The Food Service Growth Show

From One to Many: Christian Mouysset's Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Restaurant Chain Expansion

November 23, 2022 Apicbase Episode 1
From One to Many: Christian Mouysset's Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Restaurant Chain Expansion
The Food Service Growth Show
More Info
The Food Service Growth Show
From One to Many: Christian Mouysset's Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Restaurant Chain Expansion
Nov 23, 2022 Episode 1
Apicbase

Welcome to the first episode of The Food Service Growth Show.

In this episode, we're excited to be joined by Christian Mouysset, Co-founder of Hummus Brothers and Tenzo, as he shares his insights and experiences on scaling from one location to multiple locations and running day-to-day operations.

As any restaurant owner knows, expanding from one location to multiple locations can be a daunting challenge. There are many factors to consider, from maintaining consistent quality and customer experience to managing logistics and overhead costs. Christian Mouysset knows this all too well, having successfully grown his own restaurant chain, Hummus Brothers from a single location to multiple locations.

In this podcast, Carl and Christian dive into the challenges of scaling a restaurant chain and discuss the strategies that have helped Christian achieve success. One key theme throughout the conversation is the importance of optimizing processes. Christian emphasizes the need to streamline operations and eliminate waste wherever possible, to ensure that each location is running as efficiently as possible.

Christian also shares his insights on which key performance indicators (KPIs) to focus on when managing multiple locations. He stresses the importance of tracking metrics such as sales per labor hour and food cost percentage, to ensure that each location is profitable and sustainable.

Another topic that Carl and Christian explore is menu development. Christian shares his experiences with developing menus that are both delicious and scalable and discusses why reducing the number of ingredients used has been a game-changer for his restaurants. By simplifying the menu, Christian has been able to improve consistency and reduce waste, while still offering a variety of options for his customers.

Throughout the podcast, Carl shares practical tips and insights for restaurant owners who are looking to scale their businesses. From the importance of maintaining consistent branding across multiple locations, to the benefits of investing in training and development programs for staff, there's plenty of valuable information for anyone looking to grow their restaurant chain.

If you are looking to take your restaurant business to the next level, this podcast episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration. 

So grab a coffee, sit back, and enjoy the first episode of The Food Service Growth Show!

Learn how our restaurant management solutions help your restaurant business keep costs under control.

βœ… Subscribe and stay updated with new episodes:

πŸ‘‰ Spotify
πŸ‘‰ Apple Podcast
πŸ‘‰ Amazon Music
πŸ‘‰ Google Podcast

βœ… Follow Apicbase on social media:

πŸ‘‰ LinkedIn
πŸ‘‰ Instagram
πŸ‘‰ Facebook
πŸ‘‰ Twitter

Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to the first episode of The Food Service Growth Show.

In this episode, we're excited to be joined by Christian Mouysset, Co-founder of Hummus Brothers and Tenzo, as he shares his insights and experiences on scaling from one location to multiple locations and running day-to-day operations.

As any restaurant owner knows, expanding from one location to multiple locations can be a daunting challenge. There are many factors to consider, from maintaining consistent quality and customer experience to managing logistics and overhead costs. Christian Mouysset knows this all too well, having successfully grown his own restaurant chain, Hummus Brothers from a single location to multiple locations.

In this podcast, Carl and Christian dive into the challenges of scaling a restaurant chain and discuss the strategies that have helped Christian achieve success. One key theme throughout the conversation is the importance of optimizing processes. Christian emphasizes the need to streamline operations and eliminate waste wherever possible, to ensure that each location is running as efficiently as possible.

Christian also shares his insights on which key performance indicators (KPIs) to focus on when managing multiple locations. He stresses the importance of tracking metrics such as sales per labor hour and food cost percentage, to ensure that each location is profitable and sustainable.

Another topic that Carl and Christian explore is menu development. Christian shares his experiences with developing menus that are both delicious and scalable and discusses why reducing the number of ingredients used has been a game-changer for his restaurants. By simplifying the menu, Christian has been able to improve consistency and reduce waste, while still offering a variety of options for his customers.

Throughout the podcast, Carl shares practical tips and insights for restaurant owners who are looking to scale their businesses. From the importance of maintaining consistent branding across multiple locations, to the benefits of investing in training and development programs for staff, there's plenty of valuable information for anyone looking to grow their restaurant chain.

