Numbers Don't Lie: Small Metrics Can Create Big Results

Greg Costley has been thinking about Cicis Pizza for more than 30 years. Not occasionally. Constantly.

He started as an entry-level manager, worked his way through the system, and became a franchisee in 1997. Along the way, he learned—sometimes the hard way—every breakpoint in the business and how to grow sales at each location.

Today, he operates the No. 1 and No. 3 stores in the chain, including one location approaching $4 million in annual revenue, a milestone no Cicis has reached before.

Most of his 14 restaurants generate roughly $1 million more per year than when he acquired them.

“I’m never satisfied,” Costley says. “Whatever we do today is not good enough to stay in business tomorrow.”

The math that operators relied on in the past no longer works. Labor costs remain elevated. Food inflation continues to pressure margins as do rising insurance, utilities, and capital costs. Consumer behavior has fundamentally changed. For multi-unit franchisees, the pressure is coming from every direction.

The operators outperforming their peers say they aren’t looking for one big fix. They’re focused on 100 small ones, figuring out which numbers matter, catching vendor creep before it compounds, and acting on a weekly trend before it shows up on a monthly P&L.

Net revenue

Ask any top operator what number they watch first, and the answer is almost always the same.

“It all goes back to total net revenue,” says Monica Harrigill, who runs a diverse portfolio of wellness, retail, and hotel brands (Palm Beach Tan, Massage Envy, My Salon Suite, Hampton by Hilton, and others) through Sunray Management Systems. “At the end of the day, it’s total net revenue: What’s making it up? Is it growing? Is it not? And then we work backward from there.”

Early on, Harrigill tracked too many metrics. More data, she learned, doesn’t drive better performance; execution does.

“Numbers are telling you a story,” Harrigill says. “Are you understanding that story?”

She monitors a handful of leading indicators tied directly to results. Each metric has an owner, and every variance triggers a conversation. The language changes with each brand’s vernacular, but the process doesn’t.

At Harrigill’s 20 Palm Beach Tan locations, the conversion percentage is the critical metric. With her 12 Massage Envy sites, it’s closing percentage.

Daily reports cover revenue, labor, service metrics, and guest feedback. They are color coded and delivered each morning to Harrigill’s inbox and to every general manager in her portfolio.

“They’re also seeing where they rank compared to everyone else,” Harrigill adds.

Weekly reviews focus on sales pacing, staffing, and local marketing. Monthly meetings go line by line through the P&L, benchmark rankings across units, and reveal operational best practices across divisions. When a location starts trending wrong, a conversation takes place immediately.

“What are we doing to support this person right now, to flip these numbers before the month ends?” Harrigill says.

Barry Tu operates six Orangetheory Fitness studios in Salt Lake City and eight Broken Yolk Cafe restaurants across Southern California and Las Vegas. They bring in roughly $31 million in combined revenue, and their scorecards look nothing alike.

Orangetheory is a membership-driven boutique fitness business. Tu tracks weekly lead counts, booking rates, show rates, and close rates alongside longer-term indicators like 120-day retention, membership utilization, and freeze rates. Broken Yolk runs on a completely different clock. Managers submit a daily summary report covering discounts, voids, revenue against the prior year, hourly labor, guest counts, and average check size.

Every Monday, Tu goes over the weekly numbers with his full Orangetheory leadership team, including coaches, studio managers, assistant managers, and executives overseeing sales, operations, and fitness. Each studio’s results are on display.

“If you’re in last place, you know it,” Tu says. “I don’t want them to feel shame, but I do want them to feel like, ‘Oh, I need to step it up.’”

Orangetheory’s promotions routinely change, so Tu uses this time to evaluate the success of recent offers. He also makes sure staff and coaches know what’s coming so that they can communicate it to members.

More recently, he started tracking coach performance through attendance patterns, comparing average class size by instructor across morning and evening sessions. The data has been telling, surfacing best practices worth passing on.

Costley, a 2024 IFA Franchisee of the Year who was recently named Oklahoma’s 2026 SBA Small Business Person of the Year, considers productivity his weekly thermometer.

With the buffet model at Cicis, food costs run whether the dining room is full or empty, which means the ratio of total sales to labor hours tells him almost everything he needs to know about how his locations are running across Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas.

