The initial idea for this company was to develop a mobile app that you could use to pay and split your check while dining in restaurants.

I was selling this to a gentleman and he said, what you're selling to me is nice to have, but I'll show you the real problem.

I have seven different tablets of seven different delivery companies that just go ringing off the hook.

So I said, great.

It was a few months, I walk into an elevator and the CTO of five guys also walks into the elevator.

He tells me, so what do you do?

We integrate third party platforms into the pos.

We eliminate table.

That was the start of our enterprise journey.

When anybody tells me ever in life you've got to have your elevator pitch down, I'm like, I got this.

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Welcome back to lead the team with.

Number one best selling author and in demand corporate trainer Ben Fanning.

On this podcast, the world's most innovative senior leaders share their top success strategies to motivate your direct reports, cultivate your top leaders and accelerate your career.

Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Hey there everybody.

Welcome back to lead the team.

I've been fanning and wow.

I've got a phone coming your way today with my friend Vishal Argwal who is the founder and CEO over at Checkmate.

If you're not familiar with them, well you should be.

They are the platform that uniquely enables restaurant brands to become digitally omnipresent.

And if you've ever eaten in a restaurant, which I know you all have, you're going to appreciate this because it's a very unique perspectives on this.

And by the way, Vishal was born and raised in India and a sports fanatic.

Vishal.

Welcome to lead the team, sir.

Thank you, Ben.

Thank you.

Really excited about this conversation.

So let's kick this off with Sports fanatic.

Sports fanatic.

What Sports?

Sure.

Tennis.

Love, love, love tennis.

Speaking my language.

We're a big tennis fan.

I you always see there's no individual greater than the sport.

But for me, Federer does transcend tennis Right.

So when he retired, part of my tennis fanaticism left with him.

But love tennis.

I love cricket.

Being from India, you know, a billion people follow cricket.

Yes.

And for all the Americans out there, he said, right, A billion.

Right.

A lot of people follow cricket in the US we seem to all be clueless on how the whole thing works, but yes, it is a huge sport.

Then there are different formats of cricket.

The World cup of one of those formats was played in the US this year.

Okay, all right.

And how did it go?

What was the.

What was the lasting effect of that?

It was.

It was pretty wild because an India vs Pakistan game here in New York, it was a temporarily built up stadium and it was off the charts.

It was amazing.

So really good to see some foothold taking place here in the US for cricket.

And then I'm born and brought up in India.

I only moved here 12 years ago.

So the third one on my list is basketball.

Oh, yeah.

Love basketball.

And again, all because of Steph Curry.

He the.

Not the biggest guy in the league with crazy skills.

That's.

That can be a winning combination.

Just hard work and some skills.

Right?

Yeah.

So.

So yeah, Incredible shooting from all over the place and a great leader and they've had a ton of success.

And we're big tennis fans in our household.

We play a lot of tennis and we love Federer.

It's amazing to watch a player play so hard but barely sweat.

It never seemed like he was sweating.

He was address early exercise, just so, so graceful.

And I think we should just make the broadcast about that, you know, because cricket, basketball.

Yeah.

I'm not.

I'm not letting you get it.

I'm not letting you get off like that, man, because you've already.

We, y'all, we've had a great conversation already.

Sure.

And I actually stopped Vishal and telling the story because I wanted.

I wanted him to share it with you.

And I want to get the rest of it.

So take us back to the elevator pitch.

That was a big breakthrough for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I started this company back in 2016.

The initial idea for this company was to develop a mobile app that you could use to pay and split your checks while dining in restaurants.

You know how it goes where you're at a restaurant, you're done with your meal.

Like, hey, can I get the check?

Someone comes, brings you a check, put on your card, you're splitting.

It's another 10 minutes before you can get out.

Like, I'm done with my meal.

Let me get out.

Yeah, Like, I can Imagine this and who does it.

Right.

Maybe you're at a, at a meal with six or seven, eight people and the server's like, who's on what check?

And then the person you're with is sitting down at the other end of the table.

And then there's like the dips and the appetizers to split.

Yeah.

What a mess.

Yeah.

So the idea was you could use the mobile app to just pay and split your check while in restaurants and just walk out right after the thing.

I tried that for about a year and a half.

Didn't really work out that well.

The idea sounds great, but changing consumer behavior would require a few billion dollars.

Right.

Like Uber spent in changing consumer behavior.

Right.

But you know, Ben, I shared a photograph with you before we started.

I was selling this to a gentleman and he said, vishal, what you're selling to me is nice to have.

But I'll show you the real problem.

The real problem is I have seven different tablets of seven different delivery companies.

