All right, let's get started. We're joined once again this year by Savneet Singh, President and CEO of PAR Technology. Savneet, thank you for coming once again to our conference. For the crowd's benefit, I'm Neil Dalal, Managing Director in the Tech IB Group here at JPMorgan. Savneet, just to kick off, for those not familiar, just give a quick overview of PAR.
Sure. PAR is a software platform that looks to manage the enterprise restaurant workflow. We sell front-end, back-end software to large enterprise QSR and fast casual chains, and more and more into the full-service dining space. Our products range from everything from loyalty and online ordering all the way to point of sale and back office. We try to think of ourselves as an end-to-end platform to serve large restaurant chains.
Awesome. Over the last few years, both organically and inorganically, you've expanded the product portfolio pretty meaningfully, everything from loyalty to payments, online ordering, just recently analytics. Talk a little bit about how you pick what areas to invest in, what do you want to own versus where you want to partner.
When we started on the journey, we kind of identified, you know, four kind of key swim lanes we always wanted to be in, which was point of sale being the crux of kind of everything we do, then the back office. On the front end, we wanted to be on what we call engagement, which is loyalty and online ordering. We always kind of had this vision that those were the four key areas, and then everything around it we would kind of bolt on to make the collective offering stronger. The way we sort of look at things today is when we look to build or buy something, we want the product that we add to the suite to make the collective grow faster and stickier. The way you do that is by having, adding a product that makes the customer's life better.
Illustratively, when we go and buy something, when you insert it into the suite of PAR, the customer should be getting something that they could not get before when there were two separate products. If we can prove that out and then prove the financial model out, it will sort of be worth us, you know, looking at it from an M&A perspective. Over time, what we have realized is that as we add more and more products to the mix and cross onto our base, you have this added benefit that as you have more products, you become stickier and stickier and stickier, and, you know, thereby, I think, becoming a more valuable company.
You know, back to the original question, I think we generally try to see today where can we add a product that makes the moat around what we're doing stronger and stronger, because I do think we have kind of the core products we need today.
Let's talk about one of those products in payments, which is becoming a more meaningful part of ARR and revenue. I think outside in, a layperson may think that payments is harder to attach for an enterprise restaurant and an enterprise in general, and they have other options. How do you talk about, or how do you think about your value proposition in payments, and how do you think about going to market there?
It is harder to sell payments into the enterprise, you know, primarily because most enterprise customers have some understanding of how payments work. You know, down market, when you're selling to individual stores, generally it's sort of like, "Oh, sure, I'll take your payments offering," and they don't quite realize how much they're actually paying and, you know, all the downstream impacts of that selection. What we've actually been surprised by is how much we can sell. You know, we've been growing our payments business relatively rapidly, and what's been neat is that we've realized that we can sell it both in-store, so, you know, tap your card at the payment gateway, and we'll make some revenue there. We've also realized we can sell it above-store, meaning, through our loyalty, success.
We have the largest loyalty program in the United States, probably in the world as it relates to restaurants. What's been neat is we've created a digital wallet program where instead of having to open up a loyalty app or, you know, type in a bunch of codes, you just double-tap with your Apple Wallet or your Google Wallet, and the loyalty card pops up, and you pay with that. When you pay with that, we get paid. That's been a neat kind of extension to our payments business of making digital revenue there too. You know, long story short, we'll never have 100% penetration on payments like you can in the SMB, but I think we've surprised ourselves with how much we can get to.
Whether we get to 30%, 40%, 50%, I don't know, or 70%, I don't know, but it's definitely been far more than we expected.
You know, as I think about over the years, as you've been at this conference, we always talk about this better together and unified commerce story. I think this year you've really started to hit your stride in terms of actually demonstrating that with your new wins and what proportion of them, either on the operator side or engagement side, are multi-product. Talk about how is that multi-product sales motion different than what you've done historically and what's been driving your success.
