Welcome to day two of Evercore ISI's eighth annual Payments and Fintech Innovators Forum. I'm David Togut. I lead the payments research team here at Evercore ISI. Delighted to kick off the morning with the management of PAR Technology. Joining us in the fireside chat are Savneet Singh, Chief Executive Officer. And joining us in the room is Chris Burns, SVP of Business Development. Savneet, Chris, thank you so much for being with us here today. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.
Since PAR is new to many investors, can you give us some background on your company and how the company has evolved from its origins as a DoD tech contractor to pioneering the first commercial POS and then to where you are today?
Yeah. It's not a linear story. The company was founded 50 or 60 years ago, originally doing IT services for the DoD off an Air Force base in upstate New York. We did that for about 10 years. Then our founders invented the first point-of-sale terminal that I think was patented in 1978. In 1980, McDonald's adopted that point-of-sale system. Then the company went public in 1982, off the success of McDonald's going sole source to PAR and really kind of transforming this company from an IT services company to a technology provider to restaurants. The company had great success, I'd say, in the 1980s. Many restaurant organizations kind of followed McDonald's in that journey. But then I'd say the next 20, 30 years, we really struggled. And we struggled primarily because we got stuck as a hardware and services provider and not a software provider.
So even though we had built great software, we sort of got stuck as, "Go buy your software over there, and we'll be your hardware and services and System Integrator." We were a cyclical hardware and services company for most of our life as a public business. In 2014, we acquired a small software product called Brink, which was a cloud POS system focused on enterprise restaurants. The thesis at the time was we had these long-standing relationships with big enterprise chains who were using us for hardware services and systems integration. We could sell them the next generation of software, which was the cloud. When we acquired the product in 2014, we were in about 300 stores. In 2018, I joined the board of PAR, and we were probably in 5,000 or 6,000 stores.
Then 7 or 8 months after I joined the board, I became the CEO. A lot of that was, I would say, distress. We were in a tough spot. Even though our product had grown a lot, we were not run well. We were running out of money. I think we had some cultural challenge. We had a lot of legal challenges. So a new management team jumped in, originally trying to see if we could sell the business. But I think during that process, I think came away with a thesis that software was really eating the restaurant much faster than the restaurant realized it. You could see back then, and this is before the pandemic, how quickly every part of the workflow of a restaurant was going to be software or be software-enabled.
The thesis we had back then, which is very much what we hold today, is that the POS would be the heartbeat of that. Everything that you would need to run a restaurant would be some appendage of that POS system because that POS system, it was your ERP system, your system of record that ran everything. In the enterprise, we were competing against Oracle and NCR, Global Payments. You weren't competing against Square and Toast and amazing sort of Silicon Valley-like companies. We thought that was interesting, cool, and efficient. We jumped in. We took over the company, started driving it. We've been relatively acquisitive. We sort of have bought one business a year. Today, we kind of have a front-end solution where we have the largest loyalty program in restaurants.
So everybody from a Taco Bell down to a 10-store chain, we're in, I'd say, almost 50% of the top 100 restaurants in America. We have an online ordering solution that we bundled together with that. And then we have POS, payments, and back office. And so the idea being, "Hey, you can run your organization off of our platform." And it's nice because I think we're playing into the same desires of our customers who have vendor sprawl and are sort of trying to get from 25 vendors down to 5 at some point. And I think we kind of helped them do that.
Great. What does unified commerce mean for restaurants?
So today, almost for the vast majority of restaurants, every part of their restaurant is a different provider. So their online ordering provider is different than their loyalty provider, which is different than their POS provider, which is different than their payment provider. And so when you take an order from your loyalty app, it's different than if you take it from your online ordering website or from your DoorDash or from your in-store or your drive-through. And so it makes it very complicated to have reconciliation, data integrity because do I know that customer is Chris, the same Chris that's there or there? And those systems don't speak to each other. They don't connect to each other. And so unified commerce is essentially this idea that an order anywhere is an order everywhere. I know that's Dan, and I know that's Dan everywhere across my system.
And so I can connect it and actually get real insights. And so not just from a marketing perspective, targeting, but also running the workflow of the back of the restaurant too. So good examples of this be you get it's a lunch rush, and the in-store demand is crazy high. You've got people outside the door. Well, you should be dynamically changing your Uber Eats and your DoorDash times and your delivery times and pushing that out to 90 minutes, 2 hours. And so you crush demand over there so you can service the demand in here and vice versa. And you can't do that unless these systems are all talking to each other. And so inevitably, what you do is without those connectivity, your delivery time is still, say, 30 minutes.