If you are looking to take your restaurant business to the next level, this podcast episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration. 

So grab a coffee, sit back, and enjoy the first episode of The Food Service Growth Show!

Learn how our restaurant management solutions help your restaurant business keep costs under control.

βœ… Subscribe and stay updated with new episodes:

πŸ‘‰ Spotify
πŸ‘‰ Apple Podcast
πŸ‘‰ Amazon Music
πŸ‘‰ Google Podcast

βœ… Follow Apicbase on social media:

πŸ‘‰ LinkedIn
πŸ‘‰ Instagram
πŸ‘‰ Facebook
πŸ‘‰ Twitter

Hello. I'm Carl Jacobs, and in daily life, I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Apicbase. In this podcast, I'll be looking for answers on how to grow and scale your food business. I'll be talking to numerous experts who have done the same in the past. Today I'm having a conversation with Christian Mouysset, CEO and Co-founder of Tenzo, and he has run his own food service business in the past. I'm looking forward on what he has to say on scaling your business. Hello, Christian Mouysset from Tenzo. Thank you very much for joining the show today. Very happy to have you. Just to start off, I'd like you to introduce yourself a little bit so we know who's Christian and what are you doing in a daily life. Great. Yeah, very happy too. And thanks for having me on the show. I originally studied computer science back in the day and after that, I went to set up a chain of restaurants. So not the most obvious career path there was computer scientist turned restaurateur set up a chain of restaurants called Hummus Brothers and grew that to six locations and several hundred pop ups like that we ran in corporate restaurants like Bank of America and J.P. Morgan, etc. And really whilst running that business, the main realization I had actually is how difficult it was to run a restaurant business. I think from the outside, often people think it's something that's pretty easy to do. You cook some food, you bring it to the customer, customer loves the food, goes and tells their friends, and then repeat kind of thing. But the reality on the ground is very difficult. It's a very operational business. You typically are dealing with perishable food. You have lots of different suppliers. You have a lot of equipment, you have a lot of staff. And generally you need to be open every day at your opening hours. You can't be opening late or closing early. You've got to be there, and you've got to do it in a way that customers don't see all the complexity behind it. It all needs to be happening behind a curtain, and everything is smooth. And that was very difficult. And so ran that for a number of years and then went to set up a business called Tenzo, which really takes all of a restaurant's data and helps the operational team in particular. But people in the business understand what is happening, what does the data tell them? And the reason for this is that there was a huge disconnect when I ran my business between the head office teams and the GMs. The general managers that were operating on the ground, they were often in the dark, not able to see what was happening. And how I tried to solve that was bring all this POS, labor and inventory data, the three main levers a restaurant has, bring it all into one Excel and send it out to them, and they hated engaging with it because it was slow, full of mistakes and didn't really like Excel. And lots of these decisions were made on guts. And so we're trying to do that help restaurants become data driven in their approach to making decisions. All right, that's a very interesting start of your career. And before we go into, let's say data and how you can run a restaurant, I'd like to know a little bit more about your time at Hummus Brothers. So where did the concept come from? Oh, that's interesting. When I was studying computer science, I studied with this guy called Ronan, who whenever we'd meet up to study together, he'd always have hummus in his fridge. And so we would eat hummus with whatever there was else in the fridge. As students, it's not really you're not really going out to eat and you want to have the fastest meal possible. And one day we thought maybe other people would like this. It's a really healthy food. It's delicious, it's vegan. It's something that is very versatile that you could have it with lots of different dishes. And so we decided to go and test that. We went to a market in London. We tried with a few markets, we tried with the Truman Brewery and we tried with the market in Hampstead. And really what we did the first few times, I remember we cooked it at home, we cooked like, a huge rat of hummus and like, the fava beans and the mushrooms. And we went to the market and we gave it away for free initially, because we thought we’re the crazy ones that loved this, no one else was going to. One thing we learnt there is you give food away for free, people will love you for it and will tell you, yeah, it's perfect, it's amazing. They won't give you proper feedback. And what we started doing is going back and giving and starting charging for it, like Β£1, Β£2. And we started getting really constructive feedback at that point. And I remember one point of feedback which was interesting. We thought about calling the different dishes by colors. So you'd have like, the mushroom hummus, which was called the brown hummus, and the beef one that was called the red hummus. And people were like, a brown hummus, that sounds horrible. What are you doing? So we quickly gave up on the idea of colors there. But that was where we got started. It's a dish that's traditionally served in the Middle East, hummus as a base with different toppings, pita bread to scoop it. And once we had tried it in the market for a few months and learnt a lot, we then went to get our first branch, which was on Water Street and