Find out what the best are doing…and copy it! That was the advice offered to HTA Garden Future Conference delegates by leading retail consultant Dennis Reid.

Dennis, a former Olympic coach, has spent 30 years honing a measurable framework designed to transform under-performing retail businesses into world class operators.

Stressing the importance of understanding numbers and KPIs, he reminded his audience that improving conversion rates, average transaction values and traffic would make a dramatic difference to turnover and produced impressive spreadsheets to illustrate the point.

A master of the mantra – “If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room” and “It takes the same time to be average as it does to be the best, so why not plan to win” – he urged delegates not to put off  “changing things you know you need to change”.

Marketing must be educational as well as promotional. “You have a fantastic platform from which to teach people how to do it,” he said.

He encouraged retailers to produce a ‘business dashboard’ monitoring the week-by-week performances of employees across the business. “Standards are not negotiable,” he said. “If you observe something and do not address it, you condone it. Why would you not want to change it?”