Beck: Hey everybody, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, whatever time you happen to be chiming in. It's Michael Beck and Chad Horn, the host and co-host of the Chad GTM podcast, coming to you live on a beautiful, what is this, Wednesday morning? Is that where we're at? I think I
Chad: Yeah. That's it.
Beck: ruined the whole idea of evergreen content by pointing a day at edit, but that's okay. You guys might as well know what. Yeah,
Chad: There's a lot of women face.
Beck: there's a lot of Wednesdays. You can guess which one, and maybe you'll be be right about it. Anyway, so Chad and I are up a little early for what we do in this sense. We're not the early morning. Drive time news show. We're typically filming more in the middle of the day. And this time we woke up a little bit early because we have somebody this is an important dude. He's on the move. You gotta find the time with these moving targets when you can because this guy is on the go. Chad, when last we ran into our guest, we were at the Prosper Forum in Orlando about a month ago. God, I can't believe that much time has passed. When we talked to him, what was the what was the thing you took away from that conversation with David?
Chad: it's not gonna be what you're expecting. I I took away how thoughtful and I guess patient with his answers and considered he how he spoke around everything we talked about. It was it wasn't the top the substance, it was the manner. this is a guy who you know is very, very well regarded in our industry and and talking to him every time it shows why. He's a good guy,
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: he's thoughtful and Brilliant in what he does. So I'm
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: excited to talk to him again.
Beck: Yeah, I was talking to Elliswin Stanley when we were in Costa Rica and all he had to say was great things about about David. So yeah. Yeah. And I I think
Chad: Everybody, literally everyone. It's freaky.
Beck: I think the word patience i is something that's demonstrated when he has to talk to me. Like I see the patience working.
Chad: Ha ha.
Beck: So all right, well let me do our read in and we'll get going here. and so everybody the Last time we joined David Cant to, we were sitting together at the Prosper Forum talking about something that I have a lot of respect for, which is having the courage to look at what you're already have or if you've already built and ask whether you'd build it the same way today. And for David and Craftable, the answer was no. They went back to a blank sheet of paper and started rebuilding around the operator using AI automation, forecasting, and better data to move restaurant technology from simply telling you what happened to telling you understand. What to do next. But something else came through in that conversation. David talked about connecting managers emotionally to margins, developing future leaders, and using technology to give operators more understanding and more control over the business they're responsible for. So today we're picking up that conversation again, but from the other side of Prosper. So for David, we want to know what did David hear? You know. what surprised him? What challenged his thinking? And after spending time with the operators and emerging leaders, this this event was built around what does he believe our industry needs to do differently? David Cantu, CEO of Craftwell and co-founder of Hot Sudes, welcome to the Chat GTM podcast.
Chad: Bring him up.
Beck: I think we need some fanfare and some music for for these moments. Morning, David.
David: Good morning. Good to see you both. Thanks for coming,
Beck: Is it?
David: w waking up early for me.
Beck: For you, my man, anytime. And and and the the truth is is when Chad just talked, I don't know if you heard of some when we were when you're off screen, but the the when Chad mentioned your patient approach, I think that's one of the things I love about how you present yourself. You have this very I said the words earlier, just buttery approach to it. It just feel it feels good to talk to you. You know, that I feel like why when I talk to you, I feel like I'm being heard. And I feel like you take a moment to regard what was asked of you and then you actually process it and and give a an answer that you've put thought into. And I see that in every action you have. And I just want to give you that nod. I think that's an important quality in a leader and I you definitely exemplify that.
David: Thank you, Beck. I appreciate that. Thank you, Chad.
Beck: All day. All day. so so David, let's just let's just get started. now that you've had some distance from Prosper Forum, what's what conversation or ideas followed you home?
David: You know, it's with the accelerator and and the what I think about is the journey of of leadership. And in that journey of how, you know, you start your career and how you evolve and seeing leaders like Chip Wade or or you know, Ray from TJI Fridays, I
Beck: Yeah.
David: mean, I've known these guys for a long time, met them long ago and them sharing their stories and when people with like Wally Dulan like back in the day where it just it it takes me back to see how these leaders have evolved and how well regarded and well respected they are and I
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: I see the attention that the audience has for really their thirst of knowledge and learning. And you know, I think i with this one and I think I've shared this before Dave Job and Luke figured this out, they allowed it to be okay to just be real on stage, be vulnerable.
Beck: Yeah.
David: And it's really unique because at the other conferences it it seems there's more stage presence and more, you know, I would say thought on their brand rather than the human side of like who these leaders are, not just about their brand. So
Beck: Yeah.
David: it's it it it's I'm going to my first accelerator you know, coming up here and I'm actually leading a discussion in that which I love. I mean I love teaching, learning. and you know, I just I'm excited about the evolution of what I'm learning more and more about back office. I mean for twenty years I was immersed
Beck: You're still learning?
David: always learning. I mean I mean I go to
Beck: Like you wrote the book on some of this stuff.
David: Beck, I go to sleep on like the workflow of like envisioning a manager in a you know, cooler or freezer or the things that they do or driving to work on, you know, what is it their day to day to look like and how do we just like remove some of the the angst of this monotonous manual stuff so they could just jump in and develop people and create gress great guest experiences. Cause I was I was allotted that with some of the brands I started with. You know, we weren't as worried about the administrative stuff. We had a We had we had an admin in the office in the restaurant to where we just could focus on the experience. And it was beautiful. And it's just not
Beck: Execute.
David: that way today. There's a lot of there's a lot of manual stuff. And what I've realized is a lot of executives are disconnected to what that is. And I always go back to the example of undercover boss. You see
Beck: Hmm.
David: founders or CEOs and they're on the front line and they're just like in disbelief of like you have
Beck: How did we get here? Yeah. Yeah. In fact,
David: Exactly. Yeah.
Beck: it's funny you mentioned that we were I was we were wrapping up the edits last night for the Prosper videos and all the interviews we did. And one of them that stood out was Steven Sturm, who's the chief operations officer of Firebirds Wood Fire Grill. And he was talking about how during COVID they had to, you know, rift some people or or you know release them for a while. And the a lot of the C suite and the executive team went to the restaurants to work in the kitchen. Things kind of worked themselves out after that happened. They found better processes, better ways, because they're boots on the ground realizing what their people were going through. You
David: Yeah.
Beck: know? well, fantastic. So so Chad, what do you what do you got here on this?
Chad: I want to start with a a top prosper takeaway. So what's an idea
Beck: Ooh.
Chad: that crystallized, right? To the point where as soon as you got back, that's something you just had to put into.
David: Ooh, good question, Chad.
Beck: He always has the good ones.
David: That's You know, I I I would say w 'cause we are all in our own bubble in our offices and and we don't get out and socialize as much. I would say the power of connection. I created a list of leaders that I didn't get a chance to connect with there. And and I'm taking the time now, you know, you you get that first email and that second email and then you're like, wow, they don't even really want to respond, but they're just busy, just like happens to me all the time to where I'm gonna get to that email and it just you forget about it.
Chad: Yeah.
David: But
Beck: Yeah.
David: the power of connection and you know just you know being able to have a conversation about business, about life with some of these leaders. I've taken more a stronger approach to this outward connection. Not to sell, but to just stay networked and to learn, you know, what they're seeing, what they're doing. So it's just a I I love it's weird 'cause I'm I feel like an introvert, extrovert. You know, the 'cause these things these things zap me when you're there and there's so much commotion
Beck: Yes. Yes.
David: that I feel just depleted coming out of it. But Those personal one-to-one connections where you actually have time, those are the things that I value most. So if there's anything, I would say, you know, the outreach and having discussions with customers as well as people that are not customers that I've I've known for a long time that were once upon a time customers.
Chad: I think there's
Beck: You know
Chad: a technical term for introvert extrovert and like combined in different contexts. And I forget the name of it, but I'm gonna look it up and then we'll put it in the comments. I don't know what the word is, but it it's it's got a word.
Beck: I know what you're talking about too. I think I'm one of those. I call I also call it social for pay. so I was talking to I think it was a restaurant leadership conference. I was sitting with Laura Wilbur from Dinova, and we were talking or lead, where we're we're actually was the cause we're talking about. And it seems that a lot of the shows, and this isn't a ding on them, have people that aren't really entering the market. They're more in the mid part of their journey, they're more senior. You don't see a lot of youthful. energy at these events that are coming out of the K out out of out of the pipe. And so, you know, at Prosper, you talked about it being a place where established executives can connect with future leaders. And I think among many of the shows out there, Prosper represents that well because you're seeing the the next crop, right? Did you meet anyone there this year that reminded you of an earlier version of yourself?
David: From the accelerator program, I did not,
Beck: Okay.
David: specifically. from from the vendor side, you know, I I I would say that the yeah and I'm always impressed with Zach Oates. he's very dialed in and and very just authentic. He is.
Beck: He's so damn charismatic too. Sorry, Zach, but you you just you shine, man, if you're watching. Yeah.
Chad: Second call out in two consecutive interviews now.
Beck: I know last episode too, another Zakos call out, you've been Zacked.
David: He he look it's just he and I talk about business and we there were some things that we were talking about just on on engagement and there's some things he put into practice. So I just appreciate how he approaches business, his people, his customers. It's authentic. It's not
Beck: Yeah.
David: and yes, he has a lot of charisma. He he he sells himself and his business really well, but it's authentic. It's not it's not from a point of I just want another customer.
Beck: No, it is manufactured. everything from the bolo tie he worse to the events. Like this guy just he's
David: Yeah.
Beck: got an outfit for everything too. Anyways, but I I I I agree. He's such a fantastic person. Just fun to watch him do his thing. Chad?
Chad: well, you know, we want to talk a little bit about back office because one of the themes that came out of Prosper with the always a theme of Prosper is leading people and pe leading people through change and and and trial and and the the friction that inevitably enters everyone's role. So talk about that, right? You as a leader of a back office platform, how you seek to remove friction from people's lives.
David: You know, a a lot of this is you have to think about it's funny, I just created an entire playbook for implementation and onboarding and where the friction points are and
Beck: Mm.
David: how do we ensure that, you know, we have the right brand that understands what's needed. you know, just 'cause it's the human side. I mean, that's having perspective. of what's needed in order for it to be successful. I I read a a a that eighty percent of back office deployments fail and most people that have back office
Beck: Eighty percent?
David: Yes, eighty percent. and this is more like enterprise wide integrations because a failure point is do I get a return on investment? And a lot of people can't attribute to say, Yes, I get a return on investment from this. Yeah.
Beck: So in that eighty percent though it it rolled but might not have been effective. Okay, okay.
