Morning, everyone. My name is Mayank Tandon. I'm the fintech analyst at Needham. I'd like to welcome Savneet Singh, the CEO of PAR. Savneet, thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So Savneet, just to set the stage, there might be people new to the PAR story here, so could you just give us some background on the company and where you're positioned within the restaurant technology space, and then we'll dive into more details?
Sure. So we sell technology into the enterprise restaurant industry. Our customers are primarily restaurants that are 50 stores and above, although we've got some that are below that, generally emerging enterprise chains. We like to, you know, fashion ourselves as a platform to run your enterprise restaurant. So that covers everything from the front of house, which would be your online ordering and loyalty, all the way to your back of house and Payments. The core of what we do is a point-of-sale product called Brink, which is our land and expand product, which is, you know, the modern version of, you know, modern cloud POS system, you know, akin to, you know, something like what Toast would do down market, we, we do that up market.
So, maybe Savneet, to again go into more details. You've talked a lot about the unified platform. Could you just walk through- You mentioned Brink-
Yep.
But could you walk through each of the opportunity sets across the front, middle, and back office, the way you break down your segmentation?
Yeah. So we break it in three segments, which will, you know, soon be two. But, our first we call guest engagement, which is our online ordering and loyalty. Guest engagement is like it sounds, it's our... the tools that restaurants use to engage their guests. So, online ordering and loyalty. So, you know, if this goes out, if you, you know, examples would be something like the Taco Bell app. You know, we're the loyalty engine underneath that. And so the products that, you know, I think that make it exciting is historically, when you would buy these products, there were two distinct products. And so you would have a different app vendor, from an online ordering vendor, from a loyalty engine, you know, different payment vendors.
It was, it was a very confusing system, and when we go into these restaurants, we say, "Hey, now we have your front of house, front of house all in one." And so we simplify that, make it simple, make the data simple. The customer identifiers are the same, the Menus are the same, so on and so forth. And so we go to market in that area of guest engagement. Those products sell incredibly synergistic. We just started selling Menu, you know, in 2023, really the second half of 2023, and, you know, we signed 11 customers there. 10 of them are from Punchh. So it's clearly showing the ability that this unified idea is working really well in that area. Our second segment, we call Operator Solutions, which is our POS and Payments business.
This is very similar to most POS and Payments businesses. We are the everything from literally the device you see on the counter, and everything that connects into it. This is the heartbeat of the restaurant. Everything you do in the restaurant really plugs into that device. It's the biggest piece of software, it's the most important piece of software. If it goes down, your restaurant goes down. And selling Payments in there is a really relatively simple attach for most customers, given size. And, you know, that business grew 38% in Q3, and I think we'll, you know, we feel really confident about that. And then our third segment is back office, which is COGS, inventory, labor.
Again, the back-of-house stuff in a restaurant that you may not see, but have, you know, they effectively are, you know, management of your COGS. You know, we're going to be moving that under our operator solutions because we've realized that instead of selling that on its own, we're having a lot more success just bundling it into our point-of-sale product.
Great. So as you go to market, are you going to market as a bundled, unified commerce platform, or are you going to the market individually with different products and then trying to win and then land and expand over time? So what is the go-to-market strategy-
So-
with these different platforms?
So generally today in the market, you know, a customer is looking for a point solution. We go and say, "Hey, you're looking for this point solution. Let us show you why you need to look at it in a more holistic manner." And, it's now at a point, excuse me, where, the customers are now coming to us and saying, "Hey, we were going to go at a point solution, but now, like, we've heard about this, let's talk about doing it this way." And so, you know, in 2023, I don't know if there's a single customer that just bought one product. And so, you know, we've been able to now convince our you know, the industry, which is, "Hey, you went to RFP to look for this thing.
Really, what you need is this holistic solution." And so, you know, we go to market trying to say, "Hey, well, we, we can answer your RFP for this one product, but in reality, like, look at the solution together." And, you know, this was, you know, manifested with, you know, we had a win in October and November with Burger King, where it was a point of sale RFP, but we were able to sort of bring in point of sale and, and parts of online ordering. And so it's, it's sort of us going out to the industry and saying, "Hey, we think that solving these point solutions is actually a way to get yourself in more trouble than buying something more holistically and putting it together," and the industry is starting to respond to that.
You know, I would say in 2024, we have our first set of RFPs that are going to be multi-product, based off of this idea of, "Hey, can you do it together?" Because now we have enough reference points to say, "Hey, when you buy it together, there's a better together story.
Whether in terms of products or modules, is there a way to think about what the penetration today is in terms of average product or module per customer, and what that number could be over time as an indication of the land and expand opportunity?
