Owning the Numbers:

CxVG April 3, 2025 Meeting Transcript

Meeting Facilitator

• James Maxey, Faculty Member, Trinity University

Meeting Participants:

• Kristina Anderson, Chief Service Officer, Midwest Petroleum Company
• Chris Bambury, President, Bambury, Inc. dba BONNEAU
• Glennie Bench, President, Southwest Georgia Oil Company, Inc
• Ray Huff, President, Russell’s Convenience/Tenderfoot Software, Ltd
• Alan Meyer, CEO, Meyer Oil Company
• Rob Razowsky, CEO, Rmarts, LLC
• Don Rhodes, President, The Convenience Group LLC
• Babir Sultan, President, Favtrip
• Gray Taylor, Executive Director, Conexxus

Guests

• Ryan Razowsky, President, Rmarts, LLC
• Donnie Rhodes, Director of Business Development, The Convenience Group LLC

Vision Group Network Founders

• Myra Kressner, Founder, Kressner Strategy Group
• Eva Strasburger, President, StrasGlobal
• Roy Strasburger, CEO, StrasGlobal

Meeting:

James Maxey:

Welcome! Believe it or not, it’s our third meeting. It seems like just yesterday that we had our first one. So welcome to our third, all-virtual this time.

And just going back and looking at the first two, I just continue to be amazed at the discussions and the quality of the conversation and look at the quality of the team. Even though it’s been seven years [since leaving the industry], it just reminds me what a great industry that we work in.

I don’t know how many of you guys are college basketball fans right now, but the Final Four is here in San Antonio. So, the walls you see behind me are where I’m going to stay through Sunday because there is a lot of madness.

If you said, “James, I want you to go downtown.” I would say, “I don’t think so.” So as of right now, I am officially in hibernation and dodging all the tourists. Life is good.

First, we need to start with housekeeping and the antitrust statement. [Housekeeping and antitrust statement appear on screen.] We are recording this meeting, and it will be available for publication. Should you choose to have anything that you don’t want published, please just comment and say, “Hey, I’d really like to take that one off the record.” If you think back later after the conversation and think, “I’m not comfortable with that comment,” just reach out to someone in the Vision Group Network (VGN) team and they’ll be happy to take care of you.

We also ask that you please leave your camera on as much as possible. I understand that there may be times when you need to just stand up or somebody sticks their head in your office and says, “Hey, can you do something?” That’s certainly understandable. Remember to mute your audio unless you’re talking for this meeting. We 100% appreciate your willingness to share. If you have a question or comment, use the raised-hand icon or even raise your actual hand. I will make a quick note, and we’ll get to you as soon as we can.

And for the traditional antitrust, let’s not talk about anything that’s competitive.

Okay, then I will then share my screen.

During the January meeting, there was a lot of discussion about data and things happening at the NRF, and that really led to today’s discussion. Today we’re going to talk about data and uses of data by really focusing on smaller companies.

Babir Sultan is going to be one of our speakers today. It’s just fascinating to me coming from my 28 years in convenience stores, there is so much data available. There are so many tools available. We have AI now available. There is so much we can do in such a short time period that even as many as five years ago just simply wasn’t there.

But before we get into today’s presentation, I want to reach out to Eva, Gray, Myra and Roy for any opening comments. Eva, you go first.

Eva Strasburger:

I’m very excited to listen to today’s talks. Babir, are you sharing something on the new 4.0 as well?

Babir Sultan

I’ll be sharing my presentation, yes.

Eva Strasburger:

Great. I look forward to it. Thank you.

James Maxey:

Gray?

Gray Taylor:

The topic today, I think, is really exciting because from the standpoint of what Conexxus does, everything we do is about data and how it passes back and forth between systems. And unless your vendor supports that data flow, which most support POS to back office, that type of thing, once we’ve moved the data, well, what do you do with it?

And especially as a medium or small operator, it’s very difficult to get the data views that you want. So today is going to be one of those experiences where we’re going to learn some of the modern tools that are out there that vastly improve the capabilities of a small and medium retailer.

Again, we get back to what Conexxus does. Our job is to make sure that the data is as clean as possible so that the output, garbage in, garbage out, clean in, clean out. Our job is to make sure that you have the cleanest data that you’re exporting from your system.

I think it’s going to be really exciting to see what’s happening. I was floored by some of our prep meetings and what’s happening.

James Maxey:

Fantastic, thank you. Roy?

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you. I’m very excited about today and about this meeting. I think the CxVG group has really gathered steam. Welcome to our new members and our guest today.

And on a bigger note, with the Vision Group Network, we’ve got a lot of things going on. We continue to grow and get more support and participation. Thank you, because it’s the information that we share from groups like this that makes VGN relevant. So, thank you very much.

James Maxey:

Perfect. Myra?

Myra Kressner:

I want to embellish just a bit on some of the comments that Roy made. We do want to thank you, Paul Robertson, and Verifone for your support of the Conexxus Vision Group. We’re very pleased that you’re a part of the Conexxus Vision Group.

To align with what Gray was saying about the Conexxus mission and the VGN mission, we’ve been very busy since the last meeting in January. Our January 31st Convenience Leaders Vision Group meeting focused on AI strategies for large and small companies, which is an interesting juxtaposition to what Babir and James are going to be talking about today.

Our March 7th Convenience Technology Vision Group (https://vgnsharing.com/vision-report/ctvg-cybersecurity-evolving-trends-and-pitfalls) focused on foodservice technology, which was also an interesting juxtaposition to the January 28th meeting of this group (https://vgnsharing.com/vision-report/cxvg-third-party-delivery-double-edged-sword).

We also have an Electric Vehicles Vision Group. In that February 5th meeting, we invited Karl Doenges, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute (TEI), to talk about the changing EV policy landscape.

All those Vision Reports are currently available in the Vision Group Network Vision Report Library.

Also, Roy and I were in Las Vegas last week and we saw Karl there making a presentation at the EV Charging Summit and Expo, and there were a number of panels that talked about the EV standards, what they call their Open Charge Point Protocol, OCPP standards. So I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about that in relation to Conexxus.

And lastly, we did have a phenomenal launch to our Global Convenience Vision Group on March 6th with 18 c-suite members from the UK, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, Denmark, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the USA. Those members were very engaged in a discussion focused on the pros and cons of AI foodservice robots in relation to labor staffing and customer service. And that vision report will be out soon. (Editor’s Note: The GCVG Vision Report for the meeting on March 6, 2025 is now available.)

All of this really does connect with what we’ve talked about in the past and what we’re going to talk about today and will talk about in the future.

January 28th Lightning Round

James Maxey:

Perfect. Now I want to just do a quick review of last month’s meeting.

We had Jeff Keune of 4910 Consulting and previously with retailer American Natural. He presented a case study about American Natural and QSRs, and he spoke about the intersection between the QSRs and the convenience store industry.

He spoke about his marketing and promotional strategies. He spoke about his loyalty programs and their impact. And he talked about ordering platforms. I want to go around the room and, as you guys have had a chance to let all this percolate in your heads, just wanted to see if you had any incremental comments from the last meeting and general thoughts.

Raymond, do you have any thoughts?

Raymond Huff:

I did not see the last meeting. So I think I need to pass it on to the next person. Thanks, James.

James Maxey:

Okay, thank you.

Babir Sultan, what are your thoughts?

Babir Sultan:

I think it’s very practical. Anybody or any size company could learn from the session. What stood out for me was utilizing your staff. Whether it was having shirts that make you proud of the things that you’re serving or having digital screens that call out key products. We took a lot of that to heart and can’t wait to start applying into your business, as well.

I think taking food more and more seriously is a path that we’ve been working towards, dealing with different vendors and teaming up with the right teams in order to execute. It’s all about execution. Ideas are only as good until you execute on them.

It was interesting to see how they went about making staples of a certain brand or an offering to be proud of and then being loud about it, too. It was a good practical presentation overall. I enjoyed it.

James Maxey:

Thank you so much. Don Rhoads, I don’t recall if you were online last time.

Don Rhoads:

This group is invaluable for, in my case, the smaller operators. We do a wonderful job inside our four walls.

It’s communicating that in a way where we get beyond those four walls is really important. And that’s what we’re all working on now with how we do that. Technology is a big, big part of what we’re going to be doing in the future.

To Babir’s comments, I agree. I think we need to take the low-lying fruit here and run with it. And then as we move ahead, take a look at what others are doing and use some of these examples that are out there to help us.

It is all about being relevant, right? I mean, Roy, you said that early with your comments. We need to remain relevant. Part of that’s articulating to our public who we are, why it’s important that they shop at our stores.

James Maxey:

Perfect, thank you.

Kristina?

Kristina Anderson:

The biggest takeaway that I had when we were talking about foodservice technology was just how important DoorDash is.

Delivery We’ve been leaning into the foodservice apps even more. When I came back to the office, I actually talked to our owner about making sure that our alcohol or tobacco, something that’s age-restricted, that we can also do affinity sales of other items within the store. So that’s something that we’re working on right now because we may have considered it before, but we just didn’t do it because we wanted to make sure that we knew how to actually sell the smash burgers and know how to account for the sales and receive the funds.

We were still newer at the DoorDash/Uber Eats market. We’ve been doing it a little more now. We do like DoorDash. We’ve had a couple of lumps and bumps along the way with Grubhub. So we’re using DoorDash and Uber Eats pretty much now, and trying to take it to the next level and add in the age-restricted items to the sale.

