Who we are

We were founded by Joni Doolan (who was later joined on the leadership team by her husband Wally, former President of Applebee’s and later CEO & President of Friday’s and Carlson Restaurants Worldwide) in the mid nineties. People Report, the first iteration of what is now Workforce Intelligence, was a gathering of a group of restaurant executives from five leading restaurant groups who agreed to benchmark the HR and workforce metrics critical to restaurant success and profitability. Wally and Joni remain active board members to this day.

After growing our workforce dataset significantly and establishing trust and credibility within the restaurant community, an obvious question emerged: to what extent did the workforce information we were providing impact tangible and quantifiable financial performance? People Report was augmented by Black Box Financial Intelligence under a brand first known as TDn2K: Transforming Data into Knowledge for Restaurant & Hospitality Industries.

Our thesis was that happy employees meant better traffic and sales. For the first time, we empowered restaurant groups to understand whether this was the case and to what extent.

From here, an obvious next step was to layer guest experience and sentiment into the analysis – the idea being happy employees = happy guests = revenue and growth. Black Box enabled company-specific and industry-wide guest sentiment monitoring for the first time in 2013 when we established our Guest Intelligence product. This provided the complete picture of financial performance and the drivers of it, delivering a blueprint for success for restaurateurs to follow and execute on.

After a consistent and solid growth trajectory, we were acquired by Diversis Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. People Report became Workforce Intelligence, joining Financial Intelligence and Guest Intelligence, as the anchors of the Black Box Intelligence platform. We subsequently went on to acquire MillerPulse later in 2021, giving BBI the largest and most powerful restaurant dataset.

While our benchmarks across guest experience, workforce and financial had proved themselves the industry gold standard, we wanted to incorporate greater ability to take action on this insight into our offering. In 2022, we acquired AreTheyHappy. This became the basis of our GuestXM product, which enables feedback collection, monitoring and response across online reviews, social media and surveys.

The Black Box Intelligence platform continues to evolve in line with our vision for the restaurant industry that happy employees = happy guests = traffic and sales. Our commitment to being able to tie the relationships between each of these fundamental bedrocks of restaurant performance together in an accurately quantifiable way – and then take the necessary action to drive improvement – remains as strong as ever.