The Hospitality Front Door: Gregers Knudsen on Comms, Culture and Killing App Fatigue

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Speaker B: Good tech is just when you don't really think about it. We want to be the heavy use guys. Like, we want to be everything that you use this app every single day for.

Speaker A: Almost coming back to the center is monitoring. And I was kind of earwigging, listening to your conversation, but it was just the three of you talking about how much you love people.

Speaker B: I think for them, it's an easy sell. It's really like, okay, now we actually got an official place to do company comms. And you'll see managers be like, yes, finally, right?

Speaker A: And often we acted on data that was probably a quarter of the workforce, which never really seemed fair to the other three quarters of the workforce who probably either didn't vote or weren't engaged to vote.

Speaker B: Once they've done the shift and they have been working with it for, let's say, six months, then they're like, I cannot imagine how we ran our company before.

Speaker A: They want to be in a place where everybody is and where all the information is and where it's useful. And I think that's where you guys have got this market kind of. It's fascinating where they can kind of sit in that central point.

Speaker B: Good comms can become really, really good comms as well. You can learn from each other and you can actually have it fixed in there.

Speaker A: Uh, welcome to next episode of the Tech on Toast podcast, and today I'm delighted to be joined. Overdue. I Think it's been too long. We've met each other lots of times. Gregor, um, Sander. Have I said that right? Yeah, you did. I did. Founder, uh, of Monetary, which is uh, a product we are really enjoying working with and playing with actually. Uh, and uh, welcome my friend back to the uk. How long are you here for this time?

Speaker B: Until Friday.

Speaker A: Friday?

Speaker B: This time around, yeah.

Speaker A: And where are you from originally? So that the listeners know.

Speaker B: I'm originally from a small town in Denmark called. Not small, but Albert. But I'm.

Speaker A: I know all that. They've got a football team and everything.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Restaurant street. They have all the restaurants there. But In Copenhagen lasts 20 years.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker A: And been in tech all this time or is it. What's your journey been like?

Speaker B: My mom had a tavern. Yeah, my mom had a tavern. My dad had an indoor arcade. So they were entrepreneurs.

Speaker A: Okay. How do you mean? Like um. Like a game?

Speaker B: Yeah, like gaming before PlayStations. Right. So cool. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Like I don't know. There's a brand here. I forget what they call, but they have. Cool.

Speaker B: Then I went to the university for a long time. Came out financial crisis. So I worked hospitality and I loved it. And then all of a sudden you felt like. I just felt like people were having. They were working at the same time. When I'm off, I was off. Right. So I wanted to go in to do grown up stuff. And tech has always been there with me. I'd had computers ever since I was.

Speaker A: I can grew up around arcades, man. So you must have been taking.

Speaker B: I like the DOS prompt and then the windows thing and then through all of it, tech was always there and a lot of my friends went into tech. So I started working at Plan Day. Wow. And yeah, and that's uh. I don't know like that's 14 years ago or something. Wow. Uh, so it's been tech ever since. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. You're officially a techie.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker A: And for anyone who hasn't heard of monetary, uh. Am I saying it correctly as well? Is monetary. Yeah. And tell us first what is the name about and then what's the product?

Speaker B: Well, don't ask.

Speaker A: Or do you have to do it

Speaker B: the other way around? The name.

Speaker A: I love asking about the name. It's always got some weird story.

Speaker B: Yeah, well we just liked. My co founder, liked mono. And then we wanted to be something that was like fresh and gardeny because we knew it's going to be a people platform. So I was thinking like garden or forest and green. So we just end Up Mono Tree.

Speaker A: It's actually a really nice name.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's easy to spell and I don't like those tech names where you're like, what's the website? And it's not incipient with this etch,

Speaker A: like tech on toast.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Honestly, it's a problem.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Made a good decision.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And tell us about the product because I think when I mentioned, um, you guys are people first. Right. And what I love about you, we were at the trade show in um, I think it was HT360 or whatever they call it now, uh, down in Excel center, and you bumped into the guy, the team from Molly's who were visiting the stand and they were chatting, uh, and I remember you having conversation and uh, Trudy, who is there and the Matt, who are their leaders, were very, they're very enthused about people all the time. They're obsessed with people. And you were having. And I was kind of earwigging, listening to your conversation, but it was just the three of you talking about how much you love people, which I thought was great. Right. Because there's so many products on the market, there's so much to choose from. But I think it's nice to hear the actual founder talking about their interest and love of people. So tell us what monetary does, because it very much leans into that, doesn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, it does. I mean, monetary is your front door for your employees and like, it's a heavy use app where you have all of the comms, all of the information you need to find. We take learning in as well and we take operations in as well. It's basically built from our own experience in hospitality and what we needed as well. So it's kind of built from the ground up, what the employee needs. Right. So it's built for something that's super fast, super easy to go to, where you can just do what you want and get in and out really, really fast. Right. Because that's what you need in hospitality. You need something that's extremely robust, fast and easy to use. So it has a lot of functionalities. I can get back to why it has that sort of functionality.