Yeah, I mean, I think the best way to look at it is actually penetration within our point-of-sale base. So, our Punchh product, our online ordering product, is in about 70,000 restaurants. Our POS product is in about 23, as last reported, this was a while ago now, but call it 23,000 restaurants. You know, we think that over time, every single one of our customers should be having three, four, or five of our products. I think we feel incredibly confident that every customer should have at least three. You know, if you have Brink, you will most likely have Payments, you'll most likely have back office. If you have Punchh, you'll most likely end up moving to our online ordering product.
You know, what we're trying to figure out is, hey, how do we take two or three and make that into five, six, and seven down the road? And I think we're beginning that motion, but we feel incredibly confident that if we get a logo in today, it'll be buying two products.
So I'll get to numbers later, but to think about the growth levers, it would be a case of new logo wins, and then driving more penetration within the installed base.
Correct.
I think with that comes the ARPU expansion opportunity as well.
That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, if I think of like, you know, look at our 23,000 point-of-sale stores. You know, 30% have two products right now, and, you know, I expect that number to go up meaningfully in the next couple years.
Got it. Maybe since you mentioned the BK win, I wanted to touch on that. I think there was news yesterday where they bought out the largest franchisee operation. So again, just to set the stage for people who might not be familiar, how big is the BK opportunity and the news yesterday, what does that mean? Does it have an incremental impact on the growth opportunity, or is that part and parcel already of the story?
The BK win for PAR is, you know, roughly $22 million a year for, you know, a very large contract in a duration perspective. The deal starts rolling out in March 30th of this year, and then the rollout period goes for two years. It's transformative for us in the sense that it's a real whale of a deal. It's the largest deal we've ever won, but I think probably the largest deal in, you know, our industry. And also highlights the large legacy brands adopting third-party technology, which is something I think they've been reticent to do, primarily because the fear there wasn't a vendor to do that.
And, you know, I mentioned this on our Q3 call, but, you know, since that time, and, you know, leading up to that, we've just had this dramatic influx of real deal volume in our business that we've never seen before. And I think it was building, it was there, and I think Burger King also has now been like: "Hey, like, there's actually we can actually get this done." And so that... It's been transformed, not just because financially, it's an incredible deal for us. It's a well-priced deal. It's a large deal. It's so different than anything else we've done. It was a two-product deal. It wasn't a one-product deal on a mega brand. And so I think we'll, you know, hopefully have more of these to come.
Obviously, you know, they, they are owned by RBI, who have other restaurant brands that are underneath that, that we're looking to penetrate our, our products into. Then Burger King itself, you know, there's opportunities for us to sell more PAR products. You know, we've got the best loyalty product in the business. We've got other online ordering modules, and so, you know, we think it could be a long and healthy relationship for, for both organizations, and they, they have been just the most incredible partner to work with, like, really just a really well-run organization. You know, in terms of the first part of your question, you know, they announced a day or two ago, the acquisition of their largest franchisee group.
Burger King historically had, you know, encouraged franchisees to be acquisitive and, and own large, large, pool, pools of their, of their restaurants. You know, we have. I don't know anything inside baseball. I would, you know, my guess is it's probably a net good, positive thing for PAR. I, you know, Burger King, you know, I think, thinks very highly of PAR and has, you know, moved aggressively to get their corporate stores onto our products. And so the fact that there's more corporate-owned stores is probably a, a good thing for us.
So while we're on the Burger King opportunity, you mentioned $22 million per year. When does that start to roll out? And that's, again, before you sell additional products into the client, right?
Yeah.
The $22 million.
Yeah.
When does the rollout expect to?
The rollout starts in March 30th of this year, and, so we have a two-year rollout period, so it'll take us two years to get to that, roughly that number. And then, you know, it grows from there. But, you know, obviously during that period, we're, you know, we're already in front of them saying: "Hey, what about this? What about this product? What about it..." And, and so, you know, we've got to execute, but I think, you know, if you do a good job, there's no reason why they wouldn't want to consolidate more onto, onto PAR.
We'll talk costs and margins later, but just to touch on this, are you having to absorb additional R&D, additional expenses, as part of this launch?
So it's a good question. So, we are taking on a hiring spike in Q4 and Q1, which we've talked about. Now, the beauty of it is, we take on that cost, but then we get reimbursed six months later, and so it's a short-term kind of pain, long-term, you know, it'll, that's how. And, you know, these are bodies that are temporary in nature. These are support, service. These aren't, you know, bodies we're going to keep forever. You know, we have this huge spike of growth that has to come, and then we're gonna let it go.
There is a cost to it, but you know, the net impact to us is, you know, it's negative for the two quarters, but after that, it's you know, really, really profitable.
Not to put words in your mouth, but I think you implied that there's a halo effect from this win. Has that already started to play out, or is that still something we're gonna-
It is
... wait to see?
