1036: Adam Guild CEO at Owner.com

restaurant unstoppable episode 1,036 with Adam Guild. To take a step back, it's worth understanding why it is that owner exists, which is to give restaurant owners the tools that they need to succeed online in a simple all-in-one platform. So anything that a restaurant needs to succeed online, we provide through our platform to make it easy. That includes, like you said, a website builder, a marketing automation platform, which includes email and text message marketing, a loyalty system, recruiting tools to drive more job applications, branding tools, and anything else that is necessary for being a successful restaurant in 2023. Are you ready for it, Factors? Success stories, failures, and bombs of restaurant industry knowledge? Then join Eric Catchatory, it's a day's incredible guest, as they share what it takes to become unstoppable. If you're tired of the other tater, you ought to try tater cakes because it's time to serve the tater your guests deserve. Tater cakes are shredded potatoes mixed with delicious flavors, all the best parts of a baked potato in the perfect hand-held package from the freezer to the fryer to the guest. Serve them in a variety of different ways and in different applications, great for dining, delivery, and to go with all the uncertainties of the world today, we should be able to be certain that our food always has great flavor. And tater cakes provides that comfort in every bite. Request samples at taterkakes.com. That's t-a-t-e-r-k-e-g-s.com. taterkakes.com. Self-awareness is the number one skill for leaders in the new era of work and self-awareness is also said to be the peak of emotional intelligence. So let me ask you how truly self-aware are you? No matter how self-aware you think you are, you and your business can always benefit from becoming more self-aware. You've heard us talking about predictive index on the show. First, with Al Lucas in episode 978, then with Eddority in episode 1,08, and finally with Matt Pepsil in episode 1,015, the predictive index is a talent optimization platform that helps leaders understand themselves and others helping build happy, high performing teams. Try predictive index behavioral assessment for free head to restaurantunstoppable.com/tripei to take the PI behavioral assessment. Once you've taken the assessment, Eddority is offering a free 30-minute call to read your results and help you become a better self-aware leader. Again, that's restaurantunstoppable.com/tripei. This episode is brought to you by Restaurant Systems Pro and they are watching their first time ever 60-day pilot program. This is something that's never been done before. This 60-day event is at no cost to you, but it's not for everyone. Fred Langley, CEO of Restaurant Systems Pro, will be leading a group of restaurant tours through the Restaurant System Pro software and setting up the systems for your restaurants. Fred will teach you recipe costing cards, guidance in your books for accounting, cash control, sales forecasting, checklist, budgeting for the entire year, scheduling for profit, more butts and seats, and that's not it. If you are interested in this, head over to www.restaurantunstoppable.com/rsp. That's RSP for Restaurant Systems Pro. www.restaurantunstoppable.com/rsp. With excitement, allow me to introduce to you today's guests co-founder in CEO of owner.com Adam Guild, my man Adam, are you feeling unstoppable today? Yes, I am Eric. Dude, I am psyched to have you here and honestly, I'm super impressed by you as an individual. You're a fucking hustler, bro. You work, you are ambitious. I think 20 years old or 21 years old when we first made contact with each other. Even then, I just remember thinking to myself, I can't remember exactly how we met online or you're like, "Hey, I'd love to block some time." That was absolutely. And you were sharing your story and you were like, "I was 18 years old when I started owner.com." And we're doing all this stuff and I was like, "Holy cow." I was like, "What was I doing when I was 18 years old?" That was like, "I want to say two or more years ago and here you are today with over a thousand restaurants signed up to owner.com, scaling like crazy." It's just kind of been fun to on the sidelines watching your journey, dude. And here you are, guest in the show, psyched to have you. I can't wait to dive in, but let's get that motivational inspirational ball rolling with a success quarter mantra. What do you have for us? Oh, success quote or mantra. Yeah, bro. I would say it's a Yoda quote from Star Wars. He says, "Do or do not. There is no try." Dude, you've been doing it. You have been doing it. That's a great way to get the thing started. So take us to the beginning, man, when you started doing, like when your story goes back. It does. So do you want to hear my story from when my life became unconventional or my story from starting owner? I feel like for you, I mean, you're 18 when you started owner and many people would hear that and think to themselves, this must have been his first business, right? But that's not the case. You started as an entrepreneur earlier than that. So what were you doing to get you ready to become the founder or co-founder of owner.com? I've had a crazy life, Eric. And my first entrepreneurial project actually started when I was 12 years old. Okay. Because I was playing a lot of Minecraft, which is a game that I'm sure a lot of viewers kids play. And while playing Minecraft, I realized at some point that I could start my own game within the game of Minecraft. And it was this thing called a server. Okay. So when I realized I could start a server, I started to spend a lot of my time thinking about not only how to create my game within Minecraft, but how I could improve it and make it great so that it could grow a large community of players and so that I can make money from the thing by selling people various advantages within that game. So over the course of the next four years of obsessing on my Minecraft server, I got the thing to go from zero small hobby, just a way to have fun and make friends online. To then by the time I was 16 years old, it was reaching over seven million players and generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. Jesus. So much that I actually dropped out of high school halfway through 10th grade to focus on scaling that Minecraft server up and then on building my own independent mobile games using that community of players. So you're probably wondering yourself, how does this connect back to actually starting owner in the restaurant tech world? Yeah, I mean, there is kind of a bridge, our gap needs to be bridged for sure, but I'm just interested in this whole idea with like creating a game within a game. And when you were saying that what was going on through my mind is this world we live in today, new industry spurs, new industry. And as new industry, I think this is a perfect example within the game of Minecraft, there was this whole new possibility of opportunity that was never there before. And I feel like that's what one thing I love about the restaurant industry is that we think of the restaurant industry as one thing, but the birth of the restaurant industry spurs so many satellite opportunities, right? And you kind of with owner.com created a game within a game again in a way. I don't know if you ever looked at it like that. I didn't. It's really profound. Right? Yeah. But I think I don't know, I just I think it's important for listeners are listeners to kind of think of that. Like listen, we don't have to do this alone. There's partners out there. There are people who stay in a lane, who do one thing really well. And I can try to do all that on my own or I can partner with these companies that exist to solve this one problem, to be one solution or a solution within a vertical of, you know, for you guys, it's marketing, right? Yep. But back to your story. So yeah, like how do you how do you go from Minecraft to owner.com? It came from this feeling that I had that I felt unfulfilled in my life because I dropped out of high school at 16 to focus on this Minecraft server. And while I was making good money, especially for a teenager, it didn't feel like I was making a positive impact through my work. It felt like I was spending all of my time, quite literally 15 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, trying to get other people at scale to waste theirs on my games so that I could make money. And I knew that there had to be some way to use the skill set that I built in the Minecraft server world to actually help people. I wouldn't know what that way would be though until I had this experience in helping my mom's business, which is actually what inspired owner. Okay. What was your mom's business? My mom owns a dog grooming business. Okay. And when I was building that Minecraft server, I was seeing her struggle because she had a great service that people loved and they told their friends about it. But she happened to pick a quiet street for her dog grooming business. And as a result, it was really difficult for her to get new customers online. So she had tried in the first year of her business all of the different ways to advertise her dog grooming business that local business owners get sold. She tried Yelp ads and boosting Facebook posts and all of the other tactics where these salespeople come to the business owner, in this case my mom, and tell them, we can get you a ton of new customers by advertising on our platform. But the problem was that after spending so much money with them, thousands of dollars and being in this place where her business was losing money and needing to figure out how to acquire customers online, she wasn't seeing results. How is she losing money? She was losing money because as a new business owner, she had expensive rent. She was paying thousands of dollars a month in advertisements to Yelp and Facebook, direct mail, or seed ads, all these different tactics. And none of them were actually working in getting her new customers. Yeah. And then what happens when you stop paying? They pull those ads, right? They do, but the ads themselves weren't working in the first place, which is a very scary place to be. Because for her that represented that it was maybe not possible to acquire customers online. Because all they would tell her when she would buy those Facebook ads or buy those Yelp ads was, your post got 2,000 impressions or it was seen by 500 people and it got 200 likes, but that wasn't actually translating to sales. Right. So this was around the time that she came to her weird, nerdy 17 year old son for help in growing the dog-growing business because she knew that I'd grown those Minecraft servers and games to millions of players. And at first, I didn't know how to solve this problem because I didn't understand what it was about Yelp or Facebook or any of these other tactics that she was trying that weren't actually working in getting her customers. So I started to dive into the data of when somebody would click on one of her ads on Yelp or Facebook and they would land on her website. Why weren't they actually becoming a new customer? Because very few of them were. And what I ended up finding was that her website itself didn't have a high enough conversion rate because she'd set it up herself on Wix as a platform. And it wasn't designed in such a way that it made people who were looking for dog-growing services in West Hollywood want to become a customer. So I began to apply some of the things that I'd learned in the gaming world, conversion rate optimization, which is the process of making a website drive more of its website visitors into new customers and search engine optimization so that she actually showed up at the top of Google when people were searching for dog-gruming in West Hollywood. And in beginning to apply these principles that I'd learned from the gaming world, I saw my mom's business absolutely take off. Like she already had a great service and a few customers that really loved her. But what she needed was more exposure to more new customers. And when she finally had that because the website visitor she was getting, we're actually converting into new customers at a high enough rate, she started to succeed massively. And to connect it back to your earlier question on how it was that I transitioned from building gaming projects to then helping local businesses, it was feeling inspired that I'd finally made a positive impact on somebody's life, my mom's life. And I'd seen her go from this place where she was constantly stressed about money and terrified about potentially losing the business unless she found a way to get new customers online, to then finally having the right answer and seeing so much change, seeing her regain this excitement again for her future and this pride in the business that she'd built and seeing her as a person evolve over the past seven years that was the thing I was looking for. I was looking for a way to make a positive impact using that skill set that I built in gaming and I finally found it. I love that man. That's a great story. And I'm curious as to why you pivot from dog grooming business that's your mom's to like the restaurant industry specifically. But I'm a bookmarked that because I feel like I don't want to cut the story short. So when you're building your mind craft community, right? So that was a community within a community. Can you help me just kind of figure out exactly that community within the community and how you scaled that? I don't know if there might be a lesson here. I think there could be and I want to go deeper into it. Absolutely. So for context for the viewers or listeners that don't know the Minecraft ecosystem, the simple way to think about it is that Minecraft as a game allows its players to develop their own versions of that game within the Minecraft world. So there's not preset objectives or clear good guys and bad guys