August 20, 2019
How can we say objectively why any given restaurant in our system is performing the way it is? It’s easy to say we “feel” a certain way about the environment of a restaurant and why it may be over or under performing, but it is hard to provide assistance or guidance to solve a “feeling” without information to back it up. Not to mention feelings are not always right. Our solution was a big one: create a scorecard to rank our restaurants. At first glance, this seems a little detached and impersonal, but what it has done is remove any personal bias on the part of us or the franchisee and provided independent, candid feedback on actual performance. The scorecard is based on the following inputs:
- Comp transactions
- Profitability based on a current P&L
- Average online review score in the previous 90 days pulled through our social and digital partner MomentFeed
- Guest relations complaints per 10,000 transactions
- Goodcents University completion percentage
- Ace Mystery Shopping score average in the previous 90 days
- Most recent EcoSure 200-point audit score
These inputs speak to three specific aspects of the business: profitability, guest experience and operations efficiency. Each input is appropriately weighted and feeds into a final score that highlights the greatest areas of opportunity for every individual restaurant, ranking them in order from least to greatest number of opportunities. What this unbiased information from mostly external sources has allowed us to do is cut through slack and implement a more specified plan of attack for each location.
If your only solution is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The scorecard has created new opportunities for us to expand our toolbelt as a franchisor and support solutions to the solve the varied opportunities problems from location to location with focused, intentional activity. We can praise operationally sound crew members, managers and franchisees and focus more heavily on generating new traffic to their business. We can provide targeted training for crews who may have had difficulty making time to engage in our training procedures, preparing them to make lifelong customers out of each new guest.
Another benefit of using the scorecard is we can actively track improvement and decline. It’s a wonderful feeling being able to share in the excitement our partners feel when they work diligently to improve their scores. While it is not as fun to talk through a regression, those are the conversations that must take place to progress, and with the scorecard there is a clear direction for that progression. Focused feedback and intentional support have been our bread and butter this year. With positive year-to-date comp sales and improved year-to-date comp labor, we are excited to see continued growth and better even performance in the future.