Beck: Hey everybody, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, or whatever time you happen to be chiming into the Chad GTM podcast. I'm your host, Michael Beck, joined with me, my my co-host. And you know what? Today I'm gonna call you Chad. I'm gonna call you my inspiration. You're a guy that I ha that has levels of EQ I only aspire to have. These days when I I I mess with AI and I have meltdowns, I'd start going, Well, what would Chad do?
Chad: Well, today isn't about the EQ, it's about the technical quotient because I I I
Beck: The TQ.
Chad: I pointed to a button or a thing on on our platform today that we are y putting in use right now.
Beck: This is a concept called Kaizen. Incremental
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: improvements. And so for we're 40 episodes into the season and it took us what what's that say phrase the phrase they say you were this old when you found out? Yeah, I I was fifty f I
Chad: Mm. Something like that.
Beck: was fifty five years old when I found out we actually had a green room. We didn't have to make our our guests suffer. Yes, yes.
Chad: What's old is new again. We have a green room.
Beck: We we were refreshed and this is this is a brand new day. Chad, you I think you set this up. Who who's our guest today?
Chad: Our guest is Pete Riggs. I won't go too long because you've got a great read in coming but
Beck: I hope it's a great reading.
Chad: industry friend, operator that has turned innovator.
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: And so we're gonna learn about these later make them.
Beck: Turned you made it sound it was a vampire that got bit.
Chad: Little bit, it's kinda what it's like. Some some of his you know,
Beck: Okay, okay, okay. I'm an innovator. Okay, no. Okay.
Chad: operator buddies are probably gonna treat him like a vampire now. un unduly, but it it'll
Beck: He's probably wondering why I got that second cup of coffee. Huh?
Chad: happen.
Beck: That's all right. That's all right. I I love where he came from. I think there there is a really good story to be told. And the fact that he's from my neck of the woods, which not many people are. I think
Chad: Mm-hmm.
Beck: you can count on one hand how many people live in the state of Idaho. And that's not true, but it feels that way sometimes. Anyways, but let's do our reading and get going. So today's guest is Mr. Peter Riggs. He's the founder of Wage Wave. This is a guy who's seen how restaurants are losing profitable sales every single night. Because employees have no incentive to sell during the last hour before closing. I'm sure we all know that moment. Hey, kid, we now we're shutting down, we're getting out here. Anyways, he comes to this problem with some serious restaurant credibility. And if you think about it, you know, if somebody's gonna make a piece of software, they really have to have earned the authority to make something. And I think what what really gives Peter the chops here is he started as a P-2 Pit franchisee and eventually helped take over the US business, grew the system to roughly 250 locations. And has served as president and CEO of Peter Pitt USA. Along the way, he saw a problem that every restaurant operator recognizes that last hour before closing, when the crew wants to go home, customers are still coming in and the revenue starts slipping away. I'm gonna sound like Chad GPT in a second, Chad. In a world of or in a world where forty-five percent of restaurants did not turn a profit last year, according to the Technomics report. I think Peter's the man of the hour because he built WageWave to change the incentive, giving operators a way to turn measurable performance into real cash bonuses for their people. Peter, welcome to the Chat GTM podcast and I am now going to hurry to get him to the
Chad: Bring him on stage.
Beck: stage. Da da da da da fanfare. That was awesome.
Peter Riggs: We did it.
Beck: We did it. You're here.
Chad: Yes. And let let's be clear, is the company wave wage or wage wave? 'Cause I I'm not positive.
Beck: and I am dyslexic.
Peter Riggs: W Wave Wage.
Beck: Did I ru
Chad: Wave weight.
Beck: how many times did I ruin it during that intro?
Chad: I don't know, but we got it right
Peter Riggs: Just twice.
Chad: now.
Beck: It's right. This this is actually called marketing. We're we're imprinting
Peter Riggs: Yeah.
Beck: on the actual name. You now know it is Wave Wage. So anyways, Peter, how you doing day?
Peter Riggs: Yep, because you get that you get that wave of the wage bonus that comes crashing into your paycheck.
Beck: Surfing the narnar of wages. Love it. So how are you today, Peter? Thank you for coming on during my Mormonic moment.
Peter Riggs: I'm great. I'm good.
Beck: and I I guess let's just kind of get going here because I I think there's a lot to unpack, especially in the short amount of time that we have, right? And and you know, I I I think every operator has thought about if I had a magic wand, if I could make some stuff, or or the even worse one, they see a piece of software coming out going, I invented that month yeah two years ago, I just never got on it, right? And so now we're looking at a guy that that you know Went from a franchisee to becoming the leader of a brand now to becoming a software developer. How'd that work? How'd that even happen? Like something must have kept you up at night.
Peter Riggs: unintentionally is how it is how it happened. And and a actually before even a franchisee I was a customer because the second store in the US was
Beck: Uh-huh.
Peter Riggs: in Moscow, Idaho, when I was going to school there.
Beck: Yep.
Peter Riggs: And and so that's where I first became a a fan of it. And then me and some other buddies that I knew from college, we started opening some restaurants and then that snowballed into us acquiring the US company in
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: five and we grew up from there. And I think that's that's actually what led me to this because the reality is I think as an operator, you you can only be an operator so long before you have to either become an innovator or you just give up and die as a sh a shriveled husk of a human. 'Cause the restaurant industry takes its toll on you for sure. And you sit there and you go, why am I doing this? And the majority
Beck: Again.
Peter Riggs: of people either burn out or they go, I gotta
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: find a better way to do this.
Beck: Yeah, that that's funny. That's a very true statement. for some reason Highlander came in my head. It's better to burn out than to fade away, but I don't think we
Peter Riggs: Okay.
Beck: want to do either. are you still with Peter Pit as a brand or have you moved on? This is your own own just endeavor you're doing s with absent that. Okay.
Peter Riggs: A little little bit of both. so so recently we've made some changes there trying to to get Peter Pitt back to the place where where it can be. Obviously, you know, COVID was a struggle for everyone. We happen
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: to have some other stuff going on at that time that compounded and made a bad situation worse. And we've spent the last few years trying to help that kind of beloved legacy brand kind of live up to its former glory and continue on kind of in its It's new iteration. And so I actually recently stepped down as CEO, promoted John Sucre, who's got good culinary chops, and he's in there making a lot of important operational changes, and I'm focusing now on wave wage because it's something that I ideated originally for the P2P employees and franchisees and our needs there, but Like I said, I've been in this industry a long time and I've got a lot of friends who I was like, man, these guys need this too. And so it quickly it started to to become bigger than just what I needed for P2PIT. And so I've tapped
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: some of those guys for diagnostics and analysis and and they're gonna be doing some pilot testing as well because this is an operator system built for operators to kind of cut through a lot of the other garbage that we are dealing with, because we all know that we need more technology to help us run our our businesses better. But for those of us that are pure operators, a lot of times we don't we don't understand what it does or why we need it. We know we kind of probably do, but we also
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: lack the fundamental ability to understand it well enough to make sure that it's truly integrated into our operations. So we really need to kind of take a step back and look at things and say, how do we fix this as an operator first and then apply technology to it to do that in a more effective way?
Beck: Chad?
Chad: Before we get into the tech and or even the origin wave wage, I wanted to ask you this, which is what is for people who haven't ever employed people, who haven't been a restaurant operator, what are some fundamental truths about employee engagement that they need to know?
Peter Riggs: That's a that's a great question. and the the biggest thing about employee engagement just comes down to the fundamental aspects of human nature. Especially at that age where you're kind of an hourly employee at a restaurant, places like that, you've got dreams, you've got big dreams, and hopefully those come true for you. But a lot of times they don't. But you don't know that then. You're still eighteen, twenty-two, thirty, and you've still got a lot of time to make a lot of moves. And so that these people are the main character in their story. Your restaurant is not. Your business is not. And so if that
Beck: Ooh. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: if an opportunity comes along for them to have a chance to seize that greatness opportunity, then they might just not show up. And they don't realize kind of what kind of an impact that has on you, the other staff, and kind of the flow of everything there. And it's kind of hard to blame them because That's what they're living. That's their life and that's what they're dealing with. And let's be honest, most people don't hire workers in restaurants like ours as a career. They know that they're going somewhere else. Maybe some of them are gonna love it, stick on through management, maybe become their own restaurant owner. But that's a kind of a long tail process and isn't necessarily what most of the hourly workers do. So it's a different landscape, and that's what causes us to have a 90 to 110% turnover rate because
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: people are moving on for that chance at greatness, and that's okay, but we need to make sure that as operators who are going to be around for the long haul, that we've got systems in place to help reward and recognize the people that are there to help run our businesses better and give a better overall customer experience.
Beck: So Peter, before we go too much further into the subject, let's let's spend a minute defining the thing that what wage what wave wage is. Let's define what it does, where it lives in the store, kinda what that experience is like. And then we can go a further there. Cause I want the the audience to go, this is what we're talking about and start cementing that. So what what is what is wave wage if you defined it?
Peter Riggs: In in essence, it's performance pay for hourly workers based on the sales that they bring in during a specified period.
Beck: Okay.
Peter Riggs: And so in essence it it allows us to use technology to track and reward certain scenarios that will give employees the motivation and desire to kind of think and act like an owner because they have a stake in the sales that are actually walking through or walking out of the door while they're on shift. It makes them
Beck: Yeah. Yep.
Peter Riggs: an active participant in the business.
Beck: Awesome. All right, thank you.
Chad: Was there an exact moment that the in your restaurants that you something you saw that brought this to life or was it more just a pattern over time?
