Josh Sharkey: is. Yeah, it certainly makes people better and faster. I'm, so one thing I, I'm, I'm super curious about is how you, how you're using it today. I will say, I should have prefaced in the beginning of the, of the episode that you are coming from [00:07:00] this, from, uh, the perspective of someone who's been, like you said, in restaurants for, I think over 30 years, not in the tech side.
And I actually didn't know this by you, Ben. Yeah. Uh, that you were a GM and running, running, you know, restaurants like Grady's and Noodles and Co and Brinker and, you know, Dewey's for, for decades, literally decades before you ever got into, into tech. So when I first met you, I would've never assumed that, by the way, I think we met at some, you know, event in, in Vegas or something.
And now knowing more about your background and then the things that you do as it relates to, you know, tech and, and data. It makes a ton of sense. So this, this perspective that you have is obviously not just some, uh, technologist who is thinking about how to, you know, improve, improve operations. It's, it's pretty cool.
I, I totally agree. I think that, that there's so many. You know, repetitive things that we can probably optimize. But, you know, on the, on the office side, and you know, the restaurants are a pretty unique industry in that the business is actually the people and the food. [00:08:00] You can't optimize away all of that because that's what, you know, that's where you go to a lot of these places.
It's also, I think, a different problem when we talk about, you know, how you approach this at restaurants at scale versus like small businesses, whether it's, you know, mom and pops or like 1, 2, 3 new groups. Like a lot of those places are not rebuilding their entire infrastructure to add robots and even kiosks and things like that because, you know, there's a lot of CapEx there that is probably just not, you know, something that they can get their head around.
'cause it doesn't necessarily make sense to spend that much. So that's not happening for a very long time. But you, you know, the things that you're talking about, uh, in terms of like accounting, things like this, there's absolutely no reason why that's not gonna start to 10 x sort of in terms of productivity with way less people.
I wanna divert for a second because I'm, I'm super into sort of figure out all the new tools to use. I use a bunch of them in my day-to-day work. Obviously my day-to-day is very different than it was, you know, years ago when I was running restaurants. But like, what do you, what are you using today? [00:09:00] Forget, like, you know, what you, using what you think of in restaurants, but what do you use day to day, uh, tools, you know, just for your work in terms of ai?
Yeah. Very few
Ben Pryor: I think that are pure ai. I mean, I, I assume probably the usual, um, I use granola for note taking, summarizing, et cetera. Saves me a lot of time. Uh, 'cause probably like you, I'm on a lot of Zoom calls and they, they can go back to back to back to back and then I realize that it's six o'clock in the evening that I really didn't kind of synthesize 50% of the conversations I had.
So that's a really helpful tool for me. The others, you know, chat, GPT, Gemini, et cetera, um, just around composing emails, documents, decks, that kind of stuff. Um, it feels pretty boring. Um, the one that's not AI [00:10:00] that I actually really like is Expensify. That's, and I think maybe the closest example to somebody kind of out in the field when I'm traveling, when I'm on the go, I'm a desk-less worker at that point to, to use a phrase that gets thrown around the, the restaurant industry.
That's an extraordinarily convenient thing where somebody hands me a receipt and I snap a picture inside the app and then it does its thing. And I, I think there's probably a misnomer among a, a lot of restaurant folks that all this AI is running purely computerized. So I think if you took a survey of.
The restaurant SaaS ecosystem, I would guess 75 plus percent of the tools out there have, you know, teams in nearshore offshore that are supplementing the, the code that's happening. So OCR is probably the, the one that gets talked about the most, where [00:11:00] somebody's writing a note on a, an invoice, or it's not scannable.
And I, I assume Expensify does the same thing, but the end result, regardless of how it's happening behind the scenes, whether it's AI or not, is that I had something that was happening really manually that now is digitized and it's learning from, um, you know, from my behaviors. So I can set rules and say, Hey, every time I take an Uber, it automatically just shows up in my expense report.
It knows my habits, it, it knows how I use Uber, and it saves me. Four or five steps just for that single trip of getting it, from taking the Uber in the app to having it show up on my expense report correctly. And, um, you know, all the, all the dropdowns are prefilled, et cetera. So that's a, a version I think of something that's seems overly simplistic, but adding that up, like expense reports is on my top 10 list.
And I, I've spoken about [00:12:00] this for a lot of years, which I've done this taking over new markets as a, you know, director of operations for restaurant brands. It's like the, the thing that people like talking about the most or the things they hate doing the most. And so you can walk into a brand new restaurant.
If you take over as a, as a GM or multi-unit manager and say, Hey, let's grab a sheet of paper. I want you to write the 10 things down that if you could come in tomorrow and I told you you didn't have to do those 10 things anymore, how much joy would you have? You know, by me telling you that. It's funny because a lot of the things that we've built SaaS in restaurants to do, never make that top 10 list.
Sure. You've got yours and I assume cleaning fryers and mopping floors and, uh, you know, reconciling cash and daily sales reports like that list actually overlaps for the majority of people I've ever asked that question to. I, I get a new one every once in a while, [00:13:00] but there's usually five or six that are pretty universal in the restaurant industry of like, man, if I never had to do that again as a task, I would actually love coming to work way more tomorrow than I did today.
And I don't see enough companies and the industry in general trying to solve those type of things. So that's why I think the Expensify thing is interesting is it's not super high tech. They're starting to add in AI and all the things, but that solved something that was on my top 10 list of tasks that I would love to never do again, which is.
Put together an expense report. Um, and it's like, Hey, I don't have to do that anymore. I just take a picture and it does the work for me. It's not pain free. I have to do some setup and configuration and, and get the thing to learn my habits. But then once it's in play, then it's like kind of just fades into the background, which I think is the ultimate, uh, positive for tech.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. You know, it's interesting that migration from [00:14:00] just software to now ai and I'm using, I'm using a ton of tools right now and it's interesting 'cause there's, there's a lot of training you have to do up front. And so I use this one tool called Lindy. I use it for some, some basic things like I trained it to triage my email.
So it, it labels things, it archives things, it sets up drafts for me. Uh, it identifies if things, uh, it's a newsletter or something important and I can keep training this thing to get better. And I actually don't need my assistant to do it anymore because it does it all for me and I can keep training the thing.
Now I'm sort of feeding it my entire knowledge base of everything. So there are, you know, like I will have my entire, every piece of information about my, all, all my team. So I can ask questions, whose birthdays are coming up this month? Who's got the most tenure? Anybody, any anniversary is coming up, what's the scope of this contractor?
And I can just literally ask this thing. And it gives me very, very detailed answers. And now I'm using it personally. I literally dumped all of my notes from everything as well as like all my personal, you know, all my friends or, or [00:15:00] colleagues, their birthdays and things like that. And it's this place to kind of query anything that I need that I would, that I would either have to go find somewhere else or I forgot.
