Ever wish a retail expert would walk into your stockroom, pull up your numbers, and just tell you exactly what to do?

Hi, I'm Catherine Erdly.

This week on the Resilient Retail Game Plan, I’m tearing down the myths and fears behind a stock audit and showing why getting your inventory under control is the most powerful move a product-based business owner can make.

After 25 years in retail, I’ve seen it all: wasted cash in stagnant shelves, business owners drowning in data but starving for answers.

So I created Stock Doctor — a done-for-you service that cuts through overwhelm with actionable clarity.

Click play to hear real-world product business advice, cash flow for retailers, and inventory management tips that make strategy feel personal.

If you want independent retailer tips with zero judgement, this audit episode is your toolkit.

Why Listen

• Discover how to squeeze more margin from your current stockholding
• See why smart inventory management means better cash flow—and a healthier bank balance
• Get simple, practical techniques to clear excess stock without damaging your brand
• Learn demand forecasting tricks specifically for small product businesses
• Find out how to price products for wholesale, set minimum order quantities, and scale a product business confidently
• Hear success stories from real retailers who’ve used Stock Doctor to boost sales, decrease surplus, and claim more owner pay

DM your biggest takeaway or guest suggestions to @resilientretailclub on Instagram. Rate/follow the Resilient Retail Club Podcast in your favourite app to stay ahead.

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If you've ever looked at your bank account and thought, where has all

my money gone? Or stared at your stock and wondered how you're going to get

it under control, then this episode is for you.

I'm pulling back the curtain on what actually happens in a stock doctor

audit and how it helps you go from guessing and stressing

to feeling calm, clear and in control again.

Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Catherine Edley and in the

next few minutes you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies

from insights shared both of my guests and myself, backed up by

my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn how

to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump

in with this latest episode. A little bit of background if you

like. What is Stockdoctor? So Stockdoctor is my done for you

service where I work with a very carefully hand selected

group of people who've got similar experience to me. In other words,

they have got decades and decades of experience in big

retailers and I work with them to

deliver a service to retailers which is a done for you

service. So it could be retailers, could be ecom brands.

And it is basically about a stock doctor is

somebody who comes into your business who takes a look at your sales and stock

and gives you direction on what to do next. And the way it's

different from what else I offer is, is that as I mentioned, it's

a done for you service, which means that it's great for people who

are time poor, which is, let's face it, a lot of us

in particular a lot of our Stockdoctor clients are bricks and mortar stores. It

works just as well if you're E commerce.

The thinking behind Stockdoctor was that I have

my membership group and my course for people who are

maybe working towards the fat limit or getting more established in their business.

And I also have Retail by Design, which is my mastermind program

for people who are established over six figures,

ambitious product business owners who want to do more.

And then what I felt was that there were a group of people

that what they really just needed was someone to come in and tell them what

to do with their stock. And my original thought was to create

another group course, but I realized quickly that a

lot of the people that I spoke to, I did quite a lot of research

in 2024. I did all this research

and what I determined was that the people who really needed the help just frankly

didn't have the time. And so that's where the idea of a Done for you.

Service came up. Now, there are apps that you can

get. There are ways that I myself teach in

terms of managing your stock. In fact, my book Tame youe Tiger, which

is a really great place to start if you want to know more about stock

management. I felt that I had created all of the

ways that I could help in terms of giving information. And

as I said, there are apps where you can pull data out and have a

look at what it's telling you. But what I felt was really missing for a

lot of people was they just needed somebody who is an expert in this

sort of thing to come along and tell them what they needed to do.

Because for a lot of people who have created product businesses,

their real strength is the creativity. And of course,

many people are very competent in numbers as well. But lots of people would also

say it's not their most favorite thing to do and as a result, it

would either get pushed down to the bottom of the list because let's face it,

we all cherry pick the things that we want to do the most when we've

got limited time. What I also found was that it was just taking them a

really long time to sit down and they also still didn't know what to do

with the information that they had. So lack of information is not the

problem. Most business owners have access to

hundreds and hundreds of reports. And so I wanted to create with Stock

Doctor a service where someone who knew what they were looking for could

come in, take a look at your business, and very quickly give you

actionable direction. So what do I need to do? Where is

my stock stuck? How much stock should I have? How much should I be buying?

