Ep 79 - The Rise of Rivalry Tech with Aaron Knape

Transcript

Transcripts are generated by machine learning, so typos may be present.

BTB (00:00):

Welcome to the Building Texas Business Podcast, interviews with thought leaders and organizational visionaries from across industry. Join us as we talk about the latest trends, challenges, and growth opportunities to take your business to the next level. The Building Texas Business Podcast is brought to you by BoyarMiller, providing counsel beyond expectations. Find out how we can make a meaningful difference to your business at boyarmiller.com and by your podcast team where having your own podcast is as easy as being a guest on ours. Discover more at yourpodcast.team. Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hanslik.

Chris (00:41):

In this episode, you will meet Aaron Knape, CEO and Co-founder of Rivalry Tech. Aaron tells a fascinating story about how missing a home run during the World Series led to he and his partner creating a successful technology company in the food delivery industry. Aaron, thanks again for taking time. Welcome to Building Texas Business.

Aaron (01:04):

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris (01:06):

So let’s talk about rivalry tech. Tell the audience kind of what rivalry Tech is. What are you known for?

Aaron (01:12):

Okay. Yeah, so we’re known as well. Our tagline is we modernize order fulfillment. So if you think about if you’re at a baseball game, for example, then you want a hot dog or a beer delivered to your seat. It’s our app that you would use to order the food, and it’s our software and it’s our hardware that’s back in the kitchen that lets the people back there get that food out faster. So known for sports and entertainment. We’re now in healthcare, fast food, restaurants, hotels, resorts, casinos. Wow. So kind of

Chris (01:40):

Like the Amazon Prime of food delivery.

Aaron (01:43):

I think so, yeah, it is.

Chris (01:45):

I like that. So what was the inspiration to start the company?

Aaron (01:49):

Yeah, so my partner, Marshall Law, actually, his full name is Jesse James Marshall Law. No boy, no joke. Yeah, that’s his real name.

Chris (01:56):

Parents are comedians.

Aaron (01:58):

They must’ve been, yeah, they’re awesome. But he was at Astros Dodgers World Series back in 2017, sitting out in the left field and ran up to get a hot dog and a Coke with his two boys. And while he was up there waiting in line for 20, 25 minutes, Yuli Gelle just hits a bomb and it’s right over his seats. I mean, you can go back to the highlight reel and you can see Marshall’s empty seats. So he’s crushed, right? He’s devastated, and that’s the whole reason you go to an Astros game to see moments like that. But it was even worse that it was right over his seats. So he texts me that night and says, man, we’ve got to fix this. We’ve got to, why is there no app for food delivery in a stadium? And so that’s when Rivalry Tech was born. Back then we called it seats, but that’s when it was born. Oh, we darn.

Chris (02:47):

So a lot of people start companies where they see gaps in a process or

Aaron (02:52):

Something,

Chris (02:52):

But that one’s pretty remarkable. I mean, literally leaving the stadium, he sends you a text about this.

Aaron (02:57):

He did, and he was adamant being skeptic in general. I was like, well, either it’s already being done or it’s not efficient to do in a stadium. And he said, well, it’s got to be done somewhere, so we’re going to do it. It’s going to be you and me. And he’s very charismatic. So he convinced me to join up with him, and we started the company a couple months later. Wow.

Chris (03:17):

So walk us through that then. What was it like and what were the missteps taken to start from scratch on this idea that born out of frustration?

Aaron (03:30):

Yeah, neither of us are tech founders. Neither of us are tech guys. So we had another hurdle to cross. Marshall had done some internet research and found you could build an app for $3,000. We laughed. To this day, we look at the millions of dollars we’ve spent on the platform. We might’ve been a little fooled into thinking it was going to be easier than it has been. But we started by trying to understand what the real need was, trying to just kind of map it out. And then we had to find a tech guy who was going to build this for us because Houston’s got a lot of tech talent now a lot more than it did seven years ago when we started the company. But seven years ago it was tough and all the tech talent was being utilized by oil and gas and healthcare.

