How to Grow Your Restaurant Business with Brett Spiegel

David "Rev" Ciancio: Welcome to the Restaurants Grow podcast where you get tips, tricks and tactics on how to grow your restaurant business. Today on the show we welcome Brett Spiegel, who is the senior product executive at Checkmate. Someone I've known for a very long time. Uh, he is no stranger to creating incredible guest first products that support the growth of restaurants. He's uh, also an avid pizza explorer where he lives north, uh, of the city. Brett co founded Koala, a premium SaaS platform that empowered brands to reclaim direct customer relationships through superior user experience. Koala, uh, was acquired and bred as it continues his path of creating really incredible innovations. At uh, Checkmate. He provides strategic oversight for the company's guest facing technology ecosystem, including web, mobile apps, kiosks, catering platforms, digital menu boards and things. I probably were not handed in a bio. Uh, fun fact. Every year Brett and his wife host a neighborhood challenge that they describe as the field day meets frat party. And uh, now that I know how close you live, I think I want

Brett Spiegel: to invite you get.

David "Rev" Ciancio: One year. When a bunch of 40 somethings get to act like kids, bond with neighbors and turn themselves into absolute legends through a mix of athletic feats and questionable life choices, I feel like this needs its own TikTok. Um, Brett, welcome to the show, buddy.

Brett Spiegel: Thank you so much for having me, Rev. I really appreciate it. We've known each other for years now and talk so often in real life, particularly on the circuit. So it's great to be invited to the show and finally get a chance to talk here too.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Amen. I'm a fan of the IRL experience. All right, I'm just gonna put, put your feet in here real fast. Um, what are three ways that a restaurant could sell more than limited time offers? I mean you've seen everything. So like, give me three off the top of your head.

Brett Spiegel: Um, yeah, put them, put them on your menus would be, I think the first one generally good place to start. Um, I think. And while they're on the menus and, and you know, this goes actual menus and also digital, like test, like test creative, like test different versions of the images that you're using, the composition position, the color, all of that, um, and, and just, you know, get them out into the world, um, through storytelling, um, you know, more, more, more shots of people enjoying them, um, in, you know, real life sort of stuff and get it out there for sure.

David "Rev" Ciancio: I've um, sometimes I get asked that question, like, oh, Rev, how can we sell more of our lto? And I was like, promote, um, it more if you put it on social media once or you email about it once, you expect, uh, the results of talking about it once. If you put it on email 10 times, get a compounding effect. You know what I mean?

Brett Spiegel: Totally. And like, you know, it's even like when, when they actually show up to your, to your restaurant. Like, just make sure it's there too. Like that, that, that is sort of like such a critical piece. Um, whether. Even if it's just like, you know, window clings or, you know, flyers you hand up, you know, if you can get them up on the menu boards, that, that's, that's obviously a bonus. But like, any way that you could have them up there for people that just wander in?

