All right, thank you, everyone. Next up, we have Taylor Lauber. He is joining us from Shift4. He is the President and Chief Strategy Officer. He joined the company in 2018 as Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects, was appointed President in 2022. Prior to Shift4, he was a Principal at Blackstone. Thank you for joining us, Taylor. Appreciate it. So maybe we just do a brief description of what Shift4 does, just for the benefit of the audience. What kind of differentiates Shift4 compared to others in the space?
Yeah, sure. So start with a little bit of the origin story, because I think it helps contextualize why we excel in the verticals we excel in. So we're a 25-year-old payments business. We were started in 1999 in our founder's parents' basement, actually. And important because it's still a founder-run business today. He's the largest shareholder. He's our CEO and Chairman. So a lot of these philosophies that we learned over the course of 25 years are still really rooted in the business. What we specialize in is what we call software-integrated payments. It's the idea that payments is no longer about approval, decline, refund. It's much more about enabling a strong commerce experience through software. And you can imagine all the different ways that that can happen.
I would say the first significant pioneering move in the company's history was back 25 years ago, taking what had been at the time three cottage industries: software, hardware, and a payment device from your bank, and bundling them all together and delivering them to merchants. We started with that in the restaurant vertical. And today, we serve about a third of the table service restaurants in the United States. And we've increasingly tried to use kind of our knowledge of the complexities of combining these two different things in software and payments to serve other verticals. So a lot of folks know companies like Clover, Square, down at the other end of the spectrum, where you can download a piece of software for your business on an iPad and run your whole small business. We tend to be at the other end of that spectrum.
40% of the hotels in the country are Shift4 customers, a really significant portion of the stadiums in the country, and when you think about that, it's no longer just about one piece of commerce you're conducting with your consumers. It's like hundreds of revenue centers that you need to be able to manage and get a common payment experience, a common security experience, analytics, et cetera, so hopefully, that gives some context.
Absolutely. So maybe we could talk about the strategic priorities moving into next year.
Yeah, of course. So it tends to always look like we've got a lot going on. In reality, the priorities are quite few. We have a restaurant software product called SkyTab that is winning a ton in the market. We, again, have decades of experience in this vertical. There is a lot of change going on inside the vertical with migration from kind of on-premises, Windows-based systems to Android. And our SkyTab product is winning a lot in the market. So just continuing to do that is a significant priority for the organization. Hospitality, which we really just define as hotels, is benefiting tremendously from the simplification that we've been able to approach this industry with. Meaning, if you were a hotel, you typically had to contract with like half a dozen or more different vendors to make a payment solution work.
We deliver all of that under a single roof. And so you'll see us announcing many multi-billion-dollar hotels signing up for Shift4. And what we're typically displacing is like half a dozen different things that they were otherwise contracting individually. So that's been quite successful. Stadiums, I mentioned, our number one competitor in the vertical sold us the business. So we've had just a ton of success in that. And not just thinking about the payments that go on inside of these ecosystems, but the entirety of the payment experience for the fan that might be going to a stadium. So we power the ticket sales all the way through to ordering a beer in your seat through your team app if you're a season ticket holder.
And then I'd say the other piece that's been bothering us for a while is this concept of software and payments being integrated together is predominantly a U.S. phenomenon. And I know that's hard to believe, but you can go to some of the most sophisticated economies in the world. I'll pick on London for a second. And maybe it's a piece of restaurant software behind the bar, but it's always that bartender keying in what you owe on a bank terminal and presenting it to you. And none of that stuff talks to each other. And so the idea that we can take these trends that we recognized before anyone else back 20 years ago and apply those lessons learned and all of that experience to entire continents, where this convergence of software and payments hasn't happened yet, is like incredibly exciting to us.
So you guys reported Q3 results last week. You want to give us some highlights?