It's changed dramatically. You know, in our Q4 call, we mentioned that all the deals we signed were multi-product. In this quarter, all of our, you know, all of our POS deals were multi-product, almost all of our loyalty deals were. It's been really neat to see how quickly it shifted to being a multi-product opportunity. I think, you know, what's driving that is a few things. First and foremost, the multi-product motion is working, because the products are actually integrated. What that's done is made it really easy for our customers to attach more products to the initial sale because we've made their job easier, and we've actually given them outcomes they couldn't do without it.
As an example, we talked about on our last call that now, cashiers that use our point of sale system have the customer's loyalty data at the cashier so they can upsell. That is a really neat tool because now, historically, when you go to a restaurant, you hear, you know, you're the person in the cash register, you scan your loyalty app, they can't actually see, you know, do you have a promotion, do you have a reward, you know, what are the flags, are you vegan, are you a family customer, a kids customer, they don't have any of that information. Now that is all at the register for that person to upsell you, you know, engender you more to the brand. That is an example of that.
When we did that, we were like, "Wow, it's a lot easier to sell loyalty to the customers at a point of sale 'cause now you can say, 'Hey, you can get this functionality you had no chance of getting with another vendor, if you will.'" There are a whole bunch of examples like that. The integration between restaurant products is always point-to-point, it's always messy, and if we can go to them and say, "Hey, your back office and point of sale, it's all the same thing now," we make it really easy to sell. I think first and foremost, we're winning because the products are integrated in a way that makes it so easy for the customer and gives them, you know, benefit they couldn't get without it.
I think the second reason we're winning is, candidly, the market's moved to the view that the platform is probably going to win. You know, I think we were probably too early here, early on, but that was the foundational thesis we kind of started to build a company on, you know, six, six and a half years ago. We got, and the market's just kind of moving in that direction. It is clear that the vendor consolidation, simplicity, whatever you want to call it, is in favor. We happen to be the partner that can do that. I think the last reason is just focus. You know, we are a company that, you know, tends to pick a few goals every year that really matter.
You know, the last few quarters has been, "Let's, let's really get this right." We just had intense focus on doing it as well.
Let's make the go-to-market a little bit more tangible. You've landed Burger King and Wendy's, and you announced an expansion of the Burger King contract recently and then also Popeyes. Just talk a little bit about these marquee franchise-level wins. How do you go about winning those and also talk through the rollout and the plan going forward?
Yeah, so in our business, it's heavily RFP-driven. Generally, these are really big investments by large corporations, so they'll have an RFP, they'll have a consultant at times. You know, I actually love that because the best product wins in that motion. It's very hard. You know, we don't win a customer 'cause we've got a great Instagram ad, we win because our products are better. Generally, enterprise software, best product wins, and this allows our products to sort of shine. What, you know, I think has changed is that, you know, for a long time, we were a pretty small company. I mean, I think, you know, we joke we won Burger King in 2023. If Burger King had looked at us just two and a half years before that, we would've been a $30 million revenue company.
They never would've given us a chance. A lot of what I think is happening is like self-validation in the sense that as we've gotten bigger, the chance to win bigger deals happens, the trust, and so on and so forth. I think that success sort of begets success and that we have more referenceable customers, more larger brands, you know, feeling comfortable. When the next Burger King comes along, they not only can sort of vet us on their own, they can also call Burger King, they can call Wendy's, they can call, you know, Arby's, so on and so forth. You know, I think that's really been the big change, which is our ability to deliver on behalf of these large customers and then have those as reference customers to others has changed.
You know, going back to the, to answer your question, our go-to-market is really traditional enterprise software. We are sort of, you know, AE is calling accounts, six-month to 18-month sales cycles. You know, we get in labs, so we're just sort of a, like a pilot, if you will, to sort of prove the functionality, and then you sort of grow from there over time. It's been really interesting to see how that sales motion is getting shorter and shorter and shorter because the need for the technology is growing. I think part of that is the market realizing, "Hey, we gotta be digital," but also, again, "Hey, PAR has done this before, let's trust them.
