All right, next up, we're excited to have Savneet Singh here, CEO of PAR Technology. Looking forward to our discussion today.
Likewise.
So thanks for being here. I know there's probably a lot of people listening who maybe are not as familiar with the story. Would you mind giving us kind of a quick overview of, you know, the long history that is PAR, kind of how it came to be, and kind of what you've done with it since you took over?
It's a long history, but I'll, I'll try to condense it. You know, the company was founded 55 years ago, originally as an IT services company for the Department of Defense. 10 years into its journey in 1978, PAR invented what today we'd call the, the modern point-of-sale system, and then the company went public in 1982, really off the success of McDonald's rolling out this system across a bunch of its stores. It took off, I'd say, for the next five or 10 years, and then I'd say the subsequent 25 years, really kind of got stuck in the mud. It had a sort of a long, slow, slight decline, primarily because it got stuck as a hardware and services business and not a software business.
So to rectify that, you know, obviously, 25 years later, we acquired a software product called Brink, and the vision at the time was that Brink was cloud point of sale for the enterprise. And the idea was that downmarket, you saw the massive growth of firms like Square doing a great job of modernizing POS downmarket, somebody to do the upmarket, and PAR had all these relationships with these large chains. That seemed synergistic. And so, we acquired the business at the end of 2014, and, you know, it was more of a product than a business. It was in 300 stores. It was seven or eight or eight or nine people, really small. But that business, it really exploded under PAR.
It went from, you know, just a few hundred stores to 5000 or 6000 in 2018. I joined the board of the company in 2018, and then became the CEO towards the end of 2018, on this idea of recapitalizing the company, focusing the company on the software vision. Our entire vision thesis then and now is that software is eating the restaurant, but the restaurant might not realize it yet. In this wave of digital transformation, we thought the place to be was the POS, the heartbeat, the ERP of that organization.
Since that time, we've worked really hard to buy the core products that run a restaurant, so back office, POS, payments, and what we call front of house, which is loyalty and online ordering, so that we can kind of stitch together a solution for that enterprise that allows them to not have to manage a dozen different products and really focus on their guests.
Got it. That makes sense. So, you know, the legacy of the or the heritage of the companies and the kind of tier one fast food and enterprise restaurant space, how does that compare to the target market of the software-oriented assets that you have?
So our software market is broader. So the historical business was the big, big restaurant chains, you know, McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC. The market we serve today, I would say, is quick service, fast casual, and now table service, which we just entered the last six or seven months here. We are enterprise focused, so we're the right solution if you're kind of 50 stores and above. We really are. We do believe we're the best solution in that market. But we're also really great for these emerging brands.
So, you know, a number of the fast-growing, well-known chains, from Cava Grill to MOD Pizza to Sweetgreen, you know, they've been customers with us since, you know, some of them were two stores. But that's because they had the intent and the vision back then, that they wanted to be an enterprise and wanted to build an enterprise infrastructure early on. But we really are that kind of enterprise. Is the key area that we differentiate ourselves.
Got it. And so you talk a lot about unified commerce. I mean, what is unified commerce for an enterprise restaurant, and maybe separate or distinct from the SMB space that a lot of investors are familiar with?
Yeah, unified commerce, you know, the vision in that, today, you know, if you ran a restaurant, you would have 10, 20, sometimes 30 products plugged in across your store, managing different parts of your workflow. And that creates a ton of challenge because every single integration is a single point of failure. And so if your payment system goes down, well, that's just not your payment system going down, that's your POS is probably going down because most people need to pay with their cards. You can't process loyalty, you can't process online ordering. So everything is really connected. But the big challenge is that in a world where data is so important, it's hard to have that data be valuable if that data is not unified. So unified commerce is really simplistic. It's an order anywhere is an order everywhere.
And so instead of the online ordering system being different than the in-store system being different than the loyalty system, and then you taking that data, reconciling it, and trying to say, "Okay, this is, this is Will in three different places," it's literally unified. That order from Will, whether you, no matter where you order, it goes back to the same systems, same flows, everything is the same. And the key part of that is simplicity, because, well, you know, I'd argue that having deep integrations between those products allows us to identify you across the store, allows us to identify that employee across the store. But what it really does is also create simplicity to the operator, because you've got one phone number to call. You've got one bill. I mean, these sort of externalities that are, are really compound on themselves.
