Machine vs Human: Who Predicts Restaurant Sales Better

Hey there restaurant pros. It’s David Scott Peters and welcome to episode 63 of the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I’ve been coaching restaurant owners since 2003. And the Restaurant Prosperity Formula is based on what the most successful restaurant owners I’ve worked with do on a daily basis to achieve their success.

The basic premise of the formula centers around achieving prosperity, freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve to achieve prosperity, you have to follow a very specific formula made up of leadership, systems, training, accountability and taking action. Now I want to tell you about our guest today. Brandon McGill. Brandon initially made his way into the restaurant business at age 15.

parking cars and washing dishes later in college found his way back into the business ultimately dropping out of school to follow his passion for restaurants. With over 25 years of restaurant industry experience, Brandon has worked with restaurant royalty such as Danny Meyer, David Burke and Marcus Samuelsson until ultimately after opening 20 different restaurants for others. Marcus Samuelsson said, You need to open your own restaurant, and that he did back in 2016. He now owns and operates three restaurants in Philadelphia to include a QSR burger restaurant and American beer hall and a fine dining restaurant.

On top of all that today, Brandon is the co founder of Five Out, a machine-learning-driven forecasting tool for restaurants. listen in on our conversation, where Brandon talks about the importance of having the right and timely numbers to run your restaurant the right way. I want to welcome Brandon McGill to the show today. Brandon, I want to thank you so much for joining me today.

Really appreciate it.

My pleasure. It’s good to be here.

Do me a favor. I happen to know because we’ve talked and and I’ve got a member who brought to my attention in the first place. You’re a restaurant owner besides having a software company. You’re actually a restaurant owner today.

You talk a little bit about your background and what you do today. Both your restaurants and your company.

Yeah, absolutely. So I do own and operate three restaurants today, all of them in Philadelphia QSR burger restaurant, a 7000 square foot American beer hall, and they call it like white-tablecloth fine-dining restaurant. And I’ve myself been in the restaurant for 25 years the restaurant business got started when I was 15 parking cars and washing dishes in Detroit, worked through high school, kept restaurant jobs into college and then I moved to Chicago from Detroit. And I accidentally fell into a career in hospitality which I had not originally intended.

I was studying something different. The restaurant industry pulled me in a really big way. And in 2004 When I opened up a restaurant in Chicago called Alinea, where we were at the time serving a 28 course tasting menu in a brand new restaurant that would go on to become a three Michelin star four star restaurant one of the top 10 in the world. And that whole experience really kind of clarified for me that I wanted to work in the hospitality industry, and so much to my parents chagrin, I dropped out of school, started working in restaurants 80 to 100 hours a week and then spent all my free time not working in restaurants and restaurants.

And from there went on to work for one off hospitality and lettuce entertaining moved to New York to work for Danny Meyer and Jean-Georges to Burt Lancaster, Marcus Samuelsson and then I got to a point where I had opened up I think 20 some odd restaurants for all these different restaurateurs and suddenly put it in my ear. You should open a restaurant. So I went and opened the restaurant that person was actually Marcus Samuelsson. And that was my last person I worked for before when my own first restaurant in New York City called Pearl Nash in 2012.

My second called Rebel 2015 And then came to Philadelphia in 2016 to open up those three restaurants and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years.

Well, I will tell you it That’s an impressive list of pedigree like you know, I think I’ve got a pretty good story but I’ve gotten nothing compared to that my friend. You you’ve worked with some of the hospitality best food people the best. And I think that’s pretty exciting. Especially because today you’re doing software just tell people a little bit about the name of your company and what it does briefly. We’ll talk about it in great detail towards the end.

Yeah, absolutely. So the company is called Five out the number five dash O UT and some people ask what is five out me? So if you work in a restaurant and you’ve ever expedited inside of a restaurant or been around the expediting process, you know, the expediter is often asking hotline how long on how long were we add on how long? How far out are we on and sometimes you’ll hear we’re five out.

