Part 1: Building Confidence as an Entrepreneur: Skills for Success | Susan Negen

In part 1 of our new episode of Spark and Ignite Your Marketing, Beverly Cornell talks with retail expert Susan Negen about the transformative power of confidence and vision in building a thriving business. Drawing from her journey with WhizBang Retail Training and two decades of retail experience at top brands like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, Susan shares why creating a clear, inspiring vision is essential—and how it differs from simply setting goals.

Key Takeaways:

1. Vision vs. Goal-Setting: A vision is a powerful, overarching dream for your business that guides your journey, while goals are the actionable steps along the way. 
2. Investing in Essential Skills: To truly grow, entrepreneurs need to invest in skills beyond their core passion, like inventory management, people management, and financial planning. 
3. Confidence Through Community and Masterminds: Susan shares how being part of a supportive community, like mastermind groups, accelerates growth by providing fresh perspectives, accountability, and the encouragement needed to make confident decisions and stay on track with your vision.

Follow Susan:
Retail Training and Solutions for Independent Retail Stores
Brilliance

Recommended Resources:
A Better You, Every day · Mindvalley
ZingTrain | Business Training & Leadership Development

P.S. Ready to spark your unique opportunities and ignite your marketing? Here are three ways to work with us.

1. 📞 Schedule a Complimentary 15-minute Call and let’s delve into your goals and answer any questions you may have.
2. 📘 Read Beverly’s book Marketing for Entrepreneurs a quick guide filled with actionable steps to help make your brand and business shine even brighter. 🎙️ Listen to Beverly’s Marketing Podcast where she interviews entrepreneurs to get inspired and gain new business and marketing insights.
3. 🎓 Learn more about marketing and Enroll in Our Marketing Courses designed to bring clarity to your business efforts. They’re easy-to-understand and self-paced, perfect for busy entrepreneurs like you.

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Transcript

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Beverly 0:11

Did you know that effective inventory management can reduce inventory costs by up to 30%? This is a crucial activity for both large and small retail businesses to stay competitive. Welcome to another enlightening episode of the spark and ignite your marketing podcast. Joining us today is Susan Negen, a retail expert with a very unique blend of sophisticated big business skills and street smart small business experience. Susan has served as a senior executive for retail giants like Bloomingdale's and Macy's and Lord Taylor, and she brings her wealth of knowledge to whizzbang retail training and brilliance. Susan has distilled 20 years of experience with her business partner, Bob, into a practical, fun, and no nonsense approach to retail training. Susan, I am thrilled to have you with us today.

Susan 0:58

Oh, thank you, Beverly. I'm really excited to be here with you.

Beverly 1:01

So talk a little bit about how you started out in this, in the big box retailers and what that looked like. How did the journey start for you?

Susan 1:10

Actually it started small and then it got big and then it got small again. I started just as so many of us do. In high school, I needed a summer job, a little weekend job. And in my little teeny town where I lived, there was a beautiful women's boutique. And so I went in and I thought I'm going to see if I can get a job working here on the sales floor. And I did. And that was my very first job in retail. I was just, I was the salesperson on the floor, helping the women who came in looking for amazing outfits. And I think Retail and I started our love affair all the way back then when I was a teenager. And then I went to college to get my Oh, so incredibly marketable degrees in French and art history. And during those, summers I would also work at retail, but by then my family had moved to, and from my little town to Chicago, Illinois. And so I started working at Lord and Taylor there, and was like an an executive intern for them in the summer. And then when I graduated from college one of my, Dad's friends my mom and dad's friends said to me Susan do you have a job yet? You're graduating in just a few months. And I was like, oh my gosh I should get a job that hadn't actually occurred to me, but cause I was so caught up in my education. I'm like, oh, I think I need to get a job. And I was actually going to school out on the East coast in Boston. And I had all this retail experience and Bloomingdale's came onto campus during one of our, the recruiting, fairs that they have. And I applied for a job in the executive training program at Bloomingdale's in New York city and was accepted, moved to New York. Big city and started working through their training program. It really enjoyed that. And then eventually moved to San Francisco on the far other side of the country and worked at Macy's as a senior executive at Macy's. From little teeny to this is big corporate experience where we had a lot of. People helping us and a lot of people training us and giving us information as we grew with the companies and grew as an executive in those large corporate retail environments. And then I decided that I was just done. I was done with retail, but. As things happen I moved to Michigan where my family was. And as, when I met my husband, he happened to own his own small independent retail store. So there I was back again in small retail. He had a chain of kite and toy stores here in Michigan, where we still live today. And so I joined him and was the buyer for his small toy store. Independent retail chain and did a lot of work on the sales floor, store management work. So really small, big, small. And then when he sold that business to his brother, we started whiz bang retail training. And we've been doing that now for almost 25 years together.

