Ever wondered why your sales are stuck in first gear – and what you can actually do to shift them?

I'm Catherine Erdly and this episode of the Resilient Retail Game Plan drills into three mistakes I see again and again with small product businesses. If you’re posting on Instagram, trying in-person markets, running the odd promotion yet still seeing stubbornly flat sales month after month, you’re not alone. I draw on 25 years in retail, from big business stockrooms to indie brands, to break down what’s really holding back your growth – and what needs to change if you want momentum, not just busy work.

Why listen?

• Diagnose the hidden traps behind sales plateaus – and get clarity on what to fix first
• Craft a retail planning mindset that supports creative not cookie-cutter growth
• Pinpoint how to build a product strategy rooted in data (not guesswork or feast/famine launches)
• Sift fact from feeling so your decisions support cash flow for retailers
• Walk away with indie retailer tips to create your own resilient retail game plan

Let’s turn product business advice into action: DM me your thoughts or episode ideas on Instagram @resilientretailclub. If you’re finding the retail podcast UK series useful, hit follow and leave a rating – it’s the best way to help more makers and shop owners discover the Resilient Retail Club podcast.

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In today's episode, we're going to walk you through three mistakes that keep small product

businesses stuck and how to avoid them so you can finally start building

real momentum. If you feel like your sales are stuck

in first gear, then this episode is for you.

Maybe you're showing up on Instagram, perhaps you're boosting posts

sporadically, perhaps running the promotion, maybe you're

going to events or in person markets. But when you look at your

revenue, it's still seems like you're pretty much always stuck in the

same place, somewhere between 1 to 3k a month.

And it's frustrating, isn't it? You're working really hard, yet the numbers

just aren't moving. And at that point, it's easy to start questioning

yourself, is this business ever going to grow? So if

you're in this zone, then this is the

episode for you. We're going to be talking about

the reasons that people get stuck here and how you can

fix them. Because here's the thing, being stuck at this level isn't a sign that

you're failing. It's not a sign that nobody wants your products or the business was

a terrible idea. More often than not, it's because of three common

mistakes. And the good news is these are things that you can

fix. So the first mistake that I see people making is

that they don't have a clear plan. Often when I talk to people

about their business, I will ask them, do you have a plan? Do you have

a sales plan? Do you have a marketing plan? Do you have a plan for

launching new products? Do you have a plan for what you're going to

talk about when. And usually the answer is no. A lot of

people don't have a clear plan mapped

out because they're often going from one thing to the next.

They are bouncing, they're being very reactive. Maybe an

opportunity comes up, so they're answering that, or something else is coming up, so

they're answering that and back. Basically, they

are letting themselves be kind of bounced around like a ball.

Whereas my background in retail, I've been in the business

for 25 years. What I've learned is that the big guys spending

nearly two decades in bigger retailers is that everything is

planned out Now. A lot of people

feel like planning is tough, is difficult,

or not even so much that they feel it's difficult, but more that they feel

like it's restrictive. Maybe you started a business because you're wanting to be creative,

you wanted to express your creativity, and it feels like planning is the opposite

of being creative. But I'm a really big believer that planning

and creativity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they very

much feed in to one another. Once you've got a structure

and a framework and a plan around you, you can actually be more

creative because you know what you need to do and you just come up with

the ideas for it, as opposed to feeling lost and feeling like

you're kind of just being bounced around from pillar to post.

