Jordan Huck [00:00:00]:

Fundamentally, we're going to help them easily set up that network, that little network of vendors, to be paid. Right. And then as they pay, they're going to reduce the pain. They're going to reduce fraud and error. They're going to be able to schedule payments. And so we're going to give them visibility into that full process. We'll give them permissioning. This is built for a small business in mind, so we think it's a match made in heaven.

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Jordan Huck [00:00:21]:

You guys do inventory very well. We live and die ounce payable. So it should be a great partnership.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:29]:

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 to another episode of Wisking It All. We're here today with Jordan Huck, CEO of Notch. Jordan, thanks for joining us.

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Jordan Huck [00:00:55]:

Thanks for having me, Angelo. I'm really excited to be here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:58]:

Same here. I'd love to start with understanding background of your story and how you got into notch. But before getting into that, can you just give the listeners a quick overview of what is notch?

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Jordan Huck [00:01:10]:

Sure. Yeah. Thanks so much again for having me. So notch is a technology platform that we've built specifically for food service. And uniquely, we actually cover accounts payable automation and accounts receivable automation. And so, Angelo, as you know, you work in food service supply chain as got, you know, the start of that supply chain happens when a restaurant or a food service business, maybe they're using WISK and they're out of the raw ingredients that they need. I hope they're using WISK, our partners. And at that point, they're going to procure it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:43]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:01:43]:

They're going to send a purchase order out into the supply chain. Typically that's to a distributor. Distributors are in the business of warehousing. All the trucks that all the listeners see, whatever city they're in that are clogging up the streets, that's a business model called distribution. Right. And they're warehousing and providing logistics like last mile fulfillment. And then they're actually purchasing those products from growers, manufacturers, producers, farmers. Here in Toronto, you see the food service terminal when you're driving on the gardener, right.

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Jordan Huck [00:02:16]:

That's where those transactions are happening. And so uniquely about this industry, Angelo, that you and I work in, there's restaurants that do payables offline. There's distributors don't use technology at all for receivables from restaurants and then payables out to their producer. Right. Their supplier. And then you actually have that farmer, that distributor, like one of our customers, is a business called Hops Connect, right. And they actually sell raw yeast and hops to the distributors. Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:02:47]:

And so a distributor like an ace hill or a Nickelbrook would use our product, or even a silversmith in Niagara and the lake, right, would use our product for receivables to their customers, payables specifically to their producers. And then restaurants can use our product for accounts payable automation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:05]:

I love that. Yeah, definitely. As you know, also passionate about this space. And I know our teams have been chatting and we'll talk more about the partnership, but I'm excited about the WISK and notch partnership. And we do the inventory side pretty well, amongst other things, and then getting that last piece, which is super important, which is paying those actual vendors, which you guys do really well. So I'm excited about that. We'll definitely chat more, but to get into notch, what kind of got you inspired? Obviously, the supplier side is a mess. It's chaotic.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:35]:

What made you want to solve that problem?

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Jordan Huck [00:03:37]:

Great question. So I had grown up working in restaurants, grew up in Ottawa, so I've always been around the space was in a previous technology business prior to this technology services company. Originally, myself and other team members here were looking at this problem differently.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:56]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:03:56]:

We were actually attempting to kind of create a marketplace, right, where restaurants could come. And Angelo, without going deep down the rabbit hole, it's kind of the differences between b to c commerce and b to b. Right, where we as consumers ubiquitously expect. Of course. Right? Like you go online and you can buy anything you could ever want from an e commerce perspective, really powered by Shopify. Right. They've got an incredible amount, so they've democratized that ability to just sell anything you want. So that's the expectation that we as consumers have.

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Jordan Huck [00:04:29]:

And we were around that problem space. And our origin story is not that different from, I think, what a lot of great early stage technology companies, right? Like a lot of companies can make a mistake where they build something out, then go find customers. We actually met with one of the biggest distributors in Ontario. I would now consider know they're on our cap table and we've got a very good relationship with them. And we just really got to understand we wanted to solve an ecommerce problem the way consumers, right, where we would make it easier for people to order to them. But that's not the problem they wanted solved. And there's lots of reasons why b to c doesn't perfectly translate to b to b commerce. But what they told us was that, like, look, $390,000,000,000 a year is spent as food service businesses go and buy stuff from this distribution supply chain.