David "Rev" Ciancio: For sure. Okay, I want to have a very specific comment, actually. I want to bring an IRL conversation to the table for everybody here. So you and I had this interesting conversation the other day about, um, how restaurants, they maximize their online ordering experience. Uh, you could test an image, you could test a placement. You might put something in your most favorites. We think about a B testing. Uh, you come from an, uh, e commerce, online ordering background, so you know a lot about this subject. And that's a big part of why I wanted to have you on the show today. Because you think about it a little bit differently than other people. Other people test it, but like, this is what you think about all day. But you got me thinking that conversation. Okay. Restaurants spend all this time testing what to put on their website, how to structure a menu for online ordering success, um, which social post is going to get the most engagement. You know, they're looking for all. That's awesome. I do that too. Right? I'm always like, how do I optimize? How do I optimize? Right? Okay. And then when it comes to, in store, we do things like table tents, we do window clings. We just talked about that. Television displays, you know, posters. You're, you're. What you're trying to do is you're taking advantage of an active audience. They're there. You should market and brand to them. Right, but you brought up a good point that operators should be thinking of their digital display boards in the same way. And it, like, it didn't even cross my mind. I just think, like, at South House, like, we like, oh, put up a QR code, join loyalty, like, that's what we should do. Right? And you had this idea that it was like, no, you should test what works there. Um, I want to know what brought you to that thought. And then like, what does that actually look like how do people think about that?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah. So I mean to your point, I've been dating myself here, but like I passed the decade mark of restaurant of being involved in restaurant technology. And before getting into that, specifically worked at a product agency in Brooklyn, just building websites and apps for all sorts of businesses. Um, so just ton of time and my career just focused on user experience first and foremost because optimizing that makes these products delightful, easy to use and people use them more and that's going to just like have a great business impact. So how can we optimize things? Testing flows, um, testing creative to get them incentivized to take an action that we want to take. In this case buy food. And you know, to your point, it's, it's, it's ab testing, it's trying different creative, it's trying different flows, it's trying different checkout methods, copy color, everything is testable. And you know, at my uh, my time at Checkmate, I've been given the opportunity to kind of expand my scope beyond just online ordering, which is primarily what I've done for my career, into just broadly where digital can enable commerce for a restaurant. And one area in particular that we got focused into through some work that we were doing around voice AI uh, and the drive thru is, is the drive thru lane. And it sort of dawned on me that like for the brands that we're working with, These you know, QSR brands in particular, like this represents 50, 60, 70, sometimes as much as 80 of the revenue and we're not even thinking about it. Like, it's kind of like shame on us a little bit. Like, you know, like our job here is to like be good partners and help drive business outcomes. And we're not even, we're obsessing over this 15 slice of the pie which is like direct first party ordering and you know, optimizing, you know, uh, marketplace and stuff like that. But like this is a massive revenue channel and it is just like you just go there and you're just like, okay, you have this screen and you have this, this guest, like that kind of to me looks like a UI and a user to some extent and like sort of asking, just asking questions like from a naive perspective, like, hey Brian, like how often do you like you have these like little promos on here? Like how often are you rotating them? Um, uh, you know, every time we have something new. No, I mean like when you have something new, like the different versions of like the shot of the, of the sandwich, like how often Are you? Oh, we're not know when we test them. So we do market test. Right. But it's like this really feels like when a car pulls up and drive through in particular and it's the same thing when somebody walks up to the counter, uh, you know, the fast casual, indoor. This feels like a session and this again interface user session. And I just like can't take my brain away from E commerce. And so if all of those things feel like E commerce, you know, analogs, like why can't we get the rest of the stuff right? And so like what is this? Like why, why, why, why why? And eventually I think one of the brands we were working with was like just like stop asking us these questions like you think you can do it better, just do it yourselves. So we're like okay, what, what? Let's, let's do it ourselves. Like let's, let's kind of spin up a little proof of concept and let's, let's, let's instead of just like this is an interface and, and a CMS that pushes an image to, to this, like let's just put software there and see what happens. And then um, you know, kind of just like a B testing and rotating and doing stuff like that. I mean so that's really what, what sort of drove us there is again we just like this seemed like a huge opportunity to be impactful for a brand because of how much revenue it represents. Um, it seemed like a sort of like forgotten. Like this works like it's up, it's like leave it alone. And that just like created a opportunity uh, for us to really dive in and really maximize what was going on in these channels that are, that are critical to brands.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Okay, let's walk through what this looks like. So we're talking about testing what comes up on a screen in a drive thru, right?

Brett Spiegel: Yes.

