PAR Technology Corporation (PAR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

May 13, 2025

New York Stock Exchange US Information Technology Software conference_presentation 35 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Neil Dalal

analyst
#1

All right. Let's get started. So we're joined once again this year by Savneet Singh, President and CEO of PAR Technology. So Savneet, thank you for coming once again to our conference. And for the crowd's benefit, I'm Neil Dalal, Managing Director in the Tech IB Group here at JPMorgan.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#2

So Savneet, just to kick off for those not familiar, just give a quick overview of PAR.

Savneet Singh

executive
#3

Sure. So PAR is a software platform that looks to manage the enterprise restaurant workflow. We sell front-end and back-end software to large enterprise, QSR and fast casual chains and more and more into the full-service dining space. Our products range from everything from loyalty and online ordering all the way to point of sale and back office. So we try to think of ourselves as an end-to-end platform to serve large restaurant chains.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#4

Awesome. So over the last few years, both organically and inorganically, you've expanded the product portfolio pretty meaningfully, everything from loyalty to payments, online ordering, just recently analytics. So talk a little bit about how you pick what areas to invest in, what do you want to own versus where you want to partner?

Savneet Singh

executive
#5

So when we started on the journey, we kind of identified 4 kind of key swim lanes we always wanted to be in, which was point of sale being the crux of kind of everything we do, then the back office. And on the front end, we want to be on what we call engagement, which is loyalty and online ordering. We always kind of had a vision that those were the 4 key areas, and then everything around it, we would kind of bolt on to make the collective offering stronger. And the way we sort of look at things today is when we look to build or buy something, we want to -- the product that we add to the suite to make the collective grow faster and stickier. And the way you do that is by having -- adding a product that makes the customer's life better. So illustratively, when we go and buy something and you insert it into the suite of PAR, the customers should be getting something that they couldn't get before when there were 2 separate products. And if we can prove that out and then prove the financial model out, it will sort of be worth us looking at it from an M&A perspective. Over time, what we realized is that as we add more and more products to the mix and cross-sell into our base, you have this added benefit that as you have more products, you become stickier and stickier and stickier and thereby, I think, becoming a more valuable company. But back to the original question, I think we generally try to see today where can we add a product that makes the moat around what we're doing stronger and stronger because I do think we have the kind of the core products we need today.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#6

So let's talk about one of those products in payments, which is becoming a more meaningful part of ARR and revenue. I think outside in, a layperson may think that payments is harder to attach for an enterprise restaurant and enterprise in general, and they have other options. So how do you talk about -- or how do you think about your value proposition in payments? And how do you think about go-to-market there?

Savneet Singh

executive
#7

So it is harder to sell payments into the enterprise, primarily because most enterprise customers have some understanding of how payments work. Down market, when you're selling to individual stores, generally, it's sort of like, oh, sure, I'll take a payments offering. And they don't quite realize how much they're actually paying and all the downstream impacts of that selection. But what we've actually been surprised is how much we can sell. So we're -- we've been growing our payments business relatively rapidly. And what's been neat is that we realized that we can sell it both in-store, so tap your card right at the payment gateway, and we'll make some revenue there. But we've also realized we can sell it above store, meaning through our loyalty success. We have the largest loyalty program in the United States, probably in the world as it relates to restaurants. And what's been neat is we've created a digital wallet program where instead of having to open a loyalty app or typing a bunch of codes, you just double tap with your Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and the loyalty card pops up and you pay with that. And when you pay with that, we get paid. And so that's been a neat kind of extension to our payments business of making digital revenue there, too. So long story short, we'll never have 100% penetration on payments like you can in SMB, but I think we've surprised ourselves how much we can get to. And so whether we get to 30%, 40%, 50%, I don't know, or 70%, I don't know, but it's definitely been far more than we expected.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#8

As I think about over the years, as you've been at this conference, we always talk about this better together and unified commerce story. And I think this year, you really started to hit your stride in terms of actually demonstrating that with your new wins and what proportion of them either on the operator side or engagement side or multiproduct. So talk about how is that multiproduct sales motion different than what you've done historically and what's been driving your success.

Savneet Singh

executive
#9

It's changed dramatically. In our Q4 call, we mentioned that all the deals we signed were multiproduct. In this quarter, all of our POS deals were multiproduct. Almost all of our loyalty deals were. So it's been really neat to see how quickly it shifted to being a multiproduct opportunity. And I think what's driving that is a few things. First and foremost, the multiproduct motion is working because the products are actually integrated. And what that's done is made it really easy for our customers to attach more products to the initial sale because we've made their job easier, and we've actually given them outcomes they couldn't do without it. So as an example, we talked about on our last call that now cashiers that use our point-of-sale system have the customers' loyalty data at the cashier so they can upsell. And that's a really neat tool because now -- historically, when you go to a restaurant, your -- the person in the cash register scan your loyalty app, they can actually see, do you have a promotion, do you have a reward, what are the flags, are you a vegan, are you a family customer, kid's customer. They don't have any of that information. Now that's all at the register for that person to upsell you, engender you more of the brand. And that's an example of that. And so when we did that, we were like, wow, it's a lot easier to sell loyalty to the customers at the point of sale because now you can say, hey, you can get this functionality you had no chance of getting with another vendor, if you will. And there's a whole bunch of examples like that. The integration between restaurant products are always point to point. It's always messy. And so if we can go to them and say, hey, your back office and point of sale, it's all the same thing now, we make it really easy to sell. So I think first and foremost, we're winning because the products are integrated in a way that makes it so easy for the customer and gives them benefit they couldn't get without it. I think the second reason we're winning is candidly, the market has moved to the view that the platform is probably going to win. And this -- I think we're probably too early here early on. But that was the foundational thesis we kind of started to build the company on 6, 6.5 years ago. And we got -- and the market is just kind of moving in that direction. Like it is clear that the vendor consolidation, simplicity, whatever you want to call it, is in favor. And so we happen to be the partner that can do that. I think the last reason is just focus. We are a company that tends to pick a few goals every year that really matter. And so the last few quarters has been let's really get this right. So we just had an intense focus on doing this well.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#10

So let's make the go-to-market a little bit more tangible. You've landed Burger Kings -- Burger King and Wendy's. You announced an expansion of the Burger King contract recently and then also Popeyes. So just talk a little bit about these marquee franchise-level wins. How do you go about winning those? And also talk through the rollout and the plan going forward.

Savneet Singh

executive
#11

Yes. So in our business, it's heavily RFP driven. Generally, these are really big investments by large corporations. So they'll have an RFP. They'll have a consultant at times. And I actually love that because the best product wins in that motion. It's very hard. We don't win a customer because we've got a great Instagram. We win because our products are better. And generally, enterprise software, best product wins, and this allows us -- our products to sort of shine. What I think has changed is that for a long time, we were a pretty small company. I mean I think -- we joke we won Burger King in 2023. If Burger King had looked at us just 2.5 years before that, we've been a $30 million revenue company, they never would have given us a chance. And so a lot of what I think is happening is like self-validation in the sense that as we've gotten bigger, the chance to win bigger deals happens. It's the trust and so on and so forth. And so I think that, that success sort of begets success and that we have more referenceable customers, more larger brands feeling comfortable. And so when the next Burger King comes along, they not only can sort of vet us on their own. They can also call Burger King. They can call Wendy's. They can call Arby's and so on and so forth. And so I think that's really been the big change. It's our ability to deliver on behalf of these large customers and then how those reference customers to others has changed. But going back to the crux of your question, our go-to-market is really traditional enterprise software. We are sort of AEs calling accounts, 6-month to 18-month sales cycles. We get in labs, so sort of like a pilot, if you will, to sort of prove the functionality. And then you sort of grow from there over time. It's been really interesting to see how that sales motion is getting shorter and shorter and shorter because the need for the technology is growing. And I think part of that is the market realizing, hey, we got to be digital but also, again, hey, PAR has done this before, let's trust them.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#12

And just to finish the thought on go-to-market, talk a little bit about the pipeline looking forward towards the back half of this year and 2026.