And then over time, our belief is that if you use the same vendor for your POS, loyalty, online ordering, and back office, in our example, and that's under one roof, gosh, we have a ton of unique data about who you are that we could probably deliver you products that somebody else couldn't, because now we have those products, and we can sort of combine them, and that's the kind of the last layer of it. And so the first layer is really putting it together, a really amazing integration, so they just work well. The second, I think, is like a service element, which is when they're under one roof, it's so much easier to work than having to call five different vendors to figure out what your problem is. And then the last layer is actually new products.
Yeah. Maybe we could hit on competitive set. I think investors tend to just kind of lump the restaurant space into a single competitive group, and, you know, obviously, that's not right. It's a very large market, one of the largest retail markets in the country, not the largest. Who do you compete with in the enterprise segment of the market? And, you know, what are the kind of the barriers to entry, from other competitors that maybe are looking to get into this market?
Our biggest competitors are the legacy POS players, NCR, Oracle, you know, Xenial, which is owned by Global Payments. You know, these are the firms that we run into day in and day out, and we compete with, you know, every day. They have tremendous market share. You know, NCR yesterday, I think, put out that they're in, I believe, 150,000 stores or something like that, and 75% of them are enterprises. You know, they are really sticky products, really stable products, but you know, we would argue not as modern as our products, not built for the world of today. You know, sort of have a decade or two of a customer service history that, you know, might not be perfect. So we compete with those guys.
Down market, you know, getting to your question of why it's different, you know, you've got amazing businesses. You've got Toast, you've got Square, you know, Shift4, Lightspeed, so on and so forth, tons of firms down there. And the challenge is that the product you sell to a small restaurant is dramatically different than enterprise. You know, when we're selling to a big chain like an Arby’s or whoever, you know, they've got a CIO, a CMO, they've probably got a consultant in there. They've got a data science, a data science team. They've got a development team in India and wherever. They've got like, you know, an inordinate amount of people making decisions. They've got RPs, they've got, you know, auditors.
When you're selling to a two-store restaurant chain, like, the CEO is the chef, the COO, the CMO, the CIO, it's a completely different product. You know, the idea that in the enterprise, our integrations into their ERP systems or, you know, their Salesforce.com marketing automation or whatever it may be, like, that doesn't exist down market. And so it's just a really different set of needs for that customer. And the way I like to think about it is, you know, if you and I were designers of vehicles, and I designed sports cars, and you designed semi-trucks, like, if we switched jobs, we probably could still do it, but it would take us years of understanding the nuances and the needs of that customer to solve those customer's pain points. I just think they're in many ways completely different markets.
Got it. And so I guess two schools of thought on restaurant. I mean, software, as you said, is probably eating the restaurant industry. It's probably already taken a big bite out of the SMB space. So some people would say, you know, software companies that have been very successful in SMB, it's only a matter of time before they get into enterprise. So we've had a lot of time over the enterprise players to see what's happening down market. You guys have a more modern platform, you know, other competitors are talking about upgrading their platform. So how do you think market share dynamics shift, or shake out over the next couple of years?
Well, listen, I think in enterprise, you know, I think we reported last month, and, you know, our POS was up, or, you know, our operator solutions was up, like, I think 37%-38% year-over-year, and, you know, you know, we sort of expect that kind of growth. I doubt anyone's growing faster than us in the enterprise. I'd be really surprised, you know, unless they were super tiny. You know, I think that there's no doubt that if you have large market share down market, you need to find another avenue of growth to keep the TAM expectations so that folks in this room keep buying those stocks.
I think what the data would show, and I think people that work in those businesses will tell you, it's been a lot harder to get there than one would have thought, because those are organizations that are not short of money, not short of bodies, not short of inspiration, but it's been hard for them to crack that. And I think it's because of the product side. You know, can you hire a bunch of enterprise sales people? Can you hire our enterprise sales team and steal them and go sell? Like, sure. You know, can you have better marketing than us? Definitely. But can you take our pro, you know, do you have a product that can compete better? Like, I think that's hard, and I think that's why it's taken so much time.
