Tim McLaughlin

00:00So I'm going to start off and tell you guys that we use Robin's Insurance Company at both of our restaurants, the Green Hills Grill and Maribor, because they specialize in restaurants. It's so important. I'm telling you, if you buy insurance in anywhere that you buy insurance, it's so important that you're buying the right type of insurance. And you know, I don't think people tell you that. They just sell insurance for what the cheapest is. But you know, sometimes you're paying the cheapest for insurance you don't need. So that is why Robin's Insurance specializes in restaurants. They identify exactly the type of insurance that you're going to need to run your business so that you can sleep sound at night. And that's super duper important, y'all. So I would like for you, if you're curious about this, you want to learn more, give Matthew Clements a call. His number is 863-409-9372. Or you can shoot him an email at mclements. That's m-c-l-e-m-e-n-t-s at robinsins.com.

01:04Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now, here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, powered by Gordon Food Service. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host. Yes, you heard that correctly. Powered by Gordon Food Service. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a title sponsor, and I couldn't be more excited to talk about Gordon Food Service. These guys have been amazing. And I will tell you, I'll tell you a little backstory about Gordon Food Service because this is fun. So I used to be a district sales manager for U.S. Foods. And when I first came into Mayor Bowl, they were using Gordon Food Service.

02:05I didn't know a lot about Gordon Food Service, honestly. They were just another one of the broadliners. And as we continued to work, we did an RFP, which they won. And I learned about them. And I went to their facility and interviewed their CEO on the show, which is really amazing. But they have done nothing but live their core values. They're just amazing. They call them their cornerstone values. But you can tell that when they live and work by what they do. And I couldn't be more excited to partner with them. And I'll tell you how this came about. I do RFPs for restaurants. So I come in and I will help you. I negotiate deals through broadliners because I speak that language. And it's a fun thing to do to be able to help restaurants out, help them succeed. Well, GFS tended to win most of them because they understood the process and they wanted to partner with people. And that was kind of their main goal. So we did this a few times and they won every time. And finally, they came to me and they said, hey, look, we love to be a part of what you're doing at the podcast.

03:09We think it's great. You're supporting local and we just we just want to be a part of it. We want to be a part of what you're doing. And we'd love to be able to offer your listeners a really like a much better deal. And I said that would be amazing. So we're starting the National Restaurant Alliance and they're a company that wants to come on and they're going to help help you help you succeed. They're going to offer you the best possible program. You got to tell them that you heard on Nashville Restaurant Radio that you're a member of the Nashville Restaurant Alliance, which is coming soon. I still have a lot of details to work out. But memberships are going to be available very, very soon. And it's going to be a lot of fun. And we're going to take the city over going to continue to help you guys make money. Introduce you to new technology. My goal here is, you know, I ask myself, what can I do to help this industry stay? You know, the locally owned and operated industries stay relevant. How do we keep everybody there? And that's kind of the genesis behind the Nashville Restaurant Alliance. It's taking some great companies, bringing them together and negotiating based upon volume, right?

04:12Well, let's get you the best deal possible. And that's what GFS wants to do. They said we're part of it. We want to do that, man. That sounds awesome. So they have come on as a title sponsor. So you're going to hear me say Nashville Restaurant Radio powered by Gordon Food Service because they are the ones who are making this thing go and I'm super excited about it. They're also going to be the sponsor of our final thought. So if you're on the show at the end of the show, I ask every guest to take us out with the 60 second, whatever long you want to do, just the final thought. And so that's now going to be the Gordon Food Service final thought. And we're going to learn a lot about what they do, how they do it. And I couldn't be more excited to partner with a company that cares as much as I do. So we completely align on our core values and everything that we're doing. So there it is. There's my whole story, Gordon Food Service. Today is Memorial Day. And this is a brand new episode coming out today with Tim McLaughlin. And Tim is the CEO of a company called GoTab. And GoTab is well, you're going to learn about him today. And this is I kind of feel like this episode feels a little bit like an infomercial because I'm like, and tell me about this.

05:18But I really I love technology and how it changes the game out there. And if you're if you're kind of a slow adopter, like I don't need all that technology. Think about the way you were when you first started talking about smartphones. I mean, the restaurant technology that's out there right now is unbelievable in how it can help you stay profitable. And this is one of those systems that absolutely does that. And if you are somebody who wants to get rid of using Uber Eats or DoorDash, feel free to message me because I have a plan. I'm putting together a plan right now to help you start your very own delivery. It's going to be plug and play. And it's not going to cost I'm not going to charge anything, but it will be something that will be really cool through a few different sponsors. But GoTab is going to be part of that. Listen up, because you don't have to buy a bunch of hardware, guys, for this GoTab thing. It's pretty amazing. And if you go to gotab.io forward slash en forward slash nrr, that is my landing page. And if you go there and you start searching, you look up GoTab, set up a demo.

06:19I think there's a bunch of things you're going to absolutely love about it. So with that being said, we're going to go ahead and jump in right now. Happy Memorial Day. And remember, this is a day where we celebrate those who went and fought and paid the ultimate sacrifice. And hats off to you and all of the families who have loved ones who they celebrate today. Freedom isn't free, y'all. And these people have gone and paid the ultimate price. So happy Memorial Day. Let's jump in with Tim McLaughlin. Super excited today to welcome Tim McLaughlin. He is the CEO of GoTab. Welcome to Nashville Radio, Tim. Thanks for having me, Brendan. It's wonderful to be here. I'm excited to have you here, fresh off of NRA last week. How was that? It was good.

07:20That's a crazy show. I don't even know if they actually have a conference part, but the expo floor is ridiculous. You can wander around and eat hot dog bites and food that you probably should have never eaten, which I did a couple of times. Yeah, that's the thing. It's really remarkable as well. That's amazing. You said that we were getting started here and you said you're getting over your COVID cough. Oh, yeah. You're just getting over COVID? Well, prior to NRA, which I had a one-week break between conferences, but I did four conferences in four weeks. And as would be predicted, going to four conferences in four states, I got COVID. Yeah. And I fully knew that was going to happen. I just was fine and resigned to that. Luckily, it was the last day of the last conference. So I was cool. I was like, great, got all that wrapped up, then got relegated to my basement by my family, binge-watched Netflix until I was allowed out of the torture chamber. And now I have the perpetual COVID cough.

08:22The other day, I was here in the studio and I felt like this tickle in my throat and I was really tired and I was just exhausted. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to go home and take a nap. I don't know how to do that, but I'm going to try and go home and take a nap. And on the way home, I started having these delusions of grandeur that I was going to go home, take a COVID test. I was going to be positive for COVID and I was going to get to take five days alone. I was like, I don't have to hide myself in the bonus room and maybe I'll watch Breaking Bad again. But I had these thoughts of maybe it's COVID. I have yet to get COVID. So maybe it's COVID and I'll get a break. I'll just lay down for five days and it's okay. I'm not going to feel guilty. So what did you watch? I will admit, I felt very much how you're describing. I was in the basement and no one loves, you know, sci-fi quite as much as I do in my family. And so I watched the like last four seasons of Expanse basically two days in a row. So it was great. I loved it.

09:22And you know what? It's like you're like arrested and I don't feel guilty about it. Like I'm like, there's 10 things I could be doing right now, but I'm going to watch sci-fi. Like I literally can't go do anything right now. So I'm going to watch sci-fi. That's exactly how I felt because otherwise I would feel guilty laying on the couch watching sci-fi for you know, 24 hours in a row. Did you know that I read somewhere that like most men like that when they get their vasectomies, like they schedule it for the day that March Madness starts. Like that's the busiest day of all urologists like to do vasectomies. Like I got to sit on the couch for two days. I got 32 basketball games to watch. Right. I know people have done that exact thing. Yeah, I didn't know it was a thing. Kind of cool. You have to wonder though. I mean, that's like it's got to be like tax day for you know, those businesses, you know, accountants work as far as I can tell. They work basically a week up to tax day. And then they all go on vacation until next year, right? And so the same with the vasectomies. At some point they should just like hire help.