And just to finish the thought on go-to-market, talk a little bit about the pipeline looking forward towards the back half of this year and 2026.
Things look, you know, pretty good right now. You know, we've got our largest weighted pipeline ever. I tend to look at things on a weighted pipeline basis because I think generally talking of pipeline, you can kind of game it with one big customer, a couple big customers at the near end, you know, the beginning end of the pipeline, and things just look too good. Our weighted pipeline is stronger than it's ever been. I would say that's sort of in part driven by this new cross-sell motion where we are finding just tremendous growth in kind of upselling to our existing base. Then it's also being driven by continued growth in a sort of a diverse set of customers.
I think that it'll set us up for a really, really strong 2025, 2026, 2027 because you can kind of, these deals are multi-year deals. You win a deal, it takes time to roll it out. I think what we'll see happen is that as restaurants move their business to become more digital, they'll ironically need more software to manage that digital environment. You know, we hope to participate in that. We're just still really early in that journey. You know, I'm always shocked just how offline so much of this business is, you know, whether it's labor, HR, finance, inventory. Today we kind of play in two suites, but over time I think it's used to more. From a dollar-weighted basis, our pipeline's really strong.
From a sort of visibility, it's really, you know, for the next few quarters, we feel really good. We have this nice tailwind of these multi-product deals that we've announced the last couple quarters on the calls, still not in our numbers. I think we've got, you know, hopefully a lot of tailwind for the next year or two.
Let's pivot a little bit and talk about the industry and the macro. Starting with what you're seeing on the ground day-to-day in terms of consumer health, spending at restaurants, spending at your customers, what are you seeing?
We track it super closely. I track, you know, both the traffic, then we track sort of what we see in sales, then we track loyalty check-ins, basket size, you know, quantity orders from, we sort of track everything. It's actually been, I think, a secret weapon of ours in the sense that if you look at when we've gone to market to finance stuff, part of the reason we've been right on our timing is you can kind of see U.S. economic health from restaurant data pretty well. You know, what we see today is the same thing as that most restaurants are reporting, which is there's clearly a decline in traffic. It's not huge. It's, you know, very low single digits, and it's not consistent across every brand. In aggregate, there's certainly a slowing of traffic.
That is not at all led to any push-out of an RFP yet, nor a push-out of a rollout. I don't know, think the declines are big enough where it's changed stuff. Part of that is that in the restaurant category, there is a trade down. Where I think we'll see a lot of pain if we are in a recessionary environment is in the single store that's a sit-down restaurant or the larger table service chains that are expensive meals. QSR, Fast Casual, which is our base, tend to do pretty well in recessionary environments. I think the brands know that, and as a result, they're continuing their digital initiatives. The other part is that, and again, this is all hypothetical, but we are seeing growth in our engagement pipeline as an example.
We're seeing more interest in loyalty. I suspect that's because of the fear of recession, wants you to build close relations with your customers or bring more customers in the door. We're seeing pipeline expand over there. You know, today, the short answer is restaurants are clearly slowing down. Every earnings call talks about it. It has not yet impacted their technology spend. I think our comments are pretty consistent with all of our peers who've reported, which is we all see the same data and the customers have not pulled back yet. In a couple areas, you know, loyalty and back office, it seems to be accelerating.
Maybe just to expand on that, if we were in a recessionary environment, I think, as you alluded to, there's a lot of arguments for why you could not only persist but also benefit in terms of your pipeline and customers coming to you and wanting to modernize to combat the recession environment. Talk a little bit more about that and what signals you would see.