Peter Riggs: Well, coincidentally it wasn't in my restaurant that I saw it, but
Beck: Ha ha ha.
Peter Riggs: I knew that it but I
Chad: Yeah, you don't.
Peter Riggs: knew that it occurred in my restaurants as well. In fact, this was back in in twenty twenty three when I had just kind of taken Peter Pit back. and I was doing a big road show. I got a van and I was driving around to visit every single location that we had to kinda help explain kind of what transition was about to take place, the efforts we were gonna put in place to try to help them get things back on track. And I was I had just finished visiting with one franchisee and I was getting ready to hit the road and head out and I wanted to grab some some dinner before I left and so I just placed a to go order at a sushi place and I was waiting in the the front lobby area to to for them to finish the order. And it was about 45 minutes to close when I placed the order. So I felt no problem because I was just grab and go. But about 30 minutes to close, this younger couple walk in because it was a college town and they asked if they could get a table for two and the hostess just kind of sighed, picked up two menus and said, Yeah, but we close in like 30 minutes, so you're gonna have to be fast with the menu. And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: the guy was like, I didn't I'm sorry, we didn't realize that you close so soon. We don't want to I don't want to be a burden And we can we can eat somewhere else if you want. And she goes, That'd be great, thanks. And sets the menu down. And I'm sitting there just my jaws on the floor, going, I can't believe I just witnessed that in real life. It's like you hear about those stories happening. Yeah, you
Beck: Yeah, you're still open right now. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: hear about those stories, but you don't like, you're not sitting there front, row, center for it to actually play out in front of you. And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: it just, it just sat there and it chewed at my brain the whole next several hours as I was driving down the road and I was just thinking, If that was my location, I mean, besides the fact that I'd be furious, if that was my location, what would I do to get them to not do that? I would tell them that they could have some of the money. They can have all the money from the last hour of sales if they just treat people well and invite them in and be hospitable and and kind of really help us and call it brand insurance. cause the reality is it's like she's sitting there and she sees these people come in and it's like she might get some share of the tip. That's gonna split between how many people, but it's just not worth the effort. It's really not worth it for any of them. But if all of a sudden you say, Man, I know I'm gonna get the all of the the food revenue, the incremental revenue that comes in from this order, because it's coming in in the last hour, not only am I gonna be pleasant and hospitable, I'm gonna suggest some extra rolls, a starter, and make sure that they have ch tried our legendary dessert. Because even though it's a bit more work. What they can do from tacking on those sales becomes a genuine benefit to them financially. And all of a sudden they've got motivation to really sell like an owner. And you, as the operator of the restaurant, you're giving more of that revenue away, but it was totally lost at this point. And it's also one of those things where the the revenue that is generated there is also going to go there. They're gonna say, Man, we walked in, we were a little bit nervous because it was kind of close to close. We had the most amazing experience. They were so
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: nice I would go there ten times out of ten as opposed to I'm never going back there again and I blame brand whatever because they don't know they don't know who Jessica is at the hostess station that's the one that actually turned him away. They just remember that your brand turned me away.
Beck: Yeah. I I think anybody that's worked in in hospitality as a server or front or back of house as well. There's that existential dread at you know, ten minutes before closing and there comes the the the party of five that comes walking in the door. the thing that occurs to me, I I'd love to pressure test your thinking on this is so the the front of house, they're all about it. You know what? Let's see, let's see, let's see We're gonna get our bonus out of that. Back of house might be a different reality 'cause they're they're shutting down grills, they're going in sanitiz sanitizing processes and stuff like that. Tell me about how that interplay works and how you look at that.
Peter Riggs: The same way. It's it's divided across the shift.
Beck: Uh-huh.
Peter Riggs: it's basically goes across to whoever is has worked that shift and that's where that's where things got interesting and I started to build something more than just a one shift tool and started building something that was an actual business. Because as I started to ask those same questions, it became important to cover all the other scenarios where things like this happen. It's not just this last hour, it's it's when it's when a a a bus load Of volleyball players shows up and all of a sudden your forecast hour is going to be double or triple what it was before. You can't call in more people because it's going to be over by by the time somebody gets there. But what happens is a coach walks in and says, Hey, can I can my team meet here? And you go, Yeah, no problem. And he goes, Just take the orders, I'll pay at the end. And they just start placing orders, but you just want to get them through the line. But if you had surge hour set up where you could share in the benefit, now there's other rules in addition that can be beneficial to all the employees. And then that just keeps kind of going with a bunch of rules that we can set so that really there are ways to take every aspect of what we do inside an operation. And we can have custom rules for different departments as well as bundle them together with capped rules for the whole thing. And it's all set knowing that we gotta make our we gotta make this much at the end. end of the day. So if we don't get here in sales, none of none of these rules fire. So it's like they're all they're all you're earning them. It's like think of it like owning hip hip bonuses in a video game,
Beck: Yeah, yeah.
Peter Riggs: but then you get hit, you lose that combo. And it's a little bit the same way here where you got to keep pushing all day because it's not enough to have a good hour or a good moment. If we don't get above profitability, none of us are going to actually recognize these bonuses.
Beck: Hmm. Is it pulling things like CSAT too? Like if you want if you're saying like we're looking at this at a different dimension of time and say over the month we see these these these spikes that occur past the past the bit the standard business hours and there's a correlation of CSAT against the transaction record and the POS saying, Hey, after five o'clock, we are getting these scores and it's directly correlated with these these types of transactions.
Peter Riggs: Yes, and in fact we go kind of a step further than that. We're we're we're trying to take We don't want to make opinions on the data we gather yet. We just want to gather data. So what we're doing is we're looking for all of those points of data, but we're also looking for the dark spots, the parts that aren't being measured. and so if you start to find big gaps in areas that aren't being measured, late night, last hour stuff. Like if you look for last hour studies and things like that, they simply don't exist. Nobody's really measuring
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: that stuff. So as we look at these businesses and their actual transactions, we're not looking Looking for just what occurred, but also we're feeding that in to an expectation that then tells us whether or not there are gaps. And so that's part of our gap analysis system that says Based on the other trends, based on your attach rate for sodas and this and other things, you you're soft between five and seven PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You might want to look into that because it's going to recognize kind of not just potential in the the data, but also where there's gaps that need to be explored. And then you can start to find things like, well, Tony always works those shifts. And what what's Tony doing? Why is he not, you know, selling like he's supposed to? And you can start to figure out not only where you can do more to encourage employees, but you also might find some bright spots where you've got a really good rock star employee that you didn't realize was there exactly
Beck: Let's replicate that. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: and what are they doing and how do we turn that into a better part of the system?
Beck: Hm. Can?
Chad: Why do you think nobody has built Wave Wage before? It's something that always goes through our heads when we're finding something unique like this.
Peter Riggs: It's very complicated. It's it's very complicated to do it in a layered way that can start to understand and look for the deficiencies, figure out how to correct them, account for specific data at that individual location and then adjust to be functional for those employees. Cause even the same brand in a Pita Pit in downtown Court d'Alane is going to be very tourist centric. And a Pita Pit in Syracuse, New York is going to be at the college and, you know, a totally different clientele,
Beck: Throughput. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: different time, all those types of things. And so it has to be semi-universal, but that last 20% has To be adjustable to the individual locations, the individual needs, and things like that. And so that the level of complexity of kind of weaving that together on the back end is not simple. And it took me having to go at it from the other side of it, say, try to think up every single problem I've had as an operator, whether it's employees, whether it's food, whether it's order accuracy, whether it's difficult customers, all of that, and figure out how. to build kind of a very complicated if-then scenario that
Beck: Mm.
Peter Riggs: that that triggers these different levers to decide what should happen when and how much all kind of controlled and signed off on by the client but basically we've built this kind of we've we've we've embedded it with all of our learnings from challenges across years from myself and like I said some of my other friends and said, what are some scenarios that we can continue to throw at this thing to try to make it think like an operator? And that just takes a lot of time and a level of kind of interconnected thinking that I think a a lot of operators just aren't they're not tuned up for.
Beck: Peter, without knowing much about your your solution, it occurs to me a little bit that, you know, in gamification and incentives, out of sight, out of mind is kind of a thing that if it's not in front of you and present, it's hard to be excited about your score, so to speak. If you think of sports, the big scoreboard that's running. How are the employees engaging with thing with it, seeing it, that that that accumulation of points or what they're moving toward their goal? And how is that how how is how do you motivate them knowing it's their But keeping it present or top of mind.
Peter Riggs: Yeah, that's a great question. We we wanted to make sure that 'cause yeah, we agree, the the buy-in is kind of where it's at with the employees. And so we designed a very shareable kind of application interface where they can basically see what rules are active, how close they are to those, what's triggered already, where their sales are at, and what they've potentially banked in wave bonuses already. And so it shows them. kind of where they're at for each of these categories that's live. It shows them, man, we are we're almost to this to this next goal. Let's push a little bit harder and we'll get to this place. and it so it gives them the ability to kind of see where they're at, but then also we want them to take screenshots of it and share it with their friends and say, look what I did. Look at the look at the wave
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: bonus I got working here and things like that. And that's where we also decided it was important to have non financial metrics that are in there as well. Because there are a lot of things that you can't reward financially the same way you would like a surge hour or the closing
Beck: Sure.
