Branden Mcrill [00:00:00]:

It gets them closer and closer and closer and closer and closer to a finite point of optimization. It's never perfect. In fact, sometimes it's far from perfect because things change. But for the most part, it's always more accurate triangulating to than a person would naturalistically fall on their own. And it's the same thing with purchasing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:21]:

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 joined here today with Brandon McCrill, co founder and CEO, at 5-Out. Brandon, thanks for joining us.

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Branden Mcrill [00:00:51]:

Good to be here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:52]:

So as always, like to start off with what is 5-Out? We'll definitely jump deeper into it, but just high level so we can let our listeners knows what it is and what it is that you currently do.

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Branden Mcrill [00:01:03]:

Yeah, so I'm the co founder and CEO of the company. I started the company back in 2021. I started it originally from within side of one of my own restaurants, which I've been in the restaurant industry for 26 years. And as an owner operator, I'm still a restaurant owner operator today. And 5-Out, in its simplest form, is an automation solution. So we use machine learning models to automate labor budgets, and I prep and purchase volumes. And the idea is that there's a great deal of increased optimization and reduction of waste and profitability in getting to an accurate understanding of how much labor resourcing, how much food you need to prep, how much beverage you need to have on hand, and how much food and beverage you need to purchase. And so that's what we do.

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Branden Mcrill [00:01:53]:

We automate all of those functions.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:57]:

Love that. I love that. And obviously, 26 years plus of experience in the hospitality space. I'm always curious kind of here about the story of what led you to kind of where you're at today. So, like, can you maybe take us back and walk us through a bit of your journey and what led to the kind of idea of wanting to start 5-Out in the first place?

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Branden Mcrill [00:02:16]:

Yeah, so I'll run the restaurant gamut real fast, then we'll go back in time and bring us to future, to current. So I got started in the restaurant industry when I was 15. I was, I actually got started in the restaurant industry because I got injured playing soccer. So I was trying out for my high school team. I got injured during the tryout. I was injured enough that I couldn't play competitive soccer, but not injured enough that my mother wasn't like, you need to get the hell out of the house and take that energy, that 15 year old energy, somewhere else. So I went and got a job actually parking cars and washing dishes at a local restaurant near where I grew up in Michigan. And so I did that.

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Branden Mcrill [00:02:55]:

And it was just something to do to fill time and to make a little bit of money. But I did enjoy it. And I probably wasn't good at it at the time, but I certainly enjoyed it. So for my next job, it was just kind of natural that I go to get another restaurant job. So then I started working my way up, and I eventually worked at another restaurant in Detroit. And then I worked at another restaurant in Detroit. Then I worked at another restaurant in Detroit. And then eventually I actually transferred schools.

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Branden Mcrill [00:03:22]:

I was in college at this point. Now I've been in the restaurant industry for about six years. I transferred schools from CCS and Detroit to Columbia and Chicago. When I got to Chicago, first thing I did besides sign up for classes was look for a job. So I got a job at a pizza place. I was working at this pizza place for about a year, and I was poking around on Craigslist, which not everybody who's watching this will be familiar with. I saw an ad for a job for a new restaurant opening, and I went to that interview and was completely and holistically unqualified as I could answer none of the questions in a good way. And just anecdotally, some of the questions were, you know, do you read the New York Times food section? Do you read the New York Times reviews? Do you cook often? Do you love to cook? Do you love to entertain? Do you love wine? Do you love this and that? And all these.

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Branden Mcrill [00:04:22]:

And do you know who this person is? And that person is? And all these questions. I was like, unequivocally, no. I'm interested in the fact that you're asking me all these questions about why I need to know all this and be interested in all this for this job.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:33]:

Yeah.

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Branden Mcrill [00:04:34]:

That person who was interviewing me at the time determined that because my answers were all unequivocally no. That I was a blank slate. And in that, I could actually be molded into aid model employees. So I got hired, and that restaurant was called Alinea. So when I was 22, I worked on the opening team at Alinea, which is now a three Michelin star, four star restaurant, and at certain iterations in its 20 year arc, has been one of the top restaurants in the world. So I started working at that restaurant, and I very much became enamored with hospitality and restaurants and food and service and wine in a way that I had not been prior. Just small edification. I went from wearing t shirt and shorts and a pair of tennis shoes, running, slinging pizzas to a $2,000 suit, and I was serving a 28 course tasting menu to folks for dollar 250 a hat.

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Branden Mcrill [00:05:29]:

And so it was just a very different thing that I not only had never worked at, but I had never even been to or even experienced. I didn't even know it was existed. I dropped out of school. I lost 80 pounds in the first four months of working there from running up and down the stairs all night long. Running, jeez. And I really just kind of focused on hospitality as a career from there forward, and became a student of restaurants, service, restaurant culture, cooking, wine, and anything and everything that went with that world. And so from there, I went and worked for Donnie and Paul at Blackbird and Vec, which are another couple of great restaurateurs in Chicago. Then I worked for Richard Melman that let us entertain you at his two Michelin star restaurant called Tru, which is also in Chicago.

