Angelo Esposito [00:00:02]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome back to Wisking It All. We're here today with David. I'm not even going to try to pronounce his last name, so I'm going to let him do it. David from MYR POS. Also known as Master Your Rush Point of Sale system.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:34]:

David, the founder and CEO. Thank you for being here today.

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David Nadezhdin [00:00:37]:

No, thank you. So my last name is Nadezhdin. It has a Russian twist to it, so it's not always easy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:43]:

There you go. And now you know why I didn't even attempt to say it. Well, thanks for being here, buddy. It's good to see you.

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David Nadezhdin [00:00:49]:

Yeah, for sure, man. You know, it's funny how we went. How we went from different industries and all conversion to, like, from. From knowledge of hospitality to actually working in it to tech in it, and, you know, not trying to change it up a little. So it's kind of interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:04]:

Yeah, it's super fun. So for those who don't know, maybe just to kick it off, can you just tell them a bit about what is. And how do you want me to refer to MYR? Master Your Rush?

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David Nadezhdin [00:01:14]:

MYR. Everyone says Mir, and it's funny, but Mir in Russian actually means the world and. And peace, but which is not what's happening right now. But, yeah, the idea is that. No, it's. It's MYR. It's Master Your Rush originally was, like, built as peak, and then it had a name like Kumi. But now there's a reason why we went after the acronym MYR.

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David Nadezhdin [00:01:34]:

So, yeah, pretty awesome.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:36]:

So for those who don't know, obviously the point of sale space and the restaurant spaces are crowded, but what I think you've done really well is really found a specific niche. So maybe just to kick things off, tell them a bit about who or what kind of restaurants MYR is for and, like, what you guys do differently.

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David Nadezhdin [00:01:55]:

Well, it's funny, it was about 14 years ago. So we're not 14 years old as a company. We're five years old. But 14 years ago, I used to have a development studio, and Anthony Benda. People can look up who owned Cafe Mariad was the first 3rd wave coffee shop, basically, in Canada. At the time, he was the number. He's the number one barista in Canada, number four in the world. If you can believe that there are such competitions.

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David Nadezhdin [00:02:18]:

And he heard, he heard, he was right next to Concordia University, downtown Montreal, so super busy all the time. And he contacted me and he said, look, I hear you make apps. And I said, sure, what do you want to, like, what is it you want to build? He goes on a POS. I didn't understand what POS was at the time in any way, shape or form, but I said, but I heard of companies that you hear about. And it was like, lightspeed retailer or square or Shopify. His words were, they don't solve my problem in any way. So I was, so that got my attention. I was like, okay, well, what do you mean? And he goes, he goes, I make two.

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David Nadezhdin [00:02:53]:

I make 90% of my sales in a two hour window. And the difference between me being able to sell 200 coffees or 300 coffees is all about my way of being able to input an order, take an order, being able to kind of omni channel it, if you will, and relay that information accurately and properly to different stations, drips, coffee station, barista station, all that and all in real time and make it, you know, lightweight. Anybody should be able to jump onto the, onto this interface, know how to use it, not to punch it in, all that. And so I asked him, I said, well, so what is it that you want? He goes, I want McDonald's. I said, great, but that's not available for everyone. And he says, that's exactly. He goes, that's the point. He goes, it needs to be available for everyone.

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David Nadezhdin [00:03:38]:

And so we started to build this point of sale that was just super accurately built and super specific to a workflow that was like, how do I intuitively input orders as quickly and efficiently as possible with the least touch points possible, relay that information to different stations and different pieces of information so that I could move the line up as fast as possible. And so we ended up building that. And slowly but surely other coffee shops started calling us saying, hey, we really like what you built, like this feature, that feature. Then eventually that, you know, that third wave coffee shop idea went off to food trucks and salad bars and taco shops. And now we're in this world that, where QSR is absolutely dominant. So we built a POS that was super specific into the workflow of what is QSR today not compared to what is, let's say, a full service restaurant. A full service restaurant doesn't deal with volume. They deal with, they have a rush, but they're still, it's all about upselling.

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David Nadezhdin [00:04:41]:

So the POS itself, how you input the information is not, is not slave to the speed of which you need to do it at. Whereas a full service restaurant needs your product WISK right back office understanding all the preparation to the service. Whereas something like a QSR, not only does it need the back of house, which is what, like WISK does, but also needs the front of house, which is how do I get as many orders during my window of opportunity. Right. And so that's what we ended up building. And so that because we're so hyper niche focused, we ended up looking, not trying to go blanket cover and saying, a POS is a POS and it works for any kind of business. Let's say, you know, a la square, it's a POS for everybody. And then, okay, let's not talk about that.

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David Nadezhdin [00:05:33]:

Let's go like, talk about just restaurants, say, well, all restaurants are the same. Well, no, they're not, right? They're completely not the same. And so we ended up hyper focusing on that vertical. And so that vertical, its sole purpose is top line revenue. How do I input as many orders as I can? And so, because we were so focused only on that problem when the consumer world dictated that Uber Eats, Doordash and Grubhub are the way that people order, even though restaurateurs hate it, we were the first ones to be able to speak to those companies and say, we can do direct two way integrations with you. So, like, we don't. So there's no delivery, there's no Charlie with us. There's no orders.

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David Nadezhdin [00:06:18]:

It's. We are directly connected to all of these platforms. We are directly connected to our own order ahead application. So because we're controlling the number of orders that can come into our system. So we're always thinking about that, right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:32]:

That's huge. So, and just for context for, you know, people that might not know, I assume by also kind of not needing these third party ordering systems, it's also probably a, more efficient, but b, there's probably a cost savings. I'm assuming there's a, there's a cost for these third party aggregators or I don't even know what they're called, but third party ordering systems or.