Speaker A: I love it. It's massive.

Speaker B: But, but it's, it's, it's sometimes it's difficult to do the elevator pitch. Right. It would be. Be easier if we just did. We did. We do pass. Right. We do a great pause system where you can do your stuff. That's. Yeah. It's easier to explain. Right. When you do comms and learning and training. And that's AI and yeah, because people

Speaker A: by nature are complex, right? As humans, we're complex. I think m. I think this category, if you want to call it that this area of hospitality has been the hardest to fix. I think because I think the pandemic brought some solutions or people started finding a way to kind of do it like math. Facebook had, um.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, what was it called? Work, Workplace. Workplace Facebook. And I know it's going or gone. Yeah, this, um. And Facebook was kind of that place that everyone, but everyone suddenly realized, actually we can bring our team together and we can talk to them. And I mean it had its limitations, but, uh, they found a way of doing it. And I think off the back of that there's some brilliant products come around and you guys are definitely one of them.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean Facebook was probably the reason we decided to do monetary because I saw when I was working with Plan Day for scheduling, I could see like companies being thousand, two thousand employees. They were using Facebook and GDPR was the thing already. Like it was a new thing, but it was a thing. So people like, it's not good. We have all our comms on Facebook. But uh, it's a, it's easy to go to tool, right. You don't need no explanation. Everyone can use it, but not everyone's on there. And it's not integrated. So people would like, would forget. People in groups, some people like were listening in on conversations. They were fired six months ago. And all of, all of that, all of those issues were there, right? Yeah, but you know, it's. I think the reason that, that it's hard to do is because you're competing with some of the best companies in the world. So like WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook, they have thousands of developers only doing that. Right. So you're telling people, here's a concept, go use that one and they open it up and it takes like, I don't know, 4 seconds, 2 seconds to open chat.

Speaker A: Like already off.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm going to use WhatsApp again. Right. So it's really, really hard market to be in. Whereas if you're doing something that's very unique to your industry or something, you only use work related, you have a lot more slack, so to speak. Right. So you can do a lot more. Um, but, but yeah, I think that's the reason why it was so hard for people to solve this because you're really competing with some state of the art technology.

Speaker A: And how are you doing that? Because obviously you've got live customers, you're working with people, how are you kind of, what's the, I suppose, the script to get them or how is the tech dragging them from. Which is very natural to go to WhatsApp, right? These.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and these groups can be a nightmare because obviously this, uh, like you talked about Facebook, some people get left in. There's other stuff going on. How do you kind of work on that journey to get them from there to you?

Speaker B: It's actually pretty easy. I mean, once they decided on going with Monotree, it's really an easy rollout app. It's a lot easier than doing, for example, new POS systems or workforce management systems that sometimes can take gum out of hair. But this is a little bit easier. But I will say there are different arguments for it, right? So if you talk to HR and heads of people, it's often the compliance part, right? They're often like, oh, it's not good. Uh, nobody has an overview what's going on in these groups, right? They would love to have it structured and streamlined, at least feel like now it's safe, it's encrypted, it's on our server and all of these things. Now, for middle management, the whole thing is all about giving them their privacy back, right? Because if you run, uh, your whole company on WhatsApp, you're constantly getting bombarded with all of these messages. M. So you're on vacation, you have the day off, you open up WhatsApp, uh, to write your girlfriend or something like that, and in comes all those work messages, right? So they are getting grinded down by constantly being invaded in their privacy fear, right? So I think for them it's an easy sell. It's really like, okay, now we actually got an official place to do company comms. And you will see managers be like, yes, finally, right? Problem is though, if that com is not. If the comms is not fast enough, robust enough, stable enough, it will only work for a few weeks and everybody will start using WhatsApp needs to feel

Speaker A: like what they like. It needs to feel like they're on WhatsApp or that speed, as you mentioned, that functionality. You know what?

Speaker B: They don't. They need to not think about it. Yeah, yeah. Good tech is just when you don't really think about it. Like people that. I've been on iPhone for a long time right now and you, you don't even think about it anymore. Just expect it to do exactly what.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're very spoiled, aren't we? I think you become, uh, I think you just become in A place where you just think this works all the time and when anything breaks, it blows your tiny mind. Right.

Speaker B: It's crazy.

Speaker A: And I was going to say turnover and hostility, or particularly in people, is brutal and has been for as long as I can remember. I think it's probably harder now than it was when I was in the game, as it would be after Pandemic. I think it's just been a challenge. I think it's ah. And there's so many other macro factors that are hurting us. How much that do you think is? I kind of know the answer this, I think the communication and connection. So like, if you think about it from, um, as a good area manager, as I thought I was, uh, I would be really nice to people, look after them and listen to them and help them. Um, but doing that digitally or doing that on a enterprise level on a larger scale, it's not easy, right? Do you think that's part of the play that the people have been getting wrong?

