July 8, 2021 • 47 mins
As we return from a two week summer break, this awesome episode will seriously whet your appetite (not kidding!) as we're joined by Alex Pincus, one of the founders of the amazing Crew NY restaurant group. In this awesome and inspiring episode Alex takes Jordan and Andrew through their initial review of Podio and how they got started, and then the group turns the focus on some of the amazing ways their Podio system has seriously helped them scale their business.
This is a great and insightful episode for a number of reasons, not least of which it shows how an incredibly fast-paced and overhead conscious business like a restaurant can use Podio to really track so much of the business and supercharge the efficiency of it all. We look at how fully integrated communications (phone, text and email) has helped them elevate their customer service, and we dive into how they use Podio as a Content Management System (CMS) for their restaurant websites, allowing them to keep up-to-the-minute menus and quickly make adjustments to menus, ingredients, staff tasks....you name it!
This is another great episode to watch on YouTube as you can see the fruits of the labour and how it spins out from Podio to the customers plate!
Food for thought?
(if you're in the NY area, we HIGHLY recommend a visit. We will be flying in as soon as we can)
Show Links:
Check out the Crew NY Main Website: https://crewny.com/
Check out the Grand Banks Restaurant: https://crewny.com/grand-banks
Check out the Drift In Restaurant: https://crewny.com/drift-in
Check out the Pilot Restaurant: https://crewny.com/pilot
Check out the Island Oyster Restaurant: https://crewny.com/island-oyster
Check out the Seaworthy Restaurant: https://crewny.com/seaworthy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Narrator (00:00):
Welcome to powered by podio automation is everything.
supercharge your business withpodio. Get ready for another
episode of supercharged withJordan Samuel Fleming your
weekly dive into the awesomeimpact workflow and automation
you can have on your businesswhen it's powered by podio. Join
(00:22):
us each week as we learn fromthe top podio partners in the
world as we investigate systemintegrations and add ons and
hear from real business ownerswho have implemented podio into
their business. Now, join yourhost Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO
of game changers for this week'sepisode.
Jordan Fleming (00:45):
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode
of supercharge. I'm your hostJordan Samuel Fleming, here to
talk all about the power ofworkflow and automation when
your business is powered bypodio. Now, in today's episode,
I'm joined by two people. Firstof all, I'm joined by my
colleague, Andrew Cranston, whois the CTO of game changers and
(01:07):
is joined us because he reallydoes spearhead most of the
design and manage the technicalaspects of our systems. And our
other guests. Our featuredguests is Alex Pincus from
Crewe, New York. Now, this is areally different episode than a
lot of the ones we do, because alot of businesses we have on who
use podio. I be honest, theytend to focus heavily on the b2b
(01:31):
services on the field operationsand of course, on real estate
and property management. Andthat's great. It's a huge use
case for podio. Today's a littledifferent because crew, New
York, their main focus, andcertainly the main focus for the
system that we our game changeshas been involved with these
around restaurants, they own andoperate a number of seasonal
(01:56):
restaurants in New York, and Ifound out New Orleans. And it's
a really interesting use casebecause of course, there is
established software forrestaurants IE POS systems that
run restaurants and bookingsystems, but they were looking
for something deeper. And thisis a really fun episode because
it shows you kind of even morewhat podio is capable of. And
(02:20):
the system that we are going tolook at today with Alex really
brings a lot of the differentareas of the restaurant business
and their restaurantorganisation. together in a way,
they've never been able to dothat cluding communication,
automatic communication, linkingin smartphone and emails and
(02:41):
externalising things like a menusystem for into a screen into a
to be visible by the phone,which is very much linked to a
back end, which understands, youknow, ingredients and what's on
each different location. Theability to quickly remove
something from one location and,and have the menu
(03:03):
instantaneously change. And it'sshowing podio as a system that
really can manage the back endof all these different parts of
the restaurant group that theyown. But also, we have now
started to branch out to publicfacing things which were podio
is pushing the data, their menusfor each different location. And
(03:23):
each one looks slightlydifferent different colour
schemes, you could have specificmenu items on each one. And you
can dynamically remove items ifthey for instance, you run out
of you know, oysters orsomething like that. So it's a
really fun use cases, it's notone we've really done before. So
it's great to hear from Alex,it's great, you know, to see the
the effect that integratingpodio in this way has had on
(03:47):
their business, the real massivepositive effect it had on their
customer experience, theirability interact, and the way
they're continuing to buildtheir system. So, you know,
quick reminder, please do take amoment right now stop, pause,
rate the podcast, give it ashare, give it a like and more
(04:08):
importantly, give it a review.
It really does boost us up inthe rating. So the more and more
people find out about the powerof podio. Enough of that pitch
for me, please. Let's join Alex,Andrew and I in the podcast. So
okay, so, Alex, good CMC in awhile. First time in the
podcast, why don't you giveeveryone a little hint about who
(04:31):
you are and what you guys do.
Cool.
Alex Pincus (04:37):
Happy to be here.
I'm Alex Pincus. I'm one of theowners of crew. We have a
company primarily in New Yorkthat operates kind of a weird
business where half restaurantshave maritime and sometimes
those things overlap withrestaurants on boats, our
flagship restaurants calledgrand bags, we open it at
seasons ago. So slow over sevenyears ago, downtown New York
(05:02):
City. And it's been a, you know,pretty successful restaurants
kind of become a New Yorkinstitution. And we've got a
handful of other restaurants,similar waterfront nature, we
have another restaurant on aboat in Brooklyn called pilot.
And we have a seafood restaurantin New Orleans in collaboration
with Ace Hotel called seaworthy.
(05:26):
And then we have two waterfrontrestaurants in New York that are
on land, but right on the water.
One of them's called Islandoyster, and the other one is
called drift in all of thesefocus on, they're all seasonal,
they're all outdoors, they'rereally focused on, you know,
waterfront, outdoor enjoyment ofsustainable seafood, you know,
having a nice drink and escapingeveryday life. separately from
(05:48):
that we also have a boatrestoration facility, and a
handful of historic ships and weoperate a couple marinas. So
it's a very unique undertaking,where every portfolio, yeah, not
everything goes together. Butyou
Andrew Cranston (06:06):
know, just just a couple restaurants, just a
couple.
Jordan Fleming (06:11):
I can't secretly I cannot wait, at some point, I
will be in New York again, Ilive totally outside of New York
for a while. And I've In fact,smartphones just hired our new
our head of marketing is is isfunny of a woman I went to high
school with, but she, she livesjust outside of New York City,
as well. So I will definitely onone of my trips back becoming
(06:33):
swinging back through New Yorkto see some people see her and
all that. And I am definitelycoming into the city to go to
one of the restaurants becausewe'll have a good time. I at
this point, I've seen so manymenus that I've been like
drooling. Every time I see it.
I'm just like, come on, this iskilling me. So for podio there's
a couple things I wanted to gothrough in this podcast, because
I think it's there's some reallyinteresting bits that you bring
(06:55):
to the table on this podcastthat we haven't had before.
Because we've had a lot of realestate and let people you know,
there's a podio sort of fixturein real estate investment and
some of these solar panel solarcompanies. And we've talked to a
lot of people like that. But Ithink you're the first
restaurant, certainly, thatwe've discussed. And you use,
(07:17):
like as we've worked with youover the last little while, I
can't remember how long andseeing how you've sort of
integrated podio through youroperations, how then your podio
system has developed, I want totouch on a couple of those
things. But what first got youinto podio? From a restaurant
point of view? Because itdoesn't it's not necessary?
(07:39):
There's a lot of E POS systemsthat claimed to run restaurants
and is, you know, what was itthat brought you to podio. To
begin with.
Alex Pincus (07:49):
It was sort of accidental, we had been looking
for, you know, projectmanagement, data management
software packages for a while weplayed around with a few of
them. We used Asana for oneyear. And you know, there's some
cool things we liked about it.
And we'd actually very early on,used podio as a kind of project
management tool just to keepthings organised. But you know,
(08:12):
this is probably six or sevenyears ago. And I think at the
time, it just did it, it seemeda little more complicated than
what we needed. And we ended upplaying around with air table
for a long time, which you know,had some benefits in a, you
know, less robust kind of way,but it helped us organise things
(08:34):
on a certain level. And then Iwould guess it was probably a
couple years ago, now my brotheris my partner brought it up, it
was looking through all thevarious packages and trying to
figure out what might work wellfor us. And, you know, had dug a
little deeper into podio andstarted to put together that it
offered a structure that mightor a possible structure that
(08:56):
might work for us. So we startedtinkering with it and got a few
things in there. And, you know,sort of quickly realised that
there was a lot of potential.
And then I believe, you know,not long after that, we also
realise we needed a little help.
And that's when we startedtalking to you guys. And, you
know, from that collaboration,we've ended up at a pretty
(09:19):
amazing point in terms ofcreating a back end for
everything that we do. And, youknow, seems to have this
exponential world of possibilityat this point. As it's all I
would say Finally, all up andrunning in sync together and you
know, happening in real time.
(09:41):
For you know, the first timesince we've been using it, it's
it's been pretty cool process toenvision what we could do and
then finally see it come intoreality.
Jordan Fleming (09:52):
If you were to think about sort of the you
know, maybe two or threecritical things that your your
you sort of really wanted podioto do, and maybe the end that
we're now doing. Just because Iknow that there are so many
like, I guess primarily when Ithink of restaurants, I think of
(10:14):
the E POS systems where you'vegot kind of half baked systems
to do other bits, it seems tome, whenever I've seen the POS
systems, restaurants, they'reusually really good at like
taking reservations and, andlike seeing where your tables
are, and doing the doing thecore things. But all these
little other spokes of thebusiness that you wanted to
(10:35):
include, what would be the kindof key things that podio is
running, that you weren't reallyable to do conveniently before,
if that makes sense.
Alex Pincus (10:45):
I mean, what's interesting is, at this point,
podio, has taken it to a levelthat we didn't know that we
didn't even envision this is apossibility. But you know, we
went into it thinking, Okay,it'd be great to organise all
the things that we'd buy, tojust know what those things are.