So what I see with a lot of people is that they rely on ad

hoc posting spur of the moment ideas. So they'll sit there on

a Monday and think, right, I really should post something this week. And they don't

really know what to say. They don't have a coordination between their product

strategy and their marketing strategy. And I think for me

that's one of the biggest missed opportunities. Because the thing about retail

is that it varies a lot throughout the year. It's very, very

seasonal. So what your customer wants from you and the kind of

messages that work with them in the summer are going to be very different from

the messages that work with them at Christmas time, or in fact

in January or February. So there's a lot of shift and change

throughout the year. There's lots of nuance to what

people want from you in certain seasons, and there's lots of

different themes and ideas and opportunities to talk about things that are different

month on month. So, for example, very broadly,

what you're going to talk about in February, if you are a jewelry brand,

is going to be centered around Valentine's Day. And what you talk about in March

is going to be sent could be centered around Mother's Day, for example. So those

are just two very basic examples of how what you want to

talk about is going to vary throughout the year. And if you don't

have that all mapped out, it can feel quite overwhelming. Like I

said, it can feel like you're a ping pong ball being bounced around thinking, oh,

I should be doing something, maybe I should say something about Valentine's Day, oh, maybe

I should say something about Mother's Day. And the

upside is that although it does change a lot and it shifts week on week,

and arguably that's what makes it so exciting, it stays

the same year on year. So once you've cracked

that seasonal element to your business, once you've really delved in and understood

what your year looks like, and obviously it will shift, one year is

not going to be the same as another year. But broadly speaking, there are going

to be themes and ideas that work year on

year, once you've got that, you can repeat it. It is

repeatable. The benefit of retail, of

product businesses over service businesses is that predictability

and that repeatability, that opportunity

to scale and grow because you've figured out a system

and then you're repeating it. So,

for example, if you don't have a plan,

you are going to potentially miss some major opportunities

to connect with your customers because you're not going to be zoomed out and

looking at that big picture. For example, I was talking

to a men's gifting brand and this was in May, and

I asked them about Father's Day and it wasn't something that they'd considered.

Now, if you're a menswear, arguably you have

or a male focused brand, arguably you have fewer

opportunities or not such big seasonal opportunities because,

for example, Valentine's Day tends to be more heavily skewed,

broadly speaking, towards female gifting. And obviously Mother's

Day is different. It's not going to work for you if you're a male

orientated brand. However, if you miss

Father's Day because you just didn't look at the year in a

zoomed out way, then that is a major opportunity that you've missed.

And I see it every single year at Christmas. Every single

year, I speak to people in November. I ask them all the way up to

November, even into December, I'd ask them about their plans for Christmas

and they kind of say, oh yeah, I suppose I should come up with something.

Well, this is the thing. You can eliminate so

much of the last minute aspect of retail. You can plan

it. You know, big retailers are planning 18 months in advance, two

years in advance. Now, arguably, yes, that is the extreme version

and it can lead them to be a little less reactive than they would like

to be and a little more constrained. But the you can

plan in advance and the more you plan in advance, the more you're

able to roll with the punches when something unexpected does happen.

If you've done lots of prep in advance, then you

are able to deal with that without it completely derailing

everything. And then the other reason that I

feel that not having a plan is really difficult is because

if you think about all of the different ways to grow your sales. So

for example, episode 264 of the podcast was about four

ways to grow your sales. Without a plan, you can't really ensure that you are

tackling all those four ways consistently and

you can't create a really nicely aligned, up

aligned plan across all of your channels. If

you and all of your marketing channels, all of your selling channels, and all of

your marketing channels if you don't get it mapped out. Okay, so mistake

number two is not having a product strategy.

So in a similar way that people often will tell me they don't have a

plan for their marketing, I would say that

another common issue is that they don't really have a plan for their products.

So I'll ask them, do you have a plan for what you introduce when?

And the answer is usually no. And I'll ask

them, do you know what your best sellers are? That's not always a given. Either

some people aren't really sure or they think they know, but they haven't actually checked.

And the reason that I think this holds people back

is because all of retail, all of

business, I guess, could be boiled down to do more of what works

and do less of what doesn't work. And so if you don't have a plan

for your products, then you are

unable to really maximize

the data that you've got. And yes, if your sales are lower, you might not

have a huge amount of data. But especially if you look at it on a

monthly basis, look at what your best sellers are, you need to understand

what is moving the needle, what people are reacting to and what they're

not reacting to. And I would say that in this first bit of

the business, when you are at that kind of 1 to 3K, you need to

be figuring out what your customer wants from you. So you need to be

figuring out what they're reacting to, what is selling.