Speaker B: I suppose, yeah. I think all tech is just a tool, right? Like a hammer. You can build a house, you can destroy the house, right? So monetary gives you the ability to measure how people are feeling, to actually do something about it, to have structured feedback on it and put in systems that will help this. But you need the intention of wanting to do it, right? And I've been in this game long enough to see that you have very different kinds of companies, right? So the most brilliant time we can come into a company is just when they realized, hey, what we like people are our experience. Like when they connect the dot and understand that our people are the guest experience, right? And they really want to do something good. They want to be people first, they want to help them. That's the. Because now they listen, right? Now you can actually tell them, well, I think you should do this and, uh, what do you want to achieve? Well, they want this. Well, look at this. We can do it this way and that. That's a really, really beautiful time to get into a company because then monetary can really help.

Speaker A: But you become part of that fabric, I suppose.

Speaker B: Yeah, you become part of that intention and that you can roll out the machinery with intention. Right? But you can also, honestly, you can also see people where, like it was like they can still use it, right? You can like their main purpose is just we have a place we can tell people what to do at once, right. That can also be a mindset or you can just have to streamline the checklist kind of mindset. It's not where we thrive. It's not where you get the most out of the. So it is honestly, if you really want to be people first, that's where you see the magic.

Speaker A: And you've got like. So you've got task lists. I had a play on it. I was playing on it a while ago. I had an idea in my head, which is never a good idea when I was saying to the team, I'm going to put monetary in as our comm system probably didn't think it through properly. Uh, but um, there's task list, there's a community piece, there's the uh, comms, but obviously backwards and forwards rotors, whatever it might be that shared in there. Why do you think it's important to have all those bits together? Um, or, you know, I don't suppose everyone has to put everything in there, but if they're going to chuck it all in, why does that matter?

Speaker B: We're not trying to do everything. Like we are staying very clear of, for example, we're never going to do base scheduling, for example. Like lots of people do that very well. We're just going to do integrations to them.

Speaker A: Right, so you're pulling their feed.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. We're never going to do pos. Um, we do a lot of things that you just mentioned and I think you just.

Speaker A: Too many.

Speaker B: Yeah, there is a lot of them. But. But I think the main reason is actually because the whole division between people and culture operations, the different teams within an organization. Now the employees don't think about that. Like the employee don't think, oh, uh, this is a ops problem or this is a people problem. The employee just like, how do I fix this? Where do I go? Where do I need to find this? So for them that division doesn't exist. And that's why like for them, their front door, they should still be able to do the basic ops like the checklist. This is like for a large company, this has tens of thousands of tasks going through that system every single week. Right. That's heavy usage. We want to be the heavy use guys. We want to be everything that you use this app every single day.

Speaker A: For all of us, almost coming back to the center is monitoring. Yeah.

Speaker B: Also because that's where you really provide the value for the organization. Right. If people start slipping out of the app and they start only use it on a weekly basis or every fourth day or something like that, it doesn't have that instant effect when you really have important information or you really need people's feedback on something, whatever it is you need to have people there almost every single day.

Speaker A: Um, that's interesting because I was going to ask you about adoption because one of the. Not just for monetary, but I think with tech in general, as we spoke up with iPhone, for instance, you know, once you're an iPhone user, you're probably an iPhone user for life. I would imagine after a couple of years, you tend to not move. I think adoption, when you're dealing with such a diverse workforce, you've got people my age old, uh, people Gracie's age young kind of thing. So you've got lots of different groups that are. You're working to. How hard is it or how. Because you're right, you need them all to play. Right. Or you need them all to use it in the way they need to use it. How hard is that bit at the start? Or are you finding that people are kind of jumping on with this?

Speaker B: It has not been easy to get to it, but I think for now we don't really have an adoption issue. I mean, it needs to be communicated by the organization that, hey, you know, like you said, yeah, company app is coming, we're going to use it and we're going to always suggest to them, like, make sure that you cut off Facebook, WhatsApp, all the other things. Like, make that a hard decision. Like, uh, you can give them two weeks to migrate some important stuff, whatever they need, and then it's over.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then it's just like. And there's nothing wrong with that, is they're not going to miss anything. They could do everything. You can send all videos, files, images, you can reply, you can do everything. So there is no reason to continue. Right. So it's actually not an issue. Sometimes you see a bit of poor company communication around, like, oh, I thought it was next week and something. It might take a week or two to get everyone on board. But we honestly, we often see it within days. We have like 99% or, uh, sometimes 100% within a few days.

