Citi and I cover vertical software and payments. With me I've got Savneet Singh, who's CEO of PAR Technology. Savneet, thanks for thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
First of all, level setting. You know, there are people in the crowd who are probably less familiar with PAR. At a high level, could you walk us through the company's history, the business overview, and since you took over as CEO, where are you in the company's transformation journey from to a broader restaurant tech platform now?
It'll be hard to make that short. So, we were founded 50 or 60 years ago originally as a defense contractor. We went public in 1982, after our founders invented the point-of-sale terminal for restaurants and McDonald's went to single-source them as a vendor. For most of our, our life, we were a hardware and services company that was trying to find a way to become a software business. So, we would have massive swings in revenue based off the refresh cycles of restaurants. In 2014, we acquired a point-of-sale software product called Brink, that was really a product not a business. That business started to grow nicely. I joined the board of the company in the beginning of 2018, you know, with no desire to, to run the company. But, you know, I think the idea at that time was we were this hardware company.
We had these great relationships with most of the large restaurant companies in America. Could we go upsell them a software product? Eight or nine months after joining the board, I became the CEO. You know, candidly at the time, it was to sell the company 'cause we thought we were on the verge of BK for lots of esoteric reasons you wouldn't believe. Then, you know, during that time, I think we did a large restructuring. We sort of found our way through got our way through it. And I think we as a management team got really convicted on this idea that software was eating the restaurant the restaurant didn't just know it yet. And our idea was, could we not just sell a point-of-sale product but a platform to run the enterprise restaurant?
Because it was very clear then and obviously the pandemic accelerated this tremendously that restaurants were going to be adopting massive amounts of software to help them run a modern restaurant today. To put it in perspective, you know, McDonald's is probably the most sophisticated restaurant company in the world. They launched their loyalty program in 2021, and that's McDonald's. So restaurants that just had not made these dramatic investments in technology and so our idea is could we play in the enterprise? So, you know, when we took over the company in 2018, we were probably $5 million or $6 million in software revenue. You know, today we're, you know, around $140 million. So we've grown a lot. Two-thirds organic, 1/3 in organic. And, you know, really today we are sort of front- to- back platform to run enterprise restaurants.
So we have the largest loyalty product for restaurants called Punchh. So if you've got kids that eat unhealthy food, we are probably in your pockets. We have an online ordering product. And so we call that our customer engagement suite where products that touch the customer. And then in our O perator S olutions, stuff that touches the operator, we have point-of-sale payments and back office. And so we call it Unified Commerce 'cause we integrate these products very deeply so that you don't have it doesn't seem like you've got 10 different products running in your store. It seems like you've got one. And that's been a really nice, you know, historically a nice sales pitch. Now it's returned to reality, which is our customers also want that vendor consolidation.
That's interesting. You know, I think you touched upon an interesting point around Unified Commerce. When you think about kinda large enterprise restaurants that you target as your kinda ICP, who are the key decision-makers there? Is it the CIO, CEO? And why do they go with PAR, versus kinda the solutions that they have, that there are in the market?
So I'll do the latter first. So why make a change? You know, point-of-sale is usually our land and expand product. And it's a heavy lift. It's not an easy thing. That's why it's so sticky. That's why I kinda love the category. It's like once you're in there, it's tough to rip you out if you do a decent job. You don't even need to do a good job. You just gotta survive. And generally it's, you know, I think it's sort of some of the trends I talked earlier. But most restaurants I'd say almost all restaurants have realized that investments in technology have very high ROI to their business.
If you sort of, you know, graph the stock charts of the restaurant companies that have made massive investments in technology—Starbucks, Chipotle, Panera, Cava—like, look at look at how much more they've outperformed their peers. Now, part of that is just their operational excellence. They're great businesses. But they've made this massive investment in technology. And so every single restaurant company's like, "I gotta do the same thing. How do I keep up?" You know, if you're a big burger chain and you're competing with McDonald's and McDonald's has a better loyalty app, like, that will make a meaningful difference when you go to that rest area who you pick. You know, most people pick the one that they get the loyalty 'cause there's some affiliation there.