(04:12):

It’s not like the west coast where you’ve got a lot of talent. So we set out to find tech talent, and that’s where I went to one of my old Rice, MBA classmates, a guy named Craig Ante, who I knew had been a developer in his past life. He had his own successful company called Pinot’s Palate that he had built and grown and scaled. And so I said, Hey, help me find a tech guy. And so we looked for two, three months, and finally Craig comes to me and he says, I found him. It’s me. I said, so great. So Craig got back into startup life, and that was probably one of the best things that happened to us because he’s very organized, very methodical, and he’s not just a coder, he’s an architect. And so we got really lucky early on that we weren’t like a typical tech startup where we’re just writing code and it’s kind of all thrown together.

(05:01):

We were building enterprise grade minimum viable product in the early days. So we kind of had a leg up in those early days. And Craig is also co-founder, so he joined the company, really helped us get it off the ground. And then we went to work. We went to work and started out at Rice University Football with our wives handing out flyers. Our kids and brothers and friends were delivering the food into the stands. And I was running a laptop just manually assigning orders, and it was definitely a minimum viable product back at the time. But Rice had faith in us and we did ’em right and delivered a good first product, and we learned a lot from that experience.

Chris (05:42):

And as you kind of grown from there

Aaron (05:44):

And we grown from there, we then went, we got the Skeeters now the Space Cowboys to sign up with us. And then we had our big break, then we got really lucky. We’re building software the whole time. We’re learning from Rice and S Skitters, and we had really good opportunity to be put in front of one of our old mutual friends, Jamie Roots.

Chris (06:02):

Oh sure.

Aaron (06:03):

And president of the Texans at the time. And it was at a pitch event. And it was funny. I had never met Jamie. I didn’t know him prior to this. And he was sitting in my chair at my table at some point, and I didn’t recognize him. And I walked up to grab my bottle of water. And Marshall’s wife, Melissa knows him, and she said, Hey, Aaron, this is Jamie. And I’m like, Hey, what’s up man? And she goes, no, this is Jamie Roots. And I’m like, oh. And so we had a great 15 minute conversation and he said, man, I really like what I’m hearing. I like your ethos. I like the aggressiveness. We have an issue with the fan experience at NRG Stadium. I want you to come down and meet with Aramark and let’s give it a go. So he got us into the stadium, and I remember walking in and meeting with Aramark and Jamie, and I won’t name names, but the Aramark guy walks in the boardroom and he sits down and he goes, mobile ordering is bs.

(06:55):

It’ll never work at scale and in stadiums. And I thought, man, we’re done. We’re toast. And Marshall leans across the table and says, well, that’s, you’re doing it wrong. So we got a kick out of that. They gave us a shot and we did well, we had a few thousand seats we were serving. We showed them that it could be done logistically, we could make money off of it and that we had a good product. So from there, we started to scale and built a really good relationship with Aramark. One we maintain to this day. And on the sports side, we work with them at other pro stadiums. We work with them at Minute Maid right now. We work with them at Fenway Park, at the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and those are some key Aramark partnerships with us.

Chris (07:36):

Wow, that’s a great story. And fortuitous like most, if you’re working hard and you get that lucky break and take advantage of it, the combination of hard work and luck sometimes is a really good thing.

Aaron (07:50):

It is. It helps. And we were astute enough at the time to understand that there is a bigger problem. The bigger problem wasn’t that a fan wanted a beer or a hot dog in their seat. It’s that the operators, the Ara marks of the world, were having trouble keeping up with that unfettered convenience, we’ll call it. Right.

Chris (08:10):

Okay.

Aaron (08:10):

All of a sudden you go from lines which naturally throttle your demand to cell phones, and everybody can order as much as they want whenever they want, and they all expect it to show up in two minutes. So we learn that the operational challenges were the real problem, and that’s where we turned our focus. So now when you look at our platform, it’s not just about delivering food, it’s about streamlining that entire process.

Chris (08:36):

If the kitchen can’t keep up, then it doesn’t matter, right? That’s

Aaron (08:38):

Exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So building in the controls, the throttles, the reporting, the communication, all that stuff’s baked into our platform.

