Everyone, my name is Scott Wurtzel. I work on the payments team here at Wolfe. Happy to be joined by Savneet Singh, the CEO of PAR, for a fireside chat here. Thank you for coming. Maybe before we start, there may be some in the room who are not as familiar with PAR and the story, so maybe we can just begin with a quick overview.
It's a long winding road, but maybe we'll start with where we are today. Today we sell software to large restaurant chains. Our core market is restaurant-large multi-unit operators in the convenience and restaurant space. We sell to them kind of end-to-end software. We sell to them loyalty, online ordering, and then we sell inside the store, point of sale software and back office. We ended last year about $275 million, $276 million recurring revenue. A lot of what our view or vision of the industry is that restaurants and sort of the retail industry in general is being eaten alive by software. Much of the innovation has happened down market, individual single stores. You've seen the amazing success of Toast and Square and everything else down there. We have focused squarely on the enterprise side.
If you kind of think of our ICP as everybody from a Sweetgreen or a Cava all the way up to a Burger King. We sell what we think is more of a platform approach than a bunch of individual point solutions. Why that's important is that as these organizations have become digital the last, call it, 5- 10 years, they really have this vendor sprawl. They've gone from having four or five key software products in their stores to 15 or 20. It's creating a ton of confusion and complexity within the store. I'm sure you guys have all gone to a quick service restaurant and had the challenge of having to wait in line while the DoorDash orders are being fulfilled or just the complications around all of that. What we're doing at PAR is providing more of an end-to-end solution to this market versus a bunch of different point solutions.
Gotcha. Gotcha. You mentioned it's been a journey. You've been CEO for five years now.
Six.
Six now. Can you maybe just discuss the biggest changes you've seen the company make during your tenure? As we look ahead, what are you most excited about? What are some of the key strategic priorities for this year and beyond?
Oh, wow. We are not the traditional sort of, call it, a couple hundred million dollar ARR company. When we took over the business in Q4 of 2018, we were $10 million of recurring revenue and, call it, $175 million of hardware and services. Our software revenues have gone up almost 25 times in six years. Half of that has been organic. Half of that has been inorganic. What is sort of, I think, critical about that journey is that we sort of jumped into the business in Q4 of 2018. Our original goal was just to avoid bankruptcy and stay in business and survive. Back at that moment in time, you could sort of see the writing on the wall. You can see that these enterprise restaurants were really starting to look at these digital channels as the future of what was happening.
More importantly, you could see that nobody was really solving that challenge. When we took over the business, we were a point of sale company. We had $10 million of recurring revenue. We said, "Okay, we're going to really harden and become a great POS provider." Even back then, we sort of said, "Hey, to make this business successful, we can't just be a lone vendor. We need to actually bolt on the core products of the restaurants. Those products are integrated together, creating more unified guest experience." We went on this path of aggressively growing our product while bolting on additional modules over time through acquisition. We spent a lot of our R&D dollars integrating those products into one more unified platform. That's really been the key to our success. I think we've had tremendous organic growth.
When we buy a business, we almost always accelerate the growth pretty significantly. What I think is unique about our model is that we are able to penetrate these large organizations and then begin to upsell them additional products. They're not buying it because it's a bundle or it's simple. They're actually bundling it because they're getting unique and new functionality they couldn't get before. That is a really, really unique thing that very few software, very few acquisitions, companies that are acquisitive can do, is that we actually can create new functionality. I think that's why we're kind of winning the market today.
Culturally, you've got to imagine we were a 50-year-old company selling hardware and services in upstate New York. Today we're a software business. It's hard to answer your question, but we kind of transformed the business to focus on providing a more unified solution to this enterprise food service industry.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Before we get into sort of the products and sort of the industry and all that, you guys reported pretty good results. I think it was about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, which included your second straight quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. What would you say are the key points from your results that investors should be aware of to better understand the PAR story going forward?
