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About this episode
Josh sits down with Britney Ziegler, Founder and CEO of Panso, to explore the innovative world of restaurant technology and hospitality management. Britney shares her entrepreneurial journey of launching a comprehensive restaurant technology platform that streamlines multiple tools into one unified system. She reveals how her team's industry experience has been crucial in reducing onboarding friction, particularly through hiring people directly from restaurants who understand the unique challenges operators face. The conversation covers Panso's strategic approach to building in stealth mode, allowing for careful product refinement before market launch, and the critical importance of helping restaurants understand and leverage their customer data for success.
Britney discusses the art of deal-making in the restaurant business, emphasizing how industry connections and word-of-mouth strategies have driven their sales approach. She outlines her vision for empowering restaurants with true customer data ownership through what she describes as a genuine CRM system that enhances customer loyalty and collaboration. The discussion touches on the transformative potential of AI in enhancing customer engagement and operational efficiency, while also exploring the significance of strategic partnerships in driving business growth. Throughout the conversation, Britney reflects on the personal growth that comes with entrepreneurial success and her commitment to revolutionizing how restaurants connect with and serve their customers.
Links and resources 📌
Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com
Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez
Follow Josh on instagram: @joshlsharkey
Visit Panso: https://www.hellopanso.com
Follow Britney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/britney-ziegler
What We Cover
0:00 Innovative Onboarding in the Restaurant Tech Space
2:26 The Journey of Launching Panso
9:00 Background and Experience in the Restaurant Industry
13:15 The Art of the Deal in Restaurant Business
19:16 Building a Unique Hospitality Management System
23:58 Vision for the Future of Panso
28:34 A Small but Mighty Team
31:14 Non-Traditional Paths to Market
34:21 The Value of Diverse Perspectives
36:08 Integrating AI into Business Practices
40:52 Finding Balance Outside of Work
50:11 Philosophical Insights on Happiness
Transcript
Britney Ziegler: [00:00:00] Hiring people who come out of restaurants to ensure that when we do onboard a client, we don't have to ask that many questions if they're speaking to us. The person on Team Pan so understands what they're saying and we're not creating unnecessary friction during that process because we are all operators and so we're going into the market as one of our customers, and that is helping really alleviate, I think, a lot of.
The pain points for what a traditional onboarding process might look like in the technology space in the restaurant industry.
Joshua Sharkey: You are listening to the meez podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're gonna talk to high performers in the food business, everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate.
And operate and how they consistently execute at a high level day after day. [00:01:00] And I would really love it if you could drop us a five star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google. I'm not picky Anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support and as always, I hope you enjoy the show.
Well anyways, welcome to the show.
Britney Ziegler: Thanks for having me.
Joshua Sharkey: I think, uh uh, Gia folks put us in touch. Is that right?
Britney Ziegler: They did, yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: That's cool. How did you connect with Gia?
Britney Ziegler: I met Gia through my network a couple years ago actually, and we hit it off and I mean, she's wonderful and brilliant. The best in class in what she does.
And I said to her, we need to work together. And she was like, well, I don't really do tech. And then it's like, okay. Um, I was also very new at starting this business. We were in no position to have brought on a PR agency at that time.
Joshua Sharkey: [00:02:00] Yeah.
Britney Ziegler: And then fast forward to maybe nine months ago, I went back to her and was like, Hey.
You wanna talk again and Yeah. We found synergies and we've been working together about seven months now.
Joshua Sharkey: That's amazing. I'm excited to learn. I, I don't know a lot about ponchos, so we'll, we'll, we'll learn today. Yeah. But I wanted to start with, um, I'm always Ed, obviously, like, you know, I've had to build some companies now and you built a company.
Totally.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. Uh,
Joshua Sharkey: I just wanna hear how, how, how was it, uh, launching this thing? What was it like to. You know, move from running restaurants or operating restaurants in that world to now starting a business.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: Um, just tell me anything, you know, anything and everything that you can about how the launch went.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah, happy to. So the, we officially launched in January of this year, although we've been building since July of 2021, so
Joshua Sharkey: take it back. Oh, wow. Long time.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. We built in tech language, stealth, really, because I had advice that. Was given to me [00:03:00] early on and they were like, build it and don't tell anyone you're doing it and get it to where it needs to be.
And work with people early on who can iterate and understand the product with you, and you have the flexibility to then be creative and do things differently. And then launch when you actually have a product and it'll be a much more meaningful process and you'll have a proven end result. And so sure enough, I took that advice and we spent the first year building the product, and that was me taking my experience, having worked in restaurants mostly on the business development side.
And talking to my development team and saying to them, okay, I'm the end user. Because I did start this concept when I embarked on opening up my own restaurant and got to the tech stack and realized I needed seven different platforms to manage the customer experience and [00:04:00] none of those systems integrated and therefore I would have no customer data and I would've no understanding of my audience to effectively communicate and grow my business.
So I went. Brought on a development team, worked with them for the first year explaining the pain points and the challenges and really the opportunity of what we were solving for. And we started on a few different iterations and we built the database and the architecture of what our software was and then launched a partnership with the James Beard Foundation pre-product.
Um, and in that I was meeting with restaurants across the country. Educating their well division on what customer data is, what you do with it, how you can help it grow your business if you actually understand it, um, and all of the benefits around marketing based off of segmentation and lifetime value and retention of your guest.
