Mon, Dec 12, 2022 . 4:57 AM
37:42
Owner: Jeremy Julian
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
restaurant, customers, product, online ordering, menu, people, loyalty, data, company, build, point, experience, technology, cios, unified, order, philosophy, business, par, started
SPEAKERS
Savneet (62%), Jeremy (38%), Intro (1%)
I
Intro
0:02
This is the restaurant technology guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better
JJ
Jeremy Julian
0:13
Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys. As always, we thank our listeners out there for their dedication to listening to the stuff that we put out on the airwaves. Today we are joined again by a second time guest. And I will say and I haven’t told him this, I didn’t tell him this pre show, but I got some of the best feedback about his and my first conversation. It was really really fun talking restaurant technology and, and part of it was was interesting because many of you guys know in my day job, we sell point of sale. And so the Our guest today is seven meat, who is the CEO of par technologies have meat gave a fantastic story of what what farming the industry where their software is gone. And, and we’ve got another really cool story. But I think most of the comment was like you have a competitor on the podcast. I’m like, Yeah, because it’s awesome. And it’s awesome to talk restaurant technology. And I truly do believe and I think he believes this as well as if the the restaurants are, are happy and can can continue to grow the restaurants, and do cool things with technology. It’s a win win for all of us. And so 70 Thanks for coming on. Again. For those that missed our last episode. Why don’t you give everybody a little primer on who you are, what par is what you get to do day in and day out at par. And then we’ll dig into our topic for today.
SS
Savneet Singh
1:30
Absolutely. So Par is a really company it was founded 55-56 years ago. Interestingly, as a defense contractor selling it work to the DOD. Our par stands for pattern analysis, recognition, and the company was founded basically on the idea that you could use data to help predict the future. So think of it as like 50 years ahead of his time, I always joke, no power was Palantir. Before Palantir is sort of luck would have it in 1978, really, at the request of one of the mothers of the founders of our part helped invent the modern standalone point of sale terminal. And they had sort of displayed it in their mother’s McDonald’s restaurant. And after lots of trials and tribulations. You know, just a couple years after they invented it, McDonald’s actually approved to be sold to McDonald’s. And then in 1982, McDonald’s at that time mandated that every store in the world had to switch to power systems. And so part really revolutionized the restaurant technology industry is truly the first restaurant technology company. And, and that success at McDonald’s led to growing, you know, leaps and bounds for many years as the leader of point of sale. And then I would say, you know, for the last, I call it five or six years and really the last three or four years part has gone through it’s sort of second transformation, where it transitioned from being historically a very hardware and services focused point of sale business, to one focused on software. And today, we operate across the restaurant industry point of sale software with a product called break a loyalty product called punch, which is the largest loyalty product in restaurants, Back Office product called Data Central. And then a fourth product which a newly acquired acquisition of ours called menu, which is an online ordering digital commerce player. And together, our hope is to bring these products together and deliver what we call the unified experience back to the restaurant where instead these all being disparate systems that you work really hard to constantly consolidate is actually one platform that gives control back to the restaurant tour.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
3:26
I love it, I love it. And I know we talked quite a bit in our first conversation about just kind of the transition from from, you know, hardware, you know, being your primary source of revenue to software, and kind of kind of a minute, it reminds me that goes back a little bit to the IBM days when they sold off all their hardware business to Lenovo, you know, many, many years ago, and it turned into a much more profitable company. And that you you alluded to it this, this episode will come out and you know, another panel, six, eight weeks, something like that, but but in the summer of 2022, you guys did by menu. Talk to me a little bit about what menu technology is, you know, you guys have been growing leaps and bounds on again, anybody that listen to the first episode had heard sent me talk about just the exponential growth that parb rank has had. And then just some of these other acquisitions they’ve made and how they’ve integrated it. But But why menu, what is menu? Why did you guys go out and acquire menu versus some of the other players that might be on the market? Talk to me a little bit about what menu is. And for those that are less familiar? Where did it come from its origins and why did parsing that this was a good strategic initiative to spend some capital on to to bring it into the fold.
SS
Savneet Singh
4:35
So let me start maybe with our why, and then I’ll go into sort of why menu and what they do. It’s a truly an amazing story. So, you know, when when I came to power, I didn’t come from the restaurant industry, you know, and so I had this really, you know, interesting interview where I got to just interview restaurant CIOs and CEOs and people in the restaurant industry in the tech restaurant technology industry and just kind of absorb a lot as a complete outsider. And one of the big options Asians I came away with was a, it’s really hard to be, quote unquote, just a point of sale business to restaurants. When a sale is a really hard product to get right, I always say, you know, try to find a restaurant company that likes their point of sale company, it’s pretty rare. And that’s, you know, I think comes from a flaw in the industry now so far in the companies. And that the point of sale system, unfortunately, is as to oftentimes be a lot more than just a point of sale system today, your point of sale system is effectively your point of sale system plus almost like your P System Plus, it’s your your, your the heartbeat of your restaurant tying your online ordering together and your loyalty and everything else together. And so he is an expert at expectation mismatch, which is points out coming to him selling your point Sale system, the restaurants like No, no, you’re selling me this entire experience. And I want to call you anytime anything else breaks, whether it’s your fault or not. And it was really funny to me, and I was like, gosh, this is kind of interesting. Nobody likes your point of sale system, this is really hard to get alone. The second observation was really it was also I think, pretty obvious, which was restaurant, technology was just exploding and it was exploding. You were seeing the startups get launched every day, you were seeing people becoming billionaires taking restaurant technology companies public is is hot space. But when I spend time with the CIOs that the actual customers of these restaurants, technology products, they weren’t happy. And when you sort of dig down, and I’m like, what, why aren’t you happy? You know, your industry is booming. You’re the CIO of a restaurant company and during digital transformation, you know, and I would say, don’t you have more more software? And the answer is yes. Don’t you have more bodies? The answer is yes. I say, don’t you as a CIO or restaurant chain, get more time with your board and your CEO, you know, now the CEOs care about what the IT departments doing. They never cared about this? And they’ll say, yeah, and then I’m like, so why are you less happy now than you were a few years ago? And the answer, and it really comes down to well, I spent all my time dealing with vendors and not focusing on the customer experience. And so this observation led us this idea that for us, for us to actually serve our customers, those CIOs, we need to build an experience and a platform for them to actually take control back of the restaurant. Because today, they’re not really spend their time envisioning a great guest experience. They’re trying to get all these technology pieces to fit together. And so that was a sort of underlying thesis. And the biggest point of frustration that we observed to solve that was the disconnect between off premise orders. And in store orders. restaurants were built for in store orders, you know, up until just a few years ago, you know, 9090 500% of orders came in in store, then all of a sudden, we had the emergence of UberEATS and DoorDash. Then we had the pandemic, which boosted mobile online, off premise dining, and restaurants weren’t equipped for this. And so having those be two different systems made it very hard to make the workflow through the kitchen, the delivery, that fulfillment, and your employee and customer experience consistent, it wasn’t unified. And so we started looking at part of how can we connect the off premise on premise into one system, such that an order anywhere is an order everywhere, and then you can then want a smart restaurant, you can determine, hey, I want to shut down my third party delivery companies right now, or I want to turn them up or I want to turn on online ordering or loyalty, whatever may be to run your restaurant more dynamically and have control. And so we started, you know, scouring the world looking for a digital ordering ecommerce online ordering company that could serve the enterprise, because our customers are enterprise restaurants. And there’s a massive distinction between enterprise and small business. And, you know, we almost gave up and we looked for two years trying to find one. And then we stumbled across this this little company called menu, and it was based in in Zurich, Switzerland. And the first time we saw the presentation, I remember one of my team, I’m like, There’s no way this is real, this has got to be there’s no way that a company that was founded by a 14 year old could build an enterprise software product that was so robust, that candidly had more functionality than any company we’d seen. And we literally had personally met over 100 Different companies across the world, from the big ones to the smaller ones. And I’m like, there’s just can’t be sure this guy’s 14 years old, like it or whatever. He’s older now, but like, how is it possible and so we started getting demos, we start seeing the product, and every opportunity we saw, they had already built. Every weakness we saw with the incumbents that sort of dominate the industry today, they had built around and it was completely modern, it was completely was a true enterprise products. It wasn’t like a bunch of, you know, spaghetti code, it was actually built in a clean and configurable way. And most importantly, it aligned to position, which is the menu team also saw that the restaurants were being split apart by off premise and on premise. And so our vision is really aligned. And we came together and it’s you know, we took a long time to get into them. And, and convince our team but you know, we think we found the best product that you know, in particular, solves all the off premise needs of a customer kiosk, online ordering mobile, loyalty, CRM, all on the same platform with the same menu everywhere. And most importantly, it’s configurable. You can build it in your own experience as opposed to having to trust the vendor to control that experience.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
9:46
That’s, that’s really cool. I had I mean, I know you gave me a little bit of education pre pre show because quite frankly, I think you would agree you guys went through hundreds of them as you said, there’s not a lot of people that are really sure Being the space domestically here in the States? I guess, tell me a little bit more, how do you how do you find your way to Switzerland? Cuz I mean, I haven’t read your most latest, you know, recent 10k. But I know the majority of parts business is domestic and, and it has been domestic you guys are a domestic, you know, US based company. And so with that, give me the story of how you find some and and why would he write an enterprise class software in Switzerland, where quite frankly, I’ve been to Europe a few times, there’s not a lot of huge chains other than, you know, Western based chains, for the most part in much of Europe. And so do you have any insights on that, and kind of what brought you that route? Yeah.
