How Do You Roll?, the Austin, Texas-based custom sushi restaurant, has partnered with Buxton to help with the restaurants’ franchise expansion strategy. The rapidly growing concept currently operates 12 locations in four states. The brand was recently featured on ABC’s popular show Shark Tank and accepted a deal for a significant investment to help expedite the growth of the concept.

“As a restaurant concept positioned for major growth, How Do You Roll? is focusing on opening exceptional locations to serve our customers,” said Yuen Yung, CEO and co-founder of How Do You Roll?. “As we continue to strategically expand, Buxton will be able to bring us the granular view of our customer to help us make smarter real estate decisions.”

“When expanding a franchise concept, it’s vital to understand market territories and where the best opportunities exist in each market,” said Stephen Polanski, senior vice president of Buxton. “We know that How Do You Roll? is a great concept that has aggressive growth plans and we can help them pinpoint those opportunities at a national scale.”

As a client of Buxton, How Do You Roll? will utilize their predictive model via Buxton’s web-based platform SCOUT. SCOUT is a real estate tool used by retailers and restaurants nationwide to drive efficient expansion, analyze existing locations and further evaluate specific sites in any given market.

About How Do You Roll?

Founded in Austin, Texas, by brothers Yuen and Peter Yung, How Do You Roll? is an Asian fast-casual franchise that began in 2008.  How Do You Roll? leads the sushi revolution as the first build-your-own-roll, quick-service restaurant. There are currently twelve locations open nation-wide with plans to open 4 more by mid-summer 2013. How Do You Roll? prides itself on furthering cultural fusion, encouraging consumer creativity and offering a variety of healthy foods.

For more information, visit http://howdoyouroll.com/.

About Buxton

Buxton is a customer analytics firm that provides location optimization and marketing solutions to the retail, restaurant, healthcare, public sector, CPG, and financial industries. We believe strongly that every organization can achieve greater success by knowing its customers with greater precision and predictability. At Buxton, we push the boundaries of consumer data and predictive modeling to help organizations reach and serve customers more effectively, efficiently and profitably. In the process we empower our clients to be heroes within their organizations. Among our 1,900 clients are retailers Applebee’s, Sally Beauty Supply, GNC, Restoration Hardware, and Anthropologie.

For more information, visit www.buxtonco.com.

What the Cleveland Clinic, and others like them, is doing with their partnerships and consolidations is intelligent in that – while you may not need orthopedic care today – your exposure to sprained ankle care increases exponentially with a concentrated medical community. And, doctors collaborate and refer by nature. Thus, the patient will only see his or her outcomes improve with the increased partnerships available through consolidation.

For example, when a new pulmonary specialist group has just been added to a healthcare community, this helps the pediatricians and primary care physicians address asthma conditions via the enlarged network. Not only are the pulmonologists specialized and current in their knowledge base, but the patient finds more efficient and optimal treatment.

The following is an article written by Delos Cosgrove, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, where he discusses the trend of hospital consolidation: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130311203646-205372152-the-great-consolidation-begins.

What is your healthcare system doing to make sure consolidation/acquisition is the best business decision?

Forecasting the future is no easy feat – especially with a volatile economy. Due to this instability, the growth of the apparel market was stunted as the levels of disposable income dropped dramatically and unemployment grew. However, based on the growth of certain economic drivers such as U.S. consumer spending, U.S. consumer spending on nondurable goods (an indicator of retail clothing’s sales), U.S. personal income (drives consumer ability to purchase clothing), and U.S. retail sales for clothing and clothing accessories stores (a measure of consumer spending on clothing), the apparel industry should see some modest growth looking forward.

U.S. consumer spending is at a four year high, rising 36.51% in March 2013 compared to March 2012, and U.S. personal income rose 6.9% in December 2012 compared to the same month in 2011.  U.S. retail sales for clothing and clothing accessories mimicked that growth with an increase of 5.9% in the first month of 2013 contrasted to 2012. The behavior of these drivers over the last three years appears to be in line with its prerecession positive trajectory, as indicated by the graph below. As long as the economy continues to grow stronger, the level of consumer confidence will rise and benefit the apparel industry.

1. What are the biggest challenges in the restaurant industry today?

Wow, where do I start?  There are many areas that are challenging us right now, external as well as internal.  Externally, we face volatile commodity markets, increased regulations, and increasing fast casual competition.  Internally, we face sustaining our culture while growing the concept, continuously improving processes, and staying in touch with customer needs.

