In today’s podcast we break down the key steps to build (and implement) your brewery financial plan EVER.
The financial plan is the road map. Where are you now? Where do you want to go? What does financial success look like?
Listen to the podcast. Download the resources. Build your best plan EVER today!
Key Takeaways
- Use the 6 building blocks to organize the planning process
- The X Factor to financial planning success
- How to crowd source the best ways to grow sales and cut costs
- Simple and complex financial models to build your best plan
Resources
- Join our network of brewery owners and managers working together to build the best brewery financial plan EVER!
- Get the Brewery Financial Training Program included with your membership to the brewery network
Podcast Transcript: How to Build Your Best Brewery Financial Plan EVER
Today on the podcast, we’ve got a solo episode. It’s just me and you talking about how to build your best brewery financial plan ever. So how are we gonna do it? We’re gonna start with the basics, the fundamentals, how to make sure your numbers are complete, accurate, and produced in a timely fashion. The spoiler alert, there are standard operating procedures, and we’ve got ’em all. Next, we want to think about using what I believe are the two x factors, the two keys to success, to create your best plan ever. And that is one, high involvement, planning, and two, creating weekly financial huddles to learn more. Listen to the podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and more So I hope that you create your best brewery financial plan ever this year. Welcome to the Craft Brewery Financial Training podcast, where we combine beer and numbers to provide you with tips, tactics, and strategies so that you can improve financial results in your brewery. I’m your host, Kary Shumway, A-C-P-A-C-F-O for a brewery and a former CFO for a beer distributor. I’ve spent the last 20 years using finance to improve financial results in our beer business. Now I’m helping other craft breweries to do the same. Are you ready to take your brewery financial results to the next level? Okay, let’s get started.
(01:26):
Hello and welcome to the Craft Brewery Financial Training podcast. My name is Kary Shumway, I’ll be your host. Today we’re gonna talk about how to build your best financial plan ever. And usually on these podcasts I get to interview, talk with a very cool person in the beer industry, but today it’s just me. So we’re gonna talk about financial planning, budgeting, how to do this, how to start it, what are all the components, the pieces basically how to build your best plan ever. So there’s a couple of pieces to this. First is how to build the plan, and then there’s how to use it. So I want to talk to you about both of those aspects. And you know, the spoiler alert is that there’s two things that you can do that if you’re not already doing them, are gonna make a huge difference, a huge improvement in your financial planning process, the results that you get from it, the execution of that plan, and then the achievement of the results.
(02:33):
And those two things are, one, use high involvement planning, and two, implement weekly financial huddles. Now I’m gonna dig into both of these as we go, but in a nutshell, high involvement planning means including involving your key people in the creation of your budget. That sounds very simple, it’s very infrequently. It’s in very infrequently done. ’cause It, it’s time consuming. You know, we gotta bring people in. Very often we have to train them. What are we asking them for? What are the expectations? What do they need to do? So we, we often have to take a step or two back in order to go two or three or 10 steps forward. And that step or two back is, is really financial literacy training. Like what, what do these numbers mean? So for as a concrete example, let’s say you want to include your head brewer in the creation of your departmental expense plan and production plan.
(03:38):
So that’s gonna require some training. Like what are the expenses? You know, they may not have otherwise been involved in that. So we have lots of training tools to help in this regard. I put together the brewery financial training program, which I think is a really good tool for any non-financial manager or staff member in your brewery that you want to empower with financial training, with financial literacy. So that is part of our Beer Business Finance membership. So you can check that out. I’ll have links to this. If you just wanna reach out, I’m happy to chat with you about it. Ka@Beerbusinessfinance.Com, KAR y@beerbusinessfinance.com. So that high involvement planning, it does a couple things. It gets you better information ’cause you’re including the people that are actually in the best position to build those plans. Like, what should these expenses be?