And categorise those things, itwould be great to have all the
(11:05):
documents for each individualentity that we operate, live in
one place together, and be ableto reference those, you know,
have multiple digitalreferences, it'd be great for
people to be able to communicatewith each other and share those
things with each other. And, youknow, that was it was wasn't
very complicated goal that wehad at the beginning. But as we
(11:25):
started building systems, youknow, we built a system of all
the things that we buy. And thenwe started to realise, oh, we
could actually build a systemthat shows the recipe for
something that we make, and thenwe can reference, all those
things that we buy that go init. And then those things,
reference the vendors that webuy them from. But then, you
know, through some conversationwith you guys, we had this
(11:48):
realisation that we could builda, you know, a referenceable
menu that our guests see, youknow, which is also kind of
result of COVID, and peopleshifting to digital menus. But
we now have, you know, a menuthat live online, where on the
back end, it's actuallyreferencing the actual recipe
(12:11):
for the dish that has all thespecs for someone to be able to
make, it then also has all thespecs for all the people that
would buy all the ingredientsfrom. And so we have a full like
almost like a full lifecycle ofwhat something that we sell is
fully connected, in real timethrough podio. So I could go
(12:32):
right now and change it and saythat we're out of something. And
then everybody does a route ofthis thing internally, and it
actually turns itself off fromthe menu. Until tomorrow, when
it reminds manager that it's sofamiliar and either ready to buy
something, or we need to figuresomething out.
Jordan Fleming (12:49):
I didn't even know I did that I which is sad,
because I didn't get I'm notbeen obviously I don't do I've
not been involved in the buildin your system for quite some
time. Andrew spearheaded that,and maybe good time for Andrew
to, to come into this becausethat like I remember seeing the
menu. And you know, it'sbeautiful on the web. It's like,
(13:11):
it looks good. It looks likeyour menu looks. But that
connection, Andrew, how like,Can you give us a little
technical bit about how thosethings work. And maybe we can
just have a, you can maybe takea little show, so that anybody
watching on YouTube can see whatthe menu looks like. And you can
see the fantastic menu that therestaurants have to offer, and
(13:32):
whet your appetite there.
Andrew Cranston (13:34):
Yeah, I have to second Jordan like going through
this project and just constantlyreading about seafood for a good
solid month and just likedrooling over the things
Jordan Fleming (13:42):
that lobster more in my life.
Andrew Cranston (13:45):
That's awesome.
So So Jordan makes a veryinteresting point in that we do
a lot of work for propertymanagers, you know, people who
are in property wholesaling. Butin essence, everything that a
good podio system has is reallyabout objects, you know, so like
property wholesalers would havea property object. And then they
would have an offer object or acontract object, a contact
object, these things that you'reworking with. And it contains
(14:09):
certain variables within theseobjects. That particular process
while having a lot ofautomations, and a lot of
different things, differentdirections that can go, the
number of objects that they'redealing with on a daily basis
are quite small. But when youthink about a restaurant or or
an empire of restaurants, thenumber of objects that you're
dealing with, are very large. Soyou have a venue. And then you
(14:33):
have people who fulfil manydifferent roles on many
different teams and being ableto control who who's in charge
of what you mentioned aboutvendors, a dish, and then the
ingredients that go in thatdish, the venue that sells this
dish, what it costs.
Whether or not it's available onany given day, there's a lot of
(14:55):
objects and your podio system isactually one of the largest
we've ever dealt with. But wetry to control people that start
off on podio. And they startbuilding 700 apps when three
will do. But in reality, yoursystem is a weird, gentle
balance between those twothings, because you do have a
lot of sprawl, but you need itbecause you have all of these
different relationships that youneed to track. So your podio
(15:17):
system is rather large, that'san important thing to know,
considering, you know, otherpeople who do podio. Some other
things that you're doing also inyour system are, you do have a
reservation system called talkthat you do run all your venues
through now, we recently builtan integration where we're
catching web hooks from talk,specifically to know when the
(15:38):
reservation ends. And this isactually pretty cool the way the
talk has allowed us to do this,because one of the other big
builds that we've done recentlyis your guest services workflow.
So you now have a one stopintegrated place in podio, where
if somebody is contacting you,for some reason, they submit a
webform on your site, the emailone of your addresses, all of
that information comes into oneplace. And it's very, it's very
(16:01):
much just a standard globey Mailintegration where your your
guest services, people areemailing back and forth and
tracking what needs to be done.
But because these talk web hooksknow, when the reservation
ended, when the person left therestaurant, we get a rent, we
get a web hook, once your folkssign the person out, they're
gone, their bill is paid, theyget an SMS on their phone saying
(16:23):
how did we do, they click on itfeedback form comes in, and that
information comes right intopodio, as well. So that's
another key component of yourguest services workflow. So
there's a lot going on. And likeI said, in terms of objects,
there's a lot of things that wehave to track. This menu project
that we did together is actuallyone of the one of my favourite
sort of things that we've done.
(16:46):
And what in essence it is, iswe're using podio as a content
management system. So we'reusing it for your own internal
back end processes, like whatmenu items served are served by
which venues and whichingredients go into them. That's
sort of the back end part of it.
But for the front end of this,we have options for you to
organise these menu items andprice points, what am what
(17:09):
you're selling on your menus,and what it costs per venue,
we're controlling price pointsper venue in the case of your
system, and organising them intomenus for venues, sub sections.
And then also we've got a thirdlevel of like a section of the
menu, so oysters or seafood, andthen the sub sections, which
(17:29):
allows you to show the actualmenu items that are involved. So
in addition to that, we alsoallow you to track the colours,
the logos, links to social mediaoutlets, and we have one
template on it's actually runthrough codeigniter for and it's
installed on a digitaloceandroplet. And that template takes
(17:50):
all of the information in frompodio. And every single menu you
go to tells the user What doesthe header colour? What's the
body colour, what's the footercolour, what widgets are in the
footer, we also have like awidget setting. What Instagram
link does this menu, go to whatoptions are in the menu. And
then we've got drinks and lunch.
(18:12):
So you're going to see a bunchof different things. I'll go
through the back end first. Andthen you'll be able to see sort
of how the front end feeds offall this information. So I'm
going to share my screen. I'm intheir food and beverage
workspace where all of thisinformation is contained. So we
have the the main apps thatwe're working with here are menu
items, guests, menus, menu subsections, and sub menu sections
(18:34):
and sub sections, price points,the footer widgets, which are
direct relationships to themenus themselves. And yeah, and
that's it. So these apps here.
So I'm going to start at the toplevel. So I realised this was
one of the first venues thatwe'd launched. So I'm going to
use it as my guinea pig, whichis driftin. So here now we see
we've got multiple menus fordriftin. They can make it as
(18:56):
granular as they want. And eachof these menus will have its
own. Let me just go into theother one. Actually, each of
these menus will have its ownlink. So they have a URL, and
then they can choose which URLsyou go to to bring up these
menus. The subsections the logonow you can see it's on a
coloured background. So theyhave the ability to upload white
(19:16):
logos on coloured backgrounds,which is also pretty cool. Which
footer widgets and what orderthey show him. What's the
Instagram URL, what's the fontcolour of that logo, the
background colour of that logo,the menu background colour, the
footer background colour. Sowhat we're doing is like a
content management system wherethey have full control over
everything that this menu canpossibly do. Now within here, we
(19:38):
load up menu sections. So theseare the top level where they
have some other basic controlsover what shows up. They can
hide things at a glance. And allof this is live. All of this
information is being sucked upby our SQL sink. We have a
company wide SQL sink where wetake all of this information at
a podium we suck it up into SQLSo that we can respond to these
(20:00):
events, all of these menusubsections, to see if something
goes off, they can just hide itor if it's not ready. And then
inside each of these subsections, we have the menu items
themselves. So each of thesemenu items are what Alex was
referring to where it showseverything their back end,
people would ever want to knowabout this menu item, what
ingredients go into it? What arethe recipes? So these are other
(20:22):
objects that they have that thatproperty managers don't have a
recipe? Maybe sub recipes, likeplate where what what what, you
know, what, what do we whatforks, like, how many forks do
we have in the restaurant, howmany knives Do we have, there's
so many objects that they haveto track in this system. And
podio is doing a grand job of atall. And then some other
(20:44):
information that they controlstyling, and how the price goes.
And each of these menu itemshappens to have a price point
for every single venue whereit's sold, where they can
control some of these residualsbecause they don't sell them.
But like for this
Jordan Fleming (20:58):
particular, can we go into the site to see the
actual activity, see the actual?
Andrew Cranston (21:05):
Sure. So that's all of the back end elements.
Now, if I were to go to thismenu online. So we can see all
of those colour choices. As wellas the font choices, the font
colour choices, the way theInstagram URL behaves, which
(21:29):
footer widgets show up. So if Imake a change, I don't want to
make any change to anythingalive. But if I were to screw up
one of these footer widgets andgo refresh the page, we would
see it disappear, any changethat they make in podio, appears
in this menu instantly, which isgood also, because just to go
back to the menu item for amoment, they can 86 an item for
a day. So they're like oystersare off, turn them off for this
(21:49):
venue for the day. And then thenext day, we go back to normal.
So they're able to respond tothese moments that may occur. So
we have our menu sections drinkbrunch all day, we can see they
have additional informationhere. And that just happens to
be one menu. so here we can goto another menu, different
(22:09):
colours, different menu options,different footer widgets,
different Instagram URL,everything is controlled within
that one content area in podio.
And it's mobile friendly, whichis obviously very good because
no doubt your folks have beenhave been using this on their on
their phones. And I think it'sbrilliant in the age of COVID.
And in general, the fact that ifyou want to respond to the
(22:31):
world, like the oysters are off,and you have a menu that you
printed for the day, and thenyou got to have somebody go and
scratch it out on all the menusor whatever, like being able to
respond to these real worldsituations. But just going and
making an update in podio. Andboom, the menu is updated for
everybody.
Jordan Fleming (22:47):
So Alex, how did you guys do it beforehand, cuz I
love the look of this as well. Ijust, I just love the way it all
comes together? How would you?
Can we stay on the web version?
How would you guys have donethis beforehand.
