Lock your back office for a week. Don’t let anyone in or out. Shift all the work you used to do or have done there to in the newsagency shop itself.
If you or others strong oppose the move, analyse why. Is it because you like to hide?
In an average newsagents with non lottery or other agency revenue of under a million dollars, the business cannot afford a full time manager or back room operator. hence the suggestion of moving back room tasks to the shop floor.
I bet if you do this, as disruptive as it may be, you will find changes you can make to your processes to reduce some of the work you do in your back room. At the very least you will be challenged to look at your business and the back room operation in a different way. that’s a good thing.
We need to disrupt our businesses to discover opportunities for change.
I have been in many newsagency back rooms. Some are caves offering protection to owners and managers. Others are warehouses full of stock which will not deliver a financial return for the business. Others are places where occupational health and safety are challenges. Others are places for employees to take three or four times longer to do a task than if they did it at the front counter or elsewhere others could see how hard they are working.
Lock up your back room and lock everyone out. Look for business improvement opportunities as a result.
I’ve done this by creating a newsagency with a back room so small that it can hold one person standing up and not moving. The business is run from the counter.
What is this back room you speak of? 😀
All of our admin is done behind the counter. Our computers live in the shop. One is the register / accounts / spreadsheets machine, while the other is used for smaller things, as well as for our artisan glass lampwork business. All of that is done ‘out in the open’.
Then again, our ‘back room’, is actually our home, so after hours, work is not allowed out there.
I would do more out the front, but the POS system we have and the computers themselves are so antiquated that it is impossible. That said I’m in the back room around an hour a day only.
And I’ll admit to having stock in the back room from a stuff up I made with the back to school order last year. Should shift it this year though.
Vicki most Point of Sale systems would let you do any work from any terminal.
Can i lock myself in the back room for a week????
Mark
I’ve got very badly set up POS Dos, it’s so bad there is no point fixing it as I fully intend to change system in the next two years, just can’t afford to right now. It’s not just the software, the hardware is ancient too. As its a DOS system, returns need to be done online in the back office. Sucks, but you work with what you have.