Stop Labor Leaks: Preventing Time Theft & Maximizing Bar Profits with Cijoy Olickal

Are your employees secretly draining your profits? The hidden costs of labor inefficiencies might shock you.

Every bar owner knows that labor costs are a huge part of the budget—but most don’t realize just how much money is slipping away due to time theft, clock milking, and scheduling inefficiencies.

In today's episode:

• Discover how tracking minor labor discrepancies can save thousands every year.
• Learn why "buddy punching" and clock milking are bigger threats than you think—and how to stop them.
• Find out how better guest interactions can boost check averages without annoying upsells.

 If you're serious about improving your restaurant’s bottom line, this episode is a must-listen. Hit play now!

Contact Cijoy:
GMPilot.com
Cijoy's LinkedIn

Learn More:
Email Chris
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Starfish. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software using AI to help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
**We are a SpotOn affiliate and earn commissions from the link above.

A podcast for bar, pub, tavern, nightclub, and restaurant owners, managers, and hospitality professionals, covering essential topics like bar inventory, marketing strategies, restaurant financials, and hospitality profits to help increase b...

Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.016)
Today we are joined by Cijoy Olickal of GM Pilot. So as everyone that listens to this podcast knows, I love data. And lucky for me, Cijoy loves data just as much as I do. And he actually has been doing this at a, where I'm more at the individual store level, working with independent operators, he does this for chains. And so while some of stuff we're to talk about is a little bit bigger than what we normally talk about in that regard, all of his information is good and

he has better insight on the labor data than probably anyone I have ever met or talked to before. So just to give you a little bit on his background, he started out doing consulting, ended up then being a CIO for a few large restaurant chains. And currently he's with this company, GM Pilot, where they focus on helping GMs become more efficient and restaurants become more profitable through essentially better labor management and understanding labor management and figuring out where they're losing in labor management, which is something that

You know, I know I as an independent dealt with and then everybody listening to this podcast you guys all deal with. So this should be an interesting conversation because oftentimes we're talking with folks that work with smaller bars and restaurants, smaller groups, not people that work with with big chains. But all of this translates very well. So last thing I will say about GM Pilot before I let's Cijoy talk. What's really cool about them is they are using some tech, but they look at things on a location by location basis. So even when they're dealing with big chains,

They're still looking at individual stores. And while they still use some tech, they do all their communication stuff through email. So it's a tech company that doesn't necessarily feel like a tech company all the time. And it feels a lot more like personalized service. So Cijoy, Hopefully that does you justice and your background and company justice. But why don't you fill us in on parts that I messed up there.

Cijoy Olickal (01:51.278)
Chris, I think I should just hire you to, to write my communications. You did a better job of communicating what, what I do and our philosophy, but then, then I probably could. but like you said, yeah, our, our point of view is that if I can be a part of, the company with GM pilot, if we can go and support a GM on running their business better, then you take a good GM and GM pilot, you get a great restaurant.

And we get that through great financial results. And, know, what sales cures all ills, as the saying goes. So, driving up sales, profitable sales, just helps everybody, the employees, the guests, you know, the whole business as a whole and the community around it. So you're right. We deal with lots of chains. That's kind of the world I grew up in. However, chains are nothing more than just a collection of individual locations. And it all comes down to.

Chris Schneider (02:46.926)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (02:49.209)
the pulse that the GM sets for that building and how that building does. then the network is nothing more than a group of individual GMs just grinding it out with their teams and doing the best they can.

Chris Schneider (03:01.526)
Absolutely. And something that we had just talked about before we started recording that I think I want to make sure we bring up early on. We were talking about how you look at chains and a lot of times the independents feel like the chains have some special knowledge that we don't. But in actuality, that's not always true.

Cijoy Olickal (03:20.876)
No, not at all. think we were just talking about that, right? It's like, I have dealt with chains that are in the tens of billions of dollars and, and on down. and they're all, every one of them is dealing with the same things. It's just many locations of it happening at once. So, to the folks who are listening, if you're in there grinding away at your single location, you're doing just as good as a public traded company. They're, they don't have any secrets that are different than you. They're all dealing with the same things.

at just a lot of it, that's all.

Chris Schneider (03:54.04)
Well, I just think that's a good reminder because sometimes I feel like independents, especially when you get into smaller bars and in smaller markets, people feel like they're missing something and there's something they don't know and don't realize that regardless of the size of your company, you're still doing the same grind day in and day out.

