PAR Technology at Morgan Stanley Conference: Integrated Solutions Shine

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, PAR Technology (NYSE: PAR) highlighted its strategic focus at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company emphasized its integrated software solutions for enterprise restaurants and convenience stores, showcasing a unique value proposition amid a competitive landscape. While expressing optimism about growth opportunities, PAR also acknowledged challenges such as slowing restaurant traffic.

Key Takeaways

• PAR Technology aims to simplify operations for enterprise restaurants and convenience stores with integrated software solutions.
• The company focuses on cross-selling and strategic M&A to drive growth and margin expansion.
• PAR is targeting gross margins in the mid-70s and operating margins in the mid-20s or higher.
• The restaurant industry faces challenges like traffic slowdown and labor shortages, but digital transformation is still in early stages.
• PAR differentiates itself from competitors like Square and Toast by focusing on enterprise clients.

Financial Performance and Strategy

PAR Technology is balancing growth with operational efficiency. The company integrates acquired businesses to leverage operating scale and centralizes R&D in cost-effective locations. With a focus on achieving gross margins in the mid-70s and operating margins in the mid-20s, PAR aims for continuous margin expansion through cross-selling and strategic M&A activities.

• Spends 12-13% of revenue on sales and marketing, which is efficient compared to peers.
• R&D expenses are under 25% of revenue, reflecting operational efficiency.
• Targets gross margin growth of 50 to 150 basis points quarterly.

Operational Updates

PAR Technology is committed to its "better together" thesis, integrating various software solutions to streamline operations for restaurant operators. The company’s ecosystem approach focuses on providing a unified platform that replaces multiple vendors, enhancing functionality for enterprise clients.

• Core markets include enterprise restaurants and convenience stores, avoiding the competitive single-store market.
• Product offerings include loyalty and online ordering, point of sale, and payments solutions.
• M&A strategy prioritizes product fit, with an emphasis on creating unique customer experiences.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, PAR Technology is optimistic about its pipeline for 2025, with significant opportunities in cross-selling, upselling, and new deals, particularly in the convenience store sector. The company is also exploring the potential impact of robotics and AI, though adoption in its market segment remains nascent.

• Sees strong growth potential in convenience POS and loyalty solutions.
• Explores labor automation to address labor shortages in the restaurant industry.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, Savneet Singh, President and CEO, emphasized the importance of focusing on enterprise clients to avoid direct competition with companies like Square and Toast, which target single-store restaurants. He also noted that while robotics and AI hold promise, their adoption in the industry is still in the early stages.

• Few companies, such as White Castle and Sweetgreen, are currently implementing robotics.
• AI adoption is in its infancy, with potential for future growth.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Unidentified speaker: Good? Yes. Thanks, everybody, for joining. Savneet Singh is the President and CEO of PAR Technology. He joined the company’s Board in 2018 and subsequently took over as CEO in 2019.

He is also a Morgan Stanley alum. So welcome home. Great to have you. For those who don’t know Parr, can you give us a quick summary of what you guys do?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Sure. We sell software to enterprise restaurants to help them manage their day to day workflow. Our solutions are broken up into two buckets. One bucket is called engagement software. So this is software that touches the end consumer like you or me, so that’s loyalty software and online ordering.

And then the second bucket is software that the operator in the store would use and this is point of sale and back office software and kind of underneath it all we have payments.

Unidentified speaker: You’ve significantly expanded the product portfolio from POS into loyalty and payments and back office software. I’d love to hear your thoughts on truly becoming a platform. And I know you’ve talked a lot in your earnings about your better together thesis. So can you explain that for us?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yes. So I’d say stepping back for a second, what’s happening in restaurants and retail is that they’re all going through some form of digital disruption. We used to say, the reason I took the job at par was that you could see the software was in the restaurant, the restaurant didn’t realize it yet. And essentially, whenever there is a digital challenge in one of these businesses, they go and buy an individual software solution to solve that challenge. So they would say, okay, I’ve got a point of sale system.

