Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. thank everyone out there for joining us. As I like to say each and every time, I know that you guys got lots of choices. So thanks for hanging out this week. Today, I am joined by a founder. I don't want say multiple time founder, but a founder that's got a solution that I think is really, really cool and something that I quite frankly haven't seen in my experience out in the space. So I'm excited to introduce you guys to Sven. Sven, why don't you introduce yourself, kind of a little bit about your background and how... Welcome to the restaurant technology guys podcast. In today's episode, we are diving into something that is often not talked about a ton in the restaurant industry. And that's really, how do you retain employees using employee benefits as one of those levers to help the team over at pro tier has revolutionized employee benefits and make made them easier for restaurant owners to attract and retain some of your best people. I know a lot of restaurant owners that I talk with struggle to get people to come in number one and then number two to get them to stay. And the team over at ProTier use some of their background and their experience to really come up with some innovative ways that I think restaurant owners are going to want to hear if they're not already doing it. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I'm the chief revenue officer for CBS Northstar. We work the Northstar point of sale solution for multi units. Please check us out at cbsnorstar.com. you decided to go solve some challenges in restaurant tech and restaurant employee management before, kind of where did you come from and then why did you decide that this is something you want to go sink your teeth into?

Sven Jensen: Yeah, thanks Jeremy. And thanks for having me on. We started building Proteer about two years ago and launched it into the market just over nine months ago. And the is really built around the pain point that I saw in customers around my career of providing appropriate employee benefits for small businesses and particularly businesses ⁓ in the restaurant And it just, you was a need that

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: And now, on to the episode.

Sven Jensen: We constantly heard about, but just I didn't feel was ⁓ met by an appropriate solution. And before launching Crotea and going off on my own, I was chief financial officer at a company that serviced the restaurant space called Grubber, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners may have heard of one of the largest kiosk providers and self-ordering technology providers to the restaurant space. And what Grubber did ⁓ help businesses who really with employment and just couldn't fill these roles, provide a technology solution that allowed that customer at the QSR or the ⁓ to check out without needing ⁓ cashier. We're some of the same problems, but with a very different solution and a different approach. We're saying for these businesses who want to attract and retain the best employees, We think the way that companies can do that is provide them with a good set of employee benefits that also work for the business owner. So if legacy employee benefits are very rigid, they're very inflexible, they're very one size fits all, and they were really designed in the 1950s for traditional employment that was, you know, a nine to five, and you worked there for years or decades. and you were salaried, so you knew exactly how much you are participating week in and week out. The industry, as we all know, ⁓ consists ⁓ some but the majority of employees are paid hourly, ⁓ and there's high churn in those employees and often ⁓ quite high in those businesses. ⁓ So we a business ⁓ to serve employee benefits needs of those type of customers. And it's a little bit of a sort of full circle ⁓ for me in my career. The accent that you hear is South African, but I left South Africa at 18 and went to Cornell University, sort of showing up in the States as an 18 year old and didn't know anyone in the hemisphere, let alone Ithaca, New York. I studied actuarial science, so I studied ⁓ of the insurance and how insurance pools and ⁓ the risk capital around insurance is structured at Cornell. and then spent the first half of my career in sort of finance roles and Wall Street and things like that. So I've had to implement employee benefits plans for sort of small companies, fast growing companies. And then obviously at Grubber, you know, the restaurant customers that we served every day had real labor challenges and, ⁓ are a solution to it. We're trying to provide a solution to their employees to... you know, help any individual restaurant owner be as competitive as possible in keeping and attracting the best employees, ⁓ you know, what I hear consistently is, it's a very, very tight labor market that despite all the fear mongering around ⁓ ⁓ know, these businesses just struggle to keep people in these roles or even, you know, recruit people to take some of these hourly roles at restaurants.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, and I'm excited to dig into kind of the ways that you guys are solving those problems because you do hear the mythology of, nobody wants to work anymore. I think at the end of the day, the demand and the market supply are not matching, which is really where the problem is. It's less about not having people around. It's more about the benefit showing up. And so I want to talk through some of that. Before we dig into that, I guess,

Sven Jensen: Completely.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Help me understand, define benefits, define employee benefits, because that means a wide myriad of things. Does that mean employee meals and ping pong tables in the back? I doubt that's what you're solving for. And I'm teasing about that, but a lot of times people will throw that on their job description. you get a free meal per shift and that they consider that benefits, but that's not really what you guys are solving for. So I'd love for you to kind of dig through what does that even mean from the benefits perspective? Because there's a lot of different meanings to that word. And then we can kind of jump off from there.

