Just a Quick Question About Take-Out Food For My ATS Friends...

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by jude11

 

My 2 cents:

It is obviously the right answer to say that fresh is obviously better. No doubt about it. And if you are able to make hot and FRESH take out, kudo's.

With that out of the way, some input:

- if you only have 5 employees, and not having enough employees is the primary obstacle to you accepting new business, I would recommend running some numbers to determine profitability of making some new hires. I understand that too much growth can threaten the artisan nature of what you are doing. However, you are admitting to steady growth already. The growth is going to happen unless you just outright stifle it by becoming service restrictive (which it sounds like would go against your nature as an artisan and a business owner).

- You should quantify what the cost of the call back program truly is. "A few seconds" translates into labor cost. As an example, lets say you are doing 100 turns a day. Lets assume that your few seconds actually averages to around 30 (to give time for dialing, ringing, and talking). Add on another 2 minutes for handwashing once you complete handling the phone, obviously. But for the sake of this argument, we will assume handwashing is already built into the labor model (although it is a significant increase in time, coming to a total of 200 addional minutes of labor just for handwashing). So you have 100 turns at 30 seconds apiece. Over the course of a week, you are committing a total of 5 hours of labor. Not sure of your payrate for that position, but I am sure you can do the math. However, consider that you would have 130 hours a year. That is money right out of your bottom line, which for a business owner means "right out of your pocket". not saying you shouldn't do it, as it seems to be a nice value add service. Only that you should quantify it from a planning and budgeting standpoint.

Thanks for the input.

I try to quantify everything we do in here but for this one service I've found it invaluable. Hard to put a price on it actually. But what I do know is that I'm serious when I say that we have never spent one dime on advertising. The ad folks drop in and when I tell them I don't budget for advertising they just can't understand.

I give them a menu and tell them to have a nice day... That is also priceless in my books.

Thanks again tho. Great advice.

Peace