Bottleneck Management operates vibrant, upbeat restaurants with distinct differences but a common passion for friendly service, excellent drink selection, and classic American cuisine. While the 13-unit company is based in Chicago, it is expanding into new regions across the U.S.
Bottleneck’s site selection strategy has historically involved working with a partner who represents the brand to landlords. If a site seemed promising, Bottleneck would arrange a call or a site visit, but didn’t have any analytics to determine if the site was truly good. Instead, the company relied on the demographic information provided by the landlord, which, while accurate, could be biased as the landlord showed the numbers that painted the best picture of the site.
Bottleneck needed a solution that would allow them to look at not just some, but all the numbers, and have a better understanding of the market. The brand ultimately partnered with Buxton for insights to guide the company’s growth decisions.
Customer Value: A Helpful Tool for Growing Brands
Buxton provided Bottleneck with a customer value solution, which examines customer data to define who Bottleneck’s core customers are, where they are, and how their value decays the farther away they are from a location. The solution allows Bottleneck to compare the customer concentrations around existing, successful sites to the customer concentrations around potential sites.
“Buxton is the market leader in data analytics and has given us a whole new viewpoint into our site selection process and marketing around existing locations.”
The analysis was deployed to SCOUT, a real estate application in the Buxton Analytics Platform, so Bottleneck can see and interact with the data in a map-based format. Using SCOUT, Bottleneck can access analytics on a potential site to see a customer value index score and view other important market metrics.
Applying Customer Analytics to Growth Decisions
Bottleneck quickly implemented Buxton’s customer analytics into its business processes. One of the most eye-opening findings was the presence of distinct “dividing lines” that separate the regions from which their restaurants draw customers. Understanding where customers are coming from has helped the company to prioritize geographies for its marketing efforts.
Additionally, the analysis supports Bottleneck’s market planning decisions by quantifying the customer overlap between existing and potential locations. As Chris Bisaillon, co-owner of Bottleneck Management, notes, the company is “very much focused on clustering,” so identifying markets that can support multiple locations is a priority.
Another way Buxton’s customer value solution supports Bottleneck’s business is by helping the company fine-tune site negotiations. Bisaillon explains:
“Buxton’s analysis has given us pause on a few sites that didn’t score as well as maybe our eyes said they did. And in those situations, we’ve taken that information, processed it, and either said, ‘Ok, if we’re going to move forward, the economics of the deal need to improve over what a typical deal is,’ or, ‘We just need to walk away.’ And we’ve done both.”
Ultimately, using Buxton’s analytics gives Bottleneck the ability to better manage its business.
“I’ve always said in all of our businesses, if you can measure it, you can manage it. Buxton gives us some of the tools to measure our data that now allow us to manage around it.”