This episode of The New World of Consumer Behavior features an interview with Allyn Taylor, Director of Development and Construction at Pollo Campero, a Guatemalan restaurant chain serving flavorful chicken meals. Allyn is a results-oriented real estate professional who thrives in high pressure environments that require excellence. He has strong foundational financial and analytical skills, coupled with the ability to design and implement cost effective technological solutions to leverage underlying real estate knowledge. Recognized as an energetic leader, strong motivator and excellent communicator, Allyn’s past development efforts have successfully resulted in more than $750 million worth of capital investment. In this episode, Allyn talks about how Pollo Campero uses data to better understand its customer base and how major shifts in consumer behavior have had a net positive impact on the success of the chain.
This episode of The New World of Consumer Behavior features an interview with Allyn Taylor, Director of Development and Construction at Pollo Campero, a Guatemalan restaurant chain serving flavorful chicken meals.
Allyn is a results-oriented real estate professional who thrives in high pressure environments that require excellence. He has a broad-based knowledge of the United States across multiple real estate sectors with a detailed, hands-on understanding of real estate development. A creative problem solver, Allyn has strong foundational financial and analytical skills, coupled with the ability to design and implement cost effective technological solutions to leverage underlying real estate knowledge. He’s recognized as an energetic leader, strong motivator and excellent communicator. His past development efforts have successfully resulted in more than $750 million worth of capital investment.
In this episode, Allyn talks about how Pollo Campero uses data to better understand its customer base and how major shifts in consumer behavior have had a net positive impact on the success of the chain.
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Key Quotes
“We use sort of a blending application that is kind of 50% weighted on mobility, 50% on traditional progression modeling and I think it's a healthy way to do it. It kind of balances, and we're utilizing both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the mobility data. So not only are we looking at concentrations of our guests, but we're looking at the mix of those devices, essentially overlaying our customer profile over the devices to get a sense for who's there at that geography at those key day parts.” - Allyn Taylor
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Episode Timestamps
02:10 Allyn’s current role
05:45 Using data to better understand customers
11:45 Sourcing data
13:46 Consumer behavior data findings
17:27 Validating customer profiles and segmentation
18:58 Recent impacts of major shifts in consumer behavior
25:00 Future of Pollo Campero restaurants
26:19 Personalizing experiences for customers
27:23 Data dos and don’ts
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Links
Connect with Allyn on LinkedIn
Kat Harwood: Hello and welcome to The New World of Consumer Behavior: Lessons From Data Pioneers. I'm your host, Kat Harwood, Director of Corporate Communications at Near. This episode features a conversation with Allyn Taylor, Director of Development and Construction at Pollo Campero. Allyn is a seasoned corporate real estate professional who has led development efforts at nationwide chains like Zoës Kitchen, Panera Bread, and P.F. Chang's.
Pollo Campero has over 400 restaurants worldwide. Allyn is currently spearheading their North American growth strategy to scale to 200 US locations by 2027. In this episode, Allyn talks about how Pollo Campero uses data to better understand its customer base, and how major shifts in consumer behavior have had a net positive impact on the success of the chain.
But first, here's a quick word from our sponsor.
Sponsor: Imagine what your company could do with one of the world's largest vaults of intelligence on consumer behavior. The possibilities for business efficiency are endless. Across people, places, and products, across retail, restaurants, tech and tourism, data is the key to unlocking insights and drive results for your business. Near is the global SaaS leader in privacy led data intelligence with 1.6 billion data points worldwide. Go to near.com to learn how near can help your business make better decisions.
[00:01:41] Kat Harwood: Now please enjoy this interview with Allyn Taylor, Director of Development and Construction at Pollo Campero. I'm your host, Kat Harwood. Here we are with Allyn Taylor with Pollo Campero. I'm super excited to talk to you today. I've heard that you guys are truly turning up the heat when it comes to a new spicy chicken sandwich, so I'm excited to hear what. Since we last spoke, and, um, I'll turn it over to you. I'd love to kick off with, you know, who you are, what you do with Pollo Campero, and sort of what your day to day role looks like.