So we did that. We [00:05:00] actually secured our first beta partner through that relationship, which was incredible. And that's Vena to out of New York. We also onboarded with Inca Centers, which is the parent company of Ikea and their first ever food hall that opened in San Francisco. So they were an early adopter of the product as well as Tyler Florence's Restaurant Group out here in San Francisco.
So. We worked very closely with them for a little over a year. Myself and my team were in their business sitting next to them working on the product. It's a massive software and so we needed that time, and we launched in January with really a significant acceptance in the market. For a hospitality management system and CRM built for restaurants.
We do everything from website development, event management, ticketing. We have our CRM, which is the core of the product, and then a marketing suite so all of the folks that are on platform can communicate with their guests. And [00:06:00] so I think probably the most exciting part is coming out of the restaurant business and still working in the restaurant business, even though on the software side.
We've since secured a handful of accounts that we're currently onboarding with. Um, we've expanded our ICP during the launch. We've gotten a lot of attention and interest from the social club space. Um, we definitely are finding ourselves also in the re luxury retail hospitality space as well, which was surprising to me and not something that I had initially considered, but it's coming to us, so we're taking advantage of it and they're cool folks in that space.
Joshua Sharkey: That's great. So looking back now, and you, you're, you're live, how do you think about that advice? Was it, was it the right advice to, to sort of hold off and, and do a, a long beta and before you Yeah. Before you launched? Or would you, would you do anything differently or,
Britney Ziegler: no, I would, I, when I heard the advice, I was like, wait a minute.
What, [00:07:00] what do you mean I shouldn't tell anybody what we're doing? Hindsight is 2020, right? You learn so much when you're able to look back, I think. Now that I've launched and we have a proven product, we're just onboarding clients with that product and making specific feature iterations based off of their requirements.
We're not testing with them anymore. We have a proven product. I think there's a lot of times where software gets launched into market and it's still sort of in beta, and that creates a lot of friction. For the end user restaurants, you know this well, you were in the business before doing what you do today.
Every second there's something changing and everyone's working on the fly and things have to just flow. And so I think if we launched before we had a proven product, it would've made the end user's experience. Really complicated and [00:08:00] create a lot of hindrance on their business. And being an operator, that's something I would not sleep well at night knowing I was doing.
Um, so I think taking that advice, following it, I don't, I wouldn't have changed it.
Joshua Sharkey: Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a, a lot of ways to skin the cat. So they say,
Britney Ziegler: yeah. For sure.
Joshua Sharkey: Was this sort of, um, angel funding, it sounds like maybe this is not venture backed yet and you're, was it just sort of friends?
Yeah. No, we're not
Britney Ziegler: venture backed yet. Um, angel and friends and family. Today.
Joshua Sharkey: That's great.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: Cool. So, I mean, I wanna learn more about Pon uh, Zo. Just the sort of the, the entirety of what? The pan pso.
Britney Ziegler: Pso like pots and pans pan. So pan, so, oh,
Joshua Sharkey: Zo. Okay. Gotcha. It stems
Britney Ziegler: from pfi, which means universal wisdom and knowledge, which is what we're providing restaurants.
Joshua Sharkey: Oh, that's cool. Oh, cool. Okay. Banso. Now I know Banso, I'm gonna say that like 12 more times. Banso, banso, banso. Um, but let, let's talk [00:09:00] a little bit about your background before, before we get into Panto, um, because it looked like, uh, I think you spent a bunch of time at David Burke here in, I did
Britney Ziegler: in, in
Joshua Sharkey: New York.
Uh, like seven years or so. Is that right?
Britney Ziegler: Correct.
Joshua Sharkey: I'd love to understand, um, you know, how that went, how it's impacted what you're doing today and. If you had planned to, um, move as far up in that company as you did, because I think you started, you know, basically as a, as
Britney Ziegler: a server.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah. As a server. And then you were an executive assistant and sort of, uh, but you left as sort of VP of brand and marketing.
Mm-hmm. You know, a number of those things. Was that the plan when you started there?
Britney Ziegler: No, probably not. I. Started working in restaurants when I was 15. So every paycheck up until today has been from a restaurant group or a food service company. I went to school for hospitality tourism management. Graduated was offered two positions.
One was with Shake Shack at the time, and one was with David [00:10:00] Burke. I did not see myself in the Shake Shack environment. Now I'm like. Shucks, that company has grown. It got some good shares there. Um, correct. But I started with David and I'll be honest with you, I cried literally saying to myself, I went to school, I graduated college, and I'm a server and a restaurant, like what is going on with my life?
And that's what you have to do in restaurants. Now looking back, I had to go through that process and I was working in the restaurant. As a server for, I don't know, a handful of months before I ended up working in our home office and I was helping with reservations and event bookings. And it just so happened that David's assistant got another job and she gave her notice and David came to me and said, I'd like for you to take this role, and I just ended up [00:11:00] becoming his assistant.
He obviously saw something in me that he knew I was qualified enough at such a young age to do that job. And I did that for a handful of years, and celebrity chef life at that time was chaotic and wild, and anything and everything under the sun that you could imagine I've seen and experienced. So I definitely grew up really quickly in that role, but what it gave me was exposure into, you know, a very creative individual who was super successful in his own right.
