Here is the whole technical content of this course, and it fits in one line: for each customer, work out how often they come, how much they spend, and how long since you last saw them. Three numbers. Everything else in this topic is what those three numbers let you see — and what they let you see is that "our customers" is not one thing but four or five very different groups, who deserve very different amounts of your attention.
🔢 Three numbers per person
You need one row per customer and three columns. All three come straight from the transactions you already have, and you can calculate them for a year of data in an afternoon.
| Number | What it is | What it tells you |
| How often | Visits in the last twelve months | Whether they are a habit or an accident |
| How much | Total spent, and the average per visit | What they are worth, which is not the same thing |
| How long ago | Days since their last visit | Whether the relationship is alive right now |
The third one does the most work and gets the least attention. Two customers can each have twelve visits and a healthy average check, and be completely different situations: one was here last week, the other has not been seen since March. The first is a regular. The second is a regular you have already lost and have not noticed, which is the whole of topic 5.
Keep the arithmetic simple and do it on the customers you can identify, accepting that walk-ins are missing. It does not need to be exact. It needs to be roughly right and actually done, because the difference between a rough number and no number is enormous, while the difference between a rough number and a precise one is usually a rounding error you would not have acted on differently.
👥 What the groups look like
Sort your customers by those numbers and the same shape appears in almost every restaurant: a small group who come constantly, a larger group who come sometimes, and a very large group who came once and vanished. The proportions vary, but the shape does not, and it has a consequence most owners find uncomfortable — a small minority of your customers produce a large share of your sales.
The arithmetic is stark when you write it down. A customer who comes monthly at an average check of $30 is worth $360 a year to you. A one-time visitor who spent $45 on a Saturday is worth $45. The regular is worth eight of them, and yet almost all the marketing money in this industry goes to finding more of the second kind. That is the single most useful thing this course will show you.
- Regulars. Frequent and recent. Small in number, large in sales. Protect these above everything; losing one is expensive and losing several is a trend.
- Occasionals. They come, but with gaps. The biggest opportunity you have, because a nudge from three visits a year to five is easier than creating a new customer.
- Big spenders who rarely come. Celebration and group bookings. Worth remembering as occasions, not as habits — chasing them with weekly offers misreads them entirely.
- One-timers. The largest group. Some were tourists and always would be; the rest are the ones you should be asking why about, since something stopped them coming back.
- Drifting. Used to be frequent, has not been in for a while. The most urgent list in your business, and topic 5 is entirely about it.
Four or five groups is right. It is tempting to slice finer, but a restaurant cannot run ten different plans, and the moment your groups outnumber the things you are actually willing to do, you have made a chart rather than a decision.
📅 "How long ago" only means something in your own rhythm
None of these thresholds are universal, and copying someone else's is how you end up chasing customers who are not lost and ignoring ones who are. A lunch place near offices might expect its regulars weekly, so three weeks of silence is a warning. A destination restaurant people visit for anniversaries might see its best customers twice a year, and six months is perfectly normal. Same number, opposite meaning.
So set the thresholds from your own data instead of from a book. Look at your genuine regulars and ask what the normal gap between their visits is; whatever that is, roughly two or three times that gap is where "quiet" turns into "gone." Do the same for frequency: "frequent" is whatever your top group actually does, not a round number someone published. And write the thresholds down, because the value comes from applying the same definition every month — a number that drifts cannot show you a trend.
🎯 What changes once you can see the groups
Grouping is only worth the afternoon it costs if it changes what you do, and it should change several things immediately. The most important is where your effort goes: if regulars produce a large share of your sales, then losing them is your biggest risk and keeping them is your cheapest growth — and both of those are things you can act on tonight, without a budget.
It also settles arguments you have been having with yourself. Whether a discount is working stops being an opinion once you can see who redeemed it and whether they came back. Whether the loyalty program from that earlier course is doing anything becomes answerable: are members visiting more often than non-members with the same profile, and is the gap growing? And when you plan a promotion, you can aim it at one group instead of blasting everyone — which is exactly what the email course meant by a segment, and this is where that segment comes from.
One caution to carry into the rest of the course. These groups describe the past, and people move between them constantly; a regular becomes a drifter when a job changes, and a one-timer becomes a regular after a good third visit. Rebuild the groups every month rather than treating them as labels stuck on people, or you will be running your restaurant on a photograph of last year.