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Branden Mcrill [00:06:17]:

I then got recruited by Union Square Hospitality group. I moved to New York City to work for Danny Meyer at the Modern, at the Modern Museum of Art, which is a two Michelin star restaurant in the MoMA. And then I went to work for John George at his three Michelin star. I opened up Benoit for L'en Ducasse, two restaurants for David Burke. Went back to work for John George at the mark in the Upper east side Hotel, opened up the first full service hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a city of 6 million people that didn't have a full service hotel in 2011, which is crazy. Went up to 125th in Lenox, went and worked for Marcus at Red Rooster, which he was just opening. Helped him open up four other concepts. And then I was in my late twenties, and I said, I want to start something on my own.

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Branden Mcrill [00:06:51]:

So I opened up my first restaurant in the Lower east side of Manhattan in 2012 called Pearl Nash. I followed that with a second restaurant in 2016 or 15 called Rebelle. Yeah, we got Michelin star for a rebel within the first couple of months of being open, put us on national radar. And myself and my partners then got tapped by a publicly traded REIT to go open a fine dining restaurant in a mixed vertical neighborhood, $350 million new development in Philly. Went and did that, stayed and opened up two more restaurants. And that's what I've been doing on the hospitality restaurant side for 26 years now. The answer to your question about why did I start 5-Out? It started it because inclusive of all the restaurant groups I've ever worked at, as well as the ones that I've owned and operated, the same issues persist in all of them. All the restaurants have the same challenges.

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Branden Mcrill [00:07:41]:

It doesn't matter if it's a three Michelin star, four star restaurant, or if it's a barbecue restaurant on East Warren in Detroit, and everything in between, there is the same types of persistent issues, challenges, opportunities. There's human beings who work in them. They don't have all the time in the world. They don't have all the resources in the world. And the restaurant industry is at a very difficult business. That's the global in the weeds. The profit margins were difficult 20 years ago. They were more difficult five years ago, and now they're the most difficult they've ever been in the history of restaurants.

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Branden Mcrill [00:08:15]:

The biggest opportunities outside of growing gross revenue, which often doesn't lead to increased profitability. Not something that people like to address, but it's reality. If you're running 2% on 100,000, you might be also running 2% on a million. You might be running 2% on 10 million. So, that doesn't move the needle. What moves the needle is profit margin. Increase the weight, in my personal opinion, and what I've seen in my own restaurants and in some of the best restaurant tours in the United States, is optimization around your two largest controllables, which are labor and what you buy. So, if I can have the right amount of staff, and the right amount of food product, and the right amount of beverage at the right time, and not more and not less, but the optimized right size level, then I can have the best chance and the best opportunity at being the most profitable and having the best staff experience and the best guest experience.

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Branden Mcrill [00:09:17]:

And when those things all get married, coupled, so to speak, then you have the absolute best outcome for a restaurant. You can have provided that the content's good. And so we wanted to do that, but doing that is no easy feat. So we started in Excel, and my co founder, Mike, who's my chief technology officer, who's been coding since he was twelve, who had a prolific career of ten years at Citibank, and then who started a consultancy for hotels and restaurants, and that's where I met him as his third or fourth client. I said, here's what we need to do. And he said, sounds great. Show me where there's the one piece of technology that connects everything in your tech stack and. And the reports that come from it.

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Branden Mcrill [00:09:58]:

And I started laughing, of course, and he, you know, coming from Citibank, didn't understand how such a thing couldn't exist. And me explaining to him, in restaurants, we're not a trillion dollar business, so that's why it doesn't exist.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:08]:

Very fragmented.

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Branden Mcrill [00:10:09]:

Yeah, exactly. So he said, okay, here's what we'll do. Whipped up an excel sheet, started writing manual algorithms, started utilizing all the data that we had disposable to us. Point of sale reservations, inventory management, analytics, accounting, foot traffic, third party information, like I said, foot traffic, weather events, these types of things.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:28]:

Yeah.

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Branden Mcrill [00:10:29]:

Piped this through these algorithms, and out the other side of comes, at this point, 2016, a one week look forward forecast for revenue. Headcount per person, average, check average, and item wise, sales. So what actual items are you going to sell? And it was fairly accurate, and we were doing it for one restaurant. And with that information, it would be like if you sent a text to a hundred of your friends and said, I'm having a party this weekend. Come over, no one RSVP. And then you have to buy the right amount of food in BeV. Very challenging, right? Versus the wedding, where you're like, it's this day, it's this time. And chicken or steak, and if you don't fill it out, you're not getting fed.

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Branden Mcrill [00:11:10]:

Right? So we tried to go from this unknown to this exceptionally known so that we could properly provision. And that worked. That worked with in excel. With one restaurant, we were able to back into automated labor. Automated cogs, automated purchase, automated prep, all these things. Automated. And then hand these deliverables to department heads who, let's face it, are very busy folks doing stuff with their hands and feet and talking to people and talking to guests and doing all the stuff it takes to run a restaurant, but not sitting around and analyzing data. So then we scaled to two, then we scaled to five, and then we hit a human capital wall.

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Branden Mcrill [00:11:46]:

Cause Mike's a person, not a computer. And he was doing manual data entry, taking CSV files out of, like, thumb drives off of a micro terminal in an office basement. And we're like, this is not gonna keep working.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:57]:

Yeah, it's not scalable.

