How Ike’s Cafe and Grill Recovers $18,000/Month in Missed Revenue with Certus AI

“People would actually call me personally and say, ‘Hey man, I’ve been calling your restaurant. They’re not picking up. What’s going on?’ And then I realized that they were overwhelmed.”

Kwabena · CEO, Ike’s Cafe and Grill · Marietta, GA

When your own customers have to track you down to tell you they can’t reach you, that’s not a missed call. That’s a relationship walking out the door.

Before Certus AI 

Ike’s takes roughly 800 calls a week. Just over 100 a day. 

About 100 of those a week went unanswered. 

At a $40–$50 average order, Kwabena was losing thousands of dollars a week to a phone nobody could get to. 

The problem wasn’t effort. It was an impossible choice. 

When the to-go orders and the dine-in rush hit at the same time, his team had to decide in real time: seat the guest in front of them, or pick up the ringing phone? 

They chose the room. The phone lost. 

“We got a lot of bad reviews based upon putting our employees in bad positions where they’re having to answer the phone and choose, ‘Hey, should I sit this person down?’ And even when you’re in a panic, even the way you answer the phone is going to be a little bit different.” 

His dad saw it happening from across the room. 

“It got to the point where my dad would come and be like, ‘Hey, y’all need to hire somebody else because this is getting too crazy.’” 

But a hire just for the phone meant more labor cost for three or four peak hours a night. The math didn’t work. 

And the real damage wasn’t even the lost order. It was the customer who quietly gave up. 

“Whenever somebody has a hard time getting to you, they’re going to just stop calling you. So you’re going to just lose customers altogether.” 

With Certus AI 

Now the phone gets answered every time. 

Certus takes the full order, upsells, and lets the host do the one thing she couldn’t before: focus on the people in the building.

“Now that we have Certus, you kind of have everything streamlined to where the host can now focus on the customers and you have Certus being able to take care of all the calls and upselling and different things like that, which we didn’t have before.” 

Kwabena’s team stopped choosing between the phone and the floor. Certus took the phone off the table entirely. 

A family business, built on a name 

Kwabena’s dad started a grocery business in Marietta about 30 years ago. 

Kwabena was, in his words, born into serving food. Twelve years ago that became Ike’s Cafe and Grill — a West African restaurant built around bringing the culture through food, drinks, ambiance, and music.

Ike is his dad’s name. Which means every review carries more weight than a number of stars.

“Imagine now you go online and you read a review and it’s like, ‘Ike’s Cafe and Grill, Ike did this or Ike did that.’ You’re like, ‘Hey, that’s my dad you’re talking about.’ So there’s a different zeal that you have when you work on stuff like that.” 

The ambition is bigger than one restaurant. Kwabena wants African food to be as easy to find anywhere in the country as a Mexican or Indian restaurant — and he wants Ike’s to be the springboard. 

A phone that drops 100 calls a week is not how you build that. 

Why he chose Certus 

Kwabena had other companies reaching out. What moved him wasn’t a pitch. It was another operator.

“We had a brother who lived in Ohio. His name is Ra and he also was in the restaurant industry. And he said, ‘Yo, bro, I have this AI and like it’s crazy. It solved all my problems.’ Having another business owner tell you how good a product is definitely sold it for us.” 

There was one more thing other solutions couldn’t match, and for Ike’s it was the whole point. 

“One of the key things that I feel that Certus does better than everybody else is coming from a place of culture. The different nuances that come with the culture is something that is being looked at and being coupled with our business. So, there’s a match.” 

For a West African restaurant where hospitality is part of the identity — even on the phone — that match mattered more than any feature list. 

The person most afraid of it became its biggest advocate 

When Certus arrived, the host had the same question every operator’s staff has.

“At the beginning, everybody’s like, ‘Is this gonna take my job?’ But now she’s the one that’s like, ‘No, no, no. Tell them that they need to fix this and fix that.’ And how quickly it’s done just makes her happy.” 

Certus didn’t replace her. It took the part of the job that was burning her out and handed her back the floor. 

“If I could describe Certus as an employee, I would say it’s my number one go-to person. Because guess what? She never gets tired. She’s always ready and always ready to learn. And so once you kind of have that, it’s a win-win for everybody.” 

The best operators aren’t waiting to be convinced. 

They’ve watched the phone go from their biggest blind spot to a channel they finally control. They’ve seen what it does to labor costs, to reviews, to the orders that used to slip away every Friday night. 

Kwabena is one of them. And his advice to every operator still on the fence is the same advice he’d give about the business itself. 

“If you’re not innovative, you’re going to get left behind. Something might look a little bit scary, but it quite possibly could be something that creates a more efficient business solution for you. Because if you’re not going to do it, somebody else will.” 

Kwabena · CEO, Ike’s Cafe and Grill