Soho, which was an incredible location to start with the first one. All right. And then you open up your first restaurant. Was the idea of having a scalable concept and multiple branches Was this kind of from the get go or was this something that grew along the way? No. 100% we went in it with the view that we would build this into a business that had multiple locations. And also because we ultimately wanted to see if we could launch a hummus brand in the supermarkets because actually at that time and even today, I still believe that most of the hummus you get sold in supermarkets is not really what you would like traditionally expect. Like it's not really true to its origins, let's say. And really we had that view of like, getting into supermarkets ultimately. But actually the thing that I was really shocked about was how hard it was actually to go from one location to two locations and even harder to go from two to three. I think that learning curve at the beginning, because when you had one location and my co-founder and I were in the same restaurant every day, at least one of us could be there and we were learning. And you need to tweak and you need to think about these things, and things like how many people are we going to have the next, or how much food to order in, or what feedback to give to the team. When we were both there, or one of us was there, at least, I wouldn't say easy, but it was easier because we could then think about them and react. But once you start getting to two and then three, I think it's a little bit like children, right? Like when you have two children, there's two parents, you have one each. When you get to three, they outnumber you. It's a bit complicated. And that's what it was. When we got to three, things started breaking because we didn't have the right systems in place and the right processes. And that's really where you start, like defining them. But when we started, that was not something that we although we'd planned to go to multiple, we hadn't really thought about the processes that you would need to have in place to make sure that that's possible. And when you talk about these processes that weren't there and should have been there, and in hindsight, we should have done it differently kind of thing, what were the processes that you kind of immediately had to install? And how did the second question is, how did the organigram of such a restaurant looked like? I mean, how was the restaurant structured in team? Yeah, you kind of needed a process for everything, right. And I think there's two real reasons for this. To me, for a restaurant to really be successful, they need to make sure that customers know that whenever they go to that restaurant, the food will be the experience will be consistent, right. They know they will get what they expect because otherwise if they have a bad experience, then they're not going to come back and that will be everything from the food itself, the service, how much they pay, everything, right. So they just want to know that I'm going to this place, I know exactly what's going to happen. And so what that means is that you need really a procedure around everything, right? So when we open the restaurant, we need to make sure is the front door open or is it closed? Is the heater on or is it off? Is the till on? Like what time do we then is there someone at the door meeting people, etc. Because then you can replicate exactly that experience or as close as possible to what you're expecting. So really what that means is you need a procedure ultimately for everything opening, closing, how you run, how do you train the team, how do you use the different softwares you're using, etc. The short answer to that is everything needs a process. Even the things that seem so obvious will need a process because if there's room to be interpreted, it might be interpreted differently and therefore you might not have that consistent experience. And so the second part of your question that was related with that, could you tell me that again? The second question was a little bit like how did you organize your team around those processes? What does the team look like when you go from one where you're kind of the founder and you're there to six outlets and hundreds of popups like you mentioned, how do you go from being a founder-led organization to an organization with so many brands? And I think that's the biggest challenge, right, that change. Because suddenly you're needing to train people who are in turn training themselves, right. And I think even more complicated than that is you're trying to make sure that those people are hiring people that fit into the culture. And so therefore, because a lot of the experience will come through the culture that you've built with the people in the business. And therefore you need to make sure that people who are going to be hiring at Hummus Brothers every GM was hiring their team. So at that time people would drop off CVs. Things have changed a lot now we'd get CVs dropped in every day and then they would need to be making sure they're the interview to identify the right people who will add to the culture, but also that then being able to train them. So actually that step change of not being interviewing everyone and not making sure that you're hiring everyone. Especially because typically in the restaurant industry, the turnover is pretty high. So that means that you're really on a constant hiring drive. And making sure that you're identifying the right people was a real challenge. And so we'd organized effectively the GMs would be trained to train, to be able to hire and train people. But we also had these training processes where they would go to one branch, where they would then be trained in the same way and make sure that really it was the classroom, right, so that they would be getting to