PAR Technology at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Growth and Market Expansion

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, PAR Technology (NYSE:PAR) participated in the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, where CEO Suneet Singh outlined the company’s strategic initiatives. The discussion covered PAR’s multi-product sales strategy, financial growth algorithms, and market expansion efforts. Despite a slight decline in restaurant traffic, Singh expressed optimism, emphasizing the company’s resilience and growth potential.

Key Takeaways

• PAR Technology aims for over 20% revenue growth while keeping operational expenses flat.
• Multi-product sales are a key driver, with all recent POS deals being multi-product.
• The company is expanding internationally and in the convenience store market.
• PAR expects significant margin expansion in the coming years.
• Competition from Oracle is a major concern for PAR.

Financial Results

• PAR Technology reported a year-over-year EBITDA improvement of approximately $15 million, driven by organic growth.
• Gross margins on the software business stand at about 69%, with a target to increase further.
• Operational expenses decreased this quarter compared to the previous year, reflecting efficient management.
• R&D expenses are 25% of sales, and sales and marketing expenses are 15% of revenue, indicating operational efficiency.
• The acquisition of Stuzo was completed at 13 times EBITDA.

Operational Updates

• The integration of products like loyalty programs with POS systems is enhancing customer value and driving sales.
• PAR’s weighted pipeline is stronger than ever, supported by cross-selling to its existing customer base.
• The company is experiencing strong growth in the convenience store market.
• Successful integration of Delegate, now branded as ParOps, has been achieved.
• International expansion is underway with the Task acquisition and partnerships with Starbucks and Guzman and Gomez.

Future Outlook

• PAR Technology anticipates robust growth in 2025, 2026, and 2027, driven by multi-year deals and the increasing need for digital solutions in restaurants.
• The company aims to expand its platform beyond restaurants, targeting the broader food service category.
• PAR expects to benefit from a recessionary environment, with increased demand for loyalty programs and back-office solutions.
• Scale is identified as the primary barrier to significant margin expansion.

Q&A Highlights

• PAR Technology is particularly concerned about competition from Oracle, given their extensive customer relationships.
• The company is open to exclusive deals in certain markets to strengthen its competitive position.
• PAR recognizes the need to enhance its capabilities for international deployment.

For a detailed understanding of PAR Technology’s strategies and insights, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: All right, let’s get started. So we’re joined once again this year by Suneet Singh, President and CEO of PAR Technology. So Suneet, thank you for coming once again to our conference. And for the crowd’s benefit, I’m Neil Talal, Managing Director in the Tech IB Group here at JPMorgan. So, Sanneet, just to kick off for those not familiar, just give a quick overview of PAR.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Sure. So PAR is a software platform that looks to manage the enterprise restaurant workflow. We sell front end, back end software to large enterprise QSR and fast casual chains, and more and more into the full service dining space. Our products range from everything from loyalty and online ordering all the way to point of sale and back office. So we try to think of ourselves as an end to end platform to serve large restaurant chains.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Awesome. So over the last few years, organically and inorganically, you’ve expanded the product portfolio pretty meaningfully, everything from loyalty to payments, online ordering, just recently analytics. So talk a little bit about how you pick what areas to invest in, what do you want to own versus where you want to partner.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So when we started on the journey, we kind of identified four kind of key swim lanes we always wanted to be in, was point of sale being the crux of kind of everything we do, then the back office. And on the front end, we wanted to be on what we call engagement, which is loyalty and online ordering. We always kind had this vision that those were the four key areas and that everything around it we would kind of bolt on to make the collective offering stronger. And the way we sort of look at things today is when we look to build or buy something, we want to the product that we add to the suite to make the collective grow faster and stickier. And the way you do that is by having adding a product that makes the customer’s life better.

