Once again, I'm your host. James Wright. I'm the chief strategy officer here at Interworks. And, we'll talk about ourselves in a few minutes. In terms of the format for today, starting now and running for the next thirty five, forty minutes, I'm happy to have a panel discussion here today with some really knowledgeable guests, particularly in the, RCG space. Throughout the conversation, I'm gonna be monitoring chat, and hopeful that it will reply to you a few times in there, but we will reserve a specific chunk at the end of our call for question and answer. Before we wrap up. If you haven't used the functionality before, please do use Zoom's question, answer function. It lets us better track and make sure we don't miss any questions as they scroll by. And we can also thread responses and make sure we're answering them all. And that should be in your zoom controls on your screen. We are going to have a few slides up probably early in the conversation just to get things rolling, and then probably turn our our slides off and do some conversation, maybe some show and tell throughout. But most of that support only. So if you can't see the screen, then, You might miss some super handsome faces, but you're probably not gonna miss the meat of of our of our conversation to that. The the topics we're gonna cover today are largely looking at some really specific field experience around building, deploying an analytics foundation using what we might call modern techniques. And and for those of you who have been on, listening in the previous versions of our data forum podcast, and and this webinar series, you've probably heard us talk a lot about what do we mean when we say the modern data analytics stack. If you haven't, we'll make sure we get a link out to you. And I'd say, please do go back lesson to at least the last two episodes from this summer where we talk about the analytics stack and sort of evolution there as well as the data stack. And what's exciting is our guest today, Ryle, is getting to be able to talk about, you know, his, personal experience with deploying both of those to make real change inside the organization. So without further ado, I I feel like I should get to introducing our panel today and and get out of the way. Again, I'm I'm James Wright. I I run strategy here in a works, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about what does good look like in the analytics space for our clients so they can make a difference in their business. How do we go out and evaluate and test and partner with the best technologies out there to make the best combination of tool sets to achieve an outcome. And then how do we take our consultancy here at Interworks, which is a few hundred people around the world, whether it be in Southeast Asia or Europe or here across the US and Canada, and how do we train them and equip them to be able to make a difference in our client's businesses? And I I'm excited to to welcome, Carl Rodette, who has, a decade of experience in the in the RCG space or maybe two decades of experience in that, in that space, who's part of the team here at Interworks and based in Atlanta. And then also very excited to welcome, Ralph Dodd, who's chief information officer at chicken salad Chicken, and, a part of the inner works family of of clients. Maybe, Ralph, do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about you about your journey to chicken salad chicken, maybe telling us a little about the company, because it's certainly an exciting, and fast moving world. Sure. I would love to. Thanks, James. So again, Rausdod, I started my restaurant technology career back in the mid nineties with long haul steaks and then, subsequently, the capital grill is part of that group. I did pretty much everything IT related there from POS to back office to help desk and corporate infrastructure. For about thirteen years. And then I transitioned, to a role at RB's, when it was Wendy's and RB's. And I ran the restaurant technology group for that organization. And then, I joined the chicken salad chick in January of twenty twenty, right, when we were not aware of COVID yet, but it was well on its way. And so, you know, a lot of, chicken salad chicks transition into this data, world, and some of the digital challenges you know, were brought on because of COVID to some degree. So that's a little bit about my background. As as far as chicken salad, it goes. We are a growing brand that sells chicken salad. We also supplemento cheese and eggs out. So we, there you go. You know, our our Our purpose is to spread joy and rich lives and serve others, as you can see on the slide here. We sell twelve flavors of chicken salad. We're in eighteen states now, two hundred and fifty restaurants. We were founded in Auburn, Alabama by a single mom, who started making chicken salad in her kitchen, and her neighbors loved it so much that she started selling it to her neighbors. Well, apparently, there was someone in their neighborhood that wasn't very happy with that. So she had the health department shut her down. And so being the stubborn and woman that she was, she decided to open a restaurant. So the first one was in Auburn, Alabama in two thousand eight. And then we have, been able to grow successfully, you know, for the past, fifteen years. And and now we are in almost two hundred fifty restaurants, and again, in eighteen states, and again spreading joy and reaching lives and serving others is what we're all about. And we our our our motto is a little bit when you come into our restaurant, we want to hug on, hug on you and love on you and and hopefully that you you you leave the restaurant feeling a little better that day than you did when you came. And that's that's kind of our goal. So Ryle is probably the two most important questions that I'm gonna you today. Yeah. If I walk into chicken salad chicken, I order tea. Am I getting sweet tea or am I getting unsweet tea? What's what's the standard? Well, well, you know, we do it in an errand so you have to choose yourself, but, I would tell you that, The sweet tea yarn is a whole lot bigger than the other. We are primarily in the south, my brain. And then, you know, picking up on that southern, topic. And for our friends north of the Mason Dixon line, Pimento cheeses, please. Cause I feel like that's not an understood, deliciousness across the US. So You know, it's it's it's really a mixture of mayonnaise and cheese and some spices. So, it is definitely a southern tree. You know, probably made famous by the masters over in Augusta, Georgia for a lot of people around the country, but, it's certainly something I love, and we do it two ways. We do regular, and then we add