SS
Savneet Singh
10:41
So you know, I think we are product obsessed. And when I say product obsessed, it’s just a derivative of being customer obsessed, we want great products, and we want our customers to kind of control their destiny, one of the great challenges of restaurant technology, and I’m sure you know, is that, you know, if you talk to Western technology companies, they hate their customers, and you talk to the customers, vendors, and I’m like, you can’t build success that way. And so we really say the best way to solve a customer’s problem is to have great products, you can have the best service in the world. But if your product sucks, you’re doing your customer disservice. And vice versa. You know, if you have a great product or your service sucks, you can’t do your customers a disservice. But you can still make them operate. And so we started to think about, we just started looking at product, we met so many online order companies where we love the team’s great human beings, great character, but we’re like, man, like, we’re gonna take that product, and we’re gonna have to rebuild it, or we’re going to have to build so much more functionality. And do we have the bandwidth time and ability to do that while while trying to build the rest of what we’re doing? And so we ended up there because we were just product obsessed. We didn’t care so much about who are your investors? What were your story, we said, Let us show us the product, get it, let’s get underneath the product, let us see the back end. And if it met our needs, we will be getting pressed. And so we can’t really wasn’t whether they’re in Europe or you know, Australia or, you know, India, it was this product, great. And for us, the product was great. And so that sort of product led nature led us stumble in Switzerland. And you know, I think if you talk to Carl and Marlon the founders business, their original idea was, you know, a marketplace of restaurants. And then they started spending time with their customers. I think this is such a big reason why they’re so successful. Early on, they started listening to their customers and listening to their customers needs. And then they built a product that way, they didn’t sort of come at it and say, let me tell you what you need. That elicit they wasn’t very deeply. And so menu sort of came out of their conversations with their own customers about what they needed to solve their problems. And I think it’s a little bit about luck, little happenstance. But also I think about sophistication of the way the product was built, the enterprise adopted it first, they saw it and they said, Gosh, this is everything I need. And wish I had today, when we demo menu for our customers, they look at and they’re like, how did you crawl into my brain to figure out exactly what I wanted, you know, what online ordering, like I have it today, but I want it to be configurable, I want it to be more cost effective. And I want it to be unified, I want the menu on my online ordering system to be the same menu I have over there and over there and over there, I want my website to be the same experience from when you click my landing page all the way to the end, I want my mobile app experience to be exactly the same as my website exactly be the same experience as when you walk into my store. And so they’ve figured out all of that, and it doesn’t really connect with their customers. And so, you know, we realized early on that the product was better, we don’t realize the culture was just an amazing young, fun, hip culture that would add loss to our culture. And you know, every time we do an acquisition, we always say, you know, oftentimes when you buy a company, you the acquirer expect it to be the one that delivers all the value. And in our experience, it’s always been a 5050 bridge, I think we’ve had value but more often than not, when when we acquire a company, they change us more than we change that. And, and we saw the culture, we saw the team and said, Gosh, you know, how great would it be for them to influence what we’re doing?
