Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. thank everyone out there for joining us as I like to see each and every time I know you guys have got. Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. Today we are joined by Eric Steele, the chief revenue officer of a company called S I B I've been in the restaurant tech industry for 30 years and I had never heard of S I B. And so I'm excited to share with you guys all of the cool things that they do to help your restaurant operate as efficiently as possible by digging into your costs. Lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. Today is people's, you know, a difficult subject to go through, but it's very, very, very important, especially in today's day and age. So I'm excited for Eric to dig into kind of what they've been building and how they're ⁓ solving a lot of challenges within the restaurant space. But before we do that, ⁓ why don't you introduce yourself? Who is Eric? Where did Eric come from? Kind of how did you get into the space? And then we can talk a little bit about what you guys have been doing out in the market. and helping not change the customer experience, but ultimately deliver more profit to your brand. They also built an AI, and it wouldn't be a podcast in 2026 if we didn't have AI sprinkled in somewhere, called SpendBrain that allows you as an operator to dig into your expenses and ask questions of it and try and understand what it is that you can do to continue to be more profitable. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julien. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of CBS Northstar.

Eric Steele: Sure. Thank you, Jeremy. Great to be on here. It's an honor. Eric Steele. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at SIB. We are in the cost reduction business, primarily for multi-site, multi-location, operators and restaurants. We work with most of the largest groups in the US. SIB has been around for 35 years ⁓ and make reducing costs as easy as spending money.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: We wrote the Northstar PwnSale solution for multi units. Please check us out at cbsnorthstar.com. And now onto the show.

Eric Steele: And it turns out that's really important to most companies, but particularly restaurant ownership groups. Procurement is decentralized. It's fragmented. Many of our clients have hundreds or thousands of locations ⁓ lack that central visibility of their spend. So we developed something called spend brain, which is an AI spend ontology, meaning it's a knowledge graph of the clients. spend data, contracts, invoices, all assembled into one place where you can talk to your spend. And then we have an incredible group of human experts that actually are the moat and the really important part of our business. 600 employees, 400 of whom are experts in waste, linens and laundry, telecom, SaaS, you know, and they actually negotiate directly with vendors and help our clients. reduce their costs. that's who we are. My background is I spent about 15 years at Forester prior to being involved in private equity backed, B2B services companies, including Specialty Tax, and then joined SIV about two years ago.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: cool and I know I said it on the onset actually before I go any further we got about a minute and 40 seconds in before we talked about AI which it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025-2026 without talking about AI and so I'm excited to dig into kind of what you guys have been doing and I know this is not everybody's favorite topic but I'd love for you to share a little bit about why it's so important to consider Not just a tool like what you guys are doing, but even if you're doing some of the stuff that you guys are doing manually, talk to me a little bit about what the value proposition is to understanding your spend and how to go about it. Because I just think all too often people don't think about that. It is one of the quirk. I mean, it's, you know, it is a huge cost within the business, whether that's food costs or labor costs and understanding it. And then there's all of the incidental costs that you kind of mentioned, but I'd love for you to, I guess, set the stage for people to say, why is this conversation so important?

Eric Steele: It's a great question. pose a question back. As you think about it as a business owner, what is easier? Selling to 5 % more. So selling more, which would include cost of sale, cost of goods sold, the employees, marketing assets, ⁓ you gotta to get folks in the door. Or savings with zero guest impact. just making smart decisions about where you're spending money and reducing those costs in a really simple, easy way. And I think most folks would answer, hey, it's so much easier just to save money, to reduce our spend. And so with that kind of premise, that's how we approach clients is 70 % of companies don't know where 15 % or more of their contracts are with vendors. And when they do find those contracts,

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I'm gonna say that sounded generous, quite frankly. I've worked with a lot of restaurant brands over the years, And you're like 15%. There's people that are like, I have a contract for my food service provider or my Linden's provider or any of that. Sorry, I'll let you keep going. But I think it's you're being generous in the food service world.

