During the first week of 2021, Christian (CEO and Co-founder) and Lizzie (Senior Marketing Manager) read the book Play Bigger by Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney and it set off a catalyst of events that led to this: the creation of a new category, Restaurant PerformanceOps. 

Time to think

The pandemic had given us some time to think about what the ‘new normal’ would mean for restaurants and how Tenzo could best serve our customers. If we were honest with ourselves, we knew that there were 2 key pieces we needed to solve:

  1. Closing the gap between simply gathering insights and actually acting on them
  2. Evolving with the industry to help with the shift from surviving to thriving

Christian dreamed up the initial concept for Tenzo as he struggled to actually access his data let alone use it to make real-time decisions when running Hummus Bros, a 6-location chain of restaurants in London.

Having studied computer science with Adam previously, they both knew there had to be a better way of providing insights to restaurateurs. 

And so, 7 years ago, accepted into the Tech Stars start-up incubator, Christian and Adam spent a grand total of 5 minutes and 5 dollars on Fiverr for our original logo. Tenzo was born. 

At first, the goal was just to bring all operational data into one place, something we achieved and now excel at with over 70 integrations and counting.

Once we’d brought all that data together, we realised we needed to do something with it, so cards and forecasting came to life. 

Our dashboards and AI forecasting were loved by head office and our data-savvy users, but we still felt there was value being left on the table: GMs were not getting the information they needed fast enough to make decisions. 

That lack of visibility meant opportunities were literally being left on the table. And in such a tight-margined industry, those opportunities can be the difference between success and failure.

That coupled with the huge amount of data restaurateurs now generate and thinner and thinner margins due to rising inflation, labour shortages, and all the other external challenges restaurants are currently facing meant that we knew we had to help restaurants shift from surviving to thriving. 

Introducing Restaurant PerformanceOps 

Imagine a world where all of your data comes together, in real-time in the palm of your hand. 

With a single reporting language: Managers, Operations, Sales, Finance working together as one. 

Predicting sales & what that means for labour & inventory. Every Day. 

Measuring performance against your KPIs. Every Hour. 

Empowering you to act and improve performance. All the Time.

Performance at the centre of what we do

We’re introducing Act, alongside Aggregate and Analyse & Predict to ensure that insights can always be actioned in real-time and meaningfully impact performance. 

We want to make sure that every lever that can be pulled to optimise performance is pulled and no opportunities are ever left on the table. For happier teams, happier restaurants and a happier planet. 

All this to fulfil our ultimate vision: a more sustainable and successful restaurant industry.