(04:34):
What do we really need? What can we do away with? And then it also gets that buy-in that you’re looking for. ’cause When we go to execute these plans, you know, often we’ll ask our people to, you know, manage to the budget, but they, maybe they didn’t have any idea how the budget was created. They’re not the buy-in just isn’t there. So we can overcome that with high involvement planning. The weekly financial huddles are really, how do we put this plan into action? How do we do this on a consistent and regular basis? How do we make our our planning process ongoing rather than just one and done? ’cause I think inherently this is sort of the, the stigma with the budget. It’s like, oh, it’s gotta, we gotta do the budget. And you, you create it and it’s, you finally get it done and then, you know, you use it or you don’t.
(05:23):
But the weekly financial huddles are designed to be a living planning process. So I’ll dig into that a little bit more. But those, those are two things to keep in mind as we kind of move through this. So this is a topic that we covered recently in our monthly financial roundtable meetings. So we bring brewery owners and managers from across the country together on Zoom. And it’s a lot about networking, it’s a lot about idea sharing and best practices. You know, it’s a lot about, you know, what are we all doing to try to improve financial results in our respective beer businesses? So really information sharing is what it is, and it’s what it really is is is really cool. So again, if you’re interested in checking that out and I encourage you to do so, that’s part of our Beer Business Finance membership.
(06:16):
So the specific topics that we talked about in our last round table and what I want to share with you today, the umbrella topic is how to build your best financial plan ever. So I’m gonna talk to you about big picture thinking, sort of 30,000 foot view, talk about thinking different as it relates to approaching your financial plan. Then I want to go through the nuts and bolts. What are the building blocks of your plan? How do you put this puzzle together? We’ve got very structured checklists and process. You know, it really comes down to following those, those process. We’ve got models that you can follow, financial models, plug and play to use. And then, you know, to get good numbers, you also need good SOPs, good standard operating procedures to make sure that we’re, you know, properly accounting for everything. So there again, checklists, process consistency but we have it all laid out for you.
(07:21):
So these are all part of our, our membership materials. And then I’ll wrap up with what I began with, which is what I believe the X factor, the key to success in the creation and implementation of your budget is high involvement, planning and weekly financial huddles. So we started off our discussion, and I wanna start this off with what is standing in the way of creating your best financial plan ever? I would encourage you to look back and say, why is it that you’ve started and stopped, started and not completed your plan? So what, what is standing in the way? And in my experience, a lot of the times it’s, it may be a mindset issue. You know, we’re thinking, oh, it’s gonna take forever, and what’s the point? Like when I’m done, I’m not even sure it’s gonna be accurate, it’s gonna be obsolete.
(08:10):
Things change so fast. And, and furthermore, we never do anything with it. You know, I spend all this time, I create these spreadsheets. We don’t, you know, nobody follows the plan. So it might be a lot of maybe negativity around it. So I would encourage you to think about that and how can we do it differently this time? You know, how, if these are obstacles, how might we go around them, go over them, go through them. What can we do differently to remove those obstacles so that we can move forward? And one way it’s kinda a simple way to think about, it’s to really reimagine the budget. You know, these are, these are just words, but budget has a word a connotation of maybe not the best connotation, right? We think budget means it’s telling me what I can’t do, what I can’t spend money on.
(08:55):
So maybe we reimagine that. We think about building a financial roadmap or a blueprint or a profit plan. So in some respects, the word budget might be the obstacle itself. So re rethinking how we word this. I, I personally like roadmap. ’cause It says, you know, here, we’re here and we wanna get there from a financial perspective and here’s how we’re gonna do it. So roadmap sounds like, oh yeah, we’re all familiar. You know, open up the map and here’s how we’re gonna get there. And you know, everybody’s got their little sections of the map and it’s very easy to hand it out and get our hand heads around it. And it, it removes the stigma of the word budget. So something to think about there. Continuing in the lines of thinking differently there’s a really interesting creative exercise that you could incorporate into your financial planning process.
