Angelo Esposito [00:00:00]:

I do think that one of the things that hasn't changed, although everybody, I think, thought it changed, but it really didn't have to do with service models. And I think, you know, if you back up 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, most of the service was done for the restaurant tech was in was by somebody that you trusted. Restaurants bought from someone they trusted local. They had a nearby office on a Friday night when the printer went down and the credit card machine wasn't working, they expected you to run through five red light to get there, right?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:00:37]:

Basically, yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:00:38]:

That's how that works. Right. And they were. They were mad if you didn't do that.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:00:53]:

Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're here today with Anthony Presley, the chief technology officer at CBS Northstar and the managing partner at Time Forge Labor. Anthony, thanks for joining us.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:01:08]:

Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:01:11]:

I'm excited, excited to be chatting with someone that has a lot of experience both in hospitality and in the tech space. I don't know which one's harder. I think they're both hard in their own rights, but together I think they become exponentially harder. So we'll get into that. I always like to start with just what you. What is Time Forge and. And, you know, what is CBS Northw? Just to set the stage we'll go into later, but maybe why don't we start there, tell people what it is that you do today, and then we'll take it from there.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:01:40]:

Yeah. Happy. Happy to do so. Happy to talk a little bit about both. I'm. I used to think I was a little bit unique in that I, I work with two companies. But as you dive in and you learn more about the entrepreneurs in our space, I. It's, it's not that uncommon to find people who are working with two and three and four companies.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:01:58]:

You're shaking your head. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. I'm sure you've got a couple of things in the wings, if you will. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. A little bit about those two companies. Time Forge is all about labor management. And so if you think about anything from how do I find qualified applicants all the way through, how do I pay them and incentivize them to stay? And the magic is wonderful, magic word these days, AI, which is such a new thing.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:02:27]:

It's so new that in 2007, we put AI into our software.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:02:33]:

Love that.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:02:35]:

So that's all about labor. We've got some great big competitors on the market, and we're really good at building product and we didn't go raise a lot of money. So we're much less marketable in the market from that perspective. And cbs, I think you actually had Jeremy Julian on the show not that long ago. He actually introduced us. CBS is custom business solution. Been around for 30 years. Most of the market knows us as a positouch reseller and we were for a very long time, maybe 10, 12, 13 years ago, our founder started building his own point of sale system.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:03:13]:

Really saw the need for the market for mobile first point of sale. And so started building that on the first iPad. And that product has evolved and we now sell that and really specialize in cable service and all the unique problems around cable service and core thing. And we have some quick service customers. But you know, think of the tech there. And we have other pieces of tech that are. They're kind of interesting as you would expect from someone that's been around in the industry for 30 years. So.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:03:41]:

So, you know, where neither of the companies that I work with, you know, we're not fly by night. We didn't just go raise VC capital yesterday. Been around for a long time.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:03:50]:

That's cool. That's cool. And we'll get into that. And one of the things that always interests me is kind of like how people got into the. Into the hospitality space. And so I have to ask you to start off, you know, how did you first kind of get pulled into the restaurant tech world?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:04:07]:

It was two interesting accidents. And maybe I'm not that smart. I'm not that smart, but I had a. I was going to school in Lubbock, Texas at Texas Tech University. And, and I had a. A roommate in 1998, and he had a job working for his uncle's business.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:04:32]:

Okay.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:04:32]:

And they posted a schedule on Sunday night and you weren't allowed to call to find out when you worked. It was. I mean, and they had one phone line, right? There was no a agent that was going to answer this call. So you had to drive. And that was great, except that Craig didn't have a car. And so he had to drive up there every Sunday just like all the other employees did and find out when he worked because he might be working Monday.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:05:01]:

Wow.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:05:02]:

And so he had to pay me and beer money and. And I'd drive a sorry sack out there and we'd go, you know, and the whole time I'm an IT guy. And so I was like, this is really dumb.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:05:14]:

Yeah, this makes sense. Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:05:16]:

Why are you doing this? And so we'd start iterating over, hey, let's should do it this way or why are we doing this? And so we started going through the problems and every once in a while I'd stop and talk to his uncle and be like, why are we doing this? And so we got into that. And I had a different software company. I was an entrepreneur, young entrepreneur. I didn't know what I was doing. I don't know what I'm doing now, but I really didn't know what I was doing then. And so as I was in college, I had a company, I had a customer, and that customer in 1998 was funding a lot of my college. And I actually grew that company to like 60 employees. And then they.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:05:56]:

It was professional services company. And then they got in some trouble with the federal government and they got shut down. And. And that's a whole nother story, but they got shut down. And I woke up one morning and was talking to a U.S. marshal. And. And that was a scary thing.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:06:16]:

And in 2004, I was like, you know what? I don't want to be in the predicament again. I want to build a product that would allow me to not have all of my eggs in one basket. And so I went back to that issue and that, that infinite from 1998 where I was running around the talk about schedules. I looked at the market. Hot schedules are the only thing on the market. And so I went, hey, you know what? Let me go try and figure this out. And so those two things happened and I started building software for S and B restaurants in Lubbock, Texas, was where I started.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:06:53]:

Super interesting. Now let me ask you this. What a lot of people ask me this question, so I'm going to ask it to you, is how do you get started, right when it comes to tacticals, like, what do you do if you don't have a tech background? You just start hiring people like, what do you do? So I'd love to hear from your perspective with your journey. Like, you had this idea, you saw a clear problem. How'd you kind of start with that? You know, version 1.0.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:07:15]:

I don't know about you. I've. I've gotten over the years, I'm very privileged to be able to work with a variety of accelerators. And so I've worked with one at Texas Tech, I've worked with one at unt, and most recently last two years at Baylor. And all of them that we teach a business model canvas. And so there's a way and there's several books on the Steve Blank. Right. A fantastic book on how to kind of get from 0 to 1, how to get your business off the ground.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:07:45]:

But there are a number of folks and I've run into them. You run into them. They're on the LinkedIn sphere, if you will, of talking about, you know, hey, I'm in hospitality, I see a business problem, but I'm not a technologist. How do I get there? And if you're not careful, there are plenty of consultants that will take all of your money. And so don't do that. Whatever you do, don't do that. And honestly, AI has helped out in this recently. I'd say in the last six or ten months, my, my advice has changed.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:08:15]:

My advice a year ago would have been go interview 100 people that aren't your mom. So anybody that would spot you a lunch, those people don't count, so don't talk to them because their opinion doesn't matter. Go find people who won't spot you a lunch, tell them your idea, ask them about their business problems, and find out if they will advance you one month of whatever that service is. And if you can talk to 100 people and three or four or five of them will advance you one month of that service, maybe you have an idea, then you can go to the next step, which is how do I go build it? If you can't do that, then you probably don't have an idea. And you can scale that. Maybe go talk to a thousand people. Right. If you're a vp, then make them go talk to a thousand people.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:09:03]:

Yeah, there's that book, right, like, because you said it made me remember the, the mom test or something like that. No, yeah, yeah, it's for people listening. Great, great book on, on some of the advice that you're hearing right now from Anthony. Um, I'm always like trying to plug things to, to help people's out. Might be a plug, but yeah, keep going. This is great, great advice.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:09:21]:

Yeah, no, no, that's totally, that's totally right. The. On the mom cat, the. But the AI thing I think has, has gotten very. Allows you to do prototyping and so the fast prototyping. You know, there's a number of tools I could, I could plug some if you wanted me to, but yeah, drop a few.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:09:39]:

I got my list too. I'm curious, I'm curious what, which ones you're loving these days.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:09:43]:

So just in the last couple of weeks, we've started playing with a product called Lovable.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:09:48]:

That's the one I use, lovable.dev great.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:09:50]:

Yep. The Lovable is great product out Sweden. Those guys are iterating fast. Be careful. It can totally, you know, it can totally change things on you if you're not paying attention. But if you want to iterate on something simple, easy, you know, not real complex business logic and at least get it to a point of where. Now I wouldn't take that, I wouldn't go build a fully baked app out of it, but I can, you can very much build something and then hand it to a professional team to go build it. Rapid prototyping and for people listening in.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:10:26]:

Like just to kind of paint the picture a little like. I totally agree. It's funny, I was talking to someone today and I said something similar like hey, you know, a year ago my advice would have been kind of different but today I would build an MVP know with these prototyping tools and again I'm with you. I think it'll change and very soon, like you know, there are, they are getting better and better and, and connecting it to actual databases or whatever. Today I wouldn't rely on it as like a full fledged app, but I think it could save so much time in terms of, you know, prototyping it, the whole ui, the ux, the functionality, so you can at least explain it. Whether that's just cutting cost to get someone else to build it or showing people or customers to validate it. It's like you can get pretty far. And so for people listening that want to mess, there's tools like lovable.dev Google just came up with a cool one which is like Firebase Studio, which is like really neat.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:11:12]:

I think Replit was one anyways. There's a ton. So if you're out there, just Google, you know, no code tools and there's a lot you can do. And one thing that has worked well for me and my two cents. I'm sure this will probably change by the time this podcast airs because AI is evolving so fast. But I found with Lovable, where I got better results was I would use Claude AI to come up with like the actual prompts and whatever and then I would, or sometimes even the code and then I would put that into Lovable and it ended up giving me a much better end result than what I would just kind of type directly because I think when I was typing directly level I was a bit lazy. I'd like make this, this, make this too short. When I was like using Claude, it forced me to like really structure the prompts well, and the app went from like 0 to 100, like real, real quick.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:11:57]:

So it was nice. But that's great advice. So prototyping lovable.dev is, is on my radar as well, but there's others and that's good advice.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:12:05]:

Yeah, I would. The other thing I would say is that especially me as a technologist and I tend to approach things from a technology perspective, but, you know, we started framing this conversation as a, you know, someone in hospitality wanting to build some sort of a tech product. Don't over tech it, whatever it is. It's amazing how many companies run their entire infrastructure ON Excel and SharePoint and like, it's not the end of the world. And I always remind, I often remind my own team, like the entire insurance industry operates off of a freaking CSV file. Trillions of dollars a day. You know, the aca, every ACH on the planet go through what is a CSV file. And it operates with the federal government back and forth.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:12:54]:

So, like, there are cool things you can do with tech, but also sometimes the business is just getting business done. And so, like, it's okay. It's okay to not be the coolest tech.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:13:05]:

Yeah, yeah, no, totally agree. I think there's a, there's a lesson there that sometimes people definitely, you know, over engineer or maybe do things that might sound cool, but you know, to not lose track of what's the actual problem you're solving. And, and, you know, good piece of advice I got a while back, which, which was like the difference between a, a vitamin and a painkiller. And sometimes it's fine, you want to build a vitamin, it's like a chrome extension or something cool, and that's fine. And there's people who made money off vitamins. Nothing wrong with that. But most companies are generally more of a painkiller. And you're solving a big problem.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:13:35]:

Not just a tiny little nice to have, like, issue, but this. That's. That's really good advice. And so I'm curious to hear just kind of your trajectory, right? So you get this idea, you start working on it. Unfortunately, you didn't have an AI, no coding tool back then to get started. But how do you get your first few customers? Because I think that's the next pivotal point people hit is like, okay, they got something kind of working. They're showing some people they're getting some good initial reactions. But then it's like that first leap of faith.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:14:02]:

I don't know about you, but the first time I had someone actually pay for it. Even though I was down in the hole, I felt like I was rich. That first paying customer. But I'd love to hear from you, what did that look like? How did you get your first paying customer?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:14:13]:

Yeah, so I, I have two tracks to this. I like to tell them both because, because they both come with great entrepreneur stories. So the, the first one was I had that, that company I had that had, you know, 60 employees that the, the Fed shut down. Yeah, I didn't do it. I didn't do anything wrong. The customer, large customer did. We, we were actually doing online advertising. So this was Google SEO.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:14:39]:

We did a lot of technical stuff, but this was SEO back in like 1998 to 2004. So raw SEO. But we were also doing ad with like super bowl ads. So we were, we were doing some, some fun stuff, video, having a ball. And so when we launched, we had SEO stuff like back in the day, this. And so I got our very first timecord customer. Like the next day somebody showed up and bought some software through SEO. Through SEO.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:15:12]:

That's amazing. It's very rare to hear businesses start with it, you know, like SEO day one. But that's cool.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:15:18]:

Yeah. 2007, right when we launched it, you know, we had it, we went live, they called me, they paid us, I think it was $19 was our selling price. They called me and let me know that they would not pay for a second month unless we added, you know, three features. So very, you know, super nice restaurant operator. But he was very direct. He was like, I paid for it. It was 19 bucks. I'm not paying for a second month unless you add these things.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:15:49]:

Like, okay, great things.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:15:51]:

Were they things that were like in your wheelhouse or were they just too random?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:15:54]:

No, they were totally in the wheelhouse. They were very much like, you know, okay, the real world. This is a real user giving me real feedback. And I guess this is what a road map looks like. We're going to redo the roadmap. Right. You know, so if we want to get paid again, I guess it was fun. And then I hadn't with that company done door to door sales or gone out and beat the street.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:16:17]:

And in the great city of Lubbock, Texas was abuelos and so Buenos, you know, we'll call it a fine dining Mexican restaurant concepts. 60 or 70 of them at the time. I happened to know a friend of a friend who knew, you know, and so kind of went and showed off some of our software. And I'll never forget the CEO Kind of looking me. And this was automated AI scheduling. Like, bam. You know, schedule's done. Manager just clicked a button.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:16:51]:

Done. And looked me dead in the face and went, anthony, I already pay my managers to build a schedule. Why would I also pay you? Like, I didn't know what to say. I was not. I was not. Something I was prepared for was like, oh, you want your managers to keep clicking for two hours while they mess around with an Excel spreadsheet? Like, okay, interesting.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:17:12]:

Closing that client.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:17:14]:

No, never close them. Never. Never got. I did. I did pivot and say, okay, well, what problem do you have? And they were like, oh, compliance is a problem. HR is a problem. You know, clocking in early is a problem. And we did go build all of those things, and they.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:17:29]:

They then sold the private equity and sold again. And, you know, we, you know, that is what.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:17:34]:

It didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Wow. And then what was the next pivotal point? You know, I think about, like, the. The classic startup journey. Obviously, there's a million and one ups and downs, but generally it's, you know, idea some type of, you know, version one prototype to get your first client.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:17:50]:

And then there's eventually that kind of milestone where now you got, you know, how did you guys go out and grow? Was it. Was it pure SEO? Were you just. Were you. Or like you said, were you beating the streets? Like, what were you doing to kind of, like. Because, you know, I know time for today is quite big, but back then, how did you kind of get that first spurt of. Of growth?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:18:09]:

We partnered with resellers. We got a reseller channel. You know, this would have been 2009, 10. Somewhere in there, got a reseller channel and started partnering up with the POS at the time, right? Toast didn't exist. Square didn't exist. You know, I mean, we're old. That's where all my hair went. And so we got.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:18:30]:

We got dealers, you know, Aloha and Micros and Positouch and those guys. And so we partnered with those dealers, and then we, frankly, we spread our wings a little bit in some other industries. We got into the grocery industry, and then we did raise a round of Financial Capital in 2014 and went to go after some larger customers after we did that. And that kind of took us to the next level, if you will.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:18:59]:

Got it. I love that. I love that. And I imagine, obviously, 30 years this company is around between CBS and this, and you're learning a ton of stuff. So what are some of the biggest shifts that have evolved from your point of view over those years. Right. Like we kind of hit the AI. I'm curious, like, what are some things, you know, when you look back the last 20, 30 years, how has your mindset kind of evolved around, you know, product and around tech and restaurants?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:19:29]:

I do think that one of the things that hasn't changed, although everybody I think thought it changed, but it really didn't has to do with service model. And I think, you know, if you back up 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, most of the service was done for the restaurant tech was in was by somebody that you trusted. Restaurants bought from someone they trusted local. They had a nearby office on a Friday night when the printer went down and the credit card machine wasn't working, they expected you to run through five red light to get there, Right?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:20:05]:

Basically, yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:20:07]:

That's how that works. Right. And they were mad if you didn't do that. And somewhere along the way, I think it was a large volume of private equity and venture capital funding. The dealerships all got acquired. NTR bought up a bunch. Ship four acquired a bunch. But they evolved in Heartland and Global bought up a bunch and they got bought up.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:20:34]:

And then the proliferation of all these other software products have happened and they're centralized and that's Time Forge is the same way. EBS is now the same way. Imagine WISK is the same way. A lot of these products are the same way. And that's put a challenge, I think, on the support models because it's no longer, you know, hey, there's two local dealers that I have a better relationship with person A than person B. It's now I put in this system that I bought from a guy I don't know, Drop shipped it from somewhere I had never been and I installed this equipment. Now I'm calling someone that I've never talked to before and I, you know, I get a help desk in a time zone I don't know where they are and I hope they know how to fix my problem. Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:21:22]:

And I think that come full circle here revolving. In the last 18 months, I've heard more conversations about the service matters. Like it's suddenly, you know, it was the. I can get this tech cheaper, I can get this tech. It has these cool features, it's moving the needle and now it's like, that doesn't matter. My managers are pissed, my team is pissed, my customers are pissed because we're spending so much time on the phone with service and it. And it's not working.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:21:48]:

Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:21:48]:

Does that make Sense.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:21:49]:

Yeah, no, I totally resonate with that. Like, we've, you know, it's our, our team laughs about it now because, like, who would have thought the hospitality industry likes hospitable people? But it's like, it's super obvious now, but it makes sense that we've seen it. It's one of the reasons, like, a lot of the times when we get people switching from other inventory systems to wisk, two of the main feedback we get is one, our customers, like, once they're happy is, hey, your support time. I think our average ticket's three minutes. I say ticket, but it's direct chat. And they're like, hey, somet takes, you know, a day, two days when we're dealing with our other inventory supplier. And then the other common one we get is onboarding, which we really, in the beginning, even our investors were kind of like, oh, you guys are spending too many research, too much time on onboarding. But we were big believers.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:22:35]:

If we spent time in the beginning with them to connect to pos, help them with their recipes, help them get the invoices in the system, you know, all the back house cost of good stuff, they'd be successful. And. And to be honest, it. It was a bet. And you know, it's been working out because one of the second biggest feedback we get when people switches. I've been with company X or Y, it's been six months, I'm still not set up. I got some of my recipes in. I'm still waiting.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:22:56]:

They're never like fully set up, so we kind of take that part seriously. Is that okay? They're most excited when they first sign up. How do we get to keep that momentum? And like, send us your recipes. Let us help you enter them. Send us so we can. Because we know, at least on our end for the way our product works is like, tip. I always compare it kind of to like a HubSpot or something. Not because of scale or anything like that.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:23:16]:

Obviously HubSpot's a massive company, but in terms of, as a CRM, it's not that useful until you connect your calendar and connect this and then create a pipeline and start at. And then you're like, oh, I get it. But if you just logged into HubSpot and everything was blank, you'd be like, why am I paying? That's the same thing with the WISK. If you don't upload invoices, connect your pos. But recipes, it's like you're staring at nothing. So we're very adamant about that, but I'm with you, so that's a good one. I'd love to know what you guys. How do you guys handle that? So like, you know that in person support is kind of important as you guys are scaling.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:23:49]:

Right. For both companies. How do you guys think through that? Do you have a lot of feet on the ground when it comes to supports? I'd love to hear kind of like your model.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:23:58]:

Yeah. So in, in both, in both companies supports the. The largest department like it really is. And, and so at dbs we, we actually post our. Our speed to answer and so how fast do we answer? So I think last quarter it was like sub 45 seconds. Like you're gonna get a live person in 45 seconds. That's awesome. You know, and so we do that.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:24:22]:

Timeforge is interesting because of just dynamics of the product. And so for, for lots of obvious reasons. Mondays is. Mondays are payday. Right. And so you're running payroll on Monday. Typically pretty much everybody in the company is tech support on Monday. And we do that and we very high touch lots of white glove support.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:24:41]:

Very similar to Wisk in that, you know, we make sure that everybody gets up and running fully configured. We don't do free trials online. Like you're not going to go online and get a free trial and have a subpar experience. Yeah, because we think that software, I think, look, there's lack of great software on the, on the planet. And if you go list every one of our competitors next to us, like they probably feature for feature win. They've got bigger dev teams, they raise more money. Like go get it. But the reality is that change management's freaking hard.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:14]:

And getting the organization to change and getting everybody bought in and wanting to do.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:25:19]:

Oh yeah, yeah, you want to do.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:22]:

Inventory, you want to do cycle counts.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:25:24]:

Oh yeah. Why?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:26]:

Yeah, that's hard. And so that requires conversation, requires human. So we take a different approach, you know, anyway. And so that means we're slower growing and, and frankly we've been part of a rocket ship, you know, to finish some of that story with time cords. Like we, we. We merged in 20. We raised money in 2014. We merged in 2016 with a strategic acquirer.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:49]:

We had some private equity money behind us and we went and did nine mergers and acquisitions in four years. Wow.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:25:56]:

In four years.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:57]:

Four years.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:25:57]:

Wow.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:25:58]:

We. We blew up. We had nearly 600 employees. We like, we went gangbusters, man.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:26:05]:

That's awesome. That's crazy. That's crazy.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:26:09]:

When we went to go spin at the company back out in 2020, everybody was like, dap, dap. We don't, we don't like, we didn't like that. We don't want to be that big. We want to stay small. And it's funny, you and I were talking about the NRA show. I ran into one of our competitors who run sales at one of our competitors at the NRA show. And we've become friendly over the years. And he's like, I.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:26:29]:

He stopped me at the end of our show. He said, just want you to know you're doing it right. You get to do what you want to do because you kind of get to grow. You get to do what your customers want to do. You get the build roadmap the way you want to do it. So we do things differently.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:26:42]:

Just. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Not a certain scale. You kind of don't have that luxury of freedom. You got a lot of people to report to. And it becomes, you know, job more than the entrepreneurial cycle, which I totally get. I'm curious to get your perspective on, you know, the whole labor side and the POS side.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:27:01]:

But the reason I want to start with the labor side is because when I think about a restaurant, typically the first thing when it comes to tech, you know, you open a new restaurant, usually the first thing they're thinking of is POS because they're like, okay, I got to hire people and I got, you know, this is post licenses and construction, all that. But, you know, I got to hire people and I got to make sure I can collect money. So usually POS is first on the list. Something like WISK usually comes second. After a couple months of opening, they're like, do I, Am I making money? That's when they reach out to WISK. Labor is pretty important and scheduling. So I'm curious, number one, when do people reach out to you guys when it's a new restaurant? Is it pretty early on? Is it the same time as the pos? And then I love. Because again, we have a lot of restaurant listeners, managers, owners, etc, and so when Jeremy was on the show, we got.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:27:43]:

We went deep into the pos, what to look out for, where do people get screwed this. That, like what makes a good pos, Etc, which is great. And I want to get some of you, some of that opinion from you. But before we do pos, because I haven't done labor yet. Love to do that with you on the labor side. So for a restaurant, there is listing. Maybe you're using a labor tool. Maybe you're not.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:28:01]:

Maybe you've tried some, you hated them. Maybe you're using one you love. But you can hear from an expert right now, Anthony, who's literally built a company around this. I want to get your perspective. What, what do you think people get wrong when they, when they're choosing a, you know, labor and scheduling tool.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:28:19]:

Yeah, great question. So you mentioned when you're opening a new restaurant, you're picking a labor system. And the reason for that is that it's federally and state mandated. Right. That you have to pay. There are all these rules and regulations, the compliance, the HR things. You're going to get slapped. And so there's none of that around the inventory side.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:28:46]:

Maybe there should be, by the way. But, but that's the first thing. The second thing, and it's always interesting to me in the, in the restaurant space, because other industries are not like this. But in the industry, in our industry, like the POS sometimes is an afterthought. Like we, we need to have one that. Because it, I mean, how hard can it be? We're ringing up an item and we're collecting money. Like.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:29:10]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:29:10]:

Any of them can do that. I've been to a trade show. There's 500.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:29:13]:

Pick one.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:29:15]:

And I know Jeremy went into that a little bit because they're not all the same.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:29:18]:

Exactly. And you have no idea. And I want to get into that with you because QSR versus sit down. Splitting bills. This. That, like. Yeah, yeah, we'll get into it.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:29:26]:

It's a thing. But it really, in the, in the restaurant industry, that POS is the heartbeat. And often, to your point, people choose the pos and POS is often have a labor component, and we've seen this for decades, that the POs had a punch in and a punch out and they had a basic scheduler. And especially for an SMB, oftentimes that was good enough. Right?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:29:51]:

