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Eric Knott spent a decade as COO of PDQ scaling 40+ stores from Tampa to New York, and he'll be the first to tell you he learned as much from what went wrong as what went right. Now CEO of Kansas City's Tiki Taco, he joined me on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends to talk about the growth discipline he earned the hard way, the founder partnership that keeps him honest, and where AI actually pays off.
📺WATCH AND LEARN📺
👉 Why Tiki opens every restaurant 5-6 days BEFORE the grand opening
👉 How catering went from zero to ~12% of sales in under a year
👉 The "brand protector" model: how Eric actually partners with 3 founders without ego wars
👉 The Tiki Bucks playbook that turns local fundraisers into hundreds of first-time guests
👉 Where Eric lands on all-in-one vs best-of-breed across his 20-piece tech stack (shout outs to Toast, Restaurant365, Incentivo, Bikky, Byte and more)
➕ PLUS Eric and I get into a great back-and-forth on voice + kiosks, whether the "ordering guilt" factor goes away when you have to say your order out loud, and why he runs AI at 80/20 on scheduling.
We also riff on how he uses Claude to turn ~100 restaurant publications a week into one Monday-morning brief.
Eric is one of the sharpest, most genuine operators I have had on the show, and you can tell community is in his DNA. Give this one a watch and let us know what you think.
