All right, so thanks everyone for joining us again. Next up, we're excited to have Savneet Singh here, President and CEO of PAR Technology. Savneet took over the role of CEO back in twenty nineteen, and has since expanded PAR's product suite, expanded beyond the company's POS hardware roots, and now, they have the company on a path towards achieving EBITDA profitability, and has pivoted the business towards a much more recurring and software-oriented business. So Savneet, thanks for joining us today, and looking forward to the discussion.
Thank you for having me.
Maybe it'd be beneficial to the audience to do a quick overview of PAR, how the company has evolved into a more full-scale restaurant software provider.
You know, in simplistic form, we service enterprise restaurants. Think of enterprise restaurants and food service businesses as multi-unit operators. We're selling to the Arby's, Dairy Queen, Sweetgreen of the world. We're not selling to your local favorite Italian restaurant. And, you know, historically, we started out as a single product company selling them point-of-sale software targeted at that very narrow market, that sort of large market, but narrow target of QSR fast casual. And over the years, we've expanded inorganically and organically to now offer point of sale, back office payments, online ordering, and loyalty. And it all came from this thesis, and then, you know, when we started in 2018 to now, the thesis hasn't changed that much, which is restaurants are being inundated by software. They are overwhelmed with too many products, not too few, and every single time an interesting widget comes out, they go bring on a new vendor, try to plug it into their existing system, and they think they've solved that problem. In reality, it's created five more problems because that new thing they added doesn't connect well to everything else they have. Something breaks here, it has a cascading effect over there. And so, you know, we like to think that these food service businesses, and I keep saying restaurants, but it's really much broader than that, are really looking for simplicity, you know, call it vendor consolidation, but really a unification of their ordering and their data so that they can take control back of their organization and start creating really beautiful experiences for you as a customer, as opposed to managing a bunch of different vendors.
Right. So you touched on it just now, the idea of unified commerce. You know, maybe you could talk about what it means to bring all of these assets under one name. You know, you've got the Punch and the MENU assets, and your Engagement Cloud offering, Brink and Data Central and Operator Cloud. You know, you've been very acquisitive to kind of bring together all of these. What does the unified commerce platform look like at PAR?
We look at it as an order anywhere is an order everywhere. What that means is whether you're ordering on your phone, on the website, in the store, in the drive-thru, it should flow through the same set of systems so that you, the operator, can use one system to manage it all. And that might mean everything from everything goes into the point-of-sale system, so that kicks to the kitchen and the fulfillment's the same. But more likely, it means that your data is the same. So a menu item here is the same as a menu item there. And that you can get intelligence from all this technology that's come out over the last, you know, few years. Today, every single type of order is a different system. The online ordering guide is different from the loyalty guide. It's different from the in-store drive-thru, and so you're trying to collect all this data, put it together and get some insights, and that's pretty hard, and so I like to just kind of think of it that way. From a you know an operator perspective, so you've got this sort of unification. From the customer perspective, you're the end user, you and me ordering from you know our favorite restaurant. We want that same experience. We want you to feel like the experience from whether you're in the store, on your phone, online, is the same beautiful you know. You know, you're generating the same feelings you had online as offline or on mobile or on a website. And so the idea is to kind of make that unification, both the experience to the customer, but also to the operator.
Yeah. And I guess payments has become a more meaningful contributor to ARR and revenue. What value proposition does PAR bring in terms of payments? And then when do you anticipate that to be, you know, a much greater contributor to the bottom line?
Yeah, so payments is a very fast-growing revenue line for us. And, you know, for us, it's unique in that relative to our peers, we recognize it on a net basis. So, it's, you know, if you're doing apples to apples, it looks enormous.
Right.