JJ
Jeremy Julian
13:49
I love that. I love that. So let’s, let’s take that a little bit deeper, I guess. You guys acquired them, it’s been, I don’t know, eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, you probably we’re talking about a month or four weeks, so four weeks at the time of recording. So it’s not been a super long deal. Talk to me a little bit about what that journey looks like. He talked about some of the the other the other acquisitions and I know people that were on those teams that got acquired, and it’s been interesting conversations from both sides, because I’ve talked to you about it. And I think it’s I think it’s great to hear not only your philosophy, but kind of what it is that you want to do with these these brands. Because they do have a culture of them of their own, they’ve got some really cool technology or you wouldn’t have spent the money on them. You want to take what’s best from what they have, and some of the stuff that might be some opportunities for them, you know, immaturity or those kinds of things. You’ve got to gotta figure out how to how to circumvent that for your clients. Because at the end of the day, to your point your product centric, you’re you know, you want to make sure that the clients are getting what they need. Tell me a little bit about what that journey has been like the for the last four weeks and and really what do you see the next six months, the next year? Because the acquisition is now out the press release is out but clients are gonna have to start seeing this product So they’re to your point, they’re excited. You know, talk to me a little bit about what you think that journey is gonna look like, and what can clients expect that are already on your platform? How does that how does that work?
SS
Savneet Singh
15:11
We first started on until the m&a and then and then to the customers, right? So I think every action we do we learn, we get better. And, you know, I think our biggest advice anyone who asks us what to do is that, you know, we sort of go in there, and we’re pretty honest upfront of what’s going to change and, and what’s not. I think a lot of people, when they do m&a, they go to the acquirer like, Hey, don’t worry, nothing’s gonna change, we’re gonna, it’s just, it’s just a lie, it’s not because you’re trying to be, you just don’t realize that, you know, you can’t create a business by having, you know, an island and a bunch of different islands, you know, in the end, you have to get on the same page and say, your comp systems have to be the same, your costs are the same. And that takes years of work, right? It’s not something you can have. Because, you know, these are very special. You know, we did our first acquisition, I remember a small company, unique culture, but one that was very isolated and took us forever to kind of bring that in. We did you know, later, we acquired punch, and it went a lot faster, because we learned a lot from that mistake. And now from punch, we learned a lot of how to get from our mistakes there and how to make it better. And so we’ve got an incredibly tight process. I think if you’re asked to mend your team, they’re sort of shocked literally how detail we are from like, here’s how the slack is going to connect to, you know, here’s the go to market playbook. And so it’s incredibly programmatic at par, nothing is left to chance. And that’s literally everything from, here’s a guy who’s going to be doing the demos for the first 15 customers, we identified two, here’s the way the T shirts gonna look when it arrives in the office that day, we announced the acquisition, it’s really, really thorough. We got there because of our learnings from our wins and our mistakes early on. And remember, when we first started on our, I always say, our m&a roadmap, we were like, you know, our software revenues were like $10 million, or 15, we don’t really know what we’re doing. You know, now, I think we’re really good at it. And so we feel really excited by it. And again, we’ve been we open I, you know what, with open eyes, we told them anything, hey, here’s what’s gonna stick, here’s what’s not. And here’s why you should be excited. And if it’s exciting for you, we’d love for you to stay and grow. As far as bringing it to our customers. You know, it’s been funny, we weren’t, we only launched it three or four weeks, or announced it three or four weeks ago, but the amount of inbound has been surprising, you know, generally in enterprise software, right, it’s a long sales cycle, you gotta go out there and convince them, the investment significant and again, validating to the our rationale to getting into the business. And so we’re going out, we’re demoing the product, showing what made it so special to us, we’re building out the support organization, and, and we’re going to leverage our power sales team, our broader sales team to bring their product to market, and then leverage the menu team for specifics around the product. And like I said, one of the coolest parts was probably because it’s incredibly scalable, it’s ready. It’s not something you gotta like, you know, it’s not that you have to wait for something to happen on the corner. And so we’re, we’re, we’re fully enabled to sell the United States the product ready to go. And we’ve got our first few customers in demos, and we’ve got a couple of customers already signed up.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
17:53
I love it. I love it. So you said it earlier. But I want to go back to something we talked about early in the conversation. And I think it’s some I think it’s something that that a lot of these enterprise software companies, because they do they spend a lot of time and energy and money to get the tools to work together and to work together well. So whether they’re on a competitor to menu or competitor to brankin, and they want to move over, it takes a lot of time to go through those hoops to to solve that problem. The other thing that happens is people in the enterprise space that might have a solution rolled out, get fearful when a point of sale company buys loyalty company, when a company buys a, you know, online ordering company, when an online ordering company buys the point of sale company, or all of these acquisitions that are happening, you said it earlier that your philosophy has been to deliver the best solution for the for the restaurant brand. For those customers that are either on a competitor of menu, and on rank, what does that look like and then the flip that of the other way around that says there on one of the power products and want to change out the point of sale solution underneath of it talks about a little bit about kind of all all of what that looks like within power, your philosophy, the team’s philosophy, senior leadership philosophy on that, because I know with the amount of m&a There’s a lot of uncertainty for people, if they’ve got an investment in some of their platforms that are out there. And they might get scared that says, Oh, poor about these guys up, they you know, they use their balance sheet to go go buy up this this company and now I’m screwed and I gotta go spend more money to get the same product or get a lesser product and those kind of things. But I know that’s not your philosophy. He alluded to it earlier. No, that was a long way to say talk to me a little bit about not just your guys’s strategy, but where do you think this goes for those end users?