Chris (08:46):

So a couple of things that come to mind as you talk about what sounds like a lot of focus and energy, one on product development software and then trying to prove the concept. What did y’all do to try to finance that? You have to go out and raise money? Were you doing it yourself? Because most startups and entrepreneurs face that conundrum and there’s a number of different ways to handle it. What did y’all do at Rivalry

Aaron (09:10):

At the beginning, we were self-funded, we were self financed, we were bootstrapping it. I had a good job. I was president of a manufacturing company. Marshall has like three, four other companies. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and Craig was running Pinot’s pallet. So we all had good jobs and we were able to fund the beginning parts of the company. And ultimately it got to a point where really two things happened. One, I was spending more than 40, 50 hours a week on rivalry tech, and we saw that we were getting enough traction that it needed full-time focus. So as a group, we decided, okay, it was time for one of us to leave, and that was me. So I left my job and we financed a salary to get it going and do some fundraising. And we raised our first round of funding from venture capital, probably about a year into operations when we really wanted to start scaling. And that was interesting as well. That was a fun experience, but that’s how we got it started. Just a lot of sweat, blood tears, and a lot of our own money.

Chris (10:15):

That’s a common theme for anyone kind of starting something from the ground

Aaron (10:20):

Up. Yeah, it is. And it’s interesting when you do it that way, and I’ll give credit to Craig. When you have an idea and you want to start a company, you’ve got about a thousand ideas. Here’s what it should be. Craig was really good at saying, okay, but we can only afford to build three of those things out of the thousand things. What are the three things we really need to prove? What’s going to help us get to that next round of funding or what’s going to help us get that next customer? And it’s not all the super convenient stuff. It’s not about sending you a text message when you’re within a mile of the stadium, that’s not going to generate revenue. So we really had to spend time and figure out what are the most important things to build. And that’s how we got the first version of the platform out. We just wanted to prove that A, people would use it. B, people would spend money to use it, and C, we could help the customers make more money. And that was it. So that’s how you get to a platform where you have to have your kids deliver food.

Chris (11:19):

I’m sure. That was great. They enjoyed that. I bet

Aaron (11:21):

They did. They had a blast.

Chris (11:22):

So then the next, I guess, issue you face I’m guessing, is as that success is coming, you’ve got to start building your team to service the customers that you’re bringing in. How did y’all go about doing that and going through adding key people in the right spots at the right time?

Aaron (11:40):

That was a really interesting journey for us. At the beginning, we knew it was mostly about tech. We had to build the technology and the software. We did hire an operations guy in January of 2020. It was a great time to hire a field ops guy, but we were hiring more software developers around then as well because we knew we needed the software to be built. And so at that stage, we were really trying to figure out where we scale and how we scale, and we got to go hire all these operations people, et cetera. But then something happened in March of 2020, they changed the course of live sports and entertainment just a little bit.

Chris (12:20):

Right. Well, our good friend Jamie, I remember him saying that at the time, it’s a terrible time to be in the mass gathering business.

Aaron (12:29):

That’s exactly right. So when Covid shut everything down, it was really funny. We were actually in an investor meeting, I think it was March 11th, 2020, and we’re talking about raising a series A and we’re going to raise some more money, and then the phones kind of start buzzing and vibrating. Everyone’s looking down and they’re like, oh man, the rodeo just canceled or just shut down. And then a few minutes later it was like, oh, the Rockets have postponed their season already. Or no, it was the Astros. I’m sorry, the Astros postponed their season, start dating all of this. And so we said, okay, maybe we shouldn’t have this investment meeting now. And that really kind of set the stage for quite honestly was a better growth phase for us. And I actually give Covid, not that it deserves any, but I give it credit for turning us into the company we are today.

(13:18):

We took Covid and took that time to build the software we really wanted to build, if that makes sense. So rather than splitting resources, we had precious resources at the time, rather than splitting it between operations and marketing and all the other things you’re normally spending money on. We put it all into tech. And by then we had established a good relationship with Aramark. We had established a good relationship with the teams like the Texans, like the Astros, and we had established a good relationship with Major League Baseball through some of our other connections at Aramark. And so we just spent all that time in isolation talking to these other people who were in isolation. So MLB, they became really good almost friends, and said, here’s what hasn’t been built. Here’s why you don’t see it at every stadium. And we listened. And so we somehow managed to raise almost $2 million during covid throughout 2020 and just put it all towards the software.