I mean, it's, you know, you never know how these things work, but, you know, we have never had a so much demand for our products. It's, you know, we have more RFPs in the first four months of 2024 than we had for all of 2023. And in our industry, an RFP is like a... it's, it's not like, "Oh, I'm just going to do an RFP." Like, it's a, it's a really meaningful cost to the customers we operate in. Because of the size of the brands we operate in, they usually have a consultant, and they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, to get just, just make an RFP and then to evaluate an RFP. And, and so they'll, the, when they go to RFP, they're, like, pretty seriously going to do something.
And so to see how many we have in such a short period of time is, like, really interesting. Now, I don't know if it's because they saw Burger King and said, "We're going to do it, too." Like, I, I, I doubt it was that, you know, obvious. I suspect they were already doing it, and that maybe accelerated it, but we've never seen that there. Another good, like, anecdote is, like, you know, CEOs get, like, anecdotes, and then they try to pretend it's like, that they're, like, real. But, you know, salespeople are the ones that really can tell you. And we had our sales kickoff last week and, you know, you can always tell at a sales kickoff, like, how real the demand is.
And so, you know, I always, you know, I was telling someone just last week that, you know, in a sales kickoff, like, if the sales team is nervous about what's gonna happen, you know, you'll start to hear during a sales kickoff being like: "Man, I just, I love PAR so much. Like, how do I increase my equity comp and, like, how do I get a bigger salary and not be so coin operated as a salesperson?" And it's like, There's always these signals where like: "Oh, shit, that guy's really worried about, like, his pipeline, like, he's not going to make his number." And now there's, like, none of that. It was like: "Let's go. Let's get more escalators in the commission structure." It was totally the, like...
I was like: "Wow," like, you know, the team was rallying and excited. So, you know, right now it looks very positive. But I live in, you know, fear of, like, it's all gonna fall apart. But yeah, I don't know if it's Burger King. I don't know if it was, you know... But there is just a secular shift, which is, I think, you know, you asked at the beginning, which is all these point solutions in many ways have just broken the restaurant. Like, when you go to a restaurant, and you're paying with that QR code ordering thing at the table, and you think that's cool, and innovative, and simple, it's a disaster for that restaurant. It's just a freaking disaster because it's running through a different payment rail. The kitchen's like, "Fuck!
It's like an order out of nowhere." It's like, it is just a mess. And so all that technology that came out of COVID, all those things, they've just put so much stress on it. And so when we go to a restaurant company, we're like: "Hey, like, you know those six vendors you had? Like, now there's one." Like, they're like: "Okay, please, you know, please." And I know that, you know, we might be winning because of vendor consolidation. We might be winning because when we unify, we give you unified data, unified reporting. But we're not doing— You're not— When we're unifying, we're also not giving it away on price. So you can see our ARPU has gone up meaningfully in 2023, and so it's not like we gave it away on price.
The point being, that the value proposition is resonating to the customers to unify these things.
Just one point of clarification. I think, maybe I misheard you, but you said the RFP activity in the first four months after the deal one?
For first four months of 2024. So the quantity of RFP dollars in the first four months of the year is higher than all of 2023.
Okay. I think I understand. Let me ask you about the sales side. So are you having to invest aggressively in sales people, basically to keep up with this sort of, you know, pipeline potential? And just from an investment perspective, what should we think about that?
So not really. Like, you know, the beauty of selling multi-products is you can leverage the same salesperson to sell two products, right? And so we have upgraded, you know, we just, you know, hired, like, the ringer in our industry, and that was a big, like, feather in our cap, at PAR. You know, every industry has, like, you know, a couple people that the whole industry knows, and, you know, we think we've got the two best POS salespeople. And there, where we are amping up our sales resources are on sales engineers. At this same sales kickoff I mentioned, you know, the number one ask of our sales leaders was not new salespeople, not product, actually, which is really rare, it was more sales engineers to do demos.
and so, you know, again, validating there's a lot of pipeline. Now, we have to close that pipeline, that these RFPs have to be real, they can't be fishing expeditions. Like, who knows? but it's... The resources we're adding are not net new salespeople there-
Got it.
you know, the support staff to help the sales team execute.
Got it. Great. Then also, just staying on the new logo activity, I saw this morning, you guys won, Bob Evans on the Punchh side. I'm sure that's another indication of your success in the market, but, could you give us any perspective on that? I know it just happened this morning, but any thoughts around that? How big could the opportunity be, and is that, again, an indication of, you know, more sort of these QSR wins that are coming down the pike?
So I can't talk about the numbers on that one, unfortunately. But I would say, you know, Punchh, our loyalty business, it's rocking and rolling again. You know, we're. That's one of a number of wins we had in Q4, that, you know, you know, you know, really hit our mojo there. Like, at the end of the year, we signed a couple of very large deals, which we'll announce the next quarter. And, you know, we've got our footing, and we're doing really well there. And so, you know, I think there, it's a little bit different on Brink, whereas on our POS side, you know, it's just a secular moment of, like, "I got to unify this.
