Okay, good morning, everyone. My name is Mayank Tandon. I'm the FinTech Analyst at Needham. I'd like to welcome Savneet Singh, CEO of PAR. Savneet, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Another year at the NGC conference, so let me, just for the benefit of people who might be newer to the story and people who are listening into the webcast, could you just provide a quick snapshot of where the company plays in the market, and then we can dive into more details?
Absolutely. So we sell software to enterprise food service businesses. Think of that as your enterprise restaurant and large convenience store chains that have heavy food service business. We provide everything what we call front of house, which is online ordering loyalty, all the way to back of house, which is point of sale, back office. And then we kind of bundle in payments across everything that we do.
Got it. I want to actually focus on last year because 2024 was a very eventful year for the company. So I thought it might be helpful just, again, to frame the conversation in terms of how 2024 transpired, in terms of both the overall business. Also, you had plenty of M&A, a divestiture. So maybe if you could just remind us of how 2024 unfolded, that would be a helpful place to start.
2024 was a great year for PAR. It was, I think, what I like to say is we did an incredible job on the organic while also, I think, doing a really nice job on the inorganic. We haven't reported yet, but up until Q3, we grew the organic business 25%, which is great, right within our target. I think kind of proving that this idea that we have of the flywheel of our products is working really well, meaning when we land a product at a customer, we are able to sell that second product and create this really nice flywheel that's happening. When I talked to our board and to our team, I would say the greatest success of 2024 was that the flywheel worked.
And we kind of proved to ourselves that as we integrate the products that we acquire, make them all PAR branded, PAR skinned, PAR one database, we can sell so much more of that product. That was the biggest win of the year by far. Now, within that was we launched our two biggest customers of all time on the restaurant space, Burger King and Wendy's. We built this huge pipeline in our back of house. And so the organic business did really, really nicely and I think hit our projections and, again, most importantly, proved our thesis. At the same time, I think you saw our competitors and peers struggle. And so we had nice stratification between ourselves and our peers in the year, again, proving the thesis of the sort of product platform. Then we had the sort of inorganic swim lane, which was really, really active.
We divested a non-core business that we've had for a very long time to make the story a little easier for you. We made two acquisitions, one that really accelerated our growth in convenience store, one that took us international. We did a PIPE to finance one of them. We took on a debt offering to another. And then at the end of the year or towards the end of the year, we did a really, I think, creative debt for equity swap where we were able to convert some, take off some debt with an equity swap that actually ended up saving us a bunch of shares because we found a unique clause in the debt agreement. So I think we did a lot on the inorganic from a creating a shareholder value perspective.
But to me, the core business worked really well, which allowed us to do this inorganic stuff. And so I think we balanced both really well.
Perfect. So let's start with the organic business. As you said, you had a.
It's all organic now.
Right. We'll be closing those acquisitions very soon, and then, of course, you had a new one, which we'll dive into a little bit later that you announced earlier this year, but let's start with the organic business. Maybe if you could talk about the RFP activity you're seeing in the market, both in terms of large deals, maybe more small and mid-tier deals, and what the end market looks like right now as you enter 2025.
So right now, it's very strong. We had an investor day a month or two ago, two months ago. And we sort of put out there that we've got $30 million of late-stage pipeline. That creates a really good tailwind for us coming into 2025 of deals that we can pull in and drive revenue for the end market. Nothing's really changed from when we last reported. We still feel really good. The activity is strong. Customers are healthy, happy. I think as we fold the acquisitions we made in 2024 really into PAR, we'll find ways to accelerate them when we are doing that already. But nothing's really changed. The end market's still really, really strong. I think part of that is that the QSR fast casual space we play in has done fine. Not great, but not poorly like lots of other end markets in retail.
And I think the other part of that is our products are just such high ROI generators that they've continued to sort of move these processes forward. There'll be things that drop. There'll be things that come in. But the end market hasn't really changed from when we last reported.
And what is driving these restaurants to really innovate and move to a PAR platform, for example, versus going to maybe a competitor or using their current legacy product to kind of milk it out as much as they can? What is the motivation behind the shift?