SS
Savneet Singh
19:36
So first of all, we will always be open if the DNA in the way par was not to do a brick was founded punch was founded and then you will never sort of stop someone else’s growth and you know, part of this is watching those around us that have been inquisitive and seeing how extractive they become in that that desire and the reason why is not just out of hey, we want to be nice guys and we’re naive all these guys are better business folks. It’s also because we think it’s good business in the end, you know, if your product, they’re choosing your product, because you’re open, you’re still gonna win more business. And so we continue, you know, the amount of integrations we’ve added to par, since we’ve acquired punch, as an example, has accelerated tremendously. It’s not like we stopped it, we still support all the products that compete with us. And, and added stuff that’s adjacent to us. So we’re completely open, we will never screw over a customer by saying, Oh, you gotta use our thing. We don’t want that now. We believe that together is better in and we will make that pitch to the customer. But that’s the customer’s decision. And if they say, Hey, I want to use spring, but I got, you know, I want to use something else for online ordering. It’s not, it’s not, we’re not going to stop them from doing that. But we will, of course, say, hey, like, this is why we think this is really special and unique. And they’ve got to make that but we trust our customers, right, the best decision for themselves. And if it involves us going out the way we’ll get out the way.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
21:00
I love that, I love that. And again, I’m I’m saying it for our listeners, because I hear it from our customers, I’m sure you hear from from customers, because quite frankly, a lot of people use that same playbook that says, Oh, we acquired you, nothing’s gonna change, we’re gonna continue to do the support for all of these brands that we’ve always done. And then six months down the road, they go, Yeah, we like we’re doing something else, or they don’t tell you and they just stop returning your phone calls. And so for all of those enterprise brands out there that you and I both talked to on a regular basis, I I’d rather have them hear it from your mouth, because that’s kind of your guys’s philosophy, and I want people to understand that.
SS
Savneet Singh
21:32
Absolutely. And I appreciate you asking it. Yeah.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
21:35
So, um, and in fairness, I did tell him I was gonna ask that question before. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a surprise. But in general, I’m gonna go down the other path that you were going down, which is kind of this Unified Commerce. How do you define how’s your team define Unified Commerce, I use the Amazon effect, because I think a lot of people have been spoiled by Amazon and the amount of money they invest in the experience that they deliver in retail, and they want that same impact from a restaurant, they want that same impact from a restaurant that they go too often, you and I both have had the experiences. And we talked about on our last call, and we’ll talk more about it is this brand that you go to every every week, and back in the day that the host would know who you are, would know that you’d like to sit here. But now we’ve got the data to be able to do that same thing digitally. But people aren’t using the data in this Unified Commerce way to understand I’m ordering online, I’m ordering in store I’m ordering. You know, for business, I’m ordering for personal talk to me a little bit about what your guys’s philosophy on Unified Commerce is. And then it’ll really drive into why menu is so critical to that strategy.
