We are going to get started here. Next up, we're super excited to have Savneet Singh here, President and CEO of PAR Technology. Savneet took over the role of CEO back in 2019 and has been a regular at our conference for the last several years. Savneet, thanks for being here again.
Thanks for having us.
All right. To hop right in, PAR has been through an impressive transformational journey over the last decade. For those who are not as familiar, it'd be great to go through a little bit of background on PAR, kind of how did you get to where it is today?
For most of our life, call it 40, 40 years, we were primarily a hardware and services provider to the category. Our founders invented the point-of-sale terminal, had a great run in the 1980s, and then sort of 25 years of a more challenged business selling hardware and services to restaurants. You'd go into a restaurant, you'd see our logo on the devices, but we weren't selling the software on the inside. The business was cyclical, tied to the buying cycles of those restaurants. In 2014, we made a small acquisition that got us into the software space called Brink, which was point-of-sale software for the cloud. It was very tiny in a few hundred stores. In 2018, I joined the company and we sort of went on this all-out shift into becoming a software business versus a hardware business.
We spent the first year or two really rebuilding and re-architecting that point-of-sale product so it could scale. It's since bolted on a loyalty product, a back-office product, and a digital ordering product, so we can kind of become the end-to-end solution for the enterprise. Our thesis has always been that restaurants, as they become more digital, their system becomes more fractured. They have more disparate pieces of software not speaking to each other. Over time, the restaurants will want to consolidate to a platform versus a bunch of different stuff. I think that is really what's kind of propelled us to grow well above our competitors, excuse me.
Great. You've made some acquisitions over the past year with TASK and Stuzo, most recently Delaget. Can you just walk through each of these acquisitions, what they brought to PAR? As we're approaching the anniversary, it would be great to hear how the integration process has gone and how it particularly has gone relative to your expectations.
Yeah, our M&A, backing up, is 100% product-driven. We don't look at M&A as just let's look at how much revenue and EBITDA we can bring in. It's really been focused on, are we filling a core hole for a product or creating an opportunity for our product set? We like to think that if we acquire something, it either is a TAM expander, or it's making our collective secure better and also expanding the TAM that way. Last year we acquired Stuzo, and Stuzo is now called PAR Retail. It is the largest loyalty provider in convenience stores. We fell into this market, honestly, a little through happenstance.
We were growing very quickly as a loyalty provider in restaurants, and then convenience stores started buying our software and really looking to expand their food service offering to the other restaurants, and they sort of thought of us as a natural extension. We had a lot of success, but it was not a focused effort because we were still growing fast in restaurants, and we kind of had this off the side of our desk. We decided to go really focused and create a focused effort just to win that C-store market, and we acquired Stuzo. It's been an incredible acquisition, probably our best integration of all time. By the end of the year, we'll have migrated every customer onto one platform, which is really hard to do in any software business, let alone big enterprises like the Chevrons and Caseys of the world. It's been an incredible journey.
I think we inherited, no credit to us, but a great team, and then we've helped bolster that team, and obviously they've really risen and helped expand our, taken on our culture and made it better. It's been a home run for us and a category I think will continue to be more acquisitive over time. TASK, which we acquired about a year ago, was our attempt at growing into the international market. It's been, I think, a great acquisition in that, as we talked, we kind of talked about this on our call, we're in three really large potential restaurant RFPs, and near a finalist on all of them, and two of them are on TASK. Never in a million years did we think that would happen within the first 12 months of buying these products. I used to say that that's the call option.
That'll happen in three, four years, maybe. That's been really exciting to see. At the same time, the core business is doing really well within its international markets, primarily Australia. We launched with Wingstop. We were already on Guzman y Gomez, which is kind of like the fast-growing, fast-casual, kind of like, not similar food, but concept of sweetgreen, and a few others. I feel really excited about that business. I think we would do it again over and over again. Delaget we bought December 31st, 2024, and we are using that product within our PAR OPS Suite. OPS is kind of our operational set of products. I think that is going to continue to be a really great driver of growth for us because we think the back office is where an incredible amount of innovation is still to come in restaurants, and this was just part of it.
This was unique to us because it was incremental functionality within a product as opposed to a new product line. While it's still really early to determine if it was a success or not, I think the team feels like it'll work great. Each one of these things is filling those two buckets that we're expanding our total addressable market. The first two are expanding the total addressable market, and the second one is making the collective stronger.
