Welcome to Episode 7 of Solink in the Cloud! Today, our host is Cathy Langley, Senior Leader of Asset Protection at Solink. Cathy continues her conversation with Anne Sullivan, the Managing Partner of Eye on your Brand. Anne brings over 30 years of asset protection experience to help businesses build, expand, and utilize their CCTV programs. In the second part of this conversation, Anne explains how to make your CCTV cameras into a multi-million dollar profit center.
Who is Anne Sullivan?
Anne Sullivan is a veteran LP/AP industry professional. She is currently the Manager partner of Eye on your Brand. Before that, she moved her way up the ladder in the retail and food LP/AP industry, culminating in a role as Vice President of Asset Protection and Risk for CKE Restaurants. Eye on Your Brand has been helping businesses get value out of their CCTV security systems since 2018.
What’s your most memorable moment of building an ROI with a CCTV program?
Cathy jumped right into the conversation with this leading question. Anne told a story of reducing actuarial losses due to workers’ compensation cases by $1.3 million per quarter. By bringing health and safety issues under the loss prevention umbrella, companies can quickly find a massive ROI from their CCTV security system.
“That's a great question. I would have to say the one that stands out the most was when I took over safety and risk for a very large company and integrated it into loss prevention. We had $53 million of workers' comp on the book. After 18 months, our standard actuarial reduction was a minimum of $1.3 million per quarter.”
How difficult was it to build synergies between risk and loss prevention?
The fact is that many companies have siloed departments, each with their own tools, goals, and ways of measuring success. Getting everyone on the same page isn’t easy, especially when trying to wrap one department into another. However, the value speaks for itself.
“That was the turning point of the loss prevention department going from a cost center to a true and actual profit center. It was just a career highlight for everyone.”
The first step is making sure that you have the needed talent and skills within your department. The fact is that creating a joint department isn’t easy, and it becomes even more difficult when there is institutional pushback.
“I already had the most talented loss prevention professionals out there. First was ensuring that they were cross-trained to understand how risk is a truly loss. So safety is your proactive approach. Make sure people don't get hurt. Risk takes over when people get hurt or there is a loss to the company. When you think about loss prevention, that's truly what their world is. So many people think it's about fraud and security, but really it's about protecting the company from loss. Once we merge the three groups and let them understand how helpful they could be to each other, it truly started flipping rocks and finding bigger losses for the company and creating bigger savings for the company. When you're able to hold people's hand and say, ‘this is why we do this this way, and this is what the true impact is,’ and when you pull an actuarial change of $1.3 million to $1.8 million, you're high-fiving all over an office.”
Remove the silos when building your team
As mentioned above, most companies have siloed departments. If you want an effective loss prevention strategy that turns your CCTV system into a profit center, you need to break down those silos. To do that, your team needs to have a diversity of experience.
“100%. That's where it comes into building those partnerships. You have an asset protection department and a risk department, and they're usually working in silos. But when you can get those two leaders to come together and show how they can benefit and validate each other, the sky's the limit on being a true asset to the company. One of the big things is building your team. Many times when I start with a company, loss prevention is the ‘gotcha department.’ That's just their history. It may not be your department, but it is their history. So it's building a team to show we're not there for ‘gotcha.’ Honestly, if you're an RLPM [retail loss prevention manager], that's just after the notch on the belt, you're old school and 20 years out of date. That's the way it is. You want business people. When I go to an operator, I say, ‘Hey, I'm here to help you. Let's help each other. I want to take a look at your cameras. Let me show you how to use your cameras. You can increase sales by just doing this. You can reduce your service times. You can improve your productivity by understanding why sales were low.’”
Building CCTV ROI through higher productivity
As businesses struggled with hiring over the last few years, one thing they did was look at how their technology partners could bring productivity gains. CCTV systems can do just that.
“But we never looked to see why the service was so slow. Did we have a problem that a cashier called off, so we're running on one cashier? Did we have more sales that were paying cash and not using the app? Did we have an issue in the restaurant where produce wasn't made up? In the retail environment, was your cash line just not running efficiently because the floor was too busy and they were handling the fitting rooms? Understanding the why can change everything. It also can keep a corporation from bringing morale down in a location.”
