Mark Fletcher’s management tip: Rostering to a budget

When was the last time you looked at the roster for your store? Do you know the total weekly labour cost for the business? What is the sales revenue per rostered hour that you are achieving?

These are important questions for convenience store and newsagents businesses. While our bigger competitors like Asda, Sainsbury’s or Tesco  roster with fine precision, we often roster our businesses based on emotion or personal need.

If you want a better return from your business, look at your roster: look at it as an overhead and look at it as an opportunity. Make your roster decisions based on business performance data. Do more of what is working and less of what is not. Remove emotion from the equation.

Labour should cost no more than 11% of your sales where sales is revenue for non agency lines plus commission on agency lines. If you are a owner/manager you should include the market rate for you time in this 11% cost.