Cost Management Hacks For Restaurants With Angelo Esposito (Ep 228)
Jaime Oikle sits down with Angelo Esposito of Wisk.ai to dive deep into the world of cost management for restaurants. From tracking cost of goods sold to automating invoices, they explore practical ways to boost profitability and streamline operations. Angelo shares key insights on inventory management, recipe cost tracking, and how AI can simplify the most tedious tasks. Tune in for valuable lessons on improving your restaurant’s bottom line with smart, tech-driven solutions.
Learn more about Wisk.ai at https://www.wisk.ai/.
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Cost Management Hacks For Restaurants With Angelo Esposito
Introduction And Overview Of Cost Management
Coming up on this episode of the show, I get with Angelo Esposito of WISK.Ai. We get into the nitty-gritty of effectively tracking your cost of goods sold, doing recipe cost management, as well as automating invoices. We talk business lessons, life advice, book recommendations, and more. Stay tuned.
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Angelo, anything with AI in it right now is hot - what do you guys have going on over there?
First of all, thanks for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here, and I love what you're doing at Running Restaurants. Thank you for that. At a high level, WISK.AI is a food and beverage intelligence platform, or some people like to call it a management system. Essentially, it's everything cost-related. The way I like to break it down is you look at your prime costs, you got your labor costs and you got your cost of goods sold. WISK.AI focuses on everything, including the cost of goods sold. Think about everything that relates to that, inventory, ordering, invoice management, recipe costs, and all that good stuff.
We will get into a number of those categories, but how long have you guys been rolling?
Good question. We've been around for ten years this November. We started in 2014. When we started, it was very much focused on one specific thing, which was bar inventory. We’re hyper-focused on liquor, wine, and beer inventory. Over the years, as we got paying customers, they wanted more and more. We ended up going more vertically down the beverage side.
Instead of bar inventory, it was the invoices for the bar, the recipes for the bars, and the point of sale integration for the bars, etc. To be honest, maybe five years ago, pretty much COVID time, was a catalyst when we launched food. Now it's full food and beverage management, but for a long time, we were focused on beverage first. We do that well. About 4 or 5 years ago, we added the whole food module, which is great. Today, we do well in full-service restaurants for that reason.
The layperson looks at the bar and the back bar and sees all those bottles. One has got an eighth and one is full and there are ones in the back and they go, “How do they do that?” That's where you guys sound like you cut your teeth there. Did you do it with any weights or sensors? How do you do it now? Technology has obviously shifted.
The truth is when we started with all those, we looked into all kinds of different systems that we're meeting with engineers and math professors and being like, “Is there a way apart from the weight or what about this or visually, if we have the volume?” We went deep in all kinds of ways. In the end, the simplest for many reasons, it wasn't only odd but simple for us and was also for the user, and more accurate, etc. It was just the weight. The question was whether weighing makes the most sense, but how do we make weighing less painful so people want to weigh and weighing becomes easier than eyeballing?
That's where we integrated with Bluetooth scales and we made the WISK mobile app so you can point the camera of the phone to the barcode of the bottle and it would detect the bottle, and the image, and we'd already pre-fill it with weights in the back end, empty weights, and full weights. What that did is now if someone scanned a bottle of Hendricks and you put it on a Bluetooth scale, it would tell you exactly what's left in it down to the ounce.
That's the biggest thing. What we ended up seeing is that not only is it more accurate but there's less guessing, which also takes brain power. You're probably used to the old ten-thing method. You look at a bottle and you're like, “It's about 0.5 or it's about 0.3.” The problem with that is twofold. 1) Someone's 0.6 can be someone's 0.7. You end up getting these weird variances. 2) It's very hard to see in a Hendricks bottle, a Clase Azul bottle, a Malibu rum bottle, or anything that's opaque because you cannot see through it.
Ultimately, what ends up happening is it does require brain power. Even if you're guessing, what you have to realize is you pick up that bottle. You look at it. You got to think, “It's about 0.5.” It requires time. Whereas, with WISK, you just scan it, so you're not thinking. It detects it. It pulls up the image so there are no mistakes. Now you put it on the scale and it tells you what's there. That process is also easier on the brain so to speak.