Yeah, sure. So again, contextualize this as a 25-year-old business. Payment volume grew over 50% year- over- year. Revenue growth quite strong, 30% odd plus- year- over year. EBITDA growth even stronger than that. I think it's important to understand we harp back on this 25-year-old history quite a lot because we are not a Silicon Valley darling. We've never had a Series A, B, C. We didn't take outside capital for the first 15 years we existed. So in a time where a lot of the leading tech players struggle to generate a profit, we have greater than 50% EBITDA margins and really strong free cash flow. So I think in terms of balancing growing the business at an industry-leading clip while having expanding free cash flow margins on top of that is something we're particularly proud of, and you saw a lot of it in the quarter.
Yeah, and I know a lot of people were skeptical of the acceleration, and it came through. So congratulations on that. You guys tightened the guidance range for 2024. What informed your decision to do that?
Yeah, so I guess it's important to dimensionalize our guidance in maybe hardest to predict versus easiest to predict. Volume is something that we've tightened, and it's a function of two things. We had really strong ambitions for Europe at the beginning of the year. We knew how we were going to achieve them at the beginning of the year as well. We've had tremendous success identifying pieces of the value chain, like just a software company or just a payments company, and emboldening them with the combination of these things to win in the market, and so we had our eyes on a particular asset in Germany that we thought was going to give us a lot of traction in the market. It took a lot longer to close than we would have liked.
But what we got was 65,000 restaurants using their software that have never bundled a payment solution with it. So tremendous asset, took us longer than we would have liked. That certainly impeded our volume expectations a little bit. And at the high end, same-store sales, specifically in restaurants, less so in hotels or stadiums and retail, but specifically in restaurants, same-store sales has been a little bit depressed from what we would have expected at the high end of our volume expectations.
OK. So you're guiding to 25% plus organic growth in 2025. Could we just break down what the components of that are and what kind of long-term growth rate you expect?
Yeah, sure. So historically, we've been able to use M&A very effectively inside of our franchise, and I just gave an example with this German business that you can acquire a business that has a massive pool of customers that are sourcing pieces of their payments offering through a dozen or so different vendors, and that's like what Vectron offers us. It offers us 65,000 captive customers. It offers us all of the salespeople and dealers that traditionally service those customers, and all we need to do is introduce payments to these customers, and they'll get a bundled solution. They'll save a lot of money. It's one throat to choke. It's one hand to shake. It's a very valuable value proposition, so this ability to cross-sell a captive base of customers is a tremendous driver for our business.
While we win tons of new customers off the street, I would kind of point you to our latest shareholder letter just for a sampling of some of the really high-grade customers we've won on a standalone basis. We also have this massive cross-sell. We can meaningfully grow the revenue base of the business by introducing pieces to customers that they historically were using other vendors for. That has helped tremendously.
So as we think about 2025, that's simply organic. And hopefully, you can build off of that with M&A.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Great, and so let's talk about M&A. Your M&A strategy is a little bit different than others in the space. Could you just compare and contrast yours versus others and how you think it sort of informs future acquisitions you make?
Yeah, of course. Well, I would say our M&A strategy starts with 20 years of experience in understanding how software and payments and all the other complex little nuances of a merchant's value chain work. And so when we look at uses of capital, we say, is there a piece of the value chain that is dramatically mispriced, dramatically misunderstood, and the customers are simply going elsewhere for their payment processing, but they're really, really relying on this piece of technology? And by the way, payment processing, we're embedded in that piece of technology to get a much better experience. I don't want to belabor the German business in Vectron, but it is so obvious: 65,000 restaurants using this software every single day and a dumb bank terminal next to it, where reconciliation between the two is a manual exercise.
Introducing our payment offering and simply saying, hey, by the way, there's now a feature inside of Vectron. It talks wirelessly to this payment terminal that's ours. You get a single bill. You've cut out multiple vendors, and there's no reconciliation issues. That is an incredibly valuable tool. And so how do we approach this M&A? We say, how many customers can we get access to based on what we think a reasonable purchase price for this business is? And let's think about this not as ingesting a business and running it a little bit better. Let's think about this as customer acquisition cost. What would we otherwise pay to get access to 65,000 restaurants? And not just access, like a foot in the door, like the people that the restaurant calls when they have technology issues.
