Delivering Financial Clarity to Support Rapid Expansion
The Client
A restaurant in the fast-casual category has thrived with one location in the heart of downtown Chicago for six years. Now, the owners have thoughts about expanding to several locations in the suburbs of the city.
The Challenge
While the two original owners were adept at tracking certain variable costs related to food and labor, they needed guidance on how to fully understand their financial statements, bookkeeping, and records on a deeper level. At the same time, they were adding a third partner who was providing an infusion of capital to sufficiently open all of their new suburban locations.
Naturally, with any kind of business expansion, the financial statements tend to become more complex. This made it imperative for all three partners to learn how to peer inside their numbers and decipher all items, line by line, in order to build a smarter process for budgeting.
Our Recommendation
Our team at Bronswick Benjamin knew our client required more from us than to simply provide monthly financial statements. We had to work closely with them to help them understand specific line items, assess the prior year’s data, and set expectations for food sales over the next 12 months.
In turn, we could then break down the data even further, projecting what the budgeted profit and loss would be in every restaurant location, from the city to the suburbs.
The Results
As our client has grown to multiple restaurant locations, they’re not fearful of financial data. With our help at Bronswick Benjamin, they now fully embrace this data and ask questions so that they can regularly maximize their efficiencies across the board.
To this end, they have also begun sharing financial information regarding the restaurants with one of their managers. With this knowledge in tow, they can now help other location managers understand their costs in greater detail, such as why food costs or labor might be higher in a certain location versus the other locations.
