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It’s Resolution time again! Ugh, where to begin??? January is traditionally known as the slow period for retailers. But as customers are staying at home nursing their financial hang-overs from spending for goods and services during the holiday season, smart indie retailers will be at work checking their small business resolutions.

Independent retailers can relate to the organizers from the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl parade. No matter how magnificent their float was on January 1st, organizers are back at their studios on January 2, planning the next parade. Metaphorically, building up a small independent business is not much different than building up a float whose design is of composed of millions of petals.

We’ve built our small businesses up one petal at a time. So it is time to pull out those never-ending, ongoing mastermind plans that we keep for ourselves and begin tackling our goals.

This new year is a make or break year for the Independent Retailer and I look forward to getting my “mojo” going on creating some retail magic. Voila!

My list of things, in no important order is:

* Promoting The Secret Book and DVD — “The Zen Merchant has The Secret!” will be our ad campaign.

*Training new employees who will be more involved in the “click” side of our “click and mortar” business and hopefully will provide additional content to this blog.

* Increasing our online business by rewarding our loyal customers with special gifts and incentives.

* Sub-dividing a portion of our shop to help one of our employees create a working jewelry studio. This seems like it will be a nice compliment to our already wonderfully diverse arrangement of gifts and accessories.

* Increasing our in store traffic by promoting The Zen Merchant.

* Learning more about how to do effective PR and be comfortable in front of a camera. I think we will likely want to start adding some vlogging to our site! How fun??!!?

* Learning about grants for minority women–I am both a woman and a latina, and have never explored the possibilities of how I can get help to expand my business.

This is a small list. I look forward to writing more frequently and candidly about my journey parading towards creating a more fulfilling personal and professional business life.

High-Hopes, High-Hopes, Off to Work I go!!!!!