Dave Braun
00:00:03
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com and Victory. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with Virtual Assistants without breaking the bank. And that means your bank. I’m Dave Braun and normally I’m here with my partner and my fantastic business mentoring coach, and my friend, Larry Broughton. But today it’s me flying solo because I wanna bring you an answer to a really important question. And we answered this in a place that I’ll introduce you to in a second. So the question or the topic that we want to discuss is, how do you go about optimizing your supply chain and improving your inventory? Now we got this question in our Virtual spotlight session, one of them a couple of months ago, and what we do is we have a bunch of folks that come in we’re on a zoom call together, and we go deep, very deep on the member’s biggest challenge, opportunity or idea.
Dave Braun
00:01:08
And in this one Virtual spotlight session, Larry riffed on the answer to this question, and we thought afterward, that it was like so brilliant, it was great. The context that he talked about, and the added details was really, really valuable. So we just wanted to extract it and bring it to you. So one of these members is having supply chain issues and it’s really causing emissions cause they can’t fulfill client projects. The projects are getting delayed. Nobody’s happy. Right? So I’m sure nobody listening to this will ever experience that. But even if you aren’t experiencing it, listen up, and take some notes because you may have a friend or a buddy, or another company that you know of that is having those issues. And you can say, Hey, come listen to this episode. So again, this is a partial recording of one of the sessions. There were other thoughts and ideas on this that were shared and discussed. But what we wanted to do is just bring you about, I think Larry talked about nine of them. We just wanted to bring you those because those were I think the most powerful. And then after you listen to Larry, I’ll be coming back and I’m gonna list them for you at the end. All right, Larry, let’s go.
Larry Broughton
00:02:22
For supply chain and other calls. So maybe let me just kinda give a supply chain and other calls. So maybe let me just kind of give a list of things that kind of come top of mind. Like what can you do? What can I do? I’ve got a supply chain problem. I’m a small independent kinda guy and the bigger guys have access to inventory that I don’t. That’s the problem. And I’m gonna try to answer this for all of our viewers and listeners, not just for you. One thing to do is to look at your industry and see if are there buyer groups. So for us, for instance, in the hotel industry, we belong to a national purchasing program group called the vendor. And so, basically, it’s a buyer consortium. So because we buy, it’s a big group, we compete with Hyatt, Marriott, all that. We get the same pricing in some cases, better pricing because we’ve subscribed to this buyer group and there’s a fee for that. But you can do some research and find out does your industry have a buyer group buying consortia, something like that.
Larry Broughton
00:03:44
One thing I would make sure that I’m doing is communicating with all of my clients to say, Hey, this is going on. You have to do that. Now at this point, most people are gonna understand, that we’ve all been impacted by supply chain problems. But I would contact and communicate with all of your clients and potential clients that what used to take two weeks can take much longer at this point. And it’s really outside of your control. But you’re gonna do the best that you can with that. So don’t just assume that people know. I would consider getting larger deposits on projects.
Larry Broughton
00:04:28
If you’ve not done so, get larger lines of credit. And if you got lines of credit, see if you can expand them because you’re gonna need it, because you need to build up your inventory. In our company, in the hotel industry, we said that how many months ago, we do monthly meetings and I said, okay, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna spend X number of dollars and we’re gonna get six months of extra inventory. That’s just gonna sit on ourselves. Because the worst thing that we can do is get into August and run out of sheets or shampoo or whatever it is. And so you’re gonna see some heavier inventories being carried on the balance sheet. But in order to do that, you need space, but you also need money to buy the extra inventory. Now, in your case, Pedro that could be tough, but use those lines of credit to actually buy extra inventory.
Larry Broughton
00:05:36
I get unsolicited emails from people offering lines of credit to be used for and they list in there, you know, expanded inventory. So I would do some Google. Just be really careful when you do lines of credit. This is always one of my big caveats. There are different types of lines of credit, one of them requires you to pay it down for at least 30 days once a year. If you aren’t able to do that, make sure you go with the other line of credit where you pay ongoing interest on it, but you only pay interest on what you draw down on it. So if you get a $500,000 line of credit and you only use a hundred thousand of it, then you only pay interest on the hundred thousand.
Larry Broughton
00:06:19
Does that make sense? would consider —in your case, Pedro, but also for anyone else. Are there alternative products or solutions or brand names that you could be using? You may say, Hey, I’m a big supporter of Oakley. And I just like what they’ve done for the special operations community. So I buy Oakley jackets, all my eyewear and sunglasses are Oakley. However, if Oakley, all of a sudden, if this pair of eyeglasses, all of a sudden went to $1,200, I’m not that brand loyal. I may go to another alternative brand. So you may be used to using—I don’t know what the manufacturers or brand names usually use Pedro, but there is an alternative that’s easier to get. It might not be an A+ solution, but it might be an A solution for you.
