The History of our Habitat ReStore (Part II)
When I developed the budget for the ReStore, I had very little to base my projections upon. In early 2004, I wasn’t aware of any small scale, northern climate, rural ReStores to rob information from. One of the best things about Habitat for Humanity is that there is always someone who has come first. Reinventing the wheel can be a nightmare, particularly if you’re affiliate consists of one employee … me.
I knew that I had two different gross sales scenarios to choose from:
- The ReStore would take off right away, then decline a bit in the winter and rebound again in the Spring, or
- The ReStore would start off slowly and steadily gain for a while
I chose the latter scenario and projected $1000.00 in gross sales for our opening month of July. I chose wrong. We did over $1800.00 our first day and over $11,300.00 by the end of July! After the first week, I re-wrote the budget to show a gross sales curve of higher gross sales in the summer and lower sales in the winter, and that’s precisely what we did. This has been the same trend over the past four years, but the numbers are bigger nowadays.
As far as management of the ReStore is concerned, I came at this venture with a simple concept in mind: run it like a genuine business and whatever profit is made will be used by the affiliate. [Of course, there is no difference between our ReStore and the affiliate; it’s all one legal entity, and all the money basically goes into one pot, and expenses come out of the same pot.] Anyway, we had a ReStore committee, who was tasked to get the ReStore up and running, but it quickly became apparent that there was friction between this committee and the ReStore manager once the store opened. Members of the committee had taken ownership of the venture, and were reluctant to let it go once the store opened. I quickly stepped in and said the committee role should be that of support, not management. I ensured that the manager was to report to me and, through me, to the board. I had seen far too much micromanaging from the board in the past and didn’t want that to occur with the ReStore. It didn’t take long and the ReStore committee basically disbanded and stopped functioning, which had no negative impact on the store at all.
As the Executive Director, I stayed out of the day to day affairs regarding the ReStore. I didn’t deal with pricing, which donations to accept, scheduling of employees, etc. I did/do, however, stay on top of the daily sales numbers, and I also dealt with the marketing of the ReStore. The success of our ReStore was so important to the affiliate that I did have an important role, but not in the management of the store. My view is that I should be able to leave the store for weeks or even months, and it will still be a success, and that’s precisely the way it is set up. All too often, I see directors or boards get into the management of their stores and they fail because those people don’t live it every day. In my opinion, you can’t manage something you don’t live.
About three weeks after we opened, we went through a minor crisis. I had to fire our first ReStore manager. I won’t get into why, but it was best for the store and the affiliate. I hired a temporary manager; and then hired a permanent manager, Donna, who has done a wonderful job since. This situation was a clear demonstration as to why I didn’t want the ReStore run by committee. I took immediate action without talking to anyone – just as it should be.
As far as employees go, we went through a learning curve. We started out with a full time manager, a full time driver/stock person, and two part timers. We played with the numbers of employees for a long time until we found what worked for us. The same can be said about our store hours. We started with a Tuesday-Saturday schedule, then we stopped on Saturdays, then we added Mondays, then we added Saturdays again. This was a big learning curve, until we settled on Monday-Friday 9-5pm and Saturday 10-4pm, which is working well.
As the months went by, I noticed that the complexity of the organization grew significantly in terms of the bookkeeping. So, I hired a bookkeeper, which helped a lot. Unfortunately, while she was doing a great job, she didn’t last very long. She was replaced with another bookkeeper who didn’t do such a great job, and I didn’t have the accounting background to catch it. Anyway, I got rid of that person, and now we have a fulltime bookkeeper who seems to be doing pretty good.
To be continued…
Tags: Business, Habitat for Humanity, nonprofit, Recycle, ReStore
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