alapenos to it to make it spicy. So One of our attendees, Nick, says it's the nectar of the gods. So -- Yeah. -- for that opinion, So Like, I'm not gonna disagree with that. Nice. Thanks. Certainly, I learned both of those things when moved to the south for a few years. And unfortunately, and this is something we can work on later, in Salt Lake today, there is no chicken salad chick. So, I I'm just left out of the sweet tea, earn. We're headed that way. We'll get there. Looking forward to it. Ralph, in terms of kicking hands off, you know, I I remember talking, I think to you about this. But I think I remember a great story. And I I so the question here is, is this an apocryphal story or not? And If it's if it's actually true, tell me about kind of how you made this step step change for your business. I feel like the story I remember is Maybe that your CEO, many years ago, was spending his nights and maybe every weekend deep in Excel and you went on a a quest to sort of slay that dragon and save him from that drudgery. Is this true and maybe kick it off by by telling us a little bit about his escape from Treasury and maybe you're you're vanquishing of the of the spreadsheet in in favor, maybe a visual analytics? Absolutely. So when I was when Scott, Devon, he was our CEO, asked me to join chicken salad, Jake. He he sort of hit me with two primary, task. One was to sort of repair the relationship with our franchise community and our and our restaurants from an perspective. There was a little bit of a leadership void at at the IT level. So that was kind of an easy fix for me, but just from my experience. And and so anyway, we got through that, but the second one was was do something about our data. And so during our interview process, I'm like, well, you know, what's going on with the data? What are you doing now? And he said, well, we just have a bunch of questions. And so then as I came on board and he hired me, I started understanding what he meant by that. So I quickly found out that every Sunday, I would get this PDF that look like a converted spreadsheet from Scott with a list of all the stores ranked by comp sales for the week, for total sales by the week, comp sales for the year to date and and the same thing for total sales. And so I ask him the next week, like, where are you getting? He goes, well, I have a spreadsheet, and he's got this grid of a spreadsheet that he puts a tick mark in a column for the day and the year in the store to include them in comp sales. So if you think about that six days a week, a hundred and fifty stores, you know, he's managing eight hundred and something tick marks a week. To make sure they're included in comp sales and then use pulling sales from other disparate sources, combine those into a spreadsheet, and then converting that to a PDF that on Sunday because by the way, I failed to mention this. We're open six days a week, so we're closed on Sunday. So that all of our associates and our managers can be home with families and enjoy else of time. But not our CEO, Scott Demany, because he spent several hours of his Sunday every week. Compiling all of this data to be able to serve our customers, the franchisees, and the rest of the companies. Corporate office with some information about how the how the restaurants and the company did the prior week. So my primary goal when he started talking about Davis, how do we fix that? Because I don't want my see, or really anyone in our company having to work for several hours on a Sunday when we should be enjoying time with everything. So that's when Once we got serious, we got through COVID. We started the journey for this, but the other compelling reason for me to go down this path regarding spreadsheets was our board of directors asked us once COVID hit and we had to pivot to digital, which we were doing three percent of our business on digital at the time. And then delivery came into play and a four solo. We had no way to determine what those order modes were and how that was changing and rapidly changing environment. So I would literally spend up two to three hours a week trying to compile this from our catering platform, our online platform, a POS system into this massive spreadsheet to create some charts to visualize that for for our owners, in in the private equity. So that all drove me to pick up the phone and call someone that I knew could help me fix that. I'm a big believer of of show. Don't tell, and I feel like maybe we have a couple screenshots from some of your your your non spreadsheets. Yeah. Any chance we put those on the screen, you could tell us some stories around Yeah. These end up being, and how are they how are you using Visual Analytics? This is Tableauette based analytics, right, to to to change your business. Absolutely. So that phone call went out to my friend here, Carl, with that, who we I don't we'd work briefly together at Arby's, actually, for several years. And I know they did a full transformation after I left Arby's. And so I knew Carl's working with interworx. So I've called and I went and had lunch and I said Carl, My boss has asked me to fix this. I need your help. So we started having conversations and, you know, the beautiful thing and what I love about the culture of interworks is Carl didn't try to tell me what we needed even though we had a ton of experience in the business. What Carl did was brought a couple of folks from that organization in. And we all sat in a room and we talked about, you know, what we needed and and how how we ran our business and and really got to understand our culture and our business needs and and how we run our business because I'm a big believer until you understand you can't help provide a solution. So they came in and and I'll tell you as quick as quick as I've ever seen somebody be able to put together a full data stack because we ended up going with, Snowflake is our database, Matillion is our our data conversion tool, and then, of course, Tableau is the visualization. Cool. And they quickly put put together in what we call our executive dashboard. It gives us incident insight into our eighteen month comp, which is what you're seeing here on the board. Several other charts and and data points in this dashboard that you can't view here. And it gives us quick access to see our trending for the week. Some average unit volumes here, we rank our stores on, net sales from a comp perspective either by percentage or dollars. We've got a nice little scatter chart here to tell us, hey, what stores are really having a lower average check and a lower ticket comp. Those are the ones in red. So lots of visualization on this chart. We have one for total sales that's very