Often when one takes over a store it is a wreck; shelves are empty, backroom full, damages and defects out of control, shelf labeling haphazard, Plan-o-grams not complete. . . well you get the picture.
As the new manager you may be a little bewildered and overloaded. Everything that you see and touch in the store needs to be fixed, cleaned, filled straightened or just thrown out. What should you do first? You should first put your blinders on metaphorically speaking.
If you are like me you don't want to walk by something that is incorrect. In the situation where you are trying to get a derailed store back on track then you would be wise to stay very task focused. Fix one thing at a time, get it under control keep it there and move on to the next problem in the store while maintaining the first fix.
In the list of problem above, I think that the first thing that I would approach is a full backroom. Generally if POGs (Plan o grams) are set a full backroom cannot be emptied. The store has missed ad sets and the extra merchandise will never go out now because there is a new ad set. You are going to have to ignore the plan initially, just so that you are able to move the merchandise to the floor. Fill aisles first and as you are able to get those POGs up to date, excess merchandise should be put in secondary locations, back end caps, stack outs, clip strips etc, until such a time as your inventory begins to get back under control.
That being said you need to have firm understanding of how the retail replenishment system works in your company. As you pound out the merchandise your sales will increase and the system may send you all of the stuff that you just put out and sold. Depending on the system your company has you may have to do A LOT of counts to make sure that your on hands are correct and to get your PIA (Perpetual Inventory Accuracy) back to where it should be.
Remember, you can't sell it from the backroom. Just emptying the backroom will drive sales and hopefully deliver you more payroll to fix the rest of the problems in your store.