And basically to be able to really

just get the answers that they needed and then move on with their day. So

not giving you a long list of to do's, but all of the things that

you have to do anyway, like ordering more stock or coming up with promotional

ideas for your business. You are able to do it with a very specific

list that you've been given of actions and so therefore

you know that you're going in the right direction. So that's the thought process behind

Stock Doctor And I have to say I'm delighted that it

has been really successful. We launched it with a beta test

in 2024. I've been slowly, slowly talking

about it more in 2025. We've had lots of

clients going through now and having some great, great results. We

did a big piece of analysis earlier in the autumn

to have a look at what the impact has

been for these people to do Stockdoctor. And what we found was after

six months they were seeing on average

10% more sales compared to a baseline with 10%

less stock. So 10% more sales, 10% less stock on

average. That was the average result, not even the most

impressive result. And as a result

of more sales less stock, we actually were able to attribute

an additional 5,000 pounds of profit

to their per 100,000 pounds of revenue after

the cost of the program. So it has been absolutely

fabulous and fantastic for business owners. And they've been able to

really reduce their stockholding, which not only frees up space,

but it also helps with things like for example, one of the

clients who got a big tax rebate because one of the crazy

things about stock is that it can show as profit on your

profit and loss. So they were actually taxed less because they

were showing less stock, which not only made their bank balance look better,

but also meant that they had a lower tax bill. So the impact of

stockdoctor has been phenomenal. And it's a program that I'm really very

proud of. And another change that we made this year

was that we originally had it that you signed up for six

months support first off up front.

And I do believe that six months of support is the very best way to

get the support and the transformation that you're looking for.

However, we also introduced the option to

start off with an audit.

So the stock doctor audit, it's a really fabulous offer, the

stock doctor audit. It allows you to get a really great

understanding from your stock doctor on where your business

is at, what your plan should be put together, a plan going forward,

and then also understand what actions you need to take.

And it's a one off piece of work. You can book an audit. If you

want to find out more about any of this, by the way, go to resilientretailclub.com

stockdoctor so you can sign up, you can have the one time

session, you can have the audit, you can get all of the learnings from that.

And then if that's enough for you to keep going, then you can go

on your merry way with all of this information that you've gathered. However, you

can then also transition on to the monthly,

the monthly support, which is in my opinion, the

absolute cherry on top. And it works so well because then going

forward you get that update from your stock doctor on a monthly

basis. So let me tell you a little bit about the audit because if there's

one thing that I know about working with hundreds and hundreds of

small business owners over the last eight years is that people have a

lot of fear and a lot of inner embarrassment, to

be completely honest, about people seeing their numbers. And it's

something that I think is a real shame because I think it's a real shame

people have a barrier to getting help with their business.

But I also totally get it. It's like when

somebody comes into your kitchen unexpectedly and you think, oh my

goodness, is it tidy? Have I done the washing up? And I

think a lot of people feel like that about their businesses. They think, oh my

goodness, don't, don't judge me. I think probably one of the phrases I hear the

most from people is just don't judge me. And I'm here to say

that we absolutely, 100% do not judge you.

So everybody who works with me in stockdoctor, as I said, they come from a

similar background to me. Some of them I worked with during my

corporate life. And it's brilliant to be able to work with them again in

this small business owner life. And they

are all united by a passion for small businesses. They absolutely

love working with small retailers. And they've got that

amazing combination of backgrounds from people like Clark Shoes,

Anthropologie, Ganny, to name just a few.

They seem behind the scenes of the big guys, but what they're really excited about

is working with small guys. But they also understand the challenges of small

business, the reality of it. And nobody is going

to judge you. That is the number one rule of Stockdoctor is that it

is a judgment free zone. So the first thing you

do for a stock doctor audit is you would

meet with your stock doctor and it's usually somewhere between

45 minutes to an hour. And it's an

opportunity for the stock doctor to go through a whole series of

questions to understand more about you and your business.

So the stock doctor will be looking for information about a few different things.

They'll want to know what your business does, how you

sell, where you sell, how you market the business. They want to know how

you get your products. Is it from, are they manufactured for you?

Are they ones that you buy in? What kind of lead times do you have,

what kind of minimum order quantities are we talking about? And how

do you, as the business owner, break down the business?

And what I mean by that is, is if you are a

lifestyle store, how do you break down your products? Do you think

about them as, say, home fragrance and fashion

and jewelry and kids, or do you break

them up in a different way? And that's going to become important a little bit,

and I'll explain why. So this first kickoff call is so you

get to know them. You are as much as possible

assigned the same stock doctor throughout the process. So the person that you meet for

your audit will become the person that works with you on a monthly basis.