So the move has been driven by this desire to sort of catch up to the industry's best from a technology perspective. The way that restaurants were going about it was saying, "Oh, yeah. I need an online ordering company. So let me bolt on an online ordering product to my old POS product. Oh, now I need a mobile app. I'm gonna build a mobile app and attach that into that. Oh, I need a loyalty product. I'm gonna add that to that. Oh, I need, like, a modern supply chain 'cause now if there's an E. coli outbreak, I need to know where that came from. I wanna add modern payroll. I wanna pay at the table. I wanna do all this stuff." So they just kept adding all these disparate vendors to their old ecosystem that was not cloud-based.
And it broke. It just constantly didn't work. They didn't talk to each other. And so these, you know, CIOs, your first part of your question, were really suffering from a dispersion of vendors. And this is really common in any market that digitally transforms. You get excited and like, "Oh, I'm gonna have this widget, this AI tool, and this tool." And you wake up one day and you're like, "Oh my God. I'm just a vendor manager negotiating price. I haven't created a new experience for my customer." And so that's really what's happened, which is it's hard to build a modern restaurant today without a modern infrastructure. It's kind of like, "I'm gonna, you know, build all these apps to and run it off of a like a, you know, an old phone." Like, it just it's really hard to do.
So the buyer is generally the CIO. They, they're the one that sort of, you know, there. But it's really the CEO that's behind it. So the vast majority of enterprise deals we have, my relationships with the CIO and the CEO because in that CEO's plan for that year, a huge part of it is what's digital sales? How are we growing it? What are we doing it? How are we making it profitable? So it used to be the purview, I suspect you know, I wasn't in this business, but 10 years ago, it was just the CIO. It's a cost decision. Pick the cheapest vendor that doesn't break. You know, today that CEO is very involved because they wanna be aligned into what's the digital story.
You know, I always, in meetings today, I always say, "Just listen to the earnings call of any restaurant chain. Like, really pick any. And I don't know. 10% of it will be on digital." And so it's kinda hard for the CEO not to be involved when that's such a big focus from his investor base and effectively his boss.
That's very interesting. You touched upon a few themes. Like, one of the things that is, the company's history, like how you have originated, and how you target enterprise customers. Can you talk a little bit about kinda who you see as your core competition today, especially when it comes to your targeting market?
Yeah. I'm paranoid. So I assume everyone's our competitor. But, you know, I think at a high level, historically, the core competitors have been Oracle, NCR, and Global Payments through a product called Xenial. They're, you know, all of them or two of them are in every RFP we go to. So we are always going head to head against those. And, you know, we always like that dynamic because those are great companies. But that's like, you know, that's like Silicon Valley 1.0. You know, like, and I think that's like a healthy place to fish. But there's also now competitors, I'd say, suggest coming from all other parts. So, Olo is an incredible online ordering product, you know, really stable, you know, but legacy in nature. And so how do they come into our market?
And so we've been very aggressive in kinda going through their world. You've got downmarket. You've got Toast. You've got Square. You've got Lightspeed, trying to come upmarket. And so competition comes from everywhere. But the enterprise restaurant is dramatically different than the downmarket restaurant. You know, a good way to think about it is if you run a local Italian restaurant, you know, I would say, "Go use Toast. It's an amazing product." But the CEO is oftentimes the CIO, the CMO, the CTO, the chef, you know, like, the CFO all in one. And so the solution that person needs is completely different than the solution what an Arby's would need where you've got an actual CFO, CMO, CIO, digital. You have a district manager. You have a franchise manager. You've got a tax person in there.
You've got accountants in there. You've got lawyers in there. I mean, the extensibility of your product is completely different. And so, you know, there's such different products that you have this really big gap between the SMB market and the enterprise market. And, you know, will there be overlap? For sure. You know, will Toast come up? Absolutely. And they're gonna work their way there. But it's a big enough market, where I think we've got a large enough moat where we feel really good that even with that, we're in a good spot. But historically, you know, those two or three big companies really dominated this market.
Yeah. It's, it's interesting. And then listening to you definitely feels like software is eating the restaurant.
It is very fast.
You had very good wins recently with Burger King, Bob Evans. How has that changed your business outlook, especially when it comes to kinda go-to-market sales motion? Does a win like that change your kinda sales cycles and provide momentum to your business?