Now I need online ordering to have a website and then I need a mobile vendor to create an app for mobile, then I need loyalty vendors, then I need to offer some promotions lenders, then I need QR code payments, then I need supply chain. And now we get and all these little things are like a new vendor, new vendor, new vendor, new vendor. And our thesis was that that is a horrible way to go about it because you now have a bunch of different vendors trying to create a unified guest experience. And And then on the back end, the operational elements are even more complicated because those products don’t integrate. And so the back end is crazy because you don’t know if a customer here is the same customer over here.

You don’t know if the menu here is menu over here. And so our thesis was always to try to bring these together into a more integrated offering so that we could actually give control back to the restaurants. And the way I like to think about it is if you’re the CIO of a retail or restaurant organization, your job has shifted to becoming a vendor manager and managing all the vendors. And our hope is that we can make you more focused on your end customer again and create this great experience. And so our theory has been that as we build or acquire products, integrate them into our existing suite of products, we can create unique functionality for that customer that does two things.

One, it makes their life simpler because it’s one vendor, one service desk, one support desk. But two, you’re getting product functionality you couldn’t get because now we have two products under one roof and we can build stuff on top of that.

Unidentified speaker: That makes a lot of sense. And to double click a bit on product, I know you mentioned it a little bit before, but what product categories are you selling into? And I know M and A plays a pretty meaningful role in your business. How do you view M and A as part of your go forward strategy?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So today we sell loyalty and online ordering in one bucket and then we sell point of sale back of house, back of house kind of being inventory accounting labor and then payments as I said, it kind of goes through everything that we do. And as we look at M and A, M and A for us is a product journey. It’s not a financial journey. The financials have to work, but it’s really focused on product. And the reason why is that we think that our success is being able to create buy an additional product, plug it into our call it our ecosystem, integrate it and then give the customer a unique experience at the end of that that they couldn’t get before.

So you should be able to say, hey, when I had those two products under two different vendors, it was good. But when I had that under one vendor being par, I had a completely different experience that was way better. The example I give you, Emil, and it is like kind of extreme, but it’s really true is that we have a back office product and a POS product and those are now sort of an integrated offering. The equivalent to this would be and everyone and I just assembled to some investors, but would be if you use Outlook and you have your email and your calendar, it would be what literally happens in a restaurant is you’d sign on to your email and you’d sign it again separately to your calendar. And that’s kind of annoying because they aren’t integrated even though they’re in the same suite of doing the same type of stuff.

Then you’re trying to set up a calendar invite and you’re like, oh wait, my contacts and email over here don’t actually come to my calendar. So then I got to go look up, go back there, forget the email. That’s like how restaurant technology works. These things that should be so obviously connected are actually distinct products. And so when we connect that, we create this and then imagine you’re like, oh, my God, one day my email, my calendar, my contacts, they all flow through everything I do.

My team is like a beautiful integrated process. That’s what part of it does to the restaurant. And that is hugely impactful if you’re a person running a restaurant today because your job is so complicated and you are really struggling with all these vendors and new forms of customers and so that’s kind of what we do. And so when we think of M and A, we think how do we create that experience all over again? How do we create that next thing you’re going to add to the suite to make your life easier?

And so that’s why I think our M and A has worked because it’s been it’s a product development exercise. It is not a let’s just create the biggest financial outcome we can. And if we can prove that product fit, then we look at the financial cultural fit and then try to make it work. And one thing we’re really, really proud about is that when we acquire a business, we are almost always able to accelerate the growth, retain the people, higher retention rates than any company in software without adding an additional dollar of expense.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great. And I think the word you used is ecosystem, which clearly you’ve built that. I’m curious, you’ve mentioned the point of sale kind of being the key component in the value chain or in the ecosystem. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Point of sale is a heartbeat of the restaurant. It’s the ERP, it’s picked your analog. It is the system that becomes a system of record because every other product will come to you with a whole bunch of data and then you don’t know which one to pick and so you always end up back at the point of sale. And the reason why is almost every product integrates at the point of sale. So if you’re running HR applications, you’re running back office, you’re running online ordering, all those systems are injecting or pulling from the point of sale system.