Your in-store people are getting pissed because all these orders are stacking up, getting ready to get picked up. And so that lack of connectivity is creating a bad experience both off-premise and on-premise.
Is this technology differentiated versus your key competitors in restaurants?
We think so. Obviously, I think our win rates and growth suggest that. I think historically, everybody did one thing really well. They did the POS well. They did this product well. Then this idea of sort of putting them together was, I think, a bad word, consolidation, bundling, where all these had negative connotations, suggesting that I'm trading off functionality for simplicity. What we have done, I think, very differently is focused on we need the best product in every category to operate. Even though our goal is to sort of have these products all unified and give you that unified experience, we'll never sacrifice the quality of the product in that sense. So if you buy our online ordering product or our loyalty product, they are the best online ordering and loyalty product in the market.
But when you connect them together with other products, you get even more surprise and delight from that experience. And so I think that's what's distinct about us, which is there's not another company that has the highest quality loyalty online ordering, POS, and back under one roof. There really isn't anybody that I'm aware of that does anything like that. Most of it is like, "Hey, I do this pretty well, but then I'll bundle a bunch of B-minus software, and I'll give you this little thing." And I think that's been challenging for the industry for a long time.
Got it. Does your unified commerce offering have open APIs so competitors' best-of-breed can kind of connect with it?
Absolutely. We're a very open ecosystem. In our little category of the world of restaurant technology, I think we're by far the most open, objectively measured by the amount of API integrations we have. Our POS products are integrated into almost 300 different other products. And these are intense integrations. This isn't just sort of write to my API, and two weeks, and you're up and running. These are six-, nine-month-long integrations, very, very defined by the partner, potentially the customer. And so our loyalty application Punchh is also probably in 250-300 type of integrations around it. And so we're by far the most open system in our category of the world.
Got it. What's your growth strategy?
So we kind of believe we have a flywheel of when to expand with our POS product, Brink, so Brink in payments products, excuse me. That's working really well. We just announced a day ago or two days ago that product was up 45% year-over-year. So we're growing very quickly by sort of planting our flag with POS and payments. And then from there, we look to upsell, cross-sell, loyalty, back office. And then the last leg of our flywheel is, as I said, we are pretty acquisitive. And so then we look to acquire a product that we can then push back into that flywheel, into those same customers. But we are really focused on the enterprise. You will not find us generally in your local restaurant. We're very focused on that enterprise category. That's where we have domain expertise.
That's where our circle of competence is strong. And so it really is to push hard into that enterprise category. I think most of our peers are kind of spread across doing everything. We're really heavily focused on that enterprise.
A number of payments companies have stated a strategy to move up market from smaller restaurants to larger restaurants. Certainly, Fiserv, who was here yesterday, they're moving up market in a few months with a new product called Kitchen Display System, which will be part of Clover. Shift4 Payments has done that with SkyTab POS. And then obviously, you've got Toast. So how do they fit into the large restaurant ecosystem versus PAR? Do you work with some of them?
We don't see them. Some of those, we never see at all. Toast is, I think, the one that's working hardest to get there. But again, we generally don't see them in the large chains that we spend a lot of our time in. Those are all amazing companies. I would say they all have differing levels of product quality but all serve that down-market category well. But it's also a definition of enterprise. I think a lot of those would say enterprise is 5 restaurants and above. For us, enterprise is more like 75 restaurants and above. And so what we have done super well is on those emerging chains that want to be the next enterprise. So we've been in Sweetgreen since there were just a few stores, MOD Pizza since there were 2 stores. Today, there are 600 or 700, CAVA.
We've done a really great job at sort of those chains and then winning the very large chains like Burger King. So it's that enterprise domain. I think the challenge that the names that you mentioned are all working on is a product that's built for a down-market restaurant is really different than what's needed for a large chain. When you're selling software to a single-store Italian restaurant, think about that the person that owns that restaurant is probably also the CTO, the CMO, the CFO, and maybe the chef, all in one. So that person needs a very simplistic product relative to you're the CTO of Arby's. You've got an integration to Snowflake and to Oracle or SAP, HR software into billing software, supply chain software. You've got to integrate into all the CFO suite.