I mean, first and foremost, I think I was at one point in my life a software investor. I think the critical aspects of what makes a great software business are durability and visibility. I think what's amazing about our business is that the durability of our revenue stream is really strong. Our gross retention, gross retention is 95%, 96%. It's been increasing. It's actually not been decreasing. That is hard to find. It's just sort of in the end, the end market you sell to matters a lot. That's sort of point one. I think we've kind of shown how durable it is. The second part that I think is even more exciting and the best takeaway from our results is that we've had incredible durable growth. Most software companies post the pandemic have had relatively fast decelerating growth.
We never experienced that. Why I say that is what I talked about on the call is that in Q4 and for parts of Q4 and for Q1, we are taking a pause, rolling out our largest deal of all time for good reason. We added additional product. We are slowing down and selling two products. Even with that slowdown, we still grew well over 20% and guided that we will do that again in 2025. I think that is probably the biggest takeaway. We have a lot of visibility into continuing to be one of the faster growers in the SaaS industry. I think that, again, comes back to selling as this really, really healthy end market. That would be sort of the major takeaway.
I think the sub-takeaway is that in EBITDA, we continue to sort of, I think, show that while we have demonstrated really, really durable consistent growth for many years now, we're also really, really tough on the OPEX side. Our OPEX year over year was near flat or grew 1.5% while the business grew over 20%. That's the second year in a row that's happened. The business has compounded at relatively fast rates on the top line, but we have not taken up OPEX. You have had this really nice drop down into the bottom line. I think that's sort of our model. That will hopefully continue for a long time.
Gotcha. Gotcha. You mentioned selling into a kind of healthy end market. I would love to just kind of hear what trends you're kind of seeing right now in the restaurant industry and anything you can point to if it varies by different. I know you're mostly enterprise if it's different between QSR and full service, but yeah.
Yeah. There's no doubt that restaurants are feeling some of the economic pressure that you read about. That's sort of categorically true. That is sort of happening. Now, what I think is, and I'll answer your question more fully, what I think is cool about our market is that because we sell into that QSR fast casual multi-unit area, these sort of slowdowns, we have not yet experienced that they have an impact on tech budgets. In fact, it tends to accelerate it. If you look at the pandemic, even if you go back to the great financial crisis, tech investments continued. The reason why is that they generally lead to more sales or more cost efficiencies. As an example, I mentioned on our call, we have the largest loyalty software in all of restaurants.
If you've got the Taco Bell app, that runs through our loyalty engine. In these markets where things are slowing down, you want to bring your customers back in. You spend more on loyalty. You spend more on the ordering. You spend more on the digital. At the same time, you spend more in the back office because you're trying to save costs. Generally, you see that. It's kind of interesting just to observe that. To your point, there's definitely a slowdown. In our market, it's relatively small. When I look at the same sort of sales data of our customers, we aren't seeing anywhere close to the numbers that are reported publicly. I think that's because of our focus on the quick service and fast casual market.
Where we do see pretty dramatic drop-offs are, and this is more industry data and a little bit of the tiny bit of exposure we have, is in the sort of single store, fine dining. You are seeing this trade down from instead of going to get my steak dinner, maybe I'll go to Cava or Sweetgreen. That is clearly happening in our data. I would say the area where we see the most pain are undersized chains. Again, we don't really sell into this. If you're a 10-unit or 20-unit or 30-unit franchise model, we are seeing those things go out of business left and right and/or get consolidated very quickly. We don't have a lot of exposure there.
The problem is when you're 10, 20, 30 units and you have this vision of being McDonald's one day, you don't have the buying power of a McDonald's. You don't have the playbooks yet. You don't have the financial health of the operators yet. If you're an operator, if you're a 10-unit chain, the franchisees you're attracting are generally people that are emerging wealth. They're not super established. If they got a bad year, they can't fund that business. That's where we see the most pain, whether it doesn't matter quick service, fast casual, full service dining. Those small chains are really getting hurt. That's where you see a lot of the pain. In the up market where we are, there's definitely a slowdown, but it's not pronounced yet.