So that’s kind of inside baseball, a little internal nomenclature, and then you know external people we tell that the software helps people predict what’s going to happen for them in the future. Five minutes, five days, five weeks out. So simply said we are a machine-learning-driven forecasting tool for restaurants.

Fantastic. I like the analogy I truly I was wondering myself because while I’ve expert I’ve not expert fine dining I’ve eight minute ticking time so anything’s eight minutes out. My friend had said, Hey, man, let’s talk about forecasting. It’s what you do.

It’s what you’ve built a business on, but I want to make sure our listeners understand the importance forecasting. I preach it very much so about becoming a proactive management team. But I don’t think people truly understand, in your view. You’ve created this whole business, a whole software piece around forecasting, why is forecasting so important?

I think to talk about why forecasting is important. We got to go back a single step and talk about the definition of forecasting and more importantly, the differentiation between forecasting and projections. So people often interchange those words and they often think they are the same. And there’s a vast critical difference between the two.

A projection is what you would like to occur so often when a restaurateurs running a budget for 2023 it typically looks like this five 710 12% up from the year prior. That’s what I would like to occur. So I’m projecting that that’s what’s going to happen and I’m gonna start to get there. A forecast is what is likely to occur based upon not only what has happened prior but all of the different things that affect change inside of your business.

And more importantly and most importantly, is what is likely to occur. So the question comes, do you want to know what it is you would like to happen? Or do you want to know what is going to happen? And what I find to be the better of the two numbers with which to triangulate and operate a business is what is going to occur?

If I’m a restaurant tour, I know on a Friday night, I would like to have 500 covers if I normally do 250 But I’m likely to do 250 So I should provision for labor and for COGS for 250. If I do this, then I will be right sizing my two most controllable resources, which are of course my staffing and my COGS in doing so we get to an operating functionality that is best for the guest and a business functionality that is best for the bottom line. And this is what we’re looking for this perfect symbiosis of guests experience proper workload management for staff and therefore financial efficiencies and

I love it. A couple of things throw in my head one is you know when you forecast properly, you it’s so critical to your buying if you buy too little food, you 86 items, you piss off guests, you lose money, you buy too much food to be stolen, wasted spoiled, you lose money so being on target is great labor bring in too little too little people give shitty service long ticket times you lose money opportunity. Bring in too many people Tick tick tick you Oh, you lose money. So when you can provide a tool that gives you the best guess of and for me I’m gonna say guests for you different we’ll talk about that.

But guess best guess on how I can schedule properly in order to properly handle that business. Man, you’re ahead of the curve. And I will tell you on a side note, as you and I talked about, my past life is developing a restaurant training coach company turned new software company and we built a forecasting tool that was based on the spreadsheet I teach right now. Hey, give me either Sally same as last year sales and what you think the projection is going to be and it’ll give you the average day up down.

Or if it’s your trending, you’re not very seasonal last month to project next month. And it’s a decent tool because one of the things I do in the system is, hey, as soon as you see things are changing, you got a catering added if things are going up or down, you change it. So you’re in real world changing it. But the truth of the matter is I can tell you when I was doing software sales for my own company.

I had a woman once call me up go, David all I want to know is one Friday I’m busy one I’m not and if you could tell me why and how to predict I’d be like, Man, if I could do that I’d be worth a million dollars. I just go up and down Main Street of every city and just go let me tell you what your sales are. Yeah, let me tell you what your sales are because you could you could purchase perfectly. You could schedule perfectly you’re telling me you’ve created that damn crystal ball which is freaking exciting to me.

That’s how you know little backstory how you came to me is one of my members as I was teaching him my spreadsheet because sales forecast generator. He was literally got peppered by one of your marketing things. And it’s piqued his interest because I’m learning this right now. Wait a second.

There’s this other tool and he has fallen in love with it. Now, I want to kind of go one step further. I’m grabbing one data point and making an assumption. You grab lots of talk about the different data points and why they’re so important when it’s truly not projecting but forecasting and being as accurate.

