SPSF

Sales Per Square Foot is the hot topic with Brick & Mortar store owners in our Shopkeeper’s Lab Membership Group.

After running a poll, I quickly realized only a few brick and mortar store owners knew their Sales Per Square Foot, a few weren’t familiar with the term at all and many didn’t know how to calculate it.

So, we got to work.

Then the conversation began about what does the figure mean and how do we know if it means we’re doing well or poorly as business owners?

I’ll save that full conversation for another time but I think we should at least start with KNOWING our own numbers as Brick and Mortar store owners.

If you do some research on your own, you’ll find SPSF for many publicly traded companies.  They are required to report their financial numbers.  Apple stores are the Unicorn at $5,000+ SPSF and other well-known chain stores report SPSFs at $500+.

But independently owned businesses are not required to report financials.  Many of us consider this information private and understandably so.  So how do we know where we stand and how do we compare our SPSF to other similar brick & mortar stores?

Well, I decided to run an anonymous survey to do some informal research.  I knew the more data I had the better.

You need to know two things to complete the survey:

1. Total sales for the past 12 months (if you don’t have 12 months, calculate your average sales per month and multiply by 12)
2. Square footage of the retail area of your store (do not include back offices, storage areas, basements)

Then to calculate SPSF, do this:

Total sales divided by Square Footage = SPSF

Pretty simple.

I really think the more we know, the better business owners we can become, especially around our financials.  So if you’re an independently owned brick-and-mortar store owner, and you would like to contribute to this survey please click on the link below.

Update: The anonymous survey was updated in 2021. Click HERE to complete the short survey.

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