How Tenzo’s forecasting helped Fitz Group lower their Prime Costs by 3% points

We recently spoke to Nick Heys, MD at Fitz Group about how Tenzo has helped them with their costs. Get in touch to see how Tenzo could help your business!

Who are Fitz Group?

A group of 3 friends started a restaurant in Paris called Fitzgerald, but it wasn’t just an ordinary restaurant, it held a secret. A secret speakeasy bar in fact. After their initial venture saw success, the three founding partners decided to open more. They now have five restaurants around Paris. 

As part of their expansion, they decided to centralise their head office to help their General Managers do what they do best: taking care of their staff and their customers. That centralisation led the team to look for a tool to help both Head Office and Restaurant Managers stay on the same page. 

Why Tenzo?

“We purchased Tenzo because we were managing our restaurants based on hunch, and not based on numbers.”

The team at head office are not just concerned with growth; they want that growth to be profitable and that means not wasting resources. 

Tenzo’s forecasting “enabled us to get a view as to what the revenue was going to be per restaurant, per day. From there, the restaurant General Managers were able to work backwards and decide how much labour to put against those sales forecasts and how much purchasing to put against those sales forecasts.”

It wasn’t an immediate success, they needed time to embed the processes within the team and figure out the best way to implement the forecast.  

“But after three months, we saw a significant improvement in our prime costs. Thanks to Tenzo, we’ve gained about three percentage points on our prime costs, which goes straight to the bottom line in terms of improving our group profitability.”

Optimising weekly meetings

Arriving at a meeting where no one is on the same page is never a good thing, especially not in a busy hospitality business where everyone is time-poor. 

Having a tool that could provide direction was also key to Fitz Group. 

“What we liked about the forecasting tool was not only the ease with which it provides an initial forecast, we liked it because it helped create more discipline from our GMs, in every Monday morning, coming in and giving us their forecast for the next 10 days, so that they can better plan their labour costs and purchasing.”

Democratising data 

But what about looking back at what’s already happened? As the business grew, having a simple way to see performance on a daily basis became more and more important to the head office team who couldn’t physically be in every site every day. 

Tenzo’s automated daily reports were a simple solution. Everything that happened yesterday emailed to the people who needed it.

“What we liked was the morning email that tells us what happened yesterday versus the budget as well as the logbook in terms of getting feedback as to what happened in each restaurant from the manager on duty. 

We were able to get a better feeling for what was happening in each restaurant. And we shared that amongst the different General Managers so that they know what’s happening within the different restaurants and share their best practices.”

Going beyond targets  

Being able to see profitability metrics in Tenzo is important to the group. The teams have switched from only comparing sales numbers to last year and their budgets to having Prime Cost targets. This makes profitability top of mind for everyone in the business.

“We’re not so much obsessed with what sales we did versus the budget, we’re more obsessed with whether that number was a profitable number.”

A best-of-breed approach to tech

When choosing their tech stack, having the best tools for their team was crucial.

“We have a best-of-breed technology strategy. We buy point solutions that we deem are best for getting the job done. And then we work on integrating them on the back end.”

Working together with Lightspeed and Marketman, Tenzo allows Fitz Group to see their revenue and costs in one place making decision-making and performance optimisation much simpler.

What’s next?

Fitz Group have opened two new sites this year alone and have plans to open more in the future. 

“We’re happy that all of our systems are talking to each other so that we can get a holistic view of what’s happening in the company.”