This week's guest is Joffrey Tefetti, who joins us from Orlando, Florida. Joffrey is the CEO of Frontline Performance Group. Restaurants obsess over food costs, labor percentages, and marketing spend, but almost nobody measures individual server performance in a meaningful way. What if you could see, in real time, who sells appetizers, who misses drink replenishment, who discounts too often, and who's quietly outperforming everyone else?
That's where today's guest, Joffrey Tefetti, explains how performance data at the Frontline level can drive a 15-20% revenue lift, without adding seats, raising prices, or pushing guests away. This is a masterclass in modern hospitality management. One of the things Joffrey wants again for taking the time out of his schedule to join his firm interview. You find more information about Frontline Performance Group online on the web at FrontlinePG.com, and you can reach Joffrey on LinkedIn at Gefetti, or just check the show notes for all the links.
Let's dive right on in and enjoy the show. And we are back with another episode of the industry podcast, and my name is Kip, and this is Dan. Hey man, that's me, how's it going? I'm good buddy, how are you?
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And now joining us from Orlando is Joffrey Pefetti. He's the CEO at Frontline Performance Group. Thanks for joining us, Joffrey. How are you?
I am fantastic and thanks for having me. It's actually kind of cold in Orlando today, which I know you guys know. I don't want to hear it. It's not cold, but you're standing.
I have to wear a hoodie. So it's 55 degrees outside. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Actually, that's surprising.
I had to wrap myself in a mattress to leave my house. So yeah, it's pretty chilly here. But yeah, thanks for taking the time to be with us on a Monday night. It's my pleasure.
I've been looking forward to this one. So I really appreciate you guys having me on. Yeah, well, let's get started by just having you described to our listeners exactly what Frontline Performance Group does. Yeah, so we've spent the last 33 years focusing on helping frontline employees and businesses with a frontline presence optimize the guest and customer experience and increase revenue at the point of sale.
So we have a long history in automotive and car rental and call centers. But the last 15 years we've been focused on hospitality, primarily hotels. We work with just under 3000 hotels worldwide working at their front desks. And most recently, and I think the reason that I'm excited to be on your show today is we've recently rolled out our program into restaurants and bars.
Really helping the owner or the manager optimize revenue at the individual server bartender level. We know that the information coming out of the point of sale system is sometimes it's hard to interrogate. It's good for macro metrics, but it's hard to know like, how is Timmy doing versus Mary? And what are they good at selling?
What are they not selling? What are they never selling? Those kind of things that can really affect not only the revenue metrics, but the guest experience. You know, our chefs spend a lot of time preparing menus and then there's some dishes that some people never sell.
So there's a lot of synergies in just exposing those metrics and then providing the toolkit to allow the manager to do something about it. Because it's one thing to say, Timmy is better than Mary, but what do you do with Mary to get her to be as good as Timmy? Right? So a lot of it is on transparency to the individual training, digital training to address all those potential opportunities.
And then the analytics that kind of expose all of that in a very simple way. So you don't have to be a data scientist. It's just basically, I mean, with the advent of AI, it's gotten easy to say, have the AI explain basically what the data says. And then it's sort of natural language, intuitive guidance to say, Mary needs a crash course on appetizers because she's never selling them or whatever the specific thing is.
So you don't, if I've got this right, you'll go to say a hotel and you'll be, you're offering your service to a hotel, you sell your hotel to their restaurant and beverage program. And you're like, okay, what we offer you is an ability to target more specifically what your frontline workers are doing for sales rather than just giving you like an overall picture of the sales of the restaurant. How like get into the specifics of how you walk in there and talk to whoever the hotel manager explains to them how you're going to put this interaction from them and what their return is going to be. Yeah, so by way of context, in our journey to go into this, I met with an investor, a career investor who has bought and sold hundreds of restaurants and restaurant groups bars included.
And in our conversations, he said, you know, in all of the times that he's done due diligence in a transaction, not one time, did he ask or did they offer the productivity level at the server level? They never said, well, our servers sell XYZ more than someone like it was never a point of conversation. It's always about the food costs, the menu design, the aesthetic of the environment, you know, those numbers behind is like the most specifically that data that's, yeah, because that's the shit I get pushed all the time too. It was like, and sorry, I don't need to interrupt you, but it's like that.