The other thing that I’ll note is we have seen an increase in sales from those two platforms. We’re excited about that. So I am glad that you guys talked about it because it was something that we could actually take away and go implement. We learned it’s worthwhile to make your page attractive and things of that nature on the food app. So that was a good takeaway for me.

James Maxey:

Outstanding. The last two comments, I think they really validates this group because Don spoke to the importance and you turned right back around and you said, “You know what? From the last meeting I had something that was actionable with my business.” That’s very nice.

Kristina Anderson:

Yes, thank you. It was nice for us too because it gave us something to focus on. Often you go to various events and you need that takeaway so that it’s truly valuable for your business. That was valuable for us.

James Maxey:

And I hope your two speakers today give you equally actionable things as well.

Kristina Anderson:

Yes, I’m sure. Thank you.

James Maxey:

You’re welcome.

Alan, I have you next on the list.

Alan Meyer:

Specific to the foodservice and the technology from the last conversation. I think that our industry is struggling to use our technology to catch up on foodservice.

I know we talked about delivery a lot. I’m using Vroom. We went back and forth on that. Vroom in general has been working great for us, from a functionality perspective.

To me right now is from a marketing perspective. How do we get our customers to realize that they can use DoorDash and Grubhub for our foodservice just like they do for QSRs or traditional dine-in and what technology plays a role in that.

James Maxey:

Very good.

Gray, I knew I was going to reach out to you and ask you to introduce a topic, and you touched on it a little bit in your opening comments. Do you have more to say or are you ready to move on? Totally up to you.

Gray Taylor:

I think we should move on because we want to give enough time for the demos and conversations. Showing is better than talking.

James Maxey:

Okay.

Data Visualizations

James Maxey:

Our first speaker today comes from the academic environment where he teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He teaches data visualization where he talks about Tableau and Power BI. And during this conversation he speaks about the importance of data visualization and best practices.

This is a great way for me to introduce myself and stop talking in the third person. So, I’m introducing me, James Maxey. Let me share my screen.

[James Maxey’s Video demonstration is available under Meeting Assets on this page]

My first general comment is: I spent about two hours to put this presentation together.

Data Analysis And if I go back to 1991, I had a team of analysts. It was me and two other people. We arrived on site Monday morning, and we had to do performance reporting for the previous week. We ran reports that were turned around fairly quickly. Between the three of us from 7:30 in the morning till 2:59 in the afternoon, we were gathering data, we were printing data, we were inputting data into spreadsheets and looking at trends, looking at performances of promotions, etc., etc., across our various markets. And it took three of us literally eight hours each, no lunch, 100% focused to present these reports.

I look at today’s technology environment and the skills that I have and the changes in Excel over the years, and I can now do that entire report in probably two or three hours by myself. So if you look at the number of man hours, it’s just incredible how times have changed.

Other general comments.

The screens I’m going to show you over the next few minutes are all done in a software called Tableau. I want to make sure that you guys understand, I have no personal relationship in Tableau. I don’t own their stock. I just think, like Excel, it’s a super software that can do some great things.

The licensing is basically $1,400 a year. I will say that if I was back in an analytical role and the company said, “Hey, we’re not going to give you the $1,400; you have to go use other software,” I would write a check myself.

In today’s presentation or deck I’m going to be using is from Tableau. They present census data. It’s a little dated. It’s 2018, but you can also find census data in various forms on the internet, which is part of the point of today. There’s so much you can find.

I’m also using Tableau’s fictional public data set.

And really bottom line, if you have a good data set from your company’s performance or business, all you need is good clean data and a little creativity and a little time, and it’s amazing what you can do. So that’s my general thoughts.

When I first got into the industry, we didn’t call them dashboards at the time, but in effect, the senior management team came in every morning and we would look at something like this. And we were perfectly happy with it.

We could say, “Okay, January 1st we did X amount of sales, we made Y amount of profit.” And we could look through the given month and say, “This is where we’re doing well; this is where we’re not doing so well.”

And we’re sitting there comparing numbers going across the page. I think it looks great. I think it’s clean. You can hover over any day and you can see the day of the week, the month, total profit, total sales, whatever makes you happy.

That’s old school. One of the reasons why we visualize is, if I can just add color to a visualization, this is the exact same data. There is no change. The only change that I’ve made is I’ve taken profit and dropped it into the visualization so I can see which days I’m making the most money. So January 14th, where it’s dark blue, I made the most money, and I can say, “Uh-oh, January 10th, I actually lost money.”

So as I progress through the month, I can look at comparisons across or throughout the month and very quickly understand what’s doing great, what’s doing poorly.

If I was the boss person on any given day, I would see that red pop up and I’d go to my analyst or even myself, I could be the analyst, and say, “What in the world happened? Why did I lose $382?” Conversely, if I looked at January 14th, I could say, “What did I do right?”

The other thought is maybe I’m not so interested in profit, maybe I’m interested in focusing on sales performance. I want to highlight sales performance. This is one of the reasons why I really like Tableau.

I want to update this chart. I’m not going to create a new one. I want to update this chart and change the perspective from profit for the color to sales.

All I have to do is grab this little icon and remove it and grab my sales dollars or my sales values and drop it into color. And my chart is immediately updated.

Once again, January 14th jumps up and says life is good. And all of a sudden I lose the importance over here on January 10th, but it’s just another quick, easy way for me to change the view without having to do a lot of work.

So instead of duplicating things, etc., just quickly drag and drop and go from there.

Babir was kind enough to share one of his store addresses. It’s a FavTrip store in Grandview, Missouri. This is all, again, within Tableau’s application or software.

I went and I pulled information that looked at population around the store. We have population metrics; you can see it based on color. In the very lightest, it’s zero to 2,600 people. And you can see that there are some not so populated areas around it.

You start looking at per capita income. And this is where I got kind of excited for Babir is while we don’t have a lot of population, we do have some higher income.

If I look at the age, I don’t know about Babir’s stores, but young male was very important to CST Brands, as I recall. You could look at the male population and the various age groups.

I put in an attachment to Wikipedia. My whole thought behind this is maybe this is a location I want to either build or analyze. I put in the Wikipedia information for this is live to Wikipedia in Grandview, Missouri.

Here you can look at population trends. So while this may be 2018, I can look at the growth over the last few years from 2010 to 2020. And if I was making a presentation to the leadership team, I could put in a summary box: The population is over 2,500 people. We have our male demographics, we have our per capita, and based on the Wikipedia, I know there are 26,000 people in Grandview, Missouri.

So then my next thought was about the street level. It’s like what’s going on around that individual store? Again, this is Tableau software. This is not a copy and paste, it is live data. I can scroll out and see Interstate 49. I see its relationship to the store, so I’m only a couple of blocks off of the major interstate. I can see the businesses that are close to my location. Not much happening to the west of my store, but lots of good things happening around here. I see some foodservice.

My whole thought process as I was putting this together and maybe again, I’m thinking about putting a new store or buying this location, I can quickly and easily see with a $1,400-a-year software what’s going on with my business or potential business.

The other thing I like about Tableau and the data visualization, it’s very easy to build charts like this. This is just a standard sales trends chart. I have my total sales for each month. I have my profitability for each month. And in this case, I have my two Y axis synchronized, so I have sales on the left-hand side and profit on the right.

One of the things I like to do is, I think this smooths out the profit line too much, so if I want to change something, I can just right click and remove the synchronization and all of a sudden, I can see the variability of both my sales and my profit trends.

The other thing is we like to look at promotions. We historically look at promotions in a very stagnant way. So here’s the 31 days of the month of January, and again, all this is just fictional data. Here’s the 31 days of the month. I can see how the promotion is going. One of the things I like in terms of visualization is movement. So what I’ve done is loaded the promotional trends where you can see it by day.

You can see in this case, total sales by day for the month of January. But watch what happens when I hit this little play bar.

You can see what’s going on. If I was making a presentation, I would talk about the excitement of what’s going on with my promotion as opposed to just going back to, “Okay, here’s what’s going on with the promotion.”

Another way to illustrate data visualization and movement: This is Hurricane Katrina. Glennie, I think this came close to you guys. Were any of your stores impacted by this?

Glennie Bench:

No, not by Katrina. We’re a little farther east than that. We got Hurricane Michael.

James Maxey:

Okay, I’ll go pull Michael if you want me to. But in effect, this shows all the different places where the hurricane tracking center publicized where the storm was. And what I did was, the color is showing the intensity or the system pressure of the storm, and the size is a wind speed. So if I was in Louisiana–it’s before a storm and I’m trying to get my team engaged–I would say, “Okay, guys, there is a big storm. Everybody knows that. But once you start getting into here (the Gulf of Mexico), you really get the impression of, hey, this is something bad, this is something big. It’s heading right at us.”

Instead of making everybody watch the TV monitor and what’s going on, again, I built this individual chart in about five minutes. And I can do the same thing that I did with the promotion trends; I can have movement. When I click start, perhaps this is when we start identifying the storm. We say, “Oh, I think it’s going to go to Florida; we don’t have to worry about it here in Louisiana.”

Now it’s, “Uh-oh, going to go across the southern tip of Florida, and it’s heading into the Gulf. So maybe at this point we’re saying we might start getting prepared. We don’t think it’s going to go to Texas, but we think it will go north.

