Charley’s Family Steak House (A)

Charley Turner owns 4 “Charley’s Steak Houses”. He has experimented a lot with different pricing
strategies, food menus etc.

None of his restaurants offer breakfast. He is considering launching a test-run of the same at Unit #2 (a
restaurant of his).

The food menu across all restaurants is identical, but the prices are not. Each restaurant’s manager has
the freedom to increase/decrease prices by a maximum of 5% of the prices suggested by Mr. Turner.

Their current pricing strategy is this: determine the expected cost of the item, then add a pre-determined
uniform markup to the cost. Prices are reviewed semi-annually. Prices are provided in Exhibit 1.

He controls the advertising and purchasing for all four of his

restaurants. He wishes he could be in all four locations at once, because
every year the restaurants with the highest sales and largest profit was
the one which he managed himself.

A few months earlier he had found out that Unit #2’s previous manager
had been falsifying the weekly financial reports (which are sent to the
headquarters). So he wants to improve his overall planning and control
system as well.

He is also looking to improve performance of his managers by

implementing a bonus system which would allow every restaurant
manager to earn up to an additional 25% of his/her salary.

One of the bases for providing a bonus will be the achievement of a

predetermined amount of annual sales and profit goals. These goals are
prepared by restaurant managers themselves, with assistance from Mr.
Turner by way of “budget planning meetings”.

Forecasting Revenues

Mr. Turner met with Alex Pearson, the new manager for Unit #2, and
began their December planning meeting by discussing 2002’s (the
previous year) sales volume.

A new touch screen POS system (point of sales) had been installed at
each of the 4 restaurants which automatically provides Alex (the
manager) a with a weekly report of gross sales (by menu items),
discount coupon usage and the net sales for Unit #2. Based on the POS
reports for the first 50 weeks of 2002, Mr. Turner estimated that a total
of 182,000 meals would be sold by the end of the year. He is looking to
improve on this.

Additionally, a 100-room economy motel with no restaurant is

scheduled to open very close to unit.
This will generate additional sales of 100-120 meals per week during the latter 6 months of 2003.
Therefore, he is targeting a 10% increase in meals sold in 2003 over the figure for 2002.

The POS reports also show that 38% of the meals are sold during 11am-3pm. This means that the
restaurant is underutilized during lunch hours. Mr. Turner expects that some of the planned increase in
meals sold would occur through greater promotion of lunch services and healthy, affordable menu items.
However, he wants to focus on improving the profitable dinner business, and so a target of 40% meals
sold during lunch hours is set for 2003.

Average gross revenues per meal are forecasted to be $7.50 for lunches and $10.50 for dinners.

Discount coupons are placed in local newspapers to attract customers. These coupons expire after 2
weeks. They can be used at any of the restaurant locations. Based on the POS data, the coupon usage is
expected to average $0.50 per meal for both lunch and dinner.

Forecasting Expenses

Unit #2’s prices are identical to the

ones suggested by Mr. Turner (Exhibit
1). For 2003, food costs are expected
to be 55% of gross sales.

Labour costs are dependent upon the

type of employee. In 2002, Unit #2
employed 4 full time cooks, each for
2,000 hours per year; 16 cashiers and
servers, each for 1,800 hours. The cost
for the servers and cashiers varies with
the number of customers; cost for the
cooks is fixed.

In 2002, cooks were paid $12.00 per

hour, cashers and servers were paid
$3.00 per hour. For 2003, cooks are to
be given a wage increase of $1.00,
wages for cashiers and servers will
remain unchanged.

Other operating expenses include

supplies, maintenance and utilities.
Mr. Turner thinks these are fixed in a
“relevant range” of customer volume,
but Alex thinks these are driven by
customer count (i.e., he thinks these
are variable). It is very time consuming for them to identify the fixed and variable portions of each of these
operating expenses. Therefore, for 2003, they agree to budget operating expenses to be 8% of gross sales
(actual operating expenses were 8% of gross sales in 2002).
For 2003, advertising expenses are set to be 3.5% of gross sales (for the entire chain of restaurants). Of
the 3.5% of gross sales including in the plan, only 0.5% is for use by a restaurant manager, 1% is for
broadcast media, 1% for print media, 1% for ad preparation.

Certain miscellaneous expenses are also incurred and these are hard to predict. Some are fixed, some are
variable with customer volume. They budget these misc. expenses at a fixed amount of $3,000.

Depreciation (on furniture, POS cashier system, other equipment) is $2,000 per month.

A property and liability insurance policy covers all four restaurants. Premium expenses is allocated to each
restaurant based on their square footage. In 2002, Unit #2’s share of the premium was $9,400. For 2003,
the premium may be increased by the insurance company by there is no way to predict this. So they leave
the budget for insurance premium unchanged for 2003 (i.e., it is still $9,400 for unit #2).

License and fee charges applicable for Unit #2 for 2002 were $11,250. This will go up by 4% in 2003.

A 10-year property lease was signed in 1996 which requires a minimum rent payment of $6,000 per
month, and variable payment equal to 5% of the excess of gross sales above $1,800,000.

The only other expense for the 2003 operating plan is “management” which consists of salaries for Alex,
assistant managers and an allocated charge to cover Mr. Turner’s salary; Unit #2’s portion of the
purchasing, accounting and other services that occur at corporate headquarters. The “management”
expense is estimated to be $95,000 for 2003.

Questions:-

1. Verify and be prepared to explain the amounts presented in the 2003 operating plan for Charley’s
Family Steak House #2 shown in Exhibit 2.
2. Assume that the forecasted sales volume for Unit #2 in 2003 is reduced to 3,700 meals per week from
3,850 meals per week. What is Unit #2’s revised project profit for the year?

Charley’s Family Steak House (B)

Better if you read this in the original document. Just 1.5 pages long.