Ryan Volberg: Double Revenue Without New Guests

0:00Joe Dunbar: This is crazy. Right now, most restaurant owners are using AI to write Instagram captions. That's like hiring a Michelin chef to microwave a Hot Pocket. You've got the most powerful marketing tool ever built, and you're using it to punch up a post that nobody even asked for. Stop underutilizing AI. It could become a full marketing machine for your restaurant. And in this month's five-day restaurant marketing masterclass, I'm going to show you exactly how, step by step. I'm going to show you how to use AI to bring in guests on schedule. I'm going to show you how to turn a first visit into a fourth and how to fill seats on repeat without living inside of your phone.

0:41Joe Dunbar: We're going to use the same tools you already have and create a completely different result. It's going to be five days. There is zero cost associated with it, but seating is limited. So I want you to go to restaurantbusinessschool.com to register your free spot today. Now here we go.

1:02Ryan Volberg: Our industry is about to go into its no smoking on airplanes moment. We're going to look back in the next three to five years and say, can you believe we ran our restaurants with so little information about the guests who are actually sitting in the seats?

1:21Joe Dunbar: Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators, served up on the house.

1:35Joe Dunbar: What if the new customers you keep chasing are the reason that your restaurant isn't growing? Ryan Volberg has spent more than two decades building the tools restaurants actually need, From the first cloud point of sale to earned wage access, now as the founder of Guestology, he's attacking the most expensive blind spot in our industry. The anonymous guest who walks in, gets seated, and leaves without anyone realizing that they could have been a regular. In today's conversation, we get into why Frequency beats new customer acquisition every single time. Why Status is the cheapest loyalty tool you can own while discounts are the most expensive.

2:13Joe Dunbar: and how to grow revenue from the guest that's already sitting in your dining room today. If you're spending money to fill seats instead of keeping the right ones, this episode earns its time.

2:31Ryan Volberg: I think it begins with doing dishes in my dad's restaurant. I don't think it's a coincidence that when I kind of look back at my entire career arc, there was this probably nine or 10-year-old boy that would literally beg his dad, like, please can I go to, and I would cry if he wouldn't let me go, because I just loved being in the environment where things were happening, and the guests, and just all the beautiful noise of the restaurant industry was something that appealed to me, obviously, from a very young age. And so along the way, we'll sort of just cut to the founding of my first company, which was VivoNet.

3:05Ryan Volberg: And I worked for the family business a long time, and I saw a lot of the ups and the downs of it. And I think one thing that I realized is that it always felt to me that my parents worked so hard, but maybe lacked a lot of the systems and tools that they needed as independent restaurant operators to go beyond effort to actually having a system that would enable the business to thrive even when they weren't there. And so, again, maybe no coincidence that I decided to build some of those tools. So the first company was a company called VivoNet. And I had previously held a role at a conglomerate that owned a lot of sports bars and a variety of different restaurants.

3:43Ryan Volberg: And they had asked me to put a network together for their businesses and buy their point of sale systems. And that was the moment when I realized that the restaurant industry had kind of diverged from IT. Because restaurant technology's DNA is not from computing. It's from cash registers. and cash registers predate computers by 80 or 90 years. What happened is, is that we had this completely different branch of technology where over on the IT side, there was all these amazing things happening with computers. But in the restaurant industry, it felt like we were 50 years behind and we kind of were.

4:19Ryan Volberg: So that was the stimulus to say, look, why don't we create an enterprise point of sale system for restaurants that would be centrally hosted and whether you had one or 100 locations, It would speak up to that central system and you would have these amazing capabilities. And it turns out that the worldwide leader in point of sale at that time was Micros, now Oracle. And Micros saw what we were doing with this enterprise system and the internet at that time being very, you know, nascent. And they invested a bunch of money into VivoNet. And so products that were mymicros.net and iPos, Micros products were really our products or heavily influenced by us.

4:55Ryan Volberg: And so we went on this wonderful education with Micros, learning everything you could possibly imagine about doing the best POS at scale around the world. And so that was an incredible gift in terms of my experience. And so we won some very, very big deals, lots of ups, plenty of mistakes. I learned the hard way about how to not capitalize a business. All of that experience that came out of it really led me to a second startup, which was Instant Financial. We were solving a very different problem, which was around labor. So we were observing in all those years that we were at VivoNet that restaurants were struggling to staff their businesses, particularly with minimum wage hourly workers.

5:34Ryan Volberg: At the same time, we had this predatory industry called payday loans. And many of the restaurant employees were having to use those products to get between paychecks. And the thing that just shocked me was the misinformation around what the interest rates were. You think, well, payday loan, I don't know, we get different answers. that's about 32 % interest that you're paying for a payday loan. It's like this, that's correct, for 20 days. The actual payday loan interest, when you annualize it, is about 240%.

6:03Joe Dunbar: Oh my God.

6:04Ryan Volberg: Right? So what we said, look, if we built a system that gave hourly restaurant workers immediate access to earned pay after they finished their shift, that would be a huge benefit for them. And the employer that offered that would become an employer of choice. And so that's what we did. So we built Instant Financial and we were very successful with that. But also with the electronic tips distribution, we knew that many service workers, you know, they relied on tips in cash at the end of their shift. If we took that away, they might have to resort to payday, you know, because people were moving tips on the paycheck.

6:34Ryan Volberg: Because what was happening is restaurants were becoming banks. Everyone was paying on credit cards. They didn't have the cash. They were rolling armored cars in once or twice a week to bring cash in. And so we solved all of that problem with instant financial. And so, again, that furthered my education in really understanding, you know, deeply the types of solutions that our industry needed that just weren't available. And then after that, I went to go work with Park. And then I spent the next two and a half years of my life helping turn that company around. And I'm very proud of the work that we did there.

7:04Ryan Volberg: Two and a half years I was there. I think when I joined, the market cap was$400 million. And the day I left, it was$1.81 billion. Not that I'm keeping track of the pennies. And so at that point, I had gained expertise running a much larger business and more complicated public company. Unknowing to me, I had become a turnaround guy at that point because people loved what had happened at par. And so the next few years, I bounced around helping people improve their software companies, again, mostly around point of sale and restaurant technology. But along the way, started to work very closely with Google and building digital labor solutions for tier one retail.

7:40Ryan Volberg: And we were trying to solve problems around the lack of labor and the complexity in retail around just an everyday employee trying to keep up with all of the different products and how to sell them. And so we started using generative AI to solve those problems. And that was the moment that guestology became unlocked for me because this idea had been incubating in me for a long time. but suddenly now with the advent of low-cost generative AI and a bunch of the machine learning and the experience of practically applying that into real-world situations, I was like, aha, I think I know how to solve this problem.

8:14Ryan Volberg: So that's kind of my career arc in terms of how I

8:17Joe Dunbar: got here. So the through line is this. When I was looking at your career and the overall arc of your career, you know, I'm always looking for common threads. I see your life differently than you probably see your life. And I think the reason that you saw success in all of these different verticals. Like what I think is really interesting about you, your life, your career is that you built solutions that the industry needed. I think that everybody out there is building solutions that they think the industry needs, but you seem to have this understanding and maybe it comes from your childhood and your parents and that experience.

8:51Joe Dunbar: But what I would be curious to know is like, what is your working thesis? What is it that you think restaurants need and that has manifested in all of these different iterations?

9:02Ryan Volberg: I think I have a knack for finding the problem, the problem that matters. And I have an obsession with the problem. So I didn't look at generative AI technology and machine learning and sort of get really excited about that. That to me was the means to the end. To me, the problem was the anonymity of the guests. Like if I look back at these different moments, right, it was like, can you actually believe that a restaurant chain has 100 locations and doesn't know what their best selling item was until four or five weeks later. Huh. Okay, that sounds like a problem. What's the cost of the problem?

9:36Ryan Volberg: How much does it cost the restaurant chain that it would take them two months to change the price of a coffee, or that it could take an enormous amount of time and effort and errors to update menus? And like, what is it? So even though the problem, I think can be a very big problem, if it doesn't have a big cost associated with it, it might not be worth solving. So I think it's those two things.

