Episode 42: Stop Losing Money

In this episode of the Ranch and Table Podcast, hosted by Lee Wells, the key topic is about understanding the importance of maintaining consistent business hours to maximize profits and build customer trust. Lee reflects on the common issue of businesses unknowingly losing money when they close early or open late, emphasizing that fixed costs remain constant regardless of such decisions. Lee shares personal experiences and examples to demonstrate how being open during stated hours, even during slow or inclement weather days, can significantly contribute to building customer confidence and ensuring steady income. He urges business owners to seriously consider their operational hours and think through ways to avoid unintentional financial losses.

Transcript

 Welcome to the Ranch and Table Podcast, where we discuss all things related to our Texas Ranch and our ranch to table restaurant located in downtown Rockwall. I'm your host, Lee Wells. Welcome back to another Ranch and Table podcast. I'm Lee Wells. I'm glad to have you with me today and always value your time and I wanna help in any way that I possibly can and certainly don't wanna waste your time.

Today I have a business concept that I wanna run by you and get you thinking about today's episode brought to you by Wells Cattle Company. Both in downtown Rockwall and Cattle mills. Just come on by and see us. We'd love to take care of you, get you some burgers, hot dogs. Always top quality fries, desserts, always good stuff.

And I wanted to get right into it today and share with you what I've been thinking through over the last several weeks. I've really. I had this concept on my mind and trying to get it to where I could bring it to you without sounding ugly or rude or any of those things. 'cause I never want to do that.

I really just want to get you to think. And everyone's situation is different. Everyone's company is different, and so you have to weigh this for yourself. But I wanted to bring the thought to mind and then let you. Just work it through for yourself. Here's what I've been thinking about losing money without realizing that you're losing money.

Now, there's sometimes that we are losing money and we know we are. In a restaurant, if you throw food away, you're losing money. You're just throwing it into the trash. If you have, if you're overstaffed, you're throwing money away. You don't need those people just standing around.

There's times where you know that you're losing money and you're in a spot you need to do some better management on or whatever, but there's sometimes that I believe that we're losing money and we don't realize that we're losing it, and it sneaks up on us and frustrates us when.

We look at the end of the day, look at the end of the week or the month, and we don't have the money in our pocket as owners that we should, and we're not doing as well as we should, and we can't figure out why. And I wanna just throw this at you and let you think on it. Could it be that we are hurting ourselves when we close early?

Or when we open late, or when we are closed days that we should be open. Now I know weather sometimes is inclement. I do get it. There are times where it's icy perhaps and people aren't out or something like that. I still tend to be open. I try to still be open. Even in those, in that weather, because there are still people out, there's still, a lot of times DoorDash and Uber will still run until it just gets really bad.

But a lot of times I'm seeing where I. Just with the weather forecast schools are closing just for the weather forecast, like a day or two in advance before the weather pattern ever hits. We're making decisions to close our businesses. We're making decisions to stay home, and I think we live in a world right now where maybe we're tired, maybe we're worn out, maybe we're looking for a chance to stay home and stay in bed.

I don't know. I've never seen anything like this before, and I'm certainly not running anybody down. Maybe our school system's a little bit for shutting down. This past winter, they shut down, I don't know, three days, two or three days in advance, and it never even got bad. It's crazy, the world we living in, but in our businesses where we have control, I believe that we should be open every single opportunity.

That we can be open Now, I'm gonna just start off the top by telling you, I know I'm closed on Sunday. I know that would be a great big business day for us, and I'm okay with that. I'm not I'm not naive enough to think that I wouldn't do really well on a Sunday if we were open. There are priorities for us, for you.

For me, there's priorities and in my life being open on Sundays, not. A possibility that I'm going to explore and I'm willing to take that loss. And I'm not, and I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining about not making the money. The problem that I have seen recently is people are complaining about not making money, but then they're finding themselves closed a lot when really they should have been open.

It was really still people out moving around doing business and all of that. And so here's the. The concept, are you losing money unintentionally? And so we start out by saying this, your bills are gonna be paid, whether you're open or closed. Your mortgage or your lease is not gonna change depending upon the days that you're open or closed.

You're still gonna pay that same amount of money. For the most part your overhead doesn't change very much. By closing early or opening late or something like that, it really, employees are still gonna get paid. Things are still gonna happen. The person that it hurts is you, if I'm not open or if I'm close early, the person that hurts is me because everybody else is gonna get paid.

Everything else is gonna get paid. Benny, Keith and Cisco are still gonna get paid. All the bills are still gonna get paid. So who's left with what's left? You and me, the business owners we're the ones that are left with whatever's left and whatever's left is affected greatly by those times when we are not open and we're not selling.

I tell my management this, the days that we're not real busy, I say, don't worry about it. If we're lucky. This day, this what we bring in today might be enough to cover some salaries, cover some wages this week, or, cover some food costs or something like that. And so I've taught them to look at it that way.