I mean, there's so many people that interact with that system. So just think how different the system that that clientele needs. And so you're taking an SMB product and trying to bring it up market. That is a tough challenge. They're really almost completely different products. And so that's why I think it's taking these firms so long to do that. And our core competitors are NCR, Oracle, Global Payments product, Zenial. And then it would be all of those guys. And so I would say they are. We look at every. We're paranoid about every competitor. But I'd say those firms are coming, but they're still not the firms that we really think about every single day in most of the RFPs we're in.
You recently had a big win with Burger King. Can you walk through why they selected PAR, and who did you displace or beat?
Sure. In the end, we can have the best marketing. But we're a product business. And I think most enterprise software is like this. But your product wins. It's not like you can overcome a product challenge when you're selling into enterprise because you can't just say, "Oh, I don't have this." And then you're like, "Well, I can't remember my store anymore." So you have to have the product. And so when we win, it is a product that carries the day. And our product is just more modern, more elegant, easier to use, and scalable. And I think, as I mentioned, a lot of what's happened with restaurants is all of a sudden, you went from, "Hey, my POS just runs what's in my store." And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Well, now I need to take orders from DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Then I need my own loyalty application. Then I need my own online ordering system. And then I need this. I need to pay at the table." And so all of a sudden, you went from having 5 or 6 things plugged into the POS to 20. And that made it really hard because your system had to be so extensible, so scalable. Our API, we're not even an enormous company by any means. Our API gets somewhere between 700 million and 1 billion pings a month. That's a ton of distributed computing across the entire country. And so the product really needs to win. And so in that lab, we tend to do better than our peers that are in there because of core product functionality. And then we win on service. We are an intense organization.
I'd say most of our customers, even at LU, say, "Hey, you guys are very different than the rest." It is a much more sort of service-led culture but one of great intensity. We are the people that will show up at the office saying, "Hey, is everything okay?" even when we're not called. And so I think we win because of service. And in particular, Burger King really called that out when they announced, which is it was a culture of PAR that we loved too. We could text the CEO at 2:00 A.M., or we could text the help desk, and both people will call us back. And in that process, Burger King, for a long time, had run on a product called Zenial, which is owned by Global Payments.
Then they spent quite a bit of time and, I think, $10s of millions trying to build their own product, thinking, "That would be better." And then they sort of decided to move to PAR. But given how large that organization is, every single vendor was in that process.
Great. Just coming back for a minute to growth strategy, do you have a growth algorithm around revenue growth, margin?
Yeah. We generally guide that we expect to grow 20-30%. And we've been doing that for many years now. We just reported yesterday or two days ago, we grew 23% last year on our software and services business. We think we can do the same thing and maybe more in 2024. So I think we'll be one of the few companies that has the potential to accelerate revenue growth, a lot of that being dictated by how we pace out the roll out of Burger King. And again, it's all led by this idea of land expand with POS, then cross-sell, upsell. And the beauty of our business is our gross retention is extremely high, some of the highest in not just our category but all of software. It's sort of 95%-96% gross retention.
So I often say the quality of a software business is starting with gross retention. What is the actual end market? How sticky is that end market? You can have an amazing product, but if you're in a high-churn end market, it doesn't really matter how great your product is. For us, we're in a really low-churn market. So that allows us to be relatively efficient on the growth algorithm because we know we'll have 95%-96% of base every year. So anyways, generally, we sort of think we feel comfortable through price and logo growth that we can stay within that 20-30% range.
Great. How would you gauge consumer spending trends at restaurants year to date? And what's your outlook around consumer spending at restaurants kind of incorporated into your guidance?
So I'll go backwards. So consumer spend has actually never had any indicator of our business. And I think there's a strong reason for that, which is we're selling into the most durable restaurant organizations that exist. These are QSR fast-casual restaurants. It's extremely rare for a McDonald's location to go out of business, extremely rare. Some of our customers measure the length of their franchisees in decades. So it's like, "Are you a 1.5-er? Are you a 2.5-er?" It's not even years. I mean, these are really, really durable businesses that go from family to family. And so again, they're so sticky. And in times of economic uncertainty, they tend to do better because they are more cost-effective foods. And so I've been the CEO for 5.5 years, and I track the economic development very, very closely.
Never, when I see the up or down, do I see it have a really major impact on our customers' buying decisions yet. And I suspect that's because even when we had this period of inflation, it was our customers that benefited because you stopped going to the expensive table service restaurant or Outback, and you went to McDonald's or whatever. We sort of took share there. From what we see, I would say the first couple of months of the year, we're strong. I mean, it was surprising. I think we all came in with like, "Oh, there's a rate cut coming because blah, blah, blah." But we don't see any of that. And I think if you look at our own business, we've been talking about this on our call and some of the IRA work you've done. But we've never had such a large pipeline.
