The market-share battle restaurants are facing is showing no signs of easing. Traffic growth for chain restaurants has been negative for over three years. Who is stealing your market share and where is your traffic going? Find out how independents, grocery stores and others play into the battle for market share and how to tackle the complex competitive and financial pressures currently felt by the chain restaurant industry. As only TDn2K can do, we will connect the dots between employees, consumers and financial performance, highlighting how service and an engaged workforce can catapult your brand to success. 

Wintrust Franchise Finance presents an expert panel to discuss practical strategies to utilize your various capital resources to support growth.   Our panel is made up of three owner/ operators  who have managed their human, financial, and technological resources to expand their business, and enhance shareholder value.

When restaurant concepts pursue rapid growth or embark on a new franchising initiative, they often struggle to maintain the culture and brand experience that drove their early success. Find out how several premier restaurant chains use training to ensure their unique culture is carried through each new location. Learn the importance of talent development in promoting manager and franchisee engagement. Discover the impact that continuous learning can have on guest experience, and how it helps growth concepts deliver on their brand promise each and every day.

Learn how on-demand pay is driving employee recruitment and retention and how to navigate the laws and regulations, such as constructive receipt for payroll processing.  

Takeaways:

• On-demand pay benefits for employers and employees
• Navigating the laws and regulations impacting on-demand pay 

POS systems are the lifeblood of restaurant enterprises, yet many of these systems are anemic when it comes to generating sustainable profitability. All too often, POS systems fall short of client expectations, as they do not fully provide key essentials such as data security, trend-setting ordering solutions and menu updates at no added cost.

In this presentation, you will learn how to assess the value of your POS (and your POS provider) to determine if your point-of-sale solution:  

• Protects and enhances your brand via holistic data security and cybersecurity

• Directly increases sales

• Decreases tangible expenses (including labor)

• Reduces the intangibles that deter profitability (time/effort)

• Provides options that fit your budget and scale to your growth

Join us and be empowered with the ability to determine what you need, why you need it, and when you are being “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Is your business disrupted by high employee turnover? Do you struggle to execute LTOs? Is employee training expensive and inefficient? Come hear how Taco Bell addressed these challenges by adopting a digital learning solution for their distributed workforce. Not only does Taco Bell now empower their employees with engaging learning to improve execution, but they also saved $2M in annual printing costs and have experienced a 5% increase in customer satisfaction scores.

In this session, you will learn:

•How reliance on paper-based training by 44% of organizations leads to low knowledge retention and disgruntled employees.

•Why 86% of restaurant executives state that the ability of frontline staff to meet customer expectations improves with mobile-enablement.

•How mobile learning addresses the lack of ongoing training hours for restaurant employees, who only receive three hours per quarter. "

Not long ago, the conversation we had with restaurant chains was about simply adding online ordering. Now it is about getting all the digital pieces right – mobile and online ordering, kiosk, delivery, loyalty, engagement and more. Most chains have dabble in the digital ordering world, but don’t know if their program is delivering against their KPIs. Others have fully implemented digital ordering, but perhaps all the pieces don’t work well together. Many operators believe their digital ordering programs are going well, yet don’t always know how to measure what is effective.

In this interactive session, Tillster CMO Hope Neiman will discuss these critical topics and more, using insights from exclusive, independently conducted consumer research and actual consumer adoption metrics. You will leave the session with key insights on:

     -The digital tools that will work best for your business goals

    -How to set the right priorities for your brand, and effectively measure against them

    -Measuring success in ways that not only matter to you, but also to your franchisees

    -Using data to provide a frictionless guest experience that keeps customers coming back 

Only 18% of restaurant marketers are extremely confident in understanding who their diners are after leaving their restaurants. With the constant ‘revolving door’ of customers interacting across channels, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Restaurant marketers need to focus on speaking to customers on a 1:You personalized level. 1:You is a holistic customer experience strategy that focuses on personalizing communications with the best choice for individuals across all touchpoints or interactions.

During the Epsilon Innovation Forum, you’ll learn how to:

• Determine who your best customers are and find look alikes

• Better understand customer behavior inside and outside your location, including competitors and other lifestyle brands

• Create an engagement strategy for customer retention and beyond

• Drive revenue through data-driven marketing techniques

• Use machine learning to improve product and offer personalization for re-purchase and menu recommendations This is a session you don’t want to miss.

Hot off the press – attendees will receive a copy of our latest research report in which we partnered with Nation’s Restaurant News - Driving one more visit: how restaurant marketers fare in the digital age. 

Join our panel of operations leaders led by Zenput’s CEO Vladik Rikhter, where we will explore how the important pillars of operational execution excellence - communication, visibility, training, collaboration, risk mitigation, and accountability -  allow restaurant operators to execute on the operations strategy that they design. We’ll discuss how these contribute to high brand standards, better food safety, higher impact marketing promotions, and in the end, improved store performance and great customer experiences.