Show Them the Money

By The Mann Group

Employees in the specialty retail space, especially in the outdoor industry, require a host of specialized, honed skill sets: they have to be kind, engaging, and personable, self-motivated and passionate, plus knowledgeable and oftentimes experienced. In other words, your most successful employees are special—so why aren’t you paying them accordingly?

For decades, retail has been relegated to the bottom of the career totem pole, associated with summer gigs and first jobs with correlative pay scales. But as we in specialty retail know, it takes an adroit and adaptive employee to do our kind of retail well; it’s not an entry-level position, it’s one that requires experience. And in order to recruit and motivate that kind of employee, you have to pay them accordingly.

Why does compensation matter? Let us count the ways.

1. Recruitment
In order to attract the kind of talent we want—nay, need—as specialty retailers, the position has to be incentivized. Many outdoor retailers assume the passion of their industry is enough to pull in motivated talent—in other words, that people are willing to take a pay cut in order to work in the industry they love. That’s just not true. In order to recruit top-tier employees, you have to pay a salary that, if not top-tier, is at least living wage. If your employees are smart, experienced, and motivated, they’ll know enough to understand they deserve a respectable wage, and they won’t consider the positions that don’t offer them.

2. Retention
If you manage to recruit or even cultivate great employees, you’ll have trouble retaining them if their salaries aren’t up to par. Awesome employees, especially in specialty retail, are hard to find, and training mediocre employees to those standards is anything but easy—you know that from experience. So you should know that other businesses are going to be on the lookout for those recruits, and they won’t hesitate to poach from your pool. Your employees need a reason to stay, and don’t fool yourself into believing that other perks are enough. Salary is the greatest motivator for employee retention.

3. Motivation
In fact, salary is the greatest motivator, period. Hopefully your employees want to be successful as a rule‚—but there is no incentive for success quite like money. Whether it’s a daily motivator, like commission, or a more long-term incentive, like a clearly defined scale for promotion and salary increases, incorporating a clear incentive into your payment structure is necessary to build and maintain your staff’s dedication. Your employees should be rewarded—both monetarily and otherwise—for their good work.

4. Living Wage
This one goes without saying—but we’ll say it anyway: Minimum wage is not a living wage. An environment where employees are forced to juggle several jobs in order to make ends meet is not one that encourages dedication, passion, or engagement. When your employees are paid well, they’re not stretched thin, and they have the capacity and motivation to truly apply themselves to their position. Happy employees are effective employees, and that old idiom “you can’t buy happiness” doesn’t ring true when you’re struggling to make ends meet. Offering a decent compensation package gives your employees a level of comfort that breeds success.

Compensation lies at the root of so many problems seemingly inherent to specialty retail, from retention and recruitment to training and dedication. If you offer your employees a reward for their good work and incentive to work even harder, you’ll find that they become more passionate, dependable, and profitable—and that’s good news for everyone.

About The Mann Group: We are The Mann Group, a charmingly incongruous and blatantly genuine group of big thinkers and list makers. Get us together, and our ideas bloom into vibrant, sky-high projects; take us apart, and we work methodically and assiduously to accomplish the goals we created together. We create and implement practical courses and curriculum to help businesses and individuals grow.