So the short answer is, have our wins changed? Has it changed? Yes. Would I tie it to that? I'm not sure. You know, like, would I tell you that our pipeline and I said this on our call yesterday and IR before this, it's never been bigger. Like, it's one of those things where we're like, "Where did all this come from?" Now, is it because of those wins? Maybe. It's sort of self-validating and reflexive in the sense that you get Burger King 'cause everybody else is like, "Oh, you're good enough for them. You're probably good enough for us." That could be it. You know, part of me is kind of a combination of, I think, "Hey, that's very validating because the big legacy chains, you know, their restaurants are interesting.
The most innovative companies are the big companies. They're not the small companies because they have budget to invest. McDonald's is the most innovative restaurant company in the world. "They're also the biggest." Usually, it's the other way around, right? The startups will be more innovative than the big companies. And so it could be that. I, I part of it, I just think is, this sort of commitment to like, "Hey, we live in this digital world. Whether we like it or not, we're there." And the way I sort of explain to new hires at PAR is, you know, restaurants have this incredibly unfair juxtaposition. Yeah, we all, as consumers of restaurants, expect to go to a restaurant, have a great meal, healthy, organic, whatever, clean food, great service, smiles, you know, everything we want.
Like, that's the same experience we had 20 years ago when we went to the restaurant with our parents. But at the same time, when we order off-premise, we wanna be able to access them on TikTok, Instagram. We wanna follow the delivery like it's Amazon.com. And so they have to be like Amazon.com when you're ordering and have this amazing in-store experience. And, you know, it's the equivalent of going in an Amazon warehouse and be like, "Go run a three-star restaurant here." Like, that's tough to do. And so they're doing it all from literally the same exact box they had 20 years ago. Like, the restaurant, you know, form factor hasn't changed that much. And so the only way to solve that is through technology. And so I think restaurants kinda realize like, "Hey, this is gonna stay.
“This is gonna happen,” and I think the ROI is now high enough where it's now, like, leading to this change in pipeline. So, the short answer is, yeah. It's definitely like since that moment, it's been a large growth of RFPs. But I don't know if it's because of that or just the market itself.
Interesting. We shall see.
Yeah. We'll find out.
My next question is kinda related to the last one around go-to-market motion. So now you have new products—Punchh, MENU—you have back office products as well. But given the company's kinda history, do you still kinda land with POS payments products and expand from there on? Or do you land with kinda other products that you have now and then attach payments? How should we think about that?
So we run in two business units, and they're really tied to the buyer persona. So we run one what we call Guest E ngagement, which think of it guests as, you know, products that touch the end-market guest, so you, the consumer, so that would be our loyalty products and online ordering. And then we have a second business unit that is what we call Operator S olutions, which sells to operators, the guy that's in the store running the store or, you know, owns the store. And through those buying units, we the reason we sell like that is one sells to CIOs. One sells to sort of the CMO. Again, the CEO and CIO kinda still sit on top of everything. And within those business units, there is a ton of cross-sell and upsell.
So the vast majority of our products that buy or bring POS are usually buying our payments or our back-office product or within a short order. Burger King being a good example of that. On the other side, what we found is we just got into the online ordering business. And, you know, I think we've assigned 11 or 12 customers. All but one of them have been a loyalty customer of ours. And so we're like, "Oh, we can really sell that through that loyalty base that we have."
And the one that by the way, the one that's not is Burger King who was our brand customer. So, you know, we're seeing that tremendous sort of go, you know, synergy on that go-to-market. Now, we do cross-sell between those two groups but it's, you know, a handoff versus, "Hey, the same person can carry that in its bag," because the sales process is very different.
Yep. Yep. Makes sense. How should we think about ARPU in that case, and how does that change between, kinda, like, going from Brink, MENU, Punchh, and the data solutions?