Sometimes it's even just ideas. And, uh, and I just, uh, you know, it's one place where I can, where I can go even if those ideas are in 12 different places. And what I find interesting about it is it, it is a lot of setup. And it's funny how we think about software of like, oh my God, well there's, there's a bunch of implementation.
By the way, I, I hate implementation. I hate you have to do a ton of implementation. But you know, if you hired an assistant. You would need to spend a lot of time to train them. And the more time you put in training them, the better they will be. And uh, and that, that upfront work will, uh, ensure that they're, that they're really good.
And if you don't spend that time, you'll expect obviously like that the output will be, you know, based on how much time and energy and how much thought you put into how you train them. And it's the same thing with these, with these tools. I mean, you can build Expensify with, without Expensify today, if you spend the time training something, it might be more time than it's worth.
But it's super interesting, like the things that we are able to do now if we spend the [00:16:00] time. And it's helped me like realize, oh yeah, you know, it's the same as if I'm training a team member. You know, I'm gonna have to put that much effort in. The benefit is, you know, with some of these things, you trade it once, you know, and if it makes a mistake, it's your fault, you know, typically 'cause you didn't like get explicit enough about the things that you want.
But that doesn't apply to sort of, you can't really do that with a lot of the day-to-day stuff in, in, in the restaurant. You can't sort of program that. And you need people, you need that sort of hospitality. I think we, we have some similar, similar thoughts on not just the tech stack, but sort of how, how restaurants operate.
And I think you probably are in the same sort of, uh, you know, mindset of me of, of what are things that, not necessarily that we should optimize, but things that we should just not be doing at all and just have them done. Either. Either stop doing them because there's something else you could do altogether.
Or they should be com like, like significantly, you know, removed from the day-to-day and put into, into tech. But are there things that, that you can think of? You were mentioning them earlier, like [00:17:00] things that we do in the restaurant and let's just stick to back of house 'cause I'm biased and I want to talk about back house things that, that happen that you're like, we should probably not even do that anymore.
Ben Pryor: Yeah, I think most things should go through that lens. It's interesting, I guess my, my old salty operator will, personality will come out here for a second, but part of what makes. Operations and people that run restaurants really amazing is we are incredible at workarounds. We are problem solvers. We're solving problems every second of every day.
And you know, I'm sure you've got your picture of what that looks like in back of house. You know, you came in every single day and every single piece of equipment turned on and worked exactly like it was supposed to. Then all you would have to do is make sure that you were, you know, prepping and cooking and serving the freshest food.
It's [00:18:00] all the things that happen around that that, uh, I think end up creating all these extra processes and tasks. So, you know, I, I mentioned a couple of minute ago that I don't know that, you know, purely technology is gonna solve. I mentioned Friars. I know there's. A couple of companies that, that are working on that, and I guess I'll, I'll make a statement broadly about technology is technology assumes that we should just continue to do things the way they've always been done, but smarter or automated.
So fryer's a great example. Most of the companies are building what looks like a fryer just with a bunch of stuff bolted onto it. I don't see anybody out there saying like, should we just completely redesign a fryer? And it may not look at all like what it looks like today. Is there a way, and the air fryer is a good example that I think most of us probably have at home [00:19:00] of like, hey, is, is there a version between an air fryer and a commercial oil fryer that will solve a bunch of these problems?
You know, if you could go to a fast food restaurant and say like, we could have the fries come out just in time because of this machine plus technology happening, you know, in, in the drive through or. Those versions are really interesting to me. I just don't see anybody taking those risks. You know, even there's some companies doing fully automated robotic arms making burgers, making chips, making whatever.
It's like, oh, well the human does this, so let's just mechanize it and have a robot arm do that. And then, oh, it's like, well now we've got this robot arm, so now we have to add 40 different sprayers in case something goes wrong and there's a fire, and then we gotta build this huge hood system around just this one new piece of equipment.
It's like kind of a overkill, I think, for trying to solve one problem or [00:20:00] one task. I think the industry in general doesn't think holistically about how did we get to that point. Um, I'll use an example from one of my restaurants a few years ago where we used to take first names for phone in orders, and occasionally were decent at getting a last initial.
Then somebody comes in and their name is John, and it's like, guess what? There's three more Johns waiting for food in the lobby. We might give the wrong John, uh, the order that's in our hand. And so it's like, okay, well what's the system we can build to make sure we don't give the wrong John the food? So instead of maybe saying like, should we do last four digits of a phone number or a last name, we wanna continue to use the first name.
'cause we convinced ourselves that that feels more hospitality ish and more service focused feels, feels more genuine. So let's build a bunch of systems to make sure that we, you know, recite the entire order to John to make sure that really is his order. [00:21:00] Or we had another problem where somebody would come in and our, their food wasn't quite ready yet.
Maybe at three or four more minutes. And I think we've all experienced this, where we check in, say, Hey, your order's being bagged up or put together, be five minutes. Then 10 minutes goes by and then we feel weird, like, Hey, should we go tell them? You told me five minutes now been 10 Again, we had that same problem.
We built this whole sheet where the host would then write their name down and the time, the five minute time that we told them to make sure that nobody sat in the lobby without um, you know, getting recognized. And then it's like, oh, well the host was busy seating people. So then the manager had to come by and check that list.
And it's like we created 10 steps to solve a single problem. And I think we as operators tend to just think that way. They're like, what's the least amount of friction that we can, um, provide to the guess? But then we take on a ton of friction internally, whether that be technology friction, whether that be manpower, friction.
Uh, I'll say something [00:22:00] else. I think maybe slightly controversial 'cause everything I hear in the industry is frictionless is the goal. And I actually think that's incorrect. I think the beauty of hospitality is it's the perfect amount of friction at the right time. I'll use the example of a full service restaurant where somebody comes in for a reservation, the restaurants to execute this really well.
It's pretty incredible. I'll call out one of my favorites in Chicago Vets Steakhouse. There's no version of you walking in and going right to your seat, even if it's ready to go the minute you walk in, they make sure that you have time to mingle around the bar for a few minutes and order a pickle back, which is a shot of whiskey with pickled juice if you've never had one.
Next time we're in Chicago together, we will have to go do that, but, and then all of a sudden I've spent $75 before I've been seated. Like that's intentional friction. That has a purpose. And it, you know the other point, and I [00:23:00] don't know how often this happens to you in New York, but. There's also like this, Hey, we want to take your whole order and we'll time it out for you.
Right? It's not like we're not gonna let you as the guest linger and try to wave us down when you're ready to order something, we want you to decide, and that way we can make our system work and time it correctly. So those are a couple of versions of very intentional friction points that the, the hospitality focused organization has put into play.
