Leadership under pressure: How Savneet Singh saved and scaled PAR

0:01And so I think the job of a CEO in today's world of AI is lay out the actual goals that you want from it. And those can change over time, but create a forcing mechanism how you want. Because AI is just too broad. It's too applicable to everything. And so narrowing that focus, I think, is important. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here, we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their part for securing investment, and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry.

0:39I'm your host, Alex Deema, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. All right. Hi, Alex Deema here, live at SaaS.USA 2025, and I'm joined by Savinie Singh, CEO of PAR, where we're doing a live episode of the SaaS Revolution Show. Welcome to Abney, welcome to Sastop. Thank you for having me. It's not your first time in Austin, right? No, we have an office here. You've got an office here. And what thoughts about, well, given you've got an office here, the city itself, as a tech hub, like fast-growing tech hub, what are your thoughts around Austin?

1:18Yeah, I think Austin's had this incredible growth and we've participated in it to a small degree. I think it's got that perfect combination of great food, enough companies here to create an ecosystem. Yep. And then, you know, it has all the challenges of every other city with too much traffic and housing getting pushed out, you know, miles and miles. But I think it's a great hub. I also think geographically it's easier to get to from East Coast. And so I think that helps it a lot as becoming a, you know, broader Texas being a, you'll see more and more HQs built out here, I think. And outside of being a CEO of a public company, who is 7E2?

1:54I'm a, let's see, I'm a dad of three little kids. So very busy. with them I'm a huge sports fan and I uh I truly truly love to eat yeah okay sports what sort of sports like all sorts uh so I am an obsessive sports follower so I love American football basketball uh and and baseball and then I was a really big tennis player growing up so I love uh I love athletics so I'm on a basketball team I try to help my kids out in sports so just kind of or anything and everything that's got a competitive... And I guess not just watching sports, but participating in all the sports helps with that. The other hobby of yours, which is, I think you said, eating.

2:34Yes, it does. I mean, for me, you know, I think that it's, you know, when you've got kids and you've got a busy job, it is so hard to pull your mind completely out of anything. And for me, you know, I struggle a little bit with things like meditation and my mind's just too wild. But if I'm, you know, playing a basketball game where you're running and people are yelling at you. It's one of the few things where I'm like, for a short period of time, there's nothing but one other thing on my mind. And I think that's really valuable. I find for me as well, I'm not very consistent with meditation. I want to do better because I think many entrepreneurs, CEOs probably suffer from quite high cortisol.

3:12And occasionally you get those crashes and you don't feel great when you do. And obviously meditation is supposed to kind of help with this. right uh but for me personally i find like cooking for instance like i i just never think about work yeah when i'm cooking uh and therefore on the weekends i like to cook yeah uh quite a lot so that that's something how i deal with that right and um and so you've been here today you've just spoken on the stage with uh with aj in uh i think some of the lessons you know scaling uh uh par um what he shared at the beginning so par i think it's over 400 million uh in revenue right and it's a public company uh i believe you were on the board you've been an entrepreneur before you're on the board then you became the ceo but you became the ceo at the time when the company was nearly you know dying it was like running out of cash you know had had a couple of weeks uh to live can you share a little bit about maybe how you felt coming stepping in or why stepping in at that time is that like quite a risk for you like i'm going to become the ceo but we could go out a business in two weeks like how many people would take that bet right yeah so you know i had been on the board uh you know for six seven eight months before i became a ceo and you know early in my journey on the board i started being like man this is this is i don't know if this is fixable yeah and so i started nudging for a sale and you know the board at the time was not interested in that they said hey let's find a new ceo and then in in trying to find a new ceo we realized we couldn't find a ceo that wanted to take the job or one that was we thought capable of taking the job And so then we moved to try to sell the business.

4:47And I think in the journey of selling the business, we realized that with the team we had at the time, we would not be able to sell the business. It just wasn't going well. And so, honestly, I thought I was coming in, you know, almost like a part-time job. I'll come in, I'll manage the bankers, I'd spend a little bit of my career as a banker, and we'd get the company sold. I didn't know we were running out of money. The true story that happened was, literally on my first day in the office, our CFO comes in and says, hey, we're meeting with the auditors. We've got like eight, nine, maybe 10 weeks of cash left.

5:19Is that enough time to sell the company? And it was like one of those, oh my gosh, moments, which is it's a public company with a lot of issues. There's no way we're going to have, we can sell this company in that period of time. And so I think my entrepreneurial energy just sort of like triggered and it was like, okay, how do we solve this? Because I really didn't want to be the CEO of a bankrupt company. So you had a very short window. It could have been a very short tenure as CEO, right? But it hasn't been. How did you solve it? Like, I mean, I'm sure there are many things, but what were some of the key things that you had to do to ensure that you were still around in 10 weeks time?

