Managing Franchises, One Unit at a Time

Restaurant Scorecards

Restaurant scorecards have long been used to monitor the success or struggles franchise locations may be going through at any given point in time. Similar to a grade school report card, operators can get a glimpse of unit sales, costs, execution, media spending, revenue bands, area demographics, and more.

Now days, there are systems that can take operating data and use that information to compare unit to unit or geographical area to area. It can be a quick and effective way to reward and offer assistance to franchisees.

So why is it important to scorecard each location to it's granular level? Below are 3 examples!

Example #1: Rack and Stack

Lauren Neale from TMac explains how her "rack and stack" is probably the most influential report for her business. "There are a lot of team members our managers thought were their best employee. They are the ones that would always answer the phone and that’s the only thing that could be measured. Managers were surprised to see that these were not the people driving their business. They were not the people that signed up new loyalty customers, or sold the extra appetizer, the dessert. They really didn’t have a high PPA. So those things were kind of shocking to some of our managers. So being able to see that and coach those team members and say "Hey you’re really good at this area but let’s work on this. What kind of coaching can we give you on merchandising or what kind or retraining can we give you on explaining Brewniversity or the beer program, any of those sort of things". It really helped them to see their team in a whole new way."

"Team members that had a really low PPA, they didn’t even really know they had that low of a PPA, so they’ve been able to say, okay, now I know who I can go to. They can even see on the rack and stack, this is the person I need to talk to, this is the person I need to partner with to learn how to do this better. I was actually at an all team member meeting and one of the team members said he was at the bottom of the rack and stack and he’s moved up significantly, and he’s really seen that even in his own pocket because guests tip on what they buy so he’s seen a big improvement in that as well."

Example #2: Rewarding Success & Helping Those In Need

Let's say you manage 100 fast food locations across the Midwest. You'd like to know which location has been the most profitable in the past month. After some investigation, it's no surprise that the busiest location has also been the most profitable.

So you go back to your data and figure out who has been the most profitable with the least amount of customer traffic... Turns out it's a rural location who has implemented a prosperous up-selling campaign. That topped with favorable management, low turn-over, and low theft has made this location one of the best performers.

So you congratulate this unit and you ask the manager if they would be willing to hold a luncheon with neighboring franchisees. The gathering is an effort to teach them new strategies they can use at their locations.

Example #3: Up-selling Cookies

In a recent article, a client of ours, Bennie Arbour- CEO Goldco, gave a great example of how he monitor employees across his units.

"We pay bonuses out on up-selling. With our Account Manager’s help we’ve set up automatic reports to measure promotions, like our cookie sales, and help us manage the business. It’s wonderful because you can actually see a snapshot of your restaurant without having to go through some big spreadsheet. You can see what the average is per day per restaurant. So those reports are extremely important. In February we were averaging 30 cookies a day and today we’re averaging right at 80 to 90 a day in some cases of a dollar cookie per restaurant.

"We can identify successful employees with Mirus when before it was too difficult through Menulink. We can auto-report track it by cashier, we can track it by restaurant, by day and understand how many cookies they’re actually selling. Then on top of that I also put an incentive behind it where the restaurant if they hit their target of index on up-selling cookies and measures from the previous month then they get a bonus, all the way down to the hourly crew member.

These are just 3 simple ways scorecard data helped find money on the table. If you're monitoring multiple locations and can figure out how to leverage your data, you will find so many different ways to save or create cash.

Mirus offers a multi-unit restaurant scorecard solution, they call it Tier. Check out the video below for another example and to see how Tier works.