FSR May 2022

SPONSORED BY LIGHTSPEED

Your POS Should Do More Than Transact

This POS-turned-commerce platform is helping restaurants grow sales by three–four times the industry average. BY CHARLIE POGACAR

was a technical complexity that made the guest experience worse, and that was some thing Terrace Bay Hotel Owner and Operator Jarred Downs would not accept. As a result, Downs and his team sought out a new POS system that would seam lessly integrate with their property man agement system ( ƩƦƬ ) interface. What they HQGHG XS Ɠ QGLQJ ZDV /LJKWVSHHG D FRP merce platform that Downs believes will help him grow his business into the future. “The desired integration between our POS and PMS was the driving factor behind us making the switch, and we’ve been really SOHDVHG ZLWK WUDQVLWLRQLQJ WR /LJKWVSHHG Ő Downs says. “It’s user friendly and intuitive. Sometimes to get an integration you have to pivot to an inferior product, but this was a top of the line product and has all of the fea WXUHV ZH FRXOG SRVVLEO\ ZDQW Ő /LJKWVSHHG JRHV EH\RQG EHLQJ MXVW D cloud-based POS system that seamlessly integrates with other management systems, A year ago, guests at the Terrace Bay Hotel in Upper Michigan could not charge food and beverage from the hotel’s restaurant to their room. It

LIGHTSPEED

though it excels at that, too. The platform also automates tasks and offers key analyt ical insights into maximizing revenue. For H[DPSOH /LJKWVSHHG UHPHPEHUV FXVWRP ers and is able to help waitstaff upsell more effectively based on that information. “We can quickly see if servers are getting customers to add craft cocktails to 20 per cent of meals, for example, or selling a bot WOH RI ZLQH WR SHUFHQW RI WDEOHV Ő 'RZQV says. “Every restaurant has different priori WLHV DQG /LJKWVSHHG FDQ SURJUDP DURXQG those priorities, but for us that information is super valuable, and it helps us work with servers for them to get higher sales and thus PRUH WLSV Ő Another feature that Downs loves is Magic Quadrant reporting, where a graph’s X axis is how often the item brings a cus tomer back into the restaurant, and the Y axis is how much of a margin is achieved by selling the menu item. This has helped operators both streamline menus and also

design them to emphasize which items achieve the most revenue. These features—and many others—are the foundation of why a survey conducted E\ /LJKWVSHHG UHYHDOHG WKDW LWV FRPPHUFH platform helped operators like Downs grow same-store sales comps by between 55–70 percent in 2021, or about three–four times greater than the industry average. That JURZWK LVQōW MXVW QLFH WR KDYH DQ\ PRUHŋZLWK so many aspects of running a restaurant get ting more expensive, growing sales is even more important than it’s ever been. “The restaurant industry today, you have compressed margins, food costs have gone XS DQG VWDII FRVWV KDYH JRQH XS Ő VD\V 3HWHU Doughtery, general manager of hospitality DW /LJKWVSHHG ŏ:KDW WKDW PHDQV LV WKDW \RX can no longer be focused on tools that help

you sell and that’s it. You need tools that help you sell smarter and get the most out of the customers sitting in your restaurant HYHU\ WLPH Ő  FOR MORE ON THE LIGHTSPEED RESTAURANT PLATFORM, VISIT LIGHTSPEEDHQ.COM.

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MAY 2022