In the 5.5 years, we've never had more demand than we have now. So I think both within the indicators I see of our own business and I don't know by the way, I don't know if that's a contraindicator or anything else because technology is great and saving you money. I see no slowdown in the demand for our products. Also, I think just looking at the numbers of our customers, it looks very strong. That's going from everybody from Sweetgreen all the way up to some of the large chains we work with.
Great. So what's your timeline to become profitable on an EBITDA basis and then eventually on an adjusted net income basis? And sort of along with that, how do you balance off investment in new product development versus flexing expenses to achieve higher profits?
So we only have 1 area that we're making real investments in. So in our last quarter, we burned EBITDA was negative $4 million. That amount is entirely 1 product line, which is our online ordering product that we acquired about a year and a half ago. And so our core business is we feel very comfortable that the business that we run and have been running for 5 years is highly efficient. I don't think we've had net headcount growth in something like 18 months, maybe even longer. And while the business has almost doubled in size or 75% more in size, we haven't grown that OpEx base at all during that period of time. And so it's really just turning that 1 product. And so for us, if we want to be profitable, we just shut the product off. It has almost no revenue.
It's the new product. So it's very much there. But we feel really great about that product. We just launched our first customer in the United States two weeks ago. We launched another one two days ago. So we're seeing momentum. So we think the ROI is very high. So to us, profitability is a choice. I think we are rapidly approaching it. I think one of the things that we think a lot about is the more stores we have our flag planted in, it's almost like an oil well in the sense of how much can you drill? Because you start with one product, then two products, then three products. Today, we landed one product at Burger King. Then we landed a second product, an online ordering module.
And then it's sort of like, "OK, what else?" We've got a bunch of products to continue to push into that. And so making sure we capture as much market share now because we have a proven model that once we're in there, we are going to get the next products in there is very important. So anyways, long story short, profitability is in sight. And we have the lever to turn it on if we want it immediately. But I think we see that we feel really comfortable where obviously, we got lots of cash. We feel super comfortable where the business is trending. And like I said, we have this unique experience where we have more demand today than we've ever had before. And I don't know what's caused it. Is it because we're on Burger King and everybody else wants to go?
Is it because restaurants are sort of giving up on fighting the thinking that technology is going to go away? But it's been great. And so we feel great. And I think this year is a really neat year to watch that inflection because we've absorbed a ton of cost to support this Burger King launch. And the revenue starts in April. So that's been a nice that'll be a we've had this headwind that turns into a tailwind.
Gotcha. OK. Payments have started to become a significant driver to revenue. What value propositions do you offer your customers in terms of payments? And when do you expect that to meaningfully contribute?
Yeah. It's really started to take off for us. We processed about $2.1 billion last quarter, our run rate last quarter. And we're just starting. We're not even in 10% of our customers yet. Our pitch is relatively simple. Point one is simplicity. The number one call to our support desk from our customers is an issue with the payments, whether it's the payment device, payment processing, payment reconciliation, the number one call to the POS help desk. And so it's being like, "Hey, it's one desk. It makes it a lot easier," versus, "Hey, I got an issue with payments. Oh, sorry. That's not the POS company. That's your payment company. Let me push you over there." And the payment company says, "Oh, it's actually the POS guy. They push you back." And you go two days back and forth.
Now when it's one vendor, that simplicity matters a lot to the end customer. Again, you'll hear this over and over again. But simplicity really matters to the restaurant community because these aren't hyper-tech companies. And so they really need simplicity. So number one, it's simplicity. And that is the easiest sale of all time because they understand how painful it is for their franchisee operators or their operators to do that. The second is unification of data. When your POS company and your payment company are the same, you have one set of data that gives you complete transparency and integrity of, "Am I getting charged the right fee? Can I figure out who that customer is?" I think they love that. And then obviously, there's the cost element. We are in far more restaurants than any one restaurant chain.
And so generally, we can match price or beat their price and still make a really, really nice margin. And then third, when somebody upgrades to our POS software, more often than not, they also upgrade their hardware with us. And so we can help them finance their hardware by leveraging it in the payments. But I'd say more than anything else, it's conceptually this idea of simplicity, one set of data because it's the belief that eventually, we'll then create new products off of that that they couldn't have before.
