Club Individual did not start in a boardroom. It started on a spare desk in my back bedroom, with a laptop, a POS export I was not supposed to find that interesting, and a nagging feeling that we were treating our best guests exactly the same as someone walking in off the street for the first time.
At the time I was at Individual Restaurants, running IT for a group that was growing fast. Piccolino, Gino D’Acampo, Bar & Grill. We went from six sites to forty-five while I was there, and somewhere in that run I became CTO. But the bit I am proudest of is the loyalty programme, because it was built from the operational side out rather than the marketing side in.
The problem was visible from the floor
I started front-of-house. You learn quickly that a restaurant has two kinds of guests: the ones you recognise and the ones you don’t. The ones you recognise get the good table, the extra limoncello, the chat about their kids. The ones you don’t get a perfectly good service and nothing else. The difference is not policy. It is memory.
The trouble is that memory does not scale. A general manager with a good brain can hold maybe a few hundred regulars. Across forty-five sites, with staff turnover being what it is, that knowledge walks out of the door every time someone leaves. I wanted to build the memory into the system so the business kept it, not the individual.
That was the whole idea. Not points for the sake of points. A way for a venue to recognise someone on their fourth visit the way a great manager would, even if the manager was off that night.
What the first version got wrong
The first build was clunky. It was one of the first app-led programmes in UK restaurants, which sounds impressive until you remember how few people had a habit of opening restaurant apps in those days. We learned three things fast.
First, sign-up has to happen at the table, in under a minute, or it does not happen. We tried the website, we tried email follow-ups, and the only thing that moved the needle was a server saying “shall I put the points on for you?” while the card machine was out.
Second, the reward has to be understood by a sixteen-year-old on their first shift. If the floor team cannot explain it in one sentence, they will not mention it, and a programme nobody mentions is a database with a logo.
Third, the data was worth more than the discount. Within a year we could see which sites had a regulars problem, which menu items drove repeat visits, and which “quiet” Tuesday actually had a core of members who would respond to a nudge. That changed how the operations team planned, not just how marketing wrote emails.
Nearly two million members later
Over a decade the programme grew to nearly two million members. I will not pretend that was all design. Some of it was the group growing, some of it was timing, and a lot of it was relentless work by the floor teams who kept asking the question at the table.
But the principle held all the way through: a loyalty programme is an operations tool that marketing gets to borrow, not the other way round. The moment it drifted towards being a discount scheme, redemption went up and margin went down, and we had to pull it back.
When I started TheLoyaltyCo in January 2020, a few months before the world shut its doors, I took that principle with me. It is why three quarters of the team have worked in restaurants, bars or hotels. It is why we spend as much time on the POS integration and the staff flow as on the app screens. You cannot build this well if you have never cleared a table.
What you can do this week
If you run a venue or a group, you do not need an app to start. Do this instead:
- Pull a list of your bookings from the last ninety days and count how many names appear more than twice. That is your regulars base, and most operators are surprised by how small, or how large, it is.
- Ask your floor team to name five regulars and what they order. If the answers vary wildly by shift, you have a memory problem that a system should solve.
- Decide what “recognition” means in your venue before you decide what a reward is. A free dessert is a reward. A server saying “welcome back” because the screen told them to is recognition. Guests remember the second one.
I built Club Individual because I wanted the business to remember people the way a good manager does. Everything since has been a more polished version of that same idea.
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.