Yeah, we, we've had a good analog in, in COVID. And, you know, during COVID, most of the restaurant technology companies, once we got through like the world's ending phase of COVID, you know, accelerated. And just like, you know, lots of software. What's interesting about restaurant technology is it, it, for us, it less, it never stopped. We didn't have like a spike and then it, it come back down. Ours kind of was consistent. I think the reason I highlight that is it became very clear that you can create value through implementing technology during, you know, challenging times. What I expect would happen is we got to a real recession. I think you'd see a really strong growth in our loyalty business. You'll see strong growth, one in usage and application, but two, growth in new customers.
Because if you're on an average loyalty product or a home-built loyalty product or, you know, something that's sort of not the breadth that we have, you're gonna wanna upgrade 'cause you're gonna wanna say, "Hey, not only do I wanna bring more customers in, I gotta compete with everybody else that has sort of top-tier software. I, I'm gonna wanna create that engagement." That, I think, will clearly see some benefit. We saw that in the pandemic. You know, we were growing leaps and bounds back then. I think the other place we'll see tremendous growth would be in the back office. Back office software helps you organize your inventory, your labor, you know, think about your COGS, if you will.
I think that the ROI is so high and so fast that it's a lot easier to argue, "Hey, let's manage our back office more efficiently." I think we'll see some strong growth there. I do think that collectively we'll see a lot more focus on analytics and data managing your business because you're gonna be super scared about, you know, making your numbers. There is an argument to make it, we get better. You know, I always say, like, if it's a really, really bad recession, everything will pause 'cause you're just trying to hold on. Generally, I, you know, I think this category has just been so resilient. If you look at, you know, QSR sales during 9/11, during the great financial crisis, they tend to hold up pretty well.
Let's talk a little bit about the competitive environment. So just give us an update on the competitive landscape. Who are you seeing most often on deals in 2025?
In our business, in every deal, we will either see a combination of Oracle, through a product called MICROS or Simphony, NCR, and Global Payments through a product called Xenial. One of them or two of them will be a finalist in every deal. You know, we get asked about Toast. Toast has been in every RFP we've probably participated in the last five years. You know, they participate in everything as well. Generally, in the enterprise category, those first three are the ones you see in every deal. Some combination of all of them or one of them will be a finalist or the incumbent, and then it's us.
There are startups that are here and there, but, you know, categorically, those three really do show up in every single deal. On the engagement and loyalty side of the house, you know, on the online ordering side, the biggest player is Olo by a long shot. They are certainly in every RFP. On the engagement side, there is a distinct collection of three or four businesses, predominantly private equity owned, that will show up. Nobody comes, I think, to the table with the collective, "Hey, here is a suite of products that you can use today." I think that is it. It is funny, you know, people used to think that was a financial initiative by us, "Hey, we want to just cross sell." I think it has actually turned out to be a product initiative because the customers now are getting more benefit from it than before.
I think that's like critical, which is if we can create more value for the customer, then we can create more value for our shareholders.
You touched a little bit about the idea of SMB players trying to move upmarket to enterprise. Talk a little bit about the difference between the SMB market and enterprise market in terms of the products customers are looking for and also the go-to-market motion.
They're vastly different. The downmarket business is an incredible place because the sales cycles are short. You can lock in customers on payments rates that are, you know, sometimes they don't quite appreciate how high they are, and you have the ability to innovate very quickly because your sales cycles are shorter, so you can try out products all the time. The downside of that business is it will have higher churn because, you know, as we all have heard for years, restaurants are really bad businesses, and it is far more competitive because the sales cycles are so small, so you'll, you know, probably have more competition. The other difference is that product needs are completely different.
If you imagine you're running your local restaurant, you are the chef, but you're also the CEO, the CMO, the CFO. You're managing labor, like you got everything. The product you need is pretty simplistic. You need something that can help you market, help you manage your labor, your costs, your revenues. Like, it is a lot of stuff that one person has or a small team has. Imagine you're, like, you know, Arby's. You know, you've got a CIO, a CFO, you've got an IT committee, a compliance committee, you've got Accenture, you've got Deloitte. I mean, you've got an assortment of needs. You've got franchisees, you've got store managers, you've got operators, you've got supply chain software you're integrating to. It's just so dramatically different.