Cijoy Olickal (04:11.406)
Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Schneider (04:13.014)
So with GM Pilot, I know you guys focus mostly on labor metrics and labor optimization. Why don't you fill us in a little bit about what exactly you guys do and how that all works?

Cijoy Olickal (04:23.384)
Yeah, absolutely. So the kind of the beginning idea was that, you know, the GM has got a task they to manage this labor, like how much labor they need to schedule. They've got a forecast of how many people are going to come in that week, whether they set it themselves or in a chain environment. It's kind of being dictated by the CFOs organization is forecasting out how much you're going to get in sales. You as an owner, you know, roughly how many people are going to come in the door. What you need to know then is how many people you need to schedule accordingly.

based on what they're going to buy, what they're going to drink, how long they're going to linger around, you know, how quickly your covers are going to turn. So based on all that, you've got to go build a plan. if you've got us now, hopefully you guys have graduated from a spreadsheet to a scheduling system and not trying to do an all spreadsheet. If you are hats off to you, you're, better at Excel than, than, than your neighbor. but if you've got a scheduling system, then the tools are there to help you now.

What ends up happening is the more revenue you got, the busier you're getting and the bigger fish out there that you've got to go fry. and you may not get the needed hour to really sit down and do a really good schedule. I saw someone send me a TikTok video today of someone saying, look, I did this in 12 minutes, but it's like, that's 12 minutes just to complete something. It doesn't mean it's 12 minutes of like a really good schedule. Like I think most of the folks here will, will agree with that. That hour, is great. And again,

at the end, that doing that hour at the end of a shift, man, that's not something that, anybody's looking forward to doing. So we said, look, that's an important responsibility. It's a complex responsibility. can be juiced up even more with, some extra math and extra computing power. That looks like a really good thing that we should just take away from the GM. Now it sounds kind of sacrilegious to say I'm taking the GM out of scheduling, but then the GMs we talked to you're like, thank God I don't.

like doing this thing anyway so it works out

Chris Schneider (06:25.078)
I mean, in all the years that I've managed restaurants and worked with them, I don't think I've ever been mad when someone else wants to do a schedule for me. Right? Like it is, is probably the worst thing to do. So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about the, just kind of the philosophy of scheduling. Cause I know that two of the main things you guys look at when you, when you're trying to make a schedule or sales forecast and employee performance. And so how do those tie into how you do scheduling and just kind of what's the overall philosophy you use when it comes to schedule?

Cijoy Olickal (06:39.243)
Okay.

Cijoy Olickal (06:54.338)
just ACEs in places, right? It's something we all, all think about and dream about doing is putting our ACEs in places. And if the ACEs are available, we put them where we can. And if we know which ACEs work well together, we'd love to put them together. Cause there's that, you know, two Clydesdales pulling together is more than the two X over one Clydesdale. Right. So all that stuff we believe in. And if we have that knowledge from, again, if you have the systems and we can.

take that and enhance it and then optimize away, and then build a schedule that's really lined up really well. Now we take in, like you said earlier, everything we do feels like it's a person on the other end of it. it really is because we do it location by location. What does this location need? And then we look at, you know, how well does friday, what's friday traffic really look like? You know, we're used to like this, this little band of like, here's my lunch shift. Here's my midday. Here's my.

dinner shift, here's maybe my late night shift or a breakfast shift. And we work in those little kind of time slots that we were all used to doing with. When you look down into it, they're not really that flat. They're bumpy, right? we go, any human could go do it. It'll just take him four hours to write a schedule instead of one. It would be amazing if you did. You tweak out, you juice out another few percent of labor savings.

but it's also who's got the time left for it. And that's really what we ended up figuring out that we can do this at scale and very quickly for people and do it really well. So we'll look at all kinds of things about what time of day are people really coming in, which employees, again, depending on how you want to play, what you consider an ace. If it's the ace that's really moving appetizer sales or dealing really well with four tops or whatever it may be, tell us what those objectives are. We'll figure it out.

Chris Schneider (08:24.046)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (08:45.942)
because the data is nothing more than footprints that people have left behind from the work they did. We can look at that and find who's really killing it. And, you know, when it comes to scheduling, it's not a, hey, if Sojoy is really slacking on Sunday mornings, we're not going to move, him on Sundays anymore and put him to a shift where he's really performing. And if he starts performing really well, then maybe he gets a chance to be back on the high value shifts where he can earn more tips. And if again, if he slouches off, then...

