Tag: retail strategy

Retail Advice: Habit Beats Loyalty: Owning Your Local Market

Every retailer wants loyal customers. But loyalty is a slippery thing. It depends on feelings, and feelings change. There is something more reliable and more valuable to build, and that is habit. The customer who comes to you out of habit is the one who keeps your shop alive.

A habit-based shopper does not weigh up options every time. They simply come to you, because that is what they do. They buy their card from you, their paper from you, their little treat from you, without a deliberate decision each time. That is worth more than warm feelings, because it survives a bad day, a small price difference, or a competitor’s promotion.

The good news is that a local independent shop is well placed to build habit. You are close. You are familiar. You see the same faces and they see yours. That regular, personal contact is the soil habits grow in, and it is something a large chain struggles to replicate.

Building habit comes down to consistency. The customer needs to know what to expect from you. The shop is reliably good, the staff are reliably welcoming, the things they came for are reliably there. Unpredictability breaks a habit faster than almost anything, so being dependable matters more than being occasionally brilliant.

Reasons to return help, too. A shop people only visit for one occasion stays a once-a-year stop. A shop with a regular draw, fresh ranges, seasonal interest, a reason to look in, becomes part of the weekly rhythm. The more naturally you fit into someone’s routine, the harder you are to displace.

This is also why chasing new customers without keeping the regulars makes little sense. The customers you already have are the ones closest to becoming habitual. A small lift in how often they visit, multiplied across your regulars, usually outweighs a scramble for strangers.

Loyalty is lovely when you have it. But habit is what you can actually build, day by day, through consistency and presence. Own the habit and you own your local market, quietly and durably, in a way no promotion can match.

Retail Advice: The Quiet Cost of Dead Stock

Dead stock does not announce itself. It sits on the shelf, takes up space, and slowly drains the business while looking perfectly harmless. That is what makes it dangerous. A loud problem gets dealt with. A quiet one gets ignored until it has done real damage.

Every item that is not selling is doing more than failing to make money. It is holding cash you could have spent on something that does sell. It is taking up shelf space that a faster line could use. And it is sending a tired message to anyone who walks in. Dead stock is not neutral. It is a cost, even when it just sits there.

The hardest part is emotional. You paid for that stock. Marking it down or clearing it feels like admitting a mistake, so it stays, month after month, while you wait for it to come good. It rarely does. The money is already spent. The only question left is whether you free up the space and the cash, or keep paying to store a reminder of a buying decision that did not work.

A useful exercise is to walk your shop as if you were a new owner seeing it for the first time. A new owner has no attachment to old buys. They would look at slow lines and ask a simple question: would I order this again today? If the answer is no, that stock has told you what to do.

Clearing dead stock is not failure. It is good housekeeping. Run a clearance, bundle it, donate it, do whatever moves it on. What matters is turning idle stock back into cash and space you can put to work.

The discipline that prevents dead stock is the same one that clears it. Buy tighter. Review regularly. Be honest about what is moving and what is not. A shop that watches its stock closely simply does not accumulate as much of the dead weight in the first place.

Healthy retail is about flow. Cash in, stock out, repeat. Dead stock breaks that flow quietly, one shelf at a time. Noticing it is the first step. Acting on it is the one that counts.

Why Full-Face Card Displays Outsell Traditional Racks in Smart Newsagency Businesses

Greeting cards are still one of the strongest categories an independent retailer can own. They carry good margin, they bring people in for occasions, and they pull through add-on sales. But how you display them changes how they sell, and the difference is larger than most shopkeepers expect.

The traditional pocket rack shows a thin sliver of each card. The customer sees the top inch and has to pull a card out to judge it. That is friction. Every extra step between a shopper and a decision costs you sales, and a rack full of half-hidden cards is full of friction.

A full-face display does the opposite. The whole card is visible. The artwork, the sentiment, the finish all do their job at a glance. The customer browses with their eyes instead of their hands, and the cards that catch the eye get picked up. You are letting the product sell itself, which is exactly what good merchandising should do.

There is a space argument against full-face displays, and it is true that you fit fewer designs per metre. But that misses the point. Selling more of a tighter range beats selling less of a sprawling one. A curated wall of strong designs, fully visible, will usually turn over faster than a crammed rack of hidden ones.