Speaker A: That's good to hear. I did hear someone told me that one of your guys actually was Talking about high 90s for pretty much every kind of, um, customer that you had. Because as you say, it's their brain almost. It's where they go back to be educated. It's where they go back to tell their boss something. It's where they go back to find out what they care about, which is probably a rotor or probably a recipe. I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker B: And it provides value for the end user. Yeah, right. Some other systems they provide value to the head of Ops or the cfo and they need you to go in and fill it information. So my dashboards are nice and beautiful. Right. That's a hard sell to the end user. But if you're like, hey, you can get your privacy back and it's super fast, it's super easy, you can use this app instead, like, okay, fine, I can find all my information. Yeah, I'll take it. Right. So you need, for us, when you do like a comms app, all in one app, whatever you want to call it, we need to provide different kinds of value to different layers of the organization. Right. For the managers, it's all about them being able to, like, do little staff events that they can do. Check their checklist, who is onboarded, who has certificates running out. Yeah.

Speaker A: Helicopter type.

Speaker B: They need to be able to check their little department and do everything accordingly to them. That's their value plus the privacy part of it. Right. For the employees, it's a quick in and out app. It needs for them to be like, oh, I got a push notification. Check that message within. I would say you have to open the app within 0.2, 0.3 seconds. If you're not at that speed, you're going to miss the young people. They're going to go back to WhatsApp basically, again. Right. But it's an in and out app for them. It has to provide that quick value so they don't think about it. It's just here I do my chat, I go in, I go at work,

Speaker A: I just do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And once you solve these two layers, you have the value for the people and culture and the head of Ops and all of these things.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because all of a sudden you've got this engaged, you've got everyone dangling on your, uh, end of your fingers.

Speaker B: So if you do a survey, for example, you can get like a 60, 70% Reply Rate all of a sudden. Because it's a system everyone's using. Yeah. Now you can actually use your data.

Speaker A: Um, I think that's fascinating. Staff survey is a really interesting point, actually, because I think for a long time when I was in Ops, that you would do, we would do these things to gauge the temperature of the workforce, to understand, ask difficult questions, get difficult replies sometimes and be told what you're doing not so good and quite well. And, and often we acted on data that was probably a quarter of the workforce, which never really seemed fair to the other three quarters of the workforce who probably either didn't vote or weren't engaged to vote. And I think it's great seeing those numbers up at 70, 80 for engagement because all of a sudden you've got some real rich data that you can act behind. And I suppose you deliver the feedback through monetary.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You can go back and whatever you've decided to do, you can then tell them through that.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that's actually, that's where these things become really powerful because one of the things about surveying people and also this, I didn't know this until I've done it for many years. But like if you do a survey and just ask people something like you might have out of the box reply rate 30, 40% maybe if it's, it's a good one. Because people like, who's looking at this? Why? Yeah, if you put words into it and you say, hey, we're going to ask you how you feel because we want to do X, Y, Z with this information, then you raise it to like maybe 50, 60%. When you didn't act on it, when you then. And you didn't say, okay, thank you. What, what you told us. Now we have implemented a new feedback program. We're going to use forms for feedback every single month. You're going to put this in and they're like, people like, wow, they actually did something. Next time you do the survey, they did it.

Speaker A: Yeah, she listened.

Speaker B: 70, 80%. Right. Then you start to get that feedback again. It's back to the intention. Like if you just think you can click a button and start a survey and you'll have a happy workplace, that's. Sadly, that's not the way it works.

Speaker A: Damn, I was doing it wrong all those years.

Speaker B: But you actually have the tools, you can actually do something about it.

Speaker A: Right. I think that's the nice part. Right. And when I talk about connection, that's the connection I'm talking about, that you can take your workforce as a group, even though one's in Bristol, one's in Birmingham, ones in London, and bring this kind of picture together of your business, which I think right now is so important. Ah, I know it's always important. But to have a dashboard or a screen or a place where you can go and go, this is what they feel. Yeah, this is, you know, or this is where we're missing out when we're dropping a ball here so we can fix it, I think it's super important. And on that, I presume you have to have integrations with some of the, I suppose the workforce management partners, wherever it might be to drag that Data in. How important is that for you guys? And how deep do you go with the integrations?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's absolutely paramount. I think no one could accept, like, if you're 1,000, 2,000, even below that, not having the users just running freely, like being flowing freely between the systems. Right. So we have, I think 60, 70 integrations now to different workforce management systems. We kind of cut on the workforce management thing. We kind of cut on the, um. We do the same stuff with all of them. We don't try to go too deeply and we sync all the users. Right. All the groups, all the departments. So if a user is created in this system, automatically created in our system, we take the shifts as well. So you can do shift chats. You can see who you're on board there.

Speaker A: You end there.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So. So. And that's actually for the high engagement, because I know when. When I know this data in scheduling platforms. Right. People go straight to my schedule. Yeah. Like 80, 90% will go straight to my schedul if they got those shifts in the company app instead monetary. They'll just do that in the.

