Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be.

Welcome to Boutique Chat, where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek.

We'll hear from product-based businesses of all types, retailers, e-commerce, and wholesale brands,

along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry.

I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the boutique hub, and I can't wait to chat.

Hey, you're back. I'm so glad you're here.

Today is an important episode if you ever feel like a squirrel.

And you're like, I have 10,000 things to get done all at once. And I don't know where to start.

I don't even know how to prioritize all this stuff on my to-do list. Today's five-minute Friday is for you.

So let me give it to you like this. A few years ago when I, you know, just kept hearing on repeat from retailers, I'm so overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. I need to work on this and this and this. What I started to notice was retailers really focusing in on certain areas of their business, like let's just say the marketing aspect of things, but totally neglecting other critical parts of their business, like their pricing

strategy or inventory management. As humans, I think we tend to gravitate toward what we're most

comfortable with, and that's what we really lean into, and then we kind of just like bury

our head in the sand in other areas. I've been there. I have buried my head in the sand

in so many areas of this business and then

learned the hard way that that was really a bad choice. Like I needed to just dig in, get into

the messy middle and uncover what I didn't know so that I could figure it out and get better.

And so several years ago when this became like a recurring thing and I started to hear the

same questions over and over again, but really missing important critical elements of business, I thought there's got to

be a better way to coach this that makes it really easy for you to understand and follow

and gives you a strategy of how to attack the most important roles in your business.

And so what I came up with was I called this the six layers of retail.

And I think about it like building a skyscraper or some people on our team like to refer to it as lasagna. I'm going to build the six layers of lasagna. Whatever's more memorable for you. I don't care. But if I'm building a skyscraper, I have to start with a really solid foundation, right, in order to keep building it tall. Otherwise, it's going to get wobbly. It's going to shake, it's going to crumble because I don't have much of a foundation. And I think when we're building

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