Challenges In Inventory Management And Solutions
Next question. Why is there an open bottle of wine right next to your desk?
I got wine and I got this random mezcal. I have two random bottles and we got one of our Bluetooth scales so whenever a demo is required, I can easily pull it out.
I'm not saying anything nobody doesn't know. In the bar, there are games with weights and inventories. Stuff goes missing and bottles go flying. Water goes in instead of vodka. Did you encounter a lot of those questions in the beginning? How can we not be losing money with stuff walking out the door?
The first thing I always tell people is this. There is a tendency as humans to always think about like a utopia. I always bring people back and say, “What are you doing now?” What happens sometimes is people say, “You're only 99.7% accurate. I tried this one bottle and it's this creamy liquor and you were off.” I’m like, “Let's take a few steps back. Before how were you doing this? You were barely doing it, but you did it once a month. That once a month, you had someone counting on a piece of paper and guessing it. Someone tried to type it in Excel, and probably made a ton of mistakes. You were okay with that. Now you're probably getting 99% plus accuracy and you're worried about 1 or 2 old things or about whatever.”
The first thing is I bring them back to reality where all the problems you're worried about were happening tenfold before. If you're worried about people stealing because they can add water or whatever, there's a lot less chance that they're stealing as much as when there was nothing in place or they were counting on pen and paper. That's the first thing.
The second thing is I always tell people at the end of the day, as an owner or as an operator, you have to trust your staff. We're not here to police them in the sense that you're trusting them with your keys to open, to close, with the cash. You're trusting them with worse things than physical stock. Our philosophy is this. On the beverage side, people typically do their inventory weekly and you'll see the trends, you'll see the patterns.
You could try to game things here and there, but quickly things will spin out of control because you'll see negative variances. You'll start seeing things. The thing with WISK is when you see something like, “There are a lot of losses in a certain product,” we have a unique feature in WISK, we call it the partial inventory, that allows you to do a subset any day and any time in as short of a period as you want.
I'll give you one concrete example. Because we're integrated with the POS, you can go in on a Thursday, and count one bottle. Let's say you're having problems with a certain brand. Count that bottle. You don't have to do a full inventory. You wait until the one is done. It takes you 2 or 3 minutes, cool. At the end of the shift, count that same bottle, and you'll get a variance report that shows you exactly how much you're losing of that bottle for that specific shift. For us, that's the way that you can zoom in, but at a high level, our goal is simple. Let's lower the cogs so they can put more money in their pockets.
We talk about it on our show all the time and we'll get into the fact that Angelo does a podcast as well. In the restaurant businesses margins are not getting easier. They keep shrinking. You need to find a penny here, a nickel there, a dime there. I was going to ask the question, but you hinted at it. How often is a typical inventory done? You hinted weekly. Is that the sweet spot?
Typically, we find on the beverage side, it’s weekly because of the way we optimize it. We cast 200,000 balls in our database, the barcodes, the images, and the weight. The thing is when people get set up, there is no setup. We tell them and they're always like, “Do I have to send you an Excel sheet?” “No. Start scanning. It's split up the work. Everyone can count a separate area. Everything is being synced in real-time.”
That's why most people do it weekly. The food side is usually more complex and takes a bit longer. People typically do it monthly. I agree with those timelines. The more frequent, the better, but there's a tipping point in the time it takes to do these things. I usually say beverage is weekly, and food is monthly, but when you see what your top losses or problem areas are, spend that five minutes on a random day and count your steaks or count that tequila bottle. You can zoom in with that partial inventory feature.
I'm sure or I'm guessing that you've encountered new clients in the beginning, in the middle, or along the way that never did inventory. They never did it. There are a lot of learnings. What are some of those big learnings for folks that started doing it?
It's funny because the clients who don't do anything end up always being the toughest clients to adopt. The lesson here is simple. Now it's obvious, but at the time, I'm like, “I don't get it. They were doing nothing and we gave them this amazing app. It's easy and they're using WISK. Why does it feel like such an uphill battle?” What we learned is this. Nothing is faster than doing nothing. If you have staff that's doing nothing and now you're like, “Here's an app and you can scan and we have 200,000 bottles,” even if it takes 40 minutes, it's like before it took zero minutes.