SS
Savneet Singh
22:42
Absolutely. So, so Unified Commerce is essentially the concept that you should be able to place an order anywhere through any channel and it run through the same process and systems, such that your restaurant can then manage that order in the most efficient way possible. And that includes everything from slotting your order throttling of your orders, but also the fulfillment of that order. And the reason why we think this is so powerful is that I think restaurants will go the way of retail in that the amount of channels to order from is only going to expand. You know, today, if you think about how many places you can place you can place an order from a restaurant is dramatically different than five years ago, you know, five years ago, six years ago, people forget, you know, I believe McDonald’s launched their mobile app in like 2021 You know, it this is this is a very new thing for restaurants. You know, five years ago you basically wait order from restaurant was you walked up to the restaurant or went to the drive thru, you know, fast forward now you’ve got UberEATS DoorDash so and so forth. You’ve got pretty much every large restaurants got a mobile app that you can order from you got online ordering catering, and so the number of channels has expanded tremendously. And that is only going to continue you know, pretty soon we’ll be ordering on you know, tick tock live commerce. We’ll be working on Instagram, Siri, Alexa, all of these are new channels that we’ll be placing orders at a restaurant. And you don’t want each one of those to be a point to point integration, which is like imagine the restaurant changing like okay, now I gotta build an integration at tick tock live commerce. And now I gotta build one. No, it’s got to be completely the same exact system the same exact menu so that you can manage the restaurant effectively. You know, one of the great sort of aha moments I think for people when I talk to them they’re not in the rest of industry it’s just realizing how many different menus restaurants keep you know, they’ve got a restaurant they’ve got a menu for in store orders, they’ve got a different menu for loyalty a different menu for online ordering different menu for raising DoorDash at a different menu for 10 different locations, they have an est, plus LTO is plus everything else. And that’s super complicated when those are all manual processes. And so imagine that it’ll be one menu one beautiful system once record of truth. And so Unified Commerce and and unified experience really is probably better word is driven on the belief that we can unify all orders into one system, the data integrity is so tight that the restaurant can actually manage your business effectively, you know, how much labor do I need? How much food do I need? But also can I fulfill your order? Like I would love for a restaurant to actually give me a real estimate of how long my order is going to take. And so I can determine That’s the right thing for me at that time. And so that’s really what it is a sort of unified experience, because all we know is that the noun of entry into the store is just going to explode from where it is today. You know, I suspect in a very short order, you know, you’ll be able to order from the metaverse and have it in this universe, you know, you’ll say, you know, and how does that flow through what systems that flow through? How does that not screw up all the restaurants right today, because the restaurant that we all love, and cherish, it wasn’t built for this world, right? It was, you know, that form factor wasn’t meant to deliver, such as so many off premise channels. And so we’ve got to unify that experience such that you can still leverage that form factor, to have an amazing in store experience, and you don’t lose what you’re great at, but also deliver great experiences. off premise.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
25:42
I love that. So one of the big challenges that I know a lot of people struggle with, and I’d love to understand where you guys are going with that is is understanding who the customer is digitally, is relatively easily easy. You know, whether they’re ordering on a mobile app, whether they’re ordering on a on a website, you’re getting some piece of data, I’m getting your email address, I’m getting your phone number, I’m getting something that identifies you with that transaction, when we when that translates to in person, or that translates to third party where it’s coming in through another mechanism, whether that be a kiosk or that’d be from you know, from, you know, from outside the store, into the store, and in person, identifying seven, eight, at that time is harder than doing it digitally. And then you guys now have this loyalty solution. And I know you guys have got some pretty unique things there. Talk to me a little bit about that. Because I think, again, everybody goes to the places where they feel heard that man, it’s gotta have good food, it’s gotta have a good experience, but you feel good when you walk in. And they always have needs, how’s it going, when you walk into that brand and go pick up you know, pick up a pizza, or whatever, it’s a different conversation than if they don’t know who you are, and that you spend $10,000 a month to cater the office every week. There, it’s a different experience. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys identify that in person guests, because that’s probably the biggest conversation piece that I have with our customers is how do I how do I how do I unify that transaction with a customer.
