Nigel Miller: Welcome to The Road to Online Retail, I’m Nigel Miller.

In today’s episode, we are going to be exploring how the digital economy is changing for businesses and how governments are getting involved to help. And with me today as always, I have our retail shopper marketing expert, Kevin Moore to guide us through. 

Kevin, welcome as always.

Kevin Moore: Hello Nige.

Nigel Miller: Now, Kevin tell me what’s been going on in the world of retail globally, both online and physically?

Kevin Moore: Well, it’s funny, a couple of things that happened in the last three or four weeks, which have sort of fed into the, some of the conversations we’ve been having back in April and May of this year. So we talked about the fact that online retailing wasn’t so much now about reaching the world, but it was important that people who are involved in retail today, in April and May, who are involved in retail and a were either losing their jobs or were struggling with the restrictions and constraints of COVID and were embracing online, but they were doing it to be able to sell to their local postcode, their local state, their local country, if you will, as we tend to think of online has been something about reaching around the world.

There’s a couple of things that have happened that reinforced that. Big fans of Shopify, Canadian company, you know, do great stuff. They provide the backbone, if you will, for so many retailers to go online and they just put up their quarter two results, 2020 quarter two results, and they’d actually increased the number of stores on the Shopify platform by 71% compared to previous quarter.

71%, you go back to old physical businesses and if somebody grew 15% in a quarter, that was unbelievable. 71% number of stores created. But the important thing is when you get underneath those numbers, what we’re seeing, because we have data – that’s a wonderful thing, we have data – what we’re seeing is that the number of shoppers who were shopping within 25 kilometers of that business, that new online store is growing. So people are saying, I’m now opening Shopify sites for my physical store, and people are coming to collect curbside collections. And we talked about this when you’re up in Queensland last month, Nige and how people want to come to the warehouse. They want to come to wherever you are, to be able to collect if they can.

So this whole local thing is becoming more and more and more local. Great to see. It’s nice to see the data is supporting things that we believe are happening as trends, but we’re seeing it more and more. It’s even more important for people to think about setting up an online business.

And if they’re in a current physical retail, that’s got the challenges of COVID that they need to embrace this even more quickly.

Nigel Miller: And it’s amazing how fast businesses are transitioning to the online world. I was watching something on our national news here yesterday just saying, how many restaurants have gone from no home deliveries to 6,000 a month and their whole business has not really suffered, they’re just delivering it out the door rather than serving it to a table.

Kevin Moore: That’s the whole concept of the second online age is about, online for everything, every service and every product you can. And that’s also that whole collaboration. We’ve talked about Brian Harrigan, the CEO of HubSpot and an amazing, very, simple and concise, PowerPoint presentation he put up about the new normal, and he talks about collaboration.

So every time you walk into a, into a takeaway, you’re walk into a restaurant and you see all the Uber Eats brown envelopes, they are purchased by that restaurant to make sure that the branding for Uber Eats is consistent in the whole of the process. Now you pay for the pleasure of that. But you’re also paying for the pleasure of being on Uber Eats, having that reach with Menulog now huge reach. So this collaboration is important and the collaboration is always a bumpy thing because the whole thing about businesses, we have to share the profitability. If it’s too much one way, one party goes under.

If it’s too much, the other way the other party goes under. So we’re trying to find this way at the moment to make sure everybody makes money out of this. But importantly, that’s another example of local. Here’s the internet supporting local businesses for people who drive to or have delivered on electric bike their food. It’s not reaching around the world. No, it isn’t about the whole nation it’s about in that post code. And that’s what I think the theme of this podcast should be Nige. we’ve talked about the importance of being local online and people kind of scratch their heads and I don’t need to be local online.

You do, you absolutely do.

How’d you put it in context, in the state of Victoria in Australia in this month so in the months of July and August, pretty much the only place that you can buy a toy is online because toy retailing is not essential retailing service. Shoppers have no choice, but to go online.

And if you look at the, the restaurant industry, people cannot go out to restaurants. They can’t go out to bars. The only place where you can go to bottle shops, you can go to off licenses, you can go to places that sell alcohol, but the majority of it, large amounts of it are being sold online. This is the shift that’s gone on.