The single biggest driver is just everyone is becoming a digital business. Their businesses, every part of their workflow is being aided, disrupted, added to by some form of software, whether it's point of sale, whether it's back office, whether it's loyalty. All of these guys are growing because they have to become digital businesses. They have to reach their customers in every channel that their customers exist in. They have to then figure out, once I add all these digital channels like online ordering or Instagram ordering or whatever, how do I then run my actual back of, actually run my restaurant? How are you going to solve that problem? You're going to need more software. Our acquisition was a good example of that. In the end, these businesses are becoming digital.
The question is, well, how do you figure out how to become digital? You really have two, we think, two options. You can become best of breed and just buy a bunch of different products. You can buy an online ordering product here, a loyalty product there, point of sale product there, a back of house product, a kitchen product, and have 20 different vendors and trying to get all those vendors to work well. Or you can adopt our plan, which is more of a platform approach, which is use one main vendor to buy your core products and then build on top of, which has kind of been the thesis that we have put out there. For us, the reason why we win is that on either path you go on, we think we win.
We think that if you wanted to just buy our product individually, each one of them is best in class. We really obsess on that. Every product's got to be the best in market. We have all sorts of ways to measure if we're the best or not the best in the market that we're selling into. But the real thesis is we call it better together, which is when our products are bought together, you create really differentiated outcomes.
And we've seen time and time again that the reason why 2024's big success was the organic cross-sell. It was because of our ability to prove that better together outcome to our customers, saying, "Hey, when you add that next product from PAR, you're getting a different experience than if you had bought them from two different vendors." And so that's really the differential that we have going forward, which is first is product, and then second, when you combine products, you continue to get more and more outcomes that you couldn't get without it if they weren't connected.
So just to back up a little bit, could you talk about the trends you're seeing both in the operator and the engagement segments individually? And then the question would be, how many of these customers are actually buying to that unified commerce platform that I know has been sort of the pitch from PAR for some time? So maybe take two questions on that.
So I'll do the latter first. So it's funny. I think we were obviously early on this thesis, right? When we took over the business at the end of 2018, we started talking about this idea of integrating an integrated platform. We were probably too early. I think that restaurants were still not realizing how digital their businesses were going to become. Today, I think it's pretty consensus. I do think that most restaurant CEOs and CIOs and CTOs would tell you, "We don't need more vendors. We need to consolidate vendors so that we can have more control over what's going on in our business." And I think that's why we've seen the growth that we've had. It's because I think they kind of believe that. As an example, we just did an acquisition a week or two ago.
I got so many texts from CIOs and CTOs being like, "Great, bye. Makes so much sense. Be nice to consolidate this stuff." So I do think that has started to really become a core part of what they want to do. Again, it's very hard, I think, if we get in the room with a CEO of a restaurant, and even if that CEO, CIO says, "Hey, listen, I want to buy like 30 different products," it's very hard to argue against our pitch, which is, "Do you really think you, a restaurant operator, not a technologist that has a very small tech team, can manage 30 different vendors to create a unified guest experience?" That's really hard to do. It is really hard to do that when none of these vendors were meant to work together. None of them like each other.
None of them integrate well with each other, so I do think the thesis is playing out, so I do think that this is working. To your first part of your question of how are each of our two segments doing, the operator side of the business is rocketing and rolling. We've had really tremendous growth the last year or two years of 35%+ growth, I think now for a number of quarters here. That's continued. Within that sort of segment, there are PARs that are growing faster than others, which is great. In 2024, payments was a real big growth driver for us. I think in 2025, our back of house product will be a really big driver for us. And now adding the Delaget modules will sort of hopefully continue to create a lot of growth there, so I'm very, very bullish on what's happening there.
You can see it in the numbers that we report. On the engagement side of the house, we feel really good here. The growth here is slower than in the operator side just because the penetration is higher. And so on here, we're growing in two ways. One is this expansion we have in non-traditional restaurants, so the convenience store business being the main focus there. So we'll have really nice growth in that C-store business, leveraging our loyalty platform in convenience stores. And I think that will expand into other outlets because all sorts of food is served in so many different places now. You'll see that growth. And then you'll see us continue to win the big brands that come up for RFP. We've got a great track record.
And, to be honest, at this point, there aren't a lot of peers in the end that those tier ones that can compete with us anymore in that business. So our win rates are super high there. And I think we'll continue to be high. But the combined should continue to grow in the range that we hope for. And I think there's optimism for things to get better.
Before we get into the financials, I know in the past you've said the target model is to grow ARR 20% plus organically. Should it be at a similar rate over time between engagement and operator, or do you think it'll be more sort of tilted towards one or the other over time?
It's more tilted to operator right now. I guess we've never really looked at it. Should they be the same? If one can accelerate more, we're going to make more investments there. I think you want them all to be there. But I suspect for some time, just because the operator business is just earlier in its TAM, it will have higher growth.
Before we get into some of the M&A, and just would be curious to hear your thoughts on what has surprised you both positively and negatively. I do want to ask about the big whales that you won last year. So first is Burger King. Could you update us on how that's been progressing? And the question also applies to Wendy's, which I know was Punchh, but then maybe you could update us on that as well, how the whales are doing.
Yeah. So we've got a really tremendous relationship with Burger King. I think we're limited in what we can say as far as penetration and so on and so forth. But we've sort of insinuated that Burger King will be buying more products from PAR over time. And they would only do that if they were really happy with us. Now, are there stumbles, of course, or stumbles here and there? You got to work through these things. But I think they're really committed to PAR. We're really committed to them. They're an incredible partner. We have been wildly impressed with them, their culture, their organization, their commitment to PAR. And so feel very good.
I think the surprise we'll have, and we kind of, if you look at our investor day, we kind of snuck this in there. I think we will surprise people because they will be buying more products from PAR. And it's a give and take because as you add more products, you slow down the rollout a little bit because you want to bring those new products into the rollout. But then the LTV is meaningfully higher over time. So we are really pumped up and we're really all in on making their business a success as we are with all customers. But we are highly, highly focused on making them a success this year. It's certainly critical for us because if we make them wildly successful in what they're doing, it just opens up so much more business for us over time.
On Wendy's, we had a tremendous launch. Wendy's was our largest restaurant loyalty customer ever, and it was a very complicated experience because Wendy's very uniquely built their own app. And so that had to go integrate into PAR, and plus all the partners they have and the consultants they have and so on and so forth. And we were able to do that and then migrate millions of users onto our platform from a legacy old platform, and it worked. And I think the ROI has been really, really great. They kind of listen to their earnings call. Their CEO talks about the value that they've gotten from that platform, and that to me is always like a very positive thing. If a CEO is talking about loyalty on the earnings call, it means we're in a really good spot.
I hope what that turns into is they say, "Hey, PAR is an organization that delivered for us. Now, as we look to upgrade the rest of our technology, we'll come back to PAR for more." We are certainly there and nudging them on that. And they are an organization that needs, I think we'll tell you that they need more change over time. So I think we're excited to support them. And I think they are, because they've now proven that technology investment creates ROI, they're probably more incentivized to do that again and more encouraged to do that again.
So I want to put you on the spot a little bit because I think 12 months ago when we were here, you talked about a record RFP. I believe at that point you had something close to, and I may be wrong on this, but hopefully I'm close, around seven large deals. Obviously, I think Wendy's was one of them. Could you update us on where you are on the other, not to focus too much on the big deals only, but just give us some context in terms of where you are in terms of the big deal pipeline and the potential for converting some of these opportunities?
Yeah. So we're doing really well. Unfortunately, we're in a tough business where the customers don't always let you put out a press release upon winning a deal. So these things are lagging in nature. Burger King was super unique because it was a material event. And so we had to do it for SEC purposes. But we feel really good about what we'll hopefully announce out in the next year on that activity. And then I think where we have lost, and we've lost one of those that I can think of, I don't think there's anything we could have done that would have won that business, meaning a competitor did something economically irrational that we just don't want to do. But in general, the pipelines are really strong.
I think if you ask any of our peers who's winning the most in the tier one, they would say us, and so it's still very healthy.
Okay. So should we expect potential opportunities on the tier one side in 2025? I know, again, the lead time on these deals can be very long. But is the pipeline still active where you could close on potential opportunities in terms of big whales?