Got it. Can you walk through ARR growth in terms of the kind of components of ARR growth in your model, kind of built from higher pricing, upselling, land and expand? Kind of how does that growth algorithm work?
Yeah. It's quite simple, actually. I mean, generally, so if we look at 2023, the majority of our growth, upwards of 80%, was new customers. So think of it as new logos. And I'd say maybe 20%, and that might even be generous, came from upsell, cross-sell, and price. So that's better than for a long time, it was 100% new logo and nothing from price and nothing from upsell. We are getting better at that motion of adding price and upsell. And the upsell has been primarily our payments product. So we've seen really nice movement there. Over time, I think our goal is 50/50. But fortunately, I think we just have a lot of new logo growth. And so that will continue to be the big driver of our revenue right now is that market share.
So historically, I'd say it's been 100% all net new. In 2023, I think it's sort of like 80%, maybe mid-80s% of net new. But the upsell of payments and our online ordering product are starting to add to that, the lever of price of RPU, excuse me. And within that RPU bucket, I would say it's half price, half modules.
Got it. OK. Can you walk through your go-to-market strategy in terms of direct sales versus third-party sales?
Yeah. The vast majority of what we do is direct sales. We are sold through named accounts. We know every single restaurant chain in America that's in our TAM. And they are generally sold through named accounts. So it's an efficient I think a relatively efficient direct sales model because we can sort of have three products now sold by one salesperson versus one product per salesperson. We do have a down-market-ish business. I say that in that we have resellers that will resell our product to smaller chains, call it sub-50 or 60 stores. That business is not enormous. It's not a big part of our business. But it's important in that oftentimes, that's where you discover the next high-growth chain that you want to get partnered up with very quickly. So I'd say down there, there are years it's been 15% of our sales.
But generally, it's sort of like 5, 6, 7, 8% of our sales. It's not a huge portion of what we do. But it's an important one.
Got it. What's the plan for your government business?
We can't talk too much about it. But we've been very direct that it's not a strategic asset in that there's no synergy between that business and the rest of what we do at PAR. And so I expect just like any non-core asset, at some point, it won't be part of PAR. And I think that'd be better for the people that work there but also for the story of PAR. We've put it in our case a couple of days ago that we're constantly looking at strategic alternatives. And I think we're moving down that path.
Great. So you acquired Punchh in 2021. How has the business performed relative to your acquisition performance?
So it's beaten all. The business grew very fast. When we acquired it, it was $30 million of revenue. 20 months later, it was $60 million of revenue. So it beat our internal plan. So I think it's been phenomenal in that respect. The business is slowed now. And I think that's a function of TAM, which is where we're, like I said, almost in 50% of the top 100 chains already. And so the push there now is to grow with MENU our online ordering product that we just started selling. So that growth will help accelerate the Punchh growth because we're using that. And then secondarily, it will come from additional M&A, which is we have the largest loyalty base. There's a lot more we can sell into that base than just one product.
I think you'll see us both build and acquire product to push into that base of loyalty customers. The deal is it really changed who we were, changed our standing in, again, our little narrow pocket of the world. We became more interesting. Obviously, the connection of the two businesses changed our culture a lot.
Great. You also acquired MENU in 2022. How is the upselling and adoption of MENU going so far?
It just started. So when we acquired the product, it was almost like an acquirer's type of deal where we weren't requiring a customer base but what we thought was a high-quality product. I think within, I want to say, six months, we realized that and that product was focused completely internationally. So no US customers, no US pipeline. I think we realized very quickly, I'd say within a few months or six months, that while there was interest in the product internationally, that business was not going to be significant nor worth all the effort. But conversely, we were getting all this interest from US customers. And it was almost like a reverse inquiry, which is, again, the enterprise is kind of unique. And then we realized that there was a real opportunity here in the US.
So we, in 2023, started spending a tremendous amount of money to retool the product to be a U.S.-focused product. Ever since we've done that, I think it's been really exciting to see how much demand we had. We've signed probably a dozen customers, which is a lot in our industry. We won Burger King. We've won a company called Beef 'O' Brady's we just launched. We've won an 800-store coffee chain. I think once the product was enabled to sell in the United States, we saw demand really start to spike. That, I think, is super exciting. Again, creating the M&A playbook for us, which is how, wow, when we get a product that's good, we can really grow it.
So of those customers that MENU has, every single one of them is an existing PAR customer, again, showing that if we have a great product, we can push it into the base very quickly. Anyways, I think in the end, the results of MENU will be TBD. We'll see how much revenue and cash flow we generate from it. I think where we sit today, we feel pretty good about it.
