What does Q2 of 2017 look like for you

I like to look at my business performance in quarters. Besides the convenience there is the dataset itself. Three months of business data is far more valuable for spotting trends than any period less. This is especially true if you are comparing one quarter with an earlier one or the same quarter a year back.

So, I look forward to the end of a quarter to look at business performance.

Data does not lie, not does it have emotion. Data are facts and these facts matter when you are looking at your business.

I look at revenue, GP, unit sales, supplier performance, revenue by space and ROI. These and some other data points provide a good understanding of how things have gone and insights into where you might head in the near intermediary.

The first quarter of 2017 was interesting in that we tried plenty of new things in the shop, confronted an overall traffic decline in the centre and faced several new competitors.

I am grateful for the opportunity to compare performance with what I see in the benchmark dataset for this is a valuable layer of insight over the performance of my  my own business I can see that the pace of change has picked up in terms of what we sell, what we can sell and the reasons shoppers visit the business.

I think we will look back in 2017 as the year of greatest change in our channel in decades. I’ll write more about this soon….