Field notes › Running the business
Where labour hire margins quietly leak
Small leaks, high frequency
Labour hire margins are thin by nature. You bill an hourly rate, you pay an hourly rate, and the gap has to cover everything else. Very few firms lose that gap to one dramatic mistake. They lose it to small leaks that happen every week, each too minor to trigger a review, none of them ever appearing as a line item anywhere.
The leaks below are the common ones. You will know your own numbers better than any article can, and it is worth actually looking, because these costs hide in the difference between what a shift should cost you and what it did.
The worker turned back at the gate
This is the most expensive leak per incident. A worker arrives at a remote site and is refused entry because a ticket or induction has expired. You have already paid to get them there. For fly-in work, that can mean a flight and a room spent on someone who never worked an hour, plus the scramble to backfill, plus the standing you lose with the client, which is the part that costs the most and shows up last.
The frustrating part is that the information existed the whole time. The expiry date was sitting in a file, unsorted and unread. Mustr surfaces expiring certificates up to 60 days out with one-click reminders, and, more to the point, blocks any booking where a required competency or induction fails the check. The turnback stops being a risk you manage and becomes a thing the system will not let happen. See compliance for how.
Shifts you never filled and shifts you filled twice
An unfilled shift is revenue that evaporates. The client needed someone, you could not surface the right qualified person fast enough, and the hours went unbilled or went to a competitor. Often the person existed, sitting at home, available, and nobody knew, because availability lived in text messages.
Double-booking is the same leak from the other side. One worker promised to two sites means one client let down at short notice, with the backfill usually costing more than the original shift earned. In Mustr, availability is set by workers themselves in the portal, open shifts can be published for qualified workers to register interest in, and the double-booking check runs on every booking before it is confirmed.
Office hours are a cost of goods
Admin time rarely gets allocated against contracts, so it reads as fixed overhead. It is not. Every hour someone spends cross-checking certificates, compiling client reports or answering who-is-on-tomorrow phone calls is an hour generated by the volume of the work. As placements grow, that time grows with them, and eventually it turns into another salary. A coordinator's week has real dollar value, and how much of it goes to checking and relaying rather than judgement is a number worth estimating honestly.
Software that charges per worker
One leak is self-inflicted: tools priced per seat. Per-seat rostering apps tie your software bill to your crew size, so the cost climbs exactly when you take on more casuals, and churn means paying for seats that are empty half the year. It is a small leak, but it is also a pure one, entirely removable.
Mustr charges one flat monthly price per organisation, stepped in broad crew-size brackets, with every feature included in every plan and no per-seat billing. Plans start from $660 a month including GST, and the full numbers, brackets and the one-time setup fee are published at pricing. You can put your crew count against it in about a minute.
None of these leaks is fixed by working harder, because none of them is caused by laziness. They are caused by information sitting where the decision cannot see it. Fix that once and the fix repeats on every shift afterwards.
If you suspect your margin is leaking somewhere in the gap between roster and reality, see it on your own roster and find out where.