The Security Contractors’ Guide to Reducing Overtime
As a security contractor with a distributed workforce, labor is always going to be your largest expense. And overtime for hourly employees is the number one profit killer, particularly in service industries with thin margins. What if you could reduce your unbillable overtime by 20 or even 30 percent? What kind of cost savings would that equate to for your company? Wages are the highest cost for the highly labor-intensive security industry. According to IBIS World’s 2019 reports, wages account for 63.8% of revenue; a rate that has increased at an annual rate over the past five years to hover at $24.6 billion. By 2024, this cost is projected to increase to $42.7 billion. When one expense category consumes over half of your revenue, it’s important to control the things you can, like overtime, to keep your business profitable, especially with forecasts projecting steady annualized rates of increase. The secret to reducing overtime? Stop it before it starts. That’s why we’ve compiled this guide to reducing overtime for security contractors to help you get a handle on overtime and meet your business goals.
- Know your service-level agreements (SLAs)
- Use an integrated scheduling software – effectively
- Set clear goals
- Dig into your data
- Integrate your scheduling and payroll systems
- Hire more security officers
- Make the policies and procedures repeatable
- Recognize improvements
Read more in our free guide below.