And the thing about COVID and the government regulations around the world is they’re difficult to plan with. We don’t know what’s going on. It can change week by week, month by month. I don’t know you’ve seen the, there was a, a presentation done by Jim Collins, I’ve seen Jim Collins in Melbourne, amazing guy.

I followed his work for years and years and years. Good to Great amongst other things in, he interviewed, a very young Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was made redundant, fired from the job of CEO of Apple the first time round. I’ve been a huge respect for, the man’s analysis of leadership. He did a presentation of the Drucker Centennial and talks about something called the Stockdale Paradox, which was, I’m not going to go into it, but basically it’s the concept of being able to use our minds and manage our minds, to be able to navigate our way through constant change or, a lack of clarity on when things will end or when a normal will come back again.

The key thing about this is if you’re not equipped in the online world and government regulations change around your business, the third time, if the third time you get shut down as a restaurant, if the third time in a year you get shut down as a retailer, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to have, forget the financial capability, the intellectual and emotional strengths to carry on and that’s what’s happening.

And I don’t say these things lightly, I have friends of mine and people I’ve known for a long time who are in… not in a good place. And we have to find ways to help them get through this. And it isn’t about telling them how safe they’re going to be out in the streets. It’s about equipping them to be able to continue to run the businesses and feed their families. And that’s the thing I think I’ve seen over the course of the last year, four weeks. I’ve seen thoughtful, open-minded leadership minded government’s saying we’ve got to get this online thing right, we’ve got to help normal people, not massive corporations, normal people migrate their businesses online.

Nigel Miller: Indeed. And I guess the question though, is it just a case of logging on to a Shopify and building a store? Unfortunately, isn’t is it? So there’s many more resources that are needed to make it succeed.

Kevin Moore: Absolutely. So we’ve talked about this and the reason we’re doing this is because we want people to be able to come online, start a business and pay out the small amounts of money to set up their site and then and make it their own. Curate things in the right way, display them in the right way, create amazing shopper experiences.

That’s what we’re about and I’m not going to restate that here. What I’m going to say is it blows me away. Two things that Shopify have done. Number one, they’ve released that data on it being about locals. For me, it’s the first time they talk about shops contingency, more local customers. I’m reading from Businesswire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, Businesswire, “shops continue to see more local customers. In English speaking geographies, the percentage of customers per shop coming from within 25 kilometers of the shop’s registered address increased, added the number of shops at least one customer with buy online pickup in store. These geographies has more than doubled”.

So people are actually understanding that being online is about local as well. What blew me away even more is the fact that the Canadian government, and I talk about forward-thinking governments, I love the fact that the Canadian government has now announced something they called “Go Digital Canada” and it’s a program allowing thousands of small Canadian businesses to move online, not by saying here we’ll sponsor or support you with buying a Shopify site, but we’re going to equip you with the tools, the guidance, the resources to bring their business online.

That isn’t just signing up for, for a site it’s actually doing something, understanding that. Why do I say this? I think it is incumbent on governments and let’s take Australia. It is incumbent on government in Australia, at federal, state, city and local council Gippsland council, the, the city of Cairns, the city of the Gold Coast, Melbourne, my word, Melbourne, Melbourne is the home to retail in Australia, home to physical retail, and it’s in a world of pain. So how can Melbourne City Council, how can local government support explicitl, not just in words, how can local government support explicitly the helping of, individuals to get their business online?

I’m a bit more animated than I’ve been for a while. I’ve had some personal things have been shared with me today about the impact of this on people’s businesses. And it’s just not, it’s just not good. So I I’ve got even more passionate about the fact that we have to find a way through this. We have to give people the confidence. We have to hold their hands. We have to let them do it. We’re not asking them to put mammals on asteroids. We’re asking them to stay in business, we need them in business and we need them growing and we need them feeding their families.

Nigel Miller: But what’s interesting with the Canadian offer is that it’s more than just a funding. Governments are good at giving out money, but they’re not necessarily very good at anything else. But the Canadian scheme involves helping you with email marketing and all sorts of other bits and pieces and giving you access to resources to help you build the business. Expert resources from independent experts, whatever it might be, that’s more than just “Oh here’s a grant, off you go!”

