Lazy Dog case study
Marrying customer obsession with data-backed delivery intelligence
“Hear what Lazy Dog has to say about us”
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“With Loop AI, the reality is we are able to get a lot more for our dollars and the return on ad spend was really easy to understand and the attribution is super direct. And that piece has been the biggest unlock of both value and understanding for us. We're going to continue to ride for quite a while and see it as just a permanent new way of doing business on the platform.”
Robert Linder,
CFO, Lazy Dog
Impact
Margin Improvement
+8%
Gross and net margins
Incremental Revenue
$125K+
Per period across comped stores
3PD Payouts
+$3K
Per location per period
Introduction
For Lazy Dog, a 50+ location casual dining brand spread across 8 states, third-party marketplaces were a growth engine - and a maze.
Lazy Dog has
52 locations
3 brands
8 states
The team wanted to deliver a top-percentile guest experience and make the channel sustainably profitable.
But complexity piled up fast: that's where we come in
The Challenge
- Accounting reconciliation was painful: commissions, guest refunds, marketing fees, DashPass/non-DashPass rates - each hitting a different P&L line.
- Operators had platform-by-platform data, but no unified view to pinpoint the few actions that would move KPIs weekly.
- Marketing ROI was murky: overlapping promos (“double-dip”), multi-campaign attribution, and unclear incrementality.
The Loop AI Approach (Measure → Protect → Grow)
Lazy Dog partnered with Loop AI to bring delivery “into the home office”, unifying finance, operations and growth - and it was a match made in heaven.
Unified financial visibility
- Active use of the income statement on Loop AI for FP&A
- Tracking performance, understanding key drivers of profitability, and continuously optimizing margins across channels and locations.
Operational control tower
- Cross-marketplace KPI aggregation to surface the top 3 store actions each week.
- Thoughtful chargeback disputes using CCTV evidence.
- AI-powered review listening to trace guest pain points back to operational misses
- Improving their internal technical systems to reduce avoidable cancellations outside of menu hours.
- Surfacing system tweaks (e.g. drink callouts on chits) that eliminated recurring misses.
Profitable growth
- Coming up with the right mix of items to offer for delivery
- Engineering cutting-edge, profitability-safe promo constructs, marketplace splits, and audience targeting.
- Understanding the right growth opportunities by location and translating them to decisions regarding spending money towards ads vs promos and the cohorts to target.
- True, de-duplicated attribution (promo overlap + multi-program credit) and clear ROAS.
- Evaluation Playground to test promos vs. ads, by location, by cohort - the CFO checks it daily to iterate week-over-week and year-over-year.
Instead of taking a gamble with 3PDs, Lazy Dog now runs delivery with an AI-powered coworker that protects guest experience, proves ROI, and scales what works.
Results and Impact
- +8% lift in both gross and net margins within just two periods of going live,
- +7% increase in 3PD payouts and +1% net sales - all while spending 40% less on the channel.,
- $125K+ incremental revenue per period across comped stores.,
- Nearly $3K additional 3PD payouts per location per period.
With Loop AI, Lazy Dog found its formula for success - a powerful combination of operational excellence and data-driven growth.
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