And if nothing is selling, if nothing's working, then you need

to go back to the drawing board on a repeated basis,

checking in with your customers, what do they want from you. Trialing things in as

low a risk as possible to try new things to move

on. But you need to try things and learn from them. It's not about

just scattergunning, bringing in lots and lots of different new things. It's about

creating a hypothesis, checking it. Is that what they want? Let's

try something else. Let's tweak it. Let's tweak what the product offer

is. Let's tweak how I'm talking about it, how

I'm talking about the benefits to the customer versus

the features, all of those things. You want to test that over again, see

what the result is, and then move on from there.

So bestsellers, understanding your bestsellers are really, really important.

They, they help give you confidence and they help you really understand what you should

be focusing on in Your marketing, that's another issue that I

see people having is that they think that, oh, well, if something's selling, I

don't need to be shouting about it. Whereas actually you often get much more traction

by really shouting about your best sellers. Because this is all a game of

probability. You want to really focus on what your customer is

most likely to purchase from you, and that may well be

the thing that you sell the most off. So you want to focus on that

and you want to lean into it.

So if you don't really look at your products and really understand

what they're telling you, then you're going to miss some really important clues,

really important green shoots if you like, to help move you

forward. And then the other thing is

that if you don't have a really considered plan for your products,

it feeds back into my first point about no clear plan overall for the

business. Because really your marketing plan and your product

plan are very, very closely intertwined. Because

if you go through and you look at your year and you understand, right, these

are going to be my peak selling times, well, then you want to coordinate your

products. If you're going to bring new products in, make sure that the

products are coming in at the right time, seasonally speaking, making

sure that they are the right products for the right time. And you really want

the whole thing to be tied up together. But if you, you don't have a

plan for your marketing and you don't have a plan for your product, then what

you're left with is two very disjointed activities that

are really time consuming. Marketing's really time consuming. Product development

or product making new products or sourcing new products is hugely time

intensive as well. And if you're not doing it in a coordinated fashion, it can

end up getting very, very messy. And then

the third mistake that I see people make that really holds

them back is related to this idea of

knowing what's working. But if you don't have a

plan and you're doing everything in a very reactive way,

then the other thing is that you don't really

have a good idea of what you're doing, what's

working, and what you need to lean into in the same way that we talked

about for your products. That goes for everything that you're doing in terms of your

sales channels and your marketing as well. So sales

start to feel sporadic. You have good days and bad days with no clear

explanation. Now, here's something else that I would say to you as well.

One of the things that is particularly True, especially at this early stage, is

that everything feels really, really personal. So lots of

people I know will say that I just feel,

on a quiet day, it completely wipes my confidence.

And I totally get that because nobody tells you when you start a business

how nerve wracking it is to create or curate things that you

feel really strongly about, to put them out in front of other people and

to say to them, hey, buy this from me. It

can feel incredibly challenging, incredibly

triggering for a lot of people, and it can feel just

really, really difficult if you're not getting the response that you

want. So what happens is when you're not really

closely tracking your numbers and you're not really closely tracking

your actions, it feels,

it can feel very sporadic. So one week things will do great and the

next week things will go really quiet.

And you can feel, therefore a lot of.

There's a, it's a real roller coaster for a lot of founders. They feel very

personally upset when things are quiet. They say

to themselves, oh, I must be really bad at this. People really hate what I

do. This is such a bad idea. Everyone thinks it's a joke, what I'm doing,

all of those things. And it just really feeds

into this cycle of not having a plan and not having a structure because

it doesn't feel, you don't feel like you have the right to

have a plan, or it doesn't feel like this is something that

you should do, because this is. You're maybe not

giving having enough confidence in the business to say, right, no, this is what I'm

planning to do. Because the nervousness I see from a lot of people is that

they feel like, well, if I make a plan and I don't hit it, am

I going to feel even worse? Whereas what we're really talking about here is

not so much, oh, you can only have a plan if things are going

well. But we want to try and shift as much as possible

from a subjective point of view to an objective point of view.

