Success Story: How Floodlight saved us $20,000 in staff costs – Pete Groom – The Angry Pirate

Former hospitality business owner, Pete Groom gives insight into how utilising Floodlight Analytics’ toolset can help to reduce staff costs and therefore improve profitability.

“Hi there, my names Pete, I’m responsible for Customer Success here at Floodlight but I also used to own the Angry Pirate Cocktail Bar and Pizzeria in Redfern, which is where we developed the initial version of Floodlight for a very specific reason. The issue that we were having was that wage costs in Australia can be quite a challenge for businesses especially around evenings, weekends and bank holidays. We were running costs up to $42 per member of staff per hour at those times. We identified a need to cost costs, the accounting software we are using – Xero, showed us that quite clearly, the problem was that we were relying on Managers and chefs intuitions, guestimating or trying to remember back to when there was a busy time and going from there and staffing using that information.

Once we had implemented Floodlight the results were quite amazing – we could see that although out managers and staff could remember particular times that had been busy, either early or later on those were anomalies, we were then able to go to our new chef or a new cook coming in to train them to make sure that they were ready to deal with customers and reflect demand.

So, when we rolled this out we realised that Floodlight was showing us that our fist 2 hours of the day, when we would normally have a chef staff, we simply weren’t profitable so staff were able to offer popcorn and to give people menus to let customers know what time the kitchen opened and again later on let customers know that the kitchen would close so that we could get last orders in and to keep our customers happy.

The interesting outcome is that we noticed there was no effect on revenue, there was no effect on our customer satisfaction, they were still very happy, but over the space of a year we saved ourselves over $20,000 in staff costs which was a bit of a no brainer in terms of going forward with Floodlight.”

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