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Jordan Huck [00:05:21]:

And then there's Cisco, us foods, gfs. Angelo, you probably are ocrring tens of thousands invoices. Okay, so, great. But the largest part of the market is this messy, fragmented, long. This, like that is the largest part of the market. And what we learned our inception story, was that, hey, that's a really painful process. If I'm a restaurant payer, stacks of paper invoices accumulate all day long. Angelo, your product allows your customers to use your OCR technology to update their inventory counts, right, to tell them their cost of goods sold.

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Jordan Huck [00:05:58]:

Well, those have got to be paid as well. There's two, what we call personas, Angelo, but there's two customers that matter, right? There's the payer in the restaurant group, and then the operations customer. Right, that cares about solving the WISK problem. But there's two problems there. And then on the distribution side, I call it a meat and potato value proposition. And I think WISK has that same thing, right? Like, hey, let us help you understand your cogs quicker and understand your inventory counts faster. Right? Make it easier to make money. Well, it's the same thing for notch.

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Jordan Huck [00:06:33]:

Let's allow you to reduce the amount of time and money it takes to pay an invoice. But then, very importantly, on the distribution side, to reduce the amount of time it takes you to collect money. How powerful is that value proposition? Right? So that was the kind of origin story for us, and everything's been built around that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:52]:

That's awesome. And so, going to the early days, I'm always interested, I would say, in understanding the entrepreneur journey and being an entrepreneur myself. How do you go about testing or figuring things out so early days a notch. I know you mentioned maybe having good relationships with some suppliers. How did you start kind of going about like, hey, this is the problem we're going to solve, and how are we going to build a v one without spending $2 million?

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Jordan Huck [00:07:17]:

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I can go deep there, because one of the problems I think any of our listeners who fall, like, when companies have to pivot away from one of the hardest things to do is speed with going fast at everything that they do once the business model is working is an advantage. Right? It's a huge advantage. It's a disadvantage when you're trying to change things. Like, you've got to go to market. That's down a path. But what we ended up doing was really coming to market with a really small. We always had a vision for accounts payable and accounts receivable automation.

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Jordan Huck [00:07:53]:

And there's permissioning needs for accounts payable automation. And then there should be delegation of authority. I can pay bills over and under a certain amount. Right. You can build features for years there, and we will, but you don't come to market with that. We got our first customer live for accounts receivable automation, and then accounts payable with no product at all. It was being done in the background.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:15]:

Oh, wow. Okay.

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Jordan Huck [00:08:16]:

Then we came to market with a true minimum viable. It was on a no code solution. Right. We hosted it on a no code solution. And now, Angelo, we have a product we're incredibly proud of.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:29]:

Right?

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Jordan Huck [00:08:29]:

Like, beautifully designed. It becomes more feature rich every month and day. But we know we're going in the right direction. So we went very minimum viable to get started and then have anchored around that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:46]:

Love that. And so for people listening, who would you say, like, notch is perfect for? Obviously, restaurants in general. But is there a certain type of restaurant that it's ideal for?

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Jordan Huck [00:08:56]:

Yes, I would say we have customers of all types. Right. Meaning we've got a ten location sort of franchise, like an IHOP out in Calgary, where they struggle. They've got fragmentation in their supply chain, and they struggle to get the stack of paper invoices into a Quickbooks online. Right, or into a dynamics or a netsuite or one of their accounting systems. And so what's very exciting and valuable for our product is we'll actually allow them to map. And we're going to go accounting tech nerdy here, Angelo, but we can do it, do it. All right, so you can actually map your chart of accounts, right? So when you're setting up your income statement, you've got food, you've got alcohol.

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Jordan Huck [00:09:43]:

I mean, you know all this, Angelo. And so you can actually map your chart of accounts, meaning anytime you ever purchase a SKU ever again, it will automatically map to that GL code in your accounting system. So in that case, there isn't a ton of pain around payments. A business like that will have a lot of their payments probably being pulled by a broadliner. So these are the nuances of in our space. So a broadliner will pull. We help them with the rest. Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:10:13]:

Like the long tail in terms of pushing. They can schedule payments on our product or they can push them out. We've got everything from single location up to. Up to 75, 80 location businesses. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:26]:

That's awesome. And so would you say, when you say long tail, I guess it makes sense, because if you're dealing, let's say, with mainly a big GFS or Cisco, it might be easier to manage because it's one supplier, but there's a lot of products being bought from maybe smaller suppliers. Would you say generally, if someone has a lot of. I guess, in general, if they have a lot of suppliers, then they're a good fit because it's hard to manage so many invoices and kind of track who's been paid, who hasn't been paid.