So that kind of becomes like the system of record that everything comes off of. Said differently, if you’re the CFO of a restaurant company, you’re going to have the data from POS, nothing else to be what goes into your general ledger. And so if you get POS right, you have undue influence on the end customer because you run the most important product that they have. And so they’ll kind of trust you with it. As an example, this is a horrible example, but if you had like a pacemaker and you needed to like add something to a pacemaker, like are you going to go pick a new vendor and be like, I’m going to use the widget of the pacemaker that I already use that keeps me alive every single day is probably going to use like, it’s kind of like that if you do a good job.

And so when we took over the company, like I mentioned, back I think it’s 2018, like that was the vision we sort of saw, which was like if you can get point of sale right, you can then build on top of it and build a suite. And conversely, get out of the conversation of I want a better point of sale set into, I want a platform that can actually deliver these outcomes that I couldn’t get before.

Unidentified speaker: I appreciate all the analogies. I definitely can relate to all this. I hope not.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yes. I want to

Unidentified speaker: talk a little bit about TAM. What are your focus areas within the restaurant landscape and outside of it? Who are you targeting?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So our core markets are enterprise restaurants and enterprise convenience stores. We don’t do anything outside of that right now. And we think it’s a great pool to fish in because, one, it’s an area that is just early in this sort of digital transformation cycle. Convenience stores are still, for the most part, running point of sale systems and inventory systems that are run on servers in the store, still not cloud based. Restaurants are still really early in digital transformation and how they run their entire their world.

So I just think it’s early TAM on both of those segments becoming digital. Second, it’s far less competitive than selling to single store restaurants because you’re not competing with Square, Toast, Lightspeed, I mean, just all these amazing companies. Most of our competition is, I call it Silicon Valley 1 Point 0, the big companies of the past. So it’s a little bit less competitive. And then three, I think that our sort of idea of better together, integrate solutions really works at the enterprise well, because if you’re selling into a small restaurant, like do they really need complicated loyalty?

Do they really need complicated analytics? Not really. And so I think while early on, it’s a slower process to sell a lot of products. I think like the oil well is really deep because today you’re selling the point of sale and back office and loyalty and five years from now, you’re selling them a dozen other things that integrate into it. And so we’re squarely focused on those two end markets.

Unidentified speaker: That makes a lot of sense. And if I want to get into a few customer examples, but first, I would just ask, what is your pitch? If you go to like Burger King is one I would love to hear you talk through. What’s the initial sales pitch to them? What can you do for them that they’re not already doing?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So, when you’re talking to enterprises, it’s generally an RFP process. So you get the pitch, but it’s usually after you’ve kind of said, answer the 300 questions and it’s like a dense thing usually made by a fancy consulting firm. And so the way I’d answer is like, it’s not the pitch. We sell enterprise software. That is a product business.

Your product has to win. We get the best salespeople, the best looking CEO, like it doesn’t really matter. It is the product that wins in the end. And so our pitch is the product. Look at the product and the functionality underneath it.

And what’s amazing about our products is, they are the most scalable, the most stable, which means a lot in our category. Now it doesn’t sound sexy, but like stability really, really matters. And we think the most innovative because it’s we’re the most open. We have more integrations and API than anybody else in the industry. And so we’re able to kind of say, hey, you came for this old product that is not open API, that doesn’t support like modern workflows, that has doesn’t have real time data.

And oh, by the way, it’s not really in the cloud, but they tell you in the cloud and you can move this more modern solution. And that’s kind of like point one, which is we get we stick our foot in the door and say that’s why you want to pick our point of sale product in this example. And then we go in and say, hey, if you attach our back office product, look at this amazing outcome you can do that you couldn’t do before, like not having to log into your calendar and your email and having separate contacts and so on and so forth. And then you kind of get them on this like, oh, wow, like that’s really interesting. This is sort of integrated.

And then you kind of go from there and you say, well, guess what, if you had payments, here’s all the functionality and payments you couldn’t get before. We can give you the Starbucks reload card. We can give you a one tap loyalty and loyalty program in one tap. And so you kind of get in on this excitement of better together as we get going. Now we were to be candid, like this is a thesis we developed in 2018.

It is manifesting in the last twelve to eighteen months. So we were way, way too early, but it’s clearly like working now. And I think it has a long runway just because retail and restaurant customers should not be tech companies. And I think it’s been really challenging for them to sort of all of a sudden say, I’m going to make my core competency not food, but like building software. Like that’s not actually what they’re great at.