So as we proceed, we’re making different decision points. Hopefully, we have enough time to react. Now we’re seeing the intensity of the storm as it gets into the warmer waters , and this is when we start to see it go north. And by this point, hopefully our company is in full alert. We have everything battened down. We have all the supplies. We have power. And we’re prepared as it crosses the coast. And I’ll click the button again just so you can see it fast because I think it’s really cool when it goes fast.

So when I talk about the importance of data visualization, I think all of these things really give us a good feel for how we can use, again, just a relatively inexpensive software and make great decisions and drive business in our stores. With that, I will stop sharing and if you have any general questions, I’d love to answer them. Babir, you have one?

[end of video demonstration]

Babir Sultan:

I have one. Are you able to get live access to a current storm coming through, a live connection instead of an older one and looking at that? That’s pretty interesting because the news gives you, depending on which news channel you watch, you’re getting different bits of things. Being able to give live access to a current tornado or anything like that will be more feasible.

James Maxey:

If you have a URL, there are ways to use Tableau to connect to the internet and connect to their actual tables. So while it’s not live, you’d have to go in and refresh your data. But you can connect to their tables, have it automatically update your data set, and be able to populate it without incremental work.

Babir Sultan:

That would be great. Awesome. Thank you.

James Maxey:

You’re welcome.

Kristina, I see a hand.

Kristina Anderson:

I have a question. When I worked in the past somewhere else, we were able to bring in weather-related data on a daily basis, and it was saved historically. So when you went back and looked at historical sales, you could see if it was impacted by a snowstorm or a tornado, like Babir was just talking about. Is there a way that you found that that can be done to layer over historical sales so that you can see them together to see the impact to sales?

James Maxey:

100%. That is all available. Back in the ’90s when I did that, that was actually one of our pages, the weather by market, so that’s a great point. Back then, I had to manually go into each weather site to pull it, but now if you want to have access to their data, I looked when I built this, every one of them are now paid. So you’re going to have to get paid access to their data as opposed to just pulling it. Unless you want to maintain an Excel spreadsheet, just update your spreadsheet and go.

Gray Taylor:

The granularity has gotten a lot better. If you talk to somebody like Dow Jones, they basically can give you hourly weather by geocode. But to James’ point, everybody’s putting this behind a paywall now, and that’s one of the limiting things that we have out there.

The other thing I think, and what James’ presentation shows, is that we call it web scraping, but if you go out, smart cities are coming, and you will have live data that’s coming from some of the cities. Austin’s been doing this. You’ll have live traffic data, where traffic is heavy, where it’s not. So you’ll actually be able to get all kinds of things, even local events that are going to be coming up.

My son works for TXB, nobody told them that across the street was where everybody has their softball tournaments, and so they never loaded up on soft drinks. Saturday came along, and they were sold out within two hours. And so that’s the type of thing that if you could scrape local events that are going on around your store, you could actually start prepping for that sort of stuff. So this is a really rich tool, and it’s only limited by creativity. And to James’ point, you can go up simply and get public information on a periodic basis. To get streaming information is going to require an API interface, and it’s going to require a certain level of payment.

James Maxey:

Perfect. Paul, I think you were next and then Babir, we’ll come back to you.

Paul Robertson:

This is fantastic, James. I think this really illustrates how people, even small operators, can utilize tools to analyze data that they already have. Kristina, to your question, you have Commanders, you can pull the T-log out of those Commanders and now you can parse that data, which is in XML format right into some sort of an overlay that showed you what sold well after a storm came through, what didn’t. And then to Gray’s point about the Texas Born incident, you can stock up before or you can see how your promotions were affected during certain times, storms, events, traffic patterns, etc. I think this type of a presentation is super valuable to the small operator that wonders, “So now what, you’ve given me all this T-log data?” I can now pull that out of the cloud. I don’t even have to save it individually at each one of my stores. I can pull it out of the cloud and dump it right into a reporting tool like this.

This is fantastic, James.

James Maxey:

Thank you. One of my favorite comments going back to my analytical days was: There is no such thing as a bad promotion; there are only bad promotions if I repeat my past mistakes.

Babir, I’ll reach out to you.

Babir Sultan:

I echo what Paul said. Right on the nose. We need to learn from other industries. If people are able to access what’s behind the pay wall of a weather report, why are we behind on finding ways to monetize our data and further make the industry better? It can help us plan our behavior, whether to stock up on salt and scrapers at a certain time, right? I think we as an industry together and leveraging our data, I think we can only get better, and we need to find ways. And hopefully Conexxus is able to connect the dots and bring everybody together on making this happen. I think it’s way overdue that we do something like that.

Gray Taylor:

Data Analysis You know along those lines, there’s some new standards that are going up, and we’re also doing a massive upgrade on the POSBO, POS back office. We also have a thing called POS activity reporting. You can actually set up a terminal to basically feed a data lake house almost on every transaction. In fact, you could do it on every transaction if you wanted to, which now gives you a lot of other capabilities. The retail media that you’re showing, did it show immediate lift? Were people using the 8112 coupon that was coming off the digital media to buy things? The manufacturers are getting to the point where you’ve got real-time information. The question is can you handle it? Is it something that has meaning to you because you know it’s intuitively meaningful, but can you really handle it? Which means you need to have these systems back there doing the data visualizations and eventually triggering off warnings and notifications. So it’s a great start.

James Maxey:

Gray, I think you put yourself in a bad spot to be perfectly honest because I think you have two things to do. One, you talked about data scraping where you can look at local promotional events, so I would love to hear more about that. And the second one, you had three of us comment about the importance of weather. So maybe I could gently ask your team to look into what weather website could we take a look at, because obviously it’s important to your operators.

Gray Taylor:

It is. The problem again is the paywall. It might be something that’s interesting to surface up to the next executive committee is can we negotiate a good industrywide pricing for access to Dow Jones weather, as an example.

Paul Robertson:

Does NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) charge for their weather reports? Don’t they publish tracks and specific weather data as a government organization?

Gray Taylor:

They do. And I may be speaking out of lack of knowledge here, but most of it comes across as text. It’s made for emergency consumption. It’s the same thing with the marine weather. It’s coming across as voice for the most part. Although you can through NOAA download weather maps. And again, it’s not coming down to data format, it’s coming down primarily for human consumption off of their device.

James Maxey:

Perfect. Roy, I see you have your hand up.

Roy Strasburger:

Yes, James, thank you for a great, very interesting presentation. One comment and one question.

We were talking in another Vision Group several months ago about using information like weather or sports to make operational decisions. I think that there ultimately is going to be somebody who puts that business case together and actually becomes an information provider. They collect all that information, and they become a provider of information that you can tap into and eventually that is going to be somebody’s revenue source. And I’m really surprised that Alphabet or Amazon haven’t done that already, but that’s a separate question, a separate issue.

My question is, and I apologize for my lack of technology knowledge on this, but is there something like the equivalent of a live-streaming T-log that you can get from stores so that you can watch your store performance in real time? For example, if you find out that you’re having higher traffic levels inside the store because you have a softball tournament going on somewhere, there’s an alarm or an alert that is set off. Is there anything that can track that from a store in real time?

Paul Robertson:

POS I’ll do a little bit of a shameless plug. With the Verifone Commander’s T-log being deployed into the cloud, that data lake exists, and our C-Site users can tap into that data and then display it, just as you’ve described Roy. They could build some sort of dashboard that gets displayed on a TV in the back office so that management can see the trends. It would have to be built, obviously, the tool, but like what James has shown us, maybe something to do that with on a live basis.

James Maxey:

But Paul, to Roy’s point, you mentioned it was in the cloud. I would prefer an alert if I’m Babir and say oh, what’s going on with store 1234? I need to get ahold of my soft drink guy and get some more product out there. Is that available?

Paul Robertson:

Yes, exactly. We don’t have the GUI (graphical user interface) in place to tap into that, but we’re providing the data into the data lake that we’re all talking about that can be pulled down and manipulated to do this very thing.

Roy Strasburger:

And it’s live?

Paul Robertson:

It is, yes.

Roy Strasburger:

Okay. I thought you were uploading T-logs as a report daily, and then you were pulling from it.

Paul Robertson:

No. Our new cloud API is as soon as the transaction is done. It posts up into this data lake and all of our C-Site users have access to that. And then we’ve monetized the cloud API to sell to people that we’ve…Gray, to your point about this becoming a business for people, we’ve already had people come talk to us about how to tap into that cloud API to provide these analytics to their customers. They’re seeing this already.

Gray Taylor:

I think the operative word here is that cloud solves a whole mess of problems. As you can imagine going out and pulling your stores in real time. Let’s say you’ve got 50 stores. If you’re hitting 50 stores, they’re coming back to you on finalization of every transaction, and then you get to collate it, and then you get to actually synthesize it into something. Whereas you got in the cloud environment where the data structures are the same across the store, and PARA (personalized image aesthetics database with rich attributes) allows you to actually do that across multiple POS platforms. So it comes back, and we can actually do an aggregated end of day. That makes it a lot easier. The data lake house concept, you don’t have to be a huge organization to have one. It’s one of those things that you can put up on a server, structure it correctly, and just make sure that your data’s coming in a consistent fashion. Because again, if you put bad data in, you’re going to make bad decisions off of that and the visualizations aren’t going to be there.

Data Analysis To me, talking to retailers where they say, I’m swimming in data, I have no idea how I can really use it. This actually takes it to the next level where you can use it in real time instead of looking at T-logs. And then you have to do the comparatives on T-log. You can have a security one that says, I want to know in real time with the open doors, all of those things are in that site, and you’re just peeling that data off of a live real time T-log. So again, once you have the data and you’ve got it in the right format and the right place, your imagination is the only thing that’s going to limit you in what you can do.

James Maxey:

Thank you. Eva.

Eva Strasburger:

I’m going to take a step back to when you were talking about the weather and connecting to different sources of information. During COVID, we had quite a few stores across the nation. So we said, how do we make the decision for each store about when we should insist that they use masks because they were at different levels of COVID in different states. And so our technology director, Angie, who’s the one who just showed the antitrust statement, designed something for us where she went through to all the government sources in the states, linked it all, and gave us real-time data visualization using Power BI so we could see exactly what the COVID levels were in any county that we had a store in.

We were then able to say, “Increase this to a level red,” if that store needed to be told that they had to continue wearing masks. We also included data about whether the hospitals are getting overloaded or if there are hospitals asking for emergency equipment that they need? So by linking to all the government sources that were available, she was able to create really good visuals for us, which we then updated and looked at every Friday. We were able to analyze what indicators were going up and down and then deliver that report back to the store saying you’re in a low-risk area now, you can relax about this, but when next week it’d be spreading again, we’d put those restrictions back in place. It was fascinating seeing what you could do.

James Maxey:

Outstanding. Thanks. And Babir?

Babir Sultan:

That’s pretty cool. I would love to learn more about utilizing government resources.

To answer Roy’s questions, and Paul kind of hit on it, too. There are a lot of software providers that are tapped into Commander Verifone. We do have live access to our live sales. And to Gray’s point as well, I think your creativity and your imagination is however you want to utilize the data. You can have a bunch of data, and we’re going to talk about the minimum stuff that we could do in the coming presentation. But I think the sky’s the limit, and we’re only starting to realize the potential that we could do different things with our given data.

James Maxey:

Paul, I see you raised your hand.

Paul Robertson:

A quick add: These DVR providers, the cameras in your stores, are already counting people. You can take those people counts, ingress, egress statistics, and overlay them into this Tableau thing that you’re showing us and do that sort of real-time analysis at headquarters, as well. I agree, the sky’s the limit. Use your imagination.

Babir Sultan:

Not in today’s presentation, but in a future one, we’ll show how we actually have done that successfully using our existing camera and an AI. So I won’t nerd out about that yet. We’ll stick to the plan here, but we are leveraging that today.

Gray Taylor:

Technology We’ve got a pretty ambitious project going on in Conexxus, which we call the IoT WoT (Internet of Things, Web of Things). The idea is, okay, you can also scrape a lot of data coming out of your own store, door open, door close. When the customer count in the store was X, did I have a second register open or not? Do I notify the people who are in the store it’s time to open up a separate register, even though you don’t have a queue? You can start looking at all that stuff in real time, put in some messaging, use Slack if you want to and start …

James Maxey:

Great conversation, thanks to everyone. I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to our second speaker.

Myra Kressner:

Excuse me, James. We just had a guest that joined us a little while ago, Ryan Razowsky. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Razowsky

Hey, everybody.

Myra Kressner:

Do you want to just take a moment to introduce yourself, and then we’ll move on to Babir’s presentation, which is one of the main reasons why you’re on this call.

Ryan Razowsky

Yes, by all means. And I apologize, I’m working from my kitchen today. We don’t have a nanny today, so I’m playing more than one role. My name’s Ryan Razowsky. My dad, Rob’s on the phone. We own and operate primarily Shell stations in the Chicago area.

Myra Kressner:

Good. Thanks, Ryan.

James Maxey:

Thanks, Myra. I did not notice him sneak in, so I appreciate you getting my attention.

Transforming FavTrip Inventory

James Maxey:

Without further ado, Babir’s going to give our second presentation. We’re going from me using fictitious data to Babir using actual real company, real convenience store data. So we’re moving it up a notch. With that said, Babir, I’ll turn it over to you.

[Babir Sultan’s Slide Presentation is available under Meeting Assets on this page]

Babir Sultan:

Awesome. I must confess as well, I’m a big fan of Tableau and reducing our job from two hours to further down is one of my top goals. I always debate between Power BI and Tableau. But lately, if AI is doing the job, I’m abandoning both softwares at the moment, so we’ll see how that goes.

My name is Babir Sultan: with FavTrip here in the Kansas City, Missouri, area. We have a chain of convenience stores and gas stations here locally. One thing I’m very passionate about, and it’s good to be part of this group, is IT. My background is IT computer networking. I was a network admin at JFK Airport. When I came into this industry 20 years ago, the big issue was smaller operators, one, two, five-store operators had no access to their own data. When we thought of data, we thought of it being something not meant for us; only meant for the big players.

One of the key reasons was the monthly fees. A lot of smaller operators couldn’t handle that. Luckily, with some disruption, there’s been a lot of new players into the market that have allowed us to get access to our own data, like T-log data and others. So as somebody that’s always curious…and as business owners, I think we should always stay curious–one of the top things we wanted to do was try to get a better grip on our inventory.

Inventory Management When we came into the industry, we saw a lot of people go off of a lot of gut feeling, and we wanted to get that gut feeling out of the way. So currently, we are using a software, Modisoft, to access our own data. I’m just giving some visualization of ways that we’re utilizing it. You could get a visual picture of some new items you have and your cost structure. There is some mix-match, and it’s up to you to get into that data and try to make sense of it or correct it.

Being able to do things like setting up minimum inventory versus maximum over here to be notified if your inventory falls short of things. It allows us to stay on top of this Sunkist 2-liter, setting things in motion. If it matters to you, if it gets managed and measured, you will be ahead of the game. I see in 2025, there’s absolutely no reason at all for any store operator not to have access to their own data. Another thing, as we went along, the other challenge was okay, great, we have access to our own data, but how did that translate with the vendors? So being able to work with vendors like Core-Mark or Saint Joe Distributing or HubKC, them sending us our data for our invoices. Such as being able to stay on top of things like this that could get overlooked where you are undercharging while your cost is this much, including the buy-down on this basis. For example, if we notice Frito-Lay has been changing their prices quite a bit, but being able to get access to that and changing that in a timely fashion matters a lot. Because over the years, by the time you make it to your Tableau dashboard or any other Power BI dashboards that you have, there’s a good chance that you’ve been losing money without getting access. This is just our way of trying to stay on top of our data.

Internally, we call out some of these products per department. They’re forbidden items that we cannot be out of in any particular store, whether it’s 44-ounce fountain drinks or a Cheyenne brand. It’s based on sales. We will go out of our way to find Monster Green. Our main distributor, which is Coca-Cola, may deliver only once a week or maybe once in two weeks. I tell my staff, our customers don’t care if the vendor comes in two days. All they care about is getting their product. As a retailer, it’s our job to do everything within our power to make sure we don’t run out of at least the common products that we should carry.

Technology The other thing we like to do as well is to find nice and easier ways to translate this data where our staff can easily understand it.

I recommend going to websites like There’s an AI for That and type in “data dashboards.” This one I think is called Bread AI. Again, you could use ChatGPT or Cloud. All of them have their own strength that you could dump the data that you get from Verifone or Modisoft and instruct the AI to make sense of that. This is literally what we did. [I do this when] I get the Excel or the Tableau spreadsheet and it doesn’t necessarily translate into my staff understanding why is it important or doesn’t show how much product we are selling? Gray hit on this point earlier about transactional data, where we take it a step further.

If you know anything about FavTrip, we’re big on theft prevention, internally and externally. So we take a full month’s data, and we like to tell the AI to make sense of areas where no-sale/void ticket returns are being over-utilized. There’s a good chance that somebody might be opening up the register or doing unnecessary refunds, as well. As you could tell from here, there’s a good chance you should question the 7 a.m. to maybe 11 a.m. morning shift. Because our shifts run from 6 a.m. to 2 and 2 p.m. to 11, and then overnight, as well. This visualization gives you an overview picture. Many years ago, we thought these things were not possible. But thanks to AI and having new players into this industry, we’re able to access our own data.

And the beauty about AI is it does have recommendations. I don’t have to do any guesswork. It tells me that from 8 to 9 is the highest risk period. There are these many voids, these many no sales, right? It’s the evening shift, and this is when it is high, and it has recommendations as well. Now we can address the issues before they get worse. That is a top priority.

Earlier you saw our overall “Top 10 Forbidden Items.” But you could take this a step further using ChatGPT, as well. We’re going to do a little live demo here of ChatGPT and leveraging that. Here, we’re looking at the beverage department. Data shows that Dr Pepper in one store sells very differently than in another. Earlier, James was sharing information about our Grandview store. Within three miles of that, we have a store in the Red Bridge, Kansas City, Missouri, area. The buying patterns are very different.

Data Analysis In the past, we would judge one store by comparing it to another store. That store does not sell Dr. Pepper for the life of it, but it sells the same amount if not better Sprite and Mountain Dew. Every store, we say, is unique in its own way. Here, I’ll run an actual ChatGPT inquiry and be very practical about it so you can see how easy it is to do this.

Babir Sultan Demonstration Video Link to Babir Sultan demonstration

Let’s run a little demo here. I type in “Act as a data expert.” We like to prep up ChatGPT instead of just dumping in the data and telling it to make sense of things. So let’s upload a file. Let’s look at vapes here, e-cigarettes.

James Maxey:

While that’s loading, is this a paid version of ChatGPT or the free version?

Babir Sultan:

No, no. This is the free version of ChatGPT. There is no excuse for any retailer not to be able to use this. But if you have a very heavy set of data, you end up having to pay for Claude or ChatGPT. This is the free version, and this data is for a whole month. Quite heavy and intensive, but not so heavy that the free version can’t handle it.

I’ve updated my data, and here you can say. “Give me the top-selling items.”

Very quickly, it starts a very basic Excel file. If I look at it, I can tell Vuse, Juul, Geek Bar is at the top. I’m going to ask it to “Give me a dashboard.” And it didn’t take more than a few minutes.

This chart is very easy for any staff members to understand. And one thing I noticed with our staff members, this makes it easy and visually appealing for them by handing them one of these dashboards at the end of the month. And the way our staffing works is different staff members who are in charge of different departments. So this is something I would hand somebody that’s in charge of the vapes department. The earlier one would’ve been the beverage department.

The younger generation of employees is very much ChatGPT-driven. We’re not shy at all about sharing our data because we could clean it up. This is very raw data, but you’re seeing how long it takes me to do this. Fairly quickly, we’re able to get access to our own data and make it easy to understand. That’s my presentation. I want to definitely leave room for interesting chat and questions, as well. But I’ll turn it back to you guys and I appreciate your time. Thank you.

James Maxey:

Babir, I’m going to be selfish and just start the conversation.

Vendor Relations I’ve noticed or heard you say in the past how this has really changed your relationships with your vendors and how you tell your vendors what you want, meaning the quantities you want to buy, and also, what you’re going to stock by just using your own natural data. And this really underscores that point. You’re talking about Mountain Dew vs. Dr Pepper vs. Sprite. I’m sure every one of those reps are saying, “Hey, I want six facings of my 20 ounce because I’m doing great in the market.” And you’re going, “Uh-uh. D. Pepper, yes, you get it eight over here, but you only get two here.” Would you speak more on that?

Babir Sultan:

Yes, absolutely. Great point. Since we got access many years ago to our own data and we found ways of leveraging it, our vendor relation has changed quite a bit for the better. Early on, you’re right, we would just take them at their word. We’d say, “Take over the door, do as you will with it, and send us whatever product you want to send.” And that’s how it was. Being a small operator, some of our stores are 1,500 square feet and some are 4,000. We have to be very picky with the products we carry.

Nowadays, our relation has flipped very much, and we look at it as a positive. We don’t want the vendor making the order anymore. Our relation now is, “Here’s what we want and send it to us based on if you’re coming in two weeks, one month, one week, five days, three days.” We got that granular where we tell them, “This is the product we need.”

You mentioned promotions, as well. We could tell them by the basket analysis using a similar action that we did earlier saying that we don’t want 50 cases of Gatorade Zero—and it could be Gatorade Zero or Powerade, whatever product. I’ll take Gatorade Zero as an example because in the summer offer, they usually send 50 cases. In the past, we said, “Yeah, go ahead, send us whatever for the two free cases.” Now we tell them we want Strawberry Kiwi, or Orange, or certain Gatorade fruit flavors, and we want this many. When we started doing that, they looked at us very funny, I’ll be honest with you. They’re like, “How do you know? I write your orders. I know your store.” And now we say, “No, we know our store. We know what we want.” It has improved our relationship in some areas. In other areas, it has hurt our relations because we’re not willing to take in whatever. We won’t take, to put it bluntly, what is shoved down our throats because it’s not free, and it takes up space and money. We look at that as the cost of opportunity. This was an opportunity for us to be doing something different, very different. So back to your point, I think it makes us a smarter operator, and we want to be smarter in our operation.

James Maxey:

Data Analysis As I follow this through the balance sheet, it’s impacting your working capital. It’s impacting your inventory turnover. It’s impacting your sales. It’s favorably impacting your customers so you don’t have any out of stocks. It’s all the things that we’re chasing.

Babir Sultan:

And it ties in a lot more with your presentation and the points everybody else is making. You could get as granular here as possible. For example, if you follow us online, you’ll see we have FavTrip Friday. It’s our busiest day of the week. We offer 30 to 50 cents off [per gallon] to our social media and text club members. At our stores, we have a rule: We forbid any vendor to send us a delivery on Friday, and we won’t do business with you if you say you’re going to do that. It’s not good for our customers because our parking lot is full. We don’t want a 16-wheeler pulling up and disturbing everybody. But you can’t do these things unless you have access to your data.

And there’s no excuse for anybody not to have fun. I say have fun with your data. Make sense of it.

James Maxey:

Love it.

We have three people with their hands up. I think it was Roy, Kristina and then Rob. Roy?

Roy Strasburger:

Babir, thank you very much for the presentation and promoting the idea of controlling your own store. That’s always been a challenge with DSD vendors about who’s doing what. And I found it really interesting how it gives you the power to try to leverage better performance from your suppliers. But just to be clear, before I ask my question, how many stores do you have?

Babir Sultan:

I personally operate four of them, and the rest are leased out. We have eight other ones that are leased out. So we’re doing this in just those four stores.

Roy Strasburger:

I ask that to give everybody an idea of the size of your operation and what you’re accomplishing.

Did I understand earlier in the presentation that you have different employees responsible for different departments in the store?

Babir Sultan:

Yes.

Roy Strasburger:

So are the employees doing what you just did [on ChatGPT], or is somebody else creating the data dump or the charts and then passing that onto the employees?

Babir Sultan:

Training Great question. As an entrepreneur, as somebody that’s curious, I like setting the stage for them and then literally just handing it over to them. So all the employees that are in charge of the department, I will make a quick video. We leverage a lot of video training. I would show them how I went about getting access to that data and demonstrate the commands that you saw. It could be something as easy as that for them, and they’re in charge of that as each department. It becomes their job: Grow that department and get rewarded accordingly, as well. That’s how we have it. We hand it over to them.

But in the beginning. I like having fun where I say, “Can the free version of ChatGPT handle this, or do I need to continue to pay Power BI or use the desktop version?” So we test it out and if something’s working, we use it, unless something else comes along that saves us even from 5 minutes and automated, we might do that. That’ll be the next thing. But for now, that is the only hurdle. And to answer your question, the staff does it themselves now.

Roy Strasburger:

Well, just as an added comment, that’s a very enlightened approach. When we were doing a lot of work with small operators around the country, the owners were very, very reluctant to share information with their employees. And I think the way that you are not only delegating but holding people…I was going to say holding them responsible, but let’s say incentivizing them for their job performance. I think that’s incredibly impressive. Very commendable.

Babir Sultan:

Thank you. To that point, for any operator listening. I think delegating and then opening up yourself for other high-end matters like AI and other things, that’s the only way you’re going to do it. Otherwise, if you’re always putting out fires. Running these data reports, it’s a full-time job, or it could be. We even had interns and cohort projects on these things at colleges too, that we have done in the past and just perfected and handed over to the staff.

James Maxey:

Very good. Thank you. As a college professor, I love it when students get real-world access, so that’s much appreciated.

Kristina, you had your hand up and then you pulled it down. Do you still have a question?

Kristina Anderson:

Actually, Roy asked the question I was going to ask about who was responsible. We are in the same place with that one. So thank you, Roy and Babir.

Babir Sultan:

Kristina, I would ask your staff who’s passionate about a particular department. If somebody is into vaping, maybe give them that. If there’s somebody you know who buys Red Bull or certain brands, that’s how we identify them. Then we say, “Hey, would you like to take ownership of this and get paid more and have fun with this?” It’s not for everybody, as we learn as we’ve been doing this.

Kristina Anderson:

That’s a great idea. Thanks.

James Maxey:

Thank you.

Rob?

Rob Razowsky

Vendor Relations Babir, thank you for sharing. Interesting conversation. Something that’s come to light recently is our Coca-Cola distributor is no longer taking orders, so they’re putting the onus on the retailers to do it.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, we have that problem too, and we’re okay with it, to be honest.

Rob Razowsky

If you make a mistake in that order process, you’re challenged to make returns. So this [use of AI] could be a huge asset in trying to help them place orders, because it’s amazing to me that they relinquish that responsibility.

Babir Sultan:

To your point, that was the issue in one of our stores [that made us make a chance]. FavTrip Friday was an issue and the fact they didn’t like us giving them the order. They wanted to send that four-grand, eight-grand order when we only needed two, unfortunately. And you can only say it so many times until you say, “Sorry, that’s not the only data that’s available.” Sometimes they say, “Oh no, if you want to keep your contract, you have to buy X amount of energy drinks,” and we know they are not going to sell. So either you own the store, or they own it. So we have parted ways at some stores where you say that doesn’t work. And it’s perfectly fine, to be honest with you, because being able to leverage our data and knowing what items were selling, we look for other places to get product. Sometimes it’s Sam’s Club, if there’s a certain SKU that they have, we’re just going to get that and not everything else. We don’t have to carry it all.

One option is go ahead and order online, so when Core Muscle drink or something is trending, we might get five cases of that, and that’s the end of our relationship. We don’t hear from that login again. So I wouldn’t be afraid to bluntly tell not just this particular vendor or any vendor, [that you have other options] if you have access to your own data and you know your store. A lot of people worry about, “Oh my God, if they dump us, what is going to happen? We can’t run our store. Our competitors are going to take up everything.” I think you have a competitive edge if you know your store data and you can make smarter decisions from that.

Rob Razowsky

Yes. Well, thank you. It’s interesting stuff.

James Maxey:

Thanks Rob. Great question.

Alan, I have you going next.

Alan Meyer:

Data Analysis Hi, Babir. Great presentation. First off, have you ever heard of a software called Taiga Data?

Babir Sultan:

I might’ve had an introductory presentation, but I don’t recall.

Alan Meyer:

It’s a data-analytics tool for your transaction data. We’ve been using this about a year, and it performs a lot of the same functionality of what we described here. And it’s been great. It’s a software as a service (SaaS) tool that we pay a monthly fee for. One thing I’ve been talking to them about…you talked about owning your own data. I completely agree. One thing I would love to try to work out with them on is anonymizing the data and then aggregating that out amongst a lot of retailers in our industry. And then you can start doing things like elasticity analysis, margin analysis, promotion analysis. You can look at new item categories where you bring something into your cooler. You can kind of gauge that performance relative to other retailers that are also submitting that data.

There are obviously some concerns about sharing your data with other retailers. I’m a member of Study Groups, and I think what Study Groups does is provide a phenomenal gauge of company-to-company performance from a 10,000-foot view. It’s really taking what you’re talking about here, transaction level data, and going to that same concept where you’re looking at standardization of how your performance goes all the way down to the transaction level. Have you thought about that or do you have any thoughts on that?

Babir Sultan:

I’ve been on this journey I think for almost five years. I have some success with Nielsen IQ to some degree, where we are able to leverage that, and some at NACS, as well, where they share regional data if you share your data. But I honestly think we could do more.

Alan Meyer:

I think those fidget spinners are a perfect example. It comes to the market, the people that jump on it just sell a ton of them. You wait until the conference [to learn about them] and then the fad’s almost over at that point.

Babir Sultan:

I think the power is in the numbers. We talked to people at NASDAQ, we talked to Amazon actually and Google, as well, to help us with this issue. The main thing becomes, “Hey, with your four stores or 12 with eight that are leased out, it’s not enough. Come to us when you have a hundred.” I don’t have any plans of getting to a hundred, but the ones that I do have, I plan on fully optimizing them. I’ve mentioned to Gray, Conexxus and everybody else here, the power is in the numbers where if you combine all the stores, then it’s a common thing that everybody wants to do. Originally, I felt when I got into the industry, we were behind on getting access to our back office software and things like that as a small operator. Now, I feel the data monetization. We’re a little bit behind on finding ways to leverage that. And there’s different definitions.

I was in the MIT NACS semester last year. There are different ways of looking at monetization. If you’re out of a 2-liter Pepsi and you could figure how to not be out of that consistently, that’s one way that you did monetize your data, your opportunity costs. So you have to look at it in those terms, as well. I think there’s a huge opportunity. I talked to some health experts to figure out which sugary products sell the most in what region and ZIP code. And we got one-off projects, and those are exciting for us, but I want it to be an ongoing basis. There are different ways to eat the elephant. One bite at a time.

But I’m hoping as the industry together with the numbers, we figure this out.

Alan Meyer:

The rabbit hole is deep on it, but if you could start aggregating it out and get all the way down to item level, I think it’s just such a huge opportunity for our industry.

I’ve been using Taiga Data since basically they came to market. I do know they work with the main EOS, Gilbarco, Verifone, and I’m within NCR. It’s doing exactly what we talked about here. It’s grabbing those T-logs. Now, they’re going to charge you a monthly fee, but it is a flat fee.

Babir Sultan:

Just like Modisoft is our go-to, and you get comfortable with one over the other. It’s hard to switch, as well, but it does the job and you have access to your own data.

Alan Meyer:

Exactly.

Babir Sultan:

We talked to folks even at Walmart, where they have a program called Luminate (now known as Scintilla), since we’re on the subject. Vendors access their data in order to get shelf space, so they’re paying twice, not once. It used to be where they paid for shelf space. Now they’re paying for access to their own data, just their particular SKU data. “Hey, how is my product performing?” Imagine if PepsiCo or somebody came to you and said, “I would love to know how this new Voodoo Mountain Dew did over the Halloween, and I’ll give you five free cases.” As a small operator, I’ll jump all over it. But the next year, I would want probably six grand for the same deal.

James Maxey:

Ray, you ready to jump into the fray?

Raymond Huff:

Yes. Babir, thanks for the presentation. First question, in throwing your information out at ChatGPT in the free version, that information becomes public, correct?

Babir Sultan:

It depends on your settings. You could maneuver some settings, and it’s pretty much just SKU data. If you are to clean up your data, there’s a lot of information that you could just take out.

Raymond Huff:

All right, great. Good to know and great presentation on that.

The thing I just wanted to say, your growth, you’re looking at a hundred or 200 stores. Because you’re creating your category managers at four stores. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. I give you props for that, and I just wanted to pat you on the back.

Vendor Relations The other thing I wanted to speak to was the soda vendor. Everyone’s beginning to have problems with Coke and Pepsi, etc. It’s a real problem for us here in Denver, as well as Hawaii. I mean, it’s everywhere. But some areas are better than others. In Denver, they’re now saying that we can only get one delivery per month. Are you guys hearing that also?

Babir Sultan:

Yes. We find there are third-party distributors that fulfill our need in those areas.

Raymond Huff:

What we did is just called Costco because the cost difference was 82 cents per case, and then they delivered. I’m like, “Come on guys; what are you doing?” I mean, it’s next to crazy. I just wanted to share that with the group. Thank you.

Myra Kressner:

Also, we’ll add for the transcript that Kristina was raising her hand and shaking her head in agreement to your question, Raymond, about limited distribution.

Chris Bambury

Yes, a lot of us are dealing with that all over the country.

Babir Sultan:

I think it opens up a topic of reevaluating your relations with all the vendors, not just one. We revamped our relationship with the Wil Fisher Distributing. They deliver Ghost Energy Drink, C4, 7Up and others. We went to them and said they’re not fulfilling our needs. What is it that you could do for us? And we could give you more space. None of our stores have any shelf contracts at all with anybody. We just won’t give them. We want to control our store.

Raymond Huff:

We did that about six years ago.

Babir Sultan:

It’s the best thing ever.

Raymond Huff:

And maybe that’s why [these recent issues are] going across the industry. Maybe that’s why they’re giving us so much trouble.

James Maxey:

Thanks, Ray. Eva?

Eva Strasburger:

Labor Babir, it’s great what you’re doing with giving control, the tech back to your store employees. We’ve heard several of our retailers on the other Vision Groups say that they’ve seen store sales drop. and they couldn’t figure out why. But when they dug deep, it was because the store managers had started to feel disenfranchised that they weren’t relevant anymore because of all the tech going on in the store. But once the members engaged them and they said, you are still critical to the store, and it’s because of you that we can keep the employees there, the store sales went back up again. But my question to you is: Have you seen the profile of your employees change as you’re giving them more tech responsibility?

Babir Sultan:

Yes. One book I recommend a lot is “The Good Job Strategy.”  I can’t help but recommend that. I take a lot from that. When you give folks autonomy and ownership, the relationship will change because they feel this is their baby, their department, right? You can’t tell a manager, here’s everything to do with the store and run with it. We tried that, and it didn’t really work. But giving them authority. Again, with software, if they’re in charge of one particular department, just give them access to that department. Let them download the data. Otherwise, how else are they going to know what to do with it?

So our relationship has changed, and our relationship with our employees that come happy, leave happy. If you find something better to do, use us as a reference. But while you’re here, you’re not working for a convenience store. We’re going to outsmart our competition in certain ways that we can. We’re going to do delivery service. We’re going to do Vision AI things, live security, social media. We get 19 million views a month online. We have people right now, they’re starting to do posts about a day in their life of a cashier at FavTrip. I have eight volunteers. And if that channel gets monetized, it’s all their money. They just leverage our brand.

Some people have left us and started their own TikTok channels and became full-time content creators. So it makes us proud for them. The past relationship might’ve been, “Oh my God, they’re leaving us. How am I going to run this store?” Now, we’re like, “Great! Can you recommend somebody on your way out?” So our relationship has changed I think for the better. And they see that; they see they’re respected. You treat them as well where you’re just not a cashier ringing up stuff. Be smart about things that you’re doing. And if you’re just here for a 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. job, this probably is not for you. We’re very open about that.

Eva Strasburger:

Would you say you’ve had less trouble with finding workers then, because you’re giving them a more exciting, interesting environment and they feel they’re getting tools to help them with other careers?

Babir Sultan:

Yes, a lot of folks have been with us almost six years and over, and some others could last just one day because they say it’s not for them. We have more part-timers than full-timers, and that has been a good strategy for us, where if you’ve been here for a while and you enjoy what you’re doing, you shouldn’t have to work two jobs. Go ahead and become a full-timer. So we don’t have any issue with our staff at the moment, knock on the wood. It always could change. But we’ve been blessed to have great staff members, and they feel well-treated.

Eva Strasburger:

Congratulations.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, thank you.

James Maxey:

Eva, I appreciate your employee and HR perspective. You ask great questions in those areas.