10:24Like hey dude, can you come do this? This is a busy day, yeah. I think you just have like the big tents in the parking lot. So they did for COVID, you just have people roll in and so you said something starting off. You said, you know, it's funny my name Tim McLaughlin CEO on the scrolling tab down there. What were you going to say? So I had a funny story. I was an advisor to a tech company that's in like the security management space called Divvy Cloud. And because I was their only advisor, like an early investor, somehow they were getting news coverage on NBC or something like that. And they're interviewing Brian Johnson, who's the CEO, who's clearly got a very generic name. The lead singer of ACDC. Oh, well, there's probably a lot of Brian Johnson. So Brian Johnson is the CEO of Divvy Cloud. They got acquired for a lot of money. Anyway, when he was being interviewed on national or regional news, they did bad research and typed CEO Divvy Cloud into Google.

11:25Grab my name, because that's what Google thought the CEO was, because I happen to be on their website. And then on the news while he's being interviewed, it says Tim McLaughlin CEO Divvy Cloud. So forever, like whenever I'd see his company, like, hey, it's the CEO, you know, they would poke fun at him because, you know, when he finally got the news coverage right before he sold, my name was on the screen the whole time. That's so funny. Where are you located right now? Where are you right now? And if you're not, you're listening to this, you can't see it. You can go to YouTube and you can watch this. But you're in a beautiful setting. It's very green where you are. Thank you. I live in Deanna, Virginia, which is basically Tyson's Corner. If you know the DC area, so the DC area, we have, you know, our traffic and we have our beltway and I'm basically nine o'clock on the beltway for DC, which puts me in the state of Virginia. What do we have going on behind you? Is that like a chicken? Is that like a house? What is that back there?

12:25What is a chicken coop? Is it a chicken coop? That's nice. The left side is the chicken coop, the right side is a greenhouse and then there's a garden around it. So yeah. Is that yours? That's my suburban backyard that I have fruit trees and all kinds of vegetables and fruit and then some failing lemon and lime and pomegranate trees in the greenhouse. And I think I have some other weird things. And then there's chickens that wander around and occasionally get eaten by a fox if we don't keep the foxes at bay, but mostly they don't. How do you keep foxes at bay? It's like a BB gun. You just like it's funny. You know that whole sort of like awesome thing where you learn about like poly face farms and how they let the don't know if you're if you're a food nerd, you know who poly face farms is they're like, you know, sort of the super sustainable farm. They happen to be in Virginia and they drive their chickens around behind a tractor like every couple days and they get a new pasture area and they get to wander. It's super, you know, awesome.

13:28Everything you imagine a farm should be but really isn't. We tried that the foxes basically are much more clever than you ever had any idea and they would eat all her chickens. So now we keep them in the chicken jail aka coop so that they don't get murdered because like a fox fox will take out 12 chickens and you would not believe how fast. Wow. So yeah, I mean they actually it's funny in DC. The zoo just had 25 flamingos killed by a fox. No kidding. They're like lightning man. They they're so smart. It's amazing watching. I mean we actually caught them working. They were they had one on one side. They would scare the chickens to the wall and then they grab them through the fence. They actually managed to rip off one of the wings of our chicken doing that exactly that like velociraptors. Yeah, they're they're hunting. Yeah, well, I'm sure that we could talk about the background scene and all the stuff going on, but you are the CEO of go tab and you are a new sponsor to the show and I met you in Phoenix and one of those rapid succession events that you were at and I have to say I was somewhat defensive when I met you.

14:44I'm walking through and you know as a as a consumer, you know as an operator you're walking around this room and there's all these people went hey come spin the wheel. I'll give you a free Starbucks gift. There's just all these gimmicks to get you to talk to him and I walked by go tab and I had heard of go tab. I knew about go tab and you we started talking and I use at both of my restaurants. We have toast and we have a really cool lounge and in this lounge we started doing this thing where there's like a QR code and people scan it and they can open a tab but it doesn't transfer really well to like if a server wants to pick that table up and add something to it or you know, it's just kind of this accoutrement and it just it was very clunky and didn't work very well and we tried it but it was like and we started talking I kind of felt myself defending toast because that's the decision that I made several years ago and going and I after we talked for a little bit, I kind of looked back inside and go why am I walking around with this attitude?

15:46Why do I have this? Well, I use that there's there's this I've already made this decision. So I don't need to hear about this stuff. But then once I learned what go tab did I went oh man, this is really really cool. And I just wanted to share it. I just wanted to share what you're doing simply because it's what restaurateurs need right now. It's amazing solution. So thank you for coming on the show and I want to get into all of that. But first, let's hear a little about your kind of your story. Where do you come from? What is your history in the restaurant world or tech space or just let's learn about you. It's both. We know you're an amateur farmer, which is which is awesome. So I'm a mechanical engineer. I love to make stuff, right? So I came to Washington to work in satellites ended up doing software and then ended up in sort of the dot-com consulting world built what's called a digital agency.

16:46We were not an ad agency. We were more of a product agency. People would hire us to build large websites. So like our biggest site we built was Goldman Sachs. We built all their client facing sort of experience. So we designed what a Goldman Sachs client would see when they would log into their website. And these are people with their wealth management they're called. So people with a lot of money who trusted Goldman to manage it, they would log into a system we designed. So basically, we would say we did consulting around digital experiences, right? What happens when you go to the website? Is it great or does it suck, right? And so that's what we did is we designed and built those. I sold that company. We grew it up to about a couple hundred people, sold it to a private equity company out in Los Angeles. We were seven offices and it was fun. But I was really happy to be out of the business, to be honest, because it's work, right? You fly around, you meet your clients, not that restaurants aren't work. No, I understand what you're saying. We'll get to that in a second.

17:48So I sold that company. I've always been passionate about food and beverage. As you can tell, that's why I have gardens and my wife was in the cooking. She's a nutritionist. So we essentially built a brewery restaurant. We live on a bike trail and we rented some space and we opened a brewery and restaurant is like something we wanted to do because we wanted what probably happens a lot. We want a better place for ourselves because we want a good stuff. Hired a chef, did all that thing, grew it. The business was really successful and we're like, oh, this is fun. But what you learn about restaurants is you max out your revenue, right? You can only get so much revenue per seat or per parking space or you just can't make more. And our problem was that we would run out of seats, we'd have a line outside and people couldn't sit down. And then I had the wonderful experience of people giving us bad Yelp reviews because they couldn't get a seat.

18:48I was like, how the hell can you write a review on a restaurant you've never been to because you couldn't get into it and you would give it a one star rating because everybody wants somebody else to blame. Yeah. So anyway, I lived through that experience very closely, got involved with some of the brewery operations, some of the restaurant operations, had a ton of fun with that, ended up building a second brewery and restaurant. And then I kind of said, well, there's a much better way for the customer experience to use digital, like kind of my prior life, e-commerce consulting in a physical restaurant. So started GoTab in 2016, really with the intent of making it easier to pay, not trying to solve everything else, but really just this is a pain point. My belief has always been payment sucks. Like I don't want to think about it. I just want to come in, have my beer, my coffee, my food and walk out and just have it, you know, magically figure out how to pay you. How to get paid, right?