[00:02:17] Allyn Taylor: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. My journey with Pollo Campero began about two years ago. I was sitting on the couch during the summer of 2020, like hopefully not too many real estate professionals, but it was a heroin time. It was, it was not fun.
But I got a call from them. I was lucky enough to be called by Luis Javier Roddas, who's our, effectively our CEO for kusa, which is Comp Compar usa. Hoyo is actually a subsidiary of a company based in Guatemala. It's been around for 51 plus years, and we have. About is represented by over 400 restaurants worldwide.
The majority of those are in Central America, and currently [00:03:00] in the US we have 85 plus or minus one, uh, locations in the States. So I was hired in the summer 2020 with the prospect to grow this company significantly over the next couple years. And since I've joined, Bumped up our growth projections and for a variety of reasons, uh, primarily because of the performance of the brand.
Our performance has just been incredible. Uh, over the last two years, we've grown our a u from, uh, 1.9 million. Which is very respectable to this year. We'll complete the year at almost 2.9 million, so, So we've seen our A U grow by a million dollars in span of two years. Yeah, it's been nuts and what I've learned, and I knew a little bit about Poeo competitor before I came, but I really.
Wasn't that well versed. What I've learned is it's an amazing brand. It resonates with millions of central American immigrants in the States. You know, because the brand's been around for 50 years and because [00:04:00] we are the largest restaurant operator in. Guatemala, and I'm not sure about El Salvador, either one or two in El Salvador.
McDonald's is behind us, nipping on our heels in Guatemala, and it's about the same, from what I understand in El Salvador, we're part of the fabric of that country. We're part of the consciousness of, of all those immigrants. It's a brand they've known and loved, Uh, their whole. And so when we turn on our sign, it's a beckoning, and we're learning that with a couple of the most recent openings that we've done.
And so now the plan is to open 250 restaurants over the next five years-ish. I'm in charge of really all the real estate development and construction responsibilities at Poeo for Coosa, which is Compare usa. And we are currently growing kind of coast to coast. You know, there's a handful of markets that we're kind of focused.
It's generally the markets that we're in. Right now we're in something like [00:05:00] 16, 17 states, uh, which is crazy given that we only have 85 ish locations. And, uh, so we're really spread out. The original development was done through franchising. We've acquired most of those franchisees left. We still do have a very important integral franchising program, but the majority of our.
Projected over the next five years will be corporate. And so the markets that we're growing heaviest in tend to be South Florida, California, New York, uh, Washington, dc, Maryland, Chicago, and then parts of Texas. And that's generally most of our corporate growth. And then we have franchise growth kind of sprinkled in.
So I'm pretty busy right now. .
[00:05:39] Kat Harwood: Can you tell me briefly how you and your team are using data in general and how you're also using data to better understand the behavior of your consumers?
[00:05:48] Allyn Taylor: Sure. So when I first, gosh, it's been probably about running upon 10 years, but probably more like eight years, where I first saw the mobility data that was coming [00:06:00] available, I immediately saw the opportunity if to link that data with, uh, segmentation data that we could really over.
Across geographies, a lens to identify our customers at key day parts. And my background as, uh, a real estate professional sort of began through analytics. I was an analyst initially, had really no intent of getting into real estate. But just kind of fell into it. When I graduated, uh, college in 1986 went to work for this small restaurant chain called Chili's.
And at the time we had 35 restaurants in about 50 million in annual sales. And so I was the defacto analyst for really everybody at the company cuz we were such a small company. Nobody had a budget for an analyst and so, so I was the. Sky, even though nobody called it that back then. But I started playing with segmentation profiles, writing segmentation profiles in incorporating progression models into sales forecasts and really looking at a lot of different indicators to predict sales and [00:07:00] ultimately reduce, or sometimes eliminate, usually just reduce risk, uh, associated with the development program.
