Dive Resource Intro: Building Your Portfolio
D Episode 80 Dive Resource Intro: Building Your Portfolio
Hey everybody, Mike Hernandez here again, and this is for sales associates in the convenience store industry. I wanted to record another video. I'm on spring break actually right now, so I'm working to try to get caught up on things and create as much content as I can to help you with growth and training and development.
My camera's up here at the top, so when I'm looking at my screen, it's hard for me to look into the camera. Hopefully you don't mind that.
Anyway, I wanted to share some resources with you because aside from these YouTube videos, I want you to know that there are other resources for you. Now, I have
a site, let's see if I can get in here, cstorethrive.com. If you come in here, I've got to do some work here, but essentially I think I have like 531
articles, blog posts, whatever you want to call it. Sales associate, right? You can come in here, you can read this, and I've been working on these for quite a while. Anytime you have a few minutes, you want to learn something, you want to read something, you can come in here and you can do this. Now, I've also
added
something that allows you to listen.
If you're outside sleeping in the parking lot overnight and you want to listen to something, you can. You can come in here and you can listen to this. If you click on this, right now I just have English and Spanish. It might take a little while initially to get this thing queued up, I guess ready to go, but then you can listen to it. This is going to give you the intro, and I don't think I'm recording with a sound, but if you prefer English or you have
colleagues who want it in Spanish, that comes in Spanish. If you come across this channel and you decide, "Hey Mike, I live in another country and I have a different language," you can email me. If you email me admin@cstorecenter.com, admin@cstorecenter.com, and say, "Hey, I came across C Store Thrive and I would like to know if you can put this in my language." I think I can do it in about 70 languages.
If you want it, it's there, but I wanted you to kind of see what's available to you. You can sign up for a free account. I was fiddling around with some stuff. Let me see here. Oops, did I want that? Account. All right. You can just view plans and there's supposed to be a free account somewhere. Maybe not. I'll have to make some changes to that. I want to sign up.
Anyway, that's a test account that I did just to be able to get in here. Scroll through here.
I think there's home. I don't know if you're able to... This kind of gives you a little bit about everything here. Anyway, for now you have access, right?
Something else I want to mention about this is when you do sign up and I'll make it free, there'll be some other resources that I'll provide and I'll show you that right now. But if you sign up, I don't like to email. I will not email you, and I'm going to show you why.
I'm going to come into my Gmail account and this drives me crazy. This is why I will not email you. I don't have time to go through all this stuff and I know you probably don't either. Believe me, you sign up, signing up is just going to give you access to other content that's members only. Stuff like P&Ls. I don't know if I have anything in here that's members only.
Go to see all.
This is a ton of stuff. Basics.
I know there are some in here that aren't.
Some of these are just maybe a little beyond what you might need. But here's the thing, I believe in... I think since I have access to all this, okay, here it is. Subscribers only, Playbook Pro, Playbook Mastermind. Some of these, that's what you're going to get by providing your email and signing up.
I don't believe in
capping your growth. I hated it for me. You can come in here and learn whatever you want. Doesn't mean it's going to apply to your position, but at least you can grow as you need to. You can learn about these things. Knowing about some stuff, at least being aware is helpful because if you ever get into that situation, you're going to say, "Oh yeah, I remember Mike was talking about that."
Right now, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on what you think, this is somebody else's voice and same thing in Spanish. There are two different people. At any rate, I use a lot of technology. I have to. This is a huge... I wouldn't say project, but it's a huge undertaking. It's what I call like a legacy project. I want to make sure that I can reach as many people.
There are convenience stores all over the world. Somebody somewhere needs this. Somebody somewhere wants it. It's not for everybody and I know that. A very small percentage of people are going to maybe use this. But again, it's available with stores everywhere. I've seen it globally that I do have some people coming in here.
That's one thing I want to share with you, one resource. Now, I have a podcast and I'm going to get into that right now. I have a bunch of podcasts.
I'm going to come to my dashboard and I have this one for Sales Associates Dive. You can see all these different ones that I have. Kitchen workers, this is in Spanish. These are smoke breaks. Again, being in the industry for so long, parking lot clears out. You want to go take a smoke break, you can listen to a short, I don't know, maybe five-minute deal here.
But if you come to Dive, you're going to find initially there were some longer episodes, but then I started going to something you saw over here, which was kind of like a little challenge, C Store Legends. In this podcast, I ask, I give you a challenge for the week and this is across. The same content is going to be for a sales associate, the assistant manager, and the perspective of an assistant manager and how it affects an assistant manager, a store manager, a district manager, and an owner.