So, illustratively, when we go and buy something, when you insert it into the suite of PAR, the customers should be getting something that they couldn’t get before when they were two separate products. And if we can prove that out and then prove the financial model out, it’ll sort of be worth us looking at from an M and A perspective. Over time, what we’ve realized is that as we add more and more products to the mix and cross them into our base, you have this added benefit that as you have more products, you become stickier and stickier and stickier, and thereby, I think, becoming a more valuable company. But back to the original question, think we generally try to see today where can we add a product that makes the moat around what we’re doing stronger and stronger? Because I do think we have the kind of the core products we need today.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: So let’s talk about one of those products in payments, which is becoming a more meaningful part of ARR and revenue. I think outside in, a lay person may think that payments is harder to attach for an enterprise restaurant and enterprise in general, and they have other options. So how do you talk about or how do you think about your value proposition in payments and how do you think about going to market there?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So it is harder to sell payments into the enterprise, primarily because most enterprise customers have some understanding of how payments work. Downmarket, when you’re selling to individual stores, generally it’s sort of like, oh, sure, I’ll take your payments offering. And they don’t quite realize how much they’re actually paying and all the downstream impacts of that selection. But what we’ve actually been surprised is how much we can sell. So we’re we’ve been growing our payments business relatively rapidly.

And what’s been neat is that we’ve realized that we can sell it both in store, so tap your card at the payment gateway and we’ll make some revenue there. But we’ve also realized we can sell it above store, meaning through our loyalty success. We have the largest loyalty program in The United States, probably in the world, as it relates to restaurants. And what’s been neat is we’ve created a digital wallet program where instead of having to open up a loyalty app or type in a bunch of codes, you just double tap with your Apple Wall or your Google Wallet and the loyalty card pops up and you pay with that. And when you pay with that, we get paid.

And so that’s been a neat kind of extension to our payments business of making digital digital revenue there too. So, know, long story short, you know, we’ll never have 100% penetration on payments like you can in the SMB, but I think we’ve surprised ourselves at how much we we can get to. And so whether we get to thirty, forty, 50 percent, I don’t know, or 70%, I don’t know. But it’s definitely been far more than we expected.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: As I think about over the years, as you’ve been at this conference, we always talk about this better together and unified commerce story. And I think this year, you’ve really started to hit your stride in terms of actually demonstrating that with your new wins and what proportion of them, either on the operator side or engagement side, are multi products. Talk about how is that multi product sales motion different than what you’ve done historically and what’s been driving your success?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: It’s changed dramatically. In our Q4 call, mentioned that all the deals we signed were multi product. In this quarter, all of our POS deals are multi product, almost all of our loyalty deals were. So it’s been really neat to see how quickly it’s shifted to being a multi product opportunity. And I think what’s driving that is a few things.

First and foremost, the multi product motion is working because the products are actually integrated. And what that’s done is made it really easy for our customers to attach more products to the initial sale because we’ve made their job easier and we’ve actually given them outcomes they couldn’t do without it. So as an example, we talked about on our last call that now cashiers that use our point of sale system have the customer’s loyalty data at the cashiers so they can upsell. And that’s a really neat tool because now, historically, when you go to a restaurant, you’re the person in the cash register, you scan your loyalty app, they can’t actually see, do you have a promotion, do you have a reward, what are the flags, are you a vegan, are you a family customer, kids customer, don’t have any that information. Now, that’s all to register for that person to upsell you, and gender you more of the brand.

And that’s an example of that. And so when we did that, we were like, wow, it’s a lot easier to sell loyalty to the customers at a point of sale because now you can say, hey, you can get this functionality you had no chance of getting with another vendor, if you will. And there’s a whole bunch of examples like that. The integration between restaurant products are always point to point. It’s always messy, so we can go to them and say, hey, your back office and point of sale, it’s all the same thing now.

We make it really easy to sell. So I think first and foremost, we’re winning because the products are integrated in a way that makes it so easy for the customer and gives them benefit they couldn’t get without I think the second reason we’re winning is candidly the markets move to the view that the platform is probably going to win. And this I think we’re probably too early here early on, but that was the foundational thesis we kind of started to build the company on six, six and a half years ago. And we got and the market’s just kind of moving in that direction. It is clear that the vendor consolidation, simplicity, whatever you want to call it, is in favor.

