HINTS & TIPS

Keeping your head above water: a practical guide to saving money at a zoo or aquarium

Keeping your head above water: a practical guide to saving money at a zoo or aquarium
In: HINTS & TIPS

Much like an old school photo or a faded landscape hanging in your hallway, it's usually the things we see every day that go unnoticed. The same can be said of budget control and value engineering – the obvious is often overlooked.

In my last article, I outlined the concept of operational efficiency – this is the idea of optimising your zoo or aquarium to the point of achieving maximum efficiency, by minimising waste.

But that’s just the theory, what can you actually do to shake up your attraction and save money? Well, this article is intended to answer exactly that. I’ve developed the following process using my own experiences, but I’ve also drawn inspiration from change management philosophies used in other industries, too. If you want to delve deeper, and you haven’t come across the terms "six sigma" or "Socratic reasoning" before, jump on Google and have a dig around; these two ideas revolutionised the automotive and aeronautics industries back in the 80s and 90s.

So here it is: what follows is a four-step guide to help you identify and remove operational waste. Follow it properly, and you’ll save piles of cash. You’re welcome.

Anyway, on with the show.

1. Interrogate the P&L

We’ll start by finding out where your money is spent. Grab your balance sheet, and look for lines within the zoological budget with the highest expenditure. Similar items are usually grouped together, so although utilities might appear as a single line item, try to break it down as far as you can, i.e. split utilities into gas, electricity, and water. By doing this for each budget heading, we’re finding out exactly where our money goes.

Once you’ve done this, keep reading! I know there’s a temptation to see an expensive budget line, cut a bit off, and call it a night, but there is a much better way. Although simply reducing a budget will undoubtedly save money, it isn’t the smart thing to do. To illustrate my point, let’s say you’re aiming to make an annual saving of £2,000. When you start breaking down your budget, you notice a £20,000 “miscellaneous” line and think about reducing it to £18,000. Although this looks like a quick win on the surface, consider that it represents a 10% reduction in expenditure – this line could contain essentials that aren’t captured elsewhere, like animal toys, feeding tools, replacement parts, or other critical consumables. Blindly and arbitrarily reducing a budget in this way will absolutely have an impact on the operations it supports. The real skill lies in the ability to identify and reduce wastage, which will optimise your operation and bypass the need for fiscal amputations.

So by looking at a more expensive pot of say £200,000, you would only need to find a 1% reduction, through operational efficiencies, to create the same £2,000 saving from the example above. Reducing a budget by 1% is much more straightforward, and much less likely to create future problems, than reducing it by 20%. Believe me. I’ve seen these kinds of cuts, and I’ve worked under them – one way or another, it never ends well. Especially when it comes to animals.

So grab the P&L, mark up 3-5 lines within the zoological budget that cost you the most, and move to the next step.

2. Explore the facts

Once we know where our money is going, it’s time to measure. I chose the title of this step with good reason; it really does have to be an exploration – there’s no need to don your Indiana Jones hat, but you will have to go beyond your desk, and quite possibly your comfort zone, to get it right. So grab a notebook, walk around the attraction, and talk to the people directly involved with whatever it is you’re investigating – and to be clear, this means talking to the front-line husbandry team, not the curators or supervisors.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll pretend we’re at an imaginary public aquarium, let’s call it “Lazy Joe's Whaley Good Aquarium”, and we want to focus our money-saving magic on the food budget. Rather than making assumptions on what happens, or referring to the laminated procedure stuck to the wall, we need to get our information straight from the seahorse’s mouth (just tell me if the puns are getting too much!). Find one of the keepers or aquarists and speak to them about how they prepare food and feed the animals. Better yet, shadow them for a few hours and watch! Ask them the obvious questions. Write down what they say. Then ask them the really obvious questions. Write those answers down, too. We’re not here to show off how much we know, we’re here to find facts.

While we’re doing this, we’ll gain a much deeper understanding of our operation. We’ll even start to notice inconsistencies. While asking all these obvious questions, we might learn that the sharks at Lazy Joe's Whaley Good Aquarium eat around 3kg of fish each week. We already know there are ten sharks in the exhibit, so we scribble down “sharks - 30kg/week” in our notebook.

But what if the actual weekly order is four 10kg boxes of fish, for a total of 40kg each week? We’d know this because we’ve just been looking at the budget. These inconsistencies are exactly what we’re looking for, and this is how we’re going to save money.

If we probe it further with the team, the conversation might go something like this:

Manager: We’re ordering quite a lot of fish for the sharks, about 25% more than we need. Any ideas why?

Aquarist #1: The sharks often drop a few of the fish, and it either gets scavenged by other animals or collected afterwards and discarded.

Aquarist #2: Yeah, and we usually get one or two fish in a box that aren’t good enough quality, so we have to throw those away.

Manager: Wow, I didn’t know that. Anything else?

Aquarist #3: One of our freezers has a loose door! It sometimes swings open in the night and a box of food gets ruined... we hate that fridge.