Gotcha. Gotcha. That's interesting. Maybe if we move over to the product side, just starting off, what products would you say are core to the PAR value proposition that you offer?
Yeah. For us, it's pretty simple. We break our business into two business units. One is called Operator Solutions, which is point of sale software and Back Office. Point of sale is the core product that we sell. It is the most important product you'll find in a retail business. In general, it's like the ERP system. It's a heartbeat. Whether it's an online order or an on-premise order, it all runs through point of sale, which kicks to the kitchen. It kicks to your HR systems, your tax systems. It is the most important product. If your point of sale system goes down, everything goes down, online, loyalty, so on and so forth. If your online ordering system goes down, you can still operate your store. You can still run loyalty. That's sort of the core product.
The other business unit we have is called Engagement Solutions. That's really loyalty software. That is software that touches you, the end consumer. We think of our products as products that touch the operator and products that touch the end consumer. There, as I mentioned, we have the largest loyalty software in restaurants and in convenience stores. We kind of bolt onto it a small online ordering business that's growing very quickly. That's sort of the two key products: point of sale software and loyalty.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Now, are there any recent product launches maybe that aren't yet at a high level of adoption that you could see meaningful traction with and get stronger attach rates over time?
Yeah. We've got a robust R&D effort. I'll give you a couple. I'll give you one that I think is very interesting. We created something called Punchh Wallet. Punchh is the name of our loyalty product. It's essentially giving every restaurant on our platform the ability to have the Starbucks loyalty card experience where you've got one card in your Apple Wallet or Google Wallet that is your loyalty information, your payment information, your coupons, your points, whatever it may be, all in one card. Our customers really love this because historically, you probably wondered for a long time, Starbucks has had an incredible loyalty program for so long. Others haven't been able to create that. That's predominantly because you had this disjointed set of vendors. You had a loyalty vendor there. You had an ordering vendor there.
You had a payment vendor there, a point of sale vendor there. Trying to get these four or five vendors to create this Starbucks experience is impossible. We actually have that under one roof. We can create that unique functionality. We have been seeing that grow very, very rapidly. That has been a neat thing to see.
Gotcha. Gotcha. As merchants demand more products and you have to potentially increase velocity, I mean, how do you evaluate whether you are going to build a product in-house or maybe go out and try to acquire something to bring into the suite?
There's a lot that goes into that. I'll start by saying for us, we've been relatively inquisitive. We try to end up buying on average one or two businesses a year. For us, M&A is a product initiative. It's not a financial initiative. The financial is the outcome of that successful product. We obsess on, can we acquire a product that when we add it to our existing suite of products, is the customer getting something new and different? If they are, then that's value that we've created that we can then take value for ourselves. We don't look at it as, "Okay, those numbers look good. Let's add it," because then you're left with a bunch of disjointed products that don't work in the end. I argue private equity is better at doing that than we'd ever be.
When we look at buying versus building, it generally comes down to a couple of things. One of the things I think a lot about is if it's a brownfield opportunity, if it's a category that's already well developed, it's probably not worth us building unless we have an incredibly unique view of how to do something completely different. The reason why is we sell to enterprises. If you're going to build a product, it's a year, 18 months of real build work, multiple teams, an incredible effort. You take that product and you go to your first couple of customers. You're like, "Hey, can you use this? Can you try this? Can you sell it?" You get one or two enterprising people that say, "Okay, let's try your thing out." You get a bunch of feedback.
You got to go take that and add that back to the product. Then you're back in market. You're 18 months, two years before you're actually in market. Again, it's a nine-month to a year sales cycle. You're three years out before you've got your first couple of real customers and 10 years out before you have massive market share. I do think it's whatever it is, pick your year. The ROI on that is just really long. It's like a DCF on the terminal value looks really great, but you got to get to that. Generally in brownfield, I think we think about, can we acquire a product? Can we spice up the product?