Savneet Singh

executive
#13

So things look pretty good right now. We've got our largest weighted pipeline ever. I tend to look at things on a weighted pipeline basis because I think generally talking about pipeline, you can kind of game it with get one big customer, a couple of big customers at the near -- the beginning end of the pipeline and things just look too good. But our weighted pipeline is stronger than it's ever been. And I would say that's sort of in part driven by this new cross-sell motion where we are finding just tremendous growth and kind of upselling to our existing base. And then it's also being driven by continued growth in the sort of a diverse set of customers. I think that it will set us up for a really, really strong '25, '26, '27 because you can kind of -- these deals are multiyear deals. You win a deal. It takes time to roll it out. And I think what we'll see happen is that as restaurants move their business to become more digital, they'll ironically need more software to manage that digital environment, and we hope to participate in that. And we're just still really early in that journey. I'm always shocked just how offline so much of this business is, whether it's labor, HR, finance, inventory. And today, we kind of play in 2 suites, but over time, I think this gets 2 more. So from a dollar weighted basis, our pipeline is really strong. From a sort of visibility, it's -- for the next few quarters, we feel really good. And then we have this nice tailwind of these multiproduct deals that we've announced in the last couple of quarters on the calls still not in our numbers. And so I think we've got, hopefully, a lot of tailwind for the next year or 2.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#14

Let's pivot a little bit and talk about the industry and the macro. So starting with what you're seeing on the ground day-to-day in terms of consumer health, spending at restaurants, spending at your customers, what are you seeing?

Savneet Singh

executive
#15

We track it super closely. So I track both the traffic. Then we track sort of what we see in sales. Then we track loyalty check-ins, basket size, quantity of orders from -- we sort of track everything. And it's actually been, I think, a secret weapon of ours in the sense that if you look at when we've gone to market to finance stuff, part of the reason we've been right on our timing is you can kind of see U.S. economic health from restaurant data pretty well. What we see today is the same thing, is that most restaurants reporting, which is there's clearly a decline in traffic. It's not huge. It's very low single digits, and it's not consistent across every brand. But in aggregate, there's certainly a slowing of traffic. That has not at all led to any push-out of an RFP yet nor a push-out of a rollout. So I don't think the declines are big enough where it's changed stuff. Part of that is that in the restaurant category, there is a trade-down. And so where I think we'll see a lot of pain if we are in a recessionary environment is in the single store that's a sit-down restaurant or the larger table service chains that are expensive meals. And so QSR, fast casual, which is our base, tend to do pretty well in recessionary environments. And so I think the brands know that. As a result, they're continuing their digital initiatives. The other part is that -- and again, this is all hypothetical, but we are seeing growth in our engagement pipeline as an example. So we're seeing more interest in loyalty. And I suspect that's because of the fear of recession, wants you to build close relationship with your customers or bring more customers in the door. And so we're seeing pipeline expand over there. And so today, the short answer is restaurants are clearly slowing down. Every earnings call talks about it. It has not yet impacted their technology spend. And I think our comments are pretty consistent with all of our peers who have reported, which is we all see the same data, and we -- the customers have not pulled back yet. And in a couple of areas, loyalty and back office, it seems like to be actually accelerating.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#16

And maybe just to expand on that, if we were in a recessionary environment, I think as you alluded to, there's a lot of arguments for why you could not only persist but also benefit in terms of your pipeline and customers coming to you and wanting to modernize to combat the recession environment. Just talk a little bit more about that and what signals you would see.