9:57Joe Dunbar: I'm so glad you bring that up. Over the years, I've done a ton of consulting for a ton of businesses that wanted to interrogate the restaurant industry, right? They wanted to get in and wanted to be an active participant. And they said, you know, how can we get in? And Ryan, I've given everyone the same answer for years. You make it free. That it should be an investment, not an expense. The thing that you do has to create greater benefit than the expense, the associated expense of the thing that you sell. I think that you clued into that really, really early. I think that people are trying to solve problems that don't directly translate to dollars.

10:36Joe Dunbar: The worst question in the world is how much does it cost?

10:39Ryan Volberg: The context of that answer only matters in terms of how much does it fix. I think there's this response that restaurants have, which is I've invested in so much technology and actually a lot of it really doesn't live up to its billing, so at least it better be cheap. so I don't notice the$99 a month because I'm not really confident I'm going to get value. And I just don't think that's the right game for our industry to play anymore. And we certainly don't want to play that game.

11:04Joe Dunbar: In talking with you about Gasology and all of the things that you've tried to build, you always talk about money because you understand that like, if it doesn't thread back to making me more money or saving me more money, what's the point?

11:16Ryan Volberg: Yeah, you've just invested a huge amount of time and effort to not actually make somebody's business better, somebody's life better. To me, it's just the most important thing is what affected we have on the business and was it positive.

11:29Joe Dunbar: And so when you look at guestology, the core thesis, the core problem that you're trying to solve, and we'll probably talk about data, but you don't believe that the problem is data. No, I'm going to frame it this way.

11:42Ryan Volberg: Our industry is about to go into its no smoking on airplanes moment. We're going to look back in the next three to five years and say, can you believe we ran our restaurants with so little information about the guests who are actually sitting in the seats? So it's not a data problem because we actually have a lot of the data that we need. Like when a guest makes a reservation. Well, what do we know? We know that Ryan Volberg made a reservation to show up at 7 p.m. at this restaurant. We know that he showed up. We know he got seated at table 22. In fact, we also know exactly what he ordered in the point of sale system and so much other information.

12:18Ryan Volberg: The key is how do we take all that information, analyze it and drive it into the dining room so that the next time Ryan shows up, we are able to customize his experience in a way that does what? Either retains him as a high value guest or increases his visitation because we see the potential to do so. Again, I don't think it's a data problem, except I'll qualify it with one point. And I do think it's an important point. Millions of times today, this actual day, guests are going to walk into a restaurant and they will be completely anonymous. And it sounds like this. I'd like a table for two, please.

12:55Ryan Volberg: Sure. Grab two menus and seat that guest, those two guests at that table. And we have no idea who they are. This is the one exception where we do have a data problem, which is that is happening and it's starting to change, but it's happening too many times. every day. So to listeners out there, I would say the one thing that maybe it's time to appreciate is there are few data points more important. And I would even go as far as to say maybe there's one or two that are equal, but not more important than the record of the visit. That piece of data, which is this actual person, Ryan Volberg visited my restaurant on this day, to capture that data, The value of it is just enormous.

13:34Joe Dunbar: So, you know, I want to look at the landscape. You seem like a man that like in approaching something like this, that you would have gone on a desperate search to see if the solution already existed in an industry where there are platforms running points programs and CRNs and post visit surveys and all of these things. And yet you still saw a massive gap. So can you give me your perspective? What was the lay of the land like before you initially decided this needs to exist?

14:06Ryan Volberg: At first, it was a little disheartening when I started to really dig into the research because so many solutions present themselves as turning guest information into loyalty. There's these slogans that repeat themselves over and over and over. But what we believe is that loyalty is not created on a dashboard. Loyalty is certainly not created with an email offer to return for$5 off. One of the things that we saw was that there are very many solutions trying to solve the loyalty problem. And, you know, we should probably touch on, like, what is guestology trying to do? And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is help you retain your highest value guests.

14:45Ryan Volberg: And we're trying to get you more visitation from guests where there's potential to do that. We want to grow visits from your existing customer base. And there's a lot of solutions that purport to do that. but almost all of them start working after the guest is left. And where we're different from every other solution is we start working the second the guest shows up. When they show up to that host stand and say, I'm here for my 7 p.m. reservation, or they say, table for four, please, our system now goes to work. It identifies that guest in terms of what's their value to our restaurant. And we do that with a nomenclature, like the highest tier, as we call it, an elite.

15:22Ryan Volberg: One elite is worth 100 regular guests in terms of customer lifetime value. So they're generally about 0.4 % of the guests of a customer base. And then we've got VIPs and loyals and prospects. So we've got these different tiers. So the first thing we do is understand the value of that guest. They haven't even been seated yet. And we're surfacing this information. This is a very high value customer. The second thing that we do, though, is really important is it recognizes that not all guests in a segment are the same. That's a big mistake to make. And so what we realize is some guests are increasing in loyalty to us.

15:54Ryan Volberg: Some are stable and some are declining. They're falling out of love with us. So the minute that the guest is there, they've checked in, our system has already helped the restaurant understand two critical items. What's their value and what's their relationship with us right now? Then the next thing we do is we build a playbook for that particular guest. And it sounds like this. Now that Ryan is here and we know what his value is and we know what his relationship is, what ought we to do about it? in order to retain him or grow him. And so now we have a custom-built playbook for that guest. And then the final piece is, is we act as a co-pilot.

16:28Ryan Volberg: We orchestrate a number of actions and recommend a number of actions that the service staff should take while Ryan is dining with us so that we can maximize that visit. So now the service is personalized, it's contextual, it's delightful, we're equipping the staff. Instead of them walking into a dining room with a hundred heads, it's like, I have no idea who any of these people are. in our world you understand who all of the people are and what the opportunity is uniquely for each one and then the last thing we do josh is we keep score when our system has recommended that we take a particular course of action and it's done really are interested in one thing what happened next did they come back sooner did we retain them as a high value guest how is their spend changing all of those types of things and then the system gets smarter because the machine learning underneath all of this is leaning into things that work and is de-emphasizing things that work less well.

17:19Ryan Volberg: I think that's what makes us different than what I had seen everywhere else is the ability to impact the guest experience while they're actually there, not after they've left.

17:29Joe Dunbar: Agreed. That's why I wanted to have you on the show and talk to you about it. As an industry, I think that we treat guests and guest loyalty differently than we operate as guests. I think that when you look at who does loyalty the best, what is the truest equivalent of what we do for a living, I always look to credit card companies. Every restaurant sells food and beverage. Every credit card company offers you money at high interest. They all do the same thing. So how do credit card companies differentiate? They differentiate through status and access to the inaccessible. So when you look at the foundations of guestology, what I see is that what you are trying to do is create status.

18:15Joe Dunbar: You're creating status through eliminating probably the worst question we can ask in 2026, which is, have you been in here before? As opposed to the server walking up and saying, I know it's your first time here, Mr. Volberg. I just want to welcome you personally. You're going to have an amazing time with us this evening. Right, and then when the bus drops the dish on the table, They say, I know that this is the first issue you've ever had with us. Super excited about it. Let me tell you about it. What they are able to do is they're able to have these impactful playbooks that are tailored to the individual.

18:46Joe Dunbar: And what they do is they create more perceived value through doing this thing. Brian Canlis was the one that said it. He said, whenever I'm dealing with a recovery issue, the first thing I say, and I know it's going to sound creepy, but it works, is he goes, I want to let you know I see you. That is what people want. They want to feel seen. as an individual. And I think that you go a long way to solving that with generative AI, which I think has the potential to make things feel more techie, less personalized. But what you're knocking on the door of is hyper personalization at scale. And I think that's super exciting.

19:23Ryan Volberg: I think you've really captured the idea. We didn't want to reinvent any wheels when we built this. What we wanted to apply was the best wheels to the problem. There are three technologies that we lean into. One is segmentation, because I need to segment my customer base and understand how to treat the different segments and the individuals within those segments appropriately. The next thing was machine learning, to understand the patterns and the behavior so that we can get ahead of this and say, when we see someone like this, what should we do and how do we be confident that it's going to work?

19:53Ryan Volberg: Because that's the next thing. Otherwise, it's just guessing. And then the third thing is, I would say, like an icing layer of AI on top that delivers that last mile to the servers and build some of that creativity around how should we approach Ryan giving this set of facts. But one of the foundational theories that we, and you mentioned status and access, makes me very happy because there's a guy named Gabe Zickerman who actually did the work and said, what drives loyalty to brands? And Gabe came up with a four-letter acronym called SAPS, S-A-P-S, status, access, power, and stuff. And what he proved was the thing that causes the most loyalty to a brand is status.

20:33Ryan Volberg: But what Gabe realized was that status is also the cheapest. So how much did it cost the restaurant to say, I see you? Didn't cost anything. But what level of loyalty would that drive? Almost infinite. You've got me. I belong here. I'm one of your people. Down at the other end was stuff, right? Status, access, power, stuff. So what's stuff. It's transactional things, points, giveaways, discounts, half price this, two for one that. What he found was, is that those giveaways cause the least amount of actual loyalty to a brand, but are the most expensive. And I feel sometimes that our industry is kind of trapped down at the bottom.

21:11Ryan Volberg: That's our key mechanism. And I think we mistake or we conflate three terms. Term number one is loyalty with rewards. And we conflate both of those with traffic because traffic does not equal loyalty and rewards does not equal loyalty. And so the nuances between those three things, I think we really need to appreciate them because as we saw with a thing like Groupon, Groupon can create huge amounts of traffic, but it doesn't really create loyalty at all. So you mix these things together, maybe at our own risk. And so at Gastology, what we've done is we've said, we're leaning into this best thinking, which is the highest value guests value status.

21:50Ryan Volberg: And I think we don't want to attract the lower value guests who value transactional discounts. And I think over the long term, what we're starting to see is that the impact on a business that does those things is really, really tremendous.

22:02Joe Dunbar: I think to your point initially, and I see it in like that, you know, the things that we're trying to build for our client base, it's what we're trying to do is use contemporary tools to keep doing the same things that we've always done because those things work really well. And when I look as a restaurateur at my own career, and I look at the things that worked really well for me, which is something I don't think we really do enough. I think that we all look at the problems in our lives and we say, why God, why? But for the things that are going really well, rarely do we explore, why God, why?

22:33Joe Dunbar: Something that I was able to do at my dive bar in Hollywood that eventually I was able to port over to the other locations and the other tiers of dining was loyalty, creating a sense of ownership, taking someone on that journey from I like this place to I love this place. It's my favorite place to this is my place. And for us, what it became was it became a playbook. It became central to our culture. And one of the hardest things as a coach that I've tried to do is install that in my clients' businesses, because it's not something that you can install at an ownership level. And then it rides on rails and you can't work with just a select member of the team to get it done.

23:19Joe Dunbar: One of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show is because I think that you're actually providing that tool that changes the way people see the business. This isn't a restaurant, right? This isn't a restaurant that I went to for my anniversary. This is the restaurant that I go to for my anniversary. And even though verbally, grammatically, those sentences are very similar. outcome and the belief system behind them are very, very different.

23:48Ryan Volberg: That's a great insight. And I'm going to share with you something that we've learned because sometimes what I get when we present guestology is like, oh, guestology will make all of our managers as good as our best manager. And I'm like, you know what? We've actually found out that that's not true because your best managers are actually not capable of covering the landscape. And here's what I mean by that. What we found out at some of our customers in this top tier, this elite group, was that there are simply too many of them. So, for example, in one restaurant chain, there is on average about 240 elites that are making up, 240 humans that are making up about 8 % to 10 % of the sales.

24:26Ryan Volberg: But no manager, as far as I'm aware of, has the ability to recognize 240 people on site. And then we've got people coming in at different times. We've got high turnover environments. We've got all of that. So when we actually started measuring things, what we found was this restaurant chain, which is a fabulously well-run restaurant chain, was losing 18 % of their revenue from their elite guests. Yet they were operating at a very, very high level. But it was this invisible churn. They just simply couldn't recognize those guests. It actually gets much worse. The next tier down, which we call the VIPs, which in this case are people that were coming around once every month, there was 800 of them.

25:07Ryan Volberg: What you see very quickly is we've exceeded the ability of our staff to be able to recognize and address that many people. And so our system was going beyond sort of the human's ability to make the invisible visible, we like to say, and say, here's every single elite that's going to be coming to your restaurant today. And you have visibility to them before they've even shown up. Or as they walk in the door, maybe it's a walk up, whatever it is, we surface this. We say this is an elite, this is a VIP. So as a consequence of that, all of them were being seen. And we were able to reverse that 18 % revenue decline and in fact resulted in 101 % revenue retention.

25:47Ryan Volberg: So what that means is we not only reversed that decline in elite revenue, but we got a little bit more because we were so good now at recognizing every one of them and being able to just do something a little bit nice for some of them. Occasionally, again, it's that theory of variable rewards, not every single time that becomes mechanical and an entitlement. And they rewarded us with even more loyalty, even though they were already extremely loyal. So Josh, I think that's one of been the lessons on this journey is that humans have always had, now, unless you're running a 30-seat restaurant, this doesn't apply.

26:22Ryan Volberg: But if you're running a reasonably large restaurant, what we saw is it's just too hard to cover it. And we need support in the dining room floor to get that job done. And when we do though, the results are really, really impressive.

26:33Joe Dunbar: You know, all of this is rooted in I think a very poignant contrarian position. If I wanted this to be the most listened to episode of my show ever, I would name it Free Customers, new free customers, right? Because everybody wants new customers. That's it. It's all people want. Like that's the whole thing. If you were to pull a thousand restaurateurs and say, you know, what is the thing that you need more than anything else? They need more new customers. And we're not talking about new customers. What we're talking about is customer frequency. I didn't really care about it either until I was walking my dog, God rest her soul.

27:14Joe Dunbar: And I had this thought, Seth Goodman would call it an idea virus. and it was just the thought that popped into my head, which was what if everyone that came to my restaurant once a month came in twice a month? And then what if everyone that comes in infrequently just came in once a month? And then like, I started like pulling on that thread, right? And I was like, for my favorite restaurant, like what would they have to do to bring me back? And I was like, well, I mean, probably not much because I don't think that people have a loyalty problem. I think that they have a memory problem. And I think that we don't fit into their lives smoothly.

27:49Joe Dunbar: And if we did, it would be a lot easier for us to be able to bridge that gap so they don't forget about us easily. And what you're talking about, and there's so much data around it that I did separately because I'm an advocate of customer frequency, is that if we stop focusing on new customers and we just started focusing on the customers that we currently have, Magic happens. They spend more money at a more profitable margin. I mean, I'm sure you've looked at the data too. Give me your perspective.

28:19Ryan Volberg: It's ridiculous. So National Restaurant Association publishes an article saying that table service restaurants are losing 36 % of their guests annually. Churn, 36 % churn. So that is an extremely leaky funnel. And what we realized, and I think, I don't know that there would be one operator who would disagree with this, which is this idea that it's cheaper to get, invest in the guests you already have and retain them than it is to try to, like no one argues that yet there aren't really many good systems to do it. So what we were able to really start to do was to quantify and create a strategy around doing just that.

28:56Ryan Volberg: Because I think when you're dealing, you have to do a segmentation. You have to realize that you've got these elite guests and you need to retain them. Like that's job one. If you have guests that are coming all the time, you just want to retain them. And you should make that your first priority. Your second priority is kind of like your thought virus, which is which of the guests in my restaurant can I get to come more? And so our system, again, has a specific strategy for that. And machine learning is super powerful for this, which is to see signals. And again, I think this is where we go on, go past human ability.

29:32Ryan Volberg: I'll give you a very simple example, which is somebody comes on a Tuesday night and orders$150 bottle of wine. We've only seen this guest once, but they do that. What does that tell us? What would it tell you? They're probably not cash-constrained diners. It's Tuesday and they're spending a lot of money. So chances are there are people that dine out a lot. So that would be a signal that our system would lean into to say, we're gonna try and make this person a regular. And we've gotten really, really good at that. So if we look at what's happened, let's zoom out. We used to have this 18 % revenue decline problem in our best guests, but we stopped it.

30:06Ryan Volberg: Wow, that had a big impact on our total revenue. 18 % of that segment now there. Now we found all of these guests within our customer base that are showing a signal they could die more. And we're starting to act on it. And guess what's happening? So, for example, we call those prospects. When we act on a prospect, we shorten their visitation by 77%. So in one particular customer, prospects were coming on average every 95 days. When our system saw a signal and intervened on a guest, we brought them to a new cadence, which is every 21 days. So we moved them up two segments from a prospect to a loyal to up to a VIP.

