This series on the One Fat Frog blog has been on heck of a series. But you know what…it’s worth it. Now, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of your business plan, which is the money part where you estimate the money expected to be spent and made in your business. There are two elements of the money part of your business plan: sales and expenses.
Let’s start with sales. It is really where you should start; you don’t want to make expenses before you figure out how much you hope to make. So how do you forecast your sales? Well, you can start with looking at profit centers in your restaurant, like your bar, your dining room, takeout areas, or you can estimate based on how many guests you hope to have at your restaurant and when (like during lunch or dinner) and figure out your check averages, or the amount you think each person who comes in will spend. Or it’s a combination. Or something you haven’t thought of yet. No matter what you do, you want to make sure you’ve got it down before you start thinking about how much you plan to buy.
Once you know what you’re doing with your sales, you can start thinking about expenses. Now, as some of you may be aware, money is spent on your business before you even open your doors; those are expenses. The best way to forecast your expenses is by anticipating every possible thing you might spend money on; that includes your payroll, the cost of ingredients and other products, your marketing, your operating expenses, maintenance, taxes, and so on. Yeah, it’s a long list. Figure out your controllable expenses (like cost of sales for food and beverages, payroll for employees) that you can change if things go well, and your non-controllable expenses which are expenses that stay the same…ironically; one example of this is your occupancy costs like rent, equipment, and so on.
Now, the next post will get into what you hope to see from your sales and expenses, and hopefully we’ll have a decent understanding after all of that of how your business plan will go. And as always, one non-controllable expense is equipment, and if you want to keep that cost low, you can get all sorts of used equipment from One Fat Frog, and we specialize in start-up restaurants, so swing by and get your whole restaurant ready to go.
One Fat Frog Restaurant Equipment
One Fat Frog • 2416 Sand Lake Road• Orlando FL, 32809 • 407-480-3409
www.onefatfrog.com
www.onefatfrog.tumblr.com
www.facebook.com/OneFatFrogRestaurantEquipment
www.twitter.com/#!/onefatfrog