LAGUNA HILLS, Calif. (BRAIN) — State of Retail is one of the most consistently read departments in Bicycle Retailer's print magazine, which is published 18 times per year. For each issue, a panel of 10 retailers, which changes every year, weighs in on a variety of topics that affect their business, the industry and their communities.
In an effort to broaden State of Retail's reach and engage more readers, BRAIN is now publishing it online, starting with the the panel question for the March 1 issue of the magazine.
This issue's question was: "What do you do to improve operations and profitability in your store? How do you monitor/track how these changes have affected your work flow and/or bottom line?"
"Mountain bike rentals and the annual sale of our rental fleet is our largest category. Managing a fleet of 100 rental bikes is very challenging in a busy store our size. Taking rental reservations over the phone was clogging up our phone lines and tying up employees. Last spring we started using Rental Bike Manager, which moved the process online. We now take reservations on our website, which has freed up staff from having to spend at least 5 minutes on the phone for each reservation. It has allowed us to better track rental parts and repairs and prevents us from having to store any customer credit card information. Right now we are looking at ways to improve efficiency in our service department. We constantly look at our numbers on Litespeed so we always know which categories are doing well and where we need to make changes and improvements. If a category is doing poorly we look at ways to change that, then closely track if those changes have been effective."
To see more responses, check out the March 1 issue of BRAIN. If you'd like to weigh in, please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. And look for the next question on the web on March 15.
To learn more about the panelists, see our 2017 State of Retail panel bio page.