So, you know, I think, from an, you know, core ALPU perspective, you know, we, we feel really confident in the quality of our products. You know, I always tell our, our product team, you know, "You can say you're the best product, but the only way to prove that you're the best product is if you're the highest price." So don't tell me you're the best product unless you can get premium price for it. And we're kind of there. So I would say our loyalty product and our POS product are, are certainly the premium-priced product in our market. I don't think it's impacted our, our sales. But we are definitely there. You know, I think in, in some of these deals, we're meaningfully more expensive. And we're not doing it for expense. I guess we actually think we can prove the ROI behind that buying decision.
So, you know, POS today, when we land, is, you know, it's sort of depends on the makeup of the store. But, you know, call it $2,500-$3,000 per store. You know, if you go back three years ago, it was like $1,900 a store. So it's been a really nice to see that, you know, reward for the hard work we had. And then everything from there is an upsell. Our Back Office products, $1,500. You know, payments is usually $1,000-$2,000 depending on volume, so on and so forth in there. And we really make an effort not to bundle for discounting. We make a bundle to sell, "Hey, it's gonna be unified, and you're gonna get more." And so we don't usually discount yet. Now, could we down the road win a big deal?
Sure. But generally, you know, ARPU has been a nice driver for us. You know, I think, you know, we just reported yesterday. But I think our ARPU on our operator stuff was up 15% year-over-year, you know. And that's, you know, last year was up another, like, 18%. So it's, you know, that, that motion is working really well.
That's interesting. One of the things that you talked about is kinda selling it as, as a one solution rather than simply, like, a price bundling kinda solution. Is that one of the big kinda does that come up in your conversations with CIOs and your customers in that, when you have a when you have an issue, whether it's with the software or the payments, you call us?
Yeah. It's a huge thing.
Which is kinda—
Yeah. I mean, it give you just a—I hate anecdotes, but I'll give you a good one, which is that, you know, the number one call to any POS company's help desk in, in our category is almost always payments. "The Verifone device isn't working. Is it your fault? Is it Verifone's device or whatever device? Is it PAR's device? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It's like literally I remember when I first got to PAR, it was like 40% of the calls.
And it always annoyed me because I'm like, "Well, like, we gotta pay the cost of that support desk even though it might not be our fault," and so, you know, when we go to a brand and we're like, "Listen," normally when that happens, it'll be like us pointing the finger at the payment company, the payment finger company pointing the payment finger at us. That goes on for two days before anybody figures out. CIO screams, and we figure out what the real problem is. And so and, now imagine you're the franchisee, and you're, like, waiting for two days. Stuff's not processing. You don't feel like you're getting paid, whatever. And so the simplicity of being like, "Hey, it's just there's one vendor.
And because we're under one house, like, we're gonna solve the problem 'cause we get no one to point the finger to," that is a huge and easy sales pitch. So there's a simplicity of, like, having one vendor at the actual store manager franchisee level that really matters. "Oh, you have a problem in the Back Office? Same guys." So on and so forth. That actually makes their life just tremendously easier. At the corporate level, I think it's, it's vendor consolidation. I think it's like, "Gosh, we've got 20 different 25 different guys running in the store now. Like, this is a mess. And are we getting the analytics?" You know, one of my favorite conversations to have with, you know, CFOs and CIOs of the big restaurant companies is, like, "Oh, we've got Braze going in.
We've got Snowflake going." And I'm like, "Oh, that's amazing. Like, that you guys are so innovative." But I'm like, "Do you get any value from it? Because I know the data that I send there does not match your online ordering company. So, like, who's doing the work to, like, make sure these are the same things?" And generally, it's really hard. And that's not meant to be disparaging, but, like, it's actually, like, a really tough challenge when you've got different menus here and here. Your DoorDash menu is different than your in-store menu is different than your, you know, XYZ menu. Like, those are tough challenges, actually, really, really tough. And by the way, those menus change every single day. And so how do you make that seamless, right?
And so our idea is like, "Hey, if we build this beautiful unified solution, and there's one menu that updates everywhere, like, holy cow, like, imagine the simplicity you have from data, reporting, tax issues." It's, it's you know, it's pretty wild how, how that simplicity works. And so I think at the corporate level, that's what they're thinking about. I think at the franchisee level, it's like, "Just make my life easy."
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, like, how restaurant tech and broader fintech world kinda went through unbundling of solutions. And now there is sort of—
Yeah. Re-bundling.
