Hospitality Change Makers: Changing Tech to Expand Your Business

In this in-depth guide, Tommy Giruax gives structured advice and recommendations on how to run a tech audit, pick between vendors, the timeline, how to implement the tech successfully, how to handle change management, deploy training and what to measure to track success after roll-out.

Tommy also reveals how the tech helped Honest Burgers expand into new concepts and markets.

You can either watch the full video in the introduction or jump straight to a relevant chapter by following the table of contents below. 

We’ve also offered a full transcript within each chapter, which we have slightly edited for clarity and readability. 

Enjoy!

Contents:

• Introduction
• Building a better tech stack
• Pain points and frustrations
• Kicking off a tech audit
• Why you should run a tech audit now
• Top tech audit recommendations
• How to pick between vendors
• Length of time for an audit
• Three dealbreakers when picking a vendor
• Dealing with change management
• Recommendations for training and implementation
• Measuring the success of new tech
• How new tech helped Honest Burgers expand

Introduction

My name is Tommy Giraux. I am the Head of Restaurant Systems at Honest Burgers, and I have been with the company for about 11 years.

My role is to make everyone’s life easier. Ultimately.

The great thing about Honest Burgers is that we make everything fresh, homemade, on-premises, or in a prep kitchen in South London. The service is friendly and relaxed. We ask our people to be themselves, and in this day and age, we still offer extremely good value for our customers.

And we try to protect that as much as possible.

Building a better tech stack

We looked at the tech in detail about four or five years ago. We had a few all-in-one platforms that were doing many things for us. But with an all-in-one platform, you start building frustrations over time because you start asking more from it. Because they try to be good at everything, they just give you an average of everything.

When COVID hit, it was the perfect time to remove most of the tech stack. My job was to put it back together and find the best-in-class solution for all parts.

Pain points and frustrations

There were a lot of repetitive tasks from a manager’s point of view.

Data was often duplicated when taken from somewhere and entered into multiple platforms. So, surely there was a way to have a fully integrated tech stack, where the data flowed automatically between all those platforms, to save time for our managers.

Then they could focus on their actual job, not to build reports. But to look after their people and customers, be back on the floor or train and develop their team.

Kicking off a tech audit

When conducting a tech audit, the best place to start is to understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what can be improved.

First, understand where you are. What works? What do we want to keep? What works well for the brand? What doesn’t work? Where are the pain points? What do we wish the platforms could do?

Then, understand the goals you’re trying to achieve.

Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to improve the bottom line? Are you trying to increase the staff’s productivity, or are you trying to reduce your cost of sales? Are you trying to improve the guest experience?

So really understand your goals. From there, it’s just a matter of going to the market and looking up what else is out there and what ticks your boxes.

Why you should run a tech audit now

Conducting a tech audit helps you understand your pain points and limitations, set goals, and identify potential opportunities for optimising your tech stack.

Your goals could include enhancing operations, making life easier for everyone, supporting the team, and automating administrative tasks that don’t provide any return.

It also helps you stay competitive in the constantly evolving industry. If you’re not stepping up your game, others will, and then you’ll be left behind.

Top tech audit recommendations

The first recommendation is to speak to the stakeholders. We’re not talking about head office, investors, or executive teams, but actually speak to the staff.

Ask what currently works with the system, what is wasting their time, and what could be done better.

Speak to other peers in the industry, understand who and what they’re using, and how they use it. Are they happy with it? Ask questions about implementation, especially whether that specific vendor did it correctly. Are there any pain points? Was it difficult to roll out? Was the training difficult? Was there a lot of hand-holding from the vendor?

And the big one is support. Now that the tech has been rolled out, are you happy with the support you’re getting?

It’s easy to see a brand-new platform with many shiny new features, but if it doesn’t solve your problem and meet your specific requirements and non-negotiables, should you even explore it? It’s just a waste of time.

First, stick to your plan, requirements, and non-negotiables, and only if it ticks all those can you start going into the fun stuff.

How to pick between vendors

It starts with a lot of conversations.

I usually start by building a requirement list and speaking to all the departments and restaurants.

The list has technical requirements, existing integrations, and anything related to security. Then, we’d speak to the Marketing Team about anything they need, depending on the platform. Then, the Finance, Operations, HR and People teams, Property, and the restaurants themselves.

Once you start building your entire list, you decide what is non-negotiable and what is a nice to have?

Then, go to the market and have conversations with the platforms, share your requirement list, and go through the first round of demos. Then, once you’ve narrowed it down to two or three platforms, start involving the heads of departments and a few people from the restaurants and start getting their feedback.

I try to narrow down the platforms as much as possible because there is a lot of time involved for the heads of departments. Over the years, I’ve learned how to collect feedback properly. It used to be a free-for-all. But now, I’m very structured, and I have a questionnaire I share with ratings. I get all the results together and see what platform got the highest in each department and the overall score.