But it's also a cultural change, right? If you've built an organization who's been selling POS systems by putting up Instagram ads and cold calling restaurant chains, and you, you've got a, you know, two-week to a two-month sales cycle, how do you turn the culture of that organization to be like, "Okay, now we're going to do 18-month enterprise sales cycles with people that show up in suits and ties and, you know, with consultants in tow?" You know, it's a really different cultural change, too. And then there's obviously a business model difference. So I think it can happen, and, you know, our goal is to continue to innovate on our product so that our moat expands and we don't sort of get, you know, stagnant and like, "Oh, we have a good product.
Got it. That makes sense. So let's bring it back to your product set. You know, you started out with Brink, guest engagement came from the Punchh acquisition, you did an acquisition of MENU, you've had this Data Central asset for the back office. How do you kind of stitch together these products into kind of a single, cohesive, you know, Unified Commerce experience?
So the key is that they've got to be really tightly integrated to each other. You know, our belief is, we will never tell a customer, "You have to do this." You know, a lot of what we've learned studying the stalwarts of our industry from a generation ago was that kind of their playbook. They kind of slammed the stuff and said, "You got to do it." And, you know, what it did was, it led to a generation of customers who were desperately looking for an alternative once that alternative came. We don't want that to be us.
Our belief is that our products on their own need to be the best products in their market, and I think we can make an argument that all of our products are there, and I think market share would show that on Brink and Punchh for sure, and I think the other two products eventually. But what we have to convince our customers and show our customers is that if you've got two of our products and they are integrated, as they are, the outcome is even better than if you'd picked a competitive alternative. And again, we're not forcing you, but if you have our two products or our three products, together, they work better than if they were independent. Our goal is to deliver that through really, really strong point-to-point integrations that make you feel that you're connected.
There's, like, there's small stuff like single sign-on, you know, shared reporting, shared dashboard, but there's bigger stuff like, you know, eventually a CDP, CDP platform where all the data's in one place. Maybe a universal menu one day. You know, there's all sorts of stuff that you can build on top of. But today, I think it's showing that the integration between the products has to be really tight so that you may have an alternative, and gosh, you may think that alternative is better than our product, but when that— our product integrated with the other product, like, it's the better outcome.
When you think about the addressable market for the current product set today, would... Maybe you can give us a flavor for what that kind of ARPU profile looks like for a location?
Yeah, it's a bullish scene. You know, historically, our POS product, if you look back, you know, since we've been running the company, it was about, you know, $1,900 per year per store. You know, today, that's trending $2,200-$2,300 and going much higher. If you look at sort of just the data we put out there, you know, the average customer being signed is meaningfully higher than that on Brink. And so, you know, that POS module will continue to go from $2,300-$2,500 to $3,000 because the value provided is meaningful, and also, I think, aided by the competitive dynamics I mentioned. Our back office product is about, you know, $1,400-$1,500 bucks a year per store.
And our loyalty product, Punchh, is... Call it $1,000 a year per store. There's a lot of tens of modules and so on and so forth. And then Menu, our online ordering product that we recently acquired, you know, again, depending on a set of modules, it can be $800-$2,400 a year, depending on what you choose.
And that's for the core suite. And then we've got a payments product that we, you know, I always, I always tell folks to sort of, whatever we charge you for POS is roughly the same of what we're gonna charge you for payments, depending on the setup. So, you know, if we can get you to buy our suite of products, it's a, you know, it's a ton of revenue per store, and it gives us a lot of leeway, too, to be aggressive on price because we get the operating leverage of one salesperson, one marketing budget, so on and so forth.
Got it. No, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm trying to do the math in my head, but it sounds like that kind of puts you somewhere in the high single digits, thousands plus maybe payments.
Yep.
Yeah. Got it. Great. Well, maybe you can talk about the upsell or the cross-sell opportunity today. I mean, you've had pretty significant success across selling each of the individual products. Well, how, you know, is there an upsell motion, and how successful has that been so far?