Building CCTV ROI through better facility management
Facility management can be reactive at the ground level for many retail and restaurant businesses. The local management isn’t necessarily trained on how to manage a property, so problems aren’t proactively prevented. The right CCTV system can prove ROI through reduced facility management costs.
“Almost all of our clients have moved to putting cameras in coolers and freezers for the risk management reduction. We've also moved to putting cameras outside of coolers and freezers and on self-cleaning ovens so that they have a shot of them. When there is a call that goes ‘hey, my cooler is not reaching its temperature’ or it's falling in temperature, the facilities team can go in and just verify that the cooler was closed before dispatching a $279 to start service call. We've seen a huge reduction in cost there.”
Building CCTV ROI through faster emergency response
When we think of emergency response, our first instinct is police or fire services. However, many maintenance calls certainly fall into this category. For example, a flooded store or infestation can have devastating consequences to a business, both in the cost to rectify the situation and the potential hit to brand value.
“If we get back up one more time on the facility side, I've got an amazing story. We received an alarm, a video alarm through a client who's using both ADT and Solink video. We received a call for a restaurant using Solink. The video alarms operator actually said, ‘I don't know what I'm seeing, but it doesn't look right.’ The call was forwarded to someone on my team. They didn't answer. It came to me. I pulled it up on my phone, and I thought it was smoke. I knew it was either smoke or possibly steam. It ended being a hot water pipe that had burst, so it was sending steam up into the camera, which looks like smoke at times. I had them dispatch the fire department. It didn't show up on the panel alarm because it didn't pick it up as motion. We dispatched the fire department. They were able to get into the restaurant and shut off the pipe. The positive about that was my company also handles risk for this department. It ended up being a $6,400 cleanup, but they told us that, had it gone on from 2:00 a.m. to restaurant opening, it would've been in the six figure range.”
Building CCTV ROI through better marketing
While it might not be the first, second, or even third department you’d guess uses a cloud CCTV system, marketing can also find ROI in your security cameras.
“Marketing? Yeah. There's so many ways. We teach marketers in companies how to leverage cameras all the time to see if their signage is up and if it’s placed right. A lot of folks are looking at analytics. I'll give you an example. One of our clients is a large coffee company. We do a lot of reviews for them because they want to know, ‘Hey, we have these shelves over by the doors and we have some in the back of the coffee shop and we want to look at products. We want to know what's moving, our customers just looking at it, putting it down, et cetera.’ Well, the nice thing about it is, yes, your analytics can tell you when someone stops. They can even tell you if someone touches it, but they can't tell you why they didn't buy it or in some cases if they bought it. The reason for that is because sometimes if someone picks it up and they happen to turn towards the counters, it looks like they put it back down. But they may just be turning and walking out of the store.”
“I can give you a silly example that none of the marketers probably didn't even think of. We have a coffee company that's got a coffee press that, it's not meant to, but it legitimately looks like a big Mickey Mouse. Okay. It really does. It's the way it's formed, it looks like at first glance, like Mickey Mouse. So where they had it on the shelf, kids for whatever reason were pointing this out. It really does look like Mickey Mouse at first glance. One of the things was, when we did the analytics on this, because they were having it moved around according to their analytics, people were touching it, but very few were buying it. When we actually did the review on it, we found the people who were touching it were actually kids who were seeing it and then showing it to mommy who was then at times buying it. So for the shelf placement, they decided to drop it down to the bottom shelf and legitimately their sales went up, as silly as that is.”
Building CCTV ROI through training
From store to district manager is a really clear jump in position. What qualifies a person to run a single store, and how they are trained, is quite different from the skills required to manage an entire district. CCTV cameras can help initially train your new district managers, among many other employees, to focus on the core tasks in their new role.
“We do checks on the training of new district managers to ensure that their focus is not on a laptop but on the team. The biggest thing for them is really, don't always go look for the problem, but understand why you have a problem. So take a look at your restaurants. If you have a sudden reduction in sales, take a look at your retail. If you have a sudden drop in your audits, your piece audits, understand why. If they suddenly scale back or the team members are up at the front counters on their phones and nobody's watching the fitting rooms, then you are going to lose merchandise.”
