Part 2: Mark Thompson + News (ACS December 7)

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. Using the ideas for my book, Skip the Line, which just came out, I took a bunch of random people. And within 6 to 12 months, my goal is to make each one of them millionaires, worth $1,000,000. What I'm finding is that I'm learning from each one of the people that I'm mentoring because first I have to learn everything that they're good at and experts in or what they're what they would like to be good at, and then we're exploring these topics together. So this next one, this is the first episode we're doing with Jason Furst, and he really knows a lot about the restaurant industry. I ended up learning an enormous amount about restaurants. And now every restaurant I walk into, I can see what's going right, what's going wrong. But anyway, here's my first meeting with Jason. So, Jason, we're starting to record midstream here, but you mentioned how there's more restaurants now than there were last year before the pandemic began. And what I wanna understand is, first off, is that because restaurants have been opening and fewer restaurants than you thought went bankrupt? What what happened? Yeah. So I think that definitely fewer restaurants than initially thought went bankrupt. In Atlanta, especially because there was a lot of outdoor dining availability throughout, you know, pretty much the entire winter. And then also there was just like a lot less of a concern about COVID in general from the population than in other places. Because Georgia, Kemp's your governor. Georgia was the 1st state to fully open up. Right? Or they never even Brian Kemp was he was gung ho along with the governor of Florida. They were like, the first two. But Brian Kemp specifically was the first to open up because I remember he got a lot of criticism. And even from Trump. Yeah. Even Trump, was pressured basically into saying he was doing the wrong thing. Yeah. So okay. So more so then but maybe because of the early opening, restaurateurs who have previously been thinking of other states moved to Georgia and opened up. Is that what happened? I don't know if they came from other states. I know that some of the big players in Atlanta spread a bit. And then there were a few restaurants that were starting during the pandemic, and they were actually probably some of the most successful because they were not stuck in that old mindset of brick and mortar. This is how restaurants are done. And they pivoted really quickly and and well to delivery to go. There was a lot of cool ideas coming out about, you know So let me ask you. Was delivery and you're you've been in the restaurant business for how long? 7 years. And you've done all sorts of things, except you haven't owned a restaurant. Yeah. I've been, everything from a food runner to general manager of a steak house. And and now you're running private events for a couple restaurants? I'm doing private events for 1 restaurant and then, serving at another. And, I think that, you know, you look online, they're, or look anywhere, talk to anybody in Atlanta, they're 2 definitely 2 of the best restaurants with, I'd say the 2 best chefs in Atlanta. Now was delivery I mean, basically, restaurants all over the country switched to delivery. Was Georgia ahead of the game on that? Or because, like, in New York City, they all switched to delivery. Yeah. So I would not call I would not consider Georgia ahead of the game on that piece of it. My former employer was very much opposed to it when I brought it to because I was, I was actually about to move to New York before the pandemic, and then, obviously, things changed a little bit. But I saw, you know, when I was in New York in February, it was a totally different mindset than Atlanta was. Atlanta was at least a month behind on on just realizing how big of a deal COVID was and how much of a lifestyle change it was about to happen. And maybe that's what also kept Georgia restaurants open. It could be. Mhmm. Could be. And so so what are you saying though is that they they Georgia restaurants were quick to pivot to different business models. What did they do? So I think they were not as quick to pivot as maybe some other places, but, the the places that opened up at the start of the pandemic Mhmm. Like, within the first you know, places that opened March 2020 Mhmm. Were way ahead of places that had been open for 5 to 10 years. Yeah. Because I I guess necessity breeds, whatever. Innovation. Innovation. Yeah. Yeah. So what did they what did they do? They were focusing super hard on to go. They were doing stuff like, those, like, CSA boxes. So supporting, local grower like, agriculture, you know, these boxes of vegetables and and meat and, you know, would give you recipes so you can cook at home. I saw stuff like, people were doing Zoom. You know, I actually did a Zoom wine dinner with some of my clients that I you know, I was just doing it on the side. It was like a little side hustle for me. Who you you would charge? Yeah. I just, one of my old clients who worked for a major bank, He, you know, I had a good relationship with him, and I was like, hey. I, you know, I know you guys wanna do stuff for he he kept asking me about different things we were trying to work on. I was getting pushback from the owner, so I just went ahead and got him some bottles of wine. He delivered them to his clients, and we all got on a Zoom. I talked about the wine. I talked about the winemaker, talked about how to pair it with, you know, with different different foods, and they had a great time. It took me an hour and a half. And How how much did you charge for that? So the I charge for the wine itself, and I dub I just two times what the wine cost, so it was about $1,000 dinner for 10 people. Okay. And you netted, like, 500? And I netted 500. And why were they willing to pay for that? Everybody at the time was desperate for some sort of connection. This was probably in late April, and everybody had just been feeling like life had just gotten, you know, everything. And I and I guess there's 2 other things. One is they feel like they're getting something. They got a bottle of wine that was curated for them by you, and they got an explanation. So even if they didn't value the the kind of intangible value of the explanation, you could value the the hard asset of the bottle of wine curated by an expert. And the other thing is these were already in the restaurant. People were already in the restaurant business. They were clients of, what what does it mean, like, to be a client of a restaurant? I built a pretty strong regular base. I've been with the same restaurant group. So until about a year ago, I had never worked for any other restaurant group than the one I was with. So I started at the restaurant that I ended up at. I was a food runner, server assistant, server, worked in the kitchen a little bit, I was a host, I was I did the I ran a beverage program for one of the other restaurants in the group, then I came back to the original place and became the general manager. So I had really cultivated a group of people that I you know, I'd walk around that restaurant, and I know 70% of the people on any given day. You know? So these were regular more so than customers, you know? I see. So so they were basically maybe they would have larger parties there. They would go there regularly. Basically, they were a a almost a regular source of profit for the restaurant and specifically for you because you kind of cultivated the relationship. So you were able to reach out to them, and it's a little bit harder for them to say no because they had the relationship with you, and they valued your judgment and opinion. And so on. More than that, they were reaching out to me saying, hey. How can we help? You know? Everybody they knew I mean, so many people at that level, that income level did not get really hit by this pandemic financially. And, actually, maybe for this guy in particular, you know, he was telling me he's like, my budget's the same, but I have nowhere to spend it. And so so like you said, he wanted connection. He valued you as a restaurateur even more than maybe the restaurant itself. I don't know. At the time, were