Thread by @minethatdata

This is what happened to retail ... over time professionals have been replaced by low-paid mavens ... frequently low-paid because they work for 3rd party vendors:

theringer.com/2019/10/31/209…

I had a retail client several years ago ... the President of the brand asked the person running retail to look into ways to get volunteers to work in the stores instead of employees.

We've all run across retail brands who do not hesitate to pay vendors tens of millions of dollars to implement wonky tech solutions that do nothing to generate incremental sales ... and then pay in-store staff $8/hour (hello, Gap) to make magic happen.

Fifteen years ago when I was at Nordstrom we went through a "flattening" process. We were told that there would be lower paid employees, and Management. "De-Layering" was what it was called. Most career paths were sent through the moon door (hello Men in Blazers) in the process.

We see it in marketing ... user generated content is a classic example. We outsource all of the skills a Creative Professional has (and the skills are considerable) in favor of paying an influencer named Haylee a thousand dollars to have her tell us how cute merch can be.

Can you imagine being the Creative Director and being asked to freeze salaries for your staff so that you can pay influencers to make vapid comments? Everybody loses ... the maven Influencer gets pennies and your staff are ripped off in the process.

Analytics ... much was outsourced. You pay Google nothing and you get what Google tells you to focus on. You trust Facebook to analyze video metrics and they flat out lie to you and in response you keep paying Facebook while not paying your in-house folks.

When I worked at Nordstrom, I kept a score card of all the profit my team generated (24 people).

It was around nine million dollars one year.

And when Management wanted me to look into downsizing my team, I asked them how much profit they wanted to give up?!

You should have seen the blank expressions on their faces. "You want to get rid of Tina? She's responsible for email personalization. Get rid of her and you get rid of $6,000,000 in sales and $1,400,000 in profit. Is that what you want to do?"

The answer was "no".

We need to prove that we're valuable. We need to demonstrate that we're paid $105,000 a year, an in exchange we generate an incremental $890,000 profit per year, and if we're gone our skills are unique enough that the company loses out on $690,000 of the $890,000 we generate.

If we generate the linkage between our work and the profit our company generates, we're less likely to be cast aside for Connie who writes great reviews of products or for Haylee who has 127,000 followers on Instagram or for Google Analytics or a Tableau consultant.

Demonstrate what you are worth, and keep telling everybody what your worth.

Your job might depend upon it, right?

Questions?
KH