This stuff is just there." On our Punchh side, it's just really making sure it's execution. We have the best product in the market, and it's this ability to package it with our online ordering. So, you know, I think we see, you know, the rest of 2024 looking pretty strong for the POS side of our business, sorry, the loyalty side of our business, in that combination with our online ordering. But, you know, sizes, I can't- unfortunately, can't, on that one, we can't... The customer hasn't given us clearance, but, you know-
Okay
... we've got a few of these coming out. You'll see soon. That's just gonna, again, just show, like, Punchh had a very strong second half of 2023.
I think in the press release, it said 437 locations.
Yep.
I'm assuming that's all of it, right?
Yes.
Potentially.
Yes. Like I said, that's the smaller of the large deals we won.
Got it.
So we're like, there's just a lot of momentum there. And again, what is sort of happening is, you know, the enterprise side of restaurants, there just isn't. It's, you know, Silicon Valley isn't rushing to solve, like, the QSR problem. You know, we're competing against, you know, Silicon Valley 1.0. It's Oracle, it's NCR, it's, you know, Global Payments. These companies are great companies, amazing companies, you know, cash flow profiles I'm envious of. But they're also not the companies that are gonna disintermediate our products. They're not the companies that are going to outhustle our products. You know, one of the great compliments, you know, we get sometimes is they're like: "Oh, I love, like, you guys are like founder-led sales." And I always laugh.
I'm like: "I wasn't born when PAR was founded." You know, like, but they feel this, like, intensity from us because we try to run more like a start-up. That's really like, you know, helping us against these incumbent, you know, older companies. So in the enterprise, you know, if you're a big brand like Bob Evans and others, you know, you can go with a start-up that is unproven, unscalable, untested. You can go to, like, one of the legacy guys and know that you're going to have the same bad customer support you've had for 10 years, or you can go with PAR. I think, like, we are carving out that niche, so that if you're in the enterprise, that's the place to go.
If we're. Oh, by the way, we'll also take on your online ordering and this and that, improve ROI for everything that you add here on out. You know, we try to make it simple and easy.
Since we're talking about the Bob Evans win that happened, you know, recently, is Menu now fully integrated with Punchh, and are you able to go to the market now as a bundle solution, or is it still being sold individually?
Both. I mean, we do, we do go bundle it aggressively. And so, you know, generally, we go in as a package deal on net new logos, and our customers like it. Now, there's always sorts of stuff. They may have an existing contract that has another year to go with their existing vendor, and so you'll get one product in and have to wait for the second one. But it's, it is incredibly clear. We won 11 deals with Menu since we've started. Ten of them were partnership with Punchh, and so it's very clear that, like, that's the stick that's working. And I think both products help each other. But the one lo-- By the way, one logo that was not Punchh was Burger King.
Right.
So, you know, it is proving how synergistic they are. And that's pretty exciting, and, you know, we've talked about this, but, you know, we've slowed it down. Like, we've slowed down the Menu, you know, sales motion a little bit just to make sure we get the stuff out the door first.
And then, just maybe to back up a little bit on the overall market opportunity, Savneet, how should we think about the number of potential restaurants, given your focus on QSR, fast casual? I think you've also had a few wins in casual dining. So-
Yeah.
Just trying to put it all together, how big is this market for you in terms of location size?
You know, I'll give you the standard numbers. You know, I think if you looked at our peers, Olo, Toast, they have much larger numbers than we do.
Right.
We're always the most conservative because, you know, just the way we operate. And, and I would say, I, I'm starting to move off of our numbers and think they're a little bigger. But, you know, the, the-- according to, like, the data that we see in, the United States and Canada rather, there are about 1 million restaurants. Half are viewed as enterprise.
Mm-hmm.
We sort of look at that as our addressable market today. Now, we have a bunch of business that is non-enterprise today. We were in Sweetgreen, we were in all these sort of emerging chains, but pretending none of that existed, it's about half of the TAM, is about, you know, call it 500,000 restaurants. And, what's interesting about that is that number is not going to grow. That's going to grow a few percent a year. Restaurants still are growing, which is amazing. You know, it's like the over-retailing just never ends. But it's, like, the quantity of products per store that is, like, really fascinating to us, which is when we started, we had one product.
You know, now we've got four or five products, and I, and I think that's going to continue to grow over time. Now, we will come as a bundled solution, but, you know, each module you add, I think will grow over time. And so, you know, today, if you buy all of our products, it's, you know, probably $10,000-$12,000. You know, four years ago, it was $2,000.
Right. Okay, understood. I was going to sort of ask you a question related to that. In terms of, competition, because, again, you said, you know, Toast and others are out there with big numbers, but they're more SMB focused-
Yep.