You know, I always compare it to, you could have the design of a sports car try to build you a semi-truck, but it'll take them years to figure out how to get all the nuances of that market and vice versa. That's why you've had this big distinction between the two markets, is that it's just the product needs are so, so different, and it's not generally that easy to go from one to the other.
talk a little, little bit about the current size of your TAM, how you think about that, your market share, and then also relative areas of market share strength versus market share weakness.
These numbers vary a lot. We tend to take the more conservative view of it. You know, in the United States and Canada, there's anywhere from 700,000 to a million restaurants. We think we're applicable to about half, and half is just the enterprise. You know, if somebody bought all of our products, it's over $10,000 a box. And so, you're anywhere from a $3.5 billion TAM up to $5 billion TAM or $6 billion TAM. You know, our total revenues are less than $300 million when it comes to software. And so, call it, you know, we are less than 10% penetrated from a revenue maximization.
I think it's probably underestimating how penetrated we are in the sense that every year there's a set of new products that come out that will eventually be PAR products that we do not realize. That $10,000 number will continue to expand. As far as where we are stronger and weaker from a market share perspective, we are the largest provider in loyalty. Our loyalty business is really well penetrated, but it is still growing. Like last quarter, it grew 18%. It is still growing at a nice rate. We are far less penetrated in POS and back office where we are, you know, we are not even in 10% of, you know, we are in 25,000 stores or something. We have a long way to go there. That is what I think is really exciting.
The other part that I think is kind of cool is that if we stop selling the new logos today and you just looked at the existing, you know, store count, and pretend everybody bought every product, we would have 3.5x to 4x of the TAM just in our existing customer base. Now, I think that those are all made up numbers and people give you those numbers. If we kind of take out what I think is not really applicable, you know, there's probably a double in there as far as the upsell you could have to the existing base, through, you know, cross-sell and upsell over time.
Let's turn a little bit to M&A and inorganic growth, where you've been quite active over the last year in particular. Let's start with just Stuzo and TASK from last year. Just refresh us on each of those deals, the rationale, and then a quick update as to how they're going.
Yeah. Stuzo, we acquired in March of last year. It was the largest provider of loyalty software in the convenience space, convenience and fuel stores. And we had been growing in this market organically pretty quickly and unexpectedly. Convenience stores are the fastest growing food service market in the United States. Convenience stores, for the last three and now almost four years, are growing at 14% catering on food service. Food is really the growth engine of a convenience store, making up for pitfalls in tobacco and other areas. Every convenience store has now jumped into the food business. If you go to a convenience store, it is highly likely they've got prepared foods and eventually hot foods and so on and so forth.
That market was looking for the same tools that restaurants were, which is we want online ordering, we want loyalty. They were coming to us and we're growing very quickly. You know, candidly, I think we weren't doing the best job we could because while it was an emerging product line or emerging category, our product was really built for restaurants and the nuances of that market. I, and so we started to make decisions as, hey, either we go all in on this market or we get out completely, but we're not gonna be number two or number three. Stuzo is a company we've been tracking who we always view as, hey, they are the best in the business. They are priced twice as high as we are.
They have never lost a customer and they are, you know, really efficient, very profitable. We were really lucky and able to get a deal down there. We were, I think, really excited about this idea that we could run the same playbook in convenience as we had in restaurants. Fast forward a little over a year, I would say it has played out great. I think it has been the best integration we have had as a company we have acquired yet. Culture, you know, we have, I do not know the number, but, you know, they probably had 175 or 200 people. I think we have lost just four or five people across the team outside of the cuts that we made ourselves. I would say from an industrial logic perspective, it has completely hit.