in Minecraft as a game by default. Instead what they do is they give the community of players the building blocks to create their own games. So people create servers where you start off as a prisoner in a prison and you have to work your way to freedom through going through all these challenges. That was actually one of my game modes back in the day that I created or they create games where you start off on an island in the middle of the air with limited resources and have to figure out how to adapt to survive. And what all these different games have in common is they're using the mechanics of Minecraft as a game, but they enable its players to be creative in how they want to use those mechanics to develop a set of objectives and various other games within the bigger game of Minecraft. So I am not a gamer. I will disclose that right now. So I'm kind of filling in the blanks. But it kind of sounds like Minecraft almost like created like Canva for like gaming where they gave you all the tools to be able to create your own version within the game, right? So were you coding? Were you actually like designing or is it like, where's it more like drag and drop? Like type like technology. I'm really showing my ignorance when it comes to gaming right now. It was coding. So Minecraft is built in a language called Java. And it's modern community also uses Java to develop the different plugins that then end up creating one of these game modes. Okay. So you as a player, how would you go from being a player to also somebody who could create their own like sub-game within the game? You have to like sign up. I started basically just reading a lot of content on the internet about modding Minecraft. And the way I learned was I began to open the plugins that other people had built in my IDE, the place that you write code to see how they'd written their code to achieve certain things. And then I would create my own plugins using those learnings or modifying what they had written so that it would do the things that I wanted. You were 12 years old when you started doing this. I was. That's crazy, man. I love that. There is no do or do what is it? No do or do not do or wait. I just butcher your Yoda quote, say it for me more time. Yoda says there's no do or do not. There is no try, which I think is such an important message for entrepreneurs and for people that care about success. Yeah. One other thing I'm curious about. So when you created the sub-community within Minecraft, right, you had your own followers, right? Were they like, would they have to pay them like a membership or like a subscription to access your elements of the game? How were you monetizing that? It was a freemium monetization model, which means that the game itself is free to play. But if you want advantages in playing that game, like you want a sword that does more damage when you fight other players or you want to build your base with a type of material that is going to be more difficult for others to raid, then you're able to then play the server owner, in this case me, 12 year old me, money to get those unfair advantages within the game. So free to play, but if you want competitive advantages, then you start paying money. It's very similar to how mobile games today monetize. So you can either, could you play like level up over time, but if you just don't feel like leveling up over time, you could just pay the level up now. Yes, that's one way to think about it. It basically saves you time from having to earn these resources yourself. If you're listening to this or maybe Adam, you're listening to this, like, why is Eric asking all these questions around Minecraft? Because I think that one of the things that the restaurant industry is guilty of is not getting the, we're in this bubble of what business looks like, the business model. We call it the 1905 business model. Right. And I think we can look at other industries and get inspiration and swipe and copy what other ways to monetize, whether it's a membership or adding different tiers. And that's what I'm hearing from you. There was like the entry level, but like, do you want to add more value? Do you want to skip the line? Like, there's so many different things you can do to add value to your consumer. Yes. Start thinking like that, but charge for it. Like, there's no reason why you shouldn't charge for it, right? You're offering something of value. So like, I think it's important for restaurant owners to get outside of the traditional 1905 business model and look to other industries, specifically the, you're just creating an experience for your gamers, right? It's no different than the restaurant industry. You're also creating experiences. What's what we're going to say? There are some differences, but there's a lot more parallels like you're describing in developing customer experiences. That's ultimately what it comes down to. And we've definitely taken a lot of the lessons from the gaming industry to help restaurants. I love that. So back to my question that I bookmarked. You are such a great son. You help your mom out. You help her turn her business around. She's, she's breaking in the money. You pivot. So it sounds like around this point, you pivot. Are you done with Minecraft? Or are you just like, I've had enough Minecraft. Like, what's next for me? Like, what's going through your mind after you've helped your mom? When I saw her, finally have the right tool to succeed online and how that really changed her life, it took her from constantly stressed about money, about different parts of the business, not having enough money to hire a proper manager or various other team members that she needed and basically having to do everything herself. When I saw her go from that place to a place where she had enough. customers and they were generating a lot in revenue so she could afford to hire a team. And then seeing the way this changed her as a person, seeing her be less stressed and more strategic in the way she thought about her business. And more excited about her future. I realized that that thing I'd been looking for to help people using that skill set that I'd built in gaming, using my software engineering and growth marketing knowledge was in finding more people like my mom that I could help. You asked earlier why it was that I transitioned from helping my mom's dog grooming business to helping restaurants. And the answer is that there's only a few thousand dog groomers across the entire United States. So this technology that I was building, if I was going to help as many people like my mom with it, I would need to be able to look to other industries that had people like my mom in it that were providing amazing experiences but just didn't have the right tools yet to succeed online. And where I found that the most people like my mom was in the restaurant industry among independent restaurants because there's 150 times more independent restaurants in the United States than there are dog groomers. And I realized that the website builder that I built for my mom, which simplified getting her new customers online, would actually be even more useful to restaurant owners for a few different reasons that are unique to restaurants. Yeah. So basically, there was, it had legs to scale. It provided you the opportunity to skill a business and help people who really needed help. And I love that you kind of, you mentioned that earlier. I meant to resurface that, this idea of like, and this is, that's another similarity with a restaurant industry where you're providing the service, which is what you were doing with Minecraft, but you were also feeding into like an addiction by creating, like you're helping people, but at the same time, you were also hurting them, right? It kind of sounds like you almost have like this inner like, like, I don't know, like you're a torn, like you're like, do I keep on doing this? And I know that I'm helping people with their, their addictions. Is that safe to say? Is that what, was that what you were alluding to? We definitely had some players who were addicted, like spending over 80 hours a week playing. And like neglecting every other part of their life, like any other addict, people underestimate just how addicted games can be to certain people. And that was definitely one of the things that I felt wrong about because one of the dirty secrets about the gaming industry is that almost all of the money is made from what are called whales. And the whales are the ones that are so obsessed with their game that they're actually living vicariously through it and they spend all of their disposable money on it. We had players spending many thousands of dollars on Minecraft server perks. And the idea of having to spend my life optimizing for trying to make money from whales in the gaming industry because they were using the game as like a drug to numb themselves out versus what I had done for my mom's business where I helped her succeed and achieve this dream that she'd have of being the owner of a million dollar business. It was night and day different and I knew that I had to focus on helping more people like my mom. What's that term called? There's a term that's, it's like the, it's like the psychology that goes into gaming where they basically make it addictive intentionally. There's a special word that they use that I can't, they coin it where like they know human, like gamers know human behavior. Like these coders know human behavior. They are intentionally making these things addictive so you give it your attention because that's really at the end of the day. It's the data and the the eyes on the app that makes it profitable, right? You know the term I'm thinking of? I've heard a call to a few different things. One of the phrases that I go to is attention engineering because it's being engineered to consume the attention of its players in a very unhealthy way. The gaming industry looks to books like hooked by Nirei all who's. Oh, that's the book that I'm thinking of. Yes. Yes. I didn't want to show for the record. I don't know if he caught that. That is awesome. I did not see that episode but I'll definitely go back at this. Yeah. He also wrote a book called, he wrote a follow up book but anyway I digress. Indistractable. Yes. That's the one that I, yes. Thank you very much. Pick up your train of thought. So reference in the book. Yes. That's where you're going before I call you short. Yes. So the gaming industry looks to that book as the resource to get its players as addicted as possible, constantly thinking about the game, their progression within it, spending money to accelerate that rather than every other element of their life. It is being engineered and designed to hit the circuits in the brain that are the most addictive and damaging. And it's basically where you get the chemicals, wherever the dopamine plants essentially, right? Yes. And this is why a lot of the best startup founders and marketers tend to come from the gaming industry because they're the. Yes. And I do need to be really good at it because they're so little to differentiate on in games. It's super competitive, super commoditized. And as a result, the people that get really good at it are the ones that deeply understand human psychology and neuroscience and then use that to develop really excellent gaming experience. And this is one of the things that I did starting at 12 years old to make my Minecraft servers and then my own independent mobile games successful. I have more questions on this. I buy bookmarked it. You said attention mark manufacturing. That was the term, the key term, attention engineering engineering. Thank you very much. I think that that would be a fun conversation to end up on in terms of where is the industry going, especially around marketing. Because one of the things, fucking, I'll just get into it right now. One of the things that I get into in terms of my job is to educate and empower the restaurant owner. You start diving into social media marketing and all these things. And like the more you learn about it, the more you realize you're just like, why would I want to spread this information? This information is manipulative. It's not good for the person creating the content. It's not good for the people consuming the content. It's like, why are we continuing to support these broken systems when we know it's not good for us? Yes. So that's the bookmark. Maybe we picked that up. But the original reason why I was going down this path is because I think restaurant owners, especially bar owners, can relate with the 12 year old version of you. So we provide the service, this experience that hinges a lot of time on alcohol, right? And this is the same thing. Most of our money is coming from people who are addicts who are coming in and spending all their money on us and our businesses. So there's again, a lot of these parallels within all sorts of industry. But back to owner.com and your story, when did you pull the trigger? When did you start to say like, it's time to focus on these skills I learned developing games and helping my mom to serve this industry that is far more use at 150 more restaurant owners and dog rumours like when did you go all in on that? Shortly after seeing the impact of having my mom's life and realizing that there were so many more people like her that had created amazing experiences in restaurants. I love restaurants and that we're being clobbered either by companies that sell them these ridiculous advertising packages that don't end up delivering anything or clobbered by massive corporate competitors who are increasingly taking over the restaurant industry, brands like Blaze Pizza and Chipotle and various others that are in a position where they can afford to spend millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars in some cases, figuring out the perfect ways to market themselves online, to build the perfect technology, to create addictive experiences. Independent