Speaker A: And weirdly, you are exactly right. Because my son is 19, works for Pete's Pilgrims. Uh, and they recently moved to a new workforce management platform. Uh, I won't mention who they are. And on their home screen, uh, he couldn't get his, uh, rotor straight in front of his face.

Speaker B: No, it was.

Speaker A: I think they were rotor ready previously. But again, it's not a problem with the new tech company. It's just the way it was configured for the first rollout. And Shay was going, oh, all I want is. I just want to know when I'm working. That's all he cares about. That and the pay slip. Yeah, the two things that he cares about. So it's just fascinating to show and exactly what you said. He's in and out quick. He wants to know what he needs to know, and then he wants to get on with his day. He's not bothered about, you know, like, I would be trolling around looking at reports and whatnot. He wants his information.

Speaker B: Yeah. But again, I think, like, that's what we do with the workforce management systems. And then we're like, we have different. Also, like the content integrations with Sideways and with Blend and also some Scandinavian partners and stuff. But I. What I find interesting is actually, like, people customizing their own menu in the app. Right. Because they're always going to be other resources. I think, like the whole bi tool scene. Like you have Tensor, you also have A lot of custom ones right now. Right. So in our system you just say like all managers, you have access to this little bi dashboard and it's directly in the menu. So it's back to the front door thing. Right. You need to know when I open that monetary app, even though it's not a part of the monetary system, at least it's the gateway to find that system or infrastructure.

Speaker A: And is that different for every company? Would you say, would you say they're being quite unique on what they, on their front door looks like as it would be. So in terms of their menu or is it quite. Do they take your lead and say kind of what do we, what's the best thing to do here? How are we going to get the best out of the system?

Speaker B: They sometimes they start by taking our lead on and then they start being opinionated themselves.

Speaker A: Never.

Speaker B: One thing I love about hospitality is like I've never ever gotten a no from a customer. Like in terms of can, like this customer would love to talk to you. They know that they also use monetary and like can they talk? I've never got a note. They're like, yeah, sure, sure, let me talk to you.

Speaker A: It's so weird. I was, we were having dinner last night. There's a lady who was formerly at Marks and Spencer's and now is now a, uh, casual dining group. And she was saying, it's so refreshing being in this industry because we had to take our secrets to the grave at M and S. Like the way I stocked a shelf, I couldn't tell you. Even though like it's your, you know, it's hardly unique, but I could not tell anyone or share the competitors here. You guys are all talking about the same systems, talking about your numbers, openly talking about the future. She goes, it's mind boggling. And I think that's one of the great things about the industry. Right. And I love the fact that as a tech partner you can join in with that and actually, and for, and actually support that as well. And then in terms of building together, sharing what works, what doesn't work, I think it's fascinating.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It is. I think it's kind of unique. It is unique, uh, because people out there are fiercely competitive as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, right.

Speaker B: They are competing on the same, like the menu items are the same and everything. But they would love to share how they compete.

Speaker A: So it's always probably too far. But we're just nice people, we can't help it. What about wellbeing? Because we talked about, you mentioned earlier about WhatsApp and um, the fact that it can invade on your personal life, which is, you know, it's unavoidable, isn't it? If you're using WhatsApp as a comms tool, you're going to bump into Nan and mum and dad or whatever. Um, do you see. I mean it's hard to measure, but do you see some, some wins around. Well, being for the, for the, for the teams when, when they move on to the app and when they're using monetary.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think the biggest one is the one I mentioned about now you actually, you can look at sort of do your work sphere and your private sphere. You can also trim your notifications really specific days of the week or you can mute all individual walls.

Speaker A: You can set it to your working schedule.

Speaker B: You can mute everything exactly as you want. You can also say like a lot of people have meme walls and fun and games walls. Right. And you can mute those for like, I'll check them when I want to. I don't need the notifications, chat groups, all of that stuff. I think that that is probably the unique selling point for going, uh. For the individual employee.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. For the company, it has loads of other benefits that is that now they are actually where they're doing their comms. And comms is just so heavy use. Right. It's not uncommon. I was just looking at some data because I had a customer that asked me how much are people actually chatting through the system. Right. So if you have let's say 800 employees, it's not uncommon that you have 14, 15,000 chat messages going through a week.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: And that's the amount of information. I know some of it is probably private and fun information going on in that app, but maybe, I presume only.

Speaker A: But you would imagine most people would change their tact when they moved on to monetary versus on WhatsApp. So if I want me and you wanted to chat, we'd probably go on WhatsApp. Right? Yeah. If I worked, I uh, had another job. I'd definitely on monitoring. I was talking to my friend. It'd probably be a work related chat. Even though private. Yeah. We were having. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. But I mean we can. It's encrypted so we, for good reasons we can see people's chat. Sometimes when I'm, when I'm with a

Speaker A: customer, I mean it's important to mention. Right? Yeah.

