Manager J

In order to be able to eat almost everything you want and not become a giant deposit of fat, needing to buy two tickets every time you’re flying, you need to do some kind of exercise. Running Half to Ultra marathons might have the side effect of turning you into a funny skinny Mo Farah (teaching in Australia). So, I turned into gym training and the worst thing is going to the gym and it is full of people, having to wait to do your stuff. The limitation of gyms is the space available. So, in order to get most amount of revenues, they have to allocate their customers to all the hours they are open. Gym owners came up with the following product-mix solution: Segment the hours customers can go to the gym, they offer off peak, ultra off peak and unlimited packages, as well as classes only memberships. This way they can charge more for the most demanded times of the day and get something more for the rest of the day, while keeping the gym with a steady number of cu...

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to some Rap music and its lyrics remind me of 2 key business in our society: Prostitution and drug trafficking. Forgetting the drugs, I'm going to focus on what our bro 50 Cent teaches us about the PIMP business. We can see him driving around in a Rolls Royce, so business must be going well. Breakeven point must be well behind at this point, but let's discuss what he needs for his business to be profitable: He must look rich (nice car, jewelry…) he must have some kind space for the “magic to happen” as well as “warehousing” for the service providers to rest between their shifts. This means Mr. Fifty has a lot of fixed cost to get his business running and in order of offsetting these costs, assuming a worker can only service a specific number of customers per day, he needs to have several workers working for him. When this minimum number is passed, he will have a positive operating income, and the more workers he has, the ...

Friday night was soccer night! Despite being a FC Porto fan, I really like VSC and they were playing against SL Benfica. Result was not the best, but it was a great experience. Soccer is a very big business, but understanding the money flows is not easy, there are a lot of income streams, from tickets to sponsorships and a lot of costs, from the players' wages to the stewards watching out the game. The interesting thing is that the fans are very well segmented in the stadium by location.  Starting from the less profitable, the "lead" customers, these are the ones that just go if the games are very cheap or can get a voucher for a fraction of the price, this fans don't provide almost any profits to the club, they only get the stadium full. Then, the Iron customers, the ones that are behind the goals, these are the cheapest tickets, but most of these customers are loyal and give a steady source of revenues. The gold customers buy tickets where it's ...

Nowadays, the downtown of Porto is prety busy, so in onder to get a parking place, you need to pay for parking. What a business, where you can rent out 6 square meters by quarters of the hour. The way the money enters this business is easy, but how can we allocate the the fixed costs of labour to the parking rented? If we take in consideration the revenue produced to allocate the labour, the short timed parking will get smaller piece of the costs, while montly parking spaces get almost all of the costs. For instance, with we take into account that the process of checking in and out is about the same for every parking space, the cost should be inputed by the number of parking spaces rented each period. This way the cost is allocated by the number os processes that the staff has to take care of. This seems fine for either the shor timed parking, who require lots of checking in and out, as well as for the monthly renters who require almost no time spent given that they paid b...

Tuesday night, after a long day at PBS, my parents visited me and we went for a dinner. As usual, nobody knows where to go, so I decided to search good restaurants nearby. As I had found one, we went there. Not a fine looking restaurant but it was packed, both for take away and for seated dinner. It seemed to be focused grilled food, so just told the guy: "give us the specialty!" There it was, lots of pork, beef and tradicional portuguese "alheira". I started recalling what we had learned in MAC earlier. All these kinds of meat were direct costs for each meal, as well as the rice and the potatos, even if they don't mesure how much they get put on each plate, it wouldn't be very hard.  There are two kinds of staff there, the waiters and the cooks, they are both fixed costs but we can assume that the waiters are indirect costs and the cooks are direct, as they are the ones o prepares the meals and their time can be allocated to each meal prepared. ...