Just wondering how everybody is doing sales-wise lately. We’ve seen a pretty big spike in business over the past six weeks. As a matter of fact, April was our first up month, year-over-year, since April 2009. The economic reports are looking pretty good - stock market up, economy created jobs in March, consumer spending topped the pre-recession record from November 2007.
We have had great sales over the past six weeks while we have significantly reduced advertising and discounting. April 2010 was 12% below my best month ever but was my most profitable ever in six years.
How are you feeling right now about business? Are you getting optimistic again? It’s just starting to feel like old times again and I’m starting to actually think about growth for the first time in over year, as opposed to being focused on survival. I’d be really interested to hear if others are feeling the same.
Seriously, until the tourist business is back, we may reach the point where we are up over the last sh*tty year, but we will not see numbers like we were doing in 2007.
Just pray the oil spill doesn’t reek havoc on seafood or there is gonna be a huge challenge to overcome. If seafood spikes the entire food bank is gonna explode in pricing. And I’m about to by a 1.4 million dollar seafood restaurant.m working on an alternative concept now.
I think the recovery is a regional beast. Areas with 15%+ unemployment are still wading through crisis waters. More jobs = more potential customers. When we start seeing growth of +100K jobs/mo then it’ll mean we’re gaining some traction.
My business is up, but has been every year since 2007, which was absolutely horrible!!
Dudes now you’re really making it hurt! We opened March 1st so of course got that HUGE hit for the first 6 weeks…but now just this week it’s dumped. I have nothing to compare to so I don’t know what our “normal” should be but I’m patiently trying to decide if/how/what our change up should be. I don’t want to push out anything too extreme though and see this was just a short term dip.
And on the seafood biz. I read an internal email that was sent out by one of our suppliers today that suggested that most any rise in seafood pricing will be bogus profiteering since 80% of the seafood is imported. Bears thinking about.
Thanks for starting this thread. I was thinking the same thing. Looking through my totals from last year we are way up. It worries me b/c at one point I was so freaking busy and pretty much not ready for it. Good luck everyone lets make some money!
Exact same problem here. We spent all of last weekend just trying to stay ahead of the prep work, and it felt like we were flirting with disaster the whole time. Glad to hear others are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
April was up a little over 9% over last year. While I certainly shouldn’t complain about only a 9% increase, my net profit is up around 50% over this time last year, as I’m learning to operate a shop like a, somewhat, decent businessman.
We still have a little way to go to get to my goal, I’m starting to have to seriously look at how much you can actually sell with only a 200 sq/ft kitchen.