And so we happen to be the partner that can do that. I think the last reason is just focus. We are a company that tends to pick a few goals every year that really matter. And so the last few quarters has been, let’s really get this right. So we just had an intense focus on doing it as

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: So let’s make the go to market a little bit more tangible. You’ve landed Burger Kings, Burger King and Wendy’s. You announced an expansion of the Burger King contract recently and then also Popeyes. So just talk a little bit about these marquee franchise level wins. How do you go about winning those?

And also talk through us talk through the rollout and the plan going forward.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. So in our business, it’s it’s heavily RFP driven. Generally, these are really big investments by large corporations, so they’ll have an RFP, they’ll have a consultant at times. And I actually love that because the best product wins in that motion. It’s very hard.

We don’t win a customer because we’ve a great Instagram ad, we win because our products are better. And generally enterprise software, best product wins and this allows us our products to sort of What I think has changed is that for a long time, we were a pretty small company. I mean, I think we joke we won Berking in 2023. If Berking had looked at us just two and a half years before that, we would been a $30,000,000 revenue company. They never would have given us a chance.

And so a lot of what I think is happening is like self validation in the sense that as we’ve gotten bigger, the chance to win bigger deals happens, the trust and so on and so forth. And so I think that that success sort of begets success and that we have more referenceable customers, more larger brands feeling comfortable. And so when the next Burger King comes along, they not only can sort of vet us on their own, they can also call Burger King, they can call Wendy’s, they can you know, Arby’s and so on and so forth. And so, know, I think that’s really been the big change, which is our ability to deliver on behalf of these large customers and then have those as reference to customers to others has changed. But, you know, going back to the customer question, our go to market is really traditional enterprise software.

We are sort of AE is calling accounts six months to eighteen month sales cycles. We get in labs, so we’re sort like a pilot, if you will, to sort of prove the functionality and then you sort of grow from there over time. It’s it’s been really interesting to see how that sales motion is getting shorter and shorter and shorter because the need for the technology is growing. And I think part of that is the market realizing, hey, we gotta be digital, but also again, hey, partners on this before, let’s let’s trust them.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: And just to finish a thought on go to market, talk a bit about the pipeline looking forward towards the back half of this year and 2026.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So things look pretty good right now. We’ve got our largest weighted pipeline ever. I tend to look at things on a weighted pipeline basis because I think generally talking of pipeline, you can kind of game it with get one big customer, a couple of big customers at the near the beginning end of the pipeline and things just look too good. But our weighted pipeline is stronger than it’s ever been. And I would say that’s sort of in part driven by this new cross sell motion where we are finding just tremendous growth in kind of upselling to our existing base.

And then it’s also being driven by continued growth in a sort of a diverse set of customers. I think that it’ll set us up for a really, really strong 25, 20 six, 20 seven because you can kind of these deals are multiyear deals. You want a deal, it takes time to roll it out. And I think what we’ll see happen is that as restaurants move their business to become more digital, they’ll ironically need more software to manage that digital environment. And we hope to participate in that.

And we’re just still really early in that journey. I’m always shocked just how offline so much of this business is, whether it’s labor, HR, finance, inventory. And today, we kind of play in two suites, but over time, think it’s used to more. So from a dollar weighted basis, our pipeline is really strong. From a sort of visibility, it’s really for the next few quarters, we feel really good.

And then we have this nice tailwind of these multi product deals that we’ve announced the last couple quarters on the calls, still not in our numbers. And and so I think we’ve got, you know, hopefully a lot of tailwind for the next next year or two.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Let’s pivot a little bit and talk about the industry and the macro. So starting with what you’re seeing on the ground day to day in terms of consumer health, spending at restaurants, spending at your customers, what are you seeing?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: We track it super closely. So I track both the traffic, then we track sort of what we see in sales, then we track loyalty check ins, basket size, quantity of orders. Sort of track everything. And it’s actually been, I think, a secret weapon of ours in the sense that if you look at when we’ve gone to market to finance stuff, part of the reason we’ve been right on our timing is you can kind of see U. S.

Economic health from restaurant data pretty well. What we see today is the same thing is that most restaurants are reporting, which is there’s clearly a decline in traffic. It’s not huge. It’s very low single digits and it’s not consistent across every brand, but in aggregate there’s certainly a slowing of traffic. That is not all led to any push out of an RFP yet nor a push out of a rollout.