Everybody every week is getting the same message, but from a different perspective so that it's applied. There's a challenge. The challenge I give you is go do this thing and if there's a code word, if you want a resource to be able to do this, text a code word. When you text that code word, again, I'm not going to be blowing up your phone. I'm not going to be doing any of those things. I have other people who can vouch for that. I'm going to send you a resource for you to be able to complete.
Now, I'm taking it a step further and I'm going to show you what it's like and why you should sign up for something like this. Because here it is. This is your challenge, a vendor receiving log, physically count every item delivered, signing an invoice without verifying the product results in immediate inventory loss. You'd put your name here, your store number or whatever, store location the week of, and you kind of go through this stuff. Keep a vendor log, name, date, inventory count, actual count. Did they match? Yes, no, blah, blah, blah. Then you have your manager sign off on this.
Why is this important? Because you're going to start building a portfolio and this is proof of work. By doing this, you are showing that, "Hey, I didn't just listen to something. I didn't just read something. I actually went out and I applied it." And so that's why
you'll sign up, you'll text, and I'll get you something. But if you want to actually keep track of all this and hopefully the way I want to go with this is you're doing this, producing it, you'll have access to, you can see what you're... Where you're at and what you completed.
At some point, this should help you be prepared for when the positions become available or the opportunities. You get interviewed by a manager or by the district manager for an assistant manager position. You're going to have your part of it down. Because you're not just limited to accessing Dive for sales associates,
you can... I want to close that. You can move to Survive for assistant managers. One of the biggest disconnects there are in the industry is people thinking, and I went through it too, "Gosh, what does my assistant manager do? All they want to do now is boss me around." We used to be colleagues. We should be coworkers.
We should be friends. That's kind of what this is for. It gives you a perspective. It gives you theirs, what they might be going through and what they have to deal with. And so you can dabble around and check these things out. But when I was a district manager, you have managers and I wished I could have said, "You know what? You're going to ride with me one day, the whole day, see what I go through, see what I'm working on."
Because I never see my district manager. He's always saying, "He's not here." He comes in, he goes out. It's a fast-paced job. They all are, but each one of them has different levels. When you can have a better understanding of that, it gives you a bigger sense of the big picture. Working the graveyard shift, "Gosh, second shift doesn't do anything."
Then you get on second shift, "Man, what does first shift do? Just sit in the office, the manager?" When you go through these things, it's going to help you gain a better understanding of the big picture and be prepared for those promotions. These are just a couple of things that I wanted to share with you. I have a lot more, but right now this is published.
It's public. You can access it and you'll find that there are some show notes and other things in here that you can look at. But I wanted to make this so you're aware and also why I'm doing this. You can listen to a podcast. It's convenient. A lot of times your work takes you or on the way to work, but your work might take you outside. You might be in the cooler stocking if there's double coverage or whatever the case is.
This is a great opportunity for you to listen to something and learn something and then hopefully you go apply it. But that's a whole thing. The way I'm designing this is for you to be able to get something tangible. I want this to turn into a skill that's going to help you develop and become more valuable in your store, within your organization. When the time comes, obviously that turns into promotions, earning some more money, maybe extra benefits, better health insurance, bonus opportunities, things of that nature. More importantly, you're not going to be stressed or thrown in or feel like that, like a lot of people do. You're going to prevent all that.
It's an ounce of prevention. It's you taking the initiative to develop yourself. Because the way I'm structuring this, the cream is going to rise to the top and there's going to be no doubt amongst your management team that you are the best qualified for the position if you go through this. It's not costing you a lot. It's not costing you a full-time study, whatever the case is. But anyway, my name is Mike Hernandez. I started off as a sales associate, working overnights.
I went through this whole journey and I want to make sure that you don't have to go through all the bumps and obstacles that I went through. That's going to speed up your career path development. If you have any questions, again, send me an email, admin@cstorecenter.com, because that tells me you're really vested in this.
You're vested enough to... You're willing to make contact. If there's any topic that you want me to cover, same thing. Send me an email. If this helps you, I'll let your team know about it. Your sales associates, your fellow workers, your colleagues. If you're a manager, an owner, a district manager looking at this, why wouldn't you share this with your team? All of them.
If you have 10 stores, this is helping the development of your sales associates and your team. Again, if you go to the C Store Thrive, your employees can listen to this on the way to work, on the way home. English, Spanish for now. If you need another language, again, send me an email, admin@cstorecenter.com. I need it in Russian. Can you put this in
whatever language it is? That's it for now. Have a good one.