and that I think is really like a step change. When you're going from three and maybe you're getting to four, five, six locations, you really need to make that change. Yeah. In terms of so I hear you say each GM hired their own staff, basically. But did you have like a blueprint? Like you need two guys in the front-of-house, five in the back-of-house. Was this predefined? Not on day one, to be clear, but once we got to three or four locations and especially because different locations so one location for example, had two floors, which meant that you had a different profile of teams, and some locations were more takeaway heavy or delivery heavy, and others were more like, eat-in heavy. So we did have a little bit of a different blueprint. So we probably had three different blueprints, if you can say that of teams, that if it's more a takeaway delivery, it's this way. If it's got two floors, it's this way. If it's one floor, mostly eat-in, it's this way. And then you can figure out which one you'd want based on that. But yes, you would very much define it. We want like one person on the till, two people preparing the food, one person in the back, like making sure that they're cleaning the dishes, etc. And that was very well codified, and it had to be so that it was easier than to train people. But I think my turn to ask a question because I'm not fully aware of how you've come into the hospitality industry, and I would really like to hear your journey into the industry. Well, actually I am, let's say, also not a trained nothing to do with the restaurant industry as such. Actually, I'm an art historian from education, and basically the reason why I ended up being co-founder at Apicbase is because the two friends of mine, they were actually heavily involved in the hospitality business, and they were running restaurants, and they had the problem that they wanted to have standardized imagery of everything they were doing in the kitchen. So that's how they came to me. I was a friend of them. I was used to doing projects because in the art world, everything is project based. You make an exhibition and then that's the end of it. So they asked me, can you join the team to make sure that this photo studio, which we were basically back then building, that this can come into fruition and really become a tool that we can sell? And that's basically how I joined that team. Originally from a totally different product. But then along the way, we had a lot of customer requests that were mainly, let's say, software based not so much hardware based that we moved from building this hardware into what Apicbase is today, and that's the F&B management platform, which helps you streamline the back-of-house. I was going to ask, is there the photography element of it is it still part of the product? No, actually not. So we do, of course, still service the customers that use this tool, and that's really important for us. But we decided actually a year ago, when we're at end of life of the current version, do we renew, do we make a new version, or do we cancel the product? And as you have to do sometimes you have to kill your darlings. We had a lot of or at least 99% of the efforts we do go into software, and we see that the return on investment is much higher for our customers in terms of the software we offer them than it was in terms of the hardware. But as I said, customers that use our studio today still, of course they can still use it and we still support it to the fullest to the extent that we can replace parts. But, yeah, you have to kill your darlings from time to time. And I think that's only good for the growth of a company. Which brings me to the next question, actually. At a certain point, you have a fantastic business, six outlets, and then you take the decision to sell that or to close it down. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. And how do you then end up starting a totally new business being Tenzo? Yeah, it was quite a transition, and it was all on the backdrop also of Brexit, which made the restaurant industry a lot harder to operate in the UK too. But what started happening is my co-founder, Adam, who I set up Tenzo with, so we know each other also from back to time, where we studied computer science together. And his past post uni was much more reasonable. He ended up really in big data and analytics. And I was talking to him about the problems I was having running Hummus Brothers on the day to day which was really this difficulty about making sure that my team had the data they needed to run their business, right. So I was spending crazy amounts of time in Excel, downloading data from my POS, my labor, and my inventory tool, really putting it all into one Excel. And the reason why I was trying to do that is that clearly the GMs in the restaurants didn't have the time to go and log in and check all this data. And really, it was difficult for them to really say, okay, well, they didn't have the time to go and manipulate it and say, well, what does this mean? What is this telling me? I was trying centrally to get through all that bit so that they then would receive an Excel that would really make it easier for them to understand what was going on. And as I said, the difficulty about that is that GMs are typically not gone into the restaurant industry for the love of data. They've gone in for the love of food and hospitality. And what was happening as they were being pulled more and more out of the love of food and pretending more into having to look at the data. And so they didn't really like Excel. It was often late the reports, and often had mistakes because it was done manually and it was preventing us from growing at Hummus Brothers, because really what it meant that each branch we were adding, there was a lot more centrally that was happening. It was too slow to get to