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Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp2024-03-25T19:19:57-04:00

Mighty Community Markets receives national award for Cooperative Innovation & Achievement.

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NEW for 2024

Mighty Community Markets Intensives

INTENSIVES Offer a deeper dive into an additional topic area. These are supplemental courses covering material not included in the Boot Camp designed for stores who are looking for additional help in certain areas. Now there are many ways to build your teams strength, see below for registration for any of the current intensives and for registration into the award-winning boot camp!

Intensive Session: Mindful Marketing

  • Ever feel like your marketing is last minute and doesn’t get the results you want?
  • Or that the rest of the store and the doesn’t know what the marketing person or department aren’t in syncis working on?
  • This is a great workshop for any marketing or merchandising professional or store manager in food retail.
  • Presented by Jeanie Wells and Rebecca Torpie

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp

  • Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp gives cooperatively owned and independently owned grocery stores the tools and resources they need to thrive.
  • This program is designed for:
  • Department managers & buyers, newly hired or promoted managers, general managers, and merchandising departments
  • Presented by Jeanie Wells

Intensive Session: Organizational Structure

  • Ever wonder if your store has the organizational structure that it needs to do its best work?
  • Or is your structure the way it is just because it ended up that way?
  • This 2-session intensive includes a guided framework and tools for evaluating your current structure and roles, and then strategies and tactics to clarify and strengthen your whole workplace.
  • Presented by Jeanie Wells

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp gives cooperatively owned and independently owned grocery stores the tools and resources they need to thrive.


Small and independent grocery stores do not have built-in training programs like large chain stores, so they are often isolated trying to run a very complex business. Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp provides a pathway to development and training needed to help smaller stores meet the community’s needs.

Launching April 18th 2024, this 6-week remote training program is designed to give leaders like you, the essentials needed to grow sales, understand financial metrics, confidently make planning decisions, and make sense of competition and differentiation no matter where you are or who you serve.

You’re more than a grocery store. You’re a vital community resource.

Who is

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp for?

  • Department managers & buyers

  • Newly hired or promoted managers

  • General managers

  • Merchandising departments

Stores Under $1M Annually

$999for first attendee
  • Additional attendees for only $500 each
  • Scholarship funds may be available, email us at events@columinate.coop to inquire
  • Special offer to encourage skills-building for even the mightiest little community market.

Stores Over $1M Annually

$1,499for first attendee
  • Additional attendees for only $750 each
  • Full access to the Grocery Bootcamp Live Trainings
  • Assignments and discussion in our online education space
  • Documents, workbooks and cheatsheets that you can take and use in your stores.

What is Included in

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp?

  • 6 live classes. Recordings will be made available for 30 days after each session.

  • Custom workbook to track your progress and your plans.

  • Supplemental resources such as a Merchandising Guide, Grocery Calculations Cheat Sheet, and more.

Refunds and Cancellations

  • Full refunds only available by request prior to the start of the series

  • Partial prorated refunds will be available until after the 2nd session.  After the 3rd session, no refunds or credits are available.
  • Refunds are subject to a 4% processing fee.

Course

Schedule

Live, online classes take place on Thursdays.  Sessions run for 90 minutes and begin at

  • 4:00pm Eastern Time
  • 3:00pm Central Time
  • 2:00pm Mountain Time
  • 1:00pm Pacific Time

Dates for this series:

  • Thursday April 18th
  • Thursday April 25th
  • Thursday May 2nd
  • Thursday May 9th
  • Thursday May 16th
  • Thursday May 23rd

Mighty Community Markets Intensives

Mindful Marketing:

Plan Your Image Strategy to Grow Sales

  • Ever feel like your marketing is last minute and doesn’t get the results you want?
  • Or that the rest of the store doesn’t know what the marketing person or department are working on?

No matter what size store you are, planning your marketing goals and strategies ahead creates efficiencies and sets you up for long-term success. Once you have the right planning in place, putting the tactics into action is much more effective and less frustrating! We’ll explore the critical planning tools that will offer a strong framework to position your brand’s strengths and differentiators front and center.

This is a great workshop for any marketing or merchandising professional or store manager in food retail—You will use your own store’s real-life promotional challenges as mini-lessons and leave with a prioritized list of actions for your unique store.

Rebecca Torpie is an award-winning marketing and communications consultant with two decades of food retail experience in operations, branding, promotions and communications.

Jeanie Wells is the founder of Mighty Community Markets and a nationally recognized retail leadership specialist who works with independent grocery leaders all over the US and Canada to improve store performance and deepen local impact through excellent operations.

When: Wednesday, March 27th and Thursday, March 28th

From: 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. ET

Cost is $299/person

Get Your Organizational Structure Right

  • Ever wonder if your store has the organizational structure that it needs to do its best work?
  • Or is your structure the way it is just because it ended up that way?

No matter how different all our independent grocery stores are, figuring out our own best structure and internal capacity plan is something we can all do – and something we all have to do in order to stay strong and competitive in this new era.

Jeanie Wells has spent years helping stores just like yours, untangle and improve their structures and enhance their workplace culture. Now she’s sharing her tips and tactics with you, so that you can clarify the roles you may need to thrive in this new complex era.

This 2-session intensive includes a guided framework and tools for evaluating your current structure and roles, and then strategies and tactics to clarify and strengthen your whole workplace. Let’s get our organizational structures right so that we have the workplaces we need to stay strong.