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David Nadezhdin [00:06:54]:

Yeah, well, for sure. I mean, look, let's put it into context, right? It's nice to. And I'm not knocking on them, kubos, delivery checkmate. They're great systems. They're great systems when you're not, when there's a certain threshold of how busy you get. Right. But if you get to a certain level, past that certain level, there. There are fundamental flaws into that, because what you're doing is you're horizontally scaling your technology and horizontally scaling your technology.

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David Nadezhdin [00:07:23]:

There's multiple things. Well, let's first talk about you're paying an extra layer, so you're paying for a software that's an extra layer. You. You are inherently during your rush, right? That's hence coin master, your rush. Let's say it's a lunch rush. You have a two hour window to make 90% of your sales. Something goes wrong between uber eats, grubhub, or doordash, the middleware, and your pos. Figure it out.

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David Nadezhdin [00:07:57]:

You're on hold with how many different platforms, and now they're most likely blaming each other, because that's just the nature of the beast and your two hour rush is now done. You just lost a day of sales, and that's. That's massively terrible for you, right, as a restaurant or what you want. When. When efficiency. When volume and efficiency are required to be hand to hand direct. I just meant. I just said it.

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David Nadezhdin [00:08:29]:

Volume and efficiency. That's two layers. Why would I add a third? I want vertically integrated. I want to know that this technology that I'm leveraging to streamline my order flow, well, it's two layers. Like, it's vertical, right? So. Because if there's a problem, I already know that the pos or Ubereats knows that there's a problem. I don't need to now figure out where is the problem coming from. There's a problem.

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David Nadezhdin [00:08:56]:

One of them is going to know what's going on. Right. Whereas if you bring in that middleware layer now, there's so much more. So many more moving parts, and. Sorry, go ahead and.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:09]:

No, no, I was gonna say that it's a great point. And I'm thinking, like, for the average, you know, restaurant that, you know, before they start using mire, I'm envisioning the setup. Obviously, we deal with a lot of restaurants, so I've seen some of these in all these screens. But can you maybe paint the picture so they got their POS. They might have multiple terminals. Then. Is it one separate screen per ordering device? So, like, Uber is separate. Like, walk me through that, because I want our listeners to just imagine.

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David Nadezhdin [00:09:35]:

Perfect.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:35]:

What?

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David Nadezhdin [00:09:36]:

Yeah, yeah. So if you want. Actually, the best example to ever see is, look, I'm not. I'm not qualifying their food. That's a personal taste. But I am qualifying the fact that they are the best of what they do. McDonald's is by far top of the line. These guys have always been there because they.

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David Nadezhdin [00:09:55]:

Because they can afford to. I mean, that's fundamentally what it is. And if you look at. If you look at. If you go to a McDonald's, just go to a McDonald's and look, you will see all the tablets. You will see all the Uber eats doordash tablets, the skip tablets in Canada, Grubhub in the States. You'll see the. The ritual tablet.

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David Nadezhdin [00:10:13]:

If they're somewhere in a cosmopolitan, like, metropolitan area, those tablets are there for a reason. Those tablets are there not to interact with. They're there to interact with when you have to. Example, when you need more time with the drivers via Uber, Uber eats as Uber eats Uber the driver. Uber is still Uber. Separate company, separate pieces of technology. There's a privacy issue. They don't allow the point of sale to just be able to hop over into Uber and start messing around with that.

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David Nadezhdin [00:10:43]:

So you have the tablets when. When you need them. But the idea is, you're a QSR. You don't need those tablets because you're supposed to be able to make everything within seven minutes or less. That's the. That's the dream, right? It's like, you know your menu. If you have too many skus, you have a problem, right? Figure out your skus. And that's what QSR is about.

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David Nadezhdin [00:11:04]:

Be really good at very specific things and be able to output those things. Like, if you're. If you're a chicken shawarma place and you run out of chicken, you got problems. Like. No, but it's true, right? Like, you need to know what the hell you're doing. Whereas WISK comes in, you know what you're doing. But the point is. So.

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David Nadezhdin [00:11:18]:

But the point is this. I make a change in my menu, I change the price, I up it by a dollar. I forget. I do. I go on Uber eats. I go on Doordash. And, you know, I. Or not even, I go on Uber eats.

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David Nadezhdin [00:11:32]:

I go on Grubhub, and I forget to go on Doordash because maybe in my area, there's less doordash. I forgot to make that change. Now all of a sudden, I get five orders. There's a dollar difference. It's $5. Who's eating that? You are, as a restaurateur. Right? So you need a place where you can just press it. So, an MYR, you go into our admin panel, you set the price, you press synchronize across the board.

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David Nadezhdin [00:11:54]:

It's done. Now, when an order comes in, it automatically comes into those tablets, and then they get resent into MYR, meaning I don't have to take the order and reenter it. Now, let's talk about human error. Let's say, on average, you have 300 orders a day. If you're a really successful place and you have an employee or yourself, punch in the order wrong, who's eating that cost? So do the math. You just add it up. You say, okay, well, let's just say shrinkage, meaning human error. Shrinkage.

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David Nadezhdin [00:12:30]:

Three orders a week, punched in wrong. I have to give something away for free. Do the math. Do that per week. Do that for whatever. And not only that, forget just the cost. Monetary cost, everybody. I don't.

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David Nadezhdin [00:12:44]:

And this is what's funny. Even myself, as a consumer, I order something off. Uber eats, it, comes late, even if it's raining and traffic jam, I'm blaming the restaurant. Right? And so that review. And that review ends up damaging. It compounds. It's like, so, so what do I want? Your tech. Your tech should at least.

