Who we are

Founded by restaurant operators, we’ve been building products and services that empower multi-unit restaurants to get better ever since.

Black Box Intelligence was started by people steeped in the industry due to a requirement gap they experienced as operators. Their mission was simple: bring restaurant leaders from across the organization together to build a community of shared restaurant data, insights, and knowledge. Today, we are focused on supporting and empowering a vision for operational excellence across employee and guest experience that drives quantifiable sales and traffic.

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Who we are

Passionate restaurateurs

Black Box Intelligence is now a global business, made up of passionate restaurant industry veterans and tenured technologists.

We care deeply about the brands and space we serve – we believe that running and growing restaurant chains is one of the hardest business challenges in existence. But we also believe that if you can overcome all the obstacles that present themselves and get it right, the sky’s the limit. We aim to offer the guidance and support to help these complicated organizations become the superpowers of cultural significance they typically aspire to be.

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Executive team

Meet our leadership group

Our History

How we got here

First ever workforce industry benchmarks established by influential restaurant leaders

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.

Addition of financial performance insight

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.

Guest experience insight added to platform

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.

Acquisition by Diversis Capital; continued growth

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.

Black Box Intelligence adds guest engagement and reputation management capabilities with AreTheyHappy (GuestXM) acquisition

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.

Product suite continues to evolve under Black Box Intelligence brand name

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.

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Our vision

Where we’re going

We have a very clear vision for the future. We recognize the power and quality of our legacy and are proud of it. But we know the industry needs more.

Our goal is to offer data-driven strategic direction for operational enhancements directly attributable to revenue. And provide practical tools and guidance to help restaurants execute against that.

A display screen shows the "Employer of Choice Nominees" with logos of various companies: Eat'n Park, Parkhurst Dining, Taco Bell, Panera Bread, Whataburger, Islands, Apple American Group, The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, Panda Express, Seasons 52, Cheesecake Factory, Silver Diner, and Olive Garden.

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