Darlene had left the dry cleaners to go with a major laundry service company. It was better money, but a lot of her money was going to a daycare center now. The extra was helping and I needed to scramble. I started calling on what ever I could to get new business, but that really wasn’t how I was going to grow the route now. What I had to do was grow the business with the customers I already had. I did this by planning sales for their ads, the big super markets were already set up for us. I needed to be aggressive with all of the other accounts I had.
One way that I was aggressive was to start looking at my competitors space on the shelves. I decided that I should have more space. I did this by proving sales for certain products that I had that didn’t have what I believed to be enough space. In the big stores that would have scan data and I would have the store track my sales and my competitors. I would look at the sales data from the scanners. I would pay close attention to my competitors slower products. If they had space that I thought was more than they needed I would share the data with the manager of the store. Then I would sell him on the idea that I needed more space for what ever product I felt I needed more space on.
Sometimes this was an easy sell other times it proved to be more labor intensive than I had figured. One time I remember that I had approached my largest customer with the idea that I needed one more facing for a product. He finally gave in he walked the shelf and said that if I wanted the one facing I could have it from Pepsi and that I would have to do it right then. The space I would receive was about fifty two feet away from my section. I didn’t even think about it. I moved the entire set for one facing.
You see I wouldn't expect for a lot of people to do this sort of thing, but I did it and did not even think about it. I felt that this was just fine for my business and over time I gained a lot of space from my competition. It got to be so good that when I needed to reset a shelf I knew that I could count on my supervisor, Doug, to help me get the job done. On more than one occasion I got the customer to agree to entire resets of the shelves. By doing this it would put my companies products in the best position as to the location best for customers to see our products first.
Over time we had gained all of the sets in all of our stores and this was an example for the rest of the company to follow. To a lot of the old timers we were creating a lot more work for them. But the numbers spoke for themselves. Our business was growing. Now after a couple of years after a devastating strike, we were back in control of the market place.
