PAR Technology at 45th Annual William Blair Conference: Unified Growth Strategy

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, PAR Technology (NYSE:PAR) presented its strategic vision at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. The company highlighted its efforts to unify restaurant technology and expand into new markets. While challenges remain, such as integrating existing technologies, PAR Technology’s focus on product excellence and cost management shows promise for future growth.

Key Takeaways

• PAR Technology aims to integrate restaurant technologies to enhance guest and employee experiences.
• The company is expanding into the convenience store sector and exploring international opportunities.
• Financial performance shows steady ARR growth, with expectations for acceleration later in the year.
• Cost management is a priority, with flat operational expenses and strategic outsourcing of R&D.

Financial Results

• Organic ARR growth was 18% in Q1, slightly decelerated due to the Burger King contract expansion.
• Expectations for ARR growth to accelerate in the second half of the year as the Burger King rollout progresses.
• Operating expenses have remained relatively flat for nearly three years.
• R&D expenditure is approximately 24% of revenue, while sales and marketing account for about 15%.

Operational Updates

• PAR Technology is focused on integrating acquisitions within 90 days using a culture playbook.
• Product integration typically takes around a year to demonstrate synergies.
• The Burger King rollout, started in April, is on track.
• The company is pursuing international opportunities by leveraging U.S. and local brands.
• Expansion into convenience stores is underway, targeting approximately 50,000 stores.

Future Outlook

• Anticipated acceleration in organic ARR growth in the latter half of the year.
• Continued outsourcing of R&D to low-cost geographies.
• Focus on large synergistic M&A opportunities and in-store operations solutions.
• The company expects significant loyalty deals due to the integration of loyalty code at the point of sale.

Q&A Highlights

• The biggest challenge for restaurants is integrating existing technologies.
• Customer references are crucial for PAR Technology’s sales strategy.
• The pipeline is robust, with a mix of tier one and smaller brands.
• High demand for POS solutions in the convenience store market.
• Three major rollouts are planned for Q3, including a large convenience store deal.

In conclusion, PAR Technology’s presentation at the conference highlighted its strategic initiatives and growth prospects. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: Alright. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining for the PAR technology session. I’m Steven Sheldon. I’m an analyst in the tech group at William Blair, green vertical technology including PAR.

Please visit our website at williamblair.com for a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest. It’s great to have the PAR team back at our conference again this year. A lot to dig into especially with its continued strong sales momentum into the enterprise restaurant landscape. They built out, as most probably know, they built out the most comprehensive tech stack that we’ve seen, kind of a SaaS platform for targeting larger restaurant brands, you know, and and they’re kind of going into convenience stores, going into new areas of the addressable market. You know, we think it’s profit and free cash flow should ramp pretty quickly here as some of these large contracts go live, so we think it’s a great time to continue looking at this one.

From the company today, we have president and CEO, Savneet Singh. We have, senior VP of business development and IR, Chris Burns.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: I

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: thought he was sitting in the front row somewhere. Oh, he’s

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: in the

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: back now. Okay. So he’s back there. So I will pass it over to Savneet for a quick overview. With any remaining time, we’ll move into a q and a.

So I’ll pass it over to Savneet.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Great. Thanks. So I’m gonna run through some quick slides to ground over what we do. But, at a high level, our goal at PAR is to build the platform to run your enterprise restaurant. And the way we think about it is we’re trying to connect everything from the guest experience all the way back to the employee experience with the operator being in the middle.

And the the reason kinda how we ended up here is that running a restaurant has gotten more and more complicated over time, Not just because we as consumers have become more demanding, but because the amount of technology flowing into that that little those four walls has kind of become a burden to manage and oftentimes taking away the benefit of actually installing these great these great products. And so we’ve been working really hard to create a more unified experience for that guest. And by doing that, we think we can we can unlock a tremendous amount of of of upside to their business both on the bottom line and top line. We power some of the most exciting brands and largest brands in the world. I like to say power everybody from Sweetgreen and Cava all the way up to Burger King and everything in between.