So payments for us is a little bit different than others. And most people, you know, bundle payments into vertical software to, you know, create more revenue, and in our view, that's eventually a race to the bottom because there's no differentiation whether you buy your payments from, you know, from wherever you get it. What we've done is say, "Hey, we're going to offer you payments, and we're going to give you ostensibly all these benefits of simplification that you might get from having two vendors under one roof." That might be one phone call, so you don't have to go to two different people. One service desk. So, you know, the most common call into a point-of-sale help desk is an issue between the payments device and the POS. Most common call, sometimes 40% for many of our customers. Well, the beauty now is that when the... historically, when that happens, the payment guy points to the POS guy, and the POS guy points to the payment guy, and that goes on for two days, and then eventually somebody screams, and things get moved forward. Now, under one roof, you can solve that problem. And so, you know, one is, as I mentioned, one support desk, one service desk, you know, discounts on your hardware, blah, blah, blah. But really, anyone can sell that if they've got multiple products. What we're trying to do is then say: Hey, what can we give you with payments that you couldn't get if you had payments with a third party? And for us, that's really product functionality. So what we do is, if we take on your payments business, we're going to take all that data, combine it with the POS and loyalty data, put it all together in one data platform that we call the PAR Data Platform. So you've got all your data in one place. So you're not pulling it from a payments company and trying to reconcile that to the POS guy. The second part, part of that product thing is, can we actually create customer experiences that are different? We announced on our last call that we created what we call something called One Tap Loyalty, which is that ability to, instead of when you go to a restaurant and you're sort of saying: "Hey, I got this coupon on my phone, can you scan this coupon?" Then you're like: "Can I get credit for my loyalty or my-- can you give me credit to my loyalty account, and then can I pay?" It's three swipes or three taps or three scans. For us, it's just one tap. In that one tap, you can have your payment done, you can have earn your points and also burn a coupon. And so that's a functionality aspect of it. And so our pitch to the customer is pretty simple. It's like: Hey, we're not going to charge you any more than you already do on payments. We're going to give you massive simplicity. You can trust us, because, by the way, there's not a single restaurant operator, and I would challenge you to find one, who doesn't think they're getting ripped off for their payments. And then we'll give you all the functionality. It's kind of hard to say no.
Yeah... I wanted to hit on some of the recent deals that you've done recently. So TASK and Stuzo kind of big catalysts for just the simplification of the business, along with the government sale, which we'll get to in a second. But, you know, if I... You know, if we kind of dig into some of these, you know, could we talk through on the progress that you've made so far on both of these?
Yeah.
Understanding it's still early innings, what are some of the early takeaways that you've had?
So I'll go in chronological order. You know, we acquired a business called Stuzo in, I think March or April, and it's been fantastic. You know, I'm usually, you know, more circumspect about my feedback on things, but it. I think our bet here was this idea that convenience stores and restaurants were starting to become each other's worst nightmare, in the sense that the fastest growing area of growth for every single convenience or fuel store in America is food. So generally, most of these chains are growing food service anywhere from 10%-20% year- over- year. So food has kind of become the growth engine for convenience and fuel stop. Well, guess where that share is coming from? That share is coming from restaurants. And so we were getting pulled into that convenience space very organically because the big convenience stores were saying, "Hey, we want the same loyalty experiences that restaurants have because we're becoming big food businesses." And so we got pulled into that business. And we discovered this company, Stuzo, and said, "Wow, like, they not only do that, they do it better than us," because they think of that business not as a food service business, but they can also bring in the fuel, the tobacco, the CPG goods into the same loyalty platform. And so we bought that. When we bought that deal, I remember people were saying, "Well, like, you know, is this... You guys, are you getting off thesis, or is this sort of expansion for expansion's sake?" I think today, almost unilaterally, like, the thesis has played out, which is, oh, my God, there is every single week, there's an article about how, quick service restaurants are losing share to convenience and fuel. You know, someone at McDonald's once said, "Our biggest competitor isn't Burger King, it's 7-Eleven." And so we are kind of the, you know, the picks and shovels in that fight between these two different categories, and that will only expand. And the reason why I'm so excited about this deal is, obviously, you and I talked about this, but it was a great deal. We bought it for 13 or 14 times EBITDA for a fast-growing software business. That's hard to do, with no churn, lots of growth, in a long runway. But it's also a really interesting category in that while C-stores sell food, almost categorically is a better business than restaurants. Their margins are higher. They are far more partnership-oriented, and so our price