there GoFundMe's for restaurants to help the employees? Yeah. So I actually had a cool idea. I wanted to offer to cut my man bun off and have raffle tickets so whoever won the raffle would actually get to do the cutting. So many people wanna get rid of my man bun. And I wanted to give all that money to the and I thought we could we could probably raise actually a pretty substantial amount of money for that. The owner ended up he wanted to do it himself, so he, he we didn't do any GoFundMe for our staff. He ended up selling gift cards to the restaurant. Uh-huh. Future. We weren't open at all. So he ended up selling gift cards and donating that money to the hourly employees. Okay. Interesting. So it was like $100,000. I think he raised, and it was a hundred people on staff. So, roughly, it was, like, a $1,000 stimulus. Well, be before even opening up, he sold a $100,000 worth of gift cards? How did he market that? He's he's the man in Atlanta. Okay. So he's, like, a known restauranteur. He was able to alert the media and somehow generate some buzz. Did he spend how much did he spend on advertising this program? Nothing. Wow. So he just it was just media? Yeah. It it wasn't even that. It was his email list is powerful. And we have a lot of people that I mean, look. We have people that buy 10,000, $20,000 in gift cards every December because they get a 20% bonus on it. We have we have a promotion that we do every December. Mhmm. And they know they come in and spend $20,000 a year with us. I mean, I had a guy that a regular of mine for a long time, he was spending $50,000 a year with us. You know? You know, it's so funny. I've never calculated for any restaurant how much I've spent on that restaurant in a year. So people do those calculations? I do. I don't know if You do. So so the restaurant does. I'm like I'm like, look. This guy is a 200th or a a 100th of what we do here. Right. So this one client is 1% of our profits. Yeah. And that is meaningful. Right. Because he's only taking one table twice a week. You know? So and and that's our that was my biggest challenge at the time was how do I I mean, I'm a reservation nerd, and that is one of my passions for sure. Like, I I think all the reservation systems don't do a good enough job of actually, like they're good at filling all the tables up, but they don't realize, like, consumer behavior where, you know, if a table comes in at 6, that means they're gonna be up by 8, and I can see the table at 8. But if a table comes in at 7, they're gonna be up by 9, and nobody really wants to come in Atlanta at 9. So there's a huge difference there. And the reservation system just says, oh, yeah. We have this table available at 7. Let's give it to him at 7. And not thinking, well, I can't put anybody there at 5 because we're not open yet, and I can't really put anybody there. Not I could. We're open, but nobody wants to come in. And so it takes a lot of tinkering with these reservation systems to actually get them to work how you want them to. So that's really interesting, actually. Rather than just having a passive reservation system, you're saying have a a, quote, unquote, smart reservation system. Not all the way to an AI reservation system yet, but, like, a smart reservation system would say, okay. The the restaurant does optimal business if we see more people at 6:30 than at 7. So let's actually if someone wants to come in at 7, let's physically say, perhaps, no tables available at 7. Can you come in at 6:30? Yeah. The biggest mistake that restaurants make the most obvious financial mistake that restaurants make is taking too many reservations at the wrong times. And is that because they don't know there are there are optimal times, and so they're just kind of it's like a greedy algorithm. You take what you can get. Or Yeah. It's it's totally that. I mean, it's, there's so many different reasons for for this stuff. I think, a lot of the times they don't care. A lot of the times they don't know. There's no training behind it. I mean, I'm all self taught with this stuff. I really like Excel spreadsheets. So I realized I was like one time, I was like, wait a second. I'm gonna take a note. Yeah. I'll keep keep going. I'm just Yeah. I'm just I'm I'm trying to think, like, I I just I there was this real this moment of realization for me where I was like I started looking at specific tables and seeing how much money I made on them that night. And I noticed the vast difference between the tables that got set at 7 o'clock and the tables that got set at 6 o'clock and 8 o'clock. And I started realizing how easy it was if I'm just answering the phone saying, hey. You know, I can't do 7. How about 6:30? How about 6:15? And they say yes. All it is is asking. Because they like you, and they want and they like the restaurant. Yeah. And they're not so time sensitive between 6:45 and 6:15. They can just get a drink at the bar, whatever. They're on a date. They it doesn't matter. Yeah. Exactly. Or push them to 8 o'clock or even 7:30. So like, if you're taking 7 o'clock reservations, you're not maybe in New York City or someplace where there's, like, demand for restaurants at 9 o'clock, you're making just a huge mistake in my opinion. So so that's really interesting. And and part of that comes from experience, and part of that comes from analyzing data. And do you think I mean, I have this really cool Excel spreadsheet that I made Mhmm. That basically, it's it calculates how many tables are in use at every time slot. And it's a really good visual showing what how much mismanagement can be done. Because the goal is to have like, in an ideal world, obviously, you can't really do this, but in an ideal world, every table is being used at every hour. Right? Or every time, the whole night. A table gets up and immediately gets, you know, filled with with a new table. Obviously, that's not possible because you can't just seat the whole dining room at once. The kitchen would get destroyed. So you have to do it a little bit incrementally. But there's it becomes very clear if you're looking at this spreadsheet and you see how many are at 7 o'clock. You see the huge gaps of the amount of tables that are being used at different time slots very, very clearly. So other than time and table, what are the other variables? So for instance, the is the quality of the restaurant a variable? So, like, are 4 four star restaurants different than 1 star restaurants in terms of, like, optimal seating? Yeah. I mean, this is only a problem for places that have demand. So which I guess is what I'll what I'd be interested in anyway. But, well It could be the places that it could be the case that places that don't have as much demand might not have demand because they do not because they're very far from optimal seating. This problem became is is even more compounded now. So even places that didn't used to have this you know, an optimal seating problem, and we're just so used to just saying yes to everybody because you have unlimited you know, you have way more tables than the demand would necessitate. But now they only you know, a lot of places are operating at 50% capacity. So So let's say from first through third tier restaurants, it's a problem. And then and then another variable is city. Because like you said, in Georgia, there's no demand at 9 PM. In New York City, there is. So it's almost like you would have to create a separate spreadsheet per city to figure out the optimal seating. Well, no. I would what I would do is I would it's the same spreadsheet, but you look at it in a different light. Right? So you still are inputting like, the goal is is to maximize, it might be easier if you were also looking at it. I don't have it on this computer. But, but, you know, it's, it's very clear. Like, let's say I have 30 tables in the restaurant. Now if I have 30 tables at almost every time slot or 20 tables in every time slot, you know, then I can see where I want to take more reservations in. Now if you notice that there's a significant drop off at 9 o'clock and you can never fill those, then that's a really good indicator that you wanna sit you know, if I can fill 8:30 reservations, but not 9 o'clock, and that's just true over and over and over again, then and and I have an hour and a half turn time on a table, then you know what? It is okay for me to take 7 o'clock. So I can take a 7 o'clock and I can take an 8:30, only for small tables. Like, if you have a new restaurant that you're analyzing, you build, like, a month's worth of data on a spreadsheet, and then you could figure out several things. 