David: Correct. Now, the truth is most there's a lot of back office installations that are in place that there is this angst of I don't know if I want to replace it and go through that pain of just another felt implementation.
Beck: Yes. Yes.
David: It's just more of the same. And there's really a a lot of different sides on there's best practices that need to be put in place. There's expectations. it requires discipline and then th there's incentives, like how do I incentivize the right behavior? Because there there is Th there is the n necessity day to day, week to week, month to month in order to have clean data, in order to track and log things effectively, in order to have audits on portioning and you know, being able to do that. So i there's a lot of muscle that needs to be built there and if there's not buying at the front line, you're you're gonna fail.
Beck: Yeah.
David: And unfortunately there's the economic buyer versus, you know, the internal champion, the person sitting on the front lines
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: That they don't understand what the economic buyer is buying necessarily and the why behind that, other than hey, we want to improve food cost. This isn't about food cost. This is about running a healthy business with a healthy bottom line. You know, the what we see in the industry, you know, profitability is it's all controllable. That's why they call it controllables.
Beck: Right.
David: We're just not we're just not conditioning them to control it. this goes back to the emotionally connected. How do you get your team emotionally connected to the company's goals and objectives? Are your goals and objectives to just revenue?
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: Or is it year over year store level Ibita, Slibida? Is it that's that's the successful restaurant because Most brands, and and I've known this from analytics, you go to say it's that team that has the highest sales is the best. And the reality, they're the ones that have the most leakage, because
Beck: Mm.
David: sales cures all. I can overlook waste, I can overlook these things, and they do. Now, do they have the same percentage of margins? It's the one that is middle of the pack that has the highest margins of looking at why do they do a better job? Better leadership, higher retention, guess repeating back again and again. They may not have the best location, but they know how to make money. And
Beck: Yeah.
David: when you can incentivize that behavior versus percentage of food costs, which they'll game it. And that's the whole concern about padding inventory. It happens. It's it's it's when the right incentives and things are not put into place when it comes to that.
Beck: So so David, you mentioned a little bit of this just now, that angst, that feeling of reticence that, you know, we know we're hurting, but we remember the fresh hell or maybe dull fresh hell of of of implementation, right? And and we those that have been around know it's been a lift, right? We're talking to set up an item master to configure your units of measure, costing units, all this other fun stuff. Not a couple of weeks, not a couple of months. They're talking in like back in the day, it was a year and some change to get everything mapped and done. And I think that's kind of something that's residual in the memories of people that's put this thing in. How are you guys doing this different to make it faster? Because really let's be real, Blue Ocean doesn't exist in in back office. Right? What's the thing
David: Yeah. Correct.
Beck: that's gonna motivate people with what Craftable's done different? That's gonna say, you know what, that's not so painful. They've got it figured out. I don't have to have a second or third job to support and implement this thing.
David: E everybody needs a specific role and accountability and an implementation and rollout on both sides. And if they don't have the resources on their sides, there's plenty of services out there. Five and five, breakbread. There's a multitude of them that have project management that can make sure that everybody's meeting the expectations. For us, we we set from the get go An executive sponsor on both sides to talk through this is what's expected from you, this is what's expected from our team. When we go off the rails and we have all the tools to say we're starting to go off the rails, it's an executive call to where we can set accountability amongst our teams in partnership when a timeline's not met or things that don't occur. And it has to be very regimented in that manner back. It has to be very well spelled out long before the signature is created that we are going. It it does. And and
Beck: Yeah, that sequence of events, who owns what. Yeah.
David: you the expectation of how this is a bit of a journey and what you're ultimately trying to get to. What we're really focused on is if you really want to save money, you just get down to the 15 to 20. Highest revenue generating items. Items, food,
Beck: Yep.
David: labor, center the plate, your well, alcohol, and just do the audits and get to an actual versus theoretical. These are the ones that are driving 80% of the revenue. That is where the loss is, and it's not a lot of people think it's theft. It's portion control. There is not a condition to where in the restaurants that I ran, bartender. Go ahead, let's do a pour test right before the shift. On the line during the middle of a just a rush, are they pinching two ounces when it needs to be one ounce, or are they scooping a 12-ounce ladle where it was supposed to be an eight-ounce ladle? Are you figuring these things out when managers and chefs are really thinking of we're all leakage occurs, is a waste tracking log there, is there a bucket to say, we're busy, put everything in the waste bucket and then we'll account for it.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: I mean there's just gotta be standards and you know it's it's us, it's our responsibility to teach these best practices. and educate them on what's needed and make sure that we have a champion that is going to drive that because I'd love to say, let us hold everybody accountable for your own business.
Beck: Right.
David: That that doesn't go well from a vendor standpoint.
Beck: Let me ask the question a slightly different way. What's changed in the last ten years on the technology that enables craftable to go faster?
David: There look, you you we all know that there's there's modern methods now with AI. To be able to pull clean data, to be able to know, you know, we're we know what's being purchased, we know a recipe connected to a POS button to an item to where we can ensure that from the get-go that they're not just doing a dump of everything. from their, you know, catalogs or that what they ordered from the past and we can very get it down clean what was ordered in the past thirty days, everything else is garbage. We can map anywhere between. I would say the the mapping exercise then is usually 30 to 90 days of be prepared for 30 to 90 days. This isn't this isn't just a a task.
Beck: Right.
David: This is about connecting the dots. Once you've got
Beck: Foundation.
David: the dots in those 90 days on that mapping, really understanding, you know, what you're ordering, how you inventory it, how you portion it, when you get those units of measure down. Ninety days they're on this path to where there's not these large variances and they under understand where the leakage is occurring. So that is the number one pain point on that mapping exercise that occurs. There's
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
David: a lot of manual process today. We we were with a big brand that they take an invoice, they feed it through a fax machine, and yeah, and then
Beck: Like a real fax machine? They still have those?
David: Yeah, they do. And and then and then they take that and they manually type in the invoice. So AP receives it. And I mean this is a these are th there's a lot of brands out there like this, Beck. It's it's crazy.
Beck: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: And today it's just a here's a snapshot, thirty seconds, pack size, price change, substitutes, immediately captures it, it tells you what your margin change is. I mean you just you automate the process, you simplify it, you take a load off. That's the difference. There's modern technology today. And you know, I would hate I I would don't want to say everything is AI specific. It's it's it's
Beck: That's too easy. It's like Gozempic. Yeah.
David: really it's really it's really about the workflow and really thinking it through of like what is the modern technology that can be leveraged to take away the manual processes in that pain. And I'm saying from every aspect, from the way that they order. So the way that they receive, to what to the way they stack their shelves, to the way they w you know, track their their waste and log it, to the portioning and auditing and every aspect of that. We refine, review, refine, set best practice, set playbooks, communicate it, drill it in. And just like a drill sergeant to where, you know, just follow the process, follow the process. You're not following the process. You're not gonna get an ROI. The technology today can start to tell you when you're off track and has breadcrumbs of here's an audit log. We used to have to do that and share it with our customers during a business review and here's what we found out. I mean we found out that this was crazy. Only 40% of brands were actually using the ordering specifically. And I'm like, how is that possible? How is it?
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: Just going off their gut or pars or what?
David: Well no they they many of them it's okay to just call And leave a voicemail, or talk to the rep, or send an email, or send a text message. This is like the biggest gap that you see in back office. And now the person receiving it has no idea what was ordered. They just blindly receive it. Now it may be on a clipboard. Now they're not gonna go pull that clipboard and review that. But if it's in the tech to be able to say yes, yes, yes, yes. quality check, temperature. Hey, why do I have three cases I own only ordered two? Oops, I'm sorry, let me put that back. I accidentally padded a case of fillets that was an extra four hundred and eighty dollars.
Beck: Matters.
David: That I don't know, does it have a commission to it?
Beck: Right. And and that's a perishable good too. That if you have too much you're not gonna be able to sell it in time potentially, right?
David: It exactly. I I so two years ago, going through this entire process, in the restaurant I I partnered, you know, I with I was checking it in and these vendors were like, What are you doing? I said, I'm checking in the items. And they're like, nobody ever does that. And I w found extra after extra after extra what was ordered. And it was just like, why do they do that? And I'm like, well, there is a commission. And not to say that all vendors do that, but look, let's
Beck: Sure.
David: face it, if I can sell more items and nobody's really checking the process,
Beck: Why not?
David: could I make a little extra money? I mean, when you think about what leads to the waste, there was a study done, was it David Bloom from a professor, that 10% of what is ordered never never hits the plate. Ten percent. So a million dollars in purchases, a hundred thousand dollars never gets the plate.
Beck: Hundred thousand dollars. Wow.
David: It just goes from like that over ordering because there's not a perfect system. It's not
Beck: And this isn't about yield. This is just what doesn't even make it.
David: correct. It's just it it there's there's it's the waste that occurs. It's it's spoilage that naturally happens of like, ooh, I order too much. And why did I order too much? Well
Beck: Hmm. The bus and nuns is coming.
David: Yeah, it's well it's because I'm we're we're using PARS today. Like are you kidding me? Like
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
David: PARs? Who uses PARS today? Everybody. Why? We have access to real time data. It shouldn't I mean it it's a it's just a it's a faulted system. Like it's in not to say that other people haven't tried to solve for it, but the technology today, design, you know the ease of creating a workflow based on a brand standard is much different than it was two, three, four, five years ago. If you don't have a modern platform to be able to build with speed and efficiency, you know, it was like, well, we do this in our workflow. Okay, it'll we can have it in two quarters, and that'll be eighty-five thousand dollars in development fees. We're gonna have to scope it, we're gonna have the eng engineers, we're gonna have to QA it. we'll have design behind it and you know we we went through this with our back office and it was painful for the customer and for us. We didn't want to do this. Today, building out something like we build it out within weeks to say, yeah, we can solve for that. Let us go
Beck: Love it. Love it.
David: to let us go to work. You know, we were producing sixty thousand lines of code a month. Now today we're producing almost a million lines of code a month. And I'm not saying that
Beck: Jesus.
David: just to say we're building for the sake of just throwing code out there. This isn't vibe coding. This is using modern tech and having the the right people in place it with a heavy QA team, because when you're building fast, you need a QA team to ensure because nobody wants glitches or errors or issues because they don't have time for that. It's gonna
Beck: Yeah.
David: be right.
Beck: No sense even going fast if it makes everybody go slow when they get it. No. Chad?
Chad: David, one of the most popular talks at Prosper was gentlemen speaking on the macro environment, you know, all of the things and all of the mostly challenges. so when you think about the macro environment, you know, whether general trends or shocks to the system, how do you view your responsibility at craftable versus what the restaurant's responsibility is to make sure those things in the macro ultimately translate to smart restaurants?