Australian-made cards reward this approach especially well. The print quality, the local humour, the finishes all show better full-face. When a customer can see that a card is genuinely lovely, the higher price tag stops being a barrier and starts being justified.

The shift does not need to happen across the whole department at once. Pick your best-selling occasion, give it a full-face treatment, and watch what happens to the numbers over a few weeks. The evidence usually makes the case for rolling it out further.

Cards are an emotional purchase. People buy the one that makes them feel something. Your job is to remove anything standing between the shopper and that feeling. A full-face display does precisely that, and the sales tend to follow.

From Agent to Retailer: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

For a long time, the newsagency was defined by what it was an agent for. Papers, magazines, lottery, bill paying. The shop was a place people passed through on the way to something else. That model served its time. It does not serve the future.

The shift we talk about most with members is not about fixtures or ranges. It is about mindset. An agent waits for the supplier to set the terms. A retailer decides what the shop stands for and builds from there.

The difference shows up in small daily choices. An agent stocks what the rep brings. A retailer asks whether a product earns its place on the shelf. An agent accepts the foot traffic that walks in. A retailer gives people a reason to come back. One is passive. The other is in charge of its own future.

This matters because the agency lines that once anchored the business are shrinking. Lottery is moving online. Newspaper circulation keeps falling. If your identity is tied to those categories, you are tied to their decline. The retailers doing well have quietly let go of the agent label and started thinking like proper shopkeepers.

None of this means abandoning what works. Plenty of agency services still bring people through the door, and that traffic is valuable. The point is to stop letting those services define the whole shop. They are a feature, not the headline.

The practical starting point is a simple question. If a stranger walked into your shop knowing nothing about its history, what would they think you sell? If the honest answer is a bit of everything and nothing in particular, that is the work. A clear identity beats a broad one every time.

Making the shift is less daunting than it sounds. It rarely needs a costly refit. It needs a decision about what you want to be known for, then the discipline to range and merchandise around that choice. The retailers who make that decision tend to find the rest follows.

The agent mindset asks what the suppliers want from you. The retailer mindset asks what your customers need from you. That second question is the one worth building a business on.

Advice for indie retailers: compounding small moves deliver the best value

The businesses growing steadily aren’t doing one dramatic thing. They’re doing three ordinary things at once, consistently, over time. Bringing in more shoppers. Getting each one to spend a little more. Earning better margins on what they sell. None of those looks impressive on its own. Together, they add up faster than most owners expect.

Big turnarounds make good stories. They’re rarely how retail actually works.

This advice is from newsXpress, we help local indie retailers grow businesses they love.

The numbers are straightforward. A 2% lift in customer count. A 2% increase in items per basket. A 2 percentage point improvement in gross profit on lines where you control the price. Each one feels modest. Run all three at once, week after week, and the combined result outpaces what any single change could deliver. That’s not a theory — it’s arithmetic.

The hard part isn’t the maths. It’s making the changes fit your business rather than someone else’s template. Your floor layout, your local demographic, your product mix — they’re specific to you. A ranging decision that works in a busy suburban newsagency won’t automatically translate to a regional shop with a different customer base and different traffic patterns. Generic advice has a short shelf life. What lasts is an approach built around how your store actually operates.

That specificity also protects your existing customers. The people already coming through your door are your most valuable asset. Poorly handled changes — rushed ranging decisions, price moves that feel wrong, a shop that suddenly doesn’t feel familiar — push those customers away quietly. Done carefully, the same changes go unnoticed by shoppers while showing up clearly on your bottom line. That’s the goal: improvement your customers benefit from without disruption they react to.

Most owners under pressure start looking for the one big fix. A new system, a new supplier, a new concept. It’s understandable. When things feel hard, a bold move feels like the right response. But the one big fix is rarely available, and chasing it burns time and energy that could go toward smaller moves that compound quietly in the background.

Three levers. Consistent attention. Your specific store. The results follow.

Newspapers and magazines are declining. The shops growing anyway are doing this.

Every one of the 32 newsXpress member shops in our latest benchmark study saw newspaper and magazine volumes fall between January and May 2026. Newspaper units dropped 15% to 25% at most shops. Magazine units fell almost everywhere, with revenue holding slightly better only because cover prices rose.

