Background
Chop Stop is a healthy, fast casual restaurant concept featuring fresh, and locally sourced dining options and snacks, served in a bright, inviting environment across the lunch & dinner dayparts. The menu is elevated, contemporary fare with an emphasis on healthy offerings which include their specialty, chopped salads & wraps, plus rice & bean bowls and soups. Chop Stop also offers a diverse variety of drinks including pressed juices, fountain beverages and specialty teas. Focused on health-conscious consumers, the average menu item is priced at around $10.
Challenge
Joey Gonzalez, VP of Operations found that he was spending too much time manually entering each store’s reports into Excel each day. After reaching five locations, Chop Stop began moving into franchise operations. Not only was keeping up with all of the locations’ financial and operations reports becoming increasingly overwhelming, it was keeping Gonzalez from dedicating much-needed time to the documentation of their processes and procedures, as well as new franchisee training.
Chop Stop Owner & President Mark Kulkis & Gonzalez began looking into a new POS system in hopes that they could find a more robust system with better reporting options. During their search, the name Compeat (now R365) kept coming up in conversations as a business intelligence software that could produce all of their reports for them. They knew that this was precisely what their quickly growing business needed.
Solution
Chop Stop utilizes most of the Compeat’s (now R365) modules including General Ledger Sales, Labor Scheduling, and Intraday Polling Radar modules. They include in their franchise agreements that all franchises use the same modules. “We built our company to be a franchise operation,” states Gonzalez. “Our goal is to make the franchisee’s job as easy as possible. Using Radar ensures that we are all operating in the same way and that we are able to help them be successful.”
Results
Chop Stop’s business model only has one manager running each location. They promote Shift Leaders from within, which left Gonzalez as the one breaking down the P&L’s, analyzing the food cost, figuring out labor opportunities, why sales might be inconsistent, and so on. “Now, with Radar, the Manager & Shift Leaders can easily view reports on their own with the click of a button. We can sit down and talk about what factors may be affecting their profitability, and what opportunities we have to operate a more successful business.”
“It changed my job,” says Gonzalez. “Instead of spending 3-4 hours a day manually entering data to produce an operations report, I can now just look how our restaurants are performing at any time of the day from my computer or my mobile device. This gives us back much needed time to concentrate on getting our other processes together for the franchisees.”
“I talk to several people a month about franchising. Some of these people do not have restaurant backgrounds, but have the desire to be a part of the Chop Stop. I tell them about how Radar can make it so much easier for them to understand the business, and teach them how to run a financially sound, successful restaurant.”
“Instead of spending 3-4 hours a day manually entering data to produce an operations report, I can now just look how our restaurants are performing at any time of the day from my computer or my mobile device. This gives us back much needed time to concentrate on getting our other processes together for the franchisees.”
– Joey Gonzalez, Vice President of Operations