Building CCTV ROI through retraining
Once someone is in their role, the training doesn’t stop. You can both keep building new skills and reinforce the parts of training that haven’t sunk in yet.
“I have a very high-end restaurant client who put in place pairing of wines. None of their wines are under $80 a bottle. They told their servers that they want them to use the pairing to say, ‘hey, this wine would go great with that.’ Well, it didn't move. It wasn't improving the wine sales. So they asked us to look at it to see why. Well, the reason was they weren't doing it. We started showing the client that their waiters didn't actually show the wine. As soon as our report came out, the next weekend they were up over the 60% range in actual purchases of wine because now everybody was doing wine pairings.”
Last words: Get management onboard by showing you can crawl before walking
Anne ended off with some quick advice on how to prove the ROI of a CCTV camera system.
“Cathy, in closing, you'll have a lot of your viewers say, ‘well, I don't have the technology and they aren't giving me the money.’ I faced that at CKE. I had camera systems I couldn't connect to. I couldn't hold a stream, and I had a reduction in staff. Like I said, I hired great RLPMs [retail loss prevention managers]. I pulled them together and said, ‘this is what we have to work with. We need to show them why we need a better product.’ Within one year, not only did we increase our team, but we were handed a check for $1.8 million to buy cameras. Because we were able to figure out and show those little baby steps, the crawl, then walk. When they handed us the check, we ran with it.”
Cathy Langley:
Welcome to Solink in the Cloud, where we are talking to industry leaders about topics that matter. I’m Cathy Langley, Senior Leader of Asset Protection with Solink. Solink’s mission is to protect people, patrons, and profits, which is why we’re bringing together thought leaders within the loss prevention, asset protection and retail security industries to share their expertise and passion.
Thanks for joining us and this is a part two of a podcast that Anne Sullivan, who is the managing partner of Eye On Your Brand, and I did a while back, and it’s on CCTV. And Anne, when we ended that podcast, that part one, we left with the question, when you think about all of the CCTV programs you’ve built in your career, what was your proudest moment? And I’m going to say probably most memorable moment of building an ROI with a CCTV program?
Anne Sullivan:
That’s a great question. I would have to say the one that stands out the most was when I took over safety and risk for a very large company and integrated it into loss prevention. And after 18 months we had a $53 million book of workers’ comp on the book. So losses of workers’ comp. After 18 months, our standard actuarial reduction per quarter was minimum $1.3 million. And that was-
Cathy Langley:
$1.3. Sorry, $1.3 for a quarter?
Anne Sullivan:
A quarter. Per quarter.
Cathy Langley:
Okay. I just want to make sure I had you right. Okay.
Anne Sullivan:
Yeah. And it was unheard of. That was the turning point of a loss prevention department becoming a cost center to a true and actual profit center. And it was just a highlight of everyone.
Cathy Langley:
I bet. So you talked about you were the head of asset protection, but then you took risk and you joined it in. How difficult was it to build those synergies? Because I’m thinking cross-training, making executives or AP professionals into risk professionals?
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely. So I already had probably the most talented, I was blessed with the most talented loss prevention professionals out there. And so ensuring that they were cross-trained to understand how truly risk is a loss. So safety is your proactive approach. Make sure people don’t get hurt. Risk takes over when people get hurt or there is a loss to the company. And when you think about loss prevention, that’s truly what their world is. And so many people think it’s about the fraud and the security, but really it’s about protecting the company from loss.
And so once we merge the three groups and let them understand how helpful they could be to each other, so your RPMs are in your restaurants, they’re physically, they’re touching, where your risk and safety folks generally are just doing trainings in occasion. So when we started merging both of them into each other’s worlds, you had during the training safety, talking about loss prevention. And when the teams were inside the restaurants, they were partnering with safety and risk to say what could we investigate?
And it truly started flipping rocks and turning bigger losses for the company and bigger savings for the company. When you’re able to hold people’s hand and say, this is why we do this this way, and this is what the true impact is. And when you pull an actuarial change of $1.3 million to $1.8 million, you’re high-fiving all over an office, I’m going to tell you now.
