Owning your own business means walking a fine line between having the inventory you need to fulfill whatever orders may come your way while also not tying up too much of your money in inventory that you can’t or won’t sell. So when your projections get off and you acquire too much inventory, it can be hard to know exactly what you should do.
To help you figure this out, here are three things to do when you have too much inventory.
Figure Out The Problem
The very first thing you should be thinking about when you get too much inventory that you don’t know what to do with is how this problem came to be in the first place.
According to BDC.ca, some of the most common reasons why businesses will have too much inventory are things like bottlenecks in production, ordering more than you should have based on insufficient knowledge, not properly monitoring your inventory, or not basing your ordering decision off of the right information. Once you’ve nailed down which aspect of your business failed in order to get you to this point, you can begin finding solutions to the problem and, hopefully, avoid it in the future.
Find Storage While You Need It
Just because you now know what happened to get you more inventory than you need doesn’t necessarily help you with the issue of having more than you planned or have the capacity to deal with.
While you wait to figure out your next move, it may be a good idea for you to secure some additional storage space where you can keep your excess inventory while you plan how to move it. Even if you only need to have this storage space for a very short period of time, you have to know some cleaning tips on self storage. knowing that you have somewhere safe where you can keep your inventory in the meantime will help to put your mind at ease about potentially losing a lot of money over this mistake.
Get The Inventory Moving
Once you’ve been able to get a handle on the extra inventory you have, it’s time to start making a plan for how to get everything moving so that you can begin to make some of your money back.
To do this, Bennett Conlin, a contributor to Business.com, recommends that you first try giving bulk orders to other businesses that you work with. After this, you might want to try selling your stock at a slightly discounted price to your clients or customers. And for things that you’re not going to be able to sell, you may need to start donating it so that you have space and capacity for newer stock that you’re going to need to fulfill future orders.
If you ever get in a situation where you have too much inventory, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you figure how out how to handle this predicament.
