Inside the Mind of a Tech Leader: Justin Skelton's Insights | Restrocast

It's good to be here. Thank you for allowing us to do that.

Sure. So my role today is Senior Vice President and CIO at Dine Brands Global, and I run all of IT, all things IT. That's a combination of restaurant technology. So any technologies that occur inside the restaurant, I've got a good amount of that accountability. And I say a good amount because there are actually systems, for example, some of the back in HR systems in the restaurants that we don't directly decide upon, although we obviously look at where there's an opportunity to leverage our scale to get the best prices. But in terms of the back of house and the in-restaurant front of house technology, I've got accountability for that. In addition, the off-prem technology we use, the website, mobile app, all the business intelligence capabilities, I have teams that drive that as well. And then finally, I would say the corporate systems, anything that takes place or supports our corporate employees or Dine employees, I've got that also falls within my purview. And also the infrastructure, right, cloud, these technologies, etc., also fall within my remit as well. So that's my day to day. And then in addition to that, I also sit on the executive team. So I report into the CEO, and so matters any discussions around corporate strategy direction of the company, I participate directly in those conversations.

So Dine Brands from an employee base perspective, we're at about 5 to 600 people, give or take. But the difference with our company, because that may seem kind of small, but when you think about it, we support all the franchisees as well now, because we're what we call asset light. We're 100% franchise now. We don't have employees that sit inside of the restaurants. The franchisees are accountable for those resources. So it's one of those things where the numbers look relatively small, but the impact from an IT perspective is broad, is huge, because it not only deals with all the technology in the field as well.

So we've got about 1600 in IHOP, roughly the same amount in Applebee's. So another 1600. And then for Fuzzies, we're anywhere between, I think we have close to 200 locations. That's where we're at for Fuzzies right now. And growing.

Yeah. So you're talking close to 4000 restaurants. Well, that's 3200 and then you've got another 200. So not that far shy of 4000. We'll just call it 4000. Sounds better.

Sure. Well, it's an interesting story for a lot of different reasons. I always find it hard, it's a little bit boring because I talk about myself a whole lot. But it started. I'm a, I think you have to express it, I'm a military brat. We were called military brats. And that's where your father or mother was a service member and was a career service member. So we grew up moving around. The life I grew up in outside of Boston, Massachusetts. We moved around. I think I counted, I think just even being part of the military, I think we lived in five different states, lived overseas, lived in Germany for three years. We were there. And so basically, I would describe my childhood as being one of continuing to move around, nearly almost every three years. In my case, my father would come home and say, we're off moving to the next place. And so it was a bit of an adventure, not knowing where you were going to end up. And so that's how I would characterize my upbringing. I've got siblings. So knowing it wasn't just me and not an only child, but we would all go through that same experience of having to pick up, move to a new place, meet new friends, get adjusted to the new environment and adapt to whatever was going on wherever you were going.

I've got three brothers and one sister. And I'm the second youngest. So in the pecking order.

I think the biggest thing is you have to learn how to adapt. You're always subject to changing environment because you could live in the same state and never have moves and have to deal with change just because you're going from an adolescent into teenage years and into high school years. But when you have to move around, you don't have the luxury of knowing that having friends that go back to elementary school who you've gone all the way through your adolescent phase and graduating high school. So the way I would characterize it would be really having to adapt to change because that change was being thrown at you. To give you a perfect example, we moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Bonn, Germany. And if you can imagine the cultural change going from the desert in the great Southwest to a whole different country, moving to Germany, you could understand how you have to adapt. It's not only culture, it's weather, it's the food, everything. The weather was different, the language was very different. We lived on an American community, so you had other Americans around you that spoke English, so it wasn't like you were being thrown into an environment where people around you didn't speak the language. But certainly when you left the confines of the military installation and you went out into what we called the German economy at the time, you had to learn how to get around. So it was a completely new experience, but it's one where you had to really adapt to change. In addition to that, you are exposed to a lot of different people of different backgrounds. You could live in the U.S. and a lot of people never live outside of five miles from where they grew up. But when you're in the military, you got people from different parts of the U.S., different parts of different countries even. And so that was the other thing I think that changed me as well, or at least influenced the person I am today.