Sven Jensen: Yeah, so at the moment we're exclusive to healthcare and insurance type medical products for the employee benefits that those companies provide. Can companies provide free meals? Can companies provide, you know, daycare and other considerations? Sure, I think, you know, what we see in the industry is, you know, no restaurant company can match the benefits suite of the Googles and Facebooks that have, you know, massages and dry cleaning and you know, spend thousands of dollars per employee per month on things. We businesses allow their employees to get health insurance, medical, dental and vision, and then have a reimbursable expense account for incidental medical between co-pays and, ⁓ you know, visits and ⁓ all of type of things. So it isn't the suite of it, but we think a sector that lots of restaurant customers do not offer today, or they don't offer beyond a very narrow set of managers at the top echelon of those businesses. We allow that to permeate through the rest of the business. And you get the same benefits that ⁓ and I get from prior jobs. ⁓ feel a sense that company cares about you. They're doing more than ⁓ wanting to show up for your shift. They want you to be healthy. They want you to know. ⁓ that if you do get sick, you've got some support structure to it. And so those are the insurance products that we help ⁓ employees get as a result of our infrastructure.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, I love to set the frameworks and then then what is traditional? Like, you know, typically you're going to go into brands and, and, know, you've got a restaurant group that's got five restaurants and they've got, you know, 20 employees per restaurant. You know, they've got 10 managers across those, across those, five restaurants, know, two per, per restaurant. And then you've got the rest of them that are hourlies and those might be kitchen staff. Those may be front of the house staff. What do you traditionally see when you walk into these brands so that we can, we can juxtapose? I'm certain some of these owners out there. They're like, no, no, no, I take care of my people. I've got a benefits program, the ones that are listening. And then you've got others that are sitting here and they work, you know, at corporate at a Chili's and you know, they've got a whole different set of circumstances because they're a corporate employee. But I'd love to have you get into the mindset of these brands that you work with. What is traditionally what you're seeing when you engage with these clients and then kind of then we'll walk through. Where do we go from there?

Sven Jensen: Yeah, so most of the clients that we've onboarded have not offered benefits at all to hourly employees. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: at all. And so what happens with those people, guess, do they just go get the affordable health care from the government? Like what traditionally happens in those circumstances? And I apologize for cutting off, but I just think it's important for people to understand where they're at when you guys engage with them. It's wonder people are like, well, piss off, I'm not gonna hang out here for too long, because you guys don't care about me.

Sven Jensen: Yeah. It's even more than that, right? Like this is a hospitality sector and your employees are the face of your business. They're the people who, you know, convey your brand to your customers. And so if your employees are jaded or not well taken care of or feel that they've been slighted by, you know, the sort of management that's going to permeate through, you know, how they serve the customers. ⁓ You've got to treat your employees well if you want them to treat your customers well and if you want to build a sustainable, good brand of a business. legacy model, especially for hourly workers, people simply just don't provide benefits to them at all. And these employees, these individual guys and girls are out there left to fend for themselves. They don't have financial contribution. They don't have the company. ⁓ providing dollars and cents to help them buy benefits. So they've got to sort foot that bull entirely by themselves. they don't have a support mechanism to go out and understand the complexities around this or saying, man, I can go to healthcare.gov or covered California or any of the state exchanges, but it's pretty intimidating. And I see this 140 plans in Southern Florida, like, you know. I probably just shouldn't pick the cheapest one as much as that's appealing. Like how do I differentiate between those two? And so it's very intimidating. And the largest impact of that is these people just don't have insurance and then they're very susceptible to something going wrong in their life. 71 % of bankruptcies in the US are caused by a medical expense. So when things go wrong in the healthcare side,

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: hoping you were going to bring up that statistic because I think about that and go, you know what, lot of these people, and again, I think even in that, a lot of the workforce is younger and they're like, oh, I'm never going to get sick because they're 18 to 25 and they just think that they're never going to get sick. at the end of the day, they do. And it impacts them, it impacts the economy, and it impacts those employees and the employers. So sorry, I'll let you keep going.