Alex Pincus (23:01):
So you know, in the olden days, we used to have a
print menu. That looked nice,but it was a nightmare. Because
every time we made an edit, wehad to reprint and also all of
our restaurants are outside. Sothey're always getting wet. And
then you have to reprint again.
And you know, when you make atypo that you have to reprint
again. And it was always a highpressure kind of scenario on a
(23:21):
daily basis to make sure thatyou had enough menus and that
they're good. Um, last year, youknow, in COVID head, we switched
to a QR code based menu, wetried it for a second through
our point of sale system, whichis toast, just having our menu
where people could actuallyorder, you know, physically
order their own productsthemselves. Nobody liked doing
(23:44):
that people actually likereading a menu and then taking
an order with a server. So, youknow, we figure that out really
quickly. Um, you know,Squarespace, which we use for
most of our websites has, youknow, kind of a built in menu
maker widget. So we initiallyhad one that looks very much
(24:09):
like this in Squarespace, youknow, that we styled to get to a
way that we liked. And then whenwe you know, when we built it
with you guys, we actually usethat as the sort of jumping off
point for how we would style themenu.
Jordan Fleming (24:24):
And it I just find I find it's really so in
the life of a if you think abouta daily life of the restaurant
or any of the restaurants orwhatever, when you have to like
so who does the major managementlike who would decide to 86
something who has who and you'regonna like how many parts are
(24:46):
touching this sort of thing? Youknow, is it something that your
each individual restaurant cancan control themselves? Do you
do it all centrally?
Alex Pincus (24:57):
I mean, we have a it's interesting, so I like to
do the high level things of whatthe item is called, the actual
customer facing description ofit. And the price. So, you know,
generally, that's me and mybrother. Um, but then on a daily
(25:17):
on the back end, you know, Idon't know how to make many of
these things, we have a, youknow, the beginning, someone
puts together the recipe, and ifit ever changes, other people
can edit those recipes. Butevery day, our venue managers
are the ones who look at themenu for the day, and they'll go
through and 86 anything thatwe're not going to be serving
that day, that is something thatwe should be serving. So for
(25:40):
example, our beer deliverycompany didn't have the beer
that we needed a couple daysago. So we had two ad sets a
beer. And so for two days in arow, they would go in and they'd
pull up Sunday beer, and they'dsay, 86 per day. And what's
impressive about that is it justdoesn't show up as an option on
(26:00):
the menu to the guests. So, youknow, unless you're really
coming in, hoping for thatspecific beer. You would never
know that
Jordan Fleming (26:08):
you wouldn't be like, Oh, wait, it's scratched
out. It's just, it's it's isn'tit's not even there. It's not
Yeah, you know,
Alex Pincus (26:16):
it frequently happens, you know, during
service, I got a busy Saturdayor Sunday, we will run out of a
certain type of moisture, or wewill run out of something. And
we just turn it off in realtime. You know, the manager just
takes out his phone andscrolling goes into podio just
turns off Navy point or Montauk,Pearl. And then boom, that item
is just no longer in the menufor the day. And it's, you know,
(26:37):
it's venue specific to which iscool, because our other venue
managers get an alert when we atsix something for the day. And
they will reach out and say Oh,hey, I've actually got oysters
if you guys need some awesome,pretty cool to see as well. So
when
Jordan Fleming (26:53):
you if you're if you're doing that in terms of
like at the restaurant, yourpoint about people not liking to
order from like no not wantingto go in and, and make their
order on a thing, you know, on atablet or whatever. But they
want to actually like, look atit and order or said. So do you
(27:13):
just have Do you just displaythe menus on the screen? Do
Alex Pincus (27:17):
you have individual screens, all of our tables have
a QR code now. And you just, youknow,
Jordan Fleming (27:23):
everybody just goes to their phone. It's pretty
Alex Pincus (27:25):
common in New York.
Now almost every restaurant hasthat at the moment. And you
know, I'm I'm have a mixedmindset about it. I really like
having a menu on a phone. Butalso I know people don't love
taking out their phone everythree seconds. But every
restaurant that you go to nowhas a QR menu, and I have a
feeling it's gonna stick aroundfor a bit.
Andrew Cranston (27:45):
I'll make sense. I mean, in COVID times,
it really does make sense tohave people unnecessarily
handling things. And if you haveto plastic coat menus or
laminate menus, and is it evenharder to change them, you know,
like this, this, you know,everything that we've described
here in the past half hour, itmakes sense for any restaurant,
Jordan Fleming (28:02):
if it feels like a cheap diner. So that, so then
from a server point of view,that also means like because
when I last worked in arestaurant 25 years ago is a
big, so I'm sure lots of change.
But every day you would sort ofbe let know, you know, you kind
(28:22):
of know Oh, hey guys, this isthis is what's on today, like
this is today's specials, orthese are the catch of the day
or whatever. So you're able toessentially your staff are able
to just see whatever is live fortheir restaurant they're working
in, by going to their phone.
Yep.
Alex Pincus (28:41):
So one of the things that we were hoping to
build next is a version of this,that's staff, you know,
internally facing, that has, youknow, specific details that our
team, it would be good for themto know, like how to describe
something, or you know, more howto make it but not in the
backend of podio format to belike a similar to our customer
(29:04):
facing menu but haveinstructions and photographs for
our team to be able to moreconsistently do what they're
trying to do.
Jordan Fleming (29:13):
And then so then, like extrapolating that
you have in a nice seafood dishthat and they could see you
know, they can bring it up ontheir, the the internal version,
and they can see, well, thispairs really well with this wine
or this wine, and you know, getall those little notes that they
they would they would have butit's in a much more convenient
(29:35):
format. Yes. Interesting.
Interesting. And you guys also,because I have to bring it up
legally. I think you guys alsouse smartphone within your
system. Do you have all of thedifferent restaurant numbers via
that now or most of them?
Alex Pincus (29:55):
No, we haven't really talked about the you
know, the guest services. That'sa pretty separate parallel.
World, that's been prettyamazing for us. But yeah, we use
smartphone. And that's tied toour guest services suite that we
(30:15):
have that we built out. And allthe venue, numbers, net, we've
all we, they all go to onenumber and we have a sort of
group, voicemail that addresseseverything from one place, which
is just for a management pointmakes a lot of sense for us and
all that, you know, any kind ofvoicemail or message feeds into
(30:36):
our guest services suite, whichthen gets handled in the same
way incoming emails, and, youknow, incoming requests are
handled. But that world isreally cool. We, you know, we
launched that out to April. AndI've personally done a lot of
time on the, on the customerengagement side from responding
(30:59):
to emails and building out thelanguage of how we respond to
people over the years. So it'sbeen really cool to see the
transition and everything livingin one place. It's not an email
inbox, I was frankly concernedthat it wasn't going to work, or
that it would just be unwieldy.
And we turned it on. And withina day, I was kind of, you know,
super impressed with how well itcategorised everything and
(31:25):
organised everything. And youknow, probably takes a few more
seconds per interaction than anormal email. But then you build
up this incredible database ofpeople that you're communicating
with, and referencing everythingthat they may have done. So when
someone emails us now I can seeall their reservations that
they've made tied to theirprofile, and you know, any kind
(31:48):
of other emails that they'veever had, or phone calls they've
ever had. So we're reallystarting to build up this
networks database of what andwho our customers are. So it's
been pretty cool to see. Andit's, you know, just keeps
getting bigger and bigger andmore robust as time goes on.
Jordan Fleming (32:07):
I remember because, Andrew, I think you
guys did the email portion.
First.
Andrew Cranston (32:14):
Yeah. So so it was kind of in a couple of
stages that the talk, ending areservation and sending out a
feedback form that was onepiece, and that is going out
through smartphone. And what wedo is we engage a URL shortener,
which is always a good plan whenyou are sending text links via
text message, because obviously,the character counts. So try to
(32:36):
only use you know, as as nolonger. I'm sorry, yeah, three
text messages for everyone. I'msorry. Sorry. forgot all this
stuff Jordan was wearing sorry.
Alright, so So, so we have a URLshortener. So that's one piece.
And then another piece is theyhave, as of initially, all of
their Squarespace websites justdumped the result into a Google
(32:59):
Sheet, which it's stillcurrently does. But we were
using actually Integra mat, tograb those data points from the
Google Sheet and stuff them intopodio. So that they can produce
items in this Guest Servicesworkflow. And also just a shout
out to globey. Male here aswell. One other cool thing is
we, you know, you actually, andyou have kind of been a good
(33:20):
soldier in this sort of clientinteraction, battle, to load as
many useful boilerplate emailresponses, which is the first
time I've actually seen itreally used the way I think it
was envisioned to be used amassive number of boilerplate
responses in globey Mailspecifically, so that when you
are responding to these issues,all you have to do is click
(33:43):
email, and hopefully nine timesout of 10, you go, Oh, this is
about this boilerplate response,boom, their names merged in and
a couple of other things mightbe merged in send, and you're
done. So having these thesecached responses, no doubt makes
your life a lot easier as well.
Jordan Fleming (34:03):
And, Alex, let me just ask, so before, like,
with the communication point,because you've got so many
venues, like, to me, that's partof the genius of all this, is,
it's not that difficult to runone venue, and have the data
contained in a sensible way. Butwhen you've got as many as you
(34:25):
have it, then that's the hardbit, I think, because then
you've got different emailboxes, because you want
different email boxes, you wanteach restaurant, you got
different phone numbers, becauseyou want each phone number to
have address, you know, a dressor whatever. That's when it all
really ties together. So as Isay, so before, before this was
it essentially, you know, youhad a phone system that rang
(34:47):
and, you know, you were able totalk to people and you had email
inboxes with Outlook or or Gmailor whatever, what was the
landscape beforehand.
