About
The Southern Guild wasn't dreamed up in a tech office. It came out of years spent walking into independent c-stores, liquor stores, and corner markets across the Savannah area — and watching great owners lose customers to chains with bigger tools.
The founder
FOUNDER & CEO · SAVANNAH, GA
Phin has spent his career in beverage and alcohol distribution sales, building relationships across hundreds of Savannah-area c-stores, liquor stores, and neighborhood markets. Not from a desk — from the floor, the cooler, and the counter.
Week after week, he watched the same story: hardworking owners with loyal neighborhoods and zero tools to keep them. No customer data. No way to reach a regular who stopped coming in. One bad Google review sitting unanswered for a year, quietly costing them customers.
The chains solved this with apps and analytics teams. Nobody solved it for the independents — so The Southern Guild was built to. Software that's simple enough to run itself, and a real visit every month, because that's how business gets done on a route.
What we believe
Trust isn't built in an inbox. Every store gets a monthly visit, every month, forever — scorecard, strategy, and calendar built together on-site.
You know your neighborhood. We know the data. Every store's calendar is built together — your ideas, our analysis, one shared plan that actually fits your store.
We build for the corner store, the family operation, the owner who knows customers by name — not enterprise chains.
One flat price, published on our website. No contracts, no tiers, no surprises.
No long contracts. We keep your business the same way you keep your customers — by deserving it every single month.
Why owners join
7-Eleven, Circle K, and Parker's spend millions on loyalty apps, customer data, and automated marketing — that's how they pull your regulars, one visit at a time. The Southern Guild puts the same playbook behind your counter: loyalty, rewards, texts, win-backs, and review management, sized and priced for an independent store. The neighborhood feel stays yours. The machine becomes yours too.
Your customers live on their phones: rewards in their wallet app, offers by text, and Google reviews deciding where they shop. The Southern Guild puts your store in all three — no app to build, no website to manage, no software to learn. You keep running the store; we keep the store current.
No software company on earth visits its customers. We walk your store every month, photograph what your customers see, score it, and sit down with you to talk reviews, promotions, and what's next. You're not buying an app — you're gaining a partner whose only job is your store's growth.
The average c-store sale is $7.80. One extra customer per day is about $234 a month — nearly the entire cost of the platform. One flat price, $250 a month, everything included, posted publicly on our website. No tiers, no contracts, no surprises.
Every name and phone number collected belongs to you — not a franchise, not a tech platform. And when a regular starts to drift, the system catches it at 30 days and brings them back automatically. The relationships you've built stop walking out the door unnoticed.
Why "Guild"?
A guild is what independent craftspeople built when they needed the strength of a network without giving up their independence. That's the long-term vision: member stores that share a standard of quality, a "support local" identity, and — over time — perks and promotions that work across the whole Guild. The chains have scale. The Guild will too.
We're starting where we know every street and every store — coastal Georgia.
City by city, route by route — the same way trust is actually built.
Websites, local marketing, and more growth services for member stores are on the horizon.
The first visit is free, and it'll change how you see your own store.