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Jordan Huck [00:10:56]:

Yes, absolutely. So, yes, if there's tons of fragmentation, but we don't just serve the full service dining room. Right. Where it's like, we still see quick service that has linens, that has the cable bill that needs to be paid. You got to think non food cogs as well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:12]:

Interesting. Yeah. My head was thinking, it's good you mentioned that, because I was thinking cogs, obviously, with WISK being my bias. But.

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Jordan Huck [00:11:19]:

I know, right? But you've got to think, hey, every single vendor, like every single cost, I want to source a truth for those invoices. Right. And so it's as easy as photocapture or send it to us. We'll abstract the data via email. But I know you have an OCR product as well. Even a quick service location will still have four or five, six vendors. And the way our business works is it's consumption based pricing. So it scales.

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Jordan Huck [00:11:51]:

Do you know what I mean, Angelo? It scales down to that size where you can get somebody using the product. They're not uploading hundreds of invoices per month. It appropriately scales down in price and then seasonality, because we live in this business, right? We want February, our price to go down. I was going to swear on your podcast. Okay. That's a shitty month, right, Angelo? That's a shitty month for our customers. Your customers, my customers.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:20]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:12:21]:

January, really tough. Boom. We see volumes go down. Very tough. You see volumes go down 25%. Everyone's doing dry January.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:30]:

Recouping from the holiday bill. Correct.

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Jordan Huck [00:12:33]:

They're getting their bills for the holidays. So our prices go down for all of our customers during those periods.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:39]:

That makes sense. That's really cool. And then one of the things I always like to do, because we have a lot of restaurant operators listening to this in our newsletter. So I like to always give kind of a visual of, like, what does it look like? So they're listening to this. Okay. Notch, they can check it out. Notch financial, right?

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Jordan Huck [00:12:54]:

Yeah, notch financial.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:55]:

Perfect. And so it sounds pretty interesting. They're like, hey, I think this can help. What does the actual journey look like? So they go to your website. What happens? How do they get onboarded? Just to get a sense of what does it look like?

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Jordan Huck [00:13:05]:

We're very much going to hope that they use one of the accounting systems, one of the nine different accounting systems that we spent a lot of time over the last two years. Angelo, integrating into those accounting systems. I won't go and list them off, but we're hopeful that they're going to fit into one of those accounting systems and are one of the inventory management partners that we support. And they're going to ask to speak to somebody from our team, and we're going to take them through. We can literally demo the product to them in six minutes. It is designed with consumer grade usability. I think WISK is the same where we want our customers to experience software the way we do when we purchase things as consumers. And then literally they have the UI interface in our product to connect their system.

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Jordan Huck [00:13:55]:

They can agree to go with Notch, and the next day, one of our CS members is on with them. Literally, we time and money and energy and architecting our product. Angelo, I know you think about time. Like, we want people to be using our product quickly. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:13]:

Time to value 100%.

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Jordan Huck [00:14:14]:

Exactly. And so literally, the next day, they can hook up their system and we're going to pull in what's called their chart of accounts. Right. Their drop down of their GL codes is going to be there in the system. They do some initial mapping to set up the skus, and then literally they start uploading invoices. They can be doing it the next day. They start taking pictures, or they start forwarding them over to notch. We've had people live in the same day before from start of the morning until.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:43]:

That's huge. No, I was going to say, I think in this space, like a lot of restaurant tech in general and some restaurant tech, it's not their fault. You're not going to set up a pos in one day. But I think restaurants are used to setting up most restaurant tech in a month or in two months. So it's really cool. I think that your time to value could be 24 hours and they're up and running. So I think that's huge.

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Jordan Huck [00:15:05]:

Yeah, it can be, because typically most of our customers. Right, and I'm not as familiar with WISK's product, but the initial motion with our product is to start using the invoice function.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:20]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:15:20]:

Like, let's start with getting. And then we set their vendors up to be paid.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:27]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:15:27]:

Which is, ideally, they're already on the network where they can accept payment. Right. But if it's a new vendor, it's a dog walker. They want to pay that isn't in the network. Our team goes through what's called, like, the KYC KyB process, where we. And we're a licensed money service business, by the way, Angelo, in terms, know, with a compliance team. In terms. Absolutely.

