Brendan Sweeney (3:27)

Thanks so much, Chip. Thanks for the kind words.

Tony Roy (3:29)

Thanks for having us.

Chip Close (3:30)

All right, so we, we have had conversations before. Anybody who's been listening to this show for a while knows that Pop Menu has been longtime supporter of this show. You guys have been out to the different events that I've thrown and all that. We've been on stages together. It's been a blast. For those who don't know what Pop Menu is and it's changed a lot, it's evolved a lot in the last several years. How do you explain you get on a, an elevator with somebody and they say, hey, what do you do? I say, oh, I'm the one of the founders of Pop Menu. And they say pop Menu, what's that? What are the next 20 words that come out of your mouth? Brendan, I'll start with you.

Brendan Sweeney (4:04)

Yeah, it's a, it's always a struggle for me to, to be concise. It's more so now that we have so much more going on than we used to. But I just say we're a, we're a digital presence company for restaurants and we help, we help restaurants consolidate everything they have to do digitally to attract new guests and engage the ones they already have. And it does a million different things.

Chip Close (4:27)

Love it. Tony, anything you'd add to that?

Tony Roy (4:29)

That was pretty good. I can't really contradict him too much. Look, it's an all in one platform. Think about an Amazon E comm experience in terms of how you interact with the restaurant on the front end, the website, the menu interaction, you get visual content, social validation, one click path to purchase, and then all that data fuels the back end so that restaurants can market to the individual in a very personalized way because now they know their interest. And so Amazon meets Salesforce. We hope we're half as successful as those two and we'll be just fine.

Chip Close (4:57)

So you guys started, for those who don't know, it was a, it was a website company, right? Every restaurant needs a good website, good looking website, but also one that is functional. That converts. That takes all that traffic, converts that to dollars, which is what restaurant owners really care about. That's still at the heart of what you guys do. And I always like to think of it like that. Like, that's the tree we put in the stand. And then there's so much that you guys have hung off of that. So do you still lead with that conversation about being a sort of a great web design platform, or how has that changed and how has the world changed, which has changed what you do and how you think about it? Brendan?

Brendan Sweeney (5:35)

Yeah, great question. We actually didn't start with websites. We started with the web experience of the menu for browsing, not for ordering. And because I was scared of taking on websites, it's complex. There's lots of stuff that's painful about executing there. I just said, hey, take out your PDF menu, replace it with this JavaScript, and you're going to get this modern, beautiful menu experience that's unlike any other. And it has photos and it has reviews, and it has social validation. It has all these points that we want as consumers before we make a purchase in one place under the restaurant's control. It started like that, and then it was clients saying, hey, these menus are awesome. Can you handle my website? My cousin let the domain expire, or this agency is screwing me over, or whatever it is. So we expanded into the websites and. And that's been our story since then, too. We expanded into CRM and omnichannel marketing. When Covid hit, we expanded to ordering three, four years ago. We started launching AI products just because it was just obvious people needed to be able to do more with less, whether it was answering the phones or whether it was marketing. And so, yeah, but we still lead with the menu. And the menu is still the most important point. And the menu is still the thing that restaurants can use to differentiate. And it's totally in control, in their control. And so. And all the goodness that comes from pop menu still emanates from that very unique and dynamic menu experience.

Chip Close (7:03)

Tony, what would you add to this?

Tony Roy (7:05)

That was good. Again, thanks. Look, I think it's evolved, like. Yeah, you're welcome. Look, what I always tell people is the menu is the primary decision point for every guest in the world, whether they're new guests or they're returning after a few months and they're coming to see what the specials are or anything like that. And so we started with that. We quickly realized, like, we needed to control the entry point. You can have a great menu, but if you're not optimized for Google, not optimized for mobile, then you're going to be limited in how many people get to interact with that. So yeah, I think we've evolved now into an all in one platform. I mean every restaurant wants to do more with less and that means I want to manage less vendors, less tools and have more time back. I don't want to do eight or nine different vendors, eight or nine different invoices. So I think the area of consolidation started a while back when we initiated that. And I think you're seeing more and more people look to do as much of the all in one as possible. And so it's either one company or it's someone like us plugged into a, you know, world class pos, someone like Square or someone like Heartland for example.

Chip Close (8:01)

So Tony, go a little bit deeper there. So you said, okay, all in one, which is a buzzword we hear all the time. Everybody's an all in one, right? I know you guys and I know what you have added to this and how you've expanded this platform with. But give, give me an example again to use the elevator pitch example, somebody walks up to you at a trade show and you say, well we're an all in one. Say okay, give me an example. What are the eight things that you guys do that I'm going to be able to cancel over here? Tony, how do you answer that question?