But like it's what almost every POS system already offers you, which is like that data. Yeah, it's a macro level data. And even the BI tools that we've seen in the market, they offer that kind of top line look and they might even get into like the product margins and stuff, but they don't get into why is something selling or not at the front line. And then what do you do about it?
So it's pretty unique to be able to back to your question, to go to like a director from Beverage and say, we are going to put all of your servers and bartenders on our app. They're going to see how they rank on revenue per check, revenue per guest, tip percentage averages, and even down into some product metrics, we're going to show them how they're doing. And then we're going to show them how much more money they could be making if they were performing at a higher level. So when we were in about 100 outlets live right now, and so we have enough data to start really studying the outcomes of this, but in the leaderboards on average between the top 20% in revenue per guest and everyone else, there's about a 20% revenue left on the table.
So we're looking at a specific meal period, meal shift in an outlet, looking at everyone in there and what we're seeing consistently is between 18 and 22% uncaptured revenue. When you look at the performance differences between the people who are at the top and the people in the middle and at the bottom, which is a huge amount of revenue, you know better than I do, you run a restaurant or bar. The margins are not 40%. You know, they're often sub 10%.
So if you get a 20% revenue lift, you could be doubling or tripling your profitability and it's there. It's pent up in the guest flow. It's just being untapped. So our entire pitch is we will help you untap that.
We will show you who's doing what and we will tailor very specific action at the server or bartender level to help them individually. So it's not going in and saying, we have a special today. Let's go sell it. It's saying you're really good at special.
So we're going to focus on dessert for you. You're really bad at special. So we're going to focus on specials for you. Your drink or punishment frequency is too low.
You're not offering appetizers. It's all at the individual level because we're analyzing it at we're taking we're deconstructing the check and we're analyzing every product on the check by every server by every day. And then using the AI to say, what are you good at? What are your individual revenue opportunities?
And then sending that guidance to the managers in English, not in metrics. It's saying pair Tim with Mary so he can learn how to position appetizers. You know, what have Tim watch these videos that talk about how to position appetizers. And we even allow the chef and the manager to record themselves and it loads it into the system.
So the chef can actually describe the meal, describe the special. What have you the bartenders love describing cocktails so that the servers know how to sell them. So it's really everything you need to optimize performance at the server and bartender level and the man and it only takes managers like 10 minutes a day. The rest of the time they're running the restaurant, you know, and doing all of the other big important stuff that has to be done.
OK, so I guess my next question is and you've sort of addressed this but to get a little deeper into it because just in my experience and for lack of a more delicate turn, there's a fair amount of I don't give a fuck coming from the frontline workers in this situation. And they're like, I don't need AI or computer geek telling me how to do my job better. But your way of pitching this to them specifically because those are people we really need to sell even more than the management. I mean, I guess the managers could fire them and find somebody new, but really you got to get the frontline workers on board with this program.
And so your way of doing is selling them on how they personally can make more money if they if they improve their performance in whatever they're we get. That's exactly right. Revealing to them that there is a difference. Most of the time that we go into an outlet every if you ask every server, they would feel like their top performers.
And then when you show them, for instance, in most of the leaderboards from their perspective, they only see their name. Everyone else's name is kind of blur it out. But if you show someone that they're seventh out of 12 on revenue per guest and between them and the top 20% is an average of $10 per guest, it's easy to see that every guest they serve, they're losing two to $3 depending on their tip performance. That gets their attention because then we say we can help you go from $60 to $70 whatever it is on revenue per guest.
And then on top of that, we rank them on their tip average. So we have a lot of servers that not only are they bottom third in revenue, they're bottom third in tips. So when you do those two things, you say, OK, your tip average is 17, you could be at 20 realistically. Your checks at 60 should be at 70.
You could be talking five, six, seven thousand dollars a year. Right. And it's there. They already have the guests because we actually analyze it on their actual volume.
So we show them how much more revenue is at stake for them. And that has been getting their attention. I mean, because they're there to make money. They're not unlike other places in the world where they are actually on a salary here.
They're there for to earn on the tips. And if they see that there's that much left on the table, they start to get a lot more curious. Yeah, it's the most performance based job on Earth, potentially, right? Like there's a direct return on your own performance and your own investment in your performance.
