Café Ella: Cost Restructuring at a CBD Café
Analysed six-plus years of financial and operations data for a Melbourne CBD café and put in place cost cuts across supply chain and staffing that lowered operating costs by 23% and food costs by 12%.
- Role
- Contract Financial Consultant
- Organisation
- Café Ella
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
A small business with real money on the line. I went through 6+ years of a CBD café's books and operations data and found 23% of operating cost to take out without breaking the business.
Context
Margins at an independent café are thin, and the owner needed costs down without hurting quality or service. The answer was in the history: years of reports and operations data that had never been looked at together.
Approach
I worked through 6+ years of reports and operations data, then put in place cost cuts across supply chain and staffing. The supply-chain changes alone cut food costs by 12%, and the broader operational changes made the café simpler to run.
Result
- 23% lower operating costs overall.
- 12% lower food costs through supply-chain changes.
- A leaner operation that held up day to day.
What I took from it
The fundamentals work the same at small scale. Reading a few years of messy data and turning it into changes a busy owner can actually make is the same skill a restructuring uses, just smaller.