Very good. Just on the TASK side, it sounds like things have gone very different to what you expected, but for the better, right? These big RFPs that you didn't expect to be operating in. I think on the call there was some focus on some of the reprioritization that you had to do on the back of that. I guess the stock reacted negatively on that. What do you think the market is missing? How do you think about some of that reprioritization and the impact it'll have on things like ARR growth over the next year?
Yeah, I mean, I think the decision, so we had customers ready to roll out on TASK that would be revenues in 2025 that we proactively went to and pushed out to 2026. The reason we did that was as we got into the later stages of these RFPs, we needed to build a lot of functionality to give us a great shot at winning those RFPs. While it sucks to, one, not to our investors not have that revenue come in, but also to call these customers and say, "Hey, we're going to push you out a year," or whatever it may be, because we're building something else, which is a highly uncomfortable thing to do.
We think it's the right way to think about our time and capital allocation because if you win one of these big deals, it pays for itself many times over, but it also gives those customers we pushed off a better product to use because we built great functionality. If for some reason we don't win any of those deals, you've now built the functionality to go win the next large deal. I think it makes a ton of sense. Normally we would never have to have one or the other, but we just didn't ever know why while the streams do we think that would happen now. We always expect that would happen years from now. It's tough, but I think it's the right, like if PAR was a private company and I owned every share, I would have made that decision a hundred times over.
I guess talk about that. Is this indicative of a resource constraint? Is it because of the size of these RFPs? Does it make you feel any differently about hiring or investments?
On the first two, yes and yes. I mean, again, Task is a really small product line. If this was on our PAR POS business or our back offices, we would never have to make these decisions. We'd be able to do it all. It just happened so far ahead of schedule that we weren't prepared for it. Conversely, I always say, what if we made that investment a year ago, but it would have been so stupid to have made the investment to go through. I think we're going to win a big global deal when we don't even have 5,000 customers on it yet, right? It was more a deep focus on always in retrospective of what could we have done differently.
I don't think we would have made, there's probably nothing you could have said to me that would have said, "Hey, let's do that earlier until we have the data points that the product was actually better than we thought." I think that it was a resource constrained dynamic that won't happen again on TASK. If we bought a business again that had a few million in revenue, we'd probably run into it all over again if it happened to get an RFP with the big brands. We'd probably end up that all over again. I think that's just the nature. It just happened so rarely that I'm not really worried about it.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Okay. I guess the other thing that maybe was lost on people is the international footprint. You know, most of your other platforms, you mentioned the POS, like you have much bigger resources domestically than internationally. I'm guessing that played into it as well.
That's correct. Yeah. International, we just, you know, we didn't, obviously the development cost that came with TASK, but we also didn't, you know, we didn't have international footprint. You don't have your support, your installation, all that stuff would have to be.
You can't ship people from Albany to Australia or whatever.
Yeah.
I know you're not in Albany, but somewhere around there.
It's all the same.
That's all the same as north of Manhattan. Okay. Just on the macro point, I know there's been a lot of focus on the health of the consumer. Can you talk a little bit about just what you have seen in your restaurant clientele?
Listen, Q2 was really tough for our restaurant clientele. 2/3 of our customers had negative same-store sales and negative traffic. We've never seen anything like that outside of COVID. It was very surprising. Q1 was slowing, but not like declining. I don't think anyone was prepared. I listened to almost all the public company restaurants that reported in Q2, and it was a bloodbath for all of them, except for, you know, Chili's maybe. Very few did really well. I think it was the speed of that shock that caused everyone to freak out, not the fact that it was there. The health of the restaurant was really bad in Q2. We thought it would come down in April because of the tariff stuff and really come back quickly, but it took a few months for it to get back to, you know, call it some form of normalcy.
Now we're there and it's kind of, you know, we're kind of beyond that. Q2 ended very weak for many restaurant companies. I don't think anyone projected that.