Beverly 4:19

So who do you serve and what problems do you help solve for them?

Susan 4:23

Yeah. So at WhizBang Retail Training. We really focus on that. Small to midsize independent retailer folks who are putting their passion to work every single day. But what a lot of folks lack are the full breadth of skills that you need to run a retail store. So maybe you're amazing at marketing that you don't know anything about inventory management. What you mentioned it at the top of the show here, or you're not really good at being a manager of people, or you don't know HR. So all of these different skills we've identified to 11 different skills. That store owners really need to be successful. And so that's what we try to do is bring all those skills, into play and teach all those skills so that people can really be successful running their stores.

Beverly 5:14

Entrepreneurs encounter challenges all the time. And it's oftentimes the things that are outside their wheelhouse, right? It's not about the passion they have for whatever they're selling, the thing that they do. It's the other things that we have to just figure out on the fly so what are some of the biggest challenges that you faced as a business owner? And how have you, how do you approach or tackle those challenges?

Susan 5:37

At the Mackinac kite company, Bob's company this is just, it's just like any other business owner. We face these exact challenges, which is why we ended up eventually starting whiz bang training. But what happens is those things that you're really good at. For example, I was really good at selling and really good at marketing and really good at, customer engagement and that those things that you're really good at bring you some success, but then as you get that success, it starts to reveal the weaknesses in these other areas. And for example, pretty quickly, Bob realized that, he didn't have the skills to manage his team of mostly high school and college age kids, right? It wasn't that he didn't want to. He just didn't have the skills. So that, and then once you get that skill under your belt. And you build your business even more than, oh the weakness in inventory management starts to reveal itself. It took Bob 15 years to like even start to master those different skills. And I think that we're so lucky today that there's a lot of information available on the web. There's a lot of information available to us, but. Yeah. You said the word invest, and I think that is like a key concept that a lot of Small business owners don't focus in on enough. There's lots of things that we have in our businesses that are expenses, but some things that we do in our business are investments like we invest in inventory. We expect a return on that inventory investment and to really invest properly and invest in a strategic way in learning some of these key skills fast. Because you don't want to have to take 15 or 20 years to learn all this stuff. We don't have time anymore. He had time back then. Back in the day, speed wasn't as much of an issue. It's really important today. If you don't learn these things quickly, you're going to get left in the dust. So I don't know. Did I answer your question?

Beverly 7:47

How do you tackle that though, as a business owner, like you and Bob now on this business, a little bit different than a retail business, but certainly still has the challenges. So when something presents itself to you and Bob, how do you guys Circle the wagons and like, how do you solve the problems?

Susan 8:06

We do exactly what we tell our clients to do is we go out and we find the information that we need. We invest in courses, we invest in conferences, we invest in mastermind groups, probably. Some of the most important investment we've ever made has been time and money into great mastermind groups where we can learn from and together with our colleagues and that has been really super valuable time and investment for our business. We do exactly the same thing that, we encourage all of our clients to do. So we just do it in our space, our teaching space, our coaching space, rather than, and learning about retail. Cause that one, we got figured out over, over those many years.

Beverly 8:55

since I've been an entrepreneur for 13 years now, my decision making process has changed a lot. How I make decisions, the filter with which I make decisions has changed a lot. How has your decision making process changed and evolved over time?

Susan 9:09

I think one of the things that happens is as you become a more confident Business owner, your decisions happen much faster and you worry less about making mistakes, which I think is really interesting because a lot of times when we're working with new business owners or maybe less confident business owners they worry a lot about making mistakes. So they worry about a lot about making an investment that might not be perfect. And you learn over time that you, there's nothing that you don't learn from. Like even the mistake, it's tuition. I love that it's tuition, even the mistakes. So quick and and a confident decision making is just, it's part of the experience that that you get from. Over time. And I think you, you get, you start to get a really great sense about what's going to work for you and your business and what's not going to work for you and your business. Although sometimes you're surprised. I think really works for us too, is taking the risk, taking the chance, like maybe it's just like a good experience, a good course or a good class or something good. Sometimes you're going to learn something that will completely. Blow your mind and change everything about your business and about your life. That's happened to us. I took a class one time and I thought I was going to be learning about, the the management details of running a company that is developing a SaaS platform, a software service platform. No. The thing that I learned within the first 15 minutes, has literally blown up our whole company. So just being open to those kinds of sparks. Yeah. Thank you. Spark Ignite. Like you get a spark, right? And those sparks being open to that and just being willing to try and believing that no matter what kinds of things you do to improve your business, you're going to learn something from all of those different things.

Beverly 11:08

You might learn something new or you might solidify what you know. So what frustrates you the most about the retail industry and how do you think you and Bob fix it and your amazing team of people?