Yeah. So we've got a cross-sell and upsell motion. So on the upsell side, you know, we have certain products like Punchh, you know, soon to be Menu, that have modules that we can upsell, and that's always kind of been pretty programmatic. That's worked pretty well at Punchh for a long time. You know, we try to get better and better. You know, on the cross-sell side, we've you know, recently created an account management team that sort of owns the account, so that if you're an existing customer of ours, you've got one account manager that really owns that relationship at a strategic level, and that person then brings in a direct salesperson to go sell the next product to.
That, that job of that account manager is to sort of understand what are the openings in that account, what's the price point that's gonna matter, who else are we competing against, what's the tech stack look like, who are the consultants, you know, what are the- who are, who's the buyer, so on and so forth. And we've got a pretty good track record, I think. You know, when we acquired Punchh, as an example, you know, the business was growing kind of 25%-30%.
You know, we acquired it, and for the first, you know, two years, I think it grew 40%, 40%, +40% annually. And that was just because we had a bunch of customers, we could say, "Hey, check this thing out." Many of which we recently acquired. You know, we only took it to the United States in, I think, like, February, March of this year, but the amount of pipeline we've driven is incredible so far. The point being that I think we've got a good motion of, like, once we get the product under our roof, we can create that pipeline for it within our existing base.
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Could you maybe touch on the macro? How do you think about macro impacts on the business? What's the most macro sensitive piece?
You know, I used to think about this a lot, and I spent a lot of time educating the PAR team on here's the macro, here's what we get ready for, you know, and, and honestly, the only thing that's been valuable is how we finance the company. You know, in, in, you know, it was at the end of, in 2022, I was like: Oh, man, inflation's here. I can see it in pricing. And so we refinanced everything. It was the best thing we ever did from a financial perspective, but our customers had zero impact. Like, it did not change buying decision on the vast majority of our products. The only place we had some economic sensitivity was on loyalty, and it wasn't because of the spend on loyalty.
It was because when you do a loyalty campaign at a large restaurant chain, it's not just you're spending money on us. The entire organization has to buy into, like, okay, this is a dramatic shift. You've got to do a huge education campaign to your franchisees first and foremost, because they're out there. Then you got to educate your, your customers, people, like, it's just a big initiative. And so it wasn't that they weren't spending. We were just like, "Okay, we're gonna push out this enormous corporate initiative."
That's now kind of come back. But you know, I'd say categorically, our customer base has been really resilient. The lowest churn we've ever had was last quarter. Our annualized churn last quarter, I think, was like 3.5%, less than 4%. Crazy. I mean, that's like best in the world type stuff. From, you know, that's gross, right? I mean, so it's been kind of interesting to see in this tough environment. We haven't seen any pickup in churn in any meaningful way. In fact, it's gone down. Now, will it forever be like that?
You know, I don't know, but I think that QSR businesses, particularly franchise businesses, have incredibly high return on capital, and so even when their sales are down 5%-10%, which, you know, has not happened yet, they're still printing money, and they still have the ability to be like, "Okay, I need to sort of see for what these investments are." So you know, we're seeing really strong durability in our customer base today, and, but I think that's completely reflective that we happen to focus on this QSR fast casual market, which is pretty darn profitable, very resilient, and has, you know, a real commitment to investing in technology because their peers have and their peers have driven ROI.
Got it. So, you know, when we think about, you know, the heritage of the business in that large tier one space, you know, we haven't seen too much in the way of, like, synergies between that and the software business, but I... There has been some chatter around some of these large tier one chains, you know, deciding to kind of give up on the in-house systems and modernize their tech stacks. How do you think that process evolves, and, you know, what do you think, what do you think about the probability of PAR, you know, being a seat at the table for those processes?
So, the last part's easier, which is, I suspect we'll be at the part of those tables because we've been a partner with these or some of these organizations for, you know, as long as I've been alive.
Right.
You know, we've been really strategic to a lot of what they've done. But, you know, I think, like, if we were to step out for a second, most of these organizations, I think if you really ask them to their core, would probably tell you, like: Yeah, we probably should stop building our own software. Now, getting them to do that is hard because they've got, whatever, 100 people working on that team and so on and so forth.
