One of the ways to increase profitability is to find ways to better utilize your existing assets.
Real estate, even if rented, may be your number one untapped source. There are many things to consider.
One is to look at the number of hours a day you currently utilize your existing location. As Rudy puts it, “If I am paying the rent on a building 24 hours a day, but I’m only open at night, is there something I could do to generate cash in the daylight hours? So that kind of business conceptualization, that sort of cash management is good thinking.”
Questions to ask yourself include: Can I expand operations to be open longer? Is there some way that another business could sublet during hours when I am closed? Is there a way to make my location available for a different purpose, even if it is only occasional, i.e., to be used as a photo location or for film shoots? Do I have a conference room that could be rented by local organizations for monthly meetings? Does my team consist of people who might know someone, have ideas or need a space for a side gig of their own?
All of these things require a serious cost assessment. What will an expansion of hours cost? What are the risks to your location or equipment if they are rented out to others? Are there insurance considerations and do those need to be covered in your asking price or will they be handled by the secondary business? This is the kind of data analysis where having the Miick Company on your team can be of enormous assistance.
In the restaurant business there is always the possibility of renting out to, or becoming, a ghost kitchen. This has been a very important strategy for survival during the pandemic. Rudy tells of one client who was nimble enough to prosper during the pandemic. “For instance I’ve got a client that’s got about 25 restaurants in the American Southwest. They’ve got a beautiful commissary production kitchen, and one of their core products is soup. Because of that propensity to produce soup in bulk they came up with a pandemic concept of ‘Oh, let’s do Thai noodle bowls, soup bowls.’ With a food cost of about 5% – because soup is 90% water, and boiling with a little bit of flavoring. There’s no restaurant, it’s all delivery, out of the same kitchen. It’s about seven different varieties of Thai soups that are delivered to your home or office. And the only signage is on the delivery vehicles and the uniforms for the staff. The product is, say, 5% instead of 35%. Hey, they are already good at making soups.
“That’s a great example. And they’re sophisticated enough that they do the due diligence, they run out a pro-forma, they do the math. They do all of the financials and they will hit profitability as they hit positive cash flow, from day one. That’s a good business model. They are riding a trend of what is called ghost kitchens, which for thirty years we would have called catering kitchen or a production kitchen. But now it’s got this fancy new term of ghost kitchen. It’s hilarious, as if it’s a brand new idea. Instead it’s just a delivery mechanism instead of a storefront.”
Like with everything at Miick, these concepts work no matter what industry or business is being operated.