19:49That's what I want. So it started that way. We ended up doing, we had challenges because changing habits of humans is really, really hard. Very hard. Customers and operators both. And then we realized, okay, there's this other pain point. So not only is payment a pain point for both the operator and the guest, the other pain point is actually ordering. And that was true in especially some kinds of restaurants. Just remember, this is all pre-COVID. Yeah. 2016, 17. Yeah. So 17, we basically said, what's the other pain point? Well, it's ordering. Well, where's it particularly bad? Well, high volume places that get slammed on Friday and Saturday night. Right? So it's got a big ass line and your counter service or your bar service. And I want to get a beer. You and I, Brandon, we're out for a beer and we're like, well, I'd love to get another round, but one of us has to schlep it up to the front of the bar, fight our way up and then get another round screaming over everybody. And I was like, okay, well, if we could fix that, so we could at least order another beer, that would be great.

20:54Right? So we started doing QR ordering from tables and in fact, in my second breweries where we launched it, because it's three stories tall, it had a patio, service was going to be an absolute nightmare. And we did in fact have a line out the door. We had a line all the way out to the street, right? And so in 2018, when we rolled this out, I personally had to walk down the line, teach people how to scan a QR because nobody knew how to do it. And then what would happen is all the 20 year olds would peel off and go to the table. And it was like kind of the curve, the length went down as age went up. Every now and then you get the anomaly, the 65 year old tech guy who's like, this is awesome. I'm going to go sit at a table. And in fact, the women, it was what was really interesting that some of the older women were totally into it. And this is again, pre COVID. They were they were pretty excited about it. And so they would say like, I don't have to stand this line. That's awesome. So then they go sit at a table and they'd order a beer. And then some people absolutely loved it.

21:54It was pretty novel at the time. But when we found was it was adopted anytime a line was present and people would do it to avoid pain. And so that was a pure and simple metric for success. So then we started selling to breweries that basically had a hard time servicing, you know, guests because they'd have these really surgy traffic patterns and it's really hard to staff for five hours on a Friday night, right? Every restaurant in the area is looking for staff at that same time. So we were kind of struggling along and then COVID hit and then we grew 100 times in 2020 to 2021. Well, so I want to get into the COVID thing, but I want to tell you, downtown Nashville on Broadway. Have you been down to downtown Nashville and Broadway? It's been a while, but yes, I have. There's like 50 bars. I have no idea the actual number of bars, but there's like and they're all three, four stories and they're all hacked every night. So we went and saw Bill Burr, the comedian.

22:57My cousin was in town and we saw Bill Burr. He wanted to go check out some honky tonk, you know, and I don't drink, but I'm like, let's go. So we go to this place and I'm not going to say the name of the place because this could be incriminating, but we literally walked in and he's like, I just want a beer. I'm like, what kind of beer do you want? And I stood at the bar to get him the beer and I'm drinking one of those liquid white death waters or whatever it's called. And so I'm standing there and I'm waiting and I'm waiting. And in the meantime, he talks to these girls that are waiting to and says, hey, let me pick up your round. Right. So fine. After like 15 minutes, I get the bartender's attention and I'm six, six. I typically can get a bartender's attention pretty quickly. And finally, she comes over and I was like, we need four gin and tonics, two gin and sprites and a water, you know, and she's like, OK, seventy five dollars. So she she puts all these drinks and she just makes them all real quick, just house liquor, sets them in front of us. My cousin hands her a hundred dollar bill.

23:58She then turns around and puts that in the tip jar. Yeah. And I went. But I mean, I just there's just a moment where I'm sitting there and I'm going as an operator, I wanted to be like, no, no, no, you can't do that. And then I thought, man, if I had a QR code, I could have I could have. There was like a separate bar, like a neon that said, go tab, pick up your drinks here. I'd walk in and hit all of those things and just go. I would have had drinks 15 minutes earlier. I would have had to stand there and the restaurant would have actually got paid for those drinks. Right. Yeah, you're right on all fronts. It's funny. Sometimes I have a higher cash component. And I find it interesting that operators always think, hey, you know, I can put that cash in my pocket and skip paying the feds or the government. So it's like, oh, in theory, you get the tax discount. And I'm like, you do know that your staff's probably stealing more than what you're not. So you're stealing from the government. Oh, yeah. Right. So I'm pretty sure when you work out the numbers, you'll find that, you know, you're better off not using cash.

25:02It sounds awesome in concept because, you know, it's free money. But I I've just seen and we caught on video just due to because we saw some data. We don't do this anymore. But at one point, it was something we were looking at in 2017. You know, we caught the lead bartender of a bar. He gave away two hundred thousand dollars in drinks. Two hundred thousand dollars. That's that's a fair amount of money. I would care about as an operator. You've got this technology, which I would have loved to have had when I was downtown the other day would have been awesome. And COVID hit. So I know what I'm thinking. I think where you're going to go with this is it rapidly accelerated what you are doing. And I kind of feel like, you know, the retail business 15 years ago or however long, when all of a sudden people would go to a mall, they'd have to do shopping. And then all of a sudden they could just go online. And there was this weird adoption time that it took. And then all of a sudden everyone was way easier to do this online.

26:02And so you get into food now and now people the pandemic starts. What was your perspective from that date? Pick back up there. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. No, it's fine. I mean, so what was weird about us is we were focused on on-premise, right? No, that was actually our difference. There are plenty of people doing takeout ordering and delivery ordering even pre-COVID, right? Because DoorDash, all those guys are trying to do that. One thing that nobody was doing was on-premise ordering digitally, right? So that was a pretty unconventional thing. And a lot of operators really hated the concept like, well, that's not hospitality. If you talk to the guests and it's not hospitality and like hate to break it to you. First off, the guest doesn't necessarily want to talk to you. They actually sometimes just want their drink. A lot of times it turns out. And then secondly, they can't always get to you because there's a line, right? Or someone's yelling at you or a glass broke or something. So, I mean, that was it's always been the case, but people were reticent to change.

27:05But what happened in COVID is we had to basically pivot, repivot, as restaurants opened and closed and opened and closed in different states. So we went from online to takeout delivery, sorry, on-premise to off-premise. And basically back into on-premise every summer and winter, right? So our product, basically all of our improvements would go into, hey, it's patio season. People are sitting outside in COVID and using QRs. And then patios would all close and everybody go inside and it was all takeout and delivery. And they would use our takeout and delivery features, which are all the same stuff, because it turns out when you're ordering from your phone, whether it's from your couch or your chair in the restaurant, it's kind of the same. There are some feature differences. So we had to do all that ping ponging back and forth. So our product got deeper on both of those models. And then essentially what happened is in 2021, we knew there was also QR fatigue, right? People freaking hated QRs. And I can understand why. Kind of represented this bad time in their life.

28:05They kind of associate it with, I don't have the freedom to just go do what I want to do. Yeah, QRs represented COVID to a lot of people, right? Whether, I mean, QRs have been around actually since the 90s, just for a lot of reasons they didn't exist in the U.S. Even though they're dominant, they're everywhere in the rest of the world. Asia, 30% of all transactions start with a QR. Wow. So, you know, essentially it's not a COVID thing, but it became a thing in the U.S. because COVID made us learn how to use this technology. So there's this association, April 21 or so, everybody's like, you know, we actually lost some customers. They're like, I'm getting rid of QRs. I'm going back to full service. Right. And so at the time, no one quite realized what was going on with labor, right? April 21, we're just kind of like, hey, we're going back to normalcy. And everybody told us that we're going to hire, we're going to staff up. We're going to do full service. Kind of go back. Then reality of labor set in. Oh, wait a second.

29:06There's actually no people, you know, who are willing to work. Right. So it's been interesting because like we essentially, you know, grew, grew, grew. April slowed down and actually lost probably four or five customers who said, we're going back to full service. And then basically, as the summer kept going, people started realizing, hey, you know, this QR thing, it's not going away. Like, it's kind of a necessity. And so if you want to stay in business, at this point, you have to give people options. And in fact, the other thing is that although there are a lot of people who pined for the old ways and pined for full service, there were a lot of 20 year olds who actually just like the convenience of being a beer button on their phone. Right. Well, from their perspective, it was just a pain in the ass to go flag down a server. I just there's a post. I'm a generation Xer. Right. And the things that we like as generation Xers, like we were like one of the last groups of people who went out and imagine you are too. I don't know how old you are. But, you know, when I was a kid, my mom would let us go outside, play all day long.

