ABOUT THIS EPISODE
🏢 FROM THE FLOOR TO THE BACK OFFICE 🏢
On today's 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with David Cantu, CEO of Craftable and former co-founder of HotSchedules. David started on the floor at Outback Steakhouse and PF Chang's, then turned that operator DNA into a 20+ year run building tech that powers hospitality. Watch this for an insider's look into how David and the Craftable team are helping 😮80,000+ operators😮 protect their margins today 🚀
📺WATCH AND LEARN📺
👉 The origin story of HotSchedules, born out of a real problem he was solving as a PF Chang's GM. See how the team bootstrapped through the dot-com implosion and 9/11 before scaling over a decade - all before ever taking a dime of PE money
👉 Why David believes the current AI wave is forcing legacy platforms to rebuild themselves from the ground up, and how Craftable rebuilt its architecture to be AI-native 🤖
👉 How Craftable surfaces margin erosion signals in real time, from a 35% spike in lime prices to kilowatt-level waste, and why visibility alone drove a 600 basis point P&L improvement at a restaurant David recently operated 📈
➕ PLUS: David's candid take on the Founder's Dilemma and knowing when to self-select out, plus why ops-led tech buying usually beats CFO-led
➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Rapid fire answers on lettuce wraps vs bloomin' onion and the most overlooked line item that kills restaurant margins
Thank you David for sharing your hard-won wisdom from 20+ years of building in this industry. 🚀
