When I'm traveling, I always make a point of visiting local retailers, not only to observe new retail concepts, but also to see different merchandising ideas and products (and to shop, of course!). On the the island of Oahu, Waikiki Beach is known for its shopping—in addition to the fabulous beaches. The shops are open an average of fourteen hours a day (imagine how much the retailers spend for staffing!), but it's well worth it because tourists spend at least $10 billion shopping every year in Hawaii.

There is a little shopping area called the International Marketplace that I enjoyed visiting. The interesting thing about the cart program is that of the 40 or so vendors, about 30 of them sell the exact same thing! It proves that with the right location, right products and right staffing you can still be successful, regardless of competition.

One of my biggest challenges in business used to be delegation. Now you might think it was a control issue, but it wasn't. It was more that I thought the best way of achieving great leadership was through the old management principle of leading by example (i.e., participating in doing the work). And while I do still feel that pitching in to do some of the work can be a sign of good leadership, I have come to understand that a CEO's job is more to direct, encourage and support the team doing the work.

I recently read a business book on leadership and saw a wonderful quote by Lao Tzu, the Father of Taoism, which perfectly summed up the sign of a great leader, "When the best leader's work is done, the people say 'we did it ourselves.'"

What characteristics do you think define great leadership?

Would you pay a new employee $1,000 to quit? Zappos does and it works!

In a recent blog post on Harvard Business School's website Bill Taylor writes about an innovative online shoe retailer, Zappos. (They have four million shoes for customers to choose from and expect to do $1 billion in sales this year.) What makes this company interesting is not only their product selection, but also that they have built their company on providing outstanding customer service.

In order to ensure their that their 1600 employees follow through on the company's credo of service, each new hire undergoes a rigorous training program and is given a tempting offer of $1,000 to quit after the first month. Taylor says,

"When Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company's strategy, culture and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period. After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it's time for what Zappos calls 'The Offer.' The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: 'If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you've worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.' Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!"

According to Taylor, about 10 percent actually take the cash. However, it enables Zappos to determine if the new hire has the sense of commitment they are looking for in an employee. Since its inception, the CEO has raised the quit-now bonus from $100 to $1,000, and it may go higher as the company grows.

Taylor ends his post with the following,

"If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people. How are you making sure that you're filling your organization with the right people? And how much are you willing to pay to find out?"

Two thought-provoking questions every business owner should consider.

I just returned home from the gift shows in San Francisco and New York, and my show bags are bursting at the seams with fun products to showcase. The shows were fantastic and I'm looking forward to sharing products from both of them starting tomorrow.

Today, I want to respond to an email I received from an entrepreneur who is opening her first cart, and asked for a few suggestions on how to get started.

I believe there are five essential components to opening your first cart or kiosk  (check out my book for more details on each point).

1. Find the right product(s). I always recommend deciding on what products you're going to sell first, as this will impact several other decisions (such as location). I also tend to get asked, "How should I select the right products to sell," and while there are many wonderful products that can be sold from a cart, I suggest you sell one that you can relate to and that you like.

Don't be afraid to do a little market testing of the product you're considering. If, for example, you're planning on selling make-up geared to teens, ask people in that age group what they think of the product line and packaging. Some other questions you might want to consider asking the wholesalers, or companies that you'll be buying from, include:  how quickly can you ship the products from the time I place my first order and how long will re-orders take to receive, do you extend payment terms, how long have you been in business and do you have any references.

Lastly, as a cart retailer, it's particularly important to ensure you choose a product that has more than a one-time mark-up.

2. Find the right location. The key to finding the right location starts with identifying your target buyer. Most malls can provide demographic data (just ask!) so you can get an understanding of the type of buyer the mall attracts. If you're planning on selling a high-end product (such as $100 plush robes), you should think about a location with the following criteria:  high-end department stores, an average shopper income of more than $50,000 and sales per square foot of more than $400.

I highly recommend you plan several trips to the mall to observe the location during different hours and days (weekend versus weekday traffic). And don't forget to ask current cart retailers about mall traffic, where they think the best location is in the mall and what products they think tend to sell best.

3. Write a mini business plan. Not only will writing a mini business plan help you get an understanding of the money you'll need to get your venture going, it will also be helpful if you need to turn to the bank for a loan. Plus, you'll be setting goals for revenue and guidelines for expenses. And it helps you set a timeline and think through all aspects of planning for running your new business.