point in C-stores is almost double restaurants. The deal sizes are longer. Everything... You know, it just feels like a real win-win, and so we're very excited. And then, you know, I think the team and culture we brought in was pretty fantastic. You know, I think if you were to ask people that work at PAR, they'd say, "Hey, that one has kind of worked well internally." I think externally, you'll see the results of that in the next couple of years as we do more of these big deals. And again, it is. You know, you will all see this happen soon as EV charging takes off and stuff, but restaurants are going to start having EV chargers. And you know, EV charging companies are going to be at gas stations offering you your food, and there's going to be a real share fight between the two, and we like kind of being able to ride both of them. I think it was always a kind of, "Let's get ahead of the curve, and this is happening." But it's also defensive, too, because let's just say we didn't do it and one of our peers did it or somebody else did it, then they would create a vector to compete in restaurants. So I think we've done a nice job both on defense and offense. The second deal is called TASK. You know, we're less than two months in, so it's hard to say, you know, but everything looks great right now. TASK is our attempt to grow internationally.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we support so many large U.S. QSR chains, and almost all of them are growing internationally, far more than they are domestically, and we don't have a solution. And then I think, you know, we have this call option, we call it, which is they have hooks into a couple of large brands, mainly McDonald's, where they have tremendous relationships, tremendous performance, more importantly. And, you know, that creates an opportunity for us to potentially grow that business over time. So we like it a lot, and from an engineering perspective, we think the team is really, really fantastic.
Yeah. And maybe just quickly on the government business, I know there's been a focus on kind of where that business is headed, and I know the general focus was on divesting it over time. Now, you know, that's now mostly in the rearview mirror. Just what did that divestiture sort of unlock from just a focus, simplification, resources perspective?
Honestly, not much internally, in the sense that I was probably the only person to spend any time on it. Again, it wasn't a lot of time. We ran it really as an independent subsidiary with its own, you know, CEO almost, and there. I think what it did more than anything else was actually clean up our story to the investor community.
Yeah.
It made it a lot easier to figure out what we're doing, what business we're in, to encompass. You know, I suspect for companies that one day want to acquire us, I think it makes it like, "Okay, now I don't have to manage a government service business and get U.S. government approval to buy this company." Like, you know-
Yeah, sure.
There's that aspect, too. And so I think it cleaned up the story a lot, which should help us move forward. And there's small things like recruiting. You know, you recruit a senior executive, and they're like: "Wait, what's this thing over here?" And you're like: "Don't, don't look over there." Like, you know, so I think it cleaned things up.
Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. You touched on the international opportunity in TASK just a minute ago. I think a lot of people are excited about the opportunity, both, like, the strategic customers that it brings with it, but also just the international footprint, the ability to sell internationally. So, you know, how would you kind of... How are you prioritizing international expansion with, you know, the significant opportunity and backlog that you've got domestically right now?
Yeah, you know, it's not priority one. You know, I think priority one, we've talked very, you know, vocally about, is getting our Burger King and Wendy's deals live, running, and super happy. And I think, you know, we're doing a great job there. But the international opportunity is a long-term bet because it's not like you're going to a customer, and they're like: "Here's the international business." It's like: "Now, here's the UK business, here's the German business, here's the..." And so you go market by market. And so we're, I think, very carefully figuring out where can we play, where does our product fit best, and where we have to invest to grow. And, you know, it's gonna be based on ROI. I think it's exciting because I know, you know, unilaterally, our U.S. customers would love for us to do what we do for them internationally. The question is, do we want to be in those businesses? Do we wanna be in those markets? You know, it's not like you wanna take a big QSR chain, and they're like: "Hey, I love you. Here's, like, Lithuania." You know, like that, you know, that's gonna be, like, 10 stores with, you know, learning all the language. You're not gonna make your money back. You know, you gotta go there and say, "Okay, give us Lithuania, and then we want all of Europe," you know? It's really figuring out ROI before we do anything else. But, you know, I think the early returns have been like, "Wow, everybody really wants us to do this." Now it's on us to figure out where we wanna play.
Yeah. I just want to hit on the gross margin, for a second, just because I, you know, one of the big kind of results of that pivot towards software will be seeing more of that kind of software gross margin- profile over time, and I think some of the deals that have done have kind of set the company back a little bit, just from having to make investments that kind of weighed on gross margin in the near term. How do you kind of paint the roadmap for getting gross margins towards more of a software-oriented level?