We want to be straight about this, because plenty of people in our channel are not. This is not a store level problem you can merchandise your way out of. It is structural. Digital substitution is permanent. Print will keep declining, and pretending otherwise wastes time and capital.

The useful question is not how do we fix magazines. It is what do we do with the space, the supplier relationships and the customer traffic that print used to drive.

Here is what the data shows. The shops in our study that grew overall revenue did not do it through print. They offset print decline with growth in gifting, collectibles and premium stationery. Our stationery data tells the same story in miniature: unit sales across 12 reporting shops fell 8.2%, but average unit price rose 6.7% as shops shifted from commodity pens and pads toward quality journals, planners and gift stationery.

The advice we give members facing print decline is specific:

  • Measure print’s true contribution. Floor space, labour and capital against gross profit. Most shops are shocked by the answer.
  • Shrink print deliberately, not by neglect. Keep the titles that earn their space, return the rest, and reclaim the fixtures.
  • Reinvest the space in categories with proven network results: considered gifts, coins, trading cards, premium stationery.
  • Use the foot traffic print still brings. Every newspaper customer walks past whatever you put between the door and the counter. Choose well.

Helping members through this transition is core to what newsXpress does, and it is included in membership. We benchmark your data against peer shops, identify which categories should take the space, connect you with the suppliers, and support the change with marketing.

Print decline is the reality of our channel. Whether it sinks your business or funds its reinvention is a choice. Our members are choosing the second option, with evidence behind every step.

Fewer customers, more revenue: what 32 newsagency-style shops just taught us about basket value

We have just finished analysing sales data from 32 newsXpress member shops covering January to May 2026, compared with the same five months in 2025. The headline surprised some members: transactions fell 4.0% across the network, yet revenue grew 4.0%.

The number doing the work is average sale value. Across the network it rose from $20.29 to $21.97, up 8.3%. Customers are visiting less often and spending more when they do. Five shops in the study grew average sale value by more than 15%.

That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen through discounting. The shops achieving it made deliberate range decisions. They added depth in gifts, premium cards and collectibles, and they cut lines that filled shelves without filling tills.

This is the kind of analysis newsXpress provides members at no extra cost. We take point of sale data, benchmark each shop against its peers, and come back with specific advice. Not theory. Specific advice for that shop.

This is curated advice with actionable steps – created for each business, for free. heavy lifting done not only in data analysis but in considering the store location and local economic and social conditions.

Here is an example of what we told members off the back of this data:

  • Pull your top 20 revenue lines. Check whether they are growing, whether you are ordering enough depth, and whether they are displayed where customers actually walk.
  • Pull your bottom 20 lines by margin. Most shops find at least a handful of space wasters that could be replaced with higher value product tomorrow.
  • Stop measuring success by door count. Foot traffic in our channel is structurally softer than it was. Basket value is where the growth is, and it is within your control.

The shops in this study range from large shopping centre businesses turning over more than $1.5 million for the period to small country shops under $65,000. The basket value lesson held at both ends.

If you run an independent newsagency, gift shop or similar retail business and nobody is benchmarking your data against shops like yours, you are flying blind. newsXpress members get this every quarter, with a phone call to talk it through. That is what a marketing group should do.

What the data actually says about the traditional newsagency mode

Newspaper unit sales fell 13% in 2025. Magazine revenue continues to contract. Lottery players are shifting to online platforms. These are not temporary dips waiting to reverse — they are structural changes to the categories that once anchored the newsagency model.

Add to this the latest moves by TLC to further drive lottery customers online and away from physical shops.

That does not mean the newsagency business is finished. It means the businesses that are thriving have rebuilt around something different.

What that looks like in practice varies by location, store size, and what the owner wants from the business. Some members have moved heavily into gifts and collectibles, building a range that bears no resemblance to the traditional newsagency floor plan. Others have kept the newsagency identity but shifted the product mix toward higher-margin categories — greeting cards, plush, stationery ranges that command real margin rather than the thin returns of allocated supplier stock.

The common thread in the stores that are growing is that they made deliberate decisions based on their own data. They looked at what each category was actually returning per square metre, assessed what their shoppers were buying versus what they were ignoring, and reallocated space accordingly.