When it comes to managing a restaurant, nothing is faster than doing nothing—but that's not how you grow! Take action, track inventory, and make data-driven decisions.
You're like this uphill battle. One of the things we started doing is being a bit more strict with our ICP, Ideal Customer Profile. Unless someone is adamant and we can tell they want to do the work, generally, we try not to be the first one in when they're not doing anything. When I say anything, it means that it could be pen and paper. If they're doing something, pen and paper, it can be super inaccurate. It could be Excel. It could be a competitor.
Those are usually the easiest because they see the value, but they're having all those pain points. The day they start using WISK, they're like, “This is so much easier. This was so much smoother. This was so much faster.” If not, it's a bit of an uphill battle. We try to stay away from people who don't do it at all. If you're not doing it at all, that's a bit of a red flag because it's one of the most important things.
It's a big one. I was going to ask you along the way. I guess I'll do it now. That target customer that you mentioned or geography, are you all over the country, all over the planet, small, independent, big, large, or anything in between?
Generally speaking, geography-wise, we're pretty agnostic in the sense that we do have clients everywhere, but the majority is North America, specifically the US and Canada. That's probably the majority. Just more from a marketing standpoint and onboarding standpoint and the 60 POS integrations we work with. It happens to be more here, but we do have clients in Europe and certain areas of South America, etc., but the bulk I would say is the US and Canada. In terms of the ICP, we started very strong on people who have serious beverage programs like steak houses with wine cellars and cocktail bars.
We do well with those places because that's where we started. The evolution when we added food, you can imagine we do well with full-service restaurants and hospitality groups. That's our ICP. We don't do so well if it's a mom-and-pop shop or a food truck because they might not need something as robust as WISK. For us, it’s when someone is doing at least $1 million, but typically $2 million plus in annual sales. They have a big wine cellar. They have a big beverage program. They do a lot of food.
Now they need something robust. For them, the opportunity costs of trying to find a slightly cheaper app or a free app don't compensate for using WISK because of all the in-depth functionality we have to help them. I would say that's our core.
QSR's is a bit of a newer segment for us but we had some success because it goes with that theme of complexity. If you're a single venue, you might not need it. It may be expensive. If you have twenty taco shops, we have the robustness to handle the complexity of the reporting. We've been veering there more. I tell you today, our ICP eyes closed, we do well with them. It's a full-service restaurant/bar.
It's one of those things that I'm sure the conversation has changed over time, especially as everyone has become more systematized. I can imagine ten years ago when you were saying, “We're going to do all this nitty gritty stuff that no one wants to get their hands dirty.” People are like, “I don't even want to talk about it. Leave me alone.” That hopefully is changing because you're leaving money on the table. You used the word pain points a little while ago and it's come up. That phrase has come up in the last few podcasts that I've done. I like it because it resonates with folks. You guys deal with a few specific ones. If you were to say what you're hearing from folks, this is bugging me. That's bugging me. What are some of the things?
There are a few things. It depends on the person you're talking to. If you're speaking to maybe the manager or if it's a single venue, maybe it's the owner itself, but if you're speaking to someone who's more operational, their pain points will be something like, “I'm spending six hours every Sunday doing my inventory. It's long and tedious.” Even after all that, I'm not even confident that's a big one. Another big one is the visibility, especially on the food side, but both the food and beverage side.
It's like, “I don't know if I'm making the right margins.” That's a big one that always comes up because anyone can tell you what they're making revenue-wise and POS is doing a good job at that. Every week, every day, you get your report. That's easy. “This week I made $10,000.” Cool. The question is, “How much do you make from that $10,000.” That's where the cost of goods sold comes in but it's hard to do because you need to have all your recipes. Your recipes are connected to all these invoices.
That's the second biggest pain point. Even people who are decent with Excel will admit that setting it up is not crazy. It’s like, “I'm opening a new restaurant. Let me create my recipes. Cool.” The hard part is maintaining it. When you're ordering from suppliers every week, avocados are changing, meat is changing, this is changing, whatever. It's maintaining the accurate costs of those recipes. That's the hard part. Those are probably two of the biggest ones, the inventory time and the visibility in the margins.
