When Gary Thomas joined Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney on the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, the hosts asked for a crazy number, and he delivered. GPS Hospitality‘s average Burger King serves about 400 guests a day, which across roughly 400 restaurants works out to almost 60 million guests a year, and about a third of them order a Whopper. That puts GPS somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million Whoppers a year, from one franchisee.
Thomas is Vice President of Operations Support at GPS Hospitality, the Atlanta-based operator that started in 2012 with 42 Burger Kings and has grown to just under 400 Burger King restaurants plus 16 Popeyes, with around 10,000 employees. His path ran through a first restaurant job at 16, about ten years in contract services with Compass Group, and about ten years with Arby’s before joining the new Burger King franchise in Atlanta.
Asked what operators should focus on, Thomas went straight to core systems: an accurate forecast, food and labor managed properly, and cash in the bank. GPS considers itself an operating company rather than a real estate company, and the systems exist so restaurant teams can focus on taking care of customers and their teams.
GPS could not risk going backward on forecasting, food, or labor, so before committing, the company ran Restaurant365 side by side with its existing back-of-house platform for many months, without the stores ever knowing. The team compared forecasts, labor models, food variances, and reports until confidence was high, then piloted in 20 stores, where the real learning began.
What Thomas appreciated most was that Restaurant365 understood who the user actually is: a shift manager at one in the morning on a Sunday night, trying to get the money in the tills and get out of the store. The platform had to be something that person could adopt quickly, on a phone with drag-and-drop inventory or on a printed count sheet entered by hand.
The episode’s sharpest operational idea is the labor philosophy Restaurant365 customized for GPS: win or lose every hour throughout the day. Hitting $3,000 in sales on 80 allowed hours means little if the store was shorthanded at lunch and overstaffed at late night. The GPS labor matrix instead ties staffing to the forecast hour by hour, broken down into 15-minute increments. Forecast $500 in sales from 11 to 12, and the matrix calls for seven people.
The forecast then becomes a real-time management tool. Beat the $500 and the manager starts thinking about slicing more tomatoes and checking the parking lot. Miss it, and someone probably needs to go on break before the next hour starts. An 18-hour day becomes 18 shifts, each won or lost, with the data feeding tomorrow’s plan.
Staffing has shifted underneath that matrix. After Covid, few people wanted 15 or 20 hours a week, so GPS ended up with fewer team members working full-time hours, cross-trained and more productive; an hour that once took nine people now runs with seven. Channel mix helps too: delivery averages 10 percent of the business, some stores run 20 percent plus, drive-thru holds at 60 to 70 percent, and a delivery order that pops up on a screen takes less labor than one taken at the counter.
GPS is on its fifth consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales. A brand with declining traffic can prop up sales for a while with price increases and check-building; the real magic, and a huge chunk of GPS’s comps, is customers coming back more frequently, which means less reliance on discounting. Thomas credits Burger King’s focus on a premium Whopper, elevated packaging, clean ingredients, and the You Rule service culture, alongside years of remodel investment with the franchisor.
If anything threatens to pop the balloon of high sales, Thomas says it is commodity cost. Beef is at an all-time high while the US herd is at an all-time low, and the food cost of a quarter-pound Whopper patty has climbed from the 80-cent range to over a dollar. Multiply that increase by 20 million Whoppers and the hit to gross profit is significant. GPS stays very careful on pricing anyway, because nobody pays $14 for a Whopper, and the traffic recovery is too valuable to price away.
When rollout time came, GPS moved fast: roughly 380 locations in a month, informed by 14 or 15 acquisitions’ worth of conversion experience. Logins went out the Friday before go-live with one assignment: be logged in by Monday. Monday morning, a Zoom taught everyone to build a forecast, due by 4:00. The 4:00 Zoom reviewed forecasts and taught scheduling. The next morning, food ordering, and so on through about half a dozen sessions, with the old system switched off by midweek. Voluntary Q&A calls in week two shrank from 30 or 40 people to ten, then two. Divisions rolled in weekly waves, so the project took a month while each manager’s experience took about a week.
Among the wins since parity, Thomas points to something he had wanted for 20 years: integrating the back of house with payroll and the point of sale. GPS previously maintained three employee records, and every change created mismatches. Now payroll is the source of truth, and a new employee flows automatically to the back office and the POS.
Looking ahead to a year R365 has themed around transformation, capped by its Transform event in Scottsdale, Thomas wants AI that turns data into prioritized action: a tool that looks at 50 metrics, names the three big rocks, and starts with one, then runs the same analysis across a district leader’s 7 or 8 stores, where this store is food, that one is labor, the third is speed. GPS is also testing AI in the drive-thru, and Thomas insists it work as a coach rather than a big brother, guiding suggestive selling and rewarding friendliness scores with bonuses or a free meal in real time, so a cashier can course-correct mid-shift.
GPS Hospitality operates just under 400 Burger King restaurants and 16 Popeyes across eight states. You can find Gary Thomas on LinkedIn and learn more at gpshospitality.com.
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