How This Bookstore Owner Competes With Amazon Without Touching Price | Ally Kirkpatrick

The Hangover Effect: How to Be the Best Part of Your Customer's Entire Day | John DiJulius III

John DiJulius III started with three nos: no customers, no money, no employees. He and his wife Stacy opened a hair salon in Cleveland in 1993 surrounded by competitors in every direction. They couldn't out-advertise them. Couldn't out-build them. So they out-loved them and turned that obsession into a customer experience framework now used by Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, and Marriott. But the lessons John shares here aren't from a boardroom. They're from decades of mistakes: watching rapid growth nearly break his standards, losing his wife and business partner, and learning the hard way that if your business depends on you walking the floor, you haven't actually built a business. On this episode of Beyond the Register, John DiJulius III breaks down exactly how small retailers can close the experience gap, remove the word "no" from their vocabulary, and build something that runs without them. What's in this episode: - Why customer satisfaction is at a 20-year low and why that's a wide-open window for small businesses right now - The "hangover effect" and what it actually means to be the best part of your customer's entire day - What "employee roulette" is and the specific systems John uses to reduce it - The Customer Bill of Rights: never point, never say no, never overshare - Why discounting is a tax you pay for average service and how to price with confidence - How a 2003 book accidentally turned a salon owner into a global speaker overnight - The single most important quote for entrepreneurs and why John says you should pull over to hear it Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://globalpayments.com/genius]) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

How This Bookstore Owner Competes With Amazon Without Touching Price | Ally Kirkpatrick

When Ally Kirkpatrick opened Old Town Books in 2018, every sign pointed the wrong way: the last indie bookstore in Old Town Alexandria had already been killed by Amazon, she had a newborn at home, $7,000 in savings, and zero retail experience. Her own dad refused to help her look at leases. What she had instead was a decade behind the counter of coffee shops and a conviction that what people were actually hungry for wasn't a product. It was a place. This episode is a masterclass in hospitality-first retail. Ally runs her bookstore the way a great restaurant runs a dining room: front of house, hand-selling the menu, training staff like waitstaff, and obsessing over every sensory detail from the smell of the shelves to what her team wears on the floor. The result: a business that competes with Amazon not on price, but on something Amazon can never build. In this episode: - Why Ally frames her bookstore as "Disneyland for books" and how that mindset changes every operational decision - The front-of-house model that turns booksellers into experts who hand-sell a curated "menu" each season - How Old Town Books competes with Amazon on discovery, expertise, and experience when it literally can't compete on price - Why Ally's best management hire came from the restaurant industry (and why you should steal that playbook) - The book club strategy that built a community of regulars who show up in formal wear to a year-end party - What "placemaking" actually means for your bottom line and why local retail drives up residential rents in your neighborhood - The hardest management lesson: letting go, trusting your team, and what finally forced her to do it Follow Beyond the Register on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for weekly conversations with independent retailers building businesses worth showing up for. Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://globalpayments.com/genius]) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Most Makers Don't Know the Difference Between a Hobby and a Business | Katrina Parris @ NiLu

Katrina Parris, founder of Nilu Goods in Harlem, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register to share how she built an 11-year retail institution out of a simple belief: when you support a maker, you support a community. Nilu is a gift shop on Lenox Avenue in Harlem that has quietly functioned as something closer to a startup incubator. Over the past decade, Katrina has taken makers from kitchen-table batches to retail shelves, including her mailman, who mentioned in passing that he made natural deodorant and eight months later had product in the store with regulars coming back for it. She does this without charging rent, without taking equity, and without a formal program. Just a framework, a set of honest questions, and a willingness to tell founders what most retailers won't. In this conversation, Katrina and Keenan get into: - Why a great product and a great business are not the same thing and the three-tier test she uses to show makers the difference - The homework assignments she gives every maker before she buys a single unit from them - How she pivoted through the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, and near-closure in 2023 using the same core instinct each time - Why she stopped buying wholesale inventory after a decade and moved to an 85% consignment model - The GoFundMe that forced her to go public about struggling, and the brands-in-residency program she built out of that moment - What she learned from 15 years in the floral business about the difference between passion and a viable operation If you run an independent retail store, if you're a maker trying to understand what a retailer actually needs from you, or if you want to see what community-rooted business looks like in practice, this one is worth your time. Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://globalpayments.com/genius]) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