The third I would say probably both on beverage and food, but a bit stronger in the beverage, is there are losses. One out of five drinks, 20% in a bar generally is gone from overpouring spillage or theft. It's a crazy stat when you think of it, but if it was any other industry, you'd be like, “That's crazy.” If you were selling iPads and one out of five iPads went missing, you'd be like, “This is insane.” In the beverage world, the reason it was a bit more like number one, it's hospitality and “It's the way it is, whatever.” Number two, it's hard to track liquid assets because you have many different brands.
For a given tequila or mezcal, you'll have many brands within that, and then some open bottles, and some closed bottles. One single bottle, let's take a tequila, can be used in many different cocktails. You don't have this 1 to 1 you have in retail where it's like, “I have an iPad 128 gigs. I sell it. I got this, I sell it.” You then check your inventory. With these bars and restaurants, the big pain point is you have these 200 skus, different brands, different categories, and then one single brand could be used in ten different cocktails, plus a shot, plus a single, plus a double. It gets hard to reconcile with the sales.
Recipe Cost Management And Automation
I could see that. We've all gotten a comp drink every once in a while and we'll see those shots that get poured on the side. That is part of the business, as you say. The POS integration, I might want to touch and I'm curious about that, but I want to go first to recipe cost management. I will talk a little bit about this in a webinar we did this week. It's one of those things you have to do the homework, you have to do the data, and then you have to have folks implement it and do portion control and follow it. All those things can fluctuate, but if you're not doing it, it's a big miss. Do you guys help with every piece of it, putting it together, the concoction of it, the pricing of the different things? There's a much better understanding when that's in place.
A hundred percent. That's the thing you're selling. It's the most important thing. I always tell people, going back to that formula of prime costs, you got your labor, which you got to get that under control and schedule and there's different ways. It's not cutting staff, but on the cost of goods sold side, that's the core of it. It's like, “What am I selling?” Then understanding those percentages. At the end of the day, this is the way we do it.
We think of it like this. When you look at a recipe, generally, you have two main parts. You have the actual sales and that, we automate by integrating with the POS and pulling it. If tomorrow you're selling a hamburger at $12 and then the next day someone goes into their POS and changes it to $14, no problem. We're pulling the selling price or the menu price. On the cost side, we have all the ingredients that we put in WISK, and we like to take it off their plate. We usually tell them to send us your sheet. If you have a Google doc, whatever. We'll enter it in WISK because they're scanning their invoices, which have the raw ingredients.
We then create their item database, lettuce, tomatoes, whatever it is with the cost and everything. We put together their recipes and then we show them how to maintain it. They don't have to go through us. If they want to change it, it's super easy. They search, they click, and they change their measurement. The idea is now you have the two main parts of the formula. You have all your recipes, which are automatically updating costs because they're linked to the invoices that are coming in. You have the selling price, which is linked to the POS.
The short answer is once the recipe is in, we do the legwork for them, as long as someone from their staff is scanning the invoices with our mobile app or uploading it on the web or forwarding it via email, so we have a few ways to ingest them, but as long as the invoices are getting into WISK, all those recipe costs are updating automatically. On the selling side, it's coming from the POS. That's how we keep it up to date. We like to say they have accurate cogs daily, not just once a year or seasonally or when they open a new restaurant type of thing.
I think you already hit on it and people here, if they haven't done these sorts of changes yet. You're hearing, “It could be done automatically. I don't have to go in and change it and sit down.” Let's go back to that AI piece. Where is the technology clicking in? What is it doing? I will say that there's a misunderstanding sometimes about what AI does. I was watching a Bill Gates documentary on Netflix, in which the first episode is about AI and the potential dangers of AI and the great pieces of it. It comes all along the spectrum. How much do you guys integrate it and where else are you going with it in the future?
The vision one day is to get to that Alexa style, “What am I running out of this week? Should I reorder something?” Getting straight to the question and the answers. That's the dream stage. What are we doing today with AI? The main thing is we're using large language models specifically around the invoicing side. The old way of maybe scanning invoices was more like OCR, object recognition.
AI’s future in restaurants? Imagine asking, 'What am I running out of this week?' and getting immediate answers. The future is closer than you think!