But what's, what's happening is that if you're the CIO, CTO, or you're a CEO, you look around, and all of a sudden, all of your competitors have made this tremendous investment in technology, great loyalty, mobile, AI, whatever, even the ones that have done crypto, like, just, just been an incredible growth of this stuff. If you've got a homegrown product, like, every single time you want to do something, it's like: Okay, here's a build, we're gonna do this. As opposed to if you have a third-party vendor, like: Oh, we've already got all those integrations. We've already done it for these 10 customers.
Right.
You know, the cost, I think, is actually far more prohibitive when you do it internally than externally, because when you do it externally, you just bill that to the franchisee. You know, if you're building this stuff on the corporate books, you've then got to negotiate with your franchisees and say: Okay, like, your tech fee is now going up because we got to build this new stuff. Like, there's all these things that I think make the ROI challenged. What I do think now, and this is, I think, squarely the result of us being a real company, is that we are now, from a site perspective, larger than any one individual restaurant chain.
And so we can go and say, "Hey, we can handle your size." Where historically, you know, all these large chains had more sites than we did, and so that would be crazy for them to give us their business because they're gonna be like, "You guys have, like, 6,000 stores," and I'm like, "15,000 stores." Like, "That's not gonna work. I'm not gonna trust you." But we've kind of, like, crossed that chasm. And so I think that's a part of it. And the last thing I'd say is, I think it's also reputational. I think that these are risk-averse businesses that make their money on how they run their menu, their marketing, and this digital thing is new.
I think they have to really believe that the company they're working with is reliable, it's gonna work, but also, like, they can deliver without pain. I think our reputation continues to get better and better and better, and that gives them more confidence to make that switch. You know, honestly, this to me, to your pr- it's just a wave. Like, I don't I think it'll be very hard to be the last person standing saying, "Hey, I want to build my own..." You know, it's like, I guess it's like a hedge fund thing. "I wanna build my own trading software because I'm gonna get some edge." Like, in today's world, like, that's hard to argue.
Got it. And do you see this playing out as a, as a winner-take-all type of situation? There's not that many competitors in this space, but a large chain with, you know, almost 100,000 restaurants, 50,000 restaurants comes out, and are they going to-
Do I see it that way? No. Do I, do I wish and plan for that? Yes. I mean, we want it to be winner take all. I think we, we would win. I hope we would win, but you know, it's a big market. You know, if you look the last version of this market, you know, you had two really, really, really big winners and a bunch of medium-sized winners. But one of the great things that's happened with the slowdown in sort of external funding into our market is that it's allowed a lot of the noise to get sort of squeezed out, and I think puts us in a really strong position to potentially be a consolidator, but also be able to make the continued investment in R&D to show to our customers that we're the ones to back.
You know, if you're a big brand, you know, a lot of what you want to do is not just pick the right product for today, but you're like, "What's the right product five years from now?" And that's impossible to know today. What you can say is, "How much that company spending on R&D? Like, who is the person I'm talking to? Are they innovative? Are their future... You know, how are they looking at that world?" And, you know, I think we can give them confidence that we're at least spending, and hopefully, that they align to our vision. So, I don't think- it doesn't need to be winner take all. I certainly- we're certainly trying to make it that way.
Right.
But I don't think it needs to be for there to be a couple of big winners.
Got it. Makes sense. Maybe let's talk payments. It's starting to become a more meaningful contributor to revenue. You set out a couple goalposts for, you know, where you expect that to be. What, what do you view as the key value proposition for why a restaurant should choose PAR for payments in addition to the POS software that you offer?
I will give you one, give you three. One is cost, two is simplicity, and then three is data. And I'll go through this fast. You know, on a cost perspective, most restaurants, not all, like, don't... can't actually tell you what they're paying for payments. They, they have a number in their head, and then you'll say, "Give me your statements," and then it's a completely different number. And so we really go in there transparently and say, "Here's actually what you're paying. Here's what we can deliver for you," and, and that, that matters, you know, a bunch. Second is simplicity. The number one- generally, the number one call for resolution to a POS help desk is a issue with the payment device-
or the payment terminal or the payment connection. Simplicity of having that being the same vendor is really powerful because it's like, the number one reason I'm going to call and complain is the same, we can figure that out together. You're not pointing fingers. You're just like: "Okay, the payment guy's down? Oh, that's me. POS is down, that's me. We can figure that out." But the simplicity is also, I can trust that what I'm being charged is real. You know, there's an entire little business of people that will go to restaurants and say, "Give me all your payment statements. I'll tell you all the charges that were wrong, and you can claim this back." Like, when you have the POS and the payments company, like, the data integrity is high. It's like transaction fee, transaction fee, transaction fee. It's exactly... It's all there.