Interestingly, we've been able to do this many different times throughout the last decade to the tune of customer acquisition cost that looks like $3,000 a site. Our number one competitor, Toast, is spending about $15,000 to acquire a customer. You can imagine how that really appeals to us. It's not cold calling. It's not Google AdWords. It's literally, you know the customer. They are your customer. You're simply selling them a service that they would otherwise prefer to have in a comprehensive integrated solution. It's not just about the point-of-sale software and the payment processing being bundled together. This can be done lots and lots of different ways. I want to be a little bit careful about not being too explicit about our playbook.
But we've bought payment gateways that hotels are immensely reliant on because every piece of software in their hotel connects to this payment gateway. And then it routes the volume to Chase, who's doing nothing special. The payment gateway is doing all the heavy lifting, and it's earning a nickel a transaction. That, to us, is just a dramatically mispriced value chain. And we can do what Chase is doing plus 100 other things if we own that gateway. So it's been a thoughtful place to deploy capital. We've also grown a lot on an organic basis. And when you can buy a business that is very close to your own DNA in terms of serving the customer, that is much more efficient than hiring. So like buying a restaurant point-of-sale business, they know 90% of what we deal with on a daily basis.
Hiring the people we would have otherwise needed to sustain that 25% plus organic revenue growth is challenging, too. So we tend to get a lot of synergies out of these transactions well beyond kind of the obvious revenue synergy. We can deliver a lot more services to this merchant than they were getting from this standalone company. A little bit of cost synergy from time to time, but a heck of a lot of kind of filling the talent pool with people that kind of understand our DNA, understand how to serve merchants, and their lives get a heck of a lot easier because they don't have to call another company when something breaks. It's all under one roof.
Can you speak to the redundancy piece? Because I know a lot of acquisitions result in lots of redundancies. It seems like you guys streamline things. Maybe just talk, elaborate on that a little bit more.
Yeah. Historically, we haven't had a significant eye towards redundancy across the bulk of the transactions we do. Those are not fun transactions to do. We generally approach an M&A transaction with what is the revenue opportunity we think this business is missing. And if they were inside of our fold, could they achieve that? And could they sell more products to their existing customers? And could they attract new customers easier as a result of being inside of our fold, being able to offer payment processing, being able to offer a gateway, being able to offer free hardware management across your payment estate? So we try not to focus on cost synergies. There have been some obvious ones where there's a part to delete, meaning they have a restaurant point-of-sale software that would otherwise compete with our own, and we can simply delete that part.
But we're trying very often to repurpose those folks towards our own mission. In an example like the Givex transaction we just announced, it's gift and loyalty, a phenomenal business that historically sold just gift and loyalty. Every one of those salespeople is now empowered with a much larger arsenal. And where we have to be just very deliberate is you're not just going to sell gift and loyalty. You're going to sell this full-stack offering. And by the way, this is what your merchants always wanted. They historically couldn't get it from a single provider, and now they can. So you should be really excited about that.
So maybe we could talk about what's in the pipeline right now? Like how does the pipeline look and what kind of things are you looking at?
You mean from an M&A perspective?
From an M&A, yeah.
Yeah, sure. So it's a very interesting time. And I say that because we have, throughout my time at the company and quite frankly, long before that, we've kept a list of between 75 and 100 M&A transactions we think could be interesting. And we really challenge ourselves to not be too constrained, not have too deliberate of a filter on it. But let's keep these names on here, and let's have a thesis around them, and let's have what we would need to believe to gain conviction in that thesis. And I would say names fall off the list constantly. They get added to the list constantly. But in general, a healthy portion of that list simply doesn't want to have a conversation. It's not their time. For a handful of different reasons, virtually every name on our list wants to have a conversation with us.