Now we're using real language models trained on the specific suppliers. Detecting things like, “This thing was scratched out,” or there was a discolor, whatever it may be. That's been pretty cool because of the big suppliers, the training, and obviously, we have more data. Those do well, but we then add the human element to review, especially on the food side. This is where people don't understand sometimes. It's one thing to scan an invoice through accounting software.
People are like, “I use this thing and I scan my receipts.” That's fine because it's pulling the text. It doesn't care what it is, whether it is a tomato or a case of this. It doesn't care. It is a name, it is text and there's a dollar amount and then it has a GL code. When you're using a system like WISK, the details matter because you need the units of measurement. It's updating your inventory, it's updating your recipes. When you're receiving avocados, it's not just an avocado line item. It's like, “Was this received by the case? How many are in the case? It was a case of 48. Was that the cost per case or unit? If it's meat, cost per kilo, per pound, for whatever.”
The idea here is that's why we have that human element to review because if that's messed up, that links to your recipe costs, which then will mess up your costs. The short answer is the main element that we're leveraging out right now is specifically around the invoice processing side. I'm sure that'll evolve and we want to implement it in other areas as well.
You could be like, “WISK, what do I need to do today?” You say, “Do it,” and then you go play some golf.
Even with the recipes, it already exists today, catching this style stuff where it could be like take a picture of your fridge and what can I make with this? Implementing things like that in the future that are like, “Based on your overstock, here's some cocktails you can make.” By today's standards, that's very realistic. It could be done today. We do see a future where it's going to be more like, “Give me the answers I'm looking for versus bombarding them with reporting and them trying to figure out where to look.
We hit a lot. We're going to go to rapid-fire questions. I'll ask you a few random things about life and business, etc. I always like to start with advice. What's a solid piece of advice you've had?
I think that saying was something like “Show me your calendar and I'll tell you if you'll hit your goals.” I’m probably butchering it but the idea behind that was managing your time and working backwards. I used to be guilty of this. I used to always have to-do lists. When I went from a to-do list to looking at my calendar and then working backward and starting with the big rocks and then the pebbles and the sand, I ended up having a much more fulfilled life.
The idea was simple, but I've been doing it for the last three years and it changed my life. For people tuning in, the advice is simple. You probably heard the analogy. If you're filling up a cup and you put sand first and then you try to add a bit of pebble, then you try to add a bit of rock, then water, and everything overflows. If you put the big rocks first and then the pebbles and then the sand, it'll go through. At the end, you could add water. Everything fits perfectly. The idea is that generally, the big rocks are the most important things in your life and the pebbles might be career stuff, etc.
When you do that with your calendar, magic happens because now you're looking at your full year and you're saying, “No matter what, I want to go on two vacations with my wife this year.” Great. That's a rock. “I want to go see my family for Christmas.” Cool. You're starting to put these rocks. For me, that's been the biggest game changer, working backward and preloading that year from big rocks down the sand.
That's a good one. If folks haven't seen that, I've seen a video. I'm sure there are multiple ones, but there's a video of that where a professor does it on a desk. It's perfect. Google rocks or pebbles, and you'll see the video. It's good. The kids are like, “Oh man.” Good stuff. What is a book you're reading now or a book recommendation you'd share?
The funny thing is I used to read a decent amount of books a year, but then more recently, the same thing, maybe in the last 2 or 3 years, I got into a habit. I forget where I heard this and it gave me permission because instead of going for quantity, repeating the same book. The short answer is right now, the books that I'm rereading third or fourth time. One is $100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi. I don't read it from front to back again. I go to a few chapters and try to understand certain concepts and apply them and then go back and read it again.
That one, and then $100M Leads specifically because I like reading business books. The third one that I read, again I'm not reading the front end, I go to certain chapters and reread them, is Storytelling With Data, which was a recommendation from one of my podcast guests and had a better show data. That was interesting to me too from a WISK perspective of how we can help restaurant serves.
Those are the three that come to mind. A piece of advice may be for people tuning in, especially on the business side. Once you read it once, don't be shy to focus on the few chapters, and reread those few chapters, ten times if you have to because I find those are the most useful when you take things out and implement them. If not, you're just reading the same way you might watch a Netflix show if you're not applying anything.
I will echo you 100%. You see a bunch of books back there, but I have found myself going back and rereading. I tell people I interview, “I read this.” I read a chapter every day from this book, How to Win Friends & Influence People.
