So, your sales may be down, or you had a walkout or maybe you just think your having a bad year! Well, before you start feeling down or wonder what you can do to increase sales, let’s do an interesting exercise.

  1. Take your sales, profit and profit percentage for every year you have been open. When I did this over the past 15 years that I have been in business, I realized that my sweet spot (best profit margin) is not when I am at my highest in sales and staff. It’s better when I am between $300,000 to $450,000.
  2. I also realized that although I thought I had a bad year, after a big walkout. I actually did better profit-wise than when I had a much larger staff and higher sales overall. Actually, this year has been better than my overall average!
  3. I thought I had to downsize my beautiful location that I love, but, we are doing fabulously! Focusing more on each member of my smaller team and being more profitable, rather than hiring more people and doing more dollars and spreading myself too thin.

I’ve survived 4 walkouts in 15 years. I learn more after each one (feeling pretty smart by this point.) My new philosophy is NOT get bigger and bigger, but  manage spending, know your numbers, be more profitable, treat every team member with compassion. Some will fit your culture some won’t, focus on the ones that do. And most of all get my sanity back!  With my  smaller team, I am making everyone fully aware of  where we have been and where we are going, understand our code of conduct, sign non solicitation, employment, education and ethical practices employee agreements. Quite frankly, I believe that we finally value the business, our guests and each other so much that this is probably unnecessary but I have learned from several experiences to protect myself and my business!

In my exercise I did with average profit margins, I found that I am more profitable with 3-5 highly productive service providers than I am with 10 service providers that are only 50-65% booked overall.  Plus, I have time to truly illustrate and train my entire staff in our values and belief in treating our customers very well and providing unsurpassed customer service.

Here is a sample of my analysis ( it is not the full analysis, but attached below is a profitability template for you to download for  FREE.

Year                                   Sales                        Profit                    Profit %

2012 $628,847.00 $41,123.00 6.54%
2011 $451,077.00 $50,995.00 11.31%
2010 $327,183.00 $49,241.00 15.05%
2009 $254,817.00 $33,800.00 13.26%
2008 $282,789.93 $34,382.00 12.16%
2007 $254,379.63 $23,498.38 9.24%
2006 $144,707.00 -$2,900.00 -2.00%
2005 $63,446.00 -$64,421.00 -101.54%
15 Year Average Sales/Gross Profit $479,018.00 $30,680.16 6.40%

So in 2019 year, less than a year after a big walkout, my average profit is over $34,000. Better than our average and we are providing superior customer service!   Here is the spreadsheet. Let me know what you think and what you discover!

Copy of Average Profit Analysis