30:09And like when it got dark, I would come back in at all of these different things. I didn't have video games. I didn't have the Internet growing up. So it was just fine being by myself. But I think post covid, I've had to realize that there's I represent 25% of the population, you know, more than 50% of the population is generation Z and millennials. And those people were essentially born with the Internet. And, you know, kids today, Mike, I have seven and eight year old kids and they both are They've had iPads for years, but like they they know how to do stuff better than me. And it's. That's the future. I mean, this is the future and the future isn't well, let me see the men, you know, the future is on your phone, the future is on your phone doing a QR and just ordering it yourself because they're fiercely independent. And that's that's what they know to do.

31:09It's an Amazon world. And I don't know why you would steer like, well, I'm not doing that. Like, it just seems like you would go, well, that's the future. Let's go ahead and adopt now and get really good at it so that when we have to do it, we're not behind. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, I do get when the demographic of your customer base is really not that demographic, I get saying, hey, that's not important for me. And what's happened for GoTab is we're doing fine dining now. We actually, just to be clear, we have a full POS that we released in 2021 because we felt the same QR fatigue that everybody else did. Right. I'm in between those generations. I'm both digital. I'm like, I'm on the earliest part of the digital. I was a nerd. So I was like an early adopter of things that people made fun of me for in high school. So I was in some sense, you know, more associated with the younger generation because I was already a nerd when nerds weren't cool. Right. Now they're normal. But essentially, I can also sympathize.

32:13I like talking to people at a bar. I like having great servers. I think that's a phenomenal experience when they're available. And that's the thing is like, I also like the ability to click my phone when I can't order and there is no server. I don't like decide to hold a grudge against the restaurant and say, your service sucks. And this is, you know, I just work from my phone. And if I get great food, well, I didn't get any service, but I got great food. I'm totally cool with that, too. Yeah. So I just think optionality is the way to go. And there's a ton of stuff you can even do on a classic POS. Sorry, in a classic service model that the POS world has not serviced has not done well, because frankly, it's 30 year old technology. Yeah, even I mean, I will say toast is modeled after micros. If you kind of look and pay attention to a lot of the things they did, micros was the best micros in NCR. But micros was really the market leader and set a lot of standards for how restaurants work.

33:16That product was written and released in the early 90s and people were still running it, which is kind of crazy. It is kind of crazy. And even those products are all based on those concepts. But those concepts are no longer relevant with phones. There's a lot of things that are just misdesigned. So what is your concept based around? Well, we first off operate under the assumption that we know who the guest is. If you look at a legacy POS, the assumption on any POS, toast included, square included, is you do not know who the guest is when they start their experience. Right. If they walk in, they sit at a table, you don't know who that is. I find it a bit ironic that you actually know your guests who order takeout better than you know your guests who sit in your restaurant. So the people who come there and sit in your space, chances are you don't know who they are. But you'll know the guy who does takeout so you can predict what the next thing they're going to order. So it really we've built our system around the idea of like, hey, this is Brandon. Brandon likes doesn't like IPA is because he doesn't drink.

34:18And these are the things that he likes. Right. And so these are these are concepts that are that are just totally missing from these systems. And where we what things we do is even on your floor plan, you can see customer segmentation. A really interesting thing we can do is is because you have the phones involved. Not only do you know the person, if you have reservations, most places don't. But if you have reservations, you might know that this is Brandon and Brandon doesn't drink. You might know that because reservation systems do that. What you won't do is know who Tim McLaughlin is, who came with Brandon, because I'm invisible. True. And so there's this whole paradigm shift, which is in the e-commerce world. You know, Amazon knows everything you touch. Right. You go to the website, you click on it, you look at it, you don't have to buy it. Amazon's going to know it's you and you know who else, you know, they're going to calculate a whole bunch of things. Making recommendations the whole thing. Absolutely. But in the restaurant world, we operate under the assumption that 90 percent of our guests are invisible.

35:21I think that's a really bad model. I think we should start knowing who our guests are and support it with technology, meaning that there's no way you, Brandon, can be in your restaurant every day and memorizing everybody's face. So why don't we do a little more to identify like, hey, that dude's a VIP, comes in every week. We need to make sure he's taken care of or these are the things he likes or she likes. So how does your, how does your system do that? Well, when you're on a phone, everything you touch, as soon as you scan the QR, all your information gets pulled up immediately. Yeah, correct. Assuming you didn't opt out. Right. If you, if you opt out, we, of course, you know, you're anonymous and you will have, frankly, an inferior experience because we will treat you as if we've never seen you before. Yeah. So if you say, forget me, then you're going to walk back in. And it's funny, sometimes people are like, why does it not remember my settings? I'm like, did you hit the do not remember? I'm like, OK, well, then we don't remember you. But if you chose to be remembered, which is what most people do, then you're going to be able to come back in and it's going to know what you ordered last time.

36:24It's going to know what your preferences are. It's going to help, you know, identify the new things since the last time you came in, the stuff that like a perfect server would do. A perfect server would say, glad to have you back. They wouldn't ask you, have you been here or not? Right. A perfect server would know you've been here. So if I'm a if I'm a nerd, if I'm I'm the same nerdy kind of way with restaurants in the fact of what do I do with the data? Right. So if I can I mine that if I'm if I is there an app, is there some way I can go online and go, hmm, how much of this did we order and who ordered it? Or hey, that guy over at Table 24, I'm going to go see who he is. And then I can look up all of his history from everything that he's ordered and what he's done. So I can say, yeah, you were in last week and you had the Mahi Mahi. What did you think about it? Yes, you can. You can mine all that stuff. See, that's the only people in our system who are invisible are the people who who essentially order through a server and never touch their phone.

37:25So if you start with the server, but you pay on your phone, we know who you are. If you start on your phone and you order through a server, we know everything you did. If you never touch your device, you know, we don't we aren't yet like doing facial recognition or anything like that, which most people consider invasion of privacy. Right. So in this case, you're essentially taking their consent, their willingness to be remembered and then using that to actually make the experience better. Well, but like as an example, one of the things we're working on right now and the one challenge is that mining that data is not easy necessarily. So getting the data out that you want, for example, one of the things we're working on is menu analysis. OK, what products? If a guest comes in and they have this product the first time, what are the chances they come back a second time? Did they just have your worst product and they just have a bad first impression? And so therefore they're not going to come back because they're like, well, that place sucks. I had such and such.

38:27Yeah, like I can assure you, there's probably some of those products on your menu. But how do you know, you know, which ones those are? No, and I want to get deeper into that. And this is a good opportunity, Tim, for us to take a quick break to hear a quick word from our sponsors. Guys, we are talking about Maintain IQ today and Maintain IQ is an app that you can download that will do all of your digital checklists, food safety, inspections, preventative maintenance, work order management. But I love the fact that I can do manager opening duties. I love that I can do mid opening duties. I love that I can do server side work and all they have to do is open an app. There's full accountability. You can see when they started it, when they finished it. They have to sign for it. So it gives you accountability if anything in the building is not done. We all know that the most important thing you can do every day is hit all of the tiny details that make the entire building run. Maintain IQ helps you do it. They're amazing. You can go online right now at Maintain IQ dot com.

