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Everyone knows that for a business or function to be successful they need to hire great people. Unfortunately, the vast majority of managers and executives will also know the pain and angst created from a bad hire. From having someone in the business who didn’t fit the culture, couldn’t deliver and/or negatively impacted on those around them.

When I tell people that my passion is procurement, most people move on to ask the person next to me what they do for a living. A few others ask questions about the biggest tender I have ever dealt with, or how I feel about supermarkets bullying tactics with food growers and the like.

The uninitiated think that as procurement professionals we spend our time creating tender documents and beating up suppliers on price.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Our approach is VERY different.

Few businesses experience the joy of uninterrupted, problem-free growth; most hit bumps in their journey.

Why is it that any two businesses in the same industry facing the same challenges can have completely different outcomes?

Why do some overcome challenges and others fail to fulfil their potential?

And what is the key to unlocking business growth?

Saving money on marketing isn’t just about cutting the cost of a retainer or getting a new website cheaper.

Depending which study you read, marketers waste anywhere between 26% and 60% of marketing spend, and in our own experience of working with SMEs and larger businesses, up to 50% of marketing expenditure is wasted.

The key then is to identify and eliminate those areas of wasted marketing spend without impacting sales.

There are three key areas of waste:

The best procurement consultancy firm for your business will be able to drive value in the shortest time period.  How do you test their ability?

Over the years, I have observed many different procurement teams across a range of industries.  Whilst most do a good job, only a handful do a GREAT job.  The team at Insider have spent some time researching this and would like to share with you our take on what those top performing procurement teams have in common.

Because all restaurant “products” are for human consumption, any maintenance issues that affect food storage and preparation can, at best, lead to wasted food and at worst, the possibility of illness and/or legal action.

These are unique features of the restaurant business.  If you then overlay the potential costs of restaurant downtime due to property issues, it is easy to see that having robust maintenance contracts, procedures and trusted contractors are critical elements for the profitable running of restaurants.

So how can companies reduce maintenance costs without increasing risk?

This case study illustrates the approach InsiderPro took with one of our customers, reducing both risks and costs to the tune of £850,000 per year.

We recently worked with a chain of restaurants in the UK casual dining sector who wanted to reduce the cost of maintenance across all properties and equipment used by the group. 

They thought we would be looking to negotiate new contracts. 

Our approach and the impact that we had took them by surprise...

RevPASH (Revenue Per Available Seat Hour) is a great KPI for comparing revenues between different restaurants in a chain and different time periods.

Writing anything about BREXIT without a crystal ball is quite a challenge!

Managers of casual dining chains are challenged by tight margins, high staff turnover, and rising costs. Most will report progress to investors via their P&L and a number of Key Performance Indicators.

Cash flow, RevPASH (revenue per available seat hour), table turnover rate and others are great for comparing progress:

• How did we do compared with last month?
• How does this compare with the same time last year?, and even..
• How are we doing against our competition?

But which restaurant KPIs actively drive business improvements?