Speaker B: And I'm seeing their chat. I mean I think it's, it's a great mix of all of it and I Actually think that's fine. I mean, if you want to put some privacy into your workplace, the same being buddies with people you work with, that's fine. The other way around is more problematic. Right. When work is forced into your private sphere. If you want to take private work, that's fine. Right.

Speaker A: And it's. And I used to be an area manager. I used to have. We used to have about 90 sites, not all mine, with a load of area. I was a regional director, had loads of area, uh, managers underneath me. But you'd spend. You drive between. It used to be, because it was in the. Not in London. I drive between the sites. You'd spend hours on the phone, hours talking, talking, talking, you know, doing this, doing that. And I love the fact that that's moving into a space where actually the talking can lead to something quite directly. Uh, because I think to my own deficit, uh, that probably all my talking was probably 50% was wasted, uh, because we were probably just talking crap. Uh, but, you know, but it wasn't, you know, for the company. They're probably looking at my value thinking, God, you'd be much more efficient, Chris, if all of these ideas and chats you're having or driving into somewhere central where we're actually having an impact. And I think that's what. What you guys are doing. And I think it's, it's fascinating the way that it can have direct impact quite quick. Because everyone talks about ROI with tech.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So bloody hard to measure. Um, unless you're food or labor.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. You know, everything else, like pause and everything else that sits around it, it's like, how do you bloody measure roi? But I think with you guys quite quickly and particularly engagement, I suppose you can see a very quick return.

Speaker B: Yeah. Problem is often that, like, I sometimes see competitors say like three times faster. Like, and we, like, if we were an American company, we'd probably put that on the website as well. The problem is no one has the before data really, unless they came from a competitor system. Like maybe you would have some kind of, uh, advantage.

Speaker A: It's quite unique though. I mean, I know There are probably five or 10 in your category that you would know that people would know about, but it's not, um, a flooded category, is it? I would say in terms of like workforce or pause.

Speaker B: No, it's newer.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. So I think it used to be like you had workforce management and you had learning management. Then you maybe had comms as an app as well. And then you had like Trello, who only did checklists and all of this thing. And one of the problems we wanted to solve out the bat was like I was seeing, talking, uh, to employees of organizations when I was working, uh, scheduling provider. Right. That like we have seven apps now. We have a Dropbox for these folders. Then we have this learning management platform that no one can remember to log into. Then we use private Facebook for communication. Then we have Trello for checklist. That's. And like it's not uncommon to have six apps or something like that. And that's just, that's a really bad experience for an employee worker.

Speaker A: And I actually don't think that's a gone thing. I think that is still very much in play, I mean depending on the size of the business you look at these days. But I think there's a lot of mid market, I like to call a mid market, you know, from like 2 to 10 or. Actually there's a lot of that in play. We're dealing with. Well actually we're working with a customer at the moment who um, who have got a similar. Basically based on growth. They've just grown fairly quickly in their own organic way. And in that way they've just laid on technology or bought whatever or just gone on with it. And um, you kind of. I think it takes one person in the organization to stop and go, right. My job for the next six months is just to look at this and is it valid for the future and can we grow? And the answer this customer said, no, we can't. We need to adjust what we're doing. And I think it's great that you guys are involved in that chat because I think it's just that ability to kind of open your mind a little bit and look what you can do.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think what often happens, and you probably notice better than I do, Chris, but it's probably actually even the bigger they are, the more they do this. And they often think like, we have a learning problem, we're going to solve. Learning. Buy a learning software. Uh, oh, we have a comms problem. Buy pure comms. Right? Oh, we have an operation issue. Buy this really expensive, uh, workflow, something software, right. And then all of a sudden you're solving each of the this is a Q2 thing, this is a Q3 thing. And then you're creating a new problem with the bad user experience that no one was thinking about this being connected and everything. And we're not going to do all of the things. I know, like I love tech.

Speaker A: I would have if I was fatigue 100, right. Yeah. I think I said this to you when I first met you go on your phone, on your iPhone. I think you can, you can look on your battery usage, on what apps use your battery most. Now that might be an app thing, but generally I've got six apps that I think I use regularly. The rest are just there for vanity. I don't know even. I probably download them once. Right. But I think it's the same in hospitality. I think these kids are. They're probably like you say, they'll go on their scheduling because they want the schedule. There's no other reason why they're going on there. Right.

Speaker B: They just.

Speaker A: And if they've. And that's why. And I don't want to offend the scheduling guys too much, but they've got a comms platform on there there. I just don't think they're going to use it. I don't think they're going to communicate around there. I think they want to be in a place where everybody is and where all the information is and where it's useful and I think that's where you guys have got this market kind of.

Speaker B: It's.

Speaker A: It's fascinating where they can kind of sit in that central point. Uh, but, but. And I think we will get there. I think it'll be. Everybody will be. Have something like that surely in the next couple of years.

