Choosing the right date for your auction is critical. Most auctions are held in either the spring or the fall. Summer is not a good time to hold a major event since many guests may be vacationing. Winter is also considered a bad time of year as many are preparing or recovering from the holidays. Fall is normally considered the best time of year to hold an auction because many of your guests are beginning to get into the holiday shopping mood and may find that what you have to offer is on their shopping list. Weekend evenings are the most popular time to hold auctions since most auctions last well into the night.

2. Pick the right auctioneer for your live auction

You have two choices, a professional auctioneer or a volunteer. This decision generally comes down to the following considerations. A professional auctioneer will charge for their services. However, they will auction more gifts faster and for more money. A professional auctioneer can auction approximately 75 items in an evening, at 20-25% higher than an amateur auctioneer. If you are running a small auction, you may want to use a volunteer. It might also make sense to use a volunteer if you have someone in your organization that has a great personality and is known by many of your potential guests. Best of all, they are free. However, volunteers can cause the evening to run very late and ruin the opportunity to get guests to return to future auctions.

3. Use the most effective strategy for acquiring gifts for both your silent auction and your live auction

Teams provide the moral support necessary to approach a potential donor. Additionally, using teams helps ensure that the paperwork is completed properly. When setting up teams, pay attention to personal dynamics. Certain team members will be more comfortable asking donors for gifts than others. These individuals should be teamed up with team members who do not necessarily have this talent. Also, this allows teams to share the workload by allowing the more reserved person to take on tasks which are more suited to them (documentation, collection of the gifts, etc.).

4. Obtain tangible gifts for both your silent auction and your live auction whenever possible

Many businesses, especially restaurants, will offer to provide you with gift certificates instead of actual gifts. Focus on local businesses that can donate tangible items. You should not turn away businesses that can only provide gift certificates, but they should not be the focus of your campaign. Tangible gifts create a very exciting auction night environment. Just imagine an auction with no actual gifts, but rather just a bunch of gift certificates lying around on a silent auction table. Secondly, a gift certificate is only going to bring in the amount on the certificate, or unfortunately, sometimes not even that. A tangible gift is much more likely to bring in a value that exceeds its real value.

5. Know what to put in your “Auction Packet”

The auction packet is given to guests when they arrive. Some of the items you should include in your packet are:

* The auction program
* Addendum to auction Catalog
* Organization fact sheets
* Auction rules
* Payment options
* Advertising
* Silent auction table closing times
* Drink coupons
* Raffle tickets
* Flyers for other upcoming events
* Auction paddles

6. Close down the silent auction tables properly

Closing down the silent auction can be a bit tricky. There may still be several bidders bidding on the same item right up until the closing time. To prevent a situation that is perceived as unfair, it is important that the table be closed at exactly the time advertised. It is a good idea to announce the closing of table at prescribed intervals before, such as 15 minutes, 5 minutes, etc. This helps to get interested bidders to enter their “best and final” offer before the time for bidding expires. It is also helpful to close different sections of the silent auction at different times, to allow your volunteers time to pick up all the bid sheets quickly.

7. Take advantage of other opportunities to make money at your auction

Admission fees, the sale of beer, wine and cocktails, raffles, door prizes and the sale of advertising in your program are a few of the ways you can augment your auction revenue.

8. Send out invitations for your auction

If you are lucky enough to have a database of your members or guests from previous auctions then you can send out formal invitations. The design of your invitation can range from very simple to very elegant. Your should mail them approximately 90 days before your event to make sure your guests have not already made other plans for the evening. You should also develop a plan to send out reminders at periodic intervals to those who have not sent in their RSVP. Remember, RSVPs also tell you who has declined, which reduces the number of reminders you need to send.

9. Know the laws regarding silent and live auctions and stay out of trouble

Fundraising events create tax consequences for the guest and the organization hosting the event. According to the IRS; “A donor cannot claim a tax deduction for any single contribution of $250 or more unless the donor obtains a contemporaneous, written acknowledgment of the contribution from the recipient organization.” Also, “A donor may only take a contribution deduction to the extent that his/her contribution exceeds the fair market value of the goods or services the donor receives in return for the contribution; therefore, donors need to know the value of the goods or services.

10. Use checklists to make sure everything goes smoothly

* Room reservation checklist
* Room setup checklist
* Refreshments checklist
* Sound system checklist
* Check-in checklist
* Check-out checklist
* Raffle and door prize checklist
* Silent auction checklist
* Live auction checklist
* Auction cleanup checklist

Step 1

Gather your items for the auction. Depending upon the cause that you are trying to raise money for you may have a number of people willing to donate items for the auction. The best way to obtain items for the auction is to speak with businesses and individuals that you feel would be likely to donate, and explain your cause. You will find that most people are willing to help out in any way that they can if you have a legitimately charitable cause.

Step 2

Advertise your auction as much as you can so that you draw the largest amount of people possible. There are multiple ways that you can advertise an auction, even on a low budget. You can put up a website, post flyers around your community or school, and even send out a number of emails or go door to door promoting your event.

Step 3

Set up multiple tables and make sure that there are enough bid sheets. You want to give people enough room to walk around and bid without feeling like they are squished together, so multiple tables work well for a medium to large size auction. It’s also very important that you have enough bid sheets or you may lose potential bidders which could dramatically affect the amount of money that you’re able to raise.

Step 4

Ensure that each auction item has an appropriate description attached to it on the table. This is important because some people may not know what a particular item is, and this may cause them to decide against bidding. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to set up a well written description for each item, but it can go a long way towards making sure that you draw in bidders.