And a lot of our success is a commitment to being really focused on best in class and working what we call better together. There are very few companies that I think can scale at this kind of size, but what’s unique about us is that while we try to convince you that everything we we we work with is is better together, you can always plug plug and build on top of. A lot of this has benefited from us having been in the industry for over forty years. We’ve got a really strong reputation with our customers. And in general, I think if you are either an emerging chain that wants to be an enterprise, we’re probably the one stop shop, but additionally, if you’re already an established brand, we think we’ve got the best name recognition.

I sort of mentioned this, but, it’s worth double clicking on. The the the the end market we serve is QSR and fast casual tier one restaurant, tier one to one and two restaurant chains. These are big businesses that run a bunch of small businesses. And what makes it really, really challenging is that they are being inundated with new demands both from the corporate level from and from the store level, and trying to create make that actually work efficiently is is has not worked. You guys have all probably experienced that dynamic where you go to a restaurant or you’re waiting in line to order food and the cashier is just filling the DoorDash racks and you’re sitting there trying to still place an order and you’re waiting for the DoorDash drivers doesn’t come.

You know, that’s that lack of orchestration is a technology problem or an operational problem that that can be solved. And the reason why it hasn’t been solved is all these parts of technology are just not integrated well together. And at the same time, have that challenge on the labor side, the experience for the for the for the employee. And so all of these things have have just put an intense amount of pressure on the individual store operator. And as a result, you’ve had this explosion in technology.

There are something like, I forget the number, 10,000 restaurant technology startups that exist, and, you know, I’d argue 9090% of them shouldn’t exist. But the reason why they exist is that every time there’s a problem in in the restaurant, there’s someone who says, hey, I’ll go create a start up to go do that. And and the challenge with that is that every time you add one of these new products to your store, the the the system itself crumbles because you have so many point to point integrations that it’s really hard to make it all work. A really amazing example is you know, within your your within a restaurant, you will might have might have one for Uber Eats, one for the in store, one for the drive through, one for the loyalty, online ordering, and none of them run off the same service. And so you’re really managing all these menus at the same time.

It makes no sense. You’ll have a tax calculator, the POS, have one on the online ordering system, you’ve got employee labor and employee, you know, schema in three different systems. None of it’s meant to integrate to each other because, again, as you have all these problems, every time you have a problem, you’ll say, let me go add another piece of software to go solve that, but none of them really speak to each other and connect. And we think that in the end, it’s led to this challenge where you have really two bad options. You either continue to buy a point solution to solve each one of those little tiny problems you have or you try to build a software yourself.

And, you know, I I would argue that both of these options slow restaurants down. In the end, these are restaurant businesses. They should be focusing on delivering great food and employee experiences, not building software. And as we talked about this point to point idea, let me create let me kind of magically manage 20 different vendors, you really become a glorified vendor manager, not an experience creator. And so we we believe that our platform really does make it simple to to to do what a restaurant does best, is build these great customer experiences.

And, you know, we sort of look at this is our racetrack slide, but really what we think is special is that we we kind of hold the engagement side of your business, which is the interactions of your end customer, to the operational side and unified into one so that if you have, you you can manage opportunity both sides. And so as we get into a world of artificial intelligence, you can actually use those insights to to do really, really special, create special outcomes for your customers. So example, you know, we’re gonna be coming out this year with some really cool technology connecting the back office and loyalty. So, you know, you might be in a restaurant and get a flag that says, hey. I’ll give you an example, but, you know, hot dogs are expiring in twelve days.

Normally, that individual little restaurant is gonna try to figure out how I sell hot dogs, because that’s a franchisee or individual store problem. But what what we’ll we’ll be able to do is, hey, press this button to go, build a loyalty program automatically or loyalty campaign automatically to go push it out to your customers in your little ZIP code that, hey. We’re gonna go sell hot dogs. There’s a big hot dog sale happening at our restaurant or a big promotion for it. And if you say, yes, I wanna run that promotion, and again, that’s a super complicated thing to do, but Gen a allows you to target the right customers whether it’s text, email, so on and so forth.

It’ll then go back to the back office software and provision extra labor units to go service that customer. And so it’s a beautiful way of connecting the front to back of house through one platform. That would never happen if these were all different pieces of software, but the fact that we have them under one roof allows us do really innovative things like this. Our platform is squarely built on food service. Today we cover everything from online ordering and loyalty, which we call engagement, to back office payments and POS, and then we are we do have a large hardware business that supports the POS business.