We've kind of, you know, one big customer, we've kind of branded ourselves as PAR, and we see ourselves being able to have the same success there now that we did in restaurants. It's, we're really, really happy with that one. I think we paid a really great price. I think we paid 13 times EBITDA or something for it. TASK, which we closed in July of 2024, was our attempt to grow internationally. TASK has sort of two product lines. One is a loyalty business that was squarely focused on serving McDonald's and McDonald's only in 68 countries and geographies. That business was, you know, cash rich, sort of, you know, call it 8-13% grower.
The second side of the business was international POS, back office, online ordering platform, very similar to what we have, but internationally focused. When we bought this business, you know, our pitch to investors was, hey, we need to extend internationally because our U.S. customers are growing much faster internationally than they are. In fact, many of the CIOs are now being global CIOs versus the U.S. CIO. We wanted to be able to support them there. That thesis is also playing out. We've started to see the U.S. customers put us in pilots. We've won one or two of them already, which is ahead of schedule. That is kind of working nicely.
At the time we bought the deal, we also said, hey, there's a couple call options here that aren't priced into the deal that could be huge. One is a call option of, on a, Task had a couple large customers that we didn't really have great business with at PAR. And, you know, could we make one of those into a really, really big relationship over time globally? That call option, I'd say, has gotten pretty valuable, where I think we'll actually be able to crack that code, and that would be amazing if we did it. The second sort of call option we had, I think within Task, is could we find a way to make a global platform for a couple of the large brands that we never had in our TAM?
I think that's also kind of coming through. We're super excited where we are today. That one, again, we're just, we're not super far into it, but I would say from where we, when we bought it to where we are now, I think we have way more confidence that the plan's gonna work.
You talked about TASK unlocking the international opportunity for you, or at least beginning to. Talk about what else you need to do internationally to really get to scale on that side of the business.
Honestly, I think it's time. TASK is a relatively small business, has not deployed thousands of sites like we have. I suspect it'll be very similar trajectory to what we experienced here in the United States, which is we've got to build the muscle to build, ship, and then deploy. We're doing it. You know, we are in Guzman y Gomez, which is like this, you know, the fastest growing chain, which just went public in Australia. We're in Starbucks. We're in sort of this diverse set of customers. Now we've got to rebuild the repeatable playbook. The second part of it is we've got to build tremendous confidence in our U.S. brands that we can deliver the same quality of service that we do in the U.S. internationally.
I just think we need time and scale, and we feel really good about it today.
All right. More recently, Delaget, GoSkip, talk a little about those two deals and how you thought about them.
Yeah. Delaget, we acquired in the very last day of 2024. It's a analytics and recovery software business. What essentially what it does is analytics at the franchisee level, so really powerful tool to help you manage your internal tooling. That's everything from getting prompts about inventory expiring to managing labor better. It's a lot of what we do at Data Central, but at a really granular store level. That was a product that, you know, sort of spun out of a Taco Bell, a large Taco Bell franchisee years ago. The second part of their business is in recovery.
Recovery is a really cool product that, how we first discovered these guys in that it was almost like an auditing tool to make sure that you were being charged appropriately by DoorDash, Uber Eats, the third-party delivery companies, and then recovering those fees, but also giving you prompts to say, hey, kitchen wait times are like 40 minutes. Maybe you push off delivery times at DoorDash and Uber Eats, or you shut down on DoorDash and Uber Eats, handle the photos in the kitchen. We discovered Delaget, honestly, because it was growing so fast across our base. We're like, what the hell is this thing? You know, fast forward, took us quite a long time, over a year to get them to do a deal. It's a beautiful product that's being integrated now into our products.
You know, within a very short period of time, our customers will not be able to distinguish, was that Delaget or was that Data, it's all gonna be, we, we've branded it PAR OPS . It will be single sign-on, one application, one code base, and with just different modules. That is really exciting for us 'cause I think it's gonna also create a roadmap for us to do more in that back office category.