similar to this. And it really gives our executive team the ability just to jump in and look at it from a systems standpoint. But filtering it down either week today, year to date. You know, we can look at it by state, by franchisee, by company, by our franchise business consultant. So we can chop it up and and look at how these these different groups are performing. And then this is just information that Well, ninety five percent of it, we didn't even have. And the other five percent was extremely challenging to get. At at that time, think it took us about six months to pull all the data in, get the database set up, all the transformation, and get really an effective dashboard bill with the help of interworks. And I was just amazed at at the speed of that. So And, Ralph, I'll I'll say that your team was a big part of that too. And that's something that we love at Interworks is working with great clients who know what they're trying to accomplish, and ask really good questions and challenge us to also do our best work. Tell tell me something here, you know, this dashboard you got pulled up that we helped create. Where did this go from here? Like, how did this help your team? Cause it wasn't just this one dashboard that we're looking at that was the great result of us partnering together. But tell me more about, like, where did you guys go from here and what were what were some maybe business outcomes from what we did together. Yeah. So, yeah, I the again, I I know I'm bragging on you guys a little bit here, but know, one of the things Okay. We don't mind. One one of the things that we talked about, you know, during the process was you know, there would hopefully come a a point in time where we we sort of, you know, crawled and walked and started running, and and we wouldn't need you to run beside us the whole time, but we'd call you in to to run a little sprint with us occasionally. So, you know, we we were fortunate to take all of the the framework of what you guys did here. And then, James, if you go kind of the next slide, we have just one person working on our data for the most part, I I dabble in it occasionally. But, you know, our ops team came up and said, hey, is there any way we can take, you know, data from our POS, which is where we started? And then go go bring in some data from, our food costing program. And then also our guest experience, which we use SMG and create a way for our our district managers or our franchise business consultants to just have a scoreboard or scorecard for for what their store. So when they go to visit them, they have a very easy way to sort of rank their stores, which sort of the overall score you see here. You know, thumbs up, thumbs down on these other various various metrics. And and we built this in house, and and you see it has the same look and feel of what what we've built with inter with you guys interworx. And then all these have drill downs on them and have the they have, rankings if you click on the actual category. If you go to sales, it takes you into a lot of those metrics. I was talking about how we're performing on drive through and dine in and all low orders, all of that sort of thing. So it really gets deep and lets us take a look at, you know, where the store has challenges, and then you can drill down to look at a more detailed level. For instance, in food variants, if you have the yellow cone, which I still say looks a little bit like praying hands, but That's that's just me. But but you can you can drill in there and take a a deeper dive. And it's all in one place that we're not going to POS. To our, looking into our, guest experience platform and our food costs, like, we all have it right here for our franchise business. So it saves so much time and makes it just such an easy conversation with our operators. It's just amazing. You mentioned praying hands. I'm not gonna go to unsee that now, Ralph. But in today's economic conditions, I would imagine a lot of people might be praying over food costs because cost has been a big challenge in the industry lately. So Yeah. Absolutely. And so so this is kind of an example of us taking what we started with. Taking it to the next level. And we have another dashboard similar to this that we built, related to our product mix dashboard that our marketing team uses all the time to see, you know, what flavors are popular or what deserves are pairing with what flavors and and some things like that. And then this is an example of, one of those tell us something you don't know about my restaurant or unintended surprise from a test that you're doing, but without data, you would never see it. So we are embarking on potentially changing the way our guests are working. And so we've created a new menu and we're testing it in four restaurants. And our intent for it was when our guests come in, sometimes it's very confusing on where to start and how to order. And there's all these flavors of chicken salad and all these steps you you see map to go through, you know, it's a simple menu. So we embarked on the plan to create a menu that was simple for the guest to order and stream like that, increase throughput. And increase guest satisfaction. Well, we noticed some interesting sort of things going on with check when we did that at these four restaurants. So then literally in, like, less than five minutes closer to three, I went in and created a a set of the test restaurants. Grabbed a couple of things in Tableau, threw them onto a chart. And suddenly, I'm seeing that when we rolled, and and it's on period three down on the bottom slide of this chart. When we scroll the new menu at these stores in red, we instantly saw, like, an eight to nine percent jump in our upsell of what we call our Trio. And no no one had any intent for that to happen on the new menu, but Obviously, that's increased revenue. Just boom. Guess are going from, you know, a nine dollar meal to eleven or twelve dollar. An extra eight percent of the time, big numbers. So, again, without this tool, we would have never been able to pull this up much less in in three or four minutes. So it really just shows the power of the the tableau data visualization visualization platform, and it's it's, you know, our our marketing and operations team when I showed this in front of, like, two weeks together, like, holy cow. Let's go test this in some more restaurants. So Oh, I love that. That's fantastic. Especially because it feels like a lot of times we get stuck on the analytics itself. Right? And I think that the point you're both making, there are surprises and there are real decisions to make, you know, coming out of this stuff. Riles, we talk a lot on this on this conversation