How To Give Your Smoke Shop A Year End Review

Despite our best attempts to slow the eternal march of time by still listening to Limp Bizket, it is once again December - which means the year is once again over with! With that in mind, it means that it’s time for the old annual review of your smoke shop to get a reading on how things have gone over the past 365 days!

That’s why Got Vape Wholesale has crafted this business blog to break down how to start your year end review and explain what are good questions to ask during your year end review so that you are all set up for increased profits in 2025! Below we’ve got some hints on how you can complete your year end review in a way that best fits your business style.

Table of Contents:

Be Real About Your Review
Review Your Short Term and Long Term Goals
Assess The Basics
Check In On Your Loans
Conducting Competitor Analysis
Focus On The Results
What Worked
What Didn’t Work
Reaccess Your Previous Years In Comparison
Compare Your Results With National Economic Trends
Happy Reviewing

Be Real About Your Review

The first point we wanted to drive home is that whenever you do a year end reflection on your business, you want to make sure you are looking with an objective eye. That is to say you want to be brutally realistic about what worked and what didn’t in the same way a Doctor would diagnose their patient.

While this can lead to some harsh realizations, it's better to take off the rose tinted goggles now instead of when the repo guys are taking them off your head. Don’t be overly negative, but make sure to give yourself the cold hard truth to make your subsequent changes as laser precise as possible in their implementation.

Review Your Short Term and Long Term Goals

To start your year end review, you should begin from a macro view point by assessing your year based on the broad strokes of short term and long term goals. Running a smoke shop is much more akin to winning a war, than a single battle. Which is why gains, even if incremental, amount to accomplished short term goals and the inching forward of long term ones.

Think back to when you started 2024 and what was going through your head, what were your immediate worries about? Did you need to sell a certain amount of back stock? Were you dealing with less foot traffic?

Once you have these feelings back in your head, go through and do a physical check list by writing down these goals and then crossing them out if you accomplished them. This gives you a tangible method of viewing your goals and will help you see the totality of your progress instead of focusing on one or two areas that may be lacking.

After getting through this review, you should spend some time thinking about what your long and short term goals are looking like for 2025. Don’t rush into this, as we recommend taking the time to ruminate on your successes and failures in order to come up with goals that are not only challenging, but propel your business forward with growth and increased profit margins.

Assess The Basics

In order to properly make sense of the past 365 days of business and get a true diagnosis for your shop make sure to review all of your business basics. This includes taking a look at your cash flow, working capital, loan status, and overall profit margins.

First up, we have your cash flow. This is a rather simple figure that consists of how much you made, versus how much you’ve spent during the past year. Essentially this is you stepping on the scale for a monetary weigh in to see if you are swimming, treading water, or starting to drown.

With this information you will have your 2024 profit margin to look back at as a general barometer of things went for your business this fiscal year. Make sure to also break down these results by month to give yourself more data points to examine and see what times of year your shop did particularly well.

From here, move onto reviewing your working capital which is a measure of all your current assets (inventory, store value, current cash) against all of your current liabilities (bills / debts) to see how much money you currently have.

As opposed to your cash flow, figuring out how your working capital is going to not just review your year but your businesses entire life time. It’s important to know how much working capital you have to see where you stand should you need to make a drastic change or are looking to sell your shop in the future.

Check In On Your Loans

If you have any loans out currently, take the time now to check in on them to review how much you own, what your interest rates are, and start to plan how you are going to deal with them in the coming new year.

As a last case scenario, you can look into refinancing the loan to see if you can get a better deal that lets you pay off the interest at a rate you can handle, instead of being buried under bills you have no chance of paying off with your current cash flow.

Refinancing is a treacherous stretch of road to navigate as a business, so we recommend taking your time and exploring all available options to make sure you aren’t making a short sighted business decision.

Conducting Competitor Analysis

An often forgotten aspect of year end reviews is to not just look in the mirror, but to look across the proverbial street to see how your competitors have been doing.

By learning about your competitors' years, you will be able to see if your success or failures were happening in a vacuum or were instead a part of a regional trend that all shop owners were dealing with.

Where things get hard though, is figuring out how to get the information on your competitors when most small businesses keep their records private. Well we certainly aren’t suggesting you stage your own Vapor-Gate break in, there are methods you can employ to get a general barometer of how your competing shops are doing.