restaurants don't have that same level of resources to invest. So my thinking was independent restaurants are a really important part of our society. They're one of my favorite things in the world. They create magical experiences that make people feel happy at the end of really bad days or that give people a place to connect with others in their community. The idea of helping them finally compete on level playing ground with the large corporations and take back control from the door dashes and the yelps of the world was really exciting to me. So very quickly after seeing that change in my mom and realizing that there were millions more people like her within restaurants, did I six years ago focus entirely on helping restaurants succeed online by giving them the tools that they needed to develop amazing guest experiences online and acquire new customers and maximize the value of each customer. I just recently came back from the, I'm sure you've heard of Russell Branson. Yes. ClickFunnels. Yes. I was at that clickFunnels 2.0 live in Orlando a couple weeks ago. There's this quote that he said that's been sticking with me and it ties right along with what you just shared with us. He or she who spends the most money wins. What are you going to say to that? Do you know where I'm going with that? Have you heard that expression? The expression from Russell is the company that can afford to spend the most money on acquiring a customer wins. Right. Thank you for doing it way better than I did. But the point being is yeah, like restaurant owners are competing or independent operators are competing with the, you know, not to say that Domino's is a horrible company, but they have an incredible budget. How are we supposed to get the attention of these people who are all dialed into the system? Right. We don't have the marketing budget to actually do it. So I actually just finished editing Robert Chen, his episode who he was on the show, Eat Me, is his company and he created a solution for like meal kits. So like the point where I'm going with this is like there's no way we can do it by ourselves And there's companies like owner.com that are emerging like eat me's that are emerging that are a solution for one Almond of these things that level the playing field and that's the really exciting thing that's happening right now It's the world is catching up with the big companies and the the playing field is becoming Leveled what's going through your mind you're shaking your head I agree with you there's a lot of different parts to this yeah and I think the most important part to understand which I did not understand going into this industry is Why social media is Actually a scam for the majority of restaurant owners. Oh, man. I think that's a good teaser right there We're gonna take our first break to think our sponsors. 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That's t-a-t-e-r-k-e-g-s Dot com tater kegs.com. We're back and you left us with a Amazing cliffhanger about social media. Do you want to start your sentence over? Yep, you'd ask me what it was that was creating such a big divide between large restaurant corporations and independent restaurants and I said it's this Truth that so few people understand myself included when I first started in Helping restaurants that social media is actually mostly a scam for restaurants The reason this is so controversial is because all we are told in this industry is how important it is to succeed on social media and how we need to be posting on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook constantly and just every day. That's all Multiple times a day is in fact what the supposed authorities on this topic tell people to do and I thought this was the right answer because actually the way I'd grown my Minecraft servers was largely on social media and This is a world that I know super well because not only did I build pages on social media to hundreds of thousands of followers But the only person that I could afford to help me with social media during that period was my 10-year-old brother at the time when I was 12 And he got really good at building social media pages not only for the Minecraft servers But that on building his own social media pages and my younger brother topper has over 50 million followers that is accumulated over the past 10 years Megan said it was over 1.5 million. I think your number is we're a little off me a little bit over 1.5 million 50.1 million maybe Megan is the assistant so I mean we were talking but that's crazy so I should say executive assistant she was here in the background earlier we were chatting before you arrived But I mean what would your brother say if he was here? Would he agree with you that it's it's not the answer with somebody who's been so successful on social media? Yes, he would and But why so The problem is that restaurant owners and Myself when I was first getting started in helping my mom's business and then even in helping the first few restaurants I didn't like realize why it was that social media wasn't working for that from my mom When I first started helping my mom's business The first place I turned was building a large social media following because that was what I knew and so I started building A big following on Instagram and Facebook it got to thousands of followers on each page my mom's doggering page still has over 10,000 followers from three months that I spent in applying All of these different growth hacking tactics to growing her social media audience But that actually wasn't working and the reason it wasn't working is there's two major problems with social media as a growth channel for local businesses First problem is that the customers that they're reaching don't actually have intent to buy Meaning that when you're on social media scrolling Instagram or Facebook what you're looking for is Things to entertain you that is what you are therefore you're there to catch up with your friends that's entertaining or to check in with family That's pretty entertaining or even to follow big celebrities or meme pages to kind of escape from the moment You're not on social media looking for the best new restaurant to try or the Mexican food to order online that is a completely different thing And so when you see posts in your feed that are like constantly reminding you to order online from a restaurant from a restaurant You follow what happens is that people aren't In the right place or at the right time for that message and so it falls on deaf ears very few people convert with social media We have data from thousands of restaurants on where their customers come from and social media is less than 10% of all new customer acquisition online Followed by like a bunch of different other interesting stuff we can get into later in the episode So the point I'm making is that aside from the intent being wrong for social media to work as a channel It has another major problem Which is that the people on social media That the algorithms show posts to are global in nature That is a problem if you run a restaurant or a dog grooming business where the most customers Will travel to go to your restaurant is like maybe 10 miles practically speaking at absolute most most of your customers are going to be within a five mile radius of Your restaurant that's what all of our data suggests and Given that dynamic if you're on Instagram or TikTok where the algorithm is showing your posts to people globally Even if those people like your content and want to try your restaurant but live halfway across the world They're not going to convert into new customers So then the question is how can restaurants actually acquire customers online But in a place where people have high intent to buy already and are within five miles of their restaurant So they're the optimal buying profile for customers I think of Google immediately search engine optimization. I'm hungry now. I want a solution That's exactly right not only are you hungry now But people on Google tend to search for specific menu items or specific restaurant types So they already know that they want to buy and what they want to buy which means that when you get in front of them In that moment, they're significantly more likely to buy new to They're significantly more likely to become your new customer because they're already searching for what you do Where you do it and are ready to make a buying decision in that moment got it And when we were talking about the fact that that you said it was two things social media has issues with right it was Designed for entertainment and it's global not local or the two major takeaways right yes So I noticed when I look at people in our space we have massive followings And then I dive into like their actual account and I start looking at the engagement It's like the ratio to like you'd think that if you had 10 30,000 followers you'd have like high engagement with the posts and likes and comments and the two don't always line up Is that a big reason why it's part of it and that does definitely happen The reason the engagement is low is because again people there aren't there to constantly be looking at restaurant food pictures That tell them to go buy from that restaurant They're there to be entertained and it turns out that content actually isn't that entertaining the other reason Is I've seen restaurants that do have hundreds of thousands of followers and do post videos to get thousands of likes every single time Multiple times a day and yet the majority of their customers aren't coming from Instagram And that's where things get interesting because they do have high engagement They do have literally hundreds of thousands of followers and what's so interesting is that that isn't yielding new customers And so you would think that if any platform is going to yield new customers that an Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers And high engagement on a restaurant would be the solution, but it's not right what's going through my mind is I mean there's You think of like someone like David Chang right who's a restaurant tour, but he's also a political not political but a social figure Right Where he isn't making money in his restaurants with that content right you know like he has deals with like Mercedes You know, so like is there money to be made by having a big social following yes, but if your goal is to convert followers to Drive traffic to your business Then you might be disappointed. However, if you want to become a social influencer on top of becoming a restaurant tour Like that's a path for you right But maybe but there's a little bit of a disconnect is the point I'm trying to make Yes, I would say that if you're serious about running a restaurant that it's a complete waste of time right or here's the other variable David Chang sells noodles right so he has this he with found a way to link the two he's like well I'm a restaurant tour. I had this massive following of People but I created another product that is ramen that is light that can be shipped that You know, so he he found a way to work the system So like I think the point I'm trying to make is what are you trying to do? You know like you can leverage those volumes for other things, but it's not gonna really support your restaurant Agreed it's also worth noting that David Chang did not become famous from social media He became famous through other avenues that accumulated him a social media following and he's monetizing that fame on social media in addition to his restaurant endeavors but for 99.99% of people in the restaurant industry that isn't the case, they haven't been televised for years of their career with huge followings and so it is a complete distraction. To get back to that Yoda quote, do or do not, there is no try. Part of the way people in my opinion and my old self included in this end up not doing is through constantly having shiny objects in all the potential ways they could spend their time guilty. So you're describing like enthusiastically what if you built a huge social media following and then launched a noodle brand, but that is a total distraction from for sure. The very difficult work of building a successful restaurant business and so I think it's worth calling out. I used to do this too. This was like actually a huge issue for me in my teenage years, but when I realized that the grass will always look greener in other opportunities and that the real success in business comes from being willing to water and nurture your grass so that it can become a really beautiful field one day. I realized that any discussion of like, well if I spent this time on social media, then I could launch my noodle brand or then I could have paid sponsors and subtracting from the most important goal that a restaurant owner has, which is growing that restaurant, achieving the type of unit economics that then gets them to multiple locations. That should be the objective and social media is not going to be a winning strategy there. So did you know this when you started owner com or did this come to you later? I started to sense it when I started owner because I actually built up social media followings for a lot of our earliest customers manually because I was convinced that the reason it hadn't worked for my mom's business, her dog grooming store, was that maybe my mom's dog grooming business wasn't a particularly good thing to be posting on social media. Do people really care about dogs that have fancy haircuts? Like maybe that's why it's not working and so I figured that if I did with restaurants which have even more photogenic content in videos of dishes that are being made and these beautiful pictures that they're dining room that that would was sure to work. And so I actually built up multiple social media followings for multiple our earliest customers to tens of thousands of followers and yet no customers would come from it. And so that's when I realized that this wasn't a execution