It's not, this is not gonna be a record breaking day. This is gonna be a really slow day, a boring day. So we might as well just be at the house. No, that's never gonna happen. Never gonna happen in my establishments. We're gonna be open. We're gonna make the $500 to $250, the thousand dollars, whatever it is, that small day is gonna bring.

We're gonna make that, we're gonna put that towards the week, and then at the end of the week, we're gonna be glad that we have that to work with. And so everybody else is still gonna get paid. The last person to get paid is the owners. It's the business itself. It's the future of that business. It's what you have to work with to make improvements with.

It's what you have to hire someone else with. It's what you have to work with in your day or put into your retirement account or your savings account or your own personal spending money. So those are the times where you're giving away your very. Own money. When you close early, you're given it. It only hurts you as the owner if you aren't open a certain day.

That only hurts you as the owner. You have to be okay losing that money personally because you are the one losing that money personally. 'cause everybody else is going to get paid that week. So here's my thought. You hurt yourself in two ways. When you close early, when you're not open, when you're supposed to be.

We talked about this. As far as a trust and business trust in episode 35, when I go back and we talk about the Trust in business episode, I talk about being closed when you're supposed to be open. And how that hurts you, hurts your reputation. It hurts. It, it breaks that trust and it offends that customer.

If your hours say that you're supposed to be open and they drive over to see you and you're not there your open sign's not on that. Only happens once or twice. Before you're losing a customer forever, probably. There's some people who, if that happens, they're not gonna give you another chance.

If it happens twice, they're probably not gonna give you another chance that it really frustrates the customer. If your hours say you're supposed to be there and you're not, so go back and listen to episode 35 and take that in. Take that in consideration. It hurts you with your trust to that customer.

Secondly, it all, it's, it hurts your. Own, take home pay. You're missing out on your money this week. We were in a rainy season and there was a day in our truck in cattle mills. Manuel, my manager and myself, we were sitting there. I'm telling you, we might've had, we might've had four customers at lunch.

I think it might've been four orders for the first. More than half of the day and the rain is just pouring down. It's miserable, boring there's not even anything we can really come up with to do. 'cause we were already prepped up and it's already cleaned up. It's pretty much just sitting there staring at your phone.

But I told him, it's these moments right here. When people drive by and see our open sign and they see our lights on, that builds their confidence to know we're gonna be here. When we say we're gonna be here, if we're shut down because it's raining, it puts a question mark in their mind as to whether or not they're gonna be here next time I'm hungry for a burger, or next time that I wanna stop by.

And when you're there, when it's ice cold outside and freezing, and your light's on and you're there and you're gritting it out. You are building trust and you are building that confidence in those customer base that you're going to be open when you say you're going to be open. And that then also builds your own pocket because it gives that customer base confidence that they're looking for, even if they don't pull in that day, they're really proud of you for being open.

They're really, they notice, golly, they're, that's a food truck. It's pouring down rain. And they're open. I could go get a burger right now if I wanted to. And there's a confidence that comes with that, that you're building. That customer confidence that you're building for future is an amazing thing that you are taking advantage of at that moment.

And it can only come from those moments. When you could be home, but you choose to be open. I think that if you're serious about your business, you have to be serious about these things. If it's just a hobby, if you're just playing, then go home. Go watch tv, go play video games. Go go take a nap. If that's just a hobby and you're just playing around and you just open when you want and you just serve a little here and there, and you don't really have regular hours, or you really don't have a regular schedule, that's just a hobby.

You're making your money some other way. You've got someone at the house that's got a real job and you've got, some kind of retirement, or you've got some other kind of pension or you've got something else going on and you're not. Really all that serious about the business.

And that's fine if somebody wants to open a snow cone stand. I shouldn't say specifics 'cause now someone's gonna think I'm thinking about someone I'm not. But if you wanna just open a snow cone stand a couple days a week and you wanna just play and hobby it, and then by all means, do that.

Do it if you want to do it. But if you are serious. About running a business and being a service to a community and being steadfast and being counted on and being taken serious. You've got to be open when you say you are and that's where your money comes from, that's where your wealth is going to come in.

Lemme give you an example. I have some friends, we did an event together. I love them. They're really good people. I've tried to counsel with them and consult with them and they struggled at this event. And there was one day they weren't open at all during the event.

There was a couple days, they closed early during the event, and then at the end they complained about not making a lot of money. When I step back and think, okay, you had a whole day, and even if that day you didn't just blow the doors off, but you made a, maybe you made a couple thousand dollars that day and the couple days that you were slow and you went to the house, maybe you missed $250 of sales each of those days.

When you fast forward to the end of the event, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500. That you didn't make, you didn't make that because all of your other bills had to be paid. All your food already had to be paid before you took it outta the store. Your rental space is already paid before you got there.