David: So when you think about macro chat, are you talking about just the macro environment? Yeah.
Chad: Economy, supply chain, geopolitical.
David: It look, I I think whether we're whether we're in a a down economy or we're a booming economy, there's money left on the table. And you should you should always be reviewing your practices, your tech, your adoption and use of tech. I mean, I I don't know if people do tech audits at their brands, but they should. They should say, Hey partner, give me an audit on usage. down to everything and tell us what we're not doing. 'cause it really for us, we can't force them to use the software. Now they can set accountability in place, but if they ha they don't have the data to surface to say, I didn't realize 40% were used not using the proper ordering. you know, I didn't realize that they were buying chicken from another vendor. you know, nobody caught that. That they're using the substitute when they actually have the actual skew. That is our brand standard. We only use the substitute when it's not available. And that store is degrading the experience of the customer that's saying that consistency's not there. There's just things that naturally happen. But you know, I I just the problem that I think we need to solve in tech is adoption. Like adoption, adoption, adoption. I mean I'm I was maniacal ab about it at hot schedules. We had over two hundred million logins a month. I mean that thing was used consistently down to every employee, I wanna see who I'm working with today, request to shift off, trade a shift, pick up a shift, I wanna message my manager, you know, with managers, I want to log a book log book note, I need to get a task, who do I need to approve, or shift trade. I'm taking the same approach with inventory of what do I need to review. Now, not that it this one's a little bit different because we just want them to get a pre-read prior to shift and we want them to get their butts in a shift and at on the line or in in
Beck: Yep.
David: the front of the house and not analysis paralysis with a bunch of You know, spreadsheets or reports or dashboards. Those are the things we're just like, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna give them two or three things to focus on and an insight. It's this server that I need to coach on these things, or it's this leakage that I need to focus on this variance. or you know, there's a multitude of things that we really look at. Where's all the blind spots? Cause you
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: walk on a shift and it's like Groundhog Day. You get into your pre-shift, you give the rah-rack, go take care the guest.
Beck: Yeah.
David: But you don't understand everything that's leaking. There's a thousand ways to lose money in this business, and we we're maniacal about finding out where that is and how do we surface it so they can take actionability. And we're even being thoughtful about here are the choices of actionability. That we start to review to say, okay, they took this action. Did it change a trend line? Do we start to see a trend line changing and do we surface it? Hey, do more of that to where it starts to incentivize the right behaviors. And you know, there's a lot of learnings here with the data and we've done every
Beck: Yeah.
David: aspect. It's very much like toast. Toast love integrating with their their point of sell. Because TOS got the data right, and for us to be able to get good data in and really think about it the same way on, you know, air vendor management, invoice receiving recipes, it just allowed us to really think of what's the data set, what are the kernels, what are the insights that we can draw that are meaningful and that are digestible for an operations or a chef.
Beck: So so David, you were kind of hinting at this a little bit and I I'd love to understand a little more of this. So over the last, I don't know, ten years or so, or just back office historically, has been about reports, dashboards, and a look back. It's how we ran how we ran the business, right?
David: The rearview mirror. Yeah.
Beck: And tell tell me in the audience a little bit more about the prescriptive nature. Of how things have changed and and how we interact with back office. You talked a little bit of the opportunities coaching where we focus. Tell us
David: Yeah.
Beck: tell me a little bit about how Craftable is prescriptive on the activities and things that will impact the business in real time.
David: So yes, back office, it's a tool set. It's got an analytics wrapped around it or a BI tool and it's a it's a rear view mirror. And the way I look at craftable, it's a it's a GPS. And you know, if you think the most important thing for any location is truly to understand what do I need to do, how much do I need to prep. How many people do I need to schedule to come in at the right time to reduce waste? What do I need to order? How much do I need to prep? Those are the questions that I would ask. And if you so with this, we are we're launching at the end of this month, and we've been working on this, and this is for me the heart of everything. A sales forecast trend that they trust and believe in and they can understand how it's derived. That leads to suggestive ordering, prep and production, as well as the staff planning. How many people do I need? With this, the forward looking for this is this this is a four-model probabilistic machine learning that is pinging the restaurant, and these four models are competing with each other. And what we're doing is constantly finding out this is what we forecasted, this is what's happening, this is what we forecast, this is what's happening, to where we start to read the trends to where it's pulling in the weather weather patterns, it's pulling in, you know, specific to geo, whether I'm in an urban area or rural area, how much am I gonna shift that geo out to pull this conference center in, pull this stadium in, pull this movie theater in. And I'm going to take all of the events that have happened to that. I'm gonna take it back to date and timing, and I'm gonna constantly show you that, you know, hey, weather is now immin imminent in three days. We're going to adjust your dynamic order and we're gonna pare it down a little bit, and we're gonna start to tell you to start to reduce staff on the patio, completely take that out at a at a takeout person because takeout's gonna gonna increase. So it's just always that future facing what's happening because you have to know what to order. I only need certain amount of things on days on hand for certain items with certain shelf life. And I know exactly what is on average ordered based on that point of sell input
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: historically on a Wednesday afternoon versus a Friday evening.
Beck: Right. It was like six weeks trailing, right? Or some version of that.
David: So I mean it's with this, it it's if you really think about that, it's it's it's just this consistency of where are we at, where we going, where we at, where are we going. When you have all of the data set, and look, we have access to real-time data today. You know, the technology should be able to keep up and predict with accuracy. So we we in the data that we have, the average is ninety-six percent. Now some people claim ninety-nine percent. I mean, look, that that may happen if you have like ten SKUs. And it's easy and but you know the the the devil's in the details and we work with some very complex restaurants. a high amount of SKUs on the alcohol as well as on on the food side. So
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: we're really thinking through of very simple to very complex of how do you help support them to where they can trust the forecast? Ninety-six percent accuracy on average that we're seeing on the the Sug suggestive ordering, we're at 92% accuracy on average. On the prep and production, 91%. Now, we can get better. This is just the models and running and it's adjusting and it's learning. And that's the beauty, you know, when you build this out, it's just a it's it's all knobs from here.
Beck: Yeah.
David: We can start to refine, tune, share the data, work with our customers, and when we get this automated to where we the forecast is done done and known, the staffing plan is built, and we put the right people in the right place because we know their performance on their attachment rates, their guest experience, you you create a this beautiful system that really sets you up for success. And maybe it's 80% right in some things or 95% right. It at least does a lot of the heavy lifting. From there, it's just
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: taking that intelligence and then using the knowledge of the boots on the ground that can say, okay, got me there a little bit, but here's what I know that it doesn't know that I'm going to adjust. But we're also measuring
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: that to where Show us that you know what you know because we're gonna tell you what you should be doing, and then we can start to pinpoint saying this person thinks they know what they know, but they're not following the intelligence. So
Beck: Data says not so much. Yeah.
David: you can really start to determine, or this person knows something, what's wrong with the model? How do we dig in? Because
Beck: Hm.
David: our engineers are looking at all of this and saying, Wow, we're getting this wrong in this location. Let's go do some research. That's the wild curiosity of like why what are we getting wrong? we didn't realize that. Okay, let's go build that into the model. So from there it's just it's it's all tuning from And when you find that, because that no business is created equal and no location is created equal. They have a nuance of things, you know, it could be tenure of staff, it could be location that, you know, I've I'm the hottest location in the area, but three openings within, you know, ninety days of other hot concepts are gonna steal some of my thunder, you know,
Beck: Yeah.
David: those are the things that the intelligence doesn't know.
Beck: Yeah. Or even the internal layout of the restaurant storage locations, how these set up their inventory, everything has its own variation in there too. Ch Yeah.
David: Everything. Yeah.
Beck: Chad?
Chad: David, you painted a picture of how a back office platform should run. But I'm wondering when you're sitting across from a restaurant executive team, some enterprise group, and they've sunk millions in into this current tech system and with a bunch of debt, and there's bolted on modules, and that's their current state. What's the journey they've got to go through psychologically,
David: Okay.
Chad: emotionally, processed by to go from that? to be willing to take that first step and start a blank sheet of paper.
David: That question, Chad, is I I would say that there's a there's been a lot of tests and deployments and there's a lot of excitement around these third party LLMs. you know, and yes they can crunch numbers, but they're not designed for a restaurant, you know, brand. You don't understand as far as the APIs, is the data right, where is it coming from, and how am I gonna deliver the insights and information? There is a high level of protection from the GMs and the managers. I've noticed that this is noise for them. And I'm thinking, like, as a restaurateur and an operator to say, this is not noise. I've run I don't know how many shifts over 17 years. These are blind spots that I had and didn't realize that it's like gold nuggets of like they're
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: there. Pick up. Know
Beck: Signal.
David: it, understand it. That that is I I don't know what you know, all the greatness of all these LLMs, they there's a lot of disruption in the market with tech and a lot of them fear and there's this notion that, hey, we're gonna all build ourselves. We don't need to d we don't need to to do this. But the live fooding thing doesn't work. There's not a level of stability. There's a lot of tech debt that is drawn. These restaurant brands need to be good at being, you know, serving guests not building tech. And y there's some smart people out there that are gonna sink a lot of money into this
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: and they're gonna realize that they made a mistake a year or two years down the line and they're gonna wanna hand it over to an expert. you know th I'm not sure there's been modern tech truly deployed, Chad, in this mid-market enterprise. There's been a lot of tech that has AI and wrappers and their own instance of a you know this AI assistant bringing in these small data sets we're looking I mean this is we do have the cells forecasting a lot of them have it we have the granularity of like the attachment rates the items we have the recipes We have the vendor catalogs with all the pricings, the substitutes, the pack size changes. We have the inventory on hand, knowing how long that inventory on hand sits, you know, the the shelf life, we have you know, void comp data, we know everything coming in the door from a receipt to a PO, you know, and and who did it, with the date and everything else. We know the kilowatt usage, the you know, we the phone usage. We know everything to where We can start to surface a change, a trend, and we can expose some things that shouldn't be occurring. And I mean, we've already, you know, showed that to where there's these highly suspicious activities that happen with voids and comps that surface things of like, I know what they're doing.
Beck: Right.
David: I mean it's pretty it's pretty incredible and like the data set will it will continue to scale and grow because the next thing is you know the reservation systems, tying that to a server, getting that guest feedback to say, here's what broke down, here's what you need to change in in your your procedures on your cooking temps.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: so I I would say there's there's a for us, we're maniacal about it, we're centered around it. We built the platform, the architecture. We've got all of the plumbing into all of the point of cell, the ERP, the the BEI. We have all the APIs to say, okay, take that data, drop it into your own data lake, go, you know, go to town because you have a broader data set that
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: you'll compare and contrast against. And I I don't wanna be that broad data set, I wanna just be there for the operations, the front line. They're the ones that we wanna empower. That's
Beck: Yeah.