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Branden Mcrill [00:11:58]:

Yeah, not scalable. So, okay, let's build software. And Mike was like, all I've ever done my whole life. Fuck yes, let's do it. So we jumped in, and then, like, two kids building sandcastles on the beach, we were like, let's sprinkle AI in. Like, that'll be easy. We'll just make it. We'll make it automated even more so.

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Branden Mcrill [00:12:16]:

That's when we really got into it and partnered with a full stack developer who had some AI experience, and that brought us to where we're at now. Today. 5-Out is an automated labor, automated prep, automated purchase solution that utilizes ML algorithms. Pulls point of sale scheduling, inventory management, purchasing, accounting, events, reservations, foot traffic, weather, and. And end, and. And runs it through a proprietary ML model. Actually now, six different proprietary ML models, all of which spit out some piece of the puzzle of what you need to be able to automate your labor and automate your prep and automate your purchasing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:57]:

That's really cool. And I'm curious, like, obviously, it sounds like a dream come true for restaurants. Like, you nailed it. Prime costs, right? Labor, and then your cogs. Like, if you can work on those two things, you're tackling the bulk of what a restaurant needs to tackle.

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Branden Mcrill [00:13:14]:

There's nothing else to control. You can't negotiate your rent daily. You can't control and negotiate your insurance bill, your water bill. There's just nothing else to control. And so there's only two things, in my personal opinion.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:26]:

I agree with this.

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Branden Mcrill [00:13:27]:

Take good stuff and organize yourself well to continue to allow yourself to make good stuff. And it's just that simple.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:33]:

I love that. No, it's well said. So I'm curious to know, like, what. What do you find is your typical type of customer? Do you find that you do well with a certain group size or certain style? You know, FSR versus QSR, or is it really anyone and everyone?

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Branden Mcrill [00:13:49]:

I wanted it to be anyone and everyone. And that was naivety coming out of the gate because, well, in fact, I knew that everyone and anyone needed to help.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:02]:

Let me say that, right, fair.

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Branden Mcrill [00:14:03]:

Everybody needs help. Everybody. Everybody. And any people who don't need help actually still want help. And I say often at, like, Tiger woods has a golf coach. Michael Jordan had a shooting coach. All the way through the end of their career. They wanted help.

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Branden Mcrill [00:14:20]:

They were great, but they wanted help. And then there were people who, like myself, can't hit the mid range jumper, and I haven't picked up a golf club in 20 years, so I need the help.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:28]:

Right?

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Branden Mcrill [00:14:29]:

So everybody could benefit from this solution. But what we've learned over the last, I would say, two and a half years, and it continues to hone in and refine itself. And, of course, this is the naturalistic process that we all go in who are in the software space. What we have learned is that more so than everyone, that there is a not an individualistic ICP, so to speak, but a closer fit, the further you move towards a particular sector. So said more specifically, the majority of our clients are in fact QSR FSR restaurants. So initially we were spread across QSR FSR full service fine dining, and that was all good and well. However, what we're looking for ultimately, when we're working with our clients and working with our guests is a return on investment, adoption, ecstatic reviews. We were continuing and we still continue to find that more so with QSR FSR restaurants than we do with the full service and fine dining.

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Branden Mcrill [00:15:33]:

And more specifically, we're finding it at the larger store counts. So I would say the highest end of SMB and into mid market, all the way across the mid market sector and into enterprise. So we don't find that people, specifically mom and pops ones and twos, or even small groups that have several different types of concepts. So like somebody who's got five different concepts or ten different concepts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:03]:

Right.

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Branden Mcrill [00:16:04]:

I. They're not the folks that we find who achieve the ROI that we want them to get or that they're able to deploy this in a way that makes it successful. Because at the end of the day, this is 5-Out is not something that we built for people who work on businesses. We built it for people who work in businesses. So something very important to mention is that people who pick up the phone and call in food and people who type out and publish a schedule are typically not sitting at a desk. Typically, they're typically working within the restaurant. That's one of 1000 things they're going to do on any given day. Those are the people we're looking to help.

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Branden Mcrill [00:16:50]:

Those are the people that we need to connect with to be able to allow for the businesses to be more successful. And when we don't, we actually fall pretty much flat on our face. So this is not a reporting solution or a data play. It very much is. You would normally have to think about something and spend time coming up with what you're going to do in a certain particular situation. That is, how much am I going to prep, how much am I going to purchase, how much am I going to schedule when we either can replace that entirely or we can start you off at a 95% starting point and you can come in and finish the last 5%. But it's got to be people who work within the four walls. It has to be the schedulers, it has to be the purchasers it has to be the people who are deciding prep volumes.

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Branden Mcrill [00:17:32]:

That's who we built it for, not for the people who work on the business. And where those mostly exist are mostly in the QSR FSR space, in a franchisor, franchisee, or corporate environment, where you've got in store managers, supervisors, shift leaders. And they're not data scientists. They're not data analysts. They're typically not mbasitive. And even if they were a data scientist, a data analyst, and an MBA altogether, they're, like, busy. They're running around. They're doing stuff.

