Читать книгу Pricing Strategies for Small Business - Andrew Gregson - Страница 44

Average is exactly that: Average. Fifty percent are better than you and fifty percent are worse.

Where to begin? Know where the average is and rise above it!

A simple strategy to establish your benchmark and to know whether your company has good pricing or bad is to join an association and get their cost of doing business surveys. The annual surveys are sold to the membership and show line by line the costs for staffing, commissions, rent, overheads, and even owner remuneration expressed as a percentage of total sales. Even a year-old survey is a wonderful source of information to benchmark your business.

If the cost of goods is 35 percent at your establishment and the typical cost of goods in Canada^[6] or your region is 29 percent, your prices are low, or wastage is high or you have dishonest employees, and that might explain some of the company’s financial difficulties.

All of the sales in Table 8 are expressed as percentages of the gross sales. If your financial statements do not currently show each line as a percentage of sales and last year’s figures (year-on-year or month-on-month) then ask your bookkeeper.