Chris Schneider (08:49.432)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (09:11.17)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (09:13.825)
No problem. We'll shuffle. If Chris is really killing it, we're going to move Chris up to the top. It takes the GM out of the conversation of, man, why am I not getting my shift? It's like, well, your performance is what's getting you your shift.

Chris Schneider (09:25.197)
So if performance is, and I agree, performance should be one of the main things we use for shifts, right? Because even if you think about servers or bartenders, they have different volume that they're capable of, right? A really good server might be able to do $500 an hour and maybe your bad server can only do $100 an hour, right? Or however those numbers work. But for you, if you were going to say, when you're looking at employee performance, these are the metrics that I think are most important.

What would those be?

Cijoy Olickal (09:55.682)
I think you have to balance that out. And one of the things I will say that we don't look just as individuals, we look as teams. So we look at the group of people during a period of time, whether that's an hour or 15 minute increment. know, in the QSR world, we're looking at like 15 minute increments, which people are really pushing burgers out the door quickly. And that's the crew that you want to recognize, reward and reschedule often together. And you can also find, as soon as this particular person shows up, boom.

Chris Schneider (10:02.168)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (10:14.446)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (10:23.849)
It's like efficiency goes down the door. You've got a bad customer review that came in another hour. So it's like all things, right? We're looking for balance. We're looking for how much revenue can we produce? How efficiently can we do it? You know, with the least number of people, how effectively can we do it from, are we getting positive or negative reviews in that hour? And bringing that into the mix as well too. So that message that goes out the next day will tell you like,

Here's what, how you did on performance. It's there was good weather was good outside. had to a number of people coming through. You had to, you know, this level of staffing does so much volume. He moved out the door during that time and you didn't get any negative reviews. Now I don't want to end it that you with good reviews. Hopefully you get a lot of those, but if there is a bad one, we're going to put it right next to, uh, you know, the hour or period of time where it happens. So you can zoom in onto guys, what happened here. Uh, and.

You know, we have all the roles broken out so you can see who was on prep that day. You know, if it was like all the avocados were, were spoiled or the guac was sour or whatever it be. You can go back and look who was on prep and then go have a conversation. What happened here?

Chris Schneider (11:33.326)
Sure. So once you get the schedule done, then we're into the monitoring portion of things. And monitoring is where, you know, you and I have talked before, and I think monitoring is where we get into the really interesting pieces here, because there's a lot of theft that happens that people don't even really recognize or see or understand. And what's so unique about your approach is you've gotten into all these tiny little pieces of theft that there's no way

Most restaurant managers are A, even looking for them, but B, necessarily have the time. But also, if you set up some stuff, they're not that hard to always measure. And so when it comes to controlling theft, one of the big things that you pointed out that I think happens a lot, especially for small restaurants that they don't catch, is role switching. So talk to us a little bit about role switching, what that is, and how you see that play out in the industry as far as theft is concerned.

Cijoy Olickal (12:33.45)
Yeah, I think this actually works really well for the folks like your audience that have bars, right? We don't see a lot of role switching and like a QSR cause it's like one, one or two roles, but you know, If you've got a bar and you're paying a different pay rate for bar for bartender versus a server on an hourly rate basis, you can see someone who's allowed to clock in at either one. I may have scheduled them for one role versus another role because that's how I planned out my schedule.

But whether they're accidental or intentional, if they didn't switch the rules that they were supposed to, now they've clocked in and stayed clocked in at the wrong pay rate and done the wrong job. So now they're getting compensated for the wrong rate. Again, it's a broken promise between the employer employee. If you don't continue to catch that, you can't coach it. Again, we're going to assume everyone, like from our point of view, we report facts. Like we don't offer opinions. Like we just report the data facts about this is what happened.