Do you know why? I mean,
I think there's a couple of things. Only two things I can point to. One is when that economic uncertainty came, even though the stock market came roaring back, the average American still was holding onto their wallet. It seemed to have an outsized impact on restaurant spending. I don't know why, but if you just look at, you know, look at Kava, look at McDonald's, look at all these brands, they all had such horrible quarters relative to expectations. I don't, I think it just, that was the space that consumers decided not to spend. That usually doesn't happen. I mean, we've had quarters where you would see 6%, 7%, 8%, 10% sequential menu price inflation and not seeing this type of impact.
This is not like, to me, it was hard to figure out what was the underlying trend because it's not like the inflation numbers were up 10% like we saw the year before or two years before. The second thing that happened, and this is, I think, a little bit just maybe more specific to us, we are heavy QSR, fast casual. That is where 80%, 90% of the enterprise business is in the United States. You had this dynamic though that the full-service dining restaurants had done a really good job bringing down their prices to be similar to quick service. There was some shift, share shift from quick service to full-service dining. I think that also had something to do with it.
Yeah.
Given how categorical it was, I just think it was something to do more with the macro.
Yeah, no, I mean, that makes sense. Back to normal, I think we've been hearing kind of negative, like kind of negative low single digits consistently for the last couple, I don't know, years at this point, but certainly a number of quarters. Is that, is that kind of what you mean by back to normal?
No, it's a little better than that. I think it was what we see. I think the other part to remember, though, is the way the restaurant data has gone for years has been heavily focused on traffic, and traffic as a proxy for same-store sales. The problem with that now is because so many orders are digital, whether that's through DoorDash or Uber Eats or through your native applications, it's actually order count that kind of matters more now than traffic. That traffic decline might be being offset by your growth in delivery or off-premise, and that isn't disclosed publicly. That's why it's a little bit harder now to look at the data of restaurants. We continue to see delivery increase, not decrease.
We continue to see growth in traffic through all native applications, so website, mobile, and you're continuing to just see the digital, you know, software's eating the world kind of happen within restaurants. I think all that's going to mean is that whether you slow down your tech investments in Q2, you're not going to be able to stop because those channels are not changing. I do think our, it wasn't, this wasn't by design, but our bet on QSR and fast casual puts us in a very special place because that is the category that will win in a world like that, where in a world where more delivery is ordered than less, you want to be a vendor to the customers that are set up for that. That's the quick service and fast casual space.
Just to underline it, I think most people know this, but you know, other than, I mean, you do have PAR payments, there's some exposure to same-store sales and things of that like, but when you see a macro turn like that in the end market, how does it impact PAR?
Most of the time it does not have a ton of impact on us. Again, because we're selling to the QSR space, which normally takes share and is relatively healthy in long buying cycles, it doesn't. For us, it would be a small portion of our payments business, and that's really about it. Everything else is generally pretty immune. You usually see, if it's a prolonged period of time, we would then see a boost in our engagement business loyalty. Our pipeline of our loyalty business has grown pretty considerably. I feel like that's because of the weak Q2. People are like, "Hey, I want to focus on revenue-driving software.
Yeah, makes sense. All right. It wouldn't be at that conference without asking about AI. You know, I know you run very lean teams. You know, how are you thinking about AI as an accelerant to internal efficiencies? How are you thinking about AI for more customer-facing applications?
You know, on the internal, it's a constant kind of drumbeat of, you know, why do we need a hire if we can do with AI? I wouldn't say we're perfect, but I think we probably talk about it more than any other company that's of our size, at least, which is this constant, like, how do we apply? How do we apply? Where we've seen the most success has been on the dev side. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, like we've seen, we really do track, one, not only how much code is generated, but how much is deployed and shipped, and then, you know, days on keyboard versus days in meetings and stuff like that. We've definitely seen, you know, real, real, or we can point to that's the dollars we've saved by implementing this tooling. We've seen that.
I think most companies that kind of go all in have seen that impact. The second part we see it is on support. You can clearly see when we've installed tooling in our call centers, in our L2, L3, the support agent is way more equipped to handle your problems, so resolution times go down. You need less people if you, you know, that goes down too. We're not yet at a world where we're displacing agents with humans, but I think we're like on that path of if the restaurants are ready, we're ready for that. I think the third place that we see it is just all the manual processes that exist in the company that's been around for 40 or 50 years where we can start adding tons of AI. Where I hope to see it over time is everywhere.