Tony Roy (8:29)

Yeah, so it's, I hope I do it well, I've done it a million times. But I mean the first thing is, hey, a website's just a website. It's better than not having one. But other than that, it's really just like the old fashioned business card. What makes a website different is, is it performant? It's and what better place to be performant than your menu? The menu is where 96, 97% of your traffic is going to go. That's how people are going to make decisions about your business. They don't care about your blog post or your merchandise page if they don't think they're going to enjoy the menu experience and the atmosphere. So I think that's one thing is that's the place you have to start because by changing the menu experience and making it dynamic versus static, meaning I can interact with it versus just looking at static text, opens you up to so many other things. The rest of the all in one is, well, now that you've got all this data, how do you market to consumers and able to leverage those personal insights? So anything Restaurants are or should be using to market and engage with consumers. In our platform email tool, do you need to use constant contact or mailchimp? If it's already in our platform and it's more automated and it's tied to top of the funnel. Same thing for sms, same thing for social. What about online ordering? Do you want an online ordering that's talking to all the other systems? Do you want desperate and separate from that? So all in one basic encompasses every marketing tool that restaurants are or should be using. Combined with the interactive menu which gives them really unique data insights and then things like menu management, online ordering, delivery integrations. The more of that can be one place that talks to each other and is automated naturally leads to better outcomes.

Chip Close (9:51)

And the thinking being that if it becomes too cumbersome, if you have to go to too many places, it just won't get done right. So especially for right.

Tony Roy (9:58)

I mean, hey, the biggest thing for restaurants, as you know as well as we do, is the lack of consistency in the marketing. And part of that is because they're managing so many things, just managing the business, much less managing 8 or 10 different marketing tools that are highly manual and they don't fully understand. So all in one isn't just about putting everything there, but it's how can you get them working, you know, in symphony together and automating to ensure that activities are being done. Like one of the things our product team does really well is we know the next best action people should be taking and in instances where we can do that for them, we will because we know it leads to results, impressions, leads to follower capturing, leads to transactions. So we know you need to market yourself and drive up those impressions. If there's certain things that we can't do for you, we need to take it as far along the line. So now you can just evaluate what we've created, play the role of editor in chief and then just hit the button and naturally that leads to more activity which we know is a correlation to the things I mentioned, like follower captures, you know, revenue transactions.

Chip Close (10:55)

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Brendan Sweeney (12:17)

Yes. I mean, the essence of what Tony just described and kind of the simplest kind of second part of how you describe what we do is we're an impressions engine. We've been doing this eight and a half years. We can see a very, very strong correlation between impressions and either sustenance of a certain level of revenue or growth to other revenue levels. And we're lucky enough to work with thousands and thousands of restaurants. And we have data for a subset of them that might be a few thousand, 1500 to 2000, where we can see what is your total revenue, what's your first party revenue, what's your third party revenue, what's your on prem. And so we looked at all that and then we paired that up month after month after month with impressions data because we have a ton of that. And so for us, we're not really counting the web stuff. We're really focused on the marketing impressions. And so mass emails sent through our platform, automated emails that our platform sends itself text and social posts. And so over time, as we've gotten to see how does this play out. And it's not just use a tool and hope that it works. We're able to actually measure roi, which is another feature that we've invested a ton of money in that doesn't replace any other tool that's out there because there isn't another tool out there that tells you. And so like our platform shows you, here's how many impressions you got this month and here's what your online ordering was. And seeing how those charts correlate, you know, led me to say, well, let's aggregate it all and let's see. And so what we did is break down our client base into just different, you could say it's arbitrary. I'm not saying this is massively scientific or that data scientists did it, but we don't need that right in the restaurant space. Just being directional is super helpful. And so we broke it down into one to one and a half million dollars top line revenue, which is kind of our average client. One and a half to three and a half, three and a half to seven, and then seven to ten. You can say whatever. Too broad, too narrow, doesn't matter, because the same thing keeps happening because what we pulled up is, among other things, the total guests in their database, which I know you're a huge, huge proponent on and helping in thought leadership with the industry on that. And then it's how many new are we adding per month? It's how many mass emails are you sending, how many automated ones are you sending, and how many texts are you sending? And so some of the really interesting. And then we looked at the median in each group, and then we looked at the top quartile in each group. It is dramatically different. And so the TLDR is if you want to go up into the right. First of all, if you want to compete and keep the revenue and protect the revenue that you have, you have to follow this. But if you want to grow. I don't see any of our clients where these numbers are not going in this direction. And so as an example, Median client in one million to one and a half million top line has about 1664 contacts in their database. Does that sound low or high to you? Based on what you know?

Chip Close (15:09)

Sounds pretty low.

