John Florinis [00:00:00]:

It's not just about kind of creating a meal and managing the restaurants, about how do you also kind of help these distributors who are critical to the supply chain and helping them kind of manage their businesses more efficiently as well. So that's kind of the other side of the equation for me. And then looking at kind of the suppliers and how do we work with them as well in terms of giving the data that makes them more, more efficient and more knowledgeable in terms of where they spend their promotional.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:34]:

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 John Foreign EVP product at Meal Ticket. John, thanks for joining us.

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John Florinis [00:01:01]:

Thanks, Angelo. Great to be here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:02]:

Excited to have you here. So we go way back in the restaurant space, but we'll get into that. But I was excited to have you on, I know now, or it's been a little bit now that you're at Meal Ticket, but I'm sure a lot of people in the restaurant space know about Meal Ticket, but for those who don't, can you briefly tell people what is Meal Ticket?

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John Florinis [00:01:19]:

Yeah. Meal Ticket is obviously a technology company that kind of helps stakeholders across the food service value chain. So everyone from a supplier to a distributor to an operator or a restaurant, we have kind of solutions that allow each of those stakeholders to operate their businesses a little bit more effectively.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:39]:

Got it. Amazing. And I know I always like to understand people's backstory. I find hospitality, obviously, very interesting space. Cause that's where we play. But that crossover between hospitality and technology. And so I know your journey kind of goes from fintech and payments industry to kind of today Meal Ticket. Can you maybe just walk us through that journey of how you got into the fintech payment side? What led up to Meal Ticket?

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John Florinis [00:02:03]:

My story actually starts in the restaurant world. So I grew up in restaurants. My family, my parents owned a restaurant. Being in Canada, when most kids are getting up at four or five in the morning to drive to the hockey rink, I was getting up at four or five in the morning to make french fries. That's been the in and out of growing up and working in a restaurant is very, you don't lose that perspective. But as kind of time went on and you kind of go through school and just being faced with the, as society evolved, the Internet became more prevalent and kind of growing up during that era, growing up in a restaurant and then kind of working in school, I landed in payments and that was something that kind of, right out of university, I kind of jumped into the payments space and never kind of grew up in the evolution of e commerce and grew up during the stages of integrated payments. So taking pos and software and then kind of driving integration, I've been very fortunate in my career to work on initiatives that have kind of been more on the leading edge of innovation, so kind of driving new use cases, new products. And so I've been very fortunate throughout my career to kind of be working on special projects and being afforded opportunities to lead teams and lead new products.

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John Florinis [00:03:35]:

So, and then kind of growing up in a restaurant, jumping into the kind of banking, banking systems and payments and then coming full circle, kind of combining both. Right. So getting into the restaurant tech space with the heavy focus on payments, but also on SaaS as well, has been kind of a great kind of culmination of everything I've worked on over the last few years.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:58]:

I love that. And so then from the payments out, obviously where I think I officially met you was when you went, were in the pos space, I think at the time. Well, not, I think I know at the time it was touch bistro, but tell me a bit about that. How did he go from the payment side to then jumping into the world of pos?

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John Florinis [00:04:14]:

Yeah, I mean, pos has always been kind of near and dear. Right. And I think the notion of payments and pos are kind of intertwined. I can think back into early two thousands 2010 2012 range where a lot of businesses were running inefficiently, right. They had their payment processor and then they had their software. Right. And there's a lot of inefficiencies in that. And I think through the proliferation and growth of SaaS solutions, the ability to kind of combine payments with software became easier.

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John Florinis [00:04:52]:

Right. You had, you were able to integrate pin pads and all that stuff. That's kind of old school legacy became far more adaptable and easier to integrate. And that's so, I mean, you know, I've always kind of worked on those kind of initiatives. So kind of the transition from payments to software wasn't that difficult. The notion of product management between traditional kind of acquire or even Mastercard type of approach is a little bit more. You have to really focus on security and stability and make sure that you have no, you really don't want to, man, you don't want to have any potential gaps in what you're delivering, there's security, there's people's money on the line and software moves fast. Right? There's a lot of iteration.

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John Florinis [00:05:39]:

You go, you speak to customers, you iterate. So combining those two worlds has been really, really exciting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:45]:

That's awesome. And I'd love to understand how have you seen maybe a bit of that evolution of the restaurant space from early days working in it, but I think you kind of touched on it. But the idea of the 2010 world and payment processing to the positive, how have you seen that evolution to today? Like, what does 2020 onward? I mean, 2020 was Covid, but onward restaurant tech look like? And what are some things in the restaurant tech world that's kind of been piquing your curiosity?

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John Florinis [00:06:14]:

Just like with the introduction of any kind of new technology or it kind of comes in phases and stages, right? If you kind of start at the 2000 mark, I kind of mentioned you had these on prem systems, you know, very, very antiquated in terms of capabilities that, you know, the web wasn't really, it was there, but it wasn't there. And then you kind of move into the next phase, which was like integrating payments. And then, and then that was kind of the next phase of evolution that kind of accelerated. Then you moved from traditional client server type implementations to tablet. Right. Tablet was driven by SaaS. Right. So you see, you kind of look at the evolution of that space and how a lot of customers have migrated towards SaaS pos versus the client server market.