David: we're powering them with the right information that they trust so they can do the good work and that hopefully they can make a good living. I mean I'm really there's some other things that we want to do because I I it's unfortunate when I when I was running restaurants, I was living paycheck to paycheck. And I still believe that many of these managers and chefs, they're living paycheck to paycheck. They
Beck: Yeah, they bought themselves a job, right?
David: They have and look, they're they put in the hard work. They they work the extra hours when somebody doesn't show up. I'm not sure they're really compensated for all of that. They're w they're putting the extra hours. I'm not sure they have a fighting chance to, you know, get a share of the pie when margins are so low. I mean if forty
Beck: Yeah.
David: two percent weren't profitable last year, the median margins are two point, you know, eight to four percent. Well what's their slice of the pie? I mean if if It's I don't know, three percent of two point eight percent? I mean
Beck: Yeah.
David: where what's in it for them, you know? That's that's
Beck: Yeah.
David: where I I think there's certain things that, you know, I'm not willing to expose what exact but I wanna get there to where we we have a we have a path to get them emotionally connected.
Beck: Well, David, one the things that stood out when we when we were talking and and I've done back office for a while at a couple of different companies. And the one thing that I I we never tracked, I thought was so brilliant about what you guys are doing are the recurring invoices, the electrical, the water consumption, things like that that are just the bills you get used to that probably you can look at and and recover money. I think that's so smart to give a complete picture to the business of all the costs that are happening. And then understanding are we leaving the lights on at night? Are we leaving the power the fryers powered up? Are we are we not doing the thing or or is the water l running? Do we have a leak? You know, there's so many things that if it it it's it's the minutiae. You said it before, there's a there's a there's a th a million ways that you can lose money. It's almost like there's a movie called A million ways to die in the west. It's a million ways to die in the rest. That if you don't catch all these things that are gonna eat away at your margins, you're gonna lose. You're gonna lose.
David: Yeah.
Beck: And so yeah, having something as an encompassing tool like this that looks at every element of what's going out the door from a cost perspective and a people perspective tells you where you're gonna get your money back. And that's why back office is so powerful if it's done right. It's not it shouldn't be this tool that you report to going, god, I gotta go in there and enter my inventory. It's where can I save my money? Where's my next opportunity? Right. I know we have to land the plane here because we we're a little bit on time today. but I know that you shared with us you're heading off to the FS Tech show coming up. And we can definitely come c continue the conversation over there, but you're on the road, right? And when when an executive's on the road, that's called opportunity cost. Because when you're not at the office or where you do your regular work, that means you're doing something else that may be detracting from it. So there better be a damn good reason. What's taking into FS Tech this year?
David: You know, I originally wasn't gonna go to FS Tech and and I I have a a really important customer of ours that I'm meeting with in in on Wednesday in Denver that was set long ago. And you know, our office is in Dallas, you know, I'm I'm kind of if I would have thought about it sooner, we should have been there. I've been so fixated on on the rebuild of Craftable. That I want us to put our best foot forward in showing everything that we have, not just partially there. These shows are a massive investment. and and I would say that there's there's always the you know the the question as a CEO, w conversing with my CFO of we want to spend this much money, we want to send these people and here's what I think we're gonna get in the leads and It's this whole game that, you know, we have to play and then when we get there, things have changed and people don't really want to be sold to. They just want to network and have conversations. But several of them are looking at FSTech. They are looking, you know, at what are we going to potentially deploy or displace or learn at this conference? And you know, I will definitely present there next year and we will have the full stack. and you know, we will be able to put our best foot forward. I wanna see like what else is out there, what are people doing? I went to the NRA show, I went to the high tech show, you know, I saw a lot of AI. I mean it was overused and I took my my CTO, co founder Who is just brilliant and we went by and we talked to different booths and we really learned that this is not really authentic. It's just
Beck: Yeah.
David: a marketing ploy. I wanna see if there's more of the same. Or I wanna see if there's some real substance there. I wanna
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: understand. I'm not really there to I'm there to learn. I don't know if I don't really follow competition. 'Cause I'm so focused on like what are we doing and how are we gonna serve
Beck: Yeah.
David: our customers best? How are we gonna take the friction out of our own team supporting our customer too? 'Cause a lot of people don't look about d design on how are we gonna simplify the implementation so our team's not doing all the manual work or We're empowering the customer to make changes and not having to call us and get on a call to where we can say, no, no, you have the control, you have the tools. So we've taken a different approach from that, but you know, for this, it's a learning. It's a good time to network. I mean, I've worked with a lot of IT leaders over twenty-five years. so I I just love like reconnecting with people that I haven't seen in ages 'cause I haven't been to a lot of IT conferences over over the past six years. So
Beck: Wow. Well, I think it's time to officially land the plane, but we always do that with a quick rapid fire just to wrap this up and let people know about how you think about some things. So really super quick, you ready? He's like, I don't know what you're gonna ask me back. I'm never ready for you. All right. Build it or buy it.
David: Build it.
Beck: AI assistant or agent.
David: Agent.
Beck: Food cost or labor cost, which keeps you up at night more.
David: Phew. Margins.
Beck: That's bold. Okay. When restaurant metric op operators don't pay enough attention to.
David: I would say at the store level, store level Ibida.
Beck: Mm.
David: They don't know it. They just don't know it. They know their food cost and labor cost, but what is their overall profitability? And how is it measured? And how are they measuring that success quarter over quarter or year over year? Or, you know, that that 'cause that's the measure of success. Now Don't get me wrong, there's other very important metrics like guest experience, employee experience. I mean those are two key because when those are right. Sales is who cares about sales.
Beck: You nail it. Yeah. Yeah. one restaurant tech you think is overhyped. And you have to say names, you can be generic.
David: Restaurant tech that's over hyped. AI.
Beck: yeah. Well you can it both things can be true, right? what do you know about leadership today that you wish you knew at twenty five?
David: Some people want to be in a role for the sake of saying that I've reached this role.
Beck: Yeah.
David: there's a great responsibility that comes with it. You know, I have a family, I have children, but I have team members that count on me every day, leaders that count on me every day. Every decision I make. It has a balance of how's this going to impact the employees? How's this going to impact the customer? How's this going to impact my investors? And I really try and teach them to make those balanced decisions. Because when they're out of balance, it it really creates a col an unfavorable culture.
Beck: Mm.
David: don't chase the title. is what I would say. Don't
Beck: That's smart. No.
David: chase the title. For me it was never about title. It was always about serving. It was always about figuring things out. I'm fair very fortunate to be in the positions that I've been. It wasn't because I was chasing that. I was chasing, you know, the the pain that I had on on from the people on the other side of trying
Beck: Yeah.
David: to figure out and solve for them. And for me what like the satisfaction was did we do a good job today? And it's that way every day. Did we do a good job today?
Beck: Getting right with your why. Right. Yeah.
David: It is, yeah.
Beck: All right. Finish the sentence. The future of restaurant operations is. Ooh.
David: Profitable.
Beck: I you can't beat that. You know what's funny? When you were talking earlier, it occurred to me that if when we walk when we walked through trade shows five years ago, seven years ago, every booth had kind of the same value prop at the very top, that little number that they have up. Back three percent on your food and labor, three percent on your food and labor. Every single booth had the same exact value prop and then the thing they happened to do that gave you money back on that controllable. I think it's really interesting that they don't have any value prop in the corner of the booth saying what they're giving back to you. It just says AI. Right, not it's gonna give you back. It just says AI is the stamp. It's not what it gives you. It's just we have AI.
David: Yeah.
Beck: And I think you challenge that. I love the idea that you we have to get into, yeah, but what are we gonna get out of it? What are we gonna get out of it? What does it actually give me outside of I get the acronym and get to take a shot because I get to heard say AI again in the big drinking game of business, right? this has been great, David. you know, every time we get together I learn a little bit more about you, learn a little bit more about craftable, and I'm excited that you're out there doing what you're doing. It's It's hard out there. I mean, it's really hard out there. The data supports that, yeah, restaurants are great. We're the we're the we're the second largest employer in the country outside of the government. But it's hard. And and with all the various tools that are in the market, it's almost it's not a it's not a house of mirrors because everybody has, I think, a pretty helpful heart on the things that they build. But also I think if you have technology in place or you're looking at tech, you gotta say, is this the is this the thing that's going to get me where I need to go next? Is this a modern tool set? Is this the instrumentation my team needs to be able to grow? And is it gonna bog me down or is it gonna speed me up when I try to get this done? Can I have a heads up operation style versus a heads down always looking at data, trying to figure out what's in the tea leaves? Because operators are not analysts, right? We and we we even joked last time, operators aren't prompt engineers.
David: Right.
Beck: Right. And so I I I think that's an interesting takeaway that you gave us last time. Well, I'm excited to see you at FS Tech and get together with you. for the people that are listening that might have vibed on some of this stuff, what's what's your website again?
David: www.w dot craftable dot com
Beck: Boom. And you're active on LinkedIn, I know. I see you there all the time. And you're more and more on the go. but for everybody, thank you so much for tuning in with with to the show with Chad. David, myself today. We're honored that you're part of our community, that we get to spend time with you and share the messages that we have. And we're hoping to see you from the from the FS Tech show where we'll be having the Chad GTM podcast there as well, telling more stories, talking with another more great executives, somewhat like David. Everybody's unique. But you know, I I think the reason that Chat and I love this so much is we get to learn. Every time we get to sit down with somebody, we get to learn something. It's not and and we're so thankful we're not the smartest person in the room. You know, we're thankful that we get intersect with the smartest people in the room and understand where they're taking the industry next. And that's one of reasons you should be interested in the content we're putting out there. So if you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe to the Chat GTM podcast, wherever your podcasts happen to be served. If you're on LinkedIn, follow us on on our LinkedIn page. You'll see all kinds of great content, useful tips and tools and things that will help move the needle. And at minimum, you'll understand where the technologies today are going. We're going to give you a baseline of where how they are versus what they what they used to be and what you can expect next. It is our pleasure to be here. And as always, our closing statement remains the same, which is random acts of kindness. There's not enough of them in the world. Sprinkle that stuff everywhere, among your staff, among your family, among your friends, among strangers, people who can do nothing for you. That's what's going to make the world a better place. And just like David spending time with us today, give some kindness to other people. Afford them some grace. And it'll be a better it'll be a better day, a better week, a better year, a better country if we do that for each other. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks for joining us.
