Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Did you get a chance to see me live last week? If not, here’s the “10 Minutes with Kate” show on Keeping Yourself Motivated. “10 Minutes” will appear on Wednesday evenings at 8pm Eastern on the TGtbT Facebook page.
The first video, Keeping overworked employees focused,  appeared in our private group, which (if you are indeed a motivated and overworked experienced shopkeeper LOl) you are welcome to join.

Here’s Keeping Yourself Motivated. (If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, the transcript is included below.)

Here’s the transcript.

Hi guys, it’s Kate Holmes of Too Good to be Threw and we’re going to take 10 minutes today to talk about a topic that you all voted on and you wanted to talk about about resale consignment and thrift shop keeping.

Just finished making pizza so you can see all the little red stuff on my shirt. We had homemade pizza tonight, which is a wonderful thing that I get to do that maybe you don’t get to do because you’re always in your store because you’re always in your store. It’s really, really difficult sometimes to stay motivated, to remember why you’re there, to do what you need to do with joy and enthusiasm so that your customers, your suppliers and your staff feel that they can have a good time too.

Being motivated is not something that you can outsource. It’s not something you can delegate to your staff. It’s not something that you can put on a to do list and do tomorrow. Alice Sevier reminded me today of something that Kate Spade said, that she and her husband counted one day and they had over 250 decisions to make in one working day and that can really eat away at anybody’s energies.

And you have the same amount of decisions to make, whether it’s to accept something, not to accept something, to price something at this price or that price, to talk to this customer or that customer, to answer the phone or answer the Internet thing. There’s so many things going on and it’s so difficult to keep up the energies that you really want to have in your store. It’s very, very easy of course to, to simply float, but you don’t want to float. You want to enjoy your store.

You want to thrive on it. You want the people who come into your store to thrive on your enthusiasm. So many shops that I see that fail, that go out of business, that close with or without notice to their public, have only closed due to a lack of enthusiasm, due to the owner not being able to maintain her enthusiasm. So it’s a very, very important thing to do, to stay motivated, to stay focused, to enjoy what you’re doing, rather than get witchy, uh, which we all have a tendency to do at times.

So let’s talk about a couple of ways that you can stay motivated from day to day. This is not, you know, high science. This is simply coping with our lives from moment to moment. And the first thing that I think you need to do when you are trying to stay motivated is to segment what it is that you’re doing everyday.

Those 250 decisions don’t all have to be made immediately. Segment what you need to do. Figure out what’s now, what’s later, what’s important, what’s not so important. And I want to introduce you tonight to… drum roll… two of the most important tools that you as a shopkeeper have to be able to segment your attention and to motivate yourself to keep going. And that tool is a clothes pin. Yup, a clothes pin. I would take a sticky note and I would write on it whatever I need to remember and I would clip it to myself and I was renowned for going to dinner at 8:00 that night with things still clipped to me. Nowadays you might not want to use a piece of paper and a, oh my gosh a pencil… a pen… how crude and a clothes pin. You might instead want to use the notes on your phone. Whatever you want to do.

The point is to take that thing that’s nagging at your brain and that’s interfering with what you’re trying to do today and that’s making you feel overwhelmed and make a note of it so you don’t forget it, but then put it aside and wait until you have time to deal with it. And I think you’ll find, I’m sure we all have on occasion found this… something that we wrote down that we thought was really, really important. It turns out not to be quite so important and you just saved another five minutes in your life.

By the way, if you follow my facebook page, my personal facebook page: I was mentioning last night that I had a note on my calendar about, uh, was uh, what was it? “MC?” on Monday morning pointing to Tuesday and “MC?” on Tuesday pointing towards Monday. I could not figure out for the life of me what it was that I was supposed to be remembering that started with an mc. Mastercard? That was one of the examples I did finally figure it out, but it was mailchimp. Uh, I do have changed my mailchimp email server. So if you want to be on my email list, be sure to get to TGtbT.com, click, stroke, punch, press, whatever one does to a big red button there and join our email list from there. But anyway, that was MC and that wasn’t an example of something that I needed to remember, but it didn’t need to nag at me so I could stay motivated with what I was doing.

