Somewhere in South Florida, in a restaurant back office on a warm afternoon, someone finally sat down with a year’s worth of invoices and a copy of the contract, and started matching them line by line.
The contract said one price. The invoices, delivery after delivery, said something else.
Not by much. A few cents on a case here. A few dollars on a case there. On any single week, nothing you’d notice. On a full year, on a client running real volume, it added up to a number nobody had budgeted for.
The good news is that the paper was solid. When we ran the reconciliation and brought it to the vendor, they honored the deal in full. The difference came back to the client. The relationship held.
The other truth in that story is that it took a full year for anyone to look.
The one-hour question
If someone handed you exactly sixty minutes a week to protect your margin, blocked on the calendar, defended against everything else, what would you spend those sixty minutes on?
Most operators don’t have that hour. Most operators are certain they don’t have room for it. And most operators are running fire drills at month-end because of it.
The operators who actually block the sixty minutes, and use them well, are the ones whose food-cost reports stop surprising them.
This is a piece about what those sixty minutes are for.
What the hour is for
The hour skips execution. Ordering, building next week’s list, chasing a credit from yesterday’s delivery, all of that is the work of running the operation on a Wednesday. It belongs in other slots in your week.
The hour is a check on the conditions the operation runs under. The agreements. The programs. The supplier structures you’ve already committed to. It is the hour where you look at the machine, not the output.
Two things go on the agenda. First, the agreements themselves. Are they real, are they current, are they in place? Second, the processes inside those agreements. Are the things they promise actually happening every week?
Most operators, when they think about their supplier programs at all, think about the first one and stop. The second one is where the money is.
The rule most operators break first
Before I walk through the two, I want to name something else.
Even when you’re in a committed program, keep your eyes open. Never continue blindly. That is the single rule most operators break in their supplier relationships, and it’s the one worth pointing at up front.
A bread program under contract deserves your honor. It also deserves your continued awareness of what else is out there. Both at the same time. Nothing about tracking the alternatives undoes the commitment.
When a better alternative surfaces on a top-volume item, write it down. Don’t act on it. You’re in a program, and the point of being in a program is honoring the commitment. But note it. Note the item, the alternative, the volume, the delta.
Because renewal will come. When it does, you want to sit across from that vendor with a specific list of alternatives, a specific volume analysis, and specific numbers. That is what turns a renewal into a real conversation instead of a rubber stamp.
The mid-contract reaffirmation
For your top ten or top twenty items by spend, this goes further.
Those items are worth an active conversation with the vendor mid-contract. Call it a reaffirmation.
You call the vendor. You tell them you’ve been watching the category. You’ve seen some alternatives surface at competitive numbers. You want them to know you know. And you want them to reaffirm that the price you’re paying, on the volume you’re doing, is still where it should be.
Nine times out of ten that conversation is quick. The vendor confirms the program, maybe tightens up a line item, and you both hang up. The relationship is stronger for having had it.
The tenth time, you find out something has drifted. The market moved, or your volume grew, or the vendor’s cost structure changed. And you fix it before it becomes a renewal argument.
Either way, you’re managing the relationship. Not being managed by it.
Bucket one: the agreements themselves
Now the hour.
Twelve to fifteen minutes on the agreements. Pull your current supplier list. For each meaningful relationship, run the same short set of questions.
Is there actually a written agreement, or is it a handshake everyone remembers differently? Handshakes drift. Memory of what Sal said at the sales call two years ago is a story, and stories change every time somebody tells them.
If it’s in writing, is it current? A three-year-old agreement in a market that has moved a dozen times is a piece of paper, not the deal you think you have.
Are there vendors on the list you’ve stopped using? Get them off. Dead names in the file make everything harder to trust.
Are there new vendors you’ve brought in without a formal agreement? Nail those down. New vendors are almost always where the drift starts, because there’s no baseline to drift from.
Bucket two: the processes inside the agreements
Twenty minutes on the processes.
Pick your top five suppliers by spend this week. For each one, ask the harder question. Are the things the program promises actually happening?
If the deal says quotes get pulled each order cycle, are they actually being pulled? If the margin structure caps at a percentage, is anyone auditing invoices to confirm? If the deal is a manufacturer program riding on top of a distributor, is anyone verifying you’re getting the manufacturer price and not the distributor’s book price? If cross-network opportunities exist across the locations, is anyone surfacing them?
A program only functions when someone is auditing it. Without that, it’s a hope you have about what your suppliers are doing.
Which is where we come back to South Florida.
Back to the invoices
The client whose invoices had quietly drifted for a year got the money back because the contract was in writing and the vendor was reputable. Most operators don’t have both. Most operators, when the drift finally surfaces, are looking at a handshake and a supplier who has no interest in cutting them a year-of-overcharge check.
The reconciliation was possible because the paper was solid. It took a year because nobody was auditing the deliveries against the paper every week.
That is the whole case for this hour.
Sixty minutes a week is what turns “finally” into “this week.” It’s what turns a year of drift into a two-week drift. It’s what turns a renewal into a real conversation instead of a rubber stamp. And on the weeks where nothing has drifted, it’s the sixty minutes you spent finding that out on purpose, which is a different feeling from hoping.
The hour goes on the calendar or it doesn’t. It’s defended or it’s not. The operators who make it non-negotiable are the ones who stop being surprised.
That’s the whole trick.
John
Behind the Line is for multi-unit operators who’d rather see the leak than chase the symptom. If it’s useful, pass it along to someone who’d nod along.
Related issues
Behind the Line goes out every Tuesday for multi-unit operators who would rather hold the line than explain where the money went.
Want to know what your own numbers look like? ChefMod runs procurement for multi-unit independents: the agreements, the price checks, the receiving discipline, and the weekly numbers underneath all of it.