was made store manager in one of the districts in London which was ranked as one the lowest performer. Majority of my work involved meeting with directors, district managers, junior managers, and other staff members, along with day to day store management activities.
This store was opened a year back and had few issues right from dipping sales to high staff turnover. Store had earned bad reputation. Looking at my performance during the training, my ability to work well under pressure, my analytical and good commercial approach to solving problems, my previous track record of increasing sales and business performance by prioritizing and reorganizing services. Company's district sales operation manager wanted me to run this store. She had full faith in me and my abilities that I could change the fortune of this store. Before I could formally take the charge of the store I went through all the previous records of the store, made numerous visits to it in order to analyze the present situation. Finally after getting grip over the issues of the store, I arranged a meeting with all other managers of the store along with staff members.
Through a formal introduction about myself I put forward current issues of the store and my suggestions for improvement and was open to their suggestions. Everybody was encouraged to offer his or her point of view. As I knew that it has to be a collaborative effort.
With the objective of improving the sales, to initiate with I went through old sale records on items which sell the most and items which sell the least. It was noticed there were a lot of items which had a low turnover and occupied a lot shelf space. I reduced the space of low sellers and allocated more space to products which were high sellers, keeping in mind the recession period where people spend only essential items. An interesting observation made by me was that since every competitor in that area was selling similar products with almost same price, hence it was leading to price war and dipping sales at Lidl.
Through extensive competitor analysis, I tried to promote the non food items in my store as against our competitors who were dealing very little or not at all in non food items, in order to enhance the sales of that store. This gave me a slight edge over my competitors as non-foods generally have higher profit margins then food products.
After a few meetings with my sales operation manager I ordered special non –foods items like clothes, household equipments, tools etc. for my store. Then I re launched my store in the area by changing a few set ups like the layout, making it more bright. After the consent of my sales manager I got fliers made to be distributed in the local area in order to create awareness about the new changes and new products. I also retrained some of the members of the staff so as to make them aware of company procedures, rules ,regulations about the importance of good customer services . This lead to massive improvement in stores productivity and reduced staff turnover significantly.
After months of hard work, new changes and introduction of new products in the store, positive results started coming forward and not only did the sales improve but also the customer count of the store increased, which attracted diverse population of that area. For the first time in the history of the store the results were 10 % higher than expected.
Not only a this, a formal meeting had been arranged by my higher authorities to share this achievement. My Director and sales operation manager were very happy with this progress and was rewarded for the same. This moment made me very emotional yet extremely determined, enabling me to not only advance my career but also grow as an individual.
Due to globalization and international nature of workspace today demands a lot of competence and potential in their managers. Along with the growing market demands, the need for highly skilled managers is increasing . Keeping pace with