here about sort of the modern data stack. And the fundamental premise of what we're generally trying to give our clients to do is build a stack that's gonna be more flexible and gives them a faster route to adapt to business change, while at the same time reducing what I call busy work, right, like what your CEO is doing every Sunday. Can you tell me about the choices you made getting to Snowflake, Matillion, and Tableau as as your version of the modern cloud analytics and Yeah. What decisions were easy or hard for you in that conversation? So I I would say, first of all, like, this is going into this whole conversation. I knew Tableau. I didn't know any of the other. I'd heard of all the other things, but It's not my wheelhouse. I didn't grow up in the data analytics world. Had some exposure to it with Carl and his team when I was at Arby's. So, quite honestly, we relied a lot on interworks to look at what we were trying to do, and we we consulted with you guys more along the lines of Here's where we are, here's where we wanna be in a couple years, and here's where we think we're gonna be in five years. Talk to us about the tools and their advantages and disadvantages of each one and help us down the path of what would be a great fit for us. So, I mean, The decision was kinda easy for me because I I built a trust and a faith in interworks very quickly, and some of that was some relationship with Carl, but it was it was pretty simple for me. And and then the beauty of it was because of some of the stuff that I and my team had done before the data transformation. We've built a lot of trust with the with our CEO and the rest of the executive team that, you know, we we would find the right solutions. We were providing them some things very manually that weren't happening before we got I got here. So that that really helped build some trust on their side that we would find. Right? I feel like there's a a good chunk of our customer base. And if I ask that I pulled this or seventy five folks or, on the audience here, what their data stack looks like. I'm worried that a lot of them have Microsoft SQL Server, and it feels like a huge, so step function to have to go from what we had to where we are now, or maybe for what you had to where you are now. Has it felt like that or has it felt like you can you can move along a curve at the rate you need to, whether you can speed up or slow down I mean, I I really feel like that we can scale this up and and we've done it a couple of times when we've had to bring in some big chunks of data. We actually did have a SQL Server just weren't using, but we were flowing data into, from our POS solution. So it was pretty easy to grab that data from from SQL and just move it to Snowflake. We just felt like it was a more dynamic platform. That it just had a lot more functionality and ease of use and and our the data person that that, you know, we have now creating these dashboards that you've seen He had some SQL experience, and that's about it. Maybe a little bit of Power BI, and we got him in front of some training with Tableau and some snowflake training with interworks. And, you know, he he's like, oh my goodness. This is so much better. In the sequel world with Power BI, like, just over the moon with happiness when he got absorbed to it. And now you would think he'd been working with this stuff for, like, ten years. It's amazing. It's music to the ears. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so pivoting a little bit. If if we move away from the tech, move more towards the business. Carl, maybe this is a question for you. Set the stage for us. You know, you're certainly our in house expert on RCG space. You know, what trends are you seeing across the industry, that you're seeing maybe clients want to look at with data? And, maybe finding success in terms of pivoting their business around that. And maybe, you know, when you get when we get through there, maybe I'd like to, like, to talk about to Ryle's How have you how has you experienced that since the pandemic, right, or through the pandemic? But, but, Carl, maybe give us a stage. What are you seeing across the industry that you think people should be paying attention to? Yeah. That I think I'll comment what I would normally say last first just because of what Ryle's just shared. I think the most common thing I've seen with our clients overall, and not just, like, the last, say, eighteen month trend, is technical debt in restaurant retail clients. Because the businesses historically are focused on let's deliver a great either, like, in chicken salad, chicks case. Let's deliver some excellent, excellent food to our guests. Let's take care of them. Greet them with a hug, as Ralph said, and and you get a great experience chicken salad check. So their primary business vehicle is let's deliver this incredible experience or food or service or in our retail partners, how do we get the good to the person and with a great experience in a at at a cost of the consumers happy to pay for. And in those worlds, historically, especially in the twenty three years, I've been in the space, his those worlds generally don't look at technology first, generally. That has changed a lot over the last five to ten years, but especially in the last five, I think COVID really accelerated that. But in those worlds where the business has not been focusing on technology as a strategic part of how they deliver that great experience, that great food, that great material, they get into technical debt very easily. But by the cheapest solution possible, or they buy a solution that maybe doesn't meet all the needs and they say, hey, we'll just we'll just make it work. And that's generally, especially in the restaurant space. You have incredible people running restaurants. That's been my experience, whether it was at my prior life or two prior lives to go or any client I've worked with. You've got incredible people running restaurants because they love the restaurant world. And they're doing all this great work, but they're just bootstrapping it and just making do with what they have. Whatever data they can get their hands on, sometimes just printing up seat and just saying, Hey, what'd I do today and making a decision on that, right off the POS? So technical debt's been a big challenge. And I think what Ryle's just illustrated is You know what? Even if you do have some technical debt, it's not as bad as you might think it is to get out of that and get to a better place. So we help our clients a lot with that. And it can be really scary because I've been on the other side of this where I was a director of data to analytics at a at a restaurant company, and