David: Thank you.
Chad: Yeah. That's it.
Beck: ruined the whole idea of evergreen content by pointing a day at edit, but that's okay. You guys might as well know what. Yeah,
Chad: There's a lot of women face.
Beck: there's a lot of Wednesdays. You can guess which one, and maybe you'll be be right about it. Anyway, so Chad and I are up a little early for what we do in this sense. We're not the early morning. Drive time news show. We're typically filming more in the middle of the day. And this time we woke up a little bit early because we have somebody this is an important dude. He's on the move. You gotta find the time with these moving targets when you can because this guy is on the go. Chad, when last we ran into our guest, we were at the Prosper Forum in Orlando about a month ago. God, I can't believe that much time has passed. When we talked to him, what was the what was the thing you took away from that conversation with David?
Chad: it's not gonna be what you're expecting. I I took away how thoughtful and I guess patient with his answers and considered he how he spoke around everything we talked about. It was it wasn't the top the substance, it was the manner. this is a guy who you know is very, very well regarded in our industry and and talking to him every time it shows why. He's a good guy,
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: he's thoughtful and Brilliant in what he does. So I'm
Beck: Yeah.
Chad: excited to talk to him again.
Beck: Yeah, I was talking to Elliswin Stanley when we were in Costa Rica and all he had to say was great things about about David. So yeah. Yeah. And I I think
Chad: Everybody, literally everyone. It's freaky.
Beck: I think the word patience i is something that's demonstrated when he has to talk to me. Like I see the patience working.
Chad: Ha ha.
Beck: So all right, well let me do our read in and we'll get going here. and so everybody the Last time we joined David Cant to, we were sitting together at the Prosper Forum talking about something that I have a lot of respect for, which is having the courage to look at what you're already have or if you've already built and ask whether you'd build it the same way today. And for David and Craftable, the answer was no. They went back to a blank sheet of paper and started rebuilding around the operator using AI automation, forecasting, and better data to move restaurant technology from simply telling you what happened to telling you understand. What to do next. But something else came through in that conversation. David talked about connecting managers emotionally to margins, developing future leaders, and using technology to give operators more understanding and more control over the business they're responsible for. So today we're picking up that conversation again, but from the other side of Prosper. So for David, we want to know what did David hear? You know. what surprised him? What challenged his thinking? And after spending time with the operators and emerging leaders, this this event was built around what does he believe our industry needs to do differently? David Cantu, CEO of Craftwell and co-founder of Hot Sudes, welcome to the Chat GTM podcast.
Chad: Bring him up.
Beck: I think we need some fanfare and some music for for these moments. Morning, David.
David: Good morning. Good to see you both. Thanks for coming,
Beck: Is it?
David: w waking up early for me.
Beck: For you, my man, anytime. And and and the the truth is is when Chad just talked, I don't know if you heard of some when we were when you're off screen, but the the when Chad mentioned your patient approach, I think that's one of the things I love about how you present yourself. You have this very I said the words earlier, just buttery approach to it. It just feel it feels good to talk to you. You know, that I feel like why when I talk to you, I feel like I'm being heard. And I feel like you take a moment to regard what was asked of you and then you actually process it and and give a an answer that you've put thought into. And I see that in every action you have. And I just want to give you that nod. I think that's an important quality in a leader and I you definitely exemplify that.
David: Thank you, Beck. I appreciate that. Thank you, Chad.
Beck: All day. All day. so so David, let's just let's just get started. now that you've had some distance from Prosper Forum, what's what conversation or ideas followed you home?
David: You know, it's with the accelerator and and the what I think about is the journey of of leadership. And in that journey of how, you know, you start your career and how you evolve and seeing leaders like Chip Wade or or you know, Ray from TJI Fridays, I
Beck: Yeah.
David: mean, I've known these guys for a long time, met them long ago and them sharing their stories and when people with like Wally Dulan like back in the day where it just it it takes me back to see how these leaders have evolved and how well regarded and well respected they are and I
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: I see the attention that the audience has for really their thirst of knowledge and learning. And you know, I think i with this one and I think I've shared this before Dave Job and Luke figured this out, they allowed it to be okay to just be real on stage, be vulnerable.
Beck: Yeah.
David: And it's really unique because at the other conferences it it seems there's more stage presence and more, you know, I would say thought on their brand rather than the human side of like who these leaders are, not just about their brand. So
Beck: Yeah.
David: it's it it it's I'm going to my first accelerator you know, coming up here and I'm actually leading a discussion in that which I love. I mean I love teaching, learning. and you know, I just I'm excited about the evolution of what I'm learning more and more about back office. I mean for twenty years I was immersed
Beck: You're still learning?
David: always learning. I mean I mean I go to
Beck: Like you wrote the book on some of this stuff.
David: Beck, I go to sleep on like the workflow of like envisioning a manager in a you know, cooler or freezer or the things that they do or driving to work on, you know, what is it their day to day to look like and how do we just like remove some of the the angst of this monotonous manual stuff so they could just jump in and develop people and create gress great guest experiences. Cause I was I was allotted that with some of the brands I started with. You know, we weren't as worried about the administrative stuff. We had a We had we had an admin in the office in the restaurant to where we just could focus on the experience. And it was beautiful. And it's just not
Beck: Execute.
David: that way today. There's a lot of there's a lot of manual stuff. And what I've realized is a lot of executives are disconnected to what that is. And I always go back to the example of undercover boss. You see
Beck: Hmm.
David: founders or CEOs and they're on the front line and they're just like in disbelief of like you have
Beck: How did we get here? Yeah. Yeah. In fact,
David: Exactly. Yeah.
Beck: it's funny you mentioned that we were I was we were wrapping up the edits last night for the Prosper videos and all the interviews we did. And one of them that stood out was Steven Sturm, who's the chief operations officer of Firebirds Wood Fire Grill. And he was talking about how during COVID they had to, you know, rift some people or or you know release them for a while. And the a lot of the C suite and the executive team went to the restaurants to work in the kitchen. Things kind of worked themselves out after that happened. They found better processes, better ways, because they're boots on the ground realizing what their people were going through. You
David: Yeah.
Beck: know? well, fantastic. So so Chad, what do you what do you got here on this?
Chad: I want to start with a a top prosper takeaway. So what's an idea
Beck: Ooh.
Chad: that crystallized, right? To the point where as soon as you got back, that's something you just had to put into.
David: Ooh, good question, Chad.
Beck: He always has the good ones.
David: That's You know, I I I would say w 'cause we are all in our own bubble in our offices and and we don't get out and socialize as much. I would say the power of connection. I created a list of leaders that I didn't get a chance to connect with there. And and I'm taking the time now, you know, you you get that first email and that second email and then you're like, wow, they don't even really want to respond, but they're just busy, just like happens to me all the time to where I'm gonna get to that email and it just you forget about it.
Chad: Yeah.
David: But
Beck: Yeah.
David: the power of connection and you know just you know being able to have a conversation about business, about life with some of these leaders. I've taken more a stronger approach to this outward connection. Not to sell, but to just stay networked and to learn, you know, what they're seeing, what they're doing. So it's just a I I love it's weird 'cause I'm I feel like an introvert, extrovert. You know, the 'cause these things these things zap me when you're there and there's so much commotion
Beck: Yes. Yes.
David: that I feel just depleted coming out of it. But Those personal one-to-one connections where you actually have time, those are the things that I value most. So if there's anything, I would say, you know, the outreach and having discussions with customers as well as people that are not customers that I've I've known for a long time that were once upon a time customers.
Chad: I think there's
Beck: You know
Chad: a technical term for introvert extrovert and like combined in different contexts. And I forget the name of it, but I'm gonna look it up and then we'll put it in the comments. I don't know what the word is, but it it's it's got a word.
Beck: I know what you're talking about too. I think I'm one of those. I call I also call it social for pay. so I was talking to I think it was a restaurant leadership conference. I was sitting with Laura Wilbur from Dinova, and we were talking or lead, where we're we're actually was the cause we're talking about. And it seems that a lot of the shows, and this isn't a ding on them, have people that aren't really entering the market. They're more in the mid part of their journey, they're more senior. You don't see a lot of youthful. energy at these events that are coming out of the K out out of out of the pipe. And so, you know, at Prosper, you talked about it being a place where established executives can connect with future leaders. And I think among many of the shows out there, Prosper represents that well because you're seeing the the next crop, right? Did you meet anyone there this year that reminded you of an earlier version of yourself?
David: From the accelerator program, I did not,
Beck: Okay.
David: specifically. from from the vendor side, you know, I I I would say that the yeah and I'm always impressed with Zach Oates. he's very dialed in and and very just authentic. He is.
Beck: He's so damn charismatic too. Sorry, Zach, but you you just you shine, man, if you're watching. Yeah.
Chad: Second call out in two consecutive interviews now.
Beck: I know last episode too, another Zakos call out, you've been Zacked.
David: He he look it's just he and I talk about business and we there were some things that we were talking about just on on engagement and there's some things he put into practice. So I just appreciate how he approaches business, his people, his customers. It's authentic. It's not
Beck: Yeah.
David: and yes, he has a lot of charisma. He he he sells himself and his business really well, but it's authentic. It's not it's not from a point of I just want another customer.
Beck: No, it is manufactured. everything from the bolo tie he worse to the events. Like this guy just he's
David: Yeah.
Beck: got an outfit for everything too. Anyways, but I I I I agree. He's such a fantastic person. Just fun to watch him do his thing. Chad?
Chad: well, you know, we want to talk a little bit about back office because one of the themes that came out of Prosper with the always a theme of Prosper is leading people and pe leading people through change and and and trial and and the the friction that inevitably enters everyone's role. So talk about that, right? You as a leader of a back office platform, how you seek to remove friction from people's lives.
David: You know, a a lot of this is you have to think about it's funny, I just created an entire playbook for implementation and onboarding and where the friction points are and
Beck: Mm.
David: how do we ensure that, you know, we have the right brand that understands what's needed. you know, just 'cause it's the human side. I mean, that's having perspective. of what's needed in order for it to be successful. I I read a a a that eighty percent of back office deployments fail and most people that have back office
Beck: Eighty percent?
David: Yes, eighty percent. and this is more like enterprise wide integrations because a failure point is do I get a return on investment? And a lot of people can't attribute to say, Yes, I get a return on investment from this. Yeah.
Beck: So in that eighty percent though it it rolled but might not have been effective. Okay, okay.
David: Correct. Now, the truth is most there's a lot of back office installations that are in place that there is this angst of I don't know if I want to replace it and go through that pain of just another felt implementation.
Beck: Yes. Yes.