Instead, in your case, so instead of calling it re-bundling, it's actually convergence of solutions, kinda solutions coming together as one unified solution.
Yep. Yeah. And I think the challenge of every industry is, you know, bundling, consolidation, these like have very negative connotations, right?
Exactly.
Because it historically, that required a trade-off between functionality and simplicity. You know, fine, I'll buy your next product even though it's 80% as good as the other product just 'cause it makes my life simpler. And, you know, our like I said, our motto is that we need to have the best products. And so the product should be able to stand on their own. And that's what we're that's like you know, that's what we go up against, though, 'cause if you go if you go to most of our customer base are like, "Oh, man. I remember when Oracle bundled all these things together or CRM bundled all these things together, and the products were crap, but we were kinda forced to use it," where we're like, "We actually have the best product.
And so, you know, we will not sacrifice the quality of the product for the bundle. And so that's our kind of great challenge.
Interesting.
Our opportunity.
Yep. One of the things we talked about was ARPU. As, as the leadership team, how does the PAR leadership team kinda think about ARPU expansion versus kinda getting into more, getting into, like, larger number of sites, getting into bigger brands?
We get paid on it. There's a lot of focus on it. So, no. I mean, I think, you know, to me, ARPU is two factors. It's price and module. And, and so we, you know, we focus on both. You know, what I say, I'm like, "Happy where we are?" Like, "No. This is probably where we have the most room for opportunity." You know, our white space, if all of our customers bought all of our products, you know, it's like 3x-5x the revenue we have today, right? So there's a ton of white space there. So even if we got 20% of it, you're like doubling revenue just from your core base, right? So there's a lot, a lot, a lot of room to grow there. And so I think that we've got to drive the module upsell as well as price.
Price is the easy one, ironically, because when we go into a new deal, we're you know, we're starting at a good price now, where historically, we were at way below market. Upselling, raising price on our existing customers is always a harder conversation. But generally, if you do a good job, they, they wanna stick with you. And, and it's the disruptive nature of, "I'm gonna save 15% or 20% on a expense that is not my biggest line item and disrupt the operations of all my stores." Like, you know, I hate to say we have leverage on our customers, but we definitely have leverage on our customers there, if we've done a good job. If you do a bad job, like, then they're like, you know, more than happy to, you know, flip you the bird. But, you know, I think you gotta, like, execute there.
So long story short, I think most of our growth historically has been new logos and new sites. It's not been that cross-sell upsell motion. 2023 was our first like, "Okay. We kinda figured it out. 2024, we wanna accelerate it." But, you know, I think what's exciting is our unit count keeps growing so fast. So it's sort of like, "We'll figure it out," but it's hard to say, like, one's more of a priority than the other because we wanna capture more market share.
Got it. I wanna go back a little bit about kinda talking a little bit more about MENU, and Punchh, and Brink as well. Among those individual products, where do you see the current challenges and the most opportunities, within those individual products? If you can double-click for us, that would be interesting.
Yeah. So, let's see. You know, Brink is just rocking and rolling. You know, like I said, biggest pipeline we've ever had. Just one of our biggest deal. There's good mojo there. Execution is still super. Our POS is a very, very tough, tough business, you know, because you have this combination of not just software, but it's distributed computing across thousands of different restaurants and stores. And so, you know, you deal with issues like, "The Wi-Fi is not working in the store, and Whitefish in Montana. That's your fault." You know, so it's a tough business. But that's why it's so sticky, and, and you can upsell all this other stuff. But there, it's honestly just winning new logos. We have a good motion. We've got a great team, great product.
It's just, you know, the more we can, you know, prove out the ROI of our product and be great at customer service, we should do fine. So that one is just new logos. Like, we, you know, we are just rocking and rolling. I think, you know, we're up 45% last quarter on our Operator S olutions business. So we feel good there. Punchh, you know, Punchh is growing slower but has really started to pick up momentum. You know, we announced a bunch of these wins. We've got more wins coming this quarter. We haven't got the revenue for those wins yet. So Punchh will have an acceleration of growth this year. I expect in 2024, because of those new wins that we've won.