A Grubhub and Uber Eats and DoorDash.

There used to be Postmates and Caviar and Amazon restaurants all have their own individual tablets that just go ringing off the hook whenever my restaurant receives an order from these places.

Yeah.

And y'all let the record show he shows me this picture.

It's a nightmare.

Like if you're.

Imagine you going and sitting in at your desk and there's eight.

You're connected to eight or nine different companies, all eight or nine different screens just to process.

Yeah.

Orders.

Yeah.

Imagine the mentality of the servers who are greeting customers who are walking in.

And then you have like, we have one phone in our pocket.

And when that goes off, we're like, how do I shut this down right away?

Imagine seven of those.

Yeah, right.

So I said, great.

So we started this company, you know, integrating the orders from these third party platforms into the pos.

And it was a few months and I'd gone down to, I believe, somewhere in Texas, I think Dallas or Houston.

And I walk into an elevator and the CTO of five guys also walks into the elevator.

Right.

And I look at his badge because in the conferences your eyes are always on their stomach where the badges is.

Right.

What's the title?

Right.

Just scanning badges.

And you're like, oh my God, I'm in the elevator with the CEO of five guys who you wouldn't necessarily recognize, but the badge says who he is.

And very nice gentleman by the name of Zarek.

He was the cto.

He still is.

And he tells me so what do you do?

And I'm like, you know, this is what we do.

We integrate third party platforms into the pos, we eliminate tablets.

He was going up to his room, he said, do you have a few minutes?

I have few of my team members down at the bar.

We're just about winding up at the conference.

Can you come talk to them?

And these are the top management level at a brand.

Like five guys, right?

That was the start of our enterprise journey.

Wow.

So, Ben, when anybody tells me, ever in life, you've got to have your elevator pitch down, I'm like, I got this.

I really do got this.

Because that's how the company started or kicked off.

Well, okay, so let's dial this.

At that moment, did you practice your elevator spit?

Did you craft one or did you just wing it in the moment?

On the surface of it, I definitely winged it.

But I think it also came about by me being in the business and being a founder led business, doing what you truly liked doing and enjoying it and getting into the product and understanding the problem that you're solving.

Got it.

Technology is a means to an end.

At the end of the day, we get too focused on technology.

We have to focus on a business problem.

So that what I was very clear about.

So when he asked me, what do you do?

I didn't talk about the technical integration piece.

I talked about the business problem that we are solving.

Yeah.

So good, because you weren't like, well, I'm the founder of a technology.

And then you immediately lose them.

Like, what I heard you say is we eliminate those tablets and we integrate everything, all the, all that messy stuff into your POS to make your life easier.

Oh.

Instead of their eyes rolling back in their head, he's like, hey, come down to the bar and meet my executive team, y'all.

Isn't that a dream?

I would not have dreamt that kind of scenario.

My wildest, best fantasies.

Right, okay.

Conferences can be a disaster sometimes.

Yeah.

That's a good conference then.

It was the first conference of its kind.

The conference was called Food on Demand.

It has grown significantly since it.

At that time, it was held in a smallish room.

Because of this interaction, I've always made sure to attend that conference and sponsor that every single year after.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You're like, no, no, no, I'm.

I'm not attending this thing.

I'm gonna sponsor it.

Gonna sponsor it.

And yeah, we have a dinner, which we call our annual ritual with five guys every year at this conference.

Because, hey, this is where the Journey started and such a fun thing.

Then we talk about building relationships with your customers, which seems like a very nicey gooey thing to say.

The one thing I will never forget is at one of those dinners they presented me with the blueprint of the first elevator ever designed.

The blueprint of the first ever elevator design to commemorate us meeting in an elevator and kicking off this relationship.

Wow.

Okay.

I was like you.

They appreciate your partnership with them.

It sounds like.

Because usually it's the supplier having to provide the elevator.

All that be the super duper thoughtful gift.

Yes.

But you've achieved success with a customer when they're actually not just giving you a gift, but such a thoughtful one.

Right.

When you met Ben, I'm from India.

We are a very emotional being, you know, back there.

And that, like you said, achieved success, but success in not truly the business terms, but on a personal level, like, hey, we're really helping them solve their problem and they like us.

Right.

That was very, very monumental for me.

What?

So that is power.

There's a lot of.

There's a lot going on there with that power of relationship, the power of being memorable, of understanding your value of communication and building relationships.

I noticed on LinkedIn you guys have a.

Have a great picture with some friends of ours from Penn Station east coast subs.

Who in true.

Who introduced us?

Right.

Lance introduced us to President.

Thankful for Lance and he had a great episode.

And also I saw some images of you and Wendy's and some other company clients like that.