I tell our HR team, you know, there should just be an HR agent that I can ask for my [Form W-2], my pay stub. I can ask, "Hey, did I write my review for this employee? Hey, can you pull up my last review for Will and his comp? And did my review tie to his comp?" Like, I'm just interacting with that, you know, that's that there. We've kind of challenged everyone on our executive leadership team to come back and map out what does an AI-first version of your department look like in two years and start telling me how we get, what are the steps to get there today. On the product side is where I think we have to be great. I don't think you have a choice not to be.
We released, you know, we just went and released our first set of AI products this week. One is the first one is called Coach AI, which is a tool for in-store operators to basically have a ChatGPT-like experience on how you're in the restaurant. It can be like, you know, tell me what shift did the best this week. Tell me what product combo is doing the best. Hey, what's my labor schedule for tomorrow? Hey, where am I short in the next two weeks on this or that? It's that, but it's also proactively putting stuff in front of you so that operators have to think less and just action more. That's going to be really cool as we then eventually add in more data from disparate products.
Now you can, instead of just asking about inventory, you can ask about food costs, and then you can have promotions. Our plan is that eventually it will then incorporate our loyalty business as well. As an example, when you get a flag, historically, you as a restaurant operator get a flag and say, whatever, hot dogs are expiring in 10 days. There's not a lot you can do with that. You can, but now you could say, oh, great, press the button, go on a promotion for hot dogs. That promotion will be through GenAI written targeted, whether it's SMS or app or however you want to target to the right customer base that will actually like your hot dogs.
It will then trigger to your back office software to trigger an extra labor unit the day you run the promotion to make sure that you can handle the customers and so on and so forth. As we add more products to that, it'll be really powerful to kind of coach you through that and optimize your profitability on a per-store basis. Our second wave of AI products coming out this year will be on the marketing side, where, you know, I think ostensibly it's how do you target a customer more one-to-one. Instead of doing a segment, how do I target Will specifically? Now you've got a young kid at home and realizing X, Y, and Z.
That I think is going to be really, really exciting over time because you're going point to point at marketing and at also giving you that, again, conversational, like, hey, can you write me a campaign that does this? Hey, can you pull up the last report of marketing campaigns they did and what was the ROI on those products? You know, what marketing campaign should I cut? Stuff like that, giving them that again. That is so powerful because it allows anyone in the organization to be an expert now on how to target customers, as opposed to the person that would have to come in and say, run me a report to do this, this, and tell me this. It lowers the bar for everyone to be involved.
Totally. No, that makes sense. Okay. Wanted to bring it back to the financial trajectory. We touched on some of the changes in implementation schedules earlier in the conversation. Can you talk about just the longer-term growth rate for ARR, you know, maybe putting some bigger wins, things like Burger King or any other large, you know, RFPs that might come in the door? How do you think about kind of the sustainable growth rate for the business? How do you think about, you know, how, you know, one of these like large tier one RFPs could impact that?
I think we got in on the call for mid-teens growth. I think we can grow at those rates for some time with our existing base of customers, the quantity of upsell we have. I think we just see a lot of opportunity in what we have, and these multi-product deals we talked about in the call. I think if we win these much larger deals, that does go take us back into the 20s where we've been historically. That, and I think it's not just these deals, but it's our ability to win them every single year going forward, which I think the category is moving in that direction. That's kind of looking at it, which is without we don't win any of them, which I think would really suck. Given our finals in three, I hope we get at least one. Hopefully we get all.
Even without that, I still think we're a really nice grower with great profitability.
Great. You know, you've continued to see pretty healthy growth in the hardware side. Could you talk about any tariff-related impacts you're seeing both in, you know, kind of the POS business and as it relates to the core, kind of software-oriented business as well as the legacy hardware business?
We haven't seen a ton of impact. The biggest impact, ironically, was positive in Q2. We saw people kind of rush to buy because of the fear of tariffs. I think in our business, the software still drives so much more of the decision than the hardware. The hardware does matter. We've seen those that are trying to grow into the enterprise, their way of getting in has been giving away free hardware. That does have impact. It matters a lot. If your core product can't deliver on the promises that you've given, it doesn't really matter. It does have some impact. It certainly will slow down things here or there, but we've generally found ways to pass on the tariff impact to our customers. The bigger challenge is the uncertainty. That's what creates the slowdown for us.
