The Numbers Speak
for Themselves

NEXT LEVEL BRANDS DOES NOT SHY FROM A CHALLENGE. The company started operations in the middle of COVID, building a small chain of unique restaurant concepts and forming a restaurant management group poised to help them grow. But they needed to get purchasing organized – and take better advantage of their scale – so they called in CORE Insights Group to help.

“We went into COVID with one restaurant that did a phenomenal job managing the challenges of the pandemic. We built the other two while the pandemic effect was still increasing prices on commodities and building materials,” said Next Level Brands CFO Will Sadlowski. Once the restaurants were operating, they ran into other challenges. “With the population boom in Tampa, we’re lucky that demand is very high. But finding labor can be tough and we’re watching commodity prices like a hawk. We want to be a chain of family restaurants, not just special occasion restaurants.”

He said Next Level Brands’ biggest challenge was taking advantage of their scale. “Each of our restaurants is unique – they have completely different formulas and menus.” With this format differentiation comes complexities in product mix. “We didn’t want to sacrifice quality anywhere – it’s a big deal for us. While our food costs were high, we didn’t want to just find the lowest price – we wanted to be smart about it and leverage our combined purchasing power as a restaurant group. But we’re a small business and didn’t have the expertise to do it ourselves – we needed someone to come in and help.”

A friend introduced Will and the team to CORE, and partner AJ Kramer. “We had one meeting with them, gave AJ our data, and he took the ball and ran with it,” recalls Will. “He spent a couple of weeks combing through the data and contacting our vendors – doing the heavy lifting we don’t have the resources to do.” CORE helped standardize the company’s procurement processes so they can get the most out of their buying power and economies of scale. “CORE also introduced us to software to track our food costs better, which made it much easier to cost our menu, and introduced us to programs that use their purchasing power to drive our food costs down,” he said.

Will said the onboarding has been great. CORE has weekly status calls to make sure all is going as planned and has really built trust with his team. “The CORE team is a veteran industry group. They know what to look for, and they work like ninjas – they are very precise. They are good at preserving the quality of what we serve customers. They are helping us get organized to make sure if, for example, we’re using the same ground beef at all three restaurants, we’re buying it from the same vendor in the same pack size so we can scale our purchasing power.” He said the CORE team is great to work with. “They’re super friendly. They’re on top of it. They come prepared and are driving the process. They keep us organized, on task, and moving the ball forward.”

Would Will recommend CORE to others? “I think it’s a mistake NOT to use CORE Insights Group, unless you have in-house expertise – and if you do, you’re a much larger business than us! As the CFO I know what we pay CORE and what we save – and expect to save in the future – and it’s a no-brainer. The numbers speak for themselves.”  He said that while vendors might not be happy to be challenged in the beginning, long-term growth is really important. “The reason we are doing this is to grow. And as we grow, they’ll be selling us more in the future.”

The CORE approach to help Next Level Brands is two-fold. “First, they are narrowing the number of vendors we use so we have fewer one-offs and mistakes, fewer people coming in, fewer invoices. This cuts down on labor costs. The next step will be to reduce labor in the back of the house with products that create efficiencies in preparation. What CORE does for us is multifaceted – both direct AND indirect savings,” said Will.