How do you think about fostering senior level relationships?

It's not like getting access, staying in front of.

They're very busy people.

How do you, how do you foster those relationships and how do you approach it?

Sure, by doing the ground level work.

Then do your job.

Do it right.

Do it at the ground level with the people who matter, deliver the solution that you promised and more.

And what I've learned, whether it is five guys, whether it's Wendy's, whether it's inspire, whether it's Popeyes, good work always makes its way up to the top.

And they say, hey, I see you're doing amazing work with us.

We should talk and we should talk regularly and see what else you can do with us.

Right.

Well, how do you think about that with being the best kept secret?

So like someone middle level in the organization, they like working with you.

Your great work's making them look good, which is the way it should work.

Right.

They look like geniuses for bringing you in, but maybe the top leaders don't hear about you, but yet you're still up there.

Right.

So some people say, well, you're not going to get the visibility.

So how do you sort of navigate getting and maintaining visibility with the highest levels of the organization and also working down and throughout other levels?

A lot of times, Ben, what happens is we are very focused on selling our solution and not necessarily understanding the problems of the customers.

Right.

At the end of the day, no matter what level you're at in an organization, you have certain pain points that you want to solve.

If you as a supplier, as a vendor are able to identify those, I promise you, you have the attention of no matter who that person is in that organization.

Right.

We were in a, in a two hour meeting with the CIO and CTO of Wendy's and he walked out of that meeting is like, this is by far the best meeting I've had this month.

Huge compliment.

Right.

Well, what are you doing to make them say that?

Because they're in a hundred meetings.

Yes.

How are you getting them to not just think in their mind but to actually articulate to you?

Wow, Vishal, I'm glad you came to here.

Like, man, that was a nice meeting.

Yeah.

Like I said, don't sell.

Listen, right.

We've always talked about our company as being solutions oriented.

Our investors don't like this when we say this, but we are not a technology company.

We are a solutions oriented company that understands the problems and provides solutions.

And technology is one of the ways in which we provide the solution.

Right.

And we've always been very flexible.

What happens, Ben, is you speak with a lot of SaaS companies and we like to say we are a take it or leave it solution.

Right.

This is what it is.

It's ready made and you pick it off the shelf.

Right.

It's a, it's, it's the suit that is ready to go.

You pick it up and if you want a bespoke suit, you gotta pay 10 times more for that.

The difference that we have taken, the different approach that we have taken is if a brand like Inspire that owns Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, et cetera, if a brand like Wendy's comes and says, hey, your solution matches up to 85% of my problems.

Can you customize 15% of it?

Hell yes.

Right.

And that's where the 15% is, where the magic happens.

That is when you truly understand the problem that a CTO of an Inspire or a Wendy's faces listen to that.

Because at the end of the day, it's not about selling what you have.

It's about earning revenue.

And if this solution helps you earn revenue and solves their problem.

Who's losing here?

Yeah, wise words.

Yeah, the 85.

80%.

85% gets you in the door, but you earn it.

You stay in there, you build the relationships with that.

That smaller percentage that allows you to customize to really fit their unique problems.

Right, Right.

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Thinking about your own leadership journey in the early days when you were starting up, what was the defining moment that solidified your vision or tested your resilience in a way that you didn't expect?

Yeah, when I started this company, obviously you learn from your experiences.

And what I always wanted to do in learning from my previous companies and bosses is lead by example.

That was very, very important to me.

It's like, I will be consistent, and I will lead by example.

One very defining moment was we were three or four people, maybe a little bit more, and we had signed up this client in New York City, Right.

And I live in the city.

And at that time, I was doing all the implementation.

I would go talk to the client, look at their settings, make sure, you know, orders were integrating into the pos.

And the most important thing was the orders had to print out in the kitchen printer.

So there was this spooky concept somewhere in midtown.

And it was the winter, I think December or Jan, and it was snowy.

There was a storm.

The grounds were covered in snow.

But I was there in that shop late into the night working with them, like, hey, is this working?

And they had their POS up top, and they had the printer in the basement.

And I would send an order seat on the pos, then run down to the printer, see if that works, then come back and do all of the way there.

And this ran late into the night, I think 10 or 11.

And very grateful for my team that was providing the tech support from the background.

They were on the call to helping me achieve this.

And then a few days later, one of the team members, he says to me, like, Vishal, when we saw you out there and you're not used to this cold I'm not used to that kind of code.

Right.

I'm born and brought up in India.

But when we see you there in a snowstorm at 10:11 at night, working with a client, freezing in that apartment, in that building, it's just a ground floor thing and there was gusts of wind coming in, but making sure it works for the client, being hands on, I'm like, if he can do this, we can do our piece sitting in the comfort of our homes, just hitting a few buttons.