Brendan Sweeney (15:10)

It sounds pretty low. And so there's. And they're adding 44amonth, and then they're sending about 450 mass emails. We're sending about 330 automated emails, and then they're sending about 30 texts. All right, so that's the first category. As you go up to one and a half to three and a half, the total contacts in the database grows. It almost doubles. It goes up 94% to 3200. As you move to 3.5 to 7 million, it grows another 87% to 6000 in the database. And then when you get to 7 to 10 million top line, you're about 10,000 contacts in the database. Now this is the median. And so you can already see those are big jumps where it's 94%, 87%, 63%. I memorized this. All I'm in savant. Isn't that amazing? I'm not looking at any reference material, but what's crazy is when you go from the median into the top quartile, it really jumps. And so for one to one and a half million, the total guest list is 3,500. And so that's 115% jump. For the one and a half to three and a half million, it's up 146%.

Chip Close (16:20)

Yeah.

Brendan Sweeney (16:21)

And then three and a half to seven, it's up almost 100%. Seven to ten, it's up almost 118% to where they have a database of about 21,000 on average. And so the formula isn't this perfect thing where you can say, I want to get to 3 million. And so I need this exact number of followers in my database and I need to be adding this many. It's just clear that the number you have to have that you're touching on a monthly basis or weekly basis, and then the number of times you're touching them has to go up at a fairly dramatic rate if you want to grow the business, especially in such a competitive time. And so we're working on how best to share this data out. We've shared at NRA and we're working on a white paper. Just so I just find that eight and a half years into this, still the number one question we hear from restaurants that's difficult for them to answer is, how do I grow? How do I add customers? And so at least giving them something to shoot for, where it's like, hey, if you're not adding X amount of people per month, you're not growing. And if you're not touching them once per week, for me, that's really it. Can you touch them once per week? Especially with a personalized touch? We'll be sharing a more detailed version of this that I think people can use to say, all right, I want to go from one and a half to three and a half. I need to add this many people in my database and I need to ramp up the number of touches. So that's basically the formula that we've seen. And so we're lucky that we get to see not only we're generating a massive amount of impressions. Just last month, we saw almost 80 million emails on behalf of our clients. We also have the ROI tools. And so we can also see, well, what happens with all those messaging. And I think one of the hardest things is restaurants doubt that they're going to influence the revenue that much. And man, it's 2025 and still emails are so massively important.

Chip Close (18:11)

So, Brandon, let me just pause right here and say you're absolutely right. And I did marketing for restaurants for years. One of the things I also did is I did marketing for years gyms and, and fitness studios. And then I did marketing for Ecom and man, I could press click, I could press go. And I knew that an email like this will generate somewhere between 35 and 40 $500 per go. It cost me $0. The incremental cost of sending one more email is zero. And when you see that, when I'm running a deal for a gym membership or a, a pack of private training or whatever, and when I do the same thing with E commerce, when I run a sale, when I have a, you know, an lto, when I have, you know, a brand new offering, a launch, whatever, I can, I can hit go. And it's the same thing or it can be, it should be with restaurants. And now we've got tools that allow us to do that. It's getting, getting people to see those things and how they are all connected.

Brendan Sweeney (19:06)

It's 100% and to believe. And I think the, the ROI tool piece is what's led me to double down on all of this. And I think that's also typically missing from a restaurant tech style like it. I don't care if you're a massive group or you're a regional hospitality group that's very professionalized or you're a mom and pop that just wants to, you know, make food and do hospitality. Most people just do not have any visibility into their roi. And so that's the other part that I think we bring to the table. And that's becoming more of a, you know, it's more of a norm in the industry and it's super important because that lets people go, okay, yes, this works. I'll believe in it, I'll lean into it and then they're going to grow because of that.

Chip Close (19:46)

Yeah. Net new subscriber growth is the number one metric that I hear really smart people talk about over and over and over. I have long felt it and now I just listen to other smart people. So net new subscribers, how many new subscribers you're adding to your list every single month. It's why we talk about it at the shows, at the live events that we give. We talk about. Anybody who's a member of the P3 mastermind knows that. And then, and then you do, you have to keep, you have to stay top of mind, right? So we talk about this again on stage. Like, how can you people have five places, the place they go for breakfast, place they Go for lunch, place, they go for dinner, place to go to celebrate and then that fifth extra place. And if you are not one of those four, you gotta be that fifth extra place. So how do you stay top of mind?

Brendan Sweeney (20:26)

Yep. And you gotta automate as much of it as possible. Like, like both of you guys said at the start, being, being consistent is, is a massive thing and not being afraid to stay in touch with people who said stay in touch with me. And a cool thing that's happened over, over the last year for us is more of our POS partners and also OpenTable are now flowing consumer data into our clients and it's having a dramatic impact of folks being added to each client's database every single month. Isn't that incredible?