You're more enterprise. Are you seeing a little bit of crossover now from the likes of Toast and other SMB-focused players? Then I'll have you answer the question about the bigger incumbents.
Um
-separately.
You-- Not a lot. I mean, I would say, you know, we have tremendous admiration for Toast. I've always, you know-
Mm-hmm
... looked up to them. You know, they're in every RFP, like, for sure. You know, we don't see them-
Even in the QSR? I don't-
I think they bid for everything.
Do they have a product? Okay.
But they're not in the final rounds. You know, generally, in the final rounds, it's a combination of us, you know, Oracle and NCR is usually the mix. Sometimes, there's a firm called Xenial, which is on Global Payments. Sometimes there's Revel. You know, there's a few that are around the mix. You know, where I suspect that they're going to be excellent and a real competitor for us is on the casual dining side-
Mm-hmm
... where, you know, they've got incredible product down market. But, you know, we've started to win that market now. And so, you know, our thought is, let's expand our moat on the enterprise. You know, could we go, excuse me, down market and compete with Toast? You know, probably. We've got a really good product, that's, you know, I think, clearly differentiated there. But I'd rather, you know, fend off and go aggressive into the enterprise side of casual dining and, you know, make that harder for them.
When I think about the enterprise, that's where you are replacing a Micros, NCR Voyix now after the spin.
Yep.
Correct? And then, of course, as you mentioned, you are seeing some potential competition from the SMB-focused players, but they haven't really made a dent in the market. Is that a good assessment-
Yes
... of sort of the competitive landscape today?
That's right.
Then, specifically on the Menu side, are you taking share from Olo? I know it's early days, but are you making a dent in their market penetration, or is that, again, a little premature at this point?
I mean, I think, you know, we're an ambitious team, so I think, you know, we've won 1,100 stores, like, you know, that are enterprise in nature, and they're the dominant enterprise player, and so, like, I guess definitionally, yes, we're probably taking minor share. I think our win at Burger King is probably, like, a loss for them, you know, net loss for them. I think our, you know, the wins we'll announce soon in a row that's coming out in just Q1 and Q2. You know, we'll be able to sort of give logos and be able to talk about it. But generally, every logo we win is probably a logo they are in or a logo they are bidding on.
Right.
Because both of us are relatively focused on the, you know, pretty closely focused on the enterprise.
In my notes, I have a few other sort of partnerships and new logo wins. I think you won Insomnia Cookies on the Punchh side.
Yep.
Another validation of your win there, and then you have this partnership with DoorDash-
Yep
... on the Menu side. Maybe specifically on that, like, what does that mean for Menu? Is that going to, you know, potentially help with inflect higher or-
Yeah, well, I think it just makes the... So, you know, there's, the, the word partnership is, like, ambiguous, and so, you know, we'll see our competitors say: "Oh, we've got a partnership with, you know, Uber or DoorDash," and, you know, we'll look at that as like, that's, that's like a referral. You know, so we've got a really tight integration with DoorDash. It's very exciting because it does a few things. One is, our product Menu Link will take in DoorDash orders natively and put them into the POS.
Mm-hmm.
And so there's, like, the integrity between what you order on your DoorDash app into the POS, it's perfect. There's no issues, and I should say that's a rare thing.
Mm.
Because while you may not see it when you're ordering on DoorDash, what gets injected into the POS is usually another layer of middleware, and there's stuff that always breaks, whether it's your modifiers, whether it's your comments, whatever, things just don't always flow through. So we've got a super beautiful integration there that has real impact to the to the customer. Why does it matter? Because you'd be shocked how many DoorDash and Uber Eats orders are, you know, people put thumbs down, complaint, and the restaurant takes on the burden of that cost. And, you know, you have one refund, $50 order, and there's your margin on the next five delivery orders. And so they care a lot about the fidelity between that, so that's part of it. The other part is on the dispatch side.
So, you know, many customers that have an online, a white label on an ordering website, when you're ordering for delivery, they're still dispatching through DoorDash, and we've got a tight integration there. So it's a very powerful integration. It will lead to more wins for sure. It also allows us to go to market together to a degree. You know, as you know, DoorDash and Uber have this heated competition, and so can we go and say: "Hey, be exclusive to DoorDash because we'll do your online, they'll do your third party"? You know, it opens up some commercial ideas, too.
It sounds like the whole value proposition of the unified commerce platform is very compelling. We've traveled a lot, and you've given really good examples when we've been on the road. Then what is the gating factor to adoption? Like, what is the resistance you face from these enterprise customers that won't make that change because they're stuck with NCR, or they're stuck with Micros or some other, you know, vendor from the past?
Yeah, I would feel like today we don't feel gated.
Okay.
You know, I feel like it's the opposite, which is like-
Mm
... hey, we gotta make sure we can get all this done.
That's a change from maybe a year ago.
