The garden has been struggling this year. I'm not sure if it's from:
- the weather
- my skills
- the soil
Regardless of the cause, there's not much I can do in the short-term.
- Weather is uncontrollable.
- I can learn and practice new skills, but that's a long-term improvement.
- Improving the soil will take at least a few months for a short-term improvement. Real, notable improvement will take years.
This means I need to adjust down my expectations. Yields will be lower than I hoped, some plants won't produce at all, and some days might feel like a waste of time.
But if I continue to improve where I can, in the long-term things will start to work out. That's the underlying principle of continuous improvement (aka Kaizen).
When you're tracking your store's performance you'll quickly find a few metrics that are doing poorly. No matter what you do in the short-term, they don't seem to budge.
These require a similar approach:
Continue investing in improvements but don't expect big changes in the short-term.
Use whatever advice you can, like the insights in Repeat Customer Insights.
Stack of win after win, no matter how tiny. Be happy with a 1% or even a 0.1% improvement. Build up improvements year after year and eventually in the future, you'll be paid back.
Eric Davis
Learn what your customers are actually doing instead of just guessing
One of the best ways to build a sustainable business starts by getting your customers to come back. Mastering that simple process can be difficult, but builds a lifelong business.
Repeat Customer Insights can help you understand your customer's behavior. With its collection of behavior reports, you can see what they're actually doing instead of guessing and having your efforts fall flat.