There's no doubt. I mean, there's always, when we went into 2024, we had no idea that things changed. We're like, "Oh my gosh, all of a sudden this chain's going faster than this chain." And it's a little bit hard to predict. And that is a core challenge of our business, which is the predictability of the RFPs are there. They're predictable. The rollout is not. And so you have some volatility from quarter to quarter as it relates to revenue. But the upside of that is then you have a really long visibility of duration of revenue for the next 10 years, which I like a lot. So I'm okay with that upfront. And so we do have that. But where I think we feel more excited is this year is our ability to attach more products into the base.
And that's really the push that I have to our sales team is I want Data Central on every single brand customer. How do we make that happen? And so we are doing all sorts of incentives and promotions to make that happen in a bigger way. How do we create that flywheel acceleration? And so we feel good about both of them right now.
Let's pivot to the M&A. So I'll first start with the, I know you've relabeled it, but the Stuzo deal, which got you into the C-store space. I think there was a question about potential cannibalization of the punch product within that area. So could you just update us on how the acquisition has gone? And has that actually had a negative effect, or has it been more positive in terms of the?
Stuzo has been an incredible deal. I don't like hyperbole, but it's been just a game changer for us internally. We were already in C-store. We had about 10% of our loyalty business already in convenience stores. We sort of saw Stuzo and said, "That's kind of the company we want to be." We got them for a really great price, 12 or 13 or 14x EBITDA for a fast-growing, really profitable business. When we did it, I think it was contrarian. I remember I had some tough conversations with shareholders, like, "What the hell are you doing? Why are you changing your thesis?" The point I was sort of telling people back then was we weren't changing our thesis. It's just that our customers have expanded the footprint of where they're selling their foods.
It happened to be that convenience stores are the fastest-growing food service market in the United States. Convenience stores, on average, have catered 15% food service growth in the last three years versus restaurants that are way below that. And the biggest competitor to McDonald's is no longer Burger King. It's 7-Eleven. It's your gas or it's the gas station you go to. And this will only be compounded as EV charging becomes more common because you have more time now at these non-traditional restaurants. And so we took this contrarian bet. We had to sell our stock at a discount, all that stuff. I think fast forward, it is now like every article in our trade rags are our thesis, which is like, "Oh my God, the convenience stores are the new restaurants.
“Convenience stores are taking share from restaurants.” You can see that we were like, I think we were really right on that, and that was luck. I mean, I don't think we were geniuses, but that really proved out. What's exciting about that market is that we are the experts in that market because we go in and say, “Hey, we know what's going to happen. You're going to start with loyalty, and then you're going to want this, and then you're going to want this because we have done this for the last five years in restaurants.” So we go in there and it's almost like the experts that they want to talk to. That is super exciting for us because we can have a lot of influence on the customer. The second part about this business is its economic profile and business model is very different than restaurants.
We charge twice what we make. We charge less for restaurants than we can in the C-store market because it's less competitive. But also we do a lot. The functionality is more. We promote everything from CPG goods to cigarettes and everything in between. And so we've got to integrate all that into a loyalty product. And so we can actually make it. It's a much more profitable business because of the breadth of product. And then lastly, we have, I think, an undue influence on the customer to sell them a lot more. When we go to a customer because we've driven such tremendous ROI, this is a great example. As I just mentioned, it's very hard for restaurants to ever go out and talk about, "Hey, we just launched a new tech provider.
They don't want to put press releases out." Conversely, if you look at C-stores, it's like the opposite. So Murphy USA, which has been one of the best compounding stocks over the last decade, it's a convenience store chain. Their CEO, Andrew Clyde, who's an incredible CEO, he's like always talking about PAR. And it's like the most amazing thing for us because he's sort of an icon in that industry, truly like an icon. And he talks about our loyalty program being the key to his success. Casey's is another great performing organization. Their pizza loyalty runs off of our platform. And so these brands really do count some of their success to PAR and driving that for them. And so what does that mean? Well, they trust us. They want to use us more.
