Running a profitable restaurant is not only about food and service. For Marcia Davis, co-owner of ESCO Restaurants and Tapas in Marietta, it also comes down to a habit many owners skip: checking the books closely and often
A costly account everyone forgot
Davis said one of the biggest threats to a business is not a slow month or a difficult customer. It is money quietly leaving an account without anyone noticing. She described signing up for a program, then canceling it, expecting the charges to stop.
“For one year, these people were taking out $600 from that account, which added up to almost $8,000 at the end of the year,” she said. “We didn’t even have their service.”
The charge blended in with other recurring payments, which is exactly why it went unnoticed for so long. “It looked exactly like another deduction that was coming out,” Davis said. “So it was assumed to be something else the whole time.”
By the time she and her husband caught it, they had to fight to get the money back.
Why owners should not do their own books
Davis said the fix is not complicated, but it does require stepping back from a task many owners insist on handling themselves. “You are not a bookkeeper,” she said. “That is not your job.”
Her advice is to bring in a second set of eyes, someone whose only role is to review the books on a regular basis and confirm no money is missing or being overspent. She treats it as a standing part of running the business rather than an occasional check.
“We audit our books every couple months,” Davis said, adding that even careful owners can miss something without a set system in place.
She pointed to smaller, more familiar examples too, the kind many people overlook in their own lives. Davis said she once found five separate Netflix charges pulling from the same account. “We’re signing up for new ones, and they’re steadily taking it out,” she said.
Rent, taxes and the real cost of running a restaurant
Auditing is only part of the picture. Davis said rent itself carries hidden weight that customers rarely think about. Many commercial leases are structured as triple net leases, meaning the tenant, not the landlord, covers property taxes and other building fees on top of rent.
“You have to pay the landlord’s taxes and all of that stuff as well,” Davis said. She estimated that arrangement alone can add roughly $2,000 a month to a lease, on top of costs that already run into the tens of thousands depending on location.
That gap, she said, is part of why prices vary so much between cities and suburbs, and why a dish that costs less nearby is not necessarily a sign of being overcharged elsewhere.
Keeping ESCO Marietta on stable ground
Davis said the same discipline that catches missing money also protects the restaurant from bigger financial strain down the line. Missing a single month of rent on a $30,000 lease, she said, can snowball fast once an owner falls behind.
For Davis, the answer is not cutting corners. It is staying close enough to the numbers that nothing slips through unnoticed, whether that is a landlord’s tax bill folded into rent or a subscription charge nobody remembers approving.
It is a lesson, she said, that applies far beyond one restaurant. “That happens to people all the time,” Davis said, pointing to how easily larger sums can disappear once accounts scale up. “You have to make sure that you are making sure that those two companies align up.”
For more on ESCO Marietta, follow along on all platforms under ESCO Marietta. The restaurant sits at 2495 East West Connector in Marietta, right next door to the police training center.
Based on reporting by Rolling Out.
The post Marcia Davis Explains Why Business Owners Shouldn’t Do Their Own Books appeared first on BlackPressUSA.