Susan 12:29

I don't know if it's something that's frustrating so much. As it's just, it's I guess maybe it is frustrating. We, I get frustrated when I listen to the like the standard business news and they, they're always talking about Amazon, or they're always talking about Walmart, or they're always talking about these big corporate giants, because I think that's what they understand. And, but there are so many. Independent businesses, whether they're retail businesses, whether they're service businesses, local businesses are the heartbeat of our economic engine. And I just don't think we get enough love around that. And I also think that because of that, these business owners, these independent business owners don't don't give themselves enough credit. And don't get enough confidence from like the general You know, public about running their businesses. Like you are so important. Independent retailers are so important. They are the heartbeat and the lifeblood of their communities. They hire the people in the communities. Do you know that like 47 percent of all. All employees in the United States are employed by small independent businesses, 47%, like almost half. So it's, it, yes, of course, big companies like Exxon and whatever they're, they are hiring and employing people, but half of our country. Is employed by the independence like our clients. So

Beverly 14:13

I love working with service based businesses because, and retailers both, but we more niche on the service side, but service based businesses, because it does, it supports families and it also supports the causes that matter. Like the high school prom and the local rescue. And these are the threads in our community that make where we live. Amazing. And they are the superheroes. I love, I just think that they do so much for who we are as a people in America.

Susan 14:43

Absolutely. And it's what makes our communities unique. It's what makes our country unique. If people come to your town to visit, they don't say, Oh, come on. Hey, let's go down to the Walmart. They don't say that because the Walmart in Dubuque is the same as the Walmart in. New York city is the same as the Walmart in Phoenix, Arizona. It's the same. It's all the same. The local business, that are driven by the people and the communities that they serve, those are the businesses that can really develop amazing experiences, really amazing and different experiences. They can deliver, just, a lot of a lot of fun and a lot of care and connection with their communities that the big guys can't do. They try. They try the big guys,

Beverly 15:28

but relationships with the customers. Yeah, it's totally different level to talk about an experience or a story where it perfectly captures the essence of your business.

Susan 15:39

Oh gosh, Beverly, there are literally hundreds. Let me think I've got, I'll just tell you, we've got, we have so many amazing clients. We, we have a mastermind too, that we run. Not only do we participate ourselves, but we rerun mastermind for independent retailers. And I'll just talk about one of our longtime members of our mastermind group is called the platinum mastermind group. And she started with our group. About, oh, pretty close to 10 years ago now. And when she started, she was a self described hot mess and she she had a successful business and everybody, all of her friends looking from the outside and everything really, thought she had it all together, but personally, she was like a hot mess. She was stressed out. Her employees were driving her crazy. She sure sales weren't doing what they wanted her to do. All these different things. She just couldn't quite get all the pieces together. And so then we started working with her started working with us in the platinum mastermind group and literally in the next year, she took a month long vacation to Italy with her family. And she has more than tripled her already multimillion dollar business since she's been, working with us over this last decade, she has, taken her sales volume per hour and her sales volume per square foot in her store, like higher than she's Ever thought possible. And it's because she's really worked to master all of these 11 different skills that we teach and that that are really so critical to run your business. And she is just, she's just on fire right now. Everything. Is not, it's always ups and downs. Like it's never a straight line. There's no straight line up and success, right? It always looks like this always, right? But she has that confidence. I keep coming back to this idea of confidence. Like she has that confidence. Like even when she runs into a cashflow problem, or even when she has a problem with one of her employees or whatever the situation is, she has that confidence. Now. That she can figure it out. And not only can she figure it out, it will be better than it was before. That consistent improvement. Over and over that's the kind of stuff that really makes me super excited to come to work every day. And again, hundreds and hundreds of stories exactly like that.

Beverly 18:17

So you, I love this idea of a longterm vision. I, with my team, I make them, I ask them to write their eulogy. So I go a little bit more personal because I think that again, your business should serve your life. And them even going through the exercise of that, and a lot of them are younger people, them going through that exercise is the first time they thought about the legacy and the life that they want to lead. And I said, what are the things that you need, and who is the person you should be, become? To fit that eulogy. And that's where you put all your time, your investments, everything into to make that happen for yourself. And when you have a roadmap, a blueprint of what you want your life to look like, now you have some filter for yourself to create more of the experience you want to have at a much younger age than I did. Because if you, if I can save you 20 years, gosh, that would be amazing. That's such a gift. So I think that, so with that longterm vision, where do you see a whiz bang going? What's your longterm vision and how is it evolving and adapting?