1 is when is the drop off, how long is the average turn time, and then you could see which time slots are not being optimized based on that data. Yeah. And you can just go off of what Resi or OpenTable or whatever your reservation system is doing normally, and you can just see how inefficient it is. It doesn't it won't take yeah. It won't if you have this spreadsheet in front of you, it won't take long to figure out, okay, this is a pretty clear problem. So, like, in computer science, there's, like, 2 types of algorithms. There's sort of these greedy algorithms where, you get you take everything you can get. Like, if you could move forward without thinking of any other factors, you move forward. And then there's optimal ones where you could say, okay. I could get on the highway right now even though it's about to be rush hour, but maybe it's better to get on the highway a half hour earlier or a half hour later so I don't put as much time commuting. That's such a good example. So so so that's the difference between, let's say, greedy and smart. And then, AI might be one step further, which is okay. It would be great at at to seat the people at 8:30 who I know drink a lot. And, so so for people who don't drink, I'm gonna try to gear them towards 6:30. For people who do drink, I'm gonna try to gear them towards 8:30 or later. And so then you're starting to be a little bit more AI ish, and there's a spectrum of AI. And party size matters so much too in that same light. Right? Like, if I have a table of 8 coming in, and I sit them at 6:30, they're gonna be there 3 hours. Yeah. But if I put a table of 2 there at 6:30, I can still get the table of 8 at 8:30. Right. Right. Right? So And and by the way, a table of 8 is much more easier to convince to switch times because most restaurants are saying no to them. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, it's So there's probably, like, 50 little heuristics like that, by the way, that you could that your data could tell you. Even on even even unobvious ones. Like, oh, it's a here's a table of 3 women that want a reservation. There's probably an optimal time for a table of 3 women in their forties versus 3 women in their teens. Yeah. And and and, James, I mean, that's a that's a huge opportunity that I think is being totally missed right now is so one of the issues is with reservations, you don't know much about them for the most part. You know, maybe, James, you are like a resi VIP, and you put all your information in so that any restaurant you'd sign up for for on resi knows you're kind of a resi VIP. And What's resi? Resi is a reservation system that I'd say about half the restaurants probably are using right now. Half of the nice restaurants are using. As opposed to OpenTable? Is it all? As opposed to OpenTable. Those are the 2 biggest ones for sure. Very interesting. I never even heard of Resy. Really? And so I'm gonna He's given to you. If I put in your phone number into the Resi system, you've done you it'll it'll pull up James Altucher. Like, you've had to have made a reservation for No. Because I hardly ever use OpenTable either. Really? But even if you booked it like, if you ever called me on the phone and booked a reservation in the Resi app, you are now in the Resi app. How how can I see? I'm on Resi Miami right now. You can't see it. You would have to have the back of house to see your name. Well, you can try. You can try logging in. Okay. Yeah. Let's see logging in. Phone number in, and maybe it'll pull you up. Yeah. I'm there. We sent a 6 digit confirmation code Yeah. To your number. I don't have my phone on me, but I'll have to check this out. Does Resi solve the problem or no? Which problem? The the problem of, like, optimizing reservation? Oh, hell no. Okay. They let you make certain adjustments, like how many time slot you know, how many tables do you have, and they know they plot your table, and they do a really inefficient job at that too. You have to put in a lot of legwork on the back end just to do a mediocre job. So what what do you mean they plot your table? So let's say I have tables 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, and so on. And then certain tables can be great, you know, can be 2 people or 4 people, or maybe if you put these two tables together, it can be from 6 to 8 people. If you put these other two tables together, this can be 8 to 10 people. So you have to input all that first. And then after you input all that, it says, okay, there's this table for 8. There's no way to control to not let a table for 8 book at 7 o'clock if those two tables are open. Interesting. And so I literally have to go what I was doing, I was going in and shutting off manually all of the time slots saying 0 reservations could be taken at 7 o'clock or 6:45 or 7:15. And then as the day was getting closer, I would have my spreadsheet and I would see how many tables were being used at every time slot. I would plot all my large tables to make sure that I could I had room for all of them, and then I would start ratcheting it up. So if I saw that at 7:30, my whole dining room was gonna be full, and I know a 2 top takes an hour and a half, that means that I can take, you know and at 7:15, I still have a couple tables left. That that means that I can take reservations at 6 o'clock for tables of 2. Right? To the point where any of my time slots are over the amount of tables that I have. Okay. So another variable in this is time. Because what happens is it's it's not just that it's not static. It's not that always book at 6:30 and always book at 8:30 if you can. It's as we're getting closer to the day, it could be that your optimal strategy changes. Like, you have a Absolutely. You know, you have a bunch of, 8 tops at 6:30, so your optimal strategy might change at at 8:30 or 8 PM. Yeah. And it's and the other thing about it too is it's so counterintuitive. The people that call you a month in advance are much more likely to be flexible with their time because they obviously really wanna go to your restaurant. The people that call you day of might not be quite as flexible. I see. So customer profile is a factor. Yeah. For sure. And, and various aspects of the customer profile, like income demographic, how much they use your, facility Sure. And and so on. Now does a does a site like Resi ever, do cross restaurant analysis so that, like, Rezi knows that maybe I like this type of restaurant, and I'm a big spender. Hypothetically, I'm not. But, they might may does Rezi ever do outreach? Like, hey. We know you like this type of restaurant. You might like this, which has more reservations available on this this night that you you usually go out on Friday nights. You might wanna try this brand new restaurant. Yeah. So, no. It's not customized. Although it is resi does have different categories. Right? Like top rated, patio seating, fresh and new or hot new, something like that. But but does it build my profile knowing I like patio seating? No. Because they don't have any data on you other than where you go to eat. They don't know how much you spent. They don't know what kind of drinks you like unless people put that information, like, as a manager of the reservation system, I have, you know, James comes in. I say v I you know, mark him as a VIP at, you know, whatever restaurant I'm at, and that only makes you a VIP at our restaurant. Right. So and there's not really an incentive for a restaurant to give their data to Resi because then Resi might take the data. And if you're all booked up, they might send that customer to another restaurant. Right. And Unless you unless they resi calls you and says, hey. We'll make you a VIP restaurant. Meaning, if you exchange this data with for us, you'll be first in line when we need to when you need tables filled, and we'll send customers to you. But that that definitely