Sunday newsagency management advice: talk to your employees about the penalty rates changes
I got an email this week from an employee of a newsagency business I have no connection with. They wanted to know what you happen to their pay as their roster includes Sundays. They are too scared to ask the owner and wanted to know what other newsagents are doing.
My post on penalty rates brought them to this site where they found my contact details.
If you have not done so already, talk with your employees about your plans following the decision on Sunday penalty rates.
If you are an employee reading this, ask the owner about their plans. Discussions like these don’t need to be confrontational or stressful. The key is to get to the facts so everyone can make informed decisions.
Your front of store pitch shows how much you know shoppers in your area
As I mentioned yesterday, Hudson News in the US is a terrific business with well run retail stores that are consistently good at what they do.
I got to one of their stores yesterday in an airport location and saw the perfect pitch for this location of the business.
In the photo below note how they use the front of the store to attract shoppers while their shingle, their name, remains old school.
The main traffic driving unit at the centre of the entrance is promoting travel accessories for those listening to music and watching content on their devices.
Magazines and newspapers are there in the product mix but not front of store, not even where passers-by can easily see them.
This image and what Hudson News is doing is a good example of what I have written about here plenty of times, using products to tell people about your business, to attract them to the store.
The future offer businesses is less about the shingle and more about how the business under the shingle behaves. A brilliant named business that is not forward acting will be a poor business. A forward acting and shopper centric business with a name drenched in history will have a brighter future.
Sunday retail management tip: keep bookkeeping costs to a minimum
Thanks to integration between you newsagency software and accounting packages and easy expense and other tracking tools, the need for a bookkeeper for a retail business has all bust disappeared.
Many retail businesses I know have eliminated the bookkeeper cost overhead. This drops money back to the bottom line of the P&L.
If you use an external bookkeeper today, look at what you can do to reduce or eliminate that cost. The freed cash could help with inventory expansion or out of store marketing – two key activities for a transitioning newsagency business.
The best items to place with newspapers to maximise the value of these destination shoppers
In my benchmark work with newsagents and through other data I see I have developed a list of items that work best with newspapers.
With more than 70% of newspaper purchases single item purchases, leveraging newspaper placement is key to make the most of destination newspaper traffic.
Here are the best items to place with with your top selling newspaper, the items people are most likely to add to their newspaper purchase:
- Thursday through Sunday – Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
- On a Monday – your top selling weekly magazines out that day.
- On a Thursday – your top selling weekly magazines out that day.
- Crossword magazines.
- A stack of boxes of paperclips with a price offer of, say, 3 for $x.xx. You could substitute paperclips with everyday tape of any sort, staples or similar home stationery items.
- A carefully curated selection of cards, maybe no more than five, for an every day useful caption: Thank You is good. You could also pitch card captions people would never think you have.
- A selection of gifts from a single line your shoppers would never expect you to carry in your business.
Create the space next to newspapers. I have never seen a newsagency where this cannot be created.
Do not overload the space next to your top selling newspaper. If you clutter the space it will be too busy and people will not see what you want them to see.
Use my suggestions above to get you thinking about your situation. My ideas may not work. Something will. The moment you have success you will be encouraged to try more. Chase that success.
The goal here is to drive shopper visit efficiency from newspapers. Success will only come from active engagement by you in your business. No one else will do this for you.
How to advertise for new staff for your retail newsagency business
As newsagency businesses transition to broader-appeal businesses, how we acquire new employees needs to evolve.
Whereas in the past newsagency retail experience was important, today this is not the case. Today, ideal employees will be more likely found away from the business.
For years when I needed a new employee I’d put up a sign in the business. Now I place an ad on Seek to draw from a bigger pool to present more opportunities the sign might otherwise not uncover.
Here is the text of an ad I have currently running:
Casual retail assistant: Knox and Southland
newsXpress Knox and newsXpress Southland are unique businesses. Their core products are cards, jigsaws, Ty Beanie Boos, jigsaws and gifts.We are looking for people who love working in retail and want to be part of an innovative and changing business.