Cathy Langley:
Yeah, I bet. So you were in a scenario where you said, okay, I’m going to train my AP team to understand risk, and you made them into one team. You trained, you cross-trained and developed them. But even if I’m not in that scenario, maybe there’s already an established risk management department. That’s probably when we talk about, and ultimately this podcast for the listeners, is about taking your CCTV program and turning it, and in your words, Anne, from a cost center into a profit center. So really that risk management group, we’re going to talk about lots of opportunities here, but risk management is probably one of my biggest wins from a cost reduction standpoint.
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely. 100%.
Cathy Langley:
The other day a scenario came up and when we were really talking about video retention, when you think about in some cases you may not have that slip and fall reported for 90 days because if I’m going to commit fraud, I generally know that you may not have data, video also, data for that long period of time. So video retention with your risk management partnership is going to be a critical piece. Would you agree?
Anne Sullivan:
Oh, 100%. 100%. And that’s where it comes into building those partnerships. You have a asset protection department and a risk department, and many of the times they’re working in silos. But when you can get those two leaders to come together and show how they can benefit and validate each other, the sky’s the limit honestly, on being a true asset to the company.
Cathy Langley:
Agreed. And again, these are in no particular order because obviously for any of the listeners, whether you’re a financial institution, or childcare, a place of worship, or a retailer, restaurant, et cetera, your losses are different and unique and the opportunities are different and unique. But let’s talk next about operations. They’re usually one of the strongest AP partners because we as AP executives need them. Ultimately the chain of command often goes up, excuse me, to operations. So give me an example of two of when you partnered with an operation department to bring value.
Anne Sullivan:
So one of the things is building your team. So many times when I start with a company, loss prevention is the gotcha. That’s just their history. It may not be your department, but it is their history. And so it’s building a team to show we’re not there for gotcha. Honestly, if you’re an RLPM, that’s just after the notch on the belt, you’re old school and 20 years out. That’s the way it is. You want business people.
And so when you go to an operator and say, “Hey, I’m here to help you. Let’s help each other. So I want you to take a look at the cameras. Let me show you how to use your cameras. You can increase sales by just doing this. You can reduce your service times. You can improve your productivity by understanding why sales were low. It’s not necessarily because H&M opened on the corner.”
So once you show them that, you start feeling like a partner to them. And then what you tell them is when you’re looking at the cameras, if you see something that just doesn’t look right, now, you reach back out to me, your asset protection partner, and let me see why it doesn’t look right. That way you keep everybody in their lanes while leveraging great technology. And you just start flourishing from there. Because when you have a win, people talk about it. They don’t always talk about the losses, but they talk about the wins.
Cathy Langley:
And I think you mentioned the why several times in that explanation there. And I think oftentimes our data and our metrics show us what’s happening, what’s going up, what’s down, where am I leveraging? I should say leveraging more of… Basically the data is a leading indicator, but the video oftentimes gives you the why behind it.
Anne Sullivan:
100%. 100%.
Cathy Langley:
I think that’s critical. So let’s talk then about, so we talked about operations and a piece of operations is really productivity. Right?
Anne Sullivan:
Yes, absolutely.
Cathy Langley:
And labor, when you think of productivity/labor. Do you have a scenario where you have built an ROI or even just partnered with somebody and said, this is how we can utilize our program?
Anne Sullivan:
100%. And it really falls back to that why you mentioned when we get a call and say, “Hey, we bought analytical cameras, but we’re not getting the bang for the buck with them.” Okay? And don’t get me wrong, analytical cameras are great, but they have flaws. They’re a technology. So when you have people-counters, if somebody decides they wanted that water and they back up and cross the line and then back forward, it counts as two. But it was really just one who wanted a water.
Silly things like that. They held a door for someone and it made it look like four came in when only one came in. And then you’ll get where you have the analytical that works and says, “Hey, your service is too slow.” Well, a lot of times with the higher ups, I call them the folks in the bleachers, corporate folks, they look at it and go, “Hey, service is too slow.”
But we never looked to see why is service too slow. Did we have a problem that a cashier called off? So we’re running on one cashier? Did we have more sales that were paying cash and not using the app? Did we have an issue in the restaurant where produce wasn’t made up? Or in the retail environment where your cash line just wasn’t running efficiently because the floor was too busy and they were handling the fitting rooms? Understanding the why can change everything. It also can keep a corporation from bringing morale down in a location.