And so it will create a really great opportunity for us to sell more products because they really want more from us. As an example, if we had online ordering, if we had delivery management, if we had kiosks, if we had point of sale, like this thing would be growing like bonkers. We don't have those products. We're building some of that stuff. But that is really proven to be, I think, a tremendous acquisition. And then the talent we brought in was really, really, really fantastic. And so you'll see a lot of that talent spread across PAR in other ways to make us a better business, give us more confidence in who we are and what we can accomplish. So as you can tell, I am really pumped, and it's a very fun market. And I'll just tell you one other anecdote.
One of our large investors is always screaming at me, which is like, "We don't charge enough," and gives me these crazy numbers that we should be charging 10 times our price. And it's hard because in restaurants, it's an established market. But in convenience stores, we can go to a deal. We just did a deal with this $13 billion organization, not a small organization, where they're buying our loyalty product. And the guy was like, "Listen, I need to do this. My competitors are all doing it. But I don't want to pay. I want to figure out a win-win. I just don't want to pay you the highest rate because what if it doesn't work? My tech team is really not the most advanced.
“I'm a new CEO, blah, blah, blah.” And so we created a deal where we said, “Hey, you pay a little bit below our base fee. But if we hit these targets, that contract rate goes up meaningfully.” And so this goes from a $2.5 million contract to if we hit the top of the targets, it's like a $9 million contract for us, which would be one of our, that's more than Wendy's, right? And this is not a chain any of you have probably heard of. And so we can be more creative in our deal-making because this is a different industry. So we get kind of excited by our ability to create more value here. So that one's been just a home run. And we're going to put a lot of, it's in our R&D expense next year.
It has the most investment of all of our products.
I can tell you're pumped. So that's good to hear. Moving on to the international side, TASK, I'm assuming there are a lot more challenges with going international. So if you could update us on how that acquisition has progressed and what you're seeing in the market there.
Yeah. So way earlier than part of the reason I'm so bullish on Stuzo is we've owned it for almost a year. So I know it really well. I'm in on the customer meetings and stuff like that. On TASK, the early goings have been great. I mean, I think similar to Stuzo, the customers that use TASK love TASK. In Australia, their big market, there's a company called Guzman y Gomez, which is like the Sweetgreen or CAVA of Australia that just went public. And in their IPO roadshow video, they talk about TASK, which I've never seen a restaurant company say, "Here's this vendor who's been a great partner for us." And so their customers really like them, which is an important part of our growth. So far, our priority has been three things. One, making sure we can take the customers live that they have signed up.
They signed up a lot. They've put a ton of investment in product. We got to get these customers live in Australia. Number two is bringing U.S. customers to their market. So we've had one really top brand, small amount of stores, but coming to Australia, coming to Canada next. And so that is really, really exciting. And in fact, this is a really big brand that we don't have existing business with, but we have a really great relationship with. So that's going to be a cool opportunity for us to mine that. And that's sort of step two, which we've talked about when we bought the company. And so there. Now, that will be a little slower, but not much slower because we're launching so much of the organic pipeline. We can't actually send every customer and say, "Go talk to them," because it's a limited team.
So that's the second part. And the third part of TASK was to figure out if we could take some of the functionality of other markets in the United States. And so we are going to do two tests in this market. TASK is in Australia, the largest stadium POS provider. So if you guys go to the Australian Open to watch tennis, that runs off of TASK. If you go to the Melbourne Cup, which is like the biggest sporting event in Australia, I'm told, it's like the Kentucky Derby, that runs off of TASK. And so we're going to do some research to figure out can we bring that functionality over to the United States. Just to put it in perspective, the volumes of those two events I mentioned, plus others, are more than the volumes of the vast majority of U.S. stadiums.
So it's like the tech can handle it, obviously. And then we're exploring a little bit of work in the casino space, where TASK has won casinos internationally. And so these are things we're sort of testing to see does it create it. And if they don't, we'll shut them down really fast. They're a very low-cost experience. And then underneath all of this, as we've talked about with investors, is there's a couple of call options within this business where they have relationships with two of the biggest brands, probably the two biggest brands in restaurant and beverage that we want to win over the next couple of years. That if either of them hit, it'll double the size of PAR. If they don't, we didn't pay anything for it, but we really are focusing on it.