While the roles are casual, chunky hours are available. Candidates must be available to work on any of the seven days of there week.
We are not looking for people with newsagency experience as these businesses are not newsagencies as you would know them.
Good communication, professional presentation station, customer care and appreciation of the value of work are essentials we are looking for in the candidates we will choose. Visual merchandising skills are a bonus.
Check out our Facebook pages to find out more about us.
In three days the ad attracted 266 candidates. While some are clearly not suited, many are, coming from diverse retail backgrounds through which we can benefit.
It is vital we expand the retail experiences in our businesses, beyond what has been traditional in newsagency businesses. One good way to do this is to bring in new employees with experience in other retail channels. That is what I am seeking to do through this latest job ad pitch.
Footnote: I have used Seek as it shows you are serious about hiring retail professionals. A free ad on Gumtree will not, in my opinion, attract the same calibre of candidates.
Why I am not embracing the reduced Sunday penalty rates in my retail business
Here are my reasons for deciding to not embrace the Sunday penalty rates decision in my retail businesses:
- I value my employees. To pay them less as a result of the decision could suggest to them they are worth less. I have hated it when suppliers reduced margin or commission and argued then that they value me and my business less.
- I want to be competitive for good labour. Paying a competitive rate is key to this.
- The business reward. It is open to employees who are now told their pay will not be cut to return the favour to the business.
- Competition. A range of competitor business have made a similar announcement.
- While of economy fairness. While I agree with the decision, it should only be taken as a whole of economy review that fairly adjusts economic touch-points for all and not only salaried workers.
- Weighing everything up it is the right thing to do.
This is not a permanent decision. It is possible I will modify my position as the marketplace situation evolves. If I did and thereby embraced a saving in labour costs, I anticipate through would be invested in more hours.
All business owners need to reach their own conclusions on this matter. Unfortunately, as a country we are bereft of leadership on broader issues that should be confronted in any economic setting adjustment as has been done with Sunday penalty rates.
Five things you can do to leverage low-margin value high-volume shop traffic
Many retail newsagencies are traffic and margin poor businesses. Such businesses are high-risk businesses as most low margin products and services are delivering less traffic year on year … high-risk of financial failure.
In addition to low margin products and services experiencing traffic decline year on year, minimal or no retail price movement see a decline in margin in real terms. Further, too often we see the percentage cut by suppliers for selfish reasons, further diluting the value to the retailer.
But it is not all bad news with low margin products and services. If they are generating good traffic, the opportunity is to be proactive in leveraging that traffic. Here is a list of five must-do things to leverage this low value traffic in your business.
- Place at least one offer / stand at the door facing people as they leave. If you have room, have one stand / offer either side. Make sure the offer is easily understood and relevant.
- Use a portable table for pricing stock and other stock work and place this with a staff member doing the work during busy periods between the door and the destination for most traffic.
- For the highest volume items, like newspapers, weekly magazines and lotteries in a retail newsagency, always pitch other products such that these destination shoppers see the other products.
- Always have an offer at the counter unrelated to the low margin destination purchase. Get creative as to how you pitch this at the lottery counter if you have Tatts.
- Establish a floor unit to guide counter traffic. the right type of unit is best used for holing products people are likely to purchase on impulse while standing in line to make their destination purchase. All sorts of retailers do this, even if they do not have the shopper to warrant such a floor unit. The impulse purchases should make the space valuable for you. if Tatts complains, explaining it is about best practice traffic management.
My advice is do all five of these things. If you don’t do some or all you are most likely only benefiting from destination business from low-margin high-traffic products and services and there is no upside in that.
For the record, margin poor products and services are those with a GP percentage of less than 50% in my view.
This post shows how to turn a negative into a positive. I hope it helps.
FTYI this advice is an example of one of many types advice newsXpress provides its members.
Sunday newsagency marketing tip: discount vouchers continue to be the best loyalty offering
Four years in and the discount voucher loyalty program continues to be the best loyalty offering in the business.
Managed automatically by the software, the vouchers provide to shoppers encouragement to increase their spend in the visit or to come back soon for another purchase.