That’s not why you chose to go to that chain. And so giving them that control again, I think is why we have this is a kind of a decent runway in front of us.

Unidentified speaker: There you clearly have a ton of value to add in a lot of different ways. What is the typical if I were to go to an enterprise restaurant, what is the first sale and what is the motion of, hey, you should add on this next module? How long does that typically take and is that a motion you see a lot?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So generally, you try to land on point of sale because again, like I mentioned, you have a lot of influence if you do a good job. And actually, we just had our earnings last week and I mentioned we signed eight new point of sale deals in Q4. All of them took an additional product in those deals. So what’s the motion? Well, hopefully, you’re buying two products at the point of that original sale.

Generally from there, it takes about another year to get the next product in the door. And that’s usually our back office solution. And that’s because we get the ability to kind of convince you of this better together fits and this better together functionality. So we sort of announced on our call, one of our largest customers is now using our back office product. What was amazing about that is that’s a deal we actually lost for the back office business a year plus ago to a well heeled, sexy cooler company.

But once we’re able to convince the brand that, hey, when you add this like to the our existing products, so you’re getting all this functionality you couldn’t get before, they did it. But it’s usually about a year after that that you can get going to the next one.

Unidentified speaker: To talk a bit about market again, since COVID, obviously the restaurant landscape has been dynamic to say the least. What are the challenges that you’re seeing restaurants face right now? And what trends across the segments that you cover?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Categorically, there is a slowdown in traffic across restaurants. Now it’s not evenly dispersed. You see that far more significantly in single stores like the smaller restaurants. You see that dramatically in full service dining, so kind of higher ticket prices. You see that very marginally in quick service, which is almost all of our business.

So that trade down from expensive meal to cheap meal is like really very evident in our numbers. The second thing I think we see is that those special concepts that have that special something are doing incredibly well. Sweetgreen, Kava, like the brands that have captured the mind of a customer, we do not see any slowdown kind of happening there. I was mentioning, we work with a really cool, one of the best burger chains in the world in Canada and like their store in Toronto is still busting records every month and not it’s not a super cheap thing. And so that’s the kind of second thing.

In aggregate though, I would say the slowdown, if you look at just our base of customers, which is a much healthier base than restaurants as a whole because we service our enterprise and QSR, it’s pretty small impact. And what’s interesting to us is like it’s a tailwind because it actually accelerates a lot of the conversations to say, hey, like I need to reinvest my loyalty program because I need to get people in there because I’m scared of traffic declines or I want to increase bucket size or I have an issue with labor because there’s going to be less labor availability on automating my labor. So it’s actually a decent pulling of customers because we see that actually being a tailwind for us. Now these comps go down 10% like who knows, but in the QSR and fast casual space, that doesn’t really happen.

Unidentified speaker: And how just to stay on customers a bit, how does the pipeline look for 2025?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So it’s really strong. I think we see more opportunity in cross sell and upsell and new deals than we probably ever had before. The business is generally doing strong and I keep sort of skipping over the convenience side of our business, which is heavy on the food side as well. We have record pipeline there more than we’ve kind of ever had before. And so it looks really strong right now.

Now how it’ll look two quarters from now, I don’t know if the economy really does slow down. We’ll see change. It could happen. But right now, it’s really strong. It’s strongest in convenience, POS and then like loyalty third.

But I do think loyalty will actually pick up because if there’s a slowdown, you’re going

Unidentified speaker: to see much more investment happen there. And in these times, I think it’s the ecosystem is obviously important because it’s kind of a mitigate to traffic. But I am curious, you sort of touched on it, but if someone’s not using par at the enterprise level, are they cobbling together a bunch of different vendors or is it a legacy ERP?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: No, what are a bunch of vendors? It is a bunch of just for vendors. And again, remember, five, six years ago, it was five vendors that mattered. You had a POS system, you had a back office system, you probably had some sort you had your an HR system, but you didn’t have like was no QR code payments, there was no like let me scan a table and order food, there wasn’t certainly wasn’t loyalty, there certainly wasn’t online ordering, there was no integration to DoorDash, new barite, right. These are all like brand new things.