Kevin Moore: Absolutely. So how can government do what it should be doing, what it does really well, which is to be able to collaborate on a state basis, on a city basis with its citizens and say, “Guys, this is what we’re doing for you. We’re going to facilitate the meeting of you in a digital environment or in a, um, in a, socially distanced physical environment because we have the venues. We have the venues. We are government. We’re not short space. We have the venues, we’re going to do that and we can do it consistently. So it’s not going to be a one off, for the next two weeks, what we’re going to do is we’re going to help and support you. We’re going to have proper online events, proper physical gatherings that are, know, socially-distanced, but you’re going to be supported in your journey.

And I just think it seems to be a gap where we done a great job in enforcing laws, in forcing and telling. But what we’re not doing is supporting, we’re not collaborating. We’re not assisting people. People don’t need to be shouted at anymore. Boy, they’ve been shouted at, they’ve been told what they can and can’t do for good reason but we, we now need to get alongside them. Government need to get alongside its people and start to say, guys, we’re going to help you through this. Cause if all the small businesses close their doors, the tax base and the income that goes to the families is gonna shrink significantly.

And it can’t all be taken over by large corporations.

Nigel Miller: Yes, I used to get very fed up when I was doing my television show for small business, how every government minister says, “Oh, yes, small business is the engine room of Australia”, but then do nothing about it to help it to actually run.

Kevin Moore: Well, Sadly Nige, you and I did some research before we did this podcast and we looked at what the Australian government had done. And we looked at unbelievably $10 million over three years and announced in 2011, 2012. There is nothing current.

Nigel Miller: The only Google we could find either they’re really bad at their SEO or they haven’t been doing much.

Kevin Moore: “Go Digital Canada” was launched on July the 15th. This is a, clear and present, this is about, we need to do these things, we need to get on board and we need to do something tangible. As we’ve seen, we saw our old traditional retail courses boom in America in April, May and June as people, they were, they were at home and they were consuming training and they were consuming learning. It’s not hard to do. It just requires a will, two or three people and a half million dollar budget. It’s not, we’re not talking about crazy amounts of money to get it done at a city level.

Nigel Miller: And interesting enough, I actually did a government thing recently on online safety for kids. You know, having a seven year old, I wasn’t quite sure how on earth I keep her safe and so I did one of their courses and it was good. So they can do it, they just need to focus on it. And the thing I like about the Canadian one is free email marketing, they’re using their chip and read payment hardware, you get that for free, it was that what you read?

Kevin Moore: From Shopify. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s a partnership. So this goes back to the big end of town doing so in our part of the world, we should be proud of Atlassian. We should be proud of Xero. You know, Xero are like Crowded House with, we, we claim there was Australian cause they’re so damn good when they’re New Zealanders.

But we have, we have got some really good online businesses and. I mean Temple and Webster have done a great job, Kogan, Ruslan, love what he’s doing, love what he’s been doing for a long time. How can we get that connection between the digital, the people who are digital natives and the different levels of government. This doesn’t have to be a federal thing. It can be done at, at, at a city level, a town level or at any level, but we do need to find a way to do it and formalize it.

Nigel Miller: And Australia’s quite good at offering resources to help small businesses. So we’ve got a freelancer.com, that’s an Australian company, and then there’s Canva, and then a company I use an awful lot called Envato for all sorts of templates for video and online and everything else. There’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing well here, but those experts would be nice to tap into to help everyone else.

Kevin Moore: Absolutely. Absolutely. Bit, bit, bit passionate today, a couple of calls I’ve made today with people and it’s like, Oh no, you’re kidding.

Nigel Miller: So, What are you seeing from the physical side of retail, from the people you do know?

Kevin Moore: Yeah, the big end retail. So those who we’ve talked about this on a few occasions, those who’ve got it right, who have the scale and the patients and the genuine commitment to grow have continued to grow. And the, the covid environment which has accelerated the second age of, of online has supported all the investment they’ve made. And whether that be Walmart in the US, whether it  be a number of the grocers in Europe, it be a number of the hardware businesses around the world, I mean, Home Depot, Bunnings in Australia. There are obvious ones that you can just shout out, they’ve just done some really good work.