4. Create a retail look. I can't emphasize enough how important visual merchandising is to the success of your cart or kiosk. I've seen retailers increase sales by as much as 50% when they re-designed their cart with strong visuals. Many malls will ask you for a merchandising plan before you set-up, and it's an important element during your initial planning phase and for the long-term success of your business. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen cart retailers make is to fail to utilize the vertical space in the cart, and too little (or too much) inventory displayed.

I suggest working with a visual merchandiser to help you maximize your display and create the strongest visual impact.

5. Hire the best employees. Hiring the best employees is the final step to ensure the success of your retail business. Here's a common sense principle that I encourage you to repeat as your mantra, "Dynamite employees generate amazing sales and mediocre employees generate average sales." And I suggest you conduct at least two interviews before making a hiring decision. I've found that paying a base salary plus commission is the key to motivating your employees to peak performance.

When I was 22, on the cusp of my publishing career, I met a businessman who over the years became a good friend and mentor.

I admired him not only because he built a successful business (it grossed $20 million the year we met), but also for his charisma and passion. And he was always willing to offer advice to help a budding entrepreneur. He made it his mission to help as many people as possible.

I received word today that he passed away.

Now, 12 years later, as I reflect on what he taught me, I feel so lucky that we met.

And so, three really important things I learned:

1. Whatever you want to achieve in life is possible.
   It was very similar to Walt Disney's philosophy, "If you dream it, you can do it." He believed that all you need is the vision, and once you set your goal, you can figure out how to make it happen.

2. Surround yourself with ethical people.
   Not only on a personal level, but also in business. This might seem like common sense, but early on in my business career, I found myself faced with a opportunity that was not the best deal. It was tempting based on size ($100,000, which at the time represented a lot of money), but the client was unethical and demanding unreasonable terms. (In particular, if I worked with him, I couldn't work with any of his competitors.) I took my mentor's advice and turned him down. In hindsight, it was one of the best business decisions I have ever made. 

3. Track sales vigilantly.
   He believed in posting big charts and graphs depicting sales on the walls so the whole team could see not only where sales are for the day, but where they are compared to last year's sales for that day, that month and the year.

Lessons to live by.

I love the start of a new year. It's the perfect time to look back on the last one and reflect on what worked and what didn't… and a great time to plan for what's ahead.

Yesterday, on our new forum, a retailer posed a question inquiring what tools other retailers use (wall calendar, day planner, etc.) to plan for the year. Personally, I love posting a large wall calendar so I get a big picture view of upcoming trade shows, deadlines, etc.

Last year I attended a seminar given by a very successful CEO. He recommends that CEOs spend at least 80% of their time thinking strategically about their company. While it may be difficult to spend that much time all year long, I encourage you to take the time in January to think about new strategies for the year ahead, such as store promotions, website plans, new marketing ideas and creative new visual merchandising ideas.

Maybe you can even map some of them out on a big wall calendar.

I had the most amazing shopping experience this weekend. I was at Trader Joe's, a small gourmet grocery store with discount prices (for those of you who haven't heard of it before), and they were out of my favorite protein bar. I asked an employee if she knew when they'd get more in and she suggested that I speak to the store manager, who then went out of his way to order them. And this wasn't a fluke. Every time I go into Trader Joe's all of the employees are enthusiastic and excited to help the customers.

What does this mean to you as a cart, kiosk or gift store owner? You need to start out hiring talented sales people who are capable of delivering fantastic service. Then, as owner, you need to continually reinforce (at least weekly, if not daily) why it's so important to deliver impeccable service. When you set the bar high for your employees it gives them something to strive for, your customers will have an amazing shopping experience and you'll sell more in the end.

Over the years, a lot of retailers have asked me what my thoughts are on how to best motivate their sales team. Personally, I've always been a fan of utilizing rewards to encourage the team (or an individual) to reach a particular goal. Godiva, a nationally-known chocolatier, put together a very creative contest recently. They were offering their store manager, and the store's top performing employee, an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii for a week if the store hit a specific sales goal during the eight week holiday season. And you better believe that store manager was motivated to sell like crazy and to think of ways to encourage the team to do the same.