SS
Savneet Singh
27:03
So I’m going to take a look at where I think it should go. So you know, today, most restaurants have moved big restaurants have some form of loyalty. And if they don’t, they’re they’re running to get it. It’s very clear, you know, as most demonstrated by Starbucks, and Chipotle, if you don’t have a really great loyalty program, you’re leaving lots of money on the table, lots of loyalty and lots of repeat ordering on the table. And this is going to sort of continue to grow for a long time, the judges and everybody signs up for a little tap. And so and so if you are coming into a store, what store and we as technologists need to come to is figuring out how do I make you so want to use that app to place that order or connect that device that you’re getting value, and I’m getting value. And I think that’s actually the hurdle to climb, which is in the way that I think it should work is that today, if I’ve got a loyalty app, and you have a loyalty from the same restaurant, we pretty much had the exact same experience, we probably get close to the same amount of coupons maybe a little different. But real loyalty is not sort of saying everybody get the same experience on the loyalty app, right? When you go to a I don’t know, if you go to a hotel that you go to regularly, they probably know your you know, you want the Diet Coke, and whatever. It’s customized to you. Whereas like in retail restaurant loyalty, loyalty just means that like, everybody gets the same discount, or everyone gets an abortion, in reality, so be very customized to what I’m looking for what I want. And so when I go to a restaurant, you know, that loyalty app should be geared to like, optimize experience for me and my kids, because my kids are the focus of the restaurant meal, right? Whereas someone else should be focused on something else. And so I think we’re just at the very inception of loyalty can mean in the restaurant. And what I mean by that is that restaurant needs to start thinking about that, that LTV of not a cohort of customers, but that individual human beings, and with, again, with data integrity with this data being point, you know, completely down to individuals, and you should be able to deliver that and such to answer your question, then it’s very easy to go into in store and say, Hey, I wanted to read it, you know, no, it’s me whether it’s, you know, I turn my mobile app on, and it’s near field communications, whether it’s scanning something, and they’ll know it’s you, and they can provide you that experience. But today, like, unless I’m getting value for letting you know who I am, why would I want you to know who I am?
JJ
Jeremy Julian
29:05
Yep. Yeah. And it’s funny. I remember this was a year a number of years ago, I checked into the Broadmoor hotel, and, you know, the Broadmoor and if you’ve never been at the Broadmoor, it’s a gorgeous hotel in Colorado. And I, you know, you go through the security gate, and they check your license and they know who you are, and then they radio to the guy at the front desk. So when I walked up, it was, you know, welcome to our resort, Jeremie. You know, how’s it going, I see that you’ve come these three times. They were able to provide this probably eight or nine years ago, they were able to provide that same guest experience through, you know, through some some work that they had done and if you if you read her Schultz book, he talks a little bit about how the Ritz Carlton does something similar. I can see a day where the restaurant sees have neat walking in and not just because they recognize him, but because the technology told him 70 Just walked in with his kids. He’s gonna get a different offer. technologically than another place. So I love that philosophy. And I wholeheartedly agree with it. Again, I call it the Amazon effects because I think we experienced it with Amazon. When I log into my Amazon app, it looks very different than my wife’s log into the Amazon app. And I think we all are starting to get to that point, you know, anybody that does a browser without the browsers, the web without any cookies installed, like, it’s like that what happened to this experience, this is just a weird experience. But for whatever reason, to your point, restaurants historically, because it is so mature at this point, have gone down that route to to treat the online guests differently than the in store guests differently than the loyalty guests. Because it’s not unified. And I love that you guys have got that philosophy. I’m going to put you on the spot to say where I mean, so that’s really where it’s going. How is the data that’s in this going to play into the seven, eight? I think we’re I mean, you know, you hear the studies that say we’re generating in a day what we used to generate an A in, you know, a year worth of data, but calling through that data and actually getting it to actionable places, how do we do that effectively, to ultimately change the guests experience, because that’s really where we need to get it to, is that guest that walks in with his family on a Friday night, you know, we need his experience to be better, because of the data that we’re capturing. Talk to me a little bit about, about how you guys felt philosophically, you’re going to do that through menu and through punching through brink, and, and all of the things that you guys are doing, because I do see it as an opportunity, you know, that you can sit and pontificate. And I think it’s really, really key where you guys are going with it.