problem. It was the problem related to those issues with social media as a customer acquisition source for local businesses. Almost like a systemic problem like the system we're in, you know, like the like the digital system ran the tools were reinforced to use aren't necessarily geared towards local business. That's right. It's a good customer acquisition channel if you have a global business because suddenly the audience is global enough that even if they don't have the intent to buy a specific item that you are posting about it is going to reach such a large group of people that even if a small fraction of those people have the intent to buy that is enough to make it ROI positive. But with restaurants given that it is a global audience and they don't have intent it to double whammy and so it ends up leading to a channel that doesn't actually help much in growing. So how did knowing this helped you with your focus in scaling and growing owner.com? Why is owner.com unique in this sense? How did this influence it? One of the unique things about owner.com is that we have dashboards for our thousands of restaurants that are using the product where we can see where new customers are coming from. What channels online are leading to website visitors that actually place online orders or that make reservations or that do any of the other actions that would tell us that that person is going to become a new customer. And one of the very surprising things that you alluded to earlier is that social media isn't the answer but Google SEO is ridiculously underrated. So what I'm hearing from you is it's really direct meal marketing segmented is kind of like like knowing a lot like getting your your data from your guest right. But then understanding them and grouping them. No. Not for me. Okay, help me figure it out then. What did I miss? So social media isn't the answer but Google SEO if you're looking to get new customers online is the answer got it. And the reason it's the answer is because as we described earlier, people when they're searching for restaurants on Google are being showed results that are near them. So it's local rather than global in nature. And when they're in that state of mind when they're searching for best Thai food in Los Althos or we're currently in one of our customers restaurant, Sumo Sushi, best sushi in Los Althos. Sumo Sushi is coming up at the top and they're coming up at the top for customers that have already decided that they want to buy sushi and that they want to buy sushi in Los Althos and so they're just looking for the best option. And so if we can get in front of them then then the conversion rate for each impression ends up being so much higher that even a smaller amount of people seeing the marketing ends up resulting in way more sales across the board we see that Google is the top acquisition channel for restaurants for a shocking number of new customers like over 80% of total new customers to restaurants are coming through Google. What about Facebook? Facebook has the same problem with social media where no intent and global in nature. Because I mean I was just thinking because of the nature of being able to get the information about your guess to get in front of them but again it's not local. Right and to be fair, there are Facebook ads which allow you to locally target. You can tell Facebook only show this to people within five miles of my restaurant but the problem there is that the ads are still not lining up with the intent that somebody has on social media which is being intended to entertain, to escape, to catch up with friends and family. They're not there to see pictures of a random restaurant and so when they see that message it falls on deaf ears or maybe blind eyes that is more realistically the metaphor but there is a way to use social media that we've seen be wildly effective and is very underutilized by restaurants. Should we get into that? I'm tempted but I don't want to pull away from owner.com because we're here to share that story. Well it's worth sharing even if it's completely unrelated to the business because of how effective it is. So there's this interesting way to use Facebook ads where rather than trying to use it to get completely new customers and completely new exposure, what you do is you set up what's called a retargeting campaign. A retargeting campaign allows you to target people that have already visited your existing website and that have already started building an online order but for whatever reason didn't actually complete that online order. So it's like the equivalent of cart abandonment emails but using Facebook ads. This is with geotagging right? Where they land. There's something that follows them around the internet. Right. Yes, it's with a cookie. That's the technology. And that cookie after they land on your website then follows them around the internet and then when they visit Facebook Facebook knows, hey, this person has actually visited Sumo Sushi's website in the past and been to their online ordering page and actually started building an online order. And so then you can tell Facebook for anybody that's visited our website then visited our online ordering page and then started building an online order but didn't complete it. Show them this advertisement. And what's so powerful about this is that this group of people is a very targeted group that have already visited the website decided to start building an online order and then for whatever reason didn't place that order. Typically it's because they got distracted. Somebody called their phone at the same time and then they they forgot to complete it. And so then if you can get in front of them and remind them, hey, you didn't complete that online order. Here's 5% off our online ordering system. It's just enough to get them to go back to the online ordering system and complete it. And so the conversion on these people is bananas. We often see 10 to 1 ROI for those Facebook ads. The other major reason is that it's super cheap to do on the Facebook ads platform because Facebook charges what's called CPM cost per thousand impressions. And what's great about this is that there's not thousands of people to be showing these ads to. It's maybe a few hundred people a month if you're a very high volume restaurant that visit your website then visit your online ordering and then don't place an online order with you. And so if you tell Facebook just get in front of these few hundred people a month, a few times, it ends up being like less than $100 a month to drive dozens of orders from people that would have ordered from the website but didn't get a chance to complete it. So it's like it's the 80-20 rule. Like you know that 20% like because they're coming to you. So you just hit them with all of your ads bet. Exactly. If you apply the 80-20 principle to 80-20, it ends up being the 96-4 rule. 4% of people had potentially making 96% of the ad impact. That is what's happening here where it's like a very small group of people that went through all those steps already but didn't complete the order that if you can just get in front of them at that point when they have it. And you know exactly who they are. Yes. And Facebook does too. And you can tell it everything from only show these ads to people within two weeks of them doing this action and get very specific. This has nothing to do with my company by the way. This is a completely different way to acquire customers but it's worth sharing because it's a great tactic. Well I was, yeah, I was curious because I'm pulling up owner.com and I mean I do want to get into what is owner.com today in it but it sounds like just from listening to you you're a student of the world of marketing. You're constantly learning. You're constantly trying to break the system, challenge the status quo. You have a lot of the restaurant unstoppable core values my friend. I have to point this out. I see a lot of your values of what I'm trying to do here at restaurant unstoppable but it's not necessarily about like you're not parody. You're not echoing what's going on out there. You're testing things and you're breaking things and you're figuring out what works and you're putting your energy into the things that are actually getting an ROI. Yep. Safe to say that's what I'm pulling from you from this point. So when we look at owner.com today I'm on your website right now. You go to the products tab. Looks like you kind of break your product solutions into three groups. Automatic marketing, online ordering, branding. So like, kind of take us to the evolution of how you got there. And then I would like to kind of drill down on those three verticals as to what we mean by automatic marketing, online ordering, branding. So how did you get to that, like that stack of solutions, I guess? To take a step back, it's worth understanding why it is that owner exists, which is to give restaurant owners the tools that they need to succeed online in a simple, all-in-one platform. Because what's changed in our world over the past five years is that it used to be enough in restaurants to just provide great food and great service. And if you nailed those things, you could be a successful restaurant owner because word of mouth would spread, people would talk about how great your restaurant is, and that would get you a lot of customers over time. But what's changed is that those things are still important, but they're not enough. Because so much of the guest experience has come online. People are discovering restaurants online using Google and Yelp, and then they're comparing reviews across those different platforms. So it's really important to have a great online reputation. And then they're clicking into the website to judge a restaurant and make an evaluation about whether it's going to be a good fit for their needs. And then even the way they interact with that restaurant and buy from that restaurant, whether it's placing an online order or making a reservation is now happening online. So as the guest experience is shifting online, the question that we've been trying to answer is how do we make it as great as possible to do directly from the restaurant rather than having to resort to third party apps to order online from a restaurant like DoorDash Uber Reads or third party apps to make reservations like open table or to place catering orders like easy caterer. You want to create such a great experience online for that restaurant directly that their customers end up just choosing to order from their website or their branded mobile app rather than DoorDash Uber Reads and give them the right tools to achieve that. Keep the industry in the industry. Yes, exactly. Not third party. I mean, that's one of the things. So I mean, it's just interesting because I think the restaurant industry for the longest time was just so head down doing the thing, building customer relationships, being within their four walls, focusing on those human elements. And like you said, over time, we've reached this point where you can do all the things in your four walls better than anybody else. And that still might be enough if you had that reputation follow you into the 21st century or into 2020s. Yes. But if you're opening today and you don't have those relationships established, how do you get in front of people? It's not enough just to do four walls marketing anymore. And I hate that that's fucking true, part of my language. I hate that that's true. But there's an inconvenient truth to that. And I mean, I don't. What's going through my mind as I'm saying this? What went through my mind as you said that was this customer we have Antoinette, the owner of Otavio's Italian restaurant, because her business has been around for over 50 years. She has a very big base of regular customers. And those customers, by the way, are in a community called Lakeside California, which is mostly retirees. So if there was anybody that was not needing to provide a great online experience, I figured it would be Antoinette because she had such a big base of regulars. Her customers tended to be older in nature. And what I was surprised about is that when she came to me, she said that her sales were plateauing. And she wasn't able to successfully drive people to order from her website rather than DoorDash Uber Eats. So her same store sales in the four walls were basically staying the same. And she wanted to grow them online. But she had online ordering through her website with her point of sale company. And yet nobody was using it. They were instead using DoorDash Uber Eats to order from her restaurant online. And what she said to me was that she needed to create an experience that would help her attract new customers so that she could continue to grow this business. She didn't want to be Antoinette to just stay the same forever. She wanted to continue to grow the restaurant, but she had capacity and her kitchen to do. And I figured that if there would be anybody that would be immune to this trend of needing to provide a really great online experience, it would be Antoinette because she already has such a cult following amazing reviews. And the only way that she could grow is still providing a great online experience for a few different surprising reasons. Got it. So I want to make sure we get into like how you landed on these solutions. Just from talking to you, I can tell you're very intentional. Like you're not going to put your energy into something that you don't think is worth the ROI, right? Yes. So the list of, so if I'm looking at these three buckets, right, automatic marketing, online ordering, branding, let's just start with the automatic marketing. Or is there a better place you'd rather start? Would you rather focus on the online ordering first? Let's focus on marketing, automatic marketing. Okay. Within that bucket, you have customer management, email marketing, text message marketing, push notification. Why are those in your opinion