Um, we were growing the business at that time, we were $10 million when I left. We were a $50 million restaurant group with 14 locations around the country and everything from fine dining to nightlife, fast casual. After a few years of grinding with David, I said to him, I need something else, or I'm gonna go somewhere else.
And [00:12:00] I explored different opportunities and went back to David and his CEO at the time and said, I need to do something like this. I've hit my ceiling, I need something more. And they created a position with, for me within the organization, which was director of special projects. I helped them kind of identify and build a lot of the concepts that we, since that time grew and launched.
Um, and then that naturally evolved as the company grew. My role grew and so when I left GR eight, I was overseeing all of our brands, marketing, business development. Helping support do business deals from partnerships, perspective, licensing deals. We owned and operated a few of our properties. We had management contracts with hotels, so it was a really interesting time and also gave me a ton of experience to understand like the [00:13:00] art of a deal and how did these deals get done and how do you grow and expand your business.
At that time, it was expansion of brick and mortar. Um, looks very differently now, but that was definitely the start of my career.
Joshua Sharkey: When you say art of the deal, art of the deal, do you mean signing new partnerships or signing leases or
Britney Ziegler: Exactly. All of it. Yeah. Like we did. What did, what did you learn?
Joshua Sharkey: What are some, some of the big takeaways?
Britney Ziegler: I mean, it was the time when restaurants were starting to be able to ask for what they need in a deal. It was at the point when traditional leases were turning into management deals, and those owners of those assets were investing money into restaurants and helping them with the build out and providing additional capital and resources for a restaurant to fully thrive.
So I think that, for me, was super intriguing to understand what a true partnership is, and that's definitely how I still today look at [00:14:00] relationships. Engagements with any person that we're working with, it has to be two-sided. We all need to benefit in one way, shape, or form. And those values and principles are important to align on them from day one so that everybody in the end can come out with, you know, a better product in this case or a better customer experience for the restaurant.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah, and it sounds, it sounds like you also did like brand development as well. Is that right?
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. I did.
Joshua Sharkey: Is that, um, I imagine there must have been a bunch of learnings there that you've taken towards building, you know, Panza as a brand.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: What were some of those?
Britney Ziegler: It's interesting. I never thought about it like that.
I, what just clicked for me is I was wearing two hats. I was wearing a very logical business fashion hat on the business development side, and then on the brand side it was much more creative and thought provoking in a way that. I was dreaming honestly, and [00:15:00] I was sitting with David and he is a dreamer.
So to kind of feel that energy with an individual, and you're taking me back to a time I haven't thought about in so long, so I'm smiling, but like just being with David and the executive chefs and menu tasting or bringing in the designers from the interior design firms who are presenting look and feel of restaurants.
Talking through like, okay, well that seat's not gonna work because the table stand and the chair hit one another. No guest is gonna wanna sit in that environment. So like, what do we need to do? Um, everything. It was a very, are you na, are you
Joshua Sharkey: naturally a left brain and right brain person?
Britney Ziegler: I think you might just be uncovering something for me in this conversation that I had never thought about, but yeah,
Joshua Sharkey: it's funny, I, I, I am too, and it actually, I actually think it's a, a pain in the ass.
Like, I wish I wasn't, I wish I [00:16:00] was one or the other. It's, it's, there's like this schizophrenia to it of like, okay, this is the big vision and this is exactly what we do. Like, well, but to do that, the way you're gonna have to execute is this, and we're gonna put, and you're like arguing with yourself. And I do that all the time where I'm like thinking through, I'll have a really big vision, but then I'll spend a bunch of time thinking through all the, like, the logistics of it and making sure that we're planning.
Yeah.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. And, um, no, I'm there with you for sure. And
Joshua Sharkey: I, I wish I had someone that was like, like more the logical one. So I could just be the, the, the dreamer and they'd be like, Hey. Man, that's crazy. You're gonna have to do this first. But, um, it does, you know, it's, when you were talking, I was like, it sounds like you're also this left brain, right brain and it, and it, I, I've been thinking about it a lot actually lately.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah, that's fascinating.
Joshua Sharkey: I'm sure it bleeds into now how you're running Penso as well. Um, especially early on. It
Britney Ziegler: does, yeah. I mean, I, it, it's interesting because I'm dreaming in the sense we built a software that no one's ever built before, [00:17:00] so. And from my perspective, which is not a software engineer, I'm not a developer, I am an operator at heart, and I know what systems are needed to provide the end result.
So I guess in the sense of this, I dreamt of this idea and this product in this perfect world of what we need for restaurants. And then I've hired a development team who have been with us since day one, so July of 2021. We're extremely technical and absolutely incredible in every right as developers.
But they said to me early on, Brittany, no one does it like this. I was like. Right. That's why we need to do it like this. Like we need to think differently. And I think early on I instilled probably a bit of that creativity in my team across the board where [00:18:00] we do approach things and we don't look back on our experience to dictate how it should be done or look at others and how they've built companies for how it should be done.
And we've taken our own path and created a system that. Is building the first customer 360 in the hospitality space and creating a tool that replaces a lot of other tools, um, and integrates with the ones that do what they do really well. 'cause we know that we don't need to touch reservations for se, per se, or point of sale.
And we work with those players in this space and have created, you know, a much more modular system for restaurants to be able to function with.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah. I mean, you kinda, the only really real way to succeed in this tech space, I think is you have to be, you have to be contrarian and Right. Those [00:19:00] two things are, are hard.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: You know, because you can sort of like do the same thing that someone else has done. But then it's, you know, it's a lot of competition and, and you know, it's a sort of, it can be erase at the bottom, so
Britney Ziegler: Totally.