Alright, this probably isn't how the conversation would go... but it's having the conversation which is important. What we’re doing here is to try and understand the messy reality behind those organised balance sheets.

We now know that 25% of our weekly fish order, or 10kg of it, isn’t even getting to the animals. If we get our nerd on: the weekly order of 40kg costs £100 (at £2.50/kg), so that 25% wastage is equivalent to £25 per week. That’s £1,300 per year. You can get a flight to the Maldives for that! In other words, we can spend £1,300 less on our food budget, and all we have to do is reduce our waste. Even if we only reduced it to 5%, we would still save £20 per week, or £1,040 per year! Crazy.

So the lesson for step two? Understand what actually happens, not what you think happens. If you do, I guarantee you’ll be surprised. Once you know what’s really happening, and how much money is on the table, you can start making the small changes to save big cash!

We’ll do this in step three.

3. Create the saving

If the previous step was about understanding what proportion of our expenditure is wasted, then this section is about creating changes to remove that waste.

Let’s continue with the example from above, and resolve the main causes of food waste at Lazy Joe’s:

Some fish is dropped by the sharks (estimate: 5kg/week): Any animal keeper or aquarist reading along will know the frustration of this one; no matter how hard you try, sometimes an animal will drop, spit out, or otherwise turn their nose up at food. It just happens. Our job as animal professionals is to find new and better ways to reduce these instances. Trial an alternative method, feed in a different location or with a different tool, try a smaller or larger feed fish, and the list goes on. Figure out a way to achieve a better success rate, and the associated wastage will quickly evaporate.

Some fish is discarded for quality reasons (estimate: 2-3kg/week): This one is easy: if you bought a fish from the supermarket and it wasn’t up to standard, you’d complain. Treat this the same, and call your supplier! If you weren’t aware of these quality problems, it stands to reason that the supplier doesn’t know either. Let them know about the problem, and see if you can work out a solution. If they can’t resolve the quality issue for whatever reason, they can at least ensure that you’re receiving discounts or credit to offset the loss.

Freezer door is faulty (estimated: 10kg/month, i.e. roughly 2.5kg/week): I’m going to state the obvious... fix the bloody freezer! It could be a few loose screws, or a call to a local engineer, but you’ll see a return on the investment almost immediately.

It’s worth saying, though, that all of these issues are less about supplier problems or a faulty freezer door, and more about culture. Why hasn’t this been brought up sooner? Are the implications not fully understood, or does your team think it would fall on deaf ears? Use issues like these as an example to show your people that you want to know when things aren’t right so that you can fix them! Have you ever heard that saying, "Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves"? These small losses might seem negligible at the time but they add up very, very quickly. Create a culture of autonomy and ownership, and embrace new ideas and suggestions to fix the "little things" – it will pay dividends over the long term.

So if we follow these ideas through, and remove the associated waste, we’ll have saved ourselves £1,300... all by calling a few suppliers and fixing a freezer door. Bonkers, really.

(Sidebar: for anyone reading this and thinking these examples are made up or radically over-simplified: they are, I promise you, real-world problems and real-world solutions. Yes, it really can be as simple as fixing a freezer door!)

Okay, we’re nearly there. You’re almost ready to kick back with a beer and admire the results!

Move to the final step.

4. Refine, improve, sustain

Now that you’ve implemented some small changes, you need to check you’re getting the results you expected. In other words, are we seeing the £1,300 saving we projected in step three?

You can check this for your own situation in any number of ways, but my advice is to keep things simple: if you introduced changes to reduce your water usage, you could monitor meter readings to look for a drop in consumption; if you adjusted the thermostats of a large water system to save energy, you could compare utility bills to see if your charges are lower.

It doesn’t matter how you check, just do whatever you think is most straightforward and most logical to check in on the changes you’ve made.

Keep it up... The success of a project like this lives and dies by sustained changes. There is no point in making all this effort if it doesn’t work. In other words, if you’re now saving £400 per year by reducing electricity usage, you need a way of ensuring it continues into the future – your savings will vanish if the front-line team drift back to the old way of doing things, and you’ll have wasted a whole lot of time for nothing. The answer? Implement a system or process that secures the changes. In the example of saving power by reducing your thermostat setting, something as simple as a laminated sign on the thermostat with the new temperature would probably suffice.

Going further... If you’ve come this far, you’re doing great! The last question to ask yourself is “what can I refine or improve to boost the savings even more?” If you’ve reduced your food waste from 10% to 5%, can you push it to 3%? If you’ve saved £1000 on your electricity bill by adjusting thermostats and tweaking the duration of lighting, what else can you do to reduce electricity consumption?

And finally... While you might not gain a new or immediate advantage from reading this article, it is far more important that you gain a new perspective. Take these ideas, absorb them, and try to view each new situation or cost-saving goal with a more critical, and a more informed, eye.

In the next article, I’ll describe five ideas you can implement immediately to save money, using real-world examples from my own work.

ℹ️
First posted on LinkedIn, 27 July 2020
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