A lot of people don't realize that and you're really kind of putting it into them just based on real statistics, which I would imagine would have quite a motivating factor. And I think like portraying it to them that way, like I like how you said, the guests is already there because it's not like other sales jobs where you have to go out and find the business. The business already came to you and all you're telling them is like, they're already here. Here's how you can make more money just by tweaking this and by the same token, the restaurant makes more money, essentially, it's down the line.
A hundred percent. You've hit the nail on the head. And if you think about it, most of the time that you have a low performer in any group of people, but in a restaurant, it's because they're just taking the order. They're letting the guests drive the interaction and they're not being suggestive.
They're not making recommendations. They're not excited about the food or whatever. And the people that are at the top of the leaderboard, if you listen to them, they're excited, they're engaged, they're asking questions, they're making recommendations, they're evangelizing the food. We call it romanticizing the experience.
They're making it sound like something they want to have. That doesn't take any more time. It's just a matter of knowing that like sometimes you might work with a server and you think, well, they're a little over the top. They have too much energy.
But when you realize they're making 10 grand more than you a year and they're working the same shifts, you start to realize people want to be engaged. They want you to make a recommendation. They want you to make it an experience for them. And it doesn't take any more time.
It doesn't really take any more effort. It's just awareness of the words you use matter and how you say the matter and listening to the club. Like one of the big things that we're finding, I would love your take on this. One of the things we found, the biggest revenue impact is drink for punishment, particularly adult beverages.
And the number one culprit that we have found is serving the first round too late. So if you are at dinner and you don't get your first drink order fulfilled until like 10 minutes before dinner, you are then missing a replenishment opportunity when the food arrives because you serve them too late. You are speaking my language. I honestly can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation with staff over the years and like and even being a guest in a restaurant or at a bar.
And we'll even talk about it all the time when we go out, Dan and I get bad service somewhere. It's like, do you realize how much money you got lost just by? I probably would have got three drinks in this, because I'm a drinker. Yeah, so I'm like, I go out for experience.
I want to have a few drinks and like you just lost two drinks on this experience that I easily would have ordered if you would just been on it. Completely. And that could be 20% impact to the check, maybe even 30% depending on what you're drinking. If you're a wine drinker, it could be 40%.
Here we go. Yeah. So what we're advocating them to do is start with the drink order. First thing, let's get you a drink.
Even before you talk about the bread or the water, like they always ask if you want water before they ask me what I want to drink. So get the first round out as quickly as possible. And then if you are busy, if you're in a busy place, we advocate, they say, we're very busy. Would you like me to replenish this when the meal comes?
Yeah. So now they don't have to wonder, oh, when am I going to be able to get the waiter? Hey, where's my wine? You know, your glass is empty.
You just know it's coming with the meal. And then you have an opportunity to replenish after the meal. So you can get three rounds of drinks rather than two on average, which is a transformational situation. Oh my god, it's huge.
It's huge. Especially because if anyone, and anyone listening to the show obviously already knows this, but the markup on alcoholic beverages is the best that you get in any experience at the restaurant for the owner. Yeah, like it's better than food. It's better than maybe I guess if you ordered a Coke, but people don't usually drink three coaks during a meal.
So that's right. Those are often filled up for free. So yeah, I know. That's what we figured out very quickly is adult beverage service, particularly in the dinner service hour is it makes a break your entire operation.
If you're really bad at it or if you're really good at it. And then like things like this is a pet peeve ours. Did you leave room for dessert? That's the most common line when they're trying to read dessert.
That doesn't sound good. No, it already sounds like you're sort of fetching me me if I ordered it. Exactly. Talk about the dessert when you're taking the order and say you guys have got to try our signature chocolate cake.
It's famous. Yeah. I should probably put it in now because sometimes we run out. And it's a totally different thing than did you leave room or bring the dessert to the table and let them see it because there's just so many principles of frontline sales that having worked in retail and theme parks and all kinds of places, you just realize there's some truisms.
And what we have found is is is writ large. They are absent at the table and every. Here's a perfect example. When I was meeting with that investor that I was mentioned earlier, we were at a very bougie hotel restaurant, you know, five diamond max, and they had a really famous dish on their menu.