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David Nadezhdin [00:13:03]:

Your tech cannot necessarily solve for all human errors, but it could definitely minimize them.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:10]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:13:10]:

Right. And so. And that's what that. And so that's what it is. So something like MYR, you're able to make your menu changes yourself in your system. It'll publish it to all the applications, and when the order comes in, it automatically goes into my. There's no problems, because now. Now you're not relying on the human intervention of forgetting to do something or re entering something wrong.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:34]:

Right, right. And it makes a ton of sense. Like, obviously, you know a bit about WISK, but on the back end, it's this exact same thing when it comes to data entry. People manually entering their orders or manually entering their invoices from their supplier. And one comma, missing one. Then your cost is off, your whole recipes off. Like, it's such a trickle effect. Or just inventory counting.

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David Nadezhdin [00:13:56]:

Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:56]:

Like, did I count? You know, like, the amount of times, like, one extra digit, you know, you're typing in excel, throws everything off, and then you're just spending time wondering, did I even. Is the. Is the data accurate? And that's what I tell people sometimes. Even if it was a one for one, usually we save, like, 70% time. But even if it took the exact same amount of time, there's an argument to be made that on one side, you can trust the data. On the other side, you're always wondering, is this accurate? There's always that self doubt.

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David Nadezhdin [00:14:24]:

100%. You know, it's what I say, you know, I don't. I dislike the term very much. Big data. I care about relevant data, because garbage in, garbage out. So if you can at least minimize the garbage, quote, unquote, that goes in, then you. At least you're. You're.

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David Nadezhdin [00:14:40]:

You're guaranteeing that the garbage that's coming out is also the same garbage. It's not like, why is this different? Like, I have no idea. And then, and then, and then you can cause even more errors, because now you have the human panic error. It's called compounding problems. It's 100%. It's, like, in our system. Like, I'll give you an example. If you look at full service point of sales, if people look at, we'll say, well, why can't I use a full service pos for my QSR? Well, let's just look at historically, what happened with McDonald's.

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David Nadezhdin [00:15:10]:

I mean, McDonald's. I'm old enough. You're old enough to remember when they had the electronic cash registers. They had. They had, like, three colors is white, blue, red, and yellow buttons. And then when McDonald's decided to go to Pos and they're sitting on NCR, and they. They have their own POS sitting on top of the hardware, but they looked at all the systems back there. I'm not talking about the iPad generation of, you know, lightspeed, toast, touch bistros and all, which are heavy, less heavy metal than the systems like NCR micros, you know, and Matri D.

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David Nadezhdin [00:15:43]:

But what did McDonald's do at the time? They looked at those systems and they said, okay, well, these are POS. But did they use them? No, they said they don't work for our workflow, so they rebuilt it from the ground up, thinking about their logic and their. And their structure. So the idea is that, you know, well, I use an analogy, all that, I use this energy all the time, but it does drive the point home. An X seven BMW and a Range Rover, they're both equally same price cars or pretty whatever. Which one are you going to take off road? Well, that's exactly it, because the Range Rover has been built from the ground up, engineering wise, only thinking about that now. They're thinking about luxury and all that stuff. But it's easier to go from the bumpy roads down to the smooth sailing easy stuff than it is to go from something that's smooth sailing and figure out how to make it so that it's going to go through the trauma that the engine has to go through.

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David Nadezhdin [00:16:41]:

And so it's the same principle as what a POS for QSR is, right? And so it's not evident when you don't have a certain threshold and we know this. Right. It's like we have that problem. Like SMBs will call, I'm sure you have the same problem, and SMB will call and say, well, and I'm going from a cash register to, what's the difference between you and toast? And it doesn't matter what platform, it's irrelevant. You say, well, you say, how many? How many? You know how many orders you make a day? I don't know, 20 orders. Well, it doesn't really matter. You stick to your electronic cash register. No, but I want something cloud based so that I could do it at home and calculate the stuff at home at the end of the day.

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David Nadezhdin [00:17:22]:

Okay, well, that's cool and that's great. But where it really starts to make sense is that as soon as you get into a QSR that now starts thinking about multiplying multiple locations, end up franchising, et cetera. That's where we stand up. That's where we end up thinking about it. Because when you deal with, when you deal with a full service restaurant, normally, unless you're already a chain like Houston's or Texas grill or whatever, you're thinking about your one location and you want it to become a staple, right? You don't want it to just shut down after 25 years. We've seen those in Montreal many times, right? So you don't think about multi location, you don't think about those problems. And so the Pos that caters to that niche won't think about the pain points that'll happen afterwards. But when you, when we started as QSR, all of a sudden our QSRs are calling and saying, hey, I have five locations now, and I want to be able to manage it under all, under one roof, I want one login.

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David Nadezhdin [00:18:20]:

I want to have all real time reporting. I want granular menu management. And we're like, well, yeah, obviously, because that's our bread and butter and that's our niche. So we started to build franchise panels and, and multi location management and granular management, real time reporting and all that stuff, because suddenly we were no longer having conversations just with the individual QSR location, right? We were having simultaneous conversations with the franchisor's head office. And so now we're solving pain points in two places, right, at the same time. And that's, that's what makes us become very sticky. Like much of what I've seen with WISK now that you guys are touching QSR, you're realizing that there's a whole other world of problems.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:57]:

Yeah, a whole other world. And honestly, even, like, we've been getting more into QSR ever since we launched food. But just in general, even if we just look at groups or franchises. Yeah, it's the same thing. It's like you said, it's solving that initial problem. But then once they're in ten locations, 15 locations, they want to do the recipes once and push them across all locations, or they want to have the same inventory items so they can compare chicken from location a to location b. So the same skew. So you start getting to the specific and same thing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:24]:

One login, and you'd be surprised. Some of our competitors. I didn't even know this until these groups came to us, and they're like, ah, I'm tired of logging in and out of my account. Like, what do you mean? You have ten logins? Yeah, you have a login for. So things we kind of take for granted because, like you said, you built it from the ground up. You realize a lot of other companies have that technical debt where it's hard to change after you've been doing, you know, 100%.