This makes pitching it to the board, negotiating contracts, and getting the whole thing signed off easier.

Length of time for an audit

It’s usually a good two to three-month process because it takes time to go through the first round of demos.

It also takes time to narrow down the features to ensure a common understanding of what is needed, discuss future development and roadmaps, and then involve the stakeholders.

This is usually the most difficult part because everyone has their own diary, and you have to try and find a time that works for everyone. Then, the whole commercial side of things also takes time.

Three dealbreakers when picking a vendor

The first is an open and high quality API that we can access in real time.

Support and quality of support. So, have conversations with existing customers to understand whether they’re happy with the support and whether they are getting the help they need.

And ultimately, collaboration around the roadmap and direction. So get a platform or a vendor who is interested in hearing customer feedback to direct their trajectory in terms of where they should be heading and what they should be developing instead of just thinking they know better.

Dealing with change management

Change management is by far the hardest part. It’s very easy to say, ‘yeah, we’re going to bring in a new platform, and this process might take two to three months, and then you sign a contract’. But this is not where it ends. It’s actually where the real work starts.

So once you sign that contract and start running the implementation, it’s about prepping the teams to understand what’s coming and not just telling them what’s coming.

It’s telling them this is the new brand we have. This is what this platform will do for us. And this is all the stuff that we can’t do right now but this will enable us to do. And how it could be a whole new avenue for the business as well. This was the case for Vita Mojo, who helped us to open our first QSR side of the business, which is now about to grow quite expansively.

Explain to the teams why we’re doing it and why they would benefit from it. Get them involved throughout the whole process. It’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere. You already had a few managers involved in the selection process.

So they become your champions where they will be like, “Yeah, I’ve seen the platform. That one was the best, and this is why it was the best.” They become your marketing team to spread the good word about the new platform.

Recommendations for training and implementation

Training is key to the implementation’s success. If you don’t train your teams properly, they will likely not use the system properly, and the rollout will fail.

Or, in a year, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that system doesn’t work,’ when, in most cases, the system does. They just haven’t been trained properly.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the best way to deliver training is to adapt it to as many learning styles as possible. So, it’s not a matter of just conducting an online session, where everyone joins, gets bored, and listens for two hours to you talk over your screen. That doesn’t work anymore.

I’ve been doing in-person training. So I bring people into a room, a small group of 15 or 20. We go slowly through different features, and people can raise their hands and ask questions.

I’ve also been doing snippets, so generally, this is a 30-second video that you can refer to after you’ve completed the main training.

So, if you forgot to know how to do a discount or how to do a void, this is a 30-second video that just shows you how to do a specific action.

For those who don’t want to watch videos or can’t watch videos because they’re sometimes on the floor, I also offer step-by-step guides in the same spirit. These guides are 30-second reads that show you how to do one thing.

I do short videos, step-by-step guides, longer videos, group training sessions and on-demand, I conduct one-to-ones when needed. Because everyone learns differently.

Measuring the success of new tech

We launched our first QSR location just before Christmas, and we are currently looking at transactions per hour, transactions per 60-minute increments.

And a very important one: we look at fulfilment time. The great thing with Vita Mojo is that we managed to build our own dashboard that shows the managers in the kitchen and on the floor the average duration between the moment someone pays on the kiosk and the time they get the food in their hands. We are under five minutes every single day, which is brilliant. We can see live data extracted from Vita Mojo and the KDS in a kitchen showing exactly ‘4 minutes and 10 seconds’.

You can also see the average transaction value, the number of transactions you’ve made, and the number of orders you have.

We also track the timings for each process step in the kitchen. The grill, the fryer, the chicken section. We then track how long it takes to put the order together. How long does it take for the order to make it upstairs and be given to the customers. And then we work in silo on how to improve each one of them, to be even more lean and efficient.

How new tech helped Honest Burgers expand

It helped us in a few ways. First, thanks to Vita Mojo, we launched our brand new QSR, Smash + Grab, which is a whole new avenue of revenue for us. We can have it in areas where we usually wouldn’t go, like high footfall areas or travel hubs, where a classic concept might not work, but a grab-and-go concept would work at a lower price and faster delivery.

But also, we’ve been using your ‘order and pay at table’ in a cheeky way where we use it to deliver food to local pubs in probably 10 or 12 of our locations. This has increased sales, and we’ve managed to expand the restaurant and get more customers.

Then, on the map, we have ‘pay at table’ that will help us turn tables faster in locations with queues and where people don’t have time. So once again, more covers during the same time and not wasting 5-10 minutes waiting for your bill.

And then loyalty. Loyalty is something that we’ve yet to launch in almost 14 years of Honest Burgers, and we look forward to starting to build rewards for customers who have been loyal to us and keep coming back. This will incentivise them to come more often and get more goodies on the house, so we’re excited about that.