On the guest side, it feels amazing because I feel like I got exactly what I expected. I had a great overall experience. I don't get irritated that, like, while my reservation was at 7:30 PM at 7 38 and I've got a drink in my hand and I'm not gonna be irritated that I'm now walking to my table eight to 10 minutes after my, my reservation time.
So I think as, as we are building tech, as we're building process, keeping in mind that [00:24:00] frictionless may not be the ideal. I would argue that's what Starbucks is finally realizing now. They were kind of the, at the forefront of frictionless experience, order whatever you want, whenever you want on the Starbucks app, and then it all just flows downhill.
And then whoever's operating that location's gotta figure out how to execute that. Now they're realizing like, Hey, that's not a great experience. We actually made it frictionless. We allowed you to order anything on the menu, customize it to your heart's content. We're gonna try to get that ready for you in six to 10 minutes.
And people are like, it's coffee. It should be ready in two minutes. Are you, you're like, never gonna solve this frictionless dream. Um, because it, it rides on the backs of somebody. It either doesn't meet guest expectations, or most often what happens is it adds a bunch of stress and quote unquote workarounds that I mentioned earlier to the team that's actually executing the operation.
So that's, yeah, that's generally how I think [00:25:00] about it. Um. I guess speaking of Starbucks, I think operations excellence is loyalty 3.0. I think this idea of like, how do we hyper customize everything for the guest, how do we know our guest? That to me is being talked about by organizations that don't operate well.
It's like we can't figure out how to execute and, and service the guests that we want to come in the building. And so we've gotta go spend a bunch of time and energy and money on tech, uh, to try to know the guest better because operations, food, whatever that is, is not the differentiator for us. It's actually, you know, a better app or rewards program or you know, whatever else you want to throw at it.
I don't know about you, but when I see, uh, any of the public earnings reports, there's a few companies that are Hell Ben, on operations and those are the ones that continue to show. Ridiculously high profit margins, not the ones that [00:26:00] are rolling out all the new tech.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, yeah. There's no substitute for just incredible operations and most, and I think what that really like, the net net of that is can you deliver something consistently all the time.
It's way, way better to have something that's that's good consistently every single time than something that's unbelievable today. And meh, tomorrow. You know what's really fun and and interesting about the hospitality space, it's really a one size fits one, but how you think about deploying all this tech or not deploying it based on like the experience you wanna deliver and you know, basically the job is make people feel good in the appropriate amount of time with the appropriate product based on whatever you're doing.
Right? Like if you want some, if it's supposed to be fast, I. Accurate and right away, and that that's what you do. You know, and you make them feel like, man, that was really fast. I got in and got out. I got back to [00:27:00] my thing as quickly as I could. If it's supposed to be something that like, is more conducive to like, all your friends are there and you can have a big top, and, and you guys can take your time and drinks are flowing, do that.
You know, and then how do you, what, what tech do you need to make that things better? Or not? People, tech, whatever it is. I do think there are, no matter what, there's, like, there's things I see maybe I'll, I'll, I'll divert from the back of house for a minute. Like, one thing I think about all the time, 'cause it happens to me all the time when I go to a restaurant, I'm older now and I have like, you know, whatever, I can't like live yeast for example, but everybody's got, you know, whatever the things that they, whether it's allergies or, or they just wanna know, right?
Like, there's all, I mean, I love cocktails, but you know, like, and I'm a chef, but there are times when I'm like, I don't, I don't know what that fucking ingredient is and I actually want to get to my table. And have all the information that I need told to me quickly and to get, get some, some kind of order in.
And I mean, I also have kids, so like sometimes I'm just like, I wanna get their [00:28:00] orders in like literally the minute that we get there, I don't wanna wait another second because they're gonna, you know, there's a ticking time bomb when they'll start to freak out. And I think that that experience is ripe for like, innovation, right?
It's like you, you get to the table, there's really no reason. We all have a phone. Everybody I get, people are like, well, I don't know why people don't have the QR code, but like, there's no reason why you can't get to your table and right away be able to get something in, whether it's a drink or, or, or some food.
And ask a question that I promise you most of the servers don't know. And it's not their fault. It's because there's a lot of information to know if I'm at a good restaurant, there might be a thousand wines on the list and like 20 cocktails and all these random things and all this food. And, and I might want to know like, you know what I'm, I'm gonna go to the achi.
What. What cocktail should I get with that? I can ask a server, first of all, it's gonna take me some time for the server to get there and then it's kind of their opinion. They're not experts, but like you can train the AI specifically on your menu. And I say AI like because I'm, you know, [00:29:00] but you can program something to know everything that they, that it should about your menu so that you can answer any question like very quickly.
And you know, provide some really interesting information on top of that. Oh, you know what? I think you should actually try this wine from the Laurel Valley and the producer is this person and DA and here's the history. And he has this dog that no one's gonna remember that if there's like a thousand wines.
But I think there's a lot of this information that we can actually provide, you know, for people that want to like some pretty, you know, interesting quick information that's very accurate. You know, also tell them, you know, what allergies they have and things like that. And get an order in quickly. You know, I was in Chicago a little bit ago and it was some event and then we popped by this restaurant.
It was later in the evening. I don't, I don't know. They're close to closing, but not, it was probably like an hour before closing, but it was a good like 15 minutes before the server like got to us to take our orders. And then I asked about a cocktail and it was very clear, like had no idea. And like, somebody should know this, right?
We shouldn't have to ask, you know, the, the [00:30:00] chef or the, or or the beverage director. And there's no reason not to know this information. But it's hard, it's hard for somebody. Maybe it's their first week, maybe that's a, a new cocktail, they pre menu or a new wine and like they just didn't, you know, someone didn't get to train it yet.
I think that's a really, I don't know what you think about that, but I think that's a really like interesting part of the, of the like experience that we could allow all that information to be, um, provided so that the, the server can actually spend time being personable and just come to your table, which is what they're there to do, right?
Like, chat with you and like understand like, you know, like when, when it's time to like come up and ask you the question or step back. And that's a. That's a very difficult thing to, for some computer to know. You can look at a table and be like, you know what? I shouldn't bother them right now. They're having fun.
Like they, you know, they're, they're, they're in it. I'm not gonna like go and ask them if they wanna, you know, anyways, you get, you get the point. But there are, there are places where a server could, could sort of double down on the things that, that make the experience great and then actually like, divert [00:31:00] a lot of the things that are more difficult to, you know, some technology.
I dunno what you think about that, but I've been thinking, I've been stewing on this for a while because it happens to, to me all the time where I go to a restaurant and I'm like, what's Phil learn? It's sort, just forget what Flo and I seen a cocktail. I'm like, and then, and the server clearly doesn't know either.
