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As Taziki’s Mediterranean Café grew to 108 locations and over 3,000 employees, clear visibility into daily performance became more important than ever. Despite strong sales and a loyal guest base, CEO Dan Simpson saw that the team lacked the insight needed to understand what was driving results across the brand. Fragmented systems and disconnected data sources made it difficult to answer even the most basic operational questions.
The leadership team struggled to determine whether performance issues stemmed from traffic, ticket size, or guest frequency. Customer behavior data lived in separate systems, and reporting required time-consuming manual work. Menu performance, promotions, and food cost variance were just as hard to evaluate. Strong sales often hid underlying waste, and without unified data, the team could not see the full picture. Even fundamentals such as connecting training, turnover, and engagement to store results remained unclear.
The clarity Taziki’s would later gain through Restaurant365 and Square was still out of reach, leaving the team piecing together insights from systems that simply did not speak to one another.
As Taziki’s grew, the technology that once supported the brand became a barrier to strategic decision-making. On-premise orders, mobile orders, and catering each flowed into separate systems. Instead of a single source of truth, the team was left stitching together incomplete information from various tools. Leadership found themselves reacting to symptoms rather than understanding causes, and decisions required extensive guesswork. These gaps showed up everywhere, from scheduling decisions that didn’t align with staff needs to limited insight into inventory waste and cost drivers.
Most of the questions a CEO should ask are not brilliant questions. They’re obvious questions. Asking whether we had a traffic problem, a frequency problem, or a ticket size problem should have been an obvious question too, but I couldn’t get the answer.
Dan Simpson, CEO
Taziki’s Mediterranean Café
Without integrated reporting, leaders couldn’t effectively test seasonal menu items, evaluate promotions, or understand which offerings resonated with guests. Food cost reporting lacked context, making it difficult to identify whether perceived improvements were genuine or simply the result of higher sales volumes. At the same time, people-driven factors such as training completion and turnover clearly influenced outcomes, but the company lacked a way to connect those indicators to financial and operational performance.
Dan Simpson, CEO
Taziki’s Mediterranean Café
The lack of clarity made it increasingly difficult to steer the business with confidence. The team needed a unified system that would bring together guest behavior, sales mix, labor performance, and operational data in a way that was easy to interpret and act on.
Everything began to work more cohesively when Taziki’s aligned its technology around two main systems: Square for processing transactions and Restaurant365 for managing operations and financials. With both platforms connected, the team finally had a single, reliable view of the business.
Unifying data also changed how Taziki’s approached staffing and guest engagement. With all channels flowing into one system, the team could better align schedules with demand and understand how guests moved across dine-in, off-premise, and catering experiences.
Once we had everything in one place, we could start to measure what actually mattered. We get better day-to-day reporting now, and the next day we can see exactly where we are with our food and our sales.
Dan Simpson, CEO
Taziki’s Mediterranean Café
Once the full data pipeline flowed into one place, Taziki’s had the ability to clearly distinguish whether performance shifts were caused by traffic, ticket size, frequency, or channel behavior. With clearer guest data, the team shifted focus from simply acquiring new guests to understanding how to drive repeat visits. Data helped them tailor communication, menu offerings, and timing to better meet guest preferences and encourage return occasions. The team could finally understand how guests engaged with the brand and how different sales channels influenced results. For the first time, leadership had a real-time, comprehensive view of how the business was performing.
The integration also created a more sophisticated approach to menu and promotional evaluation. Rather than guessing whether a seasonal feature should return or remain limited, Taziki’s could analyze how guests responded, how behaviors changed, and how an item performed across different locations and channels. This led to more successful feature launches and helped strengthen the brand’s strategic planning.
Labor evaluation also improved significantly. By adopting entrées per labor hour as a normalized metric, Taziki’s gained a clearer understanding of operational efficiency that wasn’t distorted by pricing or inflation. This shift allowed labor performance to be evaluated based on production and service needs rather than revenue fluctuations tied to pricing or inflation. As a result, stores could benchmark performance more consistently and identify opportunities to refine staffing models throughout the year.
By layering R365 and Square data into a Balanced Scorecard framework, the company gained a holistic view of performance that connected financial outcomes with people-related indicators. Stores with lower turnover, stronger training completion, and higher engagement consistently performed better. Having this clarity enabled Taziki’s to replicate what high-performing teams were doing well and provide more targeted support where it was needed.
With a unified, data-driven ecosystem in place, Taziki’s experienced a huge shift in how it understood and led the business. The company could now identify whether sales changes were rooted in guest behavior, channel mix, or operational patterns. Menu decisions became more informed, leading to stronger seasonal features and more intentional product strategy.
Operational clarity improved as well. Insights from actual versus theoretical food cost reporting revealed inefficiencies that percentage-based metrics had previously concealed. The company gained the ability to identify waste more accurately and address issues proactively. Through integrated labor and operational data, Taziki’s established a more consistent approach to evaluating staffing efficiency, anchored in entrée-per-labor-hour benchmarking.
Doing inventory on our phones, three people at the same time… that’s world-changing for them.
Dan Simpson, CEO
Taziki’s Mediterranean Café
This change also reduced the administrative burden on managers, giving them more time to lead their teams and stay focused on the guest experience instead of back-office tasks. With people-related data now connected to store-level performance, insights around turnover, training, sentiment, and engagement became far more actionable. That clarity helped leadership better understand what drives strong performance and made it easier to support teams, coach managers, and align operations around what mattered most.
More broadly, the shift to Square and Restaurant365 gave Taziki’s the clarity it needed to plan for long-term growth with confidence. Instead of reacting to disconnected data points, the brand now operates with a comprehensive understanding of how financial, operational, and guest-facing dynamics intertwine.
For Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, the move to Restaurant365 and Square marked a turning point in how the company views and manages performance. What was once a fragmented mix of systems and educated guesses has become a unified, insight-driven ecosystem that empowers leadership to make strategic decisions rooted in clarity.
By consolidating operations, centralizing data, and adopting more meaningful metrics, Taziki’s gained the ability to understand its guests, evaluate its menu, support its teams, and guide the business with greater intentionality. This foundation now enables the brand to grow not only in size but in sophistication, blending its people-first hospitality philosophy with modern, data-driven leadership.
Smarter menu decisions
driven by integrated data
Next-day visibility
into food and sales performance
Hidden waste surfaced
through AvT reporting
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