The Cycle of Inventory and Sales

I started today at a funeral, later heard that my sister in law-to be was almost hit by a drunk driver (so close she was spattered by motor oil before the car took flight and flipped over!), and then I drove through Napa where the smells of harvest fill the air in a fermenting cloud of pungent odors and memories of seasons past. Such clear cycles, obvious patterns and what symmetry: life and death, dormancy and re-birth, day and night...

It has always struck me that everything in Napa is so symmetrical, everything in a row, straight down the line, seasons always bringing the same celebrations of planting and harvest... a perfect cycle. It would be nice if more things in life were this straight forward or at least this symmetrical and semi-predictable, wouldn't it? Who knows, maybe we would all just get bored if things were...

But business is very much this way and many of us just aren't paying close enough attention.

If you look closely you'll see that business is part of this cycle and symmetry and the better you can predict what's coming next and REALLY listen to what the seasons (or customers) are telling you, the more profitable your company will be in the seasons to come.

It was about two weeks ago that the Paw Pet Babies arrived, brand new and basically untested on the market. But I was confident they would sell because I listened to my customers, looked at their spending habits, asked stores, asked friends, dogs (no, no I didn't ask dogs but I did test the new toys with countless pups). I asked and I got answers and I qualified and quantified and I predicted and now we are sold out and ordering more.

A grape farmer can only look to past seasons to try to predict rainfall or heat in any given year, keep his fingers crossed that some movie or fad like Sideways doesn't kill an entire varietal once it has grown and do his best given Mother Nature's turbulent moods. But most industries only require the second half of this guessing game... we don't require Mother Nature's kindness, just some educated predictions and actions.

We are preparing for a change in the weather; a change in consumer behavior that in my opinion is going to eliminate many brands and leave a few with great power (this is also widely hypothesized by other leaders I have spoken to and professors at Saint Mary's College of CA). We have begun work on the 8th Paw Pet, I'm not telling the animal or name but if you guess it, you get a free one, and we are making big changes to our successful line of Paw Pets because we are looking at the past (briefly), looking at what's happening NOW (at length), and seeing an equation that requires altering something that is not broken. Just because it isn't broken doesn't mean you can't improve it.

We don't have to hold a finger to the sky and guess what Mother Nature has in store so why is it that we so often just go with our unchecked gut instinct? Why do we just follow what others have done in the past or seasons past when we can so easily figure out what is coming next and bring our rain coats or bathing suits?

My guess is laziness and too much unchecked faith in our "common sense"... what's yours?