David "Rev" Ciancio: And so you know, you're in line behind me, I'm in line behind you. The idea is we don't see the same thing, right? I mean essentially that's what you're getting at and then trying to see what, what happened when you showed me what image I saw. What image you saw. Is that really what we're talking about?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, I think it's a combination of stuff. So the first is just the, the general sort of like broadcasting that a brand does. Like which you can think of that as like here's my image, I'm just putting it out for anybody that gets in front of it to see. And we've got all of our regular Menu items and then we've maybe got like some more like high design concept y cool shots of our LTOs, right. Sort of promotional stuff. We're just going to put it out there where it's like we're speaking out to you and we're not reacting in any way to what you do or how, what sort of actions that you take. So within just that framework it is every time somebody comes up treating as a new session and just resetting all the creative through different versions that have been done. Right? Because you go out and you do the photo shoot and you kind of like come back in, you do the post shoot and you kind of like do editing and stuff. You try different backgrounds and colors and copy and then you just pick one and go with it. And so what we're saying is like maybe instead of that last step, you go to the last, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 100 that you liked and then just rotate them and rotate them in between and then you know, it's again, if it's an lto, okay, when, when version A was up, how many people bought it? When version B was up, how many people bought it? Is A doing better than B? E Commerce, basic stuff, right? And then okay, A is performing well, let's set a dial up and show more of that. Let's bring C in or let's like sort of do a variant of A with some other things and some ideas that we want to chase that. But again that's still. We put it up and then people react. The next step to that is much more almost like interactive like a dialogue in a sense. And this would be the analog to like when you add something to your order and then you get a suggested thing. People who bought this also bought that as Amazon sort of like famously started decades ago and we're still trying to catch up to. Right, but it's the little, the little nudge in your shopping cart when you're on you know, uh, on a website or like the pop up that happens and you know that says like this shake pairs great with that burger that you just put in, bringing that concept to these screens. So in real time the software seeing what people are ordering, right? So I'll take the number one and the associate punches that into the point of sale, tapping into that feed and saying, okay, that number one item using machine learning pairs best with these three things. Let's put those now on a part of the screen, right? So the screen actually changing in real time just again like a website would do with your Basket. And that sort of like suggestive area kind of like changes as you start building your order. So changing in real time, reacting to what you're doing. And then you can test how we're going to recommend things. Where in the board physically do we want to show this? How do we want to show it is static or we want to do like a little animation thing or bring a video in color, copy composition, all of those things. So uh, what product is being presented, when at the time it's being presented, how it's being showed, all of those kind of variables testable. But ultimately what you're doing is you're starting to create now interaction and you can start to think about an actual customer journey. Right. I'm going to start you like I added uh, a sandwich and we're like, great. How about you add fries and a drink to that? Oh, fries and drink. That's so great. I'll get that too. Okay, great. You know it's a big day for you, but do you want to throw on a piece of cake as well? Come on, let's go throw on a piece of cake. We uh, started kind of encouraging people to follow a specific ordering path that you want. But again uh, the analytics underneath all of that. So you can see, okay, we tried it this way and this is what happened. And now we tried it this way and this is what happened. It's just like you're talking about with like social. I posted it with this kind of, kind of a post and this is the sort of traction I got in this kind of a post. It's taking the exact same principles but without putting it on a physical board on a location where you have like, honestly like the most captive audience you're ever going to get. Someone is there, they got their wallet out, they're ready to go and you just kind of want to maximize that interaction.

David "Rev" Ciancio: I have so, um, many questions. Um, it also reminded me of a story, the greatest uh, uh, exit intent I've ever been sold. So 2 octobers ago I was placing an order for Target for pickup. You know, shampoo, soap, whatever, whatever you order from Target. And as I'm like okay, go to check out a pop up comes up and goes, would you like to buy a five foot skeleton? Well, I will let this over here answer what I did. But yes, I bought it and I was like, way to go Target. Yes, add to cart. Uh, that was the greatest upsell ever

Brett Spiegel: to your question before is like not everybody sees the same thing. Not every time of the year would everybody See, the same thing. Like that wouldn't, that wouldn't work until maybe it would work. Okay. I don't want to judge anybody. That does work for some people in the middle of summer in spring. But like that sort of time based seasonality aspect, it's the right thing at the right time. Um, that, that, that obviously has been dialed in really well in the Target app, I'm sure.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Let me ask you this. Like, I mean we're talking about technology here, but like, does the logic make sense? Like hey, on cold days we sell more soup. It happens to be cold today. It's going to test out, throw soup images out there a few times to just see like if that oversells a milkshake one 100%.