the restaurant, and therefore we were always one step behind, or maybe five steps behind of where we should have been, because the teams were either overscheduling, underscheduling, over ordering, or under ordering or not training the team and not having that feedback fast enough to really be able to tweak the performance to really get to the right place. The restaurant industry is a margin business, right. They don't have these massive margins that they can be like, well, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if today doesn't go well. No, every day matters. Every day you need to be looking at it, and every day you need to be tweaking to make sure you get to the right place. In terms of tweaking actually, I was wondering what were the let's say three to five key metrics where you were looking at on a daily or weekly basis when you were running Hummus Brothers. So that's a great question. These are the ones we were looking at, and by no means does it mean these are the only ones that there's different approaches, but really they fall in three buckets, right. Sales, labor, and inventory. Those are the three levers you can pull every day. Your rent and your marketing either they agreed for long periods of time you can't change, and the marketing has typically not got a big enough impact that the ops team can really have on. So if you think about sales, the biggest one for us was really about training the team to upsell a drink at lunch. So for example, I would train our team if it was a warm day, we'd say sell this, offer the Mint & Ginger lemonade and just ask, "would you like a Mint & Ginger lemonade with that sir?" And the answer would be yes or no. And after lunch, I wanted to be able to say to them, 75% of the people took lemonade today. That's great. Let's push to 80% tomorrow. And if it got to like 65%, then we could debate or what did we do differently, right? But you needed that real time kind of straight after lunch, did we do well or not? So that was sales. So average transaction value and attachment rate. How often are you selling a product as a percentage of the transactions. On the labor front it was really our cost of labor as a percentage of sales to really tell us if we were overstaffed or understaffed, right. So I knew that if our cost of labor as a percentage of sales was above 35% or below 25%, you probably were in trouble because there would either not be enough stuff or too much stuff. So we wanted that band to be in. People sometimes look at that as productivity or so. And then the final one was really well, there's two other ones. One was really around wastage, making sure that you're controlling the wastage so there's not too much. So the portion size, but also how much food you're throwing away at the end of the day. So wastage was one that we really look at. And the final one was around the review score, your average review score on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook, Google, because really you could tell that if it was below four on average, people when they would look up your restaurant and say, I'm not going to go there. So we were constantly trying to push the team to be above four. So those were the main five KPIs we'd be pushing. All right. And then when you're looking at one of those KPIs is inventory, it's also of course I guess food cost in general. Two questions about that. First one is, do you remember and dare to tell us what was the average food cost you had? And the second one is when you set up your menu, how did you actually design that menu? Was there kind of a financially driven logic? Was it a tasting logic? How did the menu come into being? So first question about food cost, what was it? And second question about menu, how did you get to the menu that you served to the people? Yeah, 100%. So we had a theoretical food cost, right. And we would always want to be in the and it wasn't a specific number because I think we wanted to give a bit of freedom in terms of what we could do in terms of dishes. So we were always targeting this 25% to 30% was kind of where we wanted to be. I think the actual food cost would typically be above that. So we were typically around that 32%, which was always a little bit too high. We were trying to get a bit below that. And things that would fly in that would like portion size, for example was often something that we'd often have people leaving food left over. And so we were like, okay, we're making the portion size too big, let's reduce because our customers want less effectively and it will save the business some. In terms of how we thought about it from the menu. So we had this target of where we want it to be. But I remember there's a lot of factors that you take into consideration. Like for example, we would have a soup on the menu, right. And often restaurants will typically have a soup because if there is some vegetables that are leftover that are maybe not in the best shape to be on a dish where they're not cooked in a soup, they could be. So there was a lot of things like that we tried to think about, so how can we use the full vegetable, all of the meat, and that we didn't have like, any wastage. What could we do in terms of making if some ingredients were not in their best shape initially, what could we do? There was a lot of thought around that and even thinking about consolidating the number of ingredients we had on the menu so that we could bulk buy more of these items, so less different types of items so that they could create bigger bulk buys effectively, because we would then get a better price. So those were some of the levers we tried to pull to get to a good food cost. And did you succeed in that, for example, when you started out and when you let's say finished with six outlets, did the number of ingredients actually shrink over time? And what was the