Alex Pincus (34:58):
I mean, it's kind of funny. This is allowed To get
much better at customer service,I mean, we've been lucky that we
have a restaurant group that hashigh demand. So, our email at
phone response in the oldendays, the phone message was,
hey, you've called our phonenumber for this are some facts,
we're probably not gonna be ableto help you. And, you know, that
(35:19):
was our email system as well,we'd have, you know, an auto
response email that said, youknow, these are the top 10
things people ask us about. Andif your thing is not answered by
this, that hopefully, we'll getback to you within a reasonable
amount of time. Chances are 50%,that we will, and because we
just had so much incoming, itwas crazy. So now it's very well
(35:42):
organised, you know, when we getsomething coming in, we, you
know, 95% of our incomingmessages now are generated by a
form, as opposed to an emailaddress, which is great. And
that form specifies the venueand the topic. So it allows us
to address them sequentially,based on what's most important.
(36:04):
And then, you know, most ofthese questions have, as you
mentioned, have a sort of preestablished answer anyway. Or if
there's not, there's at least aframework in which we could
insert a couple sentences, makeit feel good, and, you know,
specifically address a need.
And, you know, you can crankthrough 100 emails pretty quick,
you know. So now, actually, her,we have much better customer
(36:29):
service are actually engagingwith everyone who reaches out to
us, you know, pretty much get atinbox zero on a daily basis,
which is a good feeling andmakes us, you know, we feel like
we're getting more business outof the people that we're
engaging with, because we'reactually able to answer their
questions, you know, part ofbooking helping arrange things
(36:51):
for people. So it's been apositive, for sure.
Jordan Fleming (36:57):
Fantastic, fantastic. And, I mean, that, to
me, that's, it's so interestinghow, you know, restaurants are,
you know, the fast pace, it's,it's fast paced, it's demanding
restaurants are too hardbusinesses to run, you've got
lots of things around margins,and things you got to keep
tight, and things you got tolook after. And, you know,
(37:19):
you've got lots of staff andlots of equipment to mean, the
equipment that you guys, each,each kitchen has x amount of
equipment, all these thingscoming together, and being able
to kind of pee, you know, piecetogether as a jigsaw. I can't
think of anything, but podiothat would, that would manage
all those streams as well, like,you know, I mean, any one piece
(37:44):
of software can do a bookingsystem, or a client feedback
system, or, you know, x, y andZed. But I think the patchwork
that you guys have built withAndrew and with the team, but
the patchwork Did you guys haveput together to me is a
fascinating one that I don'tthink I've ever seen before. I
(38:05):
really don't? Yeah,
Andrew Cranston (38:07):
I think I think I mean, and that that a lot of
these podcasts kind of lead inthe same direction in terms of
why people come to podio, orwhat the power of podio is. But
we do have people coming to usfrom property management and
property, wholesalingbusinesses, because there is no
out of the box solution outthere that does everything, or
does things in a specific enoughway that makes people feel like
(38:31):
they're getting work done. And Iwould imagine the restaurant
industry is experiencing thesame thing like now we're
talking about one of theprojects that we're going to be
working on over the next week orso, is a mass mailer so that you
can communicate with folks on aparticular day. So if you had
like seven reservations betweensix and 9pm, at Island oyster,
(38:52):
and you knew that the restauranthad to close, for whatever
reason, we're talking about away for you to quickly and
efficiently grab those contactsand send an email to those
people. And one of my firstquestions was, don't you have
something in your pantheon ofsoftware that allow you to do
that? And the answer was no. Soconstantly popping up these
situations where I really wantto do this, but the thing that
I'm using just won't let me doit. Well, you know, the
(39:15):
landscape of podio being what itis like. Now, now, where we
spend a lot more time building,like your systems using a lot of
custom API that we've builtglobey flow in podio workflow,
I'm going to start calling itpodio workflow automation, I'm
going to try start calling itpodio workflow automation has
has a lot of good stuff in it.
But we now you know, the podioAPI being what it is, we can
build the gaps. So literally, wecan build solutions to do
(39:39):
anything given enough time anddirection, that that fills these
gaps that you know, out of thebox software, just you know, the
answer is normally what youremail system was, which was, Oh,
you want to know how we can dothis? Well, here's five things
you can do and if it's not oneof these five things, and then,
you know, don't bother emailingus again.
Alex Pincus (39:58):
So pretty crazy at this point. That, you know,
there's all these software'sthat we use, I'll reach out to
them in a nice way and said, I'ma restaurant group that uses
your software, this is the thingyour software needs to be able
to do, and they can't do it. Andyou know, it's opaque whether
it's going to happen or not. Andnow we're at a place where we
(40:18):
just have to build our ownsolutions to these problems. And
you know, it's funny that someof our solutions are way better
solutions than the one that'sout there. I mean, the other
day, I reached out to ourreservation system said, Hey, we
need to email everyone fromtoday's list of reservations,
you would think that that wouldbe a possible thing
Jordan Fleming (40:38):
that would be established? Like That seems
like a use case you you'd have
Alex Pincus (40:43):
no, what if I mean, there's all kinds of what ifs,
we have that issue, probablymore than most restaurants
because we're outside. So we geta lot more unique things
happening. But it would makesense to want to be able to
reach out to everybody, from aday for any possible thing. Or,
you know, once we startedtalking about being able to
reach out to our guests, evenjust to shoot them a quick note
a few days, like, Hey, guys,it's gonna be chilly. Two days
(41:06):
from now, she plan on will bringa sweater, you know, to be able
to do that awesome with just oneemail, you know, and so we're
pretty excited about thatimplementation. But you know,
the big picture is, it's funnythat all these problems, you
know, I don't know how to writesoftware, but we're creating,
you know, effectively an appthat can deal with the various
(41:27):
scenarios that occur in ourlife. And you know, the more of
these we have, the more robustthings seem to get. So it's
getting pretty interesting.
Andrew Cranston (41:35):
No, I'm glad you said that. And just to put
just to put a point on what yousaid to like, you and Myles,
both have done a lot of buildingon your own good building. I
mean, we, we we've tried to helpyou kind of corral these
situations where it may gets alittle bit too granular. But
going back to something thatJordan said earlier, how do you
manage all these venues? Well,you guys have just your system
(41:55):
is the absolute echelon of therelationship field, in my
opinion, because you have brokenthings out to such a degree that
a venue has relationships to thedifferent teams who's the
marketing team, who's therestaurant management team,
who's the, the front House ofteam and then all of these
people and there's the the venuemanagement has relationships to
like, this is the billing email,this is the this email, this is
(42:16):
the logo, this is the emailsignature. So you guys have done
great work breaking it out. Andand like I said, the challenge
is, is that you have a number ofan enormous number of objects
that you have to that you haveto put down. And we're kind of
just helping you with theautomation piece. But your podio
system has kind of been acollaboration between the both
of us. And it's it's one of theit is, like I said, it's a
(42:38):
relationship field textbookexample of how to do
relationship fields, and a lotof that has come from you guys.
So it's great stuff.
Jordan Fleming (42:47):
Absolutely. It's a fascinating system. And it's
fascinating use case we haven'twe haven't seen and I think it's
gonna you know, I think it'sreally interesting for people to
understand because I because wedo sometimes focus too much on,
on real estate in, you know, inour pipe, my podcast, and in
other things, where and I thinkit's such a fascinating use
(43:07):
case, Alex, we're coming intothe time that we have for this,
I just wanted to, I'm going toput in all of the links to all
of your restaurants into thepodcast. So I'm gonna I'm gonna
need to I'm gonna need to go tocrew and website to get them
all. But, you know, do you guysI mean, just close this out with
(43:30):
it's summer is coming up. Ithink officially summer starts
the 20th of June. I thinkofficially, although it's been
hot a ship New York
Alex Pincus (43:38):
as it lately, it's been all over the map. The
weather's been crazy these days.
But um, you know, today isbeautiful day, unfortunately, my
personal mood every day is tiedto the weather. If it's raining,
I'm depressed, and on average,generally pretty happy. But, uh,
you know, New York is crazy.
These days, it seems like we'recoming out of COVID a lot of the
(44:02):
restrictions have been lifted,people seem happy. We actually
opened up a couple of our barsas bars. And you know, they've
been filled with people enjoyingthemselves, you know, coming
back into summer. So we'rereally excited about, you know,
the days that we're in now. And,you know, we're excited about
the systems that we've got inplace that are actually helping
(44:23):
us keep it all together becauseyou know, we're still we're, we
appear big fish from theoutside, but on the inside, it's
a pretty tight group of peoplemaking all this stuff work. And,
you know, thank you to you guysfor allowing us to put that
together because it really doesmake it run, you know, with the
tight little crew. So whoever'skeeping podio alive on the back
(44:46):
end, I'd like to share that aswell. Because we dread the day
that is.
Jordan Fleming (44:53):
I'll let I'll let Sarah Bobby and the team now
they've got to actually I'vebeen having more interactions
with the back end technical teamand Citrix lately they've been
hiring more and more peopleactually for the podio team,
which is a good thing. But ifyou listen to this, and you're
in New York slash, I guess NewOrleans, I didn't realise that
was the case. But if you'relooking either Actually, I
(45:16):
should have, if you're listeningto this, please do pop over to
one of the restaurants. It's Ican't I wish I would say could
say I go there all the time.
Because then I'd be a happy guyand satiated. But being that I
live in Poland, I don't. But youcan better believe the first
time I get back to New York,I'll be there. And you know,
we're coming to crash. Well,yeah, we're coming crash. And,
(45:39):
Alex, it's been an absolutepleasure to see your system
grow. Absolute pleasure today tobe able to see particularly how
the backend management matchesthe front end experience. Thank
you for your insight. AndAndrew, thank you as well for
coming in. And giving us a bitof the benefits as you're the
guy who, who heads up thesystems.
Andrew Cranston (46:01):
It's been a very cool collaboration is kind
of like our only majorrestaurant collaboration and
and, you know, podio as acontent management system, for
those who use WordPress orwhatever, and have a front end
ability on them to be to allowyour clients to control the what
what shows on the front end frompodio, as an example, has been a
(46:22):
really cool project for mepersonally, and I'm excited
about you know, making thisinternal menu and just, you
know, we're still finding newthings to do with this system,
which is awesome. So cool.
Thanks
Alex Pincus (46:32):
for having me, guys. It's been a, it's been fun
to recap everything, just kindof think through it. We're
excited about the next phase.
And I appreciate for the chat.
