My former partner gave me some sage advice.

What it boils down to is “small but strong”.

Lean.

Let me explain.

I’ve been tinkering around at Andrew’s Ties using the same approach the past two months and I’m very pleased with the results. When I first took over Andrew’s Ties, we had a staff of 4. Not wanting to rock the boat, I kept the same head count. Shortly thereafter, one staff got married and decided to relocate.

My initial reaction was to find a replacement. I spent time interviewing and recruiting. I allocated time towards evaluating the overall performance of each staff, created a new commission plan, a lunch compensation incentive, as well as, individually recognizing the star performers. To measure how we were doing, I implemented customer service and sales metrics to evaluate our store performance.

Three months into it, another staff abruptly left the company to pursue other interest. I let another go due to poor performance. And so the cycle of having to hire and train began. That’s pretty normal in any retail business.

The second hiring cycle ended up exhausting a lot more of my time than expected.

If your company is highly profitable and has lots of cash to spend, then this whole issue is not as important. However, as we’ve seen companies can go from profit s to losses pretty quickly because of a bad economy, product cycle transition or some other bad fortune. When that happens being lean is always a good idea.

What I learned was during times of uncertainty or when things are moving very fast, it helps to be lean to take advantage of sudden market correction. In a slow retail economy like the one we are experiencing right now, that is an advantage to have.

I hope this helps those of you facing similar situations. If you know of other alternatives, please share them below.

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