Imagine you own a small bistro restaurant or maybe a little boutique and you need a new assistant.

In the good old days, you would want to hire somebody who was straightforward, honest, reliable and who could add and subtract……. And even if you found somebody like that, you would need to spend weeks training them, helping them and let’s be honest, keeping an eye on them….. especially if they went anywhere near the cash register. In fact it used to be the custom for new employees to be kept well away from the open register and a senior person or owner would be called to accept any cash. The excuse was that this was part of the training but in reality, you needed time to satisfy yourself that the new employee would not walk off with your cash.

The important thing in that particular scenario is that you would hire a pretty boring person to do a sales job because your primary need was somebody who was not going to steal the family silver. You were so severely constrained as to the type of person you could hire to do a sales job.

For someone who has trained thousands of salespeople and having been a salesman myself, I know that good salespeople are absolutely terrible not only with their own money but with anything at all to do with the administration or routine.

However, a good salesman who can concentrate on nothing but selling is an amazing asset to any sales related business. That is why the modern POS system is so useful.

Taking away the boring nonsense of balancing tills, adding up tally rolls or even giving people the wrong change will soon be 100% in the past..

Yes we are still in a bit of a transition period where there are still quite a few cash transactions but we are doubtless heading for a paperless and cashless society.

The ‘kerching’ noise of a chrome plated highly engraved cash register will be no more than a misty memory in your granny’s nostalgic recollections of long ago!

You, as the owner of a business can now go out and hire proper salespeople to do the job. The mundane parts of the job have been totally wiped out by your new POS system and you don’t even have to train your staff for weeks on end because your main till now has brightly coloured squares on it with both the item and the price clearly shown in picture form which means that your salesperson doesn’t even have to think – and they like that!

Small business people are notoriously bad at employing staff and that is why they tend to have quite a high turnover. Yes they blame the competition, poor wages etc etc but an efficiently run establishment with exactly the right sort of people will not have a high attrition rate because of the positive atmosphere that the staff works in.

I am old enough to have memories of still trying to balance my till when all of my workmates had gone home and I still do not understand why till has to be balanced to the nearest cent rather than rounded up to the nearest $50 – and as I said I have the mind and bad attitude of a proper salesman.

If you own a restaurant, the people that work for you, especially the ones that are mingling with the guests, talking, taking orders and embarrassing someone into buying the most expensive wine should be salespeople and not administrators. Administrator types can certainly add up but are far too meek to ever be proper salespeople.

If you have already installed a POS system, you should feel very liberated because there will come a time when you can get rid of all the boring people who can add up and hire yourself a proper salesteam who will help you to drive your business forward.

The meek shall not inherit the earth…. That was just a rumour put about by the meek!