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John Florinis [00:06:59]:

You see how different companies have adopted. I think payments was a big catalyst to help drive that. And now as I look forward, there's a lot of other opportunities around integrating not just the front of house functionality, but also some of the back of house capabilities as well, and having a unified experience. I do think operators are evolving. I think given the tools provided and presented to them allow them to be a lot more efficient. But it's the underlying tech stack that they invest in that affords them that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:32]:

Opportunity that makes sense. It's something we see at WISK, too. It's like backhouse is becoming more important. We've seen it over the years. It's always important becoming more important, but becoming easier to sell in the sense that I think if I think about like cash days and just the fact that I'm saying that, but like, you know, before the, you know, Quebec, you got the black box and you got a lot more control and you got reporting purposes and whatnot with, with taxes and, but I think about cash days, people were more like, I'm not worried about inventory. I'm not worried about this. And as the world's evolved and got more strict and everything is, you know, kind of logged, people have been kind of changed their perception on that because now they know they got to track everything. And then I think for another interesting catalyst was, even though it was horrible for the industry, but, like, Covid, obviously, because so many restaurants were closed, and a lot, you know, suffered during that time, but one interesting thing is, I think a lot of them became more cost conscious because it was like they had to survive.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:27]:

So it's like they really scrutinize their typical, you know, monthly expenses. What are we paying for? Looking at their food costs or beverage costs, their, you know, their labor costs. And it's like, good operators always did that, but I think it kind of made it so a larger percentage of operators are now, like, a bit more intertwined and understanding. Like, oh, shit, okay, like, there is a big difference if my food cost is 50% or 30%. It's not just this buzzword of food quality. It's like this actually affects my bottom line, my profitability. So I think I bridged that gap because a lot of people were like, yeah, like the way I would almost summarize it, I think, you know, generalizing here, but a lot of restaurants were more, like, sales oriented. You know, like, if you think of how can I get more people in the door? How can I do more marketing? How can I do a promotion? It's like, more.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:14]:

Just, how can I get revenue and less kind of looking at expenses and cutting costs, you know, it's always easier to sell more revenue than, let me help you cut costs. But I think that the one caveat is, I think post Covid, a lot more people are open to the. Show me how to cut costs.

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John Florinis [00:09:32]:

Yeah, no, definitely. And I mean, kind of living. Living the restaurant life. I mean, these are real people, right? These are people who have families with obligations and. And, you know, when. When Covid come. Came about, like, you really look at personally and philosophically. Like, I mean, you want to see people.

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John Florinis [00:09:50]:

People thrive and want to see them succeed, especially in this space, right? So it's. And, you know, the one thing that kind of COVID or the pandemic observationally taught me was there's. There's so much resilience, right? Just the ability to navigate, you know, changing bylaws, you know, changing customer, you know, attitudes and prevent, you know, like the way. The way people kind of dined. Right? And you kind of see the flexibility and the resiliency of the restaurant community. Again, thinking through, you know, my upbringing in that environment, like, you know, there's someone at the end of the day that has to put food on their family's table, right. And being able to kind of provide them with the tools and capabilities that allow them to make those informed decisions. I mean, we have, you know, we have.

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John Florinis [00:10:37]:

We have products that, you know, in our market man suite that kind of speak to, you know, to how operators can, you know, manage costs and all that. But if you. If you think through kind of, you know, the, the day to day action, like they're showing up to work there, you know, if you can shave off an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, hours a week, you know, that's. That's time that you're giving back. You know, you may not, you know, in their minds, they may not be calculating that, okay, this is, you know, you know, $20 an hour, whatever the case may be, but the fact that you've given that time back that allow them to get, you know, improve that quality of life.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:07]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:11:07]:

You know, there, there's value in that. And I think. I think we kind of both, you know, we. We both value that, that, that side of the business as well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:16]:

Yeah. 100%. It's interesting. I love to know, like, your, you know, one thing I always find is, like, restaurants today are probably not. Probably they are bombarded with technology, and some of it's great. Some of it maybe is a lot of noise, but, like, obviously there's real technology that'll help. I'm curious, how do you think about the typical tech stack when it comes to restaurant? What are the top three or top five things you would say are super important? Because there's a million on one apps, and you can have an app for this, that. But when you think about a restaurant tech sack, what are maybe the three to five things they should definitely look for?

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John Florinis [00:11:52]:

I would say there's probably three things. So I think you would need really solid pos that kind of supports your operational workflow, and then that needs to dovetail into back of house. So, like, inventory management and costs like that, because I think we kind of circled around it is like, you really need to have the ability to understand your business. Right. And you can do it with a pen and paper. But again, going back to that quality of life, no, it's. It's not. It's not really something, you know.

