Restaurant Consulting of HoReCa projects - Pros and Cons

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that everything written further on is relevant to a large degree to the Project design and restructuring of diversified services venues; hotels; hotel and restaurant complexes; health resorts/ SPAs within large holding companies, unified (or not unified, but in desperate need of this) by uniform standards of operations management and structural subdivisions’ standards.

Our degree of participation in one or another form of B2B or a HoReCa project can vary - from partial involvement in Project Management to full-scale Project Management in the following areas:
- restaurant consulting;
- F&B restructuring and management projects ;
- operations management of hotels, resorts or B2B venues;
- financial consulting and audit;
- restructuring and integration projects within procurement, purchasing department, logistics and international commercial transactions departments.

Without doubt, we - actively and on a regular basis- will provide restaurant consulting services for any third parties involved as well as for the direct participants and the operating personnel within the framework of our involvement into the hotel and restaurant management projects. The projects with our involvement or managed by our Company “can be independent and not connected with each other, but be under the same management.
The form, functions and structure of consulting depend on the needs of the organization we provide support for”. (©).
To avoid immersing the reader into the florid metaphors and the thesaurus of project vocabulary, let us note that at the stages of investment planning and establishing goals and objectives, realistically consulting is the predominant form of the project existence.

At the stage of Project implementation, the necessity in consulting as such is most frequently incited by:
1. A certain mismatch of the personnel’s professional skills and experience to the goals and objectives of the Project.
2. Personality factors and Services business specifics. It happens in reality (and it is always the case) that one and the same people: line personnel and line managers representing the Customer, at the will of the latter are getting involved in all possible ways both into the project and into the current operations. We can speak at length about standards, Charter, PMO status, but is it worth it? To say that all these people are slightly alienated from the overall pathos and the dynamics of the project – means to say nothing.
It is obvious that the first department who starts “ringing the bell” of the corporate uprising and speculate about apocalyptic scenario is… - correct! It is the Accounts Department.
These blistering maids with their glowing orbs, with their mimic and articulation pathos of Boyarynya Morozova from Surikov’s genius masterpiece, filling the Project space with the slight vapour trail notes of heart drops and some perfume of unknown aetiology, - they choose to break into meetings and inform the audience in a cold tone of a voice that:

А. All the participants of this Sabbath (Project) wish to see them in the dock or other near-penal servitude places.
В. Themselves and their colleagues (sharing the same diagnosis) from the Financial Department are there to protect the Owner’s interests (while we, naturally, dream to drain the Owner dry and aim at destroying him); and a handful of wondering swindlers (that’s us) will not succeed in destroying everything that for so many years… etc.
Naturally, such uncontrolled verbal diarrhoea is usually accompanied by dramatic pauses, ingestion of boiled waters with all sorts of sedative accounting pharmacology. Sometimes, it comes to quite ugly scenes and behaviours. If we talk about accounting policies in restaurants, as a rule the formal pretexts for such performances are absolutely traditional, more than prosaic and caused by vague understanding of most banal truths:
- how to enter bonus/ surplus deliveries and the trial/ introductory food supplies for the kitchen into 1C Accounting System;
- how to enter return of goods and significantly minimise writing-offs and costs;
- how to enter marketing budgets from the suppliers;
- how to enter the product cards into the system in a correct way;
- how to enter the research/trials and “today’s specials” correctly;
- how to fill in the process flow charts and recipes?
- what and how exactly the calculator should do in reality;
- how to make your accounting system work for you and not the other way around;
- how to budget a business unit in a sane and sound way;

and thousands more of “hows” and “whys”, the knowledge and understanding of which for us are a daily and long-ago adopted practical toolset, but by no means they are an obstacle in achieving the established and agreed project goals.
With this regard, the accounting policy is undoubtedly is one of the topics of the restaurant consulting.

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