Where we are supposed to tariffs are Korea, not so much in China anymore. Taiwan, those are the countries that we are more susceptible, but our entire category is, so it's not like anyone gets an advantage.
Yep, makes sense. Okay. Maybe let's talk about competition then. You know, we always get questions on competition in the restaurant and software space, or the kind of software-enabled payment space for restaurants, particularly at the lower end of the market. I think everyone's well aware of the success that Toast has had and kind of edging out a lot of the more marginal competitors. They've been making some inroads up market. You know, NCR has also been doubling down. How do you think about the competitive dynamic longer term and how do you feel like PAR's position?
For most, I mean, all of the time that I've been the CEO, our core, you know, biggest competitors and shared donors to us have been NCR, Oracle, and Zennio, which is owned by Global. That's kind of been, you know, in every RFP that one of those are the finalists alongside of us if we're a finalist. Toast, I always see in every RFP. I don't think there's been one that they haven't participated or thrown their hat in the ring for, for many, many years. They do, they have won some deals, I think, sometimes for esoteric reasons, sometimes for pricing. I think that we don't really look at it yet as the sky is falling. In fact, we won more POS deals this quarter than we've ever won before. We won 17 direct deals, 10 indirect deals to resellers.
That is, I don't know, two or three times what we normally would win. My point being, we would have competed, you know, likely against Square or Toast in every single one of those deals. Our win rates are still really high and we haven't seen that impact. I think I had so much love and admiration for Toast, as you and I have talked about. I think it's an incredible business. I don't know if it makes a ton of sense for them to be in our category. I always give this math, which is, you know, we are loyalty, point of sale, and ordering, but, you know, our point of sale business itself is less than $100 million. We've been fully focused on that for, you know, seven years, I guess, six and a half years, seven years I've been the CEO.
If Toast won all those deals, if they added $100 million of ARR to their business, it doesn't really move the needle, you know what I mean? In the sense of, is it really worth the time? I think they'll be a competitor, but I don't know if, I don't think it changes a ton. I think the reason why is enterprise software is a product game. It's not a marketing game. It's just, can you build the best product? I think we still have the best product. I think all the data would show that.
Great. Just maybe talk through a typical go-to-market on each product. You just mentioned, you know, success you're having both through direct and indirect sales. What, how's the go-to-market structured today? Are you leaning in particularly into any one channel?
90% plus of what we do is direct. We, you know, indirect we only do for point of sale and smaller concepts, and something we've done for a long time. The reason we do that is oftentimes that's where you discover the next sweetgreen or the next Cobbler or the next great growth chain, and so we kind of stay, we keep good relationships there. Almost all of what we do is direct. Our sales has sort of two, we have two buyer personas we service. One is the CIO, and that's our, what we call our operator solutions. That's point of sale, that's back office, that's payments, that's software that the employees in the restaurant are touching. Our second motion is to the kind of CMO or Chief Digital Officer, which is where we sell loyalty and online ordering, and that's stuff that touches the end customer.
Our goal is to land with a hero product in each one of those verticals and then kind of upsell and then eventually cross-sell amongst the two. I think the biggest change in our market is now that we're, we're now usually able to sell two products at the time of that first sale, where normally that was a multi-year journey. I think that will continue. I think that the biggest change in the end market of buyers outside of their macro world is that they're trying to consolidate more of this stuff, first having 10 dozen incremental investments and trying to figure out how to get it all to work together.
No, that makes sense. Maybe talk about that, the cross-sell success. You know, what does the trajectory look like and what's kind of the end state for getting, you know, fully cross-sold sales and things of that nature?
Last quarter, 70% of our deals were multi-product deals. 100% of point of sale deals are multi-product, a point of sale really being a beautiful land and expand product. In Q1, 100% of point of sale deals were multi-product and 50% of all deals. We've kind of stumbled our way. A year ago, I think the answer would have been zero, like all, or basically close to zero. We've kind of stumbled our way to figuring out how to actually attach product at the point of the first sale, and then hopefully we can grow from there.