Peter Riggs: hour. like like order accuracy and and and showing up for all your shifts on time and things like that. So we've put in some some tools to to do endorsements and badging so that they can in so that they can earn things like being great at accuracy, being super great
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: at at they they get mentioned all the time i by name in in reviews and things like that, positive reviews. And so as those things accumulate and are tracked in the back end. They eventually trigger these badges and endorsements. And they're they're kind of surprise and delight ones. You don't know, you don't see like I got positive reviews here, I'm three points away. Because what we
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: don't what we don't want to do is we don't want to negatively incentivize them either. So if you get named
Beck: Right. Gaming the system, right? And that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: Yeah, if you get named poorly in a review, that also counts against you, but you don't see
Chad: Mm.
Peter Riggs: that. And you don't ever
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: earn a like, this guy's a terrible employee badge. But it just kinda like it's tracking these commendations and it builds a real kind of like a a resume for these employees and every employee that signs up, when they sign up, they're get they're given a unique employee identifier. And so they can take
Beck: Mm, mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: their profile with them to another place that also uses WaveWage and they could say, here's why I'm worth a dollar an hour more than what you're saying
Chad: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: you started at. And I've got the endorsements and the background right here to show you that I'm not just blowing smoke.
Beck: From the way you're talking and and looking at your hand, that sounds like there's there's a it's a phone app that runs. Is there a way that you could pipe this to like say maybe a re per a repurposed KDS screen or a a screen in the inside the restaurant where people could monitor and police each other saying, Hey, we're really close to our number guys, let's keep pushing?
Peter Riggs: Yeah, we've built for for those that want it, we've built the ability to do kind of a back end KDS that can show those things on a kind of a live display in the back of house and show kind of where they're at. And that'll show kind of the the more detailed dashboard, including the f the forecast and the trend analysis and where they're at in comparison and all that in even more detail of the holistic store picture as opposed to their individual shift picture.
Beck: Very cool. Almost feels like something you can publish to people's social media if they really cared about their job and saying they just they
Peter Riggs: Right.
Beck: got their and I I I'm picturing a a a a wave wage or a Peter Pitt Eagle Scout festooned with badges digitally, right?
Peter Riggs: Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Beck: Yeah. Chad, sorry about that.
Chad: So I'm glad you brought up the idea of unintended consequences because I remember when I first heard about that, it's one of the things I asked you about. And you you talked about how you have this rule system and a confidence system. So my question is, you know, you you're gonna tell me as an operator what I should do, right? You know, what I should try to grow revenue. But if that's the if that's the case, how should as an operator should I think about running experiments? On something I think will work well.
Peter Riggs: We we set up so part of our system too is we've got a an AI rule generator. So basically it takes we've got our core bread and butter rules, things like the closing hour, the surge hour. the upsell rules, things like that, where we say, look, if you just want to set it and forget it, we've got these ones. They're going to cover almost everything. You just fine-tune it for your numbers and you're good to go. But there are some people that want to do a much more personalized set of rules. And sometimes those guys know what they're talking about. And sometimes people go, I've got this great idea. And everyone around them's like, I don't know if it's as good as you think it is. and that's where our rule system will take rules and compare it against things that exist in the system and also rules that are in fact th affect through other clients and it'll give it a basically a confidence score. It'll say, look you We see where you're going with this, but you're it the numbers seem off to us. And we've never seen a rule like this before. So we're gonna we're gonna rate this with kind of a lower confidence score. You're free to use it. You're always, you know, the the client's always free to set the rules that they want, but we don't see this working great. It's got a low confidence score. It's got a confidence score of 58%. Whereas these other rules, this rule has been implemented by X number of locations. It's been deployed Y number of times and it has a success rate of whatever. And so we have the a confidence score on this one of 98%. It's similar to kind of just ranking things that we buy, you know, through Amazon apps that we download, anything. It's like the more popular ones, they rise to the top. And it's important that. other operators that hadn't necessarily thought of it a different way can look at
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: other rules that other operators are putting in go that actually that's what I'm looking for right there. And so we basically build a library and are constantly checking the library against itself to develop that confidence score to show what rules are being used, how often and what the likely success rate is. And compared to your numbers, we either predict high or low success from that.
Beck: and this might be answered in the rules side of things that you were just talking about. And Chad kind of you stimulated this when you're saying unintended consequences. So let's let's have a scenario here. It's five o'clock, and some some restaurant, this restaurant decides it's it's it's its hours are f it closed at five. And the team rallies and says, We got some people coming in, let's just keep going. We go to seven o'clock. Or is that within the rules that the team can be dynamic and dictate how much longer they want to go? Or will the rules say, Hey, this is our hard close. We can't stay open because the unintended consequence side of things makes me go, Well, they're open at seven today. How come they're not at five? And now I'm ticked off. Right?
Peter Riggs: Yes, excellent question. And the reality is that's up to the ops team. We we we make what you want to do possible. We don't
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: we don't facilitate anything beyond that. So if your staff has the flexibility to do that, the
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: system can support it. But it doesn't it doesn't give them the opportunity to supersede their own
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: rules and operations. And so since those things are set by the the top levels. They can
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: try, but and and they could blame us for facilitating that. Of course,
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: I would say if they've got enough business to keep going for two more hours, you might want here's part of your gap analysis. We're gonna say you should stay open longer.
Beck: Right. Yeah. Yeah, we have some hourly flexibility we need to look at. Or I'm Chad, I'm thinking about our friends over at Snooze, right? And they just realized we don't have
Chad: Mm.
Beck: a dinner day part. What's going on? Right. Interesting.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah.
Beck: Chad?
Chad: So I want to ask you about pilots, meaning what does it take to validate that this is working in a location or locations, right? Because you want to attribute any sales lift to that employee behavior change and not weather change favorably or negatively, or there's road work. How do you think about that?
Peter Riggs: Very carefully. And that's that's part of why when like as I was saying earlier, we try not to be prejudiced about any of the data. We want to gather all the data that comes in first and then compare it against what we think it should be. And then also, especially with the pilots, we work that against with our operator friends and say, is this what you were expecting and why? And did it show what we thought or not? And figure out how to go from there because that's the that is the beauty and the complexity. Complexity of what we're building here is the system is fine, the math works, the concept is fine. In the pilots, it's what does it actually do or not do to drive changes in employee behavior, in employee morale, in customer experience, in order volume, ticket size, all of that stuff. And those are are the actual results that are not only going to vary from location to location, but they're going to take some time to continue to figure out what the the the normal is for each brand and segment. And that's where working With folks that understand that they've got to have good good management, good ops in place to make best use of the tool itself. Because it's not a fix for poorly trained people or or staff that is running loose or giving away food or things like that. This isn't a let's use it to beg them to act right. They act right and get rewarded because of it. And that's where it's important to have people in the pilots that understand. what these problems are, understand the solution set that's in front of them, and then say, as an operator, I now know how to, I can take it and help execute this within my own operations, training, and employee expectations to to close that loop and change the actual human behavior that we're talking about in the first place.
Beck: Peter, so part of this is, you know, the badges obviously that that's that's that's more intrinsic than than financial, right? But when we're talking about putting more money into an employee's paycheck, CFO zeros are gonna immediately probably perk up and and and ask the the a question like, you know, if I'm paying my employees more money, how do you make sure the restaurant is actually making more money?
Peter Riggs: Yeah. That's a fantastic question. And that's p that's the beauty of it. If you do this correctly, there's the opportunity for the restaurant to make more money, the employees to make more money, and the customer experience goes up. Because
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: what happens is th like let's let's just use we'll go back to the the we'll I'll do upsell and the the last hour real quick. The last hour i it's People think, well, geez, if it's slow, you should just have them close early. It's like, no, no, no, that's that's that's opposite thinking. That it's actually the potential to be the most profitable hour of the day for you because you've already paid for the rent, the power, the employees, all of that stuff. All we're talking about is incremental food cost that you just covered in the transaction itself. So
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: of that of that margin for the excluding the food and paper cost of that, I mean, and you can go deeper than that, but let's say
Beck: Sure.
Peter Riggs: You want to still make money there. We're going to give that plus a small chunk to just to make sure that we're covered. And then the rest gets split by the crew. You are you are spending more in labor dollars because you're giving them more money, but your actual labor percentage can go down because your revenue has increased by such that compared to the staff
Chad: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: that was already on, you might be at a
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: 26.2% labor cost. But by doing this, now you're at a 24.8%. Even though you spent more actual money, because the the change to the revenue offsets that amount and drives the percentage, the labor percentage lower. And so that's where when from an ops and a CFO side, you can see, look, if we do upsells, exactly.
Beck: Part of its marketing spend. It would be categorized as marketing spend if that's the case, right?
Peter Riggs: If we can get our upsells on drinks from 40% to 65% to 80%, then let's share half of that with the employees. That's a genuine I mean, they're sitting there going, man, I could make I could make twenty five cents out of every single one of these upsells I do. That starts to add up in their head. Meanwhile, you're actually making more money because they're actually driving new sales, new incremental sales that you weren't getting before. And so while you're technically putting out more in labor dollars, you're actually making more money and lowering your cost and or lowering your percentage. And the customers are going, man, this place is great. They treat me awesome here.
Beck: over it. Love it. Chad.
Chad: What what should operators expect wave weight to integrate?
Peter Riggs: Say that again, I'm sorry.
Chad: What should what other platforms or pieces of their technology should operators expect Wave Wage to integrate to?
