[Music] Yeah, I'm on a wave right now Nothing you say could ever bring me down Yeah, look I'm living my life like a runway You know I always pull up in style So I always live my life in one way That's in the moment live right now Oh, wow oh, wow Got them saying oh, wow oh, wow Oh, wow oh, wow see my life and they say oh, wow Oh, wow oh, wow Got them saying oh, wow oh, wow Oh, wow oh, wow see my life and they say oh, wow [Jen Spofford] Welcome, everyone. My name is Jen Spofford and I am the Managing Director of the Consumer Business Unit at Bounteous. We oversee relationships with many of our clients in the hospitality and restaurant verticals, and we are a digital consultancy that serves clients, helps them really make more out of the investments that they've made in their digital ecosystem. So you all make a lot of really important decisions about platforms and technologies. And we're a company that works with those clients to ensure that they extract the most business value out of those investments. We're about 4,000 people strong globally in the US, Canada, Europe, and India. And we've been at this since 2003 so we've learned a few things. We are so lucky to work with some of the world's most ambitious and favorite brands. I'm going to take a quick poll before we get started. Who knew what 7 Brew was before you saw this session in the Adobe catalog? Okay, so a good number but not I would say not half. And so I wanted to make sure that we shared a little bit about the brand in that introductory video. I am so lucky to be here with 7 Brew CTO Danyel. Danyel would you introduce yourself? [Danyel Bischof-Forsyth] Thanks, Jen. So Danyel Bischof CTO at 7 Brew Coffee. I've been there just over a year. And so 7 Brew just like you saw on the video is a drive-thru coffee concept and it's more than just coffee. We have anything from our own energy drinks, hundreds of flavors. We've got smoothies, shakes, you name it. You can find something at 7 Brew. So for the other half of you that have not visited yet, please make a stop and see. We are currently at over-- Actually, as of today 353 stands with our site set on a couple of thousand and that growth has come really quickly. Just last year we started the year in '24 at 180 stands and we ended at 330. And so almost doubled in size. We're looking to do the same again this year and so the growth is just amazing. Again, part of what you saw in the video is it's really all about the experience and our mission. And the mission that we have that we live we are very true to is cultivating kindness. So the experience is what we're all about. So when you get a chance to go through a 7 Brew, hopefully, that's what you'll feel. Awesome. So much of the brand is about speed. You have amazing speed of growth. The speed of getting people through the drive-thru it's a completely drive-thru experience at a 7 Brew. And then the speed of your expansion of locations ever since you started franchising in 2021. I know that the brand has been recognized as the fastest growing restaurant in the US and there's a lot of pressure I imagine to support the growth of the brand. And we just saw in the video that so much of it is about cultivating kindness, and happiness, and joy, and the human connection. So I'm just curious as you balance these two things having to support with a digital infrastructure this brand that's experiencing amazing growth and keeping that human connection, how do you keep the magic in that? Yeah. So when we say our mission is cultivating kindness, we're 100% serious about that. And it's about the experience and that doesn't just mean that when you go through that you're treated with respect. It actually is much more. You do get treated with respect but it's about more than that. And so the speed you mentioned is an important part of that. We value your time and so we want to get you through quickly. Quality is another important part. We want you to feel like you're getting great quality product. The customization there's an unlimited number of ways you can customize that drink and we want to make that perfectly every time for you. And so all of that plays into this idea of cultivating kindness in the experience. I think the whole balance, this growth with also providing uniqueness is important. And so when we look at our baristas so those are the employees that work in those stands those freestanding units. We want that to be the best job on the planet and we want their uniqueness to show. And so what I love about it when I started last year I saw even as far as the training manual that we have for those baristas it talks about, we want you to shine through. We want you to engage with the customers how you would naturally engage with them. We're not going to script your interaction. We want it to become very natural for you and so it creates this unique experience. But then as you said, Jen, at the same time we want to balance that with consistency as we grow. And so the way we do that is we are in large part of franchise model. We have 23 of those stands. Those 353 are corporate owned and then it's the franchise model we're going through. And so what we've done is we put a lot of not just technology but really process and people in place to support that. And then the technology comes in and is just there to support the human interaction. And that's the bottom line. That's awesome. Because keeping your culture is so important to making that experience something that people want to keep coming back to. So let's talk about the digital a little bit. We're having this conversation because you are in the middle of a pretty significant digital transformation focused on maturing your MarTech. We do this a lot with clients. And usually these processes start with just a ton of planning and information gathering and some really frank discussions about where your ecosystem serves your needs, the needs