Funnily enough setting your cafe’s sales goals works a lot like making a good cup of coffee, you have to understand the recipe. You might view good sales as all your ingredients combining together to create a desired result. When you set your grind perfectly, tamp your dose evenly and texture your milk to perfection you’re going to make a good latte right? Same goes for sales – combine the below ingredients well and you’ll nail it.

What Affects Sales – The Ingredients

Customer Count – How many customers do you get on a normal day? How many customers do you get on a quiet day? What about when it’s really busy? This isn’t exactly rocket science, we all know the more customers we have the better, but it’s the art of tracking this and being aware of it that’s important. Understanding what customer numbers look like on average, busy and quiet days is an important part of setting sales goals.

Spend per customer – This gives us an understanding of how customers are engaging with our product mix. Once you have your average spend per customer what does it equate to? Is it a coffee and an item of food? Is it just under that? If your POS system tracks this kind of data, cross check your spend per head with your top selling items to see if the trends match. Understanding this will help you pinpoint exactly where your customers are spending their money and what product combinations if pushed could help improve your sales.

Gross Profit Margin – Your GPM is your Gross Profit (Sales – Cost of Goods Sold) divided by your Sales. In simple terms this shows you what percentage of your sales is profit. From this we can gather information on our product mix again as well as whether or not we’re on top of our wastage.

Seasonality – We mustn’t neglect seasonal trends when it comes to setting our sales goals. If you’ve been in a location for many years this will be something you’ll have a decent understanding of – but for new owners trying to forecast for your first year it will require some research. If we know that during certain times of year or certain days during the week there aren’t as many potential customers around we need account for that in our goal setting.

How to Set Your Goals – Preparation

Start with a yearly/long term goal and work backwards. Use the ingredients above to paint a picture of what that number equates to in terms of customers per day, spend per head etc. Now compare these numbers to what you’re doing currently. This will give you an idea pretty quickly of what needs to improve to reach your goal as well as how realistic you’re being.

Now that you’ve got a long term goal set micro goals beneath your major sales goal – this means setting a goal for each of the ingredients. By doing this you’ll have a crystal clear picture of why things are going they way they are. You might be smashing your customers per day goal but they’re not spending enough per head so you’re still missing your sales goal. You won’t get this type of insight just focussing on your overall sales goal. Setting goals for each ‘ingredient’ forces you to track and understand exactly what’s causing your results.

Summary

1. Know what the ingredients are for Sales
2. Set a Long terms Sales goal (For the financial quarter or year)
3. Work backwards and find out what levels your ‘ingredients’ need to be at to achieve your long term goal
4. Set micro goals underneath your long term goal

For New Cafe Owners

For anyone opening in a new location although you can’t forecast like someone who has been open for multiple years you should still be tracking and setting goals – just not as far into the future. Setting a weekly sales goal can often be a good place to start.