(09:44):
And it’s called the workshop or playbook. So you can go online and google this workshop or playbook, check it out. Really what it is, it’s a way to get ideas from your team. And you can use it in almost any application. You know, we’ve done this in live events just as an example. So you’re, you, you’ve got a tap room and you’re trying to figure out what kind of food offerings to have. So I believe we had a room of about 75 people and we, you know, we did the workshop or playbook and we solicited, you know, what kind of food offerings should we have? And we came up with hundreds of different ideas, you know, specific ideas or more general ideas. You know, everything from what you might imagine of food trucks to, you know, heat and eat type options to full kitchens and specific types of menu.
(10:34):
But then you can really winnow it down and say, let’s gather all these ideas and then let’s prioritize ’em in terms of what do we think is gonna work and, you know, what can we actually implement. So you can take this approach in your financial planning process. And maybe a specific example of that would be, you know, as we look at our, our numbers, you know, sales are are really stagnant. You know, we just, we’re not, we’re not getting, it feels like we’re just not growing. We’re moving backwards. You know, we’re flat year over year, we’re down a little bit. You know, what, what can we do? So the workshop or playbook can be a very interesting approach, creative approach to solicit those ideas. And, you know, spoil alert here too is, you know, most of ’em are not gonna be very good, but that’s the whole idea is you, you’re going for quantity to start and then you sift it down and you’re gonna get some nuggets of gold in there.
(11:25):
You can do the same approach with, let’s just say expense reduction. You know, we’re, we’re just, costs are rising every, what can we do? ’cause As, as small business owners, it can feel tough, you know, the weights on your shoulders, but it doesn’t have to be. And so this process can be a way to really draw out those ideas from your managers and from your staff. And very often the, the best ideas come from the most unlikely of places. But I guess the takeaway is if you ask and you do it within a structured approach like this, you might get some really, really cool ideas. So that’s thinking different, you know, workshop or playbook. And again, you can Google that. The other one I would throw at you is learning to ask better questions in order to get better answers. And sometimes you know, we think about, you know, instructing or giving advice about, but sometimes it’s really asking better questions.
(12:24):
And some of the, some of the ways you can use this in your financial planning process is, you know, op open-ended questions like, how might we increase sales? How might we bring more customers in the taproom? How might we increase the average checks for our customers? You know, how might we do? So I kinda, it’s kinda like phrasing things in a very open-ended and easy way. So that’s just one example. But there’s a book called The Book of Beautiful Questions, which I highly recommend. It’s just a great read and you can kind of pick and choose from that. So we think of traditional budgeting as, you know, getting out the spreadsheet and getting out the reports and getting everybody into a room and, you know, hammering out this. But, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You know, you can, you can introduce some creativity.
(13:14):
You can introduce some interesting questions to get better answers. So these are just some things to kind of think about. Again, we’re, we’re really at the 30,000 foot view here of, of the budgeting process. Now I think one of the more important things that you can do before you put pencil to paper and build those spreadsheets is think about what it is you’re, where are you trying to go? So let’s go back to that roadmap. So if you’re here and where do you want to go? So what is that? Where’s that roadmap taking you? So begin with the end in mind. And I recently reread Napoleon Hill. He wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich. And the wording that he used with this is, you really need to define a definite chief aim. In other words, where do you want to go?
(14:03):
And you need to create a plan to achieve that definite chief aim. And you need to have a sense of urgency, gotta get this thing done. And a sense of possibility. And you want to be highly specific. Now, I particularly like the sense of possibility ’cause that opens things up. ’cause Sometimes, and I’ve fallen victim, victim to this myself, is when we’re budgeting it, it feels the possibilities and options can sometimes feel very narrow. Well, what else can I do? You know, my pap room’s only so big, my market’s only so big. Competition’s getting hard. You know, it can feel kind of, kind of difficult. But I think to approach it with a sense of possibility, it’s kind of cool. I like it. Maybe you’ll like it too. But those are some things to start off. Identify your obstacles, see what they are, and be honest with yourself.