This course is led by MCM founder, Jeanie Wells.

When: Tuesday, June 11th and Wednesday, June 12th

From: 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. ET

Cost is $299/person

About Your Facilitator

 

Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp is presented by Jeanie Wells, a nationally recognized consultant and former general manager.

  • 25+ years in retail operations & leadership development
  • Served as GM/CEO of fast growing retail grocery for more than 10 years
  • National leadership and development consultant for the past 10 years.
  • Co-developed on-going national workshop on building strong board and general manager relationships
  • Leads a team of executive coaches to help mentor and develop our nation’s food cooperative leaders
  • Nationally recognized as leader in support for small community markets

FAQs

How are the classes organized?2023-03-10T15:14:04-05:00

The driving goal of this class is to offer specific study in some essential areas of strong grocery retail operations. Coming up through various positions at a food co-op to become GM myself, I was painfully aware of how there is not really any “grocery school” to teach people what they should know and I was left to try to figure things out on my own. Chain grocery stores are good at this but as independent and autonomous grocery stores, we generally don’t have great ways to do this. But also, everyone is so busy that it is hard to think about any training that is too time-consuming. This program represents that balance – the need to move through some key content but also make it doable so that managers can focus on their work at the store too. There are 6 classes. Last fall I did them once per month but got some feedback that this took too long to get people through the material. So this time, I’m doing it 2 classes per month so that we can move through the content over a total of 3 months instead of 6. The classes are each built around a key area of operations.

Is there homework?2023-03-10T15:14:10-05:00

Yes, a little bit. After each class, the attendees will have homework. It will not be a huge burden – likely only an hour or so between classes. The goal of the homework in their workbooks is to take that class’s topic and bring it into their real jobs, real stores and do some work around analyzing their store or their department’s performance in each of the key areas we cover. So they will do the assessment and homework on their own store or department themselves using what we cover in class. I think this hands on part is essential! It will move fairly fast and each one of these topics could be it’s own 6-part series but this class is designed to be compact, covering a lot of ground and giving them hands-on work to try.

What is the order of the content of each class?2023-03-10T15:13:50-05:00

Class 1: Orientation to the grocery industry business

We dive into trends, headwinds, and emerging needs for all independent grocery stores. This class will also begin walking through financial models of how operating statements reflect the core business and product mix etc. There are some who are enrolled that are all natural organic, others are a mix, and a few that are majority conventional, so we will look at how each is a little different and what each model needs.

Class 2: Deeper dive into financial statements – the profit and loss statement especially

We will walk through how components of a P & L work: top line, expenses we control, those that are harder to change and how we measure bottom line contribution.

Class 3: Financial metrics  “The calculator class”

In this class, everyone brings their calculator and we work through the big 4 calculations, (Sales growth, margin, (applied and achieved), labor, (as % and SPLH) and inventory turns. We will practice in class on hypothetical scenarios. Everyone is going to be able to do these by themselves before we leave that day’s session! I find that so often we have people who maybe have even worked there a long time who may have some gaps in these core calculations but are sometimes too embarrassed to ask for help. This class is an easy no-shame way for everyone, brand new or multi-year veteran, to get super comfortable with how to calculate things. And they get a cheat sheet they can hang on the wall behind their desk for quick reference from now on!

Class 4: Intro to Price Strategy and Managing Price Perception

The “art and science” of building positive price perception. “Art” meaning all the visual cues that shape shoppers’ perceptions and the “science” part, meaning all the data and tools needed to shape the perception you want. This has never been more important than at this moment with the food inflation and price changes we are currently having to manage at the store level.

Class 5: Fundamentals of visual merchandising

How merchandising works in the customers’ mind, building and maintaining promotional and routine displays that emphasize your values, adhere to tried-and-true essential merchandising principles that help grow your sales!

Class 6: Bringing it all together in an action plan.

This final class we will harvest what various priorities they have uncovered in the monthly work and begin laying out their action plans. Naturally everyone will have different fiscal years and different planning cycles but the goal of this work is to help them see that no matter where they are at, they can begin to improve operations and improve their performance for the coming months/years.

What other materials come with the class?2023-03-10T16:05:19-05:00

Each MCM attendee will have:

  • A workbook they will use throughout the 6 classes.
  • When we get to class 5, they will also get my Merchandising Guide as well, which lays out the principles one by one,
  • A 1-pager financial “cheat sheet” with the essential calculations so they can keep it on the wall by their desk
  • And, at the end, each attendee who completes the course will also get a certificate of completion.
  • Access to the recordings and other supplemental resources that may arise, through an easy-to-access MCM Resource Page. The links to recordings are available for a month past the end of classes so that each attendee can go back and listen to previous sessions if desired.
How long are the classes?2023-03-10T16:06:08-05:00

The live classes are 90 minutes. The typical format is me presenting info and then discussion or Q and A at the end. Sometimes we may break into small groups but generally we stay all together as one group. Because it is impossible to find a time for everyone to make the live class, each class is also recorded and those recordings are sent out the next day along with any other resources that may have  come up. I had some students last time that told me right at the start that there was no way that they could ever make the class time work and they did the entire class using recordings. I got high marks and great emails from them just like the people who did the live class. So if there are concerns about making the live class each time, they can always go back and listen to the recordings. It seemed to work great for people’s busy schedules.

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