Andrew Raabe, Wow Bao's Chief Financial Officer, needed a trusted, highly skilled partner to advance critically important business performance reporting capabilities for an enterprise experiencing breakneck growth through physical and digital channels.
Chicago-based Wow Bao, part of the Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants group of companies, is an innovative, small footprint restaurant business that operates in the high-growth Asian fast casual segment.
In January 2020, Wow Bao launched its Dark Kitchen initiative and partnered with restaurants across the United States to steam their signature menu items and deliver them via 3rd party delivery services, including DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats.
Since then, Wow Bao has successfully launched more than 600 Dark Kitchens in 85+ US & Canadian cities, on a path to open 1,000 locations.
In his quest to transform the way he and his team handle, and benefit from, the growing volumes of data flowing in and out of the business, Andrew Raabe, Wow Bao’s Chief Financial Officer, turned to the MeasureMatch professional services marketplace to find a partner to help with operational and financial reporting, marketing analytics and more.
It was especially important to act quickly because the business was losing a critically valuable team member who played an outsized role in building and maintaining the reporting solutions utilized to inform Wow Bao’s PE-backed growth strategy.
“Wow Bao has been a pioneer in innovative ways to grow sales. However, our rapid innovations and growth have created great challenges when it comes to generating accurate sales reporting across new & existing channels”, noted Andy.
He added, “We had virtually no way of generating, exporting, or compiling data, and definitely no way to create insights from new dark kitchen and delivery services extensions of our business. Our needs were specific, stemming from our uniquely complex business model, and therefore we needed to cast a wide net to find a capable data management, analysis & reporting partner".
Within 36 hours of submitting his requirements to the MeasureMatch platform, Andrew received eight high-quality pitches from boutique consultancies and independent consultants.
Not wanting to waste any time, a discovery conversation was opened with two boutique consultancies, one of which was Denver, Colorado-based data and analytics services consultancy, Impact by Insight.
Within 10 days, Andrew received and accepted a proposal from Impact by Insight, quickly kickstarting Wow Bao’s journey to advance its data management and business reporting capabilities.
"The MeasureMatch platform helped me to quickly evaluate several potential partners, and find one that had the exact skillset and experience to meet these unique requirements.”
“After meeting Andy and his team at Wow Bao we were blown away by the business model and we were hungry to help. Without MeasureMatch we would never have made a connection with Andy and his team. Who would have thought a UK-based services marketplace would match a Chicago-based business with a Denver-based boutique data consultancy? Together we've executed a true win-win-win for everyone involved,” said Jason Phillips, Co-founder of Impact by Insight LLC (IBI).
James Sandoval, Founder & CEO, MeasureMatch, complemented with, “We’re thrilled to serve business leaders like Andrew and entrepreneurial consulting services professionals like Jason and his team. The MeasureMatch marketplace is designed and built for them to get important cloud software and data work done beautifully and, importantly, together!”.
The Software: Snowflake, Stitch and Tableau
Describing the technical requirements, Andy noted, “Receiving and generating our source data is very complex, and that data requires a great deal of finesse in order to generate executive and operator-level dashboards using Tableau, Stitch and Snowflake are heavily relied upon to synthesize this data in order for this all to come together seamlessly. For that, I’m grateful to have an exceptional partner in Impact by Insight for our data management and analytics needs.”
"Impact by Insight prides itself on being tool agnostic, but with immediate action needed to keep things humming, we were relieved to see that Wow Bao was utilizing Tableau and Snowflake," Jason bubbled with excitement. “Snowflake and Tableau provide powerful and compatible tools for data management and reporting, making the collaboration incredibly easy and powerful.”
Impact by Insight played a crucial role in stabilizing KPIs during the team member transition, addressing cumbersome data management processes, and implementing a redesigned set of Tableau dashboards.
"Wow Bao's needs fit perfectly with our skill set, and we have been able to add value all along the way," stated Jason Phillips.
"It's hard for business leaders to find trusted partners for sensitive, strategic initiatives. We pride ourselves on taking this extremely seriously so businesses like Wow Bao feel safe, supported and extremely productive every step of the way," emphasized James Sandoval, Founder & CEO of MeasureMatch.
“The deliverables from IBI have been excellent. Immediately, IBI found and implemented better ways for us to benefit from our data. Their recommended implementations allowed for more timely reporting, better visualizations, and a more scalable solution going forward.”
Andy added, “In addition, the analyses provided around our strategic questions have been generated quickly, are extremely clear, and highly relatable to our business from top to bottom. Moreover, the insights driven from these analyses and follow-up discussions have provided us with the actionable insights we needed to make sound decisions as an organization”.
More than 12 months later, Andy and Impact by Insight are still working together through the MeasureMatch marketplace.
Cloud software and data are better with MeasureMatch
Here’s a little list of the most common questions we get asked. Don’t see your question? Check out our dedicated FAQ page.
See all FAQs
The insights driven from these analyses and follow-up discussions have provided us with the actionable insights we needed to make sound decisions as an organization.
