May has come and gone pretty fast!

It’s pretty much winter now (temperature outside is telling us it is), we are in full swing of all our winter promotional activity. The retail calendar is different as we want to be out of winter product well before spring starts. The cold weather is certainly helping us with this!

Things in Cambridge are progressing reasonably well. From a store perspective the traction and momentum is flowing a lot better with a full management team.
We are in the final quarter of our retail year which means that the more we can do from a store performance point of view, the better position we will be in going into the new financial year.

May saw Cambridge creep into the top ten stores on what we call the balanced score card, a monthly scorecard that ranks stores overall for a combination of performance indicators such as sales against targets, health and safety, clearance sell through, team engagement etc. So a really great result for the store, and a true indication of how well the team are going. It is a rolling scorecard that gives stores an overall ranking at the end of the July month for the entire year.

My ways of working and routines are well and truly set now which I am enjoying as I am a man that needs structure and routine (something the calendar in outlook comes in handy for)!

My travelling to Christchurch is becoming more regular now which is good, and with a lot of my mates turning 21 I’m heading down for as much as those as I’m able to.
It’s almost time for a few of the other SMDpers that are on Phase 2 to make their moves, so will be interesting to see if any join my region- as it’s always handy to have them close!

That’s me for May!