Yeah, we're not super far off now. We're in the sort of high sixties, and, you know, I think we wanna eventually end in the mid-seventies. But, you know, I think we'll get to seventy hopefully soon. You know, we used to be in, you know, seventy-one, I think, a year and a half ago, but we did one deal that really diluted our margin.
Yeah.
Now, we were pretty vocal about it. You know, we've been pretty transparent about that, that one deal-
For sure
... which is called MENU. And, you know, to me, you gotta take those bets. You gotta take, you know, those bets that are, you know, non-consensus is hard to do. And I think so far we would say, like, you know, would we do it again? Like, yep, we won Burger King with it. And so, it, this, to me, is just a matter of when, it's not a matter of if, and it's just scaling that one product that's gotta get up there. And then our payments business, because it's still nascent, is also not yet at that mid-seventies margin. But it, it's working its way up there as well. And so to me, this is just a matter of time, and we're moving there really quickly. You know, what I hate about it, though, is that it does kind of hide how profitable the core business is going.
Right.
Because, you know, I said this a few calls ago, but, you know, that acquisition we did, you know, runs, you know, I think at the time I said $12 million a year. Well, that's like, you know, our entire company, you know, our negative, our Q2 EBITDA, when you adjust for the purchase price accounting and stuff, is $1.8 million, right? So, you know, it's all this one product, right? And, and, and what's amazing about that is the operating leverage has been extreme. It's just been hidden because we did this one acquisition. Now, again, we would do this acquisition ten out of ten times, because I think we wanna sort of take our shot in that online ordering space. But, that's one thing I don't love about it, is because it's kind of hiding how efficient the existing business has become.
Yeah.
That will come forward. I think... Sorry, one other point on the margin thing that I think is interesting is, in Q2, our adjusted EBITDA loss was -$1.8, excluding the government business. But if you, you know, including the government business, which actually, you know, we had during that quarter, then we're probably break even in that quarter. And again, on a same store sales basis, that's a pretty drastic change from just 12 months ago.
Totally. Yeah.
Again, kind of hidden in this change, but anyway, what I'm excited about is it's a clean story now. You don't have any of that disruption in Q3, Q4, so on and so forth. And we feel really great. I mean, the core, the margin growth is coming from the core products that we've owned organically, just becoming very efficient.
Yeah. No, and particularly the payments, I mean, it's very clear the incremental margins there are very high.
Very high.
So maybe on that, both MENU and payments, just how are you thinking about the ramp of some of these newer initiatives? And you know, how would you kind of characterize the growth contribution from MENU?
MENU is still pretty small, still single digits. But, you know, and we announced, you know, in the last couple of calls, we've announced some of the wins. You know, we've won one large chain called Scooter's, which is, I think, 800-900 stores. That's kind of crazy, because I don't think anyone thought we'd play in that scale yet. Obviously, we won Burger King for a portion of their technology stack and a number of other chains. So the business is growing, and it's growing off of the existing PAR base. Every customer of MENU's come from an existing PAR customer. And so I think it's proving our model of when we acquire a product, we can create revenue growth out of it by selling it into our base. But, you know, we'll know, like I said, you know, we started selling in the United States and, you know, really in earnest, you know, in the beginning of the year. And so, sorry, deploying it in the beginning of the year. And so we'll know, like, a year from now, if, you know, do we, you know, is this going to be, you know, fast forward five years, $100 million of revenue, or is it gonna be $50 million or $40 million or $20 million or. It's not gonna be zero. And so I think it'll make return. The question is how big, and we'll really know that as we get going. And then on payments, you know, payments is growing, you know, 50%- 100% a year. It's been growing historically off of the Brink base, where we are, you know, bundling it into our POS deals. But the growth being driven, you know, for the second half of this year from payments, and then I think the out years, is actually gonna happen equally from our POS business, but also from our Punch and MENU, our online ordering businesses. Because we try to, you know, with Punch in particular, this One Tap Loyalty thing I mentioned, that's very much driven by the Punch having that base where you already have our loyalty app and adding that functionality on.