The second thing that will help you stay motivated is to ditch the watch. Now I’m talking metaphorically. Now of course nobody wears a watch anymore. Um, but forget the time pressures. Most of the deadlines that you put on yourself are strictly self-imposed. You do not have to answer that email immediately. I was doing that while I was trying to write this, an outline for this group. I was trying to answer an email from a stranger, you know, that asked me something out of the blue. He could wait until tomorrow morning. It wasn’t anything that needed to, to interfere with my connection with my business, with my motivation for what I was doing. Ditch the watch.

What can I say about that? I can say that all of us are overachievers that we’re entrepreneurs and that we exhibit perhaps the worst qualities of an entrepreneur in that we feel like everything needs to be done to perfection and right this minute and that is not necessarily true.

And “to perfection” is the next point that I want to bring up and it’s one that Colleen talked about yesterday in our Kate and Colleen show. When you are doing something new, when you are doing something that requires a lot of attention such as managing your social media, you don’t need to do it all at once. You can ease into it just like going into cold water at the ocean. You don’t need to jump in like the 15 year old boys do. You can wade in and you can get up to your knees, then you can get up to your thighs. Then you can start splashing water on your back to get used to what it is you’re doing.

Better to not overwhelm yourself and to maintain your motivation than to start something and end up not doing it well. We talked yesterday in Kate and Colleen, about how many blogs, consignment and resale and thrift shop keepers have started and then abandoned, how many instagrams sit there with nothing going on. I’ve even seen facebook pages now that are almost totally abandoned. If you’re going to do something, take it a step at a time. Stay motivated, stay enthusiastic about communicating and social media. Stay enthusiastic about helping your customers on your sales floor. Stay enthusiastic about the piles of merchandise that come in your door day after day during the busy season.

So important to do the next thing on my list and the next thing on my list about staying motivated is to celebrate the small victories that you have.

Celebrate that the intake rack for once in its life is empty and ready to be filled up again with your people. Tonight, we have one of our watchers, Dee is gone out to celebrate, so I’m sure she’s not watching us right now. She’s gone out to have a couple of Amaretto sours and a cheeseburger. And what she’s celebrating is the fact that she’s been in business now seven months and she’s finally broken even, no debt, broken even. Is that pretty cool? That is a wonderful thing to celebrate. Pat yourself on the back. Keep yourself motivated by saying, Hey, I am making headway today. If you feel like you’re not making headway, if it’s just things are just getting overwhelming and you’re about ready to ditch it, to sit down and cry and complain to your family, do what I do. I have a bucket list. This is really not a bucket list of my life. This is a to do bucket list and when I feel like I’m doing too much, that I’m spending too much time on work and not enough time on life, I pick something out of this wine glass like that and I do it. What is this?

Okay, today’s message. Let me see if I can show it to you. Says write a third storytelling story. A lot of you may not know that I’m also a storyteller in addition to, uh, your fearless leader, the Resale Guru, the consignment consultant, I also write stories for storytelling. That’s where you sit down and you tell people a story and you amuse them, you tell them a tale with a moral usually, and I’ve written a couple of them that I really, really enjoy and I want to write a third one. My third storytelling story is going to be about an armadillo and her babies. So every time that I feel like I’m fighting against the incoming tide of information and work and tasks, things that I need to do in my job, I pick something out of the glass and I do it. So tonight is Wednesday night at 10 at 8:15, 8:30, and I’m going to go off right now and write a story about the armadillo.

And just so you have something to tell your family when you get off the internet tonight. Armadilloes is always have four babies. They are always identical quads. So that’s the basis of my story tonight and I thank you for tuning in to Too Good to be Threw tonight. We’re talking about motivating oneself and keeping enthusiastic about our stores. I hope you have enjoyed it. I hope you all talk about it. I will read the comments and answer them when I get a chance and I hope sincerely to be able to see you in person at NARTS conference, which will be literally just two weeks from tonight. I’ll arrive and maybe you arrive the next day. Don’t forget the Too Good to be Threw meetup in the lobby bar at 6:00 PM on Thursday. We’re going to meet there, going to buy each other a drink or so, say hello. Then we’re going to go on to the first event of NARTS conference, which will be in a getting to know you event at 8pm in the hotel. The theme of the Too Good to be Threw meetup is stars, so wear or carry something with stars because you are resale star. Thanks so much. Have a good evening.