How Coffeeangel built their own BI reporting, but ultimately moved to Tenzo

We recently spoke to Karl Purdy at Coffeeangel about his experience of building out a bespoke business intelligence and reporting platform for his nine-location coffee business and how, ultimately, Tenzo was able to fill the reporting gap in his business. 

A little background…

Karl’s journey to where he is today is truly fascinating, but Coffeeangel started with a three-wheel Piaggio van serving coffee rain or shine in Dublin. They spent seven years with just the van from 2004 to 2011 where they built a loyal following and a business model that worked extremely well. 

In 2011, they opened their first bricks and mortar shop as a pop-up that never popped down and their second shop followed closely behind in less than a year. Now, Coffeeangel operates nine locations in and around Dublin. 

Tracking performance from the very beginning

Karl’s focus on metrics and KPIs started at the very beginning. When it was just him in the van, he would track whatever he could whether that was the number of coffees sold, his baked goods attachment rate, or his coffee-making efficiency (coffees/hour).  

He still remembers the key metrics to this day: “During the Celtic Tiger from 2004 up to 2009, 30% of all of my customers bought a coffee and something else. When the recession took hold that figure dropped to 9%.”

These numbers were a driving force for him: “Once you start tracking your metrics, if your DNA is designed competitively, you’ll always want to be better, even if it’s just better than you were yesterday.”

Expanding and taking on more systems

As the business grew, they started building their tech stack. He chose modern and best-in-class point-of-sale, labour and inventory management systems. But when it came to the metrics he wanted, “I realized that they all baked reporting into their systems. And all the reporting was good, but there were multiple PDFs, CSVs, etc and it just turned into data noise.”

“I could have spent my days not making coffee and serving customers, but digesting and trying to distil this information into something usable and practical.”

He knew he needed a way to bring these systems together and get the reports he relied on without taking up his precious time with endless compiling. 

This coincided with the early days of business intelligence platforms. “I was aware of a few companies that were growing in the BI space, but none of them were interested in some guy with a couple of coffee shops and a little three-wheeler van. They wanted huge operations who could pay 10 grand a month for them to build this thing and make it work. It just was so far out of my reach.”

Building a bespoke BI platform  

With the big BI players out of reach, Karl started hunting for potential solutions online, eventually stumbling upon someone who could help him build his own bespoke reporting by pulling from his various systems’ APIs and surfacing the data in Salesforce. 

“I spent a lot of time, a huge amount of time, and a considerable amount of money building this bespoke business intelligence platform that was completely for us.”

He estimates he spent around 30,000 euros to get it all up and running. “It was built with a vision of growing the business. I wouldn’t need to invest the same again if we doubled our footprint. I think at the time we were four shops so it had the capacity to scale with us.” 

He got it set up and working: “it was a very bespoke solution, but I could create what I needed and I could share it with our teams. It was very easy to digest. It served the purpose at the time.”

But then the worst happened – one of his systems got acquired and stopped serving anyone outside of the US. “So, if you could imagine my little business intelligence platform being a stool with three legs, all of a sudden, one of the legs fell off and it just collapsed.”

Unfortunately, through no fault of his own, he was back to square one. “I just went back to building spreadsheets and sharing those through Google Sheets and giving people access to them.”

Moving to Tenzo for all their reporting needs 

Karl soon ran into the same issue that led him to try and build a BI platform the first time: compiling reports was extremely time-consuming and at his expense.

So despite some initial reservations, he made the move to Tenzo. “Anytime you embrace a new piece of technology there’s always a level of fear. In my business, I tend to underpromise and over-deliver, whereas I do find in terms of technology, whether it’s an application, or your iPhone or whatever, there’s this element of overpromising and under-delivering.”

Tenzo’s focus on his industry and best-of-breed approach sealed the deal, though. “When I decided to make the move to Tenzo, it really helped that it was hospitality-centric and platform-agnostic. Over the years, I’ve changed my point-of-sale system several times. There’s a sense of security that if we do decide to make another move, the three-legged stool isn’t going to fall over again and that gives peace of mind.”  

Lessons learnt along the way

When he looks back on the evolution of Business Intelligence in his business, Karl had this to say: “It was just a lesson learned. I’m in hospitality; I don’t want to be responsible for a BI platform. I can pat myself on the back and say, well done, you did that, but I did it and it didn’t work: it failed after a couple of years.”

“Sometimes you do just need to invest in the systems and processes that free you up to do the things that you’re good at. I can look at a spreadsheet or I can look at the data, but I’m not a developer, I can’t deep dive into that stuff. I could try to learn it, but that’s not my life goal, you know? I’d rather be out there pushing flat whites and making people happy.”