I’m gonna I’m going to spoiler alert. I’ve got a member who’s using us within a couple 100 bucks a day in what sales actually are from your forecasts, which is brilliant. Can you talk about the data points

I can talk about the data points. And I will and I want to layer into the fact that of course, machine learning and artificial intelligence is some one of you know, I’ll just say that. It’s a very complicated thing. It’s an exceptionally complicated thing.

I went to restaurant school not to data science or data engineering or data analysis school, I don’t have an MBA and quite frankly, a lot of the a lot of the math and data science and data engineering that goes into what it is that we do, I don’t truly understand. And therefore I have partners who helped us build out this software, my chief technology officer or head of data science, and a lot of this is informed by things that Google and Facebook and Amazon have commoditized and allows for allowed for us to start from build on. So let me put that out there. First and foremost is highly, highly complicated.

Stuff. However, simply I can say. There’s a few different places that we look to for information as restaurateurs, to give an indication of what’s going to occur. When I do yesterday.

What did I do same day last week. Maybe what did I do last for rolling weeks. What did I do last eight What did I do same day last year? What’s the weather going to be tomorrow?

Do I have a party? And is there any other known factors like maybe the folks in town he’s got traffic jammed up on the streets or you know, the Lakers are playing the Knicks in game seven so people are gonna be watching the game that type of stuff. We take that stuff in, and we pull it into a estimate right? But where do we actually pull it into?

We pull it into our brain, not into a spreadsheet, typically, maybe some of those things into a spreadsheet, but not all of them. And then what do we do once we have it into a spreadsheet, we make a singular anticipation of what’s going to occur. And we typically don’t even do a sensitivity analysis of two or three levels higher or lower for what a single night service or a single day service is going to be. We just do one number, right.

But when we’re doing budgeting for the year, we sometimes do 234 Or five layers of forecasting. All right. Now, imagine if you had an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of interest. What would you do instead?

If you would put every single data source that he could to a singular location, put it all in one place that you can track it. And you would run many, many scenarios. And that’s what a computer can do. A computer can pull in all those different data points.

They can bring them into one singular source. And then more important than anything else, they can run not only one analysis, but they can run multiple analysis. So our machine learning model, forecasts more than 2 million different anticipated outcomes every single night for a single day’s service. Wow, that’s across upwards of 12 different outside data points, and we’re still integrating and bringing in more at this time.

It’ll be two dozen by the same time next year. Probably more. And that will only intensify that multiples of millions of potential variable scenarios. And then what does a machine do versus what a human does a machine gets up the next morning and it looks at its work.

And if it wasn’t accurate, it goes back to work at re forecasting so our machine learning model also reforecasts every single night. So every single night as far back as 35 days Currently, we are re forecasting every single day. And the machine learning model is self learning. If you and I missed the mark on a Friday or Saturday, we might have a knee jerk reaction change something for the next Friday or Saturday.

If we missed the mark over over if we overestimate, we might need your back the other way. You have the machine has no emotional reaction to things and it knows exactly more importantly than anything else, how much weight and bias to attach to each different variability. So last, I’ll say and this is you and I look at yesterday, same day, last week, same day last year. If we even put that onto an Excel sheet, which we may or may not do, let’s be honest with ourselves, do we give each one of those numbers of 1/3 1/3 1/3 weighted ratio to come up with what the outcomes gonna be?

When it really should be 4030 30? Or it should be 2525 50. Right? We get to the point where we have properly weighted those things.

Do we ever go back and rewrite them? Because that’s the other thing. It’s a constantly moving target. What works in the second week of May doesn’t work in the third week of September doesn’t work in the first week of January.

Right? variability of the things that we measure is constantly in flux, depending on what part of the country we’re in. If we’re in the suburbs or major metropolitan city, is that a holiday? Is this going on?

Is that going on? In only a machine not a human? Not even a team of humans can calculate all of those different data points, constantly re triangulating and keeping you accurate as days, weeks and months go on.