Cathy Langley:
Yeah, I would agree with that. And even you talked about all of the scenarios where there could have been something challenging happening, right? I’ve had multiple people call off, there’s something wrong with some kind of system, processing, et cetera. And all of those going into that with knowledge instead of the finger pointing, right? You’re not producing enough. Goes back to something we chatted about in our last podcast was how much does it cost to hire and train employees? The cost of my turnover.
So anyways, so let’s talk next about facilities. And I think if I’m not mistaken, on our first podcast, we talked a little bit about energy management and things, but sometimes we don’t think of facilities other than just spot checking, floor cleaning. I think we chatted about that. But let’s talk about overall, what are some of your clients doing with leveraging their CCTV for the facilities’ partnership?
Anne Sullivan:
So we have a few of them. Almost all of our clients have moved to putting cameras in coolers and freezers for the risk management reduction. But in addition, we’ve also moved to putting cameras outside of coolers and freezers and on self-cleaning ovens so that they have a shot of them. They know what time these things, oven self-clean. In addition, when there is a call that, “Hey, my cooler is not reaching its temperature.” Or it’s falling in temperature, the facilities team can go in and just verify that the cooler was actually closed before dispatching a $279 to start service call. And we’ve seen a huge reduction in cost there. Huge.
Cathy Langley:
Think about sometimes you think about that and you know the time. So you’re just really going in doing a motion search and going, okay, boom, here it is. We’re talking a minute.
Anne Sullivan:
It’s less than a minute. You just put that line on that door, the top of the door, and you don’t even pick up motion for people walking by.
Cathy Langley:
Right.
Anne Sullivan:
Another one, it is not facilities, but it’s cameras in the coolers. I know everyone’s got the, should we put them, shouldn’t we put them. We them have over, for our companies with cameras in the coolers, over 50% reduction on slip and falls in the coolers.
Cathy Langley:
Let me just repeat that.
Anne Sullivan:
Over 50%.
Cathy Langley:
50% reduction of slip and falls.
Anne Sullivan:
In coolers or freezers.
Cathy Langley:
In coolers or freezers when you have cameras.
Anne Sullivan:
Correct.
Cathy Langley:
Interesting. And the other piece of that, also, when I think about not only just the camera in the freezer, but when you think about, I think the last time we talked about data from a POS perspective, right? But if your program, your CCTV program has the ability for any data, any API of data coming in when you think about bringing in temperature control. You have multiple things. So restaurants obviously huge loss there, but I also think of those pharmacy refrigerators that have-
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely.
Cathy Langley:
High-dollar merchant-
Anne Sullivan:
100%.
Cathy Langley:
And ultimately that would really be considered a facilities partnership to any of their temperatures, any temperature control.
Anne Sullivan:
Yeah, there’s a twofold on that though. I have one client that has since moved to, after they had asked us to do temp checks because of the health department, realizing their holds were not correct. And they’ve actually moved to putting APIs in through their camera system for when they do the temp checks. And we can actually pull up when, so there’s no search anymore. It’s when and ensuring that they’re checking all of them. And I have horror stories on temp checks when we started doing video temp checks for people who were using these softwares that they bought. Just all these softwares they spend six figures on. And you find out the person’s putting the thermometer and a glass of water and just click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
Cathy Langley:
Yeah. When you talk about partnerships-
Anne Sullivan:
Put down the iPad.
Cathy Langley:
So when you talk about, I may have lost you there for a second, I’m not sure. Can you hear me okay now?
Anne Sullivan:
Now I can hear you. Yeah.
Cathy Langley:
Okay. All right. Froze. When you talk about food safety ultimately, right? We talked before about the brand, right? Eye On Your Brand, protecting the brand. Imagine the challenges in a food safety program, cold chain, managing that whole process through and the benefits of having, to your point, your temperatures in an API and then video validation.
Anne Sullivan:
Correct. So that’s just another way utilizing your temps. I do want to, Cathy, if we get back up one more time on the facility side, because I’ve got an amazing story. We received an alarm, a video alarm through a client who’s using both ADT and Solink video. And it’s not to say that panel alarms are bad or anything, but what ended up happening is we received a call that from a restaurant of Solink. Operator actually saying, “I don’t know what I’m seeing, but it doesn’t look right.”