(14:17):

And so we were able to come out of 2020 better funded, but also with a product that MLB signed off on it. We launched at the New York Mets in 2021 coming out of covid. So that really helped us allocate those tech resources and then we could start. And if you think about it, COVID also gave us a really nice kind of gradual increase in activity with operations. So we hire one ops guy because ballparks were only at 10% capacity and they were at 30 than 50 and then a hundred. So we were able to scale. It was a lot better runway than just getting hit with it all at once.

Chris (14:51):

Yeah, I guess it makes sense. You were able to, that hiring process that we started talking about, you were able to ease into that and not have to throw a lot of investment at it because of

Aaron (15:03):

The ramp up. Exactly. And we were able to take our time and find good people. Culture is huge for us. Startup life is a grind startup life in live sports and entertainment is probably worse. A lot of nights, it’s a lot of weekends, it’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. I mean, the schedule is the schedule. And so we had to find those people who kind of thrive on that life. They like going and the insanity and the chaos around trying to serve food to 80,000 people on any given Sunday.

Chris (15:33):

Oh, I can’t imagine. The other thing though that I hear from your lessons and the advantages you took during the Covid shutdown, if you will, was you really, and this applies at any time, but the importance and value that you gain by listening to your customer and what were the issues? What did they, what would they change if they could? And then you were one listening and then you took that back to the developers, or maybe they were in the meeting too, to make those adaptations and modifications.

Aaron (16:06):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It really helped highlight a lot of those bigger challenges where we got to understand, okay, well, we did have the good fortune of working through texting season in 2019, and we saw the issues. And then Covid just allowed us to sit face to face from the customer when they weren’t distracted. When Aramark and the Texans weren’t distracted by the season, they’re just sitting at home literally, and let’s talk through it and we’re going to build it for you guys. So yeah, it really helped put a magnifying glass. And without the chaos, that made all the difference. We had a lot of competitors who just build on the fly and they’re just trying to build and learn, and they’re getting beat up every day, and that’s the advantage we have. That’s

Chris (16:46):

Great.

Aaron (16:48):

Hello friends,

Chris (16:49):

This is Chris Hansley, your building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm@boyermiller.com and thanks for listening to the show. Well, you mentioned culture, and I definitely don’t want to gloss over that. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, culture’s, everything. What have you done at rivalry to build the culture that you appear to be proud of and how would you describe that culture?

Aaron (17:34):

Our culture? So first of all, going back to what I said about just the grind of startup life and pro sports, you’ve got to find people with grit. I mean, a lot of people use that term as part of their core values, but for us, we really make whoever’s sitting across the table, they know that this isn’t an eight to five job, that this is going to be some nights and weekends. And you may have a thought at 2:00 AM and Marshall and I talk at 2:00 AM all the time. We don’t expect that from everybody. But hey, just know that you don’t have to answer that 2:00 AM text, but if you want to, that’s okay. But we’ve got a really fun culture. I mean, look, first of all, we’re doing a lot of fun things. I mean, whether we’re at sports or resorts, we do the Margaritaville up in Conroe. I mean, there’s worse places to go to have to do work, right?

(18:21):

I mean, we even enjoy going down to the hospitals where at Methodist in the med center, we’ve got some stuff. It’s just a lot of fun. And it’s really fun to go into areas where people aren’t using a lot of technology on the food and beverage side. And so we’re getting to teach everybody about all of this. And so the culture at rivalry is definitely gritty, I would say, in a good way. And then we really focus just on people who are creative and they like to question and they like to come up with answers or solutions.

(18:54):

We try not to have any of those barriers where they feel like they can’t approach me with an idea or criticism or feedback. I think part of our success has been allowing everybody in the company to have a voice. And there’s no such thing as a stupid idea or a bad idea. You never know where it’s going to go. And so we like that. Everybody can feel safe just throwing it out there. And we’ve had some crazy ideas come across the whiteboard and some of ’em have gone on to become parts of the product. And some we’ve tucked away and some we’ve giggled at and erased. And then we’ve got definitely a culture of just a very candid culture. I’m trying to think of what the phrase is, but our candor is very important. So we have a lot of meetings where we’ll share ideas and opinions and then we’ll fight about those ideas and opinions and voices will get raised and pulses will increase and language will be thrown around. But at the end of the day, everybody does it respectfully and you can scream and yell at your partner all you want, but we always make up and we realize it’s coming from a place of trying to better the company.