percentage? Yeah, so it's really interesting because the two things that happen when we started growing is that we actually started realizing that there was a huge difference if you bought a five kilo box of tomatoes or if you bought a pallet of tomatoes, right. So then we started thinking, okay, and when I say huge of the order of, like 30% to 40% could be right, like, in terms of the cost difference. So we're like, okay, well we clearly need to be bulk buying more. And that's really where we started pairing down the number of ingredients like proactively. Till that point, we were kind of like we want to give, like, the most varied menu possible. But then we realized that really, to be able to do that successfully at scale, you have to reduce it. Plus also to make the training of the chefs and of the team generally easier. So coming back to that standard operating procedure, really trying to simplify things and make it really easy to replicate and consistent every time. So we probably, I would say, reduced by a third the number of ingredients we would have on the menu. And we also made sure that, especially with the pop ups that we were running in these corporate canteens, it made us realize that actually there was a benefit of running to have a few more so that we would tip over that quantity to say then get to that 30% to 40% reduction, right. So that was really an element of us really thinking about how do we place these orders to really optimize and get the product and it made me then realize how hard it is for new joiners that are coming onto the market. If you're a new restaurateur, you're a really serious disadvantage compared to an established player. And this 30% to 40% improvement, I'm sure it happens again multiple times as you go from six locations to 20 to 50 to 100, right. I'm sure there's more benefit that comes. And so if you think about a single unit that's competing against a six location, a 15 or 50 location, they're at a disadvantage in terms of the ingredients. And same quality right ingredients we're talking about just like the ability to bulk buy. I'm wondering because of course you're CEO of a tech company. I am CEO of a tech company. Something that interests me a lot is you've been, let's say restaurateur, founder of a chain. How much of the stuff you learned in the restaurant business, can you kind of copy paste into running a SaaS business like you're doing today? Well, I think it's interesting. I think there's two things. First of all, I think there's a big difference between being a first-time founder and a second-time founder. And I think that doesn't matter what business you're looking at, right. I think there's a lot of learnings of how you approach things that are different when you do it the second time around. Whether that was the restaurant the first time around or a tech startup the first round. Because and with everything in life you learn and then you think about it and you're like okay, I should do these things differently. I do think that there is a lot that for example at Hummus Brothers, it was very important for me that we led by example, right. And in the restaurant context, that meant like Ron and I were working in the kitchens, we were cleaning dishes, making sure that the toilets were clean. We would do any job that was in the restaurant, like serving customers, etc. Because we also A- wanted to know how to do it the best possible and then B- able to train people on. And really leading by example I think is something that's translated through to Tenzo also really in terms of making sure that I speak to customers, speak to the product teams, work on all those different roles to really understand and build that credibility. So I think there's bits like that that are transportable. There's other things that are very different right like the teams we had at Hummus Brothers. A lot of them were students that were looking at this for like they wanted to do a three month stint and they were doing 3 hours a day and therefore never really got into the business and the cultural side of the business as much where Tenzo where it's more people who are thinking about this as their long term career and therefore we're building much more of a team in that way. So there's huge differences. But there's a lot of things that definitely translate over. Very interesting actually to see that indeed, especially leading by example is one of the things that you mentioned. In terms of your solution today for the restaurant business I can totally understand where you're coming from given the history of what you've been through at Hummus Brothers but can you tell us a little bit about the ultimate goal of Tenzo and how you hope to help businesses move forward with the software you're building? Totally. The two things I found, the two outcomes from not having easy access to data in the restaurants that really caused a lot of pain for me was one, the amount of food we were wasting, and two, the stress that it was causing in the industry, right. The food is the obvious one, right. If you can't predict how much food you need to have or if you're not learning from the past how much did you need, then obviously you're over ordering, under ordering, and it gets complicated. The second one is less obvious. And the reason for that is the restaurant industry is a pretty stressful industry. It's fast-paced, there's a lot going on because you're running on such tight margins. You need to be getting it right every day, right. And getting it right in the context of ordering food, having the right amount of staff, making sure you're selling the right products is looking in my belief, is looking at historical data to help you understand where did you get it right, where did you go wrong, make data-driven decisions. And by having gut-driven decisions, typically in the industry, especially