It was like their signature dish. And I'm at the table eating with these folks and I'm talking about this stuff with them. And I point out to them after the server took our order, I said they never mentioned the signature dish. That's a $200 steak.
They never mentioned it and you're sitting in a five-diner restaurant and these are private equity guys that could definitely buy a $200 steak. They never mentioned it. And then when they brought the desserts, they did that whole, did you leave room? And I said, and he was actually holding samples and I said, why don't you put the samples on the table?
And he put them down and then everyone at the table started picking the ones that looked the best and he ended up selling four or five desserts. It's like to us, it's sort of common sense. But how do you, to your point, how do you make the what's in it for me for the server or the bartender compelling enough for them to say, oh, I can say those things and it doesn't take any more time and it's not cheesy. It sounds like you're just engaging with your guest.
So part of what you're doing is not only, when this is what I like about what you're doing, is that you're not just providing the data, you're also providing the solution, which is the language that goes with it. Once you're providing the training tools to help them increase the numbers that are supported by your data. Correct. And the servers and bartenders have access to the technology.
Like I said, they have their own dashboard. But we're feeding the intelligence through the manager because the manager is the one there with them and can talk to them. So we give the manager very specific guidance, like recognize Bob in your stand up because he increases appetizer sales 40% last week. Stuff like that, they can look at that and then in the roundup, they can just say, hey, Bob, great job on your appetizer sales.
Like that stuff makes a difference in the psyche of the worker to hear that public recognition. So it's not always train this person on this thing. It's also what do you recognize people for? And on top of that, we put into the system the ability to set goals.
So we also found that goals are absent from a lot of the environments we've seen. So you can set a goal, let's say on revenue per guest. Let's say your revenue per guest last week and dinner was 70 bucks. You want it to be 80.
So you set it at 80 and it will track everyone, every check how they're doing against that goal. They'll actually see it on their dashboard. Then you could put an incentive on it. So you could say if you get from 80 to 90, I'll give you $2 per check.
Now you're creating a whole way to stretch your goals, which has been not readily available either in food and beverage that we've seen. So it's like tell the manager what's not going as well as it could. And then like you said, give them how to fix it. Don't just tell them what's wrong because they might not know how to fix it.
So here are all the different levers you can pull, recognition, reward, incentive, competition. You can pull all these levers by using the system and you can just be the guy who's like the cheerleader for the team. Well, and I personally believe that human beings are at their base, at least like everyone has different levels of it. You can have like Michael Jordan level of it or like a smaller level, but human beings are at their base or competitive people.
So even if like most servers are going to be motivated by the compensation to begin with, but there's also a level of competition now that goes into it, where it's like you're competing against the other. You can see, like you mentioned earlier, you're on the low end of the list for whatever. And then realize, okay, well, I just want to give it even if you don't realize it, like even that psychosomatically, you would be like motivated by that competition. It's like, I don't want to be last on this list.
Even if you're not thinking about it, it's like at some point you're going to be like, okay, I don't want to be last on this list. You're correct. We think there are three ways you motivate frontline people. There's accountability, which is what you're describing.
Put them on a leaderboard. You don't even have to call them out for it. They'll see it. They feel accountable.
The other is recognition. So you give them recognition when they do something well and reward. So in food and beverage, the reward is built in because they're good work for tips. So you have the dynamic of those three things.
So we built our system really to help managers hit those three levers. A little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this, because some people are highly motivated and low recognition motivated. That's me. I don't really like being recognized, but I like making more money.
Other people are just accountability. They don't care about the money. They just want to do a good job. So you have to have elements of all three when you're managing frontline teams.
And the tech we built was really just to bring that to life and make it readily available. And there's something called the Hawthorne effect. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Hawthorne effect. It came out of manufacturing, but it's since become sort of synonymous with what gets measured, gets improved.
If someone knows that you're watching, they improve. That's like across the board. And it runs between five and 10% in whatever productivity measure you're using. So we're seeing that too, just the fact that someone is looking at their placement on the leaderboard is having a positive effect.
It's making them kind of sit up in their share a little bit more. And we're also seeing, again, we didn't design it to do this, but discounts and comps and things that disappear off a check is in the data. So they know that we're not watching. They know that the manager is now aware.