We kind of do it to a very, very detailed, you know, we call it like opportunity of our TAM, meaning we don't assume every customer will ever buy every product because there are certain customers, McDonald's and Burger King, we don't think will ever buy our payments products because they've got direct deals. We remove that from our TAM. Or if we've got a customer that's spent $100 million building their own loyalty product, we don't assume they're going to buy loyalty. When we kind of trim that down and say, what is the actual observable TAM within our base, we think it's like triple, there's a triple within there. Now, whether that takes two years or 10 years, I don't know, but there's a really nice kind of, you know, well to kind of dig into over time of mining the existing base.
It's probably 2x-3x of our current revenue base if we can get what we think is actually actionable product into those customers.
Got it. You know, just continuing on that, the cross-sell has been particularly noticeable in some of these marquee client wins. Could you maybe talk through kind of some of the changes in the Burger King and Wendy’s and just maybe update us broadly on kind of timelines around those implementations separately?
Yeah, we signed Burger King in November, December of 2023. We started installing in April of 2024. It was a really fast turnaround for us for something so big. We've had great success. A year into the deal, we were able to upsell them a second product, which is our PAR OPS , which is our back-office product. It used to be called Data Central. A huge win for us. You know, we didn't win this product at the time we won the point of sale business. They had chosen another vendor, but now kind of nominated us as their preferred vendor going forward. It adds a wide range, but it probably adds another $6 million, $7 million of revenue to an already very large, $20 million, $22 million, $22 million deal. Importantly, I think it makes us stickier at the customer because now they've got two products.
The reason why I think we were successful was not because we sold it really hard. It's because the products were deeply integrated into each other such that the customer, i.e., the franchisee or the store owner, now had one reporting platform. They didn't have to go to two places. They had one database, and so the data integrity was very high. It made it so obvious to use us versus having to use a different vendor and have two different systems log in and compare data. You know, that's kind of a mess.
Yep.
I think we were able to demonstrate the product functionality, which then made it a no-brainer for them to push us forward. That's been the unlock. It hasn't been that we've been better at go-to-market or we "figured out" how to cross-sell. As we integrate the products, we've been able to unlock the cross-sell opportunity. That is the big, major distinction for us. I think that will continue as we integrate deeper and deeper. We'll give you fewer reasons not to pick us and have to be less convincing because it'll be so obvious outside the box. We continue to see that. I think all these new deals we're winning, our sales team's doing a great job, but most of that is because the product is there. I think the other place that we see this now is on the digital ordering side.
We have a very, very small online ordering business, and we've been building and building. It's a real competitive alternative to Olo and some of the existing players there. I think we're now at a point where we're like, hey, we're actually going to win a bunch of these deals, and we're winning it because we think the product is amazing. It's super modern. It's built in today's modern world versus built a long time ago. More importantly, why it's so useful, I think, is because it allows you to manage your digital from one place, one digital cockpit to manage your menu. So your online ordering menu changes and automatically updates your loyalty menu, so you don't have to update in two places. You change an image here, change the image over there. You update pricing menus, so on and so forth. You can do that from one place.
That integration is very hard to argue against if you're a customer saying, okay, I want to manage PAR's loyalty here, and I want to manage someone else's, another online ordering product here, and then my team's going to constantly like that. Our solution, I think, is just a lot simpler.
Yeah, it's great. Let's pivot to payments. Understanding we're still early innings, but you know, how are you currently approaching the payments opportunity? You know, you talked about how, you know, maybe it's less applicable at the very high end of the market. What's kind of the target audience for that product, and where are you at in sort of cross-selling that into the base?
It's been an evolution, I think, for the first couple of years. We've been in payments for 2-3 years. Most of our, or almost all of our business came from point of sale deals where you're tapping your card and we're getting the processing and sometimes the gateway. We did a good job of kind of getting through, I don't know, 5%- 10% of the base. Now every renewal cycle, we're trying to kind of attach it in. Where we're seeing a lot of opportunity in payments is actually the digital side. Because we're the largest loyalty software in restaurants, we're in the pockets of 2/3 or 3/4 of Americans or adult Americans. We're touching you somehow. We are selling into those customers that have our apps, the ability to pay through their loyalty app.
That's really powerful, not because we make a lot of money, but because it makes the checkout experience a lot seamless. You check out with your Smoothie King card that's in your Apple or Google wallet. That allows you to earn points on that transaction, allows you to redeem a coupon or whatever rewards you have and pay in one tap. Instead of going and saying, "Hey, here's my loyalty number. Can I use this? Here's my coupon and can I get points for this order?" and then here's my tap to pay, it's one tap and you're done.