I feel about my background and how it relates to how we interact in my personal life and business is one of a great deal of tolerance. I've experienced different things growing up, different cultures, you name it. So my level of interaction is one of tolerance, listening, teamwork. I also come from a sports background, partly being in the military, but also playing sports growing up. So a lot of it was just around team play. You win as a team, you operate as a team. You can't win as an individual. So I think those things influenced how I interact today and how it translates to business throughout my career. I like to think that those things had a very positive impact in terms of how I've operated, whether at Allstate Insurance, CVS, Bank of America, now. I potentially believe that those things translate really well.

So my undergraduate I went to Cal State University of San Bernardino, small school, small city school in California. I got my MBA from University of Illinois, Chicago. But when I started after I graduated, quite frankly, I was looking for a job. I needed to earn some money, I needed to eat. So when I left college, I was looking around for different opportunities and looked through the want ads back in the day. An opportunity to become a supervisor at Allstate Insurance Company. I was living in California at the time, and that's how I kicked off my career. And that is a long one in the insurance and eventually in banking. A lot of people think that when you thought about insurance, you were looking at going into insurance. And I was like, no, I could have any industry approach me at that point in time when I needed to pay my bills. I certainly would have been open to any opportunity, any industry. But I also knew when I joined the insurance business, the company had name recognition with me. Everybody knew who Allstate was. So to me, there was some comfort in knowing I'd be joining a company that wasn't just a small company that I didn't understand. So that's how I started. And I was there for 19 years. I started here in California, was here for a good chunk of my career. Just like any other business, there's always some change going on. The function I was in actually was being consolidated, so we had offices being consolidated. And so the question was, what am I going to do next? So what's the next opportunity for me? I was newly married and wanted to start a family. A good deal of my family actually live in Arizona. My parents at that time had moved from California to Arizona. My dad was planning to retire and they wanted to live there. So being newlyweds and wanting to start a family at some point, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to be close to the family. So I took an opportunity to move to Phoenix. And even though I started my career in IT, when I moved to Phoenix, they didn't have an IT role because it was more of a regional or small office environment in Allstate. So I went into underwriting actually. It was interesting. I thought, well, the only opportunity there is in underwriting. So I was an underwriter for about two and a half years. Great experience. I always say if you're in the insurance business, the three best departments you can work in to really understand what's going on are sales, claims, and underwriting. When I was in underwriting, I learned a lot about how you manage risk, how you think about when customers, when you're assessing whether a customer is a good prospect that turns into an insured, you really got to apply some critical thinking. It's not just that they can have another policy or two policies, you had a long term relationship with you, although the policy they're bringing to you on its surface may not be the best risk. So being to look at risk holistically and bring that to the table. So I was there. They figured out pretty quickly I'm an IT guy. So within that building they were really building a department around technology. And I was thrilled when at that time the president of the region, the regional vice president came to me and it was kind of more of a passing thing where he said, oh, by the way, you're going to be moving to a different apartment. And I said, what are you talking about? I didn't necessarily have insight into what I would actually have to be doing, but I think it was widely known that this guy knows technology, we're building technology, he really needs to be over there, he's going to be the biggest benefit to us. So I worked over there, did a range of different responsibilities. But the headquarters of Allstate was in Northbrook, Illinois. So mostly if you wanted to advance your career, you're going to have to relocate. So when I was working in Arizona in this newly formed department, my title was Technology Division Manager. There were multiple Technology Division Managers around the country. So each regional office had one of me in their offices. So I get a call, are you interested in coming to Chicago, coming to the big house, and coming in doing much broader things that impact not just the region you're in, but across the entire company? To which I said I couldn't pass that up. At that point in time, I was really interested in growing my career. So moved to Chicago metro area and worked in a variety of different responsibilities there. Finished up graduate school and was really happy with my career progression. I felt really good about how things were progressing. But there was a point at which I was deciding, am I going to stay here and get the gold watch, or am I going to start really thinking about my next moves outside the company? I saw where there was sort of a trend where a lot of people were moving to different companies. It used to be back in the day, you stay with the company, then you retired with that same company. And I saw a trend emerging because we were bringing people from the outside into our company versus just everything being an internal promotion. So these kind of things start to have an impact. You start to think, perhaps my best days are really going out and exploring what's in the marketplace. Before I could do anything, I just finished up my MBA. I get a call from somebody who used to work with who was at the Auto Club Group, which is Triple-A. And the person said, hey, remember me? I'm looking for a Chief Technology Officer or a CTO. And I said, okay. And things moved pretty quickly. And the next thing I know, I'm joining Triple-A as a Chief Technology Officer out of Dearborn, Michigan. So I was in Michigan. A great company, much smaller than Allstate Insurance. So sort of before I was a small fish in a big pond. Now I became a big fish in a small pond. But it was a great experience for me. And I was really looking forward to having that broader impact as an executive, making the technology decisions.

That would have been 2006. And I was really happy with the job and with the role with the company. But I had some aging parents on the West Coast. My father was sick at the time, and I found myself traveling back and forth on a regular basis. And I just said, I don't think I can really sustain this. So I had an interest in coming back to the West Coast or to Arizona. There was an opportunity that came up. And by the way, my background there was strictly insurance, so I hadn't had any restaurant experience or anything else. My whole sole career was in the insurance business. And even Triple-A, they do towing, but effectively the largest part of their revenue comes from selling insurance. So there was an opportunity working for Countrywide. Most people forget about Countrywide, but actually Countrywide, the big mortgage company in the U.S., it was right around just before the global financial crisis. And I got a call that Countrywide was looking for a CIO to run their insurance services group. Interestingly enough, the insurance business can be a relatively small world. It's a pretty defined vertical. So you find that a lot of people you probably crossed paths with at some point or you know them or people that know them. So I interviewed with them. They're based in Southern California, based in Irvine, California, at the time, and joined with Countrywide Insurance Services Group, which was a phenomenal experience. But nothing good lasts. Bank of America at the time, even before I joined, they had acquired, they were in the process of acquiring Countrywide. So even during the interview process, not only did I have to interview with people from Countrywide, I also had to interview with people from Bank of America. The acquisition was underway. It was moving pretty quickly as I was going through the interviewing process. So the minute I thought, okay, this is great, interviews done, time out, you got to interview with a whole lot of other people. So it was a fairly lengthy process. So I joined up to Countrywide and Bank of America and ran all the combined insurance services group for Bank of America. So at the time, there was property and casualty, and not to give a lesson around insurance, but there were multiple divisions that were part of the combination of Countrywide and Bank of America. So I ran that function. I reported into a kind of a dual reporting relationship to the overall CIO of all the consumer bank, which included insurance, and had a dotted line to the CEO of the insurance services group. So I was there. But again, a lot of change happening at the time. Bank of America wasn't really interested in continuing with the property casualty business. The insurance vertical is a very specific skill set. It's a very unique business. You have claims in the banking industry, you don't have much in the way of volatility around revenue and claims. But insurance you do, you have catastrophes. You've got a lot of risk you have to manage. And at the time also, most banks were trying to have a capital preservation requirement or a capital reservation need to demonstrate to the federal government that even though you weren't too big to fail, you had to, especially after the crash. After the crash, it was like everybody was saying non-strategic assets were being sold off. So it wasn't core to your business model. Those assets needed to be sold so you could bring in the money to actually have the right capital reserves. So the insurance services group was one on the chopping block, or one to be sold. And so I had a decision to make: was I going to stay with the insurance component or was it important for me to stay with Bank of America? Because that decision was going to be critical. If I stayed with insurance, if it was sold off, then I was going to go with the company that it was being divested to. If I stayed with Bank of America, then I'd become officially in the banking industry. So that was sort of an inflection point. At the time, my kids were still middle school, elementary school. So the first time in my career I basically said, I'm not willing to move. I've got to get my kids through, give them some stability. So I made a decision to stay with Bank of America. I became the Chief Technology Officer for the mortgage and the insurance and what was remaining from the insurance business. So I ran all the infrastructure, all the architecture and all that. I did that for a while. And then, of course, a lot of changes and you're thinking about your next move. Typically either you're thinking about the next move or the company's thinking about where they can put you. So after that I went into data management. I was really interested in learning more about data. So even though it's part of a CIO function or a CTO function, you're going to get exposed to data. But when you want to do it in that particular vertical and that domain across the company, you're going to get a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge. So I went into the data management under enterprise technology function there for a while at Bank of America. The company was changing. I was one of the last remaining officers in California. I could not relocate. I was not in a place where I could work and make that move. So ultimately, I made a decision to figure out what my next job was going to be. One of the individuals that I worked with at the Insurance Services Group that I mentioned for the Countrywide Insurance Group, he was a Chief Operating Officer there. He had gone to work for another company that was based in the US, but they had acquired a specialty insurance group out of London. So he calls me up and says, Hey, I could use your help. We're bringing these two companies together. You've proven that you've got a great background. We worked really well together. He says, I want you to consult with me for about nine months. And I said, Great. And I said, What am I going to do? He says, You're going to do a ton of things. And when those things are completed, I also need to do some research around things like autonomous vehicles and some of the more innovative things. So I was really excited about that. It was probably in my career I would say that was one of the most fun opportunities I had because I had never been on the 1099. I had never been an independent contractor. I didn't even know what that was. I'd always been a corporate employee. So that was a great experience. Plus, I could just throw all these different ideas out. It came to me as what my thoughts were, perspectives were, and it was just a great arrangement. Got a chance to think freely about technology.

Exactly. Hey, give me your thoughts around this. And you didn't necessarily have a team where you had all the administrative duties, team meetings, running team meetings, etc. So it was me just working as an independent contractor and again, having the freedom to be able to offer perspectives, put together presentations, the whole bit. When I look back on it, not to mention I was living in London for nine months and that was an experience in and of itself. So I worked with him for nine months. My contract was coming to an end and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. So my next assignment was working for CVS Health. I never worked in retail, never worked in the health care business. These are two beasts combined. So I joined CVS, which was based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It happened to be a location that I was comfortable with. And at that time, my kids were sort of off doing their own thing, off to college and all that. So I had the flexibility and freedom to broaden out. I mentioned I got family in Arizona, so it was a perfect fit. So I went to work for CVS Health. Huge company. I tell people when you think about acquisitions, I always tell people when you work for a company that size, I think we were before the acquisition of Aetna, I think we were probably about Fortune 10, Fortune 11. Massive company.

Oh, yeah, it is all predominantly domestic United States. Now it's like Fortune 3 or 4. Revenue was about 300 billion, give or take. It was just insanely large. But I had an opportunity to work there. I was an executive there. We did a lot of transformations at the company. So did my time there. And very similar experience where you're thinking about, okay, are you going to have to relocate? Because after the acquisition of Aetna, a lot of those individuals were actually on the East Coast. And CVS is based in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. So you really start to figure out what do you want to do next in your career. Long story short, I love CVS, and I was thinking about my next opportunity, and that's when Dine Brands comes into play.

The way it happened, quite frankly, is I had left CVS and I was looking to say, okay, what do I want to do differently? What do I want to do? And just like anything else, you're sort of looking around and saying, you know who you know, what companies are doing what? And a recruiter got in touch with a recruiter over there. And she started the interviewing process. At that time in my career, I felt like I had done everything just about I wanted to do. I already had the CIO title, which of course for me, from my humble beginnings, I was delighted that I reached the level of CIO and reached a level of CTO. I was really happy with that. And that too with the largest companies in their sector. Even the divisional CTO, divisional CIO, these are large companies and even those groups are fairly large. So for me, just to be able to achieve that level, I was delighted. So for me, it wasn't about I want to go to become a CIO again. At that point in time in my career, I was really looking forward to how can I help companies. My interest there was just saying, let me take my experience and it could have been, quite frankly, a project manager. And I was prepared to say, let me just help the company out. I felt like I had accomplished my main goals that I'd set out. And I was delighted. So I joined the company. I was running the cloud based technologies for Dine at the time. I relocated to the headquarters in Glendale, California, and I was happy to relocate again. My kids were already off doing their own thing. I had the flexibility to move. It happened to be in my geography that I had a preference of being in. And a lot of friends, my two of my kids are in California. So it was perfect. And then the pandemic hit, which was just like most people.

Yes, I joined before the pandemic. I joined in 2019, but the pandemic was like in 2020. So all of a sudden the whole thing changed on a dime. We went from, okay, I'm getting an understanding around how the restaurant business works and how in Dine Brands to, oh my God, restaurants are closing down. There's no in-restaurant dining. What is it going to mean? Now, of course, all of that, my predecessor had moved on to a different company. And I get a call from the then CFO saying, how are you doing? And I'm like, I think I'm doing okay. But this is all during when everything was getting really crazy with the pandemic. And he says basically, hey, we want you to come in and be the CIO. And he said, What do you think about that? And I said, I'm in, because what I decided at that point in time was it was either I was going to take the CIO job or somebody else was going to come in outside and take the CIO job. Now, because I already had the experience, I felt like, hey, listen, I'll go ahead and take the job, because I felt like I can make the biggest impact for the company. So I took the job. But during that period of time, it was a challenge because we needed to make very difficult decisions around how we were going to fund the IT portfolio.

Yes. So I joined the company in 2019. And then what happened as the pandemic began to really hit, the role was different. When I first joined Dine Brands, I was running all the cloud technologies and I reported into the CIO. And so when the pandemic hit, the then CIO took a different job and I was elevated to take the role. But during that period of time, we had to make some decisions around personnel decisions because overall we were in a very difficult situation for all the restaurants, for all business. The restaurant business was impacted. Hospitality was impacted more greatly. And so at that time we had decided that we were going to have to potentially reduce our staff, reduce overall IT portfolio. And so that was a very difficult period of time, kind of being new in the role. A lot of people like taking the role when everything is good, you got a big portfolio, you got a lot of money to spend. But this was a situation when I took over, it was a bit of a crisis during a very difficult time. Again, across all industries, everybody. But even more so for the restaurants, because the visibility was also poor for the restaurant, especially the dine-in formats.

Exactly. And our big pivot was we needed to really survive and we had to really go off run. We had to really look at the digital, where we were from a digital perspective. But really what it did was accelerate a lot of work we had contemplated. We needed to accelerate that because that's how a lot of people wanted to engage. For example, pay-at-the-table, bring your own device or pay on your own device, being able to see the menu and pulling out your phone and pulling it off a QR code. As a restaurant tech company, I can tell you that so many solutions over the years which we were kind of ignoring. Even when restaurants were asking for it, we were like, are you going to deploy it across the board? No, we're just trying. Digital menu. We were like, guys, you're not here for experimentation. You try it from somebody else. Let us know. And as soon as pandemic hit, in the next two months, all those solutions were not only supposed to release, they got deployed.

And we went through the same thing. And so it was one of, restaurants were being impacted here. Consumers and guests have a different way to engage you. And a lot of them needed, they were going to do it through DSPs, through DoorDash, Uber Eats, et cetera. And so we needed to make sure we adapted our strategy to support that, to support where the customers were going to be. So that was a very challenging time. We had a new CEO then that came in. Before he came in, I was reporting to the CFO. When he came in, it was starting to come out of the pandemic. But a recognition from him as well as from me having had just some time in the role that we were really behind in our technology stack.

Well, it's interesting. I wasn't entirely shocked because you would think that the bigger the company, the higher the investment in technology and the more forward looking technology is. But in fact, I wasn't entirely surprised because it would be more surprising that companies with bigger names are as far behind as they were. So I think we tend to think that Fortune 10 companies have all the best technology out there, but that's not always the case, particularly in the retail segment, because the margins are different. Retail is different margins. And when you think about how you invest in technology, that has an impact. However, if you look at banking technology, particularly around the wealth side of the business, your technology has to be state of the art. If you miss trades, you cost billions. On the CVS side as it relates to the pharmacy component, it also has to be state of the art. But it doesn't mean that all the other technology is as current or as up to date as you would think. So when I came into the restaurant business, I wasn't entirely shocked by it. But as an IT person, you also look at that as a challenge. The opportunity is brilliant. Because if you come into an organization that's already got all the current technology, what's left to do? You're just on maintenance. The excitement lies with organizations who are behind in technology but are willing to spend the money to get to a level of currency in terms of the technology stack. So for me, I looked at it as a great opportunity. I just needed to have a partner who agreed that new capital investment in technology was a good thing. And it worked out really well.

Yeah, we had a few. He joined the company. We had a few introductory one-on-ones and talks about different perspectives and points of views around it. And he had two critical points of views that I aligned with, or three, that I aligned 100% with. One was we need to invest more in technology. And to me it was like, okay, this is great. We had already developed a 3 to 4 year roadmap. But having on paper is one thing, knowing that investments are going to be made to bring that to life is a whole different thing. The other thing, the decision that was made was having me report directly to him, and that really spoke to the fact that we see IT as a strategic partner. We see how critical technology is going forward into the success of our business. Therefore, it made sense for me to be part of those discussions. Any time you talk strategy, you can't talk business strategy without a technology component. So to me, that was a big win. And the other thing I think that took a lot of pressure off of us was that technology should be brand led. I think as technologists, it puts a lot of pressure on your teams where you've got to come in with all the answers using technology. And at the end of the day, in order to get any technology implemented, you need to have sponsorship. You need to have business sponsors who are aligned to your strategy. If those ideas around the technology are misaligned at any level, the initiative gets stalled. In particular, when you're dealing with restaurant technology, because in our case, we're asset light, as I mentioned, we are 100% franchised. There's a lot of buy-in and support and sponsorship and getting everybody on the same page to take something like a point of sale and be able to take it all the way through the system and actually start deploying it. It's a massive undertaking. Very different from when you have all corporate stores, like in the case of CVS. If there's a need for technology, the level of buy-in you need is limited. You're not dealing with individual business owners who have to make financial decisions about how much cash they have, how they want to invest their dollars. That's more of a broad base enterprise project that's done at the corporate level. By working with franchises, you're dealing with so many different business owners who are going to question every dollar that is going to go in. So that was the journey to getting us to the point where we are now.

Exactly right. And that has actually also forced restaurants to think of tech as an efficiency partner, not really just a utility. And that's how we tend to approach it, too. It's not enough to just bring in technology that's going to cost them more. If they can't see the ROI, the returns, then it is going to be problematic. It's going to be difficult. And I think that can contribute to why certain industries are a little bit far behind, because of the amount of effort it takes to be able to get the adoption of the technology and sell individual business owners on how this actually is going to make their rules a lot better, improve guest experience, improve efficiency of their server and restaurant staff members. So I wasn't shocked. The good news is we were using technology. We had points of sale in all of our restaurants. It wasn't like we didn't have some level of technology.

Yes. Even to your extent, even data management, understanding your customer, your customer preferences and everything else. Other industries have been doing this a lot longer around loyalty programs and whatnot. You think about the airline industry, they know loyalty exceptionally well. The hotel industry knows loyalty really well. And we just deployed a loyalty program. A lot of that is a function of also having people that work in different industries that joined our company, who understand how to deploy a loyalty program. So absolutely.

I think you count this as a third peak for sure. I think that's a way to characterize it. It was an unexpected third peak. And it wasn't one that I was hoping for. It was literally, I felt like I've done everything in my career that I wanted to do. I always felt there was probably more I could do. So I would definitely say this was another peak in the story.

The way we evaluate technology, there's so much technology out there. There are so many different vendors out there and it's a crowded field of different providers. I only know because my inbox is pretty full with different things. For us, it starts with what's the business need. Because we have limited capital, we've got limited time to evaluate everything. So we're going to have to make in place bets on certain technologies that are really going to enable the business. But part of it, you got to understand before you even do that, you got to understand what the problem you're trying to solve is. So we're going through this thing right now where we're doing time and motion studies within the restaurant, because we've always toyed with different technologies. We have a robot running around the building. We did that just to exercise the innovation muscle. We want to still keep a pulse on how this stuff works. And they're interested too. They're interested. Hey, we're going to loan your robot. We will show you how it works. And so we should always keep the door open to that. So I'm always in favor of, as these different firms have come up with technologies that they think is value add, looking at those technologies. But again, you have to be smart about how much time you allocate to those conversations because the other business of IT has to continue to move forward. So what we do is we want to understand what the problem is to solve. For example, there's an interest in deep fry stations, because we know that there are a lot of competitive routine tasks that you perform that we believe may have a benefit there. So we believe that that's an area of the back of the house where there's a big opportunity for us. We're familiar with front of the house and we've deployed, for example, we've converted a thousand 15 stores to the new point of sale. We've got 6200 tablets deployed out there within these stores. So we've got a down payment swiping capability, not 100%, but a good percentage of them can actually take the payment right there. And we know that those things are going to help with table turns, orders. So it's critically important. But we want to see where we go next. So the way we evaluate technology is not just that we're evaluating the technology that's in front of us, but more about what problem we're trying to solve. So as we understand where those pain points are, that's how we'll think about the technology. We are also looking at, for example, our general managers. The general managers are the core of running a restaurant. We had three general managers meet with the executive team a couple of months back, and we want to hear directly from them around some of the challenges they're facing. But that's how we think about it. That's how we think about technology. And then we have to work with the business to figure out, okay, every business has budgetary constraints, where do we want to make those investments? And so we have to prioritize. Some things fall above the line, some things will fall below the line. It doesn't mean we won't do them, but perhaps that's a two or three year time.

For us, we work closely with our brand partners. So Applebee's, IHOP and Fuzzies Taco. Every year we go through a process of budgetary planning. We sit down with them, we want to get a feel for, by the way, before we even go there, we have a strategic roadmap. We have a roadmap that we build that says these are the areas we need to invest in technology. These are the business processes. We've laid that out. And so basically what we're saying is that we're starting to fill in the blanks. These are technologies that we are missing, gaps we want to fill. So we have a roadmap that we've laid out. And then every year we have to sit down with them and figure out, okay, we know what the roadmap looks like, what are the things you want to invest in from a brand perspective? Now those things bleed over into the franchisees. So if we go with a new point of sale, we have to budget what are the things and how we're going to contribute funding and investments in support of the franchisees. And then, of course, as we get closer, we need to start having conversations with the franchisees as well in terms of how they need to start preparing for that technology. So it really is more of a collaborative approach. Of course, everything is governed by how much budget you have. There's not an unlimited amount of money that you have to spend. So that's where we've got to place bets on what we're going to invest in any given year based on the roadmap. Now, with the pandemic, of course, blew everything out of the water. So we had plan to do these things, and of course, that's like, well, you can't do those things now. You need to redeploy capital to do the off-prem, the digital, the mobile app, all the things we needed to pivot on. But that's how we go through it. We have a roadmap. We have annual planning that we go through. We have budgetary constraints. There's a lot of communication that has to happen. When you're contemplating technology, if it's going to impact the franchisees, you need to be having those conversations like a year or two in advance. So there's a lot of comms. For example, when we start looking at a point of sale, it may not be that you're going to roll out that point of sale in the next year. We have proof of concepts, we do pilots that we run, and that gives us an opportunity to really understand what the financial and capital impacts are going to be in the year which you're going to do a full rollout.

What's your view on the new age young companies versus legacy systems who are trying to innovate on cloud? Because I continuously see this very interesting thing that some of the large legacy players who have really done a great job back in the day, when they have a cloud strategy, even their cloud strategy is so legacy. The thinking of cloud is so yesteryear's that I'm like, wow, you didn't get it, you didn't understand it fully. But then at the same time, I have come to appreciate the last few years the security compliance, those pieces, the credibility of the system. So I also see the point. But that does not really absolve them from using the cloud wrong. So it's kind of a dichotomy. How do you experience it?

It's a tricky thing. And I'll say why. These young companies are coming in starting with a clean slate. They're coming in almost like the Teslas of the world. They can disrupt. They can be highly disruptive. They don't have baggage. They don't have legacy thinking behind it. So they can start with a clean slate. And so if we want to think about how we're going to do this, we're going to do it this way without the bureaucracy and the oversight. So these younger companies, if done right, have an opportunity to be highly disruptive because they can think that way. And so when you think about a cloud strategy, if they're not taking a cloud strategy, it's not like, you know, it is truly a cloud strategy. And so that's one of the things I think younger companies bring, they bring that mindset to it. Now, the bigger companies, as you pointed out, they have that stability. They've had the maturity of process. And those things also add significant value. The younger companies don't always have that. So they can move quickly. The smaller companies can move quick and they can do that. But that also has its risks associated with that. So you're right, there's always that strike in the right balance between the young, innovative company who's bringing a lot of fresh new ideas to the table and the stability of an existing legacy company that has benefit as well.

Yeah, we're taking some bets. We again, it goes back to we're probably trying to solve job requirements and what the individual needs are for our company. If we feel like these younger companies, smaller companies working in conjunction with our team can scale to support a larger enterprise, then it's a hill to climb. But we feel like if this is our longer term benefit, we will take the whole place still.

It's good to be here and I appreciate the time. I'm really excited to be here and share my story, but also how the restaurant business has made an impact to me. It is that third peak, as you say. But thanks a lot for the opportunity.