And so the call had actually forwarded into one of my team. They didn’t answer. It came to me. I pulled it up on my phone and it either looks like, I thought it was actually smoke. Okay. I know it was either smoke or possibly steam. It ended up a hot water pipe burst in the hot water tank. And so it was sending steam up into the camera, which looks like smoke at times. So I had them dispatch the fire department.
Now it didn’t show up on the panel alarm because it didn’t pick it up as motion. It was just basically steam because it was on the floor. And so we dispatched the fire, the fire was there, they were able to get in the restaurant, they were able to shut off the pipe. And the positive about that was my company also handles risk for this department. It ended up being a $6,400, $6,600 that did the cleanup told us had it gone on from 2:00 AM to restaurant opening, it would’ve been in the six figure range.
Cathy Langley:
Wow. Tell me again the dollar amount?
Anne Sullivan:
So it ended up being around $6,400, $6,600 for the water cleanup and the damage. The cleanup company told us, had it been able to go on, it was around 2:00 AM when we received it to the 7:00 AM when the restaurant opened, it would’ve been in six figures.
Cathy Langley:
And that was discovered through an alert, you said?
Anne Sullivan:
That was discovered through alarm monitoring, visual alarm monitoring. But since that, the company is now installing flood API detection, water detection in the restaurants to give that alert.
Cathy Langley:
That’s interesting. It is amazing. Obviously you and I have been in the, I’m going to say obviously, but in the business for a while now. And back in the day your CCTV camera, they were just cameras. They were just cameras. And then you started syncing to video, excuse me, data, POS data. And then you started being able to see it remotely. But in the last several years, the technology is just unbelievable of taking any pieces of data, alarm, exit obstruction, et cetera, all of those things combined into. It’s really never, this is, I’m going to say a timely podcast because there’s never been a better time to take your CCTV program and turn it into a profit center.
Anne Sullivan:
100%. And it doesn’t matter what system. You can always take even the most basic system and start leveraging it to show what it can do to get the money to go up to the next level and then show what it can do. The sky’s the limit. If you can think it, you can figure out how to do it. It just takes some time and effort.
Cathy Langley:
Yeah, no, that’s a good point. So we talked about facilities and food safety, operations and productivity/labor. So let’s chat about marketing.
Anne Sullivan:
Marketing. Yeah. There’s so many ways. We teach marketers in companies how to leverage cameras all the time to see if their signage is up, is it placed right? A lot of folks are looking at analytics, and again, I’m not against analytics, it’s just what you do with the data is always a challenge. You have to have people who understand the data and how to use the data. But I’ll give you, for one, one of our clients who’s a large coffee company. We do a lot of reviews for them because they want to know, “Hey, we have these shelves over by the doors and we have some in the back of the coffee shop and we want to look at products. We want to know what’s moving, our customers just looking at it, putting it down, et cetera.”
Well, the nice thing about it is, yes, your analytics can tell you when someone stops. They can even tell you if someone touches it, but they can’t tell you the why they didn’t buy it or in some cases if they bought it. And the reason for that is because sometimes if someone picks it up and they happen to turn towards the counters, it looks like they put it back down. But they may just be turning and walking out of the store.
And this goes in retail too for the front tables with ORC. So one of the things we can leverage it with as we take the POS data, you just input an easy search line of that product or that SKU number, or that cost, even if it’s not ringing properly. And then you do a smart search on the actual shelf unit to understand did it go down like the POS says it did? And you are able to give clear definitive lines that yes, this is the type of person that bought it, this is the type of person that looked at it, but put it back down. And this is the type of person that left with it and didn’t buy it.
And this is what your losses were. So you should probably move this product a little further into the location because your teams aren’t able to watch it during these times. There’s so much, and I’m only giving you a high level of data you can pull.