More importantly, if we buy that product, can we connect into our existing product so that they get a really, really unique experience? If it's a greenfield opportunity, i.e., it's a new category that no one really has dominant market share, we would prefer to build because then it's already natively integrated in what we do. That's generally how we look at it.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Are there any key product areas that you're looking to kind of address through M&A over the near medium term here?
I think we've got a couple of areas that we're kind of, I guess, looking at. We will continue to look at operating the back of the restaurant. What I mean by that is running a restaurant has changed so dramatically in the last decade, but the actual four walls of the restaurant haven't really changed that much. You go to a McDonald's store today, and it's not that distinct from when it was when you went there as a kid, except for some kiosks maybe now in the front. The actual back of the restaurant is the exact same thing. Yet the order channels have changed dramatically. The fulfillment model has changed tremendously. I think software has to kind of help put all that together. How do you sequence orders? How do you time orders?
How do you create products that can integrate with the robots in the kitchen to connecting to the DoorDash drivers to collecting tax payments on the municipalities that you deliver to that have DoorDash and Reeds taxes? It's incredibly complex. I think simplifying the operations of the restaurant is where we're spending a lot of time looking at. The other part that we don't spend enough time talking about is we've had tremendous growth in the food service market outside of restaurant, particularly in convenience and fuel stops. Convenience and fuel stores are interesting businesses in that their food service, the food service part of their business has been compounding at 14%-15% for now, four years in a row, basically since the pandemic, compounding at 14% a year. That's way higher than restaurants. I always say this comment.
The biggest threat to McDonald's isn't Burger King. It's 7-Eleven. You stop, you buy your breakfast there. You go get your gas. You pick your meal there. When we have a trade down in the economy, like I mentioned, you're not made to stop at the restaurant. You may stop to fill your gas and buy the pizza at the convenience store. There has been tremendous growth in food service outside of the actual restaurant. I think we made an acquisition about a year ago, almost to the date, that really made us now the largest loyalty provider in that market. I think you'll see us try to do more there just because our expertise in restaurants is really helping us win in that category as well.
Gotcha. Gotcha. If we move over to the competitive environment, maybe not all the way up to enterprise yet, but we're definitely seeing restaurant point of sale software payments providers move further up market.
For sure.
Just wondering if you can maybe touch on any changes you've seen in the competitive environment over the last, let's say, 12 months. Then how can PAR differentiate itself from those competitors that could be coming into the space?
I think generally our main competitors are still the big legacy providers in this category, which are Oracle, NCR, Xenial, which is a product by Global Payments. They really control well over half this market. They have huge install bases. They have people that know their products, that install their products. You have this site base. You have us, who's sort of now been in it for, call it a decade, but really been emerging the last few years. You have a collection of the long tail. That long tail includes everybody from a random POS product that was built 20 years ago that's some big chain customized to Toast to Square to everybody in between.
I think the way that I sort of think about it is everybody that's down market will have to come up market because the TAM is limited in the end down market. There are, call it 750,000-800,000 restaurants in the United States. Less than half of them, the data is sort of fuzzy, so who knows, but are down market. If you want to sort of keep growing, you've got to kind of encroach upon the sort of enterprise part of the market. The challenge is that taking a product that was built for the individual restaurant and making it to an enterprise product is really, really hard. I remember when I took over PAR, everyone was like, "Why are you doing this? Square and Toast and everyone's coming to the enterprise. You're totally screwed." Fast forward six years, that hasn't totally played out.
Now, could it play out the next six years? Maybe. I still think it's just a really different business model. It's a really different product model. It's a very different cultural DNA. As an example, if I went today and I went and sold to my local favorite Italian restaurant, that sales cycle is like a month to two months and I'm done. Not only that, at the time I actually sell the product to that customer, I can sell them point of sale, online ordering, payments, and literally one sale. I'm done. That guy probably found me through an Instagram ad. If I want to go sell to, I don't know, Arby's, that's like a year and a half, two year sales cycle, and I'm selling one product. It's just so different. You got to get for that.
