hotel budgeting
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Chapter 11 – Being
David Lund | October 12, 2020
By David Lund The chapter below is an excerpt from my new book. It’s fiction but some of the characters and story lines are based on people I have worked with and events that have taken place in the hotels I have worked in. The book is a fable about a hotel manager who has some very bad habits. He must change in order to survive and the book takes him and you through the lessons needed to be a great hospitality financial leader. I’m writing ahead each month so I’m not sure how the book will end. I hope you enjoy it and if you missed any earlier chapters you can find them on my website blog tab. The first two days at the Norton...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Creating and Using Staffing Guides
David Lund | September 16, 2019
By David Lund In our business it is no secret that labor is our single biggest expense. Last year the average hotel in North America, according to data collected from thousands of medium- and full-service hotels by a popular industry partner, was right around 50 percent of total revenues. What is a secret is how most hotels manage their largest cost. In this piece I am going to talk about creating and using a staffing formula for all scheduled positions. In addition, I will talk about the best practices as it relates to having and using staffing guides. First of all, let’s define what a staffing guide is and what constitutes a staf...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Service Takes Many Different Forms in Hospitality
David Lund | August 12, 2019
By David Lund "If Service is Beneath You – Then Leadership is Beyond You.” I cannot find an owner on Google for this statement, so I am going to claim it as mine. If someone already coined this phrase I will let it go, if not it is mine. The reason why is because it is the foundation for the transformation I experienced as a financial leader. It is also the basis for the work I do with hospitality financial leaders and their non-financial departmental managers. Let me explain to you what I mean and how these words are the very essence of creating a financially engaged team in your hotel. I worked inside hotels for more than 30 ye...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: The Financial Forecast Disconnect and How to Correct It
David Lund | May 6, 2019
By David Lund When I work with hotel clients around their financial leadership it's often centered on getting the team to do their monthly financial forecast. A greater interest in doing it produces better and more consistent results. When doing financial leadership workshops and individual coaching, I inevitably discover the same thing time and time again. It's the disconnect between the executive team/director of finance part of the operation and the department line managers. In this piece I am going to explain why this disconnect exists, how to detect it and what you can do to fix it. First, why the disconnect exists. It exists becau...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Negative Flow Thru
David Lund | April 22, 2019
By David Lund One of the most read articles I have written is on the topic of flow thru and how to use it in your financial statements. Understanding flow thru is not something that comes easily to most people immediately, but once you look at it and do the calculation it usually clicks. Once it drops in place you have got it for good. To take things one step further in this piece I am going to discuss negative flow thru. Negative flow thru or retention is something that most people in North America have not had to deal with very much in the past decade. We have just crossed over a massive stretch of growth in our industry that was mark...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: She Said She Was Born Without the Financial Gene
David Lund | February 25, 2019
The following is a recap of a single coaching session which turned into a coaching relationship with a client. For this article I am going to call my client Jennifer. I was speaking at a local hotel association event and as usual a few people came to see me at the end to share their thoughts. Jennifer was the very last person to speak with me. She waited until the room was almost empty. She was shy and nervous. "I just want to thank you," she said. "Thank me for what," I replied. "Thank you for giving me some hope," she said. I smiled, as I knew exactly what she meant, and I said, "Hope for what?" She then explained how terrified she wa...
Why You Need to Take a Holistic Approach to Hotel Budgeting
Kristi White | October 9, 2018
By Kristi White As summer's warm breezes and lush, green growth transform into the vibrant colors and crisp air of the fall season, another familiar season arrives in its wake: the often dreaded but always necessary Hotel Budget Season. To develop an accurate and functional budget for 2019, hoteliers must take a holistic approach to the process. This involves starting with a big-picture view that includes your top company initiatives, along with a drill-down into the data to identify significant, sustainable cost-reduction opportunities in conjunction with hotel-wide profit optimization strategies. This is all then compiled into a neat ...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Using Expense Checkbooks
David Lund | September 17, 2018
By David Lund I can vividly remember, as a young lad, my dad sitting at the kitchen table paying the monthly bills by check and then updating his checkbook. I remember asking him why he entered the details on the page at the back of the checkbook. He said very clearly, "So we don't spend more than we have and in the bank. If I don't keep track, we will run out of money and I'll end up bouncing a check!" In hospitality, we are all much better off when we use the checkbook system to manage our expenses so we don't run out, and so we don't overspend. The only difference between my dad and your department's expenses is you do not really run...
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