Benchmarking and key business indicators (Part 2)

(Continued from article "Benchmarking and Key Business Indicators (Part 1)".

Here is how to lay out the foundation to collect the data:

1. Record every single bit of your data in your financial system (general ledger) and financial statements. Create GL codes for stats and book all these numbers each month. Numbers like: hours worked by department with classification for management and hourly, food customer covers served by meal period by outlet, room arrivals and departures, head count, energy units consumed, room occupancy, rooms available, rooms sold in all segments, OOO rooms, house use rooms, complimentary rooms, employee turnover frequency, employee accident frequency and accounts receivable stats. This should be a long enough list to get your started, but don’t stop there.
2. Ensure monthly compliance to the standards for recording these statistics. Establish best practices for capturing potentially discrepant stats like covers. 
3. Have your operations managers and accounting team research and design these stats into your existing financial statements, and have the appropriate software programmer make the changes.
4. Have the same programmer write the reports that pull the comparable benchmarking information from all your hotels into one report for each measurement.
5. Start with simple measurements like: occupancy, rate, RevPAR, room market segment performance, average food customer covers, average wage rates, average benefit costs per hour, rooms’ productivity and F&B productivity.
6. Continue building your reporting engine with GOPPAR, GOP per key, rooms profit percentage, F&B profit percentage, GOP percentage, EBITDA percentage, fees per key, banquet revenue per group room, EFTE’s by department both management and hourly and benefit costs per EFTE. The list of data points you can track and manage is practically endless. 
7. Incorporate relative measure like the number of EFTE’s per 100 rooms available to flatten out measurements for non-operating departments. These allow you to compare any size hotel’s stats to another. Imagine sales EFTE’s per 100 rooms available reporting across your enterprise? How about the same in maintenance or human resources? Body counts equivalents now mean a lot.

Enough said about how important it is, how much it can help you and how to get going. Now back to the beginning and I’ll answer the question: Why has benchmarking fallen out of sight for hotel brands and management companies? You might think the brands and third party managers would be eating this up. With this kind of continuous improvement possible with operating results, owners would be lining up to give these managers their business. Here is the short list on why brands and third party managers don’t.

1. We are no longer owner operators so there is no direct incentive for the brands or third party managers to spend a dime to do this. The brand and third party managers focus is on the top line and fees. Perhaps we need more focus on managing and improving the costs?
2. The 10 years of continuous and strong RevPAR growth in North America has meant the eye is off the middle of the statement. Why bother–times are good, profits and asset values and management fees are solid.    
3. Who will pay to create all of this? To answer that we need to remember the basics. Brands mandate the standard and owners pay to maintain the standard. This applies to all areas of a brand managed hotel. What sells to branded hotels sells to franchised hotels as well.  

We’re all waiting patiently for the RevPAR party to end. We already have lots of warnings about rising labor costs and expenses. I think the smart hotel management company will see that it’s time to get back to a process of continuous improvement and maybe this time it won’t be a fad. 

David Lund – The Hotel Financial Coach

Helping Hotel Teams and Leaders with Financial Coaching and Educational workshops

Contact David at (415) 696-9593.
Email: david@hotelfinancialcoach.com

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