Jordan Fleming (46:42):
Great stuff. All right. Thanks so much. And don't
forget if you're listening,please do like share, send a
review do all the things youfuckin should have done by now
if you haven't already, sofucking do it. And please share
it around all your social mediasetc. Because we do get a lot of
feedback and I know the Citrixteam listens as well. So shout
out to all of them who arelistening right now. But thanks
(47:04):
so much, and we'll see you nextweek.
Narrator (47:08):
You've been listening to supercharged with Jordan
Samuel Fleming. Subscribe todayon iTunes, Google Play or
Spotify for your weekly diveinto how you can supercharge
your business by making itpowered by podio Be sure to
check out our website we aregame changers.com where you can
learn more and arrange a 30minute call with Jordan daleview
(47:30):
understand how podiosupercharges you
Welcome to powered by podio automation is everything.
supercharge your business withpodio. Get ready for another
episode of supercharged withJordan Samuel Fleming your
weekly dive into the awesomeimpact workflow and automation
you can have on your businesswhen it's powered by podio. Join
(00:22):
us each week as we learn fromthe top podio partners in the
world as we investigate systemintegrations and add ons and
hear from real business ownerswho have implemented podio into
their business. Now, join yourhost Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO
of game changers for this week'sepisode.
Jordan Fleming (00:45):
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode
of supercharge. I'm your hostJordan Samuel Fleming, here to
talk all about the power ofworkflow and automation when
your business is powered bypodio. Now, in today's episode,
I'm joined by two people. Firstof all, I'm joined by my
colleague, Andrew Cranston, whois the CTO of game changers and
(01:07):
is joined us because he reallydoes spearhead most of the
design and manage the technicalaspects of our systems. And our
other guests. Our featuredguests is Alex Pincus from
Crewe, New York. Now, this is areally different episode than a
lot of the ones we do, because alot of businesses we have on who
use podio. I be honest, theytend to focus heavily on the b2b
(01:31):
services on the field operationsand of course, on real estate
and property management. Andthat's great. It's a huge use
case for podio. Today's a littledifferent because crew, New
York, their main focus, andcertainly the main focus for the
system that we our game changeshas been involved with these
around restaurants, they own andoperate a number of seasonal
(01:56):
restaurants in New York, and Ifound out New Orleans. And it's
a really interesting use casebecause of course, there is
established software forrestaurants IE POS systems that
run restaurants and bookingsystems, but they were looking
for something deeper. And thisis a really fun episode because
it shows you kind of even morewhat podio is capable of. And
(02:20):
the system that we are going tolook at today with Alex really
brings a lot of the differentareas of the restaurant business
and their restaurantorganisation. together in a way,
they've never been able to dothat cluding communication,
automatic communication, linkingin smartphone and emails and
(02:41):
externalising things like a menusystem for into a screen into a
to be visible by the phone,which is very much linked to a
back end, which understands, youknow, ingredients and what's on
each different location. Theability to quickly remove
something from one location and,and have the menu
(03:03):
instantaneously change. And it'sshowing podio as a system that
really can manage the back endof all these different parts of
the restaurant group that theyown. But also, we have now
started to branch out to publicfacing things which were podio
is pushing the data, their menusfor each different location. And
(03:23):
each one looks slightlydifferent different colour
schemes, you could have specificmenu items on each one. And you
can dynamically remove items ifthey for instance, you run out
of you know, oysters orsomething like that. So it's a
really fun use cases, it's notone we've really done before. So
it's great to hear from Alex,it's great, you know, to see the
the effect that integratingpodio in this way has had on
(03:47):
their business, the real massivepositive effect it had on their
customer experience, theirability interact, and the way
they're continuing to buildtheir system. So, you know,
quick reminder, please do take amoment right now stop, pause,
rate the podcast, give it ashare, give it a like and more
(04:08):
importantly, give it a review.
It really does boost us up inthe rating. So the more and more
people find out about the powerof podio. Enough of that pitch
for me, please. Let's join Alex,Andrew and I in the podcast. So
okay, so, Alex, good CMC in awhile. First time in the
podcast, why don't you giveeveryone a little hint about who
(04:31):
you are and what you guys do.
Cool.
Alex Pincus (04:37):
Happy to be here.
I'm Alex Pincus. I'm one of theowners of crew. We have a
company primarily in New Yorkthat operates kind of a weird
business where half restaurantshave maritime and sometimes
those things overlap withrestaurants on boats, our
flagship restaurants calledgrand bags, we open it at
seasons ago. So slow over sevenyears ago, downtown New York
(05:02):
City. And it's been a, you know,pretty successful restaurants
kind of become a New Yorkinstitution. And we've got a
handful of other restaurants,similar waterfront nature, we
have another restaurant on aboat in Brooklyn called pilot.
And we have a seafood restaurantin New Orleans in collaboration
with Ace Hotel called seaworthy.
(05:26):
And then we have two waterfrontrestaurants in New York that are
on land, but right on the water.
One of them's called Islandoyster, and the other one is
called drift in all of thesefocus on, they're all seasonal,
they're all outdoors, they'rereally focused on, you know,
waterfront, outdoor enjoyment ofsustainable seafood, you know,
having a nice drink and escapingeveryday life. separately from
(05:48):
that we also have a boatrestoration facility, and a
handful of historic ships and weoperate a couple marinas. So
it's a very unique undertaking,where every portfolio, yeah, not
everything goes together. Butyou
Andrew Cranston (06:06):
know, just just a couple restaurants, just a
couple.
Jordan Fleming (06:11):
I can't secretly I cannot wait, at some point, I
will be in New York again, Ilive totally outside of New York
for a while. And I've In fact,smartphones just hired our new
our head of marketing is is isfunny of a woman I went to high
school with, but she, she livesjust outside of New York City,
as well. So I will definitely onone of my trips back becoming
(06:33):
swinging back through New Yorkto see some people see her and
all that. And I am definitelycoming into the city to go to
one of the restaurants becausewe'll have a good time. I at
this point, I've seen so manymenus that I've been like
drooling. Every time I see it.
I'm just like, come on, this iskilling me. So for podio there's
a couple things I wanted to gothrough in this podcast, because
I think it's there's some reallyinteresting bits that you bring
(06:55):
to the table on this podcastthat we haven't had before.
Because we've had a lot of realestate and let people you know,
there's a podio sort of fixturein real estate investment and
some of these solar panel solarcompanies. And we've talked to a
lot of people like that. But Ithink you're the first
restaurant, certainly, thatwe've discussed. And you use,
(07:17):
like as we've worked with youover the last little while, I
can't remember how long andseeing how you've sort of
integrated podio through youroperations, how then your podio
system has developed, I want totouch on a couple of those
things. But what first got youinto podio? From a restaurant
point of view? Because itdoesn't it's not necessary?
(07:39):
There's a lot of E POS systemsthat claimed to run restaurants
and is, you know, what was itthat brought you to podio. To
begin with.
Alex Pincus (07:49):
It was sort of accidental, we had been looking
for, you know, projectmanagement, data management
software packages for a while weplayed around with a few of
them. We used Asana for oneyear. And you know, there's some
cool things we liked about it.
And we'd actually very early on,used podio as a kind of project
management tool just to keepthings organised. But you know,
(08:12):
this is probably six or sevenyears ago. And I think at the
time, it just did it, it seemeda little more complicated than
what we needed. And we ended upplaying around with air table
for a long time, which you know,had some benefits in a, you
know, less robust kind of way,but it helped us organise things
(08:34):
on a certain level. And then Iwould guess it was probably a
couple years ago, now my brotheris my partner brought it up, it
was looking through all thevarious packages and trying to
figure out what might work wellfor us. And, you know, had dug a
little deeper into podio andstarted to put together that it
offered a structure that mightor a possible structure that
(08:56):
might work for us. So we startedtinkering with it and got a few
things in there. And, you know,sort of quickly realised that
there was a lot of potential.
And then I believe, you know,not long after that, we also
realise we needed a little help.
And that's when we startedtalking to you guys. And, you
know, from that collaboration,we've ended up at a pretty
(09:19):
amazing point in terms ofcreating a back end for
everything that we do. And, youknow, seems to have this
exponential world of possibilityat this point. As it's all I
would say Finally, all up andrunning in sync together and you
know, happening in real time.
(09:41):
For you know, the first timesince we've been using it, it's
it's been pretty cool process toenvision what we could do and
then finally see it come intoreality.
Jordan Fleming (09:52):
If you were to think about sort of the you
know, maybe two or threecritical things that your your
you sort of really wanted podioto do, and maybe the end that
we're now doing. Just because Iknow that there are so many
like, I guess primarily when Ithink of restaurants, I think of
(10:14):
the E POS systems where you'vegot kind of half baked systems
to do other bits, it seems tome, whenever I've seen the POS
systems, restaurants, they'reusually really good at like
taking reservations and, andlike seeing where your tables
are, and doing the doing thecore things. But all these
little other spokes of thebusiness that you wanted to
(10:35):
include, what would be the kindof key things that podio is
running, that you weren't reallyable to do conveniently before,
if that makes sense.
Alex Pincus (10:45):
I mean, what's interesting is, at this point,
podio, has taken it to a levelthat we didn't know that we
didn't even envision this is apossibility. But you know, we
went into it thinking, Okay,it'd be great to organise all
the things that we'd buy, tojust know what those things are.
And categorise those things, itwould be great to have all the
(11:05):
documents for each individualentity that we operate, live in
one place together, and be ableto reference those, you know,
have multiple digitalreferences, it'd be great for
people to be able to communicatewith each other and share those
things with each other. And, youknow, that was it was wasn't
very complicated goal that wehad at the beginning. But as we
(11:25):
started building systems, youknow, we built a system of all
the things that we buy. And thenwe started to realise, oh, we
could actually build a systemthat shows the recipe for
something that we make, and thenwe can reference, all those
things that we buy that go init. And then those things,
reference the vendors that webuy them from. But then, you
know, through some conversationwith you guys, we had this
(11:48):
realisation that we could builda, you know, a referenceable
menu that our guests see, youknow, which is also kind of
result of COVID, and peopleshifting to digital menus. But
we now have, you know, a menuthat live online, where on the
back end, it's actuallyreferencing the actual recipe
(12:11):
for the dish that has all thespecs for someone to be able to
make, it then also has all thespecs for all the people that
would buy all the ingredientsfrom. And so we have a full like
almost like a full lifecycle ofwhat something that we sell is
fully connected, in real timethrough podio. So I could go
(12:32):
right now and change it and saythat we're out of something. And
then everybody does a route ofthis thing internally, and it
actually turns itself off fromthe menu. Until tomorrow, when
it reminds manager that it's sofamiliar and either ready to buy
something, or we need to figuresomething out.