Chris (20:08):

Yeah, sounds like transparency, but also in a safe environment, right where

Aaron (20:12):

It is. Yeah.

Chris (20:13):

The other thing it sounds like you created within that culture is one that fosters innovation. You talked about people are encouraged to bring their ideas to the table. Are there things there meetings you have or challenges you present to people so that they know that innovation is respected and welcomed?

Aaron (20:35):

We do. We have weekly meetings where we kind of go through everything from the tech roadmap to the operational roadmap to sales and marketing. And we just talk through what we’re seeing in the market, try to identify the gaps. So we’re really trying to teach everybody in the company look for those gaps. Where are we seeing areas where there’s no solutions? And so we love whiteboards. If I could have every surface in the office be whiteboard, it would be whiteboard. I mean put it up on the whiteboard and go and let’s start playing with it. And we’ve gone through some sessions where we’ve covered a whole room and come up with new ideas or better ways to execute.

Chris (21:12):

I mean,

Aaron (21:13):

We’re dealing with a stadium or a hospital. They’re not simple organisms. They’re very complex. And then when you get back into the food and beverage service side and fragmented technology stacks that they’re using in the back and how do you tie it all together? And then you got to pull in the different stakeholders, the hospitals, the ara marks, the employees, it becomes a lot of moving pieces. And within that is opportunity.

Chris (21:37):

And

Aaron (21:37):

So we spend a lot of time just talking through where and how can we do this.

Chris (21:43):

So let’s talk a little bit about, you start in sports missing the home run of the World Series. You mentioned this and alluded to it earlier, you’ve grown and sports is while you still do, that’s not your probably primary area. Tell us a little bit about how you moved into healthcare as an example, and what are some of the innovative things that you’re actually doing that when people show up, hopefully not at a hospital, but at a resort or something that they could see to know that this is your technology in play.

Aaron (22:13):

So sports and entertainment was our focus market for a very long time, and we realized that the needs existed everywhere. The problem that we were solving wasn’t just at large stadiums. So large operators like Aramark, they operate in a whole host of other industries like we talked about hospitality or leisure hospitals, et cetera. And so we knew we wanted to expand into those other verticals at some point. And we got really lucky again, where, and you can obviously tell Aramark’s been a great partner throughout all this. They called us out of the headquarters up in Philly, and it was really funny. I’d gotten to know the guy well, and he says, Hey, great job in sports. You’ve solved a lot of issues for us. You’ve built a great platform. Can you do it in other business verticals? Could you do it in healthcare? And we said, absolutely. Yeah, we’ve been wanting to for a long time. What are you looking for? And he goes, well, we’ve got a customer down in Houston, and you could hear the papers kind of flipping through. And he’s like, you ever heard of ever heard of MD Anderson?

(23:16):

Yes, I’ve heard of MD Anderson goes, yeah, they have a need down there. We want you to go look at it. And so worked through some of that. But what ended up happening is we actually got in front of Houston Methodist and their innovation team is really great, really employee focused, really patient focused, but they wanted us to focus on putting in our mobile platform for the employees. Because you think about it, a doctor or a nurse, 30 minute lunch breaks, you don’t want ’em waiting in line for 15, 20 minutes. So we saw that as our opening. We knew we wanted to expand here we have a customer pulling us into this other market. So that’s how we got started. We built the platform for hospitals at first. But the really cool thing about it is that that same platform applies to every other market in the world, right? Sports is unique. It’s a four hour event, five hour event. You turn it on, you turn it off in a hospital a

Chris (24:09):

Day or two, a couple days a week, depending on a

Aaron (24:11):

Baseball home stand. Football’s once a week, exactly. But a hospital, a hotel, fast food, I mean 365 days a year, sometimes 24 hours a day. So we built this new platform for them, and let’s use Houston Methodist as an example. So we’ve got our mobile at all eight of their locations in Houston. We have our kiosks at all eight of their locations. So you can walk up to a coffee shop, order a coffee at one of our kiosks, and the barista will make it. You don’t have to wait in line. And then we’re doing some really fun stuff. So in the med center, we are integrated with a big robot made by a BB robotics. And this thing makes your food from fresh ingredients to, it actually cooks it, puts it in a bowl and puts it in a locker for you. That robot didn’t have any way to communicate with the guest or for the guest to communicate with the food preparation system, which normally is a person behind a counter you talk

Chris (25:06):

To.