You know, is Punchh gonna grow 45% like Brink or 40% like Brink did just last quarter? Like, no, because it's also already in, you know, almost half the top 100 restaurants in the country. And so for Punchh, you know, the challenge I give to the team is like, "There are other ways to grow. There's price. There's M&A." And so I think you'll see a lot of our M&A focus on that side, because we can still drive that, and by adding products to Punchh to that base. And then MENU, you know, is just getting off the ground. So we, on our call yesterday, we announced our first U.S. customer go-live. A chain called Beef 'O' Brady's. So you can download the app or go to the website and see how beautiful the online ordering experience is versus our peers.
We just, yesterday, launched our second big customer, a much, much larger chain. And so that business is winning at a really accelerated rate. The massive challenge there is going to be we, you know, spent six months taking a product that was built exclusively for, you know, the international market and brought it to the U.S. And so there will be all sorts of challenges, you know, support calls, cultural issues, like, all the stuff that you'd expect. But for MENU, you know, I think the, the I said this on our call. Like, our headwind in MENU has been, you know, it, it is our almost our entire loss is MENU at PAR.
And so it's hidden, like, how, you know, efficient the rest of our products have been, right? And so now we have to get the ROI out of it. And it's just like, "Man, dude. We gotta prove this thing out." We will, because, you know, as you saw, part of the reason we went Burger King was because of that. And. Yeah. So it's an amazing strategic tool for us. And so, you know, the revenue like, literally, first revenue just started two weeks ago. And now we'll see.
Yeah. That's an interesting outlook for 2024 and beyond. Let's talk a little bit about churn. How do you think about churn? I saw some of the numbers in your earnings announcement. It seems very low for an enterprise platform. Would love to kinda, Yeah. Hear more about kinda how do you think about churn?
Churn to me is a function of the category you sell into, right? So, you know, if you're selling into small restaurants, like, your churn is gonna be super high no matter how great your product is. So the end market dictates should almost always dictate your churn. And for us, we sell into an amazing end market. QSR, fast casual restaurants, are incredibly, incredibly durable businesses. You know, McDonald's franchises do not go out of business. They just don't. Same with Arby's, same with all of them. You know, many of our, our, our chains measure the length of a franchisee in decades. Like, are you a one-and-a-halfer? Or, like, you know, it's, it's really these are just such durable businesses.
When we have churn in those markets, it's usually a churner that we, unfortunately, recognize as a churn, and then it's an open of a different location. So, you know, our, our gross churn, I, you know, I think it's near the best in software. And I don't think that's gonna change because the, the beauty of those models is because the return on capital is so high, they do fine in down markets. It's not like you have a massive, you know, set of CapEx that you've got to earn revenue until, like, these things are profitable day one. And so they're very durable, which is why our churn is so low. It's like I said, are we great? Yeah. Do we churn less than our peers? Yeah. But it's like the end market's dictating that.
Got it. You've talked a lot about, like, on the front-of-the-house products. You, you have a back-office back-of-the-house product as well. Can you talk to us about the, the how you use data to kinda shape the experience of, the, the end consumers as well as your own customers?
Yeah. I mean, I think first, from our consumer customer's perspective, you know, restaurants, it's surprising. You know, they've always been, you know, consumers of data. But it's never been nearly to the level that I think they have today. So, you know, as an example, you know, you kinda always knew when the lunch rush was gonna be. You kinda always knew when you'd have a lull, and you can maybe cut staff or adjust supply chain. You knew, you know, XYZ holiday was big for you 'cause you sold hot dogs on July 4th.
So you'd be like, "I'm gonna staff up and buy a bunch of hot dog buns." But it so the first wave of data into the restaurant was, like, just making that more intuitive, which is like, "Hey, the last five years, on this weekend, sales were like this. So we should have inventory for this so we don't have to 80 or, you know, 80 cut out something." You know, you don't run out of product or supply or you have labor and so on and so forth. But now, you know, with our products in the Back Office, you have literally, like, profitability to the product, to the store, to the employee. And so you can not, not optimize your menu, optimize your food supply chain costs, optimize your buying. You know, a lot of times, you know, restaurants, you know, are incredibly cost-sensitive.