the three or the four areas customer management, email marketing, text marketing, push notifications? Why is that where the magic is? That there's probably some overlap too. We're going to be going through this. We've tested every way that a restaurant can increase sales where we've run experiments, thousands of them with every possible way, including direct mail, including receipts, including posters and flyers for walls marketing within the restaurant. And we developed our platform around the ways that across the board were driving significantly more sales. So I would say that automatic marketing is one of the most underrated in the industry. Because it's so powerful to be able to stay top of mind with people after they leave the four walls of a restaurant. We all have had that experience before where we love a restaurant. It's a restaurant that we often go to and always have great experiences in. And for whatever reason, after leaving that restaurant one day, it doesn't occur to us to go do it again. We literally just forget about how great that restaurant is. Until at some point, we see something that reminds us of that restaurant and then start going to it again or ordering from it again. It's not because we hate the restaurant. It's not because they did something wrong. It's just because people are so bombarded in 2023 by the various different ways to do life. There's all these distractions constantly. Sometimes people just forget about great experiences. So what's powerful about automatic marketing is that after a guest has ordered from a restaurant, it enables that restaurant to stay in touch with that guest and stay top of mind so that this happens way less frequently. And so they are able to therefore make more money from each guest relationship. So when you hear on surface level, when you hear things like automatic marketing, it feels like that's so shallow. It's just like this. That's not for a wall's marking. That's not building a relationship. So I mean, that's like having a. To me, it just doesn't sound impactful. But what I'm hearing to you when I. I guess where I'm going with this. At what point do you automate things versus you really put time and energy into polishing and grimning a relationship? So where's that line? At what point do you lean into the automation where it makes sense without sacrificing the human element? Is it when they leave? I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive, which means that it's possible to both deepen the guest relationship and automate that depth. It's still really important for restaurants to have personal relationships with guests when they're in the dining room to make them feel special with table touches and to get to know their names and their families. That is still by far the most powerful thing you can do from a marketing perspective because it creates word of mouth and it creates lifelong customers. But the problem is that because so much of the guest experiences shifting online, that that same tactic of going to every table manually doesn't translate to this new way that restaurants are having to operate. And so the way you can translate it is through building automatic marketing campaigns that provide that same connection to the guest automatically. What that looks like is campaigns that tell the customer the restaurant owner's story. This is one of the most effective things that we've seen that we didn't really expect. But when a restaurant owner can share their story of how they actually started the restaurant, how they worked for years in other people's restaurants and saved up enough money to bring to life this dream that they had since they were growing up in India of getting to have a restaurant in the United States where they could share their grandmother's recipes with the broader world, which is the story of one of our restaurant owners, Rahul. When his customers knew this story and knew his passion for what he was doing, they became extremely loyal to him. And the way he was able to get this message across to them was by creating his automatic marketing with email and text message marketing to tell people this story when email at a time in a way that gives people a deeper connection to the restaurant beyond just their food. It's about what the food represents. It's about supporting Rahul as a person, this person that they've gotten to know as the owner of the restaurant, but didn't know the backstory of it. We're hardwired as humans to understand and resonate with stories. It's based into us. Exactly. We're part of our DNA. So really when you say the word campaign, what you're talking about is a series of emails and text messages. is that are intentional, like there's a story, like, like, you basically write the email once. They fall into a, well, there's a term for it, but a series of emails. - Yes. - Is that the campaign, the word? - Yep. - Secret sequence. - Secret sequence, that was where I was written for. Where they, like, they, something, there's a triggering event. They do this one thing. And there's a series of events, emails, or text messages that happen over a period or upon another action, like get into what you mean by campaign. - Yeah. A campaign is a, in the context of email marketing, a sequence of emails designed to achieve a specific result. So there are campaigns that are designed to achieve the specific result of turning somebody that isn't yet a customer into a customer. There are campaigns that are designed to turn new customers into regulars. So somebody that's ordered once, how do we get them to develop such a deep connection to the restaurant that they order again and again and again from us? That is another form of campaign. There's a third form of campaign, which is how do we ensure that the regulars that have forgotten about our restaurant or stopped ordering get revived? This is a campaign that is super powerful, that automatically detects when somebody has stopped ordering from a restaurant that used to be a regular, and then gets in front of them quickly with email and text campaign saying, "Hey, we miss you. We'd love to serve you again." Here's a free delivery on your next order. Here's five percent. - What triggers something like that? So say you had this customer, that third example you gave us, right? You had a customer that kind of went through the life cycle of being a customer and they became disenchanted or was it the law of reciprocity? Like where eventually they fall off 'cause there's a new Shiny object or maybe you as a restaurant owner were guilty of not staying fresh, right? Yep. You used to kind of stay the same for 10 years and people got sick of you. They went elsewhere, but now you're starting to realize you get to put energy and you're bringing those people back. So like what, like how would this look like in a campaign? Like how would you get that? Like can you break that down? Is that giving away too much information on a podcast? - Not at all. This is not supposed to be an owner commercial. So anything I can share at all that would be helpful to the viewer and happy to give detail on. And by the way, you don't need our platform to achieve these things. These things can be achieved in MailChimp and various point of sale companies at some level. So I don't want it sound like I'm just plugging my own book. I'm here to share value with the viewer regardless of whether they decide to use our platform. But to answer your question on what it is that can trigger campaigns, it within our platform is any set of tool, any set of conditions of the customer relationship. So a condition is of rule. If this person signs up for our email list on our website, but doesn't place an order, what do we send them? That's when the website visitor into new customer campaign kicks in. Another condition might be this person has placed their first online order ever with us. Then we should fire the campaign, the set of emails that are designed to turn new customers into regulars. And all of these things can be automated where there's a campaign for every different part of the customer journey that is designed to get them to that next step so that we can create an automated system around deepening relationship with customers, around deepening relationships with customers. And jacked up, aren't you? I am. Yes, I've spent six years thinking about this and designing systems for it. So I'm thrilled to share. Let it fly, brother. Keep going. So there's campaigns basically for doing any potential escalation of the customer relationship. That's a good way to think about it, where you have to take somebody from being a stranger when they're just a website visitor to then becoming an email subscriber, to then becoming a new customer, to then becoming a regular customer, and then ensuring that they stay a regular customer, which is yet another campaign. And these things can all have automations so that it's not just the restaurant owner that has to manually build this relationship with hundreds or thousands of customers, which is completely impractical, but instead they're able to scale themselves by creating communications that automate this process. Yeah. What about the person listening to us right now and goes, that's all great and all, but I'm not a novelist. I don't want to sit down and write stories. Like, what is your response to that person? So it's a really common thing that we hear from restaurant owners, which is that they didn't get into this business to have to be email marketers, or to have to be copywriters, or novelists in writing stories. And I totally see that perspective. I said that I didn't want to make this an owner commercial, but this is actually one of the reasons why we've designed our onboarding process in the way that we have. Where over a quick phone call, when we onboard a new customer, we ask people, tell us about how you started the restaurant. Tell us about what inspires you to own this place. Tell us about your favorite things of this. And then we use all these different parts of a restaurant owner's story to create the perfect campaign that they then are able to approve and send out to their customers when they feel it's ready, that helps them communicate their story, but in a way that doesn't require a huge amount of work. We're increasingly building AI into our platform as well, where the restaurant owner is able to select the different parts of their story and they be right a sentence on it. And then we've trained our AI to take all those different elements and then perfectly communicate them in an email that the restaurant owner can then edit. And it can also generate new versions of this email. Right, where I was going with this, and I was making the assumption, I didn't know this for sure, but there's templates. You don't-- like what you do is you take the uniqueness of your story and you plug it into the template. And you don't want to sound like everyone else's story. You want it to be unique. But you don't have to write it from scratch. There's tools and resources there to take the elements of you that are uniquely you and you put it into the system. That's a good way to think about it. All effective stories follow the same hero's journey for that. And like you said, it's a template that they can plug their unique individual parts into. But as long as it follows that same structure, it is a story that is designed for the human brain to find entertaining. Yep. So one of the things that I picked up on and just being aware of owner.com and just doing a little bit of research and it kind of made me proud, honestly, because it kind of echoed my sentiments that if I'm prioritizing the level of importance from marketing, at the top for me, it's for a while's marketing. Beyond that, it's direct email marketing. And beyond that, I mean, you would probably argue like Google, this probably maybe above direct email marketing. I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if you did think that. If our goal was to increase sales in the restaurant, I would prioritize it. Number one, Google. Number two, automatic marketing. Number three, direct email marketing. Number four, four, walls marketing. Okay. We're pretty aligned. I mean, I think you clearly may weigh more about marketing than I do. But for the most part, social media where I'm going with this is on the bottom of that list. Yep. So looking again, at the products, we talked a lot about email marketing, text marketing. So direct email marketing is email marketing, is text message marketing, is push notifications. They're just different mediums through which to do direct. Those are all different lists, essentially. Your email list, your phone number list, and your, I guess, users of your app. But customer management marketing, that's a term I'm not that familiar with. What does that even mean? In every other industry, there's this concept of customer relationship management software, which means software that shows you every customer that you have what their last order was with you, what the details are of that customer, their name, their email, their phone number, their order preferences, and it's all in one simple place that you can check at any time. But because restaurants have had to cobble together so many different tools for every different part of the customer journey, where they use a separate tool for some online orders versus others, like Uber Eats, sometimes, DoorDash, sometimes, direct online ordering other times. Sometimes it gets called in over the phone. Other times it comes in through the POS. Because it's such a disparate set of touch points, restaurants haven't historically been able to have that simple place to see all of the customer data and know how each customer relationship is doing, see the value of each customer that it's driven, and all of these other insights. So to us, customer management is having that simple place where you can see every single customer that you have, what the value of each