We’re in the hardware business
Mango Report creator Dan O’Haver is a fourth-generation owner of Hackney Hardware, located in downtown Dexter, Michigan, and he also owns a hardware store in Milan, Michigan. Like most small-town shops, his stores pulse with needful things such as household supplies, tools, and thingamajigs. Inventory comes and goes, changes hands, floats about the store, and sometimes *poof* disappears, leaving a trail of numbers in a database or perhaps no trail at all. Dan understands that to be highly successful in the retail business, he must answer two essential questions: What the heck happens to those thingamajigs and what’s my inventory really worth? Dan, like countless other retailers, used to practice a time-honored method for answering both questions, a method Dan’s grandfather called “counting mangos.”
Counting mangos
Dan was about nine years old when his grandfather placed a ledger pad and pen into his hands and said, “Go count the mangos,” referring to the process of recording a store’s entire physical inventory. Later, Dan’s father traded his ledger book for a newfangled point-of-sale system, which not only increased the amount of data and effort required to manage an inventory, it fueled Dan’s interest in numbers. From spreadsheets in his early years to a degree in computational mathematics, Dan honed his analytical chops and applied it to the family business. He scoured a decade of data from his two stores and examined variances in inventory records, all the while unable to shake the feeling that there must be a more efficient and effective way to count mangos.
And he found it. Dan discovered that habitually counting every mango did not guarantee the accuracy of inventory records. He also discovered that adopting a new approach to inventory maintenance significantly improved inventory accuracy and required less effort overall. Thus, Dan and his family slept better and Mango Report was born.
A better way
We, the Mango Report team, still study data and count mangos, but we do so in a more targeted, effective fashion, focusing on high-impact mangos and a thoughtful inventory maintenance routine. Thanks to subscribers of our service, we have ever-increasing pools of data and feedback to work with, which allows us to draw more accurate conclusions and improve our reports. As our reports improve, so do our subscribers’ businesses, which gives us more energy to uncover more of what Dan and countless other retailers seek: true inventory accuracy.