And so cobbled together, it’s like the right word, but it’s like it wasn’t like a ton of stuff. It was like a few applications. I would argue you didn’t need an integrated suite of stuff back then because you didn’t have all these you wanted your products when it was accessible through so many different channels. And that is going to continue, right? Like you’re going to have TikTok ordering, you’re going to have ordering in the virtual world, like you’re going to just see more avenues to order food.

The AI agents are going to allow you to order food directly and that will be, I think, super exciting for our business, scary if you’re DoorDash and Uber Eats. So I just think that like that’s what’s created this acceleration of vendors.

Unidentified speaker: And so you kind of mentioned implicitly some growth vectors, but I am curious, where do you see not just your business, but where do you see the restaurant landscape going in the

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: It’s interesting. So for the last like fifteen years, it’s been said that restaurants are over retail like the malls in America. But for some reason, like they have same store sales growth almost every year. And so the obvious answer would be like there’ll be consolidation, there’s too many restaurants, but like it really hasn’t played out. What I think is going to happen in the restaurant industry is that you are going to see tremendous change in the way that a restaurant operates.

But I don’t think you’re going to see a tremendous change in the restaurants that you buy from. Does that make sense? I think a lot of this investment into new chains, new products, like most of it, I actually don’t think it’s going to work because I think there is still this emotional, visceral connection to the food you buy or eat like I’m always going to land in SFO and go to In N Out, no matter like what exists because there’s some like emotional connection to that amazing experience. And so I think a lot of the research for today there’s going to be all there’s going to be all these new McDonald’s and all these new things. I’m not a buyer on that.

I just think the way we operate and get our food is going to change. So what do I mean by that? I think it is inevitable to have a lot of robotics in the kitchen. Being in the back of a restaurant is a horrendous job. Like it is just a job that you would never want your you used to say you want your kids to work at a restaurant, but you don’t want them to have that job.

It is brutal. People are just nasty to you. And it is tough because ten years not even ten years, five years ago, you just had to deal with people coming out of your store getting your food. Now you have to go to DoorDash guy, the Uber guy, you have to look at their thing, recognize to another system, to another tablet, like you got the people in the drive thru, like it’s a disastrous thing. And so like how do you solve that?

You can put a bunch more people there and say you’re the drive thru guy, you’re the door that’s not economical. And so you’re going to have a bunch of robots making your food and you’re going to have a bunch of automation of how that stuff flows to the restaurant, whether it’s the cubicle that Sweetgreen has done or something more sophisticated. So I think that happened in the restaurant is the complete change. If you think about it, I used to have this slide, but the way a restaurant looks, the QSR restaurant looks today isn’t that different from like 1980. There’s a big counter, There’s two or 3.8 sales systems.

Now there’s some kiosks, but like it’s pretty much the same four walls. But the actual operations have changed so much. 20% of your orders are coming from DoorDash and Uber Eats like how those four walls haven’t changed to support that, right? You should probably build that out of the back of the house. That doesn’t interfere with you guys have probably been to restaurants where it’s like you’re trying to place I got kids, so unfortunately go to these unhealthy restaurants.

And you’re like trying to place an order and you’re waiting for ten minutes because they’re putting all the DoorDash stuff up there and the drivers don’t show up for fifteen minutes. Like that is all going to be sequenced through better technology. And so I think the to answer your question on restaurants, I think the actual unit of fulfillment is going to change significantly because it’s the only way I think that this is going to like be sustainable. I don’t think that the restaurants are going to change that much as far as the type of food that we eat and so on and so forth. I think that’s just going to be a slow evolution.

As far as like restaurant technology and AI, I think AI is going to hit the category that we serve today really late. I know I’m probably counter to most, but we still have customers that I have to explain to the cloud is safe. It’s still really early. And I think we have a customer advisory board and I last two years I always say, rank these things as like what you’re most interested in. AI is number one two years in a row.

And then I say, okay, here are the 15 items that are on a roadmap and they’re buckets not the specific items. Rank how you want me to like spend on these and AI is always last. And I’m like, so if they’re not willing to put their money behind it, like it’s just a cool thing to talk about, but not a cool thing to execute on. Now part of that is probably on us, which is we got to do better job, saying here’s the value we can drive. But I think that AI is coming.

