Why Data Visibility Isn’t Enough: Chris Andrews on Moving from Reporting to Performance

Hey everybody. Welcome to the webinar. Today I'm joined by Chris Andrews, the Chief Information and Digital Officer of European Wax Center. Chris, you've spent your career at some of the largest, multi-unit brands out there, including Smoothie King, Unleashed Brands, and now European Wax Center, and always with the lens of data and transforming and modernizing that data.

Super excited to have you on.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, Gary. I'm excited.

So maybe, I know I gave you the two second version, but maybe for those that don't know you, if you could give a little bit of your journey, how your career started and how you got into technology, and then technology leadership.

Yeah, definitely. I grew up a, a tech kid. My dad was in tech. I was on, a lot of people don't even believe this, they'll have to Google it, but I was on the internet in 85, using Quantum Link to play checkers against kids in Canada and the US, my dad was on Prodigy playing chess. He brought me up in technology. Now, as you can tell by my white hair. A little bit older in, in the, college programs at the time were just so geared towards development and programming, that I just chose to kind of go a business route. I went into management consulting, worked at KPMG, Grant Thornton. About 15 years ago, I got a break, and got hired at Chuck E. Cheese. My boss took me from there to on the border. and, he's my boss today he's the CEO at European Wax Center. I've told him before, man, you were crazy to hire me there 'cause I had no idea what I was doing in multi-unit businesses. But, yeah, like you mentioned, I've been very blessed to work for some incredible brands. And that's really what I look for brands that can make an impact. not only the community, but the guests that we serve.

That's the kind of stuff that really gets me excited.

Awesome. And you've been in the CIO position for a bit. I think when we met it was CIO at Unleashed Brands. So I'm curious, as a CIO, you're always looking at data and data visibility, what did good data visibility look like 10 years ago?

Gosh, 10 years ago. It's really funny. It was the flash reports, like, how quick can you get out a flash sales report for everybody in the morning? Right?

When you're in a big multi-unit business, you have, you have, especially if it's full service restaurant. These guys aren't closing down, depending on where they're at in the country till pretty late.

And so your window to process that and try to get a sales flash report out was pretty quick. So if you could get one out by like seven, eight in the morning, I mean, everybody was patting you on the back like way to go. But then if it was nine o'clock, like, where's our sales report? We can't run the business without this. So yeah, that's kind of funny, you know, coming back 10, 15 years ago, what, was good to where we're at today.

So that was, it seemed like it was always about taking huge amounts of data, crunching it into a report, and then getting that out typically to sales folks, right? It was driving that next day of sales. Is that what you were brought in, as you're moving, into different CIO roles, that digital transformation, was it always focused on, synthesis of data into a report of what were the patterns you were seeing of where those organizations were struggling?

Yeah listen every place I've been, there's always been a focus on data. And, and you know, and there was always the famous data sprawl report.

And so operators come in with something other than marketing and finance

And, and so there's always an opportunity to have that harmony. It's almost a shameless plug for Harmonyze, but amongst the different reports, but across the organization as a whole, and I even think getting into today, and I'm sure we're gonna talk a little bit more about where we're at today with ai. Sprawls still a concern and it's always gonna be a concern when you have humans helping direct.

Right?

I can remember one of the first places that I was at. It was On the Border, they were owned by Brinker at the time, my group came in a carve out and we looked at the Brinker reports and they had different reports in there. It was really insane to keep up

Sprawl, I like that word. Is that just the function of scale? As you have more scale, as you have more data, is it just inevitable or I guess historically inevitable that things start to break down at scale?

And if so, what is that point?

Yeah, I mean, the more resources you add, the more different folks across the business are gonna ask for different insights, right? And if you don't have centralized governance, from a data and reporting perspective, you will end up with hundreds of reports and some reports, maybe looked at one time and then never again. Or maybe you're looking at the wrong things. And so I've seen that time and time again over my career.

