Think for a moment how important staffing is to your retail store. To your customers, your staff represents a significant part of why they buy from your business. The type of interaction your staff has with your customers - whether good or bad - determines in large part whether your customers become frequent buyers and continue to patronize your business again and again.

Just as important, if you ever want to be able to "get away" from the business for a few days or longer, you need staff that is competent and well trained.

Hiring and retaining quality employees is not as easy as it used to be. Independent retailers need every advantage they can get in attracting and keeping those staff members that make their business run.

We'll cover in this section how to attract quality people, how to train and motivate them, and include manuals, handbooks, and forms that you can use to put straightforward systems into place to make managing your staff much easier.