“There’s a limit to how hard you can push people in the restaurant,” Costley says. “Whatever that limit is, that’s the benchmark.”

Monthly financials give him the full picture. He moves through each line (food sales, game sales, total sales, food cost, labor, and EBITDA), flagging anything that needs a closer look.

“Every day, we should be getting better, and sales should be going up,” Costley says. “If they do not do that, you have operational issues.”

Across locations

Harrigill ranks her units by revenue in descending order, so the picture is honest before she starts asking questions. Every unit gets benchmarked against internal portfolio averages, top performers within the franchise system, and historical performance trends.

When a variance emerges, she applies a three-part diagnostic before drawing any conclusions: Is this a people problem? A process problem? Or a market problem?

“If multiple units show the same pattern, it’s usually system wide,” Harrigill says. “If one unit stands alone, it’s almost always execution at the local level.”

Becky Torrez has spent 13 years building a BrightStar Care operation across four territories and recently added three Five Star Bath Solutions locations. The two businesses, with 251 employees across BrightStar and 12 at Five Star, have almost nothing in common operationally, but the financial discipline required to run them, Torrez says, is surprisingly similar.

“The numbers usually tell you something is wrong before you can feel it operationally,” Torrez says.

She maps out exactly what each problem looks like in her business. A staffing issue signals strong referral volume with slow starts of care. In that case, the demand is there, but the agency can’t fill it.

An operational breakdown surfaces as revenue growing while margins decline. That’s usually followed by scheduling chaos and rising caregiver turnover. A market challenge can show up as caregivers asking for more hours while census growth stays flat.

“Most locations are not struggling because they don’t have enough referrals,” she says. “They’re struggling because they can’t operationally support growth consistently.”

Strong units have managers who move early, staff proactively, and respond quickly, Torrez says. Average ones live in reactive mode.

“High-performing locations usually are not less busy,” Torrez says. “They are simply more disciplined.”

Torrez tracks gross margin as her primary early warning signal across both businesses. In home healthcare, she targets above 42%. When that number starts drifting, she knows something is wrong underneath the surface often before it shows up anywhere else.

“I can see revenue growing,” she says, “but if gross margin starts eroding, that usually tells me we have some kind of staffing, pricing, or operational issue happening underneath the surface.”

Along with brand platforms, Torrez looks to additional tools, Monday.com at BrightStar and ServiceMinder at Five Star, for real-time visibility into scheduling efficiency, recruiting pipelines, and project profitability that previously waited until month-end financials.

Across both businesses, certain numbers are nonnegotiable regardless of model. They include revenue growth, gross margin, labor efficiency, sales pipeline health, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. For Torrez, leadership stability underlies all of them.

Costley uses a version of the same diagnostic. When a store isn’t performing, he makes the move he thinks will work, which often involves the manager, and watches what happens next.

“When you make the change, the numbers should fall in line,” he says. “When they don’t, you’ve got to start looking deeper.”

He also wants to know whether what he’s seeing is an event or a trend. A $25,000 air-conditioning unit explains a profitability dip without requiring a personnel conversation. A cost line drifting for three months requires a completely different response.

“You just kind of go back in and bird-dog it,” Costley says. “Is this a one-time event, or are we trending?”

Costley watches for anything that looks out of character compared to his other stores. When something doesn’t match, such as voids piling up at one location late at night or a cost line behaving differently from everywhere else, he goes looking for why. That instinct has led him more than once to uncover employee theft.

“You see certain things,” Costley says, “and then you go look at other operations. It’s not happening here. It’s not happening here. So why is this behavior going on?”

Leaks add up

Harrigill has a phrase for what operators can miss while they’re watching the big numbers: “fighting elephants and forgetting the mice.”

Labor, rent, and cost of goods sold get attention. What often gets overlooked are the line items that erode margin slowly. Harrigill points to utilities billed at the wrong rate, insurance renewals on autopilot, and vendor contracts that roll over at higher rates without anyone noticing. None of it feels urgent, but spread across 20 units over 12 months, it can quietly eat at what was supposed to be profit.

“Don’t ignore the small leaks,” Harrigill says.

Of all the line items on her profit leaks list, she singles out discount creep as one that operators often underestimate. Discounts, she says, can quietly accumulate over time, and most aren’t tracking what they’re giving away as a percentage of sales.