Yeah. So on the inventory side, good enough.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:29:56]:

And what happened over the years, and I, you know, I was running around, I told you we sold the resellers. I'd run around, I'd go to NCR and I'd be like, please, please allow us to integrate. Please allow us to bring in this, you know, this advanced thing that we've spent our entire lives building. They'd go, ah, nah, we got it, We've got it. And now what's happened. Now what's happened is that all these states have put in the compliance and the regulations and the fair work week and the, you know, the compliance around paid and unpaid breaks. And you know, do you get paid an extra hour and all this stuff? And it's just. And if you don't.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:30:35]:

If you don't pay attention to it, it turns into a class action lawsuit. So now we have. I have some friends, other friends in the POS business that are coming and going. Hey, Anthony, I have like a team of eight people that are over here just building time and attendance, just building labor. Can we, can we not do that? And we have customers that are calling or going. Like this POS time and attendance thing is not working. Like it's. I'm getting sued, I'm getting lawsuits, I'm not paying people properly.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:31:05]:

The calculations are wrong. Like it's. It's a problem. Right.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:31:09]:

So let's stay out of your curiosity. Just quick side note, I'm sure you know what states are the worst. My guess is just California because California is all super strict, but always, always okay.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:31:19]:

You know, Oregon, Washington, New York, again, Colorado. Right. Yeah. All the states you might, you might think of. But there's some weird ones. There's some weird ones. There's some strange rules in, in Portland, the city of Portland versus the county around Portland. And like, rules for where you get.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:31:41]:

There's just some weird, funky.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:31:42]:

I can only imagine. Wow.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:31:43]:

Yeah.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:31:44]:

So I guess you got to give a little thanks to Abuelos from the early days. Even though you don't work with them, they were onto something with the whole compliance thing.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:31:54]:

They were totally onto it. We've spent a lot of time on compliance. Our COO spends a lot of time, she's on the shrm, you know, Human resources Board. And so she does a lot with that and the compliance. So you ask, what do they get wrong? Generally somebody chooses like a really great, great, you know, scheduling tool. And then they go. And then they. And which.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:32:16]:

That's great. That's awesome.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:32:17]:

Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:32:17]:

And then they. And then those scheduling tools kind of will bolt on compliance. And then. And it turns out the thing that actually matters to your business is the compliance. And you should bolt on the scheduling perhaps.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:32:33]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:32:34]:

At least if you think about. From a risk mitigation.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:32:36]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:32:37]:

But where, where else do they go wrong? Look, some concepts, if you have variable scheduling, like if you. If you're a small QSR and like you have three people on staff, then, like, you don't need sales forecasting. I got into a. I had a wonderful chat with a friend not that long ago, thought leader in the industry, and he was like, 70% of restaurants don't need forecasting. Like, you know, it doesn't cost extra to have the truck show up with more food on Thursdays than it does Fridays, like, and just have them show off, you know. So he got on a riff about it. But on the, on the labor side, if you're, if you're shafting, you know, more or less the same, then like, you don't need forecasting. But if you've got highly variable hours, then.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:33:17]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:33:17]:

Get a good forecasting system. Right. And I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people that have forecasting and they check a box and it's garbage.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:33:28]:

I can imagine. Yeah, people sell a lot of forecasting, REI stuff and it's, it's not really AI, it's just, you know, like, just.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:33:36]:

Gotta run into that all the time. You've gotta run into that with competitors all the time.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:33:40]:

You know, a lot of people, like, definitely oversell. It's. It's definitely a mentality thing. Like some people just, you know, over, over promise, under deliver. And then we've done the opposite for a lot of time kind of under promise, try to over deliver. We're trying to get, you know, over the years we got more confidence. It's been good. But we learned like in the early days, it's like, okay, at a certain point you have to have some level of confidence because like, you know, people are looking at you.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:34:02]:

But I never like over promising. But yeah, there are a lot of people out there that over promise. And I'm with you. Like, a lot of people might not need it where you needed it is. It makes sense if you're, like you said, super variable. Maybe, you know, you're in a climate that's super seasonal or the type of place you're. You run is next to a, I don't know, concert hall. So it's, you know, like the more volatile probably the more it makes sense.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:34:24]:

But if not, you probably have, you know, you'll probably have a very repeatable schedule, all things equal, you know.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:34:32]:

Yep, yep. And then you're dealing with humans and so then you need a really good communication platform. And that's what you really should be shooting for, is a, is a communication platform. You know, that is same thing about compliance.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:34:45]:

First bolt on scheduling, bolt on communication. That makes sense. And then similar and we'll get into the pos. But you know, the same way with. At least I have from a POS standpoint, you know, I, I think there's certain POS that obviously do a lot better for full service and what that requires and versus maybe qsr and speed and whatever. So there's, you know, clear differences and, and even, you know, we partner with some POs are really niche in the bar side. Like you know, quick shout out to Smart tab. They're very good.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:35:11]:

They're a bit more known on the west coast, but they're really good. Let's say on the bar specific side they have a segment as an example. What do you find, let's say from the labor side makes the biggest difference? Is it number of locations? The type of restaurant? Is it number of staff? Like what do you see is probably the biggest factor on like what tool someone should go with?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:35:35]:

I think it, it has to do a little bit with how big the internal support team is.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:35:44]:

Okay. Elaborate.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:35:46]:

So, yeah, so, and I, I, I think this may be true in your world as well. I'd be, I'd be curious to hear if it's the same, but sure. You know, as an organization gets bigger jobs get deeper, if that makes sense.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:36:00]:

Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:36:01]:

So when you've got a, when you've got one store, one operator, they're wearing all the hacks. They are the chief bottle washer and the CEO and the head of hr. And, and, and Right. And then is that, and so they need, they need as close to an all in one tool as they can get.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:36:20]:

Fair enough. So those are the people that might be fine with a pos that does it.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:36:24]:

All right.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:36:25]:

Good enough. Kind of thing. Okay.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:36:27]:

Or, or pick three tools to your point. You've got, you've got an inventory tool, you've got a POS tool, you got a labor tool. Yeah, but you don't need a wage management tool and an onboarding tool and this end of that. Right. You know, whatever.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:36:39]:

Got it.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:36:39]:

As that expands out and becomes, you know, you get to 20, 30, 40, 50 stores and then now you've got a head of HR and that head of HR also has someone who's responsible for talent management or L and D or payroll or you know, these other things. And then they've got, they now have a resource or they are the resource to manage their portion of the tech stack, if you will.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:37:07]:

Makes sense.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:37:09]:

Then suddenly they have their own needs and that can go really well. They can go, I really need something that helps me with hyperlocal recruiting because I have stores and I, you know, I want people that live within a mile of the store, three miles of the store, and I'm going to recruit really strongly that way. Or they could get, you know, they could go, oh, I really need that button to be blue And I'm not going to put in a system unless the button's blue. And you and I both know there are people that do that.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:37:36]:

Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:37:36]:

Even though they could work around the fact that the button's not blue, but they're not moving until the button's blue because that's their job. And so we find that the smaller the organization, the more the all in one. The bigger the organization, the more they want to be able to pivot, which is where you need APIs and you need the integrations. And that's fair. We've built Time Forge in a way that you don't have to use all the modules. You may only use one module.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:38:01]:

And that's fine, that's cool, that's great. Where do you guys find your kind of sweet spot? It sounds like now you can kind of do size any of client, but historically I guess was your sweet spot. The 20 to kind of 50 location you kind of mentioned or really now today it doesn't matter anything and everything.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:38:17]:

We do, we, you know, honestly we were, we started in, in at the ME space and then we, you know, probably the largest customer we've had on the platform was, was Sprouts and you know, 40, 48,000 employees, you know, publicly traded company.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:38:37]:

Yeah, exactly.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:38:40]:

And so, you know, we can do just about anything. We, after we sold the company, we kind of got away from, we'll call them the startups. They're not startups anymore, but we got away from the Toast and the Square and the Heartland Restaurant. And then last year we acquired Lineup AI. And so we bought all of Lineup AI's software assets, their forecasting assets, and then all their integration. And so we got back into a bunch of one, two, three store operators. Yeah. So we now have customers all over the place of all different shapes and sizes.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:39:18]:

Okay. If people want to learn more about Time Forge, it's all, it's. I always like to, you know, plug things along again. My goal is just help people listening. So people are like, okay, this Time Forge thing sounds interesting. How can, how can they find Time Forge? And I'd love you to maybe just walk, talk through. You mentioned the modules, just the key kind of modules of what they do just to kind of pique the curiosity.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:39:38]:

We make it really easy. You go to timeforge.com and right there we spend a lot of time on the website. We, we don't have a huge sale team, so we're not out knocking on doors you'll see at the trade shows. But you go to timeforged.com you're going to find out. We've got a bunch of modules. You don't have to use them all. You can use one or more but they follow the employee life cycle. So they start with hiring.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:40:04]:

How do you find people to work in your restaurants? How do you hire them and get them to fill out paperwork? That's important. And how do you make sure they don't back to that compliance, make sure they don't use the computers. If they don't have the paperwork, then the next thing there is, we have some HR modules. So we track things like certifications and serve safe and harassment training, employee handbooks, that kind of stuff.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:40:33]:

Very cool.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:40:34]:

Then we have a whole, the whole scheduling module. Everything from make it manually to click a button, analyze my sales. It's automatically done for me. Very cool. We do all the clocking in and out. We can do that with a pos. We can do that with a, with a time clock. We can do that on a phone.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:40:53]:

Lots of ways to clock in and out. We have, we acquired a survey company so we can do 360 surveys. We can do pulse surveys.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:41:02]:

Yeah, that's neat.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:41:03]:

Yeah. So you think about how, how is your staff doing? Are you, I mean right now, are you having high turnover? Are you forgetting to talk to people? Back to that being, are we being hospitable to our hospitality people?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:41:15]:

Exactly.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:41:17]:

Yeah. We have, we have an earned wage act, this product as well. So we went out and built that with a financial partner so that there was no fees to the employees and so they can get paid, clock in, clock out, get paid before they get to their car and then get their tips distributed in the same way.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:41:36]:

Okay, that's really neat. And then last but not least, the, the kind of forecasting tool you guys acquired. Can you, can you chat a bit about that? Like what kind of stuff were they doing? And because it sounds pretty interesting. So maybe just to share with the listeners.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:41:49]:

Yeah, happy to. So lineup AI started in 2020 was, was a thesis by an insurance company. It was a great thesis was hey, if, if operators are doing a great job running their business, could we reduce some of their insurance premiums? And if you know anything about workers comp and all of that, it's pretty expensive to run and run a, run a restaurant because of that. And so, so they started building tools and one of those that they built was a forecasting and scheduling tools somewhat similar to time Forge and ran it had a great team at one point in time had 24, 25 people on staff was very focused on the machine learning and the AI and had built all kinds of algorithms around it. And they were looking at sales at item level sales that. Consuming all the data in from the positive and from other systems. Unfortunately, they raised a Series A and they were funded by a venture studio. And then unfortunately, last year in 2024, they ran out of money.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:42:52]:

They were. They did not go secure Series B. And so we stepped in and through a competitive process, acquired their assets and merged them in. And so we've about got almost all their assets merged into ours now.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:43:07]:

Wow.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:43:09]:

Yeah.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:43:09]:

Okay. Yeah, that's super cool. That's really interesting. It's. It's. I think, you know, like we kind of mentioned, right, POS cost control, labor compliant. Like, these are core parts of. Of running a.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:43:21]:

A restaurant business. And so for real listing, definitely check out, you know, timeforged.com and that's awesome. And then, you know, as we. As we slowly get to wrapping up, I also want to get your. Your opinion on pos, because, you know, you. You know a lot about the tech side and you know a lot about pos, and so I would be doing a disservice if I didn't ask you at least a little bit about POS's, because that. That's a big one. I can't tell you how many customers always ask me.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:43:46]:

I try not to get too. Too involved because it's. It's so hard to recommend a pos. And then if something doesn't work out, you're like the. The guy who recommended it. But my best advice I typically give them is like, listen, write down your top five, like, things that are really important to you, and then focus on that. Because the one thing that I always notice is sometimes restauranteurs get distracted, and so they'll just, oh, this POS has this online ordering, and this POS does the. Out of my way.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:44:11]:

