people | Business Solutions

Who is Stealing Your Profits

The question for you is not “if” your profits are being stolen but the only question is “Who is stealing how much?”

The estimate of embezzlement for the US alone in 2018 was almost $50 billion. This included robbery, cargo theft, larceny and burglary. The top incidents were organized retail crime, employee theft, fraud, burglary, counterfeiting and robbery. Note that employee theft far exceeded the losses due to robbery. In a 2017 survey by Hiscox* the median dollar amount for small or mid-sized businesses (under 500 employees) was $289,864. The median loss for companies with over 500 employees was estimated to be $452,025.

Hiscok provides the following common characteristics to look out for:

Intelligent and curious – eager to know how everything in the office works
Extravagant – often flaunt their wealth
Egotistical risk-taker – rule breaker on and off the job
Diligent and ambitious – beware of the person who does not take vacations
Disgruntled – feel treated unfairly and may want to even the score

I’ll add one more from experience: They are the manager, accountant, controller, bookkeeper or clerk who just can’t get the reports straight and on time. They love disorder in which to hide their own dealings.

According to the National Retail Federation retail goods shrinkage of $48.9 billion is due to four major sources: employee theft (30%), shoplifting (36.5%), administrative error (21.3%), vendor fraud/error (5.4%) and unknown loss (6.8%).**

None of these figures include the billions of dollars lost to employee time that is deliberately wasted, time card falsification, inflated expense accounts, office supplies that end up at home and countless other ways in which employees waste company time and money. Excuse me while I check my FB account…

A number of years ago a senior sales executive (over 25 years with the company) warned me not to make him work from home because he assured me that he would extract the “cost” from the company in any number of ways that the company could never detect. I was no longer with that company when that move was finally made to save money so I don’t know how much, if any, this long-term employee extracted in “payment.” I often wondered which of his supervisors allowed him to harbor such a terrible attitude.

Just within this year two priests in my city have been indicted for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from their churches. Prevention is a wise thing to do and don’t forget to help keep your employees honest with good systems and audits while you are locking the front door. Embezzlement and shrinkage is just two aspects of the element of Loss which is part of the Profit Equation.

How much of your hard-earned profits can you afford to allow the thieves within and outside your business to take?

References:

*THE 2017 HISCOX Embezzlement Study

** 2017 National Retail Security Survey

People Expense or Asset?

The mantra of Profit Improvement is: “You cannot cut your way to long term success.” Reference: Achieving World-Class Profit Improvement.

You must engage and empower your people to have any chance of success. Engage them with leadership and empower them with training.

Do you look at your payroll and think “expense” or “asset?”

When the pressure is on to increase profits it can be very challenging to answer this question properly. The right answers can be vital to success or, in some cases, survival.

The reality is that people cost money but without their productive efforts most businesses will fail. You have two questions you can ask when you look at payroll:

How can I cut payroll costs? This is the “expense” question that infers that payroll is a burden.
How can I increase revenues and profit from my existing payroll? This is the “asset” question that infers that payroll is a source of revenues.

Best practices asks both of these questions but asks #2 first. It is incumbent upon management to maximize the revenue generating capability of their staff before resorting to cutting head count.

The mantra of Profit Improvement is: “You cannot cut your way to long term success.” Reference: Achieving World-Class Profit Improvement.

You must engage and empower your people to have any chance of success. Engage them with leadership and empower them with training.

What’s it worth? It’s worth everything.

Why Suggestion Programs do Not Work

Why don’t suggestion programs work?

The typical suggestion program or suggestion box is an open ended and unstructured solicitation of ideas. They will typically end up:

As a place to put “nice to have ideas” rather than improvement projects
As a venue to complain
An expense rather than a savings
A disappointment for all
Annoying and disengaging participants
Wasting a lot of time and money

This happens because:

Suggestions that are submitted drop into a “black hole” or
Some suggestions are implemented and others are ignored
Goals are unclear
They lack adequate structure
The participants and not adequately trained
Expectations are not set and guided
The criteria are muddy or missing
There is little or no reward for participation

If you want ideas from your employees, use world-class methods such as Lean, TQM, ISO, Six-Sigma or the Business Solutions: The Positive Way Profit Improvement Process.

One organization with tens of thousands of employees gave up after less than 36 months when they found out that they were not only NOT saving money but they were increasing costs and reducing morale. Painting the ladies bathrooms pink was just one of the suggestions that was rejected because there was no clear ROI. That rejection and others did not go over well at all.

If you are serious about improving your financial situation and sustainability, you need to get serious about having a structured program that engages your team and leadership from the top. We know the ways to do this well and will be happy to review them with you.