Based in Tucson, Les White sports a blond goatee, favors cowboy hats and boots, and owns 26 Subway franchises. He measures his achievements not in sandwiches served or dollars banked, but in lives improved. While some may call his methods unorthodox, nobody can argue with his results:

•White initially purchased five operating Subway franchises with a partner in 1995
•In 1997, each was grossing approximately $3,500 per week
•He bought out his partner in 1997
•By 2003, each of his 18 restaurants was grossing an average of $14,646 per week.

White routinely joins his employees on the sandwich lines and takes pride in knowing all of his employees by name. But as his business grew to 26 stores and 300 employees, he found it challenging to maintain this personal approach.

He wanted to improve communications between stores and he saw room to improve the financial-reporting accuracy and operational efficiency of his restaurants. Before he began his network project, each store had a standalone point-of-sale system and traditional phone service. His company, Zeus Nestora, had no company network.

Consultants from IPcelerate, Inc., a Cisco Technology Developer Partner, connected White with Calence, a local reseller and Cisco Gold Certified Partner. Working with Cisco, the companies showed White how a network could help his business challenges.

Calence designed a system featuring applications that IPcelerate developed specifically for White's business style. The applications run directly on the Cisco Unified IP Phone displays. This makes particular sense for restaurants because it avoids placing a computer in a hot, moist, and space-constrained environment. And it's especially sensible for White, who has no IT staff.

The new system cost approximately $13,500 per store, but will drop to an incremental cost of approximately $3,500 per store as White's franchise grows.

Network applications IP franchise communications POS point of sale financial reporting operational efficiency phone compliance time card shift management