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Branden Mcrill [00:18:01]:

They don't have time to sit and analyze data. So it doesn't matter if it's Tiger woods and Michael Jordan or if it's me trying to play pickup. Everybody needs it, but it's the folks who are working at scale or trying to be at scale that are utilizing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:14]:

It the most that makes sense. And no, the idea of, like, you know, honing in on your ideal customer profile is just something we learned, too. The hard way at WISK is like, it's not just that. Like, okay, and the beating you want to help everybody, but helping everybody just technologically is tough because, you know, we integrate with, I think, 60 poss now. And I imagine you integrate not only with Pos, but like you said, scheduling and this and that. And so for you guys, the broader the ICP, the more it kind of creates this exponential kind of, you know, load of, like, now we're supporting these other 13 tools for this, like, subset of 5% of clients, and it makes things really, really difficult. So I love that you're honing in on a specific audience and audience that you could see you're helping. So maybe just to kind of paint the picture.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:58]:

I love, you know, we have a lot of restaurant listeners listening in. What does the process maybe look like? You know, so if I'm a QSR, I got. I don't know, I'm a pokeball shop. I got 20 locations. I'm listening to this podcast. I'm okay. This sounds interesting. I mean.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:10]:

Yes. Sounds like a dream. I would love to get all this data. What is the process actually look like? They come on board. They got 20 locations. Are you testing with one? What does this set up look like? Anything. I just. I'd love for you to maybe, like, painted.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:23]:

I know it probably depends on the client, but maybe a general kind of image of what the onboarding looks like and what they can expect.

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Branden Mcrill [00:19:30]:

So I think that one of the things I didn't have to learn, and I knew going in, because I had been on the other side for the 26 years and opened a lot of restaurants and therefore reviewed, analyzed, and isolated a lot of technology knew going in. That set up and streamlined process was going to be mission critical for us coming out of the gate. So it wasn't objective number one, but it sure was up there in the top five. It had to be one click. And so we designed it to be one click, and it is one click to start. And what I mean by that is we actually only need to integrate with a point of sale to be able to work with a client. The other things are nice to haves, but they're not mission critical. So the scheduler, the inventory management solution, the accounting solution, the reservation solution, the third party integrator, the events, the catering, those things, all of which are within their four walls, are things that help and can improve and hone if and when they have them, etcetera.

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Branden Mcrill [00:20:39]:

But we don't need them. We just require the point of sale. We pull three years of historical sales data up to if they have it, and that's it. We can get started with that, because then we can pull geographic location, we can pull weather, we can pull local and national events, we can pull all sorts of other things that we pull into our model. And we don't need anything else from the restaurant tour. And so all we need is a one click permission, whether it's toast or it's square, or it's par or it's aloha or it's micros. With micros, obviously a couple of different paths, but for the rest of them, one click gives us access to their data. Everything for us is automated.

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Branden Mcrill [00:21:24]:

There is zero human involvement on the operator's end. To get it set up, we run on six different models depending on what they want from us. So sometimes it'll be more, sometimes it'll be less. But it's up to six different individualistic, unique models for revenue, for covers, for per person average, for their item wise sales, for their labor budgets. And we'll provide them to them typically in about 3 hours. So if I spoke to that 20.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:53]:

Times of value, very, very short.

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Branden Mcrill [00:21:55]:

Yeah, exceptionally quick. And they just, they never have to do any setup. In fact, we do very little setup. We only have to pull in their outside third party data points and that's it. And so then within 3 hours, they could have a username and a password and be back on a onboarding and training call with one of our team members, and they could be off to the races later that day. And that's really it. And then the rest of the things that I talked about integrating, which I said are nice to have and or can help to hone the model, those are also all one click. None of those are set up.

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Branden Mcrill [00:22:29]:

There's one. I wouldn't call it a caveat, but like a layer of. We also have a built in scheduler to our solution. So some people will use our scheduler because then it basically helps them consolidate their tech stack and saves them some money. And then if they're going to do that, we need to obviously upload their schedule and their employees and their rates and all that. But that's only if they're utilizing the schedule or if they're not. Like I said, everything is automatically set up for them. It's automatically handed to them.

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Branden Mcrill [00:22:53]:

And I think probably more important than that is not the fact of how easy it is to set up, that it's automated entirely. It's that they never do data entry to make it go. So no one ever has to sit in front of a computer and go like this to make it get the information that they want out of it. It continuously automatically repopulates and reserves them all the data that they need in an ongoing capacity, which is automated labor budget, automated prep list, automated pos.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:19]:

Love that. It's funny. It's something. And I think you nailed it. I love what you guys are doing and the way you're, you know, even positioning it, because it's, it's something we realized, too, is like, restaurants don't love doing data in. But I mean, who does? But the idea, even, like, at WISK, was always like, okay, if you think of every part of, let's say, the cog side of counting the inventory and entering it, like, how do you take all those parts, the recipes, maybe. And for each of those things, how can you make it so it's like the least amount of work. And so for invoices, it might be obvious.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:45]:

It's like, oh, let's snap a picture and ocr it and whatever. And training, you know, and then for recipes, it might be like, okay, maybe we can suggest based on what. But you keep thinking about all these things and you think about how can get with the least amount of input, because restaurants are busy. And what we learned the hard way is just like, no matter how easy you make something, it's like people will always get busy. And then you're also very reliant on a human being. And what ends up happening is you can have an account that's like an a plus. Amazing client. Manager quits, new manager comes in, he's not tech savvy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:19]:

Now, it's like they're a D minus client, and you're like, that sucks. They were like our best client, and now they're not just because that human being doesn't like it, you know? So, lesson there, and I think you guys are nailing it, is the less you have to rely on people doing actual things, the better. So it's really cool to know that you guys have like a one click kind of automation.