39:29That's M-A-A-M-A-I-N-T-A-I-N-I-Q dot com. Or you can call Will Joxon. Will is the founder and CEO and his number is 714-457-4481. This is game changer. I love turning on to new technology and this is one you definitely need. I use it and I love it. What chefs want has been serving the Nashville restaurant community for over 15 years. During that time, they've worked tirelessly to be, well, what chefs want. Seven day deliveries, no fuel charges, 24-7 customer care, unparalleled availability, and they'll split almost everything they sell. If you're the kind of person that wants to see what's new when it comes in stock, you should follow them on the socials at what chefs want and sign up to be a customer at what chefs want dot com. We are talking about net checks today. And you know, last week we told you that net checks is your single source for all things people. We made a list recruiting, onboarding, performance management, human resources, scheduling, payroll, taxes.

40:43The one thing that we want to focus on today is your biggest pain point, hiring and retention. What do you use? Indeed, Facebook, Craigslist? Well, net checks will post to all of those sites for you automatically. So there's no need for you to post on all these different sites and keep up with it. One source, like I said, net checks is your single source for all things people. They are always on the employee experience. All right. So we are back and we were talking about data. And when somebody comes in the restaurant, how we mine that data, what we do with it and how GoTab allows us to be intentional. Isn't that the word? Is that is that the word? I think that there's two words when I think about when I think about what GoTab does and it's frictionless and it's intentional. Because when you go to a table and you just a server takes an order and they put it in, like you said, there's nothing that's created.

41:46But if they do it themselves, then you're then you're actually creating a better experience for the guest because they're they're getting that Amazon experience where they're going, Hey, last time you had this, or you're wondering, like you just said, I can look at a menu and I can see that, Hey, look our least selling menu item is this chicken dish. And it strongly correlates that when people order that chicken dish, they don't come back for a second time. And you can, you can do that through GoTab. Yep. That's one of the most amazing things ever. That's that's where we can hope to continue to innovate. Like I think when you have these different built in concepts, you can do things like that. One of the other concepts that we built into our system, which often gets misunderstood. Well, so, so there's a customer data side of it, but there's actually an operational data side of it that has become very relevant today, which is, Hey, is my kitchen operating optimally? Is my delivery operating optimally? And, and of course, most people are like, what do you mean? Well, they think delivery is driving cars to drop off food in boxes. And what I'm, what I'm going to say now, well, I, that's what, that's what a lot of people would say, but I would actually say, every restaurant does delivery, whether you know it or not.

43:05The shortest type of delivery would be counter service. Meaning you're not taking it to the customer's table, but you are delivering it to a counter and there are some conditions on how you bag it up and box it up. And then if you're delivering it to a table, like on a tray, well, that is delivery. And I can assure you, you actually have costs of that person taking it to the table, interacting with the guests and the further away that table gets. So take your Nashville venues with three stories tall and a patio. It turns out that delivery adds up to a lot of money. And if you're like most restaurants, you're having a hard time hiring runners and you're having a hard time getting people did. So does that delivery have costs? I can tell you right now, no other POS considers the cost and the efficiency of taking that stuff to a table. And the reason is, is if you order through a server, you automatically get batching, meaning all your orders go in at the same time. They all come out at the same time. So you get a relatively efficient delivery to a table. That all breaks when you go to QRs because now you get lots of orders all over the place from different floors, different times at different tables.

44:15How do you make all that stuff efficient from a delivery perspective? Like think about Amazon puts multiple orders into one box, even if you order them the same day at different times. Yeah. Or cause they know they're coming to the same house. Right. So we do the same sort of things. We don't run the kitchen is first in, first out. We are aware of the destination. Like we know where this is going. We know these are going to this table. So we're going to change the way we make things so that we can deliver efficiently. Wow. So there's a lot of really important things that were built in our system. We learned in 2018, actually the delivery costs will go up if you adopt QRs without any optimizations. So if you put a bunch of QRs on tables and you say, Hey, have at it, what you're going to find. And if you, if you continue to run your toast system, you would quickly realize like, Oh my God, this is so much more work. Well, it's only more work if you don't optimize your operations for it. Um, and in fact, we found that we could reduce runtime delivery costs by about 50% with the optimizations we do.

45:20Now you also, I mean, so that's, that's so, that's drilling in so into detail. And I guess that would make sense if you have a very ring QR codes, they could do that. What about actual delivery? So my restaurants, we own our own vehicles and we have drivers come in and, I mean they're their staff and we do to go staff that works there. They'll also run food to the restaurant. If they're not busy, they help out. And they're part of the tip pool. It's a big deal. Um, but they're running around. How does GoTab accept those orders? And then can GoTab help with the routing of those? We would not do the driver routing. There's a lot of integrated products out there that will do them. So we will do first party orders, meaning you take orders on your website for your brand. You get all your customer data. So take out delivery on premise and POS. Um, and then we will consolidate, we'll do all the optimizations within the kitchen for delivery optimization, but we're not going to tell you what road to turn down on your car.

46:21Okay. We will automatically optimize the kitchen so that we put as many boxes into the same right car that's going to the same right neighborhood. But ultimately you're going to need to do your own routing. And there's some different products that we plug in to do that. And they're specific for drops. But you can know what, so if I have 10 to go orders, I have 10 deliveries that come in and we deliver within like four miles of the restaurant. So it's not like there's a whole bunch of, but three of them are from one neighborhood and three are from a different neighborhood. You guys can say, Hey, these are within the closest proximity. Take them at one time. Correct. Yep. In fact, one of the things we can do that's kind of cool is you can actually, and this is more useful for, for other types of first party delivery. So we, we think of it this way. It was like, there's first party ordering, there's first party delivery. So meaning your own drivers, there's first party ordering, there's third party delivery, meaning you take the order and then you have, you outsource the driving to Uber Eats or DoorDash or someone like that. And then there's third party ordering like order through DoorDash and then deliver through DoorDash. So third party ordering third party delivery.

47:30We will do the best we can within GoTab because we do understand destinations and maps and things like that, as well as seat, seat maps, to try to consolidate orders for sending them out of the kitchen together. So they get delivered by the same person or vehicle and thereby saving you costs on the delivery side. So whether it's two tables next to each other or on the same floor or two houses next to each other, it's the same model within our system. Wow. That's so innovative. How do you, how do you come up with this stuff? Do you have, how big is your team? You know, let's just say I have a restaurant that I have some new idea and I say, Hey, can you guys figure this out? Are you guys able to like work with people and on the fly kind of make custom solutions? We don't do, it's all the same software, but we do make customizations constantly. Like I was just talking to, we just built out a feature on the, we're building out a feature on POS, where an operator said, I love everything about your system, but I love this other very niche product, this one feature, you know, and I, and I want it. And it's a POS optimization.

48:44It basically takes three touches and consolidates them into one touch. So, you know, which if you're doing a high volume alcohol bar, like every touch on the screen slows you down. And so we're going to go ahead and make that change. It's not a big lift for us. We're like, yeah, that's a cool idea. It's just an efficiency, you know, all around, you know, optimizations. So we're constantly talking to our customers. I constantly talk to our customers because I'm an operator. I still own those restaurants and we're constantly, I'm in those restaurants, finding out what works, finding out what they love, finding out what they hate. And then saying, okay, what if we did this? What if we did that? Just talking to the chef for the GM or the bar manager. I just had coffee at my restaurant this morning and was asking them why did, why they didn't 80s or why they had something 86 they shouldn't have. And partially trying to understand like, how does that human error occur? It's not to chastise them. It's to understand like, how did this slip through the controls we have in place? So it's nice to know that if I, if I'm out there and I'm listening to this and I go, I want to give this go to have a shot. It sounds really cool that there's the, the guy who's the CEO of the company is also an operator.

