You may notice that I’m working my way down the income statement in discussing operating leverage. Yesterday I wrote about the leverage that comes from product manufacturing. The key to finding this leverage is identifying fixed costs.
All the profit action takes place between the sales and gross profit lines. This is also the most important place to look for operating leverage for most firms.
operating leverage in SG&A
Today’s topic is the operating leverage that occurs in the Sales, General and Administrative (SG&A) section of the income statement.
The general idea is that large parts of SG&A expense rise in line with inflation, not sales. So if a company is growing at 10% a year while inflation is 2%, SG&A should slowly but surely shrink in relative terms. And the company will have an additional force making profits grow faster than sales.
For many non-manufacturing companies, this is the major source of operating leverage.
why this leverage happens
There are several reasons for SG&A leverage:
–most administrative support functions reside in cost centers, meaning their management objective is to keep expenses in check. Employees here are not directly involved in generating profits, so they have no reason to demand that their pay rise as fast as sales.
–as a company gets bigger and gains more experience, it will usually change the mix of administrative tasks it performs in-house and those it outsources, in a way that lowers overall expense.
–a small company, especially in a retail-oriented business, may initially do a lot of advertising to establish its brand name. As it becomes larger and better-known, it may begin to qualify for media discounts and be able to afford more effective types of advertising. At the same time, it will be able to rely increasingly on word-of-mouth to gain new customers. In addition, it will also doubtless be shifting to more-effective, lower-cost internet/social media methods to spread its message.
negative working capital
Strictly speaking, this isn’t a form of operating leverage. It has its effect on the interest expense line. And in today’s near-zero short-term rate environment, it’s not as important as it normally is. But, on the other hand, one day we’ll be back to normal–when being in a negative working capital situation will be more important. It’s also one of my favorite concepts.
If a company can collect money from customers before it has to pay its suppliers, it can collect a financial “float” that it can earn interest on. The higher sales grow, the bigger the amount of the float. If the company is big enough (or, sometimes, crazy enough) it can even use a portion of the float to fund capital expenditures. The risk is that the float is only there if sales are flat or rising. If sales begin to decline, either because of a cyclical economic downturn or some more serious problem, the float begins to evaporate, as payments to suppliers exceed the cash inflow from customers.
Lots of businesses are like this. For example, you eat at a restaurant. You pay cash. But the restaurant only pays employees and suppliers every two weeks. And it pays is utility bills at the end of the month.
Hotels are the same way. Utility companies, too. Amazon and Dell, as well.