Georgia Technology Summit 2022: Keynote by Paul Brown, Inspire Brands

Thank you. Good morning. It's great to be here. I'm really looking forward to talking about the exciting journey the restaurant industry is on, facilitated by technology and what's happening with Inspire. But given this group, I thought I'd start by telling a story I've never told before — a personal and embarrassing story semi-related to technology. I graduated from Georgia Tech 30 years ago. My first job was as a coder on a large systems integration project for a client (an Atlanta-based airline). We used COBOL, CICS, and SQL. I loved SQL and became the king of embedded queries, thinking I was efficient. But when performance tests came, my program, meant to run a couple of hours overnight, initially ran for months. I tried to parallelize it across six CPUs on an IBM 3090, but it pegged all CPUs and crashed production systems, bringing down the project for seven hours. That taught me that coding wasn't for me, so I went to business school. My first project in 1994 was about how the internet would change the airline industry, and I saw technology transform industries end to end. Now let's talk about the restaurant industry. One way to measure productivity is labor productivity. Compared to banking, retail, airlines, and hotels, the restaurant industry's productivity has been flat. It's the last large industry — $600 billion in the US, $2 trillion globally — yet to be fundamentally transformed by technology. Why? It's built on manual processes, highly fragmented with 700,000 restaurants in the US, and technology vendors haven't focused on it. Consolidation and large investments are needed. That's why in 2014-2015 we saw an opportunity to create a different kind of restaurant company: Inspire Brands. We consolidate successful brands and build a scalable and extensible technology platform. Today we have six brands, 32,000 restaurants in 70 countries, $30 billion in system sales, $7 billion in digital sales, and 650,000 team members. Our culture includes Mavericks, Allies, Visionaries, Achievers, and Good Citizens. We invest in eight core capabilities, all underpinned by technology. About 50% of our corporate headquarters staff are technology, data, or analytics people — it sounds more like a tech company. Ten years ago, the customer relationship started and ended at the restaurant. Now the industry is about 25% digital, enabling dynamic pricing, data-driven operations, and supply chain improvements. COVID accelerated digital sales at Inspire by 91% from Q1 2020 to Q1 2022. A few examples: At Sonic, we integrated mobile ordering seamlessly into their drive-in model, going from zero to a billion dollars in digital sales in 3.5 years. At Buffalo Wild Wings, we're rolling out a model where customers can choose how they interact — server, app, or any combination — enabling dynamic pricing and labor transformation. At Dunkin', we use geofencing to know when a customer arrives and have their order ready. We also use AI to predict sales down to 15-minute increments by item, allowing us to schedule labor precisely. For example, before, labor allocation was based on weekly sales volume, but now we can differentiate between bar-heavy and food-heavy restaurants. Finally, we're testing the Flippy 2 robot for frying stations in Buffalo Wild Wings, freeing up team members for better roles.

And there's a lot of opportunity to do that, particularly if you start thinking about up into the supply chain and fundamental transformation there. So I hope you see that I'm fascinated, I'm loving what's happening in this industry. I've worked in the hotel industry, the airline industry, I worked for Expedia, I've been all over those types of industries, but never have I been on this kind of a journey this relatively early in this stage in an industry that has so many opportunities end to end to actually fundamentally transform every single element of the business in a win-win environment where it's good for the customers, good for the business model, and also good for the team members. So thank you for allowing me to come up here and talk a little bit about the restaurant and Inspire industry journey. Hope you have a great rest of the conference. Thank you.