You know, should you buy every 30 days or 100 days on, you know, napkins? And, you know, all that stuff is now at your fingertips. And so that's what's so powerful about, you know, adding software to the Back Office is you have incredible data, and to the employee too, right? You can figure out, "Wow, like, that employee, that server is way better than the rest of my servers because X, Y, and Z reason." So our customers are using data in that sense.
Now, I think every CIO restaurant company would be like, "If you are using data, like, super well, like, no one's gonna rank themselves an A." And I wouldn't rank them either because they have a, you know, too much data issue and, like, how to use it and for the challenges I talked about, which is the data's not unified. And so it's very siloed. And how do you get value from that is not there. And I think the big problem is that the obvious is done. You got a loyalty program. You know who your most loyal customers are. You know that, "Okay. I don't need to over-discount for those guys. I need to discount for these guys to bring them in." Like, that's all everybody does that and kinda figures it out.
It's like, "Well, how, how do I target the customers that are not in my loyalty program?" Or, "Hey, do I need to keep giving Abby, like, a discount on that green smoothie? Like, he's gonna come in anyways." You know, like, "Do I, you know, that's the, the stuff that has to happen next." Or, you know, "How do you optimize your staff?" Or, "When do you turn off DoorDash because it's low margin 'cause you got too much you know, your" that stuff's, like, still to come. You know, with our own business, you know, I think, you know, we're still we're not, like, a consumer business where we've got 10 million customers, right? And so I think that where do we use data? We use it just like anybody else. We use the telemetry to see what parts of our product are being used.
So, POS is a gigantic product. Is there a part of our product that nobody uses that we can just cut off and save on cost? You know, but as far as, like, customer data, like, you know, we know every logo we're gonna be selling into. And so I don't think it helps us so much there. And as always, like, everybody has data. It's just, you know, do you take action on it, which I think is oftentimes a problem.
It's interesting to hear you talk about the nuances, especially when you move to enterprise QSR, large restaurant brands. Very interesting. One of the things you touched upon in our conversation was around kinda MENU and some of the losses that you talked about. Can you talk a little bit around kinda margin profiling going forward? How you see the overall expense side of the P&L as it relates to sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A?
Yeah. Our goal as an organization is we want our gross margins to be in the mid-70s% and higher. And, you know, we used to be in the low 70s% or actually in MENU and our growth and payments, which is lower margin right now. It'll eventually get to the 70s% have depressed that. And so we've had this kinda headwind. We've also absorbed all the Burger King costs upfront or a lot of them upfront, not all of it. And, and so we haven't got the revenue from that. So we've had this headwind of absorbing all this cost for this big customer launch without there and then this money-losing MENU product, which we do think will change over time. And so I, I really feel that's, like, the thing.
I'm like, "We will get to that because we used to be there." That's not, like, a hard one to believe. And, you know, I do think our team is pretty good at, like, figuring out every little thing you can cut off on your DevOps cost. Our goal on the R&D spend is to get it to be 25% of our revenues. And our goal of our sales and marketing is somewhere between 10%-15%. You know, I always tell our team, like, "I think we can be one of the most efficient sales and marketing organizations in software because we literally know every single customer. This named accounts. You're not calling random people. You literally know everybody.
And so we should be able to have more products per sales, you know, in our bag and, and go quickly. And then our G&A, you know, my hope on G&A is always to, like, keep it flat to grow very small amounts and so that we can scale into it. We have a big G&A base 'cause of the legacy of our business and all this stuff, but we're not growing that. We haven't grown our OpEx in about five quarters. And, you know, yesterday, I suggested we'll probably grow, I don't know, 5% this year. All of that is, you know, tied to new customer wins. And, and what's cool about the OpEx from Burger King, if there's something cool about OpEx, is it also comes down.
So a lot of our OpEx there is support people to get the product launched, get it going, answer franchisee questions. But then once that happens, we don't need necessarily to keep them forever, going forward. But generally, you know, those are the targets we have set for ourselves.
Yeah. That's interesting, the operating leverage you have built in your model and especially, getting into 2024.
Yeah. And think about this. Our Brink, Punchh, and Data Central products had no headcount growth in the last 18 months.
Wow.