Great. I'll pause for a minute for the audience if anyone has any questions. As you think about your kind of growth algorithm and financial algorithm, you've gotten to EBITDA profitability, you're maintaining strong organic ARR growth. How do you think about the growth levers going forward? How do you think about the trade-off of expanding margins versus driving more growth?
You gotta do both. I mean, I think we've always been, you know, really, really focused on, you know, the end metric for us will always be free cash flow per share, but the duration of that free cash flow per share, like there's a lot of stuff we could do to juice it up today, but then the duration of that cash flow stream would be there for the long run. We've always tried to look at it as saying, how do we maximize the dollar of ARR lasting for as long as possible? Because underneath that dollar of ARR, we think there's, you know, really, really high, if you sort of did the math in the last couple quarters and see the incremental margin of our each dollar of ARR, it's, you know, 40%-50%. It's dropping down very aggressively, which is great.
Our algorithm has been to try to grow the revenues at greater than 20% while keeping the OpEx near flat. We have done that now for almost two years in a row. We kind of guided on our Q4 call that we think OpEx will grow low single digits. Interestingly, it went down this quarter versus a year ago. We have been managing the OpEx really tightly in order to ensure that we have that dropdown to EBITDA. The message that I think, you know, one of the few things I think is misunderstood about our company is just how much margin I see coming off it the next couple of years. As an example, today our gross margins on our software business are about 69 % , roughly 69%.
we've always said, hey, over time we wanna get that to the seventies and, and maybe higher. Today our R&D as a percentage of sales is 25%, you know? So we're sort of best in class enterprise software. I don't think we wanna go too much lower than that because then we're probably not investing enough in the products. Our sales and marketing expense is only 15% of revenue. And so, you know, if you look at like the key lines of the P&L, those are pretty darn efficient. And so that to me means that scale is the only blocker from us being a 5% margin business to a 25%-30% margin business is just a factor of scale, 'cause the actual core products are there.
Another, I think, fascinating statistic is when we broke this out during our call is that year over year, our EBITDA improved by about $15 million. Of that $15 million, the vast majority of that was organic. That was not through the acquisitions that we just talked about. The core business, which, you know, was relatively small, it was like $120 or $130 million before these acquisitions, pulled out almost $15 million of EBITDA. That is a ton of operating leverage in just one year. I think that is also kind of a little bit hidden in the whole story. What is cool is that as we acquire these businesses, we generally are actually able to accelerate the growth posted. We did that with Punchh. We have done that with TASK. We have done that with Stuzo.
you know, we found we have, we're good on that growth side. and then we'll run the same OpEx playbook with those. You get like this, you had a compounding impact over time. I do expect us to be a really high margin business over time. I think it's a little bit underestimated, but we have to deliver to kind of prove that, I think, to the street over time.
Got it. Any questions in the audience? All right. I have a couple more. Yeah.
A question on, when you think about competition, especially from the traditional providers, are they, you know, we hear about like a Toast is trying to go up, you know, do you see them finally figuring it out and finally fixing the systems? I don't know what they have on, you know, are they trying to work harder? To prep or.
They're not all the same. I think, and I'll try to speak categorically, but it's hard 'cause they're different. But, you know, generally, I think the hard part about having the incumbent product in this market particularly is that if you wanna win, it's a product issue. It's not a go-to-market issue. It's not anything other than we have to have, you know, you have to have a more modern and better product. I think when you have so much scale, it's hard to say, hey, I'm gonna rebuild the product. You know, what do you tell your customers? What do you tell your board, your management that you're gonna take down margins to go start re-rejiggering the product? What these companies have done has been really focused on monetizing that base better.