And I'm like, I just wanna know what the, you know, or like, what's this cocktail? And it just said, you know, like you'll see a cocktail that just says like, coconut, lime and ginger, and that's all it says. You know, some, is there egg white in it? Is it foamed? Is it on, is it on the rocks? Is it like a. Zachery style, is it a, you know, what, what is this thing?
And it all, it says is that, you know, you could probably get a lot more information if you, if you allowed someone to just sort of like ask the questions right away.
Ben Pryor: Yeah, I, I have a lot of thoughts about that. I actually think you, in some ways just fell into the trap that I mentioned, which is the, the opportunity that you see is derived from pain, which is if a, a highly [00:32:00] trained and 10 year tenured server got to your table in the first 45 seconds, which used to be a metric that we measured when I ran full service restaurants was greet time.
There were serious consequences if every table didn't get greeted in under a minute, that was the, the brand standard, the expectation. And if the server didn't know the answer to those questions, then we had failed on the trading side. I think what's happened over time is that Quotient has gotten a lot more difficult to staff a restaurant in that way from a profitability standpoint.
I also have this general thought that the, the general manager, the excellent general manager of the early two thousands is likely now the director of operations level person. I think in general, most of these restaurants, and I'm speaking more to chains at this point, um, you know, not owner operated independent restaurants, but I think the, the chains have kind of thrown their hands up a [00:33:00] little bit and said, yeah, we still need somebody that's a gm, but we can't pay them $125,000 a year, whatever, you know, for, for inflation purposes.
And then have potentially two or three other salaried managers underneath them, and then a couple of shift managers or shift leaders under them. It's like that, that used to be how restaurant org charts were built and uh, I think that has changed. But what changed with that is it was kind of this idea of can we lower standards?
Um, I think it got way worse during Covid. That's what I saw. I'm still running a full service brand through the first year and a half of Covid before I, uh, came over to the dark side, um, on the, the vendor tech side of the business. And I, I think the public basically said like, we know it's hard for restaurants to hire.
We know the economy's rough. We're gonna try to give you a lot of grace and not gonna make a big deal if it takes you four or five [00:34:00] minutes to come greet the table. And then tech companies jumped in and I think you brought up QR codes. It's like, okay, well we're never going back to the way it was, so we might as well lean into this technology.
And, you know, I, I would argue, I guess that there's a place for restaurants that operate that way, that are very much QR forward. I mean, there's better versions of that that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more widespread adoption like, you know, Google Lens would be a great example of this augmented reality kind of thing where I can, whatever restaurant I go to, the restaurant doesn't have to bear that burden.
I hold my phone over the menu and everything that's written there gets captured on my phone and I can experience it. It can link out to videos or a definition of it, or, or if you've pre-saved some allergy configurations for yourself and your phone, it'll alert you and say, Hey, we've identified it's likely these [00:35:00] seven items on the menu you should avoid if you're trying to stay away from gluten or whatever.
I just think we assume that the restaurants should build all this massive tech stack and, and own that burden and that all restaurants should kinda meet customers where they are. That's the other thing. I hear a bunch that that's, I feel that way kind of about the friction comment. It's like frictionless in meeting customers where they are basically means we give up any idea of, we know exactly who we want to be as an organization, as a restaurant brand, and not that we need to train our customers to, you know, to enjoy themselves, but we're steadfast in who we are and what we're really good at.
I think that we just kind of go down the slippery slope of adding and adding and adding tech because we have noticed pain happening with the experience. So the first, when you first started telling your story, the first thing I thought, I was like, well that's an understaffed, poorly trained restaurant.
Like, can we fix those things? And then maybe you never even need the QR code or, [00:36:00] or any additional technology. Maybe you do. Uh, I'm not saying it's a zero sum thing, but uh, those are the examples I think in the trap of, well that's, you know, it's hard running a restaurant these days and I, I think I've told this story before, I don't remember if I mentioned it to you, but, uh, I have a son in college.
He got his first restaurant job three summers ago and I took him out to lunch after about three weeks, um, on the job. I was like, Hey, what do you think about the food business? Um, you know what, what's good, bad, otherwise told me all the good things. You know, it's high energy. He's fun. I love the people I work with.
I've already made a couple of friends. Um, you know, it's really exciting on a Friday night when it's really busy. I mean, all the things I think that attracted many of us to the business. You, it's the, the endorphin rush. I was like, well, you know what, what's irritated you about it? He's like, oh, you know, we never seem to be staffed correctly.
No call, no shows. The p os goes down on Friday night, and I thought back, I was like, you know, when I [00:37:00] first got in the business in the early nineties, I had that exact same list of irritations and nobody's fixed any of that stuff. We've added a ton of tech around the whole experience. And the same problems we have today are the ones we had 30 years ago.
I think too, I referenced kind of some of these brands that, uh, have had pretty exceptional earnings reports recently. There's no version of a shortcut. None of those brands are like three or four years old. Most of those brands are not even 15 to 20 years old. Most of them are 30 plus year old brands that didn't just wave a wand and add a bunch of tech and they figured it all out and now they're making a bunch of money that they, you probably know better than anybody.
Like building a really great restaurant and a restaurant company is a thousand little things done well every day. And it can be really boring and excruciating executing on those little things all day, every day. Um, and I think that's the potential poison the, like I said, the slippery slope of restaurant tech [00:38:00] is, you know, I'm going to metech next week and there's gonna be a bunch of cool things and the startup alley and.
It's gonna be really cool. And I'm gonna think like, well I'd love to not do this thing again tomorrow and maybe I can buy that and justify another $150 a month per location to, to solve those couple of things that, you know, I'm, I'm bored doing. Uh, as you know, I'm sure you've met a bunch of restaurant operators over the years that started a restaurant 'cause they thought it was sexy and they wanted to bring their friends in and, you know, comp dinners and they open a bottle of wine every night.
And most of the restaurants that typically don't do that well, uh, they, they may do well for a year or two, but the, the business model doesn't make sense 'cause they're not, they're not disciplined enough to do the hard things every day. Maybe kind of a non-answer to your question. I, I think one other comment about that is, is on the fast casual or QSR side, there's a lot of [00:39:00] talk about automation.
I. I don't disagree that there may be a version of a completely human less vending machine that's serving high quality food. Um, I know there's been a couple of attempts at it, but I'm not necessarily saying that that's a bad thing. I think this idea of trying to turn an existing QSR operation into a two or three person business through a bunch of automation is again, it's like, well, this is just how it works.
These are the things we assume have to happen, and so we're just gonna take a task away at a time or, uh, a person away at a time until we get to some version that makes financial sense. I think we as an industry need to completely rethink our p and l. I think real estate and development is a massive thing that never gets talked about on tech podcasts.