Speaker B: I, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, you hope.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. But I also think like if, if you look at it like from like an abstract point of view, like it's basically the monetary app is serving you information from your company, usually from other people, but also the company information and stuff. Right now we just released the open API and we. I think we put like eight new endpoints yesterday, seven new endpoints the day before. So like we're basically like turning monetary inside out. I already see now customers just creating all content with Claude, creating all of the staff events with Claude, dragging all of the information back into programmatically sending reports back to the individual users you need at a certain, certain point. Right. So we are kind of like becoming the fingers of the company brain that could be like Tensor or whatever bi tool that you created with Claude and everything. So I'm like do all of the endpoints basically like we want to be an open.

Speaker A: So explain that. So how does it so with. Because Claude's fascinating, right? Because I think again this then last night everyone was talking about how they're using Claude now to pull in their reporting and, and they want these. You know, they've all Got these amazing dashboards all of a sudden, which they've done from home or in the car on voice. You know, it's, it's crazy where it's going to go over the next six months. Someone, uh, asked about five years. Forget five years, five weeks. Yeah. Um, so, um, what are they doing with Claude then with, with monitoring? What are they able to do? Are they able to kind of plug in?

Speaker B: Yeah, you could. First of all, you can crunch all of the information, right. All of the engagement, all of the training data, which is actually if you just like employee satisfaction.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That dashboard, even though we like the design of our dashboard, it's really hard to tell for like, okay, but tell me which department have been doing great the last six years on these three things.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, you need to CL through and then look at, and remember what was that? And all of that stuff. Right. So if you just want to crunch this. And now even more so if you want to synthesize that with like, how are revenue doing? How are actually like new people hired in and all of these things, you want to synthesize and crunch this data. Um, then you need that data from monetary. Because we have the engagement training, the data, a lot of operations training on how they're doing on checklist. So you need that data first and foremost. But I think it's even more important for us to be the, the deliverer of that data in small report form to the employees. Right. Because one thing I've seen in hospitality for so long is CFOs with a dashboard that's one month too old. So they're like, we didn't hit the salary percentage last month, so let's do an over correlation for next month. Right. And instead of having that information like, oh, you're slipping a little bit. Oh, actually the sun is.

Speaker A: And I can tell you that 100% happened. I mean, literally I spent so much time looking at results that had already gone.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And wasting time annoying general managers saying, guys, it's not good enough. They're like, what the fool week labor result.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, it's just too late.

Speaker B: Yeah. But now comes all the interesting questions, right? Because like building that like company brain thing is, uh, like you have the tools. I mean, you need systems that have an open API. And I would like to say to everyone, if whoever you have, providers don't have an open API, switch them now. Like, you need that, you're going to need that.

Speaker A: It's going to be a competitive advantage, disadvantage.

Speaker B: It's your precious thing. Like if you don't have your data, what have you.

Speaker A: So if someone's listening and they're thinking about how they go about changing because changes what you talk about when you get into an organization and trying to get them to kind of not comply but move into the right position, that intention. What about people who are kind of on the fence and sitting there thinking, I just don't know whether we need this in our business. Is it an added cost? Is it going to be a drain on our resources? What would your advice be to them? I know you own a product.

Speaker B: I would say like first and foremost like aftermath when you look at. It's not going to be an extra cost often because often if you pay for one of the old legacy uh, learning management platforms that the cost is the same as monetary and now we can just add in the content from some of our great partners and now you have the same package plus a lot more as well. And I also think that I've heard this from many, many customers and it's actually true that once they've done the shift and they have been working with it for let's say six months, then they're like, like I cannot imagine how we ran our company before, uh, and we had a place where we can just communicate with everyone and they're like. But what we used to do there was scattered Facebook groups. We would copy the same message into each department or send them to the managers. The managers would send them and it's like that is a big, big issue. And once I think once you see the data, when you have a hospital, like a multi site hospitality and you see how much communication, wall post, uh, chats, events being created. Once you see the lower of that stuff, I think it becomes like weird that you haven't addressed it before. Yeah.

Speaker A: It's almost like servicing new data when it's not new.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: As if it's been around forever. But they've been doing as you say, they've been doing it in various different ways.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But it's probably, I would argue, as important as revenue data.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean you always have a comms problem. The only problem. Have you addressed it? That's the issue. Right. Everyone has a comms problem and comms is notoriously never perfect. It's always messy. So you can try to structure it, you could do something about. You can actually structure, structure.

Speaker A: And people at the front of comms. Right. Regardless of tech, you have great people who communicate well and people who don't communicate well.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you're as you say, you're never rid of that and be perfect. But if you're, if you're given the opportunity to have that data in one place, plus as you mentioned, all of your little operational tools alongside it, all of a sudden the weaker uh, comms people become a little bit stronger because they're Talking to you Mr. GM in a um, in a way that they're armed better. Right. I've got better information, I can help you, you. Whereas before if I was probably not as good as my next area manager.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It would take me longer to make a better decision. Yeah. So I think that's an, I mean for me a no brainer because it just makes sense, it levels the playing field.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's an amplifier.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. So like good comms can become really, really good comms as well. You can learn from each other and you can actually have it fixed in there. A lot of also things like people helping each other, right. You have a problem, you share it on the social wall, other people answer. Now the AI bot trains on that, right? So next time someone, even though that was months ago, they could, they get that answer back. So it becomes like a self learning machinery almost, right. All of the people coming back with all of the information and the more and more you use it, the more information it has.