Right.

And that really solidified to me that what matters is if you are willing to do the hard work, if you're willing to walk the talk and actually show people that hard work is relevant here.

Just because I'm the boss doesn't mean I get to sit in the comfort of my home without going out into the streets, literally in this case.

Yeah.

Actions speak louder than words and what a great demonstration of that because you're the founder and the owner, you're literally paying other people to do this kind of work, yet even though you're still willing to get in there and do it yourself.

Now a couple things on that.

When you, as you scale and you get bigger, what, what challenges have you faced and do you anticipate with that kind of approach?

Yeah.

One of the goals I had for myself at the start of this year, which I think I'm at 75%, is try and talk to one operator or one customer at least once a week.

Okay.

Be in touch with the people for whom you're solving a problem.

I can't go down in person every time now.

Right.

Because the company needs a little more strategic and a higher level vision for me and execution.

But at the core of it, Ben, if you ask me, I'm at product and ops, guy.

And you as a company are nothing if your product doesn't solve a problem.

So continue to listen.

We have grown from a one product company to a seven product company now over the last two years.

And how many across how many locations are you guys now?

We are now at roughly about 28,000 locations.

28,000, right.

That'd take you a little while to call everyone, but.

Yes, it would.

It would, but it's.

Again, it wouldn't take me a lot of time, even if it's a 10 location shop, to do a 30 minute call.

I'm thinking once a week.

You've got 52 weeks in the year.

Right.

The idea is just showing the customers that you care.

Right.

And making sure that you're understanding where the industry is going what pain points they're facing and how do you continue to evolve to solve them?

Yeah, so good man.

It's, it's a real, it's interesting here from your perspective because you were so close initially to where you were willing to be on site, put in the late nights to understand the real problem and now you face a different problem.

Well, I've got 28,000 locations across all different time zones and you can't be there.

So integrating time to find ways to be involved and still hear the problems.

The other thing is, I'm assuming you spend a lot of time talking with C suite leaders at these organizations versus the people actually operating the locations.

Correct.

How do you work navigate that challenge versus hey, I'm just talking strategy with the C leaders.

But they see the problem differently than the locations perhaps.

Right.

I would say somewhere in the middle.

Right.

It's not necessarily the individual operators at the store level, but you could have a franchisee owner with 50 locations.

You would have corporate people who are managing all of their corporate stores.

So they're not at 10,000 location view, but they are at 500 location view.

Yes.

But then also doing at least, I would say twice a year in person business review with the C suite.

It's so funny, we keep calling it QBRs because that's the standard term, right?

Yeah.

I don't know which C suite has time to sit down with every vendor once a quarter.

That's too often in my view.

What we are doing, Ben is doing semiannual business reviews and these are in depth.

We do a lot of preparation for these and at least for the top 10 clients, I make sure that I'm down there in person doing these.

So and for the others, I will do phone calls, I will do schedule meetings.

I will sometimes just pick up the phone.

I'm on texting basis with a lot of them.

I have a fantastic client in Tarka Indian Kitchen.

It's based in Dallas.

I believe they're at 12.

I apologize but he will text me and call me and email at all hours and I love having a conversation and discussion with him because you also need to be present at that level.

That's the true test of a solutions based company in my mind is do you have the cell phone number of the top executive?

Right.

And if you can text back and forth in conversation, then you're probably more likely to have a real conversation to understand their problems.

If you don't have that kind of relationship, you're probably never really going to understand their problems.

Unless I think Sometimes you can get lucky and you're like, I've seen this problem so many times.

I know it.

I show up and I just talk and I'm speaking directly to their problems.

But I find that to be so risky.

Yeah.

Because you're not really taking the time to understand and you might be missing the boat.

So leaders get the text if you can.

If you can't get to that level now, when's the time?

You've already shared some of these, but I'm curious, when's the time you had a twist or maybe even a failure in your career and how did it contribute to your success or growth on down the road?

Yeah, Ben, all the time.

All the time, Right?

All the time.

That's my business.

Yes.

It's so cliched.

It's so cliched.

But we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.

Right.

Every single time I've had a client who's chosen to leave us, I have harassed them into doing a 30 minute call with me to tell me why you're already gone.

I can't salvage you.

I know that you've already signed a contract with someone else.

It's a done deal.

I just want feedback personally to see what we could have done better.

Okay.

And is there one that sticks out in your, in your memory is one where you particularly had a deep learning?

Yes, 100%.

Excuse me.

When we talked about, we now have seven products.

