How to Grow a Liquor Store Business During + After Covid-19

Liquor Profits Store Revenue Optimization

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How to Grow a Liquor Store Business during + after Covid-19 Alex Flasinski, Store owner + online expert

www.LiquorStoreProfits.com

HOW TO GROW A LIQUOR STORE BUSINESS AFTER COVID-19, PANDEMIC GROWING OPPORTUNITIES WRITTEN BY: ALEX FLASINSKI

Alex here, from pike's wine and liquor, in our new warehouse behind us. I wanted to quickly share with you what I think you have to do right now, today, to continue growing your liquor store business. Now coronavirus has shaken things up a little bit, and everybody is reacting a little bit differently. But everybody who is doing well right now is doing the same, delivery and online.

You have to have your liquor store online, today. You can't wait. Don't even wait a week. You got to get on today. You've got to start doing deliveries. And I would suggest also looking into shipping. If it's something that you're allowed to do. We do ship. We do delivery at this point. It's the middle of 2020, July 2020.

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And, we're at this point doing about as much business online as we are doing instore. So, you can think about that for a second. That means we have our liquor store physically, and then we also have our online store that is doing just as much business as our liquor store. We weren't even online a few months ago.

We were online, but we weren't taking it seriously up until a couple of months ago. A lot of you might be thinking, is it too late? No. I see total wine is already online. Alex is already online. My competitors are online. No, it's not too late. Do you know when it's going to be too late? It's going to be too late, in a couple of years, maybe even in a few months unless you're super focused. Maybe you're just a specialty mescal store, or whiskey store or something, or you have something awesome for your customers?

You're going to be forgotten about. You're going to go out of business if you're not online.

So, what do you need to do to get online? You need a POS system. Now I know a lot of liquor store owners tend to hide their taxes and pay less on the sales tax and even income tax. And they really shouldn't be. So, getting a POS system is going to jumble that up for you.

There's a learning curve. You are going to have to pay some more taxes if you are hiding taxes currently, which you should not be. But I am under the impression that the majority of small liquor store owners do hide a substantial amount of their taxes.

And the reason that you can't hide the taxes, or at least it's not a very good idea to, is that everything is just digital, right?

And it's not just a book on your desk anymore. And you can hide the cash, you can do whatever you want with it. Of course, you should pay tax on it. But everything that you sell online or even through your POS is leaving a digital footprint or whatever you call it. And that is traceable.

So when shit hits the fan and the IRS is coming and knocking on your door and asking for your POS records and all that, there aren't too many options to hide from them, and to save your ass there. As far as being online, if you're not online already, you don't understand that it's not that difficult.

Especially if you use City Hive. I suggest starting with City Hive, as well. They're very easy to set up with. They'll give you an account manager or whatever, somebody who will guide you through and explain to you what to do and everything. They'll do the credit card processing for you and they make delivery and shipping possible, as long as you have a POS system. But you getting online is not going to just double your business. like it did for us. We had to work really hard for it. And, by work, I mean, advertising, you're going to be getting a lot more phone calls, you got to pick

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up those phone calls and remain polite, courteous, helpful to customers. A lot of these people, they'll call in just to see what time you closed.

What is the delivery? Do you have a delivery minimum? Where is the driver?

Mixed up with orders. There's a whole little set of new problems that will come in. But you have to consider that you are setting yourself up for doubling your revenue, possibly tripling your revenue, as well as you won't be going out of business if you're online.

And I'm not here to scare anybody into getting online though. I believe it to be very true that if you're not online by the end of 2020, you're screwed. As far as the liquor store business goes, because everybody else who is getting online now is starting to learn what it takes to pick up the phone calls, seeing if they need a hire a full-time driver, if they need to hire more help, whatever it is, they're going to have a head start.

You'll have a head start. Start today. There's still the vast majority of liquor store owners who are still not online. I'm not sure what the statistics are exactly, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of the liquor stores that are in my area are not online. They haven't been online and, not that I feel bad for them, I guess they're my competition, but I just don't understand, if you're planning to be in business, you have to get online.

Okay. So that's that? What else can I touch on here? Those were the basics of it.

There's a lot of laws. There's a lot of different regulations. There's a big learning curve like I said, but it's not that difficult. I did it myself. You can do it yourself. If I were to do it all over again, I would probably just omit a few things.

And, honestly, I would have liked to have just paid somebody to be able to explain to me like, how can I set up shipping? How can I set up delivery? What can I expect?

So maybe that's why I'm making these videos. I'm not really sure why I make these

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videos, but, I'm sure that if you are considering going online and you watch this, you can leave a comment, ask me anything you want.

I've been considering even offering a paid type deal where if you're really serious and you have questions, I'll have to set up something where you can pay some amount of money to get on the phone with me and I can go through your problems with you.

Hopefully, help you figure some stuff out, because I've been starting to get some phone calls, actually a couple of people have visited me in the store, so that's pretty cool. But I do imagine it's getting a little bit more frequent where I'm getting more and more emails and more and more phone calls. To save my own time, I'd rather get paid to speak to somebody rather than just anytime today, somebody can call the store and ask if I'm in there or, stuff like that.

So, if you guys do have any questions, or girls, please let me know. What else should I make a video about next? This is my warehouse now. It's about 10 minutes away from my store. It's pretty expensive. I'm paying like $5,500 a month. I'll show you guys real quick what's in here. It's pretty basic right now.

We just put in the shelves. We're getting one of those machines that can lift the pallets and, and we'll take it from there. And what we're going to be doing here also, I'm going to be moving our shipping to be going out of here. And hopefully, we will also be able to do our deliveries out of here as well, because we do have a small store.

Our store is 1200 square feet with a 1200 square foot basement as well.

So, it is kind of tiny, kind of cramped in there, especially, we're doing more and more shipping and more and more delivery. We plan to separate the stores.

They will be the same liquor license, same business, same people, but the liquor store will be focused on serving customers and, upselling customers, to the products we want to buy. Whereas the warehouse is a serving as a warehouse, also as a shipping fulfillment center, so that we could physically store our boxes here, also do the physical

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packaging here. And then, if everything goes well, we will also probably start doing deliveries from here going out from here directly to customers, so that we can remove that whole process from the store as well because we do have that tight space.

So even the parking lot, having our drivers pull up and we also use DoorDash for companies like Uber, not Uber, Minibar, and Drizly. So, we use DoorDash, so we have a lot of drivers pulling up. So, by removing the delivery from there as well, we would have more space over there, yeah.

More convenience for our customers. And that's what it's all about. If you're going to stay in business, if you're going to go online, it boils down to, what are you doing?

What's your plan? Your plan should be to make money and to satisfy your customers so that, at the end of the day, you can feel good about yourself.

You're not here to rip anybody off. You're not here to, make a quick a hundred thousand and then exit the business. This is the kind of business where it takes a few years to get rolling, but once you can get it rolling, you can do a lot, it opens a lot of doors into your community, into other investment opportunities, staying ahead of the curve.

There's a lot of stuff going on in the liquor industry. You could get involved in marijuana becoming legal. I believe in a lot of states liquor stores can already sell that kind of stuff. But whatever your situation is, you have to take a second or a minute or a month or whatever, and you have to figure out why you are in business?

What are you trying to do? And whatever your answer is, I guarantee you getting online is going to help you get there. And if you are online, ask me some questions.

Maybe you have some questions. I have a lot of questions. I wish somebody could answer them for me.

How can I best help you with your liquor or wine business?

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Store Owner and Online Expert

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