Customers continue to respond with delight. This is because more than a third of shoppers we see are first time or infrequent.
I call the vouchers front end loyalty because they put the incentive in front of the customer to get them to act beyond average. Most loyalty systems only reward the customer after they have jumped through the hoops and carried a plastic card around.
The discount vouchers are easy.
- No paperwork.
- No card.
- No confusing points.
- Easily understood currency.
- Automatically managed by the software.
- delivering incremental business.
- They cost the business nothing.
The vouchers are particularly useful for habit based purchases such as magazines, greeting cards, collectibles and similar where a customer can comfortably purchase more as they know they will want the additional purchase at some point in time.
I had a shopper yesterday who purchased a bag and a bow and received a voucher for $1.00. They used that to purchase two cards and with that they received another $1 voucher. They used that to purchase a $20.00 item for a future birthday.
The business gave away $2.00 for an additional $33.00 in revenue to a customer who is not local and will not be back in the centre any time soon. The additional GP earned was $18.45. I am happy for this to cost $2.00 as banking $16.45 is better than banking nothing.
If this was the old-school points based offer they’d have to sign up, visit a few times and then maybe get enough to get a discount. That is why points based loyalty programs are regarded as past their use by date and no longer relevant to retail today.
Things are moving faster. Shoppers want more and sooner. Social media has educated people to seek instant gratification. Discount vouchers provide this.
The engagement with discount vouchers is across demographic groups and this another thing to love about them. While different demos respond differently, they all respond positively and valuably for the business.
So, my marketing tip today – embrace discount vouchers and make more money in your business.
Sunday newsagency management tip: manage cards for success
Don’t leave everything about cards to your card supplier. Take initiatives yourself to drive sales. For example, setup a small display of Easter cards from current stock at your counter. I’ve done this and it is working a treat. Choose the right images and you will win additional Easter card revenue for no additional investment.
The Hallmark range this Easter is terrific by the way. New on-trend designs. Some selling out already.
Take a walk through my ‘newsagency’
I shop this video at my shop on the weekend. Watching it you can see how the floorspace is zoned to appeal to different demographics, how we use key international brands to attract choppers and how we pitch the business as it’s own thing and not as a newsagency.
Take a look…
I share this here to show how we are using brand name products to attract shoppers from the mall and to pitch, through the products, that we are not the business they may think we are.
Sunday newsagency management tip: list to your specialisation
Ask every person in your business to write on a shared list, on a whiteboard or a large sheet in the back room, things you sell or do that make your business unique.
The idea of the exercise is to have a shared experience of working out what is unique in your offering. What you consider unique can be relaxed or hard core. Here are some ideas to kick things off:
- Laundry markers.
- Freezer bag markers.
- Garden markers.
- A2 coloured card.
- Congratulations on getting your driver’s licence cards.
- Photocopying.
Create the list and see how long you can make it.
Once you have your list, it becomes material you can use to promote your business.
Sunday newsagency management tip: know what is different about your business
What is different about your newsagency compared to other newsagencies?
This is an important question as it defines your business compared to what people perceive to be the average newsagency out there.
Hopefully, you have a ready answer that is meaningful and reflected inside the business. Saying better customer service, for example, is not a good answer. Give people something more than that.
So, list what is different and ensure your business matches the claimed differences.
Once you have the list, use this to guide your out of business pitches for every time you promote your business through products others have you don;t pitch your point of difference, and what is the point of that?
Know your differences and promote them, urgently.
Sunday newsagency management tip: call out fakes
There are retailers out there who care less about licenced products and selling the real thing versus a cheap knock-off. Fans of licences eventually discover the fakes. However, those buying for them amy not. This is why we need to call out those peddling fakes when we discover it.
I saw this recently when a retailer posted this on Facebook.
I have blurred identifying detail as they are not necessary for this post.
If you see someone selling fakes, get the evidence and post it in-store and on social media. call out the behaviour and help educate customers that when it comes to licenced product chip is usually not good news.
