Strategic, Financial, and Operational Planning

F. Curtis Barry & Company's strategic and business expertise can help you improve your existing catalog profitability, Internet profitability, or retail business profitability – or add channels to an existing business. We are catalog consultants with many years in the business offering expertise in a number of areas:

We have developed multi-year business plans that incorporate demand, cancellations and returns projections to net sales; sales projections from circulation planning; budgeting of marketing expenses including catalog creative, production, and mailing; expense planning for fulfillment and overhead; and capital expenditure planning.

We have assisted many companies with new channel start-ups, including retail store expansion and Internet and e-mail marketing and catalog tests. Our efforts encompass business planning, circulation planning, building customer databases and installing the systems required.

For a number of clients we have developed analyses of: net contribution to profit for multiple seasons/year-to-year; pages; import vs. domestic; varying price ranges; price point; catalog page and depiction; category and sub-category; private label vs. open market; style, color, and size; Internet vs. catalog; new vs. repeat.

We have developed requirements and sent out RFPs to vendors, assisted in vendor selection, and planned and overseen installation of commercial inventory planning and management systems for direct and retail businesses.

Benchmarking Services and Our Executive Forum

F. Curtis Barry & Company has conducted benchmarking assignments for customer contact centers, fulfillment operations, and inventory management to see where the operation can be improved in terms of customer service, service levels and profitability. We provide analysis and comparison of your business to other multichannel businesses.  Our overall objective is to improve your Internet, retail and catalog profitability and customer service. 

Since 2001, we have facilitated a three-day Executive Forum annually for owners and senior managers. Forum topics typically include growing your Internet business, developing your brand, circulation strategies, fulfillment strategies, and expense-saving ideas. For more information visit our Benchmarking ShareGroups page.  

Below are examples of the types of work we have completed:

Case Study 1

F. Curtis Barry & Company developed a five-year strategic plan for a billion-dollar, public, multichannel company. The plan included an analysis that led to inbound/outbound freight savings of $4.5 million annually, and development of a fulfillment process for three distribution centers, including a review and layout of one center. In addition, we introduced inventory balancing to help serve the client's customers better, and addressed the client's future needs by developing system requirements for cross-docking, inventory optimization, warehouse management, and planning.

Case Study 2

As catalog consultants, we assisted a major non-profit catalog to implement a net contribution to profit approach to analyze merchandise results and to plan categories and products for the next season. Implementing this approach created an increase in catalog profitability from break-even to an 8% gain.

For help with your e-commerce, retail or catalog profitability, please contact our marketing manager, Jeff Barry, at (804) 740-8743, e-mail him at jbarry@fcbco.com, or use the ”Request Information” at the top of this page.

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Strategic, Financial, and Operational Planning Blog Posts Mon, 05 May 2008 21:19:09 70 Ways to Reduce Costs, Increase Productivity and Improve Customer Service Cost Reduction and Productivity Improvement Assessment 70+ Ways to Reduce Costs, Increase Productivity and Improve Customer Service By Curt Barry Over the past 23 years F. Curtis Barry & Company’s work with multichannel companies in operations and fulfillment consulting has allowed us to compile these 70+ ways that can cut costs and increase productivity, which will ultimately lead Read more... Thu, 01 May 2008 13:59:24 Are We Trying to Make a Broken Business Model Work? At our recent Executive Forum we talked about how rising postage costs, increasing paper costs and the fall off in prospecting response rates have radically changed the traditional catalog business model. While there are large, efficient catalogs that spend in the high 20-percents on the total cost to create and mail catalogs, many businesses are Read more... Thu, 01 May 2008 13:50:30 Macy’s National Strategy Gets a Makeover The Wall Street Journal (April 21, 2008, B1) detailed a strategy by Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren to localize store assortments to cater to what shoppers are more interested in buying. This localization—called “My Macy’s”—will for now will be only 15% of the total SKUs, which range from 1.5 million to 4 million, depending on store Read more... Visit our blog site to read more