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Ten Greatest Ideas for Building the Retail Business of Your Dreams • 117
'We started by collecting the Christmas card listsfrom all ourfriends on the basis
that like attracts like. We added relevant people from my past business life, my
wife's life as a teacher and entered all of these, about 550 records, into the Microsoft
Word database. This is not ideal but what do you want - it's free if you have
Word? This we called our prospect file. We then opened a visitor's book in the
shop itself and encouraged people to sign it or throw their business card into a
large, and quite attractive, glass jar. This added to the prospects file.
'As we sold things and got customers, we entered the details of the sale into an
Excel spreadsheet that we call our customer file. Once again not brilliant soft-
ware, but it seems ftt for purpose and we will not change until we discover a major
deficiency in it. We want to have the customers identified so that we can invite
them to previews orfor a glass of wine if we have something interesting to show
them. It is also useful to be able to scan the file and see who is buying what.
'We have stopped trying to guess exactly who will become customers because
we still get so many surprises. All that means is that you must never throw any
name away. Currently we have 1000 people on ourprospect file and 500 custom-
ers. Combined with a good web page to which we can refer them from time to
time, these give us a lot of our sales.'
Idea 71- Diversify carefully
Once you have your premises, it is tempting to put them to greater use than just
your original idea. There will, in fact, be no shortage of people orTering to let you sell
their wares through your shop for a percentage. Make sure that the wooden replicas
hand-turned at a local crafts factory do not include a Trojan horse. We have cov-
ered one reason for looking at diversification with a sceptical eye- you really ought
to learn as much about the new products as the old. After all, that is what you sell.
There are other reasons:
