Sailing a Leaky Boat

As much as I adore working in the coffee industry, there are ongoing challenges. I've often used the analogy that deciding to invest in catering is a bit like spending a fortune on a big, beautiful boat; a vessel that you purchase knowing full-well is riddled with holes. And your job, having just perilously waded into this crazy industry, is NOT to patch those terrifying leaks (which will continue to spring regardless of any Herculean efforts on your part to seal them), but to courageously launch that big, beautiful, perforated ark out into the sea and, with every fibre of your being, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically commit yourself to a lifetime of sailing and bailing.

My analogy may be a little fatalistic and say more about my own business acumen (or lack thereof) than anything else. But having lost half a million euros a lifetime ago in a 'critically acclaimed' but ultimately failed restaurant, that painful and demoralising experience has very much shaped how I approach running Coffeeangel today.

I must preface the following by saying that continuously providing outstanding customer service and product are core values of Coffeeangel and will always come first, full stop. But in order to grow the business beyond one location, apart from hiring great people and maintaining the service and product standards that the wage-paying public demands and deserves, I pay forensic attention to the numbers in and effort to avoid falling into that black hole of failure once again.

To help manage operations and run these numbers we have invested in some pretty amazing, small-business-accessible, cloud-based applications like talech (POS), SimpleOrder (purchasing and inventory) and Deputy (workforce management). Each of these applications, apart from offering best-in-class functionality, also provide some great reporting features. The downside is these reports are almost-always application specific. And in order to communicate key metrics or KPI's I had no option but to either rely on senior managers logging into each specific application to search for the relevant data or me sharing multiple PDF’s, CSV’s and spreadsheets with individuals. The result ultimately caused more confusion than clarity - as well as taking much more time than I felt it should. And it was this inability to efficiently communicate and share performance-related metrics that I believe will prevent us from successfully scaling beyond the five retail units we currently operate.

In order to remedy this problem (and stand any chance of future scaling) I decided that we needed to find a single, wholistic platform where key personnel could access a live snapshot of the performance data relevant to them where and when they needed it. Thereby allowing them to take immediate action on priority areas that needed attention - i.e. falling GP's, increasing LC's, etc.

However, finding this platform wasn't as straightforward as I'd hoped. After 18 long months of investigating and researching I found there are loads of out-of-the-box, customisable BI (Business Intelligence) options out there. The bad news was that most that I found were well outside the budget of a small business or my technical ability to manage.

Then nine months ago, I re-stumbled upon Salesforce (who the year previously had failed to reply to my enquiry message - no hard feelings) were now promoting a small business service. This time they did return my call and put me in touch with a local Salesforce development partner, Tether.ie, who genuinely understood the challenge I faced and the ultimate goal.

We agreed a fee and a timeline and their team have spent the last nine months patiently working with my key business applications in a effort to corral all the relevant data in one place and allow me to correlate and create simple reports, visualisations and shop-specific, shareable dashboards. I will admit that it was an extremely bumpy road, fraught with IT complexities well beyond my understanding, but to my delight metrics like NET sales, COGS, GP’s and Labour Costs are now captured and clearly displayed all in one place and calculated live in 15 minute intervals.

Senior management can now access live sales and performance data (with a six minute lag) straight from their mobile devices. Clearly defined targets can be set and monitored via a number of simple visualisations. We also have the ability to build an infinite array of custom reports - both live and historic - based on the information continuously flowing into our database for more forensic insights.

I can’t say building this was easy, cheap or hits every mark. And I definitely can’t say - at this point - whether there will be tangible business benefits as a result - it’s still far too early to tell. But I can say that I am extremely pleased with the end result. And our management team seem genuinely thrilled to finally have clear, concise and live, shop-specific, performance data right at their fingertips.

It is doubtful my accountant will thank me for automating this part of his job. And time will tell if this investment in information aggregation (and the ongoing fees associated with running this project) will make the aforementioned scaling / bailing any easier. But regardless of how this investment in BI shakes out, I remain committed, steadfast and happy at the helm of this beautiful, leaky boat.

Ps. No gratuity was paid for name-checking the above businesses. I'm just very grateful to each of their integration teams for their patience and assistance.