“Successful success doesn’t work anymore”: Klopotenko, Khramov and Borisova share the secrets of profitable business
8 April 2024 12:24
СПЕЦПРОЄКТ
The modern restaurant business requires modern solutions, which sometimes have to be as drastic as possible, and the main thing is not to chase instant success, but to calculate all the risks of your business in detail and make plans. This was discussed at the War & Food Mastermind, organised by Komersant ukrainskyi 
famous Ukrainian restaurateurs – Maksym Khramov, Yevhen Klopotenko and Olena Borisova– told about this during the War & Food Mastermind. Read our article to find out what their secrets of profitable business are.
“Now is the time for quick decisions and constant control”
According to Olena Borysova, the time of “success” in the eyes of others has already passed, and the main thing now is to have full control over your business, because the most important goal is money, and if the business does not bring it, it is time to change something in it.
“Successful success” no longer works. If we’re talking about business, the main indicator is the same – you either have money or you don’t. Business is like a bicycle: you ride it, pedal it and it goes. We cannot count as we are taught and plan something for many years. We have to calculate every month, make budgets and see the result every week so that we can influence it in some way. We need to become CEOs again, we need to stop grieving over our projects and see if something doesn’t work – redo it or close it,”
– said Borysova.
The restaurateur added that she analyses her net profit every month, and at the end of the year, she analyses all the indicators.
“Despite the war, we have a plan until 1 January 2025. The plan is made by the management company, which then releases it to each establishment. We plan the turnover plan, costs, our financial expectations. But we are constantly checking how this budget is being implemented in the context of each month. Every Tuesday, I receive a budget execution table from all the outlets. Because in the process, you can influence the numbers, and if you just receive a late report, then nothing can be changed. Now is the time for quick decisions and constant control,”
– said Olena Borysova.
“Closing a restaurant is like a divorce: when you enter, you have to understand how you will leave”
3 months is the time it takes to understand whether a restaurant will be profitable or not, or whether it will fail to become profitable, restaurateurs believe. So whenever you open a business, you should also expect to close it for a number of reasons.
“Closing is like a divorce. Everything should happen naturally, you have to understand how you’re going to get out when you enter. And this applies to everything. When you open an establishment, it may happen that you will close it,”
– said Maxim Khramov.
According to him, a good restaurant profit is not always an indicator of good profitability.
“I have a case in point: when Celentano was a large chain and there was the first closure, it turned out that this restaurant had a UAH 400,000 deficit on its balance sheet. And this was 2009, so the exchange rate was completely different. As it turned out later, this restaurant had been doing poorly for a long time. It turned out that many restaurants, in order to show good profits, accumulate debts in a bad period, hoping that a good one will come and they will pay them off. And until we closed our first restaurant, we didn’t know that. We looked at the turnover – it was crazy. And it turned out that they were paying off debts from previous periods,”
– says Maxim Khramov.
From now on, the restaurateur uses a stress resistance factor:
“Every restaurant works according to the rule that if we close tomorrow, we know all the maths. We brought almost all our restaurants to this coefficient in six months.”
“Before that, I ‘felt’ profitability on borsch, and now on dumplings”
Yevhen Klopotenko also shared his vision of business profitability and gave an example from his work.
“When we were selling dumplings, I didn’t think that in a month I would realise that the cost of dumplings was 14%, because they were the most popular of all the items. I said, ‘This is profitability! I felt this word then, and before that I felt it on borsch, and now on dumplings,”
– says Klopotenko.
The restaurateur noted that business profitability should be calculated at the beginning of its formation.
“Profitability should be calculated at the beginning of business formation, when you formulate what you want to get as a result. When you can calculate profitability in theory, it gives you room for creativity.
But in general, profitability is the creativity of positions and the correct formation of the menu, when you sell something more expensive, although it costs less in cost. It’s like with my bees. They cost me nothing, a kilo costs 70 UAH, and I sell one portion for 150 UAH,”
– says Yevhen Klopotenko about his business.
Photo report from MasterMind: “War & Food”: famous restaurateurs of Ukraine told about the peculiarities of doing business during the war
Materials from the special project War & Food: Challenges and Solutions for the Restaurant Business:
Restaurateur Olena Borisova: “Business in Ukraine now means working in conditions of total uncertainty, but also with great opportunities”
Restaurateur Maxim Khramov: “Now is the time of customers, not businesses”
