That's the rub: How do you cut costs without negatively impacting guest experience.
My plan is to go through my 2016 ledger, start with the biggest items first, and say "how can I reduce this line item?"
Some of them, like a mortgage payment, you can't do (although I'm investigating refinancing before the coming political chaos drives up interest rates), but other things can be pruned back.
An annual evaluation of your advertising ROI is always helpful and can save money. Reviewing policies that cost utility dollars (adjusting programmable thermostats down 1 degree throughout the property, not lighting unused areas, etc) also helps.
One of my hobbies is backpacking, and an important rule for reducing pack weight is "just worry about reducing ounces, and the pounds will take care of themselves." If we reduce every line item a measly 1%, then we've increased our profit margin a percent..
We do it this way. If we need sugar for baking, we buy store brand. But buy the Quaker Oats individual packs for guests to make oatmeal if they want. When toilet paper goes on sale in the winter, we stock up for the busy summer season when its expensive. (I just smile sweetly at the strange looks I get, when I push a cart overflowing with toilet paper through the store.)
We do what we can so we have learned lots of new skills. An innkeeper from here gave us some good advice when that person visited us, "Hire out what you don't like to do." So we now have a crew that does our lawn, etc. It used to take us two to four hours to get it done, lots of times doing it a little here and there all week. So now it frees us to do other things in those hours that we couldn't do before that makes the guests feel more special instead of pushing a lawnmower back and forth. They are here and gone before we know it and we don't have to worry about it at all. It also makes us happier innkeepers (Thank you, friend!)
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