The easiest option is to physically go to the store or send your own proxy to report back to you by checking out what the shop's stock, interior, and employee count looks like. What you are looking for is changes - did they lose employees indicating flagging sales? Or is there an army of helpers looking to make sales indicating a sales boon.

This method can also involve driving by and seeing who is still in business and who isn’t! With a high turn over rate, smoke shop entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone - which means that you are bound to see some changes over the years in who exactly your competition is.

Focus On The Results

Another key aspect of conducting your review is to not lose sight of the forest through trees by making sure to focus on the tangible - what worked and what didn’t.

While this may seem like an over simplification, it's the type of cut and dry thinking that you need to apply to your business decisions in order to repeat your successes and avoid any unnecessary double dipped mistakes.

As the saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. While admittedly a platitude you’d see on a colorful sign in the tchotchke shop, it holds true in the sense that if you don’t take the time to learn from your mistakes and just make them again - it really is on you.

What Worked

Let's kick this off by focusing the good news - everything that worked this year for your smoke shop. This is where you take the information you’ve compiled earlier and start extracting the lessons hidden within them for your profit.

Start with identifying brands that sold particularly well and double down on them by checking out their various accessories. Since you have already sold the brand to your customers, by further carrying it you are giving them options to further spend by augmenting their existing experience.

If you for example had success selling Puffco products like the Peak Pro, then why not expand your wares with an accessory like the Empire Glassworks Peak Glass Attachment or build brand synergy by carrying things like the Puffco Hot Knife Electronic Loading Tool.

Next look at the types of products that you’ve been moving well and see if there are any ways you could improve it. For instance if you were selling a lot of CBD Gummies, it’s worth it to try adding a few CBD Cartridge offerings to test the waters with customers. This allows you to grow your current CBD market slowly and with the precision needed to thrive.

The key lesson from all of this is to keep pushing the boundaries of what has worked in 2024 in ways that grow your market without disrupting the already solid foundation you’ve created.

What Didn’t Work

As much as we’d all love to bowl 300 every time, the reality is that we are all bound to throw a couple of gutter balls along the way. But life isn’t about how many times you get knocked down, it's about how many times you can get up back on that horse and keep thundering forward.

For every winner, you are going to have a product that just did not live up to expectations. When this happens it's no failing on your part, but just a reality of the dog eat dog world of retail.

So we recommend you make note of all your 2024 stinkers and make a news resolution to not buy them again! For the leftover stock we recommend employing some methods used to move back stock - as now is the perfect time to run some sales discounts considering the holidays!

Zooming outwards from the individual product level, you should also look to see if there are any categories that have been declining in sales over the years. If you notice this, it means that the writing may be on the wall for these items and it's time to move on from them in the new year.

Reaccess Your Previous Years In Comparison

With a better idea of how your smoke shop has performed in 2024, there is one final step you should take which is to compare this info to that of your previous years. This is a hugely important step as it allows you to see your fiscal prospects not just as a solo enterprise, but as yet another data point in a larger whole.

Use this information to see whether your profits are up or down from the previous years and look for any trends that you see emerging. Is your shop growing each year or have things stagnated recently?

Depending on what you see it may mean you should simply stay the course or instead consider a radical reinvention of your business model. It's better to redirect yourself now, than to continue down a road that leads to ruin.

Compare Your Results With National Economic Trends

Lastly we wanted to add a big caveat that you should also consider what has been going on with the economy of the country and world over. With 2024 being an incredibly volatile year, just the act of surviving should be considered a win!

Waiting out the storm will pay off in dividends as you will be all ready to go when things start booming again. The only thing left to say is to keep your heads up and to keep fighting no matter what so that your business sees the success it deserves.

Happy Reviewing

Now that we are through the review, it’s time for you to take these ideas and run with them by applying the lessons to your own business. While 2024 may be coming to a close, the entire wide world of 2025 lays before us with a whole new 365 days to reach success.

Luckily for you, Got Vape Wholesale is going to be there with you every step of the way, so make sure to check out our blog as we keep you updated on everything smoke shop related!

For some quick reads, we recommend checking out our buyers guides on dual use vaporizers and cartridge vaporizers to get an edge on the competition this holiday season!