We actually are bringing out a leaderboard next month that will be discount and comp leaderboard, but it'll be inverted. The low ones will be at the top. Because we've seen some rest of the people. That is the great news to every fucking bar owner or manager's ears.
Let me tell you that. Yeah, I mean, there's people that are discounting a third of their checks and there's others that never discount. And it's not a coupon because that's a different code. It's like a discount at the time of ring up.
So just by putting a leaderboard out there, we're pretty sure revenue is going to go up by three to 5%. Because it's just you don't have to call anyone out. You don't have to embarrass anyone. Just by the fact that it's being measured, people will stop doing it.
Unless we've seen that. Yeah, in our test, we saw we did that and all of a sudden discounts went down by 50% miraculously because someone was looking at it till there's still ways to do it. There's always a way to do it. There's always there's no system that I've been in this job my whole life.
There's no say a bartender really wants to steal from you. They can. So there's a certain inbred level of trust, but it's getting better every time someone like you're coming up with a system like that. It's a little bit better.
Like you said, if they know you're watching, they're going to be a little bit more careful. There's always going to be a way to do it. You're never going to eliminate all of that. Yeah, they're very crafty when they want to steal your money.
But it could even just be you have people that are non-confrontational that when someone complains their first thing to do is discount. We want to kind of curb that too because often discounting has the negative effect on the outcome because they feel like you're just throwing money at them and you're not actually hearing them. So just there's all those factors. There's the malice factor.
There's the I don't want to I don't want to diffuse factor. I'm just going to give them their meal for free because I don't want to hear it anymore or whatever. All of those things and that's not even the business we're in, but we're seeing it's having an effect because we're training them on service and we're revealing the data. It's natural that it'll go down.
Well, yeah, it's like you're kind of giving the both sides. You're like you're there is it's the carrot and the stick at once, which is kind of nice. So I've got a question though though, obviously with the tips that you're culture here in North America, they put that in your plans. What do you do with those countries in Europe and whatnot that aren't very well there's no tipping.
Yeah, do that. It's still the reason that we put the incentive capability in the system was to address those markets because we still you still have accountability and recognition those still apply, but you needed a reward. So we built the incentive module in conjunction with some of our customers that we were piloting with to make sure that it would hit and the tipping culture is expanding a bit. A lot of places in Europe now are putting an automatic fee on like 10% and they're splitting that up among the team.
So while that doesn't necessarily lend itself to individual performance, it does when you think about the reason for it. The reason for it is because it's all about the check size. So if you're dragging down the check average, you're dragging down the tip pool. So there's an accountability thing, but we wanted to be able to give people individual incentive, which is why we built that capability to address that exact issue.
So the one thing I'm the flip side of this, I was interested in asking, do you have any data on, do you do or do you do any research or data on guest experience in a situation because like there are a lot of savvy guests that go to restaurants and can tell when people are trying to upsell them and that can sometimes lead to an negative experience for the guests. Do you have any data on like guest reaction to the program? Yeah. So we have a lot of data at the front desk because we've been doing that for 15 years and we actually just published a study in partnership with one of our brand partners.
We looked at 11,000 front desk agents over a year and we correlated that to the guest satisfaction results at every property. They shared all of their survey data and it's a very, very strong correlation in our program that the people that sell more have the highest guest service scores. And the reason is we actually call our methodology service based sales. So we would never train a server or advocate that a server recommend the most expensive state to every guest.
We would advise that they recommend a good stake or a good dish that carries a higher value or do an add-on because someone likes something. Sides are a huge opportunity that also goes untapped. When people order something, it's perfectly fine to say most of the people that order the filet, they really like the skewers of whatever with it, a skewer of shrimp to make it a surfin turf. That's not offensive.
But if every person comes in, you're trying to sell them a tomahawk or whatever, then it gets to be obnoxious. The biggest thing is asking a couple of questions and listening to what's going on around the table, get a sense for what they like. You could be like, are you chicken or fish? Are you fish or steak and let them go a mistake guy?
Well, then you got to try the bone and ribeye because it's out of this world. That's what they should be doing. But a lot of time they're like, so what are you thinking today? Do you have any questions?