Speaker A: So, so I think one of the best examples I was talking to someone about the other day that ah, if someone leaves a company, right, um, previously they would take a lot of information with them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So if I, when I left Carluccio's as uh, a director, I took a lot of, I'm sure, very valuable information in my head, nothing written down. I didn't take any of their ip, um, but I left with a lot of, of gut data. I knew a lot about what that site would do. And then when I'd gone, I'd gone. I think the difference now with what you're doing is that you're capturing my experience, my knowledge, my thought. Thor thought, you know, if I'm putting something on a wall, giving some advice, that's then swallowed up in the bot and the bot's now got that in his brain. I think it's so cool that actually we're gonna, in two, three years look back and think all these great guys who do move on and do move to different jobs are leaving a part of them with their uh, their old role, which I think is fascinating. It's never been done before.

Speaker B: It's like you gave me a good idea there because like we're building this we're building offboarding, I think we're launching it next week. Like, similar to onboarding. Like, did you do all your stuff? And like the final thing you do before you leave, but it should be like, what's your advice? Like, that could actually be like, what

Speaker A: do you know about this business that no one else knows? Because I guarantee you, everybody walks out that door.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I could pick millions of people I know, you know, around the industry who leave and they just, they have great knowledge, but it works. But because of our high churn rate, because of the way hostility runs, it's so valuable, but it's gone.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, and I don't think everyone's. Anyone's been able to measure that cost of what that is. Or. And you hire a new Chris, they come along, they spend six months embedding, they've got great knowledge from their old job, but don't really know your job. And then they take time. But imagine if Chris could borrow from old Chris.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Then maybe all of a sudden, maybe I'm a bit quicker.

Speaker B: But this is an AI thing also, right? Because I remember being in tech where it's like, don't take those notes, don't put it in, because we're going to drown in days data. Like no one's going to look at it. We're going to be confused. Like, only store this specific data. And now it's the other way around.

Speaker A: Uh, everything.

Speaker B: We are harvesting everything. Like every company, I mean, Claude has

Speaker A: that one ask tech on toast, right? Yeah, we have the Claude thing for tech on toast and we have this thing. I never use it. I never, I just never. And then the other day I needed to find a budget that someone had promised us. So I said, I just can't find this budget, can you? And then boom. Seconds. The email was there, linked to it, wrote my reply, did it, and I was just like, my God.

Speaker B: Hard.

Speaker A: Because that would take us days, weeks to find that or we just wouldn't bother doing it, you know, So I think it's brilliant. Look, I could probably talk to you for an hour, which is probably not good for people listening. Look, monetary is fascinating. We also have a bit, a cool webinar we did with you guys. Uh, check it out, it's on YouTube. Uh, it's called bite size and it gives you a very, very, very quick view of monetary. And as, as Greg has said, there's a lot more to it than that, but it'll just help you visualize what we're talking about. But if people Want to find out more about you and the platform. Where do they go go?

Speaker B: They go to muntri.com or find us on LinkedIn and they can come and

Speaker A: bother you or find them at dinner. You eat out a lot.

Speaker B: We do. We do.

Speaker A: You're very social. Yeah. Last time I saw you all have beers in your hands. You're at service, wandering around the floor at service. So we'll be doing that again next year. But, uh, look, I think it's a wonderful platform. We support you guys and, And. And also not just because of the product. I think that the people behind the product are really important, which is something we've always been, um, like to validate tech on toast that the people who built give a toss.

Speaker B: It's half of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, it really is.

Speaker B: It really is.

Speaker A: You have to care, and I think you do. And I think that's, um. And the team that work around you also do. And. And we say that openly when we talk to operators, because, um, I was talking to CEO of Burger King last night, and he was talking about validation in tech. I said, that is what we're striving to do. We're trying really hard to be the guys that validate the good people who are doing great stuff and. And have got great results that can show you. Because that's all they want. They don't want to waste time meeting 20 platforms. And that's not being dismissive of anyone. They want to find great product quickly run by great people. And I think that's our job to do that. So that's why we love talking to people like you. Um, welcome back to the uk, my friend. How long are you here? What Friday is it?

Speaker B: Until Friday this time.

Speaker A: Okay, so three days. What day is it today? Tuesday.

Speaker B: Tuesday.

Speaker A: Yeah. My days are always. My weeks go very quickly. Uh, but look, welcome back, mate. Hope you have a great time.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me.