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David Nadezhdin [00:19:48]:

100%. It's like, you know, if you. I use. I use the medical world as an example. It's like there's a reason why the Apple Watch is not met a medical, considered a medical device. And on their website, they'll say something like, we. We measure something like an ECG. Because if they said, if they didn't have the word like, then they would have to become ISO 1345 certified, which means that they would have to go all the way back and rebuild.

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David Nadezhdin [00:20:09]:

So it's not obvious they get a lot of people. You know, I have that question all the time. Well, you. You know, when I used to have a web studio, like, hey, how much to build Facebook, I'm like, or how long? I'm like, well, how long have they existed for? It's as long as they've been around, right? It's like, you can't just build it overnight. It's. It's. It's fascinating. It's hard, because I think in tech, it's very.

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David Nadezhdin [00:20:32]:

It's very difficult to. People that aren't in tech don't appreciate. Like they said, well, it's just a button. Why? And, you know, it's like, well, it's not just a button. It's like, think about Google. Yeah, it's just a search bar, but everyone can appreciate the level of complexity behind that statement. It's like if you're, you know, you want to build a house, you're like, all right, build a house, everyone. And I guarantee you that I only want bathrooms on the right side of the house.

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David Nadezhdin [00:20:55]:

And then when they're, when they're, like, putting up the splash and they're, they're already, like, mopping up the floors, and you're like, you know what? I want a bathroom on the left side of the house. Like, can you imagine what they would have to do? They have to dismantle everything, run pipes, and then rebuild. It's the same principle with code. It's just, you don't see it, so it's hard to comprehend that. Right. And so it's like, that's why dealing with what we're fundamentally on, it's like we're so focused on QSRs that when the landscape changes, which it is, and it's dictated based on four things, real estate prices are going up, food costs are going up, wage costs are going up, and the consumers are getting either more lazy or wanted faster, cheaper, better.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:46]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:21:47]:

Right. Which technology do you think is going to be able to adapt itself quicker or be more agile? The one that has been built, purpose built for that mindset, or the one that's going to duct tape itself. And then what happens when the duct tapes itself? You're going to send a rocket into space on duct tape, then you're going to make it to the stratosphere, right? It's like it's going to fall apart and.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:13]:

Yeah, to be clear, like, yeah, like, WISK has technical debt. Everyone has technical debt, but it's how far ahead can you get? And I think with WISK, one thing I got to give credit to chip, my co founder and CTO, I love Chip, is he always does think ahead and doing things now that we don't really need to do now, and we can be reinvesting it. But he's doing that investment now because he sees what's gonna happen in a year or what's gonna happen in two years from now. So it's getting ahead of it where I think, you know, the older school mentality was maybe like just clients, clients, clients. But then the tech becomes kind of obsolete. It's very hard slash impossible to build on top. It's almost like you gotta restart from scratch.

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David Nadezhdin [00:22:51]:

Right? Well, you either restart or you either restart or you, you know, you bind your people in with super heavy contracts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:57]:

Or whatever it is.

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David Nadezhdin [00:22:58]:

But, but, but times are changing. And people are, you know, it's not, it's not to negate, it's not to negate enterprise based systems. There's a reason why they were there, you know, but again, they were built in a time where the workflow allowed to build like that now. I mean, you know, not the cloud. It's not in the cloud anymore. It's like, you know, we used to have, we, we used to have, you know, software as a service. Now you have websites as a service, now you have hosting as a service. Everything is as a service.

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David Nadezhdin [00:23:31]:

Everything is like, based on what you need when you need it, not based on. I gotta be locked in onto this contract for three years and that's it. It's like, no, I need a loyalty program right now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:43]:

Right.

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David Nadezhdin [00:23:43]:

I don't like, why isn't it, why, why don't I have it? I need it right now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:47]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:23:48]:

Right. And so, and that, and that's the reality. It's like, oh, well, you don't want it? Fantastic. Well, I got this pos, that does it. That can just connect to another one. And, you know, it's, it's, it's such a different world.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:59]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:24:00]:

So, you know, it's, it's to say it's great for us because. And great for yourselves as well, because it's like we're that new generation of thinking. I think that, like, you know, like, it's, it's important to build and think about how you're gonna expand. But it's also very difficult to know when not to just start coding. Cause it's super easy to just start coding. So let's just code it. But it's. You spent three months, and then it's like you were working towards a trend, not an actual change.

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David Nadezhdin [00:24:33]:

Right? And look, we all saw it. The biggest example that I can think is Sunday and doordash during the pandemic. Oh, my God, sales are so easy because it's a, it's a trend. All of a sudden it's like, well, everything reopened and everyone went back to eating at full service restaurants. So all of a sudden that just dropped. I don't want, I don't want to have to scan a QR code to pay my bill. I want a server to come in, you know, and say, hi, how was your meal? Like, that's what it's about, right? It's not. And so it's very, it's very difficult to.

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David Nadezhdin [00:25:03]:

You gotta be very careful in what you do. And so, you know, it's examples. It's like we have this. We have, like, we have franchises that would come to us and say, well, we need this. And we'd look at it and analyze and say, that doesn't, that doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound right. We don't see, like, give it an anecdote. We had a loyalty program, not antiquated, but an old school loyalty program, a big one.