David: It's just more of the same. And there's really a a lot of different sides on there's best practices that need to be put in place. There's expectations. it requires discipline and then th there's incentives, like how do I incentivize the right behavior? Because there there is Th there is the n necessity day to day, week to week, month to month in order to have clean data, in order to track and log things effectively, in order to have audits on portioning and you know, being able to do that. So i there's a lot of muscle that needs to be built there and if there's not buying at the front line, you're you're gonna fail.
Beck: Yeah.
David: And unfortunately there's the economic buyer versus, you know, the internal champion, the person sitting on the front lines
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: That they don't understand what the economic buyer is buying necessarily and the why behind that, other than hey, we want to improve food cost. This isn't about food cost. This is about running a healthy business with a healthy bottom line. You know, the what we see in the industry, you know, profitability is it's all controllable. That's why they call it controllables.
Beck: Right.
David: We're just not we're just not conditioning them to control it. this goes back to the emotionally connected. How do you get your team emotionally connected to the company's goals and objectives? Are your goals and objectives to just revenue?
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: Or is it year over year store level Ibita, Slibida? Is it that's that's the successful restaurant because Most brands, and and I've known this from analytics, you go to say it's that team that has the highest sales is the best. And the reality, they're the ones that have the most leakage, because
Beck: Mm.
David: sales cures all. I can overlook waste, I can overlook these things, and they do. Now, do they have the same percentage of margins? It's the one that is middle of the pack that has the highest margins of looking at why do they do a better job? Better leadership, higher retention, guess repeating back again and again. They may not have the best location, but they know how to make money. And
Beck: Yeah.
David: when you can incentivize that behavior versus percentage of food costs, which they'll game it. And that's the whole concern about padding inventory. It happens. It's it's it's when the right incentives and things are not put into place when it comes to that.
Beck: So so David, you mentioned a little bit of this just now, that angst, that feeling of reticence that, you know, we know we're hurting, but we remember the fresh hell or maybe dull fresh hell of of of implementation, right? And and we those that have been around know it's been a lift, right? We're talking to set up an item master to configure your units of measure, costing units, all this other fun stuff. Not a couple of weeks, not a couple of months. They're talking in like back in the day, it was a year and some change to get everything mapped and done. And I think that's kind of something that's residual in the memories of people that's put this thing in. How are you guys doing this different to make it faster? Because really let's be real, Blue Ocean doesn't exist in in back office. Right? What's the thing
David: Yeah. Correct.
Beck: that's gonna motivate people with what Craftable's done different? That's gonna say, you know what, that's not so painful. They've got it figured out. I don't have to have a second or third job to support and implement this thing.
David: E everybody needs a specific role and accountability and an implementation and rollout on both sides. And if they don't have the resources on their sides, there's plenty of services out there. Five and five, breakbread. There's a multitude of them that have project management that can make sure that everybody's meeting the expectations. For us, we we set from the get go An executive sponsor on both sides to talk through this is what's expected from you, this is what's expected from our team. When we go off the rails and we have all the tools to say we're starting to go off the rails, it's an executive call to where we can set accountability amongst our teams in partnership when a timeline's not met or things that don't occur. And it has to be very regimented in that manner back. It has to be very well spelled out long before the signature is created that we are going. It it does. And and
Beck: Yeah, that sequence of events, who owns what. Yeah.
David: you the expectation of how this is a bit of a journey and what you're ultimately trying to get to. What we're really focused on is if you really want to save money, you just get down to the 15 to 20. Highest revenue generating items. Items, food,
Beck: Yep.
David: labor, center the plate, your well, alcohol, and just do the audits and get to an actual versus theoretical. These are the ones that are driving 80% of the revenue. That is where the loss is, and it's not a lot of people think it's theft. It's portion control. There is not a condition to where in the restaurants that I ran, bartender. Go ahead, let's do a pour test right before the shift. On the line during the middle of a just a rush, are they pinching two ounces when it needs to be one ounce, or are they scooping a 12-ounce ladle where it was supposed to be an eight-ounce ladle? Are you figuring these things out when managers and chefs are really thinking of we're all leakage occurs, is a waste tracking log there, is there a bucket to say, we're busy, put everything in the waste bucket and then we'll account for it.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: I mean there's just gotta be standards and you know it's it's us, it's our responsibility to teach these best practices. and educate them on what's needed and make sure that we have a champion that is going to drive that because I'd love to say, let us hold everybody accountable for your own business.
Beck: Right.
David: That that doesn't go well from a vendor standpoint.
Beck: Let me ask the question a slightly different way. What's changed in the last ten years on the technology that enables craftable to go faster?
David: There look, you you we all know that there's there's modern methods now with AI. To be able to pull clean data, to be able to know, you know, we're we know what's being purchased, we know a recipe connected to a POS button to an item to where we can ensure that from the get-go that they're not just doing a dump of everything. from their, you know, catalogs or that what they ordered from the past and we can very get it down clean what was ordered in the past thirty days, everything else is garbage. We can map anywhere between. I would say the the mapping exercise then is usually 30 to 90 days of be prepared for 30 to 90 days. This isn't this isn't just a a task.
Beck: Right.
David: This is about connecting the dots. Once you've got
Beck: Foundation.
David: the dots in those 90 days on that mapping, really understanding, you know, what you're ordering, how you inventory it, how you portion it, when you get those units of measure down. Ninety days they're on this path to where there's not these large variances and they under understand where the leakage is occurring. So that is the number one pain point on that mapping exercise that occurs. There's
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
David: a lot of manual process today. We we were with a big brand that they take an invoice, they feed it through a fax machine, and yeah, and then
Beck: Like a real fax machine? They still have those?
David: Yeah, they do. And and then and then they take that and they manually type in the invoice. So AP receives it. And I mean this is a these are th there's a lot of brands out there like this, Beck. It's it's crazy.
Beck: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: And today it's just a here's a snapshot, thirty seconds, pack size, price change, substitutes, immediately captures it, it tells you what your margin change is. I mean you just you automate the process, you simplify it, you take a load off. That's the difference. There's modern technology today. And you know, I would hate I I would don't want to say everything is AI specific. It's it's it's
Beck: That's too easy. It's like Gozempic. Yeah.
David: really it's really it's really about the workflow and really thinking it through of like what is the modern technology that can be leveraged to take away the manual processes in that pain. And I'm saying from every aspect, from the way that they order. So the way that they receive, to what to the way they stack their shelves, to the way they w you know, track their their waste and log it, to the portioning and auditing and every aspect of that. We refine, review, refine, set best practice, set playbooks, communicate it, drill it in. And just like a drill sergeant to where, you know, just follow the process, follow the process. You're not following the process. You're not gonna get an ROI. The technology today can start to tell you when you're off track and has breadcrumbs of here's an audit log. We used to have to do that and share it with our customers during a business review and here's what we found out. I mean we found out that this was crazy. Only 40% of brands were actually using the ordering specifically. And I'm like, how is that possible? How is it?
Chad: Yeah.
Beck: Just going off their gut or pars or what?
David: Well no they they many of them it's okay to just call And leave a voicemail, or talk to the rep, or send an email, or send a text message. This is like the biggest gap that you see in back office. And now the person receiving it has no idea what was ordered. They just blindly receive it. Now it may be on a clipboard. Now they're not gonna go pull that clipboard and review that. But if it's in the tech to be able to say yes, yes, yes, yes. quality check, temperature. Hey, why do I have three cases I own only ordered two? Oops, I'm sorry, let me put that back. I accidentally padded a case of fillets that was an extra four hundred and eighty dollars.
Beck: Matters.
David: That I don't know, does it have a commission to it?
Beck: Right. And and that's a perishable good too. That if you have too much you're not gonna be able to sell it in time potentially, right?
David: It exactly. I I so two years ago, going through this entire process, in the restaurant I I partnered, you know, I with I was checking it in and these vendors were like, What are you doing? I said, I'm checking in the items. And they're like, nobody ever does that. And I w found extra after extra after extra what was ordered. And it was just like, why do they do that? And I'm like, well, there is a commission. And not to say that all vendors do that, but look, let's
Beck: Sure.
David: face it, if I can sell more items and nobody's really checking the process,
Beck: Why not?
David: could I make a little extra money? I mean, when you think about what leads to the waste, there was a study done, was it David Bloom from a professor, that 10% of what is ordered never never hits the plate. Ten percent. So a million dollars in purchases, a hundred thousand dollars never gets the plate.
Beck: Hundred thousand dollars. Wow.
David: It just goes from like that over ordering because there's not a perfect system. It's not
Beck: And this isn't about yield. This is just what doesn't even make it.
David: correct. It's just it it there's there's it's the waste that occurs. It's it's spoilage that naturally happens of like, ooh, I order too much. And why did I order too much? Well
Beck: Hmm. The bus and nuns is coming.
David: Yeah, it's well it's because I'm we're we're using PARS today. Like are you kidding me? Like
Beck: Yeah. Yeah.
David: PARs? Who uses PARS today? Everybody. Why? We have access to real time data. It shouldn't I mean it it's a it's just a it's a faulted system. Like it's in not to say that other people haven't tried to solve for it, but the technology today, design, you know the ease of creating a workflow based on a brand standard is much different than it was two, three, four, five years ago. If you don't have a modern platform to be able to build with speed and efficiency, you know, it was like, well, we do this in our workflow. Okay, it'll we can have it in two quarters, and that'll be eighty-five thousand dollars in development fees. We're gonna have to scope it, we're gonna have the eng engineers, we're gonna have to QA it. we'll have design behind it and you know we we went through this with our back office and it was painful for the customer and for us. We didn't want to do this. Today, building out something like we build it out within weeks to say, yeah, we can solve for that. Let us go
Beck: Love it. Love it.
David: to let us go to work. You know, we were producing sixty thousand lines of code a month. Now today we're producing almost a million lines of code a month. And I'm not saying that
Beck: Jesus.
David: just to say we're building for the sake of just throwing code out there. This isn't vibe coding. This is using modern tech and having the the right people in place it with a heavy QA team, because when you're building fast, you need a QA team to ensure because nobody wants glitches or errors or issues because they don't have time for that. It's gonna
Beck: Yeah.
David: be right.
Beck: No sense even going fast if it makes everybody go slow when they get it. No. Chad?
Chad: David, one of the most popular talks at Prosper was gentlemen speaking on the macro environment, you know, all of the things and all of the mostly challenges. so when you think about the macro environment, you know, whether general trends or shocks to the system, how do you view your responsibility at craftable versus what the restaurant's responsibility is to make sure those things in the macro ultimately translate to smart restaurants?