So I've been working with models most of my career, and I always. I saw models as a kind of a double edged sword. I believe in them strongly. I, I believe that anything that could make you smarter about multimillion dollar decision investment decisions you're making, the better. But the problem is sometimes that those models could be misinterpreted.
It's easy to break statistical laws to get the answer you want. Statistics, right? That was my always, always been my biggest concern. You wanna make sure that you evaluate. These numbers properly. And I think inherently probably the biggest problem with sales models, there's two primary databases and obviously it's not completely this way, but, but primarily you're looking at census based data and you're also looking at government generated business data.
And so you're always, For my profession, which is evaluating real estate for restaurants, uh, you're always [00:08:00] making inferences about where people die. Based on where they live and where they work. Granted, there are some other data sources, but generally speaking, those are the variables that you're looking at to evaluate real estate decisions.
And it's problematic because it, you are having to make inter interpolations based on where they live and where they work. And so you have to kind of figure out, okay, well where does it make sense for them shop so on. And so anyway, there's always been, in my mind, inherent limitations on that kind of data.
So when I saw mobility data, Eight years ago, I realized, well wait a minute. We don't have to worry about interpreting data. We can actually see where people are. We can see where they are at lunch, we can see where they are at dinner. We can isolate different days of the week, different times of the day.
Yeah, I thought it was, And so, uh, and still do and believe strongly in it. And so, so I went through I think maybe three providers that just told me. Cuz what I wanted to do was create an application where, Fed through the [00:09:00] database of devices, consolidate them at key day parts and look and create effectively quilt across the US to determine where the largest concentrations, my guess, were at key day parts.
And so it was something that I worked on for a couple years. I had a CEO call me really angry cuz I put 'em in violation of their agreement with their data provider. Oh. , um, cuz I locked up the system. The communication was meant to be nanoseconds and I locked it up for hours, , and, you know,
[00:09:29] Kat Harwood: oh my gosh.
minor detail.
[00:09:33] Allyn Taylor: Yeah, it took a couple years, frankly, to find somebody that was capable of crunching that much data. And I found that in bi spatial, uh, which has been a great partner. And I think they were kind of looking for me too, cuz I think they were of the same. I like, we wanna do this application, so we had the same kind of idea.
And so it just worked out really well. And, and they had to upgrade their equipment. It wasn't an easy process. It probably took, you know, a couple iterations before we got it down, but now we have the application [00:10:00] up and running and, and so when I first took off, uh, we kind of, I took models and kind of threw 'em in the trash and said, I just wanna focus on mobility.
I've since kind of tempered that I've, so now I use, we have an application that we've developed, and this is in in partner partnership with Sitewise, who's been also great partners along with bi spatial, and they wrote some models for us and so now we use sort of a blending. Application that is kind of 50% weighted on mobility, 50% on traditional progression modeling.
And I think it's a healthy way to do it. It kind of balances and we're utilizing both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the mobility data. So not only are we looking at concentrations of our guests, but we're looking at. The mix of those devices essentially overlaying our customer profile over the devices to get a sense for who's there at that geography, at those key day parts.
It's been great. I believe strongly in what we're doing and I [00:11:00] believe. That it's going to yield the best results. The burgs is still out because we've only opened two restaurants. But if we continue to open the restaurants at the rate we're opening, I think everybody's gonna be pretty happy. It's critical to just maximize your roi.
We want to go after the locations and the trade areas that are gonna offer us the biggest bang for the buck initially, and we know that we'll grow the. And the idea is that we'll continue to grow our customer base and we'll also see the ROI increase on some of those later trade areas that maybe don't make sense up front, but will over time.
So I think it's really key to just maximize our, the returns on our investments. And it
[00:11:37] Kat Harwood: sounds like you use a lot of different sources as well. How many would you say you're using on average?
