Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group serves all-day brunch with the unique flavors of New Orleans and an array of eye-opening cocktails. The original founders opened the first restaurant in hopes of drawing people back to New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. They've since expanded to 25 locations across the southern United States.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Ruby Slipper Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis, Dominic Lloyd, to talk about how Mirus helps him increase efficiencies and catch issues in real-time.
Tell me about how your use of Mirus has grown over the years
Initially when I first came to MCON in 2019, I did not know anything about Mirus. It was my first assignment with Ruby Slipper. We started with just our integration of Toast, very simple data- sales & labor. But that’s really expanded over the years. We’ve integrated our invoicing system, our inventory system, and our scheduling system. It’s really given us a lot of insight into ideal labor and labor forecasting. It's given us some really easy tools to dial up declining budgets and help keep operators on track to spend a certain percentage of their net sales.
Tell me about your most recent integration.
When I started with Ruby Slipper we didn’t have an inventory system. That was something we implemented in the past couple of years. As soon as we had our implementation finished we brought it over to Mirus so we could stack that data on top of our labor data, our sales data, and our invoice data.
Most Back Office Systems have reporting. Why bring that data into Mirus?
A lot of Back Office Systems have very clunky reporting that looks visually good for an operator or somebody who is just pulling up a PDF on their phone or computer. But, if you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of the data they can be a little more difficult to work with. Also just the ability to have a one stop shop for everything.
How does having the data in one place help?
It’s almost muscle memory now, somebody requests a report or analytics and my arm just naturally moves to my Mirus bookmark. It’s really efficient for me, I'm not dealing with disparate systems. I know I have similar location names and that the location names are already mapped for me, I don’t have to re-map in between two systems. I know I can interchangeably work with other integrations like our invoice software is integrated into our inventory software and then I can just pull both of those together inside of Mirus and stack whatever other additional information on top of that.
Tell me about your presentation on food cost
My presentation was about how you can look at the changes in food cost between two periods or if you’re a multi-unit operator two similar volume units. I covered how to identify efficiencies in waste, or where you might be losing cost due to mix, or where pricing might be different due to different regions, different availability from your food provider.
We’ve gotten a really good handle on how to keep our food costs down. Especially in the past couple of years, we’ve been affected by inflation and the avian flu. We’ve gotten some good real time data and real time reporting to help identify where our issues are.
How is real time data beneficial?
One of the big ways is it suggests operational changes. We do a very high liquor percentage mix. One of the things we identified is that we get to upsell more at the start and that could be a driver not only to top line but also to help bring our cost of food down just because those alcoholic drinks are so much cheaper food cost. So that gave us the insight that we need to make these changes. We need change how we think about our operations. It’s not just something we need to do on the back end in purchasing, it’s something we need to get out ahead of and really get into the restaurants and enact something new.
You also shared how you've automated reports
I shared a lot of good tips for auto push reports you can send out, which is one of my favorite features. We have probably six or seven different reports we’ve duplicated for every location. We filter down to the location and we set up an alert schedule so that right after they finish their inventory, that check to make sure everything was picked up or everything was appropriately counted immediately goes to the location and we can catch things in real time before the opening of business the next day.
This is your 3rd MCON, why come back?
You’ve got some of the best and brightest here, some really big names in the restaurant industry and it’s a great place to exchange ideas. The sky is really the limit with what you can think about in terms of efficiencies and reporting out of Mirus.
It’s a great value add to our business to be able to come here and identify new things that we may be able to implement. Whether it’s Adrian’s presentation about the labor grid and labor reporting against itself instead of taking it out of the absolute. I messaged my boss and said we’ll probably start building out something like this as soon as I get back. It’s a great place to really get good ideas about what else you could be doing that maybe you haven’t implemented yet.
How would you describe MCON?
It’s got everything. When I first started I learned a lot. Being brand new to Mirus I learned how to set up my systems, how to think about how I want to do certain integrations. I feel like I’ve grown a good base under my feet about how to use the platform. And now we can really get into the weeds on some of the creative uses of the software.
It’s great, you get to meet people from all over the country who do the same thing you do with maybe a just little different twist to their title. Swap experiences, swap ideas, swap reporting. You can walk away with some really, really good additions to your company.
About Mirus:
Mirus provides services in data management and solutions in custom reporting for the restaurant industry.
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