Our playbook has been, you know, pretty simple since we started, which is we look to build or acquire best in class products. I’ll I’ll stress the best in class. We we really really care about having the best product. In the end, we’re selling to big enterprises and the best product wins, not the best, you know, marketing. We then take that product and we couple it with really deep vertical expertise.

I think if you were to talk to our customers, this will repeatedly tell you we really, really understand the customer we serve. Then the most important part of what we do is that when we acquire or build a product, we combine it with our existing suite of products making what we call better together outcomes. Meaning that if you bought two products from par, you should be able to have a differentiated product outcome than if you bought them from two separate vendors, like the example I kind of gave you with the hot dogs. We really want to convince you that as you buy more, you get more functionality. You’re not buying a bundle, you’re actually getting more product when you buy them from one roof.

This is a bit of our flywheel. It’s relatively simple, but I think it works, which is we try to land with a hero product, so in the sample point of sale. If we do a good job. We get the right to sell you a second product and so now we’re selling you two products for the cost of one acquisition and that then gives us greater economics than our individual point solution competitors to go reinvest in this more unified platform and build the go to market. This is what’s really, really working for us and I think, you know, some of the margin expansion that that Steven mentioned is being a result of this.

We’ve had a really, you know, sort of rapid rise, I would say. Our business has been around for a long time, fifty, sixty years, but we got really reinvented six or seven years ago when we kinda went all in on the software business, and you can see we’ve had tremendous organic growth, but we’ve also been very, very successful in the inorganic side as well. We’ve we’ve we’re very active in the M and A part of the world, but I’d say that, you know, what’s unique about our m and a motion is that it’s highly focused on product. It is an r and d initiative, not a financial initiative first, is are we solving a product gap, meaning that can we acquire a product, can we integrate into our products to create a unique customer outcome? What’s been great is that I think over time if we look at our acquisitions, they aren’t run as disparate little companies.

It’s not it’s not you’re not betting on a capital allocation of a private equity fund. You’re actually building on a vertical strategy that seems to have worked. Our M and A is really, really precise. Know, there are 20 companies that we think are a great fit and we focus on trying to eventually bring those companies into the fold, but it’s not programmatic. You know, we’ve gone two and a half years without doing it and then last year we did three, I always get a little defensive when people say we’re acquisitive, we are product acquisitive and it is really the timing of the MA really depends on the availability of that product at that time.

We will not go buy the biggest company that exists. We will buy the company that has a product that fits within our flywheel better. This is a sort of a repeat slice, I’ll skip it, but we really think we’re just getting started. Global food service is a relatively large market. Today, we’re focused on restaurants.

We’ve expanded to convenience, and over time, we’ll we think we’ll build up the global business to do the same. Food service is kind of interesting in that we usually think of food service as restaurants, but, you know, the fastest growing category for food in The United States is actually convenience stores. Convenience stores are compounding their food service offerings at 14 or 15% a year. Restaurants are, you know, barely growing. And so our goal is to kind of swim to where the puck is going or or skate to where the puck is going, as the delivery of food changes more and more over time.

You’ve probably noticed this when you go to stadiums, you now have the ability to get delivery at your seat. You have the ability to get loyalty. You know you know, those you’re gonna see more and more demand for our food service technology solutions as the market grows. We’ll continue, I think, to kinda quick expand our playbook, which is really focused on food service vertical. We’ll continue to see if there’s products that make sense for us to add, but most important is this is going back into the well of upselling back to our base in an integrated offering because we’ve really, really seen that if we can make one plus one equal three from a product perspective, the cross sell kinda happens.

And, you know, we we just reported a few weeks ago, and, you know, we had now two quarters in a row where every single one of our POS deals is multiproduct. Almost all of our engagement deals are multiproduct, and so we’re kind of at this point now where we used to be a % new logo driven. Today, we have this cross sell element that’s kinda neat. We’re growing rapidly both through cross sell, upsell, international expansion, new verticals, but at its core, we are still really early in the the digital transformation of our core market. You know, most of our growth is still new logo, which I think is is very, very exciting.