But the last part is data, and what I think is interesting here is that, you know, we own the largest loyalty product in restaurants. And if we have your payment data, and your loyalty data, like, we literally know every single guest that has ever shopped in your store. And having that data and combining it, whether it's POS data or loyalty data, is an incredibly valuable tool that we can then let you take charge of. And most payment providers, they don't really give you that data or, you know, or they charge you a lot for it, but they try to. That really becomes their data. And, you know, the way we do it at PAR, we really give you the ability to monetize that data all over again.
I think our dream. You know, I sort of have this dream, which is, you know, we should be able to build a product on top of this payment data or all of our data at some point that will allow us to continue to bring down the cost of payments because we're making money on a product that's actually adding a ton of incremental ROI for you.
Makes sense. I guess, just following up on the, on the payment side, you mentioned that there's a cost advantage. Could you give us a sense for, like, how much a restaurant can reduce their cost of payments by adopting, you know, PAR Pay?
It's meaningful, and it depends on the chain, but, you know, we've gone to chains and saved them well over half what they were paying, which is a large amount. You know, I would say... I couldn't give you an average, but I would say, you know, sometimes it's 20%, sometimes it's like 60% or 70%, but it's a meaningful savings where it's hard not to take us.
Got it. Makes sense. So you've seen a lot of momentum in Brink, the POS, which you've historically talked about this being sort of the tip of the spear for the software platform. What's the outlook for operator solutions over the kind of intermediate term?
You know, I think we'll continue to grow as we've been growing. And, you know, we have a couple irons in the fire with, you know, super large customers that would take us on another, you know, hopefully a step, a step up in growth from even there. But, you know, payments has been a huge driver of that and will continue to be a big driver of that because of the value that we add. And, you know, the way we report payments is net. You know, if we were to sort of, you know, gross it up like our peers, the number would be like, I don't know, $40 million-$50 million. It'd be way bigger than it is-
Right
... than we think is, you know, we think that's disingenuous. But, you know, the combination is powerful for the end customer.... And so I think by just sticking with what we're doing, I expect it to continue to grow really nicely. And, you know, we've grown into this table service market, which is a nice extension for us, where it's a more complicated workflow, but you also get compensated for that. And so that's sort of another nice, you know, tributary for us to grow down.
Got it. In that pipeline, you—so what is the attach rate of payments in the pipeline for the new Brink deals? It sounds like a lot of those are still in the pipeline today.
It's super high. You know, in some quarters, it's 100%, some quarters, 50%. You know, it's—I think we'll—it's hard to know what will shake out. We haven't been doing it long enough to give, like, this is, this is, like, the true attachment rate.
Right.
You know, where we don't attach payments, it's pretty simple. One, they have recently signed a new deal with another payments provider that doesn't have an out. And sometimes, if there's an out, we will pay out—we will actually finance the out because we think we can still get a great deal. Or B, you know, it might be one of these mega, mega chains where they've got a deal directly with, I don't know, First Data or whatever, and it's like, you know, you're not gonna rip out that payments deal. But, you know, for the most part, they should be taking our payments product.
And then, you know, you've had a pretty good acquisition track record since you came on board. Can you maybe talk about the most recent acquisition, Menu?
MENU is an online ordering product that we sort of discovered in Europe. It's the modern version of the legacy online ordering products that we see in the United States. You know, it reminds me so much of, you know, Brink or Punchh in the early days, where there's, you know, a big product that has huge market share that, you know, starts becoming extractive on price and functionality, and it gets a little, you know, stodgy, and then it's the young upstart. So it's kind of a fun thing at PAR, 'cause it's a young upstart thing, it's a young upstart team. It's created energy and dynamism. The product itself, you know, has a couple of core pieces to it. One, it's online ordering, so it's your online ordering website at a restaurant.