it scary to think about. We got all this legacy stuff. No one likes to use, or it's a pain to use, or there's so much data. We can't move it. But then when you think about the architecture behind Snowflake being cloud first, you think, with architecture and how easy it is for users to learn Tableau. It makes that technical debt pay down so much easier and more palatable. And then you see the results and the executive and leadership team is like, well, okay. What we paid there? That's worth it now. That was absolutely worth the investment to get us to where we are As far as recent challenges, where I think what we're talking about can really play into, that is we're we're talking about, especially since COVID, more and more folks are re ordering from and this is gonna be mostly for a restaurant. So if our retail friends on the call, it does apply to you, but I'm gonna I'm gonna really focus this more on the paranigm, how you order in a restaurant has changed drastically, especially since COVID. We couldn't go into our restaurants for a while. And certain municipalities wouldn't let you for a long, long time. So how do you get how does a restaurant survive? Well, they had to take orders outside. They had to take orders from a mobile device. So they had to take orders from a third party provider, like in, you know, an Uberte's Grubhub, DoorDash type situation where they maybe weren't doing that before at all. So restaurants had to pivot very quickly with I'm getting orders now from all these different systems. Instead of just one POS or three POSs in the restaurant, I'm now getting it from all these other places. In theory with the mobile ordering, you're getting it from millions of POS systems. That raised a little cell phone. So that's one challenge. How do I get all that data, aggregate it, process it, make sense of it, and then also distribute it back out to my network of restaurants and franchisees. Because of COVID, we had massive supply chain problems. So we're seeing that trend. How do we use data to help manage our supply chain better? Increasing pressures on costs with produce and things like that chicken prices going through the roof or whatever whatever the latest, commodity pressure is or supply chain challenges restaurant companies more than ever having to deal with that and manage that. And that is one thing we're seeing some more clients leverage is how do I leverage data better, in that? And then labor. Labor's been a big challenge. So how can I use data? And we're seeing our clients do this as well to either better schedule or better manage our labor system. So These are all things that we're seeing and challenges that I think many of you who are on the call might be facing as well. So I I I think what what Ralph is talking about is is I think what a lot of folks you guys are experiencing as well. So Yeah. I mean, Certainly, if we look at the pandemic, it it produced this crucible for technical debt to sort of become, front of mind rather than something you could walk right by. Right? We were all passively used to walking by those things. And then two things happened. We had to change the patterns of how we worked and, accessibility was a big impact. And then second, many of our customers had to change their business model. And pivoting is much harder when you're when you're lagging behind on your payments on the technical debt. Ralph, if I look at your story and chicken's out Chick's story, I mean, your pandemic story seems like one of growth. How did you get there, from from sort of paying down that debt? Maybe it's just really great timing. Maybe you're a magician. What challenges did you face? Or what what did you what did you experience during that process? Well, I I mean, from an operational standpoint in the restaurants, you know, a lot of the things Carl talk about Right? I mean, our restaurants were completely shut down for some period of time. I guess to some degree, we were fortunate that we were more based in the east and the southeast. So we didn't face as long a closure, etcetera. But, you know, we built pop up drive throughs in the parking lot and and ran food out to people for us over half our stores don't have drive throughs. So they created drive throughs. Our our restaurants and franchisees created this concept of community drops where, they would put in a location out on Facebook, and people would digitally order, which we had very little of at the time, but it ran up quickly. Did you order a meal or what we call a quick check, which is chicken salad package to go, and pay for it, and they would we would be in your neighborhood on Thursday, and we would bring it to the community center, and you'd come over there and pick it up from. Because no one wanted to go out. We would bring it to your neighborhood and you'd come by and pick up your order, that you would order a couple or three days before. So it was really an interesting time. We had zero third party delivery when I started, and when COVID hit. So we had to pivot very quickly to grow that. So we, you know, we were able to rebound very quickly from the COVID drop. But, you know, then we have to have all of the technologies behind that and the data to look at it and how effective will we be. And to your point, car, we lean really hard into our back office solutions around chicken because we went to record high prices in chicken. Which are hard to bottom line in a heartbeat. So, every, you know, technology now, I mean, it touches everybody. And it's it's so crucial, that we get it right and and use it to be nimble in the restaurant space. Yeah. That's really helpful. I feel like one of the stories I'd like to explore with you both, because Ralph, I think there's probably a chicken salad chick aspect to this. And Carl, I think when we look at the work you do across our client base. I suspect there's a connection there. I feel like a lot of our clients have recently been doing a lot more to to look at their interaction of their data with third party data, whether it be ingesting data they're buying or or bringing in from their network, or whether they're actually sharing data out through things snowflakes data sharing, which we help a lot of customers with, or an embedded conversation around, can we put dashboards or search on top of our data? Within our franchise network, or for vendors, or suppliers. Ralph, is that part of the chicken salad chick story that that's worth and it's interesting it's from your data perspective? Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned on some of our our ops dashboards, you know, we're bringing in our guests our voice of the guest data. We're bringing in food cost data. We're working on labor now. One of the things we're moving towards later this year. Hopefully, it won't be in the next year, but is to bring our loyalty data, into our data warehouse so we can pair that with our POS and start doing some real deep analysis, you know, even down the check level detail on what our loyal guests are buying. And and how to market to them more effectively because our our loyalty program doesn't offer a whole lot of insight there, especially at the store level. But the interesting thing, and you touched on it a bit, we we we found a platform that we we want to share a lot of what I just described that we're bringing in with another third party to help us, with some applications that we're gonna be bringing in from their company into our restaurants. And for them to be effective, they need this voice of the guests, and they need some of our food cost numbers and our sales numbers. So rather than try to tie that platform into four or five different platforms that we're already tied into, we are working on being able to share that data out of our snowflake database directly to them in a paired down way that's meaningful to theirs. So they're not they're not recreating the wheel by creating all these calculations that we've already done. And so we can that curated data, so to speak, we can share back into their platform and to make their application more efficient and then deliver your more value. To our to our consumer, which is, you know, our above store restaurant leadership. I love that story. I feel like, data sharing is an underutilized component of the Snowflake architecture. And -- Yes. -- you know, it's an old joke right in analytics that it feels like all roads lead excel. I love the argument that maybe some of these don't have to. Right? And we could we can avoid the dump from database to excel load back the database cycle by using that data sharing. But jokingly talked about disabling the download feature in Tableos, so people can't pull it into excel. That's not been a joke with many of my clients. I have actually But, Carl, I know. I know. I think if someone buys a sandwich in America, I feel like maybe half those vendors are someone you've worked with and we've worked around the subject of sharing concept within their franchise or around their business. Do you wanna talk to us a little bit about kind of what you've been doing in that space? Because I think there's a pattern there not just for franchises, not just for for RCG companies, but in general, it it's faster and easier to work with the network if they can self serve a lot of that information. Yeah. Absolutely. And I will say, just a comment on what Ryals just said about data sharing. I wish we had that capability when I was in my prior life. There was many partners where we were doing that. We were taken out of our data warehouse and sending data through Excel or CSV uploads or f even FTP, if you guys remember those days, FTP servers. My goodness. So, yeah, it it's it's so exciting to see, Ralph and his team being able to to just be more efficient with time and getting the data in the hands of folks that need it. It's it's, yeah, super exciting. One thing that I'm seeing a lot of, especially, again, going back to that restaurant retail model where you're distributed, and you need to get data from the corporate support center out to those who are actually working in the field, whether it's field operations folks that are helping to drive business results or coaching your restaurant managers or store employees. Or the actual managers or operators. Many times, in this data world, it's difficult for those kind of field users or restaurant users to get what they want just because of how the system might be architected. And this really helped us in my prior life. So I'm actually gonna share instead of just talking to you guys about it, let's do some show and tell just like we did in elementary school. And what what we're what I'm showing here is is really more of an embedded discussion. Like, how do we take, like, what Ryle's has done and also what other clients have done Let's help our users that are out there get the data they need. And honestly, sometimes it's only the data they need. We do wanna have them self-service, do wanna be able to ask the questions they want and get the data they want, but sometimes you need to limit it because otherwise they might squirrel and now they're not doing the job that they're really supposed to do. So what we're showing you here is our embedded product. It's curated Earth by Interworks, and it works natively with Tableau, and then and there's other platforms too that it works with, but what this did for me in my prior life and also what it does for our clients today is it allows us to one customized the whole experience. It feels branded. I remember my prior life when we, stood up this product, We had folks tell us, look, this feels like this is RB's product, even though it was Tableau plus some other things that we were working with, But what it also did is a restaurant manager just said, I need to pull up this one sheet. Everybody knows how to use a website. We all know how to use downloads and and menu pull downs and We've been working on the web now for quite a long time. So this gives you that simple web interface to get to the data you need. And let's say this executive dashboard that we landed on isn't what you need. Well, maybe I just need to search for it. Where was that drive thru report? Oh, it was right there. I can just search for that drive thru report. Now I'm gonna pull it up, and I'm gonna be able to analyze my drive thru sales, based on what I saw before, and there's your dreaded download button rile. So we did not take it off our public inner burger demo, unfortunately, but there there's the download button. So this particular play really helped us get the analytics in the hands of restaurants, also in executives too. Some of those executives, this kind of interface can really help with your most senior leadership as well. And then there's gives you flexibility too to do even more things with your analytics system. Maybe there's documentation, maybe there's training, maybe there's other things that you wanna add in here that really make it the most useful and drive the most adoption and use for you. Carl, I think that's really insightful. And, I know if I had that kind of system even in our business set up well, it would it would save, you know, time and money, in, in every case. I'm looking at the time, and I think we have time for one more cheeky question that I'm gonna be able to ask, and then we'll let the the audience kinda get to their questions. One of the things we talk a