Brett Spiegel: And it should. And it like now, now that I'm like so attuned to this too. Like I was um, you know, we had a really cold winter, you know, around, around our area here and I was at a, a drive through coffee shop and it was just all frozen drinks and it's like, it's like 32 degrees outside and, and like I get it. Like the frozen drink, they got like the really colorful ones now because like that's a big trend. Everyone's leaning into a very colorful inst. Drinks. Um, but I was like, no, who, who wants this frozen drink? It's literally freezing. Um, so just an example of an opportunity to do what you're talking about, which is, I think that's where, where I'm trying to kind of go with this stuff. It's just, just there's just so many different variables that you can be testing and, and whether 100% is one of those that we want to take advantage of.

David "Rev" Ciancio: I think one of the, the biggest mistakes that I see restaurants make and this is classic, it's been there for years and you could see it in email blasts and coupons and flyers or whatever is like I get the flyer and the thing that my eye or the image, the thing that my eye is drawn to is not the thing that I want, it's the thing that you want. Right. So like what I want is the food or the promo or like the benefit of the thing and then the marketer instead, like come to the skeleton happy hour. Like what I really wanted was free drinks seven to nine. You know what I mean? And so like uh, we don't think about that. And so like we've made this mistake as marketers for a long time of putting forward, like assuming you want what I want. Yeah, right. And so that's what you're talking about. Like, how are you supposed to know what Brett wants when he comes through the drive through? You don't. But there's a way to test it that like the law of averages shakes out over time that like, try this one. You know what I mean?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, I think that that's right. And I think you're, you're hitting on what is a, a really unique challenge that, that, that applying these practices to physical places as opposed to digital presents, which is just. Everyone is anonymized. Right. Certainly there are ways and we're definitely thinking about ways to get around that. But for now, let's just go with the premise that everybody is anonymized. Right. And so you can't necessarily tap into previous purchase behavior to help sort of drive some of these things. You can't build a profile, you can't put them into a segment. Right. So what you have to rely on is law of averages. Or you know, maybe something worked really well in the south that didn't do as well in the West. In the west, something else did better in terms of like these tests and say, okay, great, we'll just be sophisticated about what we show where, um, again, it's not, it's not tailoring down to the individual customer necessarily, but we know that southern folks like this way that we present our products or like this type of call to action and folks on the west coast prefer something like this instead. So the more that we can start to dial that in, given the challenge that we have around around just again, everyone's an anonymous guest. Nobody hasn't, nobody has an account that they're logged into when they walk into your store and they see the menu boards up, um, and menu M boards inside present another challenge. If it's a one to many conversation, not a one to one, but as we can just be smarter about trying things and it's the underlying data that goes with it too. Like when we showed this, what happened that can allow us to get as close as possible as we can to that really, really dialed in personalized, um, communication.

David "Rev" Ciancio: You've painted this to give you some clues of how my brain works. But as you're talking about this, I'm picturing like the Guy Fawkes qsr like everybody's got the mask on. You're actually anonymized as you walk in. We don't want anybody to tell us which French fries you want.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, it's not Eyes Wide Shut exactly, but