49:55And as you continue to learn, as the, as the industry continues to evolve, the product will too. Cause hey, you're in the building, you're actually walking around going, Ooh, that would be really cool if we could do that. Hey guys, let's figure out a plugin. Hey, let's figure out how to do this. Let's figure out how to do that. And you, you're probably constantly updating all the time. We do. We release new software. I mean, every single week. In fact, people used to complain because we would release too many new things and they couldn't keep up with it. We're not, we're a little slower than we used to be back in COVID mainly because the product's a lot deeper. But we really software very quickly and we're, we're very responsive, especially, I mean, I have to be honest, we're most responsive to our bigger customers, but those may be big single units. Sure. For example, like we run a Guinness brewery in Baltimore. They only have one brewery in the U S it's a tourist destination and they're only open for three days a week. So they get just gargantuan lines.

50:56So obviously this is a great brand to have in our, our portfolio. So we're frequently trying to pay attention to what, what works for them, what doesn't work for them and they're super high volume. And it matters a lot, like how these little tweaks, you know, kind of drive the business. But I just, you know, what we, and the reason I mentioned them is like, we improve their sales per guest by 96%. So for our system. And I actually was just, that's a big, that's a big number. Yeah. It's crazy how much, I mean, I love that because it's from my perspective, that's like a huge success. And as you might imagine that, that's keeps us incredibly sticky. Oh, sure. So that's always our goal is we're always looking at, okay, there's a really cool brewery in, in Charlotte that the, the owner is just really sharp, really great. It's called resident culture. And he gets again, big crowds. So I'm automatically drawn to that because I, I love the, okay, how do we deal with, you know, to that a thousand people that showed up all at the same time and all want to beer.

52:07So they can all ring in. I listened to, I watched on YouTube and kind of you guys had a panel discussion and I think it was the chef general manager from stone brewery. And he was just talking about the ability to have people come in that he had, you know, four or five Cicerones that were there. They didn't really have servers, but they had the people, they don't, you don't just want to have a QR with nothing, but since he didn't have this big service staff, he was able to hire these experts to just walk around and talk to people about the beer and their choices and ask them questions and then go, great. So there's all your questions, order whichever one you decide. And then it just got ran out. And I just thought that was so innovative because versus trying to staff and keep everybody there and this person's sick and this person can't come, they had a flat tire. It's like, no, that GoTab is not going to call out. Like they're going to, it's every day it's getting, but it doesn't mean that you have to have less customer interaction. That means you can now focus your customer interaction on, you know, when I was at U S foods, I was a district sales manager for U S foods.

53:15And they used to have all of the sales reps would go into everybody's restaurant to place the order themselves. They would come in and they would say, Hey, what do you want to case the flower to case this? And they would, they would key the orders, what it was called. And these reps would spend all day long keying orders. And that's what their job was. And they'd sell while they were there. And I thought, this is the worst thing in the world. And U S foods thought that too. They thought that's the worst thing. What a waste of a sales team. So they made all these incentives. Hey, if you place your orders online, let us not have our sales reps come in and do that. And then they can start working on coming in and finding specific solutions for you. I'm going to walk in and find a solution for you. Instead of me just keying your order, I'm going to go, Hey, I did some research on that problem that you had. Cause I had the time cause I wasn't keying your order. And if you could have just people actively selling and working on the customer experience instead of, I mean, how you talked about how much time it takes to run food to a table, how much time it takes to audibly take an order, write it down and not mess it up and then go to a screen, walk over to a screen, which is probably busy, or you have a handheld or something, but you walk over and then you have to ring it up and then you course it.

54:32And then you set up like the amount of time that takes when everybody's sitting at the table on their phone. Anyway, when you look around restaurant like why 80% of the people are on their phone, why not let them place their orders and just how much faster, if you looked at the amount of time, like a turn time, if you're that busy, gosh, if you could get 15 extra tables a night because you erased that time from the server, taking the order to going, I mean, it just seems like, well, there, there's a really weird side effect that no one really accounts for. In fact, I heard someone ask the opposite ones when a guest types in their phone, their order on their phone, you don't get any sendbacks. So nothing's ever wrong. They did it them. So they don't want to admit that they did the wrong thing. Well, if they put, if they put the wrong order in, they're going to look at the phone and be like, damn, I did, I did order that vodka time. I did mean the G and T, but now my phone says, I ordered vodka tonic. So that's, you know, that's what I got. They're not going to send it back and blame it on you. My server's an idiot. I ordered a vodka tonic and she brought me a gin and tonic or he brought me a gin and tonic and it's like, you know, this cheeseburger, even though they meant hamburger and you, but you can't tell them like, no, I freaking heard it.

55:42I know that's what you said, but okay. You're free. You're free food. Yeah. And I'm not advocating for no servers or we don't need service anymore. I'm just saying what if you had customer experience specialists in restaurants that the guest experience people who walked up and said, good evening, do you have any questions about the menu? Go ahead and place your orders. And my name's Brandon. I'll be taking care of you tonight. I have any answer, any questions that you have. Wonderful. And you could just go around to all the different tables and I mean, how much fun would that be? It's well, stone does a great job of it. I think they have the right mindset. I unfortunately see some operators who just basically take this as an excuse to not have service, which I don't think is a great answer, but that's my choice. You know, I think it's phenomenal. I love both. Like my favorite model is, and my wife has two restaurants, one's full service, one's counter service. The full service one where I was at this morning in the mornings, people have more time. So the servers will come out. They'll chat with the table.

56:45They'll, you know, see if there's something quick to order. They'll order on the mobile POS. If not, the guests will look on their phone. So it's a combination. They will have printed. It's, it's all the above, but I find it's really cool that like guests may place their own order on their phone. And if you actually have time and people are touching tables, we, we show a metric like on the POS since last order. How long has it been since they last ordered? So you can identify tables that haven't ordered in some time and then go check drinks. And then you walk out and friend and Tim are sitting there. They got empty glasses. Like they haven't picked up their phones. And here's kind of the funny part. Like if you're doing this on toast and you said, yeah, I see your drinks are empty. You know, can I, can I add to your tab or would you like another round? Um, on most systems you basically have to take the tabs, either the servers or the guests, but it's not both. That's what I was saying with our situation in there, our lounge model. You can actually just walk up and be like, Hey, I see you guys had this and this. Do you want me to get you another round? You're not going to say pick up your own damn phone and order your stuff. You're going to just take care of it. I got those. They're added to your tab.

57:46And if they were to pick up the phone, they'd real time see you just added two drinks to their check. You're like, cool. Uh, that's, that all makes sense. So you can go in my mind, that's the perfect world, right? I want everything to be seamless and thoughtless and effort. Frictionless. Yeah. It's my favorite word now. Like this, like everybody got like pivot and unprecedented or tired of hearing frictionless is the word I've taken the like every restaurant experience. Anytime that you experience friction, it doesn't feel good. And you pull away. And I think frictionless, just a nice smooth like walking on glass, just like smooth, clean glass. Just anyhow, do I have to purchase this? Let's get into some of the salesy side of this thing. We've talked about the features, talked about benefits, and there's probably a million that we haven't touched on. And if you are out there and you want to do a demo on this, you want somebody to call you, go on zoom and do a demo. There is a special link. It's gotab.io.

58:48And then there's going to be a slash E N slash N R R. And if you do that, that is a special link that is set up for Nashville restaurant radio listeners. You're going to get $500 in hardware. Thank you. I mean, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, I didn't know we were doing that, but that's awesome. So, well, they, they, they said, Hey, look, if you get out there and do this, we'd like to give you a little something. And I said, don't, don't give me anything. Let's give it to, I want my restaurant tours who are here in town to get something awesome for this. And so we turned it around and we gave it to the restaurant tour. So there's $500 in free hardware. Now, what does that mean? Because do you need, I look and sometimes I see no hardware needed and then I see for $500 in free hardware and I'm confused. So, so yeah, that's understandable. Our software will run on any hardware. The only thing that will not is the, is the payment terminals, right? So if you're paying with a physical card or card present, right, as we call it, then those card terminals have to be tied to our payment processor, right?