defeats the purpose. Yeah. It doesn't seem like they're, really monetizing on it doesn't seem like Rezi is really monetizing on pushing people to your restaurant specifically, at least not from the restaurant itself. So they never hit us up, for anything like that. But the big mistake that they're making is, like, I have to anytime you if you were to come into the restaurant, I would know nothing about you except for what I put in there or what I know personally. So I don't I mean, there had there there should be a way for the reservation system to talk to the POS, the point of sale, and they're that's just not happening. So so what would they talk about? They would talk like, the point of sale should be telling the reservation system, hey. Every time James comes in, he buys a $150 to $200 bottle of Cabernet. That way my server doesn't walk up to you and say, hey, James. I got this great, you know, not knowing who you are. We have this great bottle of Cabernet. It's $80. Are you interested? And you, like, sell it up thinking you're selling a really nice bottle of Cabernet. Meanwhile, you're spending a $120 less than you probably were were going to. Right. So there there's there's a couple kinds of data. There's one is, basically, what does this person order and how much and how much does do they spend? And then there's also there's also kind of nebulous data, which is, this person I can see on Google, this person's an accountant, this person's, the mayor, this person's, an investment banker. So even if they've never eaten there before, your reservation system could kind of look up on Google to see who they are, and they and and you know on average, oh, investment banker spend this, teachers spend this. You know, maybe there's some statistics out of that that you can gather as well. Yeah. And, really, none of that's happening right now. Is that valuable, do you think? You you think knowing other things? Like, oh, this person did Instagram photos about his Spanish vacation the previous 3 years in a row. Yeah. So maybe you wanna order offer them a Spanish special. Yes. Information like that would be useful. I'd worry that I mean, I I don't know. There's a privacy issue? Well, right now on Resi, you can, like, look people up on Google. There's a button, Google Me or whatever. Mhmm. Normally, it doesn't come up with anything, you know, unless you have a interesting name. Mhmm. Because there's a lot of John Smiths in Atlanta. So you don't really find a whole lot, but we do it sometimes. And, you know, it's good to know, like, when when movie stars come in, that's like a big thing. Like but it's also about, like, pairing the right server with that person and giving the experience to him that he's looking for. More than the tip that he's ever gonna give, his word-of-mouth is like, you know, yeah, so much because it brings in this whole crowd of people. And so you were mentioning in the beginning of the conversation that you've been lately, dealing with a lot of private events. Yep. Yeah. So at one of the restaurants, the it's considered probably, like, the best fine fine dining restaurant in Atlanta right now. We have this chef that was formerly at the French Laundry and 2 other nice fine dining restaurants in Atlanta. Super talented guy. His name is Chris Grossman. And they have I mean, we're booked out a month in advance for Fridays Saturdays and 3 weeks in advance for the weekdays. For private events? No. Well, private events, if we're booked out a month in advance for any, like, any reservation at all, we can't do a private event that day because we don't have any space. Because we use all of our private event spaces for regular dining if it's not gonna be for a private event, which is a problem I'm running into when I'm trying to book these private events. I'm like, I'd love to take you in 3 weeks, but I don't I don't have the space. I see. So it might be the case that people are booking, but you can you make more money on private events than filling the room with diners? It's yes. But we're not gonna hold a room in the case of a private event. Right? So, each of our rooms, you know, even the smallest room has 9 tables, which you can do for, you know, you could probably put 40 40, 50 people down there, roughly a $100 ahead. And, yeah, we'd we, you know, we will normally charge $5,000 for that. Mhmm. So it's about the same price. Mhmm. But it's less of a guarantee. So we're not gonna, like, hold back those reservations just in case we get a private event on that particular night. But the problem is if you only half fill those rooms and then some private event wants to come through, you've you've left money on the table. Absolutely. But that's just not happening right now. The the demand is, like there's not a night where that every table in that restaurant is not not filled. Because of the social distancing and stuff? There's not as much social distancing happening at that one, but it's a beautiful space, man. The the kitchen looks like the only kitchens I've ever seen that look like this are in New York City. You know, just like huge and, you know, 3 like, fine dining in New York City, maybe. And so okay. So so so given all this, what's what's what are you thinking? What's your what's what's your issue? So, the issue is now staffing. Mhmm. More people left the industry, and this was totally I mean, the reservation issue, I love and I No. That is an interesting issue. And then there's a further question I have, which is what are all the different revenue opportunities for restaurants? But I I wanna hear specifically your your issue. Yeah. So everybody in the city is calling me and calling everybody and trying to figure out how to staff. Nobody can do it. Everything from food runners to servers, line cooks are impossible to find. Do you use online services like ZipRecruiter to identify servers and mhmm. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, people are using, the best one seems to be, like, the Given Giving Kitchen. It's a charity. They have a Atlanta Facebook page. That's where a lot of job for restaurants people people find people on there. There's one more that people were using recently, but nothing is working. I mean, nobody can find anybody. People are doing, like at the Chastain, which is, like, a really nice restaurant. They would never have done this in the past. They're hiring people to serve 2 days a week, you know, as part time. They would never have done that. And these are Why would why would they never have, done that? Because you want people that are committed to the restaurant, not you know, people that only work 2 days a week in restaurants are typically a little bit more flaky and just not not as committed to the job. And then, you know, there's all this menu knowledge and wine knowledge and, you know, you start making regulars, and it just takes time, like, actually spending in the building, I think, to to really, like, be I don't know. If you work 2 days instead of 5, you're not 2 5ths the server. You're less than that. Okay. So staffing is a big problem. And at first glance, what it doesn't seem like there's a solution. You just don't have enough people who wanna be waiters in restaurants. It doesn't seem like there's initial, solution, but there's another big problem with rest there's 2 more big problems in restaurants that I see. One is your staff, your front of house staff, so the the servers. Who are they really working for? You know? The restaurant pays them 2.13 an hour, and the guests pay their the remainder of their money. So when I was working at the steak houses, I would calculate in total how much my servers were making per hour. They were roughly making, like, $40 an hour Mhmm. And bartenders. But they weren't making that for me or from the restaurant. They're making that from the guest. So if you go and sit at a bar, like, this is a little hack for anybody that wants to, you know, anybody that wants to get free drinks at a bar, Go to a bar, find a bartender, chat them up, pay with a credit card. Get, you know, get your bill, pay with a credit card. Leave them with 50% in cash. Tip in cash. Go there the next night, do the same thing. By the 3rd night, they're gonna try to make your