So if I were to say okay, machine learning part, I mean, it blows my mind. It really does that. We’re at this point and that you’ve put together this tool because it is as close to a crystal ball as POSsible. And I’ve I’ve seen it proven out like I didn’t spend the money.

I’ve got a member and now I’ve got multiple members who are in it and rave about the results. What are some of those things? So you kind of listed off what we would do we see the sporting event, we’d see there’s a holiday, we do these things and we do these kind of naturally. You know, I grab that information you look at and go Why was last year busy on this day and so on that, oh well.

There was a storm this day and there was and this anecdotal data and we do it in our heads. I’ll put money on there is one out of 100,000 restaurant operators are building the model that you guys have built in our conversations your your your partner who’s the brains behind some of this, what he built in a spreadsheet like you’ve got to be a math genius slash geek whatever you want to say to build something this intricate, but what are some of the things like are you looking at automatically going out in the internet and you know, sporting events, you know, holidays, you know, temperature you know, POS system and know what powers are actually busy and which is not and for history and averaging like are you grabbing all that? I mean, what are you grabbing?

So, I want to do one thing quick which is demystify AI. So it’s around us all day long in Facebook and Google and Netflix. And what’s the music system that just had its big moment last week when it wrapped up the year, Spotify, Spotify round, right? And listened to all year long.

And then what’s been the big conversation last three, four days, you know, in the news cycle, that chatbot AI that’s writing everybody’s copy now and you put a simple question in. So yeah, it’s all around us. We’re comfortable with it. You know, we’re sitting in the front seat of Tesla’s and we don’t have our hands on the wheel, but they’re close enough that we need to grab it right?

So there is a lot of comfortability that we’re starting to have with artificial intelligence and machine learning in our lives in a lot of different places. So I think that restaurateurs are going to find it coming into their life a little bit more often. To go back to your base question. Where are the data points that are actually let me say one more thing, Mike.

Mike is a genius. So Mike has been my co founder and CTO has been programming software for 20 years. He’s been writing code since he was 12 years old, and he has a finance degree from BU. So all the right resources for him and it come together in 2016 to build the underlying algorithms for this back in in Excel when we were pulling flat CSV files out of old, old technology.

Now, to answer your question, the outside data points that we’re bringing in. Yes, we bring in point of sale. We go back as far as three years, historically, currently. Somebody who is listening to this might go well, that’s silly because COVID and beautifully, I can answer the machine learning recognizes non trending datasets.

And if it is messing up, we’ll call it the outcomes. It will pull it out. It’ll extract it, just like you would just like you and I would if we were going to look at three years of historical sales and we would say okay, this window of time doesn’t quite look like the others, right, it’s pulled out. That’s what the machine will do.

So the machine will pull it out. We also look at location so we geotag down to a single block by putting in the address of where you’re located. We use a weather API to pull in 40 years of historical weather data. We use a separate weather API to pull in 16 days forward of artificially intelligent driven weather.

We then look at holidays so actual holidays, nationally recognized holidays bank holidays, we also look at days to the left and right of holidays because those are also so very also often so very relevant as well. So Thanksgiving is a holiday but the day before Thanksgiving is somewhat of a different unofficial holiday, which is a big, you know, going on socializing day, so that has an effect and an impact. So does the day after Thanksgiving, right? Like people go out after Thanksgiving because they’ve been cooking in there.

They’re done. With cooking, so they’re gonna go out on that next night. And that’s going to have a big impact. So it’s the day before and after that.

We also take into consideration schedules, so sports schedules, event schedules, college schedules, so if we have somebody who’s on a university, they’re going to be impacted somebody who’s across the street from a sports stadium, they’re going to be impacted. And it takes into consideration the variability of how far or how close away they are to that thing, right. So if you own a bar across the street from Madison Square Garden, versus maybe you own a sushi restaurant 10 blocks away might not have the same impact. Right?

