The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business

by Bob Phibbs

Book Overview

It's one of the toughest economies in years, but don't fear-the doctor is in

Are you among the thousands of retailers frustrated by market challenges and looking for ways to take control of your business? Are you looking for the advice of an expert consultant, but unable to spend the money? Then The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business is for you.

By providing a step-by-step approach to evaluate your current business...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470587172
• ISBN13: 9780470587171
• Release Date: May 2010
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

How to save your business from this bad economy!

The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing your Business, a step by step approach to quickly diagnose, treat, and cure by Bob Phibbs is just that - the book you need to treat your business from the fall out due to the economy. When we are sick, we try to treat ourselves, we ask friends what we can do and we try anything to avoid going to the doctor. Putting off treatment until it is so bad we have to run to the emergency room or make a doctor's appointment. Don't do this to your business! Even if you think your business is thriving right now, use this book to learn how to do a quick diagnosis of your business, how it is doing, how your bottom line looks, how your vendors and customers are doing and how your employees are doing so that you can make an educated decision on treatment before its to late. Bob shares ideas and tips you can use once you diagnose your business on ways to treat your business and cure it from this happening again. Bob shares information on how to hire and choose employees and why that is beneficial to your business and your bottom line, learn about the stages of training, the anatomy of a retail store, sales, finances and all of the aspects that create the "guts" of your business. Learn how to keep those "guts" healthy, immune to sickness and how to make them thrive.

Don't wait for a rainy day to read this book!

The Retail Doctor's "Guide to Growing your Business" is a must read by any retail manager or proprietor, and you should not wait until your small business needs a doctor to explore this book! Bob Phibbs' valuable personal experience as the Retail Doctor advising business owners is now accessible in his new book....read full review at [...].

Skip the info on search engine rankings, but underline and highlight the rest

I'm looking at this book from a different angle than others who will review it. I want to know if this book really helps small business owners dominate their space on the web. I want to know if I would recommend it to you based on that criteria. Before I tell you my answer, let's discuss how the book addresses marketing your business online. First, the book devotes one chapter to marketing your business online. I was surprised at how well researched this chapter was. Much of the information Phibbs provides is right on the money and current. But I found one glaring omission. On page 180, he lists 5 things that determine your web site ranking on the search engines. But he leaves off one of the most important factors in getting high search engine rankings. He doesn't talk about how backlinks, the links from other websites to your website, affect your search engine ranking. He doesn't talk about anchor text in your links either. Big mistake. How Search Engine Experts Get You Higher Rankings Most search engine optimization experts spend the majority of their time getting better quality and more backlinks for their clients. If you do everything else wrong, but have higher quality backlinks with the right "anchor text," your website will rank higher on the search engines. He also says your source code is the same thing as your "meta description tags." That is wrong. Meta description tags are part of your web page's source code - they aren't one and the same. But your meta description tag is extremely important for search engine optimization. All-in-all this is a minor flaw. If I were to grade the search engine ranking part of this book, I would give it a "C" or even a "D." Omitting backlinks from this chapter is too big of an error. But the rest of the chapter contains top notch information that is fairly current. His information on Twitter and Facebook includes good examples you're able to easily learn from. Is there a good reason for you to read this book? A few years back I ran a retail store called the Sportsman's Gallery. In one year my team and I increased revenue from $240K annually to close to $500K annually. But after reading this book, I know I could've done a better job. In The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business, Bob shares information on managing the financial health of the business. He shares information about hiring and training your team. He includes information about merchandising and store traffic flow. He also includes a lot of information on what you should be looking at weekly to keep your retail store on track for growth. He does a great job in these areas. Despite the search engine ranking issues with the book, the other chapters more than make up for these deficiencies. There are several great lessons any independent retailer can learn in this book. It doesn't matter if you're a new business owner or if you own a multi-generational family business, this book teaches retail management and marketing for whatev

The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business Review

I have been following Bob Phibbs, The Retail Doctor, for about a year. After purchasing and reading "You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting", I figured there wasn't anything else Mr. Phibbs could write about retail to help me out. How wrong I was. This new book by the Retail Doctor is actually more of what I was looking for from "You Can Compete". Mr. Phibbs starts the book by breaking down what types of retailers/customers there are. Then, throughout the book, he helps us understand that customers have different personalities, how to recognize them, and then how to serve them. My favourite chapter was on how to hire the right employees. As a sports store owner who mostly sells hockey equipment, my main prerequisite in hiring was that the potential employee had to play hockey. If they did, they moved to the top of my list. This is no longer going to be the case. From now on, I will start at page 51 and go through to page 76...hiring will be very different this coming hockey season at ELMIRA SPORTS. The good Dr. gives step by step ideas such as setting up a job description, interview questions and what to listen for in the answers, how to recruit, balancing the personality types, checking references, and the final hire. I'm actually getting pretty excited about hiring new employees this year...it's always been a dreaded task for me in the past. He does not stop at hiring the right employee. The next two chapters talk about training effectively and coaching your team. Next, he writes about the Web..."What You Don't Know About the Web Could Kill You". I have a website...admittedly one of the worst on the web. That WILL change...that's all I'll say about that for now except to say that I am a firm believer in websites, Facebook, Twitter...social media in general. If you are a retailer, please stop blaming bad sales or lack of sales on government, bad economy, Wal-Mart...etc. You can be successful if you want to be. You may think you know all there is about retail. However, you need to pick up, "The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business" and read it with an open mind. Take the time to do the personality test and find out what your personality is...I'm an analytical type...probably should have become a computer engineer. Oh well, I love retail and I'm not afraid to take my newfound "retail knowledge" and apply it in my business. "The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business"...buy it, read it, apply it...you'll be happy you did. kyteman [...]

One of the best retailing books I've read.... well, period.

Let's face it: most business books have one good, solid idea- ok, maybe two- and the rest of the book is just fluff. The Retail Doctor's new Guide to Growing Your Business One of the least-fluffy business books I've read... I was going to say "in a long time", but I think I can just say "period.". This has become a new addition to the required reading list for my retail management staff, along with "First, Break All the Rules" (Buckingham & Coffman) and "It's Ok to be the Boss" (Tulgan). Well written, good ideas that can be applied both short- and long-term, and a variety of real-world examples without becoming bogged down in a litany of case studies. Do I agree with everything the Retail Doctor has to say in this book? No. Will you? Probably not. The point of this, as with all business books in my experience, is to find that one, maybe two good ideas and put them into action in ways that make sense for you. This Guide has a goodly number of solid, actionable ideas and a bit of a wake-up call (perhaps more of a "kick in the behind") to get beyond the "oh, we should do that" stage and into the "we're doing this" stage. The Retail Doc really helped me move from "thinking about" to actually acting to improve my store and improve my business. He can do the same for you. I have been following the Retail Doctor's thinking for awhile, and this book is a good synergy of his ideas, both old and new, all written in his nice, snappy writing style. As my Dad might say, well worth the price of admission.