30:42Ryan Volberg: So this is your point, right? Now, all of a sudden, we don't have the leakage problem. We're getting growth from within our existing customer base, very cost effective, very efficiently. And here's what I think the third spin out is. all of these guests are feeling so happy because this is heart stuff it's not head stuff it's we're making people feel noticed and seen and valued and happy and they're coming back more and what are they going to do they're going to tell other people and so what's going to happen is is we are getting word of mouth we're starting to get that new guest discovery but it's not through i would say advertising which all that digital advertising really is in systemic decline right now it's i I mean, you and I both know we ignore most of the stuff that comes our way.

31:24Ryan Volberg: I think everyone, right? It just doesn't work. But what really works is if I say, Josh, you know what? I went to this particular restaurant and you wouldn't believe the experience I had. And what are you going to do? You're going to go check it out. And so that's, I think, the consequences of getting it right for your best guests and then getting it right for your high potential guests. Is the new guests just naturally follow? Why? Because you're surrounding a damn great restaurant.

31:47Joe Dunbar: That's why. I think that the biggest pushback in everybody's mind while they're listening to this isn't the software itself. It's probably implementation. Is it they think, well, you know, how am I going to get my teams to do this? What I have found, and I've spoken with so many restaurateurs over the years, you know, they're always like, I can't get my team to do what I want them to do. And I'm like, well, they'll never do what you want them to do. I can't get them to sell for me. I'm like, they'll never sell for you. I don't think it's about bending people to their will. I think what it's really about is it's about aligning objectives.

32:22Joe Dunbar: And so when we look at using tools like this, I think the reason that you've seen wide adoption through large vendors like Ruth's Chris and Red Robin, and then also middle tier and smaller guys as well, is because it's not just good for the guests. And it's not just good for the restaurant. It's also good for the servers.

32:43Ryan Volberg: It is. I think that one of the things we were very deliberate about, we asked that question, it's like, why would anyone use this? Like, why is it just going to be seen as an imposition or a pain? We had a proud moment that came out of a very scary moment is we were very early on with the system and we had an outage. The API connection that kind of makes all this work went down for a period of time. And as a startup, you know, you're like worried, is this an existential moment? And we worked through it. But the COO of the chain that we were in, one of our customers phoned me up and he said, you know what, Ryan, what's been the best part about all this is the number of calls I've fielded from GM saying, when is this going to be back?

33:21Ryan Volberg: Because we feel like we're blind without it. What's happened is, is we are now allowing the staff to wing it less, right? To be able to feel like, I know who these guests are. I can approach this table confidently. I've got a system that's supporting me and saying, we see potential here. Let's go do this thing together. I think the staff have embraced it because it allows them to just act more skillfully. And not surprisingly, I think that the gratitude of the guest shows up when you do a better job. They're making more money. They're making more money. And the restaurant's making more money. And it's just a better place to work.

33:55Ryan Volberg: It's a happier place. And so the change is a bit scary. And people are just like, oh, this machine is going to tell me what to do. No, the machine is not going to tell you what to do. It is going to have your back. and it's going to give you the ability to go into your service with this really strong sense of confidence that you know who these guests are and how to approach them. The rest is just the magic that happens based on the values of that company.

34:18Joe Dunbar: I want to talk about launch to today because you work closely with restaurants, which I think is one of the reasons you're able to build effective solutions. But I would argue that the guestology was built in collaboration with the industry. You're a man that's willing to solicit feedback, take that feedback. How has guestology evolved since launch based on the way that it has actually functioned in the wild through these restaurant groups?

34:46Ryan Volberg: I think it's just been really ruthless listening to our customers. We collaborated early on with a wonderful restaurant chain out of Vancouver, Canada called Earl's Kitchen and Bar. Phenomenal operators, dominant in Canada. It's a premium casual chain. And then, you know, they've now really expanded into the U.S. And they're competing well. They've got locations in Florida and Nashville and Boston and Honolulu. Great operators. And so when we came to them and I just asked them, do you guys have this problem? Which is we just don't really know enough about the guests and the ability to tailor our service.