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John Florinis [00:12:23]:

You know, I think anyone in today's world would really want.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:26]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:12:26]:

And then I think the last thing, again, depending on the size of the business is properly labor. Labor management and controls make sense. Those are kind of one, the one two, three. You can. You can augment your business with loyalty programs. You can augment it with, you know, like, you know, like fridge monitoring tools and stuff like that. Like, all that stuff is great. But I think ultimately, those are kind of the one, two, three that I think are critical to a successful operation.

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John Florinis [00:12:55]:

If you kind of look around and you kind of look at the successful operators, they've kind of mastered a blend of those three. And I think that's kind of my observation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:07]:

Yeah, no, it's funny, because I was literally just earlier today, this morning, I had a coffee with someone, and we're talking about the restaurant space, and I had the exact same analysis. I was kind of like, look, if I think about it logically, you need the pos. Like, it's a very competitive industry, and there's a lot, and people are fighting for further market share, but ultimately, like, can't run it if you can't sell anything. So it makes sense. And then the way I saw it, and I think you nailed it, is like, if you really think about a restaurant, there's a reason it's called the prime cost, right? It's like the main cost, and the prime cost is made up of labor and cost of goods sold. And so it's like, yeah, you should probably have something to help with your labor, which could be a mix of scheduling and maybe payments or whatever, and then your cost will get sold. You might have a market, man. You might have a WISK, you might have whatever.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:48]:

But definitely use something, even if you don't use WISK. Like, use something because it's your prime cost. And so I totally agree. And then after that, there's obviously super valuable tools, loyalty being one of them, which was actually the one I thought of, too. I was like, probably number four on the list would be loyalties. It's funny to see the way you thought, because I had this same thought process. And then obviously there's just apps that can help, but I see them as secondary, whether it might be, like, online ordering stuff or, like, integrations with that type of thing, or chargebacks, managing chargebacks. When you have multiple stores and you do third party delivery, there's a million.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:22]:

And one other ways to optimize. But, yeah, I definitely like the way you're thinking, because at a high, high level, I think those are the basis points you think of, how can I sell? How can I know what I'm selling? If I'm actually making money, which might sound obvious, but I find a lot of people make that mistake. You talk to someone, they're like, yeah, I made $12,000 on Friday. And you're like, you made 12,000 revenue, but how much did you actually make? You know, like, they get used to that POS report where it tells you your sales. Nothing wrong with that. But that's sales data. Like, you now need to understand. Like, cool, you sold 227 hamburgers.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:56]:

Great. How much money did you make those hamburgers? Like, very important question. And then labor, obviously, in today's world is just, with rising costs and then inflation is just insane. So managing that, to a certain extent is super important. So super neat. And so I'm curious to think, to talk about you guys, right at Meal Ticket, at Marketman, obviously being EVP of product, how are you thinking about, like, the, the best way to kind of, you know, support these restaurants? Because one of the challenges that I sometimes find is there's kind of this, I guess, balance between, like, okay, here's all this tech to help you if you want to go all the way you can, but, like, going all the way requires a lot of work because now you're managing inventory, obviously, your invoices, your recipes or this. And yes, all that is needed, but it's also a fine line of, you know, how, how far can you get? But without also maybe crossing that line of, like, now, this is taking so much time because I'm, you know, tracking every little thing. So I find there's like this weird balance in this inventory slash backhouse space.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:58]:

I'd love to get your take on and how you guys think about managing that.

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John Florinis [00:16:01]:

Yeah, so great question. Very timely, actually. So what we, you know, so obviously there's, you know, there's a step that an operator, a restaurant takes in their journey says, look, I need to get better at this. And I think that's the step where they start evaluating solutions. Right? Then there's the step of, like, I'm going to choose a solution and I'm going to invest the time and energy to make it work. And they build that just like, just like with any corporation, you have systems and processes. I think those systems and processes are kind of the how us, you know, an operator kind of evolves their business. So they're doing counts.

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John Florinis [00:16:42]:

They're doing these things that kind of allow them to maintain and understand these costs. And they're scanning invoices. They're doing all the things that need to be done, but then it's about how do they then propagate that through their staff and making sure that their staff are involved. So I think the evolution. So you could do that. If you're in hq, you have the discipline and all that kind of stuff to kind of manage that. One of the things that we've done specifically is we recognize that some customers can get, it can start right out of the gate and get in and start using it. But we just recently acquired a firm that allows or helps our customers with professional services.

