How much profit are you making on each sale? If you are about to answer with what your margins are, you suffer from the same illusion as most business owners: truth is, until you have paid your bills, you aren't making a profit. It's called breaking even.

What is the difference between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing? Don't laugh!

On one job Dan Strongin was asked to find out why a certain department was not making the profit management had told it to make. After analyzing each product, what it cost, and how much sold, only after seeing how all these sales combined to make a sales mix, it was as obvious as the paper it was written on that there was no way that they could make what management wanted. In fact, they were doing a stellar job, (and being humiliated for it). Management had unrealistic expectations.

Companies need accurate information about what is occurring in the moment, in the hands of their frontline employees, and these employees need to be trained to understand this information to ensure the right decisions are made at the right time to control the momentum. Profit is all about flow and momentum.

In one store, which carried over 500 items in the Specialty Cheese and Foodservice department, after looking at the "whole" we came to understand that the profits were almost entirely dependent on the top 15 sellers alone. It probably didn't matter what was charged for the other items.

Lets talk a little lingo here: systems theory. Your business is a system, that is, more than just the sum of it's parts. Every part is interrelated to make a whole. A change here effects there. You have to look at it "whole-istically" and make changes carefully, after a lot of thinking based on good data. You can only make real changes for the better when your system is under control, meaning, it is understood and reasonably predictable. Shooting from the hip almost always misses the mark. Worrying about the wrong things is a bad idea; usually it is what you don't know that hurts you.

How good is the food you produce day in and day out? Do you have a way to measure it? What is measured can be improved, but how do you choose what to measure? And how can you get your employees to measure it? We can help!