From June 2007

By Janet Groeber

To paraphrase Rhonda Byrne, best-selling author of “The Secret”: It has been passed through the ages [and] highly coveted.

Beat Yesterday, a book that many retailers still hold dear for its power to deliver, was first published in 1888 by Walter Jessurun. The Manhattan-based entrepreneur conceived a number of sales tools for retailers, and Beat Yesterday was used by F.W. Woolworth, Ben Franklin stores and JCPenney. A then-budding entrepreneur named Sam Walton took Beat Yesterday with him when he founded Wal-Mart.

Beat Yesterday has not changed in size or format in 119 years. Today, Brian Jessurun is the third-generation purveyor of this simple record-keeping ledger, which continues to be used in addition to – or even in lieu of – more sophisticated IT software and accounting programs.

Sales staff, department heads and business owners record daily sales and expenses for the purpose of predicting sales or comparing year-to-date numbers. It also provides a way to track sales from previous days, weeks, months and years to help predict a business’s future financials.

In addition to his role as keeper of the Beat Yesterday flame, Brian Jessurun is a retailer in his own right. Along with brother Barry, he runs the Vanilla Bean Café in Pomfret, Conn.

Q: Do you use Beat Yesterday in your own businesses?
Well, of course we use it.

Q: How does it work?
Here’s how we use it. Today is Monday, and we’re getting ready to place an order Wednesday with our major food supplier. What we do is look back at [sales] last week and the year before to develop a budget that helps us determine how much we can spend on food this week.

Come Thursday, we look at the weather forecast because the weekend is really important to traffic. If the weather is going to be really good, we’ll up the order for a Friday delivery, or we’ll back off if the weather is going to be bad.

Beat Yesterday offers a quick snapshot that can help retailers stick to their budgets and manage their numbers by providing a benchmark. If we can save 1 percent on food and labor over the course of the year, that’s money in the pocket. Beat Yesterday can be an extremely valuable tool for not much money.

Q: What is the cost?
One of the reasons Beat Yesterday has survived is that it’s an item that lasts for six years and it costs $25, so no one is going to touch that. No one will copy it, though a lot of people have said, “I can make one of those,” but it’s more complicated than it appears because you’re comparing day-to-day, not date-to-date.

Over the years companies have tried to buy us to put us into their product line, but they’re really buying our customer base at the same time. That’s held Beat Yesterday from growing to a degree, but also has protected it.

We changed our business model, so now we’re almost entirely direct sellers to the end user at full retail. The volume has shrunk, but margins have grown.

Q: But hasn’t new technology allowed retailers to run reports easily and share them with responsible parties?
Most big stores are monstrous conglomerates. But if you break it down, retailing is a series of small businesses where you have a clerk selling a bit of product. When the regional manager comes around, he wants to see very specific things such as “How are your sales and what are your exceptions like?”

I think a lot of [managers] don’t need complicated IT and it gets in the way many times. Beat Yesterday is also a motivational device that supports the adage, “To manage it, you have to measure it.”

Almost all of the salespeople selling cosmetics in department stores such as Saks and Neiman Marcus use Beat Yesterday because it’s easy to use, with all the information in one place.

Q: But you do offer a computer version, right?
We developed software based on our need as restaurant operators because there was nothing out there that gave us the ability to graph percentage increases, for example. We are partnering with Micros on a regional level to offer our software to their customers.