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John Florinis [00:17:29]:

And what they essentially would do is they'll come in and consult and build and integrate the marketman platform into your business and kind of help build that workflow. Right. You know, and get you up and running and all that. And as part of that, you know, you get trained and all that kind of great stuff. So you kind of build those, that workflow and business and you create those manuals and processes. So depending on where you are in your journey as an operator, you can have that ability to kind of leverage services to kind of help get some help because you're busy, right? You're doing other things. You're running a kitchen. You're, you know, like, we know, like restauranters, like, there are, there is no punch clock, right? It's, you work until, until, until you have to kind of put the chairs up and mop the floors, right? So, like, Recognizing that there are different needs at different stages and different levels of assistance, we view that as an important component of our business and how we help our customers.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:31]:

Love that. No, it's, it's. It's great to hear because honestly, even here at west, like, one of our many probably knows, but one of our missions is literally Our main mission statement is to give restaurateurs their time back, to focus on the things they love. No one loves inventory. No one loves invoicing. No one loves recipe costing. But it's such a crucial part to running your restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:52]:

It's like, and how do you help? And I love that you're doing that. Like, you know, some people are like, oh, man, this is having, you know, competitors on the same call. But for me, it's like the industry is massive. At the end of the day, no matter what tool someone's using, it's actually helping them run the restaurant, their back of house, become more profitable, et cetera, et cetera. That's a win. And I love what you guys are doing because one thing we found that was helpful and it's similar, but it's services, but it's the recipes. So we were like, man, people hate inputting recipes. Let's just offer it as an add on if someone wants it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:22]:

Send us all your recipes and we'll enter for you. Which, to be honest, is a really good value prop because even for us, to be fair, it's a pain in the ass. But entering recipes is always a pain in the ass. There's no way around it. But it's been nice to tell people, send us what you got. We'll get 80% of the way there, and then we'll come back with questions because you know how chefs are. They'll say a bunch of this, a bit of that, and in a tool, you need the specificity of, like, what do you mean by a bunch and what do you mean a bit of this and a bit of that? So it's cool to hear. I love to know, kind of like, what was.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:53]:

When you think about, like, the restaurant industry as a whole, what do you think is, like, the next step? Or, I mean, maybe not next step. The evolution when it comes to, let's say, back a house. So, like, you think of reservations maybe back in the day from pen and paper to then the open tables of the world, and it's now more advanced CRMs, whatever you think about pos and you kind of already went through it, but the idea of, like, the legacy on premise client, server, side to tablet, et cetera, et cetera. So when you think of, like, our space, obviously it started off with pen and paper, and now it's like going digital. But what do you see as maybe the evolution? Like, what's next?

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John Florinis [00:20:32]:

It's like you kind of have the work that we do with, like, inventory and all that and that kind of links to accounting systems. You know, I could probably anticipate, you know, some sort of, you know, tighter integration there. Yeah, right. Obviously, you know, the role of AI playing a big, big part in terms of how operators leverage AI. I think, you know, we do a lot of work to kind of think about, like, how do we introduce AI? But really AI is just another way for us to introduce features differently or faster. It's not like I'm going to go build AI. No, AI is part of the build now. I think that's kind of the thinking.

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John Florinis [00:21:16]:

I know some more advanced operators are looking at tools to expedite data entry and stuff like that, but I haven't really seen anything kind of mind blowing at this point. But, I mean, it's going to be efficiency gains.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:33]:

Right.

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John Florinis [00:21:33]:

Again, going back to that notion of how do I, how do I save more time? How do I, you know, rather than having someone scanning invoices all day, maybe I can have them, you know, doing some prep.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:44]:

Yeah, right.

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John Florinis [00:21:44]:

Like, so I think that that's kind of, you know, what? You know, just that continual tweaking and optimization for back of house.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:53]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:21:55]:

You know, and, yeah, I mean, I think, I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot of opportunities to kind of, you know, kind of clean that up a little bit more. And actually, you know, you're aware. I'm aware. Like, there's a huge, you know, pen and paper community still. Yeah, right. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of opportunity to, I think, to convert those.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:13]:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think people will be surprised of how many restaurants are still on pen and paper. Or maybe a basic, basic excel type sheets, which is nuts. Which is nuts. I mean, look, if you're really, really small business, maybe you can get away with it, right? You don't have a ton of skus, and you're there every day as the owner operator, but there's a certain scale where it just doesn't make sense, and you're just leaving money on the table by doing it really inefficiently and it.

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John Florinis [00:22:38]:

Cuts into your quality of life or anything at the right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:41]:

That's the main thing that makes sense. That's cool. One interesting thing, you know, I'm always trying to keep up with what's up there. One interesting thing I've seen on kind of the AI side still. It's not there yet, but I've seen some demos of it is kind of like the whole image recognition thing. So, like, taking a picture of, like, you know, I think it was like, kind of a video of kind of a subway style where it's like, you know, you're in your back of house and you got your tomatoes in a container and this. And it's, it's kind of like with the camera estimating how full those containers are and it's recognizing the item. So, you know, it's not, it's obviously not fully there, and there's a bunch of holes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:13]:

But, but I agree with you. I think for now, most of these things that are coming out are just improvements of existing processes. So, like, maybe you were entering invoices before, now you're scanning them and it's using OCR. And now maybe there's a step further where there's some you know, advanced learning models and this and that. But it's really neat to see this evolution. But I think going back to the main principle, it's like, how do you help restaurants become more profitable and really ultimately just save them time to focus on what they love to do? Yeah, I mean, shifting gears a little, maybe just going with, you know, speaking, speaking of trends and then one object being, you know, evp of product at, you know, Meal Ticket, you obviously got to be on top of these, these latest trends and innovations. How do you stay on top of, you know, these SaaS and fintech and restaurant tech? You know, a lot of it's just.

