In our past few postings that weren't about our anniversary I've been discussing where we've been able to save and goals for the immediate future. We've come to the conclusion that the place that we can really save is in our labor cost. I've created a new set of calculations for our payroll to examine the daily expenses and compare them to daily sales. I did our P&L for August today and found that cost of labor is down almost 8% of gross compared to the three months of spring. Some of that is in being more careful in how we spend our labor dollars but most of it is in increased sales. Now I need to make sure that we react to any change of sales appropriately. If I'm asking more of the same employees then we need to give them more hours to do the work or pay them more for their increased productivity. If the fall brings less sales then we need to react to that also. I have to be careful that I keep our employees satisfied. How do I reward increased productivity during the busy times and not get saddled with an increased hourly wage when they're not working as productively? Bonuses come to mind.
