Austin Cantina

Thanksgiving Week, 2008

What an amazing turnout last night for the Biznik Networking event here!

And such great people, wow!

We will be closed all day Thursday & Sunday in order to spend time with family that is traveling from around the country and overseas.

Austin Cantina will be open for regular dinner hours on Friday and Saturday this week.

Networking event at the Cantina

Next Tuesday Austin Cantina is hosting a Biznik networking event from 6 to 8 p.m. It will be a special pre-thanksgiving Happy Hour. Check out this link for details.

We've had Biznik here before, in fact much of our interior space was designed and implemented by folks from Biznik. On Tues 11/25 we'll offer our $5.00 late night menu for this group. Including $5.00 Margaritas, Wine (by the glass), Quesadilla's and other cheap munchies.

Please check out the link, RSVP, and join us.

Financial reflections...

A big part of success in business is keeping good records and paying regular attention to the numbers. Hopefully I am learning a lot about this business and how to operate better. This is what I'm seeing;

Note that the accompanying graph shows expenses (and income) as a percent of sales. In other words, a 5% income on $1,000.00 in sales would look better on this chart than a 3.5% income on $1,500.00 in sales, but, of course, the 3.5% would bring 5% more actual dollars into my bank account. As my business teachers told us "you take dollars to the bank, not percentages".

Anyway, we're doing consistently better over time on a variety of measures, most especially payroll expenses. I'm getting much better at scheduling according to the level of business, food cost has hold fairly steady, despite having a higher volume of waste due to expensive/perishable ingredients like crab and to having generally lower sales volume, which results in more product waste at the end of the week. This is a challenge that I'm pleased to have worked on because tossing out whats left of a full Beef Chuck has a much bigger impact (percentage-wise) if we're selling only 1 or 2 a week than it did when we sold 4.
Note that despite the significant improvement in income percentage, we continue to operate in the red due to growing debt obligations associated with taxes and utilities. Although we keep pretty current on expenses like payroll and food cost (the lag on payment is 1 to 4 weeks for most items)  this is a "cash basis" chart and does not reflect unpaid expenses.

Buying beer and wine

I have lived in several states and each seemed to have their own peculiarity around buying alcohol. When I was 18 and 19 years old the drinking age where I lived was 21, but we could drive to Wisconsin in less than 2 hours for a legal drink at the Brat Stop, or Alpine Valley. I always found it odd that the drinking age seemed to encourage young people to get drunk hours from home and then drive impaired instead of being able to buy closer to home.
In Texas you can buy liquor in grocery stores, but the aisle with alcohol is taped off and closed on Sunday due to lingering Blue Laws. In Florida you could get beer and wine at drive through windows, like abandoned car-washes, and on occasion would be gifted with a free beer when you fill the tank.

Selling beer and wine in Washington is a different sort of challenge. I am required to only sell adult beverages purchased from certified wholesalers. If I run out I am not allowed to run to the grocery store and stock up on beer and wine, it would violate my license. Unfortunately there was a recent merger in the wholesale beverage world, one of my suppliers consumed the other. This means that there will be a lot of shuffling people around, sales reps don't have a clear understanding of what products they have available, drivers can't find destinations, I need to write 2 different checks to the same company for 2 deliveries, from the same company that arrived together, on 2 different trucks with 2 different drivers. Since one of the 2 merged entities was a union shop and the other was not, they will need to continue making 2 separate shipments because only union members can make deliveries out of one of the warehouses. Apparently the merged company has stopped supplying all of the wine that we bought from them without notifying our new sales rep of this fact, so we are likely to run out of wine before we're able to re-stock. Maybe I can find a different local vendor that carries some Texas wine.

Live music Wednesday...

Tomorrow evening we're hosting Ballard musician Dave Harmonson aka Country Dave, you can sample his work at cdbaby.com/cd/countrydaveh.

We'll expect to have him play from 6 till 9.

Check out our special value specials, kids eat free before 7:00 (with a paid adult), and we have a variety of $5.00 items, including food and beverages, after 8:00.

See you soon

Live music is back

Wednesday 11/5 we'll have live music from 6 to 9. Please stop in for a drink and a snack.

We'll be featuring "5 for $5" after 8:00 so you have a choice of 5 munchies for only $5.00 each, along with drink specials, including $5.00 wine and $5.00 Margaritas.