That analysis is not complicated, but it requires looking at the numbers honestly. What is your current margin on newspapers? What does the lottery section actually earn relative to the rent it occupies? What would happen if you took 20% of that space and gave it to a category with better margin and growing demand?

Most independent retailers have the data to answer those questions sitting in their POS system. The challenge is usually knowing where to look and what to compare it against.

newsXpress provides that framework — evidence-based business analysis using your own data, with specific advice on where the opportunities are. The goal is not to push a particular product category. It is to help you make better use of the space and stock you already have.

This is back room work, strategic work, all in service of more successful local retail businesses for newsXpress members.

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newsXpress supports small local independent retailers to thrive. Find out more at help@newsxpress.com.au.

Newsagents: Why your greeting card range might be your biggest untapped opportunity

Australian newsagents sell a third of all greeting cards in the country. The average Australian buys eight or nine cards a year. If your store has a card section, you are almost certainly sitting on more revenue than your current range is delivering.

Most newsagents know cards matter. Fewer know exactly which pockets are working and which are not. A pocket that looks busy is not necessarily profitable. A pocket allocated to a supplier because they have always been there may be returning half what a different range would in the same space.

This is where data makes a real difference. newsXpress has developed proprietary pocket-level analysis that goes through your card sales by individual pocket, identifies which are earning their space, and provides specific recommendations on what to change. It is applied to your data, not a generic template.

The results members report are worth taking seriously. One store moved 120 pockets from one supplier to another and more than doubled the return per pocket. Another cut their card range by 25%, shifted to a split-supplier model, and saw revenue rise 33%. A third split their range between two suppliers with no additional capital investment and grew card revenue by 70%.

These are not outlier results. They reflect what happens when a category that is often managed on habit gets managed on evidence instead.

Cards also reward in-store execution. How they are arranged, how signage works alongside them, and how seasonal displays draw shoppers in all have a measurable effect. newsXpress provides professionally designed seasonal collateral for members before each major card season — Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas — ready to display without any design work on your end.

If you have not reviewed your card range in the past 12 months, it is worth doing. If you want to do it with data rather than instinct, that analysis is available to newsXpress members at no additional cost.

newsXpress helps newsagents grow card sales beyond this work. We offer an active marketing program that includes newsXpress funded in-store prize packs and more – all working well to maximise the card sales opportunities.

Growing card sales is easy if you’re backed with good tools that work.

Printer ink and toner: newsXpress helps newsagents think clearly about a category that still matters to some stores

For a segment of newsagency retailers, printer ink and toner remains a genuine part of the business. Customers ask for it. It connects to stationery and office supplies. It brings people back regularly.

Ink is not dead for newsagents, it’s changed, evolved.

Whether it deserves floor space, investment, and staff attention is a different question — and not one that has a single answer across the channel.

newsXpress has developed detailed strategic guidance for members on exactly this category. The guidance does not push a particular outcome. It helps each member think through whether the category makes sense for their specific store, their location, their customer base, and their capacity to manage it well.

That kind of honest, store-specific analysis is what distinguishes useful retail advice from generic category promotion.

The competitive landscape for ink and toner has shifted considerably. Customers can check prices on their phone while standing at your counter. Large format retailers and online specialists have invested heavily in range and fulfilment. The question for an independent retailer is not whether those competitors exist — they do — but whether there is a genuine opportunity that those operators cannot easily serve.

In some locations and for some customer profiles, there is. The newsXpress guidance helps members identify whether their store is one of them.

It also addresses the risks that are easy to underestimate. Stock management in this category requires discipline. SKU counts can grow quickly. Some products become obsolete. Slow-moving stock carries a real cost. The guidance is structured to help members avoid the mistakes that turn a reasonable category test into a cash flow problem.

For members already stocking ink and toner, the guidance offers a basis for reviewing whether the current approach is working as well as it should. For those considering it for the first time, it provides a framework for making the decision with clear eyes.

This is the kind of strategic support newsXpress provides across a range of categories — not telling members what to do, but making sure they have the information and the framework to decide for themselves.

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newsXpress supports small local independent retailers to thrive. Find out more at help@newsxpress.com.au.

Small events, real foot traffic: how newsXpress is helping members use their biggest advantage

Independent retailers have something large format stores cannot easily replicate. They are embedded in their communities in a way that a national chain simply is not. They know their regulars. They can make decisions on the spot. They can do something genuinely local — and mean it.

newsXpress has been helping its members turn that advantage into foot traffic through a practical programme of micro-events.