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Branden Mcrill [00:24:37]:

I'm a restaurateur, so I get to say this with my restaurant hat on. I don't trust restauranteurs, including myself, to do manual data entry. So we had to build around it. Had to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:51]:

I love that. I love that. And so, and so, let me ask you this. What's, what's, and I'm sure you have a lot of clients, a lot of different kind of maybe, uh, wins and case studies, but anything that comes to mind. So again, going back to maybe painting that picture, pokeball shop, Tony locations, they're using toast, let's say, or square. One of the pos you integrate with, they connect. 3 hours later, they're starting to see some data. What's some typical wins they can get like out of the gate that you've maybe seen with some, some clients?

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Branden Mcrill [00:25:18]:

I think a lot of people think about a win as being less of one thing. So you have more of another thing. That is, if I spend less on this, then I'll have more profitability. And I don't like to think about things in that way. I like to think of wins or success being like a horizontal line. And we want to fall on the line. If we're over the line and too much over the line, that's not good. So if I've got too much, that's bad.

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Branden Mcrill [00:25:48]:

But also below the line is not good either, especially if you're too far below the line. Right. So if we're talking about labor, I don't want too much, right. Because I'm burning and I'm throwing it in the trash, essentially, and just wasting money. But if I'm here, it's bad guest experience. So it's not about cutting to profit, which you can't really do, but it's also not just about reducing or anything except for optimization. The closest we can get people to align to here or here or there, that's what looks like wins for us. So we're constantly looking to help people measure their success across multiple metrics.

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Branden Mcrill [00:26:30]:

Not just about increased profitability, but increased levels of service happiness with guests per person averages because they have the right amount of staff at the right time. I like to say this anecdote. I can't give somebody a weekly budget for labor because it would be like giving my two and a half year old son $100 to go to the grocery store to get groceries. A, he wouldn't make it, but b, if he brothers, he would just come home with like peanut butter and marshmallows. Right? So it's not about deploying a budget, it's about deploying the right budget at the right day at the right time. So for us specifically continuing to talk about labor, we deploy a weekly labor budget that's automated, but also daily and hourly. And it's our goal to do it at a 15 minutes increment, which we currently don't do yet, but it is in our crosshairs. So, telling someone, this is the amount of labor you need for the week and for the day and for the hour and at the department level.

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Branden Mcrill [00:27:26]:

So this is actually the area of the restaurant where you need this labor because there's arcs of the day. Right? Slow, busy, slow, again, busy, again, slow again. We need to know all of those time periods. We need to know how much money I can spend at each time which we give them. We need to know how many hours we can actually have during that window of time. How many people taking up those hours we can actually have. So it's bodies, it's hours, it's dollars, and there's productivity. How many sandwiches can a three person line make in this restaurant at an hourly increment? Hopefully in the future, 15 minutes increment, but at an hourly increment, and then being able to provide that information.

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Branden Mcrill [00:28:06]:

So now it's dollars, it's hours, it's bodies, and it's productivity. All of it handed to someone. It gets them closer and closer and closer and closer and closer to a finite point of optimization. It's never perfect. In fact, sometimes it's far from perfect because things change. But for the most part, it's always more accurate triangulating to than a person would naturalistically fall on their own. And it's the same thing with purchasing. I need twelve tomahawk steaks because I'm gonna sell twelve tomahawk steaks tomorrow.

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Branden Mcrill [00:28:37]:

Four for lunch, ate for dinner. And I know that they're gonna be sold roughly between these times. So I actually know this is when I need to have them in the line. But then, okay, do I want to have one more? In case somebody orders one, do I want to have one more? In case somebody burns one, do I want to have one? You know what I'm saying? So these are sensitivities. So you can also allow people to let us know their sensitivities. We can build those in. So then people can have the right amount plus a little bit they can carry over to the next day, but they're never going to have shortfall. That's a Tomahawk steak.

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Branden Mcrill [00:29:09]:

However, some of the people that we work with who run baked good places, who sell donuts and cookies, they actually want to get the exact right number for them. Is the right amount that people will order less. Five. Sometimes, just as an example, because they want to run out. They want to run out. So they know a client who doesn't get the thing that they want will order the next or the third thing that they want. And therefore, they'll continue to always burn down inventory, always at an equivalent level. And they run it.

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Branden Mcrill [00:29:38]:

They end the day with no cookies whatsoever or no donuts. And that's a perfect day. It also gives people a little bit of instinct of demand, because, okay, if I don't get there, I'm not going to get the cookie or donut I want. Gives them a little sense of urgency.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:49]:

So that makes sense.