While some may say they don’t want to pick a fight. Sometimes you have too pick a fight to shine a light on illegal behaviour. I did this eyers ago when a competitor was acting against the law and in doing so they were gaining a financial advantage unfairly. They were eventually hauled and forced to compete on their merits rather than their illegal behaviour.
Sunday newsagency management tip: use videos to train staff in what you sell
Product knowledge is vital on the shop floor. Leverage the knowledge of experts by providing your staff with access to YouTube videos about products.
Whether from a supplier or a fan, videos from others can provide insights that are useful selling.
Encourage staff to look for the videos themselves and share them with other in the business. They can be a great learning tool, and help you with information your competitors will likely not tap into.
Navigating to your Newsagency of the Future starts on the shop floor
This rough sketch by me represents a traditional Newsagency layout. It is close to what shopfitters designed for newsagents, encouraged by Tatts, newspaper publishers and magazine, card and stationery companies.
Everyone wanted their space. And they got it. Little regard was paid to what was right for the business, for its future. Little was known.
No one invested time in understanding the whole business. Newsagents too often did not think about the bigger picture because, too often, they were not retailers.
So, newsagents ended up with a zoned business that was inflexible and at its heart, selfish for the suppliers.
Sadly, there are Newsagency businesses with layouts like or close to this today.
The bold colours on the drawing represents floor traffic for the key traffic driving product categories. I know from years of basket analysis that lottery, weekly magazine and newspaper customers rarely purchase any other product.
Take newspapers, around 75% of newspaper purchases in newsagencies do not include any other product category. For lotteries that number is close to 80%. For weekly magazines, on the day of issue, the number is 65%.
The shop layout encourages inefficiency in these products. Lotteries are the worst, demanding front of store location and barring other products from their location.
Look at the red, blue and yellow trails of traffic. This is what I see in traditional newsagency businesses. The lines represent inefficiency. The show a business not leveraging traffic th way it should.
In this drawing you can see a core reason news agencies are closing in Australia right now. They have not been built to cope with change. Shame on everyone, involved. Shame o,n those continuing to build businesses like this today.
Back in 2009 I designed a plug and play newsagency, one where it could be relayed without a shopfitter, changed dramatically, evolved to serve evolving needs. The flexibility in the core structure of the business has helped it go thorough tremendous changes.
That was in 2009. I know of people who visited that shop and said it was too radical, went on to build an old school business and got out losing money years later.
For years, through this blog and through the work I do with newsXpress, I have been speaking about the need for change to commence on the shop floor. I am pleased to see that happening. But it is not happening in enough businesses.
Newsagents have to push back hard on any supplier who demands space allocated to their category and it alone. They have to push back on suppliers who demand front of store. These pressures need to have a commercial reason, something you can bank on. A simple demand is no longer enough. We are better than this.
My advice to newsagents is to look at your foot traffic. Fast forward through camera footage. See your hot spots and see how you are not leveraging traffic to its fullest potential.
You want to work on this before it is too late.
If you have an old school Newsagency like in my sketch, change, now, quickly, the radically.
Structure your newsagency business to change the three key traffic flows, to get the deeper into the business and more integrated with the whole of the business rather than selfishly staying in the destination category.
The Newsagency of the future starts on the shop floor.
Sunday newsagency management advice from Mary Tyler Moore
Inspiration can come on many forms and from many voices.
Back in the 1970s Mary Tyler Moore was a force to be reckoned with on television around the world. She smashed through the glass ceiling, creating successful TV shows, producing them and starring.
Mary fought against the odds, she confronted extraordinary competition. She won on her own terms. Here are some quotes from Mary Tyler Moore, published by Huffington Post, on the news of her passing. Some of these quotes are relevant to our businesses today.
- “Whatever it is, it’s OK because it’s what it is. Don’t be looking for perfection. Don’t be short-tempered with yourself. And you’ll be a whole lot nicer to be around with everyone else.”
- “I knew at a very early age what I wanted to do. Some people refer to it as indulging in my instincts and artistic bent. I call it just showing off, which was what I did from about three years of age on.”