 I think today, restaurants who want to compete on quality are finding the current inflationary commodity markets a big challenge.  Critical to navigating through this challenge is a strategic approach to the menu mix.  You want a mix that delivers value to customers and, at the same time, delivers sustainable profit.  In terms of unit economics, we have to be creative and practical.  At Jason’s Deli, our mission is to make customers happy.  We do that by serving a quality menu made from ingredients that are “less fooled-around-with”.  Clean ingredients are not the cheapest ingredients, but we make a conscious choice to serve our customers food they can trust.  That is challenging in this environment.

2. What are the biggest opportunities?

We have locations in 28 states.  We have significant growth opportunities throughout the U.S., and eventually internationally.  We have the culture, the people, the menu, the supply chain, and the financial resources to grow for many, many years to come.  Our opportunity, with help from our partner Buxton, is in finding the best markets matching our customer profiles and reaching our strategic growth targets.

3. What is the role that customer intelligence plays in your business, and how does it have an impact on the decisions you make?

There is a lot of noise in customer data.  This prevents companies from listening to the right customers.  Listening to customers is important.  Listening to the right customers is critical.  Most businesses derive a majority of revenue from a minority of customers.  Developing the profile of our most profitable customers puts us in a position to listen and learn what facts will increase value for the customer.  These facts translate into increased value for the company.  Buxton is helping us do that.  Listening to profitable customer segments helps us understand their needs, and shapes the customer experience to meet them.  Customer intelligence is part art and part science.  Making fact-based decisions is our goal, but we also can’t lose our ability to anticipate changing customer needs.

4. What parts of your business are you applying analytics to, and have you seen any results?

In our concept, we serve dine-in, take-out and catering/delivery customers.  Since there are fewer catering customers relative to our dine-in and take-out customers, and catering customers are more easily identified, we have more robust analytics for catering customers.  Catering has always represented a significant percentage of our business and is growing.  Our analytics are driving investment results in customer acquisition, retention and growth.  Buxton’s tools and data have opened a new analytic door for us.  What we are able to measure is improving with these tools.

5. What are you reading now?

I recently read Makers, by Chris Anderson, fascinating book about the coming transformation of global manufacturing.  I’m finishing my Executive MBA at UT Dallas, so I won’t bore you with the rest of the reading list.  I like reading broadly across many disciplines.  I find reading across diverse subjects helps spur ideas and creativity.  Next on the list is The Intention Economy, by Doc Searls.

Bravo Brio’s CFO, Jim O’Connor, also noted that winning restaurants put their stores in the right places, which is why they look at analytics and business intelligence when outlining their markets for expansion.

The full article from the Columbus Dispatch can be read here: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2013/03/09/bravo-brio-embraces-aggressive-expansion.html

Prior to the implementation of an acquisition / integration strategy, there are three steps that should be taken to ensure that real-time data about the patients you serve and the markets in which you operate is part of the decision-making process.  While most healthcare organizations have access to a majority of the necessary raw data inputs through EMR implementation, a model or methodology for interpreting that data and shaping it into a meaningful action plan is lacking.

1.  Define The Status Quo.

Your acquisition strategy should begin with a thorough examination of exactly where your organization is today from a patient panel perspective.  Who are your patients, demographically, psychographically, financially and behaviorally speaking?  Where do they live and work, and from what geographies are they coming to visit your physicians and facilities?  These learnings lend themselves to development of a “profile” that will serve as a foundational benchmark for who you serve today, and what that means going forward in terms of new patient acquisition.

By developing requisite profiles (family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, etc), analytical tools can be used to find those geographic areas that represent the greatest upside opportunity for your organization.

2.  Examine The Acquisition Target Landscape.

Within your market area, there may be dozens (if not hundreds) of practices that can be approached for potential acquisition – assuming they have not approached you already.  From that potential universe, it is likely that only a subset of physician practices will provide significant value-add to your existing network.

In addition to traditional due diligence on the financial and operational makeup of potential targets, utilization of learnings from your profile work will be beneficial in easily identifying those geographies that represent “pockets of opportunity” for expansion of your footprint – and those practices that are proximate to (if not already located within) them.

3.  Optimize The Market By Identifying Potential Value.

Marrying profile learnings with market data enables organizations to implement statistical models that can forecast volume potential for both existing practices and potential acquisition targets.  These models uncover “opportunity gaps” that exist between how a targeted practice is currently performing relative to its true potential.  Closer examination will then yield numerous potential causes for the gap:  Are they understaffed relative to trade area demand?  Are they marketing themselves effectively to drive the patient volume they should be experiencing?  Are there operational issues that require closer scrutiny and examination?

These three areas – knowing the profile of your patients, understanding the entirety of the practice acquisition landscape, and leveraging statistical models to optimize potential – are integral components of an effective acquisition strategy.  The more that you are able to leverage existing patient and encounter data that is at your disposal, the more successful you will be at building an ambulatory network that efficiently extends your reach.

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