Eva

Thank you.

James Maxey:

Kristina?

Kristina Anderson:

Inventory Management Babir, something that you said in your presentation, I was just thinking about your top 10. It reminds me, we created a days-on-hand report for all of our SKUs in the store. And I love your point about monetizing the data because that days-on-hand report showed us just how many weeks on hand of inventory we had in certain SKUs. And at first we just didn’t believe it. We said, well, the report has to be wrong. There’s no way we have this much inventory in our store, but we actually did. So it was a great eye-opening experience to just take that sales data and overlay it on the inventory data that we have to see just how much money is sitting in unmoving inventory in the store.

So that’s a good way to utilize this data that Babir is talking about if there’s a retailer that’s wondering: My sales really are in the same place that they were, but something’s happening with regard to profitability. Maybe it’s in the inventory side. So how can we use our SKU data, our reporting software in order to help show us where that money is, and pay ourselves back by not overspending and holding too much inventory on hand? That also helped us with those conversations with the beverage companies. Because we knew that we had a limited amount of space, so I don’t need every single version of Cherry Pepsi or whatever it is so that we could have those more targeted conversations.

But my question is how often are they pulling those reports? Are they pulling them daily? Weekly? Monthly? How often are they looking at it?

Babir Sultan:

You’re speaking my language too. This is great. I love this. It’s very practical because even as early as yesterday, one of the category managers for tobacco pointed out we have two different vendors. One delivers on Tuesday, another one Friday. The last time she did the inventory count or minimum versus maximum we should have in stock, she did it for 15 days. She thought that was a little too aggressive and we had too much stock. So as of yesterday, I didn’t have to tell her; he changed it to eight days of stock, because we have “this much” sales. And I’m going to adjust accordingly. And that was yesterday. Usually our way of looking at data with the team is on a monthly basis, but within the week, they could turn around and say, I don’t know why we have so much bottled water. Why do we have eight SKUs of different water?

When we were prepping for this presentation we talked about “water is water.” Either you have the most expensive or medium or the cheapest one. And we do get it from Costco and Sam’s Club, Kirkland. You don’t need both of them and give them a bunch of SKUs. So the beverage manager did that for one store, and he communicated it with the other stores, with the district manager. And they turned around and reduced, I don’t know, from 20 SKUs to eight now. So imagine what you could do with the other SKUs now. And it makes it look a lot cleaner. So that’s a good point.

So I would say minimum, to answer your question, if you have somebody in charge of a store, at least on a monthly basis, look at your data and adjust accordingly.

James Maxey:

Great answer. Thank you.

Gray?

Gray Taylor:

Data Analysis On the data confederation that Babir brought up. I think that’s a huge thing that the industry should look at. It doesn’t matter if you go to Taiga, if you go to Ignite, you go to any of the vendors that are out there, the thing to remember is every one of those guys thinks that they’re going to own all the data in the industry, and right now 50% of the data is sitting in PDI databases. The idea is if you can extract it in a consistent format, you should require your data company no matter who it is, whether if it’s Modisoft, to contribute that. If you can set up that type of big pool of data pseudonymized by store.

I think it’s important from a standpoint of we have 32,000 SKUs in the industry. I got a list of these things. Some of them sell one, some of them are highly regional, some are up-and-comers that start out in the West Coast and they’re just shooting up like a skyrocket. And maybe you want to start bringing them into your stores. It’s the ability to go in there and look at 15,000, 20,000 stores that are representational at the SKU level.

And I remember what Greg Gilkerson, PDI former executive and founder, told me once, “If you really want to have a universal store, you’ve got to start at the molecular level, which is the item level.” And from there you can build whatever you want to. You can even build it into NACS Category 6.0 to compare against what the industry’s doing. But you’re looking in your share group at NACS Category 8.0. You can basically bring it up into any way that you want to.

And the other artifact I have is that the president of Mondelez one time going into a large retailer, complained to Rick Brindle, the former vice president of trade relations for Mondelez. He said, “I am tired of this retailer knowing more about my products than I do. Is there a place that we can learn that we can get the level of data that they have?”

So when you talk about monetization, the monetization you can get out of 20,000 stores and split up versus 10 stores is huge. These CPGs are relying on Nielsen, which is a statistical analysis. They are getting T-logs from certain stores and so forth, but if you can provide them with a very clean database that allows them training access for their AI investments, that’s worth a whole other level of money. And that’s what Walmart has done. And there’s no reason why the convenience store industry couldn’t basically replicate what Walmart’s doing: You want access? Here’s what it’s going to cost. And you break it up amongst your shareholders.

Babir Sultan:

Dollar General, as well. They have tapped into a new P&L for them that they didn’t have many years ago. Now it is one of the major contributors to their growth.

Gray Taylor:

Supply Chain We are the most profitable segment for some of the categories we’ve been talking about. I’m not speaking out of school. NACS has talked about Robinson-Patman Act issues, so has NGA. A pallet of Coca-Cola costs us more FOB (freight on board) than it does for Costco. And so you can go to Costco and get it cheaper because they’re paying less. Forget about freight, all of that sort of stuff. And I think it’s a good idea for us to start thinking more Costco, but we have to do that in a confederated way. It’s not an antitrust thing. It is just we know what you’re moving on an industry-wide basis. You’ve paid to have access. The data is sitting in there, and we want to get paid for that data.

And to your point earlier, Babir, we own the store. We’re just not going to be a convergence point for customers to come in and interact with you and your product. We’re here to make sure that that product is in stock and the stuff that isn’t, the turnover isn’t there. It’s out of our store, and we have more of the stuff that your customers want to have.

The other thing, inventory optimization. If you’re a decent-sized chain, you probably have a whole other store investment sitting in your inventory. And if you can get down to the bare minimum inventory, you’ve freed up so much capital; you may find that you can go get another profit center store going. So that to me is incredibly important. That’s all I’m going to say. I was taking notes wildly while you guys were talking.

James Maxey:

When I think of too much inventory in a store, I’m sure everybody on this call has stocked a cooler, and there is nothing worse than climbing in a cooler and trying to figure out where product is than an overstocked store. It is awful.

Babir Sultan:

The worst feeling is if you have a sugar-free Rockstar and you’ve got six more to put on top of them for no good reason.

Gray Taylor:

Vendor Relations Somebody brought up single delivery. Josh Halpern was with Labatt Brewing, and he said that the average beer distributor can’t make money if they deliver under 30 cases of beer. So what you’re going to see, I think, is the trend that was mentioned. You’re going to see fewer and fewer deliveries coming in, which means knee-jerk reaction. If you don’t know what you got, you’re going to build safety stock which ties up working capital in your stock. By being able to order out 30 days is going to reduce the required safety stock as these vendors start cutting back. Because let’s face it, they’re not making as much money as they used to because of price inflation.

So they’re going to look for ways to save money, and that’s going to be, “How do I get rid of a human? How do I get rid of a truck showing up at that store every seven days? I’ll go for every 30, and then they’re going to buy more product from you because they’re afraid of running out.” If you know what your demand is over 30 days, you haven’t given that up at all. “Go ahead. Come back every 30 days.”

Babir Sultan:

Yes. And I think we look at it as it frees up time for the rep when we have some of the contracts. Now that we don’t, we say, “Why don’t you make some time to put up some nice signs up that are worn out or something. Don’t worry about making an order. Let’s do this and that.” It frees them up.

Or I look at it just like when people talk about self-checkout. It frees up the cashier to do other things. CVS has gone all in on that. Us freeing up the vendor’s payroll as well from being, “We’ll email you the order. We’ll autogenerate it for you in the future. Work with us, not against us.” We are not against any vendor. Our relations should be a two-way action. I think in the past they always been, they’re using up our real estate. We’re not getting anything from shelving, even though they tell you you’re going to sign a contract and both say they need 80%. But there’s only 100% of this room that you could have. Giving you both 80% doesn’t work for us.

But we’re doing things now where we could tell you which cooler is getting used the maximum versus lowest. Pay us to be in that space, not just by taking 50 cents off your case of drinks. I think we could do more than that. So we’re on a mission really to reclaim the store. We bought them, but it felt like we were renting them from somebody else still.

James Maxey:

Indeed.

Eva, you had your hand up.

Eva Strasburger:

Inventory Management Going back to Babir’s comment about “water is water.” In our last Vision Group meeting, our conversation heavily featured Aldi. And several of the people said it was their favorite place to shop, and one of the things they like is the limited items in each category. Because they know that if there is one pack of beans on the shelf, that’s already earned its place, that it’s the kind to buy. And that’s the one you want, and they’re not given all these different choices. So saying that limiting something like water is a good way to then get other items in that are more well-received. If you haven’t been to Aldi, go have a look.

Babir Sultan:

Oh yes, they run a great operation. Another thing for them as well is a lot of thought process went behind why should they have a private label of their own right next to a major brand? A lot of time they want to see that conversion of that. The Wall Street Journal did a Costco/Kirkland video a couple or three days ago. I highly recommend everybody see that. How they leverage data to figure out what are the next diapers or something we should release, using those same vendors to make that private label, as well. That doesn’t happen without data and numbers, right? Outside the industry, imagine having your own standard of Coke, as well.

Eva Strasburger:

I’m looking forward to your private label.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, we tried that too. I went to the Chicago private-label event. Casey’s General Stores has taken the crown on that one and I’m happy for them right now. We do have our own water and certain things that don’t have an early expiration date. It’s an industry in itself.