Yeah.
That will be a nice thing to see, which is now we're deploying payments not just in our on- what we call our on-premise, but also our off-premise business.
Yeah, makes sense. I want to talk about just kind of cross-sell in the organization. So you've kind of layered on a lot of products over the last couple of years. I think the numbers are you're serving over 70,000 customers, you know, in total, 122,000 customers between Engagement Cloud and Operator Cloud. Yeah, how would you... you know, I, I guess this kind of suggests there's a decent amount of cross-sell opportunities to kind of harmonize the customer base across products. How would you kind of? How, how are you thinking about that opportunity?
Yeah, I think it's the... Other than, you know, the Burger King, Wendy's stuff, which is crazy exciting to have our two biggest deals-
Sure
... and our growth rate not decelerating and, and all that, I'd say the most exciting thing that's happened is that we've kind of figured the cross-sell thing out. So I, you know, I think what you'll see in the next couple of years is that a portion of our growth will be driven by pushing our existing products into our base. So as I mentioned, I think MENU's in 11, 12, 13 different customers or something like that. Every single one of them is a PAR customer. Our back office product, called Data Central, has its biggest pipeline ever, and every single - that is because of Brink. And our, like I said, our payments products are all coming from cross-sell, and so cross-sell is really working well for us. It's also validating our M&A thesis. So, you know, I think I said this on our last call, but our sales and marketing spend in 2024 is going to be less than it was in 2023, yet we'll sign way more bookings and ARR in 2024 than we did in 2023, and that's the cross sell, right? Why we don't need two three sales teams, we need two, and then we need one, and you're kind of-
Yeah.
Consolidating that. And we've found that we've kind of figured out that unlock now. Now, you know, people always ask me what percentage of your sales will it be in 2025 and 2026, and I would say, unfortunately, it's never. It's not gonna get. I want to get it to one day be fifty-fifty. The problem is, we're just winning so many new logos that it's kind of, those new logos are still the bigger jumps in ARR.
Yep.
But it's, it has definitely been the unlock that we are most excited about internally.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. It's very exciting. Maybe we could talk about competition. I mean, there's a number of kind of notable SMB players in the restaurant space and POS. I think there's a little bit less kind of investor familiarity or focus on the enterprise side. So maybe you could touch on how you kind of view your primary competitors and what you've seen and how you've seen the competitive environment evolve over the last couple of years.
I don't think it's evolved that much over the last couple of years. You know, the players in the SMB market are incredible. They are businesses I, you know, have business envy of. They are fast-moving, they sell to customers that will buy cross-sell products on day one, so you don't even need to build a cross-sell motion.
Mm-hmm.
Their sales cycles are relatively small. You know, in our world, we compete primarily against more of the legacy install players with the large install base, and in that world, it hasn't changed that much. So, you know, it could change. We get asked a lot about Shift4 and Toast and Clover and Square, and, you know, I would say it's not often we see them in an RFP, let alone, you know, in as a finalist. And that's not because those products aren't great or amazing, they just weren't built for this market. You know, the analogy I like to use is, you know, if I was the designer of a semi-truck and you're the designer of a Porsche, and we switched jobs, like, we could probably figure out how to make those things go from A- B, but it'll take you a long time to figure out the nuance of the semi-truck driver and me to understand the Porsche driver and how that works before we could build a product that actually could compete with each other.
Yeah.
That's a little bit how I look at this market.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So you've had a number of chunky wins with very notable clients. I think it would kind of help the level setting to contextualize the value proposition behind PAR's offerings versus what's kind of out there in the market.
