As we leave 2020 and look ahead to 2021, the restaurants that assess their current situation, the ‘Now’, and look ahead to the goals they want to achieve, the ‘Where’, will be able to better plan, the ‘How’, to prosper in this new year.
Cash is king in restaurants. In the midst of this crisis situation with COVID-19, knowing your restaurant’s current cash position is one of the most important insights an operator can have.
We have created a simple, yet effective, Weekly Cash Flow Worksheet that you can easily download and modify (fill out the form below to access).
What are the common reasons that restaurants don’t use the 4-week cycle?
While there are many reasons to use the 4-week system operationally, the reason it’s not used usually comes from a disconnect between operations and the accountants.
Our mission at Trusted CFO Solutions is to help drive the performance of our clients’ businesses (i.e. especially restaurants, but retail and hospitality also). So, as part of our mission, we connect and unify operations and accounting. Here are the obstacles we face in our mission.
This is part of our Restaurant Success Series. Click here to access other articles.
Our restaurant clients are getting a good handle on controlling food cost and labor, thanks to our Prime Costs Dashboard.
Prior to Trusted CFO Solutions, most only used QuickBooks and only recorded things once a month – after month-end. Today, however, they can review their numbers by the day and also by the week.
The Prime Costs Dashboard is opening eyes. Not only are we educating them on the power of monitoring costs weekly, but the benefit is that they are able to control it before it’s too late.
This is part of our Restaurant Success Series. Click here to access other articles.
The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic has hit businesses hard. It reminds me of other times in my career where companies were faced with extreme losses and needed help from many sources.
This is part of our Restaurant Success Series. Click here to access other articles.
Now is the time to convert to a 4-week reporting cycle!
The vast majority of restaurants we work with want to use a 4-week period but don’t have their accounting systems set up to make it happen. Usually, the owner or restaurant manager is having to keep these types of schedules manually in Excel. What we hear over and over again is that it isn’t a useful exercise to compare the results of their latest P&L to the previous month because there are usually a different number of days this month than last month. Further, comparing the current month this year to the same month last year may not be valid either!
We’ve found that businesses don’t generally have friendly strategic referral partners. When the pandemic crisis hit, we had five different firms like ours, with different specialties, that were not able to serve clients when their phones rang off the hook. This opened up an opportunity.
Leading people in a crisis is better done with swift communication and quick decisions. Make the hard choices now and don’t procrastinate.
“The hardest part of the journey to personalized success isn’t adopting the new mindset…it’s letting go of the old one.” – Todd Rose
As a cutting-edge organization, the newness of our approach to business in the past decade has been challenging to teach to prospective and actual clients. Because of the crisis, the value we provide has become apparent to our customers even though it’s been available. Thus, the crisis has illuminated the clear value propositions of companies working with us.
In retrospect, this season has been a lesson learned for us on how we can better communicate the value we deliver to our clients going forward.
There are countless unknowns in our collective and uncertain future. We’re living in a new paradigm without knowledge of how long this season of uncertainty will last. Understanding this reality, NOW is the time to get back to business basics.
The federal relief package was great for delaying the terrible impact of the pandemic on businesses for eight weeks. In that window of time, companies learned where they stood before the crisis and were generously given a countdown clock of eight weeks for an upcoming failure that would have been an immediate one.
One of the most valuable resources companies can have during a crisis is an advisor on retainer. By having a guiding firm (like Trusted CFO Solutions) available on the spot, clients can focus on their growth while mitigating their risks.