The idea is not complicated. Give people a reason to visit that has nothing to do with a promotion or a price reduction. Build connection with the community through the shop floor itself. The events are small by design — low budget, low complexity, manageable for a team of two or three people running a busy independent store.

What the newsXpress guidance covers is the range of formats that work, how to execute them without disrupting normal trading, and how to get the most out of each one. Some events are built around customer participation — creating something in-store that people contribute to and come back to check on. Others lean on local partnerships, sharing the promotional load with a nearby café or maker and reaching each other’s audiences in the process. A few are simply about doing something unexpected on an otherwise ordinary day — the kind of small gesture that earns goodwill and gets mentioned.

The social media angle matters here more than many retailers realise. A micro-event that lands well generates content that is almost impossible to manufacture any other way. It is local, it is genuine, and it gives people something worth sharing. For independent retailers who find it hard to post consistently without feeling like they are just pushing product, a steady programme of small events solves that quietly.

The guidance also addresses the calendar — when these events make the most sense, how to pace them across a quiet trading period, and how to keep the idea fresh enough that regulars have a reason to keep coming back.

None of it requires a big budget. It requires treating the shop as more than a place to buy things — and most independent retailers are closer to that than they think.

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newsXpress supports small local independent retailers to thrive. Find out more at help@newsxpress.com.au.

There is a growing market in your stationery aisle that most newsagencies are missing

Stationery has long been treated as a legacy category in newsagencies — something stocked out of habit rather than genuine commercial intent. The journalling segment is quietly changing that picture.

Young men aged 18 to 40 are buying journals in growing numbers. Not diaries. Structured formats built around habit tracking, daily reflection, and personal discipline — products that found their audience through podcasts, online communities, and a broader shift toward analogue habits in a screen-heavy world. The market data behind this trend is consistent and the trajectory is upward.

newsXpress has researched this category in depth and translated that research into practical and valuable guidance for its members.

The advice provided to newsXpress members covers more than product selection. One of the more useful insights is that this category has two distinct types of buyer, each arriving in-store with different motivations and different decision-making processes. Understanding both — and setting up the floor to serve both without confusion — is what separates a display that converts from one that sits.

The newsXpress guidance covers what to look for in product selection, how to merchandise for credibility with each shopper type, and how bundling can lift average transaction values without requiring a hard sell. It also addresses what to avoid — signals that inadvertently tell the self-purchaser the product is not for him, and which are easy to get wrong without knowing the category.

The entry point for trialling this is deliberately low. The advice is built around a small, focused range, clean execution, and a clear read on what is working before committing further. For a category that costs little to set up and carries strong margins relative to traditional newsagency lines, the risk-to-reward ratio is worth a serious look.

It is the kind of category intelligence that newsXpress brings to its members — research that an independent retailer would rarely have the time or resources to develop alone, turned into something actionable on the shop floor.

This is another example of practical help delivered to newsXpress members that helps them run more valuable retail businesses. businesses they are more likely to love. This matters.

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newsXpress supports small local independent retailers to thrive. Find out more at help@newsxpress.com.au.

Advice for newsagents: Your floor space can do more than you think

The newsagency of 2026 looks nothing like it did a decade ago. That shift has created something genuinely interesting: an independent retailer with an existing customer base, established floor space, and the flexibility to move into categories that larger format stores cannot easily enter.

newsXpress is actively helping its members explore what that looks like in practice. Not in general terms — in specific categories, with specific shoppers in mind, backed by market data and real execution advice.

Three directions are worth understanding.

Emerging shopper segments with money to spend. There are customer groups actively buying products that sit squarely within a gift and stationery offer — groups that most independent retailers have not deliberately targeted. The demographics are well-documented, the spending behaviour is consistent, and the category fit is natural. In most locations, these shoppers are underserved. That is not a minor observation. It is a commercial opportunity sitting in front of most newsagencies right now.

The quiet periods in your trading calendar. Every gift-adjacent retailer has a gap between major seasons. Most operators treat it as time to survive. The better approach is to use it — to run small in-store events that bring unfamiliar faces through the door, to tackle the business tasks that never seem urgent enough during busy periods, and to test new product ideas with lower risk. The stretch between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day is the obvious example. Operators who treat it as development time rather than dead time come out of it in a stronger position.