Classic book.
A chapter a day. It takes a couple of minutes especially since I know the material. I skim through it. It's not overwhelming. If you tell me, “I'm busy. I cannot read.” Read for five minutes a day, ten minutes a day. Don't get overwhelmed that you have to do a whole book. I found myself going through stuff. I read some new stuff as well, but I reread stuff, especially since I'm getting old and my brain. I read this book probably ten times.
It's something new.
You need to get refreshed. That's how my brain is anyway.
I'm with you there.
I appreciate that. What's a favorite quote or a saying that you love? What do you think?
Quote-wise, one of my favorite ones, I even have it in my room is one from the Bible. It's like, “Ask and it'll be given to you. Seek it and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you.” For me, that one always resonates. I love that quote because it speaks to this idea in a weird way. I think of it in life, but also in business. Don't be scared. Get uncomfortable.
Sometimes all you have to do is ask. It’s the idea of seeking, discovering things, and not being scared to break things and to fail, and then knocking. The door will be open for you. I like being there at the right time and the right opportunity. I know it might be a little random because it's a quote from the Bible, but I love that quote. For whatever reason, the first time I read it, it gave me chills. That's what comes to mind.
It goes back to everyone's grandmother's advice. If you don't ask, you don't get it. That's a big part of life. Speaking of life lessons in business and personal, what do you think, life lesson?
Personal Assistant And Buying Back Time
I always joke around that I have so many failures under my belt that I can share a lot of lessons. One is the idea of going back to that calendar, but a little more specific on the idea of buying back your time. That was all. Everyone knows it to a certain extent like, “Time is your most valuable asset.” Not many people will maybe take action on it. One big lesson I learned that I wish I would have done earlier is only because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it.
The idea of delegating and offloading. One of the biggest shifts in my personal life and business life was hiring a personal assistant, but also learning how to properly leverage a personal assistant. The one I've hired in the past years ago didn't work out. I'm like, “I'll do it myself.” The second time, I did it properly, read some books, and figured out how to do it properly. That's the biggest game changer for me on the business side, but also the personal side.
The idea of buying back your time and a big inspiration for that was Dan Martell's book Buy Back Your Time. That gave me a lot of good insights on how to do it right. I always liked the concept, but I was struggling with buying it and finding how to do it. That's what comes to mind. A bit more on the business side, when launching a new business, the biggest lesson I learned with WISK and even with my previous startups is to focus on the customer. The faster you can get your product or your idea in the customer's hands, the better. It doesn't matter how shitty it is.
Focus on the customer first! The faster you get your product into their hands, the easier it becomes to raise money and grow.
Once you get real sales, nothing else matters. Let me rephrase. Nothing else is as hard in the sense that you're trying to raise money. Someone says, “This idea is stupid.” You're like, “We got ten people paying $300 a month. Okay.” You're trying to hire someone. You're trying to hire a developer. They're like, “I don't know. This idea is weird.” You're like, “We got ten people paying $300 a month.
A big lesson there for me was that if you focus on the core, which is the customer in the beginning, all those other things that are equally important, hiring people, raising money, whatever it may be, become easier. Don't delay it. It's human nature to delay it. You're waiting for one more feature or one more thing. If you're proud of it, when you launched it, you waited too long.
Future Trends in the Restaurant Industry
We touched in our talk about AI trends and so forth. Where do you see the restaurant industry as a whole going in the next 2 to 3 years?
The obvious one is if you think about that curve like early adopters and the early majority and late majority, or whatever it is, that bell curve, it's going to go further down. A tiny percentage of restaurants now adopting some of this tech and maybe some of the bigger chains doing some of this robotic stuff like Chipotle or whatever, but you're seeing that today. There's going to be more of that. That's for sure.
More restaurants are going to adopt more of this tech, both physical and robotic stuff, and then maybe online predictive stuff and back-at-house stuff, things like WISK. I think that'll be more adopted. In terms of maybe a call that I think will happen, I don't know if it'll be three years, but I've been seeing a trend happen where there's this shift where companies that are trying to get you disconnected from tech are doing well. Whether it's disconnecting from your phone or some of these are consumer apps, that general trend of getting back in terms of cyclical trends.