I’ve got a call out to premier retail in Australia. They made a decision eight years ago, very quietly have huge respect for the guys in that business. They’re good retailers , they understand the shopper have done for 30 years. Doesn’t matter what the environment is. They get it.

They made an investment in their own warehousing infrastructure to make sure that there was one inventory so that they could provide online shopping for their shoppers and physical store shopping. Now I’ve been talking about, there’s only one inventory for, oh, not quite a decade. There is only one inventory.

I remember advising retailers nine years ago. There’s only one inventory. What we’re gonna do is we’re going to set up this warehouse over here and it’s gonna have inventory for, for online, for our website. And over here is their inventory for our stores and they’re different. No, there’s only one inventory.

There is a massive retailer of furniture out of Europe that got this fundamentally wrong, and they had separate inventory for different places. And the shopping experience online was horrendous. They’ve just turned the corner and four or five months ago, and now they are humming.

Their service is unbelievable. They’re back in the online business, but they were so far behind. The frustration they were causing for their shoppers, the shopper experience was horrendous. They’ve got it right. Right. So the big end of town is all good. The big end of town that didn’t change has just, they’re going by the week, and we keep talking about that, they’re going into receivership, they’re going into Chapter 11, they’re going into liquidation, whatever the terms are in different countries around the world, but they’re going. And then we have those that were born digital and who were born in 1998, 1999, 2000, but they’re just booming.

And there isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t have another decade ahead of them. Remember the biggest online retailers have not yet used pricing power. Everybody says “Ah, that company there is massively overvalued, cause it’s only making this much money. These companies could take a 10% price increase and lose 10% of their revenue, but they’d still be so massively profitable.

We haven’t had that part where they’ve started to, all the loyalty they’ve created, all the good shopper experiences they’ve created where they’ve started to take price. We’re seeing it a bit now in, in freight services around the world, as we’re seeing that bottleneck of, access to freight services, we’re starting to see freight costs go up.

And that’s normal because there’s so much going down a little pipe, they need a massive, massive pipe, and they’ve got a little pipe.

And then Nige is the final part of it is you go from the big end of town and then the big end of, of online you then go to normal physical retailers that are small, two, three, one, two, three, 10 store retailers, they’re in a terrible pain.

And that’s why the day’s been a bit emotive for me. Cause I’ve been talking to the guys who they, some of them haven’t ordered inventory since February, we’re in July and August, since February. They’re canceling orders, they’re quietly exiting leases and they, they’re literally going to liquidate whatever they’ve got.

I walked into one store and said, look, there’s not much stock here? No, and once this has gone, we’re probably not gonna keep on going. She’d been around for 22 years. And this is not, this is everything it’s every place you go, you see scarcity. And the scarcity is not just brought on about by the fact that we’ve got issues in shipping lines and freighting.

It’s the fact that people are canceling orders. They have no confidence, and the third lockdown that you go through, you just lose the emotional energy.

Nigel Miller: Well, So there’s a couple of things you’ve touched on there and one is obviously close to our heart, which is the shopper experience and how you use it to stand out from the crowd. Do you want to just quickly talk about that? So why it is such an important thing to focus on?

Kevin Moore: Yeah. So let’s accept the fact that the growth numbers we’re seeing from people like Shopify. So 71% more stores than the previous quarter, let’s accept that everybody is going online because they need to, they understand that is the way that we’re going to do business. COVID isn’t going away for certainly two winters within the Northern hemisphere or the Southern hemisphere. And they need to be doing it.

What they’re doing is they’re the leading with a vanilla approach. They’re not differentiating themselves. The best analogy I can draw in physical retailing is when we used to, when we used to walk around the souks and bazaars and markets of the world, Istanbull and Dubai and Muttrah in Oman and the most amazing places in and around Italy and a farmer’s organic markets in, in the Northeast of America, amazing places. I mean, Great. The places you’d be drawn to are those differentiated themselves with sound and colour and entertainment. That’s what we need. There’s no point in everybody setting up a market store and all looking the same.

You need to differentiate yourself. You need to bring yourself into play. You need to bring your values and views and the things that you hold, dear, and the things, the styles and the colours and the products that you love. Remember, that’s what you’re doing. You’re curating things for other likeminded people.