Yet those businesses have, you know, grown and have grown by, you know, in 18 months, each of them has grown by at least half, with no headcount growth. So the growth has really been focused on these net new areas.
Got it. Got it. Over the last four to five years, you made significant decisions across your product and expanding that product set. What do you see as the key pivot points for the business kinda going forward?
I don't know if I ever look at, like, this is the pivot and we're gonna go this way. We are a really ambitious set of team members. You know, I always, you know, what I mean by that is, I think that you will see us take big risks always, calculated but big. I don't see us as being an incremental company ever. You know, life's too short.
Our team is too ambitious, you know. I always say to investors, like, "If you just let the people that, like, you know, work with me, like, you're gonna think they're all better than me." And so, like, that's a fact that, that's tough because you're like, "Man, how do I impress these little guys who are 10, 20 times better than me and keep them here?" And so that's what I mean by that is, like, we want our pivots will be, you know, not a pivot but a big, a big bet. So, you know, what does that mean? We'll probably be acquisitive because we need, we want more opportunity. We wanna expand our TAM. But because our and, and also, I think since we've delivered on the product and our product is winning, that's the time to pounce.
It's not the time to be like, "Oh, let's just sit here and, like, you know, see what happens." Like, now's the time. Like, "Oh, wow. You love us. Like, what's the next product we can pull into? And how do we get closer and closer to serve you as our customer?" And so I don't know if we have a pivot, but I, I do think you'll see us take some big swings, whether it be M&A or product bets because, I don't think you can stay static. And, and I do I am paranoid about competition. And so I just assume someone's gonna spend five times as much as we do with better people. And how do we keep that moat?
Yeah. Interesting. You talked about M&A and some of your R&D investments that you're like 25% of revenue is kinda R&D. Are there any kinda top-of-the-mind kinda areas where you want to take your R&D or even your inorganic expansion areas?
So, on the organic expansions area, it's actually much more about how we integrate amongst our products better and better and better. Because what I wanna go to every customer to feel is like, "Hey, if I buy one product apart, it's amazing. If I buy two, it's, like, amazing times two. And if I buy three, it's amazing times five." And because they integrate the, the sort of ability to single sign-on, all that stuff is, like, makes my life so much so simpler, so easier. You know, at my house, I had ADT and then, like, Blink cameras. And then I had this and it's had, like, three different camera apps. If it was all one, I'd be like, "Oh, my God. That was so simple." And I'd pay twice the price. It'd be awesome. Similar experience in the restaurant.
A lot of our internal is focused on that side, which is how do we can make our products, when they're unified, surprise and delight, surprise and delight so the customers feel like they're getting more and more and more when they buy more products. It's not on, "Let's go create a new widget." Because when we do that, then we can take more price. And then when we have a new widget, we can upsell. On the sort of inorganic growth, you know, I think we are, as I mentioned, you know, in our guest engagement side where we have slower growth, we are going to push that through acquisition, I hope. You know, international, we don't have a solution today. So we would probably look international one day. You know, downmarket. Do we wanna go downmarket or not downmarket?
So there's a lot to look at. But I think at its core, we'll be looking for products that serve the enterprise that when PAR integrated to PAR, the customer gets something better something better. And that's what we've always kinda focused on and looked at. And then I think, you know, as far as do we ever wanna buy a competitor? You know, do we wanna buy market share? You know, I think the answer is, of course, we look at it. But you know, there has to be such a large margin of safety on the multiple you go in because that's when things get screwed up. You know, you buy two big competitors. You put them together. It's like, "What product wins? What team wins? What do you tell the customers?
Have you just now created a whole reason for a bunch of customers to go RFP because it's, like, you're forcing them on a new product?" You know, those are tough things, right? And so we would do it, but we would need a massive margin of safety to make sure we didn't screw that up. So most of our inorganic is, like, "What product can we take into our base?" Not to slam it in there, but the customer actually feels like, "Oh, if PAR does that, it's gonna make my life better, simpler, easier.
Got it. Got it. Cool. We have covered a lot of ground. Any, any other closing remarks, before we, finish our conversation?
No. I think we covered most of it.
Got it. Cool. Thanks, Savneet. Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you.
It was a very interesting conversation. Thanks so much.