Tag Archives: Consulting

December 8, 2017 · 2:17 pm

The Food Business Isn’t Just Food

It’s Foodie Friday and the topic today is business. I know: that’s pretty much the topic every day, but let me explain. I read an article on one of the restaurant sites I frequent that spurred a thought that goes beyond the restaurant business.

Photo by Helloquence

The piece was all about the financial statistics a good restaurateur needs to watch. I’m always surprised when a place with good food in a great location goes out of business but it seems to happen a lot. Sometimes it’s that the chef leaves and things slide downhill but more often than not it’s because the business part of the food business overtakes the food part of the food business.

One needs only to watch an episode or two of the show Restaurant Startup to see how a food business is not especially different from any other startup. I assume what I’m seeing on the show reflects the new restaurant world at large and today’s article confirms that belief. Many of the contestants have no clue about the first, and maybe the most important statistics any startup needs to grasp: Cost Of Goods Sold. In a restaurant, that’s food. In a service business, we usually call it cost of sales. In either case, it’s the cost of producing whatever it is you’re selling. You’d be surprised how many businesses don’t know this number.

That number is part of a bigger one called overhead, which includes rent, salaries, services such as accounting and legal, and things like keeping the bathroom clean (your restaurant has one; hopefully, so does your office). These numbers are critical because if you charge too little for what you provide you won’t be in business very long, and you can’t figure that out unless you know your monthly nut.

Once you have the Gross Profit (or Gross Income) number, you can subtract your expenses to get Net Income or Net Profit. Divide that by your sales and suddenly you have a profit margin. That’s something you can use to benchmark your results against other businesses of the same type. In the restaurant business, it’s generally not very big, which is all the more reason why a complete grasp of the numbers is critical. There isn’t a lot of room for error.

I spend a lot of time with my clients on their numbers. It’s not just so that they can present themselves well to potential investors either. Like your web traffic or any other piece of data, they can illuminate a lot and help you make critical decisions. Ignore them at your own peril.

By the way, I’m writing this as a sort of thank you to my late brother who was my CPA and who beat accounting into me many years ago. He passed 5 years ago next week and I miss his guidance and the clicking of his calculator every day.

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November 17, 2017 · 1:11 pm

What Restaurateurs And Founders Share

It’s Foodie Friday, and this week an article on a restaurant trade site caught my eye. It’s all about the things restaurant owners wished they’d known when they decided to open a place. Having spent a lot of time working with startups, what I find interesting is that many of their statements are not unique to the restaurant business. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you will nod your head in agreement with these if you’ve even started a business or worked with one in its early stages. You can read the entire piece by clicking through here.

Photo by Bank Phrom

First and foremost, the time involved. One owner said she wished she’d known “That I was going to spend the first couple months basically living in the store and two years married to the business. 86 my social life!” I’m often amused at the founders who still have side gigs, especially if those gigs are not consulting positions that are very flexible. One startup with which I’m working has two founders who don’t seem to be able to focus enough time on their company, and as a result, their progress is very slow. What should have taken them several months has taken them a couple of years. In part it’s a financial decision – the gigs help fund the startup – but I sometimes feel as if they don’t really get that you need to be married to the business, as this owner says.

Another owner wishes he’d known “To have enough money reserved to be able to wait to open the doors to the public.” There is something to be said for throwing a lot of tests out there and iterating, but I’m a believer in making sure you’re putting your best foot forward. That doesn’t mean every beta has to be perfect but it does mean, to paraphrase the words of the old Paul Masson commercial, not selling any product before its time. The world is too cluttered and I’m not sure any business gets multiple chances after a bad customer experience (think about how many apps you’ve deleted recently or a restaurant at which your first meal was your last).

Then there is the point never underestimate the value of private dining. As the owner put it, people wanted a place where it was quiet and personal. I think that makes it as much about the experience as it does the product. Personalization is key!

Finally, I love another owner’s point: “To build your squad. We always knew that having good people was important, but I’m not sure we realized how important.” As any business grows, the founders can only do so much and your success is in the hands of the people you’ve brought in and trained. Your job as a manager is to help your team to do their jobs, but it’s also to be sure that every person is carrying their load. Nothing will bring a business down faster than a weak link in the chain that causes resentment among the rest of the team. Hire well, don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made a mistake with a hire if you have, and do everything in your power to retain great talent.

Yes, the food service business is different in many ways (you probably don’t have the health department visiting nor do you deal with many cuts and burns), but as the piece demonstrates, every startup faces many of the same challenges, don’t they?

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October 2, 2017 · 11:03 am

Is Crowdfunding A Killer?

One of the ways I’ve been working with startups to raise money is through crowdfunding. You might be most familiar with Kickstarter but there are dozens of other companies that help to fund companies that are too small for VC funding but need capital to grow.

I’ve always thought that this was a good thing. Many entrepreneurs aren’t well-connected to a network of people who can afford to invest. Having entities such as Kickstarter available to raise the startups’ visibility and to grow their investor pool seems valuable. Something I read this morning, however, challenges my thinking.

Crowdsourcing initiatives like Kickstarter are hurting innovation, according to a new study from a business school, INSEAD. Researchers found that the ‘crowd’ appetite for investing in innovative products is startlingly low. Claims of novelty and usefulness are viewed unfavorably and result in lower pledge figures on crowdfunding initiatives. This is significant as the equity crowdfunding industry is set to surpass venture capital as the leading source of startup funding.

Data from Kickstarter from its inception in 2009 to 2017 was interpreted by state-of-the-art machine learning technology that incorporates speech and image recognition, seasonality, perceived risk, etc. to determine the funding success of both ‘novel’ and ‘useful’ products. This is the first time large-scale speech analysis and image recognition has been applied to the study of innovation. You can check out the full research here. What it found was that the Kickstarter community does not view claims of product novelty and product usefulness as congruent. While the total amount pledged is boosted when a product is said to be useful (or alternatively, novel), claiming that it is both reduces the total amount pledged by 26 percent.  In fact, a single claim of novelty increases project funding by about 200 percent, while a single claim of usefulness leads to an increase of about 1200 percent, as compared to projects devoid of any such claim.

I’ll let three academics explain why this might be hurting innovation:

“Prior research has shown that products that are novel and useful typically succeed in the marketplace,” said study co-author Amitava Chattopadhyay, Professor of Marketing and the GlaxoSmithKline Chaired Professor of Corporate Innovation at INSEAD. “But when projects make both claims, backers either assume a product’s benefits are inflated, that it carries a high risk of failure or that it divides the crowd between believers and skeptics, making it hard for backers to pick a side.”

“The higher level of uncertainty in the crowdfunding context drives backers to choose modest innovations and shy away from more extreme innovations,” said Cathy Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris.

“This is deeply disappointing as the premise of crowdfunding is to support creativity and innovation”, said Anirban Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University. “Entrepreneurs, therefore, might be advised to frame a project as only novel or only useful, rather than both”, Dr Ping Xiao of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) added.

Something I’ll be keeping in mind when putting together a crowdfunding campaign. It seems a little sad though, doesn’t it?

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