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Branden Mcrill [00:29:50]:

It's always optimization. It's never like, let's cut, or, we got to get this down or this. No, it's not. It's the right amount at the right time. That's. And that's what we.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:01]:

It makes sense. And the idea of, like, sensitivity is also, like, one that is definitely needed in the restaurant space. Because you think about food, you think about even the beverage side. Right? Like, you think about, I don't know, wines. You might have a wine that, on paper looks like it's overstocked, but then you're like, no, this is a fine dining restaurant. They need this wine because once every three months, someone's going to spend $500 on this bottle of wine. And so, like, I love that idea of being able to, you know, put that extra layer of, I guess, sensitivity and, like, override almost the general. And I think that the takeaway is like, 80% of the stuff you not.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:35]:

You don't have to think about. And then that maybe 20% or whatever you want to say, you can maybe refine if it's higher margin items or wines or whatever.

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Branden Mcrill [00:30:43]:

That's an incredibly good point that you mentioned right there is the 80 20. Because that's what I think is happening right now in our industry and in every other industry, all the way up to chat GPT, like, you can't and shouldn't and people are, but they shouldn't copy paste, right? It's a framework that you start from and then you take it and you finish it. That's automation. True AI is when it's entirely closed loop and the computer determined what needs to be even done, and then it does it, and it does it entirely automated, and it completely removes human beings. We are not looking to do that. We are not looking to remove human beings from the setting. In fact, we need them. We need them very much, because they're the people who front face with the guests, they're the people who train the other staff, they're the people who do all these things.

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Branden Mcrill [00:31:37]:

And we're simply looking to automate a lot of their thought processes and their workload to make things faster and easier and to get them to a finer point of landing closer to a target. That AI versus ML thing is roughly that 80 20. If it's 100% computer, it's AI. If it's 80 20 computer. To human, that's ML. And that's the sweet spot, I think, for us, especially for restaurant people. And that's where I want to be, and that's where I want to live.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:04]:

Super cool. I love that. And out of curiosity, what's the typical reaction? Because I imagine, you know, restaurant operator, especially if it's like related to, you know, they're in an area where there's like sports events or whatever, you know, next to some stadium or whatever, I imagine, like, them being able to see the forecast and because, I don't know, let's say Copa America just happened, was on, or the Euro cup, how that affects their forecasting of, you know, certain beer they'll sell or burgers or whatever. What's their reaction when, like, the projections or the forecasts, like spot on, they're like, oh, damn, it was raining, we sold more soup. And like, it was actually accurate. Like, I'm curious to know, like, what's a typical reaction?

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Branden Mcrill [00:32:45]:

Like, are you a gambler?

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:47]:

I wouldn't say I'm a gambler, but I once in a while in big games, example, the euro. In the Copa America, I will bet, but apart from that, not really.

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Branden Mcrill [00:32:56]:

Now I'll ask you a question, fairly leading question. Fair enough. Do you remember your biggest wins or your most heartbreaking losses?

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:08]:

Probably biggest wins, but I do remember one heartbreaking loss, but generally bigger, the wins.

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Branden Mcrill [00:33:15]:

So you are, unlike most people, because most people, unfortunately, have a tendency to focus on their biggest losses, as opposed their wins, because they are. It's an emotional tie to something that happens negative, as opposed to an emotional tie that's happening positive, and you start to take it for granted. So when the elevator works every time, you don't. You're not thinking of it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:40]:

Yeah.

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Branden Mcrill [00:33:41]:

You're not happy, like, oh, we got to the floor. Yay. That's awesome. When the elevator falls five flights and you crash at the bottom, that you tell that story for the rest of your life.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:52]:

It's so true.

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Branden Mcrill [00:33:53]:

So, to answer your question, people don't really write home about the success or the accuracy of the solution. It's when it's off that people are like, what happened here? You know, because we're restaurants, we work so hard to make sure it's consistent, that it's the same, that it's perfect, that it's working all the time. And what happened? Why didn't this work? Why didn't this work? Why didn't this work? So people gravitate towards that. However, I will also say that is a little bit of a, like, smaller operator thought process. So, like, uh, just to be frank, I'll say that it's a little bit more of like a one and two mindset, because it's not the accuracy of the forecasting that is the thing that we measure, and that the thing that our partners, our largest partners measure. It's the. It's the outcome, right? So if we said it's going to be just arbitrarily, I'm just going to say a number just for the sake of keeping this simple. Ten.

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Branden Mcrill [00:34:56]:

If we say the number is going to be ten, and if we pulled the operator and their store manager said it's going to be five, and it ends up being eight, well, we were off by 20%, but they would have been off by 50%. So it's a 30% improvement. Right. So It's not about how accurate is the system. It's how much improvement are you able to make as an organization, because the system almost always beats the human. Right. It's rare, and I'm talking about less than one hand that I can count, that I've encountered, operate groups who have a consistent group of store managers and supervisors who can out forecast our solution on a consistent basis. And even the ones, even the few. And it's not even.

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Branden Mcrill [00:35:45]:

It's not even a handful. It's like two. Those folks still were like, 50, it was like 45 one week, 55 the next week. Like, it was a. It was a battle of the titans, you know what I'm saying? So, like, it's just rare. It's very rare that we're able to get to people who make sense, though, that sophisticated and that capable and that high functioning, that they're able to do it. So we're always able to move the needle for everybody else closer to the target. We're not throwing bullseyes.

