Chef led. Eight venues. One guest profile.

ART Hospitality started in Hereford in 2013 as A Rule of Tum, run by brothers Edwin and Dorian Kirk. The model they landed on is unusual enough that they gave it a name: the chefpreneur. Rather than hiring a head chef into a group format, ART backs a chef to build the thing they actually want to cook, then gives them the infrastructure to run it as a business.

The chefpreneur model shows in how little the venues look like each other. The Bookshop is a modern British restaurant in the middle of Hereford. Burger Shop does one thing in Hereford and Worcester. Leaven is Italian family dining, The Yard is communal eating. Maneki Ramen began as a chef's lunch break habit, became a pop-up with ART behind it, and is now a bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Worcester and another in Birmingham. Dr Foster is a Gloucester pub the group took back to a gastropub. Dish by ART does the events.

Eight rooms, four towns, six different ideas of what a restaurant is. What the venues do share is guests, and for a long time those guests existed in three different systems at once.

Before Stampede, ART ran the group the way most multi-site operators still do. Until ART moved to Stampede, Airship handled the group's marketing and ResDiary took its bookings, with guest Wi-Fi from a third supplier. Every one of those products worked. None of them knew the others existed, and each one came with its own contract, its own login and its own person to chase when something went wrong.

The true cost never appeared on an invoice. One guest would book an event through a ticketing site nobody in the group could see into, then eat and drink on a till that recorded a basket against nobody in particular. Another would walk in and never appear in any system at all. Ed's view is that the fragmented stack is usually defended with an argument he does not accept.

While Ed did not run the rollout himself, his general managers at his eight venues did. What happened during the launch was invaluable to a busy operator like Ed.

Ed is candid that adoption in hospitality is slow by nature, and that the group is still not using it to its full capability. Still, he does not hold that against the product. “Even today I was looking at Apple Notes and how much more it can do than I ever thought was possible. That is not Apple's fault, that is my fault.” The bookings side, he says, was simple to set up, and already does things he does not see done well elsewhere: upsells, side sales, cross-pollination between the venues, and ticketed events running inside the same portal as everything else.

Ask Ed for the headline benefits and he gives two before he gives any numbers. The first is how the software feels to use, which is not a soft point when the people using it are twenty-two and have never known a badly designed app.

The second benefit is what happens to the bits that are still clunky. Ed's complaint about the rest of the industry is that the people who build the software are unreachable by the people who use it, and that the fixes which look simple from the floor turn out to be simple from the engineering side too, if anyone would listen.

ART takes payment on Square and had no intention of changing that. Ed is precise about why: the customer-facing side is smooth, the pricing is good, and a till that front of house enjoys using is not something you trade away lightly.

What ART wanted was for the spend that till captures to reach the rest of the business, which is the job Stampede's integration does. The integration runs both ways. A booking made on Stampede carries through to the table, and what that table spends comes back onto the guest's record: basket size, items, how often they come, what they bought at Christmas. The till stays exactly as it was for the person holding it, and the guest record gains everything the till knows.

Here is where the group is actually heading. Ed has a name for it inside the business, borrowed from banking and pointed at the dining room: KYC, know your customer. Ed's ambition is not a segment within a marketing tool. Ed wants the person who greets a guest at the door to already know who that guest is before they identify themselves by name.

The team, he says, should understand who that customer is and what their preference is, and be able to offer something individual to them. A favourite bottle of wine on the table. “That is when we can really start making massive changes.” He is clear that the group is not there yet, and equally clear that the blocker is training rather than data, because the data has already arrived.

ART ran a review tool before, and Ed says that the feature list is not wildly different. What is different is where the review ends up. Google reviews sync into Stampede across all eight venues, and because the guest is already a profile, the review attaches to them rather than sitting in a separate inbox. The group averaged 4.7 stars across the venues in the month we looked at.

The newest part of the platform for ART is the one Ed reaches for when he wants a straight answer. Ed can ask Stampede a hospitality question in plain English and have it compile the reply from the group's own data, rather than exporting three spreadsheets and reconciling them himself.

Alongside it, ART's account team has been building the group a single dashboard across all eight venues. For an operator whose numbers have historically lived in three products, the appeal is less about the chart and more about only having one place to look.

Ed has done the arithmetic that any operator replacing three contracts with one has to do, but the argument he cares about most is longevity, and it comes from having been burnt. Switching a hospitality group off a platform it is embedded in is expensive and slow, so the decision that actually matters is whether the supplier will still be building in five years.

Ed can see what the record is sitting on, and most of what excites him is the part the group has not switched on yet.