Savneet Singh

executive
#17

Yes. We got to analog in COVID. And during COVID, most of the restaurant technology companies, but Once we got through like the world's ending phase of COVID, accelerated just like a lots of software. But what's interesting about restaurant technology is, for us, it never stopped. And so we didn't have like a spike, and then it come back down. Ours kind of was consistent. And I think -- the reason I highlight that is it became very clear that you can create value through implementing technology during challenging times. So what I suspect what happened is we got to a real recession. I think you'd see a really strong growth in our loyalty business. You'll see strong growth, one, in usage and application, but two, growth in new customers because if you're on an average loyalty product or a homebuilt loyalty product or something that's sort of not the breadth that we have, you're going to want upgrade because you're going to want to say, hey, I -- not only do I want to bring more customers in. I got to compete with everybody else that has sort of top-tier software. So I'm going to want to create that engagement. And that, I think we'll clearly see some benefit. And we saw that in the pandemic. We were growing leaps and bounds back then. I think the other place we'll see tremendous growth would be in the back office. So back-office software helps you organize your inventory, your labor. Think about your COGS, if you will. And I think that the ROI is so high and so fast that it's a lot easier to argue, hey, let's manage our back office more efficiently. So I think we'll see some strong growth there. And I do think that collectively, we'll see a lot more focus on analytics and data managing your business because you're going to be super scared about making your numbers. So there's an argument to make it we get better. But I always say like if it's a really, really bad recession, like everything will pause because you're just trying to hold on. But generally, I think this category has just been so resilient. If you look at QSR sales during 9/11, during the Great Financial Crisis, like they tend to hold up pretty well.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#18

Let's talk a little bit about the competitive environment. So just give us an update on the competitive landscape. Who are you seeing most often on deals in 2025?

Savneet Singh

executive
#19

So in our business, we -- in every deal, we will either see all or a combination of Oracle through a product called Micros or Symphony, NCR and Global Payments or a product called Xenial. There -- one of them or 2 of them won't be a finalist in every deal. We see -- we get asked about Toast. Toast has been in every RFP we've probably participated in the last 5 years. They participate in everything as well. But generally, in the enterprise category, those first 3 are the ones you see in every deal. Some machination of all of them or one of them will be a finalist or the incumbent. And then it's us. There are start-ups that are here and there, but categorically, those 3 really do show up in every single deal. On the engagement and loyalty side of the house, on the online ordering side, the biggest player is OLO by a long shot. So they're certainly in every RFP. And then on the engagement side, there's just a reflection of 3 or 4 businesses, predominantly private equity owned, that will show up. But nobody comes, I think, to the table with the collective, hey, here's a suite of products that you can use today. And I think that's -- it's funny. People used to think that was a financial initiative by us, hey, we want to just cross-sell. I think it's actually turned out to be a product initiative because the customers now are getting more benefit from it than before. And I think that's like critical, which is if we can create more value for the customer, then we can create more value for our shareholders.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#20

So you touched a little bit about the idea of SMB players trying to move upmarket to enterprise. So talk a little bit about the difference between the SMB market and enterprise market in terms of the products customers are looking for and also the go-to-market motion.

Savneet Singh

executive
#21

They're vastly different. The downmarket business is an incredible place because you can -- the sales cycles are short. You can lock in customers on payments rates that are -- sometimes they don't quite appreciate how high they are. And you have the ability to innovate very quickly because your sales cycles are shorter, so you can try out products all the time. The downside of that business is it will have higher churn because as we all heard for years, restaurants are really bad businesses. And it is far more competitive because the sales cycles are so small, so you'll probably have more competition. But the other difference is the product needs are completely different. So imagine you're running your local restaurant. You are the chef, but you're also the CEO, the CMO, the CFO. You're managing labor. Like you got everything. And so the product you need is pretty simplistic. You need something that can help you market, help you manage your labor, your cost, your revenues. Like it is a lot of stuff that one person has or a small team has. Then imagine you're like Arby's. You've got a CIO, CFO. You've got an IT committee, compliance committee. You've got Accenture. You've got Deloitte. I mean you've got an assortment of needs. Then you've got franchisees. You've got store managers. You've got operators. You've got a supply chain software you're integrating to. It's just so dramatically different. And so I always compare to one of them is -- you could have the design of a sports car, try to build you a semi-truck, but it will take them years to figure out how to get all the nuances of that market and vice versa. And so that's why you've had this big distinction between the 2 markets, is that -- it's just the product needs are so, so different, and it's not generally that easy to go from one to the other.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#22