That doesn't mean any of them are high probability. It doesn't mean that there'll be an agreement to what we think value is. But that is sort of a signal that our team is seeing that's very different than what we've seen before. I think it's a bit of a function of the IPO markets not being the SPAC dream that was sold to every private company a few years ago, is being forgotten. And I think people are suddenly realizing that they might not be a public company one day. I think the traditional buyers for a lot of these assets, meaning strategic buyers in our own space, are sidelined. Their investors don't want them doing any more M&A. They haven't necessarily done it in a great way. And then lastly, I think private equity seems to be a net seller more than they're a net buyer today.
All that's benefiting us, and quite frankly, I think we've felt compelled to be very, very vocal and deliberate about our M&A strategy. If you look at Jared's last two shareholder letters, like the playbook's there, and anyone can read it, and that appeals to a lot of people who maybe have just been selling gift and loyalty, and they realize that being part of a larger franchise could embolden them. I'll share one really, really cool stat with you. 72% of our employees came from M&A transactions, and we're a 4,000-person company. To be able to have that much retention of acquired employees tells you that they're winning more as a part of our team than they necessarily were before, and so I think that's becoming more obvious. I don't want to be too specific about what we're looking at, but the pipeline's full.
When we think about deal sizes then, given there's more of these opportunities, does it skew higher than usual or what?
No, because and again, this is just an intellectual challenge. We challenge ourselves to have small things that are very obvious and we should be doing all the time. Like, is there a reseller that supports a bunch of restaurants in a particular market that if we own them, it would just be far more efficient than partnering with them? These are in noticeable deals, but they make us a better business. They fill our hiring pipeline, and we should be able to do them, and we staff a team that can just do those kind of small things. We also have kind of these giant aspirational things, multi-billion dollar ideas that we challenge ourselves to keep on the list. They never really materialize, and I think that's because the bigger the deal, the kind of lower the probability.
And then in the middle are a bunch of kind of, let's call them tuck-ins, but we think they drive a hell of a lot more value than that. I'll pick on the Givex examples, about $140 million purchase price, but it gave us access to $300 billion of payments volume that the customers they support have. So tuck-in is generally where we do best because the opportunities go far beyond just that one piece that they're selling into their own customer.
You kind of talked about the hospitality vertical and described a little bit of your share. Maybe you could just talk about the competitive advantages you have there and why you think you can continue to grow your share.
Of course.
Maybe speak to the competition as well.
Yeah, sure. So maybe I'll just kind of invert it, but try to answer the question deliberately. What's a hotel operator dealing with? A hotel operator is dealing with dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of what they call revenue centers. That's your check-in desk. It's your lobby bar. It's your gift shop. And you can see how far those tentacles go in a place like Las Vegas or Pebble Beach, where it's golf courses and spas and parking garages. And you need to have a good guest experience and commerce experience at every single one of those. But you also need different software for every single one of those solutions. Like you can't have. Let's pick on Toast. Toast doesn't make good parking garage software or golf course software. They make good restaurant software.
So as a hotel operator, you need a platform that's going to stitch together all of these things where each one of your revenue centers can operate with the software they need to conduct their business. You need to stitch them all together. You need a common kind of consumer experience, loyalty, gift cards, payment devices, encryption, tokenization, analytics. And as the operator, you just want a single deposit at the end of the night and a really clear way to reconcile what happened across all this. No one of those software suites can help you with that problem. And that's where Shift4 comes in. We are integrated to 550 plus. And we handle all of those pieces for you. You can't really approach us with a software suite we haven't seen or isn't compatible with us. And that could be a 10-year-old version of your front desk software.
We support it, and so what we solve vis-à-vis competitors is we solve from the integration of that software and the payment device on the counter all the way through to the deposit at the bank. No one else does that, and while there are a couple of providers that can kind of help with integrating to all this software, they typically outsource everything else, and that's just incredibly inefficient, so this is relatively new. It's something we've been offering to the hospitality industry for the last five years, and so it's been a little bit to get the word of mouth out that there's a different and better way of doing things, but if you look at some of the resorts we've announced in just our past few earnings decks, you can get a sense for just how compelling this consolidation is.