(14:55):
Maybe you’re the obstacle, you know, maybe it’s like, I’m just not prioritizing this thing. You know, maybe it’s, if you’re in an environment with an ownership group that just doesn’t want to dedicate the time and the resources to this, alright, how might you go about that? How might you go about removing or over or through those obstacles? But first start with what those obstacles are. Second, reimagine the budget. I like the word roadmap, financial roadmap. I think it’s kind of cool. And then think differently. Think creatively. Use a workshop or playbook. Get the book a beautiful questions and ask better questions to get better answers. And begin with the end in mind. What is your goal? How are you gonna get there? Get that sense of urgency and that sense of possibility. Okay, so that’s 30,000 foot. Now let’s dive into more granular.
(15:44):
What are we thinking about for models? And I think the easiest way for me to share this with you is when is to tell you kind of what my process is? And that is, I start with a very simple financial model. And what I’m trying to do for myself is to just get kind of a high level feel of where we are, where are we in terms of sales and expenses? Where are we in terms of profitability or loss? What do I think is gonna happen in the coming 12 months? So I’m using a lot of estimates. I’m relying a lot of trends because I like a lot of, you know, what are the trends? What are the sales trends? Are expenses going up or down? Where what’s, what’s changing? So at this point, I’m not asking for really much input, you know, minimal input from my team that’s gonna come later.
(16:35):
But at this point I’m trying to keep it high level. I’m trying to just kind of get the context of, of where we are. And furthermore, it’s gonna help prompt some questions. So as I do the initial analysis in this simple model, it’s going to highlight some areas where I’m like, yeah, I don’t know enough about that. I’m need to ask some questions. I really need to ask our top manager about this, or our head brewer about that. So it’s gonna just gimme some prompts. Now, next, once that’s done, I’m gonna turn my attention to building a more complex model. And here is where we want the high involvement planning. Here’s where we want a high level of input, where we’re gonna be doing a lot of data and analysis to support our forecast. Where we’re gonna create a lot of supporting schedules and supporting schedules, as an example would be creating your lease schedule.
(17:28):
If you have multiple leases, let’s say, you know, your location lease, your, your, your taproom lease, your space maybe you’ve got vehicles or equipment any number of lease. So I wanna pull the, all my leases together. I wanna pull together my payroll. Like who, what, what does my personnel look like? How many people, what are we paying them? What changes, what am I gonna add People, subtract people. Are we have bonuses? What does that look like? Because payroll, these are the two, generally speaking, the two biggest drivers of operating expenses are people in places. So I really wanna get my hands around that. So it’s here where in our complex model, and we’ve got basically off the shelf models that you can use to forecast all of the major components of your plan. But it’s here that I wanna really have a structured approach so that when we start our high, high involvement planning, I’ve got information that I can give to my head brewer, to my tapper manager so that they can come in and we can have, it’s a combination at first of a training session.
(18:37):
Like how does this work? Setting expectations and then starting to develop, you know, what the forward looking plan might look like. So the models can really help in that regard. So those we have available for you as well. But to break it down, you know, the financial plan, I like to use six building blocks of the financial plan. And those six building blocks are your sales forecast, your cost of goods sold and margin plan, your operating expense plan, your capital expense schedule, your debt service and loan schedule, and then your cashflow drivers. So those six boxes, and what I like about, it’s sort of simplifies and organizes all the pieces of the puzzle. ’cause Another obstacle to budgeting is just feeling overwhelmed. Like, I don’t even know where to start. And compounding it is, I’m not even sure I’ll get these numbers right.
(19:42):
And then, you know, you, you start to spiral. So I like to simplify it and say, all right, we’ve got six building blocks, let’s start. And the beauty of these blocks is you don’t need to start. They’re not linear. You don’t need to do one tooth, you have to do this, then this. No you don’t. You can do it in in different order. I often recommend doing it in the easiest order for you. So you can build some momentum. And as an example, maybe the easiest thing to do is say, alright let’s figure out what our loans are, our loan schedule. So maybe you’ve got one or more than one loan. Like, so get that detail. What what’s the loan? What’s the principle amount of the loan? What are your, what are your payments? What’s the interest rate? What’s the term on this thing?
