Loaded

What a spot, and what a group of people 😍 Thanks for bringing us in on the panel, team - what a great chat 🤗

Not even a cancelled Queenstown flight, a 500km overnight drive to Christchurch for the next available seats, and then a 5am flight out this morning could stop us from getting to Fine Food Australia 😅 If you're heading to see Richard McLeod on the Crunch stage at 1:30pm, maybe take him a coffee or two ☕️ ☕️ 😂

Who’s going to the Fine Food Australia event in Melbourne next week?! Richard McLeod, Poppy Gresson, and Graham will all be heading along, with Rich hitting the Crunch stage to speak on both the Tuesday (sharing daily habits that will level up your efficiency big time) and Wednesday (helping you get a handle on your costs). Those talks are both at 1:30pm, so mark them in your diaries because they’re going to be goooooood. If you need help spotting Rich, he’ll be the guy doing all the gesticulating (oh and he’ll be wearing a Loaded shirt).

First, grab this free guide to hospitality management incentives that *actually* work: https://lnkd.in/gPHxA4ip And then go shout Rich a lunch. Based on the feedback we're getting so far, he'll be eating free for months 🍔

The truely sensational hospitality experiences i've had as a customer are definitely more art than science............. I love walking into a venue and not being able to put my finger on exactly why it’s so great, but just knowing and feeling that it has something special in its DNA. It’s always an important reminder to me that delivering great hospitality is more art than it is science. But it’s not ALL art, and the problem I see over and over again is the hospitality artist being put through the wringer because they’re not controlling the science part of their business. That is, the managing and controlling of systems and finances. Solve that, and you earn the opportunity to spend your time working on the bits of hospitality you love. All the things you got into this industry for in the first place. Often the Hospitality artist doesn't believe they can actually understand and control the numbers, but i've learnt after having trained a tonne of managers and worked with even more owners, that if you can understand the story your financials are telling you, then you'll actually see that the maths part is crazy simple. Our team has put the story of your financials into a super useful (and I think quite pretty) guide, so that you can hopefully use it to refer to and even better take your team through it, so that everyone in your business can start to understand what the numbers are trying to tell you. I hope it's useful. Link to guide in the comments.

Did you see the latest 2024 hospitality benchmarks? 😮 If you want to know how your bar, restaurant, or cafe compares, take a look 👇 https://lnkd.in/dNa-ScJD #hospitalitymanagement #hospitalityindustry #hospitalitytech

Turns out it is 20 years this month since I dropped out of Otago University and Dave, James, Ben and I, ended up rather fortuitously as the Owners of the Mighty Captain Cook Tavern in Dunedin. That somehow evolved into Cook Brothers Bars and Construction, and i've somehow ended up running a tech business despite my obvious lack of credentials. To celebrate this personal milestone the kind people at Foodservice Australia have asked me to join the legendary Adam Theobald and Ivan Brewer for a chat on enhancing customer experience through technology at this years National Restaurant Conference in Sydney. If you want to join from New Zealand I understand Air New Zealand is likely to be putting more flights on for this, much like they did for Taylor Swift, so don't all go out and start panic buying. #foodserviceaustralia #nationalrestaurantconference

Gone from running one hospitality site to owning and operating a few? Then we know your life just went from hard to REALLY hard. Your decision making is suddenly drowned in detail. You're pouring over pages of P&L data. Everything is becoming a priority, but it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Here’s how to regain your sanity (and your group’s performance) 👇 1) Get your whole group on one clear spreadsheet page (grab the template we used religiously for our 12 site group, below). 2) Start each month by taking a birds-eye view of your revenue, labour, cost of goods, and overheads. 3) Completely transform your conversations, priorities, focus, and results. 4) Feel your shoulders drop as you regain your sanity. Seriously. Jump over here to grab the most simple yet powerful P&L template for hospo groups you’ll ever find (oh, and it’s free): https://lnkd.in/girRkM-f #hospitalitymanagement #hospitalitytech #hospitalitytips

🤯 My experience moving from running one hospitality site to owning and operating a bunch of them was that life went from hard to really, really hard. What happened to us and what I think is pretty common once you start running a number of outlets, is that your decision making starts drowning in detail. Each month your pouring over pages and pages of P&L's, everything seems like a priority and everything needs fixing right now. The problem is you can't pour all of your energy into all of your venues at once, but when you look at them on a one by one basis, with a heap of detail, it's pretty hard to get clear on where your biggest opportunities to improve are. Loaded played a huge part in helping us progress, but it didn't solve the problem of a monthly P&L process that was super cumbersome and trapped in the details It wasn't until we bought on a new shareholder during the GFC that we managed to get this sorted. They wanted to see the whole group on one page (and had some pretty good ideas alongside James Arnott on how to do it.) so that we could start each month by taking a birds eye view of the revenue, labour, cost of goods and overheads each month. Sounds simple but once we got it right it completely transformed our conversations, our priorities, our focus and eventually our results. The marketing team has been at me to share some of the things we put into play over the years that made the biggest difference to our profitability and our stress levels. The first of these is the exact multi-site group template which we developed and used religiously, you can find it below in the comments. 👍

"We discovered that across three stores we were losing $570 per week, and just a shade under $30k per year. FROM ONE STOCK ITEM. They say pigs can’t fly, but try telling that to the tens of thousands of bacon dollars flying off our balance sheet every year." This may be the most interesting hospo stocktaking story - and lesson - ever written 🐷 🙈 Link to the full read is in the comments 👇 #hospitalityindustry #hospitalitytech #hospitalitytips