So why do BI Reports fall short? Right? Is it. Is it the fact that some are used one, some are used recurring, and I guess walk us through at scale, you have reports for everybody, right? You have marketing, sales, all that. You said that there's that sprawl, but why do those fall short?

One is, you're typically looking through the rear view mirror, right? And so you're looking at what previously happened, and there's value in that for sure, the real magic sauce is being able to take what, has occurred before.

What are your trends now, and doing forecasts and projections out

And I think you started to see that within the past 5 years, companies focusing, maybe five to ten, focusing on that.

And trying to get to be a little bit more predictive. AI had just blown this wide open. It's really changing the game from a reporting standpoint.

I'm excited to get to that. I wanna talk about the AI piece before we get that. One of the things that. I'd like to ask is even if you have a forecasting a, you know, whether you're using historic data, future data, there's this idea that you have things change, right?

Maybe you have a new data source, right? Or maybe there's a new con in the business or a new focus, right? How historically have you used that input to say, we need to change the way we dashboard, or we need to change the way we do things. What does that. Iterative cycle look like to say we want to change something in our business.

How does that actually get put into a report? How does that get updated? How do we train users? And then how do we get it to actually influence operators, in the field day to day?

That's the million dollar question right there. I mean, it's difficult anytime you're dealing with humans, it's change management and, and you start adding new layers and, and new applications or reports and it really starts to throw people off. A lot of people are creatures of habit and they wanna fall back to what used to work. And especially when you get into brands that have been around for a long time, it's easy to fall into the, Hey, remember the good old days? We focused on these three things. We don't need all your fancy tools. I don't care what your report's telling me, I know how to run my business. Right? And, We fall into that trap time and time again

And what I'm excited about is seeing data now being on what marketing's been trying to do forever with this hyper personalization.

That you treat each center store, restaurant location, whatever it is, as its own unique. And when you can start to tailor and people see the impact that you have on their business, then the adoption starts to come, right? Because once you start helping people with their, in their pockets, all of a sudden pretty good idea.

I'm reminded of something you and I talked about before, and I think you said systems that don't just show, but systems that think. So systems that can think on a per location level, and think across structured and unstructured data. What is your overall thesis of systems that think both in terms of where they look at, past, present, future, but also in terms of what data they can look at.

Listen, I think that's why I mentioned governance, and that's why you have to have really, really tight governance. On how to deploy these systems. Because, you know, we used to have reports sprawl.

You're going to start into AI agent sprawl. And if you don't have this, centralized, orchestrated unit, approving what you look at and helping guide the AI and the LLMs, you're just gonna get back to where we used to be except now you have a bunch of fancy agents running your sprawl for you, right?

How do you control for that? What does governance look like in the age of AI as we know it today? Everything's evolving day to day.

I think you have to have, strong partners that you bring in. You have to have a strong, committee. As tactical as that sounds, you have to run everything through a central committee. Cross-departmental,

so that everyone can weigh in, because I may think something's great but if my partner on the operation side or marketing side sees a conflict with what I'm trying to roll out, I'm not going to get adoption, I'm not going to get the kind of impact that I want to make on the business and so I think you have to start with those committees that go across the different disciplines and have lens of success for the company at the top, and then that will feed everything else that you put out into the system.

That kind of orchestration at the top level so that you can make tweaks and it gets automatically disseminated to the coach or the marketer or even the operator, store manager level, where you get to that personalization. What does that personalization look like before it was like you get a dashboard that's unique to the operator, but now it's becoming much more hyper-focused.

Where do you see the big innovations in terms of personalization at the operator level?

I think one is understanding your different personas if you don't have a good grasp on your audience, consuming whatever it is, you're pushing out reports, AI agents, the Harmonyze dashboard, you can get it all wrong. It goes back to broad stroke marketing, one size fits all. We know that doesn't work. If you don't truly understand your use cases and personas, down to the atomic layer, you're gonna get some stuff wrong. You're not gonna get the kind of adoption that you want, and then ultimately, you're not gonna get the impact on the business that you want.