(20:28):
How long is it gonna go? And you can create a very simple, if you don’t have one already, just simple payment schedule. So you go into Excel, you can, they, they’re very simple models where you can just say, oh, create this amortization schedule for me. You plug in the principal, the terminal loan, the interest rates, it’s gonna give you that payment. Maybe that’s one that’s an easy place to start. The other might be creating your capital expense schedule. And what this means is what do you plan to purchase in the new year or the coming 12 months for fixed assets? These things like maybe do you need to buy new kegs? You need to buy new tanks, you need to buy new taproom equipment. So making a list of what do we need to buy? What’s it gonna cost, when do we think we need to buy it?
(21:14):
These are all puzzle pieces. And once you do a couple, you’re like, okay, I’m got six building blocks. I got, I got two done right now. If you, you could build up some momentum. So it helps me, it may help you to diffuse the overwhelm a little bit and say, all right, I, I can get my hands around this. I think I got a plan. And furthermore, these six building blocks are incorporated into the financial models that we provide. So you can see them in the tabs, they’re color coded. Their intention is to really walk you through. It still takes a lot of thought. It still takes time, creativity and big thinking. But the models can at least help, you know, provide that canvas upon which you too can paint your financial masterpiece. So let’s talk a little bit of details. ’cause As they say, the devil’s in the details.
(22:10):
Now, the way here, again, I’ll relay this in terms of the, the way that I like to approach it certainly doesn’t mean it’s the only way. But I like this way, so I’ll share it with you. When I start into the details, what I’m really talking about is what are the historical numbers? What, what results have we actually seen? Now if you’re just starting up, you’re not gonna have any historical numbers, right? So you’re, you’re a startup, you’re trying to create a plan that’s a different approach. So we’ll probably cover that in a diff well, different podcasts and, and there’s different metrics and assumptions and estimates and drivers to think about. But for now, let’s just say, you know, you’ve been in business for a couple, three, four longer years. And what I wanna do is I want to go in and if you’re using QuickBooks, it’s certainly easy enough to do.
(23:03):
And I want to get 12 to 18 to 24 months of data. So I’m gonna run an income statement for say, the trailing 18 months. And then I’m gonna run a balance sheet for the same, I’m gonna run it by month. I’m gonna export it to Excel. ’cause Yes, I do like Excel. And this is gonna give me a really good look as to historically, what results have we seen and what are the trends look like? Are there anything, A lot of this is like a lot of your financial review is what is like pattern analysis. Like what patterns are we seeing? ’cause Sometimes you look at an expense line and it’s pretty consistent month over month, over month, over month. And all of a sudden there’s a huge big number in there. What’s that? And then maybe there’s another big number. So what we’re trying to do is first seek to understand like, what do I understand the numbers here?
(23:58):
And as a general rule, if you’re looking at your income statement or your balance sheet and you’re looking at all these balances, if the first question in your mind is, I don’t even know what that is, then we’ve gotta highlight that thing, make a note, what is this? Right? Seek first to understand and it’s gonna take some time. So if you, if you haven’t done this regularly, you’re probably gonna have a lot of questions. And that’s good. ’cause That’s the point. Really the goal is we gotta know our numbers and sometimes we gotta get into the details in order to do that. So that’s what I do first. Once I kind of ask and answer these questions like, what’s that big of number? What’s this, what’s the other, I’m ready to start thinking about projecting forward these numbers into my financial roadmap. And it’s easy enough to just take, if you’re using QuickBooks, you’ve got a chart of accounts, you’ve already got data in there historically, I can just project it forward, you know, copy, paste, add some formulas, and start kind of pecking away at this thing.
(24:58):
It’s not the best way to do it, but it is, it can be a quick and efficient way to at least get the ball rolling. So for example, trailing 12 months sales is X, we’ve been growing at about 5%. I’m gonna anticipate that growth is going to continue at around 5% for the next 12 months. I bake in a formula and boom, my form, my sales forecast is in draft form done ish. Now I am gonna go and backfill that plan, of course, with more detail, like what are, what are we selling and to whom and where and what, what products and what are all the details. But doing it this way, again, is starting to help me build momentum. Like, all right, this puzzle is fuzzy, but it’s coming in, coming into focus. And then the next I’d like to do is have access to all of our, what we call transaction detail.