in an industry where there's people come and go quite regularly in roles, it's stressful because you're often getting the decision right getting the decision wrong, to give an example for example is, if you overstaff, typically the management is going to be upset with you because you've wasted resources. But if you understaff, your team will be upset with you and your customers will get a bad experience because there's just not enough of you to make sure everyone's getting a good consistent experience. And therefore you need to get it right so that you're not being stressed either by your management or your team. And that creates a lot of stress. And this is why, really, to me, at the end of the day, if Tenzo is successful, what it means is an industry that's less wasteful, that's more caring for the planet, and secondly, an industry where there's less stress. Where more people are focusing on really where their passion lives which is food and the hospitality not having to get stressed about how am I going to look at this data and make sure I'm making the right decision? And that's really what we're trying to the end goal we're going after. Alright. And I think we're very much aligned in that sense that Apicbase has the same objectives I think it is clear that where the restaurant industry needs to move towards and I think happier people and less waste are two of the main or the most important things in the industry. But you know from experience, and I don't know how you are experiencing that but from experience I see that a lot of restauranteurs and managers, they still today say hospitality is around for 2000 years. Why should we suddenly change and why should we suddenly go digital and have all that data? I've been doing it for 30 years myself, the way that I'm doing it and I'm doing just fine. How do you respond to that? Not just from a perspective of you know I want to have a customer for Tenzo. That's not even what I want to hear. How do you respond to people that still think today data is not important for their business. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And first of all, I think the restaurant industry has been around for 2000 years and I think it will be around for the rest of eternity. And to me the proof of that is the pandemic, right. Like the pandemic, when restaurants were told in the UK, they were told basically you should not go to a restaurant because that you might spread and then they decided to shut them and then they allowed them to open everything. Restaurants survived that. To me that is like the biggest testament that restaurants will be around forever. Now, that doesn't mean that they will be around without adapting, right. I think in the pandemic they had to adapt in a very rapid way. For example, they have to start doing deliveries or order table and work with their teams to make sure people are wearing masks, etc. And to me, the industry having to digitize and to embrace data is the same way they need to adapt. And why is that? Because actually running a restaurant today has become much more difficult for many reasons, right. Like there is much more pressure in terms of labor today because yes, there are many reasons for that In the UK, you could say it's Brexit, because of the pandemic, people changing careers and many other reasons like food has become more expensive there's inflation for many reasons, fertilizer in particular going up. And all of this means that it's become much more competitive to operate and therefore you have to be much more on it was much more predictable 10, 20, 50 years, 100 years ago to run a restaurant than it is today. And that's why I think you have to adapt. Otherwise unfortunately, I don't think you survive because it's become more difficult. Final question in terms of this competitiveness, indeed, I think the world is much more competitive than it's ever been. I mean, also the world becomes a much smaller place. Everybody is in competition, or at least the competition becomes much bigger. Maybe a provocative question, is scalability the success or the key to success or is it still possible to run a mom-and-pop shop in this time and age? Yeah, that's a really difficult one. I do think it's still possible to run a mom and pop shop, but I think you need to be very clear about what makes you stand out compared to other restaurants out there and especially these chains. So for example, something that could make you stand out is actually that you embrace the fact that you're unique, that you're family run, that you're not going to have like this same experience and people seek that out and review you and that's why they come and get you right, come to you. So I think you have to go in there knowing why you're going to be different and being able to operate as a standalone. I think it is possible and we have lots of customers are standalone location mom-and-pop shops and I think they just know what is making them stand out and you need to make that it's even more challenging than it's ever had because you are competing against chains that have huge advantages. And we just talked about one, the volume, the bulk ordering of food, right. And I think that to me it is possible, but it is more challenging than ever. All right, that is a very interesting topic to end on. Thank you very much Christian, for coming on the show and I wish you the best of luck in the rest of your endeavors with Tenzo. Thank you and it's great having you Carl. And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me. So this was the end of our first podcast. Thank you very much to Christian Mouysset for joining us and also thank you very much for you for listening in. If you want to follow us, just click the subscribe button for more of those podcasts in the future. And for now, thank you very much for listening and see you next time.