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John Florinis [00:24:01]:

Talking to customers, quite frankly. And I have the benefit of, of talking to customers across the value chain. Right. So we spoke a lot about operators, but a lot of our business is actually food distributors, right. Where we're talking, you know, a fantastic group of companies that essentially work with all the major manufacturers and suppliers and on a regional basis across the US and Canada, deploy inventory and items to restaurants. Understanding their growth and what's important for their business is actually one of the exciting things I actually brought me to Meal Ticket it. And, you know, when you look at that side of the business, you kind of see the full circle, right? You kind of say, okay, well, you know, you know, they're working with, with operators, which, you know, you and I have spent a lot of time in our careers with, but now it's like, okay, these are fairly large organizations but very family oriented.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:59]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:24:59]:

So they have a very similar mindset to the operator. Right. Like, you know, how do I get better? How do I drive more efficiency? Very Relationship-focused organizations really care about their customers. And the solutions that we bring to that market help them accelerate that. So better data, better insight in terms of who their customers are, what their customers are buying from them., and then thinking through, again, the food service space is super thin when it comes to margins. So for giving them the tools and whatnot, to kind of manage rebates. And so it's a big part of the business where like a big supply like Tyson chicken or McCain's or name your massive kind of conglomerate will offer incentives, dollars, trade dollars or rebates to distributors who then can pass that savings on to operators. And managing all that is not easy, especially when you're doing millions upon millions and millions of dollars worth of sales. So that's a big part of our track max solution in terms of how we manage that and that and understanding that and getting into the, into the, into the weeds of, you know, learning that part of the business, like everyone kind of understands it, you know, at a high level.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:19]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:26:19]:

But when you get into the weeds, like it is, it is, there's a lot of, like a lot of stuff you have to take into consideration. So, I mean, hats off to the team that kind of, you know, works on that. But it's, but for me, it's been a great learning curve and kind appreciating, you know, it's not just about kind of creating a Meal and managing the, the restaurants, about how do you also kind of help these distributors who are critical to, to the supply chain and helping them, helping them kind of manage their businesses more, more efficiently as well. So, so that that's kind of the, the other side of the, of the equation for me. And then, and then looking at, you know, kind of the suppliers and how do we work with them as well. Right. In terms of giving the data that makes them more, more efficient and more knowledgeable in terms of wherever they spend their, their promotional dollars. Right.

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John Florinis [00:27:10]:

So, you know, so, you know, it's fantastic. Kind of having this vantage point that's kind of end to end and, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's been great.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:19]:

Yeah, no, it's super interesting because when you think about it, like, I know the food side is a bit different, but on the alcohol side, in many places and in, you know, at least us and Canada, it's like a three tiered system. And so it's like pretty fragmented. You got the producers, you know, then you got the actual distributors, and then you got the, you know, on premise, either locations or whether it's retail or restaurants. And what ends up happening is one of the problems on that side of things is the producers get data from the distributors. So how many cases were sold? But it's very pallets or whatever, millions of cases, but kind of stops there. And the distributors understand who bought what. But again, it stops there. But getting to the last point, which it sounds like you can do with your marketman solution and Meal Ticket, but it's like understanding what's actually happening.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:08]:

So they're like, sure, maybe restaurant x got, I don't know, x amount x cases of this tequila. But did they sell it in their premium cocktail or was that like the staff drink or was that like the promo drink? Like what actually happened? Or did it just not sell and it just sitting on the shelf because it was a deal and it just sat on the shelf like, so having that last piece of like, you know, being connected with the pos and understanding how it's being sold and the recipes and the cost. And that's where I think, you know, a market man or WISK really can help. But I'm curious to know, on the food side, maybe it's not, I mean, fragmented in a different way, but like, what, what challenges you have there? Because obviously on the alcohol side, you kind of have just had. It's more of a visibility issue because it's like, you know, level three can only sell to two, two can only sell to one, and like, there's not much communication between the others.