The second product came out of such a conversation or such a cluster of conversations because we were selling a third party integration solution.

We just rolled out 10,000 locations in a year.

Fantastic scalability.

And we said, hey, we are now competing with the best in the class and the leaders.

But we started losing a few deals when we were going up head to head against them.

New brand new deals that we were competing for.

So I got on a call with the CIO CTOs and say, Hey, I appreciate you taking a look at us.

I know you passed, but can you tell me why?

That's all I'm asking.

Just so we can grow and learn.

And the feedback that they gave me made me go out and purchase another company to really fill a big gaping hole in a product that I didn't know we had.

So one conversation, one relationship created the impetus for you to go actually do an acquisition.

Absolutely.

It hit home.

What you're saying is common sense.

I don't need to do a market survey for everything.

As a CEO, founder, you also have to go by your gut.

Right?

I had one conversation and then Midway through the second conversation with another cio, I'm like, okay, this is very apparent what we're missing.

So we need to make this happen.

Yeah.

A different day.

When an outcome.

When you spend your day on phone calls listening to the right people and let that drive your shiver, let that help, let that help drive your decision making.

And y'all, this is from a company who lives and dies by data ultimately, right?

And the data that you're gathering, but yet you're like, hey, the.

The conversations ultimately have equal or more impact and how you lead your business.

They'Re not different, right?

Ben, conversations are also data points.

It really depends on what weightage you're giving to numbers on an Excel versus the words coming out of a CIO's mouth.

It's the weightage.

Y'All think about.

A lot to pat there.

But I really like thinking about that because we're in a world of data, we're in a world of AI.

And I think the competitive edge with all of that becoming so ubiquitous does start to go to companies with leaders who are willing to.

And we just talked about the value of texting, but really it's not that.

It's the value of the conversations you're having with these people and not just driving your whole business on data driven Excel data, but data gleaned from conversations with real decision makers.

And people don't do that.

People are really missing that boat these days.

Ben, your point about texting, it's really funny because we are starting off a department, a customer success department.

It's nothing new.

A lot of companies do that.

We are now at a stage where we need to.

I've been doing this customer success myself for the longest time.

Like, okay, we now need to build a team around this that can do this on a regular basis.

I was having a conversation with Carmen, who leads a team, and she's like, so, Vishal, what's your one KPI that you would put in place to measure the success of a customer success manager?

The texting thing, that's what they should have.

They should be on a texting basis, relationship with their customer.

And I was only half joking because if you really know your customer, you should have their cell phone and they should feel comfortable and you should feel comfortable texting them back and forth.

Because if you really think about it, then texting is such an intimate measure of the connection we feel with the other person.

You break a barrier.

It's not.

Email and phone calls are not always possible because you need to be in sync and Both the timings have aligned, but hey, I'm texting you.

Get back to me whenever you can.

This is an informal communication that's literally a KPI that we have for our team.

So what you said there was, it just hit home like we've been talking about that.

All right, sorry.

Teams, Vishal is going to have this.

Do you text or how often do you text regularly with your key clients?

No, but it's really important and it's symbolic of the relationship.

Vishal, we could probably rough for another hour, but let's wind this up because I know you got stuff to do with your 28,000 locations you're dealing with.

What's your parting thought for our listeners today?

The one thing I've learned in this journey is just discipline, right?

We started off having zero locations.

This was not handed down to us.

I'm just showing up every day, consistently, day after day, right?

Putting in the hard work.

I read this fantastic quote the other day.

I don't have to be better than my competitors.

I just have to be more disciplined and I know I will win.

Great place to stop.

Plan the plan.

Here it is.

It is.

It is what I've lived by.

And when I read that code, I'm like, this hits home.

Just have to be more disciplined.

Just show up regularly.

Stick to the mission.

Stick to your leadership philosophy.

Listen, listen, listen, Ben, we started off talking about tennis.

Let's end talking about tennis, okay?

Rafael Nadal, you read his Sports is for me, a life lesson.

It teaches me more than anything in my life ever does.

What he had mentioned was like, hey, how are you?

So great, you know, he said this.

The trick is in showing up to practice when you don't feel like it.

That is what makes you great.

I hit 10,000 balls every day, and I'm the boss, right?

I can show up to work what I want.

I can choose not to show up or practice what I want.

But it's the days that you feel really horrible down and you're just not feeling it and you can't pull yourself out of the bed.

And when you're able to do that, that is a sign that you will get to greatness.

Come on.

All right, y'all.

Get on your proverbial court.

Even we don't feel like it.

Show up, put the work in.

Vishal, been a funnel, my friend.

Thanks for coming on.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Ben.

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