Aaron (25:07):

And it didn’t have any way to communicate with

Chris (25:11):

Aramark

Aaron (25:11):

In the back, Hey, here’s the reporting for the day, here’s what I’ve made. Well, we do all of that. And so we essentially said, look, let’s, and to oversimplify, just run a line from the robot into our platform and we’ll take care of the rest. And that’s what we did. You can order food from our app and the robot will make your food. It’ll tell you when it’s ready, it’ll tell you what locker it’s in. You walk up and you scan a little code we give you and your locker just opens up. And then we do all the reporting for the customer at the end of the night as well, so they can see what delivery or make times were, et cetera. Now we’re getting into delivery robotics. So we’re controlling that order fulfillment process again from the very beginning to the very end, whether it’s a human or a robot. So it’s pretty fascinating. It

Chris (25:59):

Fun. Sounds like fun. I’m still trying to wrap my head around a robot

Aaron (26:02):

Cooking in the kitchen. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. They’re induction cookers. They look like concrete mixers, and so it’s tossing this pasta or this chicken and a concrete mixer and it’s cooking it. So it’s pretty neat.

Chris (26:15):

That’s amazing. So clearly, you mentioned a remark several times, and based on a story, I can see they’re a key strategic partner for you, as are some others. What are some of the advice you could give others about how to cultivate those relationships that are so central to your business?

Aaron (26:35):

Aramark was an obvious one for us in the early days because they were the gatekeeper to a lot of our stadiums. And the other part of that is we knew we didn’t want to go door to door knocking on different stadiums doors. They are in hundreds of stadiums. So build for one major customer, make them happy, and they’ll sell for you and they’ll take you along and they’ll take us along. That’s exactly right. So we were very intent and strategic on a relationship like that. And we’ve worked with Aramark’s competitors as well. We work with a lot of them, and it’s that same mentality. But then we started looking for other partnerships, and this was a really interesting one where Comcast business, Comcast Sports Tech has, or Comcast business has a sports tech accelerator. And we were asked to join a couple of years ago and we thought we might’ve been a little too big.

(27:23):

We said, well, we’ve grown. We don’t know that we need a tech accelerator. But they said, look, we’re trying to give our partners in the space some more developed platforms, and their partners are like PGA tour, WWE, nascar. And so we signed up with them, but we were very upfront with them. We said, sports is not our focus market anymore. We want to work with Comcast business. And they came back to us and said, absolutely, we’ll intro you to the mothership, big Comcast join our sports accelerator. So we did and great relationships out of that. We now work with PGA tour. We’ve got some agreements with them working with them at a few locations, but Comcast Sports Tech did exactly what they said they would, and I’ll respect them forever for this because you never know, do they really have any pool with the mothership, whatever.

(28:14):

And so we are now fully ingrained in the Comcast business and what’s called Comcast Smart Solutions, where they sell internet, they sell connectivity and it’s a commodity, but what they’re using us for and a few other companies or we’re the value add wrappers. So we’re working with an NHL team right now. Comcast is going to provide the wifi, the access points, but hey, guess what? An HL team, we also provide mobile kiosk back of house software. There’s other companies doing digital signage, IO ot. And so now they’ve got this whole ecosystem that they’re taking out to their customers, and we work with them, not just pro sports, but major franchise chains with 30,000 restaurants, more major hospitals, hotel chains with thousands of hotels. And so now we start going in and we’ve got this really strong partnership with a major player, and they had a lot of people knocking on the door and we just took the same approach, build, listen to them first, build what they want, build what their customers want, and they’ll take you wherever you want to go.

Chris (29:18):

That’s great.

Aaron (29:19):

It’s not without its challenges, of course, it’s a slow process. You’re building something for a multi-billion dollar company like a Comcast or an Aramark. You don’t get sales overnight. You’ve got to dig in and you’ve got to understand that it’s going to take time and investment, but when that flywheel gets spinning, it’s sure hard to slow down.

Chris (29:36):

Yeah, that’s

Aaron (29:36):

Great. But you’re right, we

Chris (29:38):

Talk about it. It doesn’t happen overnight. You talked maybe a little bit about it, but I think we also learned, I’m sure there were some mistakes made, setbacks that you and your team learned from that also helped you later become as successful as you have

Aaron (29:52):

Been. A hundred percent.

