Your restaurant P&L is not a financial tool

Hi, how are you, Micholas?

Can we pause? I'm sorry. Is this can we pause for a second? Okay. and then maybe start over because two things that just changed in my business. my last name is Beeman, B E A A N. I got married. And my husband would be really upset if I didn't have that on there.

And then we're we're rebranding our business. It was pivot it's Pivot Hospitality Solutions, formally Pivot Financial Solutions.

Sorry, I should have said. Pivot Hospitality Solutions, like a month. I we just haven't launched it yet, but if you go on our website it says Pivot Hospitality Solutions. And we're doing this in like the next week. We're changing all of our branding over.

because when I started this, we were really just kind of like diving into the accounting side of things. And the more I was in there in the accounting side, we realized how much like the operations was important, which is part of the whole story that I have for you. so we really we don't just do financial. We are like boots on the ground operations and financial was like kind of segmenting us to

The marriage I got married in January. Yeah.

No, it's my fault. It's my fault. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you for having me, Micholas.

Well it's crazy because I never actually I never thought I would have pivot hospitality solutions. Like I I guess if I had to look back and tell my twenty year old self that I was here, I'd probably laugh at myself. I had my oldest son when I was nineteen and I was a bartender. And my parents told me at nineteen as a bartender that I needed to do something with my life because bartending and restaurants would never Get me anywhere. little did they know. But my mom is a CPA. I've always really been good with numbers. Math was always my strong suit, so I figured why not? I'll just get an accounting degree after, by the way, trying for a psychology degree and a pre-law degree, which both of them I realized wasn't for me. I decided to settle in accounting. I worked in corporate accounting for a while. I was a cost accountant in manufacturing. And I also was an auditor for the state of Pennsylvania. So all these like little jobs that I had here and there kind of led me to having all these skill sets that I didn't even know was gonna be super important for restaurants. Along the way through all this, I was a single mom and I had to keep working at restaurants because having one job was not enough to pay the bills when you're a single mom. So I'd work my corporate job during the day and then I would go in and work restaurants still at night. So I've never really left the scene. And the more that I was working with people and the more I was learning in my corporate world and the skills I was gaining, I'd have bosses and owners coming to me and asking me, like, Well, how do I fix my sales tech issue? And I'm not making any money and I can't really make payroll this week. And I would just start kind of helping along the way. Fast forward during COVID, I had a little bookkeeping firm that I was doing that supported restaurants. Then when COVID happened, I closed that down because nobody re needed a bookkeeper during COVID and they all put us on furlough. Went back into the corporate world, but this time I went to work at CPA firms. because I really wanted to learn more of like the tax and the gap side of things and the rules and the regulations, because it was really strong in the cost staying and had to be profitable, but not as strong as like in the legalities of accounting. S while I was there, I had a client. Who and I kept telling people at the time I did not want any more restaurant clients. Like I was done after COVID, kind of burnt me out. I had been with restaurants for so long. I really wanted to learn something new. I had a few nonprofits, so it was really cool to be able to like learn that side of it and whatnot. But while I was at this CPA firm, they had a client who was a really big restaurant group in California. She had 13 restaurants in her group. She had three c three different brands, 13 restaurants, a commissary kitchen, and she was just hemorrhaging money and very, very upset about this, obviously. so as I was her account manager, meant to just like close her books and give her her financials. I would give her operational advice from the financials I would see. So I run her financials, I see that her labor was really high, and then we would start talking about managers, schedules, and all of the operational things I learned from being in the restaurant. For at that point, I was in the restaurant world for 15 years, maybe 17. I'm dating myself here. So the more that this happened, the more how. And operational help that I realized that she needed. And I ended up leaving the CPA firm and going and working for her as a fractional. And I would fly from Pennsylvania to California every other week. I helped her restructure, reorganize. We closed units down that weren't working. And it was it was 18 months of one of the longest, most grueling contracts that I've ever had. But I can say out of it, things started turning. We started seeing morale turn up. We started seeing her loss come down that she was her cash that she was hemorrhaging. And I realized that. I didn't just love the the accounting side of restaurants, but like actually seeing the change and and learning that from the financials you can see where all these operational gaps are and if you can train the managers to walk down those gaps and fix them, now you have a really a full cycle of this. So After after some thinking about it, some support from my husband, we had a baby during this whole time, we decided after my son came, instead of me like kind of going and looking for another corporate job when that contract ended, that we would just jump in and see where this takes us. So and that's where we are now.

