The most common and time-consuming mistake ALL brands make -- and how to avoid it
How to future proof your organization to save you days of wasted time
The tl;dr
Every brand makes the same organizational mistakes: building and naming their files, folders, and stores incorrectly - it may sound silly, but it’s a big deal
If the naming conventions are not future proofed, you risk wasting new and existing employees’ time
You can save hours of retroactive renaming and reorganization simply by organizing and naming your files, folders, and stores consistently and intelligently
Name things intuitively, chronologically, and consistently to future proof your backend
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It continues to blow my mind how brand operators don’t future proof some of the simplest things as they build their businesses
Imagine doing your taxes at the end of the year, and you’ve got investments in a few dozen things, a mortgage, student loan payments, healthcare deductions, etc. and you have no way of finding those documents other than accessing your memory and searching your inbox.
Okay maybe that’s a bad example because a lot of us still do that…
Either way, you get the point: there’s a lot to keep track of that will add up to a really frustrating and seemingly endless and inevitable search for all of the relevant documents.
But every year’s tax return is approached the same way, with largely the same buckets of expenses as the prior year.
Opening and managing a retail channel is similar: every store has roughly the same process, documents, and information that was required to open the store. Which means you have an opportunity to structure two very boring, but very critical foundational things:
Folder structure & file naming conventions
Store naming conventions
The challenge newbies have with getting organized ahead of time is that they haven’t opened or operated stores long enough to understand the optimal approaches.
Your folder structure is one of the most important organizational foundations to build as early as possible
Stores are arguably the most cross functional channels in a consumer business. Every store is its own business, requiring various documents (design drawings, construction drawings, leases, estoppels, etc.), financial models (pro forma, budget, sales forecast bottoms up), and various other things (photos, vendor invoices and budget trackers, etc).
And businesses often have a natural level of turnover and/or new hires who need to transition or learn the basics of each location really quickly.
That’s really hard when Store A’s folder has a completely different set of documents or folders than that of Store B. Here’s a surprisingly common view of what a folder might look like for a location:
Here are a few reasons why this sucks:
I can’t tell the order of LOIs, especially if “LOI FINAL” has a “last edited” date that is earlier than that of the LOI files (also common)
The LOI docs aren’t shown in order, and the Lease document is nestled in there too
I can’t tell which Layout is the final. Or whether it even is final, or when it was last reviewed.
The documents are mixed in together, making it hard for various stakeholders to easily find and access the documents in a way that feels intuitive. And the lack of consistent file naming syntax makes it difficult to quickly understand what the latest version of a document is.
Let’s get organized, first by making an intuitive folder structure:
Here’s what good looks like:
A folder structure that can be copy-pasted for every location
An archive folder at the top to hold anything that is NOT the latest
Numbered folders (if you open File Explorer you can jump to a folder without clicking it by typing the “04”)
This is my favorite folder structure because it’s organized, intuitive, and repeatable. How you structure yours will be up to you and your preferences, but this will be a great starting point.
File naming conventions follow a similar logic
File organization is just as important because you need to have great version control to understand:
What is the latest version?
What changes were made since the last version?
How many iterations have we gone through?
How long has it been since version 1?
When you’re “trading paper” (negotiating LOIs), all of those above questions are critical to making sure you’re moving quickly and only negotiating the things that matter.
Here’s what good file naming convention looks like:
As you’ll notice, all files are named with dates first in YYYY.MM.DD format, and there is an Archive folder to move all those non-Final LOIs once negotiations are done and those records aren’t as important to maintain.
Naming your stores intelligently is also incredibly important
Most brands build their initial reporting as if they will never open another store in the same city or even state as the first one. If a brand opens their first store in New York City in SoHo, it’s not uncommon that they’ll name it one of the below:
New York City
SoHo
The problem with New York City is that you may eventually have numerous locations in NYC (SoHo, Fifth Ave, UES, UWS, etc.), and when that happens you’ll have to
Completely redo ALL reporting that uses that naming convention
Recondition all internal stakeholders to refer to the location as something else, resulting in wasted time in and out of meetings trying to remember what’s what
The problem with SoHo is different; it’s highly unlikely (although not impossible!) that you’d open more than 1 location in SoHo. However, not everyone may know what SoHo is (if you’re a New Yorker, then imagine if I said “Leawood” instead — you probably don’t know it’s a prominent shopping center in Kansas City).
Like folder structure, the naming conventions should be intuitive and scalable (which also leaves out the old school retailer method of just giving them each a number without a name).
Personally, I like the below naming conventions:
State Abbreviation - City - Destination → NY - NYC - SoHo
City, Destination → NYC, SoHo
The benefit of starting with a city or state is the easy ability to sort clusters of stores in spreadsheets — all NY or NYC locations will be alphabetized adjacently. As you assess market growth or regional operations, this will make your life a lot easier.
Sometimes I’ll add numbers to reflect the opening order or the order of cost center creation in accounting. It has the benefit of giving you an idea of their age very quickly, but the challenges are:
You often have to create the store name before the store opens so that you can start associating costs with the cost center (due to pre-opening costs); because opening dates can move, this may result in incorrect numbers being assigned before the opening date is known with 100% certainty
Assigning an approval sequence number helps, but may be confusing to anyone who doesn’t know the logic, resulting in confusion about whether the number reflects the opening date or not
I like to ensure the naming conventions are aligned up front with the Head of Retail and whoever is in charge of reporting (usually Tech or BI) to ensure we have a system that works cross functionally.