Cathy Langley:
And I was just going to say, so without what I consider maybe true inventory data, right? Everything coming in, receiving coming in, sales going out, returns, et cetera, et cetera. Without that, you’re still saying, I’m doing a search. I’m just going to recap here. I’m doing a search on the item number. I see all of the POS transactions, and then I’m doing a motion search where the product is placed and taking that. And again, this is a targeted review. This is an item I have issues with. I know I have shrink, and therefore I want to study to know am I making a decision in my product placement? Is there a new planogram for this particular item that ultimately would save?
Anne Sullivan:
I can give you a silly one that none of the marketers probably even the producers didn’t even think of. So we have a coffee company that’s got a coffee press that it’s not meant to, but it legitimately looks like a big Mickey Mouse. Okay. It really does. It’s the way it’s formed, it looks like at first glance, like a Mickey Mouse. And so where they had it on the show to see that they’re walking by. But kids for whatever reason, were pointing this out.
Cathy Langley:
You froze. So start back with Mickey Mouse again.
Anne Sullivan:
Okay.
Cathy Langley:
Okay, thanks.
Anne Sullivan:
But it really does look like a Mickey Mouse at first glance. And so one of the things was when we did the analytics on this, because they were having it moved around according to their analytics, people were touching it, but very few were buying it. And so when we actually did the review on it, we found the people who were touching it were actually kids who were seeing it and then showing it to mommy who was then at times buying it. So the placement they decided to do was drop it down to the bottom shelf and legitimately their sales went up. As silly as that is.
Cathy Langley:
I know why you said that’s a silly example, but when you think about it, that is like, product placement 101, right? And it is interesting that it was, obviously it’s something kids are attracted to because it looks like Mickey. That is great.
Anne Sullivan:
But the parents were missing it, the adults. So it just silly stuff like that. I have others with a very high-end restaurant who put in place pairing of wines. And none of their wines are under $80 a bottle. And they told their servers that they want them to use the pairing to say, “Hey, this wine would go great with that.” Well, it didn’t move. It wasn’t improving the wine sales. And so they asked us to look at it to see why.
Well, the reason being is because they weren’t doing it. And so once we started showing, we didn’t actually show, hey, they’re not doing it. We showed the ones that were doing it and it changed. As soon as our report came out the next weekend, they were up over the 60% range in actual purchases of wine because now everybody was doing wine pairings.
Cathy Langley:
And that ultimately is that root cause discussion.
Anne Sullivan:
It’s the why.
Cathy Langley:
Right. Why is this happening? And then how do we train, mentor, coach in order to get the results that we ultimately want? And the point we, asset protection loss prevention departments are well beyond the, I got you. I’m just looking out for bad guys. We are the business partners. And these programs are just one of the many ways to build those synergies and those partners.
So I have one more to talk about, and you may have something that I missed, but what about crime support? Now that’s true security, but when you think about the ability to support law enforcement with my CCTV program, what’s some of your thoughts on that?
Anne Sullivan:
So we have quite a few of them, and a lot of them are for crime support that honestly didn’t impact the actual location, whether it be retail, warehouse, whatever. They just happen to see that the building has cameras and need the support. And so obviously with the legal departments, we follow strict protocols on what’s released, what can benefit, what can harm a company. But I’ll tell you, we’ve had some really, really interesting cases. I know all of the establishments, especially in the quick service and higher-end food service industry, are being hit across the US by these groups that are just smashing the window, they run in, they hit your place for two minutes and they’re out. And the damage done is obviously more than the loss most of the time.
Cathy Langley:
Absolutely.
Anne Sullivan:
One of the things that they have found though, is unfortunately because of either the lack of cameras, in many cases, the lack, because they’re hitting smaller shops at many times, they don’t have a system in place. The systems aren’t functioning or the placements are incorrect. We had a very large one that I know many of my partners in the industry are following, and they had hit many, you can Google, in the Chicago area.
We actually had a location that we were able to leverage the camera system to the point of where the police were like, we can’t even believe this technology. And we were able to obviously get inside the restaurant, but we were able to identify outside where the cars came from, where they went to, what streets they crossed under public cameras, so that the police could zero in on the cameras to identify that this was a group that was stealing the cars at the airport and how they were exiting, in turn running it through using airport security cameras to actually track these folks down.