That’s kind of the plan on TASK: get the international business hungry, bring the U.S. customers over, and then explore these two verticals while we work on these things in the background.
That's a great update, and Savneet, you did touch on this, but you bought this company called Delaget recently. Again, could you give us a little bit more details on?
By the way, I should mention on those first two deals, one of the core, M&A is messy, right? I should mention I was investing in banks for the first two years of my career. And I remember going to CEOs after and nine out of 10 times this stuff doesn't work. It's just like really good for the short run. And so people always come to me and say, "Hey, you've done a lot of M&A. Help me do it." And I'm like, "Don't do it." I usually advise not to do it. At PAR, I would argue it's been one of the most successful things we've done. And the reason why is we've always looked at it as product development, not making a financial transaction. The financials have to work, but it's always been a product development exercise for us.
That makes our M&A a little bit slower because we can't just wave in deals all the time. And that is there. But where we have, I think, over-indexed, I say this a lot, so forgive me if you've heard this, but if you go to talk to the big software private equity funds and say, "Hey, have you met this guy PAR?" They'll say, "Yeah," because we invite them all the time to take a look at PAR and tell us, are we leaving money on the table or not. But they would tell you our integration playbook, I think, is near best in class. And what I mean by that is we really figure out where are we going to connect the products so the customer gets a different outcome.
And so that means that the super simple of are we just doing single sign-on or the more complex of there's two databases, how do we make it to one database, which allows the customer to have one source of truth. But then the second part is the integration of the organizations. And so on Stuzo, the business we bought almost a year ago now, we have literally lost two employees over one year. And one of them was a part-time consultant in HR. They were both in HR, which was synergy, right? We don't need that. And so that's a company that sold for almost $200 million. Many employees left with millions of dollars, and every single one of them stayed. And so I think that kind of is a core part of our success. The TASK acquisition, the founders made tens of millions of dollars. They stayed on.
We've lost six or seven people or something like that, minus the ones that were forced for synergy. And again, that's a 240-person company. And so we've been able to retain the talent, which is really hard to do. And why does that matter? Well, when you retain the talent, they've bought into the broader ecosystem of the vision and mission of PAR so that collectively we can build a lot more together. And same thing at Delaget, the company we just acquired, which you're going to ask me right now. But same thing. We've kept the management team sticking on. And they made plenty of money. None of these guys need to work anymore. And they've all signed on to kind of build the vision.
And so what I love about it is that I do think if you lose a third of the workforce within the first six months of an acquisition, which normally happens because you get your paycheck, it's hard to spend a lot of time trying to learn all the institutional knowledge that went out the door. But with us, you kind of hit the ground running and you're building right away. That has been a core part of our success. That's like the hard work. Those are the hours that you really spend. Any deal looks good on paper. It's like what you do after that's like everything. And I think that has been a huge weapon for us, which is we have this playbook.
It's fun because now you have there are three entrepreneurs at PAR that have made a ton of money selling their business to PAR that are giving me ideas and pushing me really hard on, "Why aren't you investing more in my business? Why aren't you investing more here? What are we doing this? Why are we doing that?" And they are meaningful shareholders of PAR. Meaningful, meaningful shareholders of PAR. They have tens of millions of dollars of PAR stock, and they want the best for the outcome. And so that's been a really critical part of our success. And I can share some details.
Any details you can share on that, both financially and, of course, the motivation behind it?
Yeah, so Delaget's a company we have known in the restaurant space for many years. They were spun out of a company called Border Foods a while ago. Border Foods was at one point a really successful, incredibly successful company, real estate and operating Taco Bells and other large franchises. So their founder was on the board of Taco Bell. I mean, really, really well-bred company. They built this analytics software for their own stores. And then when they realized that everybody else wanted it, they brought in a private equity partner to commercialize it and scale it. The business has two product lines. One is this analytics tool for the franchisees. When I say it's analytics tool, it's a lightweight version of Copilot where it's prompting the store manager or the franchisee to make changes into how they manage their food, what they promote, their labor.