bill as small as possible. That way, you tip more. The rest. Yeah. It's liter you're literally most restaurants disincentivize sales and incentivize tips. You tip out to food runners and server assistants based on your sales. So the higher your sales are, the more you tip out, the more you pay out to the the support staff. All your tips go to you and that's how you pay out. You know, you you pay out the tips based on your your sales or the tip out based on the sales, but your tips are based on how much people are giving you. So if I can make my sales low and my tips super high, that's win for me. And although I recognize this, I don't do it personally because, you know, that's not how I see things. Mhmm. I wanna give the best service, and I want them to spend as much money. And it's a goal for me to hit high sales marks because that's, like, how I like to do things. Well, that's how that that's more, long term career focused than Exactly. Short term wallet focused. Also, you want the, people working side by side with you in the ecosystem to to grow with you. So if you all end up at another restaurant, they know they should be loyal to you, and you're gonna treat them well and so on. Absolutely. And a lot and a lot of people are like that, but there is that risk that you have where it's like, why are we setting up systems that incentivize the wrong thing and, you know, disincentivize the right thing? So so that's a huge problem, that I see as well. And then the other big problem is it's really hard to, like, live paycheck to paycheck. And it's really hard when you make $1500 in a week to to not think that you're making $1500 to not remember that you're making $1500 every week. So a lot of servers will make, you know, $1500 a pretty decent week. So you go and spend more money that night partying and celebrating, you know, not remembering that next week is gonna be 500 and you're really averaging a1000 over the course of 52 weeks. So, you know, I remember when I became a manager, I was making stupid little money at the beginning. It was I think I was making $45,000 a year, working, like, 70 hours a week, and it was like I had been making as much, if not more, as a server the year before. And I remember the consistency of the checks, though, made my lifestyle so much easier to control. So even just being consistent, at a lower rate was easier for me to manage than the rushes of a big week and then the stressors of a of a small week. So that taught me a lot too. So, anyway, the solution I kinda came up with was it makes no sense that restaurants aren't paying like, nice high end restaurants aren't paying servers salary at this point. And it costs restaurants so much to have a bad they don't even know. I don't know the answer either, but I know it's a big number. How much it costs to have a bad server in terms of how many free drinks they're giving away, how bad their service is, how they're not upselling, you know, to the it's like in base you know, baseball statistics, wins against replacement. Yeah. Do you have any idea what what your server is costing you in comparison to what, like, you know So it's almost like a money ball of servers. Yes. So you can optimize your servers as well. Exactly. They and and what data do you have on servers? Because you don't know if they're kinda, like, getting high tips because of low sales. Like, what what what's the actual data you have on a server? You you know how much sales sales? Tip percentage. Do you know that? Yes. You can get it easily. Well Unless it's cash. Other than cash. But I will say that you can kind of estimate how much cash. Okay. So sales, tip percentage, repeat customers, which is implies they have some, customers are asking for them? Yeah. Request maybe. Positive reviews. Resi does this great thing where if you see all these tables in your restaurant. Last night, I had tables 802201, and my name was associated with it. So any reservation that came in that sat at those tables, they get an email the next day saying, hey, how was your service? And then you can rate me so you can see their their resi score. Right. So, so sales to percentage request. Can you see and can you see so here's the next level, which is can you match which servers do better with which profiles of customers. So, like and this is hard to say, but this server does better with, high income customers. This server does better with low income customers. This server does better with Asian customers or female customers. All the ladies and gay men, please. Yes. Clean up. You you can technically see that, but does anybody ever track that? No. I mean, it's no. Nobody tracks that. I mean, maybe on a micro level where, like yeah. I remember my old GM was like, any any, young gay men are going in your section, Jason? Because they all like to flirt with me, and I'll The man bun. Let them. But, but, yeah, I mean, not not as a whole, not predecided. We don't know who these people are really coming in for the most part. But, yeah, it's gotten so bad that these restaurants are like they don't even know what to do, and they're they're limiting their, you know, in terms of, like, not being able to hire any like, even anybody. It's I I just I feel like the time is ripe for a restaurant to do a Danny Meyer esque play at trying to change the the pay structure for these guys and and really dominate, you know, have the bet. Like What does Danny Meyer do? So Danny Meyer, he actually stopped doing it, but it was the whole hospitality included. So he basically increased the, the prices by 20% on everything on his menu. He told everybody they cannot tip and paid out salaries to his employees with health care. And I think it was working out okay. Although, I think he made a big miss I think his big mistake was trying to change consumer behavior. Because when I went and sat at the bar at Myalino or, you know, one of his other restaurants, I wanna tip my guy. You know? Yeah. Like, it doesn't feel good for me to be like, hey. Thanks for the good service. I know you're getting paid just fine, but, you know, I wanted to take care of this guy. I wanted to show him my appreciation in a way that's, like, universally understood. Right. So he took that away from me, the consumer, in a way. And I still have a, you know, ton of respect for this guy. Like, I think the fact that he tried with an empire that big is super commendable. Right. It's creative. And it's creative, and he wants the best for the industry, and he wants to make it professional. That's the problem with this industry is it's not professional. You know, people come in to make their buck and then get out of there. They have no concern for the restaurant. They have no concern for the patrons. I mean, a little bit of concern for the patrons. But, you know It's not a good lifestyle. So what so what are you thinking? You're think when you say, time for a restaurant to try experiments, you know, Danny Meyer style, are you thinking of starting a restaurant? Yeah. Or consulting for rest for existing restaurants. I mean, I my goal has always been to start a restaurant. I have a a chef in mind, but he's maybe a year or 2 away still. So it's interesting because it reminds me of I'm gonna I'm gonna segue to chess for a second. So given a complicated situation, you the first thing you do is you figure out all the candidate moves rather than look picking what looks like your favorite move and then going really deep down it to decide if that's a good decision or bad. First, list all the possible interesting moves and then start kind of you know, first have breadth of what are all my possibilities here and then have a little bit of depth down each one to see which ones are at least worth exploring more and then go deeper and deeper. Okay. Because it see so, like, obviously, 2 of your candidate moves is starting a restaurant and consulting, and those are great candidate moves here. But you're also telling me there's this enormous opportunity for a a smarter or even an AI reservation system. There's also a huge opportunity for a some kind of staffing solution, and that could either be manual or software based. There also could be, you know, consulting could be scaled by having a newsletter. Like, so