Ever wish there were a "Moneyball approach " to managing multi-location restaurants?

It would be a business model where we would field dozens of "scouts " who could fan out across multiple locations, logging in data, observing and recording "in-game activity, " and making note of even the smallest thing ... like the fact that the day the dumpster was overflowing, the location sold 23 fewer desserts.

Or that when the men 's room was dirty, the bar take was down 29%.

Or that at Saturday lunch (when the young wait staff looked as though they'd come directly from an afterhours party) you got only two table turns and not three.

Just like in Moneyball, an "overlord " manager would sit at a computer and view a dashboard of data, some of it raw, and some of it synthesized, based on algorithms. He'd make decisions based not on guesses. Not on theories. But on facts, gathered in real time in the field. It would be a Big Data solution for multi-location restaurants.

Impossible to put in place, right? Too expensive!

Heck, you 'd need to field a team of scouts out there walking the floors of your locations.

(Wait, don 't we have that now? Aren 't our managers walking the floors and building grounds already?)

And they 'd all have to be carrying tablets or iPads.

(Wait, everyone 's got tablets or iPads now. If not, the costs are minimal.)

And the data would have to feed a system that analyzed it.

(That exists today as well, and plus, these days, customizing analysis of data streams is not cost prohibitive, especially given the amazing ROI that's achievable.)

So, with the workforce in place ...

And the technology in place ...

The only thing missing is a protocol, a process, a workflow that would prompt the workforce to start collecting data.

The question is: Which data? What things should our "Moneyball scouts " be looking at?

That 's where SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocols come into play.

With the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol, you can leverage your workforce to collect data, which will let you draw correlations between operations, sales, and costs. That will help you determine your shortest path to optimized profits.

Old Pilots Don't Crash. Old Restaurants Managers Do. Ever see an old pilot skip a pre-flight checklist? Nope. That 's why so few planes crash.

Ever see an old restaurant manager (over confident that he knows it all) crash a restaurant? Yup. Happens all the time.

That's why we have to bring the rigor of the preflight inspection to the management of restaurants.

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