Insights & Perspectives
Short essays on stewardship, governance, and the strategic finance decisions facing clubs, hospitality businesses, and growing companies.
Browse by category
Showing 61 of 61 essays
Related topics
Membership programs make a med spa P&L look like a SaaS company — until you count the banked credits nobody has redeemed yet. What that balance really is, why the gap peaks around month 14, and the three numbers to track before you spend the cash.
In a market where resorts grew profit and midscale properties contracted, a portfolio-level P&L can average a failing property out of sight. The three reporting standards a multi-property hospitality group needs before the annual review — not after.
The first 90 days of a fractional CFO engagement is diagnosis and stabilization, not transformation — and half its value is in what the CFO refuses to do. Here's a realistic month-by-month picture, including the honest list of what you're not buying.
Every guarantee you signed was reasonable on its own. Added together, many operators have personally guaranteed several times their net worth — and nobody is tracking it. Here's how to inventory the exposure and negotiate it down.
The budget your board debates in October was already decided in a dozen quiet trades made in September. Boards that treat the document as a forecast — and argue about its accuracy — miss the only decisions that were ever theirs to make.
Your club's balance sheet says you have cash. Your late-October operating account will disagree. Why seasonal clubs need a weekly cash model, and how a treasurer can build the first version in an afternoon.
A food minimum increase feels like deficit reduction: no menu changes, no staffing fights, one line in the bylaws. But the new revenue is mostly forfeiture from your least-engaged members, and the F&B line on paper stops telling the truth about the dining room.
Every good budget question your finance committee will ask in November had a date by which the answer could still change something. Most of those dates were in August and September — here's how to tell which ones are still alive.
Clubs that sold 30-year refundable deposits in the 1990s are now watching them mature — into refund queues, member lawsuits, and a debt most balance sheets understate. How a board quantifies the obligation, and why a hot waitlist is the right moment to retire it.
Your club's fall balance sheet is the most flattering one of the year — and the one most boards use to approve a renovation. Here's how to strip out other people's money, read the equity trend, and find the deferred capital that never appears on the page.
Initiation fee cash arrives looking like income, but its accounting character — capital contribution, deferred revenue, or refundable liability — decides what a club board can actually do with it. Most boards find out the hard way, in February.
Roughly 70% of clubs subsidize their food and beverage operation, yet most boards still treat the F&B loss as a failure to be fixed. The better move is to set the subsidy as a deliberate member-benefit line item with a target — and to know what the real number is.