35:20Ryan Volberg: And they said, we really do. And I really love what they said to me. We're a guest obsessed organization. That's one of their core values. We're guest obsessed. But then the problem is like, well, how would you know? What would you need to see from a business that said they were guest obsessed? And what they believed was is that we would know a lot about our guests as they entered the restaurant and we'd be able to treat them as individuals. And they just weren't able to execute that as well as they wanted to. So they validated for us, Josh, that that was a big problem for them to solve and it was worth solving.

35:51Ryan Volberg: And we collaborated very closely with them to get these operational, I guess the way the system works within a busy restaurant really matters. And so those details, is it easy to use? Is it clear? Is it fast? And so my background in POS really helped with that. But then as we went into other restaurants, we went into a chain in the U.S. called Hawksmoor that operates steakhouses, and they're based in the U.K., so things are different there. And then Ruth's Chris down in the U.S., and then some fine dining places, and then, you know, more casual. We just kept learning and listening and learning and able to improve and iterate the software.

36:27Ryan Volberg: So the software really is a reflection of two things. So within the feedback we get from our customers, it's very practical. Our job is to apply technology and innovation and ingenuity to that. And I think that's what we've done in partnership with the industry is to build something that really goes beyond what they thought we could do, but that delivers for them because we've hit the bullseye in terms of understanding their business.

36:52Joe Dunbar: What should we steal from you? I was a decent restaurateur in my day, but the worldview that I've gotten from working with thousands of restaurants at this point, it's just giving me a really wide aperture. It's giving me a really unique worldview on the industry, on how I fit into the industry, on the things that actually drove my businesses to be successful, on the things that were hurdles for me. And through that, I've been able to distill. These are the tactics, the tools, the strategies that served me well that would probably serve everyone well? And so I would ask you the same thing. What should we steal from you?

37:27Joe Dunbar: What are the tactics, the tools, the strategies that have served you well, that would serve us well?

37:32Ryan Volberg: Well, I would say from the product standpoint, it's this macro and micro view, which is obsessing on the problem. Like this problem of every single day, millions of guests are completely anonymous and they feel it in the restaurant. So that's a big problem, right? That's the no smoking on airplanes moment, right? It's a big, big problem. But then what you need to be able to do, I believe, is you need to get into the absolute details of solving that problem. Like the software that's running in the restaurant that we've built to actually support solving that problem. You've got to be willing to get into the corners with a flashlight.

38:11Ryan Volberg: And really, because I think generative AI is the greatest 80 % tool ever. Like we heard about vibe coding and all these things. And it's all so wonderful. It really is. But the last 20 % is a bitch. It's really hard. And so I think my advice to anybody out there looking at it is go solve a big problem that's really, really expensive and then get into the absolute details of how are you solving it so that last little bit, it really, really works. On the operating side of building and scaling a software company, I think what I've learned over all of these years, and it's probably, this isn't a secret, but you should steal it from me anyway, is one of the best books I ever read was Who Not How.

38:56Ryan Volberg: And it's this whole thing of like, surround yourself with great people. I actually think that's 50 % of the equation. Founders a lot of the time are the freaking problem. And I found this in myself, which is I would surround myself with great people, and then I would still insist on making most of the decisions and talking most of the time. So I would say the other thing that I've learned as I've matured in this is is surrounding yourself with great people and then having the courage, that fearlessness, to just hand it over to them. And what happens is you find invariably they're just a lot better at a whole bunch of things than you are anyway.

39:29Ryan Volberg: Find people that really resonate. They're exceptionally skilled people. They're lined up with your cultures and your values. But then don't stop there. Get the hell out of their way. And if you do that, good things happen.

39:43Joe Dunbar: That's Ryan Volberg. To learn more about guestology and how they help restaurants see and keep their highest value guests. Visit guestology.com. Hey, it's Josh. I wanted to take a hot minute to thank you for listening to today's episode and to ask that if you are getting value from FullConf, please like and subscribe and be sure to leave a review. Those reviews matter and they help other independent owners and operators find the show. Also, if you want to take the stuff that we're talking about in these episodes from idea to execution, head to joshcopal.com. There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all of the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum.

40:26Joe Dunbar: I know you're busy, and so I don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.