The Hidden Trap of ‘The Way Things Are Done’ in Your Jewelry Store

YOUR STORE’S SYSTEMS often exist for good reasons — they’re efficient and productive. But they can also trap you into incremental growth when bigger opportunities await. In this video, INSTORE editor Trace Shelton explains why January is the ideal time to step back, set aside “the way things are done,” and ask a simple question: What would it take to reach your real goals? Sometimes the answer means blowing up systems that no longer serve you.

Video Transcript

Happy holidays. If you’re seeing this before January 1st, and if not, the sentiment remains the same. I hope you had a great holiday season. Today I wanted to talk to you about the way things are done and how sometimes the way things are done can prevent you from doing things in a better way to meet the goals that you really want to achieve.

Before I do that, I want to stick up for the way things are done for a moment. If you watch a movie and you see some kind of visionary come into a business or a situation and then, you know, someone else—the foil—says, “Well, that’s just not how things are done here,” we automatically, as the audience, think, “Well, that person is stuck in the past. They need to think more creatively and think about the future. Change isn’t all bad.”

But the truth is that most of us are very comfortable with the way things are done, and there’s a reason for that. The way things are done is often honed over years to be efficient, to be productive. For example, I’ll just speak from my own experience at INSTORE: We’ve put in systems over the years that help us track production. They help us to know where each piece of writing is, where every story is along the way, so that once the story is finished, we can go through, we can edit it, we can make sure all the photos are there, we can move it into production, they can lay it out, we look at it again, we edit it again, we make tweaks, et cetera, until finally those pages go off to be printed. And that’s the way things are done—it works here at INSTORE.

But the problem with the way things are done is that it can also trap you into complacency, into success being incremental growth. Sometimes what you need to do is back out of the way that you’re doing things and look at things holistically in order to make a big leap forward in your business.

For example, let’s say that you are a strong bridal store and you do about — let’s say 20% of your business is custom design — but you have a very systemized way of selling engagement rings. You sell a lot of stock engagement rings and you improve at a rate of let’s say 5% to 7% growth every year. Not bad, right? But maybe down the pike, you’ve seen how a lot of other stores are having way more success with custom design. Maybe in your head you’re thinking, “What if we put in a studio in our space rather than sending out these designs to be manufactured? What if we had our own shop where we could produce such designs and then we wouldn’t have to pay for these outside shops to manufacture our designs?”

That would require stepping out of the way things are done and possibly even blowing up some of those systems you’ve put in over the years. But it’s important to do that. The beginning of every year is a great time to sort of step back, take a look at your business, and look at any goals you may have for the year, and think about: if I was going to try to achieve that goal, let’s put aside all those systems for a moment. Let’s put aside the way things are done for a moment. If I was just to try to achieve that goal, what would I do? What would the answer be?

And then from that answer, you go back to the way that you’ve done things before and see what still makes sense, right? Because some systems may still make sense under the new scenario, but some may need to be completely thrown out or re-imagined in a way that would allow you to accomplish that goal.

So let’s say you decided, “You know what? We’re going to build our own shop. We’re gonna have jewelers in our shop that can produce these designs quickly, get them back to customers, and suddenly, hopefully, we’ll be doing 50% or 60% of our engagement business as custom design and our margins will go way up.” But now we’ve got to learn how to manage these jewelers. We’ve got to learn how to manage this shop, and we’ve got to figure out how we deal with our vendors now in terms of what we want to keep in the cases and how we want those pieces to work.

So, there’s something to be said for the way things are done. And if the way things are done is achieving you 20%, 30% growth a year—maybe even depending on your size, 10%, 15% growth would be amazing. But if not, and if maybe you’ve got your eyes on a little bit bigger prize than what you’re seeing right now, then January is a fantastic time to back out and just put everything to the side for a moment and think about what your business could be if you made those changes.

I hope that made some sense. I hope that you got something out of that, and I will see you soon right back here with more advice and tips for your store.