Flagship Restaurant Group is a full-service and fast-casual restaurant company based in Omaha, NE with locations across the country. Their concepts include: Anthem, Blatt Beer & Table, Blue Sushi Sake Grill, Cham Pang Lanes, Clio, Flagship Commons, Ghost Donkey, Memoir, Palma, Plank, Pyro, Revival House, and Roja Mexican Grill & Margarita Bar. Flagship is committed to delivering creative, adventurous and memorable dining experiences to make dining fun!
I had the opportunity to sit down with Flagship's Director of Restaurant Systems, Devin Jacobson, to talk about how Mirus helps them drive efficiency at the growing brand.
My biggest thing over the last couple of years is driving efficiency in a couple of different areas. We have 23 locations in 13 different states, which means there’s a lot of variabilities when it comes to the labor dollars that we're spending. Labor percentage is just no longer something we can look at when servers are making $15 an hour at one location and $2 an hour at another location.
I've spent a lot of time over the last year really refining how many hours did it take to make x number of widgets. I've created a comparison across all 20 locations based on how many items we are producing and how many hours we are putting towards it. Then you start to notice some correlations between stores that are doing really well. It's really raised the bar on what is possible. We’re seeing some really amazing savings in hours and labor dollars spent while still focused on levels of service.
Did you roll this out to the store level?
Yes, there’s stores that are definitely competitive. You also have stores that understand that they might not be able to compete with a sushi bar staff that has been together for 8 or 10 years and they’ve only been open for a year. But, it does tell them where they can get. It shows the value of employees that can produce at a high level which means more money for people that are performing well. It's opened up a lot of different windows we didn’t know we were going to be able to talk about a year ago.
What were you using before Mirus?
We didn’t have anything. Most reports would come out of our POS which was not useful when you get as many locations as we have. Very, very different being able to have Mirus involved.
Mirus is absolutely critical. It’s actually really, really difficult to pull items sold/hours worked out of Toast. You literally have to do it store by store. You can get a total number of items sold but it would group all the restaurants together.
I have some pretty specific reports where I’m saying here’s how many items sold, by sales category (sushi, food, beer, wine, liquor, sake) and then pulling those data numbers out across 20 locations. Mirus really speeds things up.
What are some of the benefits of Mirus?
Just having access to the data. For example, earlier today, an owner asked for a report showing in descending order what we're selling for the last 2 months of beer, wine, and sake at our newest location. I already have a report that I send to the management team on a weekly basis so the only thing I had to do was change it to 2 months and hit send. He was like that was really quick! A year ago that would have not been very much fun. And now we can get into why is this selling better here, what are the irregularities where items are being sold at and why.
How does Mirus help you as an individual?
Time and the ability to get large sums of data. Being able to have access to data and being able to slice and dice it and with all the measures and dimensions. Once you learn how those core things work you can do anything.
For example, before it would have been a really lengthy project for me to find out how well our Monday night happy hour is doing in a specific revenue center in one restaurant. Now I have a standing report where I can say, here’s what it looks like going back 13 weeks on Mondays. You look at it and you can tell how it's going, and see if you need to do something different.
It just makes it really easy to present numbers in a way that makes decisions easy. You’re not wondering anymore, there it is.
How are you using visualizations?
I am very excited about the color coding and the heatmap options coming up. I’m a big fan of heatmaps when it comes to numbers it really just draws attention to where the opportunities are. You can see where the windows are, the things on the shoulders where we could be a little bit better. That’s where the inefficiencies are. Is it staffing less, that’s important, but also what do you do to drive business at those times?
Have you been to MCON before?
No, first MCON. I try to get out of Omaha at least once a year, I went to OLO last year, it was MCON’s turn this year. I know there’s more for me to learn from Mirus. I need to get around some other people that use it on a daily basis and come see what I don’t know.
What did you find?
The loss prevention reporting is something that is really important to us. It’s something that I’ve wanted but I didn’t know how to execute. Now knowing people that do it, and do it well, makes it a little bit easier because you know what the path is like.
Mirus provides services in data management and solutions in custom reporting for the restaurant industry.
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