Where I think that our moat will be and will continue to be is that while point of sale is sort of like the heartbeat of the restaurant, it's the unified nature of what we do that's creating, I think, competitive barriers because we can go to these restaurants and say, "Hey, now you've got point of sale here. Let's have an integrated back office solution. Let's have an integrated online ordering system, point of sale system." That really is, I think, massively differentiating. The way I like to explain this is all of these systems at a restaurant at some point have overlap with another system. It would be the equivalent of if you had Microsoft Outlook and you had to go log into your email as a separate application as your calendar.
That's just kind of an annoying thing you'd have to do every single time. Pretend you had to go send a calendar invite, but your contacts on the calendar were different than the contacts in your Outlook email. That's what running a restaurant is. You're like, "I got a menu here. I got a menu here. I got a customer database here, a customer database here." These things don't connect. When we go to a restaurant, I'm like, "Hey, great news. Your back office and your online ordering, it's single sign-on. It's the same database." It's like you were an Outlook and calendar user. How much would you sell every day? I'm like, "Oh, I don't got to sign on twice at the same contacts." That simplification is so powerful. I think today we're the only provider that can manifest that.
Gotcha. Gotcha. As these new kind of newcomers to the enterprise space come in, have you seen any changes on the pricing side at all, or has it been relative?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it's like any market, the incumbents have tried to lower price to hold on to shares, and maybe not potentially win new deals. I think the new guys come in, and their weapon is price. Their weapon is, "Hey, take a shot on us. We have this awesome product. We're coming out market and so on and so forth. By the way, we're ostensibly giving it to you for free because we need to sort of get logos to prove it." My view on that is that that's a tough game to compete against. That is no doubt something that we have to compete against. In the end, I think product wins.
My view is if someone's willing to give away their product for free, generally those customers come back to us because in the end, you need to pay for the quality. In enterprise software, it is very, very hard to run your business on the B-minus software. You sort of do need the product that's actually going to power your future. I think that I hope in the end we win because of this more unified approach. There is no doubt there'll be competition, and we feel like we're well situated.
If we switch topics here, I mean, if we go on to sort of the digitization of the restaurant, what inning do you think we are in for in restaurant digital transformation? Do you have a sense of what percentage of restaurants are on modern cloud platforms right now and sort of how much white space there still is there?
I think we're in early innings. I don't know if it's the first or third, but we're still pretty early. I don't think we're in the dugout anymore, though. I do think the pandemic pulled through a lot of this. I mean, I remember I took over, like I said, in Q4 of 2018. I remember my first couple of customer pitches, I was convincing restaurant CIOs that the cloud was safe. That's like the world. And that was 2018. That wasn't that long ago. I remember sending CIOs articles that the CIA uses AWS and trust me, it's okay. We're not in that world anymore. I think they sort of believe digital is here to stay. And so I think we're definitely in the early innings.
The reason why I say it's early is that there's just so much that has to still be connected to make it work. I'll give you an example. We bought a business the very last day of 2024 called Delaget. Delaget has, in our opinion, the best recovery product, meaning it basically audits your DoorDash and Uber Eats fees and refunds to ensure that you are not always getting screwed by the refunds. When you order your DoorDash order and you're like, "Hey, my order came two hours late. I don't want to pay for the thing," or I got the wrong person's meal, the automatic thing that happens is DoorDash refunds the customer and it takes it out of the restaurant's wallet. That's super painful for the restaurant. This software kind of automates it. Hey, we had the food ready.