Peter Riggs: Well, our goal is to try to be a good middleman across all of their systems. So basically we sit between their POS system and the payroll system and just kind of recalculate the math based on the the settings and the caps that the clients put in place. And then those numbers are what gets sent to payroll with this kind of bonus line item down there. And it's all taxed the same as wages in the US. So it's a simple mathematical equation, but you can see the bonus line item there. On the paycheck. And then from there, it allows us to start to integrate with other systems, other HR systems, labor systems, and including we're working on some badging and endorsement stuff for operational components too. So if somebody, you know, their prep list can be uploaded into the into the app, and they can say, the three of us are working, and you two complain about chopping the onions because it always makes you cry. You don't want to do it. So I go, fine, I'll chop the onions. So I prep the onions. I take a photo of the prepped onions finished and I log it to my profile. And the manager signs off that I did the prep, you guys didn't, you're
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: fine with that. But potentially I get either more endorsement or even an extra bonus that goes into who did what parts of the prep list. And so you expand that to checking the bathrooms, cleaning the lobby, doing other things like that. And all of a sudden you've got the ability to motivate and gamify and reward your employees to do not just the public facing stuff but also a lot of the operational stuff in the back, but then divide it in a way that really shows kind of who who did the work and who didn't.
Beck: Hmm. Peter, thinking about tech companies, you know, a lot of our audience are are are or brand or companies that are selling technology in their restaurants and and retail and other hospitality outlets. And I think you have an interesting perspective that that people could learn from, which is, you know, you've been a franchisee and ex an executive responsible for hundreds of restaurants and now a founder building technology for operators. What technology what do technology companies consistently misunderstand about the people actually running restaurants? Because you've been sold to so heavily, so much until you stepped onto this side of the fence. What what what advice could you give to those people that just keep knocking on these doors, blasting emails and and and just let me show you something? You know?
Peter Riggs: Just be just because your tech works doesn't mean we can put it to work. I've had guys I've had guys before that come up to me, right? I j I j I just came up with that. That's how you can you
Beck: Ooh, that's a t shirt. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: can you can make that a an ink tank t-shirt there. The the reality is I don't I don't
Beck: What was the quote again? What what was it one more time?
Peter Riggs: I don't remember. We'll have to read it, we'll have to watch it again. Well
Chad: It's it's recorded then. It's recorded. Yeah.
Beck: I love all right.
Peter Riggs: i I I s I think it was just because their tech works doesn't mean it works for that you can work it. Because the reality is like I've had guys that show me dashboards and they're You'll all you'll be able to see everything here. It's like I don't have a person to put in front of this to tease out what I need from it. I have no doubt that it works, but it's gonna
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: sit there gathering dust because man, we are just trying to make sandwiches and get people out the door. And that's where I think a lot of the the tech guys are a little too sophisticated when it It comes to the nuts and bolts that it requires to run an actual restaurant. And I think, I think a lot of tech guys would get a lot further with their products if they would spend time in restaurants, in the operations, and say, here's how I think we could tweak our product to work better for what's actually happening here, instead of just
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: saying, Here's a sol here's another hundred dollar a month solution. Because it's like we're already,
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: it's restaurants were Thin margins before technology even exist. When we were just running tech Casio cash
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: registers, like it was still thin margins back then. And now we've got to have every every tech platform under the sun. Yeah.
Beck: Yeah. Twenty five bits of SAS running, right? Yeah.
Peter Riggs: And so that's as big a problem for the cost of food, the cost of going out to eat,
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: the cost of labor as anything else. And so it's not that we don't need or want the tech that they have, but it's gotten to a point where it's like they've gotta make it a little bit easier to to execute in a live fire restaurant.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: That is that isn't that does not have a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere managing this for It's that mid-tier stuff. It's that hundred to five hundred locations. And it's the mom and pops that want to get to a place where they're, you know, a franchise. It's how do you help make that happen for people? And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: and that's what we need.
Beck: Love it. Chad, last question before we go with rapid fire.
Chad: Similar to Beck's question, is there something you now empathize with with these tech companies now that you are with one?
Peter Riggs: yeah, it's like scary to talk to operators that you know are beleaguered from being assaulted by questions about tech and things like that. That's why I've been that's why a lot of this has just been kind of been built in a little bit of stealth mode.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: and quietly because again, like I wanted to work with these guys to learn more about ways that I could fill in gaps in my own not in knowledge and experience, make sure we've covered everything, really build an incredibly functional back end and then offer it f with no no onboarding fees, no contracts, just a monthly, a straight monthly per employee. to make it simple enough because basically I put myself in back in my own shoes and I said, I'm gonna sell this to myself and I am gonna use every answer I've ever had to say no. And when I finish when I finish refuting myself, then I will know that the product is ready to be shopped around to other folks. And so I just kept beating myself up about it until I was like, I can't say no to this anymore.
Beck: That's funny you say that because that was literally my last question before we went to Rapid Fire, which was if you could sit across from Peter Riggs, the franchisee today, and show him wave wave wage, what would that version of you immediately understand about it?
Peter Riggs: all all the bits of it now because I
Beck: Down.
Peter Riggs: I literally used myself in in the most adversarial way I could to say like, look, I've rejected a bunch of people over the last two decades. I'm gonna use everything. I'm gonna be intractable. And I finally just kept going until I was like, I literally can't say no to this anymore. There's just not I've Yeah. So that's
Beck: He's his own drive by shooter.
Peter Riggs: so that's where we're at. And then I was like, now that that's done, I'm ready to go on the Chat GTM podcast.
Chad: Well
Beck: look at that, good plug.
Chad: fun fun project could be taking all of your transcripts from calls with vendors as an operator, training an AI to be that expert
Peter Riggs: Right.
Chad: buyer and that you have to sell through.
Beck: Well it. All right. You're ready for some rapid fire? All
Peter Riggs: Let's do it.
Beck: right. These are off the cuff. If there's anything that gets weird and squiggly, just say pass, but it should be pretty easy. All right. Best piece of advice you ever got from another restaurant operator.
Peter Riggs: We're just making sandwiches. Nobody's gonna die.
Beck: Ooh, worst love it. Worst restaurant shift you can remember.
Peter Riggs: Worst restaurant. I got hit by a car. I was doing deliveries.
Beck: Holy cow.
Peter Riggs: I was doing deliveries back at one of my original restaurants and I was on the way back and a guy I used to do all the deliveries on my Harley and this was down in and in LA and a guy cut across my lane and I s had my leg smashed between my bike and his car, flew over the hood and landed on the sidewalk about sixty feet away. That was the worst shift, I think.
Beck: Yeah, that kind of blows. yeah, I th yeah, I would probably agree. Customer walks in two minutes before closing. What are you thinking?
Peter Riggs: There's another dollar.
Beck: Love it.
Peter Riggs: And another satisfied customer.
Beck: great employees, born that way or developed.
Peter Riggs: Mostly born that way, but can be developed if you show them something and give them a sense of purpose on why they want to achieve it.
Beck: Payment to that. One restaurant metric operators don't pay enough attention to.
Peter Riggs: The customers that just walked by without even without even stepping in. We measure a lot of who ate there and who walked in and walked out or who had problems. But how many people, when somebody says, Hey, do you want to go eat here today, are saying, nah, I don't want to go to that place? That's a number we never talk about. And I think a lot of operators need to answer that question. And if they did, they could figure out a lot more about how to make their restaurants more successful.
Beck: Love it. One thing you'd eliminate from restaurant management forever.
Peter Riggs: that's such a great question. Tips.
Beck: Magic wand. Tips. Ooh. Ooh. Me likey. All right. Twenty years from now, what's one thing about restaurant work you hope we as a society have finally fixed?
Peter Riggs: the ability to treat restaurants as s as the important part of a daily life cycle as they are. We treat them as kind of disposable people at disposable locations, selling now kind of not necessarily good for you food.
Beck: Mm.
Peter Riggs: And the the we can't survive like that. We have to eat multiple times every day. And we yet we treat eating like it's this throwaway burden. And then we wonder why we're getting sick all the time. And so if we could treat the industry with a little bit more respect, it would tr I think it would trickle down through the operations, through the employees, and through the offerings. And it could help us again pay attention to some things that I think have run away from us that have caused the hyper expenses that. that we see around restaurants and make it difficult to to to afford to eat out and therefore afford to ha have a profitable restaurant.
Beck: I'm just gonna say I like you, Peter. I I like the way you think. I think that's awesome.
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's an ideal to go ahead of time and land the plane to make sure we get you out of here on time as well. But but Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. And to our audience and our community, thank you for tuning in and giving us a listener or a watch on on YouTube or wherever you happen to consume your podcasts. You know, Chad and I spent a lot of time talking to founders and tech leaders and people that had that big idea that finally decided to take it to market. And I it's always refreshing when you hear one going that lands, that's gonna nail it. And I really do believe there's something very powerful there. I am curious if breakfast will start coming earlier because that as well. We only talked about closing but not opening. But I I I definitely want to stay tuned to how you and your team do, Peter, as you take this product to market and would love to chime in again in about six months and see it get another measure. Have your have your theories been right? What have you learned along the way and and where have you grown in in some places that you didn't expect? but for everybody, thank you so much for spending time with us. This is the Chad GTM podcast signing off with Peter, Beck, and Chad. And as always, we love to share that thought. Which is, and I think this is what Peter built a system on, which is a it's not, it's a deliberate act of kindness, it's not a random. This is a kindness for your employees to make them want to stay, to reduce your churn, to improve your profits, and do the whole thing you built your whole restaurant for, which is to serve guests, create memorable experiences, and keep people coming back, your employees inside and your guests outside to that building that you call home that you love so much. And so it's Beck Chad and and Peter signing off. We'll see you guys in the next one. Random acts of kindness, sprinkle that stuff everywhere. You never know who state you're gonna make better.
