Headwinds

I touched on this in an earlier post but wanted to expand on the subject. It’s not just our business that is affected as the cost of living crisis is hitting everyone. In addition to this, hospitality has faced other challenges with the lack of staff being among the biggest. We made the decision last year to become a living wage employer in Ireland and to pay close to the living wage in the UK, this long with removing zero hours contracts from our business has ensured that our vacancies are kept to a minimum and we have (apart from the odd isolated incident) kept our units trading.

Utility bills are not joke either no we have been ruthless in removing kit that uses lots of power such as ovens, this has partly been to offset high energy prices and partly to ensure that we keep the business as simple as possible. This in turn has made us more efficient and better able to cope with the vagaries of operating on transport hubs.

Cost of food has been a real killer for us (and I suspect many other types of business) and we have introduced weekly monitoring of our food cost and spent time looking at our range and removing items with a poor margin and low sales. The latest Fourth stock and ordering system has really helped us in this regard.

The above challenges are their on a daily basis and as a team we are doing our best to stay very close to the business. In later posts I will do a deeper dive into what we are doing