You know, the, the macro economy doesn't get talked about as much on podcasts. It's all like, Hey, I can increase your average order volume. I can drive top line sales through my marketing tech. I can save you labor by. [00:40:00] Selling you this thing, I can give you a better back of house solution that's gonna let you micromanage your inventory and claw back margin, I think is another term.
It's like all, all of this is really reductive and assumes that the p and l should look exactly the same. And the only place that we've got room is in labor and food. People generally don't talk about the rest of the p and l or around sales and especially not around real estate.
Josh Sharkey: Very true on all fronts.
I will push back a little bit though, 'cause I think, I don't necessarily agree with the notion that there are things like what we were just talking about in terms of like menu knowledge and things of that that aren't accretive to the experience because you are right like that, you know, no shows short staff, you know, has been that way forever and it's.
Always going to be that way. The restaurant business is, is just like a Broadway show. It happens every single day no matter what it's gonna, you're gonna open every single day and every single [00:41:00] night, no matter rain shine. And the difference is, is that there are like a hundred thousand restaurants for every one Broadway show.
So you need a hundred thousand x number of people to do that. And there's just, you know, a smaller and smaller, you know, number of people that that can. And I think when we think about, for example, with with, with service, what's the point of it? The point of it is to make sure that you get what you want quickly or in the right amount of time, and that you feel really good when it's happening.
And how do we, you know, how do we leverage our team to do that? And I would much rather have a couple less servers, or even if I didn't have less servers that they spent their time on, how I make you feel. Less time on the granularity of like, which allergies are where and what's the, you know, the look if they, there's a lot of things they want to, they, they, they want to learn and that's awesome.
And they, and they should, and I'm not saying that they [00:42:00] shouldn't know the menu really well, but there's, there's only so much information you can index at once and you got 20 tables, right. And you got every, all these different personalities at every single table. It's a lot of work for, by the way, not a crap ton of money, you know.
And what's most important, what's most important when a server comes to my table, you know, isn't necessarily that they know what Fuller is, it's that they can pick up on, I'm having a really, you know, good conversation with my wife right now and maybe just hold off for a minute and, Hey, you know what, maybe just like, like slide these drinks in while we're, while we're chatting and just make sure that this experience is great.
If you see my wife is really chilly and she's got a, you know, a her sweater on, like maybe do something about that. You know, and I think that there's so much, so much of that that happens in a restaurant that are the really special things. And not every restaurant is, you know, 11 Madison Park where you can, where you're charging 500, $600, you know, per person.
And you can afford to pay somebody who can be exceptionally good at [00:43:00] that. You'll be paying you, you know, you'll have a restaurant that's a, a fraction of that price and you can't pay them the same no matter what. You just can't. So it's like the math just doesn't work. And labor is always gonna be somewhere around, you know, 31% of your, of your, of expenses.
Maybe it can be less, right? But, um, I think there is opportunity to make, you know, not, not, not even just make people better at what they do, but allow them to spend more time on the things that are more important and less time on the things that are maybe just more binary and you kind of like information that you just have to make sure that you.
That you ingest. And I think that it does mean faster table times. You're right. You know, you're like the table, like how quickly a table gets, you know, served, how quickly you kind of get to the table is very quick, is very important, right? But if you have 10 tables, let's just say, and you seat four of them, and you have to answer all of those questions for all of those people times however many tables just came, and you have to index all of that information to answer that, answer that for them, and remember everything that they ordered.
[00:44:00] Hopefully you're writing all this down. There's just only so many people you can get to, right? In the same way that you can only deliver four, you know, households, you know, at a time if you're doing a delivery right, you can only, there's only so there's only so much time and if you can reduce the actual things that need to happen at that time, I think that there's a, there's something interesting there and I, and I'm sure that goes for a lot of things in the restaurant space.
I think you and I both agree on, you know, on the on, on another side with back of house, like. The amount of time that you spend counting every single item of your inventory is probably not, you know, worth the time relative to how many mistakes you might actually make and how much is actually driving your, your overall costs.
So. I might be a little bit more on the other camp, but like I do think there is still like an enormous amount of opportunity to to improve things. This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, MES me, helps thousands of restaurants and food service businesses all over the world build profitable menus and scale their business successfully.
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Ben Pryor: I, I agree with you. I actually don't think we're saying different things. I do agree there's an opportunity for that. I think my. Broader point, and I'm [00:46:00] glad you brought up inventory, is I think the restaurants themselves should own fixing that. It should own automating, streamlining, adding tech to improve its internal processes.
I think there are so many tools, right? It's like, I mean, you run a, a restaurant tech company, what's happening right now is like in, in that world you would go build your own version of an AI tool. 'cause you're like, oh, well I serve restaurants with my tech and so I need to go build my own AI tool to help me manage my emails, right?
Because chat GBT, they don't understand restaurants like I do. And I think that's, that's my frustration about QR codes and all this kind of guest facing stuff and every restaurant feeling like, well now we've gotta have our own app. It's like there are more ubiquitous, far more powerful [00:47:00] tools out there that the restaurants need to just rethink the data flow direction.
I'll give you another example. Um, I think Portillo's, uh, one of my favorites being in Chicago, straight hot tub, they, they're rolling out their atla, you know, wallet based loyalty. So that's a great example I think of this kind of hybrid idea. Yes, the restaurant's enabling that, but it's something that everybody walks into the building already having.
They don't have to go download the Portillo's app, sign up for an account and do all the things. And, and I think that's my point around all these tools. The reason I think that people push back on QR ordering is 'cause it was terrible. You couldn't order. What you wanted. It wasn't updated. Yeah. Sometimes just linked to a PDF didn't do anything.
Yeah. You know, then there were scammers that stuck a sticker over that and had people putting their credit card numbers into, oh, I never heard about that. Sites. Yeah, I mean, [00:48:00] it's, but it's like the, the restaurant, if they can barely figure out how to get their team trained and hired and staffed, managing this entire front of house tech system is not the solve.
I think you and I completely agree. My point is, I don't know that the restaurants should be spending a bunch of time and money on that. I think they need to figure out how to maybe print a menu in a way that is readable by industry standard. Um, you know, OCR Tech. Like I mentioned the Google lens concept.
I've seen versions of augmented reality where it's like you hold up your phone over the menu or over, uh, a wine bottle or something in a restaurant. The restaurants created this entire custom experience, and I'm like, O okay, that's cool. If that's part of your shtick, then great. Um, I just don't think that's scalable across the entire industry, so I would rather the restaurant [00:49:00] spend a bunch of time and money on fixing, how do I not have to count inventory every night or every week, or ever again.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think it, I think it, it depends on what you want out of the experience for the customer and, and, and, and that's really it because there are. The customer could. I mean, I was at a dinner the other night. We actually had a big, I had a big argument about this with my buddy who's a, who's like a, he's a very, very, very passionate and smart wine, uh, enthusiast.