Susan 19:20

Okay. So I love that question. I'm going to answer, but I want to give you a little resource, you and all the listeners out there. We've done Bob and I are big believers in this visioning piece and the visioning that we do is. but does include both life and business visioning. Two cool resources for you. If you are into visioning, one is called life book. And it, it used to be John and Missy Butcher did that separately. Now they do it through mind valley. com and it's absolutely fantastic. And they really take a look at From a personal level, like the business component is one component in their life book. There are 11 others. But life book is a fabulous resource. If you'd like to do this personal visioning. And then we learned a lot about visioning from Ari Weinzweig at Zingerman's and Zingerman's is a Ann Arbor company. And they started out just as a tiny little deli. And I think they now have a 70. million dollar business and they have done it completely on their own terms. And a lot of this has come from the visioning work that they do. And they started learning about visioning from some guys at NASA. And I know with visioning is not, by the way, people, it's not woo. Like the scientists use this stuff, to get good outcomes at the end of their projects. But Zingerman's has a fabulous course on visioning specifically related to your business. So two, just two resources, life book at Mindvalley and visioning through Zingerman's at zing train.com

Beverly 21:03

is the, we'll include those in the show notes as well so that people can access them.

Susan 21:06

Then what's our vision for Whiz Bang training. Yeah. So funny. We wrote vision, we revise our visions periodically. We started writing a vision about five years ago. And that was for 2029. So we're like about five, it was a 10 year vision. So we're about halfway into it. And we wrote this vision. And one of the very first parts of the vision was that, we wanted whiz bang training to just be ubiquitous and helpful to every single retailer in the country, in the, in the world, even That we could help all of these people. Three years later, I took that class that I said that just blew my mind wide open. And that was all about creating this open training platform specifically for retail store owners, it's called brilliance. So retail brilliance. com, but it was like, if we didn't have any idea when we were writing that vision, how we were going to get there. Visioning is it's not the same as planning or goal setting, but it's about dreaming and when you can allow yourself to dream like that the ways that dream comes true. We'll appear for you along the way, or you'll know when you see it, ah, yes, that is the opportunity that I want to take because that fits my vision. Because you've articulated it for yourself.

Beverly 22:30

So tell me a fun fact about your business that maybe like your most dedicated fans wouldn't know, like a behind the scenes detail.

Susan 22:39

I don't know. We're so like open and transparent. What are things that are that our most dedicated fans would not know. Gosh.

Beverly 22:48

Is there like a ritual or a lucky talisman or is there something that people might not know? I

Susan 22:56

don't

Beverly 22:56

know. Like

Susan 22:57

our team is super tight and connected. We, a lot of times we'll do happy hours together on Friday. I don't know if people, we do, here's one thing. Some people do know this about our company, but we do yoga twice a week in our office. We have a yoga instructor that's been coming in for about pretty close to a decade now with us, and she works twice a week with our team. And we just have a big room and we all pull out our yoga mats and put out our yoga clothes. And we practice for, an hour, twice a week. And not only is it really great Especially, working at a computer to get your body moving and, get all that stuff, but just from also a mental relaxation and meditation kind of standpoint with your mind. So maybe that's something that people don't know about what

Beverly 23:43

we

Susan 23:43

do. I love

Beverly 23:43

that wellness aspect. because really my niche is in the wellness and holistic space. Like I love working with like Dr. Jill, who's a naturopathic doctor. And those are the places that I think my mom was a nurse, but she was also a hippie. And I feel like every time I had like a boo, she come with some oil or homeopathic at me. And the idea of just your energy and your presence and Some of those, just knowing you can calm your mind, take deep breaths. Like some of those are so important

24:14

and help

Beverly 24:14

calm you. That kind of brings me to the next question though. Like I it's further down, but I think it's an important question. How do you stay centered when you have a lot of people you serve all the time? How do you stay centered and fill your entrepreneurial cup?

Susan 24:29

Yeah it's always a challenge, right? Because especially like you, we are we're giving. We, that's our job. And I think it is important to, keep focused on our own creative passions as well, because when we're excited and have enthusiasm and passion, that does help fill us up and it's just baked into the culture of our company that we caring is one of our number one core values. We care for our customers, we care for our partners, we care for each other, we care for our bigger community. And When if we start to get tired, we will fall back to that core value of how can we care for each other? What can we do to go out into the community? We do try to at least once a quarter go out into the community We have a an organization that we support called kids food basket and we go and we Fill up lunch bags for kids who would go home to houses without food otherwise. And when you can go to that place and have the gratitude for all the things that we do have, that also can just fill your cup right back up and be ready to pour back out into the client community that we serve when we're able to give also in other areas.

Beverly 25:52

What is one, I'm going to say unconventional marketing tactic or campaign that you guys have tried and have been surprised by its success?

Susan 26:04

Oh, and have been surprised by its success. Let's see.

Beverly 26:11

Hey there, you've just finished part one of the sparking that you're marketing episode. How are you feeling? Excited, inspired, but we're just getting started. Next Tuesday, we're dropping part two and you won't want to miss it. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. So you'll be the first to know when it goes live until then take a breather, let those ideas simmer and we'll see you next week.