So you get to know somebody and they important, more importantly, get to know your

business. So they'll want to know those, those types of

questions about the business, about, as I said, about the stock,

about the suppliers, about what's working for

you, what questions you might have. One of the key things that we determine in

this first session is just really, why have you come? Why now? Why have you

come? What's important to you, what would be really helpful. And it's also an

opportunity to ask questions and also find out. Some people, for example,

book an audit and what they want is they want the external view, but they

also would like to know a little bit more about how stock management

works in general. So they will share what it is that

they want to get out of this process

during this time as well. It's also an opportunity for the stock doctor to

make sure they could get access to your back end. So I'll be completely

honest. The majority of people that we work with are on Shopify.

So Shopify, we have a partners account, which means that we

can access just the analytics. That's the only thing we access in Shopify,

we get access to it and then we are able

to get in and to look at your numbers and look at your data.

And that's a big part of what we do during the audit. If you're not

on Shopify, we have used people

who are, for example, On

Squarespace, on WordPress, we have looked at

lot. On Square, we've looked at lots of different backends. So we are

familiar with them. But I would say most people are on

Shopify now. The only time it doesn't work to do a Shopify

stockdoctor audit is if you don't have any physical

records of your stock. So, for example, sometimes people

will contact me and they'll say, I really want to get my stock under control,

but I don't actually have any record of it.

That is difficult. So you do need some kind of data, even

if it's a spreadsheet. I have worked with people, for example, who've got spreadsheets where

they record everything, and that is, that's

workable. But ultimately you do need to have a point of sale system of some

description but other than that,

as I said, we can work with most systems. So once

we've got access, then what the stock doctor does

is they go away and they work their magic. Usually

we set a date for a follow up session and that's usually

within sort of eight to 10 days to give the stock doctor time to

really dig into the business. And what they're looking at

is a few different things. The first thing that they're going to do is pull

together sales history. So they're going to start pulling the sales that

you've taken historically, looking at the seasonal patterns,

looking at the different sales channels. So for example, if you have different

sales channels, they may also either get access to those systems.

For example, if you've got wholesale numbers, then

they may either. Well, actually usually they may just ask you to send them that

information, but they'll start putting together a picture of the business across

all of the sales channels so that we put that into our

sales channel, our sales forecast, which

allows us to look back and then also to set goals going forward, which becomes

really important. From that they are also able to create a

stock plan. So one of the questions I often get asked

is how much stock should I have? And that is one of the questions that

people often want to know the answer to when they have the audit. And the

answer to that is always, well, it's related to your sales. So we work out

what your sales, what we would forecast for your sales, and therefore what your stock

plan would be. Then there is a

deeper piece of analysis that goes on, as I mentioned earlier, how you break

down your business. So let's go back to this idea of being a lifestyle store.

And you've got home, you've got fashion, you have got

jewelry, and you have got kids. So

that is how you think about the business or the, the kind of

departments, if you like, the different departments. And I would say

ideally what you want is probably around six to eight departments

in your business that you can then look at and then understand how they are

doing. So within that, the stock doctor is then going to go in

and take a look at your data and basically see. And a big piece of

the work, to be honest, for the audit is actually working with your data

and getting it cleaned up. So

basically having a way of analyzing all of

your stock, but looking at those patterns, looking at those bigger blocks, looking at those

departments as opposed to looking at just individual items.

So the stock doctor goes in, does all of that work in the back end?

But sometimes it's easy to actually update it

in Shopify or to give you the option to update it yourself.

Otherwise it would be a question of us downloading that data and crunching it in

the background. But essentially what you end up with is an

overview of the big building blocks for the business, what is

working, what is not working within that. They are then able to dig in

and start talking about the bigger blocks of the

business where perhaps there is stock stuck, things that you need

to hone in on, things that you need to understand better so that you can

move on and buy correctly. So

that's a big piece of what they do. And then they're also going to be

digging into that and analyzing what are your best sellers, which

suppliers are your best suppliers, which price points are working really

well for you. How has that shifted across the year? How is that varied

to last year? And it's really brilliant at

uncovering where there may just be issues that you simply weren't

aware of. For example, we had one customer

who they looked at this and they discovered that their

kitchenware had really increased in the stock on the last year,

but the sales hadn't increased. Therefore they were able to have a look

at the shop floor, rearrange it, pull that forward and start pushing that stock.