And as, you know, I kind of round up, our our brand promise though is to continue to always be best in class. We are obsessed that we have to have the best product. We really kind of demand that of our product managers. We have ways to measure it, you know, simplistically. If, someone on our team says they have the best product, we always go back and say, are you the highest priced?

And if you’re not, you’re probably not the best product. But we really do focus on how do we have the best product. We never wanna win on the bundle. We wanna win in actually having the best product. We obsess on being open, meaning, hey, if we don’t have the best product, you should be free to have your own innovative ecosystem that you want to build yourself.

And you think you can build it better than us? Go build it. And lastly is this idea of better together, is really I think the been the unlock for us going forward. Know, I think like most companies, we think we’ve got a unique culture, but I’d say our culture is intense. If you read our values, they aren’t like, you know, super fun.

It’s not like curiosity. They’re like urgency, ownership, speed. We really obsess on winning. It’s it is a a culture that is is super harsh. I think our values oftentimes scare new recruits and attract them, and that’s kind of what we want, why they were built that way.

And and we think we’re at day one. So, you know, long story short, I think we’ve sort of transformed historically a hardware business into hopefully, the category leader within within software. We’ve got a playbook that we think is repeatable, and I think that our flywheel for growth is is is is moving really nicely but has room to grow as we’ve now kind of unlocked this this cross sell opportunity. That’s it.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: That’s great. You really do you’re a notorious fast talker. I always know I’m gonna have more time with you, which I think you guys take the value of speed very seriously even in how you present, but that was great. Maybe starting here, as we think about, think you had a slide there showing all the pain points that kind of restaurants have faced. Can you maybe talk about how those have changed as we’ve progressed through the last four to five years?

I think back to the pandemic and it’s like, it was all about ecommerce facilitation, how do you meet your customers when they can’t physically come into your store. How has that changed as we’ve kind of progressed, you know, over the over the last two to three years?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. I think so so you’ve had this switch from the, you know, let’s get digital to let’s clean up the back of house, but I I would say the biggest challenge today is just getting the stuff you have to work. You know, the lack of, you know, these point to point integrations are really challenging, and and you see it, like, every which way. And so I think that while there’s definitely more focus today on cleaning up the back of house, making sure the kitchen can operate, you know, in a world where you now have 10 different ways to order your food, it’s actually getting the stuff to be, you know, tied together that’s been the biggest challenge. You know, every restaurant company in the world wants to talk about AI, but, you know, nobody can implement it because your data is in 10 different places.

And so everyone’s like, oh, you know, you’ll see I’m I’m sure you’ll see this soon, but I’m pretty sure every single company that on that map diagram is gonna have, here’s the agent to use for your restaurant. Here’s the agent to use for your restaurant. Like, in our view is the winner there is gonna be the one that has the the largest platform. So, anyways, I think the big challenge is actually the getting the stuff you have to work rather than, you know, one area in in the industry now.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: And maybe with that, you’ve done three acquisitions. You talked about it. You didn’t do anything. You did Punch a while ago. You know, you did three over the last year.

You know, where are you at in the integration process with all these different assets? What’s gone well on the integration side? Where is there still more work to do?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: We move fast on integration. So, you know, generally within, you know, ninety days we’ve got sort of defined goals we wanna get to. Those goals are, you know, in three buckets. The first is, you know, the organizational design. How how are we set up the organization?

Who reports to who? Know, it’s always an awkward thing when you acquire a company and a bunch of people with a C level title all of a sudden are VPs. You know, how you manage that is really important, so we we kind of hit that up front. We’ve got a ninety day culture play That culture playbook is everything from here’s when the Slack changes, here’s what your email signature looks like, here’s a logo change, but then it’s about here’s how we’re gonna connect the cultures of the company, here’s how we’re gonna change, update the values, or here’s how you’re gonna meet the sequence of town halls you’re gonna have with leadership. And then it’s the product.

And the product side is the most important one. And and so and and that’s the one that takes longest because you’ve got to actually make sure that you can create that one plus one equaling three. So if I look at, you know, our last couple acquisitions, you know, once we’re a year past the deal, we should assume that the customer has real unique functionality they didn’t get before. What’s great is our last deal, Delegate, which was done the last day of 2024, we’ve already gotten to the point where the products are really integrated, where we’ve released functionality where customers can say, hey, I had both these products. I just got all this new stuff I didn’t I didn’t have before.