Sven Jensen: You know, it's exactly that. You know, it's just something relatively complicated for an individual to figure out by themselves, particularly if they're, you know, more earlier in their career and they don't have an experience set or sort of support structure to give them the help and guidance through that. So yeah, that's one of the things that we provide. have, you know, 24 seven phone, text messaging, chat support that if any of our employees want help with the benefit solution. they're connected within two rings to someone in the US who's a registered health insurance broker in their state who can help them make the right choices. And if that takes a two hour conversation, that takes a two hour conversation. If it's simply asking, hey, is this doctor covered by this plan? It may be a sort of 45 second interaction. we do think as much as we think of ourselves as a startup and technology is very core to what we do. People need support with this and people need a nuanced answer for their situation. And that's a challenge for a business owner because, say you're that restaurant and you have 40 employees, if you're trying to provide benefits as a one size fits all to those employees, you're never gonna get it right. It's impossible to get it right. You've got a broad age and socioeconomic and family situation for those people.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Besides the fact that that's not what they do. This is what you guys do. They make cheeseburgers. They serve pizza. It's not like they're in the business of going and figuring out. I I dread the days when my CFO and my controller come back to me and say, hey, we need insurance benefit renewal. And I'm like, ⁓ number one, it's going to be more expensive. I promise you that. Number two, I'm not going to understand 80 % of what the plans even say when they come through. And so it's going to be an education. Fortunately for us, it ends up being one of those things that we only have to do.

Sven Jensen: you Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: a year, again, we're in a professional environment, it's a different circumstance than with hourlies. can't even imagine the churn and having to educate yourself on those things is next to impossible.

Sven Jensen: You've been in the business for long enough that you know that lots of things that businesses used to have to do themselves have now been outsourced to a service provider, right? So it wasn't that long ago that you would have had people on your staff who ran payroll. Their job was to calculate what each person's tax numbers were and fill out 25 boxes on each employee's sort of pay stub each time and run it. And now... you know, all of your customers will use an ADP or paychecks or someone and you've now just got an owner or a manager or, you know, someone on the HR team who reviews the details and hits submit and takes care of it. 95 % of what used to be manual work has been sold for these businesses by ADP and they provide a good solution and they charge you a subscription fee per person, per month, per company to do it. We do the same thing for employee benefits except we don't charge anyone on the employer or the employee anything. So we handle all of the logistics for a restaurant. We handle all the logistics for the employee and we don't make any revenue of either of those groups. We make money because we are the broker of record for those insurance plans that we help facilitate. And as a result, we get paid a broker fee by United Healthcare or Aetna.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Wow.

Sven Jensen: Florida Blue or Kaiser. And so the company that Restaurant Group implements us doesn't have any monthly fees to us. 100 % of the subsidy dollars that they generate go to that employee. And the same thing, that employee who chooses a healthcare plan and use us for five minutes or two hours for customer support, ⁓ getting all of that completely for free. They're not being charged anything for it. because we have a business model, a revenue model that comes from the brokerage side of the business. And that's actually quite protected. The price of the plans that we sell are identical to what the person could get on the exchange. there is no markups anywhere that gets added to compensate for this. This is coming out of the insurance underwriters profitability for facilitating these plans.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, and that's one of the things that I was so impressed because at the end of the day, a lot of people get, you know, they'll sit and listen to the call and be like, I can't afford another subscription fee. I can't afford something else. But at the end of the day, the opposite is happening. You're, you're, you're retaining employees, which is a cost savings to you at the end of the day. So if you keep the right employees, even if they're hourly, they're going to end up being more productive for you and for your team. In addition to that, the fact that you're able to make their lives in a better space is is always a ⁓ benefit to me, which was the part I loved so much about your guys' kind of idea and how you guys are going to market. guess, ⁓ I'm sorry.