Yeah. I mean, we've in the last, you know, year, won our two biggest deals of all time in Wendy's and Burger King, Wendy's for our loyalty product, Burger King for our point of sale product. And, you know, I think what's exciting to me is the pipeline now for large deals is bigger than it's ever been. And so I don't know, people always ask me, "Is this because of the Burger King win?" I'm like, "Maybe." Is it because of some of those big, you know, legacy providers that have huge market share, or because they're struggling, or they look from the outside like they're struggling? Maybe. Or is it because digital transformation in the cloud is now accepted in food service? I'm not really sure which one of those levers has led to it, but, you know, I'd say without question, we feel like something has changed over the last year or two, where the pipeline is strong, and it's not stopping, and so we have not seen a drop-off since we've had these large customers, and I think we'll sign, you know, more this year than we've ever had in the year before, and hopefully, that continues in 2025 and 2026. This idea of digital in the restaurant and the food service business is nowhere near, like, stopping. We're still in the very early innings of it. And, you know, I would say if you look at our customer base, you know, we have customers today that still have less than 5% of their orders come through a digital channel. We have customers that are over 50%. But, you know, if you look at the average across all of them, it's still, like, 10%-50%. I mean, it's still really, really early on. And when I say digital, digital might be you're still in the store, but you just decide to order on your phone versus touching a kiosk or going to a customer, right? So, and so those, that penetration of digital, I don't think there's a single restaurant CEO that's gonna argue that that's gonna go the other way. Like, I don't think people are gonna go back to wanting to talk to the human being, as sad as that may be for us. That's not gonna stop. And so if that's the world that you now actually live in, that reality, which is, okay, this wasn't a pandemic thing, this is a, hey, human beings, for some reason, prefer to do things on their own, on their own device, you're gonna have to make those investments. And then, at the same time, you've got to figure out how to make a really efficient kitchen and back office, because those are really complicated. You know, we think of restaurants as simple, but they're quite complicated when you get to the level of supply chain management and so on and so forth. And so, I think these businesses are far from kind of being at the end. And the last thing I'd say that I think is a tailwind, and no one says it, but I always say it, which is, I think if you were to graph the stock charts of the best-performing restaurant companies over the last three, five, ten years, and then graph their R&D spend, it's probably pretty linear, which is, like, the firms that invested in R&D have outperformed those. So think of, like, McDonald's, Chipotle, Cava, Sweetgreen. I mean, these companies have put incredible money into R&D around their digital experience, and they happen to be the best performing chain. When you stop, I mean, jeez, what's going on? I mean, these are enormous amounts of investment they're putting in. So I do think that's the roadmap for every other restaurant chain, because you look at those guys, and you're like, "Well, I need to have that experience as well." And if they do, we're probably a good place to call.
Yeah. So maybe speaking of that, you know, I think a lot of people in the enterprise space know that there's a lot of kind of in-house software that's been kind of accumulated by some of these larger brands. So when you think about, you know, maybe an acceleration of the R&D cycle, you know, how do you think about, you know, a kind of sea change in the way that some of these large brands are thinking about their technology stack and what that can mean for you?
Yeah, I think the large brands are starting to embrace the fact that they can't do it themselves, and importantly, if they were to bring in people into their environment, they're probably not gonna bring fifteen different people. They need to kind of pick a vendor or two to trust. The win of Burger King was a big deal in the restaurant market in that, you know, I think their original goal was to build it themselves. They had hired the CIO of McDonald's. They'd really made this big investment to try to do it, and I think when they gave up on that and moved to PAR, it was probably a signal for everybody else, which is like, hey, that, you know, if they couldn't do it, I'm not sure other people could do it. Our ability to show success and wins in these big accounts, I think, has given other large accounts this comfort of like, okay, they can actually do it. Because, listen, for a long time, we had less stores than these brands had. And so, like, if you ran a 20,000-store brand, and we were in 10,000 stores, you're not going to be like, "Oh, yeah, here's my business." You're going to like, "There's no way you can handle my volume-
Right
and my scale." And so I think part of it is us getting to a scale where they can trust our ability to service them, but also them realizing, like, you know, what's the point of me building out a point-of-sale system if I'm a big restaurant chain? Like, that's not my competitive advantage. My competitive is my food, my experience, my guests, my operations. It's not running a point-of-sale system. And, you know, the example I've given to a couple of customers is, let's just pretend you built a point-of-sale system or an online ordering system or a loyalty system, whatever. You built one of these products on your own. I'm sure it's going to be better than our product for what you do because you built it for the exact thing. The question is: Is it going to be that in a year from now, two years from now, three years from now? When software changes at such a rapid pace, the amount of integrations you need to put into it is going to change your experience. Like, no, which, by the way, means that you thought you're going to build this thing, have this big CapEx spend, and then it's going to come right back down. So that's like never. I mean, anyone who's built software, it doesn't ever come down. It's not like you're like, "Oh, the product's done. I never need to look at this again." It's like, no, you got to maintain it, you got to build integrations, you got to, you know, do X, Y, and Z. And so I think that the financial argument is also very much in our favor, which is you can build these things, but do you want to maintain it, grow it? And the last thing I'd say is, twenty years ago, I would argue McDonald's or Procter and Gamble could hire better software developers than a tech company. Like, that's clearly changed. I think the quality of the product they're going to build is going to be lower as well.