Chris Schneider (13:18.615)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (13:27.345)
And then it's up to you to have a conversation. could be a very good reason for it. could be just, you know, just one of those people that, knows that you're not watching. And frankly, like we said earlier, even up to the biggest of the big chains, they're not able to watch this. It's, well, we just, what we decided to do, I was kind of scared about doing those, ops leader work with said, you really should do this. Like, I'll like, I kind of cringed. I'm like, that's just really hard work, tech wise to do.

and it just hasn't been done before. So it's like, great. How much, how much money we're going to throw at this problem. but it turned out to be worthwhile. It kind of blew our mind that, that those little paper cuts of 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there, roll switching, et cetera, all that netted out to nearly 5 % of bottom line being eroded by this. And, you know, our usual methods, like in the past have been, Hey, let me watch overtime numbers.

And I'll watch labor percentage of sales, right? And we've all kind of been accustomed to that being just an average, but underneath that average, there's a lot of noise going on that we've talked about. You can't see below the iceberg, but the chunk of the money is being lost over there. And, you know, you may be running it, let's say 25 % labor percentage of sales. You could have been running at 20, if you actually followed the schedule and built a schedule that really, really tight.

Chris Schneider (14:37.58)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (14:55.88)
to what the sales forecast was.

Chris Schneider (14:59.01)
Well, and that's the thing that I think, you know, a lot of times with independents, they're saying, well, we don't necessarily have the time to or want to put out the effort to do this. But when you're about something like 5%, 5 % of a million bucks is $50,000. Right. So for a lot of small bars, that's half a third of your annual income, you know, somewhere between a third and half of your annual income you can increase just by watching your labor cost.

Cijoy Olickal (15:15.443)
Yeah.

Cijoy Olickal (15:28.306)
Right. Yeah, it's.

Chris Schneider (15:29.378)
which is huge on the individual level.

Cijoy Olickal (15:31.87)
Yeah, it is. you know, when we did this, it was like, okay, what's the alternative? And the alternative would be to have somebody sitting around in the middle of night, crunching these numbers on every location. Now order of magnitude. takes the things that we're doing now take about three to four hours for a really fast person to do, but we're trying to get that report out first thing in the morning. So you imagine somebody sitting from like, from close at 3am until 6am trying to crank this report out. All right.

Chris Schneider (15:49.784)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (16:00.702)
Are you going to be able to find somebody, let's say, 12 hours offset from you in another part of the country or part of the planet to do that work, do it consistently, do it without error and be reliable? And the answer is probably not. It's, know, when you just thought about how do we solve this, I came from big time consulting where I had, you know, tens of thousands of people in other countries that were working. you know, hundreds of PhDs in one country, tons of like frontline workers in other country.

Could have gone down that route, but we're like, that's not going to be consistent. That's not going to be reliable because you know, it is the moment we make one human based error, then the whole trust falls apart and the whole thing. So we couldn't have that. we got to engineer this thing and, build, build a lot of software to make this work. But also, like you said earlier, give it a feel that it's a person on the other end doing the work because we didn't want something that's going to come back and look like, um, you know, the.

Chris Schneider (16:40.078)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (16:57.584)
everyday dashboards that everybody sees that are cumbersome and complicated to read. And this very simple list of here's who didn't show up to work yesterday. Who's didn't show up for the shift. Here's who did show up on their one schedule too. Here's the managers that were there during that period of time. Here's who didn't take their breaks. You know, if you're concerned about breaks, who didn't take their breaks. Here's who was scheduled for six hours and work three and a half. Did they quit on you or were they sent home early? And again,

Chris Schneider (17:10.894)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (17:18.167)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (17:27.161)
for you to determine, but we're telling you what happened. And here's all the people that stood up earlier than they're supposed to, beyond your grace period and who's left later than your grace period and who the GMs were during that time. So you can see who's watching it who's not.

Chris Schneider (17:29.976)
Right.

Chris Schneider (17:44.342)
And let's talk on that one a little bit because the clock milking thing is a real issue, right? And it's something I know from our conversation you guys see a lot of. And it's really easy, I think, as an operator to go, well, OK, it's two minutes. Why do I care? But obviously, that's the wrong attitude. So why do you have to worry about something like two minutes when it comes to clocking?

Cijoy Olickal (18:05.382)
I, I always the same place, right? Like I had never seen data around it. had, you know, taken counsel from an operator, Ingrid, she had been in the game for 40 years and she's just like, so Joy, what you're doing is cool. You want to go schedule people. That's great. Everybody needs that. What we really need in the industry is to, is to catch all the variances to that schedule. I'm like,

I'm like, mean, it was like a gut punch. I'm like, you know how hard that is to figure out and calculate that and do all that stuff. And, and I was like, is this going to even be worth it? But, uh, we did it. We did it for a brand, uh, you know, kind of the first, our first customer on this thing. They were asking for it too, cause the VP of ops was trying to do it himself. And he's like, I know this is going on and CFO and I were both like, yeah, we're not sure how, how big this is going to be. We did it and we found.