And then you're like, I don't know, I don't know what to ask you. If you just said, do you like seafood or steak and they said seafood, well, then you got to try the butterfly lobster with the saunter of butter or you got to try the po-boy. It's unbelievable. I can't agree with you more.
The biggest untapped resource for most service is the fact that they don't ask questions and they don't listen to the answers. You're just going up there and it's like stone face, tell me what you want instead of like, let me help this make, let me help you make this experience awesome for you. And question one is, what do you like? Okay, now I can narrow it down.
And then it's like, okay, in the parameters of what you told me you're looking for here, I can recommend you and let's just use wine as an example. Three different levels. And without cost shaming them, just be like, here's a great wine at this price that is something you will like, here's one at this price, who's wanted this price without bringing price into the actual language and just be like, all of these are awesome. And now they've got a choice.
Now they know how much they want to spend, but you're giving them choices, you've asked them questions and you've listened to what they're saying to you. And I would say that's true in every sales job on the planet. They don't ask questions and they certainly don't listen, active listening. You're 100% correct.
And like the wine thing, there are words you can use. You could say, this is a phenomenal moderate wine. A lot of people love it. If you want a really special experience, we have this one over here, a very similar profile, but it comes from this vineyard.
Or you could just say, most of my guests, they really enjoy this bottle with what you've chosen for your answer. And that could be you pick in the moderate upper third, but you're right. We advocate servers have two or three wines they know everything about. And they do because they like it.
And if they're not a wine drinker, you tell them, look, you got to taste these and pick one you like. You're going to learn something. Make that your go to so that you can actually like it. There's nothing more disingenuous than recommending something you don't like.
Or know anything about it. Or know anything about it. Because the human mind is miraculous. It's sniffing out BS.
So if someone is really enthusiastic about something, you're much more likely to say, well, I'm going to trust them. They work here. If they're like, you should have this wine and you look at it, it's $200. You're like, you're just trying to sell me.
And I really just said too, because like, so for instance, I'm a vegetarian. But I've been serving my whole life and I would go to a table and I would be insubodizing about a steak. And I would just be honest with them. I would just be like, I'm going to tell you the truth.
I'm a vegetarian. However, what I will tell you is that I've served that steak a million times to a million different guests and they fucking love it. You know, so you can be honest and just and then people do. It's like you said, people have pretty good bullshit radar.
Like they can tell when you're when you're just putting on a show and not genuine behind it. Okay, authenticity is critical. Yeah. Okay.
So before we let you go, it's just been super fascinating. I think what you're doing is amazing. I am kind of curious about how you personally got into this. Like what is your background?
Tells a little bit about you personally. I started my I'm going to say quote unquote for people that can't see me career. Obviously, we all have a bunch of jobs before. My career started in a hotel.
I started as a valet, worked my way through the front of the house, front desk, got into some management jobs. And I was there for three or four years and then left. But my kind of my the roots of my professional persona started in hospitality. So it's always been near and dear to my heart.
I brought it forward into every job I've ever had. I was good at it. I was good at service. I was good at upselling.
And then I departed hospitality completely and went to a startup in the end of 1999. And for those that were alive then, you realize the worst time to go to a dot com startup in the history of the economy was in the end of 1999. And so I did and we managed to survive. And I was the first employee of that company other than the guys who founded it.
And when I left, we had like 700 employees. We had grown into one of the largest in our industry. We were in procurement outsourcing, which is like super boring. But we worked with IBM and Bank of America and all these giant global companies.
And so I kind of got I like to say, I got my MBA working there because I worked like all the way up to just below the C suite. I was reporting to the CEO, who was a Harvard MBA, brilliant guy, like one of the youngest directors in GE's history. So I just was surrounded by these like heavy hitters. And I just got to learn and experiment.
And I got to do a lot of interesting things, create new products and stuff. And then we sold that company. And so my options matured. And I was able to leave.
And right after it sold, I met the founder of FPG. And he was a little company with like 27 employees, kind of a boutique. And because and he wasn't working with hotels. So I was like, I get what you do completely because I was on the front line.
And I was I felt like I was pretty good at it. And I knew that hotels would benefit from this. And naively, we just like charged headlong into the hospitality space. And our first hotel ended up being the Waldorf in New York, which is insane at the time.
