The key to measuring the success of your club is by analyzing critical data. While many club owners agree with this statement, few have the necessary time and resources to comb through data points and make sense of it all. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a system in place that not only collects, but also reports the data you need in meaningful ways.
Most club owners look to their point of sale (POS) system to provide this data. While it’s true that most POS systems collect data, it’s oftentimes presented in convoluted ways. It’s nearly impossible to get a glimpse of your club’s employee performance, promoter performance, individual guest sales, or trending liquor sales. Sure, you can find all this information out, but it’ll take time – and a lot of it.
Here are 4 steps to quickly get the data you need to keep moving your club forward.
1. Identify your goals
You can’t fully understand the importance of data if you don’t have a goal to benchmark it against. A goal needs to be more than “we want to make more money” or “we want to sell more Vodka.” You need to define your subject, a tangible number to reach and an allotted time to reach it. Then, and only then, are you able to truly measure the success of your club.
2. Know what information is crucial to your club.
There’s a lot of data that gets collected on a given night, and there’s a lot of different ways it can be reported. But just because it gets collected doesn’t mean it’s going to be worthwhile information. Define the areas that are the most critical for you to analyze and figure out what that information looks like. The more focused you are, the easier it’ll be to interpret.
3. Put a system in place
You need a way to measure results against your goal, which means you need to have a place where data is collected and analyzed. The best systems are fully integrated solutions that collect data from any area of your club and analyze and present it in one central spot. These systems are beneficial in a number of ways, because they:
• Allow you to identify the audience you want to measure (servers, promoters, customers, overall club performance, or all of the above)
• Collect data on any given area of your club
• Provide insight on trending liquor sales, which helps with inventory planning
• Report key information on individual guests – average spend, total spend, group size, favorite liquors, and top purchases – so you can better serve them
• Presents the results you chose to identify in easy-to-read charts and graphs, which removes the manual labor of you combing through all the data
4. Optimize
Review the data that’s presented, benchmark it against your goal, and optimize your results to work in your favor. If something isn’t working – such as a certain type of liquor isn’t selling well or a promoter isn’t providing results – then fix the problem. The more you know, the more you can do.
Whitney Larson is the Global Director of Marketing for EMOS. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io
