Jay Abraham's Case Study #122
From: Shawn Dreger
To: Jay Abraham
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 5:48 PM
Hello Jay,
Sorry I am late in getting this to you, I hope you can still use it. My story proves what testing can do for a business and to prove you can find ways to test anything.
We owned a convenience store which had bars on the windows for security purposes. I never did like the bars but the threat of a break and enter and the cost of cigarettes we knew we had to leave them on.
We had owned the store for about 5 months and were getting ready for our grand opening. We wanted the windows extremely clean so I removed the bars and cleaned the windows. I liked the look of bare windows so much I never put the bars on until we closed for the evening. The next month I was looking at our daily income for the past month and one day really stood out as being considerably higher than the others.
I investigated this and discovered the exceptional day was the day I took the bars off the windows. Was it coincidence or was there something to it and how could I prove it.
We were increasing business each and every week and payday weeks were quite a bit better than non pay day weeks so how could I prove or disprove that business increased without bars on the windows?
Being a bit of a math nut I decided to test the next two Mondays. I took total income for several weeks divided it by 7 to get an average and then compared it to the Mondays income. I discovered that the Mondays income was always between 85% and 90% of the average daily income for the week. Okay this way I would know if we took the bars off the windows for a Monday and if the income for the Monday was more than 90% of the daily average for that week we had to figure out a way to get the bars off the windows.
Calculating it this way took care of increased business and the fluctuation in income for pay day and non pay day weeks.
The following Monday I took the bars off the window and then put them back on for the rest of the week. At the end of the week I did the calculations and found out the Monday with no bars did 106% of the daily average for the week. Coincidence or not? The following week I did the same thing and discovered that Monday did 99% of the daily average but also took note that it rained from 4:00pm till 6:00 pm which was our busiest time, everyone stopping on their way home.
Bingo I knew if we took the bars off the windows business would increase 10% - 15 % easily. How easy was that. I called a welder and made brackets so the bars could be put on at night within 5 minutes and taken off in the morning. The bars really only needed to be on at nights when we were closed.
Shawn Dreger
BD's Convenience
PS: This was a small convenience store with 3 employees two full time and one part time. We tripled business within three years and then sold it three years ago. I hope this helps, I think it really shows how you can test almost every aspect of your business.