of your brand and where there's some significant gaps. So can you talk a little bit about the process that you had at 7 Brew just getting an initiative this big and important going? Yeah. So when I joined the organization a year ago there was minimal tech in place and minimal process. And by the way only two people on the IT team. So when I joined it was a pretty big feat to be in a position to start to put just enough process in to hire up a team and to really start to be able to scale the organization. And I wasn't alone. It wasn't just the tech group that was in that position. It was the entire organization from marketing to operations. Everybody was in the same position. And so what we ended up doing was we determined within IT we came up with a mission statement that aligned to that company mission statement which was around cultivating kindness. And our position from IT is that are driven by enabling business capability. So it's not IT for IT. It's not tech for tech's sake. It's truly getting behind enabling the business but in a way that is four things. It's scalable, it's supportable, it's resilient, and it's secure. And so that was really the key tenants that we used from an IT standpoint when we started the journey around putting in this technical infrastructure. And so you ask what started this and what kicked it off. So I have a couple of stories about what actually happened shortly after I joined the company. The first one happened when I had the person that was in charge of marketing came to me because I had this new technology leader title. And he said, "Hey, we've got an outside company that is managing our website and I can't get them to respond. And we're needing to make changes. We have a promotion coming and we just are not getting the responsiveness we need and the changes we need made to our site and I don't know what to do. I'm looking at changing firms. Can you help me do this?" And at that moment I knew we have got to have a better plan where we have control over our site. Yeah. And so that was the first interaction that I had that told me we need to bring more in-house to where we control our own destiny especially if we want to move as fast as we're moving. And then the second thing that happened was really close to that was I had another person came up to me holding a thumb drive and telling somebody in marketing and asking me telling me they were having trouble getting their assets the video that they had created that they wanted to put online getting it actually physically sent and placed online. And again, as I started to dig in further I found out that a very talented marketing department that was creating tons of assets but they were keeping them on their laptops. They did have a shared drive that was used little at that point. And there was just a lot of-- While we had brand standards absolutely there was just a lot of duplicative effort working on some of the same assets. And again it was like we need something that can help us organize this in a way that we can continue to grow and be more efficient as we scale. So those were the couple of things that happened, Jen, right out of the gate. She never told me those stories because she wanted my genuine reaction. And you were starting from scratch my friend. Starting from scratch. You were starting from scratch. So we go on this journey with clients a fair amount.
These days a little bit rare that we get the privilege to start at scratch with somebody with an entrepreneurial brand like this one that's really growing at the rate that it is. But we have these two diverging approaches that clients take when they have this many needs. Often they will find a provider they love maybe someone like Adobe and they will say this is how I'm going to go all in on an Adobe Stack and I am going to just purchase every product. I'm going to take two years and I'm going to roll out a beautiful stack and I'm going to have this massive improvement in my business. And then we have clients that take what we all know and love the crawl, walk, run approach where we look at the specific most prioritized needs create some multi-phased roadmap and make really precise decisions about each part of the stack. The whole stack might take longer to get composed at that point, but we often see clients driving value a little bit earlier and then building on that incremental value to justify the investment and the rest of the work that needs to be done. So you all are taking a phased approach. - We're part of that. - Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about as you were sitting there hearing these stories and thinking, "I need everything." How did you decide to take a phased approach and what did you decide to do first? Yeah. It was a pretty easy decision. So just like I described my team started from two and we grew significantly. So did the rest of the company. And we're in a hyper-growth mode when it comes to the number of stands we're deploying. But the company itself was in a extremely hyper-growth mode also. And it's about change management. - We cannot bite off everything at once. - No, it's not. It was not going to happen. We didn't have-- Say all the time we can build the plane, but we don't have anybody to fly it at that point. And so what we had to do was look at each of the business capabilities that we wanted to put in place and really a future state. I mean look a couple of years out and say as an entire organization what do we need? And then put together a plan and a roadmap that clearly set out what we needed to do foundationally and build on top of that. And so that's what really drove, it really wasn't a choice. It drove our choice to decide to go in with the phased approach. So we started together on AEM. Yeah. And we started with the web experience and a DAM essentially. Can we get into some of the details in terms of understanding the