But what do you need? You know, and if the most important thing you need is, I don't know, splitting the bill and like, okay, who splits the bill the easiest? Like, focus. But I'd love to hear from you. You've been in the industry, you've set up and been, you know, seen so many clients, what are taking that same question for labor, I think is gonna be another big question. Pos. What are the biggest mistakes you see restaurants make when choosing a pos, and what are some tips you can give them?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:44:34]:

I think POS is one of the things that often goes unnoticed. It's a. It's a thing that just People assume it's table stakes. And so like you, like I mentioned earlier, like you've got to have it. And so everyone just assumes when you say the acronym pos, they just assumed it. POS means POS and so. And it doesn't. So I would tell you two things.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:44:57]:

I would, I would build on what you just said. Build a list of five or ten things that you think are critical to your organization. And if you need some help, use the AI. Use chat GPT to help you build. Because, because one sentence isn't going to do it. Write out a whole paragraph.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:45:15]:

I'm a Pokeball.3 location. This is what I do. The most important thing is that, that speed lunch rush. I agree. Nice big prompt. Give me like the most important things I should look. That's great advice. So yeah, take it a step further.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:45:28]:

That makes sense. Put that into chat gbd and quick. Side note, for restaurants that are lazy, it happens to me too. Just use the audio feature. Just use the voice feature. Save you time. Talk it out loud. Done.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:45:39]:

Okay, good advice. And then based on that list, what, what would you say next?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:45:44]:

Do. Do that. Number two, do not buy a system unless you've actually seeing those things work.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:45:53]:

Fair. Going back to over promising. Yeah, yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:45:56]:

If you didn't see those things work, just assume that your job is forfeit. Okay? Because I, I don't, I cannot tell you how many people will put in a system and then be like, well the guy told me it would do that or I saw it on a PowerPoint and I'm like, I, I don't. I, I would not do that. Like you're jeopardizing your job to. Because you put something in that somebody told you that you've never met from a continent, you know what, what that you don't know anything about. And you just assume you take their word for it again. And so that's maybe the other side of hospitality. You know, there's, you just assume you take their word for that.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:46:32]:

So if you didn't see it work, just assume it doesn't exist.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:46:36]:

That's a good one. That's a good one.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:46:38]:

So I think that's the, the, the second thing, the third thing I would say is that many people focus on the point of sale and forget the layer under the point of sale. And it's amazing how much the, and so I get into this argument with people all the time. Well, are you, are you hybrid? Your point is to tell hybrid or is it on premise? We only want cloud. And I'm like Well, why? Well, if it's all in the cloud, then. And I'm like, well, do you have redundant routers? Do you have a 5G stealth failover in all of your stores, including the one in the mall parking lot? What are you going to do when they decide to re asphalt and dig everything up and you have no Internet for five weeks? Like, you know, these, these things, like sometimes people don't remember, but it's the foundation of the business. And so people won't spend that extra thousand dollars on a network switch. Right. To have redundant network switch.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:47:40]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:47:40]:

And that would have kept them from being offline.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:47:43]:

So, you know, imagine how many sales they miss out on that. Right. Like easy. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And maybe there's a lesson there in itself which is sometimes I get it. Restaurants are tight. You're trying to keep things in budget, but sometimes you got to pick the things to. To nickel and dime and, and I think that's an art in itself.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:48:01]:

But I'm with you. And I've seen it. Sometime people nickel and dime the wrong things. I've seen it with WISK, people be like, oh, this other software is 50amonth cheaper. And I'm like, that's cool. But if it's going to take you five hours more weeks to inventory, who cares? You know, it's like, right. Sometimes they look at the wrong, you know, try to save penny, save pennies, but it costs you dollars kind of thing.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:48:19]:

That's exactly, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, yeah, you know, having that fundamental network layer redundant, you know, and it's this online ordering thing is getting, you know, out of control. Right. If you don't have redundant, you know, is it getting into the store?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:48:37]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:48:37]:

You know, it doesn't really, it doesn't really matter. So you've got to have all of that up and running and all the backups and all the things and then, and then the POS. Yeah. Make sure you've got the right POS. There's a lot of POS's that are, you know, make sure if your table service that it can do all the table service things. I would tell you that there are a lot of POS's in quick service right now because of the explosion during COVID of all the quick service content. Very hard to find quick service pos or cable service pos right now.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:49:05]:

And just to quickly double click on that because funny enough, WISK, because we started very much on the alcohol side, now we do food and beverage. But because we start on the alcohol side. A big chunk of our customers are full service restaurants. So let's just go a bit deeper. I think this could be helpful to them. What should they, what, what should these full service restaurants look for in a POS that's you know, important because you see this all the time. So maybe you could just highlight a few things that they, they could think about.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:49:32]:

Yeah, so. So when you're looking for a full service, you're looking for things like, you know, we'll start with that, that one. If I go offline, like it. Does your POS work fully if you go offline or a lot of pos's you're stuck with, that ticket is stuck on one particular, whatever the last terminal was. So if Table 14 was on Terminal 2, like you can only interact with that until you get back online. You better go back to that terminal to work on table 14. And so that's a thing, that's real and so, but you're looking for things like can you do coursing, can you do automatic courting? Can I just come in and order food for Angelo? I'm going to auto fire after, you know, maybe your Appetizers fire in 5 minutes or 10 minutes or you know, can I as your server control the pacing of the food or am I going to send that to a kitchen display system and that kitchen display system is going to control the pacing. Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:50:32]:

What kind of an experience do I want you to have? Right, so that's important. You mentioned splitting checked earlier. That is kind of funny. Like is there one way to split a check? Everybody, everybody's done that. Where you've gone in and been like, here's three credit cards. Can you, I need to split it this way and that way. And inevitably the server is like, oh, my system can't do it. I promise you, the system probably can do it.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:50:52]:

They just don't want to. Yeah, but, but the reality is, is that some of systems can, can't do it. And so, you know, can the system split it 11 different ways? And that's important to a lot of people. Right. My, my corporate card, I can't charge and be reimbursed for alcohol. So I want you to move all the alcohol to my personal card and all the non alcohol. You know, how many clicks does it take to do that?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:51:21]:

Especially if it's table of ted. Yeah, right, exactly.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:51:24]:

Exactly. So that doesn't matter at a qsr, but it matters in table service. You know, is there, is there a handheld that I can walk over to. Is that handheld a very nice experience where I'm the server and when it comes to time to pay out and tip that I hand you a separate device, or is this an awkward thing where I, like, hand it to you and I'm looking over and you're doing a survey or like, what is experience?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:51:48]:

