Managing labour costs for profit in your newsagency

In my previous overall business benchmark advice I provided this guidance on your target labour cost benchmark:

1. Labour cost: between 9% and 11% of revenue where revenue is product revenue plus commission from agency lines. Labour cost should include fair market costs for all who work in the business.

What this means is: if your revenue, where revenue is product revenue plus commission from agency lines, is $1 million, your total labour cost should be $110,000.

Labour cost needs to include fair market value for owner labour invested in the business.

Too often, I see newsagency business owners putting in anywhere between 60 and 80 hours a week with the majority of this time unproductive.

A small business cannot afford unproductive management time. Your big business competitors do not have this overhead, nor should you.

This is why I suggest you have no back office or, if absolutely necessary, a small back office that is not comfortable.

There is an added benefit of no or a small uncomfortable back office – you migrate pricing and other work to the shop floor. Do this and revenue will increase.

While many go into business to be the boss and not at the front line serving customers, the front line is where the business makes money. It is where you ought have your best people.

Allocate your boss time to fit with the size of the business. In a typical small retail business turning over $2M a year or less, I suggest boss time should be no more than five hours a week. This, of course, depends on what you do with the time. If you do bookkeeping, saving the cost of an external resource, it could be more.

A more practical way to look at this is issue of labour cost: cutting three hours paid adult time a day, Monday to Friday, will add more than $20,000 a year directly to the bottom line profitability of the business.

If you think this is not possible, look at where you do your boss work. Some of this could be done at the counter or on the shop floor. You could multi-task and thereby cut paid hours. It all depends on whether you want the business to be more profitable.

One newsagent following my advice on this cut labour costs in the business by $50,000. In the same period, revenue was up 6%.

Getting your labour cost under control and within the benchmark starts with your roster.