OPINION: The retail lessons you can learn from a girl scout

Terri Sjodin, the author of Scrappy, recalls her mid-1970s American childhood and in particular the rites of passage as a girl scout selling cookies.

The process was daunting. The young girl had to canvass her neighbourhood, walking door-to-door with an order form in hand. After taking orders, the girl had to wait weeks for the cookies to arrive, and when they did she had to sort them, deliver them and collect the money.

It didn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes people were not at home. Sometimes they changed their minds. Sometimes they wanted to order more.

So Sjodin was amazed to hear about her 21st century successor Danielle Lei, who “simply blew the curve by forgoing the traditional sales approach and focused on a specific market with a proven fondness for…cookies.” Setting up outside a shop selling cannabis Lei sold 117 boxes in two hours.

In addition she solved all the big challenges of door-to-door selling and delivery. This was a scrappy solution in Sjodin’s language, which is the ability to work harder and smarter when you need to to get a result.

Independent retail owners can easily transfer the many examples Sjodin shares to their own worlds

“There is something that happens the moment you truly decide to play big that makes the difference,” writes Sjodin.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, I’m fine. Things could always be worse.’ That’s when I think of my friend Pam Jett, who once said to me, ‘Just because things could be worse doesn’t mean you don’t deserve better.’ Truth is truth.”

Her book Scrappy attempts to show the process that successful people use to deliver results. “Before taking action, their scrappy perspectives and mindset allowed them to view the obstacles in their path with curiosity and confidence rather than fear and defeat.

The book examines how you choose to play big in three sections, focusing on attitude, strategy and execution. Independent retail owners can easily transfer the many examples Sjodin shares to their own worlds.

Like the average girl scout in America, most local shopkeepers tend to follow the playbook and do what everyone else does. Stephen Shapiro, an expert in innovation, explains that “doing things differently, even if it seems like an improvement is risky. Perpetuating past behaviours from the brain’s…perspective, is the safest way. That is why innovation is difficult for most individuals…”.

Thus, in the chapter Deciding to Go Changes the Game, Sjodin provides the rationale for writing the book and for reading the book. If you don’t pick yourself, then why should someone else pick you!

Once you have made the decision to make your shop the number one in your community, for example, you then need to work out your strategy.

Scrappy suggests you map out a small thing, a medium thing and a big thing that you can do. At the end of each chapter there is a list of key points to remember and action plans to follow.

However, note that three out of five projects fail. Sjodin devotes a whole chapter to discussing failure, such as the story of a 15 year old who persuaded his parents to mortgage their home to pay for the $300,000 development costs of his invention. Appearing on the US version of Dragons’ Den, all was going well until the mortgage came up and the investors all said they were out.

The boy and his parents were in shock because they calculated their belief in the product would encourage the Dragons rather than put them off. (He bounced back and gained listings at major retailers, so there is a happy ending.)