I mean more than Enthusia. He's a sommelier. He's, you know, great incredible restaurant that serves amazing wine. And, and, uh, he, he brought this wine. It was very rare that, uh, you can't even get in the states. And I, and I used chat GPT to, to look up the wine. I got an incredible amount of information on it.
And he was, why would you do that? Like, you know, let them talk about it. But I was like, the amount of information I got was pretty incredible. And he had to admit it was like, wow. Yeah, that's, that's pretty accurate. But that's, I think it, it, it becomes where I, where I see maybe, um, a difference here is, is it's about what is the experience you want?
Like, as the restaurant, I might want [00:50:00] you to know very specific things about that wine. And maybe you can find a lot of it. One, maybe I don't want you to do that work, but maybe two, I actually want you to know my personal relationship to this wine, right? Like, I'm, I'm the restaurant owner and, and this wine means a a lot to us because of X, Y, z.
That's not something that, um, that you know, that, that you'll find online. And again, you could train the servers to do that, you know? Is that what you want them to, to, to do you, I mean, and you could have so Maier as well, but like, not every restaurant can afford a sommelier, but there might be restaurants that really love, whether it's wine or, or citrus, you know, it might be some beautiful citrus that they like, grow or something.
Anyways, let's, uh, let's digress because I, I, I do want to, I wanna talk about four top and a couple things. One, you were, um, running restaurants for a very long time, which I didn't know mostly because here's why I didn't know that is 'cause when I started talking to you, I'm like, oh, this is an engineer, he's a technologist.
Like, this guy's, you know, just, you know, he's clearly like somebody that's just writing code all day. I don't know if you actually, you know, if you, if you write code, but it's very clear, you [00:51:00] understand deeply, you know, technology. How, uh, I know your, your, your dad was in, you know, in computers growing up in, you know, in Austin.
Um, that doesn't by default make you a, you know, a technologist. But you know a lot and, and you also understand a lot. And, and I'd love to understand like how you sort of became this sort of expert on data and technology and then I wanna talk about for top a bit.
Ben Pryor: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of a difficult question to answer.
Yes. I grew up in a, I'll call my household kind of the premier early adopter household from the seventies, uh, through, I would even say somewhat today. My early adoption now comes around electronic music gear. Actually went to school to be a music teacher, played in the jazz fusion band for several years and toured for a little while.
Uh, still do a little bit of studio session work. So my early adoption was very, uh, [00:52:00] is now very focused on, on music stuff. I'm looking around 'cause I'm actually surrounded by some of it, uh, here in my office. But even once I got into restaurants, I realized that. Uh, I had tools that I had to learn, so I viewed technology very much like I did.
Uh, you know, learning how to run a broiler and, you know, at a steakhouse like that's, that's a piece of equipment, that's a tool. And how you manipulate it can have dramatically positive or negative results. It was a mesquite wood grill that I had to load the wood in all night. Um, understand hotspots in addition to actually just cooking, you know, all the food, make sure I didn't cross contaminate right.
There's like 40 things going on, running a, a wood-fired grill, and I viewed technology years later. Very much is that same thing. It's like, Hey, I've, I've got some equipment and tools that I need to understand. Uh, what's, what's the ultimate way to utilize [00:53:00] these in order to execute a, a great shift in a restaurant?
And it, it helped that I've always, I. Love, just kind of tinkering in tech. I am definitely not a technologist. I'm not a, uh, I know maybe like half of what my high school kids knew around coding, taught myself a couple of things just to be slightly dangerous, but I try to keep myself out of that. Um, and guess just like running a great restaurant.
Like I've tried to seek out people that I think have the right perspective and have a skillset that's not mine. You know, it's, there's a trope about surrounding yourself with people smarter than you or hiring only people that are smarter than you. Um, I think that's a little cheesy, but there's a version of that where I'm like, I understand things in a very specific way.
I also applied what I mentioned earlier, which is running great [00:54:00] operations. And leaning into people, and I think it's important. The reason I mention going to school to be a band director is I really realized that in order for anything to be sustainable and scalable, um, it all starts with choosing the right people and investing in those people.
You could argue that's the whole concept of teaching high school students, et cetera, is you are not just shoving knowledge down their throat or information you are trying to grow them, and theoretically the the ultimate is they all go on to change the world in a really positive, impactful way. It's actually what really clicked for me getting into restaurants was I realized like if I continue to invest in the people and the process and try to align those things, then I become scalable and I can also fill in knowledge gaps with other folks and just kinda build my entire operations career around that.
[00:55:00] That was most of my role at Noodles and Company. I led training and development there and opened, uh, I think 115 restaurants over a few years. Um, so you know, I've seen all versions of that all over the country and even outside the states. And there's really only one thing I've seen to be true with opening a new restaurant, you know, in a chain circumstance is if you select the right people to really drive the day-to-day operations and culture like that becomes sustainable.
There's no amount of micromanagement or technology or anything else you can throw at it. And so what I made the leap from restaurant operations into technology, it was very much that for me it's like, Hey, I can go work at another restaurant brand and, and, you know, really lead that one brand to great things.
Is there a version of my core beliefs around quality and, you know, hospitality [00:56:00] experience, and then especially people that I can figure out how to scale through tech. So in some ways I kind of became a defacto like product person at a tech company. I had to learn and understand how the technology actually worked, but I am just hell bent on creating value and solving problems every day.
And so I just continue to ask like difficult and varied questions to technologists and ask them to continue to think different. That was really, uh, why I got into the tech side. It was trying to figure out how to scale, not not just hospitality as as a whole, you know, but how, how can things get coded into tech and how can the right tech come to light that, uh, the average operator is gonna wanna open?
App in the morning or whatever it is, and it just becomes second nature. It's like opening up your [00:57:00] phone. I know some people don't do it for two hours or whatever in the morning, but uh, those of us that dive into email, et cetera, uh, within five minutes of waking up, I'm, I'm admittedly one of those folks.
Like, there's no hesitation for me, um, opening up my phone. It's not this scary thing that's a burden that's extra work. And I was really interested in figuring out how to make that happen for restaurants, because I realized as I really kind of sat back, I'd become really amazing at workarounds. And, um, you know, I'm a really, I guess, creative, uh, at heart.
I don't know if you're familiar with ideo. Um, the, the whole story of how they basically invented the mouse that we know today was not a bunch of engineers. A bunch of engineers built a mouse and. You can Google the original mouse pictures. And it was completely ridiculous because a bunch of people that understood, well, I need this to be the [00:58:00] output and I know how to code, and so I'm just gonna code my way to that output.
