I hear you knocking and in this case, you are opportunity. Opportunity knocking is one of those clichés that we hear used occasionally but as far as retail lessons go, it’s a good one.

Opportunity in retail might refer to something that represents a chance to produce more sales or more profit or to expand a category, a store’s footprint or maybe even open another location. When one looks at opportunity in retail it means observing a void, researching the potential represented by that void and then finally filling that void in a profitable way.

We can’t cover all of those opportunities in one lesson, so let’s look at the expansion of a single category. An elementary example of this might be simply locating a niche within your product categories and then working to specialize in that niche. So here are suggestions of ways to go about finding that niche. Look within your own store and locate categories that you already excel in. It could be that by simply expanding that offering you create even better results by adhering to the “do what you do do well” mentality. A niche, simply by the word itself, brings to mind a very narrow category. But if by expanding an offering in an already booming category you differentiate yourself then you have taken a category and made it into your niche. A wider offering within a category can help make it so, providing there is sufficient demand for the category chosen given the demographics of your retail pull area.

But where do you find the space to expand the category when the store is already full? That is the purpose for doing an examination of the space productivity of your store. Determine each department’s productivity in relationship to the space that it squanders. You will find, I am sure, departments whose productivity is not relative to the space you have devoted. Once you determine those departments plan a way to shrink the space they take up. That might be something as simple as closing out slow items or showing fewer facings of items within that group. Whatever it takes, reclaim that space and make room for expanding the booming department. A term given to space that is not as productive as it could be is “opportunity costs”.

Complete the procedure, develop your niche, minimize your opportunity costs and listen when opportunity knocks.