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David Nadezhdin [00:25:27]:

Say, okay, we want to integrate with you guys. And they're like, we want to make sure. And they told the franchise, like, we want to be able to have people sign up via the app. And I'm like, great. And at the pos, I'm like, what do you mean at the Pos? They're like, at the cash. I'm like, have you been to one of these? One of the locations? They're like, no. I'm like, they have lineups out the door. So they go.

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David Nadezhdin [00:25:47]:

So I said, okay. So I said, let's play it out. Hi, welcome to so and so brand.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:52]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:25:53]:

Would you like to sign up for loyalty? What's loyalty? What do you mean, sir? What do you mean, what's loyalty? Just give me your name, phone number, name, your name, phone number, and email. We'll sign you up. Why do you want that information? And I say, do you want me to continue with the anecdotal? I got a lineup behind the door.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:10]:

Exactly.

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David Nadezhdin [00:26:10]:

You want me to do that? Or do you want me to just say, scan this QR code, sign up, and come back later?

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:16]:

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's true. It's when rubber hits the road, it's the parallel, I think, on the west side is sometimes people will say, oh, yeah, but this other system does all these things. Or sometimes even, oh, Bobby. Pos does inventory. And it's like, look, there's a reason this exists and integrates with these poses, and it's once you're in it and you're doing the inventory, it's all the nuances that matter. It's like, oops, the app doesn't work offline, and I'm in the basement or in a fridge, or like, oops, I'm ten people doing it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:46]:

Or, oh, my phone died. Did I just lose all my data? So you kind of learn, like, as you're going, the real kind of things that you don't think about on paper, but when you're on the ground with those restaurateurs, you're like, oh, man, that's such a. I can't believe we didn't think of this or this. And you start kind of improving, improving, improving. And then years later, people are like, oh, this is great. Well, you know, I can't take all the credit. It's great because of client feedback that we kept improving and, well, exactly.

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David Nadezhdin [00:27:12]:

And your feedback was very specific. You were able to tailor to that. That's why, like, yeah, we have. We have an inventory module in our system, but it's like, it's for, like, the mom and pop that's like, I can't afford the WISK. It's like we don't lose the business, but for to franchise, it's like they're like, we'll use your inventory. Just build it out more. And I'm like, so you want me to do what did for the last five years? You want me to just build it for you in three months? Yeah, no problem. I got you, like, no, no, you.

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David Nadezhdin [00:27:38]:

It's better to have a bundled integration so that you know that the back of house is going to be so solid and looked at. It's like, you know, I keep using the car analogies, but it's like, look, everybody. I don't know what happened, but it's like every single car company decided to just create, like, the middle, the middle line, the x three s and the. The x one s and x two s. And then, you know, the Mercedes. Meanwhile, you have Hyundai. That's like, we're gonna have our models. And then they come out with the Genesis and, like, this rivals the Bentley because they figured out their manufacturing process.

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David Nadezhdin [00:28:08]:

They figured out how to be able to do one offs when you place the order. They figured out the niche of what it is, what makes a car difference. It's like, why is it that the Genesis can sell itself at 80,000, you know, canadian, which is 50,000 for whoever's listing on the United States, but, right. It's like there's a reason because they realize they're like, okay, luxury, luxury. If we can't figure out how to manufacture one offs without the hand made stuff like Bentley, no one will ever be able to get there. And so it's going to be this discrepancy. Meanwhile, you got all the other car companies like, how do we make as cheap as possible? And then it's like, who cares? Yeah, their dime a dozen. And it's the same principle.

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David Nadezhdin [00:28:46]:

It's like, you know, which one. Which one are you going to take off road? And so, and so it's like, yeah, it's the same principle with tech. And I think people don't. That don't necessarily understand tech or don't want to take the time to appreciate tech because I didn't understand it's the time to appreciate what it takes to build proper tech. It's like, there's a reason why, like, even yourselves at risk, you don't do scheduling at a greater granular level because seven shifts is doing it super well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:15]:

Right, right.

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David Nadezhdin [00:29:16]:

And if you're a franchise, you know, within the same city, within same, let's say, downtown core, and you got 30 locations and you have 250 employees and they're cross pollinating between stores, and you got scheduling an SMS. Well, you know how much work that's going to take to build seven ships? Did it. So why not use them? Yeah, because you can't always compare it. You can't just be like, well, so it's, it's. But it is difficult because budgets are. Budgets are an issue. Right. But I think that if companies like ourselves, working with the franchises that we have, can build proper, like, unit economics, case studies.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:01]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:30:02]:

Like, properly show, like, you know, like, just the example of, like, direct integration. Why don't. Why would I care about direct integration with Uber eats and all that? I got, you know, other ones, the middlewares. Okay. How many mistakes could happen? Three. How was your average ticket size? 20. All right, so this pays for itself. Right.

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David Nadezhdin [00:30:21]:

So it's. It's difficult. It's not always easy to convey that message. Yeah, I think that. I think that those. That. I think that the SMBs are much more difficult to explain that to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:37]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:30:38]:

Franchises are the new franchises, not the old, not the ones that are established with enterprise based systems that have to, like, swap out equipment. That's. That's not an easy task. Right. But the up and coming ones, those are the best ones that. To talk to because, you know, if they're. They're in the business of selling franchises the way that they're gonna sell franchises, the same way that we're gonna show to them that our technologies helps them make more money and save money, because that's fundamentally how they sell franchises.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:06]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:31:06]:

Sign up with us, not with them. Right, right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:08]:

That makes sense. And it's funny because on the, I almost feel like on the restaurant side, there's kind of, and I guess most businesses, but what I've seen is, like, generally restaurants, it's a lot easier to sell, you know, a revenue generating solution than a cost saving solution. Right. It's. It's. I could tell someone, I'll save you 5000 a month. They're like, interesting someone. Then a promoter can come and say, I'll get you 20 clients a day.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:27]:

And they're like, I love it. I'm in. And it's. It's funny how it kind of works, but I think, yeah, the one shift that we've seen at least is, you know, post COVID era, at least, so. Feels so weird saying that. But, like, after COVID, we did find that a lot of restaurants became more cost conscious and realized when they did have to close down or be at, you know, minimal capacity, they took those things more seriously. I mean, a lot did, but just a bigger percentage started seeing costs of goods and seeing their ordering and supplier costs and recipe costing and inventory, all these things became more important. So that was one thing that actually we've seen shift.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:03]:

And I think now people are thinking more holistically and they're realizing, and it's not just how do I make more top line, which is a part of it, but it's like, how do I increase those margins, you know?

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David Nadezhdin [00:32:12]:

Well, 100%. And not. And then. And not just that. I think that back a house. And I think that the most important thing is. Is exactly that. It's like, you need.

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David Nadezhdin [00:32:22]:

It's not just you want to have a system that gives you the best top line revenue and, like, ours or have a system like yours that's like, oh, it's gonna help me figure out my costs. It's. It's having companies like both of us be able to bundle ourselves together. And then, as you know, we discussed over time, like, start to feed back the information from front to back, back to front, to start understanding what are the best choices to be made in order to maximize front to house and back house. Like, great. You're saving your costs on a dish that you're not even selling that much, right? Or you don't know how to promote it as much. So what's the point?

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:00]:

Right?

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David Nadezhdin [00:33:01]:

What's the point of doing that? Wouldn't it? You know, like, it's so funny to see franchises copy each other. It's so funny. Like, we see it every day, but it's like, go back to basics. Like, you know, when there. When there is it. When there is a Michelin star. And by the way, this is true. Everyone could google this if they want.

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David Nadezhdin [00:33:19]:

There is a Michelin star food truck in Singapore. The meal is cad2, which is ten cents us because they make one thing and they Michelin star. How do you beat that? How do you beat that?

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:34]:

It's good for inventory. It's good for the.

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David Nadezhdin [00:33:37]:

You know what I mean? You need it. You need an iPhone eleven and a calculator and you're good to go. Right? That's awesome. But, you know, it's like, you gotta. So. But knowing that being able to have front end tools that can tell, can suggest, based on sales frontline, what you should try being able to, at the same time, query your back end and say, is this. Is this really the item that I want to be the one pushing? Even though. Even if I sell ten of them more, what are my margins going to be at the end? Or if I get.

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David Nadezhdin [00:34:16]:

If I made more margins on this, on the Weigu steak that I'm bringing in to make way goo burgers? But I'm only selling two. Right, but if you don't have the right systems that can tell you accurately the back of house and accurately the front of house that are working together, much like we are now, you're still going to have to figure out and have an excel spreadsheet and be like, okay, what's happening here? Yeah, right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:39]:

No, that's fair.

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David Nadezhdin [00:34:39]:

And so that's where the technology becomes interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:42]:

Yeah, no, I agree. And like, you know, we've spoken about some of these things, but, yeah, just futuristically, you know, we think about predictive and maybe price elasticity and, you know, having certain margins on certain dishes and based on the invoices being scanned, you know, from suppliers on the west side, adjusting the price on the MYR side. So there's this whole kind of concept of just giving an experience that doesn't even exist yet. Right, right.

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David Nadezhdin [00:35:05]:

No, it doesn't. It doesn't. I mean, we were talking about, again, you know, I can't wait to get into, like, I hate buzzwords, but, like, true bi. Because, like, you know, like, what we have, like, your. What you have as data is b to b, but, like, from the supplier. So b to b. Yeah, we have b to b to c, which is like, we know their customers and where they're going eventually. You know, then that's where we want to go as a company, is to be able, and I'm sure WISK as well, is like to say you should raise your price by $0.25 on your lattes and you won't see a dip in sales at all.

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David Nadezhdin [00:35:43]:

Right. And be able to suggest those kind of, those kind of pieces of information.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:48]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:35:48]:

And knowing that, you know, based on the costs of certain goods, you can. You should. You should keep your price low. Don't raise it. Don't raise it. Actually, even though the back end milk went up. Don't raise it because all your other competitors or whatever, they raised it, and now they're seeing drops. There's so much value.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:07]:

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. And I'd love to hear for, like, people listening. Right? Maybe. We have a lot of restaurant tours that listen, can you walk through maybe some, you know, case studies? You don't have to name the client, but just to kind of paint the picture so a franchise is interested. They're like, okay, wow, this sounds awesome. A pos that can actually help for my, you know, multi venue setup. And it's, you know, I need that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:27]:

That speed. I need all these things. Cool, cool, cool. What, I mean, number one, what does the onboarding look like? What does the setup look like? And then what are some kind of wins that you've seen with some of these clients to just share with our listeners?

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David Nadezhdin [00:36:39]:

Yeah, well, it's simple. We. Number one is, you know, what we do is we'll obviously understand what are we dealing with as a menu. So, you know, what, is it true QSR, is it not? QSR is a fast casual, is a food truck, whatever. We start to understand, we start to look at their current operations and see, like, where can we work? You know, we'll do a site analysis and see where can we shave. Not necessarily cost, but let's say time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:03]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:37:04]:

Example, you're. You're a pizza house, and you only start making the meal after you get paid. But on a Friday, you have 400. 400 orders. Right. So after you get paid. So from the moment you say, that'll be 1699 on average, I could take up to a minute. Okay, well, why not send it like McDonald's does? As soon as you confirm the order while the person's paying.

