Potential Client
I just had a meeting w/ a potential client (let's just say they're one of the fastest growing chain concepts in the US right now), and had a discussion first with the COO (a family friend) and then their head of IS/IT operations. And I'm still confused as to what happened, or what needs to change to fix it.I went in discussing food safety, our departure from the focus on food safety, and the reasons we were departing from that market for the time being. [Don't get me wrong, the money is in the food safety market. It just takes some money to get there (custom plastics cost money). And we don't have the necessary $500,000 - $700,000 to get the products done "right".] I then transitioned the discussion into using software to optimize the restaurants that they have.
How do they know that they are using the best schedule possible? Could they schedule people differently and more efficiently (and save money)? What cash do they keep tied up in inventory? Could they do that better? What if they saved 1% on their inventory ... 2%, 3%, 4%? They don't use a reservation system -- but what if they did? A smart reservation system would be able to help them move tables in real-time and help them allocate tables to people in a faster situation. Why don't they use that?
After a few minutes of discussing this ... I got a blank stare. I decided to focus on inventory, since that's a well known problem in the industry (or so I thought). The chain doesn't use ChefTec or MenuLink, or any other system. Somewhere in the middle of the discussion, I went from talking with the COO to the director of IS/IT ... and our conversation started going like this (I'm paraphrasing, the quotes aren't 100% accurate):
"What does your company use to track inventory?", I asked him.
"We do everything in house", he replied.
"Right ... but let's say that you take inventory once a week, how do you know how much to order next week?"
After some grumbling from him ... "We train our managers, and they're good at what they do. We know what our food costs are, and we work around that."
"Is there a reason you don't use something like a ChefTec? They propose that they can save you 1% - 3% on your inventory costs. Sounds like a deal to me.", I postulated.
"Well, I've seen it in action, but I don't know that it can save me money. So, we're developing something in house to track certain items.", he came back.
"Ok, so, if they proved it to you, would you use it?"
He said, "It depends, we're taking baby steps right now ... if we need a solution though, we can probably develop something in house cheaper than their solution."
I can't dispute that with him ... and he seemed to have made up his mind. It may be cheaper to develop it in house (along those same lines, it is probably cheaper to track your check book in Excel than it is to buy Quicken or Quickbooks ... but that's not really why people buy that software). So, I went back to the tables / reservations:
"What if you had software that could MAKE you as much as $3500 PER week more than you're making now?" I asked.
"Well, that might be nice, but what is it?"
I said, "It's a software solution to help you seat people more efficiently. It can tell you who to seat in a restaurant, and where, and when, and how [including combining tables together]. It takes a bunch of things into account, and then crunches the best solution based on how long people have been waiting, what your individual preferences are, etc..."
"Not interested. What happens if there's a party waiting for 20 minutes, and a new party comes in. It might make more sense to seat that second party, but then the first one could be upset. That's what we have good managers for."
I just stared, and said "Well, what if I told you that the software can into account more than what the restaurant manager can, and could free him / her up to do something else."
He mentioned something about software / hardware could not replace a good manager.
Yikes. That's entrenched. I didn't know what to say.
I did learn a few things that I might not have learned elsewhere.
1. They're very concerned about how things run in the kitchen.
2. "Optimizing" to them means doing what they are already doing, but with a computer.
3. They don't seem to be concerned about costs. This was most interesting. They kept referring to themselves as a "concept" -- which makes me wonder if the goal of the company is NOT to grow a company / chain, but to sell out to one of the "big boys". Let them worry about the bleeding cash situation.
Either way I look at it, I'm fighting a long, hard road.
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