Nigel Miller: I mean So the skeptic would say “Yeah but that’s just going to cost more money to do. Why would I want to focus on entertaining my online audience? Why would I want to worry about values, who’s going to look at that? They’re just coming for price aren’t they?”

Kevin Moore: We’ve been through this, so if you’ve come in at this point in the podcast, you need to go back to number one and go through them. No, it’s not about price. It is about way more than price. We are watching price inflation going on. Very quietly around the world there’s price inflation going on. There’s scarcity in some skews, I talk about people exiting the marketplace, stores closing, not opening again, that leads to scarcity.

Scarcity always drives price. We’re seeing ones and twos and 3% price increases. The reason it’s important that you focus on your shopper is they’re the people who give you money every day. The costs in your business are tiny, tiny, tiny, compared to the amounts of money in your shopper’s pockets. it’s at their mantra.

I, I shout over and over again, you’re in the biggest businesses, you’ve got a billion dollars worth of costs in your business and your marketplace is 70 billion. We must never forget the fact the reason we’re in business is to attract money to us, by doing things that we like doing and doing them well. The costs in your business might be a hundred thousand dollars a year, the people want to spend money with you have $10 million a year, so you need to invest in them. Give them a reason to come to you. Find ways to connect with them and find common ground with them. And they will shop with you.

Nigel Miller: You’re involved with Toys R Us here in Australia and New Zealand, and one of the things I know you’re very passionate about is the values and, and the feel that people get when they come to a site like that. Explain why that has been so successful for you from the Hobby Warehouse point-ofview and why this stuff does actually make a difference.

Kevin Moore: I think it’s easy to answer the question.  I saw a specialist. I live in Australia. I have to have my skin look at once in awhile, lovely lady, who had migrated to Australia, Indian lady and she said to me, Oh, you’re involved in Toys R Us? Oh, my word, I remember as a kid walking around stores, I think she was in London, in London and it was so amazing. And I’m so glad that’s coming back. When you do something that stays true to values for 56 years people remember it. They remembered over three generations. Grandparents, parents and children. So that’s why the values matter. And if you talk to the people who are involved in those brands, they never let it go. The best of them, never let it go. They’re fiercely protective of those values because those values can translate for physical stores into online. And that’s what we’re proving right now. Those values transcend a physical relationship. They can be kept alive and nurtured and grown in a digital relationship.

Nigel Miller: Hmm. And I guess what you’ve been saying is that if you focus on your values, it gives you an instant point of difference to your competitors. And if you shine through with them and people relate to them, then you get loyalty or more loyalty than you might do otherwise.

Kevin Moore: You maintain a relationship. That loyalty thing I say to you time and time again, it’s difficult, loyalty is a really tough thing to get to. Habit is a good one. Loyalty is a tough one to get to. But they think of you. They stay with you. They trust you. We all know companies that we’ve worked for or had interactions with, that have they’ve lost their values over time. There’s a been a change of leadership or management or they’ve merged with another company and they’ve had different values and we see them either slowly or quickly fall apart. Staying true to those values is, is crucial. And if you let them go and each time you change ownerships and things, it’s more difficult to keep them alive, but if you keep them alive and don’t let them go then you continue to be able to talk with confidence and with honesty, with people who are like you, who think like you and consume things like you and buy things like you.

Nigel Miller: Now talking of learning curves here. So if I am a retailer that’s moving online for the first time, I’ve tackled my Shopify, I’ve adopted my Canadian email marketing that’s been offered to me and I’ve learnt a lot of things, but then there’s another one that shines through to me as being important to master and that’s going to be social media. And where I’m coming from for this one is I live on a beautiful location which is actually a Pullman hotel resort as well. And we have a Facebook group and the hotel has been brilliant at promoting what they’re doing and food and all sorts of things through the social.

And I’ve seen more from the hotel than I have in the three years I’ve been here in the last few months and basically spent a lot more money with them as a consequence. So social’s obviously vital to get your head around as well. Would you say that?