Adjacent business models that drive repeat traffic. Pre-loved categories — records, books, physical media — are performing well in main street retail, particularly in regional locations. The model has real structural advantages. Your local community becomes your stock supplier. Gross margins are strong. And the format creates a reason to visit that no online retailer can match: the prospect of finding something unexpected. For a store that already has foot traffic from cards, gifts, or stationery, adding a curated pre-loved section is a low-capital way to extend dwell time and basket size.

None of these require a major capital outlay or a complete change of identity. They require looking at what you already have — floor space, community relationships, an existing customer base — and deciding to use it more deliberately.

That is the kind of thinking newsXpress brings to its members.

newsXpress helps newsagents master AI for profit in local retail

Most newsagents have heard about AI by now. Far fewer have used it in a way that actually changed how they run their business. newsXpress has been working on that problem for over two years.

newsXpress is giving its members a real head start on AI

The starting point is an exclusive AI toolkit — 19 prompts written specifically for newsagency retail. These are not generic templates pulled from a business blog. Each one is built around a decision newsagents face regularly: what to buy, what to drop, how to plan a season, how to write a job ad, how to think about a category that is not performing. A member can open the toolkit and use a prompt the same day.

For members who want to go further, newsXpress has developed a set of super prompts designed for deeper business analysis. A member provides their own store data — sales figures, category performance, whatever is relevant — and the prompt processes it in a way that would take hours to do manually. What comes back is specific to that business. Not an industry average. Not a general recommendation. An analysis of what is actually happening in that store, with the low-hanging fruit identified.

Then there are the AI member meetings. These are sessions where newsXpress members share what they have been doing with AI — what worked, what did not, and what caught them off guard. A member who has been hesitant watches a colleague walk through a real example on their own business. That tends to move things faster than any amount of general encouragement.

The through-line is practical capability, not hype. newsXpress is not telling its members that AI will transform everything overnight. It is giving them tools they can use now, in the businesses they have today, to make better decisions more quickly — regardless of their technical background.

For a channel where margins are tight and time is short, that matters.

Now, AI can seem daunting to many, this is where the newsXpress assistance and support makes a difference in delivering genuine help and opportunities to newsagents through smart plain English advice and engagement.

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newsXpress supports small local independent retailers to thrive. Find out more at help@newsxpress.com.au.

Why newsXpress is the best marketing group for newsagents who want to thrive

newsXpress is not a franchise. There are no mandatory requirements, no turnover-based fees, and no locked-in obligations. Membership costs $295 a month for your first store. Additional stores you own cost nothing.

That fee buys you access to a team of people who have owned newsagencies, managed retail floors, and spent years analysing real store data. The advice is evidence-based. It is not shaped by supplier preference or group politics.

A few things set newsXpress apart from any other group in the market.

Seasonal Edge is exclusive. Each major retail season, newsXpress funds a prize pack worth $350 or more for every member store, provides the in-store and digital marketing collateral, and runs the promotion at zero cost to the member. Some stores have reported a 20% lift in greeting card sales from this program alone. No other group does this.

The Mint relationships are exclusive. newsXpress is the only marketing group in Australia with access to the Royal Australian Mint, the Perth Mint, the New Zealand Mint, the British Mint, and New Zealand Post. Members who have leaned into coins have gone from selling none to generating $50,000 a year in revenue. These are supplier relationships you cannot access through any other group.

The card performance analysis program uses proprietary data to show you which pockets are earning their space and which are not. Members who have acted on the recommendations have recorded revenue increases of 33%, 50%, and in one case 70% — without additional capital investment.

The AI toolkit — 19 prompts built specifically for newsagency retail decisions — is live now and free to all members. newsXpress has been working in this space for over two years. These are not generic business prompts. They are built around the decisions newsagents actually face.

The group also runs its own physical shops and four online businesses, including one that turned over $2 million last year. The advice comes from running retail, not reading about it. This helps it offer practical and valuable advice from the lived experiences.

If you want a group that will be direct with you, move fast on trends, and actively work to make your business more valuable — talk to Michael Elvey on 0400 331 055 or Mark Fletcher on 0418 321 338.