Joshua Sharkey: It's really the only way to do it. Well, I'd love to, you know, like learn a little bit more about, about, uh, the nuts and bolts.
So you said there's like seven different platforms that you were using. What, what, mm-hmm. What are those platforms that are also consolidated into what has become Panza?
Britney Ziegler: Yeah, so front end website. All of our clients, we host their websites and we either design them based on specs that they provide to us, or we help design them for them.
Event management, so a full fledged private event booking system. It's everything from. Inbound leads to conversion contracting payments and execution [00:20:00] of eos and kitchen sheets and every possible business report around the private event business.
Joshua Sharkey: Mm-hmm.
Britney Ziegler: Ticketing, um, if a restaurant's hosting a special wine dinner or an event where they need to sell a ticket for that.
They have the functionality to build those tickets within our backend to display on their website and sell them to their customers. CRM. So CRM is at the core of our product. Anywhere within the platform, in the backend, you can get to a guest profile. That guest profile is showcasing the lifetime value of the guest.
That's every dollar that they've spent across all of the revenue centers within the business.
Joshua Sharkey: Mm-hmm.
Britney Ziegler: It showcases their preferences, their contact details, any notes that the restaurant has on them, any communications that they've had with the restaurant, [00:21:00] all of their activity log that's happening and occurring on the website, their event business, their ticketing sales, any orders that they've made.
And then all of their opt-in to the marketing suite. So all of that customer data is being utilized in our backend for segmentation. And our restaurants can then go and build email and SMS campaigns and say they wanna look at people who have inquired for private events but actually haven't booked, and they wanna segment that audience and communicate to them to drive them into a booking process in the future.
They can run that entire customer journey and flow through our system.
Joshua Sharkey: Ill last, they can even do email through the through. Mm-hmm. So it's like Bento box, triple seat, seven rooms, top MailChimp, all sort of like combined into one. Uh, I
Britney Ziegler: would say Square, bento box for sure. Triple seat, most definitely in event Bright.
And then a male [00:22:00] chimp or a Klaviyo. The folks in the reservation space do what they do really well.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. I was just thinking CRM, there's something, there's not a lot of like specific CRMs for, for restaurants, so,
Britney Ziegler: no. And it's funny that you say CRM because I'm finding that a lot of platforms use the word CRM and they use it in their sales and marketing tactics, but at the end of the day, they're a customer profile.
A true CRM helps boost loyalty. Across team collaboration, growth within the business, and tracking that entire process. No one's doing that other than Pan O.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah, there's a bunch of disparate systems there. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, one of the challenges we had, you know, before launched me, I was with another restaurant group, was connecting the customer data from digital [00:23:00] transactions and native in-store transactions.
Mm-hmm. The order on. DoorDash. Right. And then you also order in store. Yeah. How do I know that you're the same person? Uh, is that something that you're solving?
Britney Ziegler: We are, yeah. So we have, um, either integrations built where we're ingesting that customer data based off of reservation bookings or orders. Some of our restaurants are using our platform for their online sales, so we're tracking that through first party data, and we do to get technical on.
The back end, we are building customer profiles at every point of transaction and storing those independently. Um, and we have a few unique identifiers for each of those customers that we're tracking. And when they get connected automatically, we'll combine, say two profiles together so you have the full history of their spend and their engagements.
Joshua Sharkey: Gotcha. I mean, do you have, I didn't [00:24:00] ask you this in the beginning, but I think I would love to, I would love to, just to understand like what is the like grand vision for what you're, what you're building here?
Britney Ziegler: I started it to provide a solution to an industry that supports their business, helps them understand and engage with their customers, gives them ownership of their customer data.
And is cost effective to the business model. I see this becoming really a platform for the industry at large, um, where they can have full control of their customer experience instead of relegating that off to third parties, and then that will help build. A true ecosystem between the brand and the guest.
So when they look at growth opportunities, they're not just looking at demographics provided from, say, a real estate developer to assess if a property is right for that brand. [00:25:00] They're matching their true customers that they have real first party data on. With demographics and any other potential data that would help influence their growth for their businesses so they can make well-informed business decisions, identify different opportunities, and help them succeed in the future.
Now that we have so many layers to a restaurant business model, whichever way you look at it. It's challenged, um, and technology shouldn't be a challenge or a pain point for these operators.
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I didn't ask you this when you were talking about db, but Yeah. Uh, is, is David Burke a customer?
Britney Ziegler: David Burke is not a customer.
Joshua Sharkey: You gotta get them on there. It was eight years of your life. Are you, are you, uh, are you guys actively doing outbound [00:27:00] sales or how, like, how are you acquiring customers today?
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. Um, we are, so this entire business I've built. Through my network and our network. It's interesting, I look back and every.to how we got to where we are today is connected through another individual in or around the industry. So we've been fortunate enough to have access to the best of the best around the country and either working with them or getting support in the development process.
So when we launched, we had naturally built a lot of relationships. We're now back in touch with a lot of the folks that we've touched over the years to figure out and find ways to work together. We do do outbound sales. We are also receiving a lot of inbound right now. Um, and to that extent we're, were meeting really incredible people that have.