Your driver didn't show up on time, or your driver picked up the wrong bag, and then you can kind of get the money back. It is a super important product. If you asked me three years ago, I'd be like, "I would have never thought we would be in this business." That is what digital innovation does. It creates a whole new category you thought that you didn't need. Why do you need that? One, those restaurants need that money back in their pocket, but then you need to do the tax reconciliation. You need to do the audit and the financial software. These products become bigger and bigger. It is one example of I think there is going to be dozens of stuff like that as we go that just digitize, digitize, digitize. Everything from the employee experience is going to change.
The robots that are going to come in. All these things will have different pieces of workflow software that have to kind of integrate into something to give a more wholesome experience. I always like to think that people always talk about a unified ordering experience for the customer. You also need that for your operators, your employees. They need to see and feel the same thing. How annoying would it be to an employee and be like, "Okay, I got to check into this point of sale software, this back office software, this HR software. Oh, I want to use the robot. I got to go stand." I mean, that's kind of next. I think we're super early. As far as where we are in the cloud adoption, it's an impossible question because it's on which product.
If we're talking about point of sale, I don't know, we're 10% or 15% in the way. Like I said, most of the market is still on these legacy products. If you're talking about back office product, we're probably like 2%, 5% maybe. If we're talking about online ordering loyalty, I'd say half the market's already there. It just sort of depends on what product. We're still pretty early. To me, the cloud thing doesn't really matter anymore. As we sort of look at different modes of compute, you've got McDonald's going to the edge. You've got other customers going back to processing in the store because they're like, "Why do I need edge compute? What is so real-time about what I'm doing?" To me, it's not so much cloud. It's sort of, are your workflows now digitally aided?
Gotcha. Gotcha. You had mentioned one acquisition there with Delegate, but maybe we can touch on the Task acquisition and how that's helping maybe your international expansion journey. I think McDonald's is maybe a good use case on the loyalty side that you can touch on.
For sure. Task is an amazing product engineering organization. We bought the business in July of 2023, maybe August last year, July or August last year. Task has sort of two business lines, if you will. One is a very large loyalty business that focuses on providing McDonald's loyalty in something like 67 different territories and regions. Hong Kong, Spain, Portugal, many large markets. If you're in Spain or Portugal and you have the McDonald's app, that's us. It's an incredible product. I mean, I really would encourage you when you go on vacation outside the United States and play with the McDonald's app. I have very little kids, and it's like freaking amazing. You can be in Italy, order a beer, and get your kid a toy. It's the coolest. It's really well done.
We saw that a long time ago. The reason why it was exciting to us is, well, we're the largest loyalty provider in the United States. They've won the biggest, most important customer in the world over there. We've been so impressed by winning that business, but then also just succeeding and growing. McDonald's is arguably the most sophisticated restaurant company in the world. This is a little tiny vendor company in Australia working in everywhere from Hong Kong to, I guess, Japan to, I mean, it was just sort of impressive. They kind of came on our radar there. The second part of their business is what we do, point of sale, back office, digital ordering in a unified platform internationally. We saw this product and we're like, "Crap.
They're doing exactly what we're doing, but they're doing it internationally. Now they were small. And we said, "Let's acquire Task, and then we will be able to be a bridge for our U.S. customers to grow abroad." It has been a really great experience. I mentioned in the Q&A on our call that we think when we acquired the business, the loyalty side of Task was growing sort of in the teens. The point of sale side was not growing that much. We think that's going to accelerate to over 20% this year, again, showing our playbook of growing the go-to-market. As we scale, it'll be an amazing tool for hopefully mega brands to take their U.S. presence international or even bring it to the U.S.
It is a very important strategic asset for us because I say this often, but the biggest growth area for U.S.-based restaurants is outside the United States. Most of the high-growth chains in the United States are going to grow more stores outside the United States than inside. We really wanted to make sure we had a presence there for the risk of somebody else owns that business and then enters our territory in the U.S.
Totally. Totally. I mean, as we think about these growth areas, whether it's the recovery or the loyalty side, how does the kind of competitive landscape differ there relative to sort of the more traditional point of sale software side?