- “I’m not an actress who can create a character. I play me.”
- “You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.”
- “Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.”
- “Having a dream is what keeps you alive. Overcoming the challenges makes life worth living.”
- “I’ve had the fame and the joy of getting laughter — those are gifts.”
- “Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.”
- “You truly have to make the very best of what you’ve got. We all do.”
- “My grandfather once said, having watched me one entire afternoon, prancing and leaping and cavorting, ‘This child will either end up on stage or in jail.’ Fortunately, I took the easy route.”
- “I’m an experienced woman; I’ve been around … well, alright, I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been … nearby.”
The highlighted quotes are my faves.
RIP Mary Tyler Moore.
Sunday newsagency management tip: don’t stock brand rip-offs
I am pleased to see more product brands protect their intellectual property by taking on retailers who stock knock-off products.
Most recently I have seen this action against a discount retailer selling fake Beanie Boos. The Rockhampton retailer was selling products at less than half price. This alone should have made people wary.
Check if the product you could soon spot the fake – the branding was sub standard, they face wonky, the trademark bright eyes dull and the product itself felt inferior.
Cheap products are cheap for a reason. A sales rep you have never seen before walking if unannounced and offering ‘brand name’ products cheap you need to ask tough questions. Brands have authorised distributors, check with them.
Selling fake products opens your business to seizure of these products and other action.
Sunday newsagency management tip: train your staff!
This holiday season, once again, people left running newsagencies while owners are away have had to work out who to speak to if something goes wrong. I got a call from a staff member left in charge seeking help with a stationery order. They called me because my card was on the wall next to the phone. Another call, at 5:45am Friday morning, was from someone wanting help connecting to the internet in the newsagency – they had no idea who their ISP was and only called me because they knew of a computer connection.
A well organised owner would provide people running their business in their absence with a contact list and simple guidance of businesses to contact for what.
Leaving staff to work out what to do for themselves is asking for trouble, it is poor management.
Sunday newsagency management tip: consider an alternative to using a shop fitter
The days of the bespoke shop fit in retail are a thing of the past with engaged retailers going for a local, more homely, look in-store. This is good news because this type of look can be created for a significantly lower cost than purpose-built fixtures.
Using secondhand materials or easily sourced consumer products, you can create a more appealing and warm feel for your business than the sparkling yet sterile look we see in most new shop-fit stores.
If you want your business to have its own identity and not look like an old-school newsagent, that starts with the fit.
The photo is from a card and gift shop that is transforming from the old purpose build fixtures to these readily available, warm-looking, fixtures. It is a terrific look, far more appealing.
Sunday newsagency management tip: six reasons newsagency and other local retail business websites fail
Sorry that this is a negative post. However, it is important. there are newsagents and other small business retailers who have lured heaps of money into websites only to have them fail. By fail, I mean, not work, not deliver the additional revenue they sought.
I know a bit about this having run retail related websites for twenty years now – some successful, some not so successful.
Based on my experience and observations, here are the top six reasons small business retailer websites fail:
- The site design is poor: hard to navigate, hard to purchase from, not showing products in a good light, not up with current site design standards.
- The site is hard to find. Little or no thought has been given to what people search for, where and how, there is little or no promotion to get the site found through Google and other search engines.
- The site does not give off an impression of trust. If you want someone who has never been to your business before to buy from you the site is all they can gauge trust from.
- The site has no business goal and it is evident from the site this is the case.
- The site is out of date – in terms of content, prices and look nd feel.
- The site does not show what stock is available right now.
Business websites, especially e-commerce sites, are hungry beasts. They require considerable up-keep, daily attention. The data must be accurate. The site design needs to look fresh. Think of it as a shop but online. Just as you open your doors to your physical shop and keep it tidy, you need to do the same for your website.
As a rule of thumb, a retail business website needs a major look, feel and functionality overhaul at least every eighteen months. If you don;t do this you are felling behind in a highly competitive space.
Here is my newsagency management tip for today: if you have a business website, feed it, nurture it, keep it current … otherwise, take it down and save the embarrassment.