What's most differentiated about MENU?
I think the best way to explain it is, well, the best way to do it is just sort of compare our products to our peers. But generally, it's just a far more modern version than the legacy online ordering products that exist today. If you look at the online ordering products that most enterprise restaurants have, it's old. It looks like it's 10 years old. And that may sound like a small thing. But when you're selling to consumers, that stuff really matters. You really want your brand to transcend from in-store to off-premise, right? So when you go to the website of your favorite restaurant, you want it to feel like it's the same experience you had when you're in the store. That brand promise, that connectivity actually really, really matters. And so when you don't have that, you lose sales.
You lose the feeling of, like, is my brand special? You notice the brands that do that well. And so what our product does is it's completely configurable so that the website look and feel connects the online ordering experience. Generally, what happens in restaurants is you invest, I don't know, $ millions hiring an agency to build a website that's like the best website for your type of restaurant, your type of brand in the world. And then it's like, click here to order now. And you get to a templated e-commerce website to go buy your smoothie or whatever. Now with our products, it's completely the same exact experience from the home page all the way to the ordering process. And oh, by the way, it's completely integrated into your loyalty product. So it's one and the same because it's Punchh.
And so you have this beautiful connectivity and beautifully integrated into the POS because it's Brink. And so it's that kind of wow impact we have when we push it all together to our customers that I think they're enjoying right now. And as I said, the simplest way is download a couple of the customer apps and play around with it. And I think you'll see like, oh, this is a different experience.
Great. Let me just pause to see if there are any questions from the audience. We have a mic. So if you have a question, please just raise your hand. We'll bring the mic.
Thank you so much. I just wanted to get a sense as to how such churn has been in terms of the clients, the organization. And how has it trended over the past 1 or 2 years? And have you seen any deceleration or acceleration? And basically, where is that happening?
So we've seen almost no change in churn. We reported, as I said two days ago, our churn on our POS product was our annualized churn was around 4%. So like I said, in software, gross retention at 96% is literally, I think, close to the best in the world. And again, that's not a factor that we're amazing or anything. That's just a factor of this end market is amazing. And that hasn't really changed. We sort of stay in this bucket of like 4%-6% every year. And it has not changed since I've been there. The only year we had churn was during the pandemic where it had picked up to the extreme point of pandemic, it had picked up to like 14%. But by the end of that year of 2020, it was back to like 7%. They all came back.
We've never really experienced that at all. I would say more recently, Q4 was our lowest churn ever across our products if you look at the products holistically. So again, really resilient, really strong. And restaurants have this fascinating dynamic right now, which is their sales are holding up. But their costs are coming down. So we have a back office product. So we can track food costs. You can see in many chains how much that has changed. I was talking to the CEO of a fried chicken organization a few days ago. And his cost for his core product was down 30%. And he's kind of got a little bit of a higher ticket price. So he's having some sales. He's still growing. But the sales growth is decelerating. His margins are exploding.
And so because menu prices are very high right now and costs are coming down, I think you'll see earnings of restaurants going to still be very strong.
If you look at that 4%-6% annual churn you mentioned, what percentage of that is, let's say, out of business or bankruptcy versus competitive losses?
It's almost all so in our direct business, which is where we have a salesperson on it; it is entirely a store closure. I can't remember. There's maybe one customer or two customers that have churned since I've been the CEO of PAR in five and a half years, literally. And one of them was a bankruptcy, a high-profile restaurant chain bankruptcy. So again, not real traditional churn where they're switching to a peer. Where we have that churn is in the down market where I mentioned we have these resellers. That's where we have the churn. And again, that's smaller chains naturally go in and out of business far more. So we rarely lose to a peer at the enterprise level. I mean, I think I said once or twice in five and a half years that I can think of. Maybe there's more. But it's really, really tiny.
What's funny is at the enterprise level, when you close a store, you're often reopening a store in a different market or down the street. A lease ends. So it's not true churn.
Got it. We talked earlier about.
There's one more.
Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Thank you so much. You also mentioned strategic alternatives in one of the answers. So I just wanted to get a sense as to what's the plan and what's the progress on that. And where do you see that shaping up over the next couple of years?
Yeah. That was related to our government division, which is sort of a non-core asset that we've talked about selling for some time. And so that business, we wrote in our case that we're constantly looking at strategic alternatives of how we look to divest that or monetize that going forward. As far as PAR, and I say this all the time, we're public. We're for sale every day. And our job is to drive shareholder value. And we take that really serious. And so today, I would say from a strategic perspective, we are super focused on the M&A front. If you listen to our call, we talk a lot about that desire to leverage our position in the industry today.