It's way more niche. On the loyalty side, we have a few competitors there. They seem to continue to get bought by private equity and get traded around a lot. We love that because generally financial buyers are less product-focused. We get to, I think, take market share there. That is sort of interesting to us. I would say the reason why the niche comment matters more is that those products are single solutions. They solve one problem. Hey, we are your loyalty provider, and that's all we do. Or, hey, we're your inventory solution, and this is all we do. That model, I think, is going to become a vestige of the past because I think being a single solution is not going to solve the operator's problems anymore because it's not integrated into the rest of what you do.
We mentioned on our call, we have started to win a second module within our largest customer. Why that's so important is that we've now proven to our largest customer, which we're in the middle of a world, that when you integrate our Back Office product to our point of sale software, you get a really magical experience, like that calendar email thing example I gave. While the competitive suite has good products, it's the integrated thing that gets you to win. I think that's really cool. I'll just give you one silly example, but we're working on a large, hopefully trying to win a large loyalty deal. They run our point of sale system.
What that restaurant marketer or tech or CEO wants to do is that when you come into that restaurant and you show your loyalty app to the cashier or you give them the number at the drive-thru, they want the cashier at the point of sale system to say, "Hey, do you know you have these offers, these promotions, these coupons, these values, whatever?" They want them to prompt you, the customer, with that over there. Guess what? Nobody can do that because the loyalty system is completely different than the point of sale system. However, since we control both of them, we can actually go to the cashier and prompt suggestive selling and upsell to them given that customer's loyalty information.
A cool example would be you go and say, "Here's my loyalty app." Instead of the cashier saying, "Hey, look," the loyalty app can then trigger and say, "Hey, this person's vegan," or they've got little kids. The prompt you get, suggestive selling, will say, "Have you tried our vegan burger? And do the kids want their normal thing?" You can do really cool stuff like that that gives a more integrated experience. Again, I think that's going to be the competitive edge to win over time.
Gotcha. Gotcha. We'll take some questions from the audience soon, but I wanted to maybe hit on the go-to-market side and just talk about your approach in terms of landing new customers and maybe the flywheel effect around first landing with an initial product and then cross-selling and sort of driving the upsell to bring restaurant locations sort of towards that maybe $10,000 ARPU number.
I say this a lot, but to me, go-to-market is still a product exercise. You have to have the best products to win. You don't win on a great Instagram ad. You don't win because you've got an amazing salesperson. You win because the products win. You have to have the best products. Our sort of mandated PAR is best in class and better together. Each product has to be the best at what they do. Then when they're integrated to each other, they have to be better together. It starts there. I think it's really hard unless you're the mega guys like Oracle and Salesforce. Don't expect to have average products win because in our market, I do think product wins. For us, our go-to-market motion is we call land with a hero product.
For us, we have two hero products, point of sale and loyalty. We plant our flag with that first product. Our goal, planting, and let's use a point of sale example, is to plant our flag with point of sale and hopefully in a very short order convince you that we have delivered on the promises we told you during the sales process. At that time, we generally try to bolt on payments or back office to continue to build the flywheel there. The beauty of that is that as we add additional products, we're usually able to convince you that you've got something better. For example, if you take our point of sale and payments, most people just say, "Hey, take our payments. It's whatever. We're going to rip you off on payments, but don't worry about it.
No one's going to know. We sort of go in there and are like, "Hey, we're going to give you this integrated payment offering. Look at all the value you get. You now have one support desk." When you have an issue with your number one call to a point of sale on average, number one call to a point of sale support desk is a payment issue. Basically, here's what happens. If you're the franchisee, you're the guy running the store, and the payment device isn't working, you call the point of sale guy and you're like, "Hey, my payment device is not working." The point of sale support guy is like, "That's a problem with your payment company. Go call the payment company." The payment company says, "That's probably a problem with the point of sale guy." They just keep pointing their fingers.