lot about here is the future. And, we've talked a lot about the impact that generative AI and, may have on on analytics And I've been pretty candid that my thoughts are we don't necessarily know what bets our customers should make today, but if they wanna get ready to some bets. It feels to me like there's two things they can do, a, data cleanup, and just make sure we have high quality data because if you put garbage into the machine, because we're gonna get out, And, b, thinking about really being defining what the semantics, layer looks like for your business. What's important because that can act as a Rosetta Stone for, for the machines to be able to go through the the large quantities of data and sift out the important pieces. Riles, looking at that dashboard, you showed particularly the second screen where you had some very specifically and well curated KPIs and and some prayer symbols next to some of them. How do you think about that trio of, you know, governance and observability and semantics? First chicken salad chicken, where is that in in your sort of list of either challenges or solve problems? Well, so I'll tell you, like, the big thing that on our radar for the rest of this year, but we talked about a couple of things next time, but we really have done almost nothing with. And and Carl and team warned us about this, and we sort of listened, but we didn't listen in that's governance. Right? I mean, we're diving, you know, head first in, trying to get some actionable items in for our teams and trying to get some quick wins to get everyone. Paying attention to the platform, and and we've done a great job with that. What we haven't done is put together the holistic governance process and and the right teams to be able to stay in those bounds and and really fully define who our customer is in the tablet world and and what that customer looks like two years, three years, five years out. So that's a a big a big to do for us. Because, unfortunately, nobody here at chicken salad check are are historical data people. So we we've gotta we've gotta sort of build all of this from scratch. Probably have to go out and look for a little bit of help to help you know, heard the cat, so to speak. But that's a big focus for us for the next, I would say twelve months. Yeah. You're not alone. And I think that's gonna be certainly the topic of one of these calls coming up is talking explicitly about governance because it's it's it's becoming more and more important as we get to the ubiquity of the new stacks. Yep. Well, look, we have a couple questions coming in that I'd like to maybe pass on to both of you. Maybe there's two questions that are there in this first section. Rals, can you talk about your experiences with performance, in Snowflake or in Tableau? The backdrop is maybe how big are your data even if you have trillions of rows over there, are you analyzing trillions at a time? Are you doing any work to sort of prep that and make it more accessible? How do you think about getting to a useful data set? Well, so first of all, I'll say, someone else on my team handles the majority of that. That's, I'll speak at at kinda high levels, but you know, I I will say that it has been a journey for us. You know, the first thing we did was we tried to go a little bit cheap. Which, you know, Carl referenced that, and I would say, to anyone that's considering going down this path, be realistic about what what the costs are gonna be and what the resource requirements from a a people standpoint, etcetera, are going in. Because if you try to, halfway do it, you're gonna get twenty five percent results. They're gonna be fighting it the whole time and just go ahead and plan appropriately and be ready to to spend what you need to spend to get it done. I'll use the term So that was a little bit of a mistake that we did. So, you know, we went through a couple of iterations of of ramping up and then ramping down and and really right sizing. And I think anyone that does this is probably gonna have a little bit of that challenge, because we don't know what we don't have. But the good news is, you know, we are now in a place where we feel like we have right size. We don't really have a lot of performance issues. And and when we do, we go and look and see why. And some of it's because how we curate the data or, you know, an example, you know, we were instead of updating a table, we found out that we were going and pulling, you know, five years worth of data every time we went to go pull something from a certain database. Right? And that's just a bit of a learning curve mistake on our part not building the query quite right, and it'll chew up data and usage and drive up costs and and impact performance. We found that. And when I say we, I mean, Matt, who's on our team, and and he fixed that, and and we You know, we cut some of our costs and improve and improve performance, and we cut some of our costs by thirty to forty percent. It was an amazing what a couple of little things and a couple of check boxes can do. But, I mean, that's the beauty of the the platforms that we chose is that They're they're pretty quick to scale if you have some large project coming in where you're gonna be bringing a lot of data up when we get ready to bring our historical loyalty data into the platform. We know it's gonna cause problems. So we're gonna ramp that up, and and then we can scale it back back, which is a really nice That's really interesting and insightful. Absolutely. And I think that pattern of move fast check often is is, I think, a really well, you know, well recommended pattern for our clients out there. This question came in, and I think it was mostly for you, Ryle's. You may or may not wanna talk about your particular model for it. So Carl will open up to you as well. When we think about data sharing, within a franchise, how do you think about that in terms of financial exchange? Is that something where we're charging franchise owners for information? Is that is there are there two layers to it? And, again, Ralph, you may not wanna talk about chicken style chick, but Carl, in general, how are you seeing that exchange and how are you seeing sort of entitlement even in that conversation? Yeah. I'll take a take the first stab here at that one. It really comes down to how the company structured. Some companies, when they go in down this path, especially when you when you have, what we like to call best of breed stack of technology here, they will go ahead and say, from the get go, we're gonna charge back either to a department based on usage. You have Snowflake being consumption based, and they just make that decision from the get go and they get