Eric Steele: I know, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. You're exactly right. I think if we took a look at that number again this next year, it's probably gonna be half, I would imagine, if not more. And when companies do know where their contracts are, it doesn't get easier because, for example, the average waste invoice has roughly 20 % of it is errant, right? 20 % of those bills have invoice errors. SAS, some 60 % of SAS licenses are underutilized. 35 % of telecom invoices include duplicate lines, redundant lines. This goes on and ⁓ on. One of the waste haulers that's very prominent has near 15,000 unique GL codes that can appear in an invoice. How on earth does a company who has multiple relationships with multiple vendors, how could they ever track and monitor with all the invoices coming in? We have one restaurant group client that has couple hundred thousand invoices that come in every month. And so unless they have an army ⁓ 10,000 contract managers that look at every single invoice, map it against every contract, and have domain expertise around that vendor, so they can spot all the anomalies and the errors, is impossible to navigate. And so we ⁓ SpendBrain to solve for this. ⁓ now have a tool, frankly, a digital employee that is looking at all of your contracts as it processes every invoice, it maps back to your original contract, and you can teach it. You can teach the brain. Our clients even name the brain. There's pretty fun names that they choose. I won't list them here, but.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah.

Eric Steele: They get to teach their brain and really talk to it. Why did our waste bill go up in Chicago last quarter? What is the per cubic yard cost of waste in Maine this month? Why has our telecom bill increased quarter over quarter? They can actually engage in dialogue with it. And what we're finding is that this tool saves on average around 3 % of all indirect spend. And so that's powerful. That's very powerful for companies to turn on. to your original question, doing this not only catches what otherwise the human eye might miss, but maybe most importantly, it takes the team that would have been doing that laborious, monotonous work, and it pushes them back into more strategic things. They can now focus on better vendor relationships. maybe consolidating vendors and do strategic things from a contract management procurement perspective that they couldn't because they would spend most of their time mining invoices and detecting errors.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no. And I think, um, I guess I'd love Eric for you to share a little bit about those people that are out there. again, food costs and labor costs are probably the two biggest, you know, costs within restaurants. And so a lot of people like, I got my food costs figured out. And I guess let's speaks directly to those people. They're like, I've got a food cost management system. I know I'm at 18%. That's what my target is. I'm hitting my 18 % talk to that user out there because I know that you're you. have to overcome this objection. You and your team have to overcome this objection every single day with restaurant brands that are saying, well, I'm at 18%. My target is 18%, but you talked about it on the onset. There's two, three, 4 % that you may be able to change by just looking at it. Let's talk to that user that's out there and then let's dig into a little bit of the ways that you guys continue to see suppliers. I've got a contract price. They're not going to screw me or it's my buddy that's down the street. He's my wine guy. Again, I've heard them all.

Eric Steele: You

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I've been in the space for 30 years. know a lot of those same things. So let's talk to those listeners out there. They're like, I got my food cost figured out. I'm at 18 points. That's where I said I was going to be. are the things that you guys can do and how ⁓ it not impact the guests, but also just drive profit straight to the bottom line with the things that you guys are able to look at.

Eric Steele: Yeah, great question. answer with a story, which is one of my favorite stories. We had a client that felt specific to specialty gas, so CO2, with all their fountain drinks, that they had a great deal and they did with their But using anomaly detection with Spendbrain, this ontology, we started to see

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

Eric Steele: anomalies month to month, week to week, day to day. In some cases, one location would have twice the CO2 charge than one that was ⁓ size, similar zip code, right? Well, what we uncovered was actually a leak. We discovered a leak in multiple locations with CO2 that they would not have known. mean, it's going to...

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: That's amazing.

Eric Steele: show up on an invoice a little bit higher, maybe marginally higher, but over time that's compounding. And so by identifying that leak, we actually help them to improve the relationship with that vendor. We cut and recovered actually 10,000 plus dollars in a couple different locations. And we're able to ⁓ really a literal leak, a figurative leak. ⁓ so, thing tell our clients is ⁓ you likely, have a good deal, but we can test it for you. Make sure what we've asked vendors to do, we've asked a thousand other clients, a thousand other clients have asked the same thing of those vendors. So we know the data, we know the answers to the test when we go to those vendors. ⁓ We have over the 35 years we've been in business, enough data around.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah.

Eric Steele: every vendor and every price that we can come in and give you an educated understanding of whether you do have a good deal or not. And then we let the data guide the way. We'll look at your 12 month vendor payment history. We'll map it based on every geo and location and vendor. We'll benchmark it. We'll tell you if you're really in a great position, if you have a great deal or if in fact the data says otherwise. ⁓ But I can't stress enough the actual graphing

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

Eric Steele: of contract to invoice because that's the truth. You might have a good deal, but are you actually being billed in accordance with that deal?

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah. That was where I was going next, ⁓ working with a 45-unit franchise group, and we started looking through some of their contracts for credit cards, ⁓ credit being one of the ways that these software companies have monetized, and again, I'm not looking to get into a political battle of whether it's right or it's wrong. ⁓ I my own... you know, theory and if you want to hear about it, you can talk to me offline. But we looked at it and they supposedly had contract pricing with their credit card provider and they had wild swings, 100 % swings from store to store. And so one franchisee was getting totally taken advantage of by the current provider, whereas another one wasn't. The other thing that I guess I would tell you is that you might have contract pricing, but GOs as you move out to different distribution warehouses for things like you're talking about CO2, but food, ⁓ might be in a different warehouse ⁓ out of a different warehouse. They've got a different pack size and they don't honor that contract price because it's different pack size. ⁓ a different SKU number. so I guess ⁓ me through both of those scenarios because I see them very commonly ⁓ corporate says we've got a good price ⁓ might be in that good price category. They've got 15 stores of the 45 that are theirs. They're in the right price range. You know, they might be a little bit of a variance here or there, but then they, they asked for the franchisees invoices and they realized, Whoa, what we had agreed to. might've been a Claire Claire, or it might be something directly related to who, Hey, they're looking to make more profit. And they know nobody's going to tell, tell the difference.

Eric Steele: Well, you're touching on root of why we have been around for 35 years and why we've with over 10,000 and ⁓ the majority the largest restaurant groups in the U.S. We suspect, and I won't go so far as to say that we know, but we suspect that clients are taken advantage of ⁓ by some who bank on the fact that procurement can be fragmented and decentralized and that going back to that stat that 70 % of companies cannot find 15 % or you and I believe way more of their contracts. Anecdotally, from my experience, when we go to a vendor and say, hey, the client would like their contract more often than not, the vendor doesn't want to give the contract. Well, why is that? would that be?

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: 100%. Yeah.

Eric Steele: Because ⁓ coined a term vendor shenanigans. We have a ⁓ library of what these shenanigans are. From ⁓ a vendor that will change the ⁓ mat you have procured when it's delivered to a particular vendor that uses fuel. as their fuel surcharge rate, but you wouldn't know it unless you dig really deep into the contract. There are endless examples of this, and we suspect that the vendors bank on how difficult it would be for you to navigate that. And so when we talk about spend brain, one client actually said, this is like a weapon you've given us to fight back against the spend more world. It's never been easier ever in history today than it is right now to just pay vendors fast.

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

Eric Steele: There's a lot of really cool technologies that, and frankly we use some of them to ramp, Koopa, Ariba. elegant technology out there that almost with military grade efficiency helps you quickly pay a vendor. Well, we would say time out, turn the tables on spend. Let's actually give you something that can detect whether A, have a good deal. B, if you have a good deal, are you being billed in accordance with that deal? And C, when we fix any errors, do we ensure that in perpetuity they're fixed? Because there's many examples where we can re-procure, re-negotiate, fix error anomalous spend, and then six months later it all comes back. Because the vendor also suspects maybe they're not gonna always be vigilant about that, right? And so this is really, we look at ourselves as a tool.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yep. ⁓ 100%. Yep.

Eric Steele: or a weapon, as one client said, to really fight back against this Spend More world. And a ⁓ for us. We love to do it. It's why we get up every day.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, last line of questioning, I guess, before we dig into kind of what it looks like to engage Eric is this how big of a Impact can you make in those non core costs non labor costs non? You know food costs because those are the two biggest prime costs and a lot of times people have something figured out there they might be a percent here or there but you've got your You know napkins and you've got your you know, you know laundry There's so many different costs that again a 3 % or a 5 % increase in them might not move the needle because it's a hundred dollar bill and now it's 105 or 110 but again back to our early conversation I'd love for you to share a little about those things that people typically don't look at too closely because it's a small dollar amount. It comes in every month. It's kind of in that same range. It could be your telecom you talked about. It could be your SaaS. It could be, you know, your, you know, there's so many different little things. I'd love for you to talk about what a large impact you can make in those areas as well.

Eric Steele: Yeah, outside of food and labor, which is, you correctly pointed out, biggest buckets of spend. The categories that we most frequently see where we can directly impact and help clients achieve savings. Waste, near top of that list. Credit card processing, