Reader Spotlight: Billy Hubbard, Director of Channel Sales, Upserve

Upserve's vision is to be a single platform for restaurateurs to run their business. Upserve includes Breadcrumb Point of Sale - the leading cloud-based POS designed specifically for restaurants. When combined with Upserve’s Smart Management Assistant, we make it easier to manage guests, staff, marketing, finances, and even the menu.

Describe the most innovative installation/solution you’ve been involved in recently.

Earlier this year, Upserve acquired Breadcrumb point of sale. Bringing together Breadcrumb’s mobile Point of Sale with Upserve’s smart management assistant allows Upserve to deliver the most complete suite of solutions purpose-built for restaurants to increase profit, improve guest experiences, lift productivity, and reduce costs.  Additionally, Upserve recently launched its own EMV solution for new and existing customers. With Breadcrumb EMV and Upserve Pro, customers can now avoid distractions around liability and chargebacks, and access data that allow them to focus on delivering a one-of-a-kind guest experience.

What is the biggest threat to your business? What are you doing about it?

Our biggest threat is the ability for us to continue our hyper-growth while adopting a Point of Sale product. The first few months following our acquisition of Breadcrumb Point of Sale were considerably challenging in transitioning cloud-hosting, sales & support staff, and marketing efforts. That said, our team rose to the challenge and executed flawlessly.    

Over the past few months, we have rapidly and strategically focused on supporting our customers first. Since may, we have over doubled our customer-facing Account Management and Support teams in order to secure the existing Breadcrumb POS restaurant base as well as the hundreds of restaurateurs that join the Upserve family monthly.   

Over the next year, we will continue to expand our customer-facing support through the extension of our channel partner program to include Point of Sale resellers, our Solution Providers. Additionally, we’re building more automation around remotely managed network services and Tier-2 support, all with the intention of continuously improving customer experience. 

What is the biggest opportunity for your business? What are you doing to take advantage of it?

Point solutions are proving to be a cumbersome and laborious reality for restaurant owners - business technologies don’t speak to each other and often are redundant. Due to the driving demand from restaurateurs to simplify their life, the Upserve software management solution and Breadcrumb Point of Sale streamline business requirements and enable a better run restaurant.

What emerging technology will have the biggest impact on your business and why?

Artificial Intelligence is more than just a concept, it’s a reality in everyday life. For example, much of your daily intake of social media consists of posts and stories specifically curated for your individual taste. Anybody who has used Amazon Echo or Google Home has leveraged AI through voice-recognition and we’ve taken a leap forward with our “Ellie” technology.

At Upserve, we’re building a more natural way for restaurateurs to get the facts they need to make smarter, faster decisions. It starts with powerful technology: The artificial intelligence that runs our conversational interface is powered by Facebook’s bot engine, and it integrates massive amounts of restaurant data Upserve pulls in from table management, point of sale, online reviews and other systems. Best of all, it’s easy to use because simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.   Toady, Ellie is available only through our mobile app, but soon restaurateurs be able to talk with her via Facebook Messenger, Slack, and other open messaging platforms.

What technology do you wish you had embraced sooner and why?

Upserve recently entered the POS space with the acquisition of Breadcrumb Point of Sale. The marriage of our industry-leading POS with the insights and analytics delivered by our Smart Management Assistant has created a highly differentiated and unique product platform for restaurant operators. The platform is now creating new opportunities for operators to understand, manage and grow their business unlike anything previously available in the market, something operators deserved long before now. 

Where do you see the channel in 10 years?

The ISV and VAR landscapes are consolidating at a rapid pace. Looking at recent acquisitions between payments and point-of-sale, it’s almost inevitable that, at least in the hospitality space, the two will be indistinguishable. In other words, there’s too much data generated by the payments and POS networks to avoid monetization and consolidation.

A good example is how we’ve seen a big shift over the past decade in the grocery industry to monetize from “big data” such that the big distribution companies are more than happy to subsidize POS technology for retail grocery so long as they can get their hands on the proprietary data within.   I sense the same shift coming in the restaurant space where, today, independent consultants rule the market. With POS and payments data moving to the cloud, leaders in the big-data space will embrace API integrations to aggregate data and help deliver actionable insights to restaurateurs and the industries that serve them (food distribution, marketing firms, etc..), much like Upserve does today but on a massively larger scale. 

What about your company culture attracts new employees and helps retrain current ones?

Our company values working together as One Team – unified in our passion for the customers we serve, and the company we are building. We push one another and hold each other accountable for great results – but, always with respect for the diverse perspectives and background that each person brings to the table.

What advice would you give to a VAR/MSP/ISV new to the channel?

The pareto principle is a reality when dealing with partnerships - you’ll find that about 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your partners. Furthermore, there really isn’t one silver-bullet that predicts a partnership will become legendary. Most of your top partners will rise from the ranks organically, but will need your training & support along the way.

The best way to scale your business in the early years is by using data to better understand what sort of partnerships will make up the 80% of your partner base that will produce predictable revenue. By focusing on the right segment/type of partner that will contribute a known quantity of business, you’re subsequently building a pool of partners that may graduate to “top-20%” status.

I recommend focusing on quantity of partnerships to expand your market coverage in key geographies and learn what makes your program resonate with potential partners.  With enough partners in your community, you can begin to understand their lifecycle, median revenue contribution, and the support each partner will need. With this data, you can scale your internal team to recruit and enable enough partners to meet your revenue targets in a metrics-based manner.   

If you weren’t a VAR/MSP/ISV what would you be doing?

Managing a team of sales professionals in tech/industrial engineering.

What is the best business book on your shelf?

Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross