Case Study: Restaurants Game, Financial Awareness Programme
Client requirements:
Our client wanted an interactive and engaging Financial Awareness Course to train regional directors, managers and area managers.
The delegates received management accounts from the finance department each month and the client wanted to ensure that the delegates felt confident with the content of these accounts and the language of finance.
Course details:
The game our client chose consisted of 4 one hour seminars plus a one and a half day game event.
The seminars were delivered using a web cast system. Our trainer broadcast the seminars over the web using the client’s version of the Centra webcast system. The delegates listened in from locations as far apart as Glasgow and Norwich.
The game was played with all delegates in the same location in Newport Pagnall. The game reinforced and expanded on the learning covered in the web casts.
Game details:
The game was played by four teams of 4 players (16 delegates in total). Approximately 50 delegates attended the courses. Each team was responsible for running a business consisting of four restaurants of varying sizes.
They had to make quality decisions, such as the number of staff to employ, food quality, range and opening hours. They then submitted their decisions to our team who fed them in to our programme to determine their level of sales.
In addition teams were allowed to expand their range of restaurants by bidding against each other for new contracts that became available each round. The teams also had the ability to manage their cash position to make the business more flexible and were faced with the problems of trying to manage receipts from customers and payments to suppliers.
At the end of each round the teams produced a Profit & Loss Account to assess their progress.
Course coverage:
The following technical details were covered throughout the two days:
- Profit & Loss Accounts (Income Statements)
- Balance Sheets
- The Accruals Principle & Depreciation
- Basic interpretation of accounts including Gross & Operating Margins
- The importance of getting the customer offering right
- Cash management & its impact on the business
- The impact of competition in the market
- Budgeting & Budgetary Control
- Basic variance analysis
- Business Strategy
Return on Investment:
The initial course feedback from delegates gave a 100% satisfaction rating on the programme’s aims of improving the engagement with Financial Information. Following the course the managers felt confident that they were able to use the financial information that was provided by the business. In particular the area managers gained a far greater understanding of their role in appraising the results of restaurants under their control and feeding back this information to finance.