Peter Riggs: Thanks everyone. Thanks for having me.
Chad: Well, today isn't about the EQ, it's about the technical quotient because I I I
Beck: The TQ.
Chad: I pointed to a button or a thing on on our platform today that we are y putting in use right now.
Beck: This is a concept called Kaizen. Incremental
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: improvements. And so for we're 40 episodes into the season and it took us what what's that say phrase the phrase they say you were this old when you found out? Yeah, I I was fifty f I
Chad: Mm. Something like that.
Beck: was fifty five years old when I found out we actually had a green room. We didn't have to make our our guests suffer. Yes, yes.
Chad: What's old is new again. We have a green room.
Beck: We we were refreshed and this is this is a brand new day. Chad, you I think you set this up. Who who's our guest today?
Chad: Our guest is Pete Riggs. I won't go too long because you've got a great read in coming but
Beck: I hope it's a great reading.
Chad: industry friend, operator that has turned innovator.
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: And so we're gonna learn about these later make them.
Beck: Turned you made it sound it was a vampire that got bit.
Chad: Little bit, it's kinda what it's like. Some some of his you know,
Beck: Okay, okay, okay. I'm an innovator. Okay, no. Okay.
Chad: operator buddies are probably gonna treat him like a vampire now. un unduly, but it it'll
Beck: He's probably wondering why I got that second cup of coffee. Huh?
Chad: happen.
Beck: That's all right. That's all right. I I love where he came from. I think there there is a really good story to be told. And the fact that he's from my neck of the woods, which not many people are. I think
Chad: Mm-hmm.
Beck: you can count on one hand how many people live in the state of Idaho. And that's not true, but it feels that way sometimes. Anyways, but let's do our reading and get going. So today's guest is Mr. Peter Riggs. He's the founder of Wage Wave. This is a guy who's seen how restaurants are losing profitable sales every single night. Because employees have no incentive to sell during the last hour before closing. I'm sure we all know that moment. Hey, kid, we now we're shutting down, we're getting out here. Anyways, he comes to this problem with some serious restaurant credibility. And if you think about it, you know, if somebody's gonna make a piece of software, they really have to have earned the authority to make something. And I think what what really gives Peter the chops here is he started as a P-2 Pit franchisee and eventually helped take over the US business, grew the system to roughly 250 locations. And has served as president and CEO of Peter Pitt USA. Along the way, he saw a problem that every restaurant operator recognizes that last hour before closing, when the crew wants to go home, customers are still coming in and the revenue starts slipping away. I'm gonna sound like Chad GPT in a second, Chad. In a world of or in a world where forty-five percent of restaurants did not turn a profit last year, according to the Technomics report. I think Peter's the man of the hour because he built WageWave to change the incentive, giving operators a way to turn measurable performance into real cash bonuses for their people. Peter, welcome to the Chat GTM podcast and I am now going to hurry to get him to the
Chad: Bring him on stage.
Beck: stage. Da da da da da fanfare. That was awesome.
Peter Riggs: We did it.
Beck: We did it. You're here.
Chad: Yes. And let let's be clear, is the company wave wage or wage wave? 'Cause I I'm not positive.
Beck: and I am dyslexic.
Peter Riggs: W Wave Wage.
Beck: Did I ru
Chad: Wave weight.
Beck: how many times did I ruin it during that intro?
Chad: I don't know, but we got it right
Peter Riggs: Just twice.
Chad: now.
Beck: It's right. This this is actually called marketing. We're we're imprinting
Peter Riggs: Yeah.
Beck: on the actual name. You now know it is Wave Wage. So anyways, Peter, how you doing day?
Peter Riggs: Yep, because you get that you get that wave of the wage bonus that comes crashing into your paycheck.
Beck: Surfing the narnar of wages. Love it. So how are you today, Peter? Thank you for coming on during my Mormonic moment.
Peter Riggs: I'm great. I'm good.
Beck: and I I guess let's just kind of get going here because I I think there's a lot to unpack, especially in the short amount of time that we have, right? And and you know, I I I think every operator has thought about if I had a magic wand, if I could make some stuff, or or the even worse one, they see a piece of software coming out going, I invented that month yeah two years ago, I just never got on it, right? And so now we're looking at a guy that that you know Went from a franchisee to becoming the leader of a brand now to becoming a software developer. How'd that work? How'd that even happen? Like something must have kept you up at night.
Peter Riggs: unintentionally is how it is how it happened. And and a actually before even a franchisee I was a customer because the second store in the US was
Beck: Uh-huh.
Peter Riggs: in Moscow, Idaho, when I was going to school there.
Beck: Yep.
Peter Riggs: And and so that's where I first became a a fan of it. And then me and some other buddies that I knew from college, we started opening some restaurants and then that snowballed into us acquiring the US company in
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: five and we grew up from there. And I think that's that's actually what led me to this because the reality is I think as an operator, you you can only be an operator so long before you have to either become an innovator or you just give up and die as a sh a shriveled husk of a human. 'Cause the restaurant industry takes its toll on you for sure. And you sit there and you go, why am I doing this? And the majority
Beck: Again.
Peter Riggs: of people either burn out or they go, I gotta
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: find a better way to do this.
Beck: Yeah, that that's funny. That's a very true statement. for some reason Highlander came in my head. It's better to burn out than to fade away, but I don't think we
Peter Riggs: Okay.
Beck: want to do either. are you still with Peter Pit as a brand or have you moved on? This is your own own just endeavor you're doing s with absent that. Okay.
Peter Riggs: A little little bit of both. so so recently we've made some changes there trying to to get Peter Pitt back to the place where where it can be. Obviously, you know, COVID was a struggle for everyone. We happen
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: to have some other stuff going on at that time that compounded and made a bad situation worse. And we've spent the last few years trying to help that kind of beloved legacy brand kind of live up to its former glory and continue on kind of in its It's new iteration. And so I actually recently stepped down as CEO, promoted John Sucre, who's got good culinary chops, and he's in there making a lot of important operational changes, and I'm focusing now on wave wage because it's something that I ideated originally for the P2P employees and franchisees and our needs there, but Like I said, I've been in this industry a long time and I've got a lot of friends who I was like, man, these guys need this too. And so it quickly it started to to become bigger than just what I needed for P2PIT. And so I've tapped
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: some of those guys for diagnostics and analysis and and they're gonna be doing some pilot testing as well because this is an operator system built for operators to kind of cut through a lot of the other garbage that we are dealing with, because we all know that we need more technology to help us run our our businesses better. But for those of us that are pure operators, a lot of times we don't we don't understand what it does or why we need it. We know we kind of probably do, but we also
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: lack the fundamental ability to understand it well enough to make sure that it's truly integrated into our operations. So we really need to kind of take a step back and look at things and say, how do we fix this as an operator first and then apply technology to it to do that in a more effective way?
Beck: Chad?
Chad: Before we get into the tech and or even the origin wave wage, I wanted to ask you this, which is what is for people who haven't ever employed people, who haven't been a restaurant operator, what are some fundamental truths about employee engagement that they need to know?
Peter Riggs: That's a that's a great question. and the the biggest thing about employee engagement just comes down to the fundamental aspects of human nature. Especially at that age where you're kind of an hourly employee at a restaurant, places like that, you've got dreams, you've got big dreams, and hopefully those come true for you. But a lot of times they don't. But you don't know that then. You're still eighteen, twenty-two, thirty, and you've still got a lot of time to make a lot of moves. And so that these people are the main character in their story. Your restaurant is not. Your business is not. And so if that
Beck: Ooh. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: if an opportunity comes along for them to have a chance to seize that greatness opportunity, then they might just not show up. And they don't realize kind of what kind of an impact that has on you, the other staff, and kind of the flow of everything there. And it's kind of hard to blame them because That's what they're living. That's their life and that's what they're dealing with. And let's be honest, most people don't hire workers in restaurants like ours as a career. They know that they're going somewhere else. Maybe some of them are gonna love it, stick on through management, maybe become their own restaurant owner. But that's a kind of a long tail process and isn't necessarily what most of the hourly workers do. So it's a different landscape, and that's what causes us to have a 90 to 110% turnover rate because
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: people are moving on for that chance at greatness, and that's okay, but we need to make sure that as operators who are going to be around for the long haul, that we've got systems in place to help reward and recognize the people that are there to help run our businesses better and give a better overall customer experience.
Beck: So Peter, before we go too much further into the subject, let's let's spend a minute defining the thing that what wage what wave wage is. Let's define what it does, where it lives in the store, kinda what that experience is like. And then we can go a further there. Cause I want the the audience to go, this is what we're talking about and start cementing that. So what what is what is wave wage if you defined it?
Peter Riggs: In in essence, it's performance pay for hourly workers based on the sales that they bring in during a specified period.
Beck: Okay.
Peter Riggs: And so in essence it it allows us to use technology to track and reward certain scenarios that will give employees the motivation and desire to kind of think and act like an owner because they have a stake in the sales that are actually walking through or walking out of the door while they're on shift. It makes them
Beck: Yeah. Yep.
Peter Riggs: an active participant in the business.
Beck: Awesome. All right, thank you.
Chad: Was there an exact moment that the in your restaurants that you something you saw that brought this to life or was it more just a pattern over time?
Peter Riggs: Well, coincidentally it wasn't in my restaurant that I saw it, but
Beck: Ha ha ha.
Peter Riggs: I knew that it but I
Chad: Yeah, you don't.