Jordan Fleming (12:49):
I didn't even know I did that I which is sad,
because I didn't get I'm notbeen obviously I don't do I've
not been involved in the buildin your system for quite some
time. Andrew spearheaded that,and maybe good time for Andrew
to, to come into this becausethat like I remember seeing the
menu. And you know, it'sbeautiful on the web. It's like,
(13:11):
it looks good. It looks likeyour menu looks. But that
connection, Andrew, how like,Can you give us a little
technical bit about how thosethings work. And maybe we can
just have a, you can maybe takea little show, so that anybody
watching on YouTube can see whatthe menu looks like. And you can
see the fantastic menu that therestaurants have to offer, and
(13:32):
whet your appetite there.
Andrew Cranston (13:34):
Yeah, I have to second Jordan like going through
this project and just constantlyreading about seafood for a good
solid month and just likedrooling over the things
Jordan Fleming (13:42):
that lobster more in my life.
Andrew Cranston (13:45):
That's awesome.
So So Jordan makes a veryinteresting point in that we do
a lot of work for propertymanagers, you know, people who
are in property wholesaling. Butin essence, everything that a
good podio system has is reallyabout objects, you know, so like
property wholesalers would havea property object. And then they
would have an offer object or acontract object, a contact
object, these things that you'reworking with. And it contains
(14:09):
certain variables within theseobjects. That particular process
while having a lot ofautomations, and a lot of
different things, differentdirections that can go, the
number of objects that they'redealing with on a daily basis
are quite small. But when youthink about a restaurant or or
an empire of restaurants, thenumber of objects that you're
dealing with, are very large. Soyou have a venue. And then you
(14:33):
have people who fulfil manydifferent roles on many
different teams and being ableto control who who's in charge
of what you mentioned aboutvendors, a dish, and then the
ingredients that go in thatdish, the venue that sells this
dish, what it costs.
Whether or not it's available onany given day, there's a lot of
(14:55):
objects and your podio system isactually one of the largest
we've ever dealt with. But wetry to control people that start
off on podio. And they startbuilding 700 apps when three
will do. But in reality, yoursystem is a weird, gentle
balance between those twothings, because you do have a
lot of sprawl, but you need itbecause you have all of these
different relationships that youneed to track. So your podio
(15:17):
system is rather large, that'san important thing to know,
considering, you know, otherpeople who do podio. Some other
things that you're doing also inyour system are, you do have a
reservation system called talkthat you do run all your venues
through now, we recently builtan integration where we're
catching web hooks from talk,specifically to know when the
(15:38):
reservation ends. And this isactually pretty cool the way the
talk has allowed us to do this,because one of the other big
builds that we've done recentlyis your guest services workflow.
So you now have a one stopintegrated place in podio, where
if somebody is contacting you,for some reason, they submit a
webform on your site, the emailone of your addresses, all of
that information comes into oneplace. And it's very, it's very
(16:01):
much just a standard globey Mailintegration where your your
guest services, people areemailing back and forth and
tracking what needs to be done.
But because these talk web hooksknow, when the reservation
ended, when the person left therestaurant, we get a rent, we
get a web hook, once your folkssign the person out, they're
gone, their bill is paid, theyget an SMS on their phone saying
(16:23):
how did we do, they click on itfeedback form comes in, and that
information comes right intopodio, as well. So that's
another key component of yourguest services workflow. So
there's a lot going on. And likeI said, in terms of objects,
there's a lot of things that wehave to track. This menu project
that we did together is actuallyone of the one of my favourite
sort of things that we've done.
(16:46):
And what in essence it is, iswe're using podio as a content
management system. So we'reusing it for your own internal
back end processes, like whatmenu items served are served by
which venues and whichingredients go into them. That's
sort of the back end part of it.
But for the front end of this,we have options for you to
organise these menu items andprice points, what am what
(17:09):
you're selling on your menus,and what it costs per venue,
we're controlling price pointsper venue in the case of your
system, and organising them intomenus for venues, sub sections.
And then also we've got a thirdlevel of like a section of the
menu, so oysters or seafood, andthen the sub sections, which
(17:29):
allows you to show the actualmenu items that are involved. So
in addition to that, we alsoallow you to track the colours,
the logos, links to social mediaoutlets, and we have one
template on it's actually runthrough codeigniter for and it's
installed on a digitaloceandroplet. And that template takes
(17:50):
all of the information in frompodio. And every single menu you
go to tells the user What doesthe header colour? What's the
body colour, what's the footercolour, what widgets are in the
footer, we also have like awidget setting. What Instagram
link does this menu, go to whatoptions are in the menu. And
then we've got drinks and lunch.
(18:12):
So you're going to see a bunchof different things. I'll go
through the back end first. Andthen you'll be able to see sort
of how the front end feeds offall this information. So I'm
going to share my screen. I'm intheir food and beverage
workspace where all of thisinformation is contained. So we
have the the main apps thatwe're working with here are menu
items, guests, menus, menu subsections, and sub menu sections
(18:34):
and sub sections, price points,the footer widgets, which are
direct relationships to themenus themselves. And yeah, and
that's it. So these apps here.
So I'm going to start at the toplevel. So I realised this was
one of the first venues thatwe'd launched. So I'm going to
use it as my guinea pig, whichis driftin. So here now we see
we've got multiple menus fordriftin. They can make it as
(18:56):
granular as they want. And eachof these menus will have its
own. Let me just go into theother one. Actually, each of
these menus will have its ownlink. So they have a URL, and
then they can choose which URLsyou go to to bring up these
menus. The subsections the logonow you can see it's on a
coloured background. So theyhave the ability to upload white
(19:16):
logos on coloured backgrounds,which is also pretty cool. Which
footer widgets and what orderthey show him. What's the
Instagram URL, what's the fontcolour of that logo, the
background colour of that logo,the menu background colour, the
footer background colour. Sowhat we're doing is like a
content management system wherethey have full control over
everything that this menu canpossibly do. Now within here, we
(19:38):
load up menu sections. So theseare the top level where they
have some other basic controlsover what shows up. They can
hide things at a glance. And allof this is live. All of this
information is being sucked upby our SQL sink. We have a
company wide SQL sink where wetake all of this information at
a podium we suck it up into SQLSo that we can respond to these
(20:00):
events, all of these menusubsections, to see if something
goes off, they can just hide itor if it's not ready. And then
inside each of these subsections, we have the menu items
themselves. So each of thesemenu items are what Alex was
referring to where it showseverything their back end,
people would ever want to knowabout this menu item, what
ingredients go into it? What arethe recipes? So these are other
(20:22):
objects that they have that thatproperty managers don't have a
recipe? Maybe sub recipes, likeplate where what what what, you
know, what, what do we whatforks, like, how many forks do
we have in the restaurant, howmany knives Do we have, there's
so many objects that they haveto track in this system. And
podio is doing a grand job of atall. And then some other
(20:44):
information that they controlstyling, and how the price goes.
And each of these menu itemshappens to have a price point
for every single venue whereit's sold, where they can
control some of these residualsbecause they don't sell them.
But like for this
Jordan Fleming (20:58):
particular, can we go into the site to see the
actual activity, see the actual?
Andrew Cranston (21:05):
Sure. So that's all of the back end elements.
Now, if I were to go to thismenu online. So we can see all
of those colour choices. As wellas the font choices, the font
colour choices, the way theInstagram URL behaves, which
(21:29):
footer widgets show up. So if Imake a change, I don't want to
make any change to anythingalive. But if I were to screw up
one of these footer widgets andgo refresh the page, we would
see it disappear, any changethat they make in podio, appears
in this menu instantly, which isgood also, because just to go
back to the menu item for amoment, they can 86 an item for
a day. So they're like oystersare off, turn them off for this
(21:49):
venue for the day. And then thenext day, we go back to normal.
So they're able to respond tothese moments that may occur. So
we have our menu sections drinkbrunch all day, we can see they
have additional informationhere. And that just happens to
be one menu. so here we can goto another menu, different
(22:09):
colours, different menu options,different footer widgets,
different Instagram URL,everything is controlled within
that one content area in podio.
And it's mobile friendly, whichis obviously very good because
no doubt your folks have beenhave been using this on their on
their phones. And I think it'sbrilliant in the age of COVID.
And in general, the fact that ifyou want to respond to the
(22:31):
world, like the oysters are off,and you have a menu that you
printed for the day, and thenyou got to have somebody go and
scratch it out on all the menusor whatever, like being able to
respond to these real worldsituations. But just going and
making an update in podio. Andboom, the menu is updated for
everybody.
Jordan Fleming (22:47):
So Alex, how did you guys do it beforehand, cuz I
love the look of this as well. Ijust, I just love the way it all
comes together? How would you?
Can we stay on the web version?
How would you guys have donethis beforehand.
Alex Pincus (23:01):
So you know, in the olden days, we used to have a
print menu. That looked nice,but it was a nightmare. Because
every time we made an edit, wehad to reprint and also all of
our restaurants are outside. Sothey're always getting wet. And
then you have to reprint again.
And you know, when you make atypo that you have to reprint
again. And it was always a highpressure kind of scenario on a
(23:21):
daily basis to make sure thatyou had enough menus and that
they're good. Um, last year, youknow, in COVID head, we switched
to a QR code based menu, wetried it for a second through
our point of sale system, whichis toast, just having our menu
where people could actuallyorder, you know, physically
order their own productsthemselves. Nobody liked doing
(23:44):
that people actually likereading a menu and then taking
an order with a server. So, youknow, we figure that out really
quickly. Um, you know,Squarespace, which we use for
most of our websites has, youknow, kind of a built in menu
maker widget. So we initiallyhad one that looks very much
(24:09):
like this in Squarespace, youknow, that we styled to get to a
way that we liked. And then whenwe you know, when we built it
with you guys, we actually usethat as the sort of jumping off
point for how we would style themenu.
