Today I want to talk about business planning.
December in the hospitality business is really mad, you’re flat out, you’ve got no chance of reviewing last year let alone planning for this year. A lot of other industries spend December to January, doing all their reviews of the previous year and they’re planning for the following year.
You can’t do that in hospitality because it’s the mad season, it’s the busiest period. It’s the time of year where you are trying to take enough money to see you through and to start the season around about Easter.
So January becomes your December as far as planning and reviewing your business.
What should you be looking at?
You need to be looking at your key performance indicators (KPI’s).
Each business will have different KPI’s but there are some fairly basic ones, that every business in hospitality should be looking at.
- The average spend per head
- The average headcount
- Your gp
- Percentages
- Your break-even point
- How much as a percentage of the takings is staff costs
- The entertainment costs
- Wastage
- Promo costings
Let’s break that down a little bit. How much do customers spend…
If your in a bar it is a little more difficult to do because to do it you’ve got to work out how many people come through the door. So at some point in the night you need to do a headcount.
If you’re in a restaurant or you’ve got a dining area where people sit down, it’s far easier to do because you can look at the tickets at the end of the night and know how many people were in by how many meals you have served and then work out what the average spend was.
By looking at that you can decide whether you need to train your staff to be doing a little bit more upselling, it might be that you are offering when you offer deserts would they like a coffee? In the evening would they like a coffee, would they like a liquor?
Just simple ways of lifting your takings up slightly.