How We Decouple — Newsagency Conference

This session is the one I have been looking forward to.

newsXpress has told you the channel has less than ten years, and I asked you to decouple from it. At the break, more than one of you asked me the only question that matters. Alright. How?

Fair enough. The morning session was the why. This one is the how. And I want to set your expectations properly, because decoupling is not a slogan and it is not a rebrand you order from a signwriter. It is five jobs, done in order, over about two years. Every one of them is within reach of every business in this room. I know that because I watch members do it, and I want to show you what it looks like with real numbers from real shops. I will not name them. You will recognise the shape of them anyway, because one of them might be yours.

Job one: find the number that is not yours

Before anything moves on the shop floor, you need one number. What share of your gross profit do other companies control?

Not turnover. Gross profit. Go through your last full year and add up the GP that comes from lines where somebody else sets the commission, owns the licence and can change the terms without asking you. Papers. Magazines. Lotteries. Parcels. Bill payments. That total, as a share of your whole GP, is your exposure. It is the part of your living that sits in someone else's boardroom.

Last week I reviewed a member-size shop in a wealthy village, the kind of town where the cafes are full every weekend. Just under a million dollars through the till. Sounds healthy. Then you look underneath. Forty-one per cent of that shop's gross profit came from the lottery counter, at ten cents in the dollar. Add the papers, the magazines and the agency lines and more than half the shop's profit was controlled by companies that do not know the owner's name. And this is the morning session made real: the lottery company that controls that counter told the sharemarket, this month, that it is reviewing retailer commissions.

Here is the detail from that shop that has stayed with me. The gift department, in one of the best gifting towns in its state, sold nineteen dollars a week. The garden category, in a town full of acreage gardens, sold twenty-seven dollars for the year. Nobody decided that. It happened one reorder at a time, over years, while the lottery counter quietly paid the bills. That is what coupling looks like from the inside. It does not feel like risk. It feels like Tuesday.

So that is job one, and you can start it the week you get home. One afternoon with your POS data and your accountant. Find your number. For a traditional newsagency it is usually between half and three quarters. Whatever it is, write it down, because everything that follows is about driving it below a third.

Job two: make the floor tell the truth

The second job is physical. Your floor is a budget. Every metre is invested in something, and most of us have not rebalanced that investment in a decade.

Build a simple table. Down the side, the zones of your shop as they actually exist: the card wall, the stationery run, the magazine bay, the counter, each gondola. For each zone, two numbers: what share of the floor it takes, and what gross profit it produces. Then divide one by the other and sort.

In the shop I just described, that table said one thing so loudly it barely needed saying. About a quarter of the floor, the hardware and cleaning and sewing and cheap toy gondolas, produced five per cent of the gross profit. One wall of greeting cards out-earned all of it combined, three times over per metre. A quarter of the shop was working for the past. The card wall was working for the future, and it was the smallest space in the building.

The fix is not complicated and it is not expensive. Quit the dead categories through a proper clearance, bank the cash out of the dead stock, and give the freed space to what earns: cards, gifts, celebration, the categories where you keep fifty and sixty cents in the dollar. Put the papers at the back. I mean that literally. The paper customer will walk to the back wall for the paper, and on the way they pass everything you actually make money on. The best members have run that layout for years.

Then keep the table alive. Rerun it every quarter and move one bay every quarter. A shop that rearranges with its data stays interesting. A shop that does not gets walked past.

Job three: replace the traffic before it leaves

Now the harder truth, and the second shop.

This one is in a tourist town in the hills, and on paper it has already done everything I said this morning. Gifts are the biggest department at nearly thirty per cent of sales and growing. Print is under ten per cent of gross profit. Cards earn more per metre than anything in the building. The average sale is twenty dollars and rising. If the whole channel looked like this shop, I would not have given this morning's speech.

And its customer count fell seven per cent last year.

Sit with that, because it is the most important number of the day. The mix was right and the traffic still fell. Why? Because the old habit visits, the paper, the ticket, the magazine, are fading for everyone, including the shops that have transformed. Changing what you sell does not by itself change why people come. Agency lines rented us our traffic for a hundred years. When you decouple, you take on the job the agencies used to do. You have to create visits.

Creating visits is unglamorous, weekly work. A loyalty program with actual names, birthdays and preferences in it, not a stamp card. A window that changes every month, without fail, run like the asset it is. A calendar of small events: a trading card afternoon in the school holidays, a Christmas launch night, a local maker's weekend. Local product on the shelves, because the honey from ten minutes away brings in people Hallmark never will. A social media presence about what you found and unpacked this week, not about what services you offer.

That hills shop, by the way, has one category up four hundred and sixty-four per cent, trading cards, more than thirteen thousand dollars of new sales in a year. It grew off the counter, with no space of its own. Kids and parents come in weekly for it. That is created traffic sitting right there, waiting for a bay, a display case and an event on Saturday afternoon. Every shop has one of these. Most of us are serving it off the counter.

Job four: change the word

Only now, with the profit rebalanced and the traffic plan running, do you change the sign. Fourth, not first, because a rebrand on top of an unchanged shop is wallpaper, and customers see through it in one visit.

This morning I read you what the public says about us online. The kindest thing they called us was a glorified last minute gift shop. I have been thinking about that line all day, because the insult contains the instruction. Take away the sneer and what is left is a shop people already use for gifts when it matters most. So become that, unapologetically and brilliantly, under a name you own.

Changing the word means all of it. The sign above the door. The trading name. The Google listing, where you stop being categorised as a newsagency and become a gift shop, because that single field decides what searches you appear in. The socials, the receipts, the shirts, the way you answer the phone. Keep the services while they pay, but the identity leads with what you are becoming, never with what you were.

Three practical cautions from members who have done it. Check your lease first: permitted use clauses can trip a rebrand, so have that conversation with the landlord early, and ideally fold the rebrand into a refit when one is due anyway. Tell your story as growth: the line is we have outgrown the old name, never we had to change. And do it while you are trading well. The worst time to rebrand is when you finally have to.

Job five: decouple the owner

The last job is the one nobody puts on a conference slide. Decouple the business from you.

A shop that runs out of your head, where only you know the orders and the margins and the landlord, is coupled to one more thing that will eventually leave: you. Document the routines. Give staff real departments with real numbers. Review the figures monthly like a board would, because you are one.

And here is why this job belongs in this speech and not just in a succession seminar. Think about who buys retail businesses. Nobody is queuing to buy a newsagency; you heard the forum quotes this morning. But a profitable gift destination with growing categories, owned traffic, clean numbers and a team that runs it? That is a business a buyer can imagine owning. Decoupling and exit value are the same project wearing different clothes. Every job on this list makes your business worth more on the day you eventually leave it, whether that day is in two years or twenty.

The sequence and the four numbers

So that is the work. Let me put it in order, because doing this all at once is how it fails.

The first ninety days are diagnosis and demolition. Clean up the POS data so the numbers mean something. Find your exposure number. Build the floor table. Quit the dead categories and turn them into cash. That cash, by the way, is how the rest gets funded. Most members find the first stage of this transformation hiding in their own stockroom.

Year one is the build. The floor moves to the earners, quarter by quarter. The gift and celebration offer deepens. The loyalty program, the window calendar and the events start, and they run every week whether you feel like it or not.

Year two is the identity. New name, new sign, new listing, told as a growth story from a position of strength.

And through all of it, four numbers on the wall of the back room, checked monthly. Customer transactions. The share of GP you control versus the share others control. Gross profit per square metre. And the basket. If transactions and your owned share of GP are rising together, you are decoupling. Everything else is commentary.

Close

As at August 2026, the Australian newsagency channel has less than ten years, and we stand by it. But we want to leave you with the finish line, because this work needs one.

You are decoupled on the day that no decision made in a boardroom you will never sit in can materially hurt your business. When News Corp stops the presses, it costs you a traffic anchor, not your livelihood. When the lottery company trims the commission, it trims a bonus, not your rent money. When Australia Post reshapes its network, you read about it with interest instead of fear. That is the whole test. Everything I have described today, the number, the floor, the traffic, the word, the systems, exists to get you to that day.

Five jobs. Two years. Started with one afternoon and your own sales data, the week you get home.

This was the how. The rest is the doing, and nobody in this industry is better placed to do it than the people in this room.