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Jordan Huck [00:15:50]:

Like, we've. There's a large compliance and regulatory hurdle to get into that space. Right. It's very much payments. It is, yeah. But it's always the direction we've been going. So we've got our compliance and money movement team where we very securely are onboarding their vendors to be paid, and then we're moving the money on their behalf. After we move the money, we then get rid of this really painful.

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Jordan Huck [00:16:14]:

So many people have probably wondered in their lives, what does an accounts payable clerk? Maybe you've never thought that, but I used to. What's an Accounts payable clerk do? Or what's an accounts receivable clerk? Well, typically what they will do for a business like an o and B is after these payments are made, they have to go do the reconciliation manually. And so we automate all that. Right. We've built the integrations where we'll go in and mark those vendors as paid so that they don't have to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:38]:

That's huge. So I love that. So just to get a sense, it sounds like it's pretty easy to see a demo to get going with. Notch, what are some maybe success stories that you can share that come to mind? I know there's probably a lot, and you deal with a lot of customers, but any that come to mind of like, hey, we dealt with this client and time savings or money savings or just anything you can highlight that comes to mind.

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Jordan Huck [00:17:00]:

Yeah, I love our story with O B. We have a very tight relationship. I just did a kickoff hosted, put up a prop, and they wrote us and said, send us one. So very, very good relationship there. And so they've been able to use, and so they've always started with, hey, let's get rid of this invoicing problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:20]:

Right?

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Jordan Huck [00:17:20]:

So stacks of paper invoices that accumulate. So as you increase the scale of the business. Right. So, like, there's one person who's responsible for ensuring that the invoice data is appropriately updating their inventory management systems and also getting into their accounting systems.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:40]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:17:41]:

And that tells them their profitability. So the lag, Angelo. And I'm telling you, your value proposition. You know it. But that lag in terms of my counts and updating my costs, because for anybody who's not in food service, a purchase order doesn't match an invoice. They are different. Right. So an invoice is going to come back, and it will not most of the time, especially if it's any type of protein item.

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Jordan Huck [00:18:03]:

There's a catch. Weight adjustment.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:05]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:18:05]:

So you don't know how much you've spent. And so an invoice sitting in Halifax when you're corporately owned, right. If you're franchise, you own your own p l. But if you're corporately owned, an invoice sitting in Halifax for a week doesn't tell you how much you spent on protein that week. So we've been able to dramatically increase by a magnitude of 15% to 20% the speed at which they understand that data and then save every chef and line cook. Like, who would be responsible for doing that work? They no longer need to. They literally just forward thousands of invoices that we receive from them monthly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:44]:

Yeah. A lot of manual work that's now automated, which I think is huge. I know one of your. You have a philosophy about culture, Trump's strategy. So I'd love to understand maybe how you cultivate culture.

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Jordan Huck [00:18:57]:

At Notch, my philosophy and I worked on this incredible team for 13 years prior to Notch, and I work on an incredible team here now. At Notch, the most important thing for us is we think, like, try to hire the best possible people we can. And when you do that, you don't need lots of policies and procedures. And in today's world and environment, people are very much self managing. They're physically self managing. They're not even co located with you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:26]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:19:26]:

And so, Angelo, I've done a lot wrong at Notch. Right? Like, we pivoted. I've never pivoted before. Shoot. Oh, I wish I'd done this differently and wish I'd done, like, I got a list, Angelo, things I would have done. Everything is clear. Looking back, we kind of say, like, notch isn't for everybody. Angelo, you probably say, WISK isn't for everybody.

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Jordan Huck [00:19:49]:

Smaller, earlier stage companies are not for everybody. They're just not. And so we really work hard to try to explain what it's really going to be like working here, where we got a lot of people who are passionate about what we're doing, and I'm really passionate about trying to build big canadian companies. Angelo. And I hope WISK becomes one of those, man, we have a lot of great ideas, but we don't commercialize things incredibly well in Canada yet. I'm passionate about that. Changing. That's personal mission for me.

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Jordan Huck [00:20:19]:

Right. And then I'm passionate about this space, and I love the team I work with, and I love our love building. So, from a culture perspective, we just really try to explain, and I don't always do a good job. Believe me. You can go on. There are people that be like, I didn't like the culture there at notch lots of people. But we really try to communicate. Here's exactly what we're doing.

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Jordan Huck [00:20:41]:

Here's exactly where we're going, and we're trying to find like minded people. Angel. That doesn't mean we try to pay. That's all got to be there, right? Where people receive the appropriate things, compensation. That's all got to be there, of course, as well. But then we want people that want to build.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:57]:

It's a different mentality.