Talk a little bit about the current size of your TAM, how you think about that, your market share and then also relative areas of market share strength versus market share weakness.

Savneet Singh

executive
#23

So these numbers vary a lot. We tend to take a more conservative view of it. But in the United States, in Canada, there's anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million restaurants. We think we're applicable to about half, and half is just the enterprise. If somebody bought all of our products, it's over $10,000 a box. And so you're anywhere from a $3.5 billion TAM up to a $5 billion or $6 billion TAM. Our total revenues are less than $300 million when it comes to software. And so call it, we are less than 10% penetrated from a revenue maximization. And I think it's probably underestimating how penetrated we are in the sense that every year, there's a set of new products that come out that will eventually be our products that we don't realize. And so that $10,000 number will continue to expand. As far as where we're stronger and weaker from a market share perspective, we are the largest provider in loyalty. So our loyalty business is really well penetrated, but it's still growing. Like last quarter, it grew 18%. So it's still growing at a nice rate. But we are far less penetrated in POS and back office where we're not even in 10% -- we're in 25,000 stores or something. So we have a long way to go there. And that's what I think is really exciting. But the other part that I think is kind of cool is that if we stop selling to new logos today and you just looked at the existing store count and pretend everybody bought every product, we would have 3.5 to 4x the TAM just in our existing customer base. Now I think that those are all made-up numbers and people give you those numbers. So -- but if we kind of take out what I think is not really applicable, there's probably a double in there as far as the upsell you could have to the existing base through cross-sell and upsell over time.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#24

Let's turn a little bit to M&A and inorganic growth, where you've been quite active over the last year in particular. So let's start with just Stuzo and TASK from last year. Just refresh us on each of those deals, the rationale and then a quick update as to how they're going.

