Pro Forma
By now, you’ve taken one of the first major step towards creating your new sports, recreation, events, or wellness center by investing in your feasibility assessment and pro forma. Your pro forma is a highly detailed, 5-year financial forecast of your prospective business. It is key to assessing the feasibility of your future operation, but how else might you use it?
Here are 3 ways to maximize your pro forma investment:
Financial Presentations
Whether you’re a public official working on creating a new hotel/motel bed tax to fund your development, creating a public-private partnership, or you’re a private developer looking for investors, your pro forma should be the cornerstone of your financial presentations. A good financial presentation describes the mission and the story of the project and clearly communicates why the business will be successful in a numerical format. From revenue and expense to staffing and pricing, nothing illustrates the details of the business as well as your pro forma.
Operational Foundation
Perhaps you’ve already obtained project financing and you’re in the pre-opening (construction) phase of development. Don’t file your pro forma away in the archives; there’s a wealth of information that will be critical to your operations team. Your general manager or outsourced management company should use the pro forma as the operational foundation to build budgets, plan the programs, staff the facility, and price the offerings. It’s important to use the pro forma as a guide and realize that changes to the assumptions/data in the pro forma may have a significant impact on your results (for better or for worse).
Goal Setting
Once your facility staff or management company is hired, your pro forma is a great tool for goal setting. Because each revenue stream has specific detail (price, number of users, sessions per year) you have a built-in baseline for performance. Beating forecast means outperforming these numbers in one or more areas. By using the pro forma as a guide, you can be confident you’re setting appropriate goals for your team.
If you’d like to learn more about sourcing a pro forma, how to maximize your existing pro forma, or how to update an aging one, please give us a call (727) 474-3845. We’re here to help.