So, you know, that’s been kind of fun to do at a faster pace than normal. But usually it’s like it’s a really year before you can prove the product synergies. In the back office side, it’s definitely shorter.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: Got it. Maybe talk about purchasing behavior because I think one thing that surprised me when I was first digging into this space is it seemed like a lot of these big restaurant brand CIOs talk to each other. It seems like there is a big referential motion to this. So maybe talk about the purchasing behavior. You’ve had some big wins.

Do you think some of these wins might help you get the next tier one customer? The next, like how do you think that’ll play out?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: References are huge in any vertical market because they’re all relatively narrow markets. You know, so for us, is probably our best sales motion is a reference from an existing customer. Always argued we are probably the worst marketers in our category. You know, we’ve just not been good at getting the word out there in the right way, but we’ve won a lot because, you know, our references are, you know, the cool kids on the block like a Sweetgreen or Cava all the way up to a Dairy Queen or Burger King. So we’ve got great, you know, references across whatever your restaurant type might be.

I think the other part that matters a lot is, you know, point point of sale is is the most critical product within a restaurant. You know, if it goes down, your online ordering doesn’t work. Your loyalty doesn’t work. Like literally nothing works. And so if you can do a good job on the most important product, you have an incredible influence on that brand to partner with you for a long time.

And so if you can figure that part out, you’re in amazing spot. Conversely, if you screwed up, like, the chance of an upsell is like zero or negative. And so we kind of obsess on making sure that we hit our promises. I think that in software generally there’s a, if you deliver your products in Q five, you know, we really commit to delivering on time. And so that reputational part also matters a lot, is not just that we did a good job, when we built new functionality, told them it’s going be on a certain date, hit it.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: Got it. Biggest recent win has been Burger King. It seems like you’re going to be starting, you talked last quarter I think about 2Q, we’ve probably started to see some of the implementations. 3Q, I think you talked about being the heaviest. Maybe just talk about any updates on how that’s going with that rollout since it’s such a big win for you guys.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yes. We kicked off the rollout, I wanna say, sometime towards the April. You know, so far so good. It looks really great. We have the business booked for, you know, q three and most of q four, so I feel really good about it.

But generally, it’s like kind of back on track and moving the way we need to move. And then I think

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: you’ve talked about the pipeline being bigger now I think with tier one restaurants than it was even when you won Burger King. I think at the time it was four, seven tier one opportunities out there that were in RFP, you’ve won four of them. Maybe just talk about the pipeline, what are you seeing there? Just any updates on the pipeline.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. I think we manage the the optimism of the business on weighted pipeline more than anything else in that we really try to figure out, you know, tier one deals are not gonna make or break a year anymore. It’s the, you know, the entire sort of span of customers. And so, you know, we’ve just seen continued expansion of that that that pipeline. And we manage it really I’ve said this to people today, but we manage it really tightly.

Like, you know, we are certainly pitching firms like McDonald’s that, you know, these enormous customers, but we don’t put those in pipeline because even if you put them at 10% or 5%, this just screws up the numbers. And so, you know, we we have, you know, five stages of our funnel. Each have a waiting and then we sort of overrule where we think like even if we’re in the final stage, we think we’ll win or not. And that pipeline is you know as big as it’s ever been for us. And it’s great because it’s a diverse pipeline from tier one down to smaller brands.

And know right now it looks great.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: And then on international, a lot of these brands also have large international presences. You’re still predominantly US. You acquired Task. Yep. So now you have both a loyalty and kind of international version of par, I think is kind of the way that you put it.

You know, how do you think about the international opportunity? You know, is it gonna be more about following current brands as they try to, you know, expand overseas? Just how are you thinking about pursuing international?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Absolutely. I I you know, I think it was the the vision was, that US brands the large US brands are more growing more outside The United States than The United States. And it there is certainly a need to have a more holistic experience. And we didn’t, you know, really have an we didn’t really have an option for them, you know, if we want to business a brand in the We didn’t really know where to send them internationally. And so, that was the original motion why we acquired the business, and that’s definitely happening.