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Jordan Huck [00:20:59]:

Different mind, different mentality, man. Different mentality, right. Someone comes in, they're like, what's the policy for that? We don't have one. Like, invent it? Do you know what I mean?

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:10]:

I know exactly what.

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Jordan Huck [00:21:12]:

So. But I'd be fired in a big company. Do you know what I mean? They wouldn't have me. So it's kind of what I love to do. But it's been hard. A pivot, Covid. I mean, Angelo, you've been in this space. This is hard.

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Jordan Huck [00:21:26]:

Hard for all of us, man.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:28]:

Yeah. Any restaurant or restaurant tech company, I think. Or at least the majority, I guess some benefited, but I'd say the large majority definitely hurt, and we were no exception. We lost a ton of revenue because, especially around Covid time, I would say we were definitely more on the bar side. We eventually then released the food side, too, and then became, like, full service. So whether you're a full service restaurant or just food or a QSR, we could do both sides. But WISK historically was not. Historically.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:58]:

Just where we started was the bar side of things. And so because of that, quick service, restaurants were still kind of open for takeout and whatnot. But most of our clients were, like, full service or bars. And those are the ones that were, like, 100% closed. So, for us, it was just like, all these subscriptions being paused, and we're like, all right, this is not good.

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Jordan Huck [00:22:18]:

Super hard.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:19]:

I mean, it was hard for those restaurants, too. But it was tough because, yeah, it was just trying to keep the lights on. But luckily, post Covid kind of made a rebound, and it also kind of accelerated, I would say the food side, because we were working on it, but when that happened, it was like, all right, we really got to work on this food side. And so in the end, I think it led to some good product improvements and changes. But, man, I agree with you. It was not easy, to say the.

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Jordan Huck [00:22:43]:

Least at that point. When Covid hit, we were still in that transaction based business model before the change, and so we went to zero. Oh, wow, that's rough. Jesus. Transaction, right? So there's no pausing. It goes to zero for a period of time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:01]:

Yeah, it's been a while.

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Jordan Huck [00:23:03]:

Anyway, it's our customers, me and you, that had it worse than we did. Anyway, not a fun time. It's certainly not the topic of this podcast.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:15]:

Not a fun.

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Jordan Huck [00:23:19]:

And then I just hope our industry, Angelo, was overtly penalized, like, just the nature of human beings. And my friends at ritual, a great company at ritual, they were also unfairly penalized by that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:33]:

Yeah, no, I hear it's the one silver lining. I mean, there's not really many, but the one thing that I noticed, I'm curious if you noticed it too, in your world, but is like, I think restaurants became more aware of, at least on our side, we think about cogs, so of the costing side and the supplier side and realizing that prices are always changing. And not to say they weren't, but I think it's like more restaurants became aware. Before it was like the ones that understand pnls and whatever were aware. But now I think when things were closed, people became a little more like, what do I have in stock? And, oh, this stuff is going to spoil. And they started paying more attention. So the one silver lining, I would say, for us was like, post Covid, we didn't have to educate as much about why cogs are important. It was like, people got it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:17]:

They're like, yeah, prices are changing. I need to keep up to date. I need to understand this.

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Jordan Huck [00:24:21]:

Right, because then there was the supply chain constraints post Covid, too, right? So you had all the changing. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So obviously you had a lot of businesses that didn't get through. And then this, like, I've heard it called, like the replatforming, right, where all these people are investing in tech again, right, to open up the new. And there's no reason that our industry shouldn't be using technology to understand cogs, pay bills faster, get money faster. So could not agree more.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:54]:

I'm curious on your like, similar to you, I think every entrepreneur has a long list of things they would have done differently. But looking back, you can connect the dots. I think you said it well and I remember hearing that, hearing something similar from like a Steve jobs talk. But it was great. But it makes sense, like looking back, it's a lot easier to connect all the dots than it is looking. You know, one of the things I like to share is although we do have a lot of restaurant operators and listeners, a lot of them are restaurant owners, aka entrepreneurs. So I always like kind of sharing lessons or mistakes made. Sure.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:25]:

So what are a few that maybe stand out to you when you look back? Like things, you're like, Dave, these are things that were done differently.

