today. I’ve spent years testing and perfecting them to save you valuable time and money while giving you the edge you deserve.

If you haven’t done so yet, download the free 30 Days To Prosperity Workbook at RetailSolved.com/30DayWorkbook to help you get the most out of this brand-building series. Go back and listen to all of the episodes in this masterclass to that you don’t miss anything. The strategies build upon each other in the order of the series. Please share these and help me raise the bar in natural.

I want to take a moment to recap the last episode.

Yesterday, we talked about how to build a profitable food business. In that episode, we talked about the framework, the foundation that you need to have in place to successfully build your business. The reason this matters is because if you don't have a healthy foundation, a solid foundation to build your brand on, then your brand is going to crumble.

Your foundation, won't support some of the many things that you're going to want to do or things that you need to do as your business grows. It's critically important that you get the foundation of your business, right? That you understand exactly what's needed to build a healthy foundation.

Go back and review that lesson. If you haven't checked it out yet,

Before you can have any success launching or growing your brand, you need to know how the game's played and what the objective of the game is. You need to know the rules of the game and how you can leverage them to your advantage.

On podcast episode 136, Bob Burke does a great job of spelling out in very stark terms exactly what's expected of you if you want to launch or grow a brand in natural. These are the rules that every brand plays by.

Now, the good news is that once you understand what the rules are, then you can leverage the insights and the strategies that we're talking about here and throughout all my content to maximize every opportunity to grow and scale your brand.

If you follow the traditional strategies used by your competitors and taught in this industry, your brand's going to struggle. You will not get the competitive edge you need to level the playing field with the most sophisticated brands. I’m working hard to change that. There is a better and more cost effective way to grow and scale your brand than continually throwing money at retailers, distributors, brokers, and agencies. It begins with learning and adopting the strategies we’re covering here.

These strategies are the strategies that I've used to push around some of the largest and most iconic brands in the world. They've worked for me. They've worked for my clients and they can work for you too.

I think it's fair to say that none of us are born to successfully launch and grow a business. We all struggled despite the overnight success stories. There are a lot of backstories that get overlooked.

Gary Hirshberg talked about the overnight success of Stonyfield several years in the making In SECRETS 42 Gary Hirshberg With Stonyfield Shares His Passion For Natural Organic Brands & How We Need To Inspire & Educate Shoppers.

The simple reality is that brands endure large and small failures every day. What set you apart form your competition is how you solve problems, adapt, and grow. Be willing to fail as long as you are equally wiling to learn from your mistakes!
Learn from your failures and embrace them

A really good strategy to start with is to your business in simple terms. Your business is simply about making things and selling things - period. The question is how to maximize each and every opportunity to get your products into shoppers? What kind of support systems do you need to have in place? How much product do you need to have available to support your growth? How many stores do you need to have distribution in?

Think about all the things that we talked about in the previous lesson and back into exactly what you need to support your business today and beyond. You want to make sure that you eliminate out of stocks. You want to make sure that you maximize each and every opportunity to sell your product at shelf. You want to execute flawlessly across every aspect of your sales funnel.

Once you identify what's needed or what's required to achieve your goals, then you need to work backward to insure all of those resources are in place and activated.

Yesterday we discussed the importance of being strategic. This is why category management was born and how it can help you.

If you take a look back in time, big brands use the same strategies then that natural brands use today. It was all about relationships and who had the most influence with retailers. It's about buying your way onto the shelf through incentives and the different programs that we had available at the time.

This was an extremely inefficient strategy that did nothing to help us drive more shoppers into the stores. They didn't help create a loyal customer base. In fact, these strategies lowered the bar and made price the most important feature of your brand. We began to trade quality for price which I believe was a huge mistake.

It’s a big reason why the quality of what we purchased declined dramatically over time. The only way a brand could compete was to cut costs which meant reducing quality. Think about how long a pair of socks would last compared to a pare today. This is true for many of the items we consume.

That is changing today and natural brands are leading the charge. Shoppers what quality products they can trust. The core natural shopper will not settle. They appreciate the nutritional difference between clean-label organic products and highly processed foods chocked full of ingredients no one can pronounce.

In the early 90’s Walmart became a dominant retailer focused on price. A lot of independent retailers and small chains began to consolidate. We were focused to become more efficient to help our retail partners compete with Walmart. This is when category management was born.

Category management is the advanced strategies that big brands rely on today. It was born out of a need for brands and retailers to become more competitive. It helped reduce excess inventories and reduce out-of-stocks. It helped maximize pricing and promotional effectiveness and it improved category product assortments. That helped improve product planning and forecasting as well as streamline product innovation.

Since then, category management has grown and flourished as big brands continually rely heavily on the advanced strategies it offers. I’ll be teaching some of those advanced strategies throughout the 30 days to prosperity series. They are also a big focus on my podcast, webinars, videos, and articles.

Sadly, these skills are undervalued in natural with brands being told that you only need canned topline reports to succeed. I call this push button category management. That is a good starting but the harsh reality is, is that the same cookie-cutter reports and strategies your competitors use will not differentiate your brand on a store shelf. You need to go deeper and provide retailers with actionable insights they don’t have access to on their own or from your competitors. We’ll go deeper into this throughout the series.