Wow.
When we do that, we get the processing revenues out of that. That's a really powerful outcome for our customers, outcome for their customers, and then us making the processing revenue. We're making a big push into this kind of off-premise payments, which is not a place we did before. Lastly, as we grow an online ordering business, which we have been very tiny and slow to get to, but now going very quickly, we then get the processing fees if you're ordering on one of the websites we power.
Great. All right. A couple of minutes left here. Maybe you can touch on expense management. I think we've been very impressed with the company's ability to manage expenses, despite maintaining the top line trajectory. As the business continues to expand, just how do you think about the need to add more resources and what's sort of the normal OpEx growth trajectory from here?
I think we've realized over time that the beauty of our business is that we don't ever need a big step up in operating expenses to support new customers. You know, Burger King was our largest deal by a long shot and we barely added anything. Candidly, if you look at our financials, it looks like we added nothing because we were able to cover it up through cost cuts elsewhere. That's kind of how we want to be. There may be one or two deals that happen in the lifespan of PAR that require incremental investments that investors would notice from our P&L, but our stated goal is to always, always keep OpEx growth really small single digits. That requires a ton of work because everyone gets a raise every year if they stick around in the company generally, so you've got to cut to fund those raises.
I think part of the reason we've been successful is the deployment of AI across our development teams. Our biggest investment is always going to be R&D, and our ability to ship more product with less people will be critical to our ability to keep those numbers down. Today, we spend about 25% of revenue on R&D, 14% -1 5% on sales and marketing. Those are great numbers. I think those are near best in class, and G&A is where we need to continue to hold that as tightly as possible so that we can scale and get the operating leverage there over time.
Got it. Great. Just on capital allocation, you've done several deals. There's been a lot of speculation and just like the M&A backdrop in the market, obviously some well-telegraphed processes that are out there. Just wondering, it would be great to hear how you're thinking about the M&A environment and if this is an area we could see PAR return to over the course of the next 12- 18 months.
We're always looking. Our M&A is very product-led. Like I said, it's not, let's go buy $100 million in revenue this year, and so it's opportunistic in that sense. If we can see, find a product that makes our collective stickier, i.e., expand the LTV, or opens up a TAM we think we can win, you know, we'll go after it. Today, you know, we have relatively smaller deals in the pipeline. We've got a couple AI deals, a couple products in the back office that we're looking at. Those are solutions that we don't have today that actually make our collective better, meaning the chance for multi-product deal adoption will increase. In our category of restaurants and convenience store software, there's half a dozen to ten large companies that we'll always take a look at, which will dramatically change the size of our company.
They're so infrequent that they trade, and so we never really count on that and kind of focus on this continuing to continue a product-led acquisitions.
Great. Last question, during the 2024 Investor Day, you highlighted the data platform strategy, which enables synergies across operators that have more complex operations. Can you talk a little bit about that strategy and how it improves on the current value proposition?
Yeah, we're focused on coming out with what we call the PAR data platform, but really simplistically, it's a platform that takes your data across your entire restaurant. This would include the products that are PAR products, but also the products that are not PAR products. That might include credit card data. It might include competitor data, whatever that may be. The reason why we think this is powerful is, you know, AI is kind of funny. We live in a world where every enterprise, whether you're a bank or a restaurant, you've got too many software applications running that don't talk to each other. Talk to any CIO, they're all going to tell you the same thing. Now we have AI, and I just think AI makes that problem worse because it's like, are you going to listen to my agent or that guy's agent? Who's going to win?
What agent wins in that battle? Who's the source of truth? What we're trying to build is that source of truth for our customers. We think we have the right to potentially win because we have the widest product, meaning we have the most data to leverage to go do that. This is an attempt to put that data in one place, give you that foundation to get insights, but then really build your AI future out of. Because today, I think it's really hard to build these beautiful AI outcomes when you're using just a small sliver of your data across your business. It'll make you a little bit more efficient in one thing you do, but it's not really giving you an unlock that you couldn't do before GenAI.
Got it. That makes sense. I think that basically takes us to time, but thank you so much for having the conversation with us today. Appreciate you coming to the conference yet again, and I hope we see you back next year.
Thanks a lot.