David "Rev" Ciancio: I expect some checkmate marketing to come out with the guys. Fox qs.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, exactly. Shout out when we do. But, you know, I mean, the, the thing that I think this goes to if, if, you know, there's tons of privacy concerns and obviously opt in concerns, but if we can get to a place where, for guests that want to be identified, giving them an opportunity to, you know, License plate reader seems like the obvious one. And as much as we're sort of scared to talk about that, I think when you pull into most parking garages now that technology exists and we're kind of okay with it, like enter your. Enter, like literally scan the QR code, enter your license plate, put a credit card in, and then when you leave a thing, checks and make sure that you paid and opens the thing out. Right. So I think consumers are starting to come around to it, actually. Um, in restaurants, we'll see. But like, that seems like an interesting path forward, not only to unlock that, that recommendation personalization, but I think that would be super cool to just kind of pull up, you've got the card on file so you don't have to worry about as you're driving, kind of like fumbling through and finding your wallet and pulling the card out or paying with your phone. It just, it just, it's just smooth. But the loyalty program and when we can actually say, you know, I don't know about you, Rev, but like, I've got a ton of programs where I'm just racking up points and I don't even know they're there. Um, but if I could actually like pull up and be ordering and see something on the screen that said, like, hey, get this thing for free, um, you know, it's going to create a better experience for me. I realize that maybe the brand is like giving food away, but like, I know that like, CFOs want to get those points off their balance sheets anyways. So, like, okay, as long as the program is done in a way where like, that just like commercially makes sense for the brand to do, like, create a better experience for me and, and I'm going to be, oh, pumped, and I'm going to come back again. So that's a whole area in computer vision kind of unlocking that sort of stuff. I think for me, as I look to go, how much can I make this? Exactly. Like a website? Exactly. Like a mobile app is the next area to kind of explore.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Man, you're giving me ptsd. We get like a quarterly email from our CFO at Salthouse. It's like, what are we doing about this? Points Balance. And I love Frankie. He's the greatest CFO ever. So I'm kind of just taking a joke on him. But yes, us marketers are really good about getting people to earn, not spend. Um, let's talk about. I want to. So like not everybody has this really cool piece of technology that would do all these things. Like what are some things that make. I could think about or try with the technology I have that at least might like help me out? Like could I just try to put a different photo on every day and see what happens? Like what would be a really simple, easy test that makes me see that this makes a lot of sense?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, 1, 1, 100%. I mean I, I would, I would love to get, I mean it's, it's the larger the time increments, the, the sort of like the more you lose in terms of fidelity of what uh, is actually you know, moving the needle, what is statistically relevant to this test. And so it, it becomes challenging without software enabled boards to be able to do something. But because even like, I mean you know like your, your sales on Wednesday and Thursday are just automatically different. Right? So how do you kind of like normalize for that but then also have a different piece of content running on, on Thursday versus Friday? I mean you could look at it I guess uh, the P mix and the percentage take rate of a particular LTO and compare it. You could do week over week. Again there's going to be like, there's just like oh, there's so much things that, that impact the, the larger the time horizon. But yes, even if you're running a PowerPoint on a stick 100 like just have two sticks, right? And unplug one and plug the other one in. Note, write it down when you did it and then you can go to your point of sale and you can go to your ordering data and very easily kind of segment out that period of time and the second period of time, A time, B time and then see what trends happen between those things. Um, again you're not, it's not going to be the most statistically relevant test from that pure testing perspective. But um, you should see some, start to see some insights, um, slowly over time. And it's sort of good practice to start flexing the thinking about like because that's the thing too. Like just saying, okay, here's a way to test something again, got my two sticks. Um, what do I want to test? And that alone and the creativity that's sort of sparked by like the art of the possible. Like oh, this is tested. Like, I can think about, like, two different versions of the LTO Creative. Huh. How would I change those? Or what would I go back to? And the versions that I threw away because I didn't like, well, how would it. Which one of those would I pull back? And so I think that that alone is kind of like an interesting thing to do to your brain to force you to think that way. Um, if all you've got is, is two sticks, you know, you can still, you can still do some damage.

David "Rev" Ciancio: I think I'm a fan of a B testing. So even the two sticks, I'm like, I could try it. Yeah. We're doing something at Handcraft Burgers. And boo, right now. I told my, uh, marketing team I want all content on social media to be upside down until further notice. And they were like, why? I was like, why not? Why not? Like, what damage am I going to do if the burger's upside down? Like, nothing. Right. And if, if all of a sudden we're starting to get more engagement, that simply says, like, why is the burger upside down? Like, I won, but it's testing it. I have your attention. And so that's what we're really talking about.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Here's a place where you have somebody's attention. What do you want to do with it? You know?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah. And again, you're, I said this before. You're. You're not going to have a higher intent customer than one is that is inside your restaurant. Right. One that's on your homepage. There's a lot of reasons to go to a website. You could just be checking it out. You could want to place an order. You could be, um, looking for where they're located, what events they have coming up. Right. But, uh, for the most part, besides people that are putting in a job application, 100% of people walking into your restaurant are there to buy. So with that high intent, what can you do to take advantage of it and sort of push their behavior in a way that you want them to go?