We’ve sort of got customers that were that are, like, were super excited and candidly that business is limited in our ability to get stuff out, not demand. That is not a demand constrained dynamic because there’s nobody that really does. There’s no U. S. Vendor that does a great job internationally.

So that’s been crazy exciting. But I think, alternatively, there are a couple brands that are local in in in the company we acquired that we have no relationship with The US that have now opened us up to that world, which was not something we totally expected, but it’s clearly like been an amazing change for us.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: And then convenience stores, that’s another big area. You did the Stuzo acquisition, now par retail. You talked about it a little bit, you know, the food service, the growth of food service, think, in convenience stores. You know, and I think you’ve also so you’ve got the loyalty solutions, you’ve got the back of house, the data central opportunity. Just talk about convenience stores and and how you plan to pursue that.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Convenience is an amazing end market. You know, I wish I bought all the convenience store stocks. Know, what what’s amazing about convenience stores is that they they have this incredible ability to constantly find a new vertical to sell. Like, you know, think about the stuff that they sell. Cigarettes, fuel, like these are secularly declining demand yet these businesses have been great businesses.

And the new thing they’re focused on is food. And so we stumbled into this market. This was not a market we had ever planned to be in, but a number of convenience stores have kind of made that push into wanting to be a great, food service brand. And as we grew and started delivering results, it kind of just compounded and so we decided to go really all in on it with an acquisition that makes us the largest loyalty player there. What’s been amazing about that market is we literally command twice the price that we do in convenience stores and restaurants because there isn’t good alternative, but also because we drive so much value in that market.

And why do we drive more value there? Well, think about it. In a restaurant, there’s only so many times I can get you to back to have the same meal over there. But in a c store, can get you to come back one day for cigarettes or whatever, fuel or all the CPG goods that demand the internet. So there’s just a lot more utility for a loyalty program.

The other kind of fascinating part about this is that we’re gonna run the same playbook we did in restaurants. We kind of kind of we now sort of know the key parts within a retail business and what do we wanna own and then ability to own and cross sell. And we have an amazing head start. You know, when we when we first got into restaurants, we didn’t have that referenceability. You know, there I don’t there really wasn’t a referenceable customer in our base, not not even one.

Here, we have the opposite where every single customer is referenceable literally from and and it’s the CEOs of these organizations. You know, it’s and that’s what’s been kind of gets gets us so excited is we know that if we have strong strong customer CSAT in a core workflow product, we can start to build a flywheel all over again. And the last thing sorry to say is c stores are just a lot earlier in digital transformation than restaurants. You know, restaurants are now spending money on technology and still have a long way to go, but c stores are really just like at the very, very beginning of that.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: And how do you think about the opportunity? You know, how do you think about the in store TAM, you know, in the enterprise portion of it?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: There’s about a 50,000 stores that are sort of within our TAM. We’re in about 20,000 of them now for just loyalty. And obviously, we’re gonna build the motion for for more products. And so I think that, like restaurants, I don’t think you’re going have more units, but I think you’ll have a ton of call it price or module expansion within there. So I think it will be very similar.

I don’t think all the products will be twice the price like loyalty, but I do think there isn’t digital ordering vendor that exists in restaurant in C stores yet of any scale. There isn’t a mobile app vendor. There isn’t a cloud POS that exists. Like, it’s really, really early, and so that’s what’s kind of exciting about it.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: Are you starting to see any demand for the POS on that side? Is that

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: There isn’t a single customer that doesn’t ask us to do it. Okay. You know, we just have a lot of growth in restaurant POS, so I don’t wanna, like, divert our efforts yet.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: As we think about the setup for this year, I think organic ARR decelerated a little bit. It sounds like a lot of that was due to the Burger King expansion of the contract, so good problem to have. You’ve talked about acceleration over the back half of the year. Maybe just talk about some of the factors that should drive that and your level of confidence getting back to above 20% organic ARR growth.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yes. I mean I think our what I love about our business is the end market demand is like strong and I think it will continue for years. You know, we are, you know, just in the midst of this Burger King rollout. It has a big impact on our on our on our growth. And so, you know, we had 18% ARR growth in q one without that rollout.