What a 20-year Retail Exec Would Tell Every Retail Owner About AI in 2026 (with Sabrina Valdez)

Most retail and CPG leaders are still asking whether they should use AI. Sabrina Valdez answered that question three years ago, before Super Bowl commercials, before the hype cycle, before most people knew what ChatGPT even was. Today, she helps retail and CPG organizations move from aimless experimentation into scalable, repeatable AI systems, as the Founder of The Next Move Consulting. Her background spans 20+ years on the operator side: buying at PetSmart, running replenishment at Sprouts, making decisions that hit the P&L by Friday. She knows what it's like to stare down a wall of skewed data and make the call. Now she's helping other leaders do the same thing, with AI as the force multiplier. In this episode, Keenan and Sabrina go deep on what it actually looks like to build AI into the fabric of a retail or CPG organization, and why the person most afraid of falling behind might already have the biggest advantage. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why curiosity isn't what actually drives AI adoption (and what does) - The reason the oldest person in your organization has the most potential to be your best AI user - The five levels of using generative AI and why most people are stuck at level one - How to move from "endless pilot phase" to AI that's woven into your daily operations - Sabrina's four-step process for building a 3-to-6-month AI roadmap for retail and CPG teams - What OpenClaw is, why 25% of it is malicious, and why even some AI practitioners avoid it - Why AI is like yoga: you're only competing with you and your mat - Why every business, from dermatologists to C-stores to salons, can start seeing returns quicklyWhether you're a retail owner trying to figure out where to begin, a CPG leader stuck in AI pilot purgatory, or an operator who thinks this isn't for you because you're not "tech-savvy," this one's for you.Sabrina’s website: The Next Move ConsultingThe Next Move Consulting | AI Strategy for Leaders & Teams [https://thenextmoveconsulting.com/]dSabrina’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrina-e-valdez [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrina-e-valdez]Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://globalpayments.com/genius]) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

How a Black-Owned Beauty Brand Got Into Ulta, Nordstrom & JCPenney With No VC (with Kim Roxie)

Kim Roxie, Founder and CEO of LAMIK Beauty, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register this week to share how she built a national clean beauty brand from a $500 loan, zero investor money, and a willingness to do the work most founders won't. LAMIK Beauty (which stands for Love And Makeup In Kindness) is a clean, vegan cosmetics line made in America for women of color. Kim started with a brick-and-mortar makeup boutique in Houston, ran it for 14 years, closed it in 2018 to go direct-to-consumer, and relaunched it right as COVID hit. Then she did something almost no brand does: she personally drove store-to-store inside JCPenney locations, doing trunk shows for two years straight until they gave her a real shelf. The result: 978% in-store sales growth. Placement in 20+ JCPenney stores, Nordstrom, and Ulta, including as the first Black-owned clean makeup brand on Ulta's platform. A live shopping channel converting at 30%, in an industry where 2-3% online is considered a win. In this conversation, Kim and Keenan get into: * The trunk show strategy she used to earn her way into JCPenney without a traditional buyer pitch * Why women of color spend 80% more on cosmetics than any other group, yet receive roughly 10% of shelf space, and the $2 billion sitting inside that gap * The most expensive packaging mistake she made as a product founder and exactly how to avoid it * How she thinks about multi-channel distribution as separate income streams rather than a single bet * Why her live shopping conversion rate is 10x higher than her website, and how she built that channel from the ground up * The decision to walk away from a working 14-year business because she saw something bigger that the market needed If you run an independent retail brand, if you're a beauty founder trying to figure out how to get on national shelves, or if you want to understand how a scrappy, mission-driven company competes without the big-budget advantage, this episode has what you're looking for. Find Kim Roxie on LinkedIn and Instagram at @thekimroxie. Shop LAMIK Beauty at lamikbeauty.com [http://lamikbeauty.com] and in JCPenney, Nordstrom, Ulta, and more. And subscribe to the ‘Beyond the Register’ podcast, so you can get every episode the moment it goes live. Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://globalpayments.com/genius]) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.