SS
Savneet Singh
31:32
So, you know, I think the biggest part about data in the restaurant is actually not getting data that you know, as you suggested, there’s probably too much data, I think about is, you know, he did give us His word, but it’s unifying that data. You know, today, you know, when you think about all the products that a restaurant has it they’re collecting data from the data is not consistent, the store identifier might be different. The the menu codes might be different. The menus are different, as we just talked about, the customer reference number can be different. And so I think it starts with first started saying like, what, what is it that matters? How do we unify that data and have one source of the truth and as you know, as a point of sale company, that generally ends up coming down to the point of sale companies like alright, that’s that’s the, that’s the system of truth. But that’s too reductive, right? It needs to be sorted, that I can pull up that data from any of my systems, I don’t need to go reconcile and make sure it works. You probably see this most egregiously in payments data, right? I mean, it’s crazy how that data isn’t always aligned towards the point Sale system, even though they’re coming from the same two damn systems. And so, you know, I think that the key is first getting integrity across your data such that you can actually do something with it. And then I think, you know, my advice to brands is actually not to get caught up in the 1000s of different ways you can cut the data, but also to figure out what like, what’s the 8020 What what’s gonna move, move the needle, and then work around the edges. And I think in every business, it always ends up being, there’s a, you know, two 510 20, things that matter. And then the rest are things you should still know and track. But they shouldn’t, they won’t be nearly as strategic. And so my advice is first get to data integrity. And in second figure, the fewer things that really matter, obsess over those, and then don’t, don’t get caught, you know, endlessly searching for the next next set of analysis, because it won’t really change much.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
33:11
I love that. I love that philosophy. And I and I agree with it. And I think that too many people get tied up into the into that and don’t necessarily make it actionable. Because at the end of the day, the data is only as good as you can put it in the hands of the users to do something with it and make the guests experience better. What did we miss? What did we miss? In our conversations? I think we’ve we’ve kind of this is our second conversation. I you know, I chat about it before, it’s like I feel like we could sit and talk for hours about the way that the industry is going and I love some of your insights. What did we miss about kind of parse philosophy and kind of where you guys are going? Because, you know, I think that you guys have got a lot to offer to those that are interested in, in your in your menu technology, some of your some of the other pieces that are out there? What did we miss?
SS
Savneet Singh
33:57
You know, I think the only thing we really missed is a little bit of who we are, you know, par is a unique company. And you know, it’s a company that’s got this amazing history of, you know, 50 plus years in the industry, but it’s also a combination of a lot of exciting, young, motivated, bright people coming together to want to build something together. You know, none of us had to work at par, we came together because we wanted to build something special and different. And, you know, while it’s been a crazy Road, we’ve grown a lot, you know, we also always recognize how little we actually know. And so, you know, par is a story of the people more than is the story of the business. And so, you know, I think it’s always important to talk about, you know, that aspect of us, which is we obsess over the human beings that work apart. And I think, you know, whatever our customers may think of us the one thing I’m pretty sure almost every single one of them would say to you is every year part gets better and better. You know, even if I think they’re a c plus, they’re coming from an F and we take just you know you got to stumble for work. And we really believe in that. And so we’re incredibly proud of our culture, the people, and, and the openness around the people that work at heart. And so not everyone’s a fit, and we’re not a fit for everybody. But I think it’s that underlying ambition and all of us to want to build something special that’s led to the outcome we have, and will continue to drive us going forward. Because in the end, we can build or buy the best products, but it’s these human beings that connected together and into us, we’re all connected by the same vision of delivering Unified Commerce along at the core values apart.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
35:30
I love it. I love it. And I have seen since you’ve taken over the that, that, you know, quite frankly, Park gets better every day. And as a competitor apart from time to time, it’s hard. It’s hard to compete, because you guys do a great job of taking care of customers. And there’s a lot of people that are that are huge raving fans of what you guys do and kind of where you guys have gone. So congratulations on that. It’s been a little bit since we talked to talk last on the podcast, but but I do privately celebrate your success. I’m going to be careful not to do it too much publicly, because because then people might think that you know, I want to go I want to go drink the parkway. But no, it’s been fun to watch your journey over the last couple of years.
SS
Savneet Singh
36:03
Well, I appreciate you saying that. It means a lot, obviously coming from from you guys. And we have immense respect for what you guys have built and obviously the podcast.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
36:10
Well, I appreciate you being on. How would people get in touch with the sales team? How would people get in touch to learn more about what you guys are doing a menu, what you guys are doing a punch, what you guys are doing was pay what you guys are doing, which is brink? You know, if they want to talk with with your team? What’s your go to market strategy? What would the next steps look like? You know, no geographically different things. And
SS
Savneet Singh
36:30
so if you want to go to our website and Partek we’ve got a form there. If you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I you know, everyone will tell you. The one thing I’m great at is I get back to you. So message me on LinkedIn, Instagram, you text, we’ll we’ll find a way back to the right person.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
36:47
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you very much again, for being on the show. I am a fan of what you guys have done. And it’s been fun to talk to customers that are on your guys’s platform and watch all of the innovations that you guys have done in so exciting there. For our listeners, guys, we know that you guys have got lots and lots and lots of choices of who you guys can listen to and we appreciate you guys spending time with us. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the newsletter once a month we send you an email with everything that we talked about for the month. While you’re online, give us a rating on your favorite podcast player because it helps others find the podcast. So thank you for your time and to our listeners. Make it a great day.
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