What’s unique about it is it’s incredibly configurable and it’s modern. So when we demo this for our customers, it’s almost like, “Oh, my gosh, like, this is the way the world should be working. I shouldn’t have to work with a consultant to update my menu. I shouldn’t have to, like, have my online ordering website look exactly like my competitor’s online ordering website and their competitor’s website. Like, I have this beautiful functionality.” You know, the other part of what they do is sort of this, you know, linking up your third-party orders, whether it’s Uber Eats and DoorDash, into your POS. You know, it’s got a kiosk product, so on and so forth. So think of it as like the, what we call off-premise orders. That’s really where it fits.
You know, we bought the product, and at the time, it was pretty much European, and a little bit, South America-focused, not US, and it had good pipeline growth in front of it. We thought, we said, "Okay, let's let it do that for the next year or so, and we'll slowly kind of retool it." You know, after owning it for four months, we were like, "Wow, so many of our US customers are asking for this product now. Let's start showing it to some of them." And then we started showing it, and we were like, "Oh, my God," we're like, "They're almost asking us for orders." And so in Q1 of this year, we really shut down the European pipeline.
You know, we pissed off a couple of customers saying, "Hey, we're going to focus our business on the U.S." And we started to build that infrastructure and roll it out. And the pipeline is quite meaningful, like, it's a really strong pipeline of customers in the United States. And now we got to get it out the door and improve the value. But I think, you know, it's a really exciting product. It's, you know, we think it's a killer app.
We think when we give a demo to a customer, it's the funnest demo to give because every time I, I give it or I watch it, it's just like you just see the other side being like, "You know, I want that thing." And you know, what works against us is we just started in the U.S., so we don't have, like, a big referenceable clients. You know, because the pipeline is large, you know, it's gonna take us a little bit of time to get you live because we got to get a bunch of other people live. And it's got to get all these integrations done in the U.S.
You know, it had to get the DoorDash and Uber Eats and Seamless Web and, you know, the POS companies and so on and so forth. So it'll take a little bit of time, but we made a massive investment. It's a vast majority of our burn, like, but we believe that very strongly in that it not only being head-to-head a better product than what exists there, but we also believe it'll be the pull forward of, like, all of our future strategy.
I guess pre-pandemic, you know, online ordering was nice to have, kind of special. During the pandemic, it was the only thing around. What, what is the value prop today to a restaurant that doesn't have an online ordering solution? What—like, how much, how much of an uplift in sales does the, the average restaurant see when they adopt something like this?
So let me answer a different question, which is: Why would they switch to another provider? Because I, I don't think there's a restaurant chain that doesn't have online ordering that's gonna have... Like, the ones that don't have online ordering to me, to me today, have made a proactive decision not to.
Right.
Which is like, "It messes up my experience. I don't want to touch it, like, I'm not doing it.
Yeah.
Everybody else, I think, has, has got some form of online ordering. You know, in my eyes, they... You know, if you think about a, a restaurant company, what they really are, are amazing marketing organizations, right? You shop at restaurants, again, quick service and fast casual, 'cause they have done an incredible set of marketing that's convinced you that for the food type you want, that's the right place to go. And your online presence needs to match the ethos of your in-store. It has to be the same thing. It has to feel exactly the same. It has to give you that same warm and fuzzy feeling. And we believe that what's been happening is because there's been so many templated little versions of everyone kind of having the same look and feel, that you're, you're actually giving that away.
It's sort of like, wait, like, I'm not getting the same feeling that I had when I sat down at, you know, you know, my-- that amazing place. Like, you know, In-N-Out Burger doesn't do online ordering. They proactively decided probably not to do that. But if they ever did, I guarantee you that website and feel is gonna feel like you're in an In-N-Out yourself. And, I think all restaurants want that, and so they've been prohibited in doing that because of, you know, a, a legacy set of technology that didn't allow them to do that. We've sort of modernized that. But what's more powerful to me is not just that, which is today, if you use Brink as your POS or NCR as your POS, whoever, and you've got an online ordering product, those are different products.