Well, I will say doing wrong sounds like, you know, they don't know what they're doing. I think that the f the number one thing that we go in, it's kind of like how do I explain this? It's kind of like a a path that we walk down with them. Because every restaurant's different and every business owner might have a strength in one area, which is what started them. So if you have a cook or a chef who loves sh you know, being a chef and they wanna open the restaurant, they're gonna be stronger in the back of house than they are in the front of house. So their their f inventory system might be wonderful. Their recipes, their batches, yields, all the things that have cost control in the food area is gonna be great. But they may not worry about table turns or upselling or any of the front of the house things that also affect the restaurant. But then you have a bartender who opens it and the bartender's really strong on the bar and can have this crazy good train program, but a bartender's never managed. So they don't know how to run payroll and they don't know how to make a strategic schedule and they also don't know how to manage the kitchen. So I don't think that there's one number thing, number one thing that we go in and and fix in our restaurants. I think it's more of we go in and we see what our owners and our management staff strengths are, and we kind Kind of start there and say, okay, let's assess where you're at currently. Let's assess where you need to be to be like a super wonderful working restaurant. And then we're gonna fix the gap in between.

I always my my two go-to things for advice is one, learn how to read a profit and loss statement and don't do it four weeks after you close the month. Like get a good bookkeeper in there that's going to tell you what your profit and loss is. less than ten days before the following month comes because that isn't a financial tool. That really is an operational tool. And that profit and loss statement can tell you everything that you need to know about how to fix your restaurant. The other thing that I always tell them is go talk to your staff. Have one-on-ones with them. Ask them what's stressing them out. Ask them what, you know, you may have put a new system in place last week and ask them how that new system is actually working because they're the ones that are interacting with the customers. They're interacting with each other. They're the ones that really are there on the day-to-day to work the systems that you put in place. So they're the ones to know whether or not those systems work.

Yep. What I find is so right my current client list is restaurants and then restaurant adjacent companies. So I have event companies, catering companies, restaurant cleaning companies. So we really work with like hospitality in in general, hence pivot hospitality solutions. And I will say 99% of my companies that are smaller in structure, so we're talking about three million dollars or or less in revenue. Those companies usually have their moms, uncles, sisters, boyfriends, brother doing their books because they'll do it for $10 an hour under the table, cash. And QuickBooks makes it so easy. And we tech technically QuickBooks, yes, is easy, but there's still accounting concepts that need to be understood to do your books. So the answer to your question is yes. I feel like it's always underestimated. It's an administrative cost. Most restaurant owners don't want to spend on administrative cost. And we typically have to go in and we have to fix their books before we can even start working with them. Which ends up being an ad an added cost to a client anyway, because if you don't have sound financials, then we can't tell you where you're losing money, especially since people go into business for money and your financials tell you about your money.

It it is. We and it's hard too because we don't always go in and take over the accounting. Sometimes we go in at the CFL and COO level and we work with the account the bookkeeper that they have. We do always tell them that if we are going to work with them, we need to get a monthly close. So we need to close their balance sheet and we need to close their profit and loss statement. because that's what gives us the information, obviously, to to move forward and measure how we're doing. But a lot of times they want to keep their bookkeepers that they've had for so long. So we also have to go in and then train their bookkeepers on how to do bookkeeping in a healthy way.

patience. Patience is one big thing. and also like I think that everybody in the world should work at a restaurant for at least three months as a server, as a host, as a cook. Because you will never learn how to multitask more and handle stress than if you're working a Friday night at a busy restaurant that's on wait for two hours. Like there's no other feeling around that. And I think being able to handle those high stress situations in the restaurant world has allowed us to go in and do what we do with our clients because now we have 12 clients right now that we're working with. And all of those 12 clients all have a Friday night that we have to handle that high stress for.

I do. We we do lean heavily on AI be for the data analytics side of things. I also own a restaurant here in Pennsylvania and my husband's opening his first ref restaurant. We're in lease negotiations for that. So in my in my personal restaurant that I have here, I have a taqueria in Easton, Pennsylvania. And to handle our our inventory our food cost. I just ran a whole comp analysis to see how many other tacarias are in our area and how much are they charging and how many things do you get to see like where we kind of fall in the range of our offerings. All of that stuff could be done and that's like things that large corporations do and they have entire accounting teams to be able to do that. With AI coming into the world now, this allows smaller mom and pop restaurants to get that same corporate data at, you know, a fraction of the cost, obviously. So while I think it's gonna be slow to catch on with a lot of restaurant, smaller restaurant owners, once they understand how integral the data analytics can be for their business, I do see it starting to like really pick up.

emailing us at info at pivot dash financials dot com would be the best place. or emailing me directly, Jay Watson. I got married so my name changed. So Jaywatson at pivot dash financials dot com. That's the best way to get in touch with us.

Thank you, Mick. This was wonderful. I appreciate it.