Peter Riggs: knew that it occurred in my restaurants as well. In fact, this was back in in twenty twenty three when I had just kind of taken Peter Pit back. and I was doing a big road show. I got a van and I was driving around to visit every single location that we had to kinda help explain kind of what transition was about to take place, the efforts we were gonna put in place to try to help them get things back on track. And I was I had just finished visiting with one franchisee and I was getting ready to hit the road and head out and I wanted to grab some some dinner before I left and so I just placed a to go order at a sushi place and I was waiting in the the front lobby area to to for them to finish the order. And it was about 45 minutes to close when I placed the order. So I felt no problem because I was just grab and go. But about 30 minutes to close, this younger couple walk in because it was a college town and they asked if they could get a table for two and the hostess just kind of sighed, picked up two menus and said, Yeah, but we close in like 30 minutes, so you're gonna have to be fast with the menu. And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: the guy was like, I didn't I'm sorry, we didn't realize that you close so soon. We don't want to I don't want to be a burden And we can we can eat somewhere else if you want. And she goes, That'd be great, thanks. And sets the menu down. And I'm sitting there just my jaws on the floor, going, I can't believe I just witnessed that in real life. It's like you hear about those stories happening. Yeah, you
Beck: Yeah, you're still open right now. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: hear about those stories, but you don't like, you're not sitting there front, row, center for it to actually play out in front of you. And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: it just, it just sat there and it chewed at my brain the whole next several hours as I was driving down the road and I was just thinking, If that was my location, I mean, besides the fact that I'd be furious, if that was my location, what would I do to get them to not do that? I would tell them that they could have some of the money. They can have all the money from the last hour of sales if they just treat people well and invite them in and be hospitable and and kind of really help us and call it brand insurance. cause the reality is it's like she's sitting there and she sees these people come in and it's like she might get some share of the tip. That's gonna split between how many people, but it's just not worth the effort. It's really not worth it for any of them. But if all of a sudden you say, Man, I know I'm gonna get the all of the the food revenue, the incremental revenue that comes in from this order, because it's coming in in the last hour, not only am I gonna be pleasant and hospitable, I'm gonna suggest some extra rolls, a starter, and make sure that they have ch tried our legendary dessert. Because even though it's a bit more work. What they can do from tacking on those sales becomes a genuine benefit to them financially. And all of a sudden they've got motivation to really sell like an owner. And you, as the operator of the restaurant, you're giving more of that revenue away, but it was totally lost at this point. And it's also one of those things where the the revenue that is generated there is also going to go there. They're gonna say, Man, we walked in, we were a little bit nervous because it was kind of close to close. We had the most amazing experience. They were so
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: nice I would go there ten times out of ten as opposed to I'm never going back there again and I blame brand whatever because they don't know they don't know who Jessica is at the hostess station that's the one that actually turned him away. They just remember that your brand turned me away.
Beck: Yeah. I I think anybody that's worked in in hospitality as a server or front or back of house as well. There's that existential dread at you know, ten minutes before closing and there comes the the the party of five that comes walking in the door. the thing that occurs to me, I I'd love to pressure test your thinking on this is so the the front of house, they're all about it. You know what? Let's see, let's see, let's see We're gonna get our bonus out of that. Back of house might be a different reality 'cause they're they're shutting down grills, they're going in sanitiz sanitizing processes and stuff like that. Tell me about how that interplay works and how you look at that.
Peter Riggs: The same way. It's it's divided across the shift.
Beck: Uh-huh.
Peter Riggs: it's basically goes across to whoever is has worked that shift and that's where that's where things got interesting and I started to build something more than just a one shift tool and started building something that was an actual business. Because as I started to ask those same questions, it became important to cover all the other scenarios where things like this happen. It's not just this last hour, it's it's when it's when a a a bus load Of volleyball players shows up and all of a sudden your forecast hour is going to be double or triple what it was before. You can't call in more people because it's going to be over by by the time somebody gets there. But what happens is a coach walks in and says, Hey, can I can my team meet here? And you go, Yeah, no problem. And he goes, Just take the orders, I'll pay at the end. And they just start placing orders, but you just want to get them through the line. But if you had surge hour set up where you could share in the benefit, now there's other rules in addition that can be beneficial to all the employees. And then that just keeps kind of going with a bunch of rules that we can set so that really there are ways to take every aspect of what we do inside an operation. And we can have custom rules for different departments as well as bundle them together with capped rules for the whole thing. And it's all set knowing that we gotta make our we gotta make this much at the end. end of the day. So if we don't get here in sales, none of none of these rules fire. So it's like they're all they're all you're earning them. It's like think of it like owning hip hip bonuses in a video game,
Beck: Yeah, yeah.
Peter Riggs: but then you get hit, you lose that combo. And it's a little bit the same way here where you got to keep pushing all day because it's not enough to have a good hour or a good moment. If we don't get above profitability, none of us are going to actually recognize these bonuses.
Beck: Hmm. Is it pulling things like CSAT too? Like if you want if you're saying like we're looking at this at a different dimension of time and say over the month we see these these these spikes that occur past the past the bit the standard business hours and there's a correlation of CSAT against the transaction record and the POS saying, Hey, after five o'clock, we are getting these scores and it's directly correlated with these these types of transactions.
Peter Riggs: Yes, and in fact we go kind of a step further than that. We're we're we're trying to take We don't want to make opinions on the data we gather yet. We just want to gather data. So what we're doing is we're looking for all of those points of data, but we're also looking for the dark spots, the parts that aren't being measured. and so if you start to find big gaps in areas that aren't being measured, late night, last hour stuff. Like if you look for last hour studies and things like that, they simply don't exist. Nobody's really measuring
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: that stuff. So as we look at these businesses and their actual transactions, we're not looking Looking for just what occurred, but also we're feeding that in to an expectation that then tells us whether or not there are gaps. And so that's part of our gap analysis system that says Based on the other trends, based on your attach rate for sodas and this and other things, you you're soft between five and seven PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You might want to look into that because it's going to recognize kind of not just potential in the the data, but also where there's gaps that need to be explored. And then you can start to find things like, well, Tony always works those shifts. And what what's Tony doing? Why is he not, you know, selling like he's supposed to? And you can start to figure out not only where you can do more to encourage employees, but you also might find some bright spots where you've got a really good rock star employee that you didn't realize was there exactly
Beck: Let's replicate that. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: and what are they doing and how do we turn that into a better part of the system?
Beck: Hm. Can?
Chad: Why do you think nobody has built Wave Wage before? It's something that always goes through our heads when we're finding something unique like this.
Peter Riggs: It's very complicated. It's it's very complicated to do it in a layered way that can start to understand and look for the deficiencies, figure out how to correct them, account for specific data at that individual location and then adjust to be functional for those employees. Cause even the same brand in a Pita Pit in downtown Court d'Alane is going to be very tourist centric. And a Pita Pit in Syracuse, New York is going to be at the college and, you know, a totally different clientele,
Beck: Throughput. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: different time, all those types of things. And so it has to be semi-universal, but that last 20% has To be adjustable to the individual locations, the individual needs, and things like that. And so that the level of complexity of kind of weaving that together on the back end is not simple. And it took me having to go at it from the other side of it, say, try to think up every single problem I've had as an operator, whether it's employees, whether it's food, whether it's order accuracy, whether it's difficult customers, all of that, and figure out how. to build kind of a very complicated if-then scenario that
Beck: Mm.
Peter Riggs: that that triggers these different levers to decide what should happen when and how much all kind of controlled and signed off on by the client but basically we've built this kind of we've we've we've embedded it with all of our learnings from challenges across years from myself and like I said some of my other friends and said, what are some scenarios that we can continue to throw at this thing to try to make it think like an operator? And that just takes a lot of time and a level of kind of interconnected thinking that I think a a lot of operators just aren't they're not tuned up for.
Beck: Peter, without knowing much about your your solution, it occurs to me a little bit that, you know, in gamification and incentives, out of sight, out of mind is kind of a thing that if it's not in front of you and present, it's hard to be excited about your score, so to speak. If you think of sports, the big scoreboard that's running. How are the employees engaging with thing with it, seeing it, that that that accumulation of points or what they're moving toward their goal? And how is that how how is how do you motivate them knowing it's their But keeping it present or top of mind.
Peter Riggs: Yeah, that's a great question. We we wanted to make sure that 'cause yeah, we agree, the the buy-in is kind of where it's at with the employees. And so we designed a very shareable kind of application interface where they can basically see what rules are active, how close they are to those, what's triggered already, where their sales are at, and what they've potentially banked in wave bonuses already. And so it shows them. kind of where they're at for each of these categories that's live. It shows them, man, we are we're almost to this to this next goal. Let's push a little bit harder and we'll get to this place. and it so it gives them the ability to kind of see where they're at, but then also we want them to take screenshots of it and share it with their friends and say, look what I did. Look at the look at the wave
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: bonus I got working here and things like that. And that's where we also decided it was important to have non financial metrics that are in there as well. Because there are a lot of things that you can't reward financially the same way you would like a surge hour or the closing
Beck: Sure.
Peter Riggs: hour. like like order accuracy and and and showing up for all your shifts on time and things like that. So we've put in some some tools to to do endorsements and badging so that they can in so that they can earn things like being great at accuracy, being super great
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: at at they they get mentioned all the time i by name in in reviews and things like that, positive reviews. And so as those things accumulate and are tracked in the back end. They eventually trigger these badges and endorsements. And they're they're kind of surprise and delight ones. You don't know, you don't see like I got positive reviews here, I'm three points away. Because what we
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: don't what we don't want to do is we don't want to negatively incentivize them either. So if you get named
Beck: Right. Gaming the system, right? And that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: Yeah, if you get named poorly in a review, that also counts against you, but you don't see
Chad: Mm.
