UST grad gets a bump for Delaget Coach

The National Restaurant Association projects restaurant-industry sales to reach $660.5 billion in annual gross revenues by the end of this year.

Entrepreneur Aaron Engler has every intention of participating in the upside of this massive industry with COACH, a dashboard that helps restaurant owners better manage their stores through mobile delivered data.

After his win at last year’s UST Fowler Business  Concept Challenge, COACH has become as real as it is effective.

This month, his Golden Valley employer DelaGet officially launched the product into the market place, instantly signing over 200 restaurants who have demonstrably grown their revenues per store by 2% or more using the SaaS app, he says.

“The problem really is that with so much information in so many places and formats, restaurant owners cannot make actionable decisions, and it’s hard to correlate all the data,” he explains describing the pain point that COACH aims to address.

“COACH shows everything in every restaurant in real time.  Food costs, POS, labor, customer service — it’s all there all the time,” he says with emphasis. “If you’re supposed to upsell drink at 50% a transaction and you only do 48%, we can figure out how much money you’re leaving on the table with that 2% loss,” says Engler.

Delaget Coach is looking to target chain restaurants, because it makes for easier scalability. It can also improve internal numbers for those chains with the rankings system.

“No one wants to be at the bottom of a list,” says Engler. “One of our franchise clients reduced their speed of service by 30 seconds just by sending out speed reports to their delegates. All our clients love the idea of rankings because it correlates to more revenue.”

While Delaget Coach is not a native app, the mobile first approach has many features current systems do not. Working with progression analysis and data mining, billions of points of data are paired with algorithms to make restaurants more efficient in their on-the-go processes.

For example, you can see which employees work best together by how much they accomplish in a shift. Also, you can see real-time information on daily counted items, and if you’re using too much or too little. Overusing can be more expensive, but underusing can lead to customer satisfaction issues. These are but a few of the advantages of Delaget Coach.

“We stand out because we built a consumer-driven interface with a rankings system,” Engler points out. “Nobody is doing that or the data mining that COACH can deliver.”