Jordan Fleming (24:24):
And it I just find I find it's really so in
the life of a if you think abouta daily life of the restaurant
or any of the restaurants orwhatever, when you have to like
so who does the major managementlike who would decide to 86
something who has who and you'regonna like how many parts are
(24:46):
touching this sort of thing? Youknow, is it something that your
each individual restaurant cancan control themselves? Do you
do it all centrally?
Alex Pincus (24:57):
I mean, we have a it's interesting, so I like to
do the high level things of whatthe item is called, the actual
customer facing description ofit. And the price. So, you know,
generally, that's me and mybrother. Um, but then on a daily
(25:17):
on the back end, you know, Idon't know how to make many of
these things, we have a, youknow, the beginning, someone
puts together the recipe, and ifit ever changes, other people
can edit those recipes. Butevery day, our venue managers
are the ones who look at themenu for the day, and they'll go
through and 86 anything thatwe're not going to be serving
that day, that is something thatwe should be serving. So for
(25:40):
example, our beer deliverycompany didn't have the beer
that we needed a couple daysago. So we had two ad sets a
beer. And so for two days in arow, they would go in and they'd
pull up Sunday beer, and they'dsay, 86 per day. And what's
impressive about that is it justdoesn't show up as an option on
(26:00):
the menu to the guests. So, youknow, unless you're really
coming in, hoping for thatspecific beer. You would never
know that
Jordan Fleming (26:08):
you wouldn't be like, Oh, wait, it's scratched
out. It's just, it's it's isn'tit's not even there. It's not
Yeah, you know,
Alex Pincus (26:16):
it frequently happens, you know, during
service, I got a busy Saturdayor Sunday, we will run out of a
certain type of moisture, or wewill run out of something. And
we just turn it off in realtime. You know, the manager just
takes out his phone andscrolling goes into podio just
turns off Navy point or Montauk,Pearl. And then boom, that item
is just no longer in the menufor the day. And it's, you know,
(26:37):
it's venue specific to which iscool, because our other venue
managers get an alert when we atsix something for the day. And
they will reach out and say Oh,hey, I've actually got oysters
if you guys need some awesome,pretty cool to see as well. So
when
Jordan Fleming (26:53):
you if you're if you're doing that in terms of
like at the restaurant, yourpoint about people not liking to
order from like no not wantingto go in and, and make their
order on a thing, you know, on atablet or whatever. But they
want to actually like, look atit and order or said. So do you
(27:13):
just have Do you just displaythe menus on the screen? Do
Alex Pincus (27:17):
you have individual screens, all of our tables have
a QR code now. And you just, youknow,
Jordan Fleming (27:23):
everybody just goes to their phone. It's pretty
Alex Pincus (27:25):
common in New York.
Now almost every restaurant hasthat at the moment. And you
know, I'm I'm have a mixedmindset about it. I really like
having a menu on a phone. Butalso I know people don't love
taking out their phone everythree seconds. But every
restaurant that you go to nowhas a QR menu, and I have a
feeling it's gonna stick aroundfor a bit.
Andrew Cranston (27:45):
I'll make sense. I mean, in COVID times,
it really does make sense tohave people unnecessarily
handling things. And if you haveto plastic coat menus or
laminate menus, and is it evenharder to change them, you know,
like this, this, you know,everything that we've described
here in the past half hour, itmakes sense for any restaurant,
Jordan Fleming (28:02):
if it feels like a cheap diner. So that, so then
from a server point of view,that also means like because
when I last worked in arestaurant 25 years ago is a
big, so I'm sure lots of change.
But every day you would sort ofbe let know, you know, you kind
(28:22):
of know Oh, hey guys, this isthis is what's on today, like
this is today's specials, orthese are the catch of the day
or whatever. So you're able toessentially your staff are able
to just see whatever is live fortheir restaurant they're working
in, by going to their phone.
Yep.
Alex Pincus (28:41):
So one of the things that we were hoping to
build next is a version of this,that's staff, you know,
internally facing, that has, youknow, specific details that our
team, it would be good for themto know, like how to describe
something, or you know, more howto make it but not in the
backend of podio format to belike a similar to our customer
(29:04):
facing menu but haveinstructions and photographs for
our team to be able to moreconsistently do what they're
trying to do.
Jordan Fleming (29:13):
And then so then, like extrapolating that
you have in a nice seafood dishthat and they could see you
know, they can bring it up ontheir, the the internal version,
and they can see, well, thispairs really well with this wine
or this wine, and you know, getall those little notes that they
they would they would have butit's in a much more convenient
(29:35):
format. Yes. Interesting.
Interesting. And you guys also,because I have to bring it up
legally. I think you guys alsouse smartphone within your
system. Do you have all of thedifferent restaurant numbers via
that now or most of them?
Alex Pincus (29:55):
No, we haven't really talked about the you
know, the guest services. That'sa pretty separate parallel.
World, that's been prettyamazing for us. But yeah, we use
smartphone. And that's tied toour guest services suite that we
(30:15):
have that we built out. And allthe venue, numbers, net, we've
all we, they all go to onenumber and we have a sort of
group, voicemail that addresseseverything from one place, which
is just for a management pointmakes a lot of sense for us and
all that, you know, any kind ofvoicemail or message feeds into
(30:36):
our guest services suite, whichthen gets handled in the same
way incoming emails, and, youknow, incoming requests are
handled. But that world isreally cool. We, you know, we
launched that out to April. AndI've personally done a lot of
time on the, on the customerengagement side from responding
(30:59):
to emails and building out thelanguage of how we respond to
people over the years. So it'sbeen really cool to see the
transition and everything livingin one place. It's not an email
inbox, I was frankly concernedthat it wasn't going to work, or
that it would just be unwieldy.
And we turned it on. And withina day, I was kind of, you know,
super impressed with how well itcategorised everything and
(31:25):
organised everything. And youknow, probably takes a few more
seconds per interaction than anormal email. But then you build
up this incredible database ofpeople that you're communicating
with, and referencing everythingthat they may have done. So when
someone emails us now I can seeall their reservations that
they've made tied to theirprofile, and you know, any kind
(31:48):
of other emails that they'veever had, or phone calls they've
ever had. So we're reallystarting to build up this
networks database of what andwho our customers are. So it's
been pretty cool to see. Andit's, you know, just keeps
getting bigger and bigger andmore robust as time goes on.
Jordan Fleming (32:07):
I remember because, Andrew, I think you
guys did the email portion.
First.
Andrew Cranston (32:14):
Yeah. So so it was kind of in a couple of
stages that the talk, ending areservation and sending out a
feedback form that was onepiece, and that is going out
through smartphone. And what wedo is we engage a URL shortener,
which is always a good plan whenyou are sending text links via
text message, because obviously,the character counts. So try to
(32:36):
only use you know, as as nolonger. I'm sorry, yeah, three
text messages for everyone. I'msorry. Sorry. forgot all this
stuff Jordan was wearing sorry.
Alright, so So, so we have a URLshortener. So that's one piece.
And then another piece is theyhave, as of initially, all of
their Squarespace websites justdumped the result into a Google
(32:59):
Sheet, which it's stillcurrently does. But we were
using actually Integra mat, tograb those data points from the
Google Sheet and stuff them intopodio. So that they can produce
items in this Guest Servicesworkflow. And also just a shout
out to globey. Male here aswell. One other cool thing is
we, you know, you actually, andyou have kind of been a good
(33:20):
soldier in this sort of clientinteraction, battle, to load as
many useful boilerplate emailresponses, which is the first
time I've actually seen itreally used the way I think it
was envisioned to be used amassive number of boilerplate
responses in globey Mailspecifically, so that when you
are responding to these issues,all you have to do is click
(33:43):
email, and hopefully nine timesout of 10, you go, Oh, this is
about this boilerplate response,boom, their names merged in and
a couple of other things mightbe merged in send, and you're
done. So having these thesecached responses, no doubt makes
your life a lot easier as well.
Jordan Fleming (34:03):
And, Alex, let me just ask, so before, like,
with the communication point,because you've got so many
venues, like, to me, that's partof the genius of all this, is,
it's not that difficult to runone venue, and have the data
contained in a sensible way. Butwhen you've got as many as you
(34:25):
have it, then that's the hardbit, I think, because then
you've got different emailboxes, because you want
different email boxes, you wanteach restaurant, you got
different phone numbers, becauseyou want each phone number to
have address, you know, a dressor whatever. That's when it all
really ties together. So as Isay, so before, before this was
it essentially, you know, youhad a phone system that rang
(34:47):
and, you know, you were able totalk to people and you had email
inboxes with Outlook or or Gmailor whatever, what was the
landscape beforehand.
Alex Pincus (34:58):
I mean, it's kind of funny. This is allowed To get
much better at customer service,I mean, we've been lucky that we
have a restaurant group that hashigh demand. So, our email at
phone response in the oldendays, the phone message was,
hey, you've called our phonenumber for this are some facts,
we're probably not gonna be ableto help you. And, you know, that
(35:19):
was our email system as well,we'd have, you know, an auto
response email that said, youknow, these are the top 10
things people ask us about. Andif your thing is not answered by
this, that hopefully, we'll getback to you within a reasonable
amount of time. Chances are 50%,that we will, and because we
just had so much incoming, itwas crazy. So now it's very well
(35:42):
organised, you know, when we getsomething coming in, we, you
know, 95% of our incomingmessages now are generated by a
form, as opposed to an emailaddress, which is great. And
that form specifies the venueand the topic. So it allows us
to address them sequentially,based on what's most important.
(36:04):
And then, you know, most ofthese questions have, as you
mentioned, have a sort of preestablished answer anyway. Or if
there's not, there's at least aframework in which we could
insert a couple sentences, makeit feel good, and, you know,
specifically address a need.
