Meet Today’s Guest: Caty Donovan Wagner

With over 30 years in retail as both an owner and a consultant, Cathy has the unique position of having worked on both sides of the counter. She’s seen firsthand the tremendous benefits that paying attention to your numbers makes. It’s what helped her to grow to 3 stores grossing in excess of 2.5 million dollars. But it wasn’t always easy. In the hard nearly bankrupt times she cracked the code for successful retail. Cathy and her team help retailers develop action plans that increase sales, improve cash flow, and create success…and love their life.

What is the story of how you got into the business that you're in right now?

My sister and I opened up our first store right out right out of college. And we were instantly successful. So you know, being young and ambitious, we decided, well, if one store was good two stores for sure is  better. We were already planning like the houses we were gonna buy, like our new cars. Oh, did I tell you that we lived in apartments? We didn’t have anything. And we're so glad to know, we were the geniuses we thought we were like we always suspected we were geniuses.

We opened up a second store within about a year of opening the first and yeah, that was when things changed. Things just changed and the economy changed. And right. We've all been so impacted by things out of our control like that. And the reality was, is that we were so close to bankruptcy. And the thing that was so shocking was that every single thing we had done that had worked before, not only was it not working for the new store, it wasn't working for the old store, either. And so what we discovered was that we did didn't know as much as we thought we did.

I would walk through the back door like today is going to be the day that turns everything around. And I discovered that planning to do the best you can, is actually a stupid plan. Because you have to have a strategy. All the passion I had for what we were doing didn't matter because I didn't have a strategy about it.

I decided that I really wanted to go after this dream one more time. And that's something I share with people all the time. Because you have to feel like you have a choice in it, you can't feel like you're trapped. Because if you feel like you're trapped, you can't make good decisions. And it's such an important process is to make the decision that you want to stay in what you're doing.

The biggest, the most powerful decision I made was to resource up as to hire a coach and get a different perspective on your business. Because I had made so many mistakes that I didn't even know were mistakes until I hired somebody else. When you're in the frame of the picture, when you're in the midst of it, you can't actually see the picture. The minute the coach looked at everything, and they said one super easy thing that frankly, I was so mad, like how did I not think of this? I mean, I'm doing all this research all this stuff, one easy thing. And it changed everything.

Fill us in on the psychology of numbers and knowing your numbers.

What we decided on a tagline for our business - retail mavens for more profit and better sleep. And it's, it's so interesting, because those are the two things that I hold near and dear to my heart that is that you have to have both. First of all, it's your mental health, you've got to protect your mental health. When your mindset is keeping you from the success that you need, because how your how you are mentally impacts how you are physically. So you have to take care of yourself physically, too, you've got to be moving every single day. Move your body, you change your mind, these two things are so inexpensive.

And what people don't realize is that financial health, the third thing, those three things are all just interwoven. And what happens to all of us people who are go getters who have dreams or visions, we just plow forward with that financial health. If you're not financially healthy, you can't be creative. It's like all you can focus on is how there's no money. So I can't think creatively about what to do and so then that then impacts your mental health which opens this cycle of going around and around.

What advice can you offer us today to help?

You have to just embrace the fact that done beats perfect, and to resource up and get help. There's four steps that I learned from Dave Ramsey's course, which just so helped me. These four steps were then the strategy. You Remember when I said that doing the best you can, is not a plan, you have to have a strategy. There's this great strategy from Dave Ramsey that I want to share. And then the other thing is recognizing that done beats perfect, and that you will screw up and not to beat yourself up for it.

Tip #1 - Save $1,000. How you do it is that you set it up so that a percentage of money that comes into your business, and I suggest you start at 1%, and have that pulled off and put into a fund.

Tip #2 – Start paying off your debt. I always thought that I had to pay off my debt first. So the beauty of having this thousand dollars is that the thousand dollars can cover most every crisis.

Tip #3 – Start saving for retirement.

Cathy’s Free Gift:

You don't have to be in retail to do it, you can still extrapolate it into anything. One of the things I tell all of our clients is that if you're having a sale mark the sale price in red ink. The truth is, our brain can see the same number, the same number in black, and in red. Our brains will think the red number smaller. This worksheet is filled with little tidbits like that, that makes such a big difference. And we have every client that we start working with almost always ends up going through and repricing what they do based on these numbers, and it makes a big difference.

Free Gift Link

How to connect with Cathy

Website: https://retailmavens.com/

 

“I discovered that planning to do the best you can, is actually a stupid plan. Because you have to have a strategy.” – Cathy Donovan Wagner