is when each last order is filtered this, in case you want to pull specific sets of customers, and then automate campaigns to those customers, emails and text message marketing, depending on the goals that you want to achieve, so that you're able to ultimately maximize the value of each of your customers, and the customers are so valuable, so much more valuable than net new customers, because these are already people that know, like, and trust your restaurant. - I mean, it makes sense that it's the first thing on your list under automatic marketing, because essentially what you're sharing with me, it's data mining. It's the information you have on your guests, but the more you know about your guests, the more you can tailor the message, the fit they're unique need. - Exactly. - And then you can start creating multiple different avatars of like, oh, in this bucket, we have the vegans, in this bucket, we have the people who love chicken fingers, in this bucket, we have the whatever infinity avatar, and then you can start tailoring unique campaigns to those subcategories. - That's exactly right. One of our campaigns, for example, enables you to promote new dishes by targeting the people who have ordered dishes that are similar to it. So let's say that I've already been a fan of the chicken Parmesan, and that indicates that I really like Parmesan dishes. Maybe an Italian restaurant comes out with Veal Parmesan, and they want to promote that to the people that like chicken Parmesan, because it's another dish that they can order for dinner. So it satisfies another craving that they might have. It's similar to what they already liked, and so they're much more likely to buy that. And so it's a good way to tell those people that like chicken Parmesan, hey, we have Veal Parmesan. - Veal Parmesan is more expensive. - Yes, exactly. - The higher margin. - Upselling. - Yeah. - Yup, I love that. So, okay. Give me with that list, that prioritize list that you dropped on me real quick, as far as how you prioritize things. If my goal was to increase sales Interesting. from scratch, I would first focus on Google because that's the best way to get new customers. I would then focus on automatic marketing because once you get those new customers, it turns out that there's so much that a restaurant owner can do to drive up the value of that relationship, to make them spend more money on each order, order at a higher frequency, and like you described, increase the profitability on each order, which is separate from spending more money on each order. If selling one done right is a way to increase profit more than it's a way to increase sales. So that's why I would focus on those two. Then I said direct mail because that's another effective way to acquire customers that I've seen work well. Then I'd say four walls marketing because that's a good way to collect data from customers within a restaurant and promote specific upsell items on table tents within the restaurant itself or posters. I think the truth matter is we're moving beyond the four walls. You could go touch all the tables as the manager, but eventually we're getting to this point where the tables are at home. You as the manager can't get in your car and drive till we're all the deliveries and pick ups are going. Exactly. You have to think outside the four walls. Really, in the order of operation, we should have started with the brand building. I feel like because you said, for looking at the first thing you said was Google. It all starts with being discovered. Those buckets that I mentioned earlier, we talked a lot about automatic marketing. I don't think we need to go any further into that. Is there more you want to elaborate on? Nope. We've covered it all. From there does it make sense to go to the brand building, the website, the branded apps, and the dashboard, or do you want to unpackage online order? I think brand building is a good place to go. Okay. So brand building. So when you sign up with owner.com, you get the website, you get a branded app, and what do you mean by dashboard? The dashboard is the control panel that you get to use to make changes to or add content to any different part of these tools. So if you want to update a web page, say you would do that within the dashboard. If you want to mark your avocado as out of stock and you don't have any of the POS integrations that we offer, then you would do that within the dashboard. If you want to update prices or change hours online, you could do that within the dashboard. So if there isn't an automated push from your POS to your digital front, you can do it manually through the dashboard. Yep. Got it. So talk to us about websites. What makes an owner.com website unique? So most website builders are built to give the user of that website builder complete flexibility in how to design that website, where you basically start from scratch, and then you, the user, decide what first section you want to have and what headlines should be on that first section and what call to action to use. Then you have to design the second section and figure out all the content and then the third section. And this seems like it would be the right answer for designing a website builder until you realize that restaurant owners, at least the ones that use our product, don't care as much about customizing every little part of their website. What they care about is finding the way to predictably and provably increase sales. And if you just want to increase sales, it turns out that the right answer isn't to infinitely customize your website from scratch every time. Because what happens then is that you don't design the type of experience which is going to lead to the most traffic from Google or that's going to lead to the most people that visit the website converting into new customers. So that's where our website builder is different. We do offer customizability so you can change any text that you disagree with or change the logo or add in pictures that compliment your restaurant. But it's designed using a proven recipe which is going to increase sales. It is engineered for conversion rate, for search engine optimization. And as a result, it follows a proven structure to achieve those results and it starts there. So it doesn't start from scratch. Our websites actually look quite similar to each other, which to some people is a negative. But to us, the reason they look similar is because we've run thousands of tests at this point. Thousands of restaurants and we know what it is that's going to drive sales. Listen to the gamer. Exactly. This is something I learned in the gaming industry. That's exactly right. Yeah. The hours and hours of A and B testing, I'm sure. Thousands. Yeah. So really what I'm hearing is there's rigidity in the format of the structure. But you have a lot of fluidity in the branding colors, logos, things like that to make it your own. Exactly. And to tell that restaurant's story and not make it feel generic, that's one side of what we want to do. And so we're able to tell that restaurant owner's story. There's a dedicated story page. There's ways to put it on the homepage without affecting conversion. And there's ways to make it not feel generic. The font itself can be changed. The colors, even some part of the layout we offer flexibility on. But we don't want to offer so much flexibility that what ends up happening in practice is that the restaurant owner without realizing that updating a part of their website is costing themselves visitors from Google or without realizing that they're changing the call to action is changing the amount of people that are going to actually place all my orders because of the way they're changing it. So we offer just enough flexibility to achieve a look that is differentiated and authentic to that restaurant and to tell that restaurant owner's story. But that is also rigid enough that it follows the same proven recipe for increasing sales that we've validated across so many different restaurants. So that's what's different about the website build versus something like Squarespace or Wix. Got it. I think we can move to branded apps because I actually know the answer to this next thing. But I mean, I'll just get into it. I, for the longest time, thought that branded apps were unnecessary. If you had a good enough website that it achieves, especially if it's like, you know, what's a word, responsive website, like as long as it looks different on your phone, like all these other things, like do you really need a branded app? And I think you shared the same sentiment at one point along your journey. Yes. When we first spoke, I thought this was the case. I was pretty convinced. I thought there's no way that for an independent restaurant, a hole in the wall, talkorea, or Italian restaurant that somebody would want to download branded app. And I could not have been more wrong about that. Why? So I didn't realize why until that customer that I mentioned earlier and Twonette started talking to me about branded apps, which she would say every week, like I have hundreds of customers that have my personal cell phone number. So they just hit me up all the time about different ideas they have for the product. And this one I ignored for a while because I had that same feeling that you had that, like this is probably a waste of time. But what she'd say to me every week. Yeah, exactly. I thought it was a shiny object. I didn't think like this was going to be a practical solution for restaurant owners. But what she would say is any time she went into the city of San Diego, that she could use the Starbucks app to order her coffee and it was so easy because she didn't have to sign in. She didn't have to visit a website. She didn't have to find the website in the first place. All she had to do was click the Starbucks icon from her home screen. She'd already be signed in. And within 30 seconds, she could have her go to order placed. And while she was describing this, I'm like, yes, but Starbucks has so many locations. That's one of the reasons why it's valuable. Or yes, but Starbucks can afford to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars in developing their technology and marketing. And so that's why it's so valuable. But for Otopia's Italian restaurant, which is the name of her concept in Lakeside, California, well, people really download an app. And I didn't think so for a year of her telling me this. But after a year of being stupid and stubborn, I decided, you know what? She's so passionate about this. And I've heard so many different restaurant owners ask for an app that we're going to build it. And the numbers tell us whether this is a good idea. It's probably not going to be, but the numbers will speak for themselves. And the numbers did speak for themselves. It was fucking crazy. Can you share some of those numbers? Yes. So we launched this in Antoinette's restaurant, not expecting much. We thought that maybe 10% if it was a real success of her customers would download this thing within 90 days. And our hope was that maybe that 10% would order with enough frequency that the investment of actually building out an app for this restaurant would be worth it. And so then we launched the app without any table 10s, no incentive, no promotion, the only promotion for the app was when you visited the website and you scrolled to hit online order, it would say first, do you want to order from our app or do you want to order from our online website? And what was shocking is that over 50% of our customers within 30 days had downloaded her app and were using it to repeatedly order from her online rather than going through the website. So we were to represent tens of thousands of dollars in sales in 30 days time. And what was crazier is when we followed those people that had downloaded the app and measured how they were engaging as customers versus the typical customers, the people that had downloaded the app were ordering at twice the frequency and with a higher transaction. So that was my question. So you said that there was this amount of sales that was generated through the app. Yes. The overall amount of sales higher. It's significantly higher in a crazy way because what I ended up realizing was that Antoinette had a point that it's so much easier to order from an app that is on your home screen that people do it more frequently because there's less of a hassle involved mentally of, oh, I have to find the website first and then click onto the website from Google and then on the website find the order. now button. And then every time log in with a username and password, does anybody remember their username and password for that Italian restaurant they order from once every two weeks? No. And so that's a headache. Oh, fuck, I've got to reset the password. And there's all these different steps involved where you end up spending over five minutes of time to place the go to order that you usually go to. And what's different about having a branded app is first of all, there's no need to find it. In fact, the icon on a guest's home screen ends up being one of the most valuable places of real estate that a restaurant can have because anytime they're opening their phone, they're seeing an icon of that restaurant and the restaurant's name. And so it's like, oh, reminder, I love Otopia's. Maybe I should order from there tonight. And then when they click into the Otopia's app, if they decide they want to order there, they're already signed in. So it greets them by name. There's no need to go through username and password. It already knows all of their past orders. So within 30 seconds, they can click order again, their past order, click on the checkout button. It's already got all their details stored and be through the entire process. It natively supports. If you do pay and people pay. And if you're opening up tracking and knows where you are, so knows where the closest location is. So like, exactly. So as somebody