It's cool again to not have your phone on, even the concept of not bringing your phone with you or like, “I went on a plane and I didn't do anything.” This trend is coming back but the thing I would imagine is seeing that in certain restaurants. I don't know if they've adopted it everywhere, but the idea is that restaurants that do well will not only have a more personal brand. Maybe the founder and chefs will be more of a personality on social and this and that. You're already seeing that, but I think there'll be more of that brand connection. In addition, restaurants that bring back that human element will do well.
I know QSRs are growing and this and that. I know full-service restaurants are tough spaces, but I do think that these FSRs will make a comeback because people are going to miss the human touch. The waiter that remembers your special drink and that human element. Maybe there'll be elements of going to a cafe and not being able to use your laptop or there's no internet in the cafe because they don't want you to connect. I think there'll be more of that trend. That's one thing that comes to mind for sure. Generally, I could see that.
More tech, more robots, and more AI—but don’t forget, people still crave human connections. FSRs will make a comeback, thanks to that human touch.
As everything goes in one direction, you want a little bit of the other side as well to do it. Last question for you. What's one thing that not many folks know about you?
I speak fluently in Spanish. I only learned it about 3 or 4 years ago. My wife is Colombian. I started with Colombia. I was like, “I got to know what they’re talking about.” I learned it. That’s a big one. It helped because I grew up in Montreal. I spoke English and French. My parents were Italians. I spoke Italian too. Having that help with the Spanish but I think people don’t expect that. I was in Colombia with my brothers. Hearing me communicate with people or a taxi, he was like, “I didn't know you spoke that well.” That's maybe a fun one.
As we touched on before, we didn't talk in the episode, but you're down in Miami and I lived in Miami for years. Almost the assumption is that you speak Spanish. We lived in Miami. It's very helpful. We didn't talk about the podcast. Talk about your podcast for a second and then we'll wrap and you can tell us where to go and find out more stuff and all that.
Thanks so much for having me on. The podcast is called Wisking It All. You can go to WISK.AI. If you hit on the podcast, there are all the links to Spotify and YouTube. It’s a video podcast every Tuesday. You can watch the Youtube full videos. We post clips on all our socials. The idea of the podcast is simple. We got experts, and then I asked people who are in the restaurant's day-to-day space like owners, operators, etc, and gave their perspectives. Sometimes it's restaurants, consultants, or other tech companies.
It could be a scheduling app. It could be this. The idea is simple. We're trying to help restaurateurs. I'll never forget when someone told me, “If the goal of WISK is to keep the math simple, let's say 10,000 paying customers, then the question is, how can you help 100,000 people for free?” It’s like 10% is paying, but the rest, you're helping. We did a big push there. We have podcasts. We do a weekly newsletter every Monday on LinkedIn.
We do a weekly newsletter with 25,000 subscribers every Thursday with lessons and things from our podcast. Over the last year, we started pushing a lot more like we just want to help. For those of you who are on our ICP and we can help and you want to use our software, great. If you don't, we still want to help. That's the mission behind WISK.
If you zoom out, yes, it's cogs. Yes, it's this, but the main mission is time back, passion forward. These people got into the space to focus on their love of the hospitality space and they got sucked into doing all this spreadsheet Excel, boring, but necessary stuff. Our whole philosophy is how we get their time back and help them run a profitable business.
I love it. Not everyone is ready to buy every product at the right moment. Be a part of their journey. When they're ready, they may wish to go with you, but be an education force, and share what's working. I appreciate it that way. That's our mission as well. It’s to share, share, share, and some stuff eventually filters back our way. We appreciate it. Folks, Angelo Esposito, CEO of WISK.AI. You can find them at WISK.AI.
Easy to find. Lots of good stuff. You can click over to the podcast from there as well. I saw case studies on there and I'm sure you pointed to the newsletter. Lots of good content there. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service people, and tech news, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, do me a favor, wherever you're tuning in hit a like button to subscribe, do a quick review, or rate. That stuff is helpful. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you, Angelo.
Thank you. I appreciate you.
Important Links
- Angelo Esposito - LinkedIn
- WISK.AI
- $100 Million Offers
- $100M Leads
- Storytelling With Data
- How to Win Friends & Influence People
- Buy Back Your Time