(25:47):
All the general ledger transaction detail. ’cause Every line item on your income statement is, has got below the surface all of the transaction, all the stuff that you bought, the vendors to whom you paid that money, all the sales that you made, the collections and so forth. So I wanna be able to kind of quickly and easily toggle between my income statement and this transaction detail. Why would I wanna do that? Well, it helps to answer the question, what are these numbers first? So I can go into the details and say, oh, I see what that big expense was. We had a, you know, the big repair on the chiller that went down. I don’t think that’s gonna happen again. So once you understand it, you, it makes it easier to say, yeah, I think that’s gonna happen again, or no, that should be, we should be good for the next, you know, several years.
(26:37):
I’m not gonna see that expense again. So when I’m forward forecasting, I’m gonna take that out. I’m gonna exclude that. I’m gonna say, yeah, yeah, I know the last 12 months I spent, you know, 15 grand on repairs, but I don’t see that happening. You know, in the next 12 months I’m only gonna project five ’cause there was some anomalies in there. So that’s where the transaction detail can really help. The next detail tab that I want to create are these supporting schedule which schedules, which I’ve alluded to before, which is, you know, creating a payroll schedule, all of my people, what they’re gonna pay, whether we’re gonna add, subtract, bonus schedules, pay changes, et cetera. I need all that detail for a number of reasons. One is to support the payroll line items on my income statement. And two is to use as a management tool for each of my department managers.
(27:29):
‘Cause It’s very useful. Well, ’cause a lot of times people are like, well what’s my budget? Right? Well, I but no, here’s your budget. Here’s your, here is your personal and payroll budget. You know, you’ve got three full-time employees. We’ve got a bonus plan based on X, we’ve got this, we’ve got that. So it’s very clear, it’s quantifiable. It’s easy for people to, because that’s what people are really looking for, is like, yes, I want to help build this plan and have some input, but I also need to know what am I, what am I operating guidelines here? You know, what can I do? What’s that look like? So a very reasonable question. And these supporting schedules can help answer those.
(28:09):
So here I wanna do take a step back and talk fundamentals again. ’cause All of these numbers that I’m talking to go in and run a 12 month, 24 month income statement and put, it doesn’t do you much good if the numbers are not complete and accurate. And sometimes we are not sure if they are. So the best way to make sure you’ve got complete and accurate numbers that you can produce in a timely fashion or to have standard operating procedures. And here again, we’ve got a whole manual of SOPs to help you get your financials done, complete, accurate and timely. And it really revolves around a month end process following it. There’s checklists, a year end process, same deal, and then where you can to do regular audits and reviews. And that’s just having a second set of eyes. Look at your books. So that could be outside CPAs that may be helping you with your financials, your taxes.
(29:07):
That could be, you know, industry consultants who come in and kind of go through your numbers whatever it may be. But that’s sort of a last crosscheck that makes make, just take a look at these, make sure these are, these numbers are still, you know, kind of in line with what they should be. Okay. So those are some details, some fundamentals. Those are the building blocks. Those are the schedules and models that you can use to build your fi your best financial plan ever. Now I wanna talk a bit about returning to the concept of financial huddle. So you’re gonna do a decent amount of work on your financial plan. It does take time and I would encourage you to let it do so. It’s just the way that it works and you know, you’re thinking you’re investing this time now so that you can really create a better future.
(29:58):
So it’s, it’s very much time well spent if you use the plan. So this common, this one two punch of high involvement planning with the financial huddles, again, I believe is the X factor. So if you’ve implemented high involvement planning, you’ve included your department managers, you’ve created that financial roadmap. Now what do you do? Well, now comes the execution of that and the financial huddles are the best way to do that. So what this really is, is regular meetings that are focused on the numbers of your business to include the people that created or helped create a financial roadmap. So it’s a weekly financial huddle whereby people come to this meeting prepared to share what’s going on in their department from a quantitative standpoint, what are their numbers? And from we would say like a qualitative standpoint, like what, what’s the story behind those numbers?