“I look at discounts all the time,” Harrigill says. “These are the hidden costs that you just don’t realize are there.”

Harrigill picks two or three vendor contracts to rebid each year rather than trying to fix everything at once. This past year, it was waste pickup and internet service costs. Across her company’s seven hotels alone, the rebid dropped costs by $500 a month or $6,000 per year for one brand.

“If you do that times four divisions, you’re now at $24,000,” Harrigill says.

For Costley, the biggest leak in a buffet model is almost always waste. He’s adjusted pizza sizing and portion protocols multiple times over the years to reduce what gets left on the table. He also monitors for behavioral patterns in his POS data that don’t match what’s happening in the dining room, which can include voids clustering at odd hours and transactions that don’t align with guest counts on camera. Two of his managers were ultimately let go after that kind of analysis revealed discrepancies that deeper investigations confirmed.

Torrez flags software subscription drift as one of the quietest leaks across any multi-unit operation. Scheduling tools, marketing platforms, HR systems, and training portals can all stack up one justified purchase at a time. Operators rarely go back to ask whether any of them are still producing a return.

Action items

For Costley, turning insights into action starts with keeping the right people in place long enough for the system to work.

His assistant managers earn 2.5% of EBITDA with the potential to reach 5% if they hit their goals. Bonuses come as physical checks handed directly by the general manager to the employee and accompanied by a conversation about what the team accomplished and what the next quarter needs.

“I’m trying to empower the management team to have more influence and buy-in from their people,” Costley explains.

The longer people stay, the better the operation gets. Several of his locations have employees who have been with him for 30 years. His highest- volume store has a general manager who has been there for 38 years.

Retention builds the foundation. Costley builds on top of it.

Years ago, he began installing growth-driving game rooms in his Cicis locations, treating each one as its own P&L center with the same reporting rigor he applies to food sales and labor. At his highest-volume store alone, the game room generates $600,000 a year.

“All I do is build sales,” he says.

Every month, Tu’s Orangetheory studios are scored across 15 to 18 metrics, including sales execution, member experience, review volume, and event activity. The results feed a monthly ranking he calls the “Orange Cup.” The numbers are tracked weekly so that management knows where each location stands in real time. The winning studio gets a trophy and a $500 bonus for team activities.

“It’s a culture-building thing for us,” Tu says. “It also sparks up competition.”

Making it stick

Harrigill runs her portfolio on the principle of continuous incremental improvement, a concept known as kaizen that she brought back from Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management Program and put directly to work.

The housekeeping departments at her seven hotel properties offer one of the clearest examples. Each property got three months to redesign its process to cut time per room without hurting guest scores. The team that posted the best results won roughly $5,000, a trophy, and branded jackets.

The winning team figured out that stocking cleaning caddies in advance and moving through each room in one direction instead of retracing steps cut as much as three minutes per turn. Harrigill estimates the process changes added roughly $50,000 to the bottom line. When you’re turning hundreds of thousands of rooms a night, she says, shaving those minutes adds up fast.

Tu has aggressively used AI to cut administrative time and save money. His team previously spent 15 hours a week manually compiling KPI dashboards across his studios. He rebuilt the process with AI, and it now takes just two and a half hours.

Payroll was even more time-consuming: Orangetheory’s commission structure involves roughly 20 variables per pay period, and processing it manually took two people six hours at each location every two weeks. After training an AI tool on the commission rules, the same work takes 45 minutes. By his estimate, the payroll change alone saves about $34,000 a year across six studios.

“I love the data,” Tu says. “Because if you present it the right way, it really becomes your biggest ally.”

Finding and keeping the right people, Tu says, is where execution starts. Tu already offered health insurance to his Orangetheory employees, and he added a 401(k) plan to help him compete for elite-level managers and staff.

“I call it the Jordan Effect,” Tu says. “To attract a Michael Jordan to run a studio, it’s 100% worth it because they’re going to improve retention significantly and improve our membership base, and their training time is cut because they’re already proven.”

At Broken Yolk, the rule is that between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., managers are on the floor, not in the office. Rather than sitting behind a desk, Orangetheory coaches should be standing and greeting members 15 minutes before class. When those behaviors aren’t happening consistently, Tu doesn’t treat it as a coaching problem. He treats it as a commitment problem.