David: So when you think about macro chat, are you talking about just the macro environment? Yeah.
Chad: Economy, supply chain, geopolitical.
David: It look, I I think whether we're whether we're in a a down economy or we're a booming economy, there's money left on the table. And you should you should always be reviewing your practices, your tech, your adoption and use of tech. I mean, I I don't know if people do tech audits at their brands, but they should. They should say, Hey partner, give me an audit on usage. down to everything and tell us what we're not doing. 'cause it really for us, we can't force them to use the software. Now they can set accountability in place, but if they ha they don't have the data to surface to say, I didn't realize 40% were used not using the proper ordering. you know, I didn't realize that they were buying chicken from another vendor. you know, nobody caught that. That they're using the substitute when they actually have the actual skew. That is our brand standard. We only use the substitute when it's not available. And that store is degrading the experience of the customer that's saying that consistency's not there. There's just things that naturally happen. But you know, I I just the problem that I think we need to solve in tech is adoption. Like adoption, adoption, adoption. I mean I'm I was maniacal ab about it at hot schedules. We had over two hundred million logins a month. I mean that thing was used consistently down to every employee, I wanna see who I'm working with today, request to shift off, trade a shift, pick up a shift, I wanna message my manager, you know, with managers, I want to log a book log book note, I need to get a task, who do I need to approve, or shift trade. I'm taking the same approach with inventory of what do I need to review. Now, not that it this one's a little bit different because we just want them to get a pre-read prior to shift and we want them to get their butts in a shift and at on the line or in in
Beck: Yep.
David: the front of the house and not analysis paralysis with a bunch of You know, spreadsheets or reports or dashboards. Those are the things we're just like, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna give them two or three things to focus on and an insight. It's this server that I need to coach on these things, or it's this leakage that I need to focus on this variance. or you know, there's a multitude of things that we really look at. Where's all the blind spots? Cause you
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: walk on a shift and it's like Groundhog Day. You get into your pre-shift, you give the rah-rack, go take care the guest.
Beck: Yeah.
David: But you don't understand everything that's leaking. There's a thousand ways to lose money in this business, and we we're maniacal about finding out where that is and how do we surface it so they can take actionability. And we're even being thoughtful about here are the choices of actionability. That we start to review to say, okay, they took this action. Did it change a trend line? Do we start to see a trend line changing and do we surface it? Hey, do more of that to where it starts to incentivize the right behaviors. And you know, there's a lot of learnings here with the data and we've done every
Beck: Yeah.
David: aspect. It's very much like toast. Toast love integrating with their their point of sell. Because TOS got the data right, and for us to be able to get good data in and really think about it the same way on, you know, air vendor management, invoice receiving recipes, it just allowed us to really think of what's the data set, what are the kernels, what are the insights that we can draw that are meaningful and that are digestible for an operations or a chef.
Beck: So so David, you were kind of hinting at this a little bit and I I'd love to understand a little more of this. So over the last, I don't know, ten years or so, or just back office historically, has been about reports, dashboards, and a look back. It's how we ran how we ran the business, right?
David: The rearview mirror. Yeah.
Beck: And tell tell me in the audience a little bit more about the prescriptive nature. Of how things have changed and and how we interact with back office. You talked a little bit of the opportunities coaching where we focus. Tell us
David: Yeah.
Beck: tell me a little bit about how Craftable is prescriptive on the activities and things that will impact the business in real time.
David: So yes, back office, it's a tool set. It's got an analytics wrapped around it or a BI tool and it's a it's a rear view mirror. And the way I look at craftable, it's a it's a GPS. And you know, if you think the most important thing for any location is truly to understand what do I need to do, how much do I need to prep. How many people do I need to schedule to come in at the right time to reduce waste? What do I need to order? How much do I need to prep? Those are the questions that I would ask. And if you so with this, we are we're launching at the end of this month, and we've been working on this, and this is for me the heart of everything. A sales forecast trend that they trust and believe in and they can understand how it's derived. That leads to suggestive ordering, prep and production, as well as the staff planning. How many people do I need? With this, the forward looking for this is this this is a four-model probabilistic machine learning that is pinging the restaurant, and these four models are competing with each other. And what we're doing is constantly finding out this is what we forecasted, this is what's happening, this is what we forecast, this is what's happening, to where we start to read the trends to where it's pulling in the weather weather patterns, it's pulling in, you know, specific to geo, whether I'm in an urban area or rural area, how much am I gonna shift that geo out to pull this conference center in, pull this stadium in, pull this movie theater in. And I'm going to take all of the events that have happened to that. I'm gonna take it back to date and timing, and I'm gonna constantly show you that, you know, hey, weather is now immin imminent in three days. We're going to adjust your dynamic order and we're gonna pare it down a little bit, and we're gonna start to tell you to start to reduce staff on the patio, completely take that out at a at a takeout person because takeout's gonna gonna increase. So it's just always that future facing what's happening because you have to know what to order. I only need certain amount of things on days on hand for certain items with certain shelf life. And I know exactly what is on average ordered based on that point of sell input
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: historically on a Wednesday afternoon versus a Friday evening.
Beck: Right. It was like six weeks trailing, right? Or some version of that.
David: So I mean it's with this, it it's if you really think about that, it's it's it's just this consistency of where are we at, where we going, where we at, where are we going. When you have all of the data set, and look, we have access to real-time data today. You know, the technology should be able to keep up and predict with accuracy. So we we in the data that we have, the average is ninety-six percent. Now some people claim ninety-nine percent. I mean, look, that that may happen if you have like ten SKUs. And it's easy and but you know the the the devil's in the details and we work with some very complex restaurants. a high amount of SKUs on the alcohol as well as on on the food side. So
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: we're really thinking through of very simple to very complex of how do you help support them to where they can trust the forecast? Ninety-six percent accuracy on average that we're seeing on the the Sug suggestive ordering, we're at 92% accuracy on average. On the prep and production, 91%. Now, we can get better. This is just the models and running and it's adjusting and it's learning. And that's the beauty, you know, when you build this out, it's just a it's it's all knobs from here.
Beck: Yeah.
David: We can start to refine, tune, share the data, work with our customers, and when we get this automated to where we the forecast is done done and known, the staffing plan is built, and we put the right people in the right place because we know their performance on their attachment rates, their guest experience, you you create a this beautiful system that really sets you up for success. And maybe it's 80% right in some things or 95% right. It at least does a lot of the heavy lifting. From there, it's just
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: taking that intelligence and then using the knowledge of the boots on the ground that can say, okay, got me there a little bit, but here's what I know that it doesn't know that I'm going to adjust. But we're also measuring
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: that to where Show us that you know what you know because we're gonna tell you what you should be doing, and then we can start to pinpoint saying this person thinks they know what they know, but they're not following the intelligence. So
Beck: Data says not so much. Yeah.
David: you can really start to determine, or this person knows something, what's wrong with the model? How do we dig in? Because
Beck: Hm.
David: our engineers are looking at all of this and saying, Wow, we're getting this wrong in this location. Let's go do some research. That's the wild curiosity of like why what are we getting wrong? we didn't realize that. Okay, let's go build that into the model. So from there it's just it's it's all tuning from And when you find that, because that no business is created equal and no location is created equal. They have a nuance of things, you know, it could be tenure of staff, it could be location that, you know, I've I'm the hottest location in the area, but three openings within, you know, ninety days of other hot concepts are gonna steal some of my thunder, you know,
Beck: Yeah.
David: those are the things that the intelligence doesn't know.
Beck: Yeah. Or even the internal layout of the restaurant storage locations, how these set up their inventory, everything has its own variation in there too. Ch Yeah.
David: Everything. Yeah.
Beck: Chad?
Chad: David, you painted a picture of how a back office platform should run. But I'm wondering when you're sitting across from a restaurant executive team, some enterprise group, and they've sunk millions in into this current tech system and with a bunch of debt, and there's bolted on modules, and that's their current state. What's the journey they've got to go through psychologically,
David: Okay.
Chad: emotionally, processed by to go from that? to be willing to take that first step and start a blank sheet of paper.
David: That question, Chad, is I I would say that there's a there's been a lot of tests and deployments and there's a lot of excitement around these third party LLMs. you know, and yes they can crunch numbers, but they're not designed for a restaurant, you know, brand. You don't understand as far as the APIs, is the data right, where is it coming from, and how am I gonna deliver the insights and information? There is a high level of protection from the GMs and the managers. I've noticed that this is noise for them. And I'm thinking, like, as a restaurateur and an operator to say, this is not noise. I've run I don't know how many shifts over 17 years. These are blind spots that I had and didn't realize that it's like gold nuggets of like they're
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: there. Pick up. Know
Beck: Signal.
David: it, understand it. That that is I I don't know what you know, all the greatness of all these LLMs, they there's a lot of disruption in the market with tech and a lot of them fear and there's this notion that, hey, we're gonna all build ourselves. We don't need to d we don't need to to do this. But the live fooding thing doesn't work. There's not a level of stability. There's a lot of tech debt that is drawn. These restaurant brands need to be good at being, you know, serving guests not building tech. And y there's some smart people out there that are gonna sink a lot of money into this
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: and they're gonna realize that they made a mistake a year or two years down the line and they're gonna wanna hand it over to an expert. you know th I'm not sure there's been modern tech truly deployed, Chad, in this mid-market enterprise. There's been a lot of tech that has AI and wrappers and their own instance of a you know this AI assistant bringing in these small data sets we're looking I mean this is we do have the cells forecasting a lot of them have it we have the granularity of like the attachment rates the items we have the recipes We have the vendor catalogs with all the pricings, the substitutes, the pack size changes. We have the inventory on hand, knowing how long that inventory on hand sits, you know, the the shelf life, we have you know, void comp data, we know everything coming in the door from a receipt to a PO, you know, and and who did it, with the date and everything else. We know the kilowatt usage, the you know, we the phone usage. We know everything to where We can start to surface a change, a trend, and we can expose some things that shouldn't be occurring. And I mean, we've already, you know, showed that to where there's these highly suspicious activities that happen with voids and comps that surface things of like, I know what they're doing.
Beck: Right.
David: I mean it's pretty it's pretty incredible and like the data set will it will continue to scale and grow because the next thing is you know the reservation systems, tying that to a server, getting that guest feedback to say, here's what broke down, here's what you need to change in in your your procedures on your cooking temps.
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: so I I would say there's there's a for us, we're maniacal about it, we're centered around it. We built the platform, the architecture. We've got all of the plumbing into all of the point of cell, the ERP, the the BEI. We have all the APIs to say, okay, take that data, drop it into your own data lake, go, you know, go to town because you have a broader data set that
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: you'll compare and contrast against. And I I don't wanna be that broad data set, I wanna just be there for the operations, the front line. They're the ones that we wanna empower. That's
Beck: Yeah.