And they were a multi-state ring. And so it’s just understanding your placement, where it is, and while granted that doesn’t really benefit the company as a whole, but the partnership benefits the company as a whole. Because our team and their team now have specific officers and detectives they can call who will take the calls because of the support we gave.
Cathy Langley:
Totally agree with you, Anne. The idea, now that particular one was like incident driven in the partnerships with law enforcement, but when you think about it, it’s great to have those partnerships with law enforcement agents before you actually need them. So number one, the partnership is, it’s the right thing to do. Straight up. But that being said, just building those relationships in any way you can, understanding who your local partners are, it’s just good for business.
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely. And then it’s the proactive approach to it too. Leveraging your systems to ensure that teams aren’t entering by themselves, leaving by themselves. A big one, locking the doors at close, not taking the trash out the back door after dusk, if that’s your policy. Because the reality is you can put all of these in place, but if you don’t verify them and train to them, you are going to be sued when there’s an incident for failure to maintain proper security levels.
Cathy Langley:
Right? It’s that old adage, right? Inspect what you expect.
Anne Sullivan:
Exactly.
Cathy Langley:
It’s just validation, video validation. So can you think of any other departments, again, across multiple verticals about partnerships to build to turn your CCTV program into a profit center? Anything else come to mind?
Anne Sullivan:
I really can. Just other areas in that field operations piece. We do checks to ensure trainings of new district managers to ensure that their focus is not on a laptop, but on the team. The biggest thing is really, don’t always go look for the problem, understand why you have a problem. So take a look at your restaurants. If you have a sudden reduction in sales, take a look at your retail. If you have a sudden drop in your audits, your piece audits, understand the why’s. If they suddenly scale back or they’re not placing the team members. The team members are up in the front counters on their phones and nobody’s watching the fitting rooms. You are going to lose merchandise.
If team members aren’t proactively trained on approaching guests and saying, “Hey, can I help you with those 11 pairs of jeans you have behind the counter that you’re hiding? I have a great shirt that would go with this.” It’s about that proactive. Don’t teach your folks to go and stop shoplifters because that’s how people get hurt. There’s an easy way of proactively doing it and saying, “Hey, can I help you? No? I’ll be right over here watching to see if you need my help.”
But there’s just so many ways of proactively doing it to help support the teams and leverage that positive so you’re not chasing. Why would you not want to leverage technology to understand why fix it and move on to the next challenge?
Cathy Langley:
Yeah, great conversation. Really, really appreciate it. Again, I think that when you think about building a CCTV program, just, we talked about it, right? Understand what are you trying to solve for? What are you trying to solve for? Do you have the resources to solve it? Get the funding initially, but also remember that it is, I’m going to say a crawl, walk, run process.
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely.
Cathy Langley:
And this end piece that we’re talking about turning into a profit center is really the run process, right?
Anne Sullivan:
100%.
Cathy Langley:
Now how do I make the best of it? How do I partner with, how do I become that great business partner and say, “Yes, I’ve invested this money. Let’s all work on this together to ultimately benefit the bottom line and the P&L of the company that we work for.”
Anne Sullivan:
Of course. And Cathy, in closing, you’ll have a lot of your viewers say, “Well, I don’t have the technology and they aren’t giving me the money.” And I faced that at CKE. I had camera systems I couldn’t connect to. I couldn’t hold a stream, and I had a reduction in staff. But like I said, I hired great RLPMs. I pulled them together and said, “This is what we have to work with. We need to show them why we need a better product.” And within one year, not only did we increase our team, but we were handed a check for $1.8 million to buy cameras. Because we were able to figure out and show those little baby steps, the crawl, walk. And then when they handed us the check, we ran with it.
Cathy Langley:
And sometimes, to your point, that example, sometimes you’re in it, it’s the long game, right?
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely.
Cathy Langley:
Sometimes you’re sitting around a table and yeah, you get the funny right away. But more often than not, it’s prove it. I’ll give you a little bit more. Prove it. I’ll give you-
Anne Sullivan:
Exactly. Anybody can do it.
Cathy Langley:
Yep. Absolutely. So Anne, again, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you and sharing your knowledge with our listeners.
Anne Sullivan:
Absolutely. My pleasure. We love your product. Take care.
Cathy Langley:
Thank you.