Peter Riggs: that. And you don't ever
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: earn a like, this guy's a terrible employee badge. But it just kinda like it's tracking these commendations and it builds a real kind of like a a resume for these employees and every employee that signs up, when they sign up, they're get they're given a unique employee identifier. And so they can take
Beck: Mm, mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: their profile with them to another place that also uses WaveWage and they could say, here's why I'm worth a dollar an hour more than what you're saying
Chad: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: you started at. And I've got the endorsements and the background right here to show you that I'm not just blowing smoke.
Beck: From the way you're talking and and looking at your hand, that sounds like there's there's a it's a phone app that runs. Is there a way that you could pipe this to like say maybe a re per a repurposed KDS screen or a a screen in the inside the restaurant where people could monitor and police each other saying, Hey, we're really close to our number guys, let's keep pushing?
Peter Riggs: Yeah, we've built for for those that want it, we've built the ability to do kind of a back end KDS that can show those things on a kind of a live display in the back of house and show kind of where they're at. And that'll show kind of the the more detailed dashboard, including the f the forecast and the trend analysis and where they're at in comparison and all that in even more detail of the holistic store picture as opposed to their individual shift picture.
Beck: Very cool. Almost feels like something you can publish to people's social media if they really cared about their job and saying they just they
Peter Riggs: Right.
Beck: got their and I I I'm picturing a a a a wave wage or a Peter Pitt Eagle Scout festooned with badges digitally, right?
Peter Riggs: Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Beck: Yeah. Chad, sorry about that.
Chad: So I'm glad you brought up the idea of unintended consequences because I remember when I first heard about that, it's one of the things I asked you about. And you you talked about how you have this rule system and a confidence system. So my question is, you know, you you're gonna tell me as an operator what I should do, right? You know, what I should try to grow revenue. But if that's the if that's the case, how should as an operator should I think about running experiments? On something I think will work well.
Peter Riggs: We we set up so part of our system too is we've got a an AI rule generator. So basically it takes we've got our core bread and butter rules, things like the closing hour, the surge hour. the upsell rules, things like that, where we say, look, if you just want to set it and forget it, we've got these ones. They're going to cover almost everything. You just fine-tune it for your numbers and you're good to go. But there are some people that want to do a much more personalized set of rules. And sometimes those guys know what they're talking about. And sometimes people go, I've got this great idea. And everyone around them's like, I don't know if it's as good as you think it is. and that's where our rule system will take rules and compare it against things that exist in the system and also rules that are in fact th affect through other clients and it'll give it a basically a confidence score. It'll say, look you We see where you're going with this, but you're it the numbers seem off to us. And we've never seen a rule like this before. So we're gonna we're gonna rate this with kind of a lower confidence score. You're free to use it. You're always, you know, the the client's always free to set the rules that they want, but we don't see this working great. It's got a low confidence score. It's got a confidence score of 58%. Whereas these other rules, this rule has been implemented by X number of locations. It's been deployed Y number of times and it has a success rate of whatever. And so we have the a confidence score on this one of 98%. It's similar to kind of just ranking things that we buy, you know, through Amazon apps that we download, anything. It's like the more popular ones, they rise to the top. And it's important that. other operators that hadn't necessarily thought of it a different way can look at
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: other rules that other operators are putting in go that actually that's what I'm looking for right there. And so we basically build a library and are constantly checking the library against itself to develop that confidence score to show what rules are being used, how often and what the likely success rate is. And compared to your numbers, we either predict high or low success from that.
Beck: and this might be answered in the rules side of things that you were just talking about. And Chad kind of you stimulated this when you're saying unintended consequences. So let's let's have a scenario here. It's five o'clock, and some some restaurant, this restaurant decides it's it's it's its hours are f it closed at five. And the team rallies and says, We got some people coming in, let's just keep going. We go to seven o'clock. Or is that within the rules that the team can be dynamic and dictate how much longer they want to go? Or will the rules say, Hey, this is our hard close. We can't stay open because the unintended consequence side of things makes me go, Well, they're open at seven today. How come they're not at five? And now I'm ticked off. Right?
Peter Riggs: Yes, excellent question. And the reality is that's up to the ops team. We we we make what you want to do possible. We don't
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: we don't facilitate anything beyond that. So if your staff has the flexibility to do that, the
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: system can support it. But it doesn't it doesn't give them the opportunity to supersede their own
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: rules and operations. And so since those things are set by the the top levels. They can
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: try, but and and they could blame us for facilitating that. Of course,
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: I would say if they've got enough business to keep going for two more hours, you might want here's part of your gap analysis. We're gonna say you should stay open longer.
Beck: Right. Yeah. Yeah, we have some hourly flexibility we need to look at. Or I'm Chad, I'm thinking about our friends over at Snooze, right? And they just realized we don't have
Chad: Mm.
Beck: a dinner day part. What's going on? Right. Interesting.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah.
Beck: Chad?
Chad: So I want to ask you about pilots, meaning what does it take to validate that this is working in a location or locations, right? Because you want to attribute any sales lift to that employee behavior change and not weather change favorably or negatively, or there's road work. How do you think about that?
Peter Riggs: Very carefully. And that's that's part of why when like as I was saying earlier, we try not to be prejudiced about any of the data. We want to gather all the data that comes in first and then compare it against what we think it should be. And then also, especially with the pilots, we work that against with our operator friends and say, is this what you were expecting and why? And did it show what we thought or not? And figure out how to go from there because that's the that is the beauty and the complexity. Complexity of what we're building here is the system is fine, the math works, the concept is fine. In the pilots, it's what does it actually do or not do to drive changes in employee behavior, in employee morale, in customer experience, in order volume, ticket size, all of that stuff. And those are are the actual results that are not only going to vary from location to location, but they're going to take some time to continue to figure out what the the the normal is for each brand and segment. And that's where working With folks that understand that they've got to have good good management, good ops in place to make best use of the tool itself. Because it's not a fix for poorly trained people or or staff that is running loose or giving away food or things like that. This isn't a let's use it to beg them to act right. They act right and get rewarded because of it. And that's where it's important to have people in the pilots that understand. what these problems are, understand the solution set that's in front of them, and then say, as an operator, I now know how to, I can take it and help execute this within my own operations, training, and employee expectations to to close that loop and change the actual human behavior that we're talking about in the first place.
Beck: Peter, so part of this is, you know, the badges obviously that that's that's that's more intrinsic than than financial, right? But when we're talking about putting more money into an employee's paycheck, CFO zeros are gonna immediately probably perk up and and and ask the the a question like, you know, if I'm paying my employees more money, how do you make sure the restaurant is actually making more money?
Peter Riggs: Yeah. That's a fantastic question. And that's p that's the beauty of it. If you do this correctly, there's the opportunity for the restaurant to make more money, the employees to make more money, and the customer experience goes up. Because
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: what happens is th like let's let's just use we'll go back to the the we'll I'll do upsell and the the last hour real quick. The last hour i it's People think, well, geez, if it's slow, you should just have them close early. It's like, no, no, no, that's that's that's opposite thinking. That it's actually the potential to be the most profitable hour of the day for you because you've already paid for the rent, the power, the employees, all of that stuff. All we're talking about is incremental food cost that you just covered in the transaction itself. So
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: of that of that margin for the excluding the food and paper cost of that, I mean, and you can go deeper than that, but let's say
Beck: Sure.
Peter Riggs: You want to still make money there. We're going to give that plus a small chunk to just to make sure that we're covered. And then the rest gets split by the crew. You are you are spending more in labor dollars because you're giving them more money, but your actual labor percentage can go down because your revenue has increased by such that compared to the staff
Chad: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: that was already on, you might be at a
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: 26.2% labor cost. But by doing this, now you're at a 24.8%. Even though you spent more actual money, because the the change to the revenue offsets that amount and drives the percentage, the labor percentage lower. And so that's where when from an ops and a CFO side, you can see, look, if we do upsells, exactly.
Beck: Part of its marketing spend. It would be categorized as marketing spend if that's the case, right?
Peter Riggs: If we can get our upsells on drinks from 40% to 65% to 80%, then let's share half of that with the employees. That's a genuine I mean, they're sitting there going, man, I could make I could make twenty five cents out of every single one of these upsells I do. That starts to add up in their head. Meanwhile, you're actually making more money because they're actually driving new sales, new incremental sales that you weren't getting before. And so while you're technically putting out more in labor dollars, you're actually making more money and lowering your cost and or lowering your percentage. And the customers are going, man, this place is great. They treat me awesome here.
Beck: over it. Love it. Chad.
Chad: What what should operators expect wave weight to integrate?
Peter Riggs: Say that again, I'm sorry.
Chad: What should what other platforms or pieces of their technology should operators expect Wave Wage to integrate to?