So there’s, there’s very ability based on the concept and based on distance away from from that location. That’s a lot of what are the core things that go into it. There’s some other things that go into it that are sometimes more and less impactful for other restaurateurs. But those are the those are the key foundational pieces that really get us a good a good percentage of the way to accuracy.

It’s a it’s a ton of information that there’s no human being could ever like you’d spend all day just forecasting if you’re grabbing all that data, and then what do you get that on restaurant?

And that’s that’s, that’s the issue. That’s why we created this, you know, if you have a big organization, you might have a big financial office, and they might be budgeting for you. But then they’re gonna send that information in, and then they’re not going to revise and resend that information. So what we need as restaurateurs is a system that’s going to re forecast every single night and give the people who are working with inside of the four wells working in the restaurant and on the restaurant. The operational information with which to act quickly because things shift in the restaurant industry all the time so we’ve got to we got to move fast.

Well, On a sidenote, just tell Mike if I had known he talked last time that he was was from bu I might not have completed the call. I’m a Northeastern University grad. So we are rivals just so we’re clear being pot all the way and you just saying so. With that said.

Now we’ve got this incredible forecast. We kind of hinted what the benefits were. But can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen in your own restaurants or your clients restaurants? By having this drill down forecast, whether it’s labor or cost of goods sold?

What are some of the big like takeaways Mike drop kind of moments you go look what this does for you, look what it actually did for me or for someone else?

Yeah, I mean, I want to say I kind of undersold it a little bit by saying that, it just forecasts, the forecast is actually only the very starting point. So we wanted to create a tool that didn’t create work for restaurateurs, but did work for restaurateurs. And I want to be very clear, we do not want to do it in its entirety, which is to say, we don’t want people to stop doing this work and to stop paying attention and to take their hands off the wheel and climb in the back of the Tesla because we don’t know if Tesla will get where we need to go. And if something happens, you got to be sitting at that wheel.

So what I mean by that is we take the restaurants forecast, and then we ask these restaurateurs for their custom cost-of-goods and labor targets. Which is to say we don’t tell people how to run their business. We don’t tell you what your margin should be. We simply ask what is what where would you like your margin to be here?

Where would you like your margin to be here? We plug those into the system, and we reverse engineer back to them a labor budget up to 35 days out, though it’s really most workable, obviously within a week or two weeks span, depending on what city and state that you live in. But we also break it down by the day and the hour. And then we break that down by department so front of the house and back in the house.

And then if you have pastry or another department we break it down by as many departments as you have and what you end up with is either an exact amount of money to spend on labor on any given day, week or hour by POSition by department. Or if you want to in labor matrix, which is the amount of hours that you’re allowed to work or the amount of people that you require to be able to do that workload. So we do as a percentage of revenue or we do sales per labor hour or we do an actual physical human labor matrix. We can do all three.

On the COGS side. We give back a weekly and a daily budget because we’re obviously not purchasing COGS on the hour. So we purchase once a day at the absolute most so we give you a weekly and daily COGS. budget, which takes into consideration not only the amount of money that you need to purchase a particular category or particular group of items, but the quantity of those items.

So we are actually also forecasting item level, which means you now will have every day, every week and every hour the right amount of people in the right amount of apartments at the right amount of time to service the guests that you have as well as to produce and serve the items that those people are going to come in ask for. It’s the easiest way to explain it is you taking an organic restaurant and you’re turning it into the visibility that a banquet hall has, which is the understanding of who’s coming, what time they’re coming, and what they’ve ordered, right when you go to a wedding you have to put down steak or chicken, that restaurant or that banquet hall, never over order steak or chicken because they’ve got the order right there in advance. 30 days, 60 days 90 days out. If you have that you would never over order you would never overschedule the right amount of beer, the right amount of red wine.

That’s a perfect business model. This is what we’re looking to do and what we get to do with organic restaurants.

