Webinars

Increasing your revenue as a furniture retailer comes with lots of decisions that need to be made. But, how do you know you’re making the best decisions for your store?

Luckily, HFA has retailers and experts here to share best practices and strategies for successfully increasing profitability in their businesses. You’ll also hear about the challenges these entrepreneurs faced when starting out and the lessons learned along the way.

Peer-to-peer support and guidance are so important, and that’s why this webinar is the perfect opportunity for you to learn new ideas on how to improve your business performance and get a better understanding of what it takes to maintain a successful furniture business. It should be an enlightening experience!

OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS

David Harkness – Owner, Harkness Furniture

David is the owner of fourth-generation home furnishings retailer Harkness Furniture. David currently sits on the Executive Committee of the Home Furnishings Association. He participates in several performance groups and continually learns how to increase profitability and reduce expenses in this business.

Jamie Winter – Co-Owner, Furniture Mall of Kansas / Tools2Win

Jamie is the co-owner and third generation of Furniture Mall of Kansas. He joined the family business in 2009 after 16 years in auto electronics manufacturing, where he was an Executive with Continental, utilizing his degrees in electrical engineering from Kansas State University and an MBA from Texas A&M University. Furniture Mall of Kansas is a Mall concept that includes three furniture brands covering three distinct price ranges from good to better and best. Jamie and his brother Jeff continue to grow, now moving the Mall concept into Texas. Jamie is also the owner and founder of Tools2Win, which provides a suite of tools that turns Point-of-Sale data into actionable information for the furniture industry.

David McMahon – Founder & President, PerformNOW

David specializes in growing the sales, profits, ROI, and cash flow of operations in the furniture industry. He is a certified management accountant and a certified supply chain professional, and simply put, he deploys solutions that make money.

Key Takeaways from this webinar:

• Control your expenses by maximizing margins (55-60% margins are the new normal).
• Due to supply chain price hikes, you should raise your prices accordingly and quickly in order to maintain your margins.
• Be consistent in how you communicate to your customers and manage their expectations with delays is crucial to maintain orders and negate cancelations.
• Today, there is an opportunity to grow market share by providing better customer service through honesty, transparency, and being proactive in your communication to customers. For example, attach a small tag to available items that read IN STOCK FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY.
• Qualify your customers with the right questions from the start to negate frustration later.
• Be creative in how you store inventory that finally comes in from containers that have been delayed for several months.
• Take a hard look at SKUs that are not selling and remerchandise your buying to maximize space and revenue opportunities.
• Always look for opportunities to eliminate expenses that are no longer necessary. Since COVID, you may be able to reduce some services that you had in place pre-COVID.
• If product demand is up, you may be able to reduce your advertising dollars with little impact on your traffic.
• If you are not using some form of chat on your website, you are missing a key element to greater conversion rates.
• Measuring your sales per guest and net income are top metrics to follow for improving revenue daily.
• Make good use of your added revenue by strategically investing in your business to plan for the future (i.e., system upgrades, staff training, etc.)
• To manage expenses and use of added revenue, evaluate what things can you eliminate and what things can you automate.