Peter Riggs: Well, our goal is to try to be a good middleman across all of their systems. So basically we sit between their POS system and the payroll system and just kind of recalculate the math based on the the settings and the caps that the clients put in place. And then those numbers are what gets sent to payroll with this kind of bonus line item down there. And it's all taxed the same as wages in the US. So it's a simple mathematical equation, but you can see the bonus line item there. On the paycheck. And then from there, it allows us to start to integrate with other systems, other HR systems, labor systems, and including we're working on some badging and endorsement stuff for operational components too. So if somebody, you know, their prep list can be uploaded into the into the app, and they can say, the three of us are working, and you two complain about chopping the onions because it always makes you cry. You don't want to do it. So I go, fine, I'll chop the onions. So I prep the onions. I take a photo of the prepped onions finished and I log it to my profile. And the manager signs off that I did the prep, you guys didn't, you're
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: fine with that. But potentially I get either more endorsement or even an extra bonus that goes into who did what parts of the prep list. And so you expand that to checking the bathrooms, cleaning the lobby, doing other things like that. And all of a sudden you've got the ability to motivate and gamify and reward your employees to do not just the public facing stuff but also a lot of the operational stuff in the back, but then divide it in a way that really shows kind of who who did the work and who didn't.
Beck: Hmm. Peter, thinking about tech companies, you know, a lot of our audience are are are or brand or companies that are selling technology in their restaurants and and retail and other hospitality outlets. And I think you have an interesting perspective that that people could learn from, which is, you know, you've been a franchisee and ex an executive responsible for hundreds of restaurants and now a founder building technology for operators. What technology what do technology companies consistently misunderstand about the people actually running restaurants? Because you've been sold to so heavily, so much until you stepped onto this side of the fence. What what what advice could you give to those people that just keep knocking on these doors, blasting emails and and and just let me show you something? You know?
Peter Riggs: Just be just because your tech works doesn't mean we can put it to work. I've had guys I've had guys before that come up to me, right? I j I j I just came up with that. That's how you can you
Beck: Ooh, that's a t shirt. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: can you can make that a an ink tank t-shirt there. The the reality is I don't I don't
Beck: What was the quote again? What what was it one more time?
Peter Riggs: I don't remember. We'll have to read it, we'll have to watch it again. Well
Chad: It's it's recorded then. It's recorded. Yeah.
Beck: I love all right.
Peter Riggs: i I I s I think it was just because their tech works doesn't mean it works for that you can work it. Because the reality is like I've had guys that show me dashboards and they're You'll all you'll be able to see everything here. It's like I don't have a person to put in front of this to tease out what I need from it. I have no doubt that it works, but it's gonna
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Riggs: sit there gathering dust because man, we are just trying to make sandwiches and get people out the door. And that's where I think a lot of the the tech guys are a little too sophisticated when it It comes to the nuts and bolts that it requires to run an actual restaurant. And I think, I think a lot of tech guys would get a lot further with their products if they would spend time in restaurants, in the operations, and say, here's how I think we could tweak our product to work better for what's actually happening here, instead of just
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: saying, Here's a sol here's another hundred dollar a month solution. Because it's like we're already,
Beck: Right.
Peter Riggs: it's restaurants were Thin margins before technology even exist. When we were just running tech Casio cash
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: registers, like it was still thin margins back then. And now we've got to have every every tech platform under the sun. Yeah.
Beck: Yeah. Twenty five bits of SAS running, right? Yeah.
Peter Riggs: And so that's as big a problem for the cost of food, the cost of going out to eat,
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: the cost of labor as anything else. And so it's not that we don't need or want the tech that they have, but it's gotten to a point where it's like they've gotta make it a little bit easier to to execute in a live fire restaurant.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: That is that isn't that does not have a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere managing this for It's that mid-tier stuff. It's that hundred to five hundred locations. And it's the mom and pops that want to get to a place where they're, you know, a franchise. It's how do you help make that happen for people? And
Beck: Yeah.
Peter Riggs: and that's what we need.
Beck: Love it. Chad, last question before we go with rapid fire.
Chad: Similar to Beck's question, is there something you now empathize with with these tech companies now that you are with one?
Peter Riggs: yeah, it's like scary to talk to operators that you know are beleaguered from being assaulted by questions about tech and things like that. That's why I've been that's why a lot of this has just been kind of been built in a little bit of stealth mode.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
Peter Riggs: and quietly because again, like I wanted to work with these guys to learn more about ways that I could fill in gaps in my own not in knowledge and experience, make sure we've covered everything, really build an incredibly functional back end and then offer it f with no no onboarding fees, no contracts, just a monthly, a straight monthly per employee. to make it simple enough because basically I put myself in back in my own shoes and I said, I'm gonna sell this to myself and I am gonna use every answer I've ever had to say no. And when I finish when I finish refuting myself, then I will know that the product is ready to be shopped around to other folks. And so I just kept beating myself up about it until I was like, I can't say no to this anymore.
Beck: That's funny you say that because that was literally my last question before we went to Rapid Fire, which was if you could sit across from Peter Riggs, the franchisee today, and show him wave wave wage, what would that version of you immediately understand about it?
Peter Riggs: all all the bits of it now because I
Beck: Down.
Peter Riggs: I literally used myself in in the most adversarial way I could to say like, look, I've rejected a bunch of people over the last two decades. I'm gonna use everything. I'm gonna be intractable. And I finally just kept going until I was like, I literally can't say no to this anymore. There's just not I've Yeah. So that's
Beck: He's his own drive by shooter.
Peter Riggs: so that's where we're at. And then I was like, now that that's done, I'm ready to go on the Chat GTM podcast.
Chad: Well
Beck: look at that, good plug.
Chad: fun fun project could be taking all of your transcripts from calls with vendors as an operator, training an AI to be that expert
Peter Riggs: Right.
Chad: buyer and that you have to sell through.
Beck: Well it. All right. You're ready for some rapid fire? All
Peter Riggs: Let's do it.
Beck: right. These are off the cuff. If there's anything that gets weird and squiggly, just say pass, but it should be pretty easy. All right. Best piece of advice you ever got from another restaurant operator.
Peter Riggs: We're just making sandwiches. Nobody's gonna die.
Beck: Ooh, worst love it. Worst restaurant shift you can remember.
Peter Riggs: Worst restaurant. I got hit by a car. I was doing deliveries.
Beck: Holy cow.
Peter Riggs: I was doing deliveries back at one of my original restaurants and I was on the way back and a guy I used to do all the deliveries on my Harley and this was down in and in LA and a guy cut across my lane and I s had my leg smashed between my bike and his car, flew over the hood and landed on the sidewalk about sixty feet away. That was the worst shift, I think.
Beck: Yeah, that kind of blows. yeah, I th yeah, I would probably agree. Customer walks in two minutes before closing. What are you thinking?
Peter Riggs: There's another dollar.
Beck: Love it.
Peter Riggs: And another satisfied customer.
Beck: great employees, born that way or developed.
Peter Riggs: Mostly born that way, but can be developed if you show them something and give them a sense of purpose on why they want to achieve it.
Beck: Payment to that. One restaurant metric operators don't pay enough attention to.
Peter Riggs: The customers that just walked by without even without even stepping in. We measure a lot of who ate there and who walked in and walked out or who had problems. But how many people, when somebody says, Hey, do you want to go eat here today, are saying, nah, I don't want to go to that place? That's a number we never talk about. And I think a lot of operators need to answer that question. And if they did, they could figure out a lot more about how to make their restaurants more successful.
Beck: Love it. One thing you'd eliminate from restaurant management forever.
Peter Riggs: that's such a great question. Tips.
Beck: Magic wand. Tips. Ooh. Ooh. Me likey. All right. Twenty years from now, what's one thing about restaurant work you hope we as a society have finally fixed?
Peter Riggs: the ability to treat restaurants as s as the important part of a daily life cycle as they are. We treat them as kind of disposable people at disposable locations, selling now kind of not necessarily good for you food.
Beck: Mm.
Peter Riggs: And the the we can't survive like that. We have to eat multiple times every day. And we yet we treat eating like it's this throwaway burden. And then we wonder why we're getting sick all the time. And so if we could treat the industry with a little bit more respect, it would tr I think it would trickle down through the operations, through the employees, and through the offerings. And it could help us again pay attention to some things that I think have run away from us that have caused the hyper expenses that. that we see around restaurants and make it difficult to to to afford to eat out and therefore afford to ha have a profitable restaurant.
Beck: I'm just gonna say I like you, Peter. I I like the way you think. I think that's awesome.
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's an ideal to go ahead of time and land the plane to make sure we get you out of here on time as well. But but Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. And to our audience and our community, thank you for tuning in and giving us a listener or a watch on on YouTube or wherever you happen to consume your podcasts. You know, Chad and I spent a lot of time talking to founders and tech leaders and people that had that big idea that finally decided to take it to market. And I it's always refreshing when you hear one going that lands, that's gonna nail it. And I really do believe there's something very powerful there. I am curious if breakfast will start coming earlier because that as well. We only talked about closing but not opening. But I I I definitely want to stay tuned to how you and your team do, Peter, as you take this product to market and would love to chime in again in about six months and see it get another measure. Have your have your theories been right? What have you learned along the way and and where have you grown in in some places that you didn't expect? but for everybody, thank you so much for spending time with us. This is the Chad GTM podcast signing off with Peter, Beck, and Chad. And as always, we love to share that thought. Which is, and I think this is what Peter built a system on, which is a it's not, it's a deliberate act of kindness, it's not a random. This is a kindness for your employees to make them want to stay, to reduce your churn, to improve your profits, and do the whole thing you built your whole restaurant for, which is to serve guests, create memorable experiences, and keep people coming back, your employees inside and your guests outside to that building that you call home that you love so much. And so it's Beck Chad and and Peter signing off. We'll see you guys in the next one. Random acts of kindness, sprinkle that stuff everywhere. You never know who state you're gonna make better.
Peter Riggs: Thanks everyone. Thanks for having me.