So I don’t know if I think the declines are big enough where it’s changed stuff. Part of that is that in the restaurant category, there is a trade down. And so where I think we’ll see a lot of pain if we are in a recessionary environment is in the single store that’s a sit down restaurant or the larger table service chains that expensive meals. And so QSR, fast casual, which is our base, tend to do pretty well in recessionary environments. And so I think the brands know that, and as a result, they’re continuing their digital initiatives.

The other part is that and again, this is all hypothetical, but we are seeing growth in our engagement pipeline as an example. So we’re seeing more interest in loyalty. And I suspect that’s because of the fear of recession wants you to build close relations with your customers or bring bring more customers in the door. And so we’re seeing pipeline expand over there. And so, you know, today, the short answer is restaurants are clearly slowing down.

Every earnings call talks about It has not yet impacted their technology spend. I think our comments are pretty consistent with all of our peers who’ve reported, which is we all see the same data and the customers have not pulled back yet. And in a couple areas, loyalty and back office, it seems like to be accelerating.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: And maybe just to expand on that. If we were in a recessionary environment, I think as you alluded to, there’s a lot of arguments for why you could not only persist, but also benefit in terms of your pipeline and customers coming to you and wanting to modernize to combat the recession environment. So talk a little bit more about that and what signals you would see.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. We’ve had a good analog in COVID. And during COVID, most of the restaurant technology companies, once we got through the world’s ending phase of COVID, accelerated. And just like lots of software, but what’s interesting about restaurant technology is for us, it never stopped. And so we didn’t have like a spike and then it come back down.

Ours kind of was consistent. And I think the reason I highlight that is it became very clear that you can create value through implementing technology during challenging times. So I expect what happened is we got to a real recession. I think you’d see a really strong growth in our loyalty business. You’ll see strong growth, one, in usage and application, but two, growth in new customers.

Because if you’re on an average loyalty product or a home built loyalty product or something that’s sort of not the breadth that we have, you’re gonna wanna upgrade because you’re gonna wanna say, hey, I not only do I wanna bring more customers in, I gotta compete with everybody else that has sort of top tier software. So I’m I’m gonna wanna create that engagement. And that I think will clearly see some benefit. And we saw that in the pandemic. We were growing leaps and bounds back then.

I think the other place we’ll see tremendous growth would be in the back office. So back office software helps you organize your inventory, your labor, think about your cogs, if you will. And I think that the ROI is so high and so fast that it’s a lot easier to argue, hey, let’s manage our back office more efficiently. So I think we’ll see some strong growth there. And I do think that collectively we’ll see a lot more focus on analytics and data managing your business because you’re gonna be super scared about, you know, making your numbers.

So there’s this there’s an argument to make it we get better. But, you know, I always say, like, if it’s a really bad recession, like, everything will pause because you’re just trying to hold on. But generally, I think this category has just been so resilient. If you look at, you know, QSR sales during nine eleven during the great financial crisis, like, they tend to hold up pretty well.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Let’s talk a little about the competitive environment. So just give us an update on the competitive landscape. Who are we seeing most often on deals in 2025?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So in our business, in every deal, we will either see all or a combination of Oracle through a product called Micros or Symphony, NCR, and global payments through a product called Xenial. One of them or two of them will be a finalist in every deal. We get asked about Toast. Toast has been in every RFP we’ve participated in the last five years. They participate in everything as well.

But generally in the enterprise category, those first three are the ones you see in every deal, imagination of all of them or one of them will be a finalist or the incumbent. And it’s us. There are startups that are here and there, but, you know, categorically, those three really do show up in every single deal. On the engagement and loyalty side of the house, you know, on the online ordering side, the biggest player is Olo by a long shot, so they’re certainly in every RFP. And then on the engagement side, there’s a district collection of three or four businesses, predominantly private equity owned, that will show up.

But nobody comes, I think, to the table with the collective, hey, here’s a suite of products that you can use today. And I think that’s it’s funny. You know, people used to think that was a financial initiative by us. Hey, we wanna just cross sell. I think it’s actually turned out to be a product initiative because the customers now are getting more benefit from it than than before.