Chris (29:53):

Anything that come to mind that stand out as one of the bigger ones?

Aaron (29:55):

Yeah, we, in software, it can be challenging because people, customers will just say, Hey, I want this. I want it to do this. And the proper answer is, do you really need it? Do you really need it to do that?

Chris (30:11):

Other than a programer going,

Aaron (30:12):

Sure, I can

Chris (30:12):

Do that.

Aaron (30:13):

And they will. And you could spend all the money you want. And I remember this isn’t a major mistake fortunately, but I remember we were at an NFL team and it was a customer and they said, we want the ability for the app or the users to pay with cash. And we’re like, why do you want to pay with cash? We’re digital. We don’t need. And they’re like, we have to have it. You have to have the ability to say, this was a cash payment. And then reconcile the end of the night. And we were like, and this was a week before the season, and so we hired a couple of extra developers. We spent, I don’t know, 50 grand to add this cash functionality. And we go back a week later and we’re proud of it, and we’re like, check it out. And you know what?

(30:53):

The team said, oh man, we decided afterwards we didn’t need it anyway. I wanted to strangle him. I was going, man, we jumped through hoops. Could have told us, right? Yeah, you could have told us when you decided you made the decision, but here we go and we built it. So in the early days of a company, you’re really eager to please, and you do have to take a step back and say, look, we can’t build it all. You’ll go broke or you’ll build things that you don’t need and you’ll never use. That goofy function is still sitting out there somewhere attached to our platform just

Chris (31:25):

Turned off

Aaron (31:25):

Like an appendix. We don’t need it. And it’s just there forever. So that’s probably one of the biggest things we learned in the early days. We’ve learned as well that, I mean, you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel for new developments in the market. You’ve always got to be looking at what’s coming down the pipeline. We probably aired a little bit in not getting into kiosks earlier when covid hit, we thought no one’s going to, no one wants to kiosk. They don’t want to touch anything, right? Remember in the early days, we were fogging everything down.

(31:53):

And the reality is kiosks are probably the biggest thing out there right now. And it’s a natural extension of our platform. We had the time to do it, and we’re getting in the game and getting in the game a good way. And to be fair, we’re not worried about that first mover advantage. We’ve got a lot of mistakes from our competitors that we’re learning from and gaining ground very quickly. But you do learn to start looking farther down the road. We were maybe looking a year down the road, you’ve got to be looking two years down the road, what’s really coming down. So now if you look at what we’re focused on, biometrics, computer vision, there’s a lot of components that are on our roadmap or on our current integrations that we’re building that you won’t even recognize our platform six months from now.

Chris (32:35):

Wow. That sounds pretty cool. It’s fun. While we have some time, let’s turn and talk a little bit about leadership. As you said, you kind of were the first to really step in full time. You were running a company before. How would you describe your leadership style and why do you think that style’s been successful in helping rivalry grow to the company? It’s been,

Aaron (32:57):

Yeah, we like to hire people who take a lot of initiative on their own, who aren’t afraid to go out and do something and maybe make a mistake and try it again. So in the startup world or in the tech world, and this applies to a lot of places, but it’s tire slow and fire fast, and we hire slow and we’ll fire medium fast. I mean, you can’t make everybody think they’re going to get fired for making a mistake. My leadership style, I’m not a micromanager very much. When we hire people, I say, look, I’m not going to give you a book to tell you how to do your job. We’re going to write this book together because we’re breaking new ground every day and we’re learning something new every day. And I’m not going to pretend to know everything. So I’m hiring you because you’re smarter than me.

(33:47):

Hopefully you’re known for what you do and do it well. And if I’m going to teach you anything, it’s going to be how this company operates and where you can find your best fit and your best purpose if it’s a salesperson where and how do they make their best fit as a salesperson? So that’s been my style. It’s give them some autonomy, give them some ability to go out and make it their own. And if you hire slow, you’ve got a good feel for the person. You know what they’re going to be capable of and if you’re comfortable with them. So that’s how I’ve tried to lead the company. It hasn’t always worked. We’ve had people come and we’ve had people go, and then we’ve got some people who just, they grind it out every day for this company, and they’re always thinking of new ideas. And there are days you go, man, when is this guy going to leave me? He’s so good. He’s bound to go find something better. And they don’t and they stay. And I think that speaks to the culture and the loyalty and the environment that we’ve built.

