Your business is now Tuesday to Thursday

Ask anyone who sells lunch to offices how the week goes and you'll get the same answer: midweek is busy, Friday is dead. That used to be a mild seasonal grumble. It's now the single biggest thing shaping demand in this trade, and a lot of lunch businesses are still prepping as though every day were the same.

The numbers are fairly stark. HubStar's Hybrid Occupancy Index, published in February this year and drawn from three years of data, puts average office occupancy on a Tuesday at 58.6%. Monday comes in at 46.4%. Friday is 34.5%. So the building you serve on a Friday has, very roughly, half the people in it that it had on Tuesday - and that pattern has held steady for three years now, which means it isn't a blip you can wait out.

If you make the same amount every morning, Tuesday sells out and Friday goes in the bin. Both of those cost you, and the Friday one costs you more than it looks, because an unsold sandwich isn't a lost 30% margin - it's the bread, the filling, the packaging and the labour, all already paid for and all gone.

Worse, they mask each other. A good Tuesday and a bad Friday average out to a week that looks acceptable on paper, so nothing gets changed.

The first move costs nothing: go back through your own figures and work out your split by weekday rather than by week. Most operators have never done this and are surprised by how wide the gap is. You may find Thursday is closer to Tuesday than you thought, or that Monday is worse than Friday in your particular patch - offices vary, and industrial estates behave differently from town-centre offices, so your numbers beat any national figure including the ones above.

Then prep to the day. That might be a shorter menu on a Friday, or the same menu at lower quantities, or using Friday for the lines that keep.

The other approach is to stop treating Friday as a worse Tuesday and treat it as its own thing. Whoever is in the office on a Friday is a specific crowd - often a smaller, more habitual one - and they're worth having, because there's less competition for them. A Friday-only special, or a deal that only makes sense if a few people order together, can pull a thin day up without discounting the days that are already full.

And if the numbers genuinely don't work, dropping a stop on a Friday is a legitimate business decision rather than an admission of defeat. Two hours not spent driving to an office with four people in it is two hours.

All of the above is forecasting, and forecasting is only necessary because you're being asked to decide what to make before anyone has told you what they want. Pre-orders remove the question. With a cut-off time, Thursday afternoon tells you what Friday looks like, and you make that - not your best estimate of it.

That's the part that surprises people who move to ordering ahead. It isn't just that waste goes down. It's that the shape of the week stops being something you have to predict, and becomes something you can simply read off the screen the night before.