Opening a Retail Store

Everyone can open a retail store, can't they? They are qualified, aren't they? They can do it better than the last person, won't they? It takes a certain personality, drive, and determination to open a retail store...along with intelligence, common sense, lots of flexibility, and experience in many area such as sales, marketing, buying, managing, human resources, merchandising, and finance.

I opened a retail store after working for someone who began a huge manufacturing operation. In my capacity working there, I learned much of the above, and along with my natural curiosity to continue to learn, strong drive and determination, I ran and grew my own business for 15 years and successfully sold it. I then decided to go back to school for my MBA in Retail Management...a little backwards, but my natural instincts kicked in when I heard about the program at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. I learned so much that could have added to the success of my original retail store that I now highly recommend such a program to anyone who wishes to open a retail store and wants to be successful.

A formal education teaches you things like how to locate your store based on demographics, and sociographics; how to create a customer relationship marketing program; store atmosphere in creating sales; product pricing models; strategic planning; marketing; consumer behavior; supply chain management; as well as many other core courses. I'd like to explore each of these issues further in separate posts.