59:54So because these, and there's other models, but this is just an example, I'm holding up a PAX device for those of you who aren't watching the video. We're not tied to any particular hardware, but we have certain types of card readers that we are tied to. If you can run a POS on an iPad, on an iPhone, on an Android tablet, on an Android phone. Really, we have hardware. We actually have multiple hardware options. So if you just want to buy the cheapest, fastest Android hardware you can buy, we have that. If you want to buy the best iPad and with a stand, we have that. Or you can like, you know, take your kid's old one and recycle it and turn it into a mobile POS. So you're not, you're not in the equipment game. We are not in the equipment game. That's why the whole, no hardware needed. Like that's why it says that if you do want to do card present, then there is a little bit of hardware. It's a card reader, a physical card reader, and that's like 400 bucks. But you can have, I mean, they realize that if your guests are using their phones to order and pay, your number of card readers can be very limited. So if you, especially if you're getting the $500 NRR discount or whatever, then you basically could pay for nothing and grab a couple of iPads and turn it on or reuse your old POS. You can actually like Brandon, you can take your toast hardware and you can use that to run GoTab.

01:01:11Really? Yeah, you can. Yeah. May have to test that theory. Well, I, you know, same thing with iPads. If you have square, for example, you just install the app and you now have a GoTab POS. Wow. That's incredible. And it also works. So let's just say that I don't need the whole POS. Can I just use? Yep. Hey, look, I want the QR technology for people to order and pay. Can I just, can I just do a little bit of it? Yeah, yeah, you can do, you can do just that. There's no hardware whatsoever. The only hardware you are going to want is you're going to want a KDS for your bars and your kitchens. You're probably going to want printers for running, for chips that you print out for running food. But you can reuse all your old stuff. I mean, so if you have anything in a restaurant or you just have like, it seems to me like iPads just show up when you have kids because you end up with iPads for stuff. So I always end up with like, you know, leftover Android, something or other, like some Kindle tablet, and you can run GoTab on a Kindle tablet.

01:02:20I have four of those right now sitting at the entrance to my bedroom to be taken to a place that you can recycle electronics at. Yeah. Like these old tablets, these little Verizon tablets that we got for, so whatever. And it's like, where are all these tablets come from? What the hell is this? Yeah. Kids, kids make them, I think. Santa Claus brings them. Yeah. Guy just drops them off. As long as they're not too ancient, because it'll be kind of slow if they're super old, but if they're reasonably new, a couple of years old, they're great. Um, and then it's really just a paint card reader. Uh, we run, you know, iPads and kitchens all the time, or you can use, like I said, you'll get an Android, the 10 inch model, the Kindle Fire is like 150 bucks and you can run it as a mobile POS and kitchen tablet. I love that. Tim, we're going to take one more short break to hear our last word from our sponsors and then I want to wrap up with some rapid fire questions and I want to learn kind of some of your takeaways as to what's happening in the industry right now.

01:03:24One of God's great gifts to this world was fresh baked bread. That's why sharpies bakery delivers six days a week to your restaurant, as they've been doing for 36 years. Aaron Mosso's family has been running sharpies bakery locally owned and operated right here in Nashville, Tennessee. Like I said, for 36 years, go check him out at sharpies.com. That's C H A R P I E R S.com or sharpies bakery on Instagram and Facebook. Give Aaron Mosso a call at 615-319-6453 to set up an appointment to talk about what fresh bread you'd like delivered to your restaurant today. You have heard me talk about SuperSource for the last two years and in that time Jason Ellis, I feel like he's taken over the city. It is hard for me to get a guest in here that doesn't use SuperSource and I'm telling you, everybody loves him. When you mentioned Jason, like, Oh my gosh, that guy's legitimate. Ask yourself this question.

01:04:28Do you feel that way about the person that provides you with your dish machine and chemicals? Because he's the real deal. And guess what? He's not going to make you sign a five year contract. He's never going to say, well, you signed a contract. It's on you. He goes week to week. You never sign a contract. So he earns your business every single week. I loved it when we had Cam and Nickian from the red perch and they said, he's like one of our employees when he's in the building, he's that good. You should call him today. If you don't feel that way about your dish machine and chemical person, 770-337-1143 is how you get ahold of Jason or go to NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com. Click the sponsors tab. There's a special link on there that will get you special discounts for new customers. Call him now. Okay, so we're back now. Tim McLaughlin, let's wrap this thing with some fun, fun stuff. So every time that I go to one of these big conferences, I always come back and my notes are crazy.

01:05:29And I have just all these thoughts because I get to hear people who are on a, on a big scale, talking to a lot of people, seeing what the industry is doing. What have you taken away? You said you had four of these big conferences you've just been to. What are you seeing out there? What are the major pain points? Are there any other solutions that you thought were really cool? And kind of what's your, what's the biggest challenge that operators are telling you about? So two questions in there. I mean, it's, I still hear it's staff, staff, staff everywhere. Supply chain, supply chain, supply chain. Yeah. I mean, food costs, you know, managing that is very difficult. There's some cool products that we're seeing, like we're integrating recipes directly into the kitchen display and the bar display, which is nice for efficiency. I mean, I think I saw right of an NRA and it is very accurate. Everything's about efficiency now, which I'll tell you, as an engineer, I love it.

01:06:30Restaurants always drove me crazy because there's zero attention paid to efficiency. Full hands in, full hands out. There's so much opportunity. There's so much low hanging fruit in a restaurant to, to get more efficient and make them more profitable. And so I, I, I'm frankly happy to see this stuff happening. Although I did talk to an operator yesterday, he runs like 40 different or like three brands under a 40 unit group. And he was saying that he, he, he, I would do, I was demoing our product. He hadn't seen it in some time. And he was like, Oh my God, this is everything that I, you know, I ever, I, I wanted it to be, but he's like, I can't imagine putting this in place because everything's just kind of a shit show. He's like, my it's everything's in shambles and I have no leadership. You know, it's, it's very difficult. So he was lamenting the fact that he's seeing everything kind of revert to its old ways, even though he knows, you know, that they should be changing and they would, they would, I mean, within two or three months, he would recoup more than his costs and his profits would go through the roof.

01:07:40Like we see operators doing 20 plus percent profit. Wow. So that's where you want to be. I mean, I can tell you, well, I can, I can't tell you, but I can tell you label costs. We see 14, 15% all the time. Well, you know, I, the supply chain thing. So the supply, the two biggest things like labor and supply chain costs rising. You know, we print a menu every single day at our restaurant, at the nightmare bowl. And the menu has the actual today's date on it. But the dynamic pricing is something I think that's really fascinating. But also if all of your menus are online and they're all in a QR code, your state comes in today, my filet comes in today and it's $2 a pound over. Well, guess what? I can go in there really easily and raise the price $1, seven, $2, what the market does immediately. When people go ring their orders in, I don't have to go change this paper or melamine menu that I printed and spent so much money on. Like, you know, if you go to the grocery store, the milk price spikes, I guarantee you, the milk is reflected immediately at your local grocery store. They don't go, well, we bought these four pallets at this price and we're just going to wait till the market changes. They're not just going to go, well, we already put the sticker out there that says $3.99, although we paid $3.25 a gallon, we're just going to wait.

01:09:12Like we don't want to incur the costs of changing a menu. And it's like, no, no, no, no, you can't not incur it. Like you have to do that right now. And I think that there's a, there's a fear that I can't just go reprint menus. And it's like, well, when your state goes up $2 a pound, and you sell a hundred of those a week or, you know, 200 a week or, you know, chicken, we have ad chicken that went up, you know, our chicken was like $9 a pound two weeks ago. And I'm like, I got to raise my ad chicken $3 and you just do it overnight. And all of a sudden I didn't feel it. I mean, the guests to a degree are like, Hey, why'd your chicken go up? But you can, there's an explanation that's involved there, but with a system like this, you can address that immediately. And then the staffing thing also, it does, you can train your staff differently to be more customer experience specialists versus order takers. Yep. I agree. I mean, I think that's what, I think that's what candidly, my belief long-term is in the industry, humans are for entertaining, whether that even if that's describing food or describing drinks or experience or anything, that's all entertainment.

