This American fast food company prides itself on freshly prepared ingredients and unlimited, additive-free burger toppings, something unheard of in the burger industry. With such a high level of customization, the chain needed a point of sale that would give them the same freedom to run their business the way they wanted. Koeppel Companies President Aubert Prévost and Project Coordinator Joey Pearson run 15 Five Guys restaurants across Canada. After experiencing numerous issues with their legacy system, including long downtimes, they knew they needed a modern solution they could rely on. In 2019, they upgraded to Lightspeed’s cloud-based solution .
We sat down with Aubert Prévost and Joey Pearson to learn why they decided to switch providers, which Lightspeed features made the biggest difference to their business, and how they kept their operations running during a global pandemic.
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What problems were you looking to solve when you decided germany whatsapp number to move to Lightspeed?
Prévost: Micros customer service was a big problem for us. We had to open support tickets and then wait, wait, and wait. We spent countless hours on the phone. The whole system would crash and we couldn’t reboot, so when we had major issues, we had a huge loss of sales. With Lightspeed, that hasn’t happened yet and we’re confident it won’t.
With the adoption of new technologies, questions are bound to arise. Can you talk to Lightspeed’s support team and the transition process?
Pearson: I’m very grateful to have Etienne, our Lightspeed rep. He was assigned to us – something we never would have had with Micros. When I email him, he responds immediately, so we rarely have an issue that isn’t resolved within a day.
Prévost: What’s great is that since day one, we have had a good line of communication between us and the Lightspeed support team. We had weekly calls, we discussed what’s working, what’s not working, what we can change, etc. So we had a very good communication channel that I hadn’t thought of earlier when we were looking for a new point of sale, but the fact that Lightspeed is located in Montreal allows for better communication. That’s been a big advantage for us.
As a multi-branch franchise, how does Lightspeed help you better understand your business as a whole?
Prévost: We want to grow. Our goal is to reach about 30 locations. So it’s really important to understand the nature of our business and all aspects of our business. We rely on this POS system to provide us with a lot of data, from employee hours to sales to all kinds of revenue analysis, so reporting is really important. It’s been easy to generate all kinds of reports, whether they come from Lightspeed or we create our own.
When COVID-19 impacted businesses globally, how did Five Guys respond and pivot in this new world of dining?
Prévost: We have learned a lot from this pandemic since the beginning. We were very affected: we had to close seven out of thirteen sites at the time and we didn't know if and when we would reopen or if there would be other closures. We adapted everything? day by day, trying to understand what we could do to survive to get through all of this.
In the first couple of weeks, everybody left their offices and started working from home. We decided as a company that we were going to keep all of our support team on payroll and working. We kept all of our executives, we deployed them to open locations, we kept the leadership team, whether they were operational or support, working to try to figure out what we should do next. Even though we didn't have a task force, we had people working on how we could survive with what we had and what we needed to do to keep our heads above water. We had coffee calls and meetings just to see what everyone was doing at home, so we kept the lines of communication open and that really played a big part in our business continuity.