Spin in my mind, a [00:28:00] potential dream client and just kind of going organically at this stage because we know we have to work with the right people who understand the product. It's definitely not the traditional approach to scaling, but I think at this stage, because the system's so large, it's what we have to do and it will help us with stickiness.
It'll help us with word of mouth, and it'll also build. Our own little cheerleaders, um, across the industry to, to help us in getting buy-in.
Joshua Sharkey: That's great. How, how big is the team?
Britney Ziegler: We have a team of 20 on the development side. Um, wow. And we're a small and mighty team of three state side.
Joshua Sharkey: Uh, where's the, where's the development team
Britney Ziegler: in India?
Joshua Sharkey: Gotcha. Um, yeah, we, we used to have a team in Vietnam. Okay. They were amazing. Um, yeah, we're, we're, we're all in-house when we started. It was similar thing. Fine. We have a very similar start of how, uh, yeah, yeah. [00:29:00] The, the, the, the biggest challenge was, uh, just the time zones of just deployments, you know? Oh, yeah.
Happening, you know, overnight and then having to, um, you know, and having to sort of like do quick updates and things like that. But, oh yeah. You, we, you know, we, we do have a, we actually, it's, it's funny, we have a, we have a similar journey in a lot of ways, and we started Mees, um mm-hmm. You know, we were by no means in stealth.
I, I'm a, this is just a part of my. Is like, as soon as I decide I wanna do something, I tell everybody. 'cause then I'm forced to do, oh, I
Britney Ziegler: remember this. Um,
Joshua Sharkey: um, I, I'm, I'm, it's, it's just a, uh, from early on, even before I, you know, when I was a, when I was a kid, I used to do this and, and um, I remember when I would, when I started traveling, when I was.
Cooking. I would just tell everybody, oh, I'm gonna Mexico. And I would just tell everyone I couldn't afford it. I had no money, but I would tell everybody I'm going to Mexico or Europe or something. And then I had to, 'cause everyone's like, when are you gonna Mexico?
Britney Ziegler: That was a form of manifestation actually.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's funny because, um, with, with, with our lunch, I, I told [00:30:00] everyone. And I'm a chef and we were selling to chefs. Mm-hmm. And man, just so much hate because we were doing something, um, we were doing something wildly different and it didn't exist. Yeah. There wasn't like a, a frame of reference for it.
Yeah. Because everybody used paper or, or spreadsheets. Right. And, and it sucked in the beginning. Like we, I knew that the delta between kind of. Where we needed to be and what the state of the art of just a spreadsheet or a, or just even just a piece of paper was, was pretty great. So we had to, we had to spend a lot, so in the beginning.
I look back, I'm like, man, kind of for my mental health, I would've liked to not told anybody because you know, people would play around with it and they're like, dude, this sucks. What do you like? This will never work.
Britney Ziegler: But on the flip side, not having told anybody about it, people are like, who are you? Are you real?
Are you actually a company? Is your product actually working? Like, I had somebody recently say to me, oh, I'll send you a couple people. They could test the product. I'm like, we don't. We're beyond that point, you know, like, so [00:31:00] it's. Yeah, there's, I don't know if there's a right or a wrong for how you do it.
Joshua Sharkey: It is true when you, I mean, when you told me, uh, when you started developing and how big your team is and how long you've been developing for Yeah. Mean you've been building this for almost four years. It's a, it's a, it's a long time Yeah. To, to just be launching now and it is pretty, um. Well, it is pretty contrarian in terms of go to market.
Yeah. Or just launching a product because typically, you know, you wanna get something in the hands when you're kind of embarrassed by it and you get feedback. You might be, you might have the wrong hypothesis. Mm-hmm. Sounds like you ha you, you're, you're lucky again that you had the right hypothesis and, and it, and it, and it still worked.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. Which is definitely stuck to my guns. And I think coming outta restaurants and now being in tech, I'm looking at the process very differently. Like, I'm not walking in the shoes of a tech founder in the way that a tech founder would. And I'm doing things that are not traditional to say, an outside investor who's looking at a business and they're like, well, wait, show me this on a spreadsheet.
Like how is this gonna work? And I can [00:32:00] do that, but I can also get there by not taking the traditional path. And so like, and what is that
Joshua Sharkey: traditional path in, in that regard that you're referring to?
Britney Ziegler: Putting in? A huge marketing spend for outbound sales and hiring a sales team and going out into market with a big splash.
I am leaning on really the network and the word of mouth and hiring people who come out of restaurants to ensure that when we do onboard a client, we don't have to ask that many questions if they're speaking to us, the person on team Panto understands what they're saying. And we're not creating unnecessary friction during that process because we are all operators and so we're going into the market as one of our customers, and that is helping really alleviate, I think a lot of.
The pain points for what a traditional onboarding [00:33:00] process might look like in the technology space, in the restaurant industry. And so that has created one opportunities for us on the product side to hear directly from the restaurants. But it's also building really like that stickiness and the fact that people are calling us and saying, oh yeah, well we heard about you and you know this person and that person within the industry says we should meet.
It is a very different conversation than if I was like, Hey, let me tell you about my software. We should work together. And so it's really flipped the script on all of our sales and that I think is gonna come with real long-term benefits. Yeah. For our business,
Joshua Sharkey: hundred percent agree. It's always best to to spend.