Holy crap. That's 3 % is what that all added up to over the month. And I was like, okay. Uh, and we started looking at the behavior, like what, what are people doing here? And it's all right. We schedule, you know, this person for 20 hours. They know 30 is when they're going to get picked up on overtime. They can speak out on 22 in a week and no one's going to catch on because they'll linger here and there or start slowing down. Laris enough. had a talk with someone, uh, from

from Disney theme parks. And they said that they had the same problem. Let's just call it a Dolores problem. I forget the name of the employee, but they call it a Dolores problem. Dolores would work really fast during, the beginning of her shift, crank people out. But near the end of her shift, all of a sudden, this guest that she's checking in and need his special attention. And she had to stay on for an extra hour to make sure that that special attention got taken care of.

You wouldn't scold her for it, but she picked up on his behavior pattern and you know, she was a top earning employee because of all this oversight that she was ranking in, but it was covered under the guise of this is good guest experience, right? So this stuff happens, it's human nature. I mean, I was a knucklehead 15 year old working an hourly labor job where the people around me, I'm watching them and what are they doing?

Chris Schneider (20:23.502)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (20:23.676)
You know, the shift is over, but no one's punched out. So I'm like, okay, I guess I'll punch out when I leave, even though I'm not, I'm not on schedule anymore. I'm just roaming around the store, just doing stuff that I'm not scheduled to do. I didn't know any better. And I followed, you know, whoever's around me, cause I didn't want to be called a nerd for trying to be too by the book. But, but again, that goes to establishing the culture of the, of the building. And if the organization knows it.

Chris Schneider (20:49.048)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (20:51.58)
that, this is actually theft. Is that what we consider it? Not just oopsies. Then the things change and everyone gets in line about it. And the folks that don't want to behave well with everybody else, they'll leave. they'll leave. what we see is the people that are left behind are grateful because those people weren't just doing that aspect of stealing or dragging it down. They were doing other things as well too.

Chris Schneider (21:06.104)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (21:20.596)
sure. Yeah. Most people, if you have the morals to milk a clock for a half hour every shift, you probably also have the morals to do other things that aren't great either. Two other places that we were talking about, labor monitoring, that I wanted to just touch on real quick. One of them being buddy punching, because I know this is a huge thing in the industry, especially when you have a busy store with a lot of employees.

Cijoy Olickal (21:21.317)
Yeah.

Cijoy Olickal (21:26.425)
Thank you.

Cijoy Olickal (21:39.237)
Yeah.

Cijoy Olickal (21:46.555)
Right. Yeah. It's a, again, just like clock milking. It seems, Hey, it doesn't seem like it's a big deal. And buddy punching. We're like, no, how could you be buddy punching? Because, you know, there was a code that you got to have the manager code to be able to clock in earlier. And then when you look at it, like, wait a second, there's no manager here at this time. Uh, cause there, you know, the, the email message we sent out the next day, says, Hey, so do I clocked in 27 minutes early with no manager on duty at the time? Uh, cause there was no manager clocked in. like, okay.

This kid's got the, the manager code, which we all know the manager codes are leaked out. We just don't know the consequences of it. Right. It may be this person's probably, you know, giving away a beer here or there using the manager code. Probably not a huge deal, but on the other end of it, they're clocking in early. They got the manager code at that point. How are you going to argue that, that the manager, you know, wasn't there or didn't agree to it? That's problematic. So.

It's became very obvious like the, the manager code is leaked. Everyone's got it. Everyone's doing it. and you know, we see kind of on our, our summary reports, like the habitual line steppers, we have a list of those and you can see who's doing what often. And it's usually the usual suspects. It's lot of times the GMs are not surprised when they see a certain person's name on, on the, on the list. They're like, yeah, this is a person we've

struggle with and we're going to coach them in or coach them out and you know, everyone's better for it.

Chris Schneider (23:20.762)
And then the last piece of labor monitoring I wanted to hit on was high deviance shifts, that's something that I think, A, is important, but B, also lot of people don't know exactly what I mean when I say that.