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John Florinis [00:28:52]:

You know, I think that, you know, the challenge, you know, opportunity, I like to look at things more as opportunities. I think it's really, you know, how do you, how do you leverage, you know, these are, these firms are, you know, they've been around a long time. Yeah, right. And they've served their communities for a long time. And I think really where the opportunity is is like, how do you kind of help, you know, our technology and our products are really geared around, you know, helping them kind of strengthen those relationships. So using technology is a way to kind of, you know, strengthen relationships with, with their customers, you know, help them optimize their, their profits and their, and their margins through our, you know, able to kind of manage, you know, rebates more effectively. It's a massive, massive industry that we don't talk about a lot, but it's really complex.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:40]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:29:40]:

Right. And, you know, it's about essentially, it's, it's making sure, you know, if you're, if you have, you know, tens of thousands, hundred thousands of invoices, how do you make sure that you're getting, you know, your extra dollar per case? Being able to kind of have technology that allows you to simplify that and invoice that and, you know, generate revenue off of that helps these companies, you know, where the margins are sub 2% even lower in some places. Getting back a few basis points worth of margin is substantial.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:12]:

It's massive.

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John Florinis [00:30:14]:

That's really kind of the key in how we kind of help them. And I think there's a lot more opportunity to optimize within these businesses. So that's kind of what we're focused on in that regard. But, yeah, I mean, it's great. I mean, it's a whole different world that I haven't really spent too much time in, but it's great learning about it and kind of meeting the individuals that are kind of driving the agenda forward.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:44]:

Yeah, that's awesome. And I know obviously maybe putting your product hat on. I know you have a ton of product experience, both what you're doing today at Meal Ticket and marketman, but also at touchpadays and beyond. I'm curious, like, just maybe shifting gears and speaking a bit about product. I'd like to, like, pick your brain. How do you think about prioritizing features and enhancements? Because I know there's no shortage of customers wanting improvements. And obviously you got to listen, but how do you go about prioritizing what you guys want to do, what customers want, and just kind of like building that list of features?

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John Florinis [00:31:21]:

It's more, I won't say it's a textbook approach, but essentially it's, you know, you have to kind of, it's part art, part science, right. You know, there's things that you need to do. Right. There's realities of the market. There's realities of the business that you need to kind of factor in. And essentially, you know, prioritization is, you know, you kind of look at your overall overarching company goals and strategy and everything you want to achieve, kind of your north star in terms of where you want to go, but then you have to be mindful of things that you need to address within the business, and you kind of. Wait, you kind of create a weighting system. Right.

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John Florinis [00:32:01]:

In terms of, like, what's new that we need to kind of play where, you know, what are our customers asking for? How do we make sure that we can evaluate that size that. So a lot of the work essentially is scoping and questioning and really, really challenging. Is this something that is going to be at incremental enterprise value? Is this, you know, something that we need to do to kind of address a specific customer need? So those are, that's kind of the debate that we have with, you know, with, within the product organization, but also, you know, with, with the stakeholders. Right. So I think the other piece here is, like, tight alignment with each of the functional groups, especially the customer facing groups, and making sure that, you know, we're hearing noise. It's, it's, you know, quickly being able to kind of, you know, understand what kind of noise is it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:53]:

Got.

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John Florinis [00:32:53]:

Got it. And be attuned to that. And always question always, you know, always kind of have an eye out for how we look for those new things, but more so making sure that everything that we do has a customer has a positive customer impact as the end result.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:11]:

I love that. And maybe just for fun, can you think of a time? And if you can't, I'm sure there's plenty, but of a time where maybe a product launch didn't go as planned. Cause we talk about the good, but I'm sure being in products is not easy. There's times where things don't go as planned. And maybe like, you know, if you have any fun stories there and maybe like, what you learned from that experience, what, what's changed?

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John Florinis [00:33:35]:

I can't really think of a specific example, but I can think of like ways I think, I think of how things could have gone better, right. And I think, you know, where when I think about, you know, my evolution and launching new products and all that, the main lesson for me has always been I think you need to kind of have organizational alignment early. Right. So if you kind of think of my history of, you know, at Maneris and Mastercard, fairly large organizations, you know, things, when things launch, it's usually a big deal, right. So taking that kind of large company kind of mentality around ensuring everything's kind of lined up. You have press releases, you have internal communications, you have, you know, people trained up across your sales training, your support training, you know, all that stuff, having that, you know, taking that, that framework and bringing it to kind of smaller companies, it's kind of helped me because it doesn't matter. You know, what I've learned is like, it doesn't matter on the size of the release or what you're trying to do, people are still impacted. Right.

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John Florinis [00:34:35]:

So it could be, you know, so being able to just to kind of have, have a game plan around, you know, a Mastercard, we are former header product, when I was there, used to have this thing around, look left, look right, and product was more than kind of just like product managers had a lot, you know, how to, a lot more like p and l type of accountability. So like, you know, if you weren't looking left and seeing how you're going to impact your support resources, if you're on looking right and see you're going to impact your sales resources, then you're not doing your job right. So it's that kind of mentality that I kind of go into. You know, it's like, are we, you know, if we release this, you know, if we release this feature, is it gonna, you know, is it gonna blow up or support you? Right, because we're trained properly. So like what needs to make sense for it, you know, so that's kind of the main lesson around, you know, kind of, you know, kind of, you know, making a career of introducing new, new capabilities and releasing products yeah. Is making sure that, you know, there's that strong organizational alignment and people know what role they have to play as a result of bringing something to market that makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:43]:

And then how would you say you've maybe fostered a culture of innovation within your teams at Meal Ticket? Because obviously there's maybe a balance, right? You want people to be innovative and think different and whatnot, but obviously you can't move too fast. So how do you guys maybe manage the innovation at Meal Ticket?