I love the concept of IDEO because it's it's design, not just design thinking, but they actually hire instead of a bunch of technologists and engineers, they hire a bunch of people like me that went to school for music and that, uh, do art and design and really human-centric endeavors, philosophers, and through that power of like, how do I think slightly differently.
We all agree on what the, uh, you know, the outcome or the results should be, but we're all very open-minded to how we get from here to there. Uh, and I think that's why I really can have those conversations with technologists, um, is because I'm really clear on what the outcome should be. And I'm also really clear on what, what means value to me.
Like if I were the buyer or I was the user of that. And I think that's where [00:59:00] most companies tend to fall short. And, and I'll blame, you know, put some blame back on folks like me when I was still running restaurants and buying tech. And I think it still happens today that restaurants are part of the problem, that they, they also think like, oh, well if we just have the better app, it's finally gonna work the way we want it to this time.
And, and they just keep chasing like the, the next thing. So I don't, it's kinda a long answer to your question, but that's really how well A, why I got into Tech B, why I think, you know, what, what we are doing at For Top. And I, I guess you kind of asked that question as well. So For Top was not my first tech endeavor.
I spent close to two years at Spot On, thought I was gonna change the world, joining a quickly growing restaurant technology company, and realized it was a ton of smart people running at a bunch of things really fast. And, uh, there was no [01:00:00] appetite for somebody like me getting in the way and saying, um, Hey, we should think about this differently.
Um, I realized I needed to, to go surround myself with, with like-minded folks that wanna do something in a really different way. Also, I've generally been anti pure SaaS for restaurants. I think the real value gap in restaurant technology is the, the last mile. It's the, you know, you can have all the adoption metrics you want.
Adoption metrics generally for SaaS is just how many people logged in and did a thing. There's not this ongoing understanding of like, is it actually creating a positive experience for the team members using it in the restaurant or for the guests using it. There's just this assumption, like if it gets used more or less, that's good or bad.
You know, we, we started Ford Top with the idea of we want to get people to value and that probably means we're gonna have to go do some stuff for the [01:01:00] restaurant. It's not scalable. Like, we didn't go after s and b as an example, um, because there was no version of that that was scalable. We couldn't go, you know, go on site or spend x amount of hours getting every single restaurant to value.
But it was something we were passionate about. And, um, and something I think that's very different. 'cause most of the SaaS companies hit a wall and then all of a sudden they started announcing that they had professional services teams and they, they like added it after the fact because they realized like, Hey, we've sold a bunch of things and now we're starting to churn customers.
And it's like we can't build a. New features and products fast enough to keep people from leaving. But, uh, they started to realize that the restaurants wanted to solve the problem, but they most of the time didn't have the right people or the right ability and inside the four walls of the restaurant to execute on a consistent basis with that SaaS product.
So that's [01:02:00] what we're doing. I think that that is different. Um, one day I'll figure out how that becomes highly scalable, uh, to the entire industry. But, you know, most of the, most of our clients now are, you know, I guess emerging brands, kind of 30 locations and up. Uh, and then we do pretty heavy services, um, at the enterprise level.
'cause they've got a bunch of technology people already in house. Um, we just come in and do more, kind of what I mentioned, the, the IDO concept. We do, um, kind of design thinking and an actual implementation. Like, we'll, we'll come work with a training team and write a training manual. If that's what is gonna get the, that brand
Josh Sharkey: to success with the tech.
If you had to sort of explain, I, let's just pretend it's my five-year-old son behind me. Like can you just explain what you do? Like you're talking to a five-year-old.
Ben Pryor: We sit in between any system that a restaurant uses and make them all work in harmony.
Josh Sharkey: Got it. [01:03:00] So it's a lot of, a lot of integration and, and data.
Data cleanup and Yes.
Ben Pryor: And, and our theme at Four Top is definitely, uh, holistic. Everything, because there's a bunch of great tools out there and they generally get 50 to 75% of the way there to solving a bigger issue. And I'll, I'll give you an example of was my LTO effective that I just ran last month.
That's a really open-ended question. But those are the questions that happen inside executive meetings at every restaurant brand. It's like, and that means something. May be different to each brand. And you can't answer that alone in a marketing platform. You can't answer that alone in a supply chain or in a POS there, there's no one or even two systems that are currently integrated that will get you to that answer.
It's probably seven or eight systems. 'cause you need to understand menu costing, supply chain, actual sales. But you also need to [01:04:00] understand the customer. Did it drive frequency of existing customers to hit, bring in new customers? You know, the, there's a bunch of versions of what success looks like of, you know, was my LTO effective?
Should I roll out kiosks is another question. You know, it's funny, I, I hear all these, uh, CEOs now of restaurant brands scratching their head and they're like, you know, how come our sales continue to hold steady but our traffic continues to go down? It's like, well, I don't know. Maybe you're people are paying too much money at your business and your.
Impacting frequency because you raised your average order volume on a kiosk, or have you ever thought about price parity on third party delivery? Because maybe we could actually sell a, a lot more food. You could get economies of scale through volume and increasing traffic counts without having to make, you know, the same amount of money on every single order.
That's kind [01:05:00] of like, I mean, when you and I first got in the business, right, it's like the kids' menu at a restaurant. It's like if they would've applied this kind of across the border, you brought up wine earlier, the, the dumb way of doing a wine list is saying like, oh, we want a three x markup on wholesale every bottle of wine, and we're just gonna do the math.
And that's, that's our wine pricing. And I just think restaurants aren't able to get to that holistic data across multiple systems. And so they have a really hard time asking the right questions because they, they generally think it's gonna be impossible to get that answer. 'cause they can't go into any one or two systems and get all the data they need to, to answer those bigger, broader questions.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it will likely be a very long time before all of that, all of that data can be seamlessly sort of, you know, pulled even, not even just integrated, but pulled into, into one place. Unless there's a team [01:06:00] in-house or, uh, external like Ford that can help. I don't know why, you know, it's, it, it really is, you know, I don't know a lot of industries, obviously, you know, the restaurant industry, it's, so, I hate words like this, but it's like fragmented the, the tech.
And I don't know why. Like if, you know, we, you know, you know, now I have this software company like, okay, we use HubSpot, we use the this BI Tool Sigma, and we use. School analytics and we use all those things. We just pull the stat in, we pull it all in, go into our warehouse, and then we can start to ask really interesting questions and we can pull in customer information and we can pull in attribution information.
And from all of these things, we can start to find, you know, better, better insights. Of course, you have to know what questions to ask. That's the hardest thing. But it doesn't, doesn't happen in the restaurant business. You can't do that. You can't do it easily, at least one, you know, first all you have to enough, enough scale.