Chip Close (20:55)

I gave a talk about this four years ago where every restaurant, most full service restaurants have two main pieces of hardware, right. They got the POS that locks in all the sales data and then they've got the reservation software which says like who came in and we do a really bad job of connecting the what to the who. And now that's becoming finally so, so much easier to put together.

Brendan Sweeney (21:16)

And that's what we're doing. And we're looking for as many ways as possible to consolidate those data points because we're generating so much through AI now. And I might even be sick of AI. I know a lot of people are sick of it, but it depends on the application, right? This is the absolute best application, is like sending emails consistently that are personalized.

Chip Close (21:35)

Yeah, let's dive into that. Because AI is a buzzword. And even just in six months, the needle has moved quite a bit. Tony, dig into this for me for a minute. How are you guys utilizing AI? And why should the listeners who are maybe sick of hearing the two letters AI, why should they perk up and pay attention to this?

Tony Roy (21:58)

Well, the first thing to answer your question in reverse, first thing I always tell restaurants is, it's the bigger question is can you be the only one that's that that can afford not to at least be learning about it?

Brendan Sweeney (22:09)

Right.

Tony Roy (22:09)

I mean like any restaurant, I don't care how long you've been, which geography you're operating in, you should be at least learning about it to see how it can help your teams do more with less. That's just a fact Today, I mean, we started as you know, gosh, almost six, seven years ago. It started with like sentiment analysis on first party reviews. We evolved in there. We created the first, I believe the first AI phone system specifically for restaurants. And that has gone incredibly well. You know, allowing restaurants to meet, you know, consumer queries while having to deal with stressed and unpredictable labor. I think where it's evolved now is, at least from the marketing side of things is, you know, at a basic level, it's allowing restaurants to produce copy, meaning they hit a button using a friendly tone and it's a staff favorite, and then using AI to generate the copy, meaning what that message is going to say that turns the marketer or the restaurant into an editor in chief. Right. Part of the legwork of the lack of consistency, I should say, is because they oftentimes are one too busy to do the work, right? Especially if you're like less than five locations, you don't have some big marketing team, so it's just taking the time to do the work to market yourself. But the other part is they oftentimes try and think about the perfect post. I need to say the most perfect message of all time when in reality you and I just want to see a juicy burger and an ice cold beer and we're like, all right, that place is going, let's go there for lunch. So we created AI Marketing Calendar, which today alleviates a lot of those challenges, right? It develops an entire month's worth of marketing activity across multiple mediums. Email, SMS, social, we send it to the restaurant 10 days in advance of the month. That way they can see what's been produced. If there's anything that they don't like or they, they just don't want to go out, you know, they can reject it. They can use AI or manually go in there and adjust the copy of what the message says. They want to change the photo, they can do it. But what it does, it's set up to go out automatically. So if they get busy, they're on vacation and they forget, at least they know there's a base level of activity happening. So from our perspective, I think AI in the restaurant space, I think one of the biggest ways that restaurants can use it today is how can they help them produce more marketing content faster, effectively at a fraction of the cost. And so if you're a two or three location operator competing against a regional group, you're never going to have the same ad dollars that they have. You're not going to have the same team to invest in. So how do you help the existing two members of your team produce four times the content for the same or less cost?

Chip Close (24:35)

I think one of the keys that you said is consistency. I think it's one of the things that we that we've sort of touched on a couple of different times here. But the, the cost of missing a beat, the cost of not staying consistent is too great to, to lose it. And so these are tools that make it really easy to just, you know, keep the wheel turning. So once again, big thanks to Brendan and Tony for taking time out of what must be very, very busy days running a company as big and as growing as Pop Menu is. The links are in the show notes to go connect with Brendan and Tony and to Lear about the Pop Menu suite of products. Pop menu.com restaurant strategy for a very special offer. Every listener of the show gets access to that. As always, guys, I appreciate you making this show part of your week. Listen, if you get some value out of this show and you have never left us a review, Apple Podcasts, that is the thing that matters. Go to Apple Podcasts, leave us a five star rating and review. If you love this show, if you've gotten anything out of the show, literally just leave a couple of words. Tell people what you get out of the show. Let them know why you think they should tune into the show. There are plenty of people out there. Just like they check out your reviews on Google and Yelp to figure out if your restaurant is worth dining at. I'm telling you, new listeners, prospective listeners have a lot of different choices and they check out the reviews to figure out if this is a show worth listening to. Your words will help move the needle in my small business. Appreciate everything guys. Appreciate you making this part of your week. I will see you next time.