Guess what? If you can go to a franchisee and say, "Guess what? It's one vendor, and so we're going to solve your problem," that's a huge unlock for them. You go and say, "Hey, we have transparent pricing." You go and say, "Hey, we can unlock all this cool functionality." They add payments, and then they have a better experience there. You're like, "Hey, did you know we have a back office product that when you integrate it into the point of sale, you get all this new functionality?" You kind of work this flywheel over time where as they add each additional product, your collective products get way stickier, but also the customer is getting a better experience. That flywheel sort of accelerates.
That's why I think we're usually able to accelerate the growth of the companies we acquire because we kind of plug them into the flywheel and create that better together functionality.
Gotcha. Any questions from the audience?
Hey, thanks for being here, guys. When we think about just the opportunity from a competitive standpoint, we have seen so many companies saying that they're doing something differentiated on technology. A lot of the companies that investors here cover, I think, whether it's Pfizer, BentoBox, or it's maybe a smaller side of the market in terms of restaurant size, but they're all saying they can offer more and more solutions up market. I guess just to revisit the competitive landscape first, I mean, are you seeing anything different whatsoever in the past, call it year, year or two years?
Obviously, Toast talks about going up market also. Maybe just the competitive landscape, if you could help reframe if there's been any change from your perspective. Who is the area where you're seeing the most opportunity? I mean, NCR comes up a lot and Aloha, but curious to hear where you're taking the most share from from your perspective.
Yeah. I think on the current landscape side, it's still when we go into an RFP, it is, I don't know, 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10 chance. One of the finalists will be Oracle or NCR, almost always. That's either they're the installed provider or they've got a great relationship. They're always a finalist. The second finalist is usually us, hopefully. The third finalist could be anybody from Toast to a bunch of products you've never heard of. It's sort of all over the place. It really is. Toast, no doubt, is trying to go aggressively into the enterprise. We've kind of always, if you've sort of heard me for many years at these kind of conferences, I've always said, I've always expected Toast to be successful in the full-service dining part of the enterprise market.
The reason why is historically, we weren't in that market. They were going to have the same competitive advantage of going against the legacy guys like Oracle or NCR or whoever. I've always thought that would be a market that they would grow into. Interestingly, I think I look at sort of in a new place, we have now grown into that market. I feel like we've almost encroached upon their territory because I don't think they expected us to be a competitor in that market. I have, as I tell investors all the time, I'm the biggest Toast fanboy there is. I think they've done an incredible job disrupting that market a lot for us, for us to learn from them. I wouldn't say it's like you're feeling like tectonic plates move.
It's sort of the same, those three or four folks that would be in the finals for RFP, it's exactly the same group that would have been there three years ago. Who's in the finals hasn't changed that much. The narrative has changed a ton where you see everybody saying, "We're going enterprise, going enterprise, going enterprise." We don't really see Toast, Pfizer, Square in the enterprise RFPs. We don't really see them in those. It's generally Toast would be in there or some of the other guys. We don't see those guys almost at all, just literally zero. I think if I asked our sales team to list the top five or seven or eight people, they wouldn't show up. The second part of your question of where we're focusing, there isn't like a swim. The enterprise category is predominantly quick service and fast casual.
Full-service dining is a small subset. There are not a lot of thousand-unit sit-down restaurants. There's Olive Garden and whatever. There's Dine Brands, there's Brinker, and not a lot more. There's just not a ton of big multi-unit full-service dining chains. Our focus is kind of this broader QSR fast casual now growing into that full-service market. As far as where we're taking share, obviously, NCR has had very public issues for some time. Generally, we'd find them a share donor. It's kind of I wouldn't say there's one area where you take more. It's kind of across the board.
Cool. I think we're out of time, actually. Sam, thank you for joining us. Got a break next and then RTP.
Thank you.
Yeah. Appreciate it. That was great.