(30:57):
Like how did that number come to be? If it’s not what we need, what are we gonna do in order to improve it? So that is the main focus of these meetings and it creates a lot of downstream benefits as well. And for example, we do tend to get kind of siloed in our businesses, even if they’re small. Sometimes the production team is not, you know, really jiving with the admin team and the taproom team’s off doing their own thing. So this, these meetings really can bring everybody together so you can understand what everyone’s up against, what their challenges are, their opportunities and you can work towards helping each other. It’s also just general communication like the the brewers are creating all these new beers. Taproom had no idea about that. Well, how are we supposed, you know, marketing didn’t know either.
(31:48):
Well, we gotta sync these things up. We used to see this a lot when I was implementing this in the beer wholesaler world where the sales team would be bringing in lots of new brands and packages and the delivery team and warehouse team knew nothing about like, where are we gonna put this stuff? You know, I have no room in the warehouse, there’s no room at retail. So at first it’d be kind of frustrating, but then they’d be like, okay, well at least I know, you know, it’s not coming in for another, you know, week or two or six weeks or whatever. So there can be those, those additional benefits. But by first and foremost, the huddles are designed to be a regular, consistent look at the numbers of the business. How are we doing? What did we think we were gonna do?
(32:29):
If we’re on track, great. If we’re not, how do we get on track? And we do this in a very structured way. So the templates that we have are financial scorecards and we’re really creating the income statement and other key numbers of our business on a weekly basis. So sales and margins, operating expenses, profit or lack thereof. We’re forecasting these out on a weekly basis. So in week one of the month, what actually happened, and then it doesn’t end there. We’ve got three more weeks this month, week two, three and four, what’s gonna happen? So I think the beauty of this approach is unlike traditional budgeting, which you might create a budget say at the end of the year, and then you just kind of let it ride through through the new year. It’s not the way business works, it’s not the way life works.
(33:17):
Things change. So the weekly financial huddle gives you 52 cracks at refining that budget, at projecting it, at adjusting to the realities of what’s actually going on in your brewery business. So we do forecasts, we do actuals, we share the information, we work together to achieve those financial results. So to build your best brewery financial plan ever, these are some things that you can check out. And then to supplement this, what I would recommend is checking out our financial training courses for non-financial managers. These are step by step through the basics of the financial plan, common sense language specifically for non-financial employees in your brewery. And it shows everyone how they can help improve these results, how they fit in what they do, and how it translates into the financial results of the company and gives everybody action items that they can follow. Because that’s really what it’s about, is we’re creating this plan as a financial roadmap from where we are to where we want to be, and we want everybody to come along for the ride.
(34:32):
So that’s high involvement planning, that’s weekly financial huddles. So hopefully there’s something here of value for you. If there is, I’d love to hear from you what it was and or if there’s something missing or if you want more information, love to hear from you, Carrie, at beer business finance.com, KARY, at beer business finance.com. And I would love to welcome you into our membership if you so desire. We have, again, our monthly financial roundtables in our Beer Business Finance Association. And again, this, we’ve got about 150 brewery owners and managers from across the country that are in our group. We meet monthly in the intervening time periods. We’ve got about a dozen 14 financial training courses that are available to you on our portal. The Brewery Financial Training program is our flagship that I recommend for people to take, again, common sense language to help you improve financial results in your business, and particularly for those non-financial managers.
(35:40):
And I know that’s most of us. So if that is of interest to you, we’ll put some links here in the article, in the blog post that you can check out. And again, feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m happy to jump on a call or a Zoom to learn more about you and what your goals are and how we might be able to help. So I’m carrie@beerbusinessfinance.com, KARY, at beer business finance.com. Thank you for listening to the Craft Brewery Financial Training podcast, where we combine beer and numbers so that you can improve financial results in your brewery. For more resources, tools, guides and online courses, visit k craft brewery financial training.com. And don’t forget to sign up for the world famous Kraft Brewery Financial Training newsletter. Until next time, get out there and improve financial results in your brewery today.