Sven Jensen: I think there's two components to that which I think are sort of important to do a little bit of a deeper dig to one is yes, we don't charge for the service, but also we make our solution as automated and light touches possible for the business owner. we integrate directly with your payroll. We have partnerships with 85 major payroll companies. It's probably everyone anyone in this call has ever heard of. And so If you add employees or remove employees, you don't have to do that in duplicate on the proteo technology system. We have a technology integration that goes directly to your payroll provider so that if, you know, John Smith employee leaves or is terminated for any reason, they're automatically pulled out of subsequent subsidies. You don't have to duplicate the work. And again, you know, we all know all these business owners are incredibly inundated with tasks and effort, right? So we really need to make it as streamlined and as simple as possible. ⁓ the other part is just ⁓ much it costs. If you think of legacy businesses, there a very sort high threshold in terms of what you need to pay to offer benefits to employees. And that's why for hourly teams, it's just almost inevitably like unfeasible for that person who may work for your restaurant. 10 or 15 or 20 or 31 hours per week, it's really difficult to pay $500 towards their healthcare, right? You just cannot cover those costs of the business. And we allow businesses to effective strategies when they try and set up what their subsidy framework looks like. One is a compliance strategy and one is a non-compliance strategy. The compliance strategy means the business is compliant with all the state and federal regulations in terms of how those subsidies are structured. And so there is a minimum threshold. It's about $130 per employee if they're full time that you have to contribute to that employee.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Okay. Well, that's still not all that expensive, quite frankly.

Sven Jensen: Exactly. It's slightly more detailed than that. It's the lowest silver price point plan in the zip code of the employee. But, you know, it's within a few dollars of $130. So that's something to think of. And that's, again, assuming the employee is full time. So our structure says if that employee is working part time, and they're working, call it 20 hours a week, then you only need to contribute half of that. So you have to do $65. per month towards benefits. And now you've got a compliant state and federal plan. if you've got more than 50 employees, more than 50 full-time equivalents, you need to provide an option for benefits to people. Otherwise, you're out of compliance and you have all kinds of penalties that the IRS or your state regulatory body can impose on you. it's a lot more expensive than the sort of penalty. it's the cost.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: 65 bucks a month I promise you that. Yeah.

Sven Jensen: to get it all figured out, it's lawyers, it's paying the penalties, it's paying the fees on the penalties, it's putting something new in place. So do obviously think being compliant is the right way to do it. But if a company in most states has less than 50 full-time equivalents, you do not actually need to provide employee benefits to your team. But we think there's a great business. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: but it's still good business to do it. It's still good business to do it. And that's one of the things I loved about your guys' stuff is you can do it because you have to be compliant, but at the same time, it makes good business sense to do it. got happier team members, you've got people that are wanting to come work for you. It's something you can market. Back to ⁓ of our original story. I'd love for you to talk about what you guys are seeing in these brands that you guys have implemented because...

Sven Jensen: Exactly. And that's.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I'm guessing retention numbers are higher. I'm guessing the amount of applicants that are coming in are higher. And those two things, you know what, when you really look at at the cost of replacing an hourly employee, especially a kitchen employee in a lot of places, it's very expensive because you can't find them. And so if you can't find them, you got to replace them. And I just saw a note on Facebook earlier today that, you know, somebody's like, we had to close today due to lack of staff. It's like, often, ⁓ much did that cost you to not be open today? Because you didn't have enough staff to staff your kitchen or staff the dining room. or whatever else. And so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what are you seeing as far as the benefit to the restaurant owner by not just doing it because the government says you have to do it, but because it's good business.

Sven Jensen: Yeah, and because we integrate with payroll, we actually get a ton of those details. And, you know, our customers are very interested to allow us to assess that and sort of show you the learnings or show them the learnings of what we can glean from it. what we found is, you know, all the businesses who provided us access to that have actually ⁓ more money on benefits than they did in the past. But every single one of them has become more profitable as a business. as a direct result of that. And that doesn't really make sense if you say, oh, I'm a restaurant and I've got 50 employees and I'm going to spend $100 a month for them. Where do I come up with that $5,000 to do it? But the cost is being saved by the amount of money it costs to attract and retain these employees. So there's a hard and a soft cost to it. The hard cost is, on average, it's about six to 12 weeks of salary. to replace an employee by trying posting jobs and interviewing them and screening them and then bringing them into your location and training them up and running double shifts. And they're not productive for a few weeks. And so, you know, the multi-unit owners, typically know this number, but often individual owners don't because the multi-units have a team that kind of runs their recruiting and they're like, we're spending $15,000 a month.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: they're not productive the first couple of weeks either because they don't know the menu and they don't know what you're doing.