It's a really slick tool that the franchisees really live off of. The product doesn't churn because you end up kind of like, "That's how you're going to run your restaurant." And it's really complementary to what we do because we do the same thing, but at the top store level, the brand level. And so they do it at the store level, right? And so combining that is pretty powerful. And so we have known them through that part of the business for many, well before I got to PAR. They were very successful doing that. The second part of their business is loss prevention, which we rebranded Recovery, which is creating an automated system for restaurants to collect back the overages and the refunds from DoorDash and Uber Eats and everybody else.
A little-known statistic is you'd be shocked how many orders that come in through DoorDash or Uber Eats have some form of the order injection was wrong. And so you put an order on your DoorDash or whatever. The order that actually got kicked to the kitchen was slightly different than what you put in on the order. You get your order and you're like, "What the hell? This is not what I ordered." And you get a refund. The DoorDash or Uber Eats will give you that money back. The restaurant will say, "No, no, no. Your order injection screwed that up, so we shouldn't be funding that loss," as an example. Or a more common example is, "Hey, the customer complained that the food was soggy and cold by the time we got it. They wanted a refund." And the restaurant will say, "No.
If you look at the KDS system, which obviously PAR provides, you'll say, "We finished the food. Your driver didn't come in time." And so you have to go through this process of going back and getting all this money back from your stores. There are stores, this is on the Delaget website, that make $75,000 a year back. When you are a QSR restaurant, so it makes $75,000 back, it's the equivalent of sometimes of some of these guys, it's like a third of their entire profits for the year. Now, most of them, it's not $75,000, it's $25,000 to $30,000 to $40,000. That's still 10% of your free cash flow. That's a big nugget. And so they automate that recovery and then do all this analytics and integrate it into it. And so that space has been booming for the last few years.
And it's an example I always tell people of like, "Where do you think PAR is going to be?" And I'm like, "As these markets digitally disrupt, I never thought this would be a thing that we would ever spend time on." But this loss prevention thing is wildly complicated because guess what happens? When you're doing that refund, you got to apply for like a sales tax rebate, right? Because you got to like, "Hey, I got to pay that money back," right? I mean, there's just so many other things that it cascades through. You got to update all the inventory. It's a really complex product. Does that product make any sense standing on its own in the corner? No, it should be with your inventory product, which is what we have. It should be with your point of sale product. And so this is a module.
It's not a standalone product, in my opinion, and so it fits really beautifully within our product line, and so that's the product strategy I mentioned, which is we can make one plus one equal three. As I mentioned, it was really cool to have the CIO of some of our biggest customers be like, "Great deal. Super smart. Love that one," because by the way, sometimes I do stuff and it's like, "Why the hell did you go do that," but this was great that way. From the financial perspective, I think it'll be very creative. The business has grown well over 30% for three years in a row. It broke even in Q4, so it's got to very much work in the path to Rule of 40 really fast. We think that under PAR, there's a tremendous amount of white space in our calculations.
There's $84 million of white space if we were to cross-sell their products and our products across each other's base, just one of our products or two. So we think if we can sell Data Central, our back office product in their base, and they can sell their product in our base, it's about $84 million of white space. So we think just the cross-sell opportunity is quite significant. And what's going to be fun about this is we are literally going to sell it through the exact same salespeople. It's going to be branded PAR really quickly. It'll be skinned PAR really quickly. It'll be single sign-on really quickly. The end user is going to be like, "Man, that's awesome how fast that felt like it all of a sudden became one PAR product." And so this is different from every acquisition we've done.
I've always said it's created a swim lane for us. We always said we wanted the big parts of the restaurant: point of sale, back of house, loyalty, online ordering. This is a module. And so the barrier to integrate the bar is much, much easier because this is something we can attach. It's a switch to the end customer. It's not a big install. So we're excited. We paid about seven times current revenue. If you assume 25% growth, which we think we can accelerate meaningfully, the forward multiple is accretive both on a current and a go forward. And on an EBITDA basis, it'll be accretive to us as well. So I think the math will work out nicely. And I think it will create a bit of a roadmap for us to potentially do this again and again.
