Availing of the Digital for Business programme from her Local Enterprise Office helped fashion retailer Bernie Griffin rock both better efficiency and greater productivity, a good look for any enterprise.
Griffin is the owner of SOUL Boutique in Longford, which she opened in early 2023.
The opposite of fast fashion, SOUL specialises in quality clothing designed to last, with capsule wardrobes that take her growing client base from the working day to nights out with ease.
Having spent many years working in retail fashion, her forte is helping women feel great and look fantastic. A terrific ‘people person’, she excels at intuiting and satisfying customer needs.
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But when she opened her own store she quickly learned that being an expert service provider is only part of what it takes to run a successful business. Having the right systems and processes in place is vital too.
In particular, she realised that her manual, paper-based inventory management was proving both time consuming and error prone. “I was writing codes on bits of paper. My stock takes were an absolute nightmare,” she recalls.
Yet it was all she knew. “Before I started the business I could look at Facebook or Instagram but never posted anything. I was able to look at email. But if you asked me about spreadsheets and Excel, I would have cringed,” explains Bernie, who is 47.
“When people of my age were in school or college it was all books, nothing was online and the whole digital thing just wasn’t relevant to my career up until this point.”
Her first year in business was taken up with “all the glitz and glam of opening the shop and selecting stock without realising there is another side to it,” she explains.
“The second year was when reality bit and I realised I really needed to take a grasp of the business end.”
She knew her manual stock control system was resulting in lost time and poor stock management, including overstocking, a hidden expense.
“That’s when I contacted my Local Enterprise Office and said I need to go digital. I needed to get things on a computer, so that I would know which brands were working for me and which were not,” she explains.
Supporting small businesses
Ireland’s network of Local Enterprise Offices is the first stop shop for anyone thinking of starting or growing a business. There are 31 of them spread across the country, providing advice, mentor support and grant assistance to small businesses.
Staff at her Local Enterprise Office suggested she take part in Digital for Business. This provided her with a digital consultant who conducted a digital audit of her business, identifying the areas she could digitise to save time and money.
Once these had been identified, she was able to apply for a Grow Digital Voucher to help cover the cost of implementing the changes.
“I was blessed to get the system I got as a result. It has streamlined everything. Now I simply input my sales at the end of each day so that, when it comes to stock take, I just open up my spreadsheet and can see everything,” says Bernie.
The digital system has improved inventory accuracy, reduced time lost due to manual tracking, minimised errors, and helped prevent overstock, easing cash flow.
“I can see at a glance if an item was returned or swapped for something else. Before I was writing things down on bits of paper and trying to remember what all the notes meant. This just makes the whole process so much easier,” she says.
Migrating her stock management online also meant she was ready for the next digital step, which is to develop an ecommerce website.
“The idea of that would have been hugely stressful by myself. But working with LEO and my digital consultant is making the process so much easier,” says Bernie.
In the meantime, she uses the time she has saved on stock management for more value-added activities, such as marketing.
“Social media is everything for me and I’ve done courses with my Local Enterprise Office on both Facebook and Instagram. The LEOs have the resources to help you all along the way. They certainly helped me go from being a 47-year-old that had never been near a computer to someone digitally savvy. It’s brilliant,” she adds.
Targeted digital supports
Digital for Business helps in a variety of ways, whether eliminating paperwork, reducing time spent on administrative tasks, or allowing businesses to efficiently meet their regulatory requirements.
For some it is about introducing customer relationship management systems, improving the customer experience, or providing enhanced insights into business performance. Digitalisation can also make life easier for staff, helping to boost staff retention.
“A lot of time we find small businesses are struggling with the time it takes to do repetitive, administrative, clerical tasks. Software can take a lot of those away and reduce the time the business is putting into low-value, high time-intensive tasks,” says John Magee, chair of the Network of Local Enterprise Offices.
Too often small businesses feel that things like digitalisation and automation are beyond their reach. Not so.
“Sometimes small businesses think digitalisation is for bigger companies only. But lots of small businesses are sitting on top of very significant inefficiencies and the business owner is caught up spending time they don’t have on tasks that can be automated,” he explains.
“They just need someone to come in, spot the problem and diagnose a low-cost solution, whether it is ecommerce, customer relationship management, ebooking systems, tools to track jobs on a dashboard or the management of stock control. All these things just make their life so much easier.”
They can also help a small business owner move from surviving to thriving.
“All these things are about competitiveness. We know that small businesses are struggling with rising input and labour costs. But the best antidote to rising costs is to increase competitiveness, and that is something that is within the company’s control,” says Magee.
“It’s why we are massively encouraging people to come and talk to us about our Digital for Business programme.”
Find out how to boost your competitiveness with LEO Digital for Business