The Art of Buying & Selling a Convenience Store

Thinking of Buying or Selling a Convenience Store?

We have to keep up with trends. In a more rural setting, selling items produced locally is one way to please the local community, as well as attracting those visiting the area.

Interview with a Convenience Store Buyer

Sarah Ellson and her husband, Dunc, took over the Longdon village shop and post office in Shropshire two and a half years ago, when the postmaster retired. So we have a more traditional corner shop section where people can come in and get their tomato ketchup and baked beans. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.

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The Art of Buying and Selling A Convenience Store [Terry Monroe] on Amazon. com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This book gives the reader the do's. The Art of Buying and Selling a Convenience Store: This book was written by gas station and convenience store industry expert Terry Monroe, a professional.

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Telegraph Connect Small business. Telegraph Telegraph Connect Small business Sales and trade. F rom fighting off supermarkets to weathering recessions, businesses can learn a great deal from local convenience stores.

A drink with a slice of pizza, a snack with a soft drink. Upselling is getting the customer to switch their intended purchase for a more profitable product, such as a suggestion to buy a ounce drink over the 16 ounce or pointing out the larger bag of chips for only 50 cents more. Phibbs, who generally works with large traditional retailers to develop sales training programs, points to a convenience retailer when he thinks of one of his favorite companies that teach upselling. They do it almost intuitively, and they regularly increase the size of the purchase.

Phibbs concedes that the airport customer is a little different than the average convenience store customer. Employee incentives for upsells can help drive business, provided there are ways to measure those opportunities. The retailer then decides how to distribute the bonus.

NACS | The Art of the Upsell

Next generation POS terminals are combining with data analytics that take in sales data to move the needle on tasks such as upselling, which used to be only tasked to sales staff. Knowing from sales data that a snack item is often bought between 9 am and noon and that a higher-profit ounce drink goes well with it would be enough to make those two a pair. Coded into the screen facing the customer can be an instantly targeted message: Analytics are also helpful in what not to offer. If a particular ounce soft drink does well between 11 am and 2 pm, these systems will know enough not to offer a special on that product during those hours.

Morris said many corporations in the quick-serve industry are already using this kind of big data information, combining sales data with contextual information such as time, weather and traffic patterns. These types of strategies have been around for several years but are still relatively new to most in the c-store industry. You would be right if you said stress. Yes, stress is at the top of the list as the cause for many different sicknesses and most of the time, this can be avoided simply by planning and delegating.

In the selling process, it can get very stressful when a long period of time has been invested in the negotiating and the preparing of the needed buyer information only to have the deal fall through and you are back to square one. Sometimes, you are farther behind than where you started because of the time and distraction of the ongoing sale. Most people don't think about factoring stress into the equation of selling, but it is a very viable part of the selling procedure.

Sell My Convenience Store

With preparation and guidance, though, you can be prepared and reduce the amount of stress, if any, during the selling process. You don't know the process. Selling, when done properly, is really a staged process that implemented in the correct manner can reduce the stress of the situation and navigate the buyer and seller to the closing table. However, most people don't sell complicated things like a business very often and so they don't realize there is a process.

They end up doing things in a haphazard way that causes them grief and confusion. The key is to put together the right team of players who have experience in the field of selling complicated things like a business and are willing to work together. In the sale of a business, the team will need to consist of a business broker, an accountant and an attorney -- in that order.

With the team working together, they will complement each other and work within the process and ultimately get you the top dollar for your business in a painless manner.

Regardless of what an individual is selling, there is always the fear that they are selling too low and thereby leaving too much money on the table for the next guy. So, how do you know if you are selling too low? Easy, do the research before you decide to sell your business and take it to the marketplace. In today's world, there is hardly anything that is private. People are finding out things about each other in a multitude of ways and finding out what a business like yours is selling for in the marketplace is not going to be very difficult in the age of the Internet.

Plus, ask other individuals who may belong to the same trade association if they know of any recent sales that you can compare with. Ask a knowledgeable business broker if they have sold any businesses like yours and for how.

The Art of the Upsell

The main point here is all you have to do is ask around in a few certain places and you will have the range as to what your business should be selling for in the marketplace. You focus too much on the price. Generally, the first thing that comes into one's mind when they are getting ready to sell something, especially if it as important as their livelihood, is what do they price the business at?

What is the highest price I can get out of it? Don't get me wrong, but getting the highest price shouldn't be your ultimate goal. No, what you should be focused on is how much do I get to put in my pocket when the sale is complete? There is a difference between the selling price and how much you get to keep. All too often, someone will come up with a price, the buyer may agree to pay that price and only then does the seller go to talk to his accountant and gets a quick lesson in taxes.