David "Rev" Ciancio: Totally. Um, let's, let's talk about the two sticks thing. Um, what does it take for a brand to change something on their menu across locations? Like, why is that so hard?

Brett Spiegel: I mean, the amount of technology variations across this industry is just, is just, is just wild. I mean, some people have printed boards, right? So what's really hard, because you got to, like, create a print file, send it to the printer, get it printed, get it shipped, get it hung. Um, and then you move kind of up from that into digital and like digital sometimes is literally just ah, a thumb drive with an image, a PowerPoint on a stick. Um, and then from there I think that you know there's various type like levels of content management systems that are, you know, effectively just delivery mechanisms for an image. And then you get into like vendor managed and certain vendors are really responsive and quick to turn things around and others take six weeks. Um, you'd be surprised at how many very large national global QSR chains have to settle for six week turnaround times. But I think it, it becomes challenging because you have that, you have that, you have to be able to deliver it. Um, you have to be able to if you're doing it well, connect all of the pricing that's on that image to like actual items in your point of sale. Why? So that when you update a price in the point of sale it reflects on the boards. When you mark something as 86 it indicates on the boards this is either not available, either hides it or ideally kind of puts not available so that your guests understand like the thing that you're looking for actually isn't here. So all that sort of stuff, you know, can take a lot of work and depending on the underlying software it might just be all hard coded. Right. And so it's some team of people that are just like cranking out, updating HTML files. Literally. I've seen that to, to change and swap out stuff, um, versus just kind of like more of a, you know, anybody that's like stood up a squarespace site M should understand how simple it can be and should be to update content on a website. You know, just pull and go to the back end, drag and drop, swap to hit save and it's gone and it's done. And oh, you can verify it because you can pull it up and you can see that it's done. But if you didn't.

David "Rev" Ciancio: You're making me think about my good friends at playables. I love going to Pliables. Like they, those literally they're pan painted and like wow, it looks really nice. But yeah, what if that's out? What if that's out? What if there's.

Brett Spiegel: Don't ever change the menu.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Yeah, it's good if we don't change.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, exactly. So I mean it's hard to answer. Why is it hard? Uh, it's hard because it was, it was, I don't know, built to be hard. Just. No, this, this is like how the whole thing started is, is us just being like why can't you rotate stuff? Why does it Take six weeks to update something. Why can't you see when a screen is out? What are you talking about? Like at hq, you have no idea if any of your screens are blank. Like, you just don't know that. Like, why don't you know that the Internet exists? Like, it's just so. It's hard to answer. Why? Because we're still trying to figure out, like, why things are the way that they are.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Um, you know, 100 heard. I think if everybody had a magic wand, it could be perfect every day. Like, yeah, they do all these things, right?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah.

