Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Your best salesperson might be the one quietly eating your margin. Here's how to audit and rebuild your commission structure so it rewards the sales that actually grow your business.
Here is a number that should worry more owners than it does. Going into last December, small US retail businesses were still profitable, but their profitability growth turned negative for the first time in eighteen months, even while payrolls and average ticket sizes were both rising. Revenue was not the problem. What revenue was costing to produce was, and most owners did not see it coming until the numbers were already in.
The Bank of America Institute's December 2025 analysis, reported by Retail Dive, found exactly this pattern at small retail businesses: profits stayed positive through November, but profitability growth itself turned negative for the first time in a year and a half. The same report's companion data from Fiserv showed inflation-adjusted sales actually fell 2.2 percent year on year in December, with higher average ticket sizes doing the heavy lifting, likely reflecting rising costs being passed straight through to the customer. A busy till and a healthy business are not automatically the same thing.
You do not need a new system to catch this early. You need one habit: tracking gross margin as a percentage, weekly, through your peak trading period, not just the total revenue number at the end of the month.
"I have grown my business 5x since working with Kevin. Everything Kevin told me to do was the complete opposite of what I had been doing. Working with Kevin has truly been a complete game changer."
— Richard, Chem Suppliers
Your busiest weeks of the year are also the weeks you personally have the least spare attention, which is exactly when the margin number most needs watching. Owners coast on revenue feeling strong, and find out the real number in January, once overtime, discounting, and freight have already eaten the quarter's profit.
An outside set of eyes checking that one margin number weekly, during the exact weeks you have no bandwidth to do it yourself, is a small habit with an outsized payoff, and it is the kind of weekly discipline the Simple-Growth System™ is built to install before your next peak season, not after it.
If you do not want this December to leave you busier but not richer, have that conversation before January, not after. Be the owner who spots the margin slipping in week one, not in January.