Kevin Moore: Yes it is, it’s just another part of the mix. They feel like there are so many moving parts. So if you’d listened to what Miranda was talking about two podcasts ago, there’s a structure to things. All anybody’s trying to do at the moment, all we’re trying to do is to give you comfort that there are a number of things that you can do. Now, it is not a, a prescriptive, there is only one way approach. But there are a number of key things that if you do and do consistently, then your business will grow. And businesses around for a long period of time doing the same thing, doing it consistently, doing it well, putting thought into it, tend to grow. They grow over a long period of time.

So there’s enough there, whether it be social, it be electronic direct mail, it be, what you’re doing with your SEO, to what you’re doing with your, with your own shopper experience on the site, what you’re doing with blogs, community involvement, they’re all there it’s just understanding that there’s about eight or 10 levers. There’s six or 12 – there aren’t 27 levers to pull. That’s what frightens people. They go, “Oh, there’s all these things to do”. No, they fit in about six or eight, eight or 12 buckets. And as long as you look after those buckets or somebody looks after one of those buckets for you, you look after two and somebody looks after another two, you’re okay.

It isn’t significantly complicated. It’s going to take time. But you’ve got time. You’ve got eight hours, eight hours a day, five days a week. Normally we are happy to invest in our businesses. So you’ve got that time. And if you shared that around other people, they’ve also got, eight hours a day, five days a week. So we start to add those things together and we can run a business.

It’s the confidence to run a business.

Nigel Miller: And it’s to take the first step. I guess.

Kevin Moore: Do that. So there’s one of two ways you do that. It’s called burning platform or burning desire, burning ambition. So burning platform is guys who are physically in retail right now, and nobody’s coming to the door or the doors locked. That’s a burning platform. So you have to spend that time when your door’s locked or the quiet times in the store when nobody walks in to get your head around which of the sites you’re going to choose. How are you going to migrate your stock on. How are you going to get the inventory loaded up? How are you going to get your merchant’s structures in place, whether it’s PayPal, AfterPay, MasterCard,  whatever it is.

How are you going to start? You just do it step by step. That’s the burning platform. The burning ambition is the fact “no I want to do this. I’ve always wanted to…you know Canva. The I’ve always wanted to do this and I’m going to do it well. They don’t have to be as big as Canva. That’s the thing I think, Nige we’re trying to get people to understand.

We’re not trying to make people billionaires. We’re trying to get people to feed their families. That’s all we’re trying to do.

Nigel Miller: So, What else are you seeing out there Kevin? What other changes are you seeing?

Kevin Moore: Just crazy little things. I bought a, a guitar on Gumtree and I went over to pick up this guitar. And the guy there, lovely guy, he’s been in real estate all his life and now no longer works for an agency. Can’t. So there’s been a down turn. They let him go. Now this guy is, I’m going to guess he’s over 50.

And this guy on his own has gone up, set up his own agency with his own website. He’s put community pages on the website. Community pages. So anybody who’s looking to come into buy property in the area, he’s got links to the community pages so they can understand what happens in that community. Now, this guy, he’s got every excuse not to be online.

He’s got every excuse not to understand. Every reason to say, ah, I’ve lost my job. I’ll go and find another job working with somebody else, maybe one day. And he hasn’t. What he’s done is he’s taken his name, his family name. He’s registered an agency and he’s doing it. And he’s getting people come to see him and guess what?

He’s selling properties because he’s in real estate. And that blew me away. It’s humbling. I was with the guy for, oh, 20 minutes, 25 minutes. It felt like an hour because boy, he could talk. You think I can talk? Well, He could talk, but hats off the guy had done a stunning job and the site looked beautiful.

Beautiful.

Nigel Miller: I guess the great thing with online is that you can carry on just tweaking at the edges. So, iteration one looks okay, then iteration two can look fantastic and everything you do just builds.

Kevin Moore: And exactly, and it never goes away. So the same way that people went and got their first lease and they got their first shop and they bought their first season of stock. And 75% of it sold and 25 was never going to sell. And even when the guys who sold it to you, they knew it wasn’t going to sell. So you then liquidate that at below cost and you start your next season.

And this time you buy and 85% of it sells all at full margin. You’re left with 15% and the next season, 90% of it sales and left with 10% and then you’re in rhythm. That’s what it takes.  You know, we’re going to go around the sun. So if you start today an online business, you’re going to go around the sun four times on this little planet before you you’re on your game, it’s gonna take you four years.