5:55So I think it's no different than any other problems. I think you've got to, if you can set the right goal, bring the right people around the table, catalyze the right energy and focus, any problem is solvable in my opinion. And we did that. I remember Brian, who's still our CFO today, I said, like, let's get everybody in the room tonight. and we need a cost savings plan that we can enact within 10 days. And at the same time, I need a meeting with these lenders to give us an extension and we're going to convince the lenders on this extension because we're going to make these cost cuts and so they can underwrite that as a way for us to extend their financing.

6:28And then we just started getting to work. I don't think we had the perfect plan, but I think it was a lot about just a ton of focus, which is our goal is to convince the lenders to give us a little more time and get the business as profitable as we can in a very short period of time and remove every distraction, which was sell non-core assets, cut out all the parts of the business that really didn't need as essential. And it was painful. I mean, we had to lay off 20%, 25 % of the workforce within 10 days. And that's a tough thing to do because many of those people have been there for decades. And so it's a horrendous thing to do.

7:03But in many ways, and I hate saying this because people's lives are impacted, but it was one of the best things we did because it set the culture of the company. I remember the day we did it, the prior head of HR said, you know, hey, I talked to the board, like, don't come to the office. And I said, what do you mean? It's my decision to make this decision. And she's like, well, you kind of look a little bit different than everybody else. You're a lot younger than everybody else. This might not go over well. And, you know, my commentator is like, listen, if I'm going to, you know, treat people like kids, they're going to act like kids.

7:29If I treat them like partners, they'll act like partners. And so I show up to the office and we make this change. And when we do town hall at the end of the day, and back then everybody was in the office and said, hey, we just disrupted the lives of 100, 200 people, whatever the number was at the time. And they'll never forget that. They'll be insecure for the rest of their lives because today we made them all feel like they were not good enough. That's something you never get over. And I know what that's like. I know it's a former household that's had financial insecurity. We have really scarred a set of individuals.

7:57And the responsibility of that falls on only me and those sitting in the front row that get paid these really high salaries that did not make a business that succeeded them. And all the blame goes to those folks in need. And not those people that were fired. And in doing that, it was funny. I hadn't planned the speech or anything, but it ended up setting the tone for the rest of the company, which is like, okay, leadership's going to take accountability for their errors and their mistakes. And then we, and I remember, you know, I went through all the cost cuts, the amount of money we saved, how we're going to save the company.

8:23And it was transparent to the entire company. And I remember I got off stage and I got like a semi-standing ovation. And I remember calling my wife after and being like, man, that was weird. We just fire all these people. And I got like a semi-same innovation. Like, I might be able to do something here. Like, that's the kind of culture of resiliency that we can do something with. Nice. And so what year was it then, let's say, the turnaround was like complete and then you could focus then on growth? I don't know. I mean, I think you're kind of always balancing the two. I mean, the hardest part for us was we got through that piece.

8:54We raised a bunch of money to go invest. We then had to rebuild our product. I mean, the core challenge, and I still say one of the hardest things I've ever done, is rebuild an enterprise software product that's installed in thousands of stores while still growing it and making sure the basis is alive. That was a full two-year journey. But during that journey, we had to still keep our customers happy. We still did an acquisition or two. And so I think it was really two, two and a half years into the journey where I was like, all right, we are now 100 % on offense. And from that point, then, in terms of like, OK, you're public, you've got pretty good revenue.

9:30But obviously, then, you know, each quarter we've got to meet certain targets and grow. So the strategy for you to do this, you know, I guess kind of like since that point, maybe what are some of the things that you've kind of brought in as you could relax a little bit from, you know, we're through the turnaround part and now just fully focus on scaling this public company. what can you share about like strategic focus for you to be able to do that? I mean, listen, I don't think we've ever relaxed. In fact, I say this to a lot of my friends. I'm like, you know, if you had, when we took over the company and we were a$250 million market cap, if you had told me that when we're, you know, a two and a half or$3 billion market cap, that I would be working harder and be more stressed then, I would have never believed you.

10:19I'd been like, what do you mean? I'm going to have a team do everything. I'm going to go fly around. It's going to be great. And it's, you know, so I don't think there's ever a moment of relaxation because as you get bigger, the expectations get bigger. The talent you hire gets better. So they demand more from you. And the obviously investors want more and more. And so I think we have always, we've never taken our foot off the pedal in that sort of intensity to win. You know, it's hard to answer your question of sort of like, you know, when did it, you know, strategically what we did. I think what we built at par was an incredibly ambitious culture that has been self-reinforcing for years and years now.

10:48And what I mean by that is that ambition is about how do we solve our customer problems? How do we solve them faster and better than our peers? At the same time, how do we build a business that we can be proud of that our investors want to get behind? And then where do we want to take this thing down the road? And so we started out doing restaurant point of sale. Today we have point of sale plus five other products. We started out just in restaurants. Now we're in a convenience store. And so I think, to answer your question, every year we start the year with five goals. We obsess over those five goals.