I just think it’s in the category that we are solving, the operations of the business have to change in order to support all these AI ideas.

Unidentified speaker: Let’s pivot just a bit to the financials. You’ve managed to actively to grow active sites pretty significantly over the last few years. I’m curious, with your ecosystem play and obviously you have a multi product strategy going, how do you balance the let’s go get new customers versus let’s continue to upsell our current base?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: You and I talked about it earlier, like we are an ambitious culture, so we’re an and culture, so it’s not an or, and so you got to do both. And we measure it pretty precisely and push it really hard. So I don’t think we think one or the other, we just have to do both. I think what’s great about the growth in site count is that it’s certainly expanded the opportunity to cross sell and upsell and that’s what’s working really well. We’re sort of seeing like, wow, we can push this product here, let’s push this product here.

But at the same time, we’re in like less than 30,000 of sale sites. That’s obviously that’s pathetic like we should be so much bigger than that. And so I think I still get really excited about that front end, if you will. And so I just think we have to do both and I think we feel really good about it and the execution has been really strong by the team’s done a great job and also really efficient. I think one of the things that people are sort of seeing about our financial model is we spend 12%, thirteen % of sales on revenue on sales and marketing.

There’s not many software companies that are better than that, nobody at our size. We spend less than 25% of revenue on R and D, so we’re really efficient there. And so I think we have the opportunity to be sort of best in class margins while still doing both of those things because we of our obsession on we’ve got four or five products, one person can sell all those products. We don’t need five salespeople.

Unidentified speaker: Very interesting. And you kind of led me to the next question, which is you’ve obviously demonstrated a lot of top tier growth over the last few years actually and then while also generating a lot of operating leverage. I’m just curious how do you balance that? I mean, it’s very difficult to do both things at the same time. You’ve managed to do so.

What are the levers going forward for both growth and operating leverage?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: So historically, we were lucky in that we had levers to have this operating margin expansion from two like big areas. One was we when we acquire a business, we truly integrate that business. So there’s one engineering team. There’s not five engineering teams because we have five different applications. It’s one engineering team.

It’s one culture. We put our people in there. It’s one brand. We really bring that under one roof. And what that allows us for us to then centralize R and D in a low cost geography.

And so that’s been a really great sell. And so we’re I forget the math, but organically doubled revenues without growing R and D expense. That’s hard to do, but we did it because we were still adding people just in a much lower geographic base. And so like that was a core lever that we had. The second thing that we were able to do is sort of the sales model I mentioned was as we started to change our sales model and have one person sell more and more products.

And so we got a ton of efficiency there. And the last thing is we are a really, really ambitious, intense team. Whenever firms come to me, they walk away being like that’s not your normal software company. That is just a little bit of experience. And so on the G and A levels, we’re like we literally just say like, sorry, HR, you get forgot a way to make math work with no new people.

Sorry, finance team, forgot to do it. And so there, but to your point on like what are we doing going forward? So I think there’s a couple of levers we have to play with. One is the cross sell motion is wildly accretive to the margin because you’re selling additional product without the sales marketing expense, without the go margin. So that’s like critical to get that right and that will create more margin expansion.

The second thing I think you’ll see us do is continue to do M and A that is accretive to our rule of 40 score. And so that will help. These are businesses that are hopefully growing faster and higher margins, the potential for higher margins after they come into par. I think that’s another lever that we have. And then third, just scale.

Like we still think we’re under scaled. And so I think we haven’t really seen the peak of our gross margins to anywhere close to that yet.

Unidentified speaker: Great. We have a couple of minutes for questions if anybody has anything.

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Yes. So we talk about this a lot publicly. So we’ve historically said, we want our gross margin to be in the mid-70s over time and we want our operating margins to be in the mid-20s or higher. And the way we get there is we’ve sort of said, we want our R and D expense to be 25% of revenue, our sales and marketing expense to be 15% of revenue and our G and A expense to be 10% and you can get to 25%, thirty % margins there. Now as you heard, we’re way ahead of schedule on the sales and marketing R and D.