Unless you happen to be some sort of like engineer and you know, SQL and all these things like, and you were in a restaurant, which, come on, who's that? You have to have enough scale. You can afford to do all of this, and then you have to be able to maintain it. And then you have to have the systems that can actually like send you [01:07:00] this data, which is the hardest part, right?
You can even get this data. So I hope, look, I hope eventually that this, it's something that can just happen because every, everything is, all the data's available, but until then, it sounds like what you're doing is the best bet. Yeah. And, and I don't know that.
Ben Pryor: There will ever be a time where the entire industry just says, oh, we're all gonna adopt this one way of doing things.
To your point about scale, I do think there's probably the majority of independent restaurants should probably use an all-in-one, and some of those are getting better. I mean, previously it was mostly if Toast had all the things, there's some newer entrance into the, the POS market, quote unquote, that have built out kind of this full 360 ability to run your business.
They're not perfect. But I generally think for, you know, if I've got a handful of locations or especially a single unit, [01:08:00] that's the best version of that thing for me right now. 'cause all the, all the insights and data is all in truly in one place. I think for brands that are bigger and they want to, you know, they're multi concept, they are.
They're trying to answer potentially bigger and more complex questions or do a couple of innovative things, or they want to try me or, or whatever. I don't think there's this world where it makes sense to try to get everything in the box. So what we do on the integration side is not terribly difficult or unique.
It's difficult because the tech companies intentionally make it difficult. It's not, there's not some like systemic issue of, you know, it's impossible to get the data out of the systems. That's more of a choice and it's believing that the operators don't know what to do with it and maybe aren't paying enough to be able to access it.
Um, which I, I don't know that I'd argue either one of those things, but that's the reality of today. [01:09:00] I also fear this kind of consolidation talk. Around tech stacks because I think it can be anti-innovation. If a restaurant brand wants to go try something really interesting, I wanna make that really easy for them.
And when I was running restaurants, I had a bunch of college kids that were in computer science or whatever that were tossing pizzas on a Friday night. They knew what the problems were and they probably could have solved it. And if my quote unquote POS company would've let my team next Friday night, just plug something in and try it out in our operation that they built on a raspberry pie or whatever in, in 45 minutes, like, that's the exciting part for me about the opportunity in restaurants.
Um, most of these systems in restaurant tech are very closed, and then there's been an effort like with RTN trying to do like, you know, data and integration standards across the entire industry. You know, it's a little bit of boiling the ocean. [01:10:00] And so it's like the tech companies are trying to keep it all in here.
The industry at large wants it to all be unified so they can do whatever they want with it. And it's like there's, I think there's a version in between, or at least in the near term that, um, which is what we believe and what we do every day at Fort Up. I actually think the bigger issue and why I mentioned being services heavy a minute ago is restaurants even today can get a bunch of data.
They can even go hire an integration engineer for $10,000 and pull all their data into a warehouse. We do it differently in that we actually transform the data in flow, because once it hits the warehouse, we want it to be cleaned and normalized across every system. So you can add exponentially, you know, unlimited systems to that data and all starts looking the same.
But even once all the data's there and even the work that we do, a lot of times the brands are like, great, we all, we got it all in one place. We love looking at it. [01:11:00] Then like three months later, they'll call us back and say, Hey, can you guys come help us actually solve this thing? Our franchise business consultants are going to visit franchisees and they would love to be able to have like a consolidated scorecard.
Can you help us build that? It's not like they don't have the talent to do it. They just can't generally get from having all the data, even clean, normalized centralized, to actually getting to end use value with it very easily. 'cause most of the time we hear data and it tends to go up into the finance org or it's not this holistic idea of how do we make every part of the business better with data.
It tends to stay organizationally siloed even when it's technically and physically unified and centralized. Yeah. Hopefully that keeps getting better over time. Yeah, it has. Even in the last three years since we started the company, it's. Brands [01:12:00] understand the needs more and tech companies are responding and um, I think it's moving in a positive direction.
We were kind of felt like we were yelling at a wall, uh, three years ago when we started Fort Top and now I see a lot of other tech companies kind of using the same language that we were using three years ago. Um, so that's really encouraging for me when the industry understands that that's a need and not just like, man, I'm on my fifth POS system and it's still isn't meeting my needs.
It's like, well, yeah, 'cause problem isn't the POS company, um, you, you can keep changing POS every three years and it's not gonna get exponentially better.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, well it, it would be pretty cool if there was a universal nomenclature for all the, you know, to just to normalize all this, all this data. 'cause it is, it's a lot of work.
By the way to, to sort of wrap this up, I, I was curious but sound design, so I. It sounds like you do that you, you do it for fun on the side and you're teaching it, but like, are you taking classes on this? Is it [01:13:00] something that you're, that you are just doing now as a, as a hobby? And also I'm curious, 'cause you mentioned jazz, like what, like, are you creating your own music?
What kinda music are you, are you playing while you're, while you're working on this? I've been playing this entire
Ben Pryor: podcast. You just couldn't see it. Um, no, I, it actually goes back to your question about like, how did I get from restaurants into technology? You know, I'm the guy that, uh, when I help my kids put Legos together, I'd open up every bag and dump it all out and dive right in.
I'm definitely a somatic learner and that's how I kind of came across sound design. So I grew up playing classical piano, absolutely hated lessons. And so just started writing my own music when I was like 10, 11 years old, and then started taking jazz piano lessons and high school. Was primarily self-taught.
And then same with sound design, got my first synthesizer in the late eighties and started twisting knobs. And I was like, [01:14:00] oh, that does that. And then I, I eventually kind of learned the more technical side of different wave shapes and oscillators and, and all the things, and did most of it by ear. So I still do, uh, I guess it's a paid hobby.
I still do a little bit of studio session work where a band will record tracks and then send them to me electronically, and I will fill in synth piano, organ background noise, whatever. So I kind of sit in between the, the tracks being, you know, all the stems being recorded, and before it goes to mixing and mastering, I will usually add the, the extras you don't necessarily like hear when you listen to the.
Uh, the finished production, but it adds that little something, uh, special you can't quite put your finger on. Cool. So that's, uh, cool. Yeah, you should,
Josh Sharkey: you should send me, uh, send me something. I'd love to, I'd love to hear it. [01:15:00] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm sure we'll catch up in person soon, but this was, this was awesome and I appreciate you taking some time and I know you have some news at some point, so we will talk about that when the, when the time comes.
But for now, um, really awesome to catch up again. Yeah, you as well. Thanks for tuning into the Me podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the Song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, fresh Daily. For show notes and more, visit get mes.com/podcast. That's G-E-T-M-E z.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Keep innovating, don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next [01:16:00] time.
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