black friday: A marketing opportunity

     I have never particularly liked shopping and certainly never have liked shopping in a crowd of shoppers.  Now that I am on the other side of the fence and am a retailer I am feeling the pressure of making these holiday events profitable.  My store will be open from 10 to 7 as is the usual hours on this day, but I am doing some advertising featuring some new products at very special prices.
     Today was a good day with better sales and more traffic in the store.  If this week is good I can expand my orders for the Christmas season and try to capture more of that business.  I am soon going to have to decide how to keep the store open while in Chicago and how long I can stay.  I also have to very soon decide whether to attend the Midwest Band Directors convention.  I have attended this event many times when I was teaching and enjoyed it very much as a band director.  Attending as a merchant will be very different and one day I would love to attend as an exhibitor.  There would be some very good benefits from attending such as:
     (1) finding new sources of product.  The big distributors will be there like Selmer and Yamaha but there are many other smaller folks that might love to have another outlet for their products.  Anything to set my store apart would be good like offering a quality brand that is not easily found elsewhere.
     (2) Finding new customers :  The band directors that attend all control a school budget and need everything that I sell.  It is a bonanza of potential customers that are in an environment that is unique and much more conducive to relational selling. I am a retailer but was a band director for many years so know exactly what these folks do every day and have a good insight to their needs.
     (3) Educating myself on the latest technology: The latest and best in technology used in the classroom is all there and the dealers of this product are eager to connect with potential buyers who can in turn market the product.
     It is still another expense so I will need to try to be as objective as I can about the cost verses the benefit.  It is something that I want to do already so being objective is hard.  Decisions like these would be easier to make well if I were still involved with a business mans group like the Christian Businessmen s Committee as I was in Chicago before the store.  This week I attended a luncheon and the speaker compared life in corporate America verses the life on an entrepreneur.  In the corporate setting you are working in teams and you do not want to take risks but an entrepreneur has to operate alone in a very exposed position.  Leading and risk taking are part of the job.