EP 64: Multi-Location Restaurant Challenges with Jeremy Julian

Transcript for this Episode:

INTRODUCTION VOICEOVER: Dive into the world of innovation with us as we unravel the challenges, breakthroughs, and latest trends that are shaping our digital landscape. This is Tech UNMUTED, your guide to the tech revolution.

SANTI: Welcome to another episode of Tech UNMUTED. Terry, in these, let's just say fast-paced restaurant industry, right?

TERRY: Oh yes.

SANTI: Managing multiple communication channels across various locations, right? That could be like a major daunting task, as you well know, right?

TERRY: I do.

SANTI: Restaurants really have to ensure that they really have seamless coordination to provide the best customer service. At the same time, they got to worry about streamlining their business. It's crazy when you think about it, right?

TERRY: It really is. The whole restaurant, you have to think, especially if it's a quick service restaurant, QSR, which is a franchise. It's a restaurant that has a bunch of locations. If it's something like that, they have to really lay out a plan for each of them to be a template. Then if it's a fine dining or a restaurant where it's more of a sit-down day-to-day restaurant, there, you can be a little more unique. Every one of them have unique situations.

SANTI: It is very challenging. Today's podcast is interesting because we have invited a friend. We have a special guest today. I'm going to bring him on stage right now. Welcome Jeremy Julian. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast.

JEREMY: I appreciate you guys having me. It's always weird sitting on this side of the-- [chuckles]

SANTI: I know. What's great about this is that I had an opportunity to join Jeremy on his podcast, which is the Restaurant Technology Guys, which is a great podcast. It's very niche-focused. We had a lot of fun, by the way, recording it. Terry, you were not available for that one but I was not. It was a blast. That'll be published soon. Now, Jeremy gets to come join us. Jeremy, what I want to do is if you would just introduce yourself because you'll do a better job than I will, so our audience can get to know you. Then we'll kick off.

JEREMY: Jeremy Julian, Chief Revenue Officer for CBS NorthStar. We sell multi-unit restaurant technology, primarily the point-of-sale. I also am the award-winning host. I guess Santi told me I got an award before, so I'm allowed to call it an award-winning podcast. I'm teasing. The only restaurant technology-focused podcast in our industry. If you don't know the restaurants, there's over 700,000 restaurants in the United States alone, not to mention in the world.

Because of that, it's the second-largest employer behind the government. There's lots of people that have been impacted by restaurants. I'm the only restaurant technology-focused podcast. I started about five years ago and six years ago, something like that, and continue to get fantastic guests and talk all about restaurant technology.

SANTI: It's a real grassroots effort too. Your podcast was grassroots. You've done a fantastic job.

JEREMY: I appreciate that.

SANTI: Listen, I want to do something a little different. This is great because we have two people here. Terry, who is very frontline. He's very customer-engaging. He's always involved from a technical standpoint with some of the most complex deals. Then we have you, Jeremy, who's also very frontline because you guys run a very specific niche in that restaurant industry, which is that POS, that point-of-sale solution-based. I think we're going to get super awesome perspectives on the challenges that, really, this industry faces. I really want to just start with the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is what? It's the challenges related to multi-location communications.

It gets tricky. I just want to talk about some of the difficulties that you guys see with multi-location setups like that. Maybe, what does disjointed communication cause? What are the pain points with that? Because that could be a problem. Then just share your perspectives on what you're seeing with just that whole multi-location approach to business and how do we best do it. Terry, why don't we start with you? Because I know you've had some recent wins in the restaurant industry, so maybe you can share some of those challenges.

TERRY: Absolutely. The restaurant industry in and of itself, having multi-locations, like I said when we were first doing the introduction, you really have to look at the whole of the restaurant. You can't just look at a site. A lot of people that aren't in the industry look at it and say, "Oh, it's a location, you just do this, this, and this." It's not because you have to find out how are those restaurants communicating back to their corporate facilities. How are they communicating with their end users?

When COVID hit a few years back, about four years ago now, when it hit, the restaurant industry changed considerably. It went from, it used to be when we do a restaurant, the network communication was important, but then the voice communication was just as important because they were taking phone calls in for reservations, for orders, for things like that. If you're a quick service, you're taking orders. If you're a fine dining, you're taking reservations. With COVID, that completely went on its ear. The most important thing was their network. If the phones dropped, most restaurants weren't worried about that because they weren't taking telephone orders anymore.

