An area coach can only watch so many stores.
Matthew Lau is CTO of International Restaurant Management Group, which operates more than 160 Burger King and Popeyes restaurants across 40 states. At that scale, the limit of the traditional area coach is simple: they're human.
"There's only so much they can do. They're only trained to fix their eyes on a certain number of stores. Whereas Expo, at a store level, we can see individual trends and help that manager, and Expo can tailor its coaching to that specific store."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
Where AI earns its keep.
Lau is measured about AI, but clear on the use case:
"There's a lot of talk or hype about AI in the restaurant industry, and I think it's definitely going to be beneficial to operators using tools like this. With the enormous amounts of data we collect, someone needs to do something with it. At a franchisee level, it's very difficult for us to manage all of that."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
In practice, Expo flags the metrics that are off, helps identify them, and points to the actions to take, instead of that conversation having to come down from a director of operations.
"They don't have nearly enough time to talk to everybody. If the food cost is running a little bit higher, this could tell us what steps the manager needs to take. Or if labor is running higher than what we're budgeting, it'll give us some steps they can take to address that."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
The numbers since October 2022.
International Restaurant Management Group implemented Expo in October 2022. Lau's reported results since:
- ~20 basis points on food cost, from tracking inventory better
- ~20 basis points on labor
- ~10 basis points on loss prevention, from tracking discounts and voids more easily
"As an expense to a restaurant operator, just giving you all that insight and coaching, it should very easily pay for itself versus how much we're already paying for our current equipment and technology packages."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
The build-vs-buy case, from a CTO.
Lau is the person who would build this in-house if building it made sense. His take on why he didn't:
"Legacy software has taken years to actually implement correctly for a lot of restaurant organizations. Back-of-house, POS, accounting systems. Expo sits right on top of that and utilizes all the other systems. If you're running different POS, different back-of-house software, this packages it all into one easy-to-use website that our GMs really don't need any training for. I don't even think we had a training call."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
And on hiring for it:
"Slicing and dicing data ourselves is very tedious. The cost of hiring somebody to essentially do business intelligence for the company is a lot more expensive than utilizing something as simple as Expo. And there aren't really too many experts when it comes to food service and data and business intelligence."Matthew Lau, CTO, International Restaurant Management Group
International Restaurant Management Group isn't alone.
The pattern holds across other multi-unit operators using Expo. Independently, they describe the same things: pulling every store's numbers into one place instead of juggling separate portals, and freeing up field leaders' time.
"I'd much rather have my district leaders on the floor with the teams than sitting in a booth for hours digging through data."District Operator, multi-unit franchisee
"The way I view Expo is it's an investment in my time, and my people's time. They're not fumbling around the computer all day."Owner, multi-unit franchisee
One operator put numbers to it: a stubborn product-cost variance against the national benchmark that the team had been unable to move for some time began to shrink once they started using Expo. Another, comparing same-volume stores side by side, caught one location burning through roughly four times the operating supplies of its peers — the kind of waste that hides until the data sits next to itself.
Read the transcript
"Our team was able to pick it up so easily that it was kind of a no-brainer. We see a lot of possibilities with AI. When it comes to area coaches, there's only so much they can do — they're only trained to fix their eyes on a certain number of stores. Expo, at a store level, can see individual trends and help that manager, and tailor its coaching to that specific store.
There's a lot of hype about AI in the restaurant industry, and I think it's going to be genuinely beneficial to operators using tools like this. With the enormous amounts of data we collect, someone needs to do something with it — and at a franchisee level it's very difficult to manage all of that. So Expo acts as an area coach. It flags the metrics that are a little off, helps identify them, and points to the actions to take — versus that conversation having to come down from a director of operations who doesn't have nearly enough time to talk to everybody. If food cost is running high, it tells us what steps the manager needs to take to improve it. Same with labor.
We implemented Expo in October of 2022. Since then we've seen about 20 basis points on the food-cost side, because we can track inventory much better. About 20 basis points of savings on labor as well. And another 10 basis points on loss prevention, because we can track discounts and voids more easily than before. As an expense to a restaurant operator, Expo giving you all those insights and coaching should very easily pay for itself.
One reason you should use software like this is simply the implementation. Legacy software takes years to implement correctly — back-of-house, POS, accounting systems. Expo sits right on top of all of that and uses your existing systems. If you're running different POS, different back-of-house software, Expo packages it into one easy-to-use website that our GMs really don't need any training for. I don't even think we had a training call. Slicing and dicing data yourself is very tedious, and hiring someone to do business intelligence for the company is a lot more expensive than using something as simple as Expo. There aren't many experts in food service and data and business intelligence. And since you come from the restaurant industry yourselves, you know what we're talking about."