Sven Jensen: on HR across our two, three locations because just constantly have to find that kitchen staff or whatever the staff number is. ⁓ we've seen that these employee retention metrics improve by sort 15 to 20 % within the first six months of rolling out our solution. And that improvement in employee retention in and of itself pays for the benefits that these businesses are otherwise paying. ⁓ it really is one of those situations where A company spends money and makes more money as a result of it. The company is happier, it's more profitable, and the employee is happier because they now have insurance, maybe insurance for the first time in their life so that if someone gets sick or they have a need within their family to have health care, they've got exposure and they're not sort of taking unpaid time off or not showing up for their shifts. you know, it's just

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I didn't even think about the sick time that, you know, they've got to, they don't, you know, they're either coming in sick and now getting the rest of the staff sick or, you know, they get some long-term injury or whatever and they can't afford it and now, I didn't even think about that stuff. That's also really good, so sorry.

Sven Jensen: And that's some of the soft part of it. like, yeah, when I asked restaurants, particularly if I asked the general managers are like, what's the worst part of your role? And, like get, you get good answers sort of, posing that question, right? Like we should all ask that to all of our employees.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: So we need a word cloud of all of those answers. Sorry, I'll let you keep going.

Sven Jensen: The consistent theme that they say is the first 30 minutes of their time, figuring out who's not going to show up for work that day. And the generation is such that this isn't people give you two weeks notice, right? They don't even give you notice. You know, like you said with your friend, they're supposed to be there at four o'clock and you know, at five o'clock, you've sent them a few text messages and you just never get a response. And now that general manager is like, ⁓ we're short.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: They just decide they're not coming in today and they don't even tell anybody.

Sven Jensen: this person in the kitchen, we're short a bartender, a maitre d, whatever it is. And it's a disaster, you know, they're taking off their tie and they're doing those roles. the soft cost of employee churn is probably even more impactful than sort of the dollar amount of it, because it makes everyone's life very, very complicated. makes it sort of, it forces all these businesses into this perpetual sort of hair is on fire situation, right, where they can't be thoughtful and strategic and they can't provide the best hospitality experience because they're just trying to make sure someone's and like sort of exactly. And again, these are all hospitality businesses. So ⁓ your employees are there and happy, it completely shows through the consistency of food, consistency of ⁓ experience.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Somebody's showing up to serve the guests, yeah.

Sven Jensen: And that's where you get the Yelp and the Google ratings. You know, the negative ones are typically when, you know, things are going wrong because of a labor challenge. And that's why these businesses will just say, Hey, we're just going to shut the doors today. many times have you been into a restaurant on a ⁓ night and you know, you'll go in there and they'll say, we're fully booked. Sorry, we can't serve you. And you look in and there's seven tables with a plastic ⁓ on it saying reserved and no one's sitting there.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Sven Jensen: and the business is set. We're labor short, so we've taken off 30 % of our tables.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: of a reliable inventory to be able to serve people. Yep, no, 100%. The part that I find ironic, and I'm going to teach you here a little bit as a former CFO, now business founders, you're trying to resell me on soft costs and every CFO I ever worked at work with, it's like, no, no, no, show me the hard cost. But you know what? At the end of the day, you recognize that those soft costs are real cost to the business. And I love the idea of creating a better environment for the workforce. And the fact that you would say that they've not only

Sven Jensen: And, you know.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: made more money. mean, that is remarkable and awesome because a lot of people see it as a cost center when they invest in new technology, not as a investment into your people, which are ultimately going to be all of what you've talked about to drive the business forward. One more real quick question about kind of the logistics. What happens with insurance changes? Because they change all the time and they are hard. They are hard to come by as a business owner myself. It's a challenge. You got to go look at these things and You got to figure out from your staff and, and, know, the people that are there and, the insurance business is a tough business. You you studied it in college and, know, actuarial tables and, know, people are living longer and it's costing more to keep people. All of that is hard. I guess, how do you guys help to make sure that they're getting the best coverage for the dollars they're spending on a regular basis? Because that, as you guys continue to grow and scale, it's going to be hard to do, I guess. I would, I would imagine, but I don't know. I'd love to, to get your thoughts on that for those that might be like, no, no, no, no. He's just gonna get the best thing for what pro tier is gonna get. It's not gonna be the best for my benefits. It's gonna be the best for pro tier because they're gonna make the most amount of money. You can hear the people out there saying that,

