Tag: Rebrand

How to decouple your newsagency: five jobs, two years, four numbers

All week we have made the case for decoupling. Today, the how. This is not a slogan and it is not a rebrand you order from a signwriter. It is five jobs, done in order, over about two years, and every one of them is within reach of every shop.

Job one: find the number that is not yours. Go through your last full year and add up the gross profit, not turnover, from lines where someone else sets the commission and can change the terms without asking you. Papers, magazines, lotteries, parcels, bill payments. That share of your total GP is your exposure. We recently reviewed a shop in a wealthy village doing nearly a million dollars, where 41 per cent of gross profit came from the lottery counter at ten cents in the dollar, and more than half was controlled by companies that do not know the owner’s name. For a traditional newsagency the number usually sits between half and three quarters. The work is driving it below a third. One afternoon with your POS data starts it.

Job two: make the floor tell the truth. For each zone of the shop, record the share of floor it takes and the gross profit it produces, then sort. In that same shop, a quarter of the floor produced five per cent of the GP, while one card wall out-earned all of it three times over per metre. Quit the dead categories, bank the cash and give the space to what earns. Put the papers at the back so the paper customer walks past everything you make money on.

Job three: create your own traffic. One transformed shop grew gifts to its biggest department and still saw customer counts fall seven per cent, because changing what you sell does not change why people come. Agency lines rented us our traffic for a century. Replacing them is weekly work: a real loyalty program, a window that changes monthly, small events, local product, social posts about what you unpacked this week.

Job four: change the word, fourth, not first, because a rebrand on an unchanged shop is wallpaper. New name, new sign, new Google category, told as a growth story while you are trading well. Check your lease first.

Job five: decouple the owner. Document the routines, give staff real departments, review the numbers monthly like a board. A business that runs without you is also a business someone will one day want to buy.

Then track four numbers monthly: customer transactions, the share of GP you control versus others, GP per square metre, and the basket. If transactions and your owned share of GP rise together, you are decoupling.

This is the work newsXpress exists to help members do. If you want help finding your numbers, talk to us.

Website: www.newsxpress.com.au | Find out more: help@newsxpress.com.au | CEO: Mark Fletcher: 0418 321 338

Yes, it’s time to stop calling your business a newsagency

The proposal we put to the newsXpress national conference this month is simple to say and confronting to hear. Decouple from the channel. De-identify as a newsagent. Stop defining your business by a word that is losing its meaning, and start defining it by what your customers actually value.

Think about what the word newsagency now means to a shopper. Almost every story about newsagencies is a closing story. The last one in town. Another one gone. Each story is true, and together they teach the public that a newsagency is a business on the way out. That association attaches to the sign over your door whether your own shop is thriving or not. Every newsagent in the country is carrying the reputational weight of every closure in the country, for free, on their own shopfront.

Listen to what the public says online when it thinks we are not reading. “Are newsagents still a thing?” We are called “glorified last minute gift shops”. People group us with video stores and milk bars. Asked whether to buy a newsagency, the replies are blunt: a dying business model, you would be buying a job. That is not a competitor talking. That is our own community telling us what the word already means to them. The nostalgia is real and kind, but affection is not a sale, and the affection is for a good local shop, never for the word newsagency.

Let us be clear about what we are not saying. We are not telling anyone to close. We are not saying print income is worthless tomorrow. Take every dollar the papers, magazines and lotteries still pay, but take it knowing what it is: a declining annuity, not a foundation.

What must change is the identity. The sign, the window, the Google listing, the socials, the in-store experience, and above all the position your shop holds in the customer’s mind. You can be anything you want. The best card and gift destination in your community is the most natural move, because the categories that resist Amazon and Officeworks, cards, gifts, the tactile, the local, the last minute, are already in your shop. But members have become the best toy shop, the best homewares shop, the best coffee stop in town. What you become is entirely up to you. There is simply no longer any value in being the best newsagent.

The businesses that survive the next ten years will not be the ones that held the word longest. They will be the ones that quietly stopped being one, early and on their own terms.

Tomorrow: the how. Five jobs, two years, four numbers.

Website: www.newsxpress.com.au | Find out more: help@newsxpress.com.au | CEO: Mark Fletcher: 0418 321 338