From cashflow dry up to a thriving business

Welcome to our new 6 week series that will take you on one restaurants journey, from the brink of cashflow dry up to a thriving business in the heart of Canberra.

We introduce you to Gabriele Saccardo; an award winning restaurateur with over 30 years experience.

Each week we will tell you a little more about his restaurant La Scala, and how he has incorporated Bartercard into his business to make it the success it is today.

If you have ever heard of Bartercard and wondered what it is about then this series is for you.

Let's begin...

“Hi, I am Gabriele Saccardo, and I am really looking forward to sharing my story with you.

My brother Enrico and I opened our Italian restaurant La Scala, in 1988 and since then it has become a very popular restaurant in the Canberra region.

About 15 years ago we had a massive cashflow dry up that forced us to find a solution to keep our doors open.

The first thing we did was call my Bartercard Account Manager who arranged a line of credit for us and we started buying goods from right around Australia that we could use in our restaurant. We bought pasta, sundried tomato, sauces, flour, wine, wheat and sugar. We even had to hire a storage space on Bartercard, which we still have to this day just to keep some of the goods.

I remember thinking, “wow, this is the brilliance of this tool” We had managed to purchase everything we needed to keep our restaurant going without using any cash...which was lucky, since we didn’t have any!

From that time on, we have considered Bartercard a safety net. To us it is like insurance for our business. When cashflow is tight we can fall back on our interest free line of credit and we can also promote the restaurant through Bartercard and they will get the people through the door.

Week to week, month to month, you never take your future income for granted. There are always new restaurants opening up so you have to keep re-inventing yourself, whether it’s menus, your service or the feel of your restaurant. Sometimes you aren’t as popular as other times and during winter we often slow right down and these are the months that we really push Bartercard. They keep the patrons coming which keeps up the flow of income.

We promote ourselves heavily through Bartercard and do special wine dinners to encourage people to come early in the week so that it gives us extra income in the days that would normally be really quiet.

Our restaurant is promoted through the Bartercard online directory and Mobile phone app. These tools are fantastic as members just do a location search and they find us! The other promotional method is the email communication. We let the local office know what is happening in our restaurant and tell them of any promotions and they let the members know via the email system. When we do this, we generally book out.

It is the ease of promotion that proves to me over and over that Bartercard is a really powerful marketing tool and how it puts us ahead of my competition.

In these uncertain times when cash is up and down, it is nice to know that you have a back up economy to help. We take business constantly through Bartercard but we can push the accelerator during the quieter times.

Next week I look forward to explaining how we use Bartercard to decrease the cash expenses within our restaurant...this is gold, I hope you will tune in.”

www.bartercard.com.au/restaurant   |   1300 BARTER (1300 227 837)