And in the back office space of restaurants, nobody here has ever paid attention to or looked at. But it's kind of a sleepy category. There are three private equity funds that are rolling this category up really beautifully. And I can tell you all three of them are sort of $100 million plus businesses. And at least what we've been told, every single one of them runs at 35%-40% free cash flow margin. And so it's a space we want to be in. We think it's really attractive. But I think it's because it's buying modules that you can build on as opposed to letting you combine two competitive products. So it's an exciting product for us to bring on. And I think, again, a really important part of it is management sticking around when they don't need to stick around.
I should mention that management team will now be running the combined back office business of PAR. We give them a bigger platform to test their skills and see if we can find another great leader at PAR.
That's great insight. I know some people only have a couple of minutes left. So two very quick questions from my side. One is you talked about the growth aspirations. What about EBITDA? You turned profitable. What are sort of the longer-term aspirations there? And secondly, I'll just throw this in there as well. Do you still have more sort of firepower to do M&A or do you have to do some type of capital raise to be able to actually keep that M&A machine going? So two quick questions there.
So we crossed EBITDA last quarter. We'll have growth again. I think. I've never meant this to be flippant. I never worried about the profitability. If you look at all software companies that are ACV, they all kind of end up in the same margin. We all do different things, but we've got a pretty high ACV. We should have decent margins over time. And what I think is I'm most proud about at PAR, if you step back, is like I would argue, and I don't know, and some of you experts will know better, but we might be one of the most efficient when it comes to R&D and sales and marketing expense. R&D expense is 25% of our revenues. Our sales and marketing expense is less than 15%.
There are not a lot of enterprise software companies that are still growing 20-plus% a year that are anywhere close to that. So we're super efficient. Where we're inefficient is on the G&A side. And that is a little bit of this legacy hardware and services business that we have. And so to me, it's just a matter of scale for us to get to incredibly comfortable margins that we're all very proud of. I think I would encourage everyone to look at our investor deck. Just in the last 12 months, we've had organically a $17 million or $16 million growth in apples over apples operating margin improvement. But that $16 million came over a $130 million ARR business, which means a $115 million revenue business, right? And so we took off that much improvement is really hard to do.
And so we're really, really focused on driving EBITDA. The biggest point I'll say is I think that 2026 will be a really huge jump in EBITDA for us. That's like the velocity there in our modeling is, I think, well above what everyone is expecting for us. And I think that's because this is still a really big growth year for us, right? We're expanding in C-store. We're launching more at Burger King. And I think that in 2026, I'm just really the cash flow generation of PAR is going to be super exciting because we are at a scale and size where you get the benefits of the scale and the G&A costs that there's operating leverage on G&A costs.
So in 12 months when I host you here, I'll hold you accountable.
Yeah, you should. You should. And we hit everything we told you last year. We went beyond that. And I think that's where I'm really excited. But I think in 2024, sorry, 2025, it'll be really good EBITDA growth because we're starting from a low point. And we live that challenge of do you invest a little more here or there because now we've got more and more growth opportunities. But we'll be a very profitable business. To your second point, M&A is a point in time. What is the best cost of capital and use of capital at that point in time? If we have a lot of cash on the balance sheet, we should always try to use that because it's not earning a ton of money. But if there's an opportunity for us to use stock accretively like we did with Delaget, we'd use that.
We don't really want to use debt. We had to use convertibles because it was the only tool available for us when we took over the company years ago, but it really is a function of time, and we've done creative stuff. We were so passionate on this convenience store deal, and it's really turned out to be a home run, so we did a PIPE, and we did a small discount, which sucked, and it was really hard for me to swallow, but I think I'm glad our shareholders made money from it, and we made them money, but importantly, I think it's a tool, and so you got to look at it all; it's a point in time.
I say, "Listen, if our stock trades all the way down to four times ARR, but we can buy something at one times, that's more accretive than if our stock's at 15 times and I'm buying it 10 times." And so, again, we don't hope for that or want that. But we have to kind of look at everything at a point in time. But the bar for M&A is really high. I can't stress this to you enough. We see dozens of deals a week. And the product thing, it starts with product. The product has to fit. If the product doesn't fit, it's just hard for us to make it work.
But if you start us buying a bunch of stuff that doesn't make the product sense, that probably means we're trying to sell the company because then we're just juicing things up for someone else to fix it later.
On that.