David: we're powering them with the right information that they trust so they can do the good work and that hopefully they can make a good living. I mean I'm really there's some other things that we want to do because I I it's unfortunate when I when I was running restaurants, I was living paycheck to paycheck. And I still believe that many of these managers and chefs, they're living paycheck to paycheck. They
Beck: Yeah, they bought themselves a job, right?
David: They have and look, they're they put in the hard work. They they work the extra hours when somebody doesn't show up. I'm not sure they're really compensated for all of that. They're w they're putting the extra hours. I'm not sure they have a fighting chance to, you know, get a share of the pie when margins are so low. I mean if forty
Beck: Yeah.
David: two percent weren't profitable last year, the median margins are two point, you know, eight to four percent. Well what's their slice of the pie? I mean if if It's I don't know, three percent of two point eight percent? I mean
Beck: Yeah.
David: where what's in it for them, you know? That's that's
Beck: Yeah.
David: where I I think there's certain things that, you know, I'm not willing to expose what exact but I wanna get there to where we we have a we have a path to get them emotionally connected.
Beck: Well, David, one the things that stood out when we when we were talking and and I've done back office for a while at a couple of different companies. And the one thing that I I we never tracked, I thought was so brilliant about what you guys are doing are the recurring invoices, the electrical, the water consumption, things like that that are just the bills you get used to that probably you can look at and and recover money. I think that's so smart to give a complete picture to the business of all the costs that are happening. And then understanding are we leaving the lights on at night? Are we leaving the power the fryers powered up? Are we are we not doing the thing or or is the water l running? Do we have a leak? You know, there's so many things that if it it it's it's the minutiae. You said it before, there's a there's a there's a th a million ways that you can lose money. It's almost like there's a movie called A million ways to die in the west. It's a million ways to die in the rest. That if you don't catch all these things that are gonna eat away at your margins, you're gonna lose. You're gonna lose.
David: Yeah.
Beck: And so yeah, having something as an encompassing tool like this that looks at every element of what's going out the door from a cost perspective and a people perspective tells you where you're gonna get your money back. And that's why back office is so powerful if it's done right. It's not it shouldn't be this tool that you report to going, god, I gotta go in there and enter my inventory. It's where can I save my money? Where's my next opportunity? Right. I know we have to land the plane here because we we're a little bit on time today. but I know that you shared with us you're heading off to the FS Tech show coming up. And we can definitely come c continue the conversation over there, but you're on the road, right? And when when an executive's on the road, that's called opportunity cost. Because when you're not at the office or where you do your regular work, that means you're doing something else that may be detracting from it. So there better be a damn good reason. What's taking into FS Tech this year?
David: You know, I originally wasn't gonna go to FS Tech and and I I have a a really important customer of ours that I'm meeting with in in on Wednesday in Denver that was set long ago. And you know, our office is in Dallas, you know, I'm I'm kind of if I would have thought about it sooner, we should have been there. I've been so fixated on on the rebuild of Craftable. That I want us to put our best foot forward in showing everything that we have, not just partially there. These shows are a massive investment. and and I would say that there's there's always the you know the the question as a CEO, w conversing with my CFO of we want to spend this much money, we want to send these people and here's what I think we're gonna get in the leads and It's this whole game that, you know, we have to play and then when we get there, things have changed and people don't really want to be sold to. They just want to network and have conversations. But several of them are looking at FSTech. They are looking, you know, at what are we going to potentially deploy or displace or learn at this conference? And you know, I will definitely present there next year and we will have the full stack. and you know, we will be able to put our best foot forward. I wanna see like what else is out there, what are people doing? I went to the NRA show, I went to the high tech show, you know, I saw a lot of AI. I mean it was overused and I took my my CTO, co founder Who is just brilliant and we went by and we talked to different booths and we really learned that this is not really authentic. It's just
Beck: Yeah.
David: a marketing ploy. I wanna see if there's more of the same. Or I wanna see if there's some real substance there. I wanna
Beck: Mm-hmm.
David: understand. I'm not really there to I'm there to learn. I don't know if I don't really follow competition. 'Cause I'm so focused on like what are we doing and how are we gonna serve
Beck: Yeah.
David: our customers best? How are we gonna take the friction out of our own team supporting our customer too? 'Cause a lot of people don't look about d design on how are we gonna simplify the implementation so our team's not doing all the manual work or We're empowering the customer to make changes and not having to call us and get on a call to where we can say, no, no, you have the control, you have the tools. So we've taken a different approach from that, but you know, for this, it's a learning. It's a good time to network. I mean, I've worked with a lot of IT leaders over twenty-five years. so I I just love like reconnecting with people that I haven't seen in ages 'cause I haven't been to a lot of IT conferences over over the past six years. So
Beck: Wow. Well, I think it's time to officially land the plane, but we always do that with a quick rapid fire just to wrap this up and let people know about how you think about some things. So really super quick, you ready? He's like, I don't know what you're gonna ask me back. I'm never ready for you. All right. Build it or buy it.
David: Build it.
Beck: AI assistant or agent.
David: Agent.
Beck: Food cost or labor cost, which keeps you up at night more.
David: Phew. Margins.
Beck: That's bold. Okay. When restaurant metric op operators don't pay enough attention to.
David: I would say at the store level, store level Ibida.
Beck: Mm.
David: They don't know it. They just don't know it. They know their food cost and labor cost, but what is their overall profitability? And how is it measured? And how are they measuring that success quarter over quarter or year over year? Or, you know, that that 'cause that's the measure of success. Now Don't get me wrong, there's other very important metrics like guest experience, employee experience. I mean those are two key because when those are right. Sales is who cares about sales.
Beck: You nail it. Yeah. Yeah. one restaurant tech you think is overhyped. And you have to say names, you can be generic.
David: Restaurant tech that's over hyped. AI.
Beck: yeah. Well you can it both things can be true, right? what do you know about leadership today that you wish you knew at twenty five?
David: Some people want to be in a role for the sake of saying that I've reached this role.
Beck: Yeah.
David: there's a great responsibility that comes with it. You know, I have a family, I have children, but I have team members that count on me every day, leaders that count on me every day. Every decision I make. It has a balance of how's this going to impact the employees? How's this going to impact the customer? How's this going to impact my investors? And I really try and teach them to make those balanced decisions. Because when they're out of balance, it it really creates a col an unfavorable culture.
Beck: Mm.
David: don't chase the title. is what I would say. Don't
Beck: That's smart. No.
David: chase the title. For me it was never about title. It was always about serving. It was always about figuring things out. I'm fair very fortunate to be in the positions that I've been. It wasn't because I was chasing that. I was chasing, you know, the the pain that I had on on from the people on the other side of trying
Beck: Yeah.
David: to figure out and solve for them. And for me what like the satisfaction was did we do a good job today? And it's that way every day. Did we do a good job today?
Beck: Getting right with your why. Right. Yeah.
David: It is, yeah.
Beck: All right. Finish the sentence. The future of restaurant operations is. Ooh.
David: Profitable.
Beck: I you can't beat that. You know what's funny? When you were talking earlier, it occurred to me that if when we walk when we walked through trade shows five years ago, seven years ago, every booth had kind of the same value prop at the very top, that little number that they have up. Back three percent on your food and labor, three percent on your food and labor. Every single booth had the same exact value prop and then the thing they happened to do that gave you money back on that controllable. I think it's really interesting that they don't have any value prop in the corner of the booth saying what they're giving back to you. It just says AI. Right, not it's gonna give you back. It just says AI is the stamp. It's not what it gives you. It's just we have AI.
David: Yeah.
Beck: And I think you challenge that. I love the idea that you we have to get into, yeah, but what are we gonna get out of it? What are we gonna get out of it? What does it actually give me outside of I get the acronym and get to take a shot because I get to heard say AI again in the big drinking game of business, right? this has been great, David. you know, every time we get together I learn a little bit more about you, learn a little bit more about craftable, and I'm excited that you're out there doing what you're doing. It's It's hard out there. I mean, it's really hard out there. The data supports that, yeah, restaurants are great. We're the we're the we're the second largest employer in the country outside of the government. But it's hard. And and with all the various tools that are in the market, it's almost it's not a it's not a house of mirrors because everybody has, I think, a pretty helpful heart on the things that they build. But also I think if you have technology in place or you're looking at tech, you gotta say, is this the is this the thing that's going to get me where I need to go next? Is this a modern tool set? Is this the instrumentation my team needs to be able to grow? And is it gonna bog me down or is it gonna speed me up when I try to get this done? Can I have a heads up operation style versus a heads down always looking at data, trying to figure out what's in the tea leaves? Because operators are not analysts, right? We and we we even joked last time, operators aren't prompt engineers.
David: Right.
Beck: Right. And so I I I think that's an interesting takeaway that you gave us last time. Well, I'm excited to see you at FS Tech and get together with you. for the people that are listening that might have vibed on some of this stuff, what's what's your website again?
David: www.w dot craftable dot com
Beck: Boom. And you're active on LinkedIn, I know. I see you there all the time. And you're more and more on the go. but for everybody, thank you so much for tuning in with with to the show with Chad. David, myself today. We're honored that you're part of our community, that we get to spend time with you and share the messages that we have. And we're hoping to see you from the from the FS Tech show where we'll be having the Chad GTM podcast there as well, telling more stories, talking with another more great executives, somewhat like David. Everybody's unique. But you know, I I think the reason that Chat and I love this so much is we get to learn. Every time we get to sit down with somebody, we get to learn something. It's not and and we're so thankful we're not the smartest person in the room. You know, we're thankful that we get intersect with the smartest people in the room and understand where they're taking the industry next. And that's one of reasons you should be interested in the content we're putting out there. So if you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe to the Chat GTM podcast, wherever your podcasts happen to be served. If you're on LinkedIn, follow us on on our LinkedIn page. You'll see all kinds of great content, useful tips and tools and things that will help move the needle. And at minimum, you'll understand where the technologies today are going. We're going to give you a baseline of where how they are versus what they what they used to be and what you can expect next. It is our pleasure to be here. And as always, our closing statement remains the same, which is random acts of kindness. There's not enough of them in the world. Sprinkle that stuff everywhere, among your staff, among your family, among your friends, among strangers, people who can do nothing for you. That's what's going to make the world a better place. And just like David spending time with us today, give some kindness to other people. Afford them some grace. And it'll be a better it'll be a better day, a better week, a better year, a better country if we do that for each other. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks for joining us.
David: Thank you.