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John Florinis [00:36:00]:

You want to always have? I use something called a horizon framework, but essentially, you want to make sure that you're delivering for your customers today. You're spending most of your time and energy kind of delivering and driving for the business value for today, but you don't want to lose sight of what's next. I think depending on your role and where you sit, you have a different point of view of, well, this may not be something we want to work on this year, but maybe something we should think about next year. Right. And just have that line of sight and be able to kind of openly communicate that and share ideas and document and, you know, kind of. We meet frequently and all that. So if there's something that we say, hey, you know, this is, this. This is something I'm hearing over here, it could grow into something bigger.

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John Florinis [00:36:50]:

Maybe we should, you know, plot it out for something that we evaluate in a quarter or two quarters from now. And I think that that's kind of, you know, there really is, like, you know, I don't think there really is any, you know, outside of the pandemic, I don't think there's, like, any, like, you know, black swans that that that all kind of pop up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:09]:

Right, right. That makes sense. Yeah, that was an interesting moment, to say the least. I think a lot of people, you know, had to have to pivot fast, and it wasn't easy. I mean, out of curiosity, like, how do you navigate, you know, or, like, yeah, if I think about the COVID time. Right. Like, it was super hard for the hospitality industry, you being in a hospitality tech. Just out of curiosity, how did you kind of approach such a.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:39]:

Such a tough moment? Like, what are strategies you thought of in the moment, right, when no one knew what the hell to do? Like, how do you think about that? Crisis management?

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John Florinis [00:37:50]:

I guess it was definitely a tough time. I think, you know, what. What kind of, you know, having a great team is one, you know, and, you know, having a good leader at the time was, was, was two. And I think the main thing for. For me was being so closely aligned to the industry, you just had this innate desire to help. Right. So what are the things that. That I can do that my team can do that the organization can do to help the industry kind of survive this unknown scenario? How do we help them navigate? What are the tools? What are the things that we can do to help them kind of, you know, get by the week, you know, the month, until things started to kind of normalize.

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John Florinis [00:38:38]:

Right. And I think that that was kind of. So it's a combination of what are. What are the things that the product can do and this combination of what the company can do. Right. I think that that was kind of, you know, the. The. I guess, the driving force around.

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John Florinis [00:38:53]:

Around kind of navigating those, you know, those. Those weird times.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:56]:

Yeah. And then have you ever thought of, like, what things, let's say, you would do differently? Like, imagine. Oh, I hate to imagine this, but if there was a Covid 2.0, like, are there things that you're like, you know, what if this ever happened again?

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John Florinis [00:39:11]:

Or I've really got through another. Another Covid 2.0. I think the industry is. Has built that resiliency muscle. Right. You know, there's things that we can't protect against. But I think ultimately, you know, the fact that during COVID online ordering, you know, kind of skyrocketed. Different operating models emerged.

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John Florinis [00:39:38]:

And I think what the industry has done is they've kind of almost kind of created their own insulated way of kind of, you know, if maybe not Covid, but if something else were to cause, you know, mass shutdowns, people still need to eat at the end of the day. Right, right. And I think there's, you know, the different modalities in terms of, you know, how they operate have. Have kind of been tested. So I think there's. The industry's kind of built some.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:01]:

Yeah, that's fair.

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John Florinis [00:40:03]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:03]:

Curbside pickup goals, kitchens. It's that, like, delivery models. Yeah, it's true that there's been some interesting. Like, the one thing I will say is, like, I think we've all seen it. Like, obviously, there's been a lot of digital transformation happening in general in the restaurant scene, but I think there's been a steep curve, you know, in terms of growth. Like, during COVID Right. Like, third party ordering and online ordering is, like, a key one. You know, the QR code made a comeback.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:31]:

Right, from menus.

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John Florinis [00:40:34]:

It drove habitualization. Right. That was a big thing that, you know, in my Mastercard days was like, how do you, how do you focus on industries that are habitualized, meaning people are, you know, tapping a card or using Apple pay in certain industries to help drive that. And QSR restaurants is one of those industries, right. People, you know, like, you know, if I go pick up food, I'm tapping my card or I'm using apple pay, and I'm. And, like, I wouldn't think to not tap my card, right? Online ordering is the same thing. It's like a lot of people have, like, you know, I'll just order online and I have my few spots on my dining roster that I cycle through and I'll just go there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:14]:

Yeah. And one of the things, and correct me if I'm wrong, obviously, I know Marketman is international. I don't know if Meal Ticket is as well. But being, working with international clients and employees, I imagine there's, like, some cultural differences. I'm just curious if you can highlight any interesting ones that you've seen either internally or just, just, even just from like, a restaurant operator point of view of, like, you know, dealing with restaurants in, I don't know, Italy versus, you know, Canada, like, any, anything that comes to mind.