It's much smaller now, but it was 1100 rooms and Hilton owned it at the time. And so we kind of just plowed our way in. But it was because my background was in it. And we just immersed ourselves.
You know, what the one thing we're probably the best at as a company is immersing ourselves into the reality on the front line. Because you can't guess. You got to know what the workflow is. You got to know, like, you got to know the flow at a table or across the bar at a front.
You can't just wing it. You're going to screw everything up if you don't understand it. So we immersed ourselves in hospitality. And for the last 15 years, it's gone well.
You know, we're we're prime vendor in in Marriott Hilton Hyatt. We're approved to decorate. I used to be Radison and Windham and work with a bunch of, you know, independence. Personally, like, I didn't go to college.
So I sort of had this sort of unconventional pathway where I basically just chased every opportunity that came my way. It either had to teach me something or it had to advance me in some way. And I just dove in and I ended up, you know, doing price strategy and marketing and like all this weird stuff that I had no business doing because someone had to do it. And that's the beauty of a startup is you get to, you know, try different things.
And so when I left the hotel, we moved to Orlando. We've been in Orlando ever since. And I'm married. I have two kids, 21 and 17, both boys, both lacrosse players.
And now golfers, they've picked up golfing last year. So that's costing me a bunch of money. Yeah, sorry to hear that. And in Florida, you can do that year round.
Whereas, you know, if they were in Canada, maybe it's only four months. Well, I'm here. We apologize to hockey parents because it's equally terrible. That's right.
Yeah. So like, were you then on like the front line of like going to pitch this company to like the hotels? Were you on the front line and like, how did you go about doing that? Yeah.
So when I joined the company, coming from my prior company, we did what we call consultative selling because we were selling to the Fortune 5000, which is like a year-long process. So I had experience in how to do that. So we came up with a process and we refined it over time. We had some missteps, but we ended up getting the point where we were closing about 90% of our opportunities because we would do what we call the discovery and we wouldn't charge for it.
And but it would give us access into the hotel or the business. And we would go there for like a whole day and we'd interview everybody. And then when we went back to the above property decision makers, we were able to give them a profile on what their properties were doing, like what we would stand there and listen to the front desk for four hours. How would you catalog that the entire time?
Like we had documents we created that were checkboxes so we can tally it. And in the interviews, we would just be taking notes. We had a standardized questionnaire. So we were able to go back and say, 70% of your front desk agents don't know what is beneficial about your suites, you know, because we'd ask them all, tell us about the suites.
What's great about them? I don't know. So, you know, we could categorize it. And also we would analyze their data and we'd be able to tell them, you know, and we got to the point where we could tell them within, you know, a couple thousand dollars how much they should be doing at their front desk.
And then we got enough masks where we didn't have to go every property. We would do the discoveries on the phone because now we got to the point where we had hundreds of comps that we could compare to. When we first started the first 50 hotels, we had no hotels. So we had to go in deep and analyze it deeply.
And now we basically we know everything that you could know about a front desk. So now the sales process is more educational and done, you know, virtually like this. But we've taken what used to be a full day discovery down to about an hour long conversation. And we take their data.
We give hotels a free analysis. And for restaurants, we're kind of working on the same thing. You know, it's like we can share with you what we've done, what we're seeing on a benchmark level. We can take the number of seats, kind of give you an idea of what the impact will be.
But a year from now, when we're in 2000 hotel or restaurants, we'll have a lot more much more robust data model that we can share with them. That's crazy. I'll be interested to see how this goes with the whole restaurant thing. Because a lot of restaurants owners, like obviously you're going to start with more restaurant chains.
It's easier to pitch to a group like that where they're just like, but like to smaller independent restaurants, most people think they don't need to pay for the service like that. Right. And maybe don't have the capital to do it. Right.
So obviously you're starting with more franchise type restaurants. And then you will build your model for restaurants, have your data together. And then now maybe you can go to a smaller spot and pitch it and like be able to do it quicker. Yeah.
And we're our initial focus is in hotels because in the 3000 issue hotels we have, there are over 8000 restaurants and bars. So that's where we're going to cut our teeth is in our existing client base. But yeah, I mean, the restaurant chains, and we want to get to the point where a small individual restaurant could sign up for like a freemium, try it out for a while. Once we have all the integrations with all the point of sale systems, we would be able to say, put in your restaurant code, give us the login credentials, and you can kind of get the analytics for free or something.