It's unique in the sense that restaurant technology, if you just Google restaurant technology, you'd be shocked at all the market maps of how many startups sell to restaurants. It's truly mind-blowing for not the most gigantic industry. Most of those companies are flailing because they sell one little product to a restaurant thinking that a million restaurants would buy their product. You wake up, and you're like, oh, crap. I'm only in 20,000 restaurants. I have a big prep in front of me. How the hell do I make any money? They're up for sale. We are in this unique position where we're in a world where the platform is winning, not the point solution. These point solutions are for sale. I think it behooves us to take those serious because these businesses are cash-flowing.
They just happen to be too small to go public or to be the cap table's underwater. So it's creating really unique opportunities for us to be acquisitive. So I think from a strategic perspective, we're very focused on that M&A side.
Hi. You were talking about that their service culture is definitely kind of a differentiating factor for you. But you also said that as your business is growing, that you're not growing your workforce. Are you kind of worried that as you grow and the fact that service is such a key part of your growth that you really don't have the capacity to continue that service competition?
Yeah. It's definitely the thing I think about. I get nervous about it over time is do we lose that edge? We measure it constantly. And I think we've done it through efficiency. Obviously, stuff like chatbots and automated responses in a self-service wiki have brought down the call volume. But another way to think about service that I've appreciated later is the quality of your product can differentiate your service. What I mean by that is point-of-sale software, it is a brutal product. What I mean by that is there are almost no restaurant chains that say, I love my point-of-sale software. It just doesn't exist. And the reason why is if your point-of-sale software goes down for five minutes, you never forget. It's like if your pacemaker ever went down and you depended on one, you never forget.
Even if it went down for half a second over a 30-year period, you hate those guys for the rest of your life because of that one experience. That's how it is in POS. If we go down for 10 minutes, your entire restaurant shuts down. Your online orders, your loyalty, you can't even open the cash drawer if you had a cash drawer. I mean, it is so mission-critical. What I always tell people is the quality of our service will be dictated by our product, which is if our product works amazingly well. It's more intuitive. You'll get less calls. You'll get less asks. That combination of super high-quality product lowers call volume, lowers the service side. Then where I sort of demand that service culture is on the executive side, which is if somebody emails you, you respond quickly.
So the way I think we balance that is I always tell every CEO of a restaurant, I said, just text me at any time. Text anyone very quickly. And see, push us. Don't just take our word for it. Call our help desk and see how well they treat you. And so I think it's a combination of training, technology, but also quality products that's helped our service get better and better. But yeah, I worry about it all the time. I mean, I think about it all the time, which is I don't want to lose that edge.
But it is very cultural because, again, because of that dynamic of the customer doesn't always appreciate how much work you do, there is a little bit of an adversarial dynamic that we work really hard to say, hey, listen, the reason why you may have that angry customer is we just cost them a ton of money. Or their kid's college depends on that. And we kind of train our team, which is like, hey, it's a very sensitive thing. Now, the beauty is if you do a good job, they really appreciate it because they're like, I know how different it is when I use PAR versus what I had in the past. And I saw the ROI. And I saw how well you did that. Really amazing example.
For something like 40 years or 35 years, PAR survived as a hardware-only company in a world that outsourced literally every hardware product in the world to Asia. PAR survived. The reason why is that you would and we were something I don't remember his price, but like 25%, 35% of McDonald's stores still use PAR hardware. It's something like that. 40%. It's a crazy number. We don't sell any software there. The reason why is if you told a McDonald's franchisee that uses PAR, hey, we're going to swap out PAR for some other company, they will say, I'll pay 10% more. They will say, because I know when I need them, there'll be someone at my door the next day taking care of me. So it is cultural in the sense that we survive by having great service.
It's hard to rip that out of us too.
Earlier, you underscored that you're hyper-focused on M&A. We talked a little bit about Punchh and MENU. What areas are you looking at for M&A? Are there opportunities with some of these point solutions that are down and out where you can integrate them in your core platform?
Yeah. So we historically have always looked at product M&A. We haven't really looked at acquiring competitors. I can explain why. But generally, we're looking for products that we can sell into our base. Our belief in M&A is that if we add a product, it has to in some way improve the experience of our customers. So it can't just be. We're not a private equity fund. And so we're not going to go buy a grocery chain software and assume we're going to create some synergy there. It has to sort of help our existing base of customers. And if it starts there, then we sort of go, OK, OK, can we run it better? Can we run it more efficiently? Can we create a product on top of it and charge more money?
