Six years ago today TheLoyaltyCo opened for business. January 2020. I had left eighteen years at Individual Restaurants with a very clear plan: build loyalty programmes for restaurant groups, do it with a small team who knew the industry from the inside, and grow carefully.
The plan lasted about ten weeks.
The first year
By March the venues we had been talking to were closed. The loyalty programmes we were pitching had no visits to reward. For a few days it looked as though the business had been born into the one environment it could not survive.
What saved us was that the team had run restaurants. We knew what an operator with a dark dining room and a full kitchen needed, which was a way to sell food out of the door that did not hand a third of the margin to an aggregator. So we built delivery and collection platforms. Fast, functional, branded to the venue, plugged into whatever POS they already had. The first ones went live in weeks. Some of those clients are still with us, and some of those platforms are still running.
It was not what I set out to build. It taught me more about the company than a smooth first year ever would have. We learned to ship under pressure, to integrate with systems we had never seen, and to be useful before being clever.
What changed since
The team has grown roughly tenfold. We have studios in Manchester, London, Dubai and Berlin. We have expanded into the UAE, where I now live, and from there into the wider Gulf. The product set has grown from loyalty into branded guest apps, websites, CRM and reporting, because clients kept asking for the next piece and it made sense to build it properly rather than bolt on someone else’s.
What has not changed is the focus. We are still 100% hospitality. Restaurants, bars, beach clubs, hotels, breweries. We have been offered work in retail and we have turned it down, not out of principle but because we are good at this precisely because we only do this. Three-quarters of the team have worked on the floor or behind a bar. That is not a recruiting slogan. It is why the training sessions work and why the apps make sense in service.
What I have learned
A few things, in no particular order.
- The best loyalty programme is the one the floor team understands. Everything else is secondary.
- Integrations are the project. Budget time for them before anything else.
- Operators do not want a platform. They want a guest who comes back more often. Sell the second thing.
- Going quiet to focus on the work is always the right call. The market forgets you less than you fear.
- Hire people who have been shouted at by a head chef. They have perspective.
Year seven
We are starting this year with the most ambitious roadmap we have had. More of the Gulf. Deeper reporting, with AI that an operator can actually talk to rather than a dashboard they have to interpret. New programmes launching in markets we were not in a year ago. I will write about the specifics as they go live.
To the clients who were with us in 2020 and still are: thank you for taking a chance on a company that had been open for a few weeks. To the team, past and present: thank you for building it. To anyone thinking about starting something this year, my advice is the same as it would have been six years ago. Pick an industry you understand, hire people who understand it too, and be ready for the plan to change in week ten.
Happy birthday, TLC. Back to work.
If any of this is relevant to your estate, get in touch. There is more writing here, and the studio behind the work is TheLoyaltyCo.