And I think that’s, like, critical, which is if we can create more value for the customer, then we can create more value for our shareholders.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: So you touched a little bit about the idea of SMB players trying to move up market to enterprise. So talk a little bit about the difference between the SMB market and enterprise market in terms of the products customers are looking for and also the go to market motion.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: They’re vastly different. The down market business is an incredible place because the sales cycles are short, you can lock in customers on payments rates that sometimes they don’t quite appreciate how high they are, And you have the ability to innovate very quickly because your sales cycles are shorter, you can try out products all the time. The downside of that business is it will have higher churn because as we all have heard for years, restaurants are really bad businesses and it is far more competitive because the sales cycles are so small, so you’ll probably have more competition. But the other difference is that product needs are completely different. So imagine you’re running your local restaurant.

You are the chef, but you’re also the CEO, CMO, the CFO. You’re managing labor, like, got everything. And so the product you need is pretty simplistic. You need something that can help you market, help you manage your labor, your costs, your revenues. Like, is a lot of stuff that one person has or a small team has.

Then imagine you’re like, you know, Arby’s. You know, you’ve got a CIO, CFO. You’ve an IT committee, a compliance committee. You’ve got Accenture. You’ve got I mean, you’ve got an assortment of of of needs.

Then you’ve got franchisees. You’ve got store managers. You’ve got operators. You’ve got supply chain software you’re integrating to. It’s just so dramatically different.

And so I always compare it to one of them is you could have the design of a sports car try to build you a semi truck, but it’ll take them years to figure out how to get all the nuances of that market and and vice versa. And and so that’s why you’ve had this big distinction between the two markets is that it’s just the product needs are so so different, and it’s not it’s not generally that easy to go from one to the other.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Talk a little bit about the current size of your TAM, how you think about that, your market share, and then also relative areas of market share strength versus market share weakness.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So these numbers vary a lot. We tend to take the more conservative view of it. But in The United States and Canada, there’s anywhere from 700,000 to a million restaurants. We think we’re applicable to about half and half is just the enterprise. If somebody bought all of our products, it’s over $10,000 a box.

And so you’re anywhere from a $3,500,000,000 TAM up to 5 or $6,000,000,000 TAM. Our total revenues are less than 300 when it comes to software, and so call it we are less than 10% penetrated from a revenue maximization. And I think it’s probably underestimating how penetrated we are in the sense that every year there’s a set of new products that come out that will eventually be part of products that we don’t realize. And so that $10,000 number will continue to expand. As far as where we’re stronger and weaker from a market share perspective, we are the largest provider in loyalty.

So our loyalty business is really well penetrated, but it’s still growing. Like last quarter, it grew 18%, so it’s still growing at a nice rate. But we are far less penetrated in POS and back office where we’re not even in 10% of the we’re in 25,000 stores or something. So we have a long way to go there, and that’s what I think is really exciting. But the other part that I think is kind of cool is that if we stop selling the new logos today and you just looked at the existing store count and pretend everybody bought every product, we would have 3.5 to four x of TAM just in our existing customer base.

Now I think that those are all made up numbers and people give you those numbers. But if we kind of take out what I think is not really applicable, there’s probably a double in there as far as the upsell you can have to the existing base through cross sell and upsell over time.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Let’s turn a little bit to M and A and inorganic growth where you’ve been quite active over the last year in particular. So let’s start with just Stuzo and Task from last year. Just refresh us on each of those deals, the rationale, and then a quick update as to how they’re going.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. Stuzo, we acquired in March of last year. It’s the was the largest provider of loyalty software in the convenience space, convenience and fuel stores. And we’ve been growing in this market organically pretty quickly and unexpectedly. Convenience stores are the fastest growing food service market in The United States, so convenience stores for the last three and now almost four years are growing at 14%, catering, on food service.