There are lots of effective contests, such as a pizza party at the end of the month, or a store gift certificate for beating last year's monthly sales. Back when I worked as a store manager at Casual Corner, they used to hold an annual dress sale during the summer and sales associates were paid $5 per dress sold (normally commission was not part of the compensation package). It was a great incentive to encourage friends to come in, and to establish a great rapport with customers.

Since the summer months tend to be a little slower for most retailers, I challenge you to think of a fun employee contest and roll it out for the month of July. Let me know what you decide to try and how it works.

Back in December I came across a blog for a young entrepreneur who had decided to start her first business… and it wasn't an ordinary start-up story. As part of an entrepreneurship business class, Carolynn Duncan opened a cart in her local mall with a budget of just $100 (for a 30-day trial period).

I was impressed by her tenacity to start a business on such a shoestring budget, and with her ability to actually convince her local mall to work with her (she had a bit of luck as well… it turns out a retail merchant needed to vacate the space during the holiday season, so the mall decided it was better to fill the opening than to have it sit unoccupied for the remaining time). We were so intrigued by her story, we covered it in an article in the spring 2007 issue of Specialty Retail Report and invited her to speak at SPREE West.

I managed to snag some time to sit down and chat with her there and one of the questions I asked is what she might do differently the next time she starts a business. She told me that she plans on doing a lot more research and creating a (mini) business plan (that would include a budget to make sure the numbers work). It turns out that she had just "jumped in" and had completely skipped the planning phase of the business altogether!

I know as a business owner (and as a person who loves to execute things and leave the planning to others) it's easy to skip the planning and just get going. I have also seen the reverse in business, people who spend five years writing a business plan only to find out they really can't sell anything when they get around to trying. It is truly a delicate balance of the two: planning and execution.

What do you like to do better—plan or execute? Has it helped or hurt your business?

Rachelle Anderson, Carolynn Duncan and me at SPREE West in San Jose

Today's guest post is from Allisyn Deyo, Webmaster and editor for the Pinnacle Publishing Group.

One of my first jobs (and second, and third, and fifth) was working in the specialty coffee industry. I worked for a large corporation out of Seattle (not that one.. a smaller, but direct competitor) that was intent on having their employees be the most well-educated employees in the coffee industry, and as such, I had several days of training at our corporate headquarters.

While I learned how to pull shots, steam milk and sell espresso machines, they never taught me what to do if money was missing from the till, or if I caught a shoplifter. Granted, our shops didn't sell a ton of products, but we definitely sold high-end merchandise ($699 espresso machine anyone?) and of the four locations I worked in over three years, two of them weren't in the choicest areas of town.

By the time I left that job, I'd held management positions for two years, hired and fired numerous employees and dealt with three shoplifting incidents… one that involved firing an employee.

At the time it happened, I still hadn't received any formal training (or literature, for that matter) on how we dealt with shoplifters, but the one previous experience was with a couple of teenagers, and I had used an age-old method I learned from my mom—I put the fear of god into them. In other words, I called a beat cop (who worked our area and regularly got coffee from us) and he came in and verbally thrashed them, all the while threatening to call their parents. In the end, the tears were enough for me to not "tell on them." They came into the shop a time or two after that, and while we were all on high alert, I never had a problem again.

The employee theft shook me the most. It was someone older than I who had worked with the company for a long time, and I had just been placed in charge of her store. (I had a great manager when I first started, and because of her, I became a "fixer" manager, who went into stores that were problems and helped get them up to speed.) We fired her (one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life), hired some new blood and the store turned around quite nicely.

There's an article today in the Bradenton Herald about how much retail crime costs stores per year ($30 billion), and reading through it, I realized they didn't mention employee training to prevent the thefts. Oh they discussed security cameras, and locking high-ticket items behind the counter, but this article never mentioned how employers could teach their employees how to spot a shoplifter.

My question is this: do employers nowadays (my coffee job was almost a decade ago) teach their employees how to spot a thief? Do they tell them who to call if they do see one? Or is most of the teaching about how to be friendly and sell?

Don't get me wrong, it's important to sell well and lord knows I hate when someone follows me around a store, but I wasn't trained and part of me wonders are employers really doing all they can to train their employees to stop theft?