E-BOOK
Surviving Seasonality
Eight chapters on cash planning for a trade that earns unevenly and pays evenly. The quiet months are not a surprise, they are a timetable, and the worked quarter runs The Lantern House’s takings through a seasonality index from 0.86 in the thinnest week to 1.12 in the loudest, the same index as the 13-week cash flow on this hub.
- Eight chapters and the 13-week discipline that names the low week early
- The mismatch: quiet months pay busy months’ taxes
- A reserve with a stated size, banked through the peak on purpose
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Who this e-book is for
Coastal, tourist-town and event-driven venues, and any owner who has been profitable on paper and terrified in February, which in this trade is most of them at least once.
You budget on the average week
A venue that averages 620 covers might never actually have a 620-cover week: it has 530s in February and 700s in August, and a budget built on the average is wrong twice a year in both directions. Chapter one replaces it with an index written down from last year’s tills, an afternoon’s work that upgrades every forecast made afterwards, and the cost chapters make the index reach the rota, which only flexes if somebody makes it.
You are profitable on paper and short of cash every winter
Chapter two names why: the same venue, the same £11,150 weekly nut, clears it by £4,034 in the loudest week and £509 in the quietest, while the rent quarter lands in week one on the year’s thinnest index and the VAT earned in the busy quarter falls due in the quiet one. Profitable and illiquid is this trade’s default winter setting, and the 13-week sheet with its Monday actuals row is the instrument that names the low week while it is still a planning problem.
Your reserve is whatever happens to be left
Chapter six sizes it from the index instead: the quiet stretch owes £30,800 of rent and VAT lumps against £6,071 of thin-week margin, so the peak banks £24,729, monthly, into a separate account, on purpose. A reserve with a stated size stops being savings and starts being a plan, and the January meeting in chapter eight resets the number annually alongside the reprice and the break-even.
FACTS
The same nut, two different weeks
Contribution scales with the season; the rent and the committed rota do not. At index 0.86 the demo venue clears its weekly nut by £509; at 1.12, by £4,034. Eight times the headroom for the same week’s work is the entire argument for planning by index, and for pricing the peak properly instead of letting the trough set the menu.
8 chapters
Index, mismatch, discipline, reserve, people, the January meeting
£24,729
The demo reserve the peak banks, sized from the index
FACTS
Peaks priced, troughs bought carefully
Set menus and events buy covers in the trough without discounting the card, because a discount teaches regulars the real price. The peak holds its rate, and the rooms prove it in miniature: £95 at 72 per cent occupancy beats £85 at 80, £68.40 against £68.00 of RevPAR, before the extra laundry and breakfasts are counted. Deposits taken for events, with the £8.33 a kept tenner really recovers after VAT.