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What jewelers can learn from other business owners
JJ Ramberg, host of MSNBC’s Your Business and the JA New York Winter keynote speaker, shares stories of the small companies she’s covered, including a low-fat bagel baker and a laundromat.
"Your Business" host JJ Ramberg: “When you just dig into your business a little bit (you’ll discover) there are a lot of inefficiencies that can be fixed. It is not hard to fix them. It just takes some time and the will to do it.”
New York--As the keynote speaker at the upcoming JA New York Winter show, JJ Ramberg will be giving tips for small business owners, advice gleaned from years of experience covering companies as the host of MSNBC’s Your Business.
Recently, the journalist and author, who is an entrepreneur herself (she founded GoodSearch, now GoodShop, with her brother), sat down to talk to National Jeweler about some of the most outstanding companies she’s covered on her show.
Ramberg is scheduled to deliver her address on the show’s opening day, Jan. 18, at 9:30 a.m.
Her show, Your Business, airs at 7:30 a.m. on Sundays and also can be viewed online.
National Jeweler: What are some of the lessons small business owners have learned on your show?
JJ Ramberg: We did (a story) last year, one of my favorite stories, where we made over a jewelry store in Monterey (Calif.). It was a family-owned business, husband-and-wife team, and they owned a jewelry store on the wharf. They had one and they expanded to three other stores.
And they were doing fine. They were making enough money but they were older and they had no nest egg so they couldn’t retire.
I think the way they ran their business is typical of a lot of mom-and-pop places. They didn’t have a POS (point-of-sale) system, everything was on instinct.
NJ: So what you are saying is that they had no way of knowing what their best-sellers were?
Ramberg: It was exactly that.
They had these four different stores and they all sold different things, and they had many more employees than they needed. If they had just gotten under one roof they could have consolidated their employees.
We went in there and did a (Your Business) Makeover for them. They were already in the process of putting everything under one roof but we got Gensler in there, a design firm, and we got this woman who worked in luxury for a long time to come in and talk to them about their POS system and figure out their inventory.
I find them same thing (with many small business owners). We went to a bed-and-breakfast where I asked the woman, “What’s your revenue?”, and she looked at me like I was crazy. When you just dig into your business a little bit (you’ll discover) there are a lot of inefficiencies that
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can be fixed. It’s not hard to fix them. It just takes some time and it takes the will to do it.
WATCH: Ramberg’s follow-up on the jewelry store makeover
NJ: What are some of the top inefficiencies you see?
Ramberg: Not knowing where all your cash is going, not paying enough attention to your bills to see if you are getting the best price on things.
Not having a good handle on your inventory, so you don’t know if you have all this cash tied up in inventory that’s just sitting there.
Not having a good understanding of customer flow, so you are wasting money on employees when you might not need them.
We did a story on a laundromat and it turned out that they had, I think, three people working there at all times. Turns out, no one ever came on Tuesdays in the morning, ever.
All you need to do is look at your receipts to find out (when people are coming in.) Paying employees when you are a small business, that’s a big cost for you. If you can figure out how to optimize your staffing, that’s an efficiency as well.
NJ: You’ve featured thousands of small businesses on your show. Besides the jewelry store, is there one that really stands out?
Ramberg: Lots of them.
My mom was an entrepreneur and she used to read us The Little Engine That Could, this “I think I can” (mentality.) You have to go after something, believe that “I can do this” combined with this idea of “I think I can’t.”
There is a whole list of things that I don’t know how to do, so I can’t delude myself into thinking that I can do everything. But I can figure out who to go to do get those answers.
I think the smartest business owners believe in themselves, not only to do it and be successful but (also) that they can figure out how to find the answers.
This woman who started a bagel company in Connecticut, she had never worked, she was a part-time waitress. Her husband was the bread-winner in the family. He lost his job because of an illness, he couldn’t go back to work and it was the recession.
She had this idea for a low-fat bagel company. She had done Weight Watchers and had lost (a considerable amount of weight) and so saw a hole in the market: there was no low-fat bagel.
She took most of their money, I think they had $18,000 left, a mortgage, four kids, no job and she took the bulk of that and put it into this company and just started knocking on doors and did it. She just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
She knew with her heart that there was a market. But then she went out and got advice from people on how to start this thing. So it took a little bit of a combination of, “I can do this” with “I know I need to ask the right questions to get to the next step.”
You don’t need to recreate the wheel. People have done almost everything before; just ask.
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