And this is the benefit that I have from my long years of experience

in the retail industry and two decades in big retailers,

is that they have to be completely objective.

And what I mean by being objective is that that they

really put a plan in place and then

every week they're looking at the plan and they're seeing whether or not

they've hit it on what they need to do to adjust it. So it's about

a process. And obviously in big retailers

there is much less room for people to be so caught up in

that kind of personal, oh, I failed or I've done something wrong. I mean,

obviously everyone has personal feelings and people have

selected products that haven't worked and that can feel really difficult too. But

ultimately what it's about is the setting a goal, setting a plan

in place and then reacting to it. And that's what I'm talking about

when we're thinking about being more objective than being

subjective. And what can happen if you get too

caught up into the emotion of it? You start making

knee jerk reactions. So, for example, you launch

something it hasn't sold, you think, oh, maybe I should take some money off it,

discount it, instead of thinking, right, okay, did I do

enough promotion? It's almost like we get these negative feelings and

we want to just do something to try and alleviate them rather than actually looking

into it and saying, right, what was the actual plan? So

it's, it's also something that I would really stress that

the benefit of having that plan is that retail

fluctuates a huge amount. It fluctuates a lot, month to month.

But as I've mentioned before, it's on an

annual cycle. It does repeat. So learning things like when

you're going to be quiet can really help with that confidence building and

really help you understand when you're going to naturally

be quieter and then get to helping you get ready for the busiest times

as well. So if you set yourself a

plan, then yes, of course you may have weeks and months where

you don't hit it. But it's still better to have that plan in place

than for you to be so caught up in the emotional

side of it that you really end up

almost beating yourself up if things aren't going so well as instead of

thinking, right, what do I need to do now? What can I try next?

So what I would suggest that you do is take the

time to set those goals and make some time

to, Even if it's 10 minutes a week to really look at, right, how am

I doing? How am I selling? How am I

doing compared to my plan? What's working, what's not working? And

which of my sales channels are really are performing for me.

And it, I totally understand why people don't

do this because it can feel very upsetting if you look at something

and you think, wow, actually I'm not really selling that much or this is not

what I thought it would be. But I really do believe

that there's a lot of power that comes from really

knowing the truth of your situation. Whenever I've had

times in my Business where I've stuck my head in the sand and not really

addressed what's going on. I've always felt so much better

when I've taken the time to sit down and really go through things and get

an actual accurate picture. And also, I can't tell you the number

of times that people will have sit down and run their numbers and

actually they're better than they thought they were. In fact, somebody

in the club mentioned that they had always thought to

themselves that they would feel like they'd done well when they hit a certain

revenue number. And it turns out because they'd been not

looking at these things, they were feeling stuck and in denial. They hadn't

looked at their numbers and they'd actually hit the revenue number that they'd been aiming

for. But they hadn't realized it because they hadn't looked, they hadn't engaged because

they caught up in these feelings of insecurity and

just not feeling like they, they wanted to engage with the numbers because

they were scared of what they might show them. So if you're stuck

then around that 1-3k month,

1-3k of sales a month level, then it's probably not because you're doing

anything wrong. It's because of

these particular mistakes that I see people

make. Those are things like, for example, not having a

clear plan, not having a product strategy, not having visibility of what's

working and all of those things that keep you on a

sales plateau. So the good news is, is that every single one of them is

fixable. You can definitely take the time to work

your way through and. And maybe it's sitting down and

sketching out a seasonal plan. Maybe it's identifying your bestsellers,

maybe it's starting a sales check in with yourself. But

whatever you choose, make that one small step towards helping move you

past that plateau. And if you'd like some more support with this,

then we have the retail sales game plan. The doors are open

for this course. It is the first time I'm running this course. I'm really

excited about it. We are going to look at everything that you need to

put some plans into place, some structure, some

strategy and help you really get a grip on with how to grow your product

business. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next

week.