Year-End Review

This week has been dedicated to getting my business taxes wrapped up and out the door. I always forget how much time and energy that takes...and I have an accountant do it! It did give me a chance to dig into the numbers a little bit more though and figure out what went right and what went wrong last year. I already had a good idea of where things stood but it was great to see it backed up by some solid figures. In a nutshell, sales increased by 1% and costs were down 27% so we're getting there. Slowly...but getting there.

After a closer look it was evident that sales to boutiques was down about 28% and given that the majority of my marketing budget is dedicated to those sales it really showed me that I need to better reallocate those funds into channels that will net a higher ROI. I have that one BIG customer who has been wonderful and one dropship relationship that panned out far better then I anticipated this year. So my goal is to focus on trying to get another "bigger" (not as big - 13 stores in my state) customer and another dropship relationship.

Since the funds spent on getting boutique business didn't work as I had hoped - though not altogether surprising given the economy - I want to work on cutting expenses by another 27% in 2010. In some instances this will be easy - for example, I'm cutting one of the Fall tradeshows this year and that's a big chunk of my marketing budget, but others are going to be tougher like trying to keep a tighter reign on those random office expenses. Something about OfficeMax just makes me want to spend money!

All in all 1% increase in sales was not what I was hoping for in 2009, but given the state of the economy I also have to realize that simply staying alive in 2009 is a huge coup. My personal opinion is that this is going to be a slow slow slow recovery so I think my key to staying alive in 2010 and beyond is to keep a really tight hold on costs. Cause at the end of the day it's all about cash flow!