What do you get when you mix two fine dining veterans and a nostalgic treat? The answer is Good Behaviour – a Toronto-born brand that offers an elevated take on ice cream and a variety of sub sandwiches.
Founders Eric Chow and Michael Lam previously worked together at Ascari on King West before launching Good Behaviour in 2021 when the restaurant shut down during the pandemic. Why ice cream? It was comforting during a stressful time. And it was a canvas to experiment with flavours, textures and layers inspired by the duo’s experience in high-end restaurants.
At first, their ice cream was only available in pint format at pop-up shops and through online delivery. But with unique, refined flavours like Hong Kong Milk Tea – a blend of Ceylon black tea and evaporated milk – and Torta Della Nonna – a combination of lemon, ricotta, pine nut and shortbread – the concept took off.
Today, Good Behaviour has three permanent brick-and-mortar locations across Toronto and still participates in seasonal pop-ups and events, like collabs with brands like Garnier Canada featuring limited-edition flavours.
From day one, the team needed a nimble, easy-to-use solution to take payments from anywhere. Chow encountered Square through a friend using a small card reader attached to a phone jack. It was a natural choice – and it came in handy as the business grew and required tools to support inventory management, staffing and more.
Moving fast means needing a POS that doesn’t slow you down
In the early days of getting started, Chow and Lam were mainly concerned with being able to take payments. They were busy making ice cream and running pop-ups in different locations. They couldn’t afford to be slowed down by a complicated setup, expensive hardware or an awkward user experience, especially not during rush periods. They needed a mobile POS that worked immediately and allowed customers to tap their cards and grab their ice cream. Having a core lean team and a user-friendly system to onboard staff as needed was also important due to the seasonal nature of ice cream businesses.
As Good Behaviour built a name for itself, the operational demands started getting more complex. More inventory to manage, more sales data to track across multiple locations and more work hours to stay on top of when prepping payroll.
Managers couldn’t fully step up, as they didn’t have the right permissions to use software. They would have to wait on direct input from the founders to access reports or inventory management tools. Chow and Lam became weighed down by an increasingly heavy admin load that could no longer be managed with spreadsheets and manual data pulls.
How Square helps Good Behaviour streamline operations and growth
Good Behaviour started with a simple POS setup, then leaned into Square’s full ecosystem of tools to meet its needs as it became a multi-location operation.
First, there’s the hardware for accepting payments from customers. “We use all of Square’s hardware – three terminals with printer rolls attached, three iPad systems and the Square Register with a cash box,” says Chow, who adds that the team also uses Square Reader for contactless payments on the go and appreciates the “Apple-esque” design of the products.
On the back end, Square helps Good Behaviour work smarter. Square Dashboard provides in-depth analytics that can be exported to Excel as a CSV file. “We pull all kinds of reports – month-over-month between the shops by category and hour-over-hour comparisons as well,” says Chow.
The team uses centralized reporting to make data-driven inventory decisions. If one shop is outperforming the other in the ice cream category, they adjust delivery routes to stock it first. And speaking of inventory, Square’s inventory management tools, which work in real-time, allow for on-the-fly product updates from any device such as adding the flavour of the month to the menu.
Looking at hour-over-hour sales is also helpful for staffing. It makes it easy to see when to schedule more staff to keep lines moving during rush. And Excel exports let Chow and Lam visualize trends exactly the way they prefer to work – except this time, they’ve ditched manual data entry. “If you can pull it as an Excel sheet, then we can manipulate and play with the data. It’s way more useful for us,” says Chow.
For example, they track labour costs by pulling timecards from Square on a bi-weekly basis. The data provides a shift-by-shift breakdown of costs per location, which is added to fixed labour costs in an Excel sheet to help prep payroll.
Plus, with Square Advanced Access, managers have role-appropriate access to pull their own reports and adjust inventory without having to wait on the founders, which has reduced demands on their time and provided both security and independence for managers. “There’s a separation between who can do invoicing, who can change things and who can just access reports,” adds Chow.
What started as a simple solution to take payments has turned into an all-in-one toolkit that makes things a little more predictable in an unpredictable business environment. Chow can only recall three instances of downtime in five years, which all involved clear communication and quick resolutions.
Data-driven operations that power long-term growth
When Chow describes Good Behaviour’s ideal hire, one of the qualities that come to mind is the ability to work efficiently, or, as he puts it, “run”. With the right tech and systems, Square has helped the team do just that. New hires are quickly introduced to the Square POS as their initial task, as they believe its intuitive design makes it an easy “gauntlet” to pass.
The business has come a long way since its early pop up days, partly because of its relentless focus on leveraging granular data to make choices that lead to fewer missed sales, a better customer experience and, ultimately, more profit.
Team members enjoy the user-friendly POS, which allows them to focus on customer interactions without worrying about the system crashing right when a customer wants to pay for their spicy meatball sub.
Thanks to Square Dashboard and Advanced Access, managers are empowered to take faster, clearer decisions on stock routing and staffing. The result? Less waste and better coverage during peak hours.
Meanwhile, founders Chow and Lam can focus on growth opportunities. For example, Good Behaviour has a relationship with the Toronto Raptors with the business currently catering for some of the Raptors’ draft nights and other events at their practice facility. Having a permanent booth in the Scotiabank arena is a long-term goal.
Growing Good Behaviour’s footprint across Toronto also means opening more locations. The founders would love to have five to seven shops within the next two to three years, a move that would enable them to open their own milk plant and sell wholesale. They hope to lean on Square to support bigger purchase orders, invoicing and production inventory.
In the more immediate future, Good Behaviour is working on a website refresh, complete with online ordering and in-house fulfillment, which will give the business more control over the entire customer journey. The team is considering Square Online to support that strategy.
Regardless of how the exact path unfolds, Good Behaviour can continue to analyse customer data through Square POS tools to generate buzz for their products all-year-round, such as introducing fun limited edition holiday flavours like the white chocolate and mint combo Candy Cane Lane in December. The long-term plan? Run neighbourhood-level campaigns to expand the brand’s reach. “If we can anchor to something dependable that grows with us, that’s priceless,” says Chow.