Sven Jensen: Completely. think the biggest thing that we do is get the people who shouldn't be involved out of the way. And that's the business owner and the business CFO, the business HR person. Again, with the legacy way that you provide businesses, and this is what you do with your own company, ⁓ and your CFO will sit down and you'll say, we're going to offer three plans to our employees, a low, medium, and a high price point plan. How much can we afford to contribute to each of those every month? And you put it in place. Every year, you've got to repeat the whole process, right? ⁓ few years, you say, OK, what if we actually move from ⁓ to United? And then everyone's frustrated because they've to have a new insurance card, and some people fall in and out. So it's a nightmare. You don't want to be doing that.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: they're not covering the certain doctors and yeah, the whole nine yards, yep.

Sven Jensen: And you being involved in that actually makes the system worse. I believe that why, when there's 142 great insurance plans available in Southern Florida on the individual market on healthcare.gov, why should your business owner curate those to three and allow you to only choose three of them? Because guess what? If you're less than a hundred employees, you may think you've got this great small group plan and your broker may tell you, how hard he or she has worked to put this together. In almost every instance, that curated small group plan is an off the shelf Affordable Care Act plan that you could go and buy individually. And so your employee, when he's choosing a plan, is forced to look at your three options that you've chosen. And you try to choose plans that serve a whole spectrum of your workforce. Each person's... Each person's... Each person's...

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: You're speaking my language because I got this renewal coming up soon. It's awful.

Sven Jensen: Each person's different. Each employee is different. why not let them pick the right health care for them out of the available options? Why remove 139 of those choices from them and let them get the right price point? sad reality of insurance, and it's the same thing if you buy a car or a watch or a cell phone. In most instances, a more expensive insurance plan is better. ⁓ Mercedes is better than ⁓ Kia. Apologies if anyone. You know, has strong affiliations with one or other, brand theme is what I'm really going for. If you're healthy and you don't need insurance or you don't need ongoing medical treatment, maybe Akia gets you to and from work just perfectly. It's a great functional, low cost of ownership car. If you have health conditions that you know you're incurring a number of medical expenses per month, sometimes the Mercedes, sometimes the more expensive insurance plan actually costs you less. because more is covered and your premium is higher, but your out of pocket is lower. And so again, in the legacy model, maybe your employee is coming up to your general manager or the owner and saying, hey, Jeremy, which plan should I choose? What's it between an HMO and a PPO? is Crichton on this plan or not? And you're like, I don't really know. I can tell you that I'm through an HMO and a PPO, but the business owner or the general manager at restaurant certainly isn't an expert in it. And the only way that employees get in the right plan for them actually requires more conversation. So you need to say, hey, are you healthy? Are you planning on having children? Are you on any medications? And please, anyone who's listening, do not let your general manager ask your employees that question. You cannot.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: would say don't ask those questions because it's, you know, are you planning to have children soon? Like all of those questions are HR nightmares that are going to hurt you and your employee retention and all of that, right?

Sven Jensen: Next. completely and it's illegal. Like you can get fined massive amounts of money by employment departments for asking those questions. If instead of those questions being directed at the general manager, they're directed at a health insurance broker who's acting entirely your behalf and is helping you choose from the plans that you have available, intentions incentives are aligned. And that's big sort of realization that I had beyond all the challenges of the hospitality world and keeping and retaining employees, the fact that the employer is the curator of employee benefits makes no sense at all. And so our model is something called ICRA, which stands for Individual Contribution Health Reimbursement Arrangement. The last three letters are HRA. So there's a lot of familiarity with an HRA if anyone has an HRA or an HSA. But basically it says, A company's job is to look after their employees and provide funds benefits, but not to curate the benefits, not to tell them what to choose. Figure out a dollar amount and let the employee choose what's best for them individually. So basically, companies don't want to be doing this job, but they've been co-opted into this job by their legacy model. And we're sort of changing that. We're saying companies, A, you don't have to deal with the logistics of it. B, you have all the flexibility of making your subsidy dollar denominated. So if you can afford $142 or you can afford $215, that's your choice. They're both compliant plans and you can figure them out and you can create different pricing amounts, different subsidy amounts for different roles within the organization. So you get all the granularity that comes with the subsidy being a dollar number, right? It's got cents, it's got, you know, a hundred incremental points. per dollar that you can figure out. And you set it and it runs. If at the end of the year you want to increase it by 3 % or 5 % to match the expectations of planned costs on the exchanges, you can do that. And your employees see that you're contributing more. Again, with legacy plans, the company just pays more money and nobody even realizes that they're coughing up more to help the employees out on a renewal basis.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: we don't get, I mean, as a business owner, I don't get credit for it oftentimes that we're, continue to get our prices increased and they don't, they don't realize it, or we got to do a big marketing campaign to explain to them. And they forget by, you know, by the second time you've told them. And so, um, so I guess that brings me down to what does it look like? How do they engage? If I'm a restaurant owner out there, I own five shops and you know, back to that example that we said earlier, what would it look like? How do they engage with you guys? What, you know,