Can you talk about payments and software and if a good payments company could be a good software company and vice versa?
Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. And I don't think many have figured out the formula yet. I point again back to that 20 years of experience doing this because we learned a lot about what not to do. And it's obvious that if there's going to be commerce conducted through software, it should have an interplay with the payments company. That is plainly obvious to everyone. It was obvious to our founder 20 years ago. It's obvious to largely everyone today. If you're a payments company trying to approach this opportunity, you need to question how good of a software operator you're going to be, how important are payments inside of that software, and what is the addressable payments opportunity. I mean, we've seen competitors buy dry cleaning software. There's not a natural Cultural Synergy between running dry cleaning software design and payment processing. Contrast that to restaurants.
Payments are embedded in everything about the restaurant experience. You start a bar tab. You have to add a tip. You might split the payment across multiple users. So fortunately, the verticals we've chosen to be in have a really, really tight payments plus software interplay. And it makes the cultural fit work. But again, we've seen competitors buy, let's pick on one, apartment rental software because there's this massive payment volume flowing through it. But it's your ACH for your rent payment that they might make a nickel off of. That's not necessarily the right place to be in our mind. So you have to be really picky and choosy. And you also have to know, and this is critically important, there is religion around do you build, do you buy, or do you partner. And many of our competitors refuse to do anything but one of those.
And we feel you need to do all three. It's a function of the verticals you serve. We could never own all of the software that sits inside of a hotel. You would be owning Microsoft. You'd be owning Oracle. You'd be owning Salesforce plus dozens of others. So partnering is necessary. Contrast that to a vertical like restaurants. We feel like we can, through our own restaurant software, command a really healthy share of the market. And we're happy to build and selectively buy. If there's a piece of software that's got a basket of customers that would otherwise be much more expensive to get access to, let's just buy them. So you have to have that kind of mix of approaches if you want to serve more than one vertical.
So let's shift gears and talk about sort of sports venue share gains you've had. You guys have won a lot in that space. I mean, just every quarter I see all these sports teams. I'm like, which sports teams do they not have anymore? So maybe you could just talk about what's driven the success there, how penetrated you are in that market, and what's the opportunity on a go-forward basis.
Yeah. I'm going to be long-winded in this, but I think it's important because it's got nothing to do with the vertical. It's got something to do with how we approach kind of the problem. We were solicited to buy a suite at the Raiders Stadium when it was being built. We had a big office in Las Vegas. And as part of that, they give you a tour of everything. And we said, this looks just like a hotel. Like ignore what the revenue center does. There's dozens of them. And they're trying to figure out how to stitch this all together. We said, we can solve this problem. Tell us what vendors you're thinking about using. And they kind of rattled off the list. And we said, well, we're already integrated to a bunch of that software, so we can help.
And it caused us to analyze that market and say, what we've solved for the hotel industry is directly applicable to this market. And it set us in pursuit of software we could buy. Like is there a piece of software that's really winning share? And we found one that was plainly obvious to us. It was like this mobile-first technology that really helped you order a beer in your seat as a fan. It helped deliver a lot of customized offerings to season ticket holders, et cetera. And we said, this is software stadiums are going to seek out. They have to deal with all the rest. And they need a solution that can integrate all the rest. But this is going to open doors for us as we talk to stadiums. And we acquired that software.
It wasn't long before we went from that software company selling mobile-first solutions to selling the entirety of food and beverage concessions to offering integrations to all of the payments inside of that stadium and going far beyond that to offer integrations to the ticketing providers that those teams use to sell their products. And so a team prior to kind of Shift4's entry into this vertical would have used dozens of different vendors, gotten dozens of different deposits, had a nightmare of reconciliation and no chance at analytics. And now you buy your season ticket through Ticketmaster. We process that payment. The team has insight into who bought that ticket and when. And then when you show up and use that same card, or maybe you got a voucher with the ticket and you want to use it in the stadium, it's all completely seamless.
So it's not surprising to us that the offering was incredibly compelling. We know where all the stadiums are, so it's not hard to find them. And to your point, we're in kind of a healthy majority of every stadium in every league in the United States and also theme parks. There's a big kind of corollary there. So we're incredibly excited about it. And just foreshadowing, stadiums throughout Europe are dealing with the same problems as the stadiums in the U.S. a decade or so ago. So we think there's a really nice global expansion opportunity around it as well.
When we think about penetration, I guess there's a difference between penetration of teams and venues versus the actual spending.
Yep.
Maybe you just talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, of course. So I call it kind of market share versus wallet share. So our market share inside of stadiums is great. And I mentioned a high--I'll be careful about how I contextualize it.
Healthy majority is what you said.
Healthy majority of every stadium in every league. The total spend, to your point, across those goes far beyond just what's spent on concessions. It goes to a lot of different assets that are inside the stadium: parking, retail merchandise, et cetera. We have a payments opportunity against all of those as a result of being in the stadium and increasingly ticketing. You typically spend about three to five times on a ticket what you would spend inside of the stadium. And that's where we've been able to offer kind of an incredibly differentiated thing where literally every way a team is going to collect revenue is a single pane of glass for them. And we can help stitch together what had been a clunky consumer experience in sort of buying the ticket and then using a lot of those vouchers and incentives while you're actually at the game.
I would say the offering was, quite frankly, so compelling that our number one competitor in the vertical sold us their business, which gave us yet again really massive market share, but an opportunity to go cross-sell all of these services to them. So we bought a business called Appetize a little over a year ago. And the bulk of this year has been winning a lot of new stadiums and converting some of their marquee customers like a Yankee Stadium, where they were just one piece of software, to supporting the entirety of the estate all the way through to a less favorable World Series outcome.
Yeah. Let's not talk about that. International, obviously, you mentioned a little bit about international and sort of the opportunity there. Maybe you could talk about the strategy and how you see it becoming a bigger part of the story into 2025 and onwards.
Yeah. This was a problem kind of presented to us by our customers in the United States and specifically in the hotel vertical. They said, you've consolidated all of these pain points for us. And you're delivering an awesome solution. How do we get this throughout the rest of the world? And we had kind of two of three ingredients for success. We had the software that was installed at that Hilton in Madrid is the same as the Hilton in the United States. We already had the software integration. We already had the customer relationships. What we didn't have was what that Hilton in Madrid needs, which is the ability to accept local payments, settle them to local bank accounts in local currencies, et cetera. So we knew we needed to solve that with M&A.
Building another platform, especially kind of a continental platform, was going to be too difficult for us. So we bought a European payments platform, which kind of solved one piece of the puzzle. And so now there's really very little excuses. We can onboard hotels throughout Europe. There's very little technical work that has to be done. There's little nuances here and there around tax codes and things like that. And the challenge kind of entering 2024 was, do we have the right sales infrastructure to execute on this now that we have the product? And so for hotels, we largely feel like we do. Restaurants, you need a lot of feet on the street. And we've solved that through some creative ways, whether that's buying a restaurant software company like I highlighted earlier.
I think there's still a lot more to be done because for better or worse, distribution in Europe is not as simple as a single continental approach. You need smaller geographic approaches. But we believe that we've got kind of the market know-how. We've got the technical solutions. And they work today inside of merchant locations to deliver what we've done in the United States inside of this continent. And what we don't have is decades' worth of competition that's crept into the market. When we talk to whether it's a restaurateur or whether it's a hotelier about bundling all these technical solutions, it's like an eye-opening moment for them. And there's really not many others that are able to deliver on that.
You think they're willing? Or is there going to be a little bit of a reluctance compared to here? Do you feel like they're as willing as they are in the United States to adopt the technology?