David "Rev" Ciancio: But I think, I think in restaurant land, like, you could be optimizing everything every minute, every day, every hour. And I just, do I have the bandwidth or not? You know what I mean? And it's really looking that. But I think that our tools are getting smarter, right? Like we're getting access to tools where it's like, I don't have to remember to do everything because it will, you know?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah. And you know, I don't, um, it's not there yet. And I want to get too buzzy by saying AI, but like, you know, the, the generative AI that can take an input which is like, listen, we did our photo shoot and this is how we like our food represented, right? This is, this is a guide, this is guardrails on how to represent our brand, how to represent our food. Now within that, give me a thousand variations and then connect it into a system that can run them, testing them, and report back on what's performing. And even better, self optimized, right after it hits statistical relevance, you drop the winners, you double down, you drop the losers, you double down on the winners, right? So again, we, we're, we're playing around there and I, I don't personally think it's all the way there yet, but it's getting close and so it's just a matter of time. To your point of, like, it shouldn't take anybody's bandwidth to do this stuff. The system should just do it for you and just let you know how it's going.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Hey man, I would like the system to go get me an espresso, but I'll take care of that after our show. Um, uh, as we're sort of winding down here, look, you guys have this really cool digital menu display boards that does kind of the stuff you want to take a second to kind of tell us how that works, what it does.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah. So we've effectively again, we approach this from e commerce first principles and we built out a software Platform that is designed to be hardware agnostic. Because we want to be hardware agnostic. We're software people at the end of the day. So, you know, we trying to get to a place where it's incredibly plug and play, um, can sit on top of the existing hardware infrastructure and is a platform that's built on really three pillars. So one is content. We've been talking a lot about content, um, pushing out content, managing content, making sure all the content's running where it's supposed to be, doing built in sort of QC to make sure that, you know, the LTO was supposed to drop on, on Friday. Did it drop on Friday? Everywhere, really. Really. So an audit trail around content experimentation. Uh, another point that we talked about, right. So, um, the ability to, to change and manipulate that content and kind of see how it is impacting the business, how it's impacting check size, how it's impacting PMIX and take rates. And the third one is just m monitoring of the hardware itself. Again, we're hardware agnostic, but we think that our role is needs to be providing insight into the full stack from the point of sale to the screen and every individual hardware component be an hd, HDMI cable, a media player, a networking cable. Is everything up and running here and if it's not, how long has it been down and what is happening right now to get it back up and running? Um, so when you take that sort of monitoring content, experimentation, those are the kind of three pillars that we built this software platform on top of so that we can start to really maximize these channels, these revenue channels that are so critical, particularly for QSR brands. Um, and, and, and help move the needle a little bit.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Yeah, for sure. I've walked into Handcraft Burgers and brewing like, why is the walkios down? Like, oh, I didn't notice.

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, that is, it's uh, that is in my mind maybe not. It's definitely not as bad as a dirty bathroom, but it is comparable to like, like peeling paint. Right. And it just, and it just. What it does is it erodes trust in the guests. You're like, like somebody isn't paying attention to this. Somebody doesn't care about this. What else do they not care about inside this operation? What else are they not paying attention about? Right. Um, and so, you know, this story either looks totally dialed in and I, and I just feel really great about coming here and I love coming here or I don't know about this store. Right. And so again, dirty bathroom first, but after dirty bathroom, like make sure all the screens are on all kiosk. Yeah.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Also, uh, at Handcraft Breakers Route, that's the only way you can access the secret menu where Rev Secret smashes. So. But, uh, that's a different show at a different time. But we got to wrap it up here. If somebody wanted to learn more about you or Checkmate, what would be the best way to do that? Where could they find you?

Brett Spiegel: Yeah, it's a checkmate.com's the hub for everything, and you could find links. Uh, I'm on. I'm on LinkedIn. Um, I'll be reposting your post about this post. Uh, so stay posted for that.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Thank you. We got a bunch of comments too, here. So if you're live with us right now and you want to hit up Brett, just, I think go to the top, click on his name, and go in and send a DM M. Right. Does that work?

Brett Spiegel: Oh, that works. That works. DMS are open. I respond. I respond.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us, Brett. Today, uh, really insightful conversation. Like I said, I enjoyed so much what we talked about in the prep call. I was like, I can't wait for this conversation because even my thing, my thinking gets challenged once in a while. And this is one of those moments. Moment. So thank you.

Brett Spiegel: Appreciate it. Thank you, Rev, for having me.

David "Rev" Ciancio: Awesome. And thank you, everybody, for listening. If you, uh, are joining us live, please share this on your favorite social media platform. And if you're listening to one of the replays, make sure you're hitting that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you like to listen in. Thanks, everybody.