As an entrepreneur, you are always looking for ways to improve your business and increase your bottom line. The best way to leverage this is through your menu. Your menu includes the expenses you are to assume in order to earn profit. Here are some guideposts for you to look out for when you need to change your hot dog business’s menu.
Check the availability of ingredients. Always remember that the scarcer an ingredient or when it is off-season, the more expensive it is for you as an entrepreneur. Thus it is important that when you formulate your menu, the ingredients you would need are available all year round. If it is unavoidable that you need to use a seasonal ingredient, either find out the shelf life of the particular ingredient or change your costing because of this menu. When the time comes that an ingredient is unavailable, either find a suitable replacement or pull out the menu item altogether.
Check the sales of the particular menu item. It is best that you have a running count of how many orders are made of a particular item. Cumulate the statistics of these running counts weekly to form a picture on which food items are good sellers and which ones just gather bacteria in storage. After a few weeks, do review the sales figures and see how much your business is losing money with item still on your menu. There are two ways to go about it. The first way is to increase the advertising and the up selling of the item. The other way is to remove the item altogether and replace it with another food item.
Check costing of your food items. Always remember that the food you sell has a price that determines the profits you earn. You need to breakdown the individual parts and ingredients of your menu items. After individualizing them, you need to determine the cost per ingredient when added together forms the actual cost of the food item. When you set your selling price, you need to earn a profit for your business. If the actual cost of your menu item does not earn you a profit, then you need to either change the ingredients or pull out the item from your menu.
These are three signposts an entrepreneur needs to look for when you want to business to succeed. In checking the availability of ingredients, you need to make sure that it would not impede the progress of your business. Another signpost is checking the sales volume of a particular item to see if it earns a profit. Also, you need to find the costing of your menu items because profits need to be earned when the item is ordered by the customer.