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David Nadezhdin [00:37:26]:

It's already being started in the kitchen. Why would I do that? What if the person doesn't pay me and leaves? How many times does that happen a year? We'll pay for that. Okay. Because the difference is that extra minute is 400 orders. Well, that's 400 minutes. You just saved yourself for more orders. So we do a site analysis. We'll definitely start a pilot.

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David Nadezhdin [00:37:43]:

So we do a pilot. We'll do a pilot, at least in one to two or three locations, so that not only does the local one location understand the POS itself, but the franchisor is going to see what they can control granularly and the real time savings of reporting and all of that. That's very important because, you know, so give a context to that. One of our restauranteurs, franchises, Bustan, they're famous in Quebec. They're now expanding in Canada. They. They were literally. They were literally making that.

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David Nadezhdin [00:38:15]:

When they had 35 locations with us, they would spend 5 hours a week. Their controller would spend 5 hours a week taking our reports, calculating royalties, and publishing invoices and their accounting softwares. They're now at 65 locations. So you can imagine how much time that would take them if we didn't build the automation of that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:33]:

Wow.

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David Nadezhdin [00:38:34]:

So the automatic. So just the savings of their. Of their accounting staff, the human errors that happened with them. Yeah, that was one thing. Just. Just by being able to take out. To take out an iPad at any time when there's a lineup out the door, and we call it a rover. So it's like a cache where you can at least go line bust.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:56]:

Okay.

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David Nadezhdin [00:38:56]:

And just take an iPad so you don't have to call us. You just grab an iPad, download our app, enter your activation key, and you go in the lineup, and you start taking orders down the line. And the barista is still making orders. So dispatch coffee saw an increase of 30% right off the bat. 30% of sales. Because. Because past the door, every person behind that door was a look and leave syndrome. Ads.

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David Nadezhdin [00:39:20]:

Busy. I'm gonna go. That happens twice. Person's never coming back. It's muscle memory. So these are. Those are the kind of things the. The flow of not making mistakes on orders, the savings right there, the ability to spin up and control.

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David Nadezhdin [00:39:38]:

And control granularly pricing, increase sales. So I won't mention the name of the. Of the franchise, but it's a big burger chain that crossed into Canada, came from the states. They chose us over NCR, which is a nice win for us. But because their locations are so dispersed in greater Canada.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:01]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:40:01]:

They're able to have very granular pricing. So at this location, it'll be $0.10 more than that one, etc. If they're all within the same city, obviously, they can't do that, because people are gonna be like, what the hell?

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:13]:

Why?

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David Nadezhdin [00:40:14]:

But they can't. But they can do it. When it's dispersed, and they do it from their cell phone, they don't have to call us. Figure it. They just add new rule. This price dislocation. Click, click, click, save. Done.

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David Nadezhdin [00:40:27]:

This kind of. This kind of reactivity, this kind of. This kind of so. And not just granular, let's say if that's kind of stuff, the way it's set up. Okay, well, I have a front facing. I have a street facing store. I need two caches, one kitchen, download iPads and there you go. Configure it for that location.

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David Nadezhdin [00:40:47]:

I have one food truck, no kitchen. Okay, click. I don't want my items that are punched in the cash relate to a kds at this location. I want to have a rover because I'm at a festival near the food truck, and I want people to. I want a guy to walk around and take orders around there. Perfect for that location. That's the configuration. You didn't call me.

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David Nadezhdin [00:41:07]:

You didn't call our support. It's done. And so these things, they save time, they save money, they save precious abilities to adjust and figure out how to maximize square footage, which is what it's.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:19]:

All about in QSR big time. And what do you find is your sweet spot? I mean, I know it sounds like you guys are getting bigger and bigger groups. Are you finding a sweet spot right now in terms of number of locations or pretty flexible on that side?

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David Nadezhdin [00:41:30]:

So we're pretty flexible. Like, we go all the way up to. We have now one at 135, but anything from four to 20 is, like, a no brainer for us. Anything above that, it'll usually already have an established system that we'll have to, like, work on and, you know, convinced, not convinced by analyze, explain why they should switch to us and. And the work that it takes to do that, whether it's financing options, whether because, you know, you have 60 locations, you got to buy, you know, 60 Epson printers. Not cheap. Yeah, it adds up. And that's just printers.

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David Nadezhdin [00:42:07]:

I ain't talking about iPads and stuff. Right. So. So there's that legwork. But. But recently, you know what. What's fascinating is that we did QSR, and now we're this close. Hopefully, we'll be able to put a press release soon.

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David Nadezhdin [00:42:23]:

But we're so close to converting a massive retail franchise in Quebec that they put our QSRs to shame the amount of volume that these guys transact. And so. But because we connected to a barcode scanner, which people say, well, why QSR? Well, we connected to a barcode scanner because a lot of people started selling wine during COVID and lockdowns and coffee, and so they needed a scanner. So we did it all of a sudden, because we have a franchise panel. We have granular control. We have a very simple, intuitive POS. We have all the integrations that people would need on inventory back. Whatever it is, all of a sudden, this retail brand is like, we are QSR.

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David Nadezhdin [00:43:09]:

We're like, what do you mean? They're like, we're quick service retailers get it. So you need something simple, stupid, fast and easy to manipulate. Yes. Perfect. And now we're, you know, interesting. So, it's, it's good because again, it's like the core. It's like, you know, I always, I always say horizontal versus vertical integration. Apple is horizontal.