a high end newsletter, best, you know, best experimental practices in restaurant design or whatever you wanna call it to make it, like, a high end newsletter. Like, given the pandemic and given the problems that the industry is facing, here's the new best practices of of, you know, 2021, 2022, and so on. And then and then there's other things too. There's, there's kind of, you know, coaching for beginning restaurants, like how you can start off, with a a a good foot forward. There's also interesting data solutions, like more profiling of customers and and outreach of customers. Like, you could go to a resi and offer them a solution that, hey. Here's what you could here's revenue opportunities, if you profile the customers a little more. Or so so not only is there kind of smart AI reservation systems, but there's also kind of smarter sort of customer relationship systems that could be developed that are unrelated to reservations. So there could be more outreach to to to kind of the, like, the way you did outreach. I'm gonna have this wine tasting, and you reached out to your best, customers. So that suggests to me also that there's more revenue opportunities for restaurants. So the restaurant could have been more actively involved in hosting your wine tasting, and the restaurant could have put that together as a revenue opportunity for themselves. And if they had those things going every night, can make an extra $1,000 a night, you know, during a time that's that's slow because of COVID or whatever, or a time that's seasonally slow or or whatever. So it seems like there's a lot of candidate moves, and then, making the decision is a factor of how much time do you wanna spend, what do you truly wanna do. Like, maybe you just wanna start a restaurant, and that's great. Or or or maybe you wanna start a a restaurant chain, and restaurant comes first and then restaurant chain and you build up. Or maybe you wanna, do something like, an AI version of, like, Resi or OpenTable or completely different from that, but, you know, making a smarter version of a a a a private you know, so, like, OpenTable and Resi are kind of these generic things open to all restaurants. And but maybe there's something you could kind of customize for each restaurant and sell per restaurant, a system to them that that interfaces with OpenTable but kind of beats out you know, it sort of controls the the interface between their private smart reservation system and the more public open open table. Like, it changes like like, you do manually. You change the, you say all the tables are filled at 7 even if they're not, but you're doing that manually based on your intuition from the data. And, so there's a lot of candidate moves. Each one can make money, and then it's just a question of what, a, what fits your characteristics. Like, you don't wanna spend a lot of time. If it's software, I'm I'm just making this up. Maybe you do. Or you're really obsessed with doing a restaurant, or maybe you wanna do a newsletter because it builds your network among restaurant owners so that maybe 5 years from now, you have a bunch of restaurant owners back a restaurant you wanna do. You know, and that's a way to scale consulting. Maybe you charge x for newsletters, but a much higher amount for consulting because it's more 1 on 1. So I'm just saying what my my point is, the restaurant there's a, what I call the spoken wheel technique where wheel the wheel here is the restaurant business. You've identified a lot of problems, and there's also a lot of solutions that could be businesses unto themselves, and those are the spokes of the wheel. So there's a lot of spokes other than just starting a restaurant or doing consulting. And I think a lot of times people make the not necessarily the mistake. It it just they just don't think of it maybe, but they don't realize that there are more than just 1 or 2 spokes because everything is geared their whole lives geared towards, oh, I'm gonna eventually start a restaurant. So you that's the one spoke you you focus on. Even though the other spokes could lead to restaurant starting a restaurant down the road and even a better one. I'm I'm just saying this just to say, given your knowledge and given the sort of deficits you've explained to me about the industry, it seems like there are a lot of business opportunities to consider, and then you have to just figure out what is appropriate for you. Like and and then you just have to ask yourself questions about about how you come to a decision about which spokes are interesting to you, which one or more spokes are interesting to you. Yes. Presumably, the foundation and I'm speaking in terms of, like, how I would speak based on on my books about this and how I've done this in the past. So, presumably, the foundation is set, which is you're not arguing with a spouse all day long, which affects your creativity. You're you're you're not, sick or unhealthy, which is, of course, gonna affect your creativity. So assuming and and, also, you you have to get your creativity in shape so you start seeing more and more of these folks. Given that you're the only one who knows all the data and problems you've just been telling me, you're the one who has to sort of know all the candidate moves. I'm just doing stuff brainstorming, doing stuff out there without knowing at all. But then there's 3 questions I always ask, which is, who are you, why are you, and why now? So who are you is sort of like, you know, what you're good at, what you're not so good at, what you're interested in, and and so on. Why are you is sort of like your vision about the restaurant industry. So, like, kind of things should move towards a more smarter system and a more creative or, as you put it, Danny Meyer esque type of system or restaurant or whatever. So so so that's the why are you. And the why now is, well, the entire restaurant industry has turned upside down in the past year because of the pandemic. And so that leads to certain possible solutions where there might be more demand. For instance, there might be more demand for people who wanna start restaurants, or there might be more demand from chains that are getting bogged down and maybe on the verge of going bankrupt be but they because they haven't made these changes on how to optimize. Another thing we haven't discussed is what are the other restaurant revenue sources for rev for restaurants, like doing these types of wine tastings or other things that might be obvious to some restaurants, not obvious to others. Or or maybe there's ways to optimize delivery so they don't eat as much on cost. Like, maybe some restaurants can switch to a more cloud kitchen approach and and temporarily or or so on. Or or they can borrow from like, I know one chain of, call it, arcades. They they they do something else. Like, let's let's say they're like a disco. I'm just making this up. But they have a kitchen in the back, but they but they create, multiple menus for Uber Eats and Grubhub so they could basically pretend as if there are 10 restaurants in in the club instead of just the restaurant for the club members. Yeah. Why anybody with a kitchen that has any hours of being closed wouldn't do that is beyond me. Yeah. So that's part of kind of, like, these best practices. And then there and then there's data there as well, like who orders what and who likes what. And maybe they wanna be invite hey. You're our best delivery customer. You're invited to a special opening when we reopen, or you're invited to the special night where it's, like, sushi burrito night at the sushi place or whatever. What I would say is, yeah, it's it's keep thinking about the who are you, why are you, why now, which is what are your skills, what's your vision, and more and more about what are the problems occurring specifically right now so you know that you haven't don't have years of competition that you're competing with. You have today's people who are as creative you. You limit the number of people who are competing against you. So the more specific it is about now, the fewer people are competing with you. Like, OpenTable is generic. It's good no matter what time it it of of the universe it is. But some of these things