It's an interesting question because the industry fights it. And what I mean by that is you have software companies, hardware companies, and payments companies, typically banks, that give you all sorts of reasons this can't be bundled together. What emboldens us is those are the same reasons we heard 20 years ago. The software company says, if I don't sell my software for $500, I don't make enough to pay my salespeople. And therefore, I can't subsidize it in exchange for payments. And we say, that's a cash flow problem. That's not a structural reason that it shouldn't be this way. I can tell you putting a very small group of people into Europe, just kind of talking merchants through this and introducing a product like SkyTab, where it's all integrated together for them, has been a groundswell of appetite for merchants.
Our challenge is going to be meeting that merchant demand. And I'm less concerned about what traditional industry incumbents think can or can't be done. We've proven that that way of thinking is a little stale.
So maybe you could talk about where you expect the momentum to come from in terms of verticals and geographies over the next two to three years?
Yeah. It's going to be a boring answer because hotels are still really strong. We support roughly 40% of the country. But we continue to win more. And every one of them brings us a heck of a lot more volume than your average. Ticketing is another significant component. So while we support a vast majority of stadiums in the United States today, adding ticketing onto them is like three to five X what their traditional footprint is. And we've sold a lot of ticketing across the last year, of which season ticket sales and other big events have not yet occurred. And so we're really excited about that in 2025. And then international expansion, I would say we had an excellent game plan entering 2024. But we didn't have the pieces done yet. And now we have them done. So we're really excited about international expansion.
And I hope to be able to say this isn't just the Europe thing. I hope to be able to say there's more continents we can unlock in this capacity. Fortunately, we've got this really awesome strategic e-commerce customer that we work with and is using us to help light up payments in lots of different countries around the world. And so every time we light up a country for them, we get to send in the strategy team and say, what's the hotel, restaurant, and stadium opportunity? And can we fast follow with that?
So I left the most exciting part of the story for last, which is SkyTab. Seems like it's running ahead of the plan, this year's plan. Where are you seeing the most traction?
I want to be balanced in how I define our success because I think investors tend to be overly surprised by our success. We are not surprised internally. Keep in mind, we've been serving the restaurant vertical for 20 years. We've traditionally done it, though, across a handful of different brands. Those could be brands we owned, a brand called Harbortouch, or brands we acquired like POSitouch, or simply brands we partnered with like Oracle MICROS. And so our presence in the restaurant space has been quite prolific for a very long period of time. We've had very solid growth rates for a long period of time. We made a deliberate decision back about two years ago to focus on a single product.
And that was SkyTab, an Android-based hybrid cloud solution that eliminates a lot of the traditional tech debt of an on-premise solution that a restaurant might otherwise have to deal with. And so the success you're seeing is not necessarily surprising to us. It's simply consolidating what has been an incredibly strong franchise with lots of great distribution around a single product. And of course, when we consolidate all of that energy and power and focus around a single product, that product is going to do really well. We've acquired about six different restaurant point of sale brands. And in almost every case, the CTO of those brands still works here. And they're focused exclusively on how to make SkyTab better in their little Swimlane of expertise, whether that's enterprise, multi-menu management configurations, whether that's how a kiosk should work. So the mantra is SkyTab or die inside the company.
Regardless of the franchise you came from, this is the way of the future. And I think when we apply that much energy and, quite frankly, focus and burn the ships, by the way, you're not allowed to support those old pieces of software anymore. You have to focus on this. We get good results from it.
Invariably, people want to compare you guys to Toast because that's your primary competitor in the market. You're very early with SkyTab still. So a lot of people are like, oh, I see Toast everywhere. What do you say to that?
A few things. There's never been a winner take all in a market that we've seen, and we are thrilled to have one great competitor. One great competitor is much better than 10 mediocre competitors, and so if you're to kind of look at the business as a whole, we think we're kind of second place to Toast with a lot of great reasons to continue to win despite their success. We are number one unequivocally in hotels. We are number one unequivocally in stadiums, and we've got a lot of expertise to take those things around the world. So our positioning vis-à-vis a great company like theirs is we're quite content with it, and we also generate really strong profit margins and really strong free cash flows. So we see lots of opportunity to invest in ways to differentiate ourselves from them.