outcomes that you felt like you really needed to drive with web that made this the priority? Yeah. So other than the couple of stories that I told-- Yeah. And a big need just some more structure and systems to do that. The 7 Brew customer probably doesn't surprise you but we over index in the social channels by over 150%. And so they're highly active online. They were very much hitting our website in many cases looking for an app which we don't have yet. But we saw a lot of activity in that space combined with the fact that our brand is everything at 7 Brew. And that marketing department they're very, very active in social and on the web. And we just needed a way to be able to capture those assets and be able to store them in a way and create them in a way that was effective with the group that we had. So we started with actually January is when we deployed the DAM or Assets. And we did that in a way that we took-- We ended up finding thousands and thousands of images and videos and probably a lot of content that we may not have remembered we created, but now we're excited about having. And we put that in the DAM or in Adobe Assets. And to our surprise not only did it help us structure everything, some of the features were just wildly excited about getting. We used the auto-tagging features were something that, again, we didn't have enough people to do the job already. We're very lean. And so some of those features with the leverage AI to do that were great. And so it allowed us to just consolidate all of that and be able to take advantage of some of those features. You also mentioned the website. That's where we implemented about the same timeframe at the beginning of this year. We put in Adobe Sites and we re-platformed 7brew.com And about 17 other websites that we had we brought them all together under one infrastructure and completely re-platformed that. And at that point we got control. So my team learned how to make the changes. My business partners learned how to make changes. And we return to calls. - Exactly. Exactly. - Awesome. Well, let's talk about just a little bit because with the core website it was a re-platform. It was not a redesign. So not much to see here if you are a customer. But you now had the control and we were able to fix some of the sort of performance issues that the website had had in the past. So I'll cover these a little bit left to right and then we can go into any that you want to add more context to. But first of all immediately after launching the new site you got a score of 90 for mobile responsiveness meaning that the site was resolving well and fully for any of those mobile devices that our customers are using. And as we just heard they're primarily experiencing the brand on a mobile device. Right. So that's great for usability and customer engagement. We then saw a 3x increase in site searchability so the ability for Google and the other engines to find this site or any of the many sites that were re-platformed and be able to deliver it up in search results for customers looking for those sites. And that's so important because the rate of your expansion means that locations are changing every day. Information on that site is changing every day and it needs to be highly crawlable. And then finally we saw 40% improvement in efficiency using AEM Assets to be able to store and programmatically pull in those assets as needed into the site experience. So it sounds like overall your team must be very satisfied with the performance, as well as the efficiency that they're getting out of the site. Yeah. And as a bonus then our site also met all of the accessibility requirements as well. So all of the way around. And you didn't mention it, but our mobile score was 30 before-- - Yeah. - We re-platformed. And so just overnight just significant improvement by the re-platform without even doing a redesign yet. So we're very, very pleased with that. And as a technologist what I'll mention is I love the idea of reuse and being able to take one platform and use it for multiple purposes. And so with this implementation especially with the Adobe sites, of course, we keep the assets within and leverage them on our site. But we're able to launch a couple of additional projects based on without incremental investment and an additional tool. And so with Adobe Sites we were able to-- Believe it or not, we didn't have an intranet. So we had 100 different places where we had bookmarked sources, employee handbooks, etcetera. And so we are building an intranet on top of sites which is beautiful with a lot of reuse of components that we used on the website. The other thing that we're building and I know there's tools out there that do this that are very specialized, but we were able to build a franchisee portal that is amazing using Sites as well. And so again, I love the idea of using one thing for multiple purposes but that's something that we're launching in April so that all of our franchisees can come to one place and gather all of that information. And then, of course, since we are a franchisee model we do share a lot of assets with our franchisees for their marketing as well. And then we loop in assets to be able to do that and start sharing with our franchisees. So it really has played out really beautifully to be able to put the foundational tech in place and just keep building on top of that. Awesome. That's fantastic. You need to get a lot of use out of each tool when you're dealing with the situation that you're in. And the second platform that we have worked on together is Customer Journey Analytics. This is my favorite program that we've worked on together because I think it's been really meaningful for the business which I want to talk more about. But also because it's a fairly rare situation as a partner that a customer comes to us wanting to implement AEM shortly followed by CJA. Those two tools are not always purchased and implemented together. And I think we have some customers who will push a tool like CJA to a little bit later in the digital multi-phase roadmap. And I'm so happy that we did it first because now you're able to get that view at that data and be able to make those incremental improvements and drive more value as we continue to expand the focus across the stack. So I know we just launched what two weeks ago. We just have a few marketing channels in there right now, but it's already making a difference for your team, right? Yeah. It's incredibly awesome. So on this one I had the person, the marketing exec that was in charge of digital marketing came to me and said, "Look, I'm going to--" And he also came from TikTok, so "we have a lot of advertising going on in the social space." And he said, "Look, I'm having to go to multiple platforms to look at this investment I'm making to see if I can correlate the payback here. And it's every day multiple times a day. I'm going into multiple platforms to look at that." And so that is exactly what CJA is geared to do. And even though even though we haven't expanded to all of the platforms yet, it was a huge win for us. And the tool is incredibly, I would say, fairly intuitive to use, easy to use. We were able to pull in and that's actually a snapshot of one of the dashboards that we bring in real live activity clicks from our customers. We line it up against some of the advertising that's done and you can see the correlation between the two. And you can create those dashboards really, really quickly and put side by side whatever data you're wanting to compare. And then what I love about the relationship that we have is your team taught us as you put in the data flows from those platforms you see up there and taught us to fish. And then my team is going to put in Meta in the upcoming two weeks. So it was a really nice arrangement that we're just-- We needed some help from a manpower standpoint great partnership, great architecture, and then taught us to fish. And so we'll take it from here. Awesome. And we blacked out the dollar sign there because we're not ready to share that publicly yet. But we are looking at the sales value of these journeys which is really I think one of the powerful components of CJA. Because we're bringing in that offline data, right? Right. It's awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about the multi-horizon roadmap that we talked about earlier. I know that our teams work together to develop multiple looks at that roadmap. And we're not showing one of the actual ones that you shopped around because there's plenty going on that we can't share yet. But actually having a view of the multi-phased approach was something that you used to walk around, get championship, get alignment get people all on the same page so that we could take these phases together as an organization.
What we have here is a simplified version. So we went with the largest areas of focus and then the multi-phases that we're looking at. So we have this simplified version. We're in phase one. We've talked a little bit about the web experience and the assets experience. And right now we're in laying the foundation part of that journey. It enables as Danyel mentioned numerous other implementations of AEM to be used throughout the organization and for that web experience to continue to grow. So when we get to phase three, we'll do things to fully enable that customer journey and have an ambition to use more of the content supply chain whether or not that's Adobe content supply chain or just our content supply chain to use AI and automation to be able to do more of that marketing and help the team scale that website content. Because eventually we do hope to have online ordering and full interactive menus and things like that. Right now we're at a foundational content point. And then, of course, we talked a little bit about the data and using CJA. We're again at the beginning of that with just a few of our paid and owned media channels coming in. And there's even so much more we can do with those journeys. But eventually the idea would be that all of those marketing journeys are feeding into CJA and your marketers are empowered to do real-time optimization of their dollars and their efforts to impact the business results which is awesome. We're not really touching on right now marketing and loyalty. We're in the strategy phase of that and there's a lot planned for phases two and three with regard to marketing and loyalty. And then that last question which Danyel indicated earlier is the number one question I think people bring to you. Is there going to be online ordering? Where is the app? I know we were at dinner last night with one of our team members and she said there's a fan group on Facebook. And the header image is just-- There is no app. Because those admins are so tired of answering that question that they just made it the cover image of the group. So there's clearly demand. And there's more coming in the future with 7 Brew. But we certainly want when online ordering is available to integrate that with the rest of the journey and be able to incorporate that with the offline data that we have right now about the stands. So a very full roadmap when you look at the different pieces of technology that we need to touch. Is there any contextualization that you want to add to that? No. I would just reinforce. For me because I had the future state drawn out it made it a lot easier to go sell. Even though we're only taking the first couple of steps I think that was really important. And then, again, at the end of the day it's all about improving that customer experience. So we're stepping into some of these places really, really carefully because it is all about the experience. And if you want to know about the app go follow our socials and you'll be the first to know.
Everyone wants to know. So we talked a lot about what needs to be done and what you've done so far. But I'd like to talk because we probably have folks in the room who are in a similar situation and ready to jump into, let's say, a platform or a piece of technology. But as you mentioned-- I know your team is bigger now but still a fairly modest sized team. More than two people but fairly modest sized. So to get that work done you needed to bring in partners. And I'm just curious to understand a little bit more about your approach to identifying, and then pulling in the right partners at the right time recognizing that you really want to own a lot of this internally in the end. Yeah. I mean so I've spent my 35-year-career in partnering with amazing vendor partners to get things done.
I want to staff up only to continue to maintain things. If there's an incremental implementation that's involved a lot of times partners are a great way to do that. And so exactly you ask about the selection process and how we jumped in. It really is-- I will bring a lot of the same partners with me from company to company, from project to project. And so I'm looking for partners that I have a great relationship that have delivered before. And ours is a fairly new relationship. And so what I saw is that you have delivered for other people that I trust and know and came with great references. And just the interaction was phenomenal. You asked about what I look for. I think in particular we're moving so fast. I need somebody that's going to move fast with us. I need somebody especially with our growth. It's almost immediate response. We are moving and changing things so quickly. And through the selection process you're extremely responsive. And then I would also say I look to all of my partners as thought partners. I want somebody that's going to challenge me. I want somebody where I can pick up the phone and say, "Hey, we're looking at this capability. Help me know which direction would you head? What have other clients done? How can you connect me? How can I learn from those experiences?" And so those are all some of the aspects that we look for in a partner because it's a long-term partnership. - It's not just a-- - I love that. - Short-term experience. - I love that. We talk a lot about not wanting to date clients. We want to marry clients. And so we want to lay a strong foundation for that. You didn't mention price. - I did not mention price. - I know. I still have to be competitive. Right. Of course. I just feel like there's so much pressure put on that sometimes and you've talked a lot about the intangibles that make a really strong partner for the future. Right. Well, there's a TCO involved in a partnership also.
Just because I go lowest price with one provider and then they're going to change control me to death that's not any fun. Okay. Or if I have somebody that isn't going to be responsive and I don't hit my dates and we don't deliver what's expected that also comes at a big cost. - So-- - Right. I think that's why I focused on the things that I-- I love it. No. I love it. So it's really heady work that you're doing collaborating with technology teams, external partners. You got a new President, a new CMO this year. And so a lot of stakeholders and people contributing to the story. I'd really love to hear some of the lessons that you've learned so far in trying to make this major change inside this, just company growing at hockey stick rate. No. Absolutely. The four are listed up here as I really reflected back about this journey. So I think the first one like it says is build that strong foundation. We are leveraging-- AI is the big question of the day and we've got-- Many of the executives are asking, "What are we doing with AI?" And my answer right now especially, as we're scaling is we're leveraging the foundational components of the tools that we're implementing and what we're building. And in some cases we're taking advantage of AI that's inherently and they're like the auto-tagging as an example. Or we're using it to change images and remove things in the images. But it's really-- We can go after those things as we do the crawl, walk, run. That's just that the foundation is absolutely key for us. And so that's where our focus is. I think the second thing is it says there is focusing on business capability first. And so that map that we drew out was all about the business capabilities. It wasn't about the tech. And so when we drew out all of the capabilities of that future state vision that we have then we went in and said, "Who are likely candidates or a build that we would want to look at for each of those business capabilities?" And that helped guide our way to then see what made sense. And like I said the tenants that we used from IT were, it's got to be scalable based on our growth. So we're actually looking at capabilities a few years out, not where we're at now. It's going to be much different from the expectation. And then, of course, they need to be the whole supportable resilient and secure. Still very, very important when we looked at those options. But again, business capability first. It's about the human experience not about installing tech.
Then the third item there which is really, it's just beyond marketing. And it's looking at the entire ecosystem. And like I said foundational is important. And as we build on that, as an example when we're building our intranet and then our franchise portal we're looking at that across the board where we can actually take this technology we're implementing and these capabilities and we're looking at our entire ecosystem. So it's obviously about the customer. That drives us first. But we're also making sure that we're ensuring that the barista's job is the best on the planet that we're not interrupting operations for them that they're actually supporting them and enabling them. We look at making sure our franchisees are an important part of this ecosystem. And so the franchise e-portal that we're developing is for them to be able to put their hands on whatever information they need whenever they need it. And then a corporate is also a great beneficiary. So it's just really solving for the entire ecosystem when we're looking at this technology. And then, of course, the last item there is keep it simple. We don't have a large organization to get incredibly complex. And actually simplicity is something we're really proud of in everything that we do from a company standpoint. So making sure that we do our very best to keep things as simple as possible.
Makes sense especially when you're working with a really concise team trying to get a lot of work done. You've only been at 7 Brew a little over a year, right? Yes. And it seems like you've just plowed through so much of this strategy work in that time and taken on even some of the implementation. Would you change anything if you could go back to day one? Would you approach anything differently than the way that you have? It has been a heck of a year. I think when I look at the past 12 months, we've moved quickly. We put in people, process, technology.
I would say we've learned a ton, but I don't know that I would go back and change anything as part of that journey. That has to be an amazing feeling. I know that you've probably had times in your career when you wanted to and it's got to be amazing to set this one up really, really well.
I love this story and I love how fast you are moving. We don't have a lot of clients that move as fast as 7 Brew is able to move. And I know that there are reasons why you can move fast being an independent company. But it's really impressive what you've done in that time. Thanks, Jen. So we have a little bit of time. I wanted to talk a little bit about the intersection of the restaurant space and digital because it is such a human experience as you've talked about with your culture being so important with technology having to enable the human experience. And this probably goes beyond some of the MarTech. But what are your thoughts on that intersection and how you best leverage technology but without losing all of that core services of hospitality? Yeah. I think, now that I-- So I didn't have any restaurant experience before this role. And so I'm following a lot of channels and a lot of people in the restaurant space making a lot of connections there. And I haven't met anybody who is not going in big on how to support the experience with customers. It's not about the technology. It's about how we improve the interaction with the customer. And so I think we're no different than that which is why the roadmap's important. It's why we're stepping in very carefully to make sure that everything that we do is going to support that interaction. And then I think it's interesting, a lot of our-- And I would say competitors in the QSR space. So not necessarily the drink competitors but a lot of them are coming out with announcements where they've created custom technology solutions with their customers. - And-- - Wow. When I look at our team and how fast we're moving, I'm not at a luxury to spend the next three years developing something that's custom for our customers. We're in a position to-- A lot of places buy things put them together and then we'll build-- I do have talented builders in the team but we'll build where we think we're going to have a competitive advantage in this space. And so staying true to our mission, our cultivating kindness around the customer experience, we're going to keep laser-focused on that and the technology will then be there to support that. But you're seeing a lot of activity in the QSR space with-- - Right. Right. - Customer tech. Well, as you've immersed yourself in that restaurant industry and I didn't ask you this question when we were prepping. Is there a brand from a digital standpoint not necessarily from what they sell or what their customer base is but is there a brand from a digital standpoint that you have come to admire how they've addressed that intersection of restaurant and digital? That's a good question.
We look at our competitors. We look at a lot of people in this space. I would say for us we're going to be very focused on not messing up the interaction with the customer and not making it be about the tech. It's why we're being so careful with the app deployment. It's why we're being so careful with any type of ordering that is not in our lines. We're going to be really, really careful about what we do that could disrupt that. And so what I would say we're not going to do is we're not going to just roll something out that we haven't well thought through, well tested, and looked and learned from others in the industry. And you've seen some other brands do stuff like that? - We have. - Yeah. Okay. We won't name those brands. Thank you all so much for being here, Danyel. - Thank you for being here. - Thank you. You are an amazing partner to us and we're so lucky to have the relationship with 7 Brew that we have. And thank you everyone for joining us. Have a great rest of your show. Thank you.
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