Serving Up Data to Get Real-Time Sales Insights

The Good Food Guys is a restaurant group that operates 12 restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles under the Mixt and Split brands. As a brick-and-mortar revenue business, the team at Good Food Guys constantly has to make mission critical decisions that impact their business on a daily basis.

With increasing competition and daily operations at stake, Good Food Guys is leveraging data to learn about their customers and make informed business decisions. Check out their story in this video:

The Problem: Too Much Unused Data from Disparate Sources

As a business that operates multiple locations across California, Good Food Guys relies on a few databases to capture critical business data from their cloud-based Point of Sale, Enterprise Resource Planning, accounting system, a MySQL database and a third party loyalty system.

While all this data may seem like a good way to understand your customer and leverage data, analyzing was more of a cumbersome task rather than providing insights.

“Before Chartio we had to manually pull all of our data into Excel from multiple data sources. While each database has reporting features built-in, we were unable to gather all of the data into one place at utilize it effectively,” said David Silverglide, CEO of Good Food Guys.

Even if the team decided to pull all their data into Excel, there was still a lot of manual slicing and dicing that resulted in a lot of repetitive one-off analysis. Soon after, the team decided to look into a solution that would allow them to monitor their data in real-time, rather than spending hours creating reports that were outdated.

We needed a solution that was simple and easy to use for a large and diverse group of people. We’re not an IT organization and we didn’t want a solution that needed technical expertise to surface data and insights.

— David Silverglide, CEO of Good Food Guys

“We needed a solution that was simple and easy to use for a large and diverse group of people. We’re not an IT organization and we didn’t want a solution that needed technical expertise to surface data and insights,” said David.

The Solution: Increased Capability of Analyzing Data

The Point of Sale (POS) system is a cornerstone for any brick-and-mortar business, and for Good Food Guys the limited reporting capabilities of their POS wasn’t cutting it. One of largest shortcomings from the POS reporting was viewing historic data over time. Good Food Guys was unable to see trending data on a daily basis, which in their industry is critical.

With Chartio, Good Food Guys is able to get accurate comps store sales day-in-and-day-out and know exactly where our performance numbers are.

“One of the big advantages we’ve had with Chartio is providing our general managers with daily reports. Prior to Chartio, they would receive reports on a weekly or monthly basis, and at that point, the data was stale and they’re weren’t able to act on it,” said David.

Additionally, with all their databases connected to Chartio, it has increased the team’s capability of analyzing their business data to surface meaningful insights that impact their business.

I spend a lot of time in Chartio building reports for strategic decision making. I don’t have a background in SQL, but now that Chartio has been set up, I’m able to generate the reports my team and I need.

— Jake Katz, VP of Finance and Operations

“I spend a lot of time in Chartio building reports for strategic decision making. I don’t have a background in SQL, but now that Chartio has been set up, I’m able to generate the reports my team and I need,” said Jake Katz, VP of Finance and Operations.

The Outcome: Ability to Get Trend Analysis

For Good Food Guys, performing sales trend analysis can give the company valuable insight into customer activity and operations. With that, one of the first dashboards Jake built in Chartio was a trend analysis dashboard to look for sales trends and patterns, so he could scope out any potential problems and outliers with the business.

While analyzing the dashboard, Jake noticed that one of their store locations experienced a sharp decline in sales at one acute point in time. Curious, he decided to dig into the data and ask, “what’s going on here?”

By digging into the data and leveraging context, Jake found that the sharp decline in sales was directly related to the 2016 Super Bowl that was hosted in San Francisco. Jake realized that their third party food delivery platform had reduced the delivery radius due to traffic restrictions associated with the event. Second, Jake realized that since the event’s completion, the third party food delivery platform had yet to reset the parameters.

Once this realization occurred and Jake had the data to prove its massive impact on the business, both parties were able to fix the situation and saw their sales increase by 20%.