Purpose: This course is the cornerstone of the Certificate in Retail Operations. Its purpose is to introduce participants to the legal and personal demands of running a successful retail business.

Learning Goals:

1. Familiarize participants with the basic legal and operational requirements that must be met in order to establish a retail business in Virginia.

2. Provide participants with the opportunity to evaluate their own strengths and growth areas to inform their development of a successful retail business.

3. Allow participants the opportunity to develop a network of retail colleagues for brainstorming, encouragement, and support.

Purpose: This class provides participants with the vocabulary and key concepts of retail accounting. This class is foundational for budget development and understanding how the Seven Principles work together to form a cohesive whole. Although this class is a discrete topic, the concepts learned will be an integral part of the other five courses.

Learning Goals:

1. Enable participants to translate the goals they set for their business into sound financial practices.

2. Provide the participants with a basic vocabulary for understanding retail accounting.

3. Familiarize students with key accounting concepts applicable to retail businesses.

Purpose: To ground participants in the actions and processes, including marketing research and advertising, required to promote a retail business and to bring customers into a retail establishment. It is differentiated from merchandising in that the focus is on getting customers into your store as opposed to merchandising’s focus on what happens once a customer comes into a retail establishment.

Learning Goals:

1. Introduce participants to an appropriate process for developing a marketing plan.

2. Allow participants to develop basic competencies in marketing research, including situational and market analysis.

3. Expose participants to various promotional tools (including, but not limited to, traditional advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, direct marketing, social media marketing, and public relations).

Purpose: This course will allow participants will learn how to effectively plan and promote the sale of their goods and services through the appropriate presentation in their retail outlets. Merchandising is differentiated from marketing by focusing on what happens inside a store to complete a sale. This includes merchandise selection, pricing, and displaying, as well as managing stock levels, supply chains, and customer service. Essential to the course is understanding the role of accounting in effective merchandising.

Learning Goals:

1. To familiarize participants with the basic vocabulary, tasks, and operating principles used in the field of merchandising.

2. To allow participants to develop basic competence in using supplier, buying, and pricing decisions to support their business goals.

3. To acquaint participants with how to best manage the customer experience. This includes such areas as signage, shelf space and placement, end caps, displays, planned promotions, and customer service policies and procedures.

Purpose: To expose participants to the appropriate methods of devising formal systems for the management of people within their businesses. The course will cover three major areas: staffing (including hiring and termination), employee compensation and benefits, and defining/designating work.

Learning Goals:

1. Develop a staffing plan that adequately serves business goals, including financial constraints

2. Familiarize participants with legal requirements and deadlines related to various aspects of becoming a successful employer.

3. Enable participants to develop appropriate policies and procedures related to the hiring and termination of employees.

Purpose: To enable participants to develop a set of practices they can employ to preserve their profit. This includes business activities specifically designed to reduce preventable losses, that is business costs caused by deliberate or inadvertent human actions (shrinkage.) Areas covered include employee theft, shoplifting, paperwork errors, supplier fraud, and unknown or miscellaneous issues.

Learning Goals:

1. Familiarize participants with various strategies and techniques that can be employed to protect business assets including people, property, and information.

2. Enable participants to develop a loss prevention plan for their unique retail establishment, including a financial policies and procedures document.

3. Articulate an Emergency Response Plan for a retail business.