The foodservice industry may suffer some loss of revenues during hard economic times along with other industries,
however, people still want to eat out and will continue doing so as long as they perceive favorable price and value
relationship. You will get a healthy share if you are alert to serving and satisfying patrons with the foods,
beverages, service, decor and hospitality that they desire. It's the "tuned-in" restaurant operator who'll benefit most
in the coming years by having an ear accurately tuned to the needs of the dining-out public.
This is a critical time to stop back and look at your operation with a view to seeing how your customers see you.
Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. Your business is no exception. Imagine how you compare with the
competition that surrounds you. Are you really as good as you think you are? How can you be sure? Have you taken
customer opinions to heart recently? Do they think your pricing is fair, your portions correct, your menu in tune with
the times? If you don't have answers to these questions, GEC Consultants helps you get them and soon!
If your monthly income as reported by you P&L isn't as robust as you had hoped it would be, you should plan to take
immediate action in required areas to acheive greater profitability during the next period. But, this may require a
turn-about in your way of thinking of how profits are generated in your restaurant. GEC can help you.
USE YOUR FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AS MANAGEMENT TOOLS
An excellent way to view a perspective of your monthly financial statements is to convert the data into ratios. The use
of ratio analysis gives an operator meaningful expressions of complicated relationships.
There is hardly a restaurant operator that doesn't know the meaning of "food cost." Yet food cost ia only "a ratio"
derived from dividing the cost of food by the sales price of that food. There are ways to get ratios that can bring
understanding to otherwise complicated information.
First look at your monthly P&L statement. It gives you current monetary values for volume of sales, cost of sales,
gross profit, operating expenses and net income (or profit). Now, by a method you soon will learn, you can convert
these easily to ratios which you may use to compare each cost factor to sales volume for the month, as well as to
compare changes with last month and even for the last year or two. You can go further and establish a performance
"budget," so that each of these ratios can be compared with the "budgeted ratios" to see how close to budget,
percentage-wise, the actual performance figures come. Your balance sheet will give you current monetary values of
current assets, fixed assets, liabilities and capital. As with the P&L data, ratios can be developed and evaluated
against budget and compared with past time periods. We can label these ratios derived from P&L and Balance Sheet
information "primary ratios."
Second, a full library of ratios can be developed from you internal data coming from daily operations. These include
the number of hours of labor used to prepare food, serve customers or operate the bar. Other data can be number of
meals served by areas and distribution of purchases by food category. Your own cost of an average meal, the cost of
labor to serve that meal, labor cost per customer served, variable and fixed costs per guests served and average hourly
wage by departments. These ratios are called secondary ratios or "key" ratios. Both primary and secondary ratios have
practical applications in an analysis of your restaurant's operation.
For complete details and registration for this Program please continue.
