The owner was expecting bad news.
It was the second Monday of January and she had the December close coming through on her monitor. December had been bruising. Two of the three big corporate bookings they’d counted on for the second half of the month had fallen through in the week before Christmas. The catering line that was supposed to carry the P&L into the new year had gone soft, and she’d spent two weeks assuming that whatever the composite number did in December, January was going to show her the real a la carte business underneath, and the real a la carte business was going to be uglier than she wanted to admit.
She opened the close.
The food cost line was 30.4%, within half a point of what the model said it should be. The labor line was where she’d set it up when she staffed December. The variance that showed up had one specific vendor pass-through attached to it, and she’d known about that pass-through since the first week of December, because the receiver had flagged it on the invoice and the controller had logged it in the Monday review. Nothing on the statement was a question. Everything was a confirmation.
She closed the laptop and went to lunch.
That is what a January close looks like when the discipline holds through a disappointing catering season. Not a win. Just an absence of surprise.
What was actually holding the number
The reason the number came in where it was supposed to is boring but worth naming. The habits had been in place since Labor Day.
Her shop had been running a weekly review hour since September. Same hour, every Monday, the owner and one of her GMs looking at the top twenty items by spend across all four units. Price moves on reorders had been caught in the week they happened, not six months later. The counts in the walk-in and the freezer had been honest, done on a schedule, before the biggest order of the week went out. When something was moving slow, they moved it to a special while it still had life. When something was moving fast, they ordered more and planned around it. None of this was dramatic. All of it was running in the background of a very normal fall.
The receiving door was running the same way. Every delivery got notated on both copies of the invoice, in the driver’s presence, with the discrepancies and credits and refusals captured on the paper the receiver had signed. The scanned document carried the receiver’s work into the AP workflow. The electronic invoice from the supplier reconciled against it. Any discrepancy between the two surfaced in days, not weeks.
She didn’t invent any of this. All four things are what the discipline looks like in October, when you have the time to install it. By November it was muscle memory. By December it was running on its own, which is why her Christmas week staff turnover didn’t blow the number up.
What the four habits did for her, in the end, was make the a la carte business legible all month. The catering collapse she’d been dreading had already shown up in the daily and weekly numbers in late December. By the time the January close printed, there was nothing left to find.
Why this January was the test
Last year, when a catering season was strong, you could not tell whether a group’s discipline was real. The composite number looked good whether the a la carte business was healthy or not. January was when the catering tide went out and the real number showed.
That is still true. The operators who had a strong December because the catering carried them, and who did not maintain the discipline underneath, are reading January closes right now that are telling them something unwelcome. The operators whose catering was strong and whose discipline was intact are reading the same number they expected to read.
The owner above actually had the harder version of this test. Her catering was weak. Which means the a la carte number was the whole story in a way most groups don’t have to confront in January. And the number held, because the fundamentals she’d been running since September had been doing their job regardless of what the event book did.
For operators reading this today
Halloween is Friday. The install window for anything new is about twenty-one days before Thanksgiving volume starts to take all the available time. Six weeks after that, you’ll be looking at your own January close, and it will say what it says.
The four pieces of the install are the four pieces of this season. A weekly review hour, same hour, every week, on the top twenty items by spend. An honest count in the walk-in and the freezer before the biggest order of the week. The receiving notations on all copies of the invoice, with the receiver’s signature, before the driver leaves. And a system of record for the AP close that reconciles the supplier’s electronic invoice against the one your receiver actually worked.
Install any one of them and your January will be better than last January. Install all four and your January will be the first one that doesn’t surprise you, no matter what the catering does.
The last word on Holiday Run
Four weeks of the season come down to one idea. The work you do in the fall is what you spend the winter not having to do. The quiet January close is paid for in October, in weekly reviews nobody applauds, in two-minute notations at the receiving door, and in a count of the top twenty items while the kitchen is quiet.
The owner who runs a shop where the numbers don’t surprise is the owner who did the small boring things in the fall. There isn’t a shortcut around that, and there isn’t a software product that replaces it. There is only the discipline, kept week after week, until the first time January comes around and you realize you already know what the number is going to say.
That’s Holiday Run. That’s the season.
Related issues
- A Point of Food Cost in December Isn't a Point in January
- Two Points of Food Cost Back Before the Holidays
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.