Nothing on marketing until you, um, really understand your customer and they understand you. Mm-hmm.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: I will say, you know, it's funny when I, when, when we launched, it's been, it's [00:34:00] been four years now since we, since we launched. It was all like, I, I was like, I'm only hiring restaurant people and really I'm only hiring chefs and there's a huge benefit and obviously I'm, I'm a chef restaurant owner.
That's what I did most of my life. Well, my whole life until, until this, there's obviously this huge benefit. For us to understand our customer, understand the industry, look at tech differently as we build it. Mm-hmm. And as we grow it. I, I have found over the years that there's also an advantage to having people that don't know the industry, uh, on our team.
Interesting. That, that look at our problems from a different perspective. You know, I'm, I'm obviously solving a very different problem than you have, like Right. Um, recipes and, and, and consistency of execution mm-hmm. And things like that. And how do you interact with the recipe? And I've Right. I've been interacting with recipes as a chef for 20 years.
So I have all of these, um, ideas, but I also have preconceived notions in cognitive biases around like, what I, you know, around here's what it should be like. But then sometimes you, you know, an engineer would be like, why, why are you doing that? That, like, why do you, do I get that? [00:35:00] Why are you scaling it this way?
Like, why, what if you just did that? And, uh, I mean, you know, and our CTO came up with a, like this brilliant. She, you know, I mean, before AI was a thing, we, we, we deployed an AI model of how you like, get recipes into the platform and how you ingest them. And, um, when she sort of started building this, she was like, what?
Why are we writing recipes this way? Like, you know, that I could just detect all of the elements of this recipe if we did this. And I'm like, really? That's cool. Yeah, that is cool. And, and I would've, you know, uh, and so I think that that, that, I mean, I think that's anything in life, right? Is you, yeah. Is you have to have.
You have to get perspective from outside yourself. It's also totally important to do things outside of your work 'cause
Britney Ziegler: Right.
Joshua Sharkey: My, now my best ideas are like when I'm walking in the park or in the, in the forest with my daughter or my son or something and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And you always think that the, you know, that the, these things come from just actively thinking about something.
And I try more and more nowadays to find time outside of work.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. That's [00:36:00] brilliant.
Joshua Sharkey: You're an entrepreneur, so I'm sure you're like me. That I was gonna say, that's
Britney Ziegler: the entrepreneur brain we have.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah. We're just constantly working. How are you? How are you, are you leveraging a AI at all today for yourself?
Britney Ziegler: I need to get better at it for myself. I have a wonderful woman on my team who tells me every day, just download superhuman, and please just use it. It'll make your life that much better. I need to, yes. That's one thing on. The next half of the year that I need to work on, on the development side and our software platform, we have AI within all of our discussion modules within our marketing suite, you can use AI to help generate your responses and
Joshua Sharkey: Oh, that's cool.
Um,
Britney Ziegler: communicate with the guest. We also have, which right now is in true beta, a full fledge reporting module That's basically. [00:37:00] A chat with our AI to say, how many customers do we have inquiring about events over the last five days? What were our sales for the last month? Um, being able to just have a conversation with it and pull in really any data point that our system stores into providing that response.
That'll be the first round of it. The second round will be, well, where are growth opportunities within my business? How can I segment specific audiences and what are the communications that need to go to them? And so we'll create more of a, a prompt that helps the business figure out different opportunities based off of the data that we're storing.
Joshua Sharkey: That's great. Yeah. Uh, and it sounds like you guys are building, you, you, you're building a lot. Yeah, I, I, we have, I hope you start playing around with, uh, with AI yourself. I, I, I've been like obsessed. Thank you, Josh, over the last six months. And as a CEO and just even just personally,
Britney Ziegler: [00:38:00] I'm fascinated with it.
I just need to actually use it. Like I'm finding myself going to seminars where Sam Altman speaking, and I'm fascinated with where it's going, and the fact that AI is smarter than any child born into this world. What that means for our future to me is just mind blowing. Do you know that? Yeah. Do you know,
Joshua Sharkey: um,
Britney Ziegler: I, where it's at in terms of its knowledge base at this stage,
Joshua Sharkey: I use so many different tools now.
I, I, I've forced myself to use them often and I'm, I mean, I've, I've, I've gone pretty deep into it now. I have Okay. You know, I have my own MCP that I'm using to like, connect all my tools. I use it as my personal assistant. I use it for my own. I love that like, um. Every, you know, my, my, everybody that I know, uh, any important dates are in there.
And it reminds me, you can send reminder. That's how
Britney Ziegler: you're using it as a CRM.
Joshua Sharkey: I'm using it as, as everything if, you know, there's, there's so many, there's [00:39:00] so many applications. Uh, I mean, I'm building my own applications, you know, I'll use something like Revit and it starts just Yeah. You know, rather than like, you know, getting an off the shelf SaaS tool for something, I'll just, right.
Exactly what I need. Oh, that's super cool. And you know, our, obviously our engineers are using it as well, but before, I think my second job in New York in between working at this place called Oceana and, and this mm-hmm. Uh, and, and this place called Tabla, I mm-hmm. I was staging and I std it at Danielle and, um, and Alex Lee put like two boxes of, uh, pet pa uh, on my station.
And I was like, oh, what's the, what's the fastest way to, um, to clean these? And he's like. Just start, and it's always stuck with me is like, you know, you always like love that plan those things. Yeah. And I try as, as often as I can to just, you know, with, when I, when I don't have to build a, like a deep strategy around something.