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Jordan Huck [00:25:33]:

My muscle memory, all I'd done is scale, is grow something for 13 years where we weren't spending really that much time for the last seven, eight, nine years thinking about the product and the model. We're always thinking about the product and the service. But dead honest, my muscle memory was very much like, just grow this thing before it was formed, before we knew what it was. And so, angel, that's when you get the leaky bucket man, right? Like if you tried to push your food, your food OCR product before it's formed, you're revving up, go to market versus listening to customers, right? And the analogy works in any space. I'm launching 100 location concept before I know the one is going to be a hit, right? And so if I could change, and by the way, that's what they teach and you can read about it, but when you're in it, it's hard to see some, especially with investors, a lot.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:30]:

Of pressure for growth.

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Jordan Huck [00:26:32]:

Pressure. You got to grow, you got to grow, you got to grow. And so I mistakenly tried to move the growth wheel and that was what was comfortable for me. But what was needed was to go out with true beginners mindset and be like, let's understand this problem for real.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:48]:

That makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. There's a long list on my side, too. It's hard to remember in the moment, but sometimes when people bring things up, I'm like, oh, man, yeah, I messed that. Or like, oh, that was another big one. Like just a list of mistakes that, again, look obvious when you look back. One that comes to mind for me, and it's kind of just random.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:07]:

But in the early days, I was like, I don't want to say cheap, but I was pretty frugal. We just raised a bit of capital. I didn't want to run out of capital. So I was always, like, with the hiring. And what I realized is there was like a happy medium, right? It's like, on one end, the mistake of hiring someone that was too senior but doesn't have that experience to really be on the ground. So I don't know. Senior exec, massive company, but is used to having a team of 40 at their disposal, so they don't actually know how to do the thing. That's one mistake.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:41]:

Yeah, that one was like, it's obvious looking back. But the flip side was also took me longer to realize the flip side, which was like, hiring someone a bit too junior, but who was eager. But sometimes that's fine. But what I realized is when I do this now is just hiring someone who's just been a bit past where you want to be, right. So they've done it. So if you're at, I don't know, 5 million ARR, you can find someone who's been at a company that was at three, and they went to ten as an example. And that type of thing, it doesn't have to just be ARR, but that type of thing, I realized, goes a long way. And then the lesson I took away was sometimes spending, like, call it, I don't know, 30% more on that person's salary.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:21]:

And it feels like this person's expensive is so worth it because you're getting, like, double or triple productivity and finding the right fit, but you're spending 30%. So I look at it now as a steal. Whereas when I started in earlier days, I'd be like, I don't know. But there's this other person that's only x amount. So I don't know. Those are just two that come to mind. I want to just share with our listeners that sometimes paying for the right talent makes sense, but don't overpay either.

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Jordan Huck [00:28:47]:

No, those are really great learnings, man. I couldn't agree more. And then the point I would just add is, like, Angelo, the one thing that you need for your business and for all the entrepreneurs is like, you need the energy to just never stop. As long as you never stop, risk is going to be something big. So it's like when you don't work, when you hire great people, they fill your energy bucket. When you go the other direction, it does not. And so it's great learning, man. Couldn't agree more.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:19]:

Well said. Well said. And then one thing I want to talk about, obviously I'm excited about is the partnership. So for listeners that don't know, WISK and notch forming a partnership, and I think I'll tell you my two cent on it, but I'd love for you to also chat a bit about it. But really at a high level. For listeners that don't know, WISK really helps with all the cog side of things and inventory and ordering and scanning invoices and all that recipe costing and all that. But one of the areas we kind of don't do and a lot of customers always want is the actual accounts payable side. And so it's kind of like a match made in heaven.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:54]:

We met you guys and you're like, hey, we do this really well. How can we work together? So I know we're working on some press releases and we're working on some partnership stuff, so I'm super excited about that. But really the idea is to give our clients the best of both worlds, something to manage their inventory and their day to day kind of operations and invoicing from a cogs and costing perspective. But then also that AP side, which is like, how do we manage? So I'm excited about that, but I'd love to hear what are your thoughts and then how do you see this kind of partnership?

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Jordan Huck [00:30:23]:

Man, we couldn't be more excited. We hear such great things from the market about WISK. We think it's match made in heaven. Angelo, I think design, aesthetic and feel of your software, I think there's a lot of similarities, right? Like, I think our customers are going to get jointly a great experience using the product. We certainly hear that about WISK and get that feedback using notch. So it will be great, right? Because obviously WISK has a great OCR product to get in all invoices, right? And those get pushed into the accounting system, their accounting system of record, which is great. If there's any non food cogs, they could use our product for that. But then fundamentally we're going to help them easily set up that network, that little network of vendors to be paid, right? And then as they pay, they're going to reduce the pain, they're going to reduce fraud and error.