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David Nadezhdin [00:43:30]:

They're trying to be vertical, their icloud and this and that. But technically, if someone made a better phone than the iPhone, someone made better Airpods than the Airpods, someone made a better laptop than the laptop, those would just disappear. So horizontally you just start dropping. How do you destroy Google? You want to destroy the entire essence of search, the entire essence of vertically integrated information. I don't know. It's going to be hard to do. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:52]:

Yeah, fair enough. That's crazy. It's crazy. On the retail side you find same types of POS, competitors and stuff. Or is it totally different when you look at retail versus, because I'm more familiar on the restaurant side, right. I don't know.

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David Nadezhdin [00:44:10]:

Yeah. For sure. No, when I go into retail space. So what we've seen so far is that we'll, we'll be competing against the, anybody who's using like the blanket, all kind of retail. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not negating, by the way, I love square. I think the company's phenomenal. But it's, the square Pos is trying to be blanket across like it's good for everybody. And that's fine.

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David Nadezhdin [00:44:29]:

That's great because they, they're not even a POS, they're their payments company. That's what they are. It's like everyone thinks Clover is a pos. No, it's not. Clover is a payments company owned by first data, owned by Pfizer. And the clover is just a product. It's a necessary evil to get in the door. So, but that's a blanket all kind of system.

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David Nadezhdin [00:44:45]:

So when we go, now that we're seeing it, when we go into retail and they're using kind of a blanket all system, we're starting to compete. We would never go into like a Hudson's bay or a sacks like. No, it's like, that's a whole other animal. And then we know our place as a company.

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Angelo Esposito [00:45:04]:

That makes sense.

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David Nadezhdin [00:45:05]:

Cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:45:05]:

And so let me ask you this, you know, just to kind of wrap things up. I'd love to hear, number one, where do you see kind of mirror going in the future? It sounds like you guys are crushing it. With franchises growing, getting bigger and bigger groups really tackling and helping them with those, you know, hurdles and operational side. What's, what's next for, for my.

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David Nadezhdin [00:45:24]:

I think it's a good question. I think, I think ideally what we're trying to achieve as a company is to, is to build a, is to build a. I don't want to sound cheap when I say this, but to build an enterprise like solution at a cloud based price. Right. And it's, it's like you don't need front facing to be heavy, you need backup and to be heavy, like ERP integrations. And we're never, ever trying to be like, oh, we're going to go after Oracle and that's, no, they're there for a reason, but we can tie into them. But your front facing, you don't need heavy, you don't need heavy hardware. You don't need things that people need to be trained on for three days.

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David Nadezhdin [00:46:08]:

You need easy, stupid, lightweight, simple, omnichannel, automated and automation. When you look at true automation, it always looks like a ballet. It's always smooth because behind simplicity is a lot of complexity.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:26]:

Agreed.

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David Nadezhdin [00:46:27]:

Right. But if something looks simple but complicated, it's because it's really badly done. And we know those systems and not just in our software, it's in most software, enterprise based platforms because they didn't have the luxury that you and I have now, which is we don't have to think about servers. We don't have to be like, well, we have to think a little bit about servers. We have to be like, all right, we need an office and we need cages and we need power. And it's like, no, we just go on AwS and click, click, click. And it's, you know, it's like, it's a different beast. We can focus on very specific things.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:00]:

Yeah.

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David Nadezhdin [00:47:00]:

And so I think that's where, I think that's where MYR is going, is that our goal is to be able to not beat out NCR, but I would love our company to be a contender. We're like, okay, you know, are we gonna go with this? We're gonna go with that. I'd love to sit at the table with the big, with those big companies and be like, we got there because, because we can't do what they do necessarily at the franchise level that they're doing. And Os is allowing other companies to plug in, but at least be an option for some of them that can't necessarily, that don't necessarily want to go all that way. I mean, I think that could be a nice place.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:44]:

That's awesome. And I mean, you know, we've been chitchatting a bit. And one thing I'd love to kind of plug it here. One thing I love to see, so for, you know, restaurateurs, listening franchises and groups, QSRs that can really benefit of, you know, top, top of the line, front of house, what you heard here, right, in terms of operationally integrating with your ordering systems, making it easy to kind of Master Your Rush. And then on the flip side, looking for that back house, David and I have been chatting. We're going to figure out a bundle for that type of clientele so they can really get something that's the best of both worlds. There's going to be some kind of special bundle pricing for that. So right now, I think what we're going to do is we're going to figure out how to open it up to these franchises and really kind of do what you alluded to, David, which is some kind of case studies, understand their needs, how many locations, what are their pain points, and see how we can make it a really, really good bundle group.

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Angelo Esposito [00:48:36]:

So it's a no brainer for them.

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David Nadezhdin [00:48:37]:

Yeah, I mean, look, we got, we got in it. We got in it because we saw, we, we got in it because we saw it. Like you said at the very beginning, crowded space. It's a crowded space. Why the hell are we doing this? We're not, we're not, we're not, we're not kamikazes because we definitely see that there is, that there's a need that's not being addressed and, and, and we're doing it. And I think that. And that's why, that's why, you know, thank you for having me because WISK is, since the day I saw it, I was like, man, this, these guys, these guys get it. They get it.

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David Nadezhdin [00:49:04]:

They get it where they're going. And that's, and that's also a great point. It's like, do you want, if you're going to go and venture into the technology sector, do you want to have a technology company that is continuously paying attention and continuously working on its tech stack or the ones that say, this is all you need? Don't worry about it. It's like, well, I don't. If this industry isn't evolving all the time, I do want a tech stack that's evolving all the time, too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:49:32]:

Agreed. Amazing. Well, David, thank you for being here today. Once again, MYR CEO and founder, Master Your Rush and stay tuned for the bundle. Between WISK and MYR, we're gonna do something real cool for franchises and groups out there.

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David Nadezhdin [00:49:47]:

Agreed. Thank you so much.

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Angelo Esposito [00:49:49]:

Feel free to check out WISK.ai for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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