Cijoy Olickal (23:25.53)
Mm-hmm.

Cijoy Olickal (23:32.059)
Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it wasn't something we were looking for, like, like anything else. And we started going down this rabbit hole of, of, uh, watching labor to what the schedule was. And we started seeing people show up like four hours earlier than they're supposed to be there. And they're like, Oh, I thought I was on at 12. No, you're on at four. Like you've got an app you've got, we've told you. Were they, were they being serious or were they just like, felt like showing up at 12 because I didn't want to be here at four.

Great. got their hours, but not that wasn't an ACE in the place that you were looking to get. Right. So there's a one end of the deviant side of it. There's other ones where you see folks take a smoke break, so to speak, and they step out and all of a sudden they're gone for like half a day and they come back to the end of the shift. like, what the world is going on here. Doesn't happen often. Right. It's not something that you are going to see it. If it was that visible, everybody would notice, but if you got a team of 10, 20 people running around and one person just.

blocks out, disappears to go do something and comes back in later. If the manager wasn't aware of it, then that's disruptive because that's sending a signal to everybody else. They're looking around going, yo, where did so-and-so run off to? God knows. It's like, well, I guess that's how we're doing it here. Right. And that sets the tone for everybody else. But like, yeah, I got to shift and I'll work as much or as little of it as I choose.

Chris Schneider (24:54.776)
Yeah, and obviously that from an ownership angle, that doesn't work ever, right? Your employees can't just make up their own schedules and do what they want. So those are the big things that you guys watch for. And those are, as you've mentioned, some of these are really hard to monitor on your own. But there are things that at least I feel like everybody on the independent side, yeah, you may not have the resources to hire somebody like Cijoy and GM Pilot to do this for you, but you need to be aware of these and watching for them nonetheless.

Cijoy Olickal (24:58.105)
Right.

Chris Schneider (25:25.004)
Now the last thing I want to talk about because we're running out of time quickly. see so join. I both love data so much and we can get we can lose ourselves pretty quickly. But last thing I want to touch on before we go. Sales improvement because especially right now we're seeing some some contraction in the market, right? It feels like no one quite has the money that they did a few months ago. And I know a lot of people, a lot of restaurants. It's a little.

Cijoy Olickal (25:39.768)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (25:52.76)
tenuous right now. I wouldn't say anybody's in a bad spot, but we're not feeling great about where things are going. So everybody's trying to improve sales. And the argument always comes, guess check average. Do I want to sell more money to the people that are coming in the door or even have fewer guests and just have higher checks? Or do I want more volume? And do I just want more people coming in the door? So what are your thoughts there?

Cijoy Olickal (26:15.641)
So going to say something probably controversial and probably as you would expect out of me, right? I think that yes, trying to get an additional visit. Absolutely should try. Will you get it? In my 12 years at the enterprise level, I haven't seen people truly move the needle on that successfully consistently for a long period of time. What I have seen really successful is

Chris Schneider (26:22.094)
Yeah.

Cijoy Olickal (26:44.6)
is having better conversations with the people you have that are in front of you right now. And showcasing, hey, you know, why are you just getting a water? How about we get you into some bubbly water, right? How about we get you into some water with some color and some caffeine in it? How about we add, you know, something else special to that as well too. You know, you've, you've ordered one appetizer, but there's this other appetizers you really try to, here's some

better entrees for you to try. And do you know what? Look, let me at least tell you about the desserts. You may not want it, but you should probably take one to go home. And there's plenty of people that, that really did well when plastic water bottles showed up and selling people water bottles to walk out the door with. One by one, that check average goes up, but none of it is stuff that the guest is saying, Hey, you forced me into something. It's hospitality, right? You're, you're sharing what else can you do for me? I'm already here.

What else can you do? You could see the opposite of the spectrum. It's the sit down. What do you want? And you know, that attitude and you're going to get the smallest check, the smallest tip out possible. And you're going to have a very memorable experience. That's negative for you. Never a role experience. That's positive. It's kind of our choice. Now I came from high school. I was retail sales. So was in the nineties, selling like $4,000 computer systems to people in nineties money.

Chris Schneider (28:06.03)
Mm.

