When Beer is Related to Electricity
Everyone in business today is trying to reduce their operating costs; I don’t think there is a small business in existence that is making too much money. We spend time with our chefs reviewing food cost, and our GM or manager going over our pour cost. I think it’s amazing how much money you can actually save if you take the time to review and measure on a weekly basis. This is a process that takes time, effort and managing. If the managers do the work and we don’t review it, or pay attention to the information, it ends up being an effort in futility.
As an owner, we tend to focus on costs controlled by our managers; we measure them and even bonus managers on their numbers. This is a typical scenario, which we tend to accept as the norm, this is where we as owners tend to fail, sometimes miserably. We hold our managers accountable; yet tend to let ourselves slide. Owners are privy to so much more than a typical manager, our job is to spec everything for our managers, and then let the managers manage.
A good friend of mine shared with me information about a product called a line conditioner; this is a device that connects to your breaker panel. I’ve recently researched this product and am impressed by the data and am appalled our government or watch groups do not share this information or make it readily available.
Here’s where the beer comes in, we’ll call this the foam analogy. Take a draft beer with a lot of foam, there is a tremendous amount of waste, you only drink the beer and dump the foam. The actual power you use is the working load, this is the beer, and the wasted power is the foam. A line conditioner’s function is to manage the excess electricity, or in this case, the foam. I know this is breaking the whole process down into relative simplicity, my point is for everyone to understand there are things we can do as owners that can reduce costs way beyond food and liquor cost. If your beer taps were continually pouring draft beer that was thirty percent foam, you’d do something about it.
How much can the savings possibly be? When I asked this question, the rep I spoke with explained to me that his company typically quotes five to twenty percent. Off the record, he explained that he’d never seen a savings under seventeen percent and most were twenty to as high as thirty percent. I don’t know what this correlates into for savings for your business, for mine it ranges from three hundred dollars to up to one thousand dollars a month. I think when you do the math, the payback is maybe a year or less.
When I bought my restaurant, I witnessed one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in my career. The breaker panel was located on the wall under my beer taps. It blew me away; the first major project I completed when we shut down that winter was to relocate our breaker panel. This is not how anyone should relate beer to electricity, remember the foam, take action and do your homework. This is money that runs right to the bottom line. Is your business making too much money? If the answer is no, then look into a line conditioner for your business and start saving.
Author: Richard Varano
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Bumper guardian