We start sort of thinking, what products can we sell into our base? Because again, what we've realized is every company in the world wants to sell more products to the customer they have. What's unique about our market is our customers actually want that because they don't want another vendor. They want to consolidate to a platform. And so when we go acquire a product, and we're like, hey, great news. We now have a payment gateway software. They're like, great. I want you in there because it removes one vendor for me. I get one bill. I can do X, Y, and Z. And so we're kind of selling into a community that wants that from us as well.
So we really think about where can we sell where can we build a product or, sorry, sell a product that actually adds value to our existing suite of products so that our customers feel like they got something better. That's primarily where we focus. Then the other part is where we have real holes. So today, we have holes in areas that we wish we didn't. We sell to food service chains, right? And restaurants aren't restaurants are restaurants. There's restaurants in hotels, restaurants in stadiums. There's restaurants in convenience stores. Convenience stores are huge restaurant chains now. And so we have limitations there. We're like, oh, man, we're growing really fast in X, Y, Z vertical. We need more help there. And so we'll find a product extension and say, OK, we'll boost up there. We are very limited international presence today.
But if you listen to earnings call, most of the fast-growing restaurant chains, they're all talking about international expansion. Well, we got nothing there. And so we'll look at stuff like that. But generally, it's like a product hole that we look to fill and say, hey, how can we make our products better? And then where we haven't done something, but we get asked a lot and think about is, do we ever buy a competitor? Do we ever try to capture market share that way? And the reason we haven't done that is those are much messier deals. When you sort of put together two companies that do the exact same thing, there's obviously the internal culture clash of who runs what and what product wins. But also, it's confusing to the customer. That customer usually probably chose that product and not yours at some point.
And now you're going to say, "Hey, great news. You're going to switch back to the product you decided to skip on." And so I always say, "I would love to do those because the economics of those deals are pretty exciting." The amount of sales and marketing G&A you can rip out because you're selling the same product to the same customers is meaningful. But you need to have a large enough margin of safety on the entry multiple to assume that you create more churn. And it's messy. So we haven't done that quite yet.
Got it. OK. Any other questions from investors for Savneet?
Yeah. Thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it. I had a quick question. I read a lot about the dynamic of smaller restaurants and why Clover and Toast and competitors try to sell into smaller restaurants. And one of the aspects of that dynamic I found interesting was they're oftentimes closing. And because restaurants are closing and then new restaurants are opening in their place, it presents a new opportunity for those companies to sell into those restaurants. It's more at bats, if you will. Obviously, you talked about the defensibility of your business. McDonald's doesn't often close a restaurant. But can you talk about the challenge of generating opportunity for new wins given how often are those companies renegotiating their contracts, et cetera? Thanks.
It's a great question. And again, it highlights how different the markets are. When you have a high-churn market, there's more sales opportunities. When you have a low-churn market, there's less sales opportunities. So you got to win the ones you get into. So generally, in POS, you go through cycles of every 5-10 years, you're looking at potentially upgrading your POS. But they come in waves. And so what's happening now is a wave in the sense that the cloud has changed the way people run a restaurant. And so if you don't have a cloud product, it doesn't really matter if you're 2 years into your deal or 10 years into the deal. You are sort of like, I kind of need to make this change now.
The second part that I think is really creating this change is that even if you have a cloud or a cloud-light solution, you're realizing that, oh, my god, I now have a loyalty product. Now I'm an ordering product. I got a reporting product. I got QR code, AI, all this stuff pounded into an old product that is not updating, that's breaking all the time. And so I would say normally, the short answer is most of these products are like 7-10-year life cycles. So that's why they're so great from a business perspective. But there's a secular trend that's forcing that churn to be much higher right now on the legacy guys. And it's the same dynamic happening down market.
It's just that a new restaurant generally is not going to open on a legacy product, right? They're going to go straight to Square or Toast or Lightspeed or Clover, whoever it may be. And so you're totally right. But I think what's happened now is there's just a secular trend of like, hey, if I'm not in the cloud, if I'm not on a modern product, how am I going to catch up to Panera, Chipotle, or Starbucks, or whoever it may be?
Great. Well, Savneet, thanks so much for being with us here today. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks to you as well, Chris. And enjoy the day ahead.