It's like, just, just start. And, and that's the best way I think with AI is you just start playing around with these things and you start to learn, oh wow, you can do this and you can do this. And then you look for [00:40:00] new solutions and then you get into these,
Britney Ziegler: you know, I, I will take your advice on this and start.
Joshua Sharkey: Superhumans great too, by the way. I use Superhuman. Um, I'm finding there's like, there's a lot of redundancies with a lot of these tools.
Britney Ziegler: Okay.
Joshua Sharkey: So I have a separate AI that I built. I built an agent that manages all my email and all my meetings and, um, all my tasks and just manages all that for me. So
Britney Ziegler: smart.
Joshua Sharkey: But it, it, it works with superhuman, but superhumans a little bit tough because. It sits on top of Gmail, so there's some limitations around right around what you can do. But is, I mean, I think super's the best email server You can, you can use. Okay.
Britney Ziegler: All right, fine.
Joshua Sharkey: I'm gonna follow up with you in like a month.
Yeah. I know
Britney Ziegler: you are
Joshua Sharkey: like Brittany, what are you, whatcha you doing
Britney Ziegler: know,
Joshua Sharkey: I think you've been doing some, some podcasts lately. What's something that, um, that you wish people would ask you more?
Britney Ziegler: Something like, I mean, I don't know. My life is so much about work. That's all I think about. People don't ask me about like the things I do [00:41:00] outside of work.
Um, I think I am starting to get into conversations about being a female founder in the tech space, which I really enjoy. I think that's important just in general, regardless of the industry.
Joshua Sharkey: Mm-hmm. What do you do outside of work?
Britney Ziegler: Outside of work, I find myself making time for myself.
Joshua Sharkey: What does that look like?
How do you, how does that sort of benefit? Right
Britney Ziegler: now I've grown a ton in this process of starting a company, and I'm sure you know what I mean when I say that, but I've learned so much about myself personally, that when I'm not in work, I wanna know more about myself. Um, and so I do that by taking a walk every day, um, which is really a.
Mindful movement meditation. Mm-hmm. Um, plus it also provides a bit of exercise, which is great. I [00:42:00] read a ton. I definitely sit in silence, which is probably not the norm for somebody our age. I'm not watching TV very often, but when I am, I'm watching The Housewives, it's just garbage television and so good.
I, I don't know
Joshua Sharkey: how you do it, but, uh, my, my wife's the same and every time I see it, like I don't get it, but, okay. Can I ask you a question?
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: Do you color code your books? I'm just looking behind you.
Britney Ziegler: So you do, right? These are color coded? Yes.
Joshua Sharkey: So is that, so there, there's, there's
Britney Ziegler: closets also color coded.
Joshua Sharkey: There's two kinds of people in this world. There's those that color code their books and those that organize their books by type. Yeah. And you, I'm clearly the, the, the other side in your BI type and I've never understood other than obviously aesthetically it's so much nicer, uh, visually. Yeah. How long have you been color coding your books for?
Britney Ziegler: Well, I take them out of [00:43:00] the cover, first off, so you don't get to see the colors of the actual book if they're wrapped in a book mm-hmm. Sleeve. So I take that off first and then I did this aesthetically, I didn't say all these colors should be. Next to one another. I definitely toyed with putting this bookshelf together.
Okay. All of these books I've read, I have another pile of books that's not color coded of books that I'm not, that I haven't finished that are in. Process.
Joshua Sharkey: How do you find books when they're color coded? This is the thing I just don't get about color coding. Like how do you find a book?
Britney Ziegler: Oh, my memory is very good across everything in life.
Like I was talking to somebody the other day and he was like, you're human. CRM, how do you remember all of these things and all of these people and where you met them and how you met them and all. And just, I absorb things in that way.
Joshua Sharkey: I'm the opposite. I have some things that I remember annoyingly well, and then things like that.
I don't remember at all. You don't? [00:44:00]
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. So maybe I, I definitely remember things visually, like if I see something, it's stuck in my mind. Mm-hmm. Words stay too, but there's a visual aspect.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah, that makes sense. I, I can't do physical books anymore, which annoys me. 'cause I used to only do that and now it's mostly because like my, you know, like at night if you have a book light and my wife would be like, turn off the light.
Yeah. She
Britney Ziegler: wouldn't be too happy. Um, so I
Joshua Sharkey: have akin I use a Kindle now.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah. And I actually
Joshua Sharkey: love it because, um, the other thing that I do is who was this that, um, I don't now I don't remember, uh, who the author was. I think it was. I don't actually, no, it wasn't, it was somebody else. Anyways, there was, there was this aha moment I had where like one you can just put down a book and be like, I'm not gonna finish that.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: Two. You can read multiple books at once, right? And so now I actually read like three or four books at the same time. And so on any given night, I'm just like, you know what? I'm gonna finish this one, or I'm [00:45:00] gonna work on this one or this one. And, and so I'll have like three or four books at a time. I do miss the, the physical, kind of like physical, the physical.
Britney Ziegler: I, I prefer physical. I also, I'm on the computer, my phone all day long, so I like to read a book and I do have a pile of. Five books, and I do go between them and I, but I'm, I have a little bit of the OCD in me, so I can't not finish a book, even if I am so upset with reading it. I have to get through.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah.
