How Billy Sims BBQ Increased Consistency in Their Franchised Stores
Billy Sims BBQ founder, Jeff Jackson, collaborated with former NFL running back and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Sims with the goal of creating “an authentic dining experience that is a feast for the eyes as well as stomach.” Quickly after inception in 2004, Billy Sims grew to five locations in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leading them to begin franchising in 2008. Billy Sims BBQ currently has 40 units, with 38 of those franchised and two corporately owned.
“Our mission is to remain humble and focused while maintaining a high level of operations, increased profitability, and continued growth by adhering to our core values,” says Whitney Beavers, Director of Training & Compliance at Legendary Q Brands. “Those values — Quality, Guest Service, Best People, Integrity and Respect — translate into exceptional guest relations, providing quality products, and a fun and friendly atmosphere, in a clean, fast-paced environment.”
A Challenge With Consistency
“Consistency is a top priority,” notes Beavers. It is also especially challenging for restaurants navigating the ups and downs of hiring, training, and retaining employees during the current labor shortage.
This is especially difficult for a brand using almost solely a franchise model, as Billy Sims does. Without all stores being managed by one person or group, Billy Sims needed to create a scalable system to maintain consistency across all stores, even if Beavers isn’t in the store. Enter MeazureUp.
An Efficient Solution
Billy Sims BBQ has found new efficiencies, consistency, and compliance with MeazureUp, a digital field assessment solution that offers management a quick and easy way to track performance and identify areas of improvement to make data driven decisions using an analytics engine.
Billy Sims BBQ was already working with MeazureUp for compliance checks when Beavers asked about implementing digital checklists to replace paper lists and other time-consuming and unreliable administrative tasks.
MeazureUp quickly designed DailyChex, a mobile checklist that can be applied to all restaurant operations, allowing for customizing and configuring checklists, creating action plans and assigning responsibilities to managers, tracking progress in real time, building quality-assessment templates, and storinge photos to ensure accountability.
“With MeazureUp’s tools, it freed up the managers’ time, increasing productivity and efficiency,” Beavers reports. “When utilized properly, the location and their staff know that they are serving the best product in the cleanest environment. When looking at metrics, we can see that higher volume locations utilize these checks 100 percent of the time, proving that this is an invaluable tool for our concepts!”
A Unique Selling Point
On top of addressing their consistency problem, MeazureUp offered benefits to another key part of Billy Sim’s business — franchise development.
It’s not a given that a franchisee will buy-in to all of corporate policy and even worse, they may make changes without the permission of their franchisor. That’s why MeazureUp has been key in Billy Sims’ franchising process by lessening the learning curve for new franchisees, in turn reducing operating and training costs.
Steven DeGeorge, Director of Franchise Development, utilizes MeazureUp’s AuditApp ensure franchised stores are running like their corporate counterparts: “It’s a great selling feature for prospective franchisees. MeazureUp allows me to show them what we do and exactly how we do it.”
Learn more at MeazureUp.com