Chris (34:44):

Well, that’s certainly true, especially for those high performers. If they’re staying, the reason they’re staying is because the team that they feel like they’re a part of, which it goes to the culture.

Aaron (34:55):

It does. Yeah, it does. And I’ll share a little bit more on the intimate side. We’re a tech company and you have your ups and your downs, you always do. And teams come. Teams go, COVID happens. Covid goes away. We’ve been through times in our history where you’re strapped for resources, you’re strapped for capital raising venture dollars,

(35:17):

And we’ve let people go who have said, can we work for free? Can we still keep doing our job? We know you can’t afford to have this big team. And I get emotional when I think about that, that we have people, and it’s been multiple people who’ve done that. And you bring them back and the goal is to bring them back. And I mean, you can’t loyalty like that. That’s not something money buys. And so as we grow, I know that’ll get harder to keep that part of the culture, but man, it’s the early days. If you can just capture that magic of the stress and the trenches and have responses like that from all your employees, you can go out and teach a pretty good course.

Chris (35:56):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, to your point, I think one of the goals of a company should be hire really good people, give ’em good opportunities, autonomy, training, so that they become really good, so good that they’re marketable anywhere else in your industry or others, but also have a culture that’s so good they don’t want to leave. And if you can hit on those two things, that’s the key to the kingdom.

Aaron (36:21):

It is, it is. And those people are priceless. And our goal is down the road, if there’s a big exit or something like that, I mean, loyalty gets rewarded and you don’t forget those times. Those are meaningful for business owners. Very

Chris (36:32):

Good. That’s great, man. It’s great. What a cool story. I mean, like I said, from the text message after a baseball game to now, I mean crazy. Seven

Aaron (36:41):

Years it has been.

Chris (36:42):

So we’ll turn it a little bit on the lighter side. Growing up, what was your first job?

Aaron (36:47):

My dad’s a large animal vet, and so I was shoving the proverbial, you know what?

Chris (36:51):

So

Aaron (36:52):

Yeah, I worked at his vet clinic quite a bit. So it was a lot of painting, a lot of fence building, a lot of cutting hay out in the pasture. So I was a farm boy.

Chris (37:01):

That’s funny. So my dad was a vet, primarily a large animal, and there was a big pile behind the stalls, and that was one of the jobs and his partner’s sons and I, yeah, I could totally relate that. Exactly. That’s too funny. Well, not necessarily the best segue from shoveling that stuff, but I’m going to ask you, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue?

Aaron (37:23):

Oh, Tex-Mex,

Chris (37:24):

Alright.

Aaron (37:25):

Yeah, I’ve lived around the world and I know it’s not exactly true, but I mean, it seems like you can find barbecue or barbecue adjacent foods almost everywhere, man. You just cannot find it. I mean, there’s restaurants everywhere, but it’s not unless it’s here.

Chris (37:43):

I think that’s pretty true statement.

Aaron (37:45):

Yeah.

Chris (37:45):

And the last question, I curious to know, if you could take a sabbatical for 30 days, where would you go and what would you do?

Aaron (37:52):

Oh man. If I could take a sabbatical for 30 days, I would go back. So we spent a lot of time as a family over in Europe and in France and in small towns. There’s just, it’s a part of that world. If you asked me where I would go, you ask a lot of people where they would go in France, they’d say Paris, Paris is okay. I like the small towns. I like the history, the quietness that you get in a lot of those places, rivers and streams running through it. So I just found that part of the world to be especially peaceful. And if it’s a sabbatical, that’s where I’d prefer to be. Good food. Can’t beat it. Good wine. Yeah, really good wine. Yeah, very good. Can’t leave that part out.

Chris (38:33):

No, not at all. Well, Aaron, this has been an amazing conversation. Love hearing your story that you and Marshall and others have created. So thanks again for taking the time.

Aaron (38:42):

Yeah, appreciate it, Chris. Thank you.

Chris (38:47):

And there we have it. Another great episode. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at boyarmiller.com/podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at boyarmiller.com. That’s it for this episode. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.