And, you know, you can crankthrough 100 emails pretty quick,
you know. So now, actually, her,we have much better customer
(36:29):
service are actually engagingwith everyone who reaches out to
us, you know, pretty much get atinbox zero on a daily basis,
which is a good feeling andmakes us, you know, we feel like
we're getting more business outof the people that we're
engaging with, because we'reactually able to answer their
questions, you know, part ofbooking helping arrange things
(36:51):
for people. So it's been apositive, for sure.
Jordan Fleming (36:57):
Fantastic, fantastic. And, I mean, that, to
me, that's, it's so interestinghow, you know, restaurants are,
you know, the fast pace, it's,it's fast paced, it's demanding
restaurants are too hardbusinesses to run, you've got
lots of things around margins,and things you got to keep
tight, and things you got tolook after. And, you know,
(37:19):
you've got lots of staff andlots of equipment to mean, the
equipment that you guys, each,each kitchen has x amount of
equipment, all these thingscoming together, and being able
to kind of pee, you know, piecetogether as a jigsaw. I can't
think of anything, but podiothat would, that would manage
all those streams as well, like,you know, I mean, any one piece
(37:44):
of software can do a bookingsystem, or a client feedback
system, or, you know, x, y andZed. But I think the patchwork
that you guys have built withAndrew and with the team, but
the patchwork Did you guys haveput together to me is a
fascinating one that I don'tthink I've ever seen before. I
(38:05):
really don't? Yeah,
Andrew Cranston (38:07):
I think I think I mean, and that that a lot of
these podcasts kind of lead inthe same direction in terms of
why people come to podio, orwhat the power of podio is. But
we do have people coming to usfrom property management and
property, wholesalingbusinesses, because there is no
out of the box solution outthere that does everything, or
does things in a specific enoughway that makes people feel like
(38:31):
they're getting work done. And Iwould imagine the restaurant
industry is experiencing thesame thing like now we're
talking about one of theprojects that we're going to be
working on over the next week orso, is a mass mailer so that you
can communicate with folks on aparticular day. So if you had
like seven reservations betweensix and 9pm, at Island oyster,
(38:52):
and you knew that the restauranthad to close, for whatever
reason, we're talking about away for you to quickly and
efficiently grab those contactsand send an email to those
people. And one of my firstquestions was, don't you have
something in your pantheon ofsoftware that allow you to do
that? And the answer was no. Soconstantly popping up these
situations where I really wantto do this, but the thing that
I'm using just won't let me doit. Well, you know, the
(39:15):
landscape of podio being what itis like. Now, now, where we
spend a lot more time building,like your systems using a lot of
custom API that we've builtglobey flow in podio workflow,
I'm going to start calling itpodio workflow automation, I'm
going to try start calling itpodio workflow automation has
has a lot of good stuff in it.
But we now you know, the podioAPI being what it is, we can
build the gaps. So literally, wecan build solutions to do
(39:39):
anything given enough time anddirection, that that fills these
gaps that you know, out of thebox software, just you know, the
answer is normally what youremail system was, which was, Oh,
you want to know how we can dothis? Well, here's five things
you can do and if it's not oneof these five things, and then,
you know, don't bother emailingus again.
Alex Pincus (39:58):
So pretty crazy at this point. That, you know,
there's all these software'sthat we use, I'll reach out to
them in a nice way and said, I'ma restaurant group that uses
your software, this is the thingyour software needs to be able
to do, and they can't do it. Andyou know, it's opaque whether
it's going to happen or not. Andnow we're at a place where we
(40:18):
just have to build our ownsolutions to these problems. And
you know, it's funny that someof our solutions are way better
solutions than the one that'sout there. I mean, the other
day, I reached out to ourreservation system said, Hey, we
need to email everyone fromtoday's list of reservations,
you would think that that wouldbe a possible thing
Jordan Fleming (40:38):
that would be established? Like That seems
like a use case you you'd have
Alex Pincus (40:43):
no, what if I mean, there's all kinds of what ifs,
we have that issue, probablymore than most restaurants
because we're outside. So we geta lot more unique things
happening. But it would makesense to want to be able to
reach out to everybody, from aday for any possible thing. Or,
you know, once we startedtalking about being able to
reach out to our guests, evenjust to shoot them a quick note
a few days, like, Hey, guys,it's gonna be chilly. Two days
(41:06):
from now, she plan on will bringa sweater, you know, to be able
to do that awesome with just oneemail, you know, and so we're
pretty excited about thatimplementation. But you know,
the big picture is, it's funnythat all these problems, you
know, I don't know how to writesoftware, but we're creating,
you know, effectively an appthat can deal with the various
(41:27):
scenarios that occur in ourlife. And you know, the more of
these we have, the more robustthings seem to get. So it's
getting pretty interesting.
Andrew Cranston (41:35):
No, I'm glad you said that. And just to put
just to put a point on what yousaid to like, you and Myles,
both have done a lot of buildingon your own good building. I
mean, we, we we've tried to helpyou kind of corral these
situations where it may gets alittle bit too granular. But
going back to something thatJordan said earlier, how do you
manage all these venues? Well,you guys have just your system
(41:55):
is the absolute echelon of therelationship field, in my
opinion, because you have brokenthings out to such a degree that
a venue has relationships to thedifferent teams who's the
marketing team, who's therestaurant management team,
who's the, the front House ofteam and then all of these
people and there's the the venuemanagement has relationships to
like, this is the billing email,this is the this email, this is
(42:16):
the logo, this is the emailsignature. So you guys have done
great work breaking it out. Andand like I said, the challenge
is, is that you have a number ofan enormous number of objects
that you have to that you haveto put down. And we're kind of
just helping you with theautomation piece. But your podio
system has kind of been acollaboration between the both
of us. And it's it's one of theit is, like I said, it's a
(42:38):
relationship field textbookexample of how to do
relationship fields, and a lotof that has come from you guys.
So it's great stuff.
Jordan Fleming (42:47):
Absolutely. It's a fascinating system. And it's
fascinating use case we haven'twe haven't seen and I think it's
gonna you know, I think it'sreally interesting for people to
understand because I because wedo sometimes focus too much on,
on real estate in, you know, inour pipe, my podcast, and in
other things, where and I thinkit's such a fascinating use
(43:07):
case, Alex, we're coming intothe time that we have for this,
I just wanted to, I'm going toput in all of the links to all
of your restaurants into thepodcast. So I'm gonna I'm gonna
need to I'm gonna need to go tocrew and website to get them
all. But, you know, do you guysI mean, just close this out with
(43:30):
it's summer is coming up. Ithink officially summer starts
the 20th of June. I thinkofficially, although it's been
hot a ship New York
Alex Pincus (43:38):
as it lately, it's been all over the map. The
weather's been crazy these days.
But um, you know, today isbeautiful day, unfortunately, my
personal mood every day is tiedto the weather. If it's raining,
I'm depressed, and on average,generally pretty happy. But, uh,
you know, New York is crazy.
These days, it seems like we'recoming out of COVID a lot of the
(44:02):
restrictions have been lifted,people seem happy. We actually
opened up a couple of our barsas bars. And you know, they've
been filled with people enjoyingthemselves, you know, coming
back into summer. So we'rereally excited about, you know,
the days that we're in now. And,you know, we're excited about
the systems that we've got inplace that are actually helping
(44:23):
us keep it all together becauseyou know, we're still we're, we
appear big fish from theoutside, but on the inside, it's
a pretty tight group of peoplemaking all this stuff work. And,
you know, thank you to you guysfor allowing us to put that
together because it really doesmake it run, you know, with the
tight little crew. So whoever'skeeping podio alive on the back
(44:46):
end, I'd like to share that aswell. Because we dread the day
that is.
Jordan Fleming (44:53):
I'll let I'll let Sarah Bobby and the team now
they've got to actually I'vebeen having more interactions
with the back end technical teamand Citrix lately they've been
hiring more and more peopleactually for the podio team,
which is a good thing. But ifyou listen to this, and you're
in New York slash, I guess NewOrleans, I didn't realise that
was the case. But if you'relooking either Actually, I
(45:16):
should have, if you're listeningto this, please do pop over to
one of the restaurants. It's Ican't I wish I would say could
say I go there all the time.
Because then I'd be a happy guyand satiated. But being that I
live in Poland, I don't. But youcan better believe the first
time I get back to New York,I'll be there. And you know,
we're coming to crash. Well,yeah, we're coming crash. And,
(45:39):
Alex, it's been an absolutepleasure to see your system
grow. Absolute pleasure today tobe able to see particularly how
the backend management matchesthe front end experience. Thank
you for your insight. AndAndrew, thank you as well for
coming in. And giving us a bitof the benefits as you're the
guy who, who heads up thesystems.
Andrew Cranston (46:01):
It's been a very cool collaboration is kind
of like our only majorrestaurant collaboration and
and, you know, podio as acontent management system, for
those who use WordPress orwhatever, and have a front end
ability on them to be to allowyour clients to control the what
what shows on the front end frompodio, as an example, has been a
(46:22):
really cool project for mepersonally, and I'm excited
about you know, making thisinternal menu and just, you
know, we're still finding newthings to do with this system,
which is awesome. So cool.
Thanks
Alex Pincus (46:32):
for having me, guys. It's been a, it's been fun
to recap everything, just kindof think through it. We're
excited about the next phase.
And I appreciate for the chat.
Jordan Fleming (46:42):
Great stuff. All right. Thanks so much. And don't
forget if you're listening,please do like share, send a
review do all the things youfuckin should have done by now
if you haven't already, sofucking do it. And please share
it around all your social mediasetc. Because we do get a lot of
feedback and I know the Citrixteam listens as well. So shout
out to all of them who arelistening right now. But thanks
(47:04):
so much, and we'll see you nextweek.
Narrator (47:08):
You've been listening to supercharged with Jordan
Samuel Fleming. Subscribe todayon iTunes, Google Play or
Spotify for your weekly diveinto how you can supercharge
your business by making itpowered by podio Be sure to
check out our website we aregame changers.com where you can
learn more and arrange a 30minute call with Jordan daleview
(47:30):
understand how podiosupercharges you
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