Case study · Operating model
Standardising a family entertainment centre aiming at franchising and multi-site growth
Standardisation as leverage for replication and growth.
- Sector
- Family entertainment and hospitality
- Size
- About 150 employees
- Service
- Operating Model and Organisational Design
The situation
A family entertainment centre (FEC) employing around 150 people, running karting, arcade, laser tag, escape rooms, VR, bowling and children's entertainment alongside a sports bar and kitchen, was preparing to expand.
The operation worked. What made it work lived in people. Experienced employees and managers knew the sequences, the exceptions and the fixes. Very little of it existed as a system.
That is a manageable condition in one location. It does not survive a second. The question was no longer whether the business could be run well, but whether it could be run well by people who did not build it.
What we did
We built the operating system in four connected layers.
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01
Define.
We mapped the business end to end into a hierarchical process architecture, from operational areas down to activities and work instructions, so that every procedure sat inside a structure rather than standing alone. That architecture became standard operating procedures across the attractions, food and beverage, and the supporting functions: roles and responsibilities, safety and escalation, and the customer-facing flows that carry the experience, including reception, payment and wristband handling, attraction access, complaints and service recovery.
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02
Control.
Procedures nobody checks are decoration. We designed the control layer: opening and closing routines, supervisory checks, quality gates, maintenance and incident handling. The client's IT provider has since digitised these into daily and weekly checklists.
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03
Measure.
We built a sales and performance dashboard in Power BI, so management could see what the operation produces rather than infer it.
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04
Learn.
We analysed customer behaviour and built a segmentation on behavioural patterns rather than demographics. That analysis became the core input to the loyalty strategy the client is developing, with our support.
Built to be handed over
Each layer earns the next.
Standards without control are ignored. Control without measurement is guesswork. Measurement without customer insight tells you what happened, not what to do about it.
The documentation was structured for replication from the outset. Processes, standards, responsibilities and controls are organised so that the operating model can be transferred to a new site or a franchisee rather than reinvented there. That is the operational knowledge base any franchise system has to have before it can sell a licence to anyone.
What changed
- Roles and activities are defined rather than inherited.
- Internal service levels are understood: functions know what they owe each other, and when.
- Controls are in daily use, in software, not in a binder.
- Two further locations have been announced.
Scope: more than 800 pages of operational documentation and over 15 supporting instruments and tools, across the principal operational areas of the business.
Common questions
How much documentation does a business actually need before it opens a second location?
Enough to cover what a new site cannot work out for itself: the sequences, the standards, the safety rules and the points where a decision has to go up a level. Volume is a consequence, not a target. The useful test is whether a competent manager who has never seen the original site could open, run and close a day without calling anyone.
Will employees actually follow standard operating procedures?
Only where somebody checks. A procedure with no control attached to it decays within weeks. That is why the control layer, the routines, the supervisory checks and the quality gates, matters more than the procedures themselves, and why digitising those checks into daily and weekly lists is usually the moment adoption becomes real.
What is the difference between operational documentation and franchise documentation?
Operational documentation describes how the business runs. Franchise documentation is the commercial and legal package built on top of it: the licence, the fees, the territory, the brand standards and the support model. The operating documentation is the precondition. Without it there is nothing to franchise except a name.
The principle
A business becomes scalable when its way of operating can be understood, taught, executed and controlled without depending on the people who created it.