are specific to what's gonna be happening over the next 2 years as restaurants either come back, develop, or try to survive and be creative. So, so so so those are the things I would think about. And then I would also think about for each spoke, it's not as critical to think about it, but, like, who's the customers for that spoke? So for instance, a smarter reservation system might be good for high end restaurants, not as interesting for 2 star restaurants. Staffing staffing is a problem, but you haven't we haven't really talked about a potential solution x other than maybe paying salary so it becomes more attractive on sites like Indeed or ZipRecruiter or whatever. But maybe there's other solutions. And then Yeah. Newsletter is interesting because it allows you to network in addition to making money, it allows you to network more and research more as you research the newsletter, and you're getting paid to do this research because you're selling a subscription newsletter. Or is it a high end newsletter? Is it a low end newsletter? Is it directed towards owners, customers, managers, waiters? You know, and then there's courses. So we could do a course on, you know, you could you could do a course that's real macro, which is how to set up the 21st century restaurant post COVID, or it could be more micro, which is how to how to optimize new techniques for optimizing, you know, number of reservations per day. And, so that's a more micro course. You could charge less, but then you could offer more micro courses than all the work required to make one macro course. But you could charge a lot more for 1 macro course, and then you could upsell a newsletter. So we're just brainstorming here. Yeah. But that's how I would and and then I would ask, okay. What given these theories I have, what other skills do I either need or need to learn about or need to learn to how to outsource it? So for instance, if you're gonna make a smarter reservation system or an even an AI reservation system, you need a skill set of how to design, a user interface for such a thing so it's easy for people to use. And then maybe you need to understand the skill of programming, not as a programmer because you're not a in the who are you or you're not a programmer, but maybe understanding how to outsource to a programmer or partner with 1, to to build such a thing. Or maybe, another approach is to try it manually with 1 restaurant, you know, because you have these Excel spreadsheets. You can use statistics on them to manually figure out the optimal things, and then you could just sit there making helping the restaurant make the reservations for next month and see the actual results. So now you can get testimonials. So when you make an actual software system, a, you know what works, and b, you have testimonials to help raise money and to also sell to restaurants. So again, I'm just spitballing and and breaking up. Doing right now Mhmm. At the place I'm doing the events, and I'm also doing a reservation system. Mhmm. So you're you're, like, sitting there and manually telling them what to do and and then seeing the difference. Yeah. And, I mean, to be honest with you, it's, like, not to the level that I was doing it at my previous restaurant just because I don't spend the same amount of time doing it. Like Right. So maybe what you could do is, though, you can outline the very specific things that are part of a smarter reservation system, like bullet point them. And this way, you know specifically which as opposed to say like, right now, you know you're not spending as much time, but maybe it would be good to know, alright. On these 10 bullets that I've identified as important for a smarter reservation system, I'm able to do 6 equally well with these two restaurants, but I'm not doing these 4 because I'm not spending as much time. This way you can isolate where which ones are working where and how much money they're generating. So the more you can isolate specifically what you're doing as opposed to just time as the only variable, you can, you can identify specifically what's working and what's not, and what you're doing and what you aren't. Yeah. And and I would say I could, about 40% of the success does not take a lot of time. Like, the increased volume, the increased capacity does not take a lot of time other than maybe the initial setup of it. But the other 60% does take a lot of time. It does take focus and, you know, because the reservation system's so jacked up that you have to, like, literally manu every time you wanna take a new reservation, you have to manually increase the amount that you can take. So you have to be watching it. It has it's it's focus on it. So so there's there's the there's an 80 20 rule effect. Whereas, let's say let's say you have a 100 different choices you can make to improve in your reservation system in order to increase and, ultimately, the goal is to increase revenues. So the 80 20 rule, which, if you haven't heard it before, it it it's it's kind of this generic rule sort of works, which is that 20% of your effort creates 80% of the value. So so, you know, and and on a baseball team, 20% of the hitters create 80% of the home runs. And so, ideally, you identify those 20% of the hitters, and you put them up front, and you get 80% of the home runs right away, and you win the game. And so part of the task is finding out what the right 20% is, but you do that with a lot of data and domain knowledge, which you have both of. And if if you multiply the 80 20 rule by itself, it turns out that 4% of the value creates 64 or 4% of the effort takes creates 64% of the value. It's the right 20% of the 20%. So so what are the 4% of changes you can make to a reservation system that will result in 64% of whatever increase in revenues would have resulted from a smarter reservation system. And that's what you could play with. It's a little easier to play with manually with less time to see really how to build this from the ground up and then add features later to get to the full 100%. That's that's probably good advice that I should probably I I I thought I was thinking about it strategically of which 20% I was doing or maybe a little more than 20% of the work, but, maybe I should I I should spend more time thinking about the Yeah. Like, think about like, do you play scrabble? Yeah. Okay. So if you were to apply let's say let's say I'm even gonna apply the the 80 20 rule again to the 6444. So what 20% of the 4% creates 80% of of the value of the 64%. So I know that it says a lot a lot of numbers and math, but it turns out words. Yeah. It's a it turns out 1% of the effort creates about 50% of the increase in value. So in scrabble, you can either spend all your time memorizing 7 letter vocabulary words, which is a lot of time and, you know, a lot of effort, and then you still have to find those words in in when you're playing the game and so on. There's a fit there's a 50 slash one shortcut where you could win at least half of your games if you know just 1% additional knowledge, which is if you know all the legal two letter words, you're gonna win that's gonna help you win at least 50% of your games, if not more. So because people don't realize illegal scrabble words are xi, xu, qi, k a, z a. Just if you know q I, it's an easy way to get rid of the q. Throw it on a 3 letter word score or 3 words you know, triple word score, and boom, you win a game just knowing that q I is a legal word. So that's kinda like the 1% of Scrabble knowledge you would need to know to win 50% of your games. And so even there, I wonder if there's 1% change that can happen that can create 50% of the additional value. So for instance, in a typical company, one person does 50% of the sales. Usually, the owner of the company brings in 50% of the customers. Like, you mentioned one restaurant where the guy starts a new restaurant, and he sells $20,000 worth of gift cards because he knows the people to sell to. Yeah. I mean, the the one per that that 1% right there is shut down 7 o'clock to 7:30 reservations. Yeah. So that's that's really interesting. And so that's something that, you know, is easy. So it's not like you're gonna sell a system that does it because people will realize, I