Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and games store in
I had an interesting conversation with my Senseii the other day. We've both been training for many years and are good friends, but I was a bit surprised when he told me that he actually never wanted to start teaching. "If that was the case," I asked, "Why did you start?"
"Well," he answered, "My teacher told me that he wouldn't teach me anymore until I started teaching others."
I kept prodding him. I knew where this was going, because I had been an instructor for years before I met him. He continued, "I thought he was kidding, but he was dead serious. My instructor said that I had reached a point in my training where in order for me to continue learning, I had to start teaching."
He didn't understand it at the time but once he started to teach, he did. There's something about explaining what you know to someone that enables you to view it a different way, to look at it from a fresh perspective and learn it all over again. We see this all the time in martial arts where you gain all-new insights into a technique by teaching it to someone else.
But this isn't just some esoteric, metaphysical ideal. Studies have found that one of the best ways to learn and master any material is to learn it with the idea of having to teach it. That's right, just learning something with the intention of teaching it at some point in the future actually increases your capacity for learning. So imagine what actually teaching the material can do!
Like I said last week, I'm asking for some audience participation this week and next. For those of you who don't know, I'm on the board for the Retail Division of GAMA and am also the Chairperson of GAMA's Mentorship Program. The Mentorship Program is designed to guide people interested in entering our industry to open professional stores that strengthen our market instead of weaken it. It's also designed to provide an opportunity for existing retailers to reach out to mentors who can assist them in specialized areas, such as opening multiple stores, installing a POS system, or bringing in a new product line.
So here's the first area where I'm going to ask for help. The Mentorship Program has been very active this year, and we're in need of more mentors. If you're an experienced retailer I'd like to ask you to consider registering as a mentor. Each mentor determines the level of involvement they want, but as a time commitment it's only a few hours a month at most. I'm currently working with a handful of mentees. Some I've only spoken to once, just giving them the hard reality of what it takes to open a store. Others I've spoken with (or e-mailed) occasionally to help them with a specific problem they need to talk out. And one mentee I've chosen to work with very extensively and become very good friends with.
There are some people out there who probably think that we shouldn't be helping anyone enter out industry; that we've got enough competition. But what I've found is that these stores are going to open anyway and with proper guidance, they can make decisions that don't hurt the local market. In fact, in many instances giving these would-be entrepreneurs a glimpse of the reality of opening a storefront has actually dissuaded them from opening somewhere on a shoestring budget. Over the past year and a half I've managed to convince new stores not to target the local established competition in a price war; talked with them about developing their own clientele rather than trying to steal someone else's; and generally worked with them on building a solid business focused on contributing to the community rather than trying to take from it.
Personally, I've also found that I've learned so much from working with all these people. One mentee asked me how I handle budgeting my orders each month, and as I prepared an answer for him I realized exactly how I do budget orders, and in doing so I was able to further refine the process that I had come to take for granted for quite a few years. If you're coming to GTS this month and are interested in becoming a mentor, please feel free to talk to me about it.
If you haven't realized by now, as you'll see in my next column, one of the things I believe is that ultimately the retailers in our industry possess a tremendous amount of knowledge that we can all benefit from if we share it constructively (I know I've learned a lot from some great people). At GTS this year, we're trying to create more opportunities than ever for that to happen.
One of the seminars at this year's GTS will be "The Manager's Toolkit," which is focused on providing retailers with a range of tools for streamlining their daily operations. We've spoken with a number of retailers who have donated their ideas and tools that they use to manage the daily operations of their stores, items such as Store Closing Checklists, Walk the Floor Checklists, Weekly Budgeting Sheets, Training Checklists and a host of other forms and tools that retailers use to run their stores, smoothly and efficiently.
If you'd like to contribute a form, idea, or "tool" to the seminar, we'd love to have it. I'll be compiling all these ideas and forms into one resource book which I'll send out to everyone who contributed as soon as we're done. I'm hoping that this can be an incredibly useful tool for retailers everywhere and a toolkit that we can continue to update and maintain as a living document for everyone's benefit. If you'd like to contribute to the project please email me at ghopcom@aol.com and feel free to attach your "tool" and any description of how you came up with it and utilize it in your store.
OK, I've asked you for a lot this week. Next week I'll be discussing the Power Retailing Workshops we'll be running at GTS in a few weeks. I'm very excited about them and we'll have more opportunities for your input.
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