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Branden Mcrill [00:36:13]:

I always say this, We're not throwing bull's eyes. We're making sure that your team gets the dart closer to the center than they can get on their own. Simple as that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:19]:

I love that. And I'm curious because obviously, a guy with so much experience, like you said, 26 plus years, I couldn't even count how many missions are restaurants, but a lot. But point being is you got a ton of experience under your belt. What are some things that maybe you took over that you implemented at, you know, mentality wise? Lessons learned. Because, like, the obvious one that I've heard you say a few times, which I love, is that just ease of use and implementation, because restaurants don't have time. But what else, if any, and anything, that you can think back and be like, you know what? Because of lessons I learned here, these are things I implemented at 5-Out.

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Branden Mcrill [00:36:54]:

It's interesting because so much of my career was focused on guest and guest experience. And, like, I'll also say, you know, accolades and awards, which I'm not proud of, but it drove me into the business. So it's a good thing, but it's ultimately not the reason to be or stay in the business. And for those who do it, I don't have, I don't begrudge the decision. It's just I don't feel like it's the right reason to do it. But whatever the reason, I think to do it is because you like to host people and you like to make nice experiences for people and you like to make nice content for those people and you like to do that. Now, you can have that altruistic position and you can focus on that for a period of time, but eventually the rubber is going to meet the road if you are also not doing other things as well. And that is running a restaurant like a business, because so many people run a restaurant like a restaurant and not like a business.

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Branden Mcrill [00:38:05]:

Also, too many people run a business. A restaurant like a business only, and not like a restaurant. That does not. That's not good either. It's this very fine line that flows collectively well together. When you are mutually interested in guests and hosting and guest experience and content creation, as you are in the back end economics of the business, when those two things come together, it's beautiful because you can sustain the party you want to throw. It can keep going for a long time. The thing that I think is probably the biggest takeaway for me after 26 years, It doesn't matter how much you care about your staff, your guests, your content, and everything that you do every day, all day long. It is for the most part, if you can't also not love, but come to terms with the fact that you also have to be business-oriented. equivalently. there's no 51 49.

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Branden Mcrill [00:39:08]:

It's like 5050. It's gotta be. So I like 5-Out for myself. I like it for our restaurants, clients and guests because it can allow for them to focus on the things that they love, because this does a lot of the work of the things that they don't necessarily love, don't necessarily have a lot of time for, don't necessarily have a lot of acumen to, and it takes care of it, it handles it. I think that's probably the biggest takeaway. And then the other thing I think is, and this is just me taking my restaurant hat on and my tech hat off. Simplification, simplification, simplification, simplification figure out what are the most important. I'll say, I'll call it, I'll quote Karmy here from the bear.

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Branden Mcrill [00:39:59]:

Non negotiables start with that. Kick everything else out and just focus on what it is you have to do as a core to be able to make your mission work right, scrappier, leaner, better. When you have time and money, it becomes an enemy of greatness, because you can do anything and therefore you do nothing or you do too many things. Whereas if you don't have money and you don't have time, then you get to a distilled point and the things you have to pick have to be the exact perfect right thing, and everything has to work out perfectly. So I think simplification and distillation, I love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:33]:

I love that. I got two more for you. And then at the end, I always like to wrap up with just plugs. So like your website, your LinkedIn, whatever you want to plug. But real quick, I want to get your take on just maybe industry trends. More specifically, what do you think? What do you see happening in the world? Obviously, there's just the buzzword of AI. How do you see maybe that trend or not trend? It's here to stay. But AI in restaurants, what kind of excites you with just the idea of AI in restaurants beyond obviously, what you're talking about now, which is the data forecasting side?

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Branden Mcrill [00:41:11]:

I think the two most interesting things that are happening operationally in restaurants utilizing AI is robots and automation. So if a robot can make something, if a robot can serve something, if a robot can talk to somebody, if a robot can do anything that a person can also do, then a business has the opportunity to choose whether or not it involves humans in that business and how many. And I think that that is, that has to be the most fascinating thing that's happening with inside the restaurant industry right now and also all industries, because there are some people, like some of them very wealthy and very famous and very popular with very successful restaurants that are making robot only restaurants, and that's their choice. And it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out because people are going to, as a position of choice who decide to open restaurants, are going to be able to have zero robot restaurants, 100% robot restaurants, and everything in between. And I think how restaurateurs choose to make those decisions and how guests react to that is going to become so interesting because it's going to be like back to the future. Two total recall, demolition man. Like everything that happened in the future in the films that we watched growing up in the eighties and nineties is about to come to fruition right in front of our face, and we're going to get to see how people react to it. And that's crazy that that's happening right now.

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Branden Mcrill [00:42:43]:

It's crazy to me. So I think that's the most interesting and interesting thing in every, like, in every way. Every. The other thing that I think is the most interesting that's happening is the automation side of things on the more like mundane rote, like we do unsexy stuff. I feel like. Right. We're not out there with the fireworks and the frothy sales stuff, although we do help people grow their revenue. It's not our core function and core target.

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Branden Mcrill [00:43:12]:

It's not what we talk about. Right. We're helping people do that. Like we're cleaning underneath the stoves. Right. Like we are getting down in the dirt and we're helping people with the very unfun, unsexy very hard.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:22]:

I feel you there. I feel you there big time. Yeah, exactly.

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Branden Mcrill [00:43:26]:

So I think the automation that can happen in that area of that unsexy unfun, nobody wants to focus on it, nobody really wants to look at it. Area, I think is the other most second interesting thing by a far stretch. Less interesting than what I said first, but still also the second most interesting. And then after that, you know, what could happen with marketing, which I think hasn't been figured out, not that any of this has been figured out perfectly yet. It has not. But what could happen with marketing on an automated side with ML is interesting. And we're at stage, you know, one or zero, and then what can happen? I think catering has a really interesting opportunity because I think a lot of people don't look at catering and I think they absolutely should. I think catering and events should be a much bigger part of everybody's business than it currently is.

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Branden Mcrill [00:44:13]:

So those two things I think are a little bit further off. Yeah, they're a little bit less buzzy. I think the marketing one's buzzy. But, but the things that interest me are the two things I said to you first, robots and automation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:23]:

I love that. I love that. And then, and then let me ask you this, what's next for 5-Out, right, looking into the future, what's next for you guys?

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Branden Mcrill [00:44:30]:

We always wanted to be a system that could close a loop if an operator wanted. And so that's true AI, and we're aways from that. You know, that's happening in bunkers and places in Colorado and mountains somewhere for sure, but not in the restaurant industry today. Right. So that's what the future looks like long term, in the medium term, I think we continue to refine what it is that we're already doing. I think that we have initially provided data to people and analytics and analysis and reporting. And then our clients said, okay, this is great, but can you just do it for us? And so, okay, yes, we can automate this. Automate this, automate this.

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Branden Mcrill [00:45:17]:

So you don't ever actually have to review any data. You have to do no analysis and we'll just give you the full deliverable. And now what's happening is and has been happening for a while. And what we're starting to warm to and adopt and start to do is actually become the de facto system of record. So previously we were kind of a centralized connector where we connect to point of sale scheduling, inventory management, analytics and this and that. The next. Now people are like, you know, it's been two, two and a half years and the tech, like, let's figure out every single piece of technology and bring it all in. It's kind of starting to wane.

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Branden Mcrill [00:45:52]:

And people are kind of like, let me see if I can get a few pieces of technology off my tech stack, if I can get a couple less bills, right? So people are saying, well, you have all this information to be able to do this thing, but then you, I got to take it somewhere else. Can you just do it? And so now the question becomes to us, what do we actually want to do? Right? So, like, we built a scheduler. Well, that's done. And now people are adopting that. And so now we, for better or for worse, sometimes we partner with scheduling solution companies. Sometimes we are the scheduling solution company. Now it's getting to a point where it's happening on the prep side. So I feel inventory is a challenged vertical.

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Branden Mcrill [00:46:31]:

I think that counting things once a week or once a month so that a person over here can get an accurate understanding of how purchasing affected the outcome for people is it's not a great use of time, and it's not something that people are really excited about. And what happens in a daily basis in restaurants is prepping and purchasing. Food gets prepped every day. It gets purchased every other day or sometimes every day. That's really much more high functioning and much more critical to improving the operation, improving the employee experience, the guest experience, and the bottoms line. More so than counting x, y, and z once a month. Right. Where we're focusing our energy now is people are asking us to not only automate that prep and purchase process to a decision, but also to become the function with which they can actually prep and purchase from.

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Branden Mcrill [00:47:19]:

So that's where we're leaning into right now because we already built a scheduler, so now we're going towards that. And I think that's, I want to say as far as we want to go, I don't want to become a reservation solution. I don't want to become a point sale. I don't want things. But I think if we can have a solution that automates a scheduling, prep and purchase, and people can do all of those things from within side of our solution, whether they want to connect them to others or they want to work with us independently, then I think that's enough and functionality because it's what we wanted to help people with since day one. Right. It's how do we improve prime costs and that's labor and that's cost of goods. Well, I don't think it's cost of goods.

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Branden Mcrill [00:47:58]:

I think it's actually prep and purchase and labor, and it's those three things. So that's, that's my trifecta.

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Angelo Esposito [00:48:04]:

Love that. Cool. Very well said. And last but not least, just to wrap things up, like a chance to just plug your stuff away. So website, LinkedIn, whatever you want to plug this, your chance. We're going to include in the episode notes too. But yeah, for people listening that want to learn more, feel free.

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Branden Mcrill [00:48:17]:

Yeah, so I like to talk to people so people can reach out to me direct. So you can go to www. Dot 5-Out. Dot IO. It's the number 5 o u t IO. You can email me direct. My email is Branden 5 o u t IO. So you can email me direct.

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Branden Mcrill [00:48:38]:

And my LinkedIn is Brandon mcCrill. B r a n d e n m c r I l l. So you can check me out on LinkedIn. Shoot me a note. You can email me direct. You can go to the website and make an inquiry and any way you like.

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Angelo Esposito [00:48:52]:

Once again, for people listening, if you fit in that kind of ideal customer profile, you're curious, check out 5out.IO. It sounds like, you know, one click away. Not a lot of, not a lot of risk to try it out. So, Brandon, thank you for being on the show once again, Brandon McGrill, co-founder and CEO of 5-Out, thanks for joining us. 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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