Got it. You've referenced these big wins, Wendy's and Burger King, several times today. Maybe we can focus on those for just a little bit. I know these are, these are large wins, going to be a little bit longer implementation timelines. Could you help us just think about how these will kind of fold into the business over the next year or two?
Yeah. So Wendy's went live in July, so, you know, you'll see that, it turns on kind of overnight. So you'll see that all happen in Q3. And Burger King is a two-year rollout, so we get to recognize, and build revenue when we take an individual store live. And so we're working on a two-year plan from April first, 2024, to April first, 2026, of rolling out sort of region by region, if you will, with Burger King. And so you'll see it kind of come on over time and, you know, starting out slow, growing faster, faster, faster, so that it's a very sequenced, roll-up, there. And that's pretty normal in the POS side.
Yeah. And then just from a capacity standpoint, you mentioned pipelines are kind of stronger than ever outside of these two deals. Obviously, these are very large deals as well. Just how are you feeling around implementation, resources, and capacity within the organization to kind of do both?
Feel great. You know, these things are very sequenced, very coordinated with the brands, and so, yeah, we wouldn't take anything on, we couldn't. Now, listen, if everybody wants to go live on the same month, that would be pretty hard. But, you know, we kind of choreograph it with them, with our customers, and so that there's... It can definitely work through. So I, I'm not worried about, you know, that. I mean, back in the pandemic days, there was massive limitations because you couldn't get a point-of-sale hardware terminal, or you couldn't get a service technician because they had COVID or they stopped working. And so most of that is kind of worked through the system now.
Got it. You know, one thing we haven't talked too much about is just how go-to-market works. Would you mind kind of talking through across the different products and across the, you know, the restaurant business, how do you organize the go-to-market in the organization?
So we break up by buyer persona. So, we have a group that sells to the CIO, who is the buyer, and a group that sells to the CMO, and so we have these two different buying groups. And, you know, it's named accounts. You know, there's not 10,000 enterprise restaurants in America. You know, there's 350, 400 that really matter for us, and so we've got- they're assigned to those accounts. And it's a very traditional enterprise software process. You are calling on the CIO, et cetera, making that call, working your way, you know, generally over a long period of time to get to the point of, "Hey, let me demo my product." And then you go from a demo to an RFP, usually. And then from that RFP, you go into what's called a lab, where you are effectively testing your product, basically, in a fake store that the restaurant runs, based in their headquarters. And then in that lab, they'll, you know, the brand usually bring in franchisees and people to look and say, "Hey, what do you think of this versus that?" And then, you know, if you, if you do a great job there, they'll throw you into a store. So you're actually running a store, and they'll sort of compare how that store operate versus their existing store is, what worked, what didn't. And then at that point, they'll sort of say, "Okay, you won." And so it's, it's different in that you're tested in the field. It's not like. You know, it's different than if you're buying Workday, and you kind of win the RFP, then you're kind of rolling out and you're doing it. Here, you're, you're actually tested in the store before you go live. By the time you're actually launching, that brand has a pretty good feeling for how you're going to operate, how you're going to work. You know, it's generally six months to a year, that's on the point-of-sale side. The rest of our products are, you know, either that sales process or they're the same thing, except the rollout is much faster. You know, with Wendy's, you're going to the CIOs and the CMO, making this pitch, then you're kind of going through an RFP process, usually managed by a third party, like one of the big consulting companies. Then, you know, once you win, you're sort of going through all the, you know, testing and so on and so forth, then you kind of go live. It's a very similar kind of six-month to a year process generally for us to get a win.
Got it. I want to spend a brief moment on hardware. You obviously have sort of the legacy hardware business, and there's obviously hardware support for the software businesses, particularly in POS. You know, there's been some commentary, some of the competitors about just, like, softness in the overall hardware environment. What are you kind of seeing this year? And then, more broadly, how do you think about the drivers of the hardware business going forward?
Yeah, and we've had a somewhat weaker first half than we had last year. You know, in our business, it's we have one huge advantage versus our peers, which is, while we have a hardware business that sells to our non-software customers, like a McDonald's, if you will, or KFC, or Taco Bell, these are brands that buy our hardware but don't use our point-of-sale software. We also sell hardware to our Brink customers, our own point-of-sale customers. And so the hardware business, because of that, is a lot less volatile than, you know, some of the experience that some of our peers have. And so, you know, we see that from our organic business, like, call it the business that's attached to our own product, that looks pretty good, and it's kind of coming back nicely and going what we hopefully do that. Then on the sort of legacy customers that, you know, we've had for four years, you're seeing some demand come back on that side of it. I don't think our second half will be, you know, as great as it has been historically, but I don't think it's gonna. Right now, my guess is I don't think it'll also go down.
Yeah.
You know, hardware is necessary in this market. It's profitable. The service is certainly profitable. But it is the challenge, as you said, is a little bit lumpy and always hard to forecast. And so I always tell investors, sort of, put an EBITDA multiple on that hardware and services business and, you know, be conservative because of the lack of visibility, but the software business is obviously where the juice is.
Yeah, makes sense. So we talked about, you know, improving the gross margin profile. Top line seems to be hanging in the 20%-30% range. How are you thinking about sort of the scaling of profitability over the next couple of years?
Yeah, well, we put out our long-term targets of, you know, we wanna get gross margins to the low to mid-seventies. We want our operating margins to get to the twenties. You know, the path to get there is we want our sales and marketing spend to be, you know, less than 15% of revenue. You know, I think today we're almost there. I think it's around 18%. So we're pretty close on the sales and marketing target. We want our R&D expense to be 25% of revenues. You know, today it's 31%. And we want our G&A to be, hopefully, over time, less than 10%. And that's the one that we have the most work to do, but that is a, you know, us just scaling the business. It's not like G&A grows as we grow revenue. It's just we have a big G&A base because of our historical, you know, hardware and services business. So, you know, we think we can get to that, those sort of, you know, midterm targets. You know, I think we've communicated to the market that we wanna be EBITDA profitable next quarter. And I think it's gonna continue to build on each other. I don't, you know, obviously, we don't think it's gonna go the other way. And the, you know, either way, the hardware business, you know, past life won't really matter that much as we quarter to quarter, as we build up that. So we're really excited. I think it's gonna be fast, and I think, we're super focused on it.
Yeah. So, you know, we've covered a lot. You know, in the last minute here, you know, how are you thinking about the business over the next two years? How are you thinking about the outlook for the industry and, you know, any final words you'd kind of leave us with?
I think we have never been more excited to run the company that we run today. And, you know, like I mentioned, I started in 2018. We were, you know, seven, eight weeks from going bankrupt. We were kind of a, a has-been, you know, hardware manufacturer in upstate New York. And, you know, today, I would say, we feel great that we've kind of come so far. We're. You know, I think between, it's between us and a couple other people to win this sort of enterprise food service category. But our ambition is, like, it's, it's, it's very much day one. And so I think as a team, our excitement comes from how we, we've got all this pipeline that's gonna grow, but it's really about how do we do what we did the last six years and do it all over again. Yeah, I think my commentary would be, looking from a business perspective, everything looks fine. We're not seeing slowness. Things look really great. 2025 looks strong because what we see, what we've been talking about as far as our pipeline.
Yeah.
But I think what we feel, you know, wildly excited about is the next six years of how do we kind of repeat what we just did the last six years all over again.
Great. Sounds exciting. Well, I think with that, we're out of time. Savneet, thanks for joining us.
Thanks, Will.
It's always a pleasure.