Savneet Singh

executive
#25

Yes. Stuzo, we acquired in March of last year. It's the -- was the largest provider of loyalty software in the convenience space, convenience and fuel stores. And we've been growing this market organically pretty quickly and unexpectedly. Convenience stores are the fastest-growing food service market in the United States. So convenience stores are -- for the last 3 and now almost 4 years are growing at 14% CAGR on food service. So food is really the growth engine of a convenience store and making up for pitfalls and tobacco and other areas. And so every convenience store has now jumped into the food business. So if you go to a convenience store, it's highly likely they've got prepared foods and eventually hot foods and so on and so forth. And so that market was looking for the same tools that restaurants were, which is we want online ordering, we want loyalty. And so they were coming to us, and we're growing very quickly. And candidly, I think we weren't doing the best job we could because while it was an emerging product line or emerging category, our product was really built for restaurants and the nuances of that market. And so we started to make decisions, hey, either we go all in on this market or we get out completely, but we're not going to be #2 or #3. And so Stuzo is a company we've been tracking, who we always view as, hey, they are the best in the business. They are priced twice as high as we are. They have never lost a customer, and they are really efficient, very profitable. And so we were really lucky we were able to get a deal done there. We were, I think, really excited of this idea that we can run the same playbook in convenience as we had in restaurants. Fast forward a little over a year, I would say it's played out great. I think it's been the best integration we've had as a company we've acquired yet. We've -- I don't know the number, but they probably had 175 or 200 people. I think we've lost just 4 or 5 people across the team outside of the cuts that we made ourselves. And I'd say from an industrial logic perspective, it's completely hit. We've kind of won a big customer. We've kind of branded ourselves as PAR, and we see ourselves being able to have the same success there now that we did in restaurants. So we're really, really happy with that one. I think we paid a really great price. I think we paid 13x EBITDA or something for it. TASK, which we closed in July of 2024, was our attempts to grow internationally. TASK is -- has sort of 2 product lines. One is a loyalty business that was squarely focused on serving McDonald's and McDonald's only in 68 countries and geographies. That business was cash-rich, sort of, call it, 8% to 13% grower. And the second side of the business was international POS, back-office online ordering platform, very similar to what we have but internationally focused. And when we bought this business, our pitch to investors was, hey, we need to extend internationally because our U.S. customers are growing much faster internationally than they are. In fact, many of the CIOs are now being global CIOs versus U.S. CIO. And so we wanted to be able to support them there. And that's -- that thesis is also playing out. We've started to see the U.S. customers put us in pilots. We've won 1 or 2 of them already, which is ahead of schedule. And so that's kind of working nicely. But at the time of the deal, we also said, hey, there's a couple of call options here that aren't priced into the deal that could be huge. One is a call option of TASK had a couple of large customers that we didn't really have great business with at PAR and could we make one of those into a really, really big relationship over time globally. And that call option, I'd say, has gotten pretty valuable. I think we'll actually be able to crack that code, and that would be amazing if we did it. The second sort of call option we had, I think, within TASK is could we find a way to make a global platform for a couple of the large brands that we never had in our TAM. And I think that's also kind of coming through. And so we're super excited of where we are today. That one, again, we're just -- we're not super far into it. But I would say from when we bought it to where we are now, I think we have way more confidence that the plan is going to work.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#26

So you talked about TASK unlocking the international opportunity for you, or at least beginning to. So talk about what else you need to do internationally to really get to scale on that side of the business.

Savneet Singh

executive
#27

Honestly, I think it's time. TASK is a relatively small business, has not deployed thousands of sites like we have. And so I suspect it will be a very similar trajectory to what we experienced here in the United States, which is we've got to build the muscle to build, ship and then deploy. And we're doing it. We are in Guzman and Gomez (sic) [ Guzman y Gomez ], which is like the fastest-growing chain, which just went public in Australia. We're in Starbucks. We're in sort of diverse set of customers, and now we've got to build a repeatable playbook. The second part of it is we've got to build tremendous confidence in our U.S. brands that we can deliver the same quality of service that we do in the U.S. internationally. And so I just think we need time and scale, and we feel really good about it today.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#28

All right. Then more recently, Delaget, GoSkip, talk a little bit about those 2 deals and how you thought about them.

Savneet Singh

executive
#29

Yes. Delaget, we acquired in the very last day of 2024. It's an analytics and recovery software business. What it essentially does is analytics at the franchisee level. So really powerful tool to help you manage your internal tooling. So that's everything from getting prompts about inventory expiring to managing labor better. It's a lot of what we do at Data Central but at a really granular store level. And that was a product that sort of spun out of a Taco Bell or Taco Bell -- a large Taco Bell franchisee years ago. The second part of the business is recovery. And recovery is a really cool product that -- how we first discovered these guys in that it was almost like an auditing tool to make sure that you were being charged appropriately by DoorDash, Uber Eats, third-party delivery companies and then recovering those fees but also giving you prompts to, hey, kitchen wait times are like 40 minutes, maybe you push off delivery times at DoorDash or Uber Eats or you shut down DoorDash or Uber Eats, handle the phones in the kitchen. And we discovered Delaget honestly because it was growing so fast across our base. We're like, what hell is this thing? Fast forward, took us quite a long time, over a year, to get them to do a deal. But it's a beautiful product that's being integrated now into our products. And so within a very short period of time, our customers will not be able to think was that Delaget or is that data -- it's all going to be rebranded PAR OPS. So it will be single sign-on, one application, one code base and with just different modules. And so that's -- it is really exciting for us because I think it's going to also create a road map for us to do more in that back-office category.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#30

Great. And then I'll pause for a minute for the audience if anyone has any questions. As you think about your kind of growth algorithm and financial algorithm, so you've gotten to EBITDA profitability. You're maintaining strong organic ARR growth. How do you think about the growth levers going forward? And how do you think about the trade-off of expanding margins versus driving more growth?