“If they can’t do the basics,” he says, “they’ve already checked out.”

Torrez says that building accountability into an organization sometimes requires looking at the business differently.

“Too many business owners do not really understand what is happening financially in their business until it is too late,” she says. “I was very guilty of this in the beginning.”

The answer for Torrez came from outside her organization. She joined a performance group through BrightStar that meets quarterly. Every member presents their financials, explains the numbers, and justifies the decisions behind them.

“That level of accountability forces you to pay attention and improve,” Torrez says. “The operators who consistently win are usually the ones who know their numbers best and are willing to make adjustments early.”

Torrez has learned from both of her businesses. Healthcare, Torrez says, taught her operational discipline and retention, and she learned that small inefficiencies compound quickly when managing recurring services every day. The remodeling side reinforced speed, pipeline management, and production efficiency.

Harrigill starts every planning session with a simple question: Is the bigger issue revenue growth or cost control? The answer determines everything that follows.

“It’s not a one-year plan,” Harrigill says. “It’s a five to seven-year process. You take on two things this year, so next year you can focus on two more. Don’t get overwhelmed. Just take one thing at a time.”

Costley has thought about what drives performance for decades and keeps arriving at the same answer: “Take care of your facilities and take care of your people. And if you do those two, you might have a chance.”

The data, he’ll tell you, only confirms it.

“You can take all the data points you want, but it’s still about people, and it’s key to having operational excellence,” Costley says. “My whole world is about being better than I was yesterday, and all my employees are the same way.”

TOP 20: Profit Leaks Franchise Operators Miss

When it comes to profits and losses, little decisions add up over time. Here’s a practical checklist for multi-unit operators reviewing unit-level profitability:

1. Discount creep. Promotions quietly grow over time. Track discounts as a percentage of total sales and review monthly trends.
2. Unmanaged menu or service mix. Some products drive revenue but destroy margin. Identify high-contribution items and steer demand toward them.
3. Credit card processing fees. Rates often rise without review. Audit interchange categories, processor markups, and equipment fees.
4. Common area maintenance (CAM) reconciliation errors. Landlords frequently overestimate CAM charges. Audit annual reconciliations and challenge incorrect allocations.
5. Property tax pass-throughs. Verify that your share of property taxes is calculated correctly.
6. Insurance renewal without market testing. Insurance renewals often rise automatically. Rebid policies periodically and review five-year loss runs.
7. Workers’ compensation MOD rate. A high experience modification rate increases premiums dramatically. Monitor claims and implement safety programs.
8. Utility demand charges. Most operators only review the usage charge. Demand charges can represent 30–50% of the bill.
9. Incorrect utility rate classification. Businesses are often placed in the wrong rate class, increasing energy costs unnecessarily.
10. Equipment energy waste. Poorly maintained HVAC, refrigeration, or lighting systems create hidden cost increases.
11. Vendor contract auto-renewals. Pest control, waste removal, linen, and maintenance contracts frequently renew automatically at higher prices.
12. Fragmented purchasing across units. Multi-unit operators miss savings by not consolidating purchasing.
13. Cleaning and supply over ordering. Lack of inventory discipline creates slow but steady expense leakage.
14. Software subscription drift. Operators accumulate multiple systems for scheduling, marketing, HR, training, or analytics. Audit subscriptions annually.
15. Marketing spend without ROI tracking. Many local campaigns measure activity, not results. Track cost per customer acquisition.
16. Agency fees hidden in marketing budgets. Creative and digital marketing fees can quietly consume large portions of marketing spend.
17. Unemployment claims not contested. Failure to contest claims can significantly increase unemployment tax rates.
18. High employee turnover costs. Turnover creates hidden costs through recruiting, training, and lost productivity.
19. Deferred maintenance. Ignoring small repairs leads to major capital expenditures later.
20. Brand compliance delays. Waiting until the last moment for franchise improvement plans or required upgrades often increases project costs.

An Operator’s Formula

The most profitable franchise operators follow a simple discipline:

• Assume labor and cost of goods sold are already controlled.
• Review the entire P&L for hidden leaks.
• Identify the largest opportunity each year.
• Fix one or two issues well.
• Repeat every year.
• Small improvements compound across multiple units and over time.