But on that journey, you should have enough money coming in to be able to pay yourself, to grow to the next level, the next level, the next level.

Nigel Miller: Well, But one of the things I know we’ve been talking about is that with The Road to Online Retail, because we’ve changed how we’re structuring our courses, we’re pretty much starting from scratch. So I was actually thinking of maybe writing a little blog, which I’ll pop onto the website about what we do and what the corresponding effect is. So how we build awareness and engagement with our own community and all the things I learn along the way, because I am going through that steep learning curve of email marketing and all the other things that Miranda talked about. But I will say I don’t think I’ve told you this, but I will say that the SEO tips that she gave us, for anyone who hasn’t listened to it, go back to episodes five and six.

When I first looked at our website and the terms we had, and the key term for us is shopper experience and shopper marketing, and the road to retail. We were on page 35 for the shopper experience. We’re now on page one in just about four weeks. So her tips work.

Kevin Moore: So, Again, anybody who’s petrified of this, the data’s there. It’s that’s what’s so good. So we could open a store and we could look at our till, and we could see what was coming in, or we could count the number of people coming in and how many bought. But, we’ve got data, amazing data that we can use every month, some of it every day, but we tend not to, but every month, every week we can look at data and change what we’re doing. We’ll make another decision, then we make another decision. It’s there to do. That’s the key thing for me, it’s there to do. And by the way, if you’re under 30, you’ve got no excuse, you’re digital natives, guys. You were born with this, you get this.

So Shopify also have something called Shopify Studios. So they’re putting a series out all about entrepreneurs and they talk about people have given up full time jobs, to focus on launching their own businesses. Now that’s what I did.  I left a good paying job in my mid thirties, to back myself in growing the business and it was a roller coaster ride, but we got there.

And we got there with really good people around us and we continue to do that. And I think once you’ve looked over the cliff once, you know, you can do it. So guys are you’re under 30, certainly 35 is a great time to do it. If you’re under 30, this is what you should be looking at. Go and do it.

Allow your personal abilities and passions to shine through.

Nigel Miller: So Kevin in summary, after all the things we’ve discussed today, if I am in a panic, my physical retail is just doomed in the way things are heading at the moment. What do I do?

Kevin Moore: You either liquidate your stock and shut up shop and go or you actively and passionately embrace online.

Nigel Miller: Would you say that most of the people moving online at the moment are physical retailers that are just in a panic?

Kevin Moore: No. There’s people who actually want to give it a go. This is a shocking year, 2020 will go down as a shocking year in every sense, but out of shocking years become good things. And I think a lot of people will say, I used to work in hospitality and it’s just not happening so I’m going to go and allow myself to be an online in some shape or form. It will be the reason for them to do it. It’ll be the reasons that for them to back themselves and try. I keep saying these are not massive amounts of money. We’re not asking you to go out and borrow tens of millions to launch the next Amazon or eBay or anybody else it’s about you just backing yourself and then buying yourself a job.

Nigel Miller: So, How are you feeling from what you’re seeing at the moment overall? What would you be saying to people in their various circumstances? How do we get through this and come out the other side in a better place?

Kevin Moore: So when we break, Nige said to me, you sound a bit down. I’m not, I’m probably one of the most optimistic people around. I’m a great believer that tomorrow is the next best day ever. But I just think we’re at that point where it’s hard and we can’t see the end of this Nige, and it’s getting people down and we have to give them the confidence that they can do this.

And I’ve been working on a deal now, one particular deal, for six months and I’m non Zoom calls from 8:00 AM till 8:00 PM trying to save some jobs in one company and create jobs in another. And it’s hard. It isn’t easy.  At the moment, the business community have more to offer, the world economy, than anybody else .

We need to find our ways through it. We need to give people jobs. We need to give them reasons to get out of bed in the morning. By the way, we’ll touch on universal, basic income, which I think is something that we need too. So we need to find a way that people have choices in their lives.

But right now we need to give people reasons. I was talking to people and they’re struggling to get out of bed. And they’ve got businesses and they’ve taken a 30% cut in the salary for everybody, the pay scales of everybody in their business. And they’re struggling to get out of bed because it’s hard.

