“If you haven’t taken any of these classes, you absolutely freakin’ should.”

Shari Stauch, owner, Main Street Reads, Summerville, SC

Certified in: Event Management, Inventory Management, and Basic Bookselling

 Shari Stauch opened her store in 2019 after a career as a magazine publisher, author, and consultant. Her new role as bookstore owner is by far her favorite.  Experience has shown her that she needed professional training, so she turned to the Professional Booksellers School. In one year she took Event Management, Inventory Management, and Basic Bookselling. The last, she says, was really fun. "I wanted to go back and see if there were things I was missing. Learning about Back Pocket Lists upped my handselling.”

Stauch says, “Event Management was my first course in PBS and it was fantastic. The key thing that came out of that was how to do a quantitative analysis of events. Instead of saying “yeah, it seems like we had a bunch of people here so it was a success,” we apply points on a metric for all elements of the event. How many people attended, how many books sold, here's the money and time we put into the event. We started tracking social media, and how many people bought other things because they were in the store for that event. For example, a recent event had 24 ticket presales on Eventbrite, but we did another dozen in store with people that just showed up and we did another $100 in other book sales to attendees who bought something else. All this is tracked in the metric.”

"In this metric, we assign a point value to everything we want to achieve - the values are based on our parameters. When we first opened, social mentions were important to us, whereas now, book sales are the goal. So, their point values have changed. We’ll compare in-store sales for two years to see if an event increased sales, and we also track things like weather to see if that impacted the event. You can add your own intangible metrics, such as does the event support the store’s mission. The point value helps assess an event without personal judgment.”

Shari Stauch’s final advice: “If you haven’t taken any of these classes, you absolutely freakin’ should.”