Savneet Singh

executive
#31

You got to do both. I mean I think we've always been really, really focused on the end metric for us will always be free cash flow per share but the duration of that free cash flow per share. Like there's a lot of stuff we could do to juice it up today, but then the duration of that cash flow stream won't be there for the long run. And so we've always tried to look at it as saying, how do we maximize the dollar of ARR lasting for as long as possible? But that dollar of ARR, we think there's really, really high. If you sort of did the math in the last couple of quarters and see the incremental margin of each dollar of ARR, it's 40%, 50%. It's dropping down very aggressively, which is great. And so our algorithm has been to try to grow the revenues at greater than 20% while keeping the OpEx near flat. And so we've done that now for almost 2 years in a row. And we kind of guided on our Q4 call that we think OpEx will grow low single digits. But interestingly, it went down this quarter versus a year ago. And so we've been managing the OpEx really tightly in order to ensure that we have that drop down to EBITDA. And I sort of mentioned that I think one of the few things I think is misunderstood about our company is just how much margin I see coming off in the next couple of years. As an example, today, our gross margins on our software business are about 69 -- roughly 69%. We've always said, hey, over time, we want to get that to 70s and maybe higher. Today, our R&D as a percentage of sales is 25%. So we're sort of best-in-class enterprise software. I don't think we're going to go too much lower than that because we're probably not investing enough in the products. Our sales and marketing expense is only 15% of revenue. And so if you look at like the key lines of the P&L, those are pretty darn efficient. And so that, to me, means that scale is the only blocker from us being a 5% margin business to a 25% to 30% margin business. It's just a factor of scale because the actual core products are there. Another, I think, fascinating statistic is when we broke this out during our call, is that year-over-year, our EBITDA improved by about $15 million. Of that $15 million, the vast majority of that was organic. That was not through the acquisitions that we just talked about. And so the core business, which was relatively small, it was like $120 million or $130 million before these acquisitions, pulled out almost $15 million of EBITDA. That's a ton of operating leverage in just 1 year. And so I think that's also kind of a little bit hidden in the whole story. And then what's cool is that as we acquire these businesses, we generally are actually able to accelerate the growth post it. We did that with Punchh. We've done that with TASK. We've done it with Stuzo. We're good on that growth side. And then we'll run the same OpEx playbook with those. And so you get like this kind of compounding impact over time. So I do expect us to be a really high-margin business over time. I think it's a little bit underestimated, but we have to deliver to kind of prove that, I think, to the Street over time.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#32

Got it. Any questions in the audience? All right. I have a couple more. Yes?

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#33

A question. When you think about the competition, especially from the traditional providers, they [indiscernible] work harder [indiscernible]?

