Twin Peaks is a sports bar with a lodge-like feel. Each of the 90 plus locations is covered in wall-to-wall TVs so you can catch every game, match or fight. They serve 29º draft beer in frosted mugs and scratch-made food. But the real reason many people visit Twin Peaks- is the Twin Peaks Girls (TPGs).
I had the opportunity to chat with Twin Peaks Senior Manager of Operations Analysis, Lizzy Wright, to talk about how Mirus helps them increase sales through promo and event tracking.
How do you use Mirus?
How do we not use Mirus at Twin Peaks?
I've created multiple push reports for all our short-run promos or LTOs. It's helped us be able to keep an eye on how well those promos are running for the first day. If we're not getting enough buy-in to a promo from the customers, we'll send a note to our operators to remind them of the promo.
Keeping an eye on these LTO programs has helped us build our sales and our Per Person Average (PPA).
How do you measure traffic?
We pull the cover count from Marketing Vitals into Mirus. It's very helpful for us to see our traffic influx into the restaurants. With Covid, we saw our traffic decline, as everyone did. But we saw our PPA averages go up due to price increases.
We use our traffic counts to see if we are over 2019 to see if we are actually growing the business or if it's just inflated due to price increases.
Is reporting for Sports Bars different?
For our specific genre of sports bar, we have guests mainly come in to see our TPGs- our servers & bartenders. It's not necessarily driven from a food or beverage standpoint but people stay because of the food and the drinks.
Mirus has been able to show us which servers and bartenders have a very unique following and what those items might be that we can help push and promote to increase sales as well.
Do you do server contests?
We do actually do server contests. We recently did a dessert food test for a mini-change coming down the line. We used those specific test stores and broke it down in Mirus so we could see each employee by shift, by day, and see how much they sold. We did it on a percent basis because someone working a lunch shift isn't going to sell as many on a dinner shift.
Any other ways you're using Mirus?
We use Mirus to track some of our events like a UFC night to see how we can prepare for the next one that comes through. It helps us with some of our forecasting.
We pull down previous event days and look at a six-week trend, or if it's UFC and it's only once a month we'll pull down a six-month trend and see the averages. Then we can say, okay guys, you'll roughly do $35,000 today so let's make sure that we're prepared. We look at our PMIX on those days and see what items we might want to prepare heavily on versus cut back on others.
Does that differ based on the event?
Wings are the king among all menu items for us. So, wings are never going to fluctuate or go down. But it does help us prepare like queso versus people wanting cheese bites. UFC people want something they can eat while they are very into the fight because it can end in seconds. Whereas with the football game you can look down and eat some chips and queso, you can meander around the menu and the table.
Tell me about the systems you have integrated into Mirus
The first one we did is Aloha because there is so much information in there that you can get and use out of it. We are in the process of integrating our back-of-the-house inventory program which is Decision Logic. That one includes our payroll processing platform, our employee files, inventory, -and all sorts of crazy amounts of details. But it's not an easy platform to utilize. In Mirus, we can slice and dice the data and pull it out so much easier and quicker which is better for our operators to act on.
Was Mirus hard to learn?
Honestly, it wasn't very hard because pivot tables are very easy to me. As soon as I saw the platform, I was like this is beyond easy, I can do this.
What is your reporting style?
I personally start from scratch because I like to make it my own. The way I cut my data and look at it is different from other financial analysts because I have been in operations for so long. The way I want to see it is the way our operators prefer to see it as well. I try to keep that spin on there for them and make it easy for them to make a decision.
This is your 1st MCON, what did you think?
There's been so many different things that I have running through my head right now. I'm really excited. I have a laundry list of things for you guys to help us integrate now.
About Mirus:
Mirus provides services in data management and solutions in custom reporting for the restaurant industry.
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