who lives their life on the road, I've grown to love restaurant apps because I'm somebody who's trying to eat healthier on the road. So I have my tender greens. I have my sweet greens. I have my kava. I have my Mendocinas farm. So I don't, I know through my interviews that these are healthy concepts, right? Yes. And I'm trying to find healthy concepts because when I'm on the road, I want to be able to eat healthy and it's hard to find it's harder to find healthier food, right? Yes. So like, I've developed this habit, this routine, this path of at least resistance to find healthy food. So I just go to my app, like my food category on my phone. And I'll know like, Hey, like I already have all my information, saves and all these like everything you just said, as somebody who is a consumer, who uses these things, really what it comes down to is a path of these resistance. You don't want to make the consumer jump through hoops. And when you're opening a browser, typing in like how many types is it take to get the full name and maybe it will like auto populate. But there's so many hoops like all the points you made versus three clicks. Yep. Open the app, the friend center, the thing you ordered last, right? And then purchase and then we'll just automatically maybe four clicks. But the path of these resistance inhabits. Yes. I'm so glad that you brought up those brands, tender greens and Kava and the others that you named because what they all have in common is that they invested in an app early and that ended up being really key to their expansion strategy to multiple locations. I didn't understand this when we first built Antoinette app. But now I've seen restaurants that start with one location, like talking tacos started with us with one location and got the app. Now they're at 10 locations over the course of three years. And part of the way they were able to grow to so many locations so quickly is they had all of the app data on where their customers were and they could tell franchisees, hey, we've already got thousands of people that have our app installed in the South Florida region. So these people when we open multiple locations will be able to order from us when they're in those different areas of South Florida. And that is a really compelling and differentiated proposition to franchisees or to private equity investors that invest in restaurants because it basically means that you have built in customers that you can track the location of. That's another interesting thing about apps. They offer location tracking built in on the device. And so you can see where customers are and then serve them different push notifications when they're passing by your locations. Yeah, that's powerful. We've covered a lot so far. I'm pretty sure we fully unpackaged automatic marketing, which covered the customer management email marketing text marketing push notifications, which is tied to the branding with the branded app and the website and the dashboard are we safe to move on to the third bucket we really haven't dove into yet, which is online ordering. You tell me whatever you think would be most fabulous. I feel like I feel like we unpackaged a lot and I still want to talk about the future. And you're a nerd. I can tell you're a nerd and I mean that in the most respectful way possible. Like you love this stuff. And I need more nerds in my life. So like I want to talk about the future of the evolution of where the industry is going in terms of technology specifically around marketing. So I want to make sure we cover that. So getting into online ordering. Why is that a whole separate like bucket? Why'd you guys keep that separate in terms of the you're offering? We have whole teams focused on that because there's so many different parts to creating a magical online ordering experience. And a huge problem that restaurant owners come to us with is that they already have online ordering generally through their POS often toast or through their white label solution like Ciao now. And the issue that they run into is that for guests, it doesn't make sense why they should order from that restaurant directly rather than ordering from door dash Uber Eats. So what happens is that more and more guests order from door dash Uber Eats. They lose more and more of their profit margin to those third party delivery apps as well as all the customer relationships. And restaurant owners are looking for a way to get those people back to ordering directly from them so they can save those thousands of dollars in fees and save all of that customer data. And the only way that those customers are going to come back to ordering directly from that restaurant is if the restaurant ordering experience is even better for the guest because 90% of people don't actually care what the best route is for supporting local business. They're always just optimizing for what's going to be most convenient and best value for themselves. See that last one more time. 90% of people do not respond to messages where you tell them order from our website to support local business or because it's better for our restaurant or because it helps us survive. It's a sad truth, but it is a truth we've tested this extensively. Most people do not care. But what they do care about is when you can tell them the benefits of ordering from your website from their perspective. What's in it for me? Exactly. And what is in it for them from toast and chow now there's not much in it for them. And so it's not any wonder why people are ordering from door dash Uber eats instead because door dash Uber eats provide experiences which are so much more convenient than having to find that restaurant's website and click on order now every time then sign in with a username and password each time or that offer better value because door dash has a deal with the taste of our reserve card and other credit card which give people extra points for spending on door dash or the dash pass which gives people free delivery. And so when you're competing with those experiences would provide such great convenience and such great value. The question is how do you provide better convenience and better value through your experience. And that is why we have people dedicated to all my ordering to constantly obsess over that problem and create a technology which makes it so that ordering from that restaurant is actually better for the guest therefore they do. This is an argument I brought up in the past back to what we started talking about earlier today where all this hinges on customer behavior customer habit customer path of least resistance friction all that stuff you have so you have these mag these huge companies the door dashes of the world collecting all this data right so they have all this information about consumer behavior and how they act on these apps there every time a consumer engages with one of those apps are gathering this information and tweaking other tweaking and they have millions of dollars behind them fine tuning this drug this this you know which is essentially what it is because like people are addicted or they're just you're you're baking this into their daily routine their habits how does a small mom and pop compete with that level of detailed habit formation and owning the the attention of the guests and the habits these routines these rituals around eating right right it seems like how the if we if we aren't getting the data how we ever going to be able to we don't have the resources to tweak these things so I love that you're putting all this energy into that because it's like what it's like the thing like how how are you supposed to compete exactly like the the the small mom and pop cannot unless they have a partner a technology partner my opinion I agree with that but the right answer is actually in looking at what the large restaurant corporations have done because a lot of the large restaurant corporations have successfully gotten out of this trap of being dependent on the third party delivery apps what have they done dominoes would be a great example of this because over 90% of their online orders are coming through their website they are listed on door dash to get new customers from but then once they acquire that customer they quickly get them to order from their app and what they've done is they've designed an experience that actually wins on those factors that the guests selfishly compares about what's in it for me what is the easiest most high value way so there's a few different parts of that from an ease standpoint the dominoes app is wonderful there's a reason it has millions of positive reviews on the app store it makes it ridiculously simple to within 30 seconds open the app like you said populate what you typically order get to the checkout process and it's also doing a lot of great things for dominoes business but we'll get into those later because we're just focusing on the guest experience for now so not only is it easier to order from dominoes with the dominoes app because you don't have to actually go through the step of selecting dominoes you just tap in the app but more importantly to most Americans it's better value the dominoes app has a loyalty system built in which allows them to give people free items every few transactions and those free items and at making it a more exciting experience for the guest because they say oh my gosh I'm getting the $7 cheese sticks for free or the $5 lava cake for free every two or three orders with dominoes free stuff is better than no free stuff therefore the dominoes app is a much better experience for me and what's so smart about this from a business perspective is the way the numbers work for dominoes what they've done is they've designed their loyalty program to give away the high profit margin low food cost items these types of things are very important for the people who are in the business and to be appetizers, beverages, and desserts. And so while those cheese sticks might be listed on the menu for $7, in reality, they have a food cost of 30 cents, because it's fried cheese. - And that's how they make their pizza so affordable. - Exactly, exactly. But when they design their loyalty system around giving away those high profit margin, low food cost items, the guest feels like, oh my gosh, I'm getting $7 in free value every two orders. This is amazing, but to the restaurant, it only has a 35 cent food cost or whatever it might be. - Next generation menu engineering. - Yes, and it is menu engineering for the purpose of creating a really awesome guest experience, which is necessary for getting people to order directly from that restaurant. And so then your question earlier was, how are independent restaurants supposed to compete with this? They don't have menu engineers on the team. They don't have the hundreds of millions of dollars that Dominoes spent in developing their app and various other technologies. They don't have tens of billions of dollars in market capital like Dominoes to use. And the answer is, that is what we spend all of our time at owner thinking about. We literally look at Dominoes and we look at Starbucks and we look at all of the other restaurant brands that are crushing it online and we figure out what they all have in common. And then we use those things as cheat codes for independent restaurants to use within our platform. We begin actually switching every feature to match what the large restaurant corporations are figuring out so that all of the mom and pop restaurants, the independents have those same superpowers. So that loyalty program that I described Dominoes having, that is now exactly what our loyalty program looks like. The app, that is what our app was modeled off of. And there's all these different best practices that we take inspiration from, so that we're able to copy what works for the large guys and give it to the people that don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend. Yeah. So within this segment of online ordering, we have listed online ordering system, which I don't know, I mean, I think you're talking about the app right now, the ordering through the app. And then there's also the online dashboard experience, right? Is it worth unpackaging that at all? We offer both an app and a web ordering experience. Orders don't have to be through the app if restaurants don't want or customers don't want them to be. But I don't think it's worth getting a demo or detail. Okay, anything. So under this online ordering bliss, we have Commission Free Delivery, Loyalty Pro, I definitely want to talk about the Commission Free, the Delivery, Loyalty Programs, which we already kind of mentioned. We kind of brought that up smart upselling. We alluded to that to integrations, which is something we haven't really gotten into that I'm curious about in tablets. So going down this list, let's get into Commission Free Delivery. How are you making delivery free? Or for Commission Free? We make delivery commission free by going to DoorDash and Uber Eats and GrubHub and Lyft, and all these other companies with huge delivery networks and telling them, "Hey, we have thousands of independent restaurants that want to do delivery from their website and we can give you huge amounts of order volume. What is the cheapest rate that you can give us for delivering food within a five mile radius?" And then we make them bid against each other so that we're constantly negotiating the lowest rate with our thousands of restaurants and then giving that flat fee structure to the restaurant. What that looks like is they typically choose to spend $3.50 on their end and then chose the guest $3.50 to make up for a $7 flat fee that covers a five mile delivery. Okay, so the restaurant pays $3.50, sorry, $3.50, flat fee that covers the delivery fee. Yes, and what we do is we let the restaurant owner choose. That's the best practice that we recommend. - We need to choose. - Three dollars. Choose what? Choose how much of their delivery