How To Manage Your Business Expenses & Operating Costs

9th May 22

Last month, we urged you to review your cost base following the implementation of the new National Living Wage and Minimum Wage rates.

Now, more than ever, it is vital for businesses to review expenses and operating costs in order to ensure that day-to-day financial spending runs smoothly, with no unexpected surprises.

Structural changes, such as local Click & Collect and delivery models, are affecting the way businesses operate, adding more complexity and workload to retail stores and food outlets. Add to this external cost pressures coming from supply chain challenges, inflation affecting profit margins and sky high energy costs. And if that wasn’t enough, recruiting and retaining staff members with the right skills and attitudes to reflect your brand is becoming increasingly difficult. Together, all of these factors show how important it is to review your overall cost base.

If you want to make an immediate and sustained dent in your operating costs, firstly take a look at those areas that cost the most. For retailers, when you put the cost of goods aside, the two biggest areas are stock handling and serving customers. For quick-serve food outlets, production time is also a factor.

Consider using business improvement consultants

Work study doesn’t have to be a huge commitment that drags on for weeks. At ReThink, we design short, sharp studies that help businesses quickly identify and put value on opportunities. The various ways we can help you include:

• A day-long, team-wide study in various locations to quantify down-time in order to target and measure precisely how long those time-hungry processes take
• Targeted activity studies measure how long it takes to complete stock handling processes. Combining the outputs with benchmarking insights helps create a clear plan to focus efforts and achieve savings on time
• Video footage of a process filmed just once provides a high quality and detailed analysis of how a task can be completed more efficiently. It also highlights extra movements carried out by team members and results in the perfect solution for those high frequency processes that are completed thousands of time a day where shaving off seconds will amount to a big change

Whether you are looking to reduce costs or shrink your workload, get in touch, share your challenge with us and discover how we can help your team deliver a top quality experience for your customers.

And if you’d like some top tips in the meantime…

• Minimise stock counting – stop any routine counts and focus on exceptions where you have gaps or overstocks
• Reduce store stock-holding – it benefits your cash flow and helps stores get closer to the goal of touching stock just once as it arrives in the store. Having excess stock in a backshop creates extra work by forcing additional handling of items before they reach a customer
• Consider self-checkouts if you don’t already have them – done well, they are popular with customers and free up colleague time
• Unless you have a cash loss issue, don’t cash up more than once a week

Do you want to find out more about our processes and how we can help your business? Please reach out to us and we will be happy to help.