We’re already below the targets or beating the targets there. Where we need to do work is on the gross margin side, which is we just had our call last week and we talked about how we think it’s going to grow 50 to 150 basis points every single quarter. And then on the G and A side, and the G and A side is just scale. Once revenue base gets a little bit bigger, we’ll do it there. So of all the like fears that I have, like getting to long term the long term margin targets is not one I worry about tremendously because we’ve already done it on the two hardest levers to get right, which is sales and R and D.

Unidentified speaker: An unrelated question, you talked about robotics in the backroom, making the food, etcetera. Who’s doing that? I recall Kura Sushi is doing Which brands?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Or the name of the company? Which

Unidentified speaker: companies are doing that?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Today is very few. So White Castle has a thing with Flippy, MISO Robotics is a company doing it. I forget what brands are in, but it’s very, very few. Sweetgreen has their Infinite Kitchen in Chicago that makes their salads for you. We’re still really early in it, but I think it’s unavoidable today for that not to happen more.

And by the way, it doesn’t need to mean like there’s a robot making your whole meal, but the prep stuff like why is preparation done by a human being when that human being can focus on, I guess. So most restaurants have two hours, three hours, four hours, sometimes six hours of prep before the restaurant opens. That can be done by robot, cutting the tomatoes, cutting the whatever the onions, like all that prep can be done. Not even that all the testing of the food, right. You got to test the temperature, right.

Like all of this can be much more automated to make the employee experience better. But to start? We’re I mean, we’re not even out the dugout yet. We’re early.

Unidentified speaker: You made this great point earlier about your focus on enterprise partially because you’re avoiding those competitors that focus on single stores, if you will. But Toast is making a big deal about going after your space. Can you help us understand why we shouldn’t be worried about that?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: Well, I worry about everything. So the guy doesn’t sleep and it’s kind of paranoid at all. But I would say this whole thing. So I’ve always said that I’m a huge toast fanboy. Like I was an investor in toast as I discovered Para, so I’m forever grateful.

And I really have tremendous admiration for them. But their journey to enterprise has been so when I was on the board of Parr in 2018, the big bear case was Toast is coming to the enterprise. So it’s been a really long journey for them to get there because the enterprise functionality is dramatically different than down market. As far as their growth, I’ve actually said for years at all these investor conferences, I expect them to come into the full service dining market, the table service market, that market that we don’t play in historically. And the reason why it was pretty simple.

They have an incredible offering in the single store restaurants for eating, sitting down at a table service restaurant. The tablets, the QR code, it’s beautiful, it’s amazing. And so I thought they have a great competitive advantage to go take that functionality, bring it to enterprise and something special to get built. So that’s point one. And then point two, they didn’t have a competitor.

The competitors were NCO or Oracle, the legacy tech guys. And so I’ve always assumed they were going to win that market. Ironically, I actually argue opposite. We’re probably becoming a thorn on their side because now we have expanded into that full service dining market. We look at it as expanding our TAM again, ironically, because that wasn’t a business we played until the last twelve months.

And so we have now expanded into that market and then we’ll kind of see who wins. But that wasn’t a market we really played in a bigger degree. The last thing I’d say is, there’s plenty of market. I have always expected for them to be a competitor. I expect other people to eventually become competitors.

We’re not going to win the whole market. And I think if you’re again, I think if you had to choose CRM and talk to whoever their head of enterprise or enterprise sales, they’d say like it’s going to be a dogfight and it’s going to take a long time before that. And I think our moat here will be that multi product connectivity that I mentioned that I think is very, very hard for anyone to replicate.

Unidentified speaker: As a follow-up, I should know this, but you’re expanding to full service. That means you have your own hardware. And is it competitive with that of Toast, which seems to be loved, the hardware?

Savneet Singh, President and CEO, PAR Technology: We think so. We won very large we’re winning great business with it. It’s not hardware that wins the deal though, like the Toast hardware, it’s awesome, but it is not even it’s a third party that makes it and you can just make a deal with another third party who make the same same darn thing. It’s the soft the connectivity of software that’s really the secret sauce. The hardware is like, we’ve been make Par was sounded on selling hardware to restaurant chains for forty years.

So most people in the restaurant industry would tell you we’ve got the best hardware in the market.

Unidentified speaker: Any other questions? Great. That’s me. Thank you. Thanks, Neil.

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