You know, that's the worst. When you got the server looking at the tip, you're like, what do I do?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:51:52]:

All right, don't tell me the tip and hand it back to me. Like, you know, the whole thing, you know, and that's funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:52:00]:

That's good advice. That's. That's good advice, I think. Yeah. It's so different. A quick service that you care about speed. You usually have peaks, whether it's, you know, maybe, you know, the lunch rush, the dinner. I mean, depending on the type of QSR where you're located.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:52:11]:

But, you know, there's probably a couple hours in that day where you make 80%. And in certain ways, you know, full service could be similar. But. But. But I'm with you. It's. It's. It's very different.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:52:21]:

The, The. The one area I'd love to pick your brain. And then. And, and I know we're coming up on time, but the. Is the data side of things. I know it's always talked about. People are always like, okay, how can you make the guest experience better? You have the reservation data, you have their ordering. You know, Angelo comes back, it's his birthday, it says it's that.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:52:37]:

How do you guys think through that? Like, do you guys have your own kind of internal CRM? Do you guys integrate with others? Like, I'd be curious to just learn a little more about. That's like, as it comes up a lot, I find when restaurants just want it, and maybe they're getting some of it through Open Table, maybe some of it through a loyalty app. They're using some of it through this. How do you guys think through that side of the business?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:53:01]:

Yeah, and the, the power in the data is not having the data. Right. It's. It's doing something with the data.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:53:07]:

That's correct. Yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:53:08]:

And that. And. And a lot of that goes back to that change management. Like, you've got to train people to. To do things with the data. And so, you know, and you don't normally do that with a shotgun. You've got to do that one step at a time. And so we look for little places in the POS where we can inject touch points.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:53:28]:

You know, you Mentioned open table, they're a partner. We have other partners that do similar things. But. So for example, you can reserve online, which is another thing you don't generally do in a QSR world, by the way. And so you're going to reserve online and then when you come in and you get sat at a table, we'll automatically associate that Angelo came in and is sat at that table. We'll pull your reservation, your birthday, your anniversary, all of that information in and associate it with that ticket. And so now we can notify the manager, hey, there's a, you know, there's somebody here, there's a big shopper here, it's their anniversary, you should swing by and we can, we can drop a pin on that table. We can do some other things so that, that guest touch experience is there again, stuff you wouldn't really have to do in a QSR world, but you do need to do in a, in a table service world.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:54:29]:

I love that last question for you because I know we, you know, we're, we're on time, but I always like to just ask what's, what's a restaurant tech trend that you're watching closely right now? You know, I know there's a lot out there, but what's something you're keeping your eyes on?

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:54:43]:

There's a lot. And it's something I'm cheating because we've got our hand in a little bit. But, but I, I think there, there's two and, and so, yeah, I guess I'll cheat. I'll say there's two. One is this concept of gamification. I think that, I think gamification with customers is going to continue to be a thing. Right? How do you. And it, it's kind of a twist on loyalty and, and that's been around for a while, but I think people are starting to figure it out and I think we're starting to see that come.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:55:20]:

Can you tell the cock with my hands a lot. And to bring other brands into it where there's like cross brand promotions and we're starting to see some of that where you're getting, you know, hey, if I'm shopping here all the time, how do I get my net flicks bill paid for? Right? Like, how do we bring in some of this other stuff? You get some of these larger brands that are starting to dip into gamify some of this stuff. And so I think that's very interesting and I think we're starting to see some of that with employees as well, which is, I'm from the generation of I'm getting paid to do a job, so I'm going to do my freaking job.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:55:58]:

Right.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:55:59]:

And I think we're, we have enough people in the workforce as Gen A is supposed to take over, you know, here in the next couple of years there'll be 50% of the workforce and Gen A and Gen Z and they're like, I came to work, that's the base pay. Where's my, where's my bonus pay? Right. And so that mentality, yeah, it's a different mentality. Like I came here, I busted my butt, I did better than everybody else, where's my commission?

‍

Anthony Presley [00:56:21]:

Yeah, yeah.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:56:22]:

You know, and I, you can't fault them for that. So I think, I think the gamification is one thing. I think the other thing is, is that there's a lot of time, effort, money spent on front end, you know, whether or not that online ordering, Kiops, whatever. I think there's a lot of tech that's wasting in the back of the kitchen. Yeah, you know, the kdf, the, all of that, the optimization, the. Yeah, some of what you're doing and you know, I think that there's a lot there that has been untouched.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:56:54]:

Yeah, totally agree with tobacco stuff. It's interesting and you're seeing some of it even just with like prep things or like, you know, machinery and like, you know, peeling vegetables or whatever it may be but you know, or the avocado thing with Chipotle. But it is interesting because it's like really just you're talking about saving on labor and you're just talking about, you know, something that people probably don't want to do anyway. So it's, it's, it's a good example of where people don't mind being replaced by robots. I don't think anyone's dying to, you know, slice avocados. Maybe, maybe you got some avocado aficionados. Maybe. I don't know.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:57:34]:

That's awesome. No, that's good. Well look, we'll see where it goes. I always like to get those predictions to see kind of what you're keeping on. And last but not least, this is just for people to find you. So I know you mentioned Time Forge. Love you to plug CBS as well and then just plug yourself. Like if people want to find you on LinkedIn or whatever, we're gonna link it all.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:57:51]:

But it's good to just people listening in.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:57:53]:

Yeah, yeah, please find timeforge.com easy cbs north star.com also pretty easy. Like you know, like the TV station, but but not though cbs north star.com and then you can find me on on LinkedIn. I'm on the first Anthony Presley you'll find and and feel free to connect with me. I connect with a lot of people, happy to leverage my network to help out anybody in the industry anytime I can.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:58:22]:

I love that. Well, Anthony, look, thanks for being here. I think there's a lot of good advice you share, and I think for the people listening, they'll appreciate that. So thank you for spending the time with me on the WISKing it all podcast. It was great having you on.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:58:34]:

Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Great to get to know you a little better.

‍

Anthony Presley [00:58:38]:

If you want to learn more about WISK, head to WISK AI and book a demo.

‍

Angelo Esposito [00:58:53]:

Sam.

whi

‍