Sven Jensen: and we're done.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: much work does ⁓ take and how quickly can you get people up to speed? Because in most cases, as you said earlier, they're not offering this benefit. So they may be offering benefits to the ⁓ employees, but not the hourly employees. And so, ⁓ you guys even do a half and half plan where they start with the hourlies and then move to the salaries later or kind of what happens there?

Sven Jensen: Yeah, so how someone engages us is, you know, our website is pro-tier.com, P-R-O-T-I-E-R.com. There's a ton of information there. We've got a lot of articles that we've populated that kind of provide education to people who want to read it. If someone thinks it's of interest, we've had customers, you know, get on a 30 minute phone call and by the end of it, they're up and running. That's how quickly it is.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ⁓ wow, that's how quickly you guys can do it.

Sven Jensen: The technology is super easy to do. Most times we have a 30 minute conversation and we walk through their pain points and we tell them how we can solve them. People go around and think about it and say, ⁓ like this makes sense or doesn't, or they of run the numbers or they get sort of comfort more broadly. For a business owner to implement ProTier, it's three simple steps. Once got a business account created, you click link payroll. And again, The 80 payroll companies that we integrate will automatically pull all your employees in. We will have their roles. will have everyone who's in it. And then you can define all of those employees who are subsidy eligible. The second point is you link a bank account. And we do that with Stripe, the biggest payment gateway in the world. A couple clicks and you get your bank account linked with ACH. And the third step is you set up subsidies. So you could say we're going to do up. front of house subsidy and that's going to be $250 for full-time employees and you add your three managers or five managers to it. You say, we're going to do an assistant manager subsidy. That's going to be You add your two assistant managers to that and then you say, ⁓ we're going to do a back of a house one and we're going to make that hour denominated. So you add those people. you basically, the third step is SYNC. ⁓ person and employee with the subsidy amount and you hit run and then every month from then after it will run without any engagement from you. If a new employee gets added, you will be tasked with assigning them to a subsidy. If an employee leaves your business for any reason, there is nothing for you to touch. They automatically come out of it. And it's more than there's nothing to touch with ProTier because in the legacy model, if your employee left, you had to deal with Cobra.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Sven Jensen: And if you've ever done that, that's months and months of paperwork and chasing checks. And the company is paying for the insurance premium and then waiting for that employee to pay you back. It's a nightmare. Our plans, they start where it's an individual plan. That employee is choosing an individual plan in their own name without any tether to the company. The only thing the company is involved is providing some dollars to reduce the cost of it. So if that employee leaves.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yes.

Sven Jensen: your company's role is click terminate employee in, know, pay last on the Eats and then it's over. There is no more logistics to do. Because again, these businesses just don't have the to ⁓ HR experts or have an HR team to do it. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: and ADP or whatever and you're done. Real quick, just because I was thinking about it when you were explaining kind of the process, we know a lot of team members work at different restaurants, two different restaurants. If you guys have got multiple clients that are on pro tier, do you guys figure out how to mesh those two people together? Or do they have two insurance plans? I'd love to, again, it's a question that I ask and I'm sure you guys get that question a lot where I'm working at two different restaurants, maybe in the same brand, maybe in a different brand, and would just love to understand how you guys deal with that, if you do.

Sven Jensen: Yeah. Yeah, we definitely do. The technology is actually pretty robust in the sense where sometimes if you're a multi location owner, even if you're not a franchise group, say you've got, you know, six Jeremy's pizzerias right throughout Dallas. Sometimes that's a single EIM meaning is a single payroll provider and all of your employees across all of the locations roll up to one. And sometimes

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Sven Jensen: Each location has its own employment identification number and its own payroll. We work with either of those. So in the situation where it all rolls up to a single payroll company, this is more common than not, your employee may be working at ⁓ Jeremy's and Main Street and then Jeremy's Pizzeria and Broadway. If they're on a single ⁓ W2,

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: business.

Sven Jensen: it all gets automatically aggregated and the benefits get calculated automatically. If potentially they're separate, so Jeremy's Main Street and Jeremy's Broadway have their own payroll systems there's an employee who's common between the two of them, they would get one subsidy from Jeremy's Main Street and a separate subsidy from the separate employer.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: awesome. One employer. ⁓

Sven Jensen: And so now you've got this employee who's maybe working 40 hours a week. So they're full time, but they're splitting, you know, two days or three days a week at each business. They're now getting and say the amount of benefits you want to give to that employee is $300 a month. Yeah. Business A may be contributing 150 and business B is contributing 150. That employee doesn't care. At end of the day, they're getting $300 and they're doing it.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: they're getting their healthcare coverage. Yep, exactly. Yeah, no, I love it. Again, that was.

Sven Jensen: So yeah, it's kind of, it becomes simple again because the unit of transfer is dollars, right? And it's just infinitely flexible and fungible.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, and I think again, we see that. sure you, like I said, I assume that you guys have dealt with that. So again, just a couple of reminders from the show that I want everybody that's still listening 38 minutes in, 39 minutes in, just most businesses actually, the businesses that you guys have been working with are, it's costing them a little bit more, but at the end of the day, they're making more money because the customers, it can get set up really, really easily because we hear way too often, I can't. I can't implement everything. just don't have enough time to do all of this stuff. The fact that you guys can do it and, you know, kind of three easy steps is huge. And at the end of the day, it's making your business better and making the lives of the people that help you guys better. So, love what you guys are doing. I was excited to get on the call. Is there anything else that we missed that you want our listeners to hear on today's episode before we sign off?

Sven Jensen: I mean, it's all our goal is to make this as simple and easy for a business owner to implement and manage. And I think we've done a great job of that. There is a lot of, you know, complexities and specific situations. So again, anyone can reach out to me at spen at protea.com and I'm happy to, you know, help each individual business owner put a solution in place that works for them. The one other thing that I didn't mention that is actually sort of helpful is say you that business who has an employee who works 20 hours a week for you. and the other 20 hours a week, don't work for one of your other brands, they work for your competitor down the street, right? So Jeremy's Pizza works, you work half time for that and then you work for Spend Steakhouse the other half of the time. When one of these businesses offers benefits like Proteer, it actually helps those employees increase their attachment rate to that business. Because they're saying, hey, Jeremy's offering me healthcare and the more I work for him, the more healthcare I get. So maybe I'm going to go from working three shifts a week for Jeremy's and two shifts a week for Sten to four and one or five and zero. And again, for a business owner, you rather have 40 people working 20 hours a week or 20 people working 40 hours a week? Typically, having more hours per employee is better. It's just easier to manage. It's more consistent as a restaurant experience. That's one of the other soft advantages to doing it. So many people in this industry for more than one employer. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: work for multiple brands. Well, that was one of the things that I like to say all the time on these shows is if you're not doing pro tier, likely your competitor is down the street and they're going to get that employee that's going to want to come work there. They're going to be the one that's going to pick up the more chefs. And again, we're all in a war for talent to make sure that we keep the best people on our team. anything you can do to help that is to what you guys built really, really positive and really a helpful thing to do.

Sven Jensen: Businesses should be as efficient as possible with their employees because employees are expensive, but you do need employees. They're a massive part of the hospitality and guest experience and you want the best employees that you can get. And we think, you know, we help those businesses be as competitive as possible when, you know, getting those people onto their team and retaining them on their team.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, Sven, I love what you guys are doing. Obviously, you've been investing back in previous role, this role in making the hospitality and the guest experience that much better. So thank you for building what you guys have built. Thank you for continuing to pour into the community. our listeners, guys, like I said at the onset, I you guys got lots of choices. Please go check out the team at ProTier. Sven, thank you again for your time. And to our listeners, make it a great day.

Sven Jensen: Thanks, Shermie.