Yeah, I think so. You know, I think it's... Again, I don't think it's... I don't know how much it's us, just the market. I think there is a... You know, restaurants are being eaten by software, and for a long time they didn't realize it. And now they're kind of waking up and being like: Well, whether we like it or not, we are, you know, becoming, you know, quasi-tech businesses that have to figure out how to do all this work. I always think it's akin to, you know, you've asked your restaurant to deliver you this amazing experience in the restaurant. Like, you still want that awesome experience when you ordered your Happy Meal or whatever, or you're sitting down at Olive Garden. But at the same time, you, we expect them to be Amazon.com, we want off-premise delivery.
We want to track our food, we want time with the food to be amazing, the delivery to be like-- It's been an unfair juxtaposition to put them in and say: You've got to be great in-store and great off-premise, and, oh, by the way, your net sales are up, like, single digits. Like, it's-- that's hard. And so, you know, if we can be their ally in that journey to, to becoming digital, by simplifying this stuff together, I think they're kind of at that point of like, "This is here to stay." And, I think there were a meaningful number of chains that thought: "Okay, post-COVID, like, the digital stuff was going to, like, fall back down here, and we'll--" And it just, it's not. Like, it's stayed- it's not continued like this, but it's, it's, it's stayed up.
I think, you know, we're just at that point where it's there. You know, candidly, you know, we used to have all these dreams of like, "Oh, we're going to unify these products and build this stuff on top of it," and we are going to do that. But, you know, it's working so well right now that I'm like: Let's slow all that down and just make sure we can get more market share, and then we can deliver more. So, you know, I think the pitch is resonating. As I said, I don't, I can't think of a customer, I'm sure there is, but, like, in the last year, that hasn't bought more than one product. And I think as we are in all these RFPs right now, every single one is like: Hey, let's...
It's. Let's make this a multi-product thing now, so we can deliver you the value of those together.
Great. One question we get from investors a lot is around the payment opportunity. Are you going to market with a payment-agnostic solution, or is it that PAR Pay we see in the market out there-
Yeah
... is that going to be more of a sort of custom-built solution for your restaurant customers? How are you approaching the payment opportunity, more broadly?
How are we approaching it? Aggressively. So, you know, I think what we've realized is, early on, we said: "Hey, pick whatever you want for Payments. We're going to be this open-ended thingy." And I think that was a really dumb idea because, you know, for a couple reasons. One, there was a huge economic opportunity we, we skipped on. But two, you know, when you're the POS company, for some reason, the operators still think you're the, the Payments company. So when there's a problem with that thing, they, they still blame it on you. You're still taking... You know, when I first got to PAR, 40% of our calls, of our service calls, were for payment issues. And I just, just-- I remember calling, like, the president of Verifone, I'm like: "This is crazy.
You gotta pay for this, 'cause like, I don't have anything to do with this thing." And so, you know, we realized, you know, self-servingly, like, if we own the Payments part, then, like, we can give you a better customer experience. Because normally, here's what happens: "Hey, I've got a problem with my payment thing." The payment company says, "No, it's a problem with the POS company." The POS company points to the payment, and it's like this for two days. But if it's the same vendor, like, we have to figure it out right away. And so, you know, it's that simplicity. It sounds stupid, but, like, it's a really big deal if you're, like, the CIO of a restaurant chain.
You're like: "Okay, like, that's going to make my life a lot simpler." Then, if you're the operator, you're not sitting there being like, "Am I getting ripped off by my Payments company?" Because if it's your POS company, you can literally go transaction by transaction and figure out, like, what have I been charged, literally to the penny. And so, you know, what we've realized is, hey, we're aggressively pushing on our Paymentspayment product. We're not going to say, "Hey, you have to do it or you don't get the deal." But we're saying: Hey, like, this is the simplicity, this is the SLAs, this is the rates. And it's very hard not to choose it, I think.
The only reason you don't choose it, if you're stuck in a contract that is, that you still have a year or two left on, and then we'll obviously wait. You know, when we're selling down market, you know, 100, 200 stores, we're going to be much more aggressive of sort of like just stapling it, which is: "Hey, it's-- this is, this is the way it works." Because it is. Like, we now have enough data to say that if you're on our payment products, your support service is all better, and so the ROI is very, very high. And so, as much as it sounds like a self-serving comment to increase ARPU, it's also like we can deliver it to the customer.
You know, our promise is far better if it's under one roof.
So simplistically, should we think of it as the gateway, but then you're still working with the acquirers, right?
So we do both.
You're working with Global Payments, JCM Tech.
No, so we work with acquirers, but we're a facilitator. So we are the gateway, which is one product, and then we're the processor as well. And so the gateway product is the one we're more aggressive on mandating, and then the payment processing is really a, you know, can you, with the combination of rates and service, pull them out? So, you know, we're sort of like the full- we're sort of everything, including reporting and cyber and everything in between.