And it’s just this is not gonna be a normal I hope well, maybe hopefully, it will be, but it’s not going to be a normal year to year kind of thing. But, you know, our three big rollouts for the year all start in q three, which is a big c store deal, a big expansion story happening in in q three. Burger King really hits its stride in q three and then payments. And so, that doesn’t usually sequence that way or hasn’t sequence since I’ve been here, but there’s that. The other part of it is in the last two quarters, almost all of our deals have been multiproduct.

And so those have real those are big drivers of revenue. We don’t get essentially, we don’t get any of that revenue in q one and q two. We get most of that in q four. There’s just a lot of momentum in the business. It’s I don’t think quarter to quarter is perfect, I do feel the long and the durability of the revenue growth is is will be strong.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: And then you’ve you’ve kinda talked about OpEx being more or less flattish with inflation. So maybe just talk about how you’ve been able to do that, what you’ve been able to do with the cost structure to kind of maximize your leverage. And how are you thinking about the need to reinvest, especially some of these big contracts scale?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: We’re pretty maniacal on the cost side. We’ve kept OpEx close to flat for almost a couple of years, almost three years now. But the way we’ve done it is I think not penny wise pound foolish. We’ve outsourced R and D to low cost geographies. That was a huge tailwind for us to have plenty of R and D bodies but at a low cost geography.

And then I think I’d argue our low cost geography is actually higher efficiency and output than we had domestically. Particularly when we acquired business, we’re able to push that out there. The second has been on our sales and marketing. On the R and side, today we’re about 24% of revenue is R and D. That’s probably the right level as we continue to reinvest here.

Second part of your question. We spent 14 ish, I forget exactly, 15% of our revenues on sales and marketing. Again, think that’s near best in class. And what’s happened there is that we just continue to be realize that one salesperson can sell not one product, but two, three, four, five products. And what is kind of fascinating is a lot of the our sales headcount was the support staff, sales engineers, solution architect architects.

But as those products become one, you need less and less. And so as an example, you know, Burger King, the biggest lever, it was one salesperson who brought those two products, two and two and a half products in, one sales engineer. Normally, would have been three people. That’s really powerful. Why?

Because it’s running off the same code base. You know, we just want a big loyalty deal where we, because our loyalty code is now at the point of sale, it was one sales engineer. And so that’s a really powerful tool. And so we’ve been able to, you know, right size the sales force to do that. So that’s kind of second level.

And so the only place I I don’t think we’re best in class is on G and A where we’re kind of smack in the middle of revenue companies of our size, and that to me is just scale. As we get larger, we’ll be able to do it. And I think I’d argue that our G and A is pretty decent given that we have this legacy forty five year old hardware and services business that just is a big part of the G and A base that we have to outgrow versus peers. You know, I think we’re gonna be a super profitable business, and I think we’re getting there faster than people expect.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: We maybe have time for one question from the audience if anyone has one. Otherwise, I can throw in another question. Maybe talk about m and a. I mean, you’ve bitten off a lot. What’s your what’s your appetite for additional m and a going forward?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: You know, for us, it’s it is product driven. It is product related. It’s it is and and today, there’s kinda two things we’re spending a lot of time in. There are three or four sort of, mega, you know, companies in our space. Again, that does mega for our world is not, you know, in a big software world.

And, you know, we want to take big swings at them because we always do them as super synergistic from a product perspective. And so we are, you know, gonna see if we can make those happen. But those deals, you know, they’re binary and you never know when they’re gonna come or not come, and we don’t kind of bet the company on it. The second area that I think you’ll see us continue to look at is this the in store operations that you talked about. It is really clear that if you sit with the CIO or CEO of a restaurant and and you remove their fear of like call it the macro of what’s happening today in the world, like their biggest insecurity is their operations.

It’s not they just don’t know how they’re gonna be able to run, you know, employees are unhappy, customers are unhappy in the store, and there’s just so many so much wastage, so we’ll probably continue to look for stuff in that area. But honestly, we’re building so much now with with AI that I, you know, the bar is just getting higher to buy something.

Steven Sheldon, Analyst, William Blair: Alright. Well, we’ll end it there. Thank you so much Savneet. The breakout is gonna be upstairs in Burnaby. So

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