Larry Broughton
00:07:15
The other thing, I guess I would, and again, this I’m just rolling here. You may have to adjust your pricing to make any of this stuff happen. And if you’ve not increased your pricing, your price says in the last year or two years, you need to increase your pricing. I’m sorry, but everybody expects it. And this is part of inflation. It just is and your vote matters. And although they’re saying that, inflation’s — officially they said is 9.1%. The real inflation’s probably closer to 12 or 13 from what I’m hearing. So that’s me riffing on what to do. And I know none of them are easy for you, Pedro, but lines of credit. Oh, here’s another thing collaboration versus competition with some of your traditional competitors. What does that mean? So there might be other vendors that are in your market that do the same services you do or a neighboring market.
Larry Broughton
00:08:24
And this is the time to call owners and say, Hey, I’m Pedro, I own this company. You own your company. I know we’re in the same space. Are you having the same challenges that we’re having? Someone has to get honest first. And then say, Hey, if there’s anything I can ever do to help you let me know and what are they gonna say? Yeah, the same thing, you let me know as well. When the pandemic first hit, I started calling a bunch of hotel companies, and CEOs. And it’s funny, I’ve shared this before. A couple of them actually cried on the phone. It’s like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re calling, nobody does this, number one. And I don’t know what to do. Right now things aren’t as bad now as they were back then.
Larry Broughton
00:09:13
But now I’ve got relationships with some of these other hotel companies that I didn’t have before. And Dave and I have got a former client who we encouraged, go meet the other business owners who direct— Dave, you know who I’m talking about— who compete directly with you. We kept saying over and over and over again, you have to, you gotta go meet these people. Well, as it turns out, he didn’t do it. And we encouraged him for a couple of years. And finally, the guy who had the largest, who was the largest competitor in the market, his business burned down. And our client was— Was he number three as far as size in the marketplace, Dave? I think he was number three in the marketplace. But when that business burned down, he sent all of his business to number two and number four, number three got zero business. Why? Because he didn’t know number three. Does that make sense? So it became a collaboration. So I would consider that as well.
Dave Braun
01:10:24
Hey. Wow, that was power packed. So here are the nine tips and I’m gonna share them with you on my iPad. Write them down. You may have seen me do this before. I like to do it. It’s fun. So let me switch this. So here are the nine tips. Number one, buy your groups. Now I’m not gonna go in and describe everything that Larry talked about. You just need to go back and listen to it, but this will help you to remember the tips. And what I want you to do is after I talk to you about these tips, if you’re having these issues, write down one of them that you can actually do right away. So number one is buy your groups. And now number two is you talk to your clients about the delay. Now, again, I’m writing on my iPad. If you’re just listening to this, I’ll describe it as we go. And then the third thing is, what you wanna do is you wanna get larger deposits from clients because there may be some stuff available that is an extra cost, that will be more money and you may be able to free something up that way. And the fourth thing is gonna be, get larger lines of credit…
Dave Braun
01:11:46
…for purchasing inventory. And then number five is, to look at alternative products. And then number six is, look at alternative brands. Now you may have a favorite brand, but there may be some alternatives. Number seven is to increase your pricing. And then, number eight is to collaborate with your competitors.
Dave Braun
01:12:32
Well, I guess there are only eight of them. I thought there was gonna be nine, but there are eight of them. You may be able to think of some more. Now, one of the things that I want to point out here is— over here, where you actually borrow many to build up some inventory. For example, you get a line of credit to do this. If you actually start building up inventory, be careful because if you go wrong, you will be stuck with it. Or you may have to provide it at a discount. We’ve heard of that happening as well. So just be very careful with that. So those are some great eight tips. If you’re watching this, you can see them here. If not, that’s great. We love you just to listen.
Dave Braun
01:13:19
So here we are at the end of it. So we discovered some ways here about how you can go about optimizing your supply chain or improving your inventory. If you guys have any comments or thoughts on this, go ahead and put them in the comments below. If you have an extra tip or if one of these makes a big difference for you, just go ahead and do that. So let me go back to just me. And what I wanna do now in the episode, and I just wanna say, thanks for joining me today. And remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And we’re here to help you with our course community and our White Glove service, where we find a Rockstar VA for you. So three things we’d love for you to do right now and we’d really appreciate it.
Dave Braun
01:14:02
Number one, subscribe to the podcast. If you haven’t already done so, on your phone, your iPhone, or your Android phone. And then subscribe on YouTube by hitting the subscribe button and clicking on the little bell that’s up there so you can get some reminders. Number two, give us a rating, we’d love to have a five stars rating, that’s great, but give us any kind of a rating. As I said, put a comment down below the video, because it’ll help us to get the word out. And then number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our Course and Community and our White Glove service. Because remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with Virtual Assistants. Larry and I are helping a lot of folks. We’re helping folks now. So we’d love to help you too. So the big thing is just go to Hiremyva.com for more information. Thank you, guys. See you later. Have a great day. Bye.