I'll square this with my next question, which is, I think you've talked about ARR growth of between 20%-30%. One, are you still, you know, holding on to that level? And related to that would be, you know, how much is that payments revenue or ARR in that bucket? I think you've put numbers around that, 110, 120, maybe I'm off a little bit in terms of the actual ARR. So, a couple of questions in there in terms of-
So, yeah, you know, we haven't-
Payments
... you know, give our, done our Q4 call yet, but yeah, we always-- I think I feel extremely comfortable being in that 20%-30% range for, you know, a long time. And, you know, I think it's, you know, we could, and I think we'd be one of those rare software companies that can have, you know, increased growth in 2024 than 2023. And, you know, I, you know, I've got the team hoping that we can do that in 2025 again, just with all the demand that we have. And so, you know, I think at the very least, I know we will not be a decelerating software company as we get bigger because of the market share that we're winning today. I feel really, you know, strongly right now that that's, where we're at today.
As far as, like, payments contribution there, you know, I think we ended 2022 at, like, under 5%. I think we ended 2023, well, we haven't reported yet, but, you know, we've said we think it'll grow 100%. And I think it'll kind of continue. You know, I think it'll double again in 2024 and, you know, continue to grow. The key part about our payments revenue, though, is that it's sort of synonymous about everything that we do. So, like, we have deals where we'll say, "Hey, your Brink is up for renewal. We're gonna raise price 25%. But you know what? We're gonna keep it flat for the next year, but take on our payments product.
And oh, by the way, our payments product is cheaper than your existing product, so you're actually saving money by getting two of our products, but we now have sold two products into you. And so it's a little bit, you know, it's squiggly that way, in that it sort of spreads across everything that we do. You know, payments is the only thing we do that touches every part of PAR. So it's in our loyalty business, it's in our online ordering business, it's in our POS business, and so it touches everything. So, you know, looking at it as a uniquely identifiable revenue stream is a little bit hard because you kind of use it as a tool in the sales field.
If I had my ARR baseline numbers correct, it's probably somewhere in that 5%-10% of total revenue or total ARR today?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
In that ballpark?
Yeah. Growing very quickly. And it should—that, you know, that's net payments revenue, so we're-
Right.
distinct than I think everybody else in our industry at this point in time, which is, we're giving you, like, the net take that we take. And so, you know, so it's very high margin-
Sure.
you know, become very high margin payment revenue.
Savneet, you've also talked about reaching EBITDA profitability sooner rather than later. Is that something that's... Given some of these new logo wins, and you mentioned some of the upfront investments, is that still a reachable goal, potentially in 2024? Not to put you on the spot, but or is that something that's a little bit maybe further out?
Yeah, we'll talk about it on, on our Q4 call, but, you know, There's no reason, you know, you know, not to. Obviously, we'll have a-- Like I said, we're gonna grow OpEx the next two quarters for this Burger King deal, but, you know, that's throwing good money at a really good problem. And you know, we're not expecting our OpEx to you know, grow double digits or anything like that. And so if we can continue to maintain the, you know, the revenue growth we talked about without growing OpEx meaningfully, we should be there. And we also have, you know, we had a major headwind, in 2023, with Menu and, Payments gross margin way below our average, right? So our subscription services gross margin in 2022 was higher than 2023 so far.
You know, we were at 71% in Q3 of 2022. We were at, you know, 60s in, in one year later, and that was because Menu was negative gross margin. We had no revenue and lots of cost. And so, you know, I think, you know, you've got the tailwind also in the gross margin, coming from just revenue actually going live on these new products.
What does a steady state model look like in terms of margins? You know, obviously, you've set the ARR growth profile long term, but-
You know, I think we feel really confident that our gross margins should be in the mid-70s, high 70s, and I have, like, a hope that we can even get to the 80s one day. Like, I really would love to be known as, like, the company that figures out how to build software scalable cheaper than anybody else. Like, I think we really, you know, can figure that out. And so we think, you know, we can get to mid-70s in gross margin. We think we wanna get our R&D to be 25% of revenue. We want our sales and marketing to be 10%-15%, and we want our G&A to be around 10% and scale into that over time. The sales and marketing one's the easiest.
Like, you can see, we're not—we don't add a ton of sales and marketing costs. It's come through acquisition. On the R&D side, you can see how, you know, we used to be at 100% of revenue R&D. We're down into the high 30s% now, and it'll continue to get better from there. And then, on the G&A side, it's just we had to scale into it. We had a big G&A base when we took over the company and, you know, there. Now, what's hidden in all of that, like, the thing that... Like, I tried to explain this on the Q3 call is, if you look at that G&A base, what it's hiding is how profitable Brink and Punchh have been.