What’s magical about it is number one is where I fell in love with your with your software your company again came from a member like I have a mastery plus group and a mastermind group of restaurant owners meet three times a year in Vegas share these are the these are the top of the crop of my people. And they’re on the cutting edge of anything’s going on in every Ward, who I mentioned earlier and I’ve done a podcast with in the past and is now a member mentor of mine because he’s a rock star literally brought I asked him to demo your software to the group and around the table it was like a mic drop no brainer because the what I teach and anybody listens to my podcast, watch my YouTube videos read my book or someone understands that I always preach the two most important things any restaurant should ever budgets and recipe costing cards. And the reason being is they’re proactive management tools. Now how do they tie into what you just said?

Well with a budget we have the right labor costs so when you feed your software, the right budget to hit your labor cost now you drill down even better now if you don’t have a budget the beautiful part is you are backing in it’s going to give you a target now whether you can hit that targets a whole nother story but when you have a budget you know you can hit it you now you see by our so when we start talking about stagger starting, you’re telling me you’re gonna Hey, you can see exactly we need the seven cooks and when you need to bring two in and five and then get to your seven magic. Then Mike drop was when I got to we got to I teach a system called the restaurant payroll or payroll guardian for that and then there’s a restaurant checkbook guardian for ordering give up ordering without giving up your checkbook. Well, I’ll tell you exactly how much money you can spend on your next order. You’ve built it already into what you’ve got, but you’ve gone one step further.

I have yet another system where I call automatic par levels with a lot of history and some data entry. It produces what you’ve got, and that’s based on your usage. So if your recipe card said five ounces of French fries, and Lerch has been putting Nate because he’s got a huge hand every single time. We’re going to order the eight.

But it doesn’t mean it’s going to match budget. That’s where you’re gonna discover you have a problem. You built both of those things already automatically in there because it’s talking to all the right information. And it’s like, holy crap.

I tell restaurant owners your job or work on budgets, marketing, leading the team, developing your managers, holding them accountable, leading the business forward, not doing the task but grabbing the data to make good decisions. You just You just left people 10 years ahead of wherever their experience level is, because you’re giving them all the things they need to proactively run their business. Am I misstating any of that?

No, except No, not at all. It’s perfectly it’s perfectly said and one more step beyond that. We’re actually then taking those deliverables and pushing them into the existing systems that they have. So for example, on the labor side, if they use 7shifts to write their schedules, which is one of our favorite tools that are out there.

We actually have a push integration with 7shifts, where you can take our budget directly out of our system and push it right into 7shifts. And build your schedule right from that budget. So you can log into our system and look at our data or you can log right into 7shifts and build your budget. On the cog side.

We’re actually in the process of doing that right now. We’re rolling it out in the next two weeks. So if you take your inventory and sell your inventory management system, of course it already has your sales so we’ve been in the system has your sales, and then also you have your recipes in there, right. And then you have your your inventories that you take.

So you’ve got your purchases, you’ve got your sales, you’ve got your inventory, but you’re missing one thing. You don’t know what the demand is. So you can set a par and you can build purchases to pars but wouldn’t you rather purchase what the demand is going to be as opPOSed to a party answer, of course is always yes. So we provide the demand and with understanding what you’ve bought, but you sold them what you counted.

We tell you what’s going to sell next and what happens automated generated purchase orders automatically generated prep lists. Now again, keep your hands close to the wheel because I want you to look at it. I want you to say okay, this makes sense. I’m gonna approve this and send it out, right, I’m gonna send it to my vendor or I’m gonna give it to my am prep team, or I’m gonna make a couple adjustments.

I know something you don’t just things happening to me having an event, or I’m gonna close early today. We’re all gonna take the team fishing. So let me rip that up. You know, something we don’t tell us or tell the system right?

Yeah, can allow for that to occur. But right there, we’ve already done so much of the work for you. Let’s call it 85 to 95% of the work has been done for you. And you just have to come in and finish it and lesson and that’s the nice thing.

I’m gonna say you had to one up me, right. I sit there and put a soliloquy just brilliant. I spew out and then you go Yeah, but there’s one thing you forgot. It’s truly No, it’s fine.

