Five Minutes, 500 Stores, and Where Margin Disappears

The next margin opportunity in multi-site operations may be hiding in the work everyone has learned to tolerate.

I’ve seen versions of the same scene for more than 20 years.

A manager steps away from the operation because something isn’t working. Maybe it’s a device, an application, a refund, an update or a vendor issue. They spend a few minutes diagnosing it, figuring out who owns it, making a call, trying a workaround and eventually getting back to the business.

Nothing dramatic happened. The location stayed open. Most customers probably never knew.

But the business paid for it.

I’ve worked across restaurant, retail, hospitality and other distributed environments, and one thing has remained remarkably consistent: small operational problems become expensive when they are allowed to repeat at scale.

That matters because most conversations about technology naturally gravitate toward growth. How do we drive another transaction? Improve digital engagement? Increase loyalty? Make the customer experience more seamless?

Those are important questions.

But there is another side of the P&L that deserves just as much attention: How much unnecessary effort does it take to run the operation every day?

The Cost of “Just Five Minutes”

Five minutes at one location is noise.

Five minutes multiplied across 500 locations, several times a week, is an operating expense.

And the labor itself is only part of the cost. What was the manager supposed to be doing instead? Did the issue affect throughput? Did another employee get pulled in? Did support become involved? Was the customer inconvenienced? Did a refund result? Did the location create its own workaround because the formal process took too long?

This is how operational friction hides.

It rarely arrives as one enormous failure with a clean financial number attached to it. It accumulates through repeated interruptions, handoffs, manual processes and inconsistencies that eventually become accepted as part of the job.

That acceptance is dangerous in a multi-site business because scale multiplies inefficiency just as effectively as it multiplies growth.

Good Operators Can Hide Bad Systems

Strong operators are remarkably good at making imperfect environments work.

Experienced managers know whom to call. Support teams know the workaround. District leaders know which issue needs to be escalated outside the normal process. Long-tenured employees remember how three different systems actually fit together, regardless of what the process map says.

That resourcefulness keeps the business moving.

It can also disguise how much unnecessary work the organization is carrying.

At some point, your best people become the integration layer between systems, vendors and processes that should already work together.

I don’t think the goal of technology should be to give those people more technology to manage. It should be to take work out of their way.

That means better visibility across locations. More consistent workflows. Fewer handoffs. Earlier detection of problems. Routine issues resolved without requiring someone at the location to become the project manager. Updates and deployments that behave consistently across the network.

The technology should carry more of the operational burden so the people running the business can concentrate on running the business.

AI Has to Earn Its Keep

This is also how I look at AI.

There is no shortage of things we can automate. The more important question is which ones are worth automating.

The best candidates are usually not mysterious. They are repeatable, high-volume activities with a measurable operating cost: routine support requests, device resets, password issues, informational requests, issue routing, recurring remediation, refund workflows or signals that can identify a problem before an employee has to report it.

At Solugenix, that principle is increasingly shaping how we approach Intelligent Store and our NOVA capabilities. We are interested in what happens when support becomes more proactive, store systems become more visible, and routine work can be handled without another call, another handoff or another interruption.

The objective isn’t to put AI everywhere.

It is to make the operation simpler.

And we have seen what happens when you attack the underlying operating model rather than simply trying to process the same volume of work faster. In one restaurant environment, Solugenix helped reduce support costs by 40%, call volume by 30% and refund costs by 25%, while maintaining 95%+ customer satisfaction.

Those numbers matter because they connect operational improvement to something executives care about: cost, productivity and customer outcomes.

Don’t Stop at the IT Metric

A faster resolution time is good.

What I want to know is what the business got back because resolution was faster.

Did the store return to normal sooner? Did we reduce manager distraction? Did we eliminate recurring support demand? Did we protect throughput? Did we lower the cost to serve? Did customers encounter fewer problems?

The same applies to ticket reduction. The goal is not an attractive chart showing fewer tickets. The goal is to understand why fewer tickets exist and what that changed economically.

That is the conversation I think technology, operations and finance leaders need to have together.

Because once operational metrics are connected to business outcomes, store technology stops being exclusively an IT conversation.

It becomes a margin conversation.

Start With What Everyone Has Learned to Live With

If I were looking at a large multi-site operation today, I wouldn’t begin with a list of technologies to deploy.

I’d start with the friction everyone has stopped noticing.

Where are managers repeatedly stepping away from the business? Where are support teams solving the same problem over and over? Where does an ordinary change require five people or three systems? Where are employees compensating for a process because “that’s just how we do it”?

Pick one.

Establish what it actually costs. Simplify it. Automate what makes sense. Measure the operating result and the business result. Then decide whether it deserves to scale.

After more than two decades in this business, I’ve found that some of the most meaningful improvements don’t begin with a transformation program.

They begin by taking a hard look at those five minutes everyone learned to tolerate.

I’m looking forward to digging further into this at FS/TEC, where I’ll be part of the session “What Guests Never See: Finding Profit in Better Store Operations” on Wednesday, September 23 from 1:45–2:30 PM.

If you’ll be in Grapevine, come join us. And if these issues sound familiar, reach out. I’d be interested to hear where operational friction is showing up in your business.