The different food delivery services, the Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, all of the different ones, even the regional ones, they all got into the restaurants and said, "Look, we've got all these systems." Jeremy would know the point-of-sale systems have to tie into those and accept orders from those. That became their number one priority. Ensuring that those restaurants could communicate network-wise was the most important thing. It went away from being telephony and on to being the communication of the network because without it, they were losing thousands of dollars every minute that they couldn't hit the Internet.

JEREMY: I would say it's almost understated how much COVID impacted the restaurants. I'm a 30-year industry veteran, coming up on 30 years. I don't want to age myself too much.

TERRY: I'm a little older than you. I'm older. [chuckles]

JEREMY: 30 years in this industry, and I don't know that anything changed and accelerated the adoption curve for restaurants more than COVID did. I know it changed a lot of things in a lot of industries. On that same hand, there's a lot of technology that existed but people hadn't adopted it. Traditionally, retailers are laggards as far as adoption of tech, whether that's retail, restaurants, grocery, they typically have been that way. They were forced to. To your point, Terry, they were forced to. They had to do it to stay in business, number one. Number two, it was critical to ensure. Today, our average customer has between 12 and 15 different integration touchpoints.

TERRY: Really?

JEREMY: Amazingly, every one of them requires connectivity to the outside world to the Internet. When your Internet is not stable or not configured properly to allow the traffic in and out or you don't manage it appropriately with quality of service and such, you impact your guests' experience and you impact your staff's experience, which ultimately impacts your guests' experience. If your staff member is not able to process a credit card, if your staff member is not able to process a third-party delivery, if they're not able to process a gift card, a loyalty card, any of those things, all of those things require Internet connectivity in order to function.

If they don't, ultimately, it impacts the staff member, which then impacts the guest, which drives the guest to not want to come back in. That's just a small, very, very tip of the iceberg as to the ways that not only did it change, but how much a properly managed and configured network is going to be crucial to ensuring that you can deliver the service that you're expecting.

SANTI: It's almost like if Internet or connectivity used to be an afterthought, but now, it's just essential. This is the front of mind, right?

TERRY: Yes, you used to be able to do, whether it be a bulk upload at the end of the day, all of your systems were within the actual restaurant. I'm sure Jeremy can tell you the point-of-sale systems, it all used to be unified right there inside the restaurant and it might require the LAN to get back to the kitchen so that they get the ticket to print out and work.

Today, that is all cloud-hosted. It is all on the Internet and it truly is.

The credit card machines now, where in the past, credit card machines, that was one of the few things that still required POTS lines, those plain old telephone service for years and years. Today, I would say very seldom do I run into a restaurant or retail that is still using POTS lines for their credit card. It has gone to Internet. Without them being able to run a credit card, a cash-only business in this day and age, people don't carry cash. They just don't.

I've talked to many people in our industry and outside of it that somebody you'll meet, "Do you have a whatever to give this person a tip?" They're like, "I don't carry cash at all. I just have credit cards.? If your restaurant can't process those credit cards and can't hit the Internet to place an order for a burger or a shake or whatever it may be that's in your restaurant that you are known for, then you're losing a lot of money. It's really--

JEREMY: I've got two examples that I'd love to walk through with you guys. The first of which happens to be my one of my favorite restaurants in town, this favorite Mexican restaurant. They've been having connectivity problems. They've been having connectivity problems. We're there at least twice a month, if not once a week. Friday night, margarita night for my wife. It's a Mexican restaurant. She enjoys her margaritas. It's teased. Friday night margaritas. We go to the same place. They know us. We walk in and they happen to have an Internet outage. Ultimately, the manager came up and asked if I had cash. I didn't have cash.

It was a party of six or five. It was an expensive meal. They said, "Our Internet's out. I'm going to have to use the knuckle buster to get your card number." I was like, "Number one. No, number two. No, number three. No, I'm not letting you do it. I'm here all the time. If you need to, I'll give you money some other way. I'm not giving you a knuckle buster, besides the fact that my card doesn't even have raised card numbers." She was going to write it down, which is in complete disregard for all of the compliance factors. At the end of the day, we were able to figure out an offline transaction. I was able to pay for my meal. No problem there.

It created a pretty bad guest experience for me, number one. Number two. If I had somewhere to go, if I needed to get to the ballgame, if I needed to get to a movie, it would have been awful. That's number one. Number two. We've got a large brand that we're working with that-- I say large brand, large property, 25 TVs. It's going to be a sports bar, 25 TVs, plus voiceover IP telephony, plus 12 to 15 handheld wireless devices that are going to be working on the patio.

I spend more time talking to the guy that's designing and engineering their network and pulling Internet into that building than I do even the restaurant on how much we're going to charge for a Jack and Coke or how the cheeseburger is going to be rung up on the point of sale. Because I recognize how critical if we don't get the amount of bandwidth that we need because those 25 TVs are all sucking up the bandwidth or they allow guest Wi-Fi and it's sucking up all the bandwidth, how poorly it's going to represent our product.

To your guys' points, making sure that that partnership for those transaction engines that are so critical is a really big deal. That's another brand that we're working with. I had a 90-minute call with their network engineer the other day to design everything that needed to happen. Then I made them document it and get it back to me. Sorry, I'll give that back to you guys. That is part of what we have to deal with every day.

TERRY: You're absolutely right. That's the thing that other people don't think about is you have to make it a redundant network. You have to give them that backup, the business continuity on their network. You do, but at the same time, I don't know about you, but like here at home, I used to have a satellite dish. I used to use one of the satellite providers. I don't anymore. All I have is streaming service. All of the restaurants are going to that as well because even the direct TVs and the dish and those guys are pushing their streaming services.

JEREMY: Even though they put the dish up on the ceiling.

TERRY: Right. You don't have to have the dish. The weather doesn't affect it anymore. Remember, I've sat in a sports bar watching a ball game and had a storm come up and then I'm mad because I missed part of the game. That's that user experience that if they can keep their customers happy, they're going to do whatever they have to do to do that. That bandwidth that a video stream takes really can overrun your point of sale, which is important. Your point of sale is most important for getting the food to them.

JEREMY: And charging them because they can't drive revenue if they don't have the ERP at the middle of the store-

TERRY: That's right.

JEREMY: - to be able to charge for those transactions and get it to the kitchen and create the efficiencies that they need to. Yes, to your guys's point, the Internet is so critical. With 12 to 15 different integration touch points, again, that loyalty membership, that online order, that being able to check in, do the reservation. There are so many different ways that it's that it's impacted.

TERRY: The gaming systems. If you're in a sports bar, they probably have the little video game in the corner for timeouts and halftime.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: You probably also have the streaming music systems. Nobody has those jukeboxes anymore.

JEREMY: Big box and the rack anymore. Yes, not anymore. It's all [crosstalk].

TERRY: You can control it from your phone and you're paying money for that. Every one of those is a revenue stream. For restaurants and retail, those are really, really important. Communication and networking, having a redundant SD-WAN type of environment so that you have, not just secure redundant access, but secure redundant access that you can control the priority of that. You can say, "My point of sale is number one and my loyalty and credit card is in that number one telephony has become the bottom."

Sports bar, maybe its TVs are number two. If you're in a fine dining restaurant, maybe that music that's being streamed in on the background is number two, because if it's silent in a restaurant, you notice it. If I'm sitting in a restaurant and we're having a normal communication, a conversation, and I've got just that little bit of music in the background at a fine dining restaurant, that's a comfort noise. That music goes away. I hear the kitchen. I hear the other patrons talking. It's uncomfortable for me. It's all about making that comfortable for the customers and knowing what you have to prioritize and what you don't and doing it right.

SANTI: Yes, that's all good points. That's fantastic because these are the things that folks don't think about.

TERRY: Right.

SANTI: I want to pivot here from it because this brings me to Fusion Connect. It's so hard for us sometimes [chuckles] to explain what we all do because we do so much. We can't spend an hour on this podcast explaining it now. Terry, I know we have what we call the full stacks, just a stack of solutions that we put together to meet specific customer needs. What are some of the things that--As Fusion Connect, we've been able to tie together, specifically for the restaurant business that we could highlight here. Then I love to hear Jeremy's take on once he hears some of the things we can piece together, what does that mean for him? If that makes sense.