Your propane was already paid for before you set up to cook. All of your other bills are paid. You're, you had to pay your people for being there. You're not gonna have people work for you anymore. So all of that other has to come off the top. And you're left holding disappointment simply because you didn't do the work when it was inconvenient or when it wasn't booming, or when it wasn't fun, or when it wasn't making the money you thought that you should be making.

So you shut down early and you went home. And when you do that, you cost yourself only yourself. Profit. That's where your profit went. Your profit went when you shut down early. Your profit went when you didn't open up on the day because you had something else going on. And so don't, if that's what you wanna do, fine, but don't do that and then complain.

About not making money because had you done the diligent thing, the serious thing, the non hobby thing, and you opened a business and you ran that business straight the way you should, you would've had 220, 500, 3000 maybe more money in your pocket whenever you got to the end of that period of time. So we can't say things like, it's not worth being open.

We can't say things like, this isn't worth my time being here. It's worth your time on many fronts, your profits, the trust that you have with your community. The fact that you're building that relationship of that steadfast seriousness that comes from doing your job and doing it well. And maybe that's the difference in somebody making it or giving up.

So think about it. Think about it. I'm not telling anybody how to run their business. I'm really not. I'm not getting into your business. I'm just saying think about this. And when you do, see what you have lost by doing business. That way. Businesses with light hours and they tend to make light profits.

I'm friends with a lot of barbecue guys and I. Barbecue's a different animal. It's a whole different thing. You're working night shift and then coming in, working days. My hat is off to, I tip my hat to barbecue guys, especially when as I do it, good to do it very well all the time.

Consistent. Way to go guys. But here's the thing. I've had friends that say, I just can't make enough money. Doing barbecue food cost is high. Labor's high. It, you run out whatever. And then you look at the schedule and they're closed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or something.

I don't know. I'm not thinking of anyone in particular here. So don't be looking up schedules here. I'm not doing that. But if you're only open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and you're only open from 11 o'clock to two. You can only sell so much. So many plates serve so many people in that three hour window, that nine hour week.

You can only do so much during that time and all the other time that you're not open. Is costing you money because your rental your mortgage, your space, your smokers, your, all your equipment, all your stuff is still costing you all week long. And so think about this, you can only make so much money.

In so much time I was at the state fair or the county fair. Sorry. I was at the county fair. We were there 10 days and we made money. We made money. We did well. We didn't do as well as I had wanted to. But then when I look back on the number of hours that we were open. We did really well for the number of hours that we're open.

I don't know that we could have served many more burgers on those busy days than what we served. 'cause it opened at five people would start trickling in six, something like that after work, and it was go to 11. But typically it really wasn't. Full all the way to 11 on the weeknights. It was pretty much, 6, 7, 8, somewhere in there, three to four hours of serving, a day.

Now I'm used to being open at 11 o'clock in the morning, running a lunch through one 30 or two, and then picking back up at five 30. Six for sure, and running six to eight or, whatever it is. And so I'm used to running more hours a day, serving more hours a day, therefore making more money a day than what we made even at the fair.

So at the fair, they were, busy two, three hours. Just one after another, the faster we could go. But from 11 to five, six. We were prepping, we were running around doing some stuff, but we weren't open. We couldn't be, no one was there. And so my point is, you gotta work the hours.

In order to make the money, you can't do this in just a few days a week. You can't make enough money to, for usually multiple families to live on, plus the overhead, plus the all the food costs and all the stuff that goes into it. You have to be open more hours to serve more people to be able to do it.

'cause people are only going to eat lunch at the hours they eat lunch. People are only gonna eat dinner. The hours are gonna eat dinner. And so you have to be able to catch as many lunches and as many dinners as possible if you're in the restaurant business to make the most money as you can make. So you gotta be open.

So these guys that are open, two or three days a week I guess they're just doing it as a hobby 'cause there's no way they can make enough money or they just have really low overhead. They can't make enough money to really excel and build out a big place and go open other locations and, it's gonna be hard to do that because you're only able to serve as many as you can serve during the time that you're open.

Anyway. Listen, I again, don't want to tell anybody what to do. But I do want you to think with me. I want you to think through this and see if any of this makes sense in your life, in your business in the things that you're involved in. What can you do to maximize the amount of time you're there and make sure that you're doing the things that you've committed to do?

And I believe that if you think this through, you might be some places where you're losing money. Without knowing that you're intentionally losing money, it might be a place where you can make a little bit more in your day. Anyway, this episode was brought to you by the, both locations, the Cato Mills and Rockwall locations of Wells Cattle company.

And just so glad you joined me. I hope some of this has made some sense to you. I could keep talking for another hour. I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna tell you to come by and get a burger. Come by and we will be open during the times that it says that we will be open. We will not be open if the time says we're closed.

So come by when we're there. We'll be glad to take care of you. I'm Lee Wells on the Ranching Table Podcast. Until next time, we say audios farewell. Goodbye. Good luck.