could just do this myself manually. But so that's why newsletter that that so that starts to bring a a live idea of a newsletter or both. Because if you have other things that are a little bit more complicated, here's a system. So the newsletter could be kind of a lead gen for an upsell to a a a res a smarter reservation system, but the newsletter system itself could make money either through subscription or through advertising or whatever. And it's very easy to set up newsletters. There's substack.com. It's a very easy easy to set up courses. There's skillshare.com or Coursera or Teachable. So there's all these things to think about. I will say this is that I think there's something here. The idea of sort of a moneyball type data analysis for restaurants, whether it's reservations or staffing or changes in pay or profiling of customers and employees, combined with these various different business models, there is money to be made here that doesn't seem like it's been made yet. And and it's a wide open area because of the why now. The restaurant's never had this kind of upheaval before, and it needs solutions. And so you're solution driven. There's just many candidate moves and many business models to So many. And so I think this is a a worthwhile an extremely worthwhile attempt to move forward and experiment and try things out and with the goal to make essentially $1,000,000 in the next year or so, doing one or more of these I ideas. Let's say 3 or 4 ideas. And how there's questions of how to experiment easily so you can try different things out. But, I think, you know, this is a good start. Now I understand what the issues are. I could think about it a little bit more. And I think seeing where I'm coming from, you could think about it a little more. And let's talk next week. And both of us think about it a little more and see if there's a a next step in at least 3 different directions on 3 different spokes. Can we find some experiments to do to to either manually or automated or whatever to is you're already experimenting with the reservation system, but I think you could, break it down into data a little bit better. Like, instead of just time spent, what things are you focusing on and what things are you not focusing on if you were to have your ideal system? And just think about these other things and how you would do it, and and I'll think about them as well. But I think I think there's a $1,000,000 to be made here. There's a there's this is a wide open spoke and wheel system, and there there's there's things to be done that can be done fairly quickly. Perfect. Yeah. And so I know we didn't come up with a specific solution, but that wasn't the goal. The solution the the goal here was to kind of describe this spoke and wheel approach and and kind of give you a almost format to think about how to think about all the possibilities you have, not just your favorite possibilities, but all of them with the idea that maybe they're connected, some of these, and maybe one of them could be your favorite when you didn't realize it yet. No. I mean, it's great. I mean, the, especially the, newsletter idea. I mean, I kinda thought about it a little bit, but just the way you talked about it as, like, a stepping stone towards, a potential sale. Eventually, I was one of my other you know, one of the other ideas. I just hadn't really put that those 2 together. I think it was definitely gave me a lot to think about. So Yeah. Because they're all connected. All those folks are ultimately connected. Like, in my own career, I they're all connected. So let's say I originally started writing about finance back in 2002, but that led to, starting a hedge fund, being a media personality on CNBC, which got me a social media following, you know, writing books, and then ultimately, starting a podcast and expanding out the things I was interested in. So writing about more things, which led to more opportunities. So they're all all the spokes are ultimately connected. I I sell newsletters, for instance, and courses. I consult. I manage money. I do media. So all the spokes are ultimately connected, so you don't really have to decide which one's your favorite, but the favorites help you decide which ones you wanna at least experiment with first. And then when I say experiment, you don't really know if a newsletter will work, and you don't wanna go head first and spend a year into starting I'm just using a newsletter as an example. But you don't wanna spend a year developing a newsletter and sacrificing everything else, but maybe there's experiments for each one of these folks we can construct to see which things are worth exploring further. That's like how in chess analyzing the candidate moves a little deeper to see which ones are worth exploring further. Like, if one candidate move, oh my gosh. I lose my queen right away. You back out. You don't need to explore that anymore. And it's the same thing with this, but you have to the way you explore is by you can't think about it as much as you have to do some experiments and see where excitement and energy are generated. Right. Like, play play it out more than you know? Yeah. Yeah. You you you begin playing it out. And and and just like in chess, pieces have energy, and you put a knight in a certain area of the board, and suddenly it looks like their whole position's collapsing, and then you know this is good. You could picture that in your mind, but for business, you kinda have to play it out a little bit, and experiments are the way I think about it. And the experiment is you set up a situation that doesn't require a lot of time, doesn't require money, has little downside, but has massive upside if it works. And the the the downside is really you learn something no matter what. Of course. So, like, even what you're doing manually at this other restaurant, you're learning more about what you would look at in reservation data. That that's your downside, and, you know, your downside is your time spent. Yeah. And I mean, for, like, the last 7 years, it also feels like I've just been kind of moving positionally without too much. With some I mean, definitely some ambition, but, more so just, like, putting myself in the in the position to eventually get where I wanna go without knowing exactly where that is yet. Right. Like, maybe it is the the classic thing, which is you wanna start a restaurant. But these are other ways to kind of approach that that might be very tactical now and, put you ahead of the others who just sort of, you know, plainly want a restaurant but aren't really tactical about it. And you're also specifically, addressing issues of great concern to restaurant owners but doing it in a very creative way. And so that's kind of a skipping the line past all the people who just generically wanna start their favorite the neck the next sushi restaurant in in a big city with tons of sushi restaurants. Right. So so, again, didn't come up with a solution, but came up with a framework. And next week, we could start aiming towards a solution, And I I think that's the the best approach. There was no way to really come up with I needed to know all the or I needed somebody to I wasn't really asking for a solution. Even if it's not next week, I just, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about it. Well, I think this framework is really powerful, and I think those what you're coming up with is extreme there is a it seems to me, without knowing anything about the industry, what you just described was at least several multimillion dollar businesses in a best case scenario. And that's what we could start experimenting with, and you could start figuring out which ones are the most exciting to you. And maybe that this conversation will give you more ideas when we talk next week. Let's talk a little bit after the lesson on next Wednesday, and let's see how to move it forward in terms of ideas, which things you wanna experiment on first, and what your further stuff on what you're already doing. And I I do think there's a a multimillion dollar idea here, so this is this is exciting. Thank you, James. Jay, good idea for suggesting it. Jay being producer extraordinaire once again. Thank you, Jay. You're welcome.