TERRY: We've been talking about it the whole time. Everything that I've talked about thus far are things that Fusion Connect can and does. We have great SD-WAN and redundant network services that we provide to those clients. We've put them together in a repeatable format for the restaurants. What it is is, as I said, every restaurant is unique. You have to talk to, not just the IT person that, "I need a redundant connection. I need failover," but you have to talk to the people that run the restaurant and find out, "How do you do business? What do you do? What is most important for your revenue? What is most important for your clients? How do you work with your clients?"

Once you do that-- Here at Fusion Connect, we've built out our SD-WAN solutions where we can make them repeatable or repeatable with tweaks. I have restaurants that say, "I'm launching a new standalone restaurant. That's going to be different than a new-- In another building, in a strip mall, or in a different type of facility restaurant. They're going to have different needs. I'm launching a new-- We have restaurant brands that work with us that they have, "I have a quick service brand. I have a mid brand and I have a fine dining brand. They have templates with us of each of those that give us a starting point.

We work with our IT staff for days and days, [chuckles] more than hours, just to go through and make sure that we had designed those appropriately, securely, redundantly to give them those solutions. Then we do the communication. We have the voice communication as well, but as I said, with restaurants, a lot of that has become secondary. If I do something like a WebEx or a Teams for manager meetings for things like that, what they'll do is--

I've got a major pizza brand that at their corporate, they use Microsoft Teams and we were able to provide them all of their teams calling at corporate. Then at each of their at their locations, they put a Team seat for the manager because they'll do a monthly manager's meeting and they want to do it via video. No more bringing people into the office. Nobody has to drive to that regional office. They go in their office. They bring up the video. They do their manager meeting where they're all together. Then the rest of the house, it's all about the rest of the communication stack.

JEREMY: CCaaS too, right? We've seen an update on some CCaaS stuff.

TERRY: Oh yes, we do quite a bit of CCaaS with we're bringing in queues for people, "Thank you for calling our restaurant." Again, that's more the fine dining. Although they do have-- On the fine dining side, you have things like open table and resi and the reservation systems there. They do still take the occasional call, and if they get three or four calls, they don't want to lose any of those because every call they lose is somebody going to a different restaurant. "Thank you for holding. Give us just a moment. If you'd like to text us, just text this number and we will respond back with your reservation." It really is giving them all of those different options are all things that Fusion Connect does for our restaurants. Are those things needed, Jeremy, all the time?

JEREMY: Every day and part of why it needs to get front-loaded, and that's the part that I guess I want to let our listeners hear, is so many of these things need to get started. It's the foundation of what it is that you're doing and every day-- As the week that we're recording this, I just went to a trade show. Somebody told me there's 70,000 pieces of technology that have been written for the restaurant industry. 70,000 different applications.

With that, every day, there's somebody new that's trying to get into your network to get to your data, and not in a bad way, not in a nefarious way. It's trying to solve problems for people. Without designing it that way and just throwing it on top of what you already have without engaging somebody like Fusion Connect or somebody that understands your network environment is really, really critical. Because I'm going to share this long-term with my audience, I'm going to talk about [chuckles] what SD-WAN is because I think while I

TERRY: Oh, I'm sorry.

JEREMY: No, you're fine. I just say that when people listen to it, they're going to be like, "What is SD-WAN?" SD-WAN is the ability-- You guys live in this world. Restaurateurs don't know. It's essentially a backup Internet connection that is not using the same connection type that you would bring in from the street, Spectrum or AT&T or Verizon. It's a different type of Internet connection that automatically fails over when your primary doesn't work, even--

I'm sure you guys could talk all day about SD-WAN configurations. I know that a lot of our audience, when I say SD-WAN, they go, "I don't know what that means." Business value, 100% uptime because your primary and secondary, you've got two connections that are using two different forms of tech to make sure that you're always connected to the Internet. Sorry, Terry. I'll let you [chuckles] run on that for a second.

TERRY: No, not at all.

JEREMY: That's very, very critical.