So food is really the growth engine of a convenience store and making up for pitfalls and tobacco in other areas. Every convenience store has now jumped into the food business. So if you go to a convenience store, it’s highly likely they’ve got prepared foods and eventually hot foods and so on and so forth. So that market was looking for the same tools that restaurants were, which is we want online ordering, we

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: want

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: loyalty. And so they were coming to us and we were growing very And candidly, I think we weren’t doing the best job we could because while it was an emerging product line or emerging category, our product was really built for restaurants and and the nuances of that market. And and so we started to make decisions, hey, either we go all in on this market or we get out completely, but we’re not going to be number two or number three. And so Stuzo is a company we’ve been tracking, who we always view as, hey, they are the best in the business. They are priced twice as high as we are.

They have never lost a customer and they are really efficient, very profitable. And so we were really lucky and able to get a new deal done there. We were, I think, really excited at this idea that we could run the same playbook and convenience as we had in restaurants. Fast forward a little over a year, I would say it’s played out great. I think it’s been the best integration we’ve had of a company we’ve acquired yet.

I don’t know the number, but they probably had 175 or 200 people. I think we’ve lost just four or five people across the team outside of the cuts that we made ourselves. And I’d say from a industrial logic perspective, it’s completely hit. We’ve kind of won a big customer. We’ve kind of branded ourselves as par, and we see ourselves being able to have the same success there now that we did restaurants.

So we’re really, really happy with that one. I think we paid a really great price. I think we paid 13 times EBITDA or something for it. Task, which we closed in July of twenty twenty four, was our attempts to grow internationally. Task has sort of two product lines.

One is a loyalty business that was squarely focused on serving McDonald’s, and McDonald’s only in 68 countries and geographies. That business was cash rich, sort of, call it, eight to 13% grower, and the second side of the business was international POS, back office, online ordering platform, very similar to what we have, but internationally focused. And when we bought this business, our pitch to investors was, hey, we need to extend internationally because our US customers are growing much faster internationally than they are. In fact, many of the CIOs are now being global CIOs versus The US CIO, and so we wanted to be able to support them there. And that thesis is also playing out.

We started to see The US customers put us in pilots. We’ve won one or two of them already, is ahead of schedule. And so that’s kind of working nicely. But at the time we got the deal, we also said, hey, there’s a couple call options here that aren’t priced into the deal that could be huge. One is a call option of on Task had a couple large customers that we didn’t really have great business with at par, and could we make one of those into a really, really big relationship over time globally?

And that call option, I’d say, has gotten pretty valuable, where I think we’ll actually be able to crack that code, and that would be amazing if we did it. The second sort of call option we had, I think, within Task is could we find a way to make a global platform for a couple of the large brands that we never had in our TAM, and I think that’s also kind of coming through. And so we’re super excited where we are today. That one, again, we’re just we’re not super far into it, but I would say from where we we bought it to where we are now, I think we have way more confidence and that the plan is going work.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: So you talked about Task unlocking the international opportunity for you or at least beginning to. So talk about what else you need to do internationally to really get to scale on that side of the business.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Honestly, I think it’s time. Task is a relatively small business, has not deployed thousands of sites like we have. And so I suspect it will be very similar trajectory to what we experienced here in The United States, is we’ve got to build the muscle to build, ship, and deploy, and we’re doing it. We are in Guzman and Gomez, is like this the fastest growing chain, which just went public in Australia. We’re in Starbucks.

We’re in sort of this diverse set of customers, and now we’ve got to build a repeatable playbook. The second part of it is we’ve got to build tremendous confidence in our US brands that we can deliver the same quality of service that we do in The US internationally. And so I just think we need time and scale. And we feel really good about it today.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: All right. And then more recently, Delegate, GoSkip, talk a little about those two deals and and how you thought about them.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yeah. The Delegate we acquired in the very last day of 02/2024. It’s a analytics and recovery software business. What what essentially, what it does is analytics the franchisee level, so really powerful tool to help you manage your internal tooling. So that’s everything from getting prompts about inventory expiring to managing labor better.

It’s a lot of what we do at Data Central, but at a really granular store level. And that was a product that spun out of Taco Bell or a large Taco Bell franchisee years ago. The second part of the business is recovery. And recovery is a really cool product that how we first discovered these guys in that it was almost like an auditing tool to make sure that you were being charged appropriately by DoorDash Uber Eats, third party delivery companies, and then recovering those fees, but also giving you prompts to hey, kitchen wait times are like forty minutes. Maybe you push off delivery times at DoorDash Uber Eats, or you shut down DoorDash Uber Eats, handle the phones in the kitchen.