[00:11:43] Allyn Taylor: Well, we license kind of the traditional data. I guess most of what we look at is really just kind traditional demographics.
There's also some competitor data. We're looking at crime data. Probably it's the standard off the shelf stuff that anybody can get. Nothing too spectacular. But I think [00:12:00] the, the key frankly, in my mind is the mobility data. And the reason is, you know, this is something too, Traditional demographic analysis would never direct you this way, but.
Like Manhattan's a good example. We're under construction right now on two projects in Manhattan. We're about to start a third. I have a couple more deals that I'm working on. It's been a really interesting time to try and negotiate and get deals going.
[00:12:24] Kat Harwood: So two new locations in Manhattan. That's right.
It's exciting, but one
[00:12:27] Allyn Taylor: of the, one of the things that's interesting is, you know, by and large, our customers don't live in Manhattan, skew Hispanic, and other than maybe the lower East side and parts of Harlem, They just don't live in the city. But the mobility data shows us where they are during key day parts, and so we can utilize the mobility data to, to really point us in the right direction in terms of where are guests at key day parts, because we know they're on the island.
We don't know necessarily what they're doing there. We don't know if they're there. If we don't know if they're there, shop, [00:13:00] vacation, whatever. At the end of the day, we don't really care. I think that's probably the next evolution is we start to figure out intent behind the data, which is the hardest part, right?
But it does really kind of provide a roadmap for where we need to target on the island, and that's something that we just simply couldn't do with traditional demographic.
[00:13:19] Kat Harwood: Absolutely. And how nice is it for these customers to have their favorite sandwich where they're traveling or working, you know, in Manhattan?
So that's exciting for them.
[00:13:29] Allyn Taylor: We've already gotten feedback. Yeah, I think we're gonna blow the roof off our first location. I'm pretty
[00:13:33] Kat Harwood: exciting. What kind of problems are you trying to solve, or questions do you need to answer when using consumer behavior
[00:13:39] Allyn Taylor: data? There's so many questions that need to be answered.
I think the first thing we look at is just kind of ranking development opportunities. That's, that's kind of number one. And, and that's where most of our efforts are, are placed. And we have market plans written for the whole US now for every, uh, major dma. , you know, the mobility data is, uh, a big piece of that.
But then when you start getting [00:14:00] into site assessment, this is kind of what's exciting too. Traditional demographic analysis. It was good for, uh, analyzing trade areas, but when you get to actual site assessment, I don't think it really helped too much. And so much of that, you know, which is fine. I'm good.
Real estate professionals should be able to pick the right site. But what's interesting now is now we can actually, in some instances, we can look. And we're doing this in all major cities, not just New York, but we're looking at Chicago and South Florida and the Strip in Vegas. And we're evaluating locations based on the concentrations of our guests during key day parts, during the hours of the day.
And so we can kind of see the e and flow of, of how our customers, you can evaluate positioning within a shopping. And get a sense for where the better positioning would be based on the concentrations of your guests. We're looking at non-trad locations. We're kind of utilizing the data, just beginning the process of kind of utilizing the data to evaluate non-trad locations within, whether [00:15:00] it's an airport, whether it's in a food court, whatever it might be.
So that's particularly exciting to me to be able to utilize the data to kind of help evaluate. Trade areas and sites, not just trade areas.
[00:15:13] Kat Harwood: Mm-hmm. . No, that makes sense. It's sort of like two part, knowing where your customers are, where do they live, but also where are they working during the day? Where are they traveling to, to kind of get them on both ends of the spectrum It sounds like.
[00:15:25] Allyn Taylor: One of the other things that's so important for us too is cannibalization. So we can look at, we've built existing trade areas for all our locations. We isolate where our guests are 30 minutes before visiting compare, so we utilize that data. To look at potential cannibalization. We're obviously understanding traffic patterns, and so it just kind of, again, provides more information into our market plan, comes that much more vetted, and then when a particular site comes into play, we can utilize that information to, uh, estimate cannibalization.
It's one of those things where, We're [00:16:00] answering more and more questions with the data. These are things that we couldn't even dream of answering even 10 years ago, and now we have data to do it and get great results back. So that's what's exciting as well. That is
[00:16:12] Kat Harwood: exciting. How would you say you use data to validate customer profiles and segmentation?
[00:16:18] Allyn Taylor: So right now we've been updating our customer profile once a year. It's interesting, I mean, we haven't opened very many restaurants over the last year. But what it did change, I mean, we saw, uh, an incredible expansion of our sales. This would've been from 2020 to 2021. So we saw our sales grow from really about, you know, 1,000,009 to roughly 2, 4, 5.
In that one year, we did see an expansion among non-Hispanic segments, which wasn't surprising. I saw it in the restaurants. Certainly a good validation for what we've seen. But where I'm particularly interested in seeing what happens to our profile is when we start opening, Cuz next year, well this year we're [00:17:00] gonna open 10 additional restaurants and then next year the plan is to open 25 corporate.
And I think we have plans for another five to seven franchise. And so as we begin to open these restaurants and then it's gonna, you know, it goes from 25 to. 40 on the corporate side and really from zero to 40 in the span. But what I'm really excited to see is what happens to our customer profile with each edition, because I know it's going to grow.
The Central American immigrant is a fantastic customer. They love the brand, they seek us out, but. On the average profile or trade area that we're looking at, there are no more than 3% of the total population. So it's not, it's not a large enough population to build our complete development profile around.
And based on the, the ambitions that we have in terms of our development potential, we know, I mean, we're seeing it, uh, with our existing set of restaurants. We know that the potential for this brand is a couple thousand restaurants, [00:18:00] but realistically we want to get to 500 over the next couple years. So I'm really interested in seeing.
What our customer profile looks like. Once we get from here to 500, I think you're gonna see a huge expansion based on the real estate that we select, and also based just on the quality of our product. We're gonna get to two 50 from a corporate standpoint within the next five years. When you layer in.
The franchise, you're probably getting closer to three 50, but I think the realistic target right now is 500, and I think that's gonna be a bit of a layup. That's my hope. Then it'll start to get tricky. But these are exciting times because we have this amazing brand that's been around for 50 years and that has a customer base that absolutely loves our product.
[00:18:43] Kat Harwood: Okay, so I wanna move on to sort of what you've seen in the last two years. As you know, there's been so many major. And different industries, and especially of course in consumer behavior. How have you seen that impact your business?
[00:18:59] Allyn Taylor: You know, I was thinking [00:19:00] about this yesterday as far as Covid goes, it's completely rewritten the rules of our game, and I mean the restaurant industry and dining out and how people use restaurants to dine out.
I was thinking yesterday about how much when we were in the throws of Covid and I remember just wanting things to return to. And things to come back the way. They were just longing for that and now I realize it's never gonna return the way it was. It's a new normal and I don't know that as individuals that we've seen such a huge shock to the way we.
Live in the way we shop and the way we eat just our lives, uh, in our lifetime, like we saw in the last two years, and hopefully we never will again. So what it's meant for restaurants has been, it's rewritten the rules. There are certain players in the industry. Primarily fast casual guys, primarily the guys that have drive-throughs.
But depending upon your platform and how you [00:20:00] operate it, you're either much better off now than you were before or you're much worse off based on how the rules have changed. And what's tough is when you design and build restaurants, you know you're building them. A usable life of typically between 25, 50 years.
And so it's not easy sometimes to go in, depends on the nature of the brand, but it's not easy to go in and just change who you are to accommodate the new trends. So Poeo compare, clearly we were positioned well based on what happened. Some of it was luck and some of it was foresight. Our current management.
And they've all been in place now for about, for the most part, the last six, seven years. They saw the trends prior to Covid and they made several key strategic investments in the business that really paid off During Covid. It was pretty easy for us to pivot from a restaurant that really had it normally high dine in percentage of our total sales versus most QSR and fast casual guys prior to.
And part of that is because of the legacy of the brand and [00:21:00] because Poeo in Central America is a full service restaurant. And so when you dine there, you will get table service. You placed your order at a counter, you sit down and the food's brought to you, but you get table service, you can sit down in a restaurant order from your table.
And so in part because of the history of the concept, we've always, and just the understanding of our, our consumer, we've always had more dine. Of course that evaporated during covid. It's now coming back. But it's never gonna be what it was before. We've been able to do very well because of those strategic investments that were made because our food really is just well suited.
And I think, you know, the thing that's really exciting to us is there's a lot of people that didn't know that much about compar. Before Covid that have now tried us and the good news is they're coming back in large numbers. They like it. So we're in a great spot. I think a lot of other people, uh, are also equally great spots, but you'll see differences in [00:22:00] performance and I think a lot of that has just due to the strength of their brands or how well they're managed.
You know, I think we're in good shape right now. It rewrote the rules and it just turned the field upside down. Unfortu. Yeah. And I
[00:22:11] Kat Harwood: feel like the rules keep changing. That's never really over, you know? Yep. It's, the consumer behavior is constantly changing. If you don't keep up with it, it's just, you know, it's hard to keep the doors open.
It
[00:22:22] Allyn Taylor: is. The pace of change has been accelerating, uh, it seems like. Certainly over the last five, 10 years. I remember 10 years ago restaurants, we kind of witnessed the retail meltdown and restaurants. I think to some extent, and I'm dating going back 10 years ago, we felt kind of invulnerable to Amazon without what, what people gonna order their food from their phones.
Mm-hmm. , you know, that's, fuck, it's never gonna happen. It's crazy and, and so, Technology has really changed consumer habits. A lot of people look at food now like they would room service. You know, they want it [00:23:00] delivered to their door. They don't care what it costs. So it's all about convenience. And now the convenience is still super important, but I think we're starting to see now because of inflation, now you're starting to see all sorts of movement.
You're seeing movement among segments. I think we're well positioned for that, cuz of our price point and the value that we provide. But I think you're starting to see a movement away from some third party delivery, but I do think that people are, especially given the cost, people are starting to migrate away from it.
We're seeing that.
[00:23:29] Kat Harwood: Absolutely inflation doesn't make it easy. And it's interesting you talk about this movement sort of away from delivery apps because we coincidentally just had a new report come out, The New World of Consumer Behavior all around restaurants for 2022 and sort of how things have shifted.
And through our findings we see that diners actually. Wanting that, you know, in-house experience, they don't want to solely just rely on delivery. So there is, I think that shift [00:24:00] and maybe we've been longing to get back to normal, so I don't see us completely going all the way to one side. I think we want that balance.
[00:24:08] Allyn Taylor: Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. So much of it is just driven by the demands of the day. Right? There's only so much time. Seems like the pace of our lives seems to accelerate as well. So to find time to sit down with your family for even 30 minutes an evening, that's, that's a daunting proposition at times.
And so some people and myself included, are gonna resort to Uber Eats to help us have some. Family time together.
[00:24:33] Kat Harwood: Yeah. I used to think of delivery as more of a luxury and it, it still is, but I think it's also more of a convenience, If anything, it's almost a luxury now to be able to go out, I feel, and have the time to do it.
So I'm curious, will you be opening any restaurants that are more of that sit down vibe that you have in Guatemala, for example?
[00:24:53] Allyn Taylor: Well, we won't be opening restaurants like we do in, in Guatemala because those restaurants, they're really casual dining restaurants. I [00:25:00] mean, they'll have, you know, 150 seats in them, uh, 150 to sometimes 200 seats, including the patio.
Whereas our restaurants typically. You know, we're typically gonna top out around 50. We might get as high as 70 with the patio. Cuz what we're seeing is, you know, just about everything we're doing with the exception of Manhattan, we have a location in River North in Chicago, one at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.
Don't have drive-throughs, but everything else. We're doing generally has a drive-through because the drive-through is of just key importance. I mean, we're driving more and more of our sales through there, whether it's through our customer or third party delivery folks or whatever. We're just seeing more and more business go through that drive-through.
And to your point, it's all about convenience. We wanna minimize that friction. The moment somebody says, I want Peto, and that idea pops in their head, we wanna make sure. Get that chicken in their mouth as quickly as possible. Make it as easy as possible. Exactly. Exactly. So that's what we're constantly working on, trying to [00:26:00] reduce that friction.
[00:26:00] Kat Harwood: Mm, that sounds great. Can you give us some examples or use cases of how you're personalizing experiences for customers?
[00:26:08] Allyn Taylor: Everything we do on the real estate development side is about, it's really about evaluating geographies, utilizing the customer data. And so everything I do is kind of anonymous. I'm aggregating customer.
We are obviously tracking individual phones and tracking that data, but you know, it's all aggregated and so it's all anonymous and so everything and, and segmentation data is aggregated as a plus four level. And so yeah, so it's all anonymous where it gets to the Customer level I think is really more of a marketing question.
And so, you know, I, I am seeing, and it's weird, I don't, I don't quite understand why, but in my, over my career, it seems like there was just a separate set of tools built for a one set, built for real estate development, one set built for marketing.
[00:26:54] Kat Harwood: As we wrap up, we've heard so many amazing ways that you're using data to really unlock [00:27:00] that consumer behavior and expand the way you want to here in the us.
Some final thoughts? Do you have any data dues and maybe a data don't that you wanna share with our listeners?
[00:27:11] Allyn Taylor: I think the key thing is to really think hard about what the data means. At times. The one thing, and I've made this mistake, The one thing we don't know is sort of we can identify customer's locations.
We can identify concentrations of guests in certain geographies at certain key day parts. What we don't know is, Their intent, why they're there. And I think that's where we're gonna try and probably try and build some parameters and some understanding perhaps with additional data sets around intent. Uh, sometimes it's obvious, sometimes you can clearly figure it out.
Other times it's, it's a little more opaque and so you have to be careful. I see misinterpretation. I guess the biggest don is misinterpreting data. I mean, how do you prevent that from happening? I don't know the answer to that. I think a lot [00:28:00] of it just is experience, uh, working with the data. Over a period of time and.
From my perspective, my function is primarily a support function for my operations team and my job. I've always looked at my job as limiting risk. Ultimately, what I want to do is set my operator up for success. So when we open a restaurant, that's when the real work begins. That's typically where most of my work.
Kind of ends. I mean, we still have maintenance obligations and things like that, but I wanna set them up for success. And the way I do that is by eliminating all the risk, whether it's a poor location or whether it's a poorly constructive restaurant or whatever it might be, I want to take out all the risks that I control.
And so I look at data as really a means to do that. Um, it's not gonna answer every question, but what I've seen over time is, is it's answering more and. Questions because there's more and more data available. And so the more where you foster an [00:29:00] environment where you get access to the data, you compile that data, that's what we're trying to do.
It's not just site decisions or market planning decisions. It gets down to, you know, development issues and processes as well. So we're utilizing data all along the way to help us make the best, most timely decisions. And so I only see. Gaining in importance and it's never gonna go away. It's only gonna get more important, and so we want to capitalize on that on every way we can now and in the future.
[00:29:29] Kat Harwood: Yeah, I agree. Data for the win. That's right. Awesome. Thank you for listening to this episode of The New World of Consumer Behavior. To learn more about this topic, check out the case study on our website. The link is in the show notes below. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave a rating and a review and tell a friend.
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