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Jordan Huck [00:31:21]:

They're going to be able to schedule payments like, hey, I want to make sure that I get this payment out to this vendor at this time. And so we're going to give them visibility into that full process. We'll give them permissioning. So maybe it's the owner who's got to approve, who wants to approve something to be sent out. So this is built for a small business in mind, right? Like this is built for that small medium sized business in mind. So you're getting the same technology that maybe large enterprises, the large enterprise would get, but you're getting it for either a single location or even a QSR type restaurant. So we think it's a match made in heaven. You guys do inventory very well.

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Jordan Huck [00:31:59]:

We live and die. Accounts payable. Should be a great partnership.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:03]:

Yeah, I'm excited about it. We'll definitely do some releases. I know we're going to highlight this in our next newsletter. Definitely going to add it on our website. And then for people listening now, I mean, we post this on YouTube, we post this on Spotify, Apple Music, a bunch of other sources. So I'll make sure to, we'll create some type of partner URL in this. So in the description for people listening and want know use notch and they can, they'll be able to kind of sign up and learn more about how that works. So on my end, I'm excited.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:29]:

I always like to give plugs. So for people who want to just to maybe wrap up for people who want to find notch. I know you mentioned the website, but this is your chance. Anything you want to say. Plus, where can they find you? Website, social, LinkedIn, you name it.

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Jordan Huck [00:32:43]:

Sure.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:43]:

I'd love for you to just kind of plug away.

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Jordan Huck [00:32:45]:

We think about interacting with this industry that we care so much about by creating as much helpful content, best practices for accounting, restaurant profitability guide stuff for distributors, how to collect money so you can find us on all the know, Instagram, LinkedIn and our website. I think what I would say is for a long period of time for our inception, Angelo, and there was always a period of time probably with your product where you wanted it to be better. This, I mean, come on, we're all that way. We want it to be better this way, better that way. And we always thought like our mantra here at Notch was like, well, nobody's going to out service us, right? Nobody's going to like, we were able to get customers to not even use a product initially with us because they know when they reach out to notch, many customers have my, I receive many text messages from too many sometimes right where that is the level of love, to be frank, that we can give to this community as a company that's obsessed with building something substantial that gives back and makes an impact to the industry that we serve and then also create a great platform to do great stuff for everybody that works here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:01]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:34:01]:

So I think for people who are thinking about this problem or want to learn about this problem, when you work with Notch, and I think very much when you work with a WISK, you're going to get that. Like, you got a group of people that's pretty obsessed with making sure you're taken care of. There's going to be problems, Angelo, always there's going to be problems, challenges.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:21]:

Right.

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Jordan Huck [00:34:21]:

But it's like how well do we respond to those? And we pride ourselves on like, okay, nobody is going to out service the customers that choose to work with us. That's how we think about it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:31]:

I love that. I think that's somewhere we're aligned really well. We're big on that. Like our chat times, we have less than a five minute response time. But I'm like giving a tough time to my email. I'm like, how can we make that less than two minutes? Yeah, exactly. I mean, with intercom, they came up with fin. Now it helps, but we really try to pride ourselves on that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:53]:

So, no, I'm with you there and I'm excited. I think we'll figure out more stuff of how to give value to these restaurants, both listening and that have these pain points. And I even think one of the things we'll do, if we haven't already spoke about it, is maybe our teams have spoke about it, but is a webinar. I think we could definitely host a webinar.

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Jordan Huck [00:35:10]:

I would love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:11]:

Best practices on the inventory side and then flipping it to the accounts payable side.

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Jordan Huck [00:35:19]:

Absolutely.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:19]:

Yeah. I think we do something really cool and valuable to restauranteurs. So we'll set that up. So for everyone listening, we'll put some links to some type of partnership page. We'll include a webinar date. I think that'll be fun. But this is great. All this to say, Jordan, thank you for taking the time today to join the Wisking It All podcast once again, Jordan Huck, CEO of Notch.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:40]:

You can check them out at notch Financial. Thanks for being here.

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Jordan Huck [00:35:44]:

Thank you, Angelo. Thank you so much.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:46]:

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

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