It’s absolutely fine. Because I tell you right now, if I was running a restaurant, it’s a no frickin brainer. I mean, it is it is ridiculous, how powerful what you built and this is coming from somebody who built a whole software package, a whole back end that did scheduling and ordering and prep and all these things. What you have built is amazing, and unbelievably affordable.

Like it’s a no brainer. You got a POS system and you want to you want to make a change. This is a must. Can you talk about the integration so you got 7shifts and and that’s one of the people one of the software’s we recommend.

We there’s margin edge for food costs, and we recommend but there’s a whole slew of other things, or QuickBooks and so on. What are the is there a short list of of bigger names of software you integrate with?

Yeah, so first things first. Currently, today we need a POS I’ll talk about why we won’t in a second, but today we need one. So we integrate with toast. We integrate with square, we integrate with PAR Brink we integrate with micros and we integrate with Aloha and those are the five we currently have right now.

We have a couple others coming along but they’re not done. So that’s where we can work. Currently. We integrate with 7shifts.

On the scheduling side we integrate with HotSchedules on the scheduling side and then on the inventory management side. craftable extra chef, margin edge Restaurant365 and MarketMan. So those are the five inventory management tools. There’s some other things that we work with.

A little bit more indirectly. We’re formalizing the actual API integration. So those are things that we work with still in a CSV Flat file format. So those are still in process, but that’s the core competency of what we work with currently right now.

May take care of a lot of people right there.

Like the restaurant industry. Yeah,

yeah, no they’re the big ones. You’ve got a couple bigger POS systems, they’ll do go and really not much other other software. But as you learn, there’s always a new POS and new scheduling a new cost of goods sold every other week. So here’s the deal.

I’m sold, and I don’t have a restaurant and that’s why we went out and we grabbed you and said okay, I need you to talk to my people. I need you on a podcast. Talk to people about your company like we gave a snapshot but who are you who is five out and and ultimately summarized what it does.

Yeah. Five out is a group of people who work in the restaurant industry and some of whom have left it but all of whom are fundamentally from built from within it. Recognize that there was very valuable information that existed inside of all of the you know, some of the older systems that are out there, by way of either automated reporting, or customizable reporting, though, the tech stack being anywhere between let’s call it four to six different pieces of technology inside of a restaurant, give or take 10 years ago when we started working on this. They were desperate and they you couldn’t get them on to one place.

Right? And so foremost, we need to connect this information. So we set out to do that. The second thing we set out to do was be very forthright about the fact that the majority of us, myself and yourself and I’m about to, you know, make an assumption that you’re not not a data scientist, right.

So if you are I apologize, but I know I’m not. And I know a lot of people who are in the restaurant industry aren’t right. And in that even if you can get all that data into one place, I really just need the answers. Like I don’t need studying because I get up early.

I go into the restaurant I start to work to get ready for service and then service happens and then I say after to do more work and then I go home I get a little bit of sleep and I come back but you know in there have time to analyze data every single day. And like manually pulling it updating, it’s like it’s just difficult. It’s hard for anybody. And if you’re a bit of organization, there’s a room of people that do it somewhere in an office.

It’s difficult for them to get it into the hands of the people very, very quickly. So either way, it’s difficult. So we wanted to solve for that. You already have all this valuable information.

Let me get it into one place. Let me then make it valuable to you. And then there we got there were like you know what, this isn’t enough. It’s not enough just to put all the information in one place and present the key information.

can we automate the distribution? Can we push it into this capitalist can we push it into the inventory management systems so that the restaurateurs can do the things that they are a good at and below which is a cooking, serving or other and be talking to people and honing a craft and executing on a craft? That’s I think more so than anything else who we are. We’re just a bunch of restaurant people who know that restaurant people want to deal with people and they don’t want to deal with spreadsheets.

