The question nobody asks properly I get asked this a lot. Someone running a café, a gym, a consultancy, a retail shop. They are busy during their current hours. They wonder if staying open longer would mean more revenue. Usually, they have already half-decided. They want me to confirm it. But here is the thing: extending hours is one of the easiest ways to accidentally make your business less profitable. I have seen it happen. A client added two extra evening hours, thinking they would capture the after-work crowd. Revenue went up 8%. Costs went up 23%. They were worse off than before. So before you start planning the rota, let me walk you through how I actually think about this. Start with the real numbers Pull your sales data for the last three months. Not the average. The actual hourly breakdown. Most point-of-sale systems can give you this. If you are running something more manual, you will need to track it for a fortnight. Worth the effort. What you are looking for is the revenue per hour at the edges of your current opening times. The first hour and the last hour. If your last hour is already quiet, adding another hour after it will almost certainly be quieter still. If your first hour is your busiest, opening earlier might work. But only if the demand exists. One of my clients discovered that 62% of their daily revenue came between 11am and 2pm. The rest of the day was filler. They were open 8am to 6pm. Ten hours of overheads for three hours of real business. They cut to 10am to 4pm. Profit went up. Not because they sold more, but because they stopped paying for time nobody wanted. Understand what the extra hours actually cost People underestimate this constantly. You are not just paying for staff. You are paying for lighting, heating or cooling, insurance cover, wear on equipment, security, and your own attention. If you are the one working those extra hours, price your time. Seriously. If you would not pay someone £25 an hour to do what you are doing during that slot, you should not be doing it either. Then there is the hidden cost: complexity. More hours means more scheduling, more handovers, more things that can go wrong when you are not there. Every additional hour you are open is another hour you need to manage. I worked with someone running a small studio in east London. They wanted to open Sundays. When we ran the numbers, they needed to bring in £340 per Sunday just to break even. Their average Saturday was £280. They dropped the idea. Ask why you think demand exists This is where most people get it wrong. They assume demand rather than test it. "People keep asking if we are open on Mondays." Great. How many people? What did they want to buy? Did they come back another day, or did you lose them entirely? If you do not know the answers, you are guessing. There are a few ways to test before committing. You could run a limited trial: open the extra hours for four weeks and track everything. You could survey existing customers. You could look at what competitors do, though be careful here. Just because someone else is open late does not mean it is working for them. London's licensing rules are a good example of this dynamic. A recent piece in the news pointed out that the capital has some of the strictest rules in the country, which has pushed nightlife to other cities. The lesson: just because you want to operate certain hours does not mean the environment supports it. Demand has to meet conditions. The questions I actually ask clients When someone comes to me with this, I run through a short list. First: what is your revenue per hour in your weakest current slot? If it is already below your hourly cost base, you have no business adding more weak slots. Second: what specific evidence do you have that people want these hours? Not a feeling. Evidence. Third: can you staff it without burning out yourself or your team? Fatigue is a cost too. It shows up in mistakes, turnover, and your own health. Fourth: what would you stop doing to make room for this? Every hour you add is an hour taken from something else. Rest, planning, marketing, family. What is the trade? If you want to structure this thinking properly, the Decision Matrix tool at alira.london can help you weigh these factors against each other. It forces you to score options rather than just feel your way through. When extending hours does make sense I am not saying never do it. Sometimes it is exactly the right move. It makes sense when you have clear evidence of unmet demand at specific times. When your fixed costs are already covered and the marginal cost of staying open is genuinely low. When you can staff it without stretching yourself or your team. When the extra hours fit your life, not just your spreadsheet. A client of mine runs a training business. She extended her hours by 90 minutes in the evening, specifically because she had a waiting list of people who could not make daytime sessions. She already had the space. She already had the equipment. The only extra cost was her time, and she was happy to trade it because the demand was proven. Within two months, those evening slots were her most profitable per hour. The difference between her and the café owner who lost money? She knew the demand existed before she made the change. What to do this week Pull your sales data by hour for the last 12 weeks. Identify your weakest and strongest slots. If you cannot get hourly data, start tracking it manually from Monday. Calculate your true hourly cost to operate. Include everything: wages, utilities, insurance, your own time. Write it down. If you are still considering expansion after that, use the Decision Matrix at alira.london to compare staying as you are, extending hours, and cutting hours. Score each option against profit, workload, and quality of life. See what the numbers actually say.