They have different schemas, they have different menus, they have all this stuff, and you got to, like, kind of take your orders there, orders there, throw them into something, figure out if what's the same. Like, it just doesn't connect to what's the-- You're losing the value of that, that data. And so we can give you that, that, sort of, ability to say, "Hey, like, we're your POS company, we're your loyalty company, and, like, we're an online ordering company." You see the beauty of that, that is? Like, you've got to update your menu once, and it'll all update at the same time. Your, you know, Will over there ordering, like, we know Will's there, there, there, and there. And so there's so many, like, sort of these, you know, benefits that are really concrete that we can show.
The last part is online ordering is expensive to the restaurant. It's already expensive because the fees and all the stuff you've read articles about, but it's also a really complicated thing to maintain. Every time you update a menu, it's, it's there. Most of these businesses, because they don't like the templated website of the legacy online ordering providers, they'll spend millions of dollars customizing the website, redoing the flows. Like, I joke at one of our largest customers, I think one of our largest customers, they spent more customizing their online ordering than they have on us, and we're, like, literally the SaaS guy.
I'm like, "That's insane!" But you know, that's not right because you don't want to limit the creativity of the brand, because in the end, that CIO, CTO, CMO, they should, they're trying to create a brand experience that is consistent with the brand experience everywhere else you touch them. And so, we think that that's what our product allows, that they can have control of that versus having a third party in there and manage it.
So maybe we can tie all this together, and I'll try to lump two questions in one here. It sounds like you've got a lot of momentum in payments. Punchh has kind of improved after seeing a little bit of an air pocket. You know, you're investing in Menu. Margins recently have taken a little bit of a step back. That's mostly been through some of the investments in Menu and some of the acquisitions. How do you kind of frame the growth algorithm, you know, from a financial perspective over the next year or two?
So I think we're in a really nice position. I suspect, you know, we'll continue to grow at the rates we've been growing for the last few years. You know, we haven't really had a massive deceleration like many, probably primarily because I think the work we did on the POS side a few years back, we're getting the benefits of that. I also think, you know, there's a decent probability we win, you know, a large transaction at some point, a large customer at some point, one of these mega, mega whales that could take that revenue growth far higher.
I think we will likely continue to be acquisitive, and probably more acquisitive than we've ever been before, given you know, our view of our currency versus the currency of the company that we think would be attracted to us. So, you know, I think that to me, the growth algorithm is pretty simple. We will continue to grow at the rates we're going, and I think there's a couple levers for that to grow even faster. And then I think on the cost side, we're trying to be really disciplined. We're not growing OpEx. We did have a blip last quarter, which I think is explainable but unacceptable. And, you know, we're gonna continue to be that way. You know, I think if you...
I think a lot of products, anybody at PAR, in any part of the organization, I think there wouldn't be one person that'd say, "Oh, like, we wasted a penny here or a penny there." I think most people would be like, "We're pretty tight on everything," but also they would explain that's because we're focused on ROI. So I think the growth and profit algorithm, I think, is really clear, and I think the M&A that I mentioned will only enhance that, because we wouldn't be buying stuff that's burning a ton of money. We'd be buying stuff that's profitable or very close to profitable.
Makes sense. You know, I wanted to ask about the government business a little bit. I mean, you know, it sounds like acquisitions are top of mind. You know, you've publicly stated that, you know, you're looking to kind of free up some capital, divest this business at some point in time when it makes sense. What's that decision tree look like? Does the recent kind of opening up of capital markets make that process easier to get accomplished?
In our 10-Q , we put in the MD&A that we are, you know, we are looking at strategic alternatives. You know, we are crystal clear there's no strategic fit between a government business and a restaurant technology business. You know, it, it's a very good time to divest the business in this category. You know, whether it's the Ukraine war, whether it's the uncertainty among all the world powers, the DoD will continue to invest in technology, and particularly in the areas that we operate in, which is, you know, Counter-UAS, drones, you know, communication forces.
You know, we're involved in, you know, some of the stuff that's going on today. Like, all these are areas that have long-term secular growth trends. And so I think, there'll be no shortage of buyers if, if/when we sell it. And I, I also think that, it's a growth asset in an industry that doesn't have a lot of growth assets. And so, you know, hopefully, we get lucky, somebody sees it that way, too.
Awesome. I think that's just about all the time we had. Savneet, thanks for joining us today.