So we got them out of our life and we’re getting out of other people’s lives. And and that’s an Amen

And I think one of the reasons why I feel very comfortable bringing you on and sharing with the world is your restaurant people it’s kind of like when I created my software. You can tell the difference when it was a software company that saw a niche let’s create software and there was a restaurant person who said man there’s a problem I need to fix it and create software and that’s you. Like you get it inside out. Again your pedigree is is pretty damn impressive.

And you’re operating today so nobody knows better than a restaurant owner. I swear to goodness of what really is needed. And you’ve really built a better mousetrap and and I applaud you and I’m excited to get this out to the world. If somebody wanted to comment if somebody wanted to learn more about your company and your software how would they do that?

What’s the best way to go about it?

Yeah, thank you just reach out to me directly. So I like to talk to people, both who are working with us and also people who are wanting to work with us and I as often as POSsible, talk to absolutely every person that we work with so I would would love it if they would reach out to me directly and so my email address is Brandon which is B-R-A-N-D-O-N at the number five o u t.io.

Fantastic. That’s pretty impressive.

You can also go to our website now that will send you to ultimately you’re gonna get to me and maybe another person as well. But you know, that’s my contact info. Well, fantastic.

Brandon, I really appreciate you taking the time to share, teach people and share with us what you do. With that said, Is there anything you’d like to leave us with? We didn’t either talk about or you got words of wisdom that you just want to throw out there because again, your experience is amazing. Anything you want to share?

Yeah, I think the thing that is most important for people to walk away with is that whole demystification of AI and machine learning. It’s around us all the time. We, whether or not we like it, we at least recognize that it’s there. Sometimes we see it’s helpful when we, we grab it, we take it in.

Sometimes we’re like, Oh, I wish that was a little bit further away and we try to put an arm out in this circumstance. This is your own data, and you’re paying for it to be held in all these different places. And so the ability to be able to bring it into a singular location and have it provide value back to you, in the quickest and easiest way, is something that every single restaurant tour deserves to have. And so I want people to know that the embracing of AI and machine learning is really an embracing of the ability to benefit from the value of all of the data and the tech that they already have.

Just leverage what you’ve got to get you further and make your life easier.

Instead of the arms away or draw it and put arms around it hug this this is your embrace it. Because times are here, they’ve changed and you’ve created a tool that is like God, if you’re a restaurant operator, you need to have it I’m just going to tell you right now, and you don’t pay me to say that correct? No,

we have no agreement, no deal. There’s nothing.

So I’m telling you right now that you need to be contacting Brandon, you need to get Five Out into your restaurant because it will change how you run your restaurant. Brandon, thank you so much for doing this today. I really appreciate you. Hey, that was an awesome episode.

I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant. Before you go. I want to give you these three thoughts. One by combining leadership and taking action with systems and training being checked by accountability.

You are on your way to creating prosperity for you and your restaurant to have something I need from you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you happen to listen to podcast by leaving us a review other restaurant pros seeking out this information are able to find it. I read the reviews and hearing how this information has benefited you. does wonders for me.

And three, if you find any of the discussions helpful share them, the more restaurant pros who have access to them, the better we become as an industry. For more restaurant resources or to get in contact with me. com. Be passionate about what you’re doing.

Be persistent, but more importantly, become better and help everyone around you become better and your restaurant is going to kick some ass. If you’re tired of not being able to leave your restaurant because no one else knows how to run it. I want to make sure you know it doesn’t have to be that way. You can leave your restaurant, it is POSsible to build a team of people who know how you want the restaurant to run.

With these trained and responsible people in place. You can give yourself time away. What would you do if your time away from your restaurant? Would you sleep better?

Would your relationships improve? Would you feel more relaxed? These are all things you deserve to experience as a business owner. It’s why we own our own businesses.

If you would like to learn how to own a restaurant that doesn’t depend on you to be successful. Click the link in the description to watch a free training course that teaches you exactly what you have to do. Also, be sure to subscribe to get my weekly tips and watch these two videos to get more information and guidance for running a successful restaurant.