James Maxey:

Well, this is outstanding conversation. What I’d like to do, we’re down to 11 minutes, believe it or not. What I would like to do is just kick it out, maybe have more questions for Babir or just general comments. I want to call on some people that we haven’t heard from. Paul, are you still available? Any thoughts?

Paul Robertson:

I’m practicing the “we have two ears and one mouth” methodology at the moment because this is absolutely fascinating. It really is. I love what you’re doing, Babir. It’s refreshing to see that it is possible for a small operator to take their own destiny into their own hands.

James Maxey:

Thank you.

Glennie, any thoughts?

Glennie Bench:

Babir, I totally enjoyed the presentation. Thank you for the work that went into it. And I am equally impressed with how you have managed to accelerate your four stores into being something much bigger than the sum of their parts. One particular takeaway, we actually did a demo with Taiga, and our concern was that our store managers, it would have a lot of use at the store level, but we were kind of afraid that our store managers wouldn’t really use it. And that we don’t really have a mechanism for incorporating it into their day or their routine. So I like the idea of maybe using the ChatGPT free and grow into that. And maybe we have a better opportunity if we just get people in the habit of using the data on a regular basis and then you can go to a paid version or some sort of subscription version.

Babir Sultan:

Training Another recommendation I have is if you have somebody that, maybe there’s an age difference or somebody who’s not very tech-driven, we have done something as simple as here’s the printout of the things that you cannot be out of, just handing that to them after it got printed out. It doesn’t have to be complicated is what I tell my staff.

Before I would say I was nerding out about data and I was doing different things like AI and camera AIs. I know I’m excited, but I cannot necessarily say my staff is excited. And I go back to “The E-Myth Revisited” book where people want things to stay the same. There are certain engineers or tech people that [have a mindset of] why are you bothering things that are working just fine? I know everything in my head. We literally have people that say “How’d you make the order? It’s all here.” I challenge them. I say, “I appreciate that you’ve been with us for three years. But what happens if you leave or you’re on vacation? Who’s making the order?”

Again, back to “The Good Jobs.” All of our folks are cross-trained. Somebody could be gone for two weeks; everybody can make an order. They literally know thanks to the data. They look at a sheet and say, “It says we need five; we have two. Let me order three more.” We made it that simple. But it didn’t happen overnight. I think you have to be in on it for the long haul for people to really get it, and consistency is key. If you do it once in a while and then you don’t follow up with it the next month…“Here’s your 10 forbidden items in your department and can’t be out of”…they’re not going to speak that language.

Glennie Bench:

Vendor Relations Yes. The other aspect of taking ownership of your store back is not only with those vendors wanting to give you what they want you to carry, but even the vendors who give you build-to’s or give you tools to help decide what your order should be, you’re still dependent on that vendor for that build-to order or that booklet from their order guide. And so there’s another level of taking your store back if you have that data and developing your own build-to’s.

Babir Sultan:

The last point I’ll make on that as well is that I love seeing the reps. Before it used to be they’d make the order and just walk out, and we didn’t even know when they came in. When did they make the order? Now there’s some that are there, they’ll run it by the department person, and they have each others’ phone. “I’m going to be here at this time, did this work for you?” And we tell them, “Go ahead, you make the order, and we’ll look it through together as a team and make sure we are happy with what you’re sending us.” Because the more product you move, the better you will look for us, too.

Glennie Bench:

Labor Babir, if I could jump in just a second. When you delegate out the department management, the category managers, is that a person per store or is one person doing all of your stores?

Babir Sultan:

No, it varies per store.

Roy Strasburger:

So you actually have four cooler category managers for four stores.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, pretty much.

Roy Strasburger:

Wow. Okay.

Babir Sultan:

Training And it’s great to see them communicate with each other. We try it out for two or three weeks and either they’re getting it or not getting it, or you move on to the next person that wants to be a category manager. We have had people, don’t get me wrong, that said, “This isn’t for me. Let me just run the register.” And we’re like, “Fair enough, you could do that.” But if somebody comes along that does both things, for us, they hold more value for long-term, and we want to keep them and pay them. And the person that comes off the job, some of them want to be demoted. Well, they don’t want that. You’ve just got to understand what they’re cut out for or not.

James Maxey:

We have time for one more question from Ryan, and then we’ll get the closing comments.

Ryan Razowsky

Data Analysis You know, Babir, the piece that really resonated with me is it seems like you’ve been able to take the data and actually create actionables off of it. One of the things that we struggle with, and I’m sure that this is something that’s universal, whether you’re a small retailer or a very large retailer, is generally speaking, we don’t really have problems with access to our data. We have the data. We have the ability to source it. We have the ability to review it. But to really come up with concrete plans to take it and produce actionables off of it on a consistent basis in multiple parts of your business is actually very difficult. And so I commend you for being able to create a system where you’re able to take the data and actually do something with it.

Because I’ve noticed in our company, we review data a lot. In fact, we’ve been able to determine specific sets of data that we find usable. But I find that we do a lot of reading the data, discussing the data, but then the actionables off the data sometimes are lacking. So I give you a lot of credit for being able to take that and do something with it.

Babir Sultan:

And I get that a lot. Like Ray mentioned as well, there’s a lot of data out there. It is all to us to make sense of it. I would just highly recommend doing something. Set up a SMART goal for yourself, that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Come up with a small one, and then maybe tackle one category at a time or a promotion that you could potentially do. I’ll just throw one out there. We’re going to increase our beverage department, and that’s the only thing we want to focus on this month. It’s time-sensitive. We can create specific measurables for it, right? Setting that up and staying focused gives you something to aim for.

With our online video content, we are very focused. We’re going to make eight shorts next month, and that’s the end of it. And we want these many views. If we don’t hit it, we’re going to sail ship from that. So I would highly recommend setting up some goals specific to your particular store in any department, and then take it from there.

Ryan Razowsky

I’ll tell you what our goals are right now; we’re just trying to provide value at our stores. We’re taking a hard look at our markets, trying to figure out where the lowest value points are. Because we’ve taken margin in so many parts of our stores. But we’re really trying to figure out where we can present value, like actual value. Because customers know prices these days and that’s been a big objective for us.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, it is doable.

James Maxey:

I looked it up, SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Timely.

Babir Sultan:

There you go. That’s what I recommend. I would say setting up a goal for one month that you’re going to figure out what those values are. What are some areas that you have the highest margin that you could play with? What can you renegotiate your contracts with? And then the following month would be, we’re going to put these things in motion and observe the sales.

We started a program with Alani (energy drinks), in particular. We’re going to set up a booth for sampling, and after the booth we’re going to give them this much access to our social media. We’re going to make free video content, finding synergy with everything. So I think you could do a lot with that.

Ryan Razowsky

Yes, makes sense.

James Maxey:

Very good. If we could give Babir a quick virtual round of applause, that would be awesome.

Babir Sultan:

For you, as well, James. I enjoyed your presentation. It got me interested in weather data now.

James Maxey:

Perfect.

Eva, some closing comments?

Eva Strasburger:

I was just going to say, we spend a lot of time trying to keep our staff off their phones, and now we’re saying to them, here, get onto ChatGPT, which is fascinating and addictive. So a word of caution, that all needs to be managed, too, if they’re going to have access.

Babir Sultan:

If we notice our staff is on the phone a lot or a particular platform, we make them the admin of TikTok or something, and we get views from that. We actually had done that where 300 people were tuning in live on TikTok to watch them do their shift. That has been a fun change of perspective for us. We learned from each other.

Eva Strasburger:

This has been a good conversation.

Babir Sultan:

Yes, likewise. I enjoyed this. It’s good to be among peers that are doing data-related items in AI, and we’ll get into AI because we want to keep this light on inventory focus only.

James Maxey:

Outstanding.

Myra, any closing comments?

Myra Kressner:

I would remind everyone that our next meeting should be on everyone’s calendar, June 26th. And our last meeting in 2025 is September 25th. So please make sure those dates are on your calendar. And of course, as James, Eva, Roy and I say, thank you to everyone. Of course, thank you, James. Thank you, Babir, and thank you, Paul again for being our Ally Supporter and contributing the content the way that you do. Thank you, Gray. And I’ll hand it to Roy.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, everybody. Great meeting, great content. If you haven’t subscribed to the Vision Reports so that you can see all of them that come out, not just for this group, you can do so at VGNsharing.com (), go to the Vision Reports. You can subscribe, and we’ll send you a link every time we issue a report. We’d love to have you join in on that.

Eva Strasburger:

One thing to add: Myra, Roy and I are working on a virtual summit that we’re going to have in mid-November where we’ll be bringing all of our seven Vision Groups together. We will have a presenter, potentially a futurist, and then ask each group to present on their learnings from the past year. So you can see each other, hear what each group been doing, and hear what they’ve learned in their meetings. That will potentially be over 100 people and lots of information. So we really hope all of you will show up for it.

Myra Kressner:

Yes, we’ll have the November date for that probably in about two weeks. It’ll be a three-hour virtual event.

James Maxey:

Yes, the date will be available in a couple of weeks.

Paul Robertson:

Thanks for having me, everybody. It is very much appreciated.

Myra Kressner:

Thank you, Paul.

James Maxey:

Thanks to one and all. Have a great afternoon and stay warm or stay cool, depending on where you are.