alignment on leadership. So that way, everybody shares the cost of what's being used. In that way, like what Ryal said, if I've got a thirty nine billion row data set I need to do some analysis on. I'm not sure how long it's gonna take. My department can say, yeah, we'll pay for whatever increased costs. We wanna run it on a bigger warehouse to get things done faster. We can do that. And we help educate our clients on that. Like, this is an option you have. You can either try to go really, really economical, but you're, you know, you may not get the speedy performance on the super large data sets that you're looking for. But here's how you can ramp up and ramp down, or if you do wanna share costs, some restaurant companies will sell back to either franchisors. Like, if they've got a lot of franchisee companies are dealing with other franchise or worse that that they have their own set of restaurants. That's a common model, for those companies that that choose to to operate that way. Because they're they're delivering a service in essence to that franchise award. It's almost a I mean, they are separate entity. They're not the exact organization. They share a brand together, sometimes multiple brands together, but, that that's a separate company. So they There should be. In my opinion, a financial transaction there, there's certainly some value going on, in exchange there. And whether it's Snowflake data sharing or just we're gonna give you access to our own, curator or portal to have your own insights. We can do that for you, and that's what makes this platform the way it's architected very powerful. Yeah. And James, and on our side, current currently, we don't share the the dashboards and access to this into the franchiser or even at the store level. Another thing that's kind of on our sort of our data government governance road map is how do we start getting this data in more of a real time down to the store level and the franchisee. So that's still in the works for us. Right now, we depend on our franchise business and tell things or they'll mark managers to use the data to enhance the services that we provide to the restaurants, outside of sort of dashboards. Right? So when a market one of our field marketing managers is working with a franchisee you know, they can talk about the data that they're seeing within our b in our dashboards and how that impacts the franchisee and have them develop a a marketing campaign. So Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's absolutely a a pattern we see in an easy middle ground for a lot of folks. Right, who who are sort of intimidated by the notion of everyone can access, but you can certainly give, value accelerators to that pool of you know, marketing managers, whoever it may be, who work one to many. And I think we see a lot of clients take that step first. A few different questions coming in, Riles around, can you give us a sense of how you collect data and and maybe some of the disparate data sources you work with? Yeah. I I really the majority or really all of the data that we're currently collecting. I should say most. Is really through APIs that that tap into our partners. So again, SMG, our voice of the guests, we have an API that we pull data on a regular basis. NCR, we get, a daily API feed from them every day to get all our per sales data. That's our POS data. Then I would say the same thing with our back of the house application. And then, and then, you know, to help build the chart, so to speak, you know, we we keep a what we call a data attributes or restaurant attributes table. Where we have everything that we know about our our restaurants. We know, you know, who the marketing manager is, who the franchise business consultant is, we know the square footage of the restaurant. What size quick check unit they have in it? Do they have a drive through, you know, who the owner is? Obviously, whatever state address and all that. So we can do. Regional mapping. So we we can look at performance of restaurants. You know, by square footage, we get we collect rent from our franchisees that those are manually, some of the financial data that our franchisees send us on a quarterly basis. We do have sort of a manual input from the dreaded Excel spreadsheets into into our data set, but that's where where they operate. So And then that allows us to just slice and dice. And, you know, we can look at, you know, square footage versus profitability and all kinds of things with this data attributes. That answers the question? I I think it answers this question. Excellent. And, I think we're gonna let you have the last word, here. Ryan, so look, I'll just say thank you for joining us today. Thank you for sharing about about the company. Thank you for getting me a future sweet tea earn here in Salt Lake City, that I can I can dive into And for anybody who's here, who's interested in continuing the conversation, I think the indirect side, we are always willing to be to to have that conversation? We will be at the Quickserve Revolution Conference coming up in Atlanta. If you wanna know more about chicken salad, chick, their CEO will actually be speaking. At that conference, Carl will be in attendance. So if you wanna pick his brain or just get in touch with him, we'll be there. And, I'll just say, look, thanks, Ralph, for joining. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Really appreciate the conversation and, and, Yeah. You're open to us. You're you're welcome. Happy to be here. And if I can just share one thing with the audience before I leave is if you're getting ready to go down this journey, I would advise the first thing you should do is ask the why. Why are we going down this journey? Doing it because someone says we need data. You you need to you need to look at little people because that's always the answer. We need data more data. What data? Why? How are we gonna use the data? And then really make sure that you have buy in from all the groups within the company before you embark on the journey because that is such a key piece. To when you hit stumbling box or if you have a an a financial, you know, miscalculation, you need a little bit of extra funds or whatever. It makes it a whole lot easier to have a conversation if you built the trust behind the project. And everybody understands why we're going down this path, and how we're gonna get Willie, that is the last word. Everybody, in attendance, If you have a chance, please do answer a couple quick questions. We hope this is informative. If you have any advice for us on what what you'd love to hear or or what next, let us know. And, Ryle's, again, thank you very much for all for all that, that wisdom.