So that's probably a year away. But that's, I think ultimately we have to do that in order to get to the independent because I'd say 85% of the restaurant market are independent or small group. They're not the big chains. I mean, the big chains are big, but the restaurant world is so vast that if we don't have a solution for the individual, we're going to miss out on most of the market.
And okay, so that is obviously the next big step and probably you're very focused on that. But just a big picture wise, you envision any other businesses that you might want to fold into the tent here, any other style of business? Yeah. So the interesting thing about hotels is they're actually like a microcosm of the economy.
Yeah, basically. Yeah. You've got the restaurants, you've got retail, you've got spas. So I think probably, and again, it makes the most sense strategically to follow your existing clients because it's a faster sort of sales process.
But it would probably be spas or it might be meeting in events because it's a different form of food and beverage, you know, banquet and catering. And there's vast upsell opportunity. When you're talking to an event planner that's got a $100,000 budget, $5,000 increases doesn't sound like a lot, but it's $5,000, right? So it's just again, getting people comfortable with the idea of how to position an upgrade opportunity.
It'd probably be banquets or spa would be the next two. I think spa might be number one because it then transfers outside of hospitality. Again, there's spa companies that have spas and hotels, but they have 200 spas outside the hotel. So sort of like restaurants, what we're finding is there's a lot of restaurant groups that manage a restaurant in a luxury hotel, but most of their restaurants are outside.
So it's what we call the connective tissue between the hospitality and the broader market. So we would probably be thoughtful on what else could we do in the hotel that translates to the broader marketplace outside of the hotels. It's really smart as it might be thinking about it because you're right, the hotel is like a microcosm of the economy. And it's like a spiderweb that we can lead you in a million directions, because everything is now existing in a modern hotel.
It's like the 1980s shopping mall. Exactly. Yes, it is exactly the same kind of thing. And in hotels and in restaurants, you have different constituents.
You have the owners that don't always manage. And then you see a management company, you have owners, and then in some cases you have brands because they're franchises. So you have this, it is like a spiderweb. We actually use that analogy.
It is a spiderweb effect. You can get one hotel that's owned by one group, managed by another, and it's a different brand. So in that one hotel, you can meet three important people. And then the manager might, that management company might manage 50 other hotels that are owned by 20 other owners, and it goes like that.
And I think in restaurants, it kind of does the same thing as you have for management groups, and you have restaurant ownership groups. And you've got the chefs that kind of license themselves into these other groups. So there's these interesting sort of three or four party relationships. And if you're doing a good job, and you're reasonably priced, and you get results, the relationship aspect of that actually drives your growth, because they're taking you from one to the other, because they're not afraid to recommend you because you've done a good job.
Well, in the modern hospitality world, every single person, like you're talking about chefs or bartenders or whatever, are almost everyone's working on their own side private project now. COVID taught us that was probably smart move. And that's another branch you can potentially explode online. Well, it's super fascinating.
This was a great conversation, and I like really cool what you're doing. Tell all our listeners how they can get in touch with you, with the business, however you want to, however you want to market yourself here. Yeah, so obviously our website, www.frontlinepg, that's like Performance Group.com, is where we update everything. I'm really big on LinkedIn.
So we have represents on LinkedIn. I'm also on LinkedIn. G2FETI is my LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you or connect with you.
That's where we publish a lot of stuff that we're doing case studies and things. Those would be the two best channels to find us. We're also at some of the industry conferences. We're not going to the big restaurant conference this year, but we're going to be going next year.
It was a little too early for us to go to the outside world of restaurants. So we're going to stay in our little incubator in hotels for the next six or eight months. But yeah, so our website or LinkedIn are the best places to find us. If anyone has a comment or question or anything, I'd love to hear from you.
Perfect. I'll put those in the show notes. Awesome. Well, super fascinating.
It was a really interesting conversation, and that's a luck with everything going forward. You guys obviously know what you're doing. And yeah, the spider webs just keep going. So thank you so much.
And you asked me some questions I haven't been asked before, so I really appreciate the thoughtful questions you asked. It was a great conversation. Awesome. Thanks again.
Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you.