Cijoy Olickal (28:11.87)
and you know, there are things where like, Hey, are you going to sell them a computer because they're going to go home and, great. You didn't sell them a monitor. You sold them a keyboard because those were separate. You didn't ask them if they wanted a printer. and you forgot the printer cable, the paper and the ink. Ink was cheap back then. It wasn't, you know, I worked for HP later in life, but, it wasn't, but again, it's like, you didn't give them a full experience, right? If they came in and you gave them just the minimum of what they wanted.

And you didn't build a relationship. You didn't ask them questions about, know, what, what are they, what are they in for? What's their day like? What do they enjoy? Like, what can they, what can you do to make it special? I had to do that as a 15 year old nerd that Tro was trying to, know, suit and tie, along with 30 year olds trying to sell computers to people in that era. That same thing I did in e-commerce at, for large scale e-commerce organizations in the nineties and two thousands. But the philosophy then.

was if you have someone in the state of mind to buy, then you need to be making suggestive orders along the way. Early days before Amazon started doing this stuff with some engineering work we did at HP, we were doing that as well too with HP shopping. We're making sure that if you're buying this or you've purchased something else from the past from us, that we're offering a suggestion of something else that complements what your existing experience is today.

You've had those few experiences where you go into restaurant and you have that experience. I'm like, yep, I had a great time at this restaurant. I had a great experience. I'm going to go back again. I think that's going to drive you more frequency than just throwing a discount or coupon at somebody. think frequency begins there. Uh, and as well as average check value goes up because someone's making the offer, uh, not just making an offer, but making you part, making an experience for you.

Chris Schneider (30:05.23)
And I think that's really well put, all of it. And honestly, I don't think you're going to piss that many people off because volume comes from having great guest experience. A high guest check average comes from having a great guest experience. So at the end, you tied it all together. If you provide that great experience, you win on both. And I couldn't agree more with you.

Cijoy Olickal (30:14.111)
No, no, think it's yeah.

Cijoy Olickal (30:20.663)
No. Yeah, absolutely.

Cijoy Olickal (30:30.113)
Yeah, and I didn't get to talk to you about another product that we have in the works right now, but I'll just tell you right now. We have a thing called Top Gun. So Top Gun is where we start to recognize and reward people for their going above and beyond. So this person is the one that's really cranking up the check averages and you want to recognize them or reward them, then we'll do that part of it. So the first phase is...

Chris Schneider (30:39.095)
Sure.

Chris Schneider (30:46.99)
guys.

Cijoy Olickal (30:54.826)
Let's get all the bad apples and bad behaviors out of the building when it comes to labor practices and scheduling and you know, not working the shift that that you want to work, but working the shift that we asked you to work. And now, okay, great. You guys are doing exactly what we asked you to do. Now, if you start doing a little extra, like really suggesting an upsell of, of a drink with that, that meal, we can capture that and then recognize it and reward it out as well too. done it plenty of times at the chains. It's like,

anybody at a bar can do the same thing. It's like, I love it when they do because otherwise I walk in, I can't decipher a six page menu to save my life. I'm just going to go to, you know, there's a period of time I go everywhere and just order club sandwich because I knew everyone had one. But it's like the easiest thing in the world to order at any diner across the country. I just give me a club sandwich. But if they're like, look, you know, we're really known for this other thing. Great. You've taken me from a $12 sandwich to an $18 burger.

Chris Schneider (31:32.002)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Schneider (31:43.149)
Yeah?

Cijoy Olickal (31:52.95)
You've added what 33 % or 50 % to my check average right there. I got a better experience. I got to taste something you cared about my experience. I'm happy to buy something more expensive because you're promising me it's worth it. That's a win all around.

Chris Schneider (32:11.444)
Absolutely it is. But on that note, our time is coming to an end. real quick, where can people go to learn more about you and GM Pilot?

Cijoy Olickal (32:15.497)
Pleasure.

Cijoy Olickal (32:21.299)
If they're on LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn or gmpilot.com.

Chris Schneider (32:25.39)
All right, and we'll make sure those links are down in the show notes. So anybody listening, you can just scroll down and click on them. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a great conversation. And hopefully we inspired some people to pay more attention to their labor metrics.

Cijoy Olickal (32:32.585)
Thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure.

Cijoy Olickal (32:39.005)
I hope so. All right, everyone. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Schneider (32:45.518)
All right, and we're done.