It is not, I would argue, not done, done super well. You know, if you look at those three, those three names, they've all tried to either monetize way more through payments, which, you know, I think has been a tough challenge. They've tried to, you know, acquire their resellers. What they haven't done is said, hey, we're gonna rewrite the product or hey, we're gonna, you know, move, you know, if you think back to the cloud transition years ago with Autodesk or Adobe, like those were rocky, but they worked and they were amazing. They told you that, you know, it's an all-in initiative. The only reason I can sort of seriously empathize is when we took over PAR, it was a rebuild of the product that got us to be where we are today.
and so I think the challenge has been that they haven't, they haven't had the ability or haven't yet kind of addressed the product challenge. To me, it's Band-Aids versus like the long-term win. The other thing that they're doing, one of them in particular, is aggressively cutting price. It's, you know, trying to win a deal off of price. You'll win some deals for sure. There are people that will make that mistake. Generally, I think it actually highlights the value of our product. That's kind of what I've seen from them so far. Could it change? For sure. but, you know, if you.
The traditional ones?
Yeah.
What are you most concerned about?
you know, I would say in our business, this is pretty well known. NCR has been struggling for a long time, and so we don't, we worry about them less. you know, I think with Global's, you know, acquisition, like Xenial , which is the product we compete with, is probably gonna get less attention, you know? And so it's probably Oracle we worry about the most because Oracle has relationships beyond just being your point of sale. That might be your database. It might be your ERP. and so that's probably the one we probably worry about the most.
Follow up, you're talking about, you know, TASK has a contract with like one of the bigger retail chains, you know, and you guys have a good pro, like you guys have, like you have working, I think you might be mentioning Burger King . Would those two chains have a problem having PAR as the provider? Like, I just wonder whether.
There are.
Is that an issue?
So it depends on the chain. There are, you know, one or two chains that would be a real issue. You know, you mentioned one of them. You know, Burger King is running on the same POS platform that we have 25,000 other customers on. And so, you know, they've been super supportive of us wanting to grow our business. In many ways, they wanted us to get bigger 'cause one of their big concerns was how small we were when we won that deal. In the end, I think the question comes down to, what is your competitive alternative?
I would argue that no matter what chain you are, are you really gonna pass on the best product because you're scared that a competitor's using it and you're gonna use like the crappy JV product? I don't think so. I think you're still gonna buy the best product and then you're gonna, you know, make it, you know, make it work for you in the way that delivers the value to your customers. Certainly there'll be certain deals that we look at that, you know, and we're evaluating some of them right now where there are huge revenue deals, game-changing, but we would then have to commit to not selling it. That's just a decision we'll make at that time. Generally, most of our customers have been really supportive of our growth and have acted as references.
I mean, Burger King is an amazing partner for us and is our best reference call.
Great. I think we have one more question. Just the last question for you, Savneet. You mentioned earlier in terms of things that PAR is, or that are misunderstood about PAR, one being your margin potential. What else is really misunderstood about PAR?
I think that there's probably a couple things. I'll go fast. You know, I think the durability of the end market, you know, I used to be a software investor and I used to always say that people always screw this up. You know, your churn is almost exactly correlated to the end market you sell. You can have the best product in the world, but if you're selling to a high churn category, it doesn't really matter. Enterprise restaurants, QSR restaurants are really durable businesses and they last for a long time. I think that's sometimes lost in sort of the macro talk. I think the second part that's, you know, at times misunderstood about us at PAR is I don't think we've ever viewed ourselves as, hey, let's just be great at restaurant tech.
The idea is to build a platform that can serve food service across the category. Today we're in restaurants, we're growing super fast in convenience. I think you'll see us do more and more over time. I think a lot of that is rooted in the ambition of the people at PAR. You know some of the story, but we were nine, 10 weeks from going bankrupt six years ago and had less than $10 million in revenue. Today we're here. I don't think it's ego or hubris. There's an ambition to do a lot more. Our path to do that has been, we've done more, which is we obsess on delivering for the customer.
We obsess on making sure that customer's happy so then we can have the right to sell them more and kind of continue this flywheel. I think we kind of feel like, hey, we found this flywheel that actually really works. And, you know, where else can we eventually put that to work?
Great. Thanks so much for your time, Savneet. Thanks for being here again.
Thanks, Neil.