01:10:24Humans shouldn't really be taking orders or taking payment, right? Those, those are, those are things that can easily be replaced by machines or whatnot, but the human touch for those things, for the, the entertainment part is irreplaceable. As an example, we were right next to a robot booth. It was a robot delivery booth at NRA. And you know, I wasn't super optimistic on this technology in general. I can definitely see there's some, some use cases for it. But I will say like some of them done a good job of not making it a human like robot. There's really just a cart that rolls around to pick up drinks or to pick up empties or to, you know, bring stuff to tables. So it doesn't feel so much like it's replacing a human. And it's actually just, it's like, again, it's, it's an automatic oven, right? It's just, it feels like something that's a machine as opposed to trying to, you know, busing tables, frankly, not many people want to do that job.

01:11:27That's my favorite thing to do. I love it. So it's easy. It's easy. It is easy. I can come to work and just bus tables for like two or three hours. And it's, it's nice. Like I just stay busy and I know what I'm, I don't have to think. Yeah, there is that. I don't mean that in like the derogatory way to do a bus tables, but I'm just saying like for creative people, they're just constantly thinking going like sometimes it's nice just to go in and just, I love washing my car too, mowing the yard. I mean, I don't know. Well, I mean, but I don't think you want to do it all the day. No, I don't. So I do think there's some interesting places that are going to be filled in. And some of these technologies I do see as being relevant. Some of them I see as kind of being BS. I'm not long-term super optimistic on the whole ghost kitchen thing. Really? I think it's a little overblown to be honest. Do you know what? It's my judgment. I agree.

01:12:30I think it's a shiny thing. I think it's one of those things that if you're an operator, you go, Ooh, I could exercise some far off thing in my brain or I can, it's a money grab. I can just create this dish. It goes out the back door. I never see it again. It's just fine. But at some point it deters from what you need to be laser focused on. And if you're laser focused on the operations that are happening within your building and focusing on the guest and putting out the best damn food you can with fantastic service. And you know, you're doing everything you can to make every guest or repeat guest when you're working on a ghost kitchen, kind of out of that same kitchen and you're just trying to do it just, I think it's a shiny thing that you go, Oh, we could, should we? Gosh, that really was a drain of my time and energy. And it took away from my primary of this restaurant that people come in and dine and I'm not seeing them. And so I tend to agree with you. Yeah, I think it's a, yeah, it's a bit of a, um, a mirage, if you will. And so, and, and I agree with you that the thing is that people come to work at restaurants cause they're passionate.

01:13:38In many cases they're passionate about the brand or passionate about what you're doing or passionate about people. They're not going to be passionate about somebody else's brand that's being run virtually out of your place. Right? So I just, I have a hard time seeing how you can get employee morale excited about like, Hey, let's make virtual chicken sandwiches that aren't even on brand aren't even related. And then they're not, there's no humanity to them. Right. And so I just have a hard time seeing, getting people to care. You can get robots probably to do it. Hey, um, you know, I want to talk about something. Since we're working together, the people that work with you, um, you've got some amazing people, but I want to give a shout out to somebody who probably doesn't get shout outs a lot. Who's that? Patricia. I don't know how often she does. I know that there's a lot involved when you do these, you said four shows, there's a lot of marketing.

01:14:39Patricia does the marketing there and she is just delightful. She's awesome. I love working with her. How long have you guys worked together? Uh, well I worked with her at my last company for probably six years. Uh, the makeup of the leadership at GoTab, the four of the executives are all actually all from my first company. Um, at this point. So Patricia was one of those, my co-founder, Daruse, who incidentally loves to wash dishes. So he, he has the same passion apparently. Um, and then our recently we rehired or we were able to pull back our old CFO. So, uh, and Patricia was one of that original team. She wasn't a co-founder with Daruse, my CTO, but she we recruited her in probably a couple of years after we got going at GoTab. Well I kind of feel like from all my experiences with everybody with your company so far as I'm learning about you and I've kind of gone in and I did a demo recently and it feels like family, you know, it kind of feels like you guys all know each other really well and you're passionate about what you do.

01:15:40And that's one of the things that endeared me to you was just that this isn't just some nameless faceless tech company out there. Who's just trying to make a quick buck. It's almost like, well now these are real people who know each other, who have a goal, who saw an opportunity to fix a problem and to change an industry. And you guys are just out there crushing it. And I just wanted to say, uh, thank you and thank I wanted to give Patricia a shout out because so many times those people, the marketing people go behind the scenes and they set up to make sure you're here on this call and that all this stuff works. And I wanted to put her name on the show as a thank you because she is amazing. She's awesome. Her husband's a chef too. So she actually has a lifelong chef, I believe. So there you go about what we do as well. It's amazing. Well, Tim, I don't know how to thank you enough for taking the time this morning. We've gone over our allotted time, but, uh, I guess time flies when you're having fun. Absolutely brand new is awesome. Thank you for having me. Uh, and I'll be down in Nashville before too long.

01:16:47I cannot wait. We're going to do an event. Uh, I have an idea of what I want to do about the event and I'll get with Patricia about that. But last thing that we do, and this is, this is a new segment. This is going to now be the final thought, uh, powered by Gordon food service, right? So that's officially, I think that that show starts today is, uh, they're a new title sponsor Gordon food service. So the final thought powered by Gordon food service is whatever you want to say, whatever you want to say to my listeners, you get to take us out with a final thought, inspirational, motivational, recap what we've said. I don't care whatever you want to say. The mic is yours. Uh, take us out. Oh, good. Good thing you told me to prep for this. Um, I try not to, I like to catch people off guard. Um, at the end of the day, I think it all comes down to knowing your, knowing your guests, knowing your customer, uh, and spending the time, frankly, one-on-one or in person, uh, to watch and see the experience that they're having. And, uh, I, I don't really think there's a substitute that for that.

01:17:54That's why I try to get out to my client restaurants. And that's why I think operators have to spend the time and watch. Uh, there's no way around it. I, I wish there was a magic bullet other than that. And in maybe COVID made, made people think we could watch from afar, but I don't think there's another way around it. And I love doing it. And I hope, I hope other people do too. Marvelous. Thank you, Tim. Have a wonderful, wonderful Memorial Day weekend. This will be coming out on Memorial Day. Awesome. Well, so here we are. We'll listen to it from a boat or something fun. Yes. They'll definitely catch up on Tuesday. Thank you, sir. Thank you. All right. You too. See ya. Wow. Tim McLaughlin. Thank you so much for joining Nashville Restaurant Radio. That was a fun interview. You know, I do love bringing you guys new technology and stuff like this. And this is something that I believe in. Um, if you're out there and you're looking for a POS system, but you don't have a ton of cash and you want to do something that is amazing.

01:18:55If you want to, you know, we talk about data all the time. We talk about what can you do with it? And this is an actual system that helps you use your data to get people back in the door. Right? So this is an amazing, amazing system. I think you guys need to check it out. So go to right now, go to go tab dot IO, right? That's what it's like. Go tab dot IO and then do forward slash E N forward slash N R R. And that takes you to our custom landing page. We could you $500 off if you do need hardware. Um, so that is, that is a great deal. And they're doing that for you. I would love to hear your success stories. If you do a demo, give me a call. Let me know what you thought of it. If you have any feedback for me, I'm in for all of that. Have a wonderful rest of your Memorial day. We thank you guys for listening. Love you guys. Bye.