Brett: Yeah. I mean, it was surprising. I was quite shocked really, to find out how many businesses were operating without technology inside. You know, Excel comes up a lot. I’m sure we still all use Excel for a lot of functions, but a lot of people, you know, maybe built a spreadsheet they’ve been using for the last 25 years that serves a great purpose. And, you know, it can be an amazing spreadsheet, but then you just, you know, you don’t unlock all the communication benefits and engagement benefits with team members and employees and whatnot. So I was quite shocked. But I did find that it kind of lined me up to be able to start to have those conversations with the businesses and be a bit more advanced in terms of how to work with technology and hospitality.

So it was definitely a benefit for me having all that experience coming from such an integrated environment going kind of back to the basics and thinking, okay, well what can we add on here to improve operational efficiency and how can we look at becoming more digital and at least starting that digitalization journey? So yeah, that was kind of, it was a benefit if anything. But I was fairly shocked about how little of a tech stack some of the businesses had.

Carl: So you opened the conversation in those businesses about, you know, the importance of digitization. Were you listened to or did it take a long time or, you know, how is the reception within a business where you come in and say, “Hey, guys, I come actually from Hard Rock. They are very advanced. They have probably a competitive advantage because of that.” And how did they respond to that?

Brett: I was met with a lot of pushback in the beginning. You know, Hard Rock had big budgets. And I think some other smaller hospitality businesses struggle with securing the funding for systems in the beginning without being able to show, I guess, a quick return on some of them. So yeah, there was a lot of pushback at first, but actually one of the businesses I was working with was using a software company I work for now, Planday, so that kind of was my segue into software was going, okay, you know, I see value in this. I know that this will provide value to other hospitality businesses.

And yeah, I want to go work for you guys. I want to help you on this journey because I see that there’s a big problem or a big challenge to solve. And I think we can solve that. You know, a little bit of my history in hospitality and being from the UK and helping Planday with that entry into the market. So it was a really nice segue, as I said. But yeah, lots of pushback and not so much success at that stage.

Brett: Sure, sure. I think, you know, first thing first is get a good project lead. Whether that’s somebody that is within your own business already, that has strong organizational and somewhat project management skills depending on the size of that implementation. Or if you don’t have that person, hire a consultant or hire an expert that can help with this. It’s important. It’s a huge business decision because the person needs to be highly organized and understand how to measure success and calculate the ROI of the implementation. But I think one of the bigger ones as well is you really need to understand or get the internal buy in to understand that, is this digital strategy part of the overall corporate strategy or business strategy?

So will it ensure that initiatives are working towards the same goal and avoid any potential duplication of effort or conflicting priorities? So you really want to understand that you have the buy in from the whole business and people really need to get behind it, especially your leadership teams. So a project leader or somebody who is ultimately a senior responsible owner for that implementation will help get that buy in. So I think, as I said, success looks different for everyone. But on your project team, you very much need optimistic people who are happy about this. If you have somebody negative on that team, get them off that team. It needs to be very solutions focused, not so much problem focused.

And I guess my biggest call out would be, you know, ask the room, what does success look like to you? What do you want out of using this product? And you may have a payroll manager say, well, we want to reduce payroll errors by 10%. Maybe operations say we want to be more visible on the floor and reduce admin tasks by 5% and have success statements for every different person in that group. You know, execs, we want a clear overview of our costs and we want easy access to reporting. We want to reduce overall costs, you know, right down to a floor manager. I want my employees to see their holidays like, have these statements and always revisit these statements. And then at the end of the implementation, if you’ve managed to reduce those payroll errors by 10% then some of the smaller, smaller maybe feature requests or development requests that they don’t find are working perfectly, or maybe you’re on the way to building some of those for them.

They’ll remember what would success look like. To me, it’s not just a small, tiny little feature that maybe I would like to work a certain way. No, I actually wanted to see if this would reduce our payroll errors by 10%. So make sure that what you have you can measure first to make sure you’re always coming back to these kind of impact measurements and success metrics.

Carl: Yes, that sounds very familiar to how Apicbase approaches the project. It’s important indeed to have these project leads, which kind of is the advocate within the business. Dare I ask you the question, you know, when you are implementing a software like Planday, which is the biggest hurdle? I mean, of course you get the sign off of the project, you have this project lead, you’re going in the business. Everybody’s happy. And then, you know, the real life starts. And maybe from a learning perspective to businesses that want to switch into Planday is like where does a C-level guy need to or a project lead needs to watch that it doesn’t go south because of certain reasons.