Focus: Operating Model Design, “Build vs. Buy” Governance, Reputation & Data Architecture
IHOP entered a leadership transition with an unusual structural handicap: the prior administration had dissolved nearly all in-house creative and digital functions. Strategy lived with agencies. Data sat untouched. And a 1,600-unit franchise network was left without a digital operating system of its own.
The result: a hollowed-out brand running on borrowed muscles—no internal capability, no institutional memory, and no mechanism for compounding growth.
My mandate was to rebuild the brain: the decision architecture that a modern digital organization depends on.
Installing a Decision Engine
The real blocker wasn’t creativity; it was governance. IHOP had no method for deciding what belonged inside the company versus what should remain with vendors. Without that logic, the new leadership couldn’t rebuild responsibly—they risked over-hiring, under-hiring, or rebuilding the wrong capabilities entirely.
I designed a proprietary Build-vs-Buy Decision Matrix, a weighted scoring system that evaluates every marketing function against five variables:
Strategic relevance
Internal capability
Responsiveness
Cost efficiency
Innovation potential
This gave IHOP a mathematical logic for reconstructing its digital division that will only internalize high-leverage functions while keeping commoditized work elastic. It turned organizational design into a de-risked, repeatable mechanism rather than a political negotiation.
Rebuilding the Growth Architecture
With governance in place, the next step was defining the first principles of IHOP’s new revenue systems—what the digital division should own and how it should behave.
1. The Reputation Engine
IHOP’s most valuable digital storefront wasn’t its website—it was its reviews. One star of improvement on Yelp can correlate to 5–9% revenue lift, yet the organization treated reviews as after-the-fact customer service.
I reframed ORM as revenue capture, designing a store-level intelligence loop that turned 1,698 locations’ reviews into operational data: insights for franchisees, discoverability for local search, and cultural trust for younger guests. ORM became not a support function, but IHOP’s most powerful organic growth lever.
2. Data Activation
IHOP sat on immense amounts of anonymized Chase transaction data—directionally rich but operationally unused. I developed a segmentation strategy to turn “dead data” into a market-shaping signal layer, helping IHOP predict which LTOs resonate by region, which cohorts respond to digital touchpoints, and where loyalty penetration gaps hid latent value.
This laid the groundwork for a modern identity-resolved CRM system without forcing the company into premature tech spend.
3. The Cultural Flywheel (SEO)
SEO had been treated as a technical hygiene task. I repositioned it as a cultural flywheel—an engine that connects Limited Time Offers, influencer content, and franchise operations into sustained organic visibility.
The goal wasn’t ranking for “IHOP.” It was winning non-branded, high-intent intent (“best breakfast near me”), reducing reliance on paid media and converting cultural heat into foot traffic.