Have you ever watched the show undercover boss? I love that show because it illustrates exactly what I want to talk about right now. It always amazes me how disconnected the senior leadership is and how little they know about the companies and the roles that their employees play. It highlights the value and the importance of walking in the shoes of your team.

Making a point to learn every job

That was a mantra at price club when I was the grocery manager. Price club is now Costco.

We were encouraged to continually find better and more efficient ways to do our jobs. You need to adopt that mindset.

I believe that an efficient manager needs to be able to do all the jobs below them - or at least understand the different roles, their purpose, and why they matter.

I rarely find that when I work with companies of all sizes. This leads to a lack of coordination and poor communication throughout the company. Something as simple and basic as this can derail and stifle your companies growth or ability to compete.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. A few years ago I had the privilege to do a project for a big company that I had always admired. I quickly learned how siloed they were and how key departments were not working collaboratively or toward a common goal. They brought me into the help them launch a healthy snack. I put together a clear path to market including merchandising recommendations compete with a robust category overview. The marketing department had an entirely different strategy. Sadly the product failed because there was no clear execution strategy for the sales team. In addition, Promotions did not align with new product introductions at retail. Product merchandising was inconsistent and shoppers were confused.

This is the Achilles heel for big brands. That experience reinforced the importance for you to adopt the advanced strategies highlighted in this series. This was a big reason I launched the podcast.

It’s important to keep your teams connected as they were when you were small. You want to make sure that you're bringing everyone to the table and that you're having robust conversations about what's going on. You want to cross-train employees and at the very least have people shadow co-worked in other departments do this on a regular basis so that they appreciate the impact and the importance of other roles in your company. Remember that your success is tied to your co-workers' success. When everyone on your team is aligned with each other, you accomplish more and you are more effective.

Doing this is going to give a sustainable and significant competitive advantage because I guarantee that a lot of brands don't do this.

I'll give you another example of why this matters. You've heard a lot about brands using focus groups. The challenge of most focus groups is that they typically attract people that may not use your brand or understand the unique attributes your brand offers.

Years ago while working for Unilever the company launched a new stain treater. The product was amazing and we were well poised to disrupt a stale category. Consumers loved it! The marketing department made a huge splash and we all worked hard to get the product on every store shelf. Well, the marketing department did not bother to ask the sales team or category management about how retailers merchandised the category. The refill was to be the backbone of our sales strategy but it did not fit on store shelves. We could either spend a ton of money resetting and re-merchandising every section in every store nationally or change the size of the bottle. Both options were hugely expensive and so they decided to kill the brand.

Your customers are unique. They appreciate and understand of the benefits and the quality of your products. Traditional strategies and typical focus groups overlook how they buy your products and what they purchase when your brand is in their shopping cart.

You and everyone who sells or supports your brand need to be laser-focused on that customer. So back to the story, if you can leverage those insights with your retail partners you will gain a significant and sustainable competitive advantage.

For additional inspiration, listen to the podcast, episode SECRETS 136 Bob Burke With Natural Products Consulting, The Retail Game – What You Need To Know. I already talked a little bit about this podcast and why this matters. Bob does a phenomenal job painting a stark reality of what's expected of you as a new brand or as an existing brand that wants to grow and scale. You need to know how the rules and how the game is played.

Once you understand how the game is played, then you can get creative. This is where you have an opportunity to leverage the strategies that we're talking about throughout this entire series and with all my content. Listen to secrets 136 with Bob Burke, with the retail game, what you needed to know.

Then I recommend that you listen to SECRETS 85 Adam Lowry With Ripple Foods & Method, Revitalizing A Tired Category Using Advanced Strategies. In this podcast episode, Adam talks about how he leverages the advanced strategies that we're talking about here. He talks about how he uses those to his advantage.

The point is this, once you know how the retail game is played, then these advanced strategies will give you a significant and sustainable competitive edge. You're going to want to check it out - secrets 85.

And then I recommend you listen to SECRETS 126 Dustin Finkel With KAPOP, A Well Defined Business Strategy Will Add Rocket Fuel To Your Growth. In this episode, we have a great conversation about the importance of having a solid business strategy and how that strategy is going to give you the bandwidth that you need to succeed and how that strategy is going to give you the additional bandwidth that you need to grow and scale your brand.

And more importantly, it’s that strategy that can help remove a lot of the obstacles that derail’s other brands. This is one of my favorite episodes because, in this episode, we talk about how to leverage the best of the advanced strategies used in mainstream while keeping natural natural. Check out secrets 126 with Dustin Finkel

Tip of the day: Commit to learn and appreciate the different roles in your business. This will keep you grounded and help you better understand how your business works.

I’ve recorded the video which has illustrations and additional information I can’t share on an audio podcast. You can watch the accompanying video on the podcast webpage and you can get there by going to BrandSecretsAndStrategies/Session228. In tomorrow's show we’ll talk about Surrounding Yourself With Trusted Advisors and Experts. This episode will build on today’s conversation. Thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next show