And we discovered Delegate, honestly, because it was growing so fast across our base, we’re like, what the hell is this thing? Fast forward, it took us quite a long time, over a year, to get them to do a deal, but it’s a beautiful product that’s being integrated now into our And so within a very short period of time, our customers will not be able to distinct, was that delegator or was that data it’s all gonna be we’ve branded it ParOps. So it’ll be single sign on, one application, one code base, and with just different modules. And so it is really exciting for us because I think it’s gonna also create a roadmap for us to do more in that back office category.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Great. And then I’ll pause for a minute for the audience if anyone has any questions. As you think about your kind of growth algorithm and financial algorithm. So you’ve gotten to EBITDA profitability, you’re maintaining strong organic ARR growth. How do you think about the growth levers going forward?

And how do you think about the trade off of expanding margins versus driving more growth?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: You got to do both. I mean, think we’ve always been really, really focused on the metric for us will always be free cash flow per share, but the duration of that free cash flow per share. Like there’s a lot of stuff we could do to juice it up today, but then the duration of that cash flow stream wouldn’t be there for the long run. And so we’ve always tried to look at it as saying, how do we maximize the dollar of ARR lasting for as long as possible? Because I think that dollar of ARR, we think there’s, you know, really that high.

If you sort of did the math in the last couple quarters and see the incremental margin of each dollar of ARR, it’s 50%. It’s dropping down very aggressively, which is great. And so our algorithm has been to try to grow the revenues at greater than 20% while keeping the OpEx near flat. So we’ve done that now for almost two years in a row, And we kind of guided on our Q4 call that we think OpEx will grow low single digits. But interestingly, it went down this quarter versus a year ago.

And so we’ve been managing the OpEx really tightly in order ensure that we have that drop down to EBITDA and sort of measures that I think one of the few things I think is misunderstood about our company is just how much margin I see coming off the next couple of years. As an example, today our gross margins on our software business are about 69 roughly 69%. We’ve always said, hey, over time we wanna get that to the seventies and and maybe higher. Today, our our r and d as a percentage of sales is 25. You know?

So we’re sort of best in class enterprise software. I don’t think we wanna go too much lower than that because I’m probably not investing enough in the products. Our sales and marketing expense is only 15% of revenue. And so if you look at the key lines of the p and l, those are pretty darn efficient. And so that to me means that scale is the only blocker from us being a 5% margin business to a 25% to 30% margin business.

It’s just a factor of scale because the actual core products are there. Another, I think, fascinating statistic is, we broke this out during our call, is that year over year, our EBITDA improved by about $15,000,000. Of that $15,000,000, the vast majority of that was organic. That was not through the acquisitions that we we we just talked about. And so the core business, which, you know, was relatively small, was like a hundred and 20 or $30,000,000 before these acquisitions, pulled out almost $15,000,000 of EBITDA.

That’s a ton of operating leverage in just one year. And so I think that’s also kind of a little bit hidden in whole story. And then what’s cool is that as we acquire these businesses, we generally are actually able to accelerate the growth post it. We did that with Punch, we’ve done that with Task, we’ve done that with SUSO. We’re good on that growth side.

And then we’ll run the same OpEx playbook with those, and so you get like this you had a compounding impact over time. I do expect us to be a really high margin business over time. I think it’s a little bit underestimated, but we have to deliver to kind of prove that, I think, to the street over time.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Got it. Any questions in the audience? Alright. I have a couple more.

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So they’re not all the same. I think and I’ll I’ll try to speak categorically, but it’s hard because they’re they’re different. But, you know, generally, I think the hard part about having the incumbent product in in in this market particularly is that if you wanna win, it’s a product issue. It’s not a a go to market issue. It’s not anything other than we have to have you know, you have to have a more modern and and better product.

