In PBFS015 we ruffled a few feathers in the retail industry. I suggested that the value of retail businesses is very volatile. You will remember I said that retailers are at risk and are exposed to the effects of interest rate changes, government policies and global crises.
So what about other sectors – the rest?
Obviously these businesses are also at risk of the external factors pressing down on their full over draft bladders. But I would venture to say that on the whole, the effect on them is much less dire, with some exceptions.
Some consultants and “luxury” suppliers are perhaps almost as volatile as retailers. The so called corporate gifts businesses lose their finger nails on a slippery slope of cut backs by their customers in hard times. Their biggest exposure is often the fact that they are single parent stores with only a few customers. If one large customer pulls back on ordering, the entire net profit of the business may suffer.
The saving grace of the corporate gifts business is that most of them operate from home, and unlike their retail cousins do not have huge rental bills waiting for them at month end. They are more likely to remain in business during tough times; and like retailers, their multipliers fall precipitously.
Wholesalers to the retail industry are perhaps even more volatile. At the first whiff of trouble, their customers, having ridden the crest of a very profitable wave are quick to “destock”, driving their store room volumes down. Not only will a wholesaler’s customers purchase less, but they will actively actually not buy at all and cancel orders, leaving the wholesaler with an over stocked business, and all the risks that entails. In tough times they tend to shed customers while surviving customers purchase less. It seems though that their biggest customers survive the tough times, and a boom happens as the retail sector wakes up in the upturn. There is a big shift in multipliers in the wholesale sector, from boom to bust times, although not as remarkable as in the retail sector.
Factories are much less reliant on the position of their premises than are retailers, and are able to move routinely, with the exception of a few for whom their buildings are purpose designed. Most factories though, have to relocate as they grow, in order to survive anyway. Moving premises is used as a marketing opportunity, rather than being regarded as a marketing catastrophe. Tough times for factories usually result in lower utilization of capacities, less money spent on overtime payments, lower raw materials costs and a sharpening of the pencils of salary negotiators. The biggest impediment to factory values in tough times is the access to credit for prospective purchasers, and there are therefore fewer of them. This naturally drives prices down, but not nearly as badly as for the retail sector.
Franchises are generally retail businesses, but not always. Somehow they are less volatile in their value than other retail operations, for reason only of the perception being that they are part of a stable operation, and have huge marketing budgets behind them. In difficult times their undercapitalised competitors go to the wall, reducing the number of slices the pie needs to be cut up into, even if it is a smaller pie.
There is another albatross following franchisees, viz. the franchisor and his debtors department. This is a sting in the tail of franchisees’ income statements, particularly where the franchisors do not reciprocate the royalty and marketing fund contributions with a strong brand, and even stronger marketing effort. The effect of this comes to the fore in tough times. When strong stand alone businesses are able to net less than 5% of their sales, outlets of weak franchise systems are contributing all of this to their overlords. So where strong franchise systems command good multiples, their weak counterparts do not.
We will unpack this some more, later in the series, but for now, I hope I have illustrated how foolhardy it is to compare notes with friends in other industries, using the multiples they achieved in the sale of their businesses which may have been in an entirely different industry, different geography, different economic cycle, different … etc.