Step 5

Collect the bid sheets and promptly notify the winners. People are usually looking forward finding out whether or not they’ve won an item, and by notifying them quicker you’ll be able to get the money from your items and put it towards your cause as fast as possible.

Our inventories come primarily from firms that have “surplus” inventories or firms that go out of business and must liquidate whatever inventory they have on hand when their business ends. Most of this inventory is purchased for prices much less than original cost to the host merchant and is marked up by us a slight amount and sold at huge discounts to original retail. For example say an item sells with an original retail of $10.00. We would normally sell it direct to you in the $2.00 to $5.00 range with freight paid. We always try to be under half price and frequently can be way under that. Because we pay the freight with our “free freight” program we factor freight into our final selling price and still sell for far less than what you are used to.

We have been in the auction business for 30 years and been doing inventory liquidations for the past 15 years or so. The past 10 years we have specialized virtually only in inventory liquidations and this is one of the hardest auction specialities there is. If you have inventory to sell we can buy it outright or we can sell it for you on commission with an on-line or a live in person auction. We are licensed auctioneers in many states and we have affiliates in all 48 states that can assist us in multiple warehouse sales. We can respond immediately if the situation calls for it and can start moving truckloads of merchandise virtually immediately if necessary because of security or pressing needs.

In future blog posts we’ll look at how closeout merchandise is generated and how this differs from returns and salvage merchandise, which we do not handle at all. Our merchandise is all first quality and this is important to know when you are buying from a closeout house. Generally salvage and returns are best avoided and left to those who deal in them regularly. You can get burned easily with salvage merchandise because of water or other damage. All our merchandise at www.kiefers.com is guaranteed and is returnable by simply paying the freight back to us. We have a long list of satisfied national clients and proudly post our client list on our home page.

In 30 years in business “we’ve seen it all” but we are always looking for a few more good customers like you to find some incredible deals.

So where can you find “the deals”. First of all the closeout industry is one place. Closeouts goods come from all sorts of places and it provides a needed marketplace for manufacturers and finance. The closeout industry is mostly centered around a few cities, mainly Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. There are other sub hubs, like Minneapolis, that have active markets. Chicago is the biggest and has more closeout dealers than any city, probably because it is in the center of the country and is the transportation hub for the midwest. Many of the closeout vendors blend imported goods with closeouts to give a great variety of inventory like www.RegentProducts.com Others like The Bazaar, H & J, Great Discounters, only deal in closeouts. In another blog we’ll give a complete list of top closeout firms. Regent Products currently hosts 8 merchandise shows a year in its Chicago warehouse with over 50 other vendors.

Closeouts is a generic term for merchandise that moves from it’s regular selling channel to the closeout channel for liquidation. It can be simply because a firm ordered too many and they didn’t sell or made too many. When a manufacturer get a product idea they base the cost upon selling so many units and order up an initial run of say 500,000 widgets. Say the product is the wrong color, wrong price or simply doesn’t sell. After selling 100,000 in the first year, 80,000 in the second year and 50,000 in the 3 year, they still have 270,000 widgets from their initial run. That is a perfect example of a product that would be liquidated because it didn’t “turn” fast enough to be profitable. It might have cost $1.00 to manufacture but every month it sits on the warehouse racking it cost storage and it could be replaced with a product that sells faster and makes money. That might be sold to a liquidator for $0.10 cents and to you for $0.15 cents so you can sell it to your customers for $0.30 or much more.

“Managing the margin” becomes an important part of closeouts when you get them. Normal wholesale channels might give you a 30% to 50% margin. Say you buy an item for $0.65 and sell it for $1.00 and you make 35 cents. A closeout item might cost you that same $0.65 cents but because it previously sold for $5.00, means you could mark it up to say $1.99 and give you $1.34 selling profit and save the customer over $3.00. It’s a win-win for you and the customer.
Think of the tremendous margin over a single year you can gain by dealing in closeouts with your regular retail store goods.

I’ve exhibited in many trade shows and was originally surprised to find out how many stores shop the closeout shows to find unique and off price goods for their stores. Many drug stores, grocery stores, home stores all come to the shows to find goods that will improve their margins. Most national manufacturers use closeouts to move their slow-moving products. You’ll find 3M, GE, Mead and most other top manufacturers selling their brand name goods off price to move it.
Sometimes entire warehouses are sold to liquidators when a manufacturer makes a strategic decision to close a building.

Liquidators mostly work on “blended margin” and try to get a higher price when an items comes in and then over time drops the price to keep moving the product until it gone. Many times near the end when the product is almost gone you can offer a much lower price to the vendor to clean them out of the item. If they have done well at the beginning they will look at the overall blended margin and accept your offer. Say they sold 20 at $5.00, 20 at $4.00, 20 at $3.00, 20 at $2.00 and have 20 left. Their blended or average selling price was $3.50 for the 80 they sold and might let the last 20 go at something less than their previously low of $2.00 to clean it out. That’s an overly simple example but shows an important aspect of the closeout business that most customers all pay different prices based upon your purchasing volume and negotiating skills.

Our own business is 100% closeouts www.kiefers.com and comes to you freight paid. The free freight is a factor because freight today can easily add 10% to 20% to an entire order. Most closeout houses cannot offer free freight because the weight of certain categories such as paper, chemicals, plastics, etc. can be tremendous and cost a lot to ship. We use averages and don’t buy certain products that would cost more to ship than the product is worth. We offer a huge selection of products numbering into the thousands of items, and they are all delivered to you freight paid.

Another source of closeout goods is auctions which we’ll talk about in another blog. Auctions can be a huge source of profit for retail store if you know what to look for.