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John Florinis [00:41:45]:

I think there's more commonalities and there are differences.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:47]:

Interesting. Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:41:48]:

I think a good operator is a good operator regardless of what country you sit in.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:53]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:41:54]:

You know, they're, you know, you're right. We do have, we do have customers all around the globe. We have, we have teams that are all around globe. Good operators operate the same way. And you kind of see that when you make the choice to leverage marketman, regardless of if you're in Italy or in the UK or Israel or wherever, you've chosen a tool to help you manage your business, and that puts you in a space where you want to operate your business more effectively. Uh, and doesn't matter if you're, if you're, if you're from, you know, any other country. It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just the way you, you've approached the, um, the situation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:37]:

Yeah, that makes sense. The one, the one thing that we saw was kind of interesting, and it's all sounds super obvious. And I'm sure you probably saw this at touchpad show, too. But it was like, we're obviously heavy on, on the liquor, wine, alcohol side, and then we do food, too. But what we've noticed is, like, in places like, maybe like the US, Canada, or the UK, like, liquor is important. It's where if you run a restaurant, or a full service restaurant or a bar, like, you make a lot of your money. So, like, managing, that makes sense. But then in other areas specifically, I'm thinking, like, maybe like South America or even Mexico, for instance, like the, where the alcohol was not, they weren't as stressed about the cost of alcohol.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:14]:

They were more worried about, example, the high cost of, you know, premium steaks or whatnot. So it's like we saw this kind of difference between, you know, really caring about, you know, the liquor and wine versus maybe in, like, you know, again, Mexico or South America, for instance, like, they really cared about, like, the expensive proteins, let's say, and making sure they're managing that, which, super interesting, when you think of it.

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John Florinis [00:43:37]:

There are different countries, different economies have different things that they need to kind of protect against. Yeah. I mean, but at the same, you know, at the end of the day, it's. It's either you're managing, you know, a bottle of fine wine, or you're managing, you know, premium cut of steak. Right. It's. You want to be able to have eyes on those products and making sure that you're optimizing your business accordingly, 100%.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:03]:

And then just to wrap things up, I'd love to know, like, looking back, you have a wealth of experience in the hospitality space, in the payment space and the Pos space, and now in the back of house distributor space. So given all that knowledge, anything that stands out that you had wished you known earlier in your career, that would have made a significant difference. In other words, any lessons you can share for people listening in that are maybe in the restaurant tech world?

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John Florinis [00:44:29]:

I think a lot of my lessons came through trial by fire. Right. I think it's like, and again, I've been very fortunate to kind of be working on things that are relatively new, I think, from a lessons perspective. Yeah. Like, it's. It's just being, you know, never, never kind of, you know, I think, I think sometimes, especially kind of as you kind of raise the, you know, raise up the management ranks.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:56]:

Yeah.

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John Florinis [00:44:56]:

You, you tend to discount things. And I think, I think being able to kind of stay open to new ideas and keeping a lens on kind of the current versus the future, you know, the, you know, that's a muscle if you can build early in your career is, you know, will serve you well. Right. So, you know, don't, don't dismiss things, you know, just because they maybe seem, seem hard or you don't see the market opportunity kind of, you know, kind of tease out the value and, and, you know, you never, never kind of, you know, shut the door on opportunities. It may not be the right time, but, you know, most things, you know, there never really is the right time. It's. It's. It's about.

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John Florinis [00:45:38]:

It's about, you know, making, you know, understanding wherever in the industry is going and how customers are evolving and then, you know, creating, creating that big network of contacts, you know, just like you and I. Right. Like, you know, just having that broad network, you know, network often network quickly and kind of, you know, get deep into your space. I think that that's kind of, you know, lesson learned from my perspective.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:00]:

Love that. And last but not least, for people who just want to find you, like, where can they connect with you if you want to plug your LinkedIn? And at the same time, if you want to plug, plug, you know, Meal Ticket, marketman, anything, because we'll also include this in the episode, notes and stuff, but anything you want to share on how they can reach you or reach Meal Ticket or marketman or. I'll forget the last one. What's the last one called?

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John Florinis [00:46:24]:

Track Max. Track max is part of Mealtaker.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:27]:

Okay, got it. Track Max.

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John Florinis [00:46:30]:

So, John Flournis, I'm on LinkedIn, and then our websites are marketman.com and beautiful.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:39]:

Easy, easy to spell. So that's awesome. So, John, thank you for joining me today. Honestly, wealth of knowledge. I appreciate you sharing that wisdom coming from that hospitality and tech sides and kind of, you know, sharing it with our restaurant listeners. So really appreciate it. Once again, we're here with John Florinis EVP product at Meal Ticket.

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John Florinis [00:46:59]:

Thank you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:00]:

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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