Line chancing

Do you know which are your top-20 selling lines? If you don't, then you should, as chances are that these 20 products will represent about 70% of your total wet business.

"So what?", I hear you ask. "What difference will it make knowing this information?" Well, the answer is that knowledge is a wonderful thing, especially if you can make it work for you.

If you know what your top-20 selling products are, then you can concentrate on these, starting with your suppliers. Can you negotiate a better discount rate with them or can you do better by looking elsewhere?

Once you are happy that you are buying your stock for the best possible prices, then you can look at the prices at which you are selling it to your customers.

If you want to improve the gross profit margin in your pub then there is no point increasing the prices of products that do not sell. You can increase spirits or liqueurs by 10p or even 20p a shot, but if you do not sell much of those products, then the move will have no significant effect on gross margins.

Better to concentrate on those best sellers and be more selective with price increases. If you are not hitting the desired GP percentage on your best sellers then you cannot possibly achieve the target you have set for your overall wet business. Ask your stocktaker to help you identify your top-selling products. Most professional stocktakers have the ability to produce a product-ranking report that not only identifies best sellers but also those products that do not sell at all.

The product-ranking report can be used to clear out obsolete lines, which gives you the opportunity of experimenting with new products.

Ask your customers what their preferences are and slowly introduce one or two new products, and you can monitor sales of these new lines at each stocktake. Eventually you will end up with a product profile more suited to the customers that use your pub.

It's all very well trying to stock your pub for every eventuality, but if it means tying up hard-earned cash in products that are poor sellers then do not do it. Concentrate instead on what your regular customers want, and give it to them.

What is the point in offering customers 15 or 20 different whiskies for instance, if only one or two regularly sell?

So, at the risk of sounding repetitious, if you do not already know what your top-20 selling products are, then ask your stocktaker ­ and get him also to tell you what percentage of your total wet business these products represent. Let it be the start of knocking your product file into shape.