So they got more out of it. It's not necessarily saying, oh, you've got too

much of this, discount it all. In fact, all of the stock

doctors are very much focused on full price sales where possible,

but they will give you direction on where you could do targeted discounts that

are not brand damaging, that will enable you to clear through stock that

is otherwise stuck.

So then what they do is after they've spent all of this time digging into

the back end, they're using their years and years and years of industry knowledge

in big retailers to look at your business with one

goal in mind, which is how do you make your stock stock work harder and

how do you put together a really strong sales plan?

And so they will then present back to you and you will

have another session with them where you are getting the feedback of

the plan, you are getting walks through your numbers and also

you are getting the handed back to you the sales and stock plan

so you know what you need to be aiming for in terms of sales going

forward and what your stock should be as well as a whole list of

recommendations of things that you should do to either buy more into areas

that are working or to clear through stock that isn't working. We

also have people who are very familiar with fashion, which

is has an extra level of Complexity because you have to work with

for example, seasonality and making sure you're not left

with too much dead stock at the end of a season. And

people who between the stock doctors, they cover all kinds of different

product areas and are used to working with both bricks and

mortar. So many of them will have worked with the big chains of bricks and

mortar stores, but then also online and understanding the

challenges of online as well. So you get given back to you

the plan of how much you should buy and how much

and when you should buy it, what you should be aiming for. You get a

whole list of recommendations and then you also get a really good

understanding of where you may have stock that is stuck

and where you may have the opportunity to do more with the stock that you

do have. So it is really fabulous. It's very practical. You'll also

get a written up email after the session so that you know exactly what you

need to do. You don't even have to take notes if you don't want to.

You can come along, listen and take, take in the

information. And essentially an expert has looked at it and has said

to you, this is where you're at, this is what you need to do. And

as I said then we have lots of people who will continue on to do

the month to month support. And that is brilliant because

effectively each month the stock doctor goes in, they update the

data. So if you've got a sales plan, they'll say how much you actually took,

they'll make any adjustments that are needed. So having a look at for

example, you've really overperformed. Well then you'll need to buy more.

Having a look at the different categories, how they're doing and what you might

need to do. You are just there to listen to have it

presented to you and then to go away knowing exactly what you need to

do with your stock. So it's a service

I feel really passionate about. I was absolutely delighted to see the impact that

it has on retailers and the people

that who have been doing it for the six months and longer we have. Lots

of people renew because they get used to running their business this way. Then

they are seeing really great results being able to grow sales

and also reduce stock. So boost that profitability, boost

your cash flow, have more money in your account which is at the end of

the day what it is all about. So if you want to know more about

stock doctor audits, it is a perfect thing to do at this time of year.

I know we're heading towards Christmas, but when better to have somebody take a

look at your stock and tell you whether or not it's in the right place,

what adjustments you could make. The great thing about Christmas sales is

that if you do have chunks of stock that are sitting there,

this is the great time of year to actually move them. And so

there's so much you can do at this time of year. I would highly, highly

recommend it. As I said, head over to Ms. Elite retail

club.com.d the next step essentially is to have a call with me to

check that it's the right fit for you. And I will always be completely honest.

If it's not the right fit, I will let you know. And we get you

matched up with the Stock doctor, we get your first call booked in and then

we start the ball rolling. So before you know it, you can have a

clear plan of sales and stock as well as a great list of actions

that you need to take. It is not something that you have to do, somebody

else is doing it for you. And you're getting not just great expertise but

like really, really in depth industry expertise. We're talking

about people who were running whole merchandising departments,

senior, senior merchandisers, so amazing industry knowledge which

they're going to be able to apply and give you the insight into

your business. And as I said, this is non judgmental. This is

absolutely something that is here to support you. So

they totally get the reality of running a small business. And it's the brilliant

opportunity to really combine the big business expertise

with cheering on and supporting small businesses to be more

resilient. Because let's face it, what makes you more resilient, that's having more cash

in the bank and having a really clear idea of what you need to do

to drive sales and to get your stock under control.

Thank you so much for listening. If you've got any questions about Stock Doctor, if

you just want to know if it might be right for you before you even

book a call, then you can always drop me an email or a DM on

Instagram. Resilient Retail Club. And if you want to hear an interview with

a previous stock doctor client, then check out episode 237 of the

podcast where we interview Victoria from Ready Money Beach Shop. You

can also hear an interview with one of our stock doctors, Paola, in

episode number 240 of the podcast. Don't forget to

like, follow and subscribe the podcast and you'll be the first to know about each

new episode.