Growing Your Business with Data Analysis

How I helped grow a small RV Parts company grow exponentially in sales to over $8,000,000 in three short years.

Growth doesn't happen overnight. The key word here is "helped." As our sales grew, our team grew. Although I wore many hats in the beginning, I was able pass off some of those hats to additional eBay and Walmart listers and customer service to take over communications. Additionally, we hired more people to pack and warehouse items.

In the beginning, I listed parts on Amazon, eBay and Walmart.com, loaded the database, managed brick and mortar and online part sales and telephone customer service. In addition, I researched products to sell and quantities to purchase and keep on hand. With such a small volume of sales, it was possible to wear so many hats. Luckily, as sales grew, my team grew and I was able to focus more on sales.

As sales began to pick up, I changed the listing strategy on Amazon. Our rather limited inventory system showed which items sold, and which items were not selling. Rather than going thru the distributor's catalog and listing page by page, I started focusing on available data and primarily concentrated on commonly replaced service parts. Changing the focus of listings, immediately improved business. This was just the beginning of growth.

Once service parts were listed, I changed my strategy to look for products that were used repeatedly in a given year. I listed simple things like deodorizer, sealants, plastic parts, and filters that must be replaced several times a year. Adding focus to plumbing deodorizers added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bottom line.

From that point, I stopped looking for new parts and decided to "mine" the store. As a brick and mortar store, we had a huge amount of inventory sitting on shelves making us no money at all. Additionally that inventory was taking up valuable space that could be used to store profitable online products and could be better utilized as a packing room rather than a showroom. I suggested moving out of the unair-conditioned packing room and taking over the showroom for packing and warehousing items. The change was made to accommodate items that sold better online rather than items sold in the store.

With more room to store more items, I once again turned to my data. I changed the listing strategy again and began to focus on higher profit margin items. Management really liked the volume of sales coming in, which really boosted our visibility on Amazon. Higher visibility translated into even more sales. Once again hundreds of thousands of dollars were added to the bottom line.

The bottom line is... Many avenues of Data point in all different directions. We have to follow them all, make changes as needed and understand that today's sales plan may not be tomorrows.

Looking for more> The Great TP Shortage, March 2020​

Read more> How this Data thing got started