Savneet Singh

executive
#34

So they're not all the same. I think -- and I'll try to speak categorically, but it's hard because they're different. But generally, I think the hard part about having the incumbent product in this market particularly is that if you want to win, it's a product issue. It's not a go-to-market issue. It's not anything other than we have to -- you have to have more modern and better product. And I think when you have so much scale, it's hard to say, hey, I'm going to rebuild the product. What do you tell your customers? What do you tell your Board, your management? You're going to take down margins to go start rejigging the product. And so what these companies have done has been really focused on monetizing that base better. And it is not -- I would argue, not done super well. So if you look at those 3 names, they've all tried to either monetize way more through payments, which I think has been a tough challenge. They've tried to acquire their resellers. But what they haven't done is said, hey, we're going to rewrite the product, or hey, we're going to move -- if you think back to the cloud transition years ago with Autodesk or Adobe, like those were rocky but they worked and they were amazing. But they told you that. That was -- it's an all-in initiative. And the only reason I can sort of seriously empathize is when we took over PAR, it was a rebuild of the product that got us to be where we are today. And so I think the challenge has been that they haven't had the ability or haven't yet kind of addressed the product challenge. And so to me, it's Band-Aids versus like the long-term win. The other thing that they're doing, and one of them in particular, is aggressively cutting price. It's trying to win a deal off of price. And you'll win some deals for sure. There are people that will make that mistake. But generally, I think it actually highlights the value of our product. But that's kind of what I've seen for them so far. Could it change? For sure. But if you...

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#35

[indiscernible]

Savneet Singh

executive
#36

Yes. I'd say our business is pretty well known. NCR has been struggling for a long time, and so we don't -- we worry about them less. I think with Global's acquisition like Xenial, which is a product we compete with, it's probably going to get less attention. And so it's like Oracle we worry about the most because Oracle has relationships beyond just being your point of sale. It might be your database, 2.it might be your ERP. And so that's probably one we probably worry about the most.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#37

Are you talking [indiscernible] those 2 chains [indiscernible]?

Savneet Singh

executive
#38

So it depends on the chain. There are 1 or 2 chains that would be a real issue. You mentioned one of them. But Burger King is running on the same POS platform that we have 25,000 other customers on. And so they've been super supportive of us wanting to grow our business. And in many ways, they wanted us to get bigger because one of the big concerns is how small we were when we won that deal. The -- and so in the end, I think the question comes down to what is your competitive alternative. And I would argue that no matter what chain you are, are you really going to pass on the best product because you're scared that a competitor is using it and you're going to use like the crappy JV product? Like I don't think so. I think you're still going to buy best product, and then you're going to make it work for you in a way that delivers the value to your customers. So certainly, there'll be certain deals that we look at that -- and we're evaluating some of them right now that are huge revenue deals, game changing, but we would then have to commit to not selling it. And that's just a decision we'll make at that time. But generally, most of our customers have been really supportive of our growth and have acted as references. I mean Burger King is an amazing partner for us and is our best reference call.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#39

Great. I think we have one more question. So just the last question for you, Savneet. You mentioned earlier in terms of things that PAR is -- that are misunderstood about PAR, one being your margin potential. What else is really misunderstood about PAR?

Savneet Singh

executive
#40

I think that there's probably a couple of things. I'll go fast. I think the durability of the end market -- I used to be a software investor, and I used to always say that people always screw this up. Your churn is almost exactly correlated to the end market you sell. You can have the best product in the world, but if you're selling to a high churn category, it doesn't really matter. Enterprise restaurants, QSR restaurants are really durable businesses, and they last for a long time. And I think that's sometimes lost in sort of the macro talk. I think the second part that's at times misunderstood about us at PAR is I don't think we've ever viewed ourselves as, hey, let's just be great at restaurant tech. The idea is to build a platform that can serve food service across the category. And so today, we're in restaurants. We're growing so fast in convenience, and I think you'll see us do more and more over time. And I think a lot of that is rooted in the ambition of the people at PAR. And you know the story, but we were 9, 10 weeks going bankrupt 6 years ago and had less than $10 million of revenue. And today, we're here. And so I don't think it's ego or hubris. It's just there's an ambition to do a lot more. And our path to do that, as we've done, which is we obsess on delivering for the customer. We obsess on making sure that the customer is happy so that we can have the right to sell them more and kind of continue this flywheel. But I think we kind of feel like, hey, we found this flywheel that actually really works and where else can we eventually put that to work.

Neil Dalal

analyst
#41

Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Savneet. Thanks for being here again.

Savneet Singh

executive
#42

Thanks, Neil.

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