Brink and Punchh, whose both businesses have doubled in the last 18, 20 months, roughly-
Mm-hmm
... 20 years. They actually have the same exact R&D staff they did two years ago. So it's, like, we have doubled the size of the revenue there without growing the actual, roughly the size. The team's barely grown. Maybe it's grown, like, a few, but, like, it's barely grown, the spend there. And so the core products that have delivered all the growth and all the revenue have not actually sucked in money. It's gone into, you know, a massive Salesforce.com implementation, a massive cybersecurity investment. You know, we held our OpEx flat this year, but there was probably $10 million-$12 million of actually net incremental expense into Menu and internal IT stuff that came out of Brink and Punchh becoming, you know, so efficient.
And so, you know, I say that in the sense that I feel really confident we can do that, 'cause when I look at the individual P&Ls of those products, I'm like, "Oh, shit, like, these are really getting juicy." I think we'll obviously do that with Menu again and with payments once they get to scale, too.
Just doing the math in my head, this should be a 20%-25% EBITDA margin business as you scale, you know, at least in steady state.
We think so. Yeah.
Okay.
And I would also say, you know, we've been pretty vocal about M&A, and you know, every M&A deal we have in pipeline we look at is, you know, more profitable than PAR.
Since you mentioned M&A, is that going to be targeted on sort of filling out the product portfolio, or is it more geographic expansion?
Scale. It's scale right now. Geographic expansion is the other part. You know, when you win these enterprise deals, you're getting forced or pushed to international more and more and more.
Right.
You know, I think if you were to ask Burger King, this is just a guess, they would've been like, "Oh, gosh, I wish PAR had international." We would've given them all 23,000 stores overnight, and we would've made a $100 million contract, and not whatever it was. We didn't, we didn't have that. We couldn't deliver that. I think, you know, there's only so long we can hold off. It also opens up competitive threat, right? Like, what if one of, like, our B-minus competitors says, "Hey, we've got the perfect international solution," does somebody say, like, "I'll take B-minus across everything instead of A-plus-
Right
- and a C over there? Like, you know, I think we've got to figure that out.
Then you've been, I think, teasing us for some time about the potential sale of the government business. Any updates there?
You know, I think it's moving. You know, we're so strict in what we can talk about, but, you know, I think we never would've put it in our MD&A if we didn't, you know, if it wasn't, you know, near-term thing.
... Okay, well, I don't know how much time we have left, but a few minutes? Okay, I'll just open the floor for any questions from the audience. Five, five minutes. Okay. Any questions from the audience? Please, feel free. Go ahead, yeah.
Sure. Curious about artificial intelligence and whether you're incorporating any functions into any of your products, and also if you're using it in your operations?
Great question. So we are using it in two of our products right now. One is called Data Central, our back office product. Back office is really complicated because it's like your labor inventory, like, just so much stuff into one product, and so we're using it. It's more like the UX experience. So it's like, instead of trying to run a query to figure out, you know, "What is my most profitable store on December 15th, 2023?" You know, doing a whole... You can just literally type that in and pull out the information you like. So what are the top 10 Menu items that are trending? This, that, you can pull it all through that. So I would say it's more about, like, how you engage with our product there.
And then on our Punchh s ide, we use a lot of AI on segmentation and stuff like that. So you can go down to the individual, target the individual customer, as opposed to, like, "Here's a segment." So we use a lot, a lot of AI there. As far as how we do it in our business, you know, I have pushed really hard to try to find a way to push it forward, and the only places we've got adoption are, you know, we've rolled out Copilot, and I would say it's worked well, and... Well, it's okay domestically. In our foreign development center in India, it's done terribly. I think there's almost, like, an aversion to using it because of that.
So we just put a new leader of our India group to go figure that out. It's something we've got to get right, because I, I obviously see what's, hear what's happening there. And then we use it a lot in the G&A function. So our job descriptions are linked. Like, a lot of that stuff has now become using AI. And then we've, you know, like, supplier communications are now AI-driven, and so, you know, if we're getting a shipment from China, the thank you email, the question, the follow-up is all now AI prompting. Our customer support service use all the tools there to respond. So, you know, response times have gotten better and things like that.
Thank you.
Savneet, you could consider changing the company's name to PAR AI. Get a big multiple expansion right there.
We're far from that. You know, it's in the actual restaurant itself, though, like I, I think if I went to a restaurant CIO and said, "Let's talk about AI," he would, like, laugh me out the door. And he'd be like, "Just look at the stuff I have now working." You know, there, there's really... It's like, you know, it's just there's such a long way to go. Or, like, when people say, "Is AI gonna disrupt your business?" I'm like, "It will. It should disrupt everything at some point." But, like, literally, I'll be laughed out of the room if I started talking about AI with our customers today.
Anybody else? All right, well, thank you, Savneet. Appreciate-
Thank you
... all the color. Good seeing you again.
Yeah, thanks.