And I think when you have so much scale, it’s hard to say, hey, I’m gonna rebuild the product. What do you tell your customers? What do you tell your board, your management that you’re gonna take down margins to go start rejiggering the product? And so what what these companies have done has been really focused on monetizing that base better, and it is not, I would argue, not done super well. So if you look at those three names, they’ve all tried to either monetize way more through payments, which I think has been a tough challenge.

They’ve tried to acquire their resellers. But what they haven’t done is said, we’re gonna rewrite the product. Or hey, we’re gonna move if you think back to the cloud transition years ago with Autodesk or Adobe, those were rocky, they worked and they were amazing, but they told you that. An all in initiative. And the only reason I can sort of seriously empathize is when we took over PAR, it it was a rebuild of the product that got us to be where we are today.

And so I think the challenge has been that they haven’t felt they haven’t had the ability or haven’t yet kind of addressed the product challenge. And so to me, it’s band days versus like the long term win. The other thing that they’re doing, one of them in particular, is aggressively cutting price. It’s trying to win a deal off of price. And you’ll win some deals for sure.

There are people that will make that mistake, but generally, I think it actually highlights the value of our product. But that’s kind of what I’ve seen for them so far. Could it change? For sure. You know, if you traditional ones?

Yeah. What are you most concerned about? You know, would say our business is pretty well known. NCR’s been struggling for a long time, and so we don’t we worry about them less. You know, I think with Global’s, you know, acquisition like Xenial, which is a product we compete with, is probably gonna get less attention, you know.

And so it’s probably Oracle we worry about the most because Oracle has relationships beyond just being your point of sale. That might be your database, it might be your ERP. And so that’s probably one we’d probably worry about the most. So it depends on the chain. There are one or two chains that would be a real issue.

You mentioned one of them. But Birkin is running on the same POS platform that we have 25,000 other customers on. And they’ve been super supportive of us wanting to grow our business. And in many ways, they wanted us to get bigger because one of big concerns was how small we were when we won that deal. In the end, I think the question comes down to what is your competitive alternative?

And I would argue that no matter what chain you are, are you really gonna pass on the best product because you’re scared that a competitor is using it and you’re gonna use like the crappy JV product? Like, I don’t think so. I think you’re still gonna buy the best product. And then you’re make it work for you in a way that delivers value to your customers. So certainly there’ll be certain deals that we look at, and we’re evaluating some of them right now where there are huge revenue deals, game changing, but we would then have to commit to not selling it.

That’s just a decision we’ll make at that time. But generally, most of our customers have been really supportive of our growth and in fact, as references. I mean, Burger King is an amazing partner for us and is our best reference call.

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Great. I think we have one more question. So just last question for you, Suneet. You mentioned earlier in terms of things that par is or that are misunderstood about par, one being your margin potential. What else is really misunderstood about par?

Suneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: I think that there’s probably a couple of things. I’ll go fast. You know, I think the durability of the end market I used to be a software investor, I used to always say that people always screw this up. Your churn is almost exactly correlated to the end market you sell. You can have the best product in the world, but if you’re selling to a high churn category, it doesn’t really matter.

Enterprise restaurants, QSR restaurants, are really durable businesses, and they for a long time. And I think that’s sometimes lost in in sort of the macro talk. I think the second part that is, you know, at times misunderstood about us at par is I don’t I don’t think we’ve ever viewed ourselves as, hey. Let’s just be great at restaurant tech. The idea is to build a platform that can serve food service across the category.

And so today, we’re in restaurants. We’re growing so fast in in convenience, and I think you’ll see us do more and more over time. And I think a lot of that is rooted in the ambition of the people at par. And, you know, you know, know of the story, but, you know, we were, you know, nine, ten weeks ago going bankrupt six years ago and had less than 10,000,000 in revenue. And today, we’re here.

And so I don’t think it’s ego or hubris, it’s just there’s an ambition to do a lot more. And our path to do that is being we’ve done before, which is we obsess on delivering for the customer. We obsess on making sure that the customer’s happy so then we can have the right to sell them more and and kinda continue this flywheel. But I think we kinda feel like, hey, we found this flywheel that actually really works, and you know, where else can we eventually put that to work?

Neil Talal, Managing Director, JPMorgan: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Saved. Thanks for being here again. Thanks, Neil.

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