Hi everybody! This is Ron Cox from PMQ. I’m interested in your thoughts on a few topics we’re working on for future issues. 1)Dishes/Dishwashers 2)Seating organization/pagers 3) Beverage serving technologies 4)Delivery equipment.
Food distribution business model… producers, brokers, distributors. Layers of pricing and markups. House brands, private label product, incentive money.
Fact based results of different marketing ideas.
Restaurant premises leasing.
Realistic startup costs.
Selling a business.
I would agree with bodegahwy! Would like to see more of those items described. Way more information on market ideas and how those are working for other companies. Ways of retaining more of our customers and attracting new ones.
I think the magazine and the tank do A GREAT JOB all year long, but i think with these times going on that more posts have been done on these items than on seating and plates and the magazine should follow suite and fill more operators in on those topics.
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Tax credits available for hiring employees that fall under certain categories, equipment purchases and building improvements.
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Ways to handle online ordering. Should I do heavy discounts online to drive sales through that medium or should I do minimum discounting online and enjoy the high profit margins on a smaller number of orders?
I have to give one to gregster here. He has touched a very important issue that I bet less than 10% of your readers has even thought about. What happens if the power goes out and you lose all you refridgerated products and cannot open for a day or two or a week? I know a back up generator is not cheap but maybe worth while to budget in or start a special savings account to add a natural gas auto-backup when possible. The other issue Greg brought up was was lost of a crucial employee…or you? Who knows ALL the procedures? Whos is cross trained to do absolutely everything if you were taken out of the picture with zero notice. It is hard enough trusting and paying an employee or multiple employees to fill this type of a position…but a little expense over time for higher trained, better compensated employees will be a lot less than your business going dark for who knows how long if something where to happen to you. This is a great topic and deserves a long write that touches on these issues in the PMQ I think. :idea:
I would think most operators would have business interruption insurance.
Unfortunately that does not preclude loosing some customers during the down time.
George Mills
Good insurance is essential to any operation but I wouldn’t be surprised if we posted that question and saw the response. I bet less than half actually carry it. The other side would be to help the community out if it really was a larger scale outage or disaster if you could stay up and running.
My guess would be that less than half of delivery operators carry hired and non-owned coverage… kidding themselves that the drivers own coverage protects them. This is a greater threat to business survival than lack of business interuption covcerage (which I would guess less than 20% buy)
Another good topic is monthly budgets for our businesses. I bet that the majority of us don’t sit down every month and physically write out a detailed budget (assign every dollar a name before the month begins). I’m guilty of not doing this and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve recently started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University and budgeting is a big part of it. I’d like to thank Kris who a while backed mentioned how she was getting out of debt with the Dave Ramsey program. I started his program 1 month ago and have already paid off 2 credit cards that I’ve had for a long time. It’s amazing how when you set up a budget ahead of time and stick to it, all of the extra money that you uncover. By doing this with my personal life, it’s made me realize how important it is to do this with my business as well. I plan on starting a business budget this upcoming month. I will theoretically have every dollar spent on paper and assigned to different categories before the month begins. It will be a little more difficult to do this for my business. I will have to use averages since sales and supply costs fluctuate week to week. I will also have to factor in for long term budgeting such as sales tax, insurance, etc.
So to sum this up, I think this would make for a great topic. A lot of people probably don’t do a monthly budget, and those people that are doing one, might not know how to do one correctly to maximize its effectiveness.
I agree with Roger. I’d love to have monthly and annual budgets to work off, but with so few fixed costs, I just don’t know how to set one up right.
I do my budget for the variable cost items as a percentage of sales.
That is one of my major projects to start while we’re a little slower this summer. I operate overall slightly under my targeted cost of goods, but I don’t have each item broken down for cost of goods.
I guess that would be the first thing to do, then try to go from there. How do you come up with your projected sales?
I have 5 years of sales to look to for projections based on history but it all comes down to WAG [size=2](that is a term I learned in Advanced Accounting in college, it means Wild @ss Guess)[/size]
We have daily forcasted sales (at this point out to the end of Sept) from which the manager schedules staff and buys food and dtermines prep quantities.
We have monthly budgets for EVERY expense catagory and payroll period budgets for labor. We do benefit from having run the store now 11 years, but it really is not too tough once you set it up. Most numbers do not vary so much and you plug them in.
Thanks for all of the great ideas; we’re currently working on our editorial calendar for 2011 and your suggestions will be taken into account.
Liz Barrett, editor-in-chief
PMQ
You are most welcome Liz. Ask any time. We will all chime in… input from the “fact free zone!”