TERRY: Yes, that is critical. I forget sometimes because I've done this so long, I forget not everybody knows what SD-WAN is. Also, SD-WAN, the other purpose of it is to give that prioritization and to set that class of service so that, like you said earlier, it's most important that point of sale be able to operate and isn't overrun with the televisions or with the radio. That's got to be your top priority at 99% of your restaurants. SD-WAN allows--

JEREMY: If you're running in 4G mode or 5G mode, do you want guest Wi-Fi to be turned on? You're paying for guest Wi-Fi, the chances are no, you don't. With your standard, where you've got unlimited Internet access, you're probably fine too. When you go into backup mode, do you want somebody to be streaming six hours of Netflix and you're paying for all of that sitting in your dining room? Probably not. Not done properly, people end up failing. Now it costs them even more money to deliver a service that when they're in backup mode, they probably wouldn't want to.

It ultimately also will impact your guest experience because all of those different systems are using that Internet connectivity. Not configured properly, really, really big deal. Also, you guys keep adding, restaurants keep adding, keep adding, keep adding. You've got to make sure that your network team is involved because it ultimately is going to hurt your guests and your staff members significantly.

TERRY: It is. When you build a restaurant, you have to think about how I'm building this building. At the same time, you have to think about how I'm building this network. How am I building that stable communication platform so that all of my customers can get to me inside and outside the restaurant? I want them to see my menu. I want them to be able to order online. I want them to be able to make that reservation so that when they come in, they've got a table waiting.

SANTI: This is so fascinating to me to hear this because we who live in the industry are thinking about this is common sense. It's not because everybody, they're so focused on their specific vertical or what the final output is, which is, "I need to make burgers." You can't make the burgers and get it to the right people and have them come back unless you've thought about all this other stuff that makes your restaurant tick. I love this conversation. It triggers a whole other group of solutions and problems that you usually get. It's an afterthought. You're right. I love what Jeremy said. We have to front-load this stuff moving forward. We have to bring it to the forefront.

TERRY: We have to think about-- Jeremy, I really appreciate you defining SD-WAN for the audience and it's something I wasn't thinking about. I like to cook on the side. That's my release from being technical all day.

JEREMY: Me as well.

TERRY: You as well. If you ask me to go upstairs and from scratch make you a beef Wellington with no recipe and all of the details of it, what temperature I should have the center to? I don't know that. I can look it up and get through it, but I don't know it. I'm not an expert chef. I'm an expert at technical. Jeremy's an expert at technical. We forget that the people we're talking to are experts at food. They know--

SANTI: Hospitality.

JEREMY: And hospitality, training, and environment. They don't really give a crap how many bits and bytes that Apple TVs need to have to stream 12 college football games on Saturday morning. They don't care. They don't care how many bits and bytes the music needs to be. They say, "I need music," and they don't really care. The good ones partner with people like you guys to make sure partner with people like us, people like with you guys that understand how critical that is to ensure that they're going to be able to deliver on that guest experience.

SANTI: Now, I love talking about this stuff. I could talk about this forever, but we can't. We have to. This is why we have our producer behind the scenes poking at us saying, "Okay, guys, time to wrap it up." This is great. Jeremy, this was awesome. Honestly, this is-- Terry and I love hearing perspectives outside of our ecosystem because it just helps us connect so many dots. I hope that some dots are connected for you as well. What I want to do now is I want people to know how to get a hold of you. Jeremy, what's the best way for our audience to find you and connect with you?

TERRY: On a professional level, very active on LinkedIn, constantly posting on LinkedIn, Jeremy Julian, if you search Jeremy Julian on LinkedIn. The business website is cbsnorthstar.com. That's where we talk about point of sale and all things restaurant technology. Then my personal blog and podcast is the restauranttechnologyguys.com. Again, you search "Restaurant Technology Guys," you'll find me. If you search my name, quite frankly, you're going to find lots of different articles and blogs and all of that stuff. Love to connect with you.

As a friend of mine says, I'm oddly available. People send me messages all day, every day. I get back to them because, at one point, I was that same person that didn't know anything. I would never want somebody to not feel like they could reach out.

SANTI: That's awesome. Thank you. Folks, this brings this podcast to a close. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us. I know Terry and I had a great time.

TERRY: Yes.

SANTI: Do not forget to like, subscribe, share because that way you'll be alerted of our next coming episodes and you won't miss an episode. Folks, until next time, stay curious. Stay connected.

TERRY: Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Jeremy.

JEREMY: Thank you, guys.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Thanks for diving into the tech world with us today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to never miss an episode of Tech UNMUTED. Stay curious, stay connected.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect