The team behind emerging restaurant player, Junk, have an increasing and captive audience for its fast casual, Asian street food dining experience – a first for the southeast Queensland market.

Junk continues its impressive growth from one store with 30 employees, to three stores with over 160 staff, in only 12 months.

To sustain rapid growth, Junk’s chief executive officer, Scott Hoskins, explains that having the right systems in place has helped to address key challenges facing the business such as labour costs and increasing competition.

One area that helps Junk to compete in an increasingly crowded space, is savvy use of data. This has allowed the business to extract precise insights that enhance operational efficiency and manage costs better. Most importantly it allows them to better understand their customer base – something that is firmly embedded in the company’s ethos.

Scott says that armed with intelligence on the nature and purchasing behaviours of its target audience – millennials – Junk has tailored its offering, developed the right brand position and maximised marketing spend.

Among the tools that Junk uses is Commonwealth Bank’s free business insights tool, Daily IQ. Daily IQ is available to its business customers and is accessed through online banking platforms CommBiz and Netbank.

The tool provides unique insights into customers through analysing a business’ own card and merchant transactions. Using Daily IQ, Junk easily taps into its customer demographics – age, gender, location* – and sales patterns on a daily and weekly basis.

“We want to understand who is coming through our doors, when they are visiting and what they buy in-store. With tools like Daily IQ we now have solid data that informs our decision-making.

“We saw that our customers were more likely to be millennial females. We fed these insights into our marketing and branding activities, which means our spend is a lot more targeted, optimised for the right channels, and we can track our success against actual sales.

Scott says that combining POS data with tools like Daily IQ can provide greater certainty around peak and slower sales times, and matching staffing levels with sales peaks has allowed Junk to tighten its rostering.

“Labour is possibly the biggest area that can trip you up,” Scott explains. “We now look more deeply at regular sales patterns – whether it’s a rainy Wednesday or a public holiday.

“Now when we look at our roster, we are not simply guessing, we have a better estimate of how many staff should be on, for what period of time, and we are using more split-shifts.”

With Junk’s plans to expand its store footprint over the coming year, Scott and his team are also using data and insights to better understand where sales are coming from, which can inform new store locations.

“We are looking closely at where the dollars are coming from, and combining the insights from Daily IQ with broader demographic research to give us greater confidence that we can attract customers to new stores.”

Scott sees data continuing to play a pivotal role in Junk’s ongoing growth, and the ability to look even more closely to align its offering with customers at an individual store level.

“We are getting much savvier at using data, and now will be drilling into the local geographies. This will help us to unearth small differences in customer types in the local area and we can make subtle menu changes or create unique offers to drive sales. This is all about maximising the performance of each store as we grow,” Scott added.

Brought to you by Commonwealth Bank.

*Data based on CommBank card sales (EFTPOS and credit). It doesn’t include cash sales, or payments from non-commBank cards.