And so I guess contextualizing that and what we've built together, with Harmonyze for European Wax Center, you know, we started at. The highest level. We were working with you and your operations counterpart, and then we've moved down to the coaches and worked down that hierarchy tuning and using the AI agents in a very European wax center orchestrated way.

Can you walk us through, why you decided to start high, move down and the results you're hearing from your team right now?

Yeah, the reason that we started when we partnered with you guys at the highest level is to ensure that the vision from my seat, from our chief commercial officer. From our COO that it's all aligned up to our strategic pillars that we have and initiatives that we know where we need to focus in the business. And so that's why we started there to say hey we know what important things are, let's get that right. Then as we flow down, then we can start to personalize and that's where you start tapping in to, you know, when we our franchise business coaches, we have different power operators large op-cos, small op-cos, and getting, their vision of how they use it plus leverage their experience in the system, is huge but we've provided the box to play in. It's not just this infinite sandbox that they can pick whatever it is they want. We defined it for them and now they've made their tweaks within it to fit what's gonna impact their particular center.

And the cool thing on top of that is that now that you've defined that box, that applies to structured data. But now it also applies to unstructured data, right? So it gives you and your COO, the ability to influence things like operational notes, and field reports, and all of those inputs coming in.

It's all within the confines of the box that you guys have outlined.

Yeah, and it's not, you know, we're not trying to take the magic and the little bit of art and science from, let's just say a, center manager or even a franchise business coach. What we're trying to do is free up their time to use their gray matter for bigger things, I can say, take an hour off of an FBCs plate, of them just preparing and like, okay, what's going on with the center that I'm about to talk to, and it's all tee'd up, man, I've freed up this hour that now I can leverage their expertise that actually looking through the data that's been served up and then ensuring that that action plan is sequenced correctly and then they have deeper, better, conversations and it's not just surface "hey let's try to figure out what's been going on here." No we already know what's going on guys. We see the trend, we see potential opportunities and areas. Let's focus on those and let's go back to the training, or let's go back to best practices. I think it really just uses their time in an efficient manner, and cuts out a lot of the admin work.

I think I heard it best from somebody on your team where it was, no longer is there a "Hey, report the news". It's not that there's a report that's generated of here's what's going on in your business. Everybody's fully aligned. The conversations about what's next, not what has happened right?

Everything being future looking, everything being action oriented.

Yeah, it's very impactful.

So, we're at the end of 2025 right now. We're getting into 2026. When you think about, the more ever-growing dynamic, all-inclusive systems that can look across structured data and unstructured data, like notes and reviews in 2026 and 2027, what does that unlock for, you know, coaches, operators, leadership, where do you see this moving in the next couple of years?

I think over the next couple years, you're really gonna start to see the, adoption throughout operators. I think a lot of people get it at a certain level, right? It started with the tech nerds and the tech nerds are like "I'm so excited for AI." But then when you can get that, restaurant manager, that center manager, to embrace an application like this and the insights it provides, it's going to make an impact not only on top line but on your bottom line as well. And I'm hopeful that it's going to help with retention and turnover, because when you have such a smart system like that, that is helping you, guiding you, coaching you on, your business that is beyond a regular tool. This is a souped up Lamborghini that you're dropping in someone's lap and like, man, you've made my job great, why are they going to go to a competitor where they're having to print stuff out or they're having to get their own spreadsheet? That's a lot of work. Let these guys focus on what they do best.

I love that. Reading between the lines, you might've called Harmonyze Lamborghini. I'll take that. Chris, this was awesome. I appreciate you hopping on, appreciate you sharing a little bit of wisdom for us on the data organization piece on how to guide AI and AI agents. In the age of 2025, but also governance, which is something that a lot of brands talk about, but few are doing as well as you guys in terms of setting up the guardrails for AI and making sure that you have full control over it end to end.

Yeah. It's been it's been fun. I'm glad you had me on.