Yeah. Whatcha are you reading right now and what kind of books do you read?
Britney Ziegler: I'm reading Ben Tru book from Attica out of Australia. Mm-hmm. It was just recently at the chef conference and he and Tom kli. We're there as part of mm-hmm. Their book tour, and I'm maybe a third of the way through. And I have to say, it's incredible, it's giving me very much Anthony Bourdain style writing [00:46:00] in a very honest, humbling, like, caring way.
So I would recommend that. That's cool.
Joshua Sharkey: Oh yeah. I'm gonna, I gotta write that down.
Britney Ziegler: I'm also reading written by um, Freud's daughter, but it's about psychoanalysis of the human brain. A little dense. Oh, that by his daughter. Really? Yeah. So it's all of his works, but she is the one writing the book and she's looking at all of his studies and.
Giving in a different point of view. It's super dense. It's definitely probably supposed to be read by a doctor and not a hospitality tech founder. But, um, that one's great. And then I have over there the art architecture of happiness. So how design influences your happiness.
Joshua Sharkey: Oh, that's cool.
Britney Ziegler: Which I had never really considered, but I for sure am on a journey of.
[00:47:00] Understanding happiness. We don't have a metric for happiness, though everybody's striving for this feeling of joy, and I am realizing that there's a lot of components that help a person achieve happiness and architecture. I never thought as being that, although rightfully so. Your surroundings. For sure help influence feelings and thoughts in your own person.
So logically that makes sense.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big, uh, fan of stoicism that that always helps me the most with yeah, just sort of battle battling happiness. It's more about acceptance, I guess, rather than, um, understanding happiness, but, but, but I don't like it.
Britney Ziegler: Um, thank you. Do you
Joshua Sharkey: ever reread books?
Britney Ziegler: I have reread a couple.
I've reread Kitchen Confidential. I've reread, uh, setting the Table over the course of a few [00:48:00] years. Um, I haven't read that one in a long time. And The Art of Happiness, which is about the Dalai Lama, I've read a couple times.
Joshua Sharkey: Very cool. I reread Siddhartha every year. I've been re rereading that book every year since 1998.
Britney Ziegler: Oh, wow. Yeah. Why? What are you getting out of it?
Joshua Sharkey: The arc of this, of Sharita's life and the journey, and it's, it's very stoic actually. Uh, the, the, the general premise is that with whatever happens in life, you know, for, for Siddhartha, he can think. He can fast and he can wait. And those three skill sets basically, um, help him, um, address any problem he has in life.
And it's sort of the, it is a journey to enlightenment and, and I find that no matter where I am in my life, no matter what stage I'm at, I always can connect to this journey because. It's a journey that we all have. And you know, we, we go through sort of phases of samsara and, and, um, yeah, we're always sort of like seeking happiness or getting stuck mm-hmm.[00:49:00]
In these different phases of, um, whatever, materialism or any of these things. And, and all of that happens to him and he then becomes sort of enlightened and,
Britney Ziegler: oh, I would like that, I should grade that.
Joshua Sharkey: Oh, it's a great book. Yeah. And it's, it's, I mean, it's also quick. It's a, it's a short one, so you know, you can read it over a weekend if you, you know, if you're, you're quick.
Britney Ziegler: Are you familiar with Young Pueblo? That's his script name. His, uh, Diego? No, I forget his last name. You may like his writing. He is a poet, but he, um, I actually just finished his most recent book, which is How to Love Yourself or How To Love Better. How To Love Better. Um, and I've read all of his other works, but he talks about like, it's pretty much.
The achievement of joy, and it's through personal understanding and the depths of you as a human and what you have to uncover and move past to [00:50:00] get to a place of enlightenment. And then once you're there, what that means. Yeah, they're pretty good. And they're also a quick read.
Joshua Sharkey: Yeah, that's great. I love that.
You know, it's, it's funny, I, I think the one, the one lesson I've learned is it's very simple. To, uh, be happy and very difficult. Yeah. Uh, you know, because we're exactly where we are supposed to be at all times, you know? Correct. No matter what's, no matter what's happening, but like, actually like, you know, accepting that and embracing it is incredibly difficult.
Britney Ziegler: Well, I think I say this pretty often. We're all living this day, this hour, this minute and second for the first time ever together. So I think if you flip it and you think of you are not the only one that needs to accept this moment, we all do. And now we're in it
Joshua Sharkey: together. Yeah, I love that. Well, we're in this, we're in this, we're in this podcast episode that started that's been so
Britney Ziegler: fun.[00:51:00]
Joshua Sharkey: Started with Panto and ended with, uh, uh, philosophy, enlightenment.
Britney Ziegler: Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey: That's a, that's a, it's a great way to end, end a show. Yeah, Brittany, this was, this was awesome and I'm so stoked that likewise, um, that we got to meet. I'm sure. We'll, we'll chat again. Definitely. I gonna follow up with you to make sure that you start, uh, using AI more for yourself.
Thank you. I appreciate
Britney Ziegler: that.
Joshua Sharkey: And I will always pronounce Pan Cell correctly. Moving, moving forward.
Britney Ziegler: Well, thanks for having me, Josh. It's been a pleasure.
Joshua Sharkey: Thanks for tuning into the meez podcast. New 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 getmeez.com/podcast.
That's G-E-T-M- double 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 [00:52:00] time.