fee they pay versus pass onto the guest. So if they wanted to pay $0 delivery fee and pass the entire $7 onto the guest because I think their concept is that great, that guests will pay $7 in delivery when they could get it delivered on DoorDash for $2. That is up to them. I strongly advise against that strategy because again, we have to make sense from the guest perspective and it doesn't make sense to pay $5 more for delivery from the restaurant's website if you can get it for $2 on DoorDash. The restaurants that do choose to do that often don't list on DoorDash Uber Eats at all and have such demand for their restaurant that they're just like, if you wanted to deliver at seven bucks from us, that's it. And that's your only option and that works for them but most restaurants aren't in that boat. So what I recommend doing is contributing some money to the order, $3.50 and then passing the other $3.50 onto the guest so that it is affordable for both parties and the typical online order in restaurants is $50.50. Our transaction size. DoorDash Uber Eats are typically taking 30% from the restaurant and 20% from the guest. So that means that the restaurant's paying 15 bucks and the guest is paying 10 bucks. They're paying 25 together. We've negotiated it down to $7 and the restaurant pays $3.50, the guest pays $3.50, that's the way it works within our system so you've recommended practice. - So that $7 waves the commission. So basically it's not totally commission free 'cause they're still paying $7 but it's commission free because commission would be a percentage. It's just a flat fee. - Got it, got it, heard, understood. I think we unpacked that. We talked about the loyalty program, smart upselling. How is that baked in? I noticed in the web browser but I'm assuming it's also in the app. - Yes, so smart upselling is the ability completely copied from the best practices of Domino's and Sweet Green and all these other brands that are created it. The ability to suggest the perfect compliment to a dish at the right part of the ordering journey. So what that looks like is let's say I'm ordering a sushi roll from this restaurant that we're in right now, a long-term customer, Sumo Sushi. And I'm adding my typical California rolls to the cart. Smart upselling would then be showing me a little pop up as I'm adding that item saying, guests who love our California rolls also love these items and then it could suggest the green tea. If I haven't ordered that in the past because that's a pretty commonly ordered beverage, a Thai margin for the restaurant, it will suggest the very addictive wontons that they make here that often get paired with the California roll, they're delicious. And they would suggest a dessert probably because it's nose, we're ordering an entree so it would suggest maybe the chocolate cake to go along with that California roll or the green tea ice cream. And through that process of suggesting items to guests when they're ordering items that it is relevant to, we're able to bump the average transaction size which increases sales, but most importantly, we're able to add items to the order which are extremely high margin and low food cost. - Yeah, I noticed this whenever using kiosks, the restaurants that use kiosks, what's the one in honeycomb or honey grove in Philadelphia? Their technologies, like it's, you go in there and you're using the kiosks and I'm like, they are killing it with these upsells right now. But like, it's formulaic. You know, whereas a server or somebody on the other side of the register, they might miss, they might be busy and they might be trying to push you through the line through put when they're missing all these key opportunities to upsell and get that ticket higher. That is so powerful. - Exactly. And I described what the upselling part is. The smart in smart upselling is having technology that learns from what guests do and notices patterns. After we get thousands of orders for a restaurant, we can start to notice, hey, when people order the chicken teriyaki, they tend to also order the green tea ice cream, extra meat or whatever. - Right. - Right. Or any other modifier that could go well with that dish and then it prioritizes those things. It also gives the restaurant owner, if they have a new dish that they want to promote as an upsell, like a new dessert or a new appetizer, they can select promote via upsell and it'll factor that into the algorithm that is showing the guests the most relevant recommendation so that they get more exposure on that new dish and get to quickly determine whether that new dish is going to be a good seller for them or not. - Dude, Adam. - We've been going for almost an hour and 40 minutes. Isn't that crazy? - That is. - One by super fast. - It does go by so fast, man, it blows my mind. That being said, we gotta take a break to think our sponsors. We're gonna be right back and we are going to talk about the future. - Self-awareness is the number one skill for leaders in the new era of work. Self-awareness is also said to be the peak of emotional intelligence. So how truly self-aware are you? Q, Eddority, one degree coaching and the predictive index. One degree coaching is offering a free, self-awareness behavioral assessment from the predictive index. Experts agree, emotional intelligence is the most sought-after leadership competency in the post-COVID era. Our ability to drive results requires human connection in all starts with self-awareness. The predictive index is a talent optimization platform that helps leaders understand themselves and others helping build happy, high performing teams. Try the predictive index behavioral assessment for free head to restraunstoppable.com/tripei. To take a PI behavioral assessment. Once you've taken your assessment, Eddority is offering a free 30 minute call to read your results and help you become a better self-aware leader. Again, that's restraunstoppable.com/tripei. Recently on the show, you've been hearing it come up often. Restaurant Systems Pro. If you've become interested, I highly recommend you sign up for the restraun system pro 60-day pilot program. Fred Lingley CEO of Restaurant Systems Pro will be leading a group of restaurant tours through the restaurant systems pro software and setting up the system for your restaurant. Red will be leading the training, supporting you and holding you accountable, typically this cost $10,000 a month to have Fred in your restaurant. But during this no-cause to you, 60 day training, he will be teaching you every process he does during the group coaching sessions and nothing will be held back. During this 60 days, Fred will walk you through the restaurant systems pro process and help you crush the following goals. Rest be costing cards. Guidance in your books for accounting. Cash control. Sales forecasting with accuracy. Check list. Budgeting for the entire year. Scheduling for profit. More butts in seats and that's not it. Often, the team at Restaurant Systems Pro helps restaurant tours out pro bono because their hearts go out to these folks. I mean, it's hard out there. But because of that, a lot of the time these restaurant tours don't follow through because they have no skin in the game. For that reason, there is an application process. Only those serious about making change in their operation will be accepted into this program. Are you interested? They go to restaurant unstoppable.com/rsp. Restaurant unstoppable.com/rsp. We've covered a lot of important ground. Nothing comes to mind that we could cover in five minutes. Right. I know, man. It's been a lot of fun. We have covered most of everything I wanted to cover. The only thing that didn't really come out was where the future is going. I'll just answer that question. How is owner.com be evolving to be ready for the future? We are evolving to be ready for the future by paying very close attention to what the guest experience looks like at the most efficient restaurant corporations. So we look at Chick-fil-A. We look at Domino's. We look at Kava. We look at Sweet Green. These restaurant brands that are really efficient and really dialed in and crushing it in the publicly traded market so we can actually see the numbers behind them. And we're trying to ask ourselves this question of what are these restaurant brands doing really well to adapt to this increasingly online world that we could build into our platform and give to the other 50% of the restaurant industry the independent restaurant owners. That is where the answers are because these companies are already spending billions of dollars in adapting their restaurants to the latest technology and the latest marketing. So we don't have to spend the same billions of dollars to figure it out. We just have to watch them carefully and then build what they do and make it accessible to the rest of the industry. Yeah. And I just want to end on one note to this idea. I wanted to talk about automatic marketing. Not automatic marketing. What was it? I forgot the term that we coined there. The here I have it. I can't remember what it was. It was the basically how these platforms are being used to manipulate people and not necessarily serve people. I think I would love to have you come back to talk about the future of the industry and how we can create a service that literally serves people versus manipulates people. I think that's where I would like to see the industry go. But I've had a lot of fun talking to you. I have to have you call somebody. Who do you respect and admire and believe it be a great guest mentor like you made for us today? I respect and admire Timmery Shipley who is the owner of Duda Diner in Wichita, Kansas. And she was the name that came to mind because we started with this quote of do or do not there is no try which represents the entrepreneurial spirit. It represents this idea that to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to overcome the odds and push through really difficult obstacles. And I've seen her do that time and time again with her concept. She actually started the concept with less than a thousand dollars. She bought a defunct restaurant off of Craigslist. And then with that defunct restaurant off of Craigslist over the past 10 years has grown it into being the most popular diner in all of Kansas. She's constantly winning national awards. She's the chairwoman of the Kansas Restaurant Association. She's such an incredible person. And somebody that I've seen per se year through so much in the time that I've known her and yet always comes out stronger on the other side. So I think there's a lot to learn from her. Looks like I have an excuse to go to Kansas look a lot. I'm coming after you. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us to share your story, to share your immense amount of knowledge on this subject. And thank you for your support. There is no questioning you are unstoppable. I appreciate you saying that Eric. And thank you to anybody who took the time to listen to this episode. I hope you found it valuable. Cheers. There's another episode wrapped up here at restaurant unstoppable. Well thanks to our guest today, Adam Gild for coming on the show and for sharing your story. A unique perspective, a unique story. And I sometimes catch some flack for going deep into the come up, the story behind the story before my guest ever opened their restaurant or their tech company. But I think it's important to keep in mind that behind every great restaurant and behind every great organization company is a great person. And restaurant unstoppable is about the people behind the organizations learning from them and their journeys. And I think there's always a little nugget. Something that is a little extra that we get from going back. And I think Adam's story was really interesting, definitely inspiring. And wow, what a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the vertical of marketing. What I really like about Adam is that you can tell he's not just parroting what other marketers say. He's not just, you know, there's a lot of echoing going on. There's a lot of people just kind of trying to get rich too out there. And you can tell when Adam talks, he does the research. He knows what he's talking about. He's not misleading people and he focuses on what matters and what's going to get you an ROI. And look, you can choose to go out and to be an expert in all subjects that are necessary to be successful in the restaurant industry or you can choose to partner with people who are the best at what they do. And you can stay in your lane. And I kind of lean towards that ladder of staying in your lane and finding industry partners out there. And I think owner.com is one of those amazing partners. And I'm excited to see where they're headed. Definitely a robust suite of tools. And if you're enjoying this podcast and you want more content just like this, please support our sponsors, support our affiliates. Use our links basically is what I'm asking you. If you ever hear about something on the show or something, it's echo them the show. Use us as your lead. Support the show by sharing this with everyone and anyone who knows, inspiring to be great in the industry. You can also come hang out in restaurant and stoppable network. We have a lot of cool things going on over at the network. A lot of visioning. We're kind of ramping up for the future. Restaurant and stoppable podcast wasn't born overnight. It's been 10 years of evolution and reiteration. And the same is true for the network. But every time we reinvent it or we pivot, we come back stronger. And I would love to have you be a part of the future of that. I can't say goodbye without saying thank you to my team. Thank you, Jared Perisi for your editing. Thank you, Calon. Miola for your copy. Oh, sorry. For your community management. And thank you, Anitas and for your executive support and help with the good kind of consulting. That's it for today. Until next time, peace out.