Moneyball for Restaurants. It ’s Here. On Your Tablets and iPads. – Part I

Ever wish there were a Moneyball approach  to managing multi-location restaurants?

It would be a business model where we would field dozens of scouts ” who could fan out across multiple locations, logging in data, observing and recording in-game activity, ” and making note of even the smallest thing … like the fact that the day the dumpster was overflowing, the location sold 23 fewer desserts.

Or that when the men s room was dirty, the bar take was down 29%.

Or that at Saturday lunch (when the young wait staff looked as though theyd come directly from an afterhours party) you got only two table turns and not three.

Just like in Moneyball, an overlord ” manager would sit at a computer and view a dashboard of data, some of it raw, and some of it synthesized, based on algorithms. Hed make decisions based not on guesses. Not on theories. But on facts, gathered in real time in the field.  It would be a Big Data solution for multi-location restaurants.

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 Impossible to put in place, right?  Too expensive!

Heck, you ’d need to field a team of scouts out there walking the floors of your locations.

(Wait, don ’t we have that now? Aren t our managers walking the floors and building grounds already?)

And they ’d all have to be carrying tablets or iPads.

(Wait, everyone ’s got tablets or iPads now. If not, the costs are minimal.)

And the data would have to feed a system that analyzed it.

(That exists today as well, and plus, these days, customizing analysis of data streams is not cost prohibitive, especially given the amazing ROI thats achievable.)

So, with the workforce in place 

And the technology in place 

The only thing missing is a protocol, a process, a workflow that would prompt the workforce to start collecting data.

The question is: Which data? What things should our Moneyball scouts  be looking at?

That ’s where SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocols come into play.

With the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol, you can leverage your workforce to collect data, which will let you draw correlations between operations, sales, and costs. That will help you determine your shortest path to optimized profits.

Old Pilots Don’t Crash. Old Restaurants Managers Do. Ever see an old pilot skip a pre-flight checklist? Nope. That ’s why so few planes crash. Ever see an old restaurant manager (over confident that he knows it all) crash a restaurant? Yup. Happens all the time. That’s why we have to bring the rigor of the preflight inspection to the management of restaurants.

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Tommy Yionoulis

I've been in the restaurant industry for most of my adult life. I have a BSBA from University of Denver Hotel Restaurant school and an MBA from the same. When I wasn't working in restaurants I was either doing stand-up comedy, for 10 years, or large enterprise software consulting. I'm currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica and our Inspector platform was originally conceived when I worked for one of the largest sandwich franchisors in the country. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn.

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  1. […] part two of the Moneyball blog. Part one was posted on Monday, click here to read part one if you haven’t […]

  2. […] part three, the final installment, of the Moneyball article. Part one was posted on Monday, click here to read. Part two was posted on Wednesday, click here to […]

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