And I just think of this one, don’t mistake my voice as being flat. Mistake my voice as being resolved, committed. We have to push through. We have to get up tomorrow, and work out what we’re going to do, how are we going to move forward, make a decision, then make another decision, then make another decision.

We feel like we’re in the, the bottom of the dip, but we don’t know when we’re going to come out of it and that’s the whole thing that Jim Collins was talking about, the Stockdale Paradox. We don’t know when we’re going to come out so accept it’s here and make being here the best thing you can do every day. Put all our energy into things that we can control, the things that we can influence, things that we can do and let go of the things we can’t.

Nigel Miller: I guess another opportunity that’s out there is there a lot of people who have more time on their hands than they’ve ever had before and I know when I used to do my small business TV show that we would get experts to help businesses to build – basically mentoring, finding mentors, to help them.

If you are in a business and you don’t know, you’re starting out, you don’t know  where to go, I guess there’s going to be quite a few people you can reach out to now that might have more time to spare for you?

Kevin Moore: Yeah. And if they don’t have time to spare for you, cause they’re busy doing it, they will have enough time to chat with you. So if somebody mentors you, they can mentor you for 60 minutes a month. So the great thing about mentors is that they can, you can reach out, you can work with them they can be just business people around you or people in a similar area and as long as they have the philosophy that says, we’re going to talk, and we’re going to agree to do some things, then we’re going to talk again in a month. If you haven’t done those things and you give me the mentor, 10 reasons why you haven’t done them, it’s all good. And then we’re going to stop and we’ll get the next month. If at the second month, you still haven’t done those things. And again, we have reasons and they’re just reasons and they’re reasonable reason, but they’re just reasons.

Then at that point, you’re starting to waste my time and the single most important resource I have in my life is time. It’s not money. It’s time and family and friends. And if you do it a third time, I use a phrase “I’m gonna let you go. I’ll let you go”. And that means it doesn’t matter you can be paying me a hundred thousand dollars a month. You’re still wasted my time. We’re not moving things forward. So you have to have that commitment to do it. So reach out to people, ask them. I’ve got a call after this podcast with a young guy I haven’t heard of from 10 years and he’s called me out of the blue and says, “Kevin, I got this thing. I think it’s gonna work. I think it’ll, I think it’ll…”  I’ll give you an hour of my time. So you send a Zoom through, we’ve got a Zoom call in 11 minutes time and we’re going to go through it and I’ll give him my views. They’ll be valid or they won’t be, but he’s reached out. You know, good on him, he’s reached out.

Nigel Miller: Well, Actually it wasn’t deliberate, but I guess it does lead us to an opportunity that people can grasp, which is that we are intending to launch a masterclass as one of the options, in addition to the online shopper experience course, where you can get some time with Kevin as part of the masterclass, and also share with other like-minded online business people.

So anyway, we have just, at long last, finished the online retail course. So if you’d like to find out more about our online retail shopper experience course, as always go to our website, the road to retail.com. You can find out about the course and you can also find out about the masterclass that we’re intending to do a pilot of soon.

So we’re looking for some early adopters who are keen to get a huge discount to take part in that masterclass. So log on, have a look and sign up.

So Kevin, we really need to end on a more uplifting note. So music, music, give us some music, give some uplifting music. What have you got for us?

Well Nige, this really is uplifting. So this is a wonderful song. It’s called “Gold in a Vegemite Jar”. it’s almost a true story. Bob and John have worked all over Australia in the strangest of places. John Lay writes the most beautiful melodies and was a rock doctor. He worked at our mine sites and goldfields, and Bob’s just done crazy things his whole life. He’s panned for gold in all sorts of places.

This song “Gold in a Vegemite Jar” is all about crossing Australia, being out in the wild and the stars and the heat of the day. It is just a wonderful, fun, energetic song. So play this one it’s a hugely uplifting – Gold in a Vegemite Jar

And

Kevin Moore: for people that don’t know, Vegemite is a black paste made out of yeast that’s a very poor substitute for the English Marmite, which, and if you’re American, you probably wouldn’t like either of them. So here we go: Gold in a Vegemite Jar.