11:13We're comped on those five goals. Those goals change every year. but naturally what drives the success of those goals is this intense ambition underneath the people at par and reinforcing that culture so like my job is to make sure we don't lose that edge well i guess then on the culture point and you mentioned like on the stage you changed the values you felt like the values that you had were perhaps not the values that you needed as the business um uh can you share a little bit about like what they were and what you check why you changed them and how this has impacted the culture yeah so you know i remember like the The values, and I don't remember all of them, but it was stuff like caring, empathy, and these are not bad values.

11:48And by the way, I don't think any values are bad. They are, but they were not relevant. And I was like, what do you mean caring? We're gonna go business, I got out of business and all these thousand people are gonna lose their jobs or whatever, how many people, like that's not caring. In reality, the business has to win in order to take care of its people, take care of its community, take care of its shareholders. And so to me, I'm like, we're robbing our shareholders by not telling the truth that we might go out of business. We're lying to our employees who don't realize they're gonna be out of a job in the next amount of time.

12:10And so the reason we changed the values was that they weren't real. And it's because you can have a value like caring. But to me, caring is like, am I a caring father, can be a father that spoils his child? Versus a father that pushes their child to be successful, has tough conversations, is comfortable being, delivering being uncomfortable. To me, a CEO is no different, in the sense of if you care, you're going to build a sustainable business that can take care of that team, take care of your community, take care of your customers, take care of your shareholders. And so our values went from these sort of light, fluffy words to really tough ones.

12:41And the whole point and the advice I always give to companies is you want your values to scare as many people as they attract or even more. And the point being is like if you go to most companies' values, try to find a company's values you disagree with. Nine out of ten, you're going to be like, yeah, I'll fit there. I'll fit there. I'll fit there. And I wanted the opposite. I want to be like, that sounds intense. I don't want that. And so we made ours like speed, ownership and winning. So like it's very clear what our goal was. We wanted to win. We wanted to be fast. We wanted people that we owners, not renters of our company.

13:09And so that was a great filtering mechanism to scare people away. and attract those that really wanted to climb that mountain with us. How are you thinking about AI and the culture of the business with AI? So I'd be curious to see maybe how your person is using AI as a CEO and then within the business, maybe some of the communication to the team. So I think AI is obviously all the buzzwords, blah, blah, blah. I think for a CEO, your job is actually to create a focus on what you want to do with AI. I think the worst thing you can do as a CEO is just keep talking about AI being important because in the end nobody in your company that knows what to do with it And budgets aren't set up for it and it's like oh I want to do it But like I need an extra X amount of money to buy licenses and so on and so forth And so like my job I believe in creating AI at par is say here's what we want to deliver with AI And so at par we've said two things we want to create AI tooling for business efficiency So if you can find AI to create a business use case that makes us faster cheaper or deliver better customer experience We want to hear about it.

14:07We want to fund it. We want to support it Our second one is AI as it relates to the user experience of our products. And so the company knows exactly what we want to accomplish now, as opposed to, if I did this thing, I can rewrite all the code apart. I'm like, that's not what we're trying to do. And so I think the job of a CEO in today's world with AI is lay out the actual goals that you want from it. And those can change over time, but create a forcing mechanism how you want. Because AI is just too broad, it's too applicable to everything. And so narrowing that focus, I think, is important. And the last thing, and this is sort of my advice, and it could be totally wrong here, but I see all these companies creating the AI czar role, the head of AI, you know, and I generally find that to be like the innovation labs of companies that never like, they sort of become professors, not doers.

14:47And so I think if you want to be in the AI world, like that expense, if you want to go invest in those tooling, needs to be owned by the department in the line of business. And so that they are actually saying, hey, I'm making this investment in my P &L or my HR department because I believe it's actually going to deliver my goals better versus the AI team has got this. Final question, Stephanie. What's the hardest thing about being a CEO? You know, I think it's, and it sounds silly saying this, but like it's sacrifice. And what I mean by that is if you want to be a successful CEO, and maybe it's my own ineptness, but like you kind of sacrifice a lot of other stuff.

15:23You sacrifice an immense amount of time with those that you love and care about. You sacrifice your health. You know, I'm on a plane 50 % of the year. You sacrifice other joys that your friends have. And so I think that you've got to be all in if you want to be the best. You know, and it sounds kind of silly, but I think a lot of CEOs relate to athletes in a funny way. And I always think it's so funny because I think athletes are so much more impressive than CEOs. But, you know, when you read, when I read a biography of a great athlete, they're like sometimes I'm like, oh, my God, like that's exactly what I feel.

15:53But they've been so eloquent in delivering that. So I do think there is a sacrifice because, you know, there are very few large, in this exam, software companies in the world. and if you want to be the person that builds one of those companies there's no doubt you have to sacrifice something to do that there's not a balance and I think this idea that you can have it all is a key to being really, really average so to me it's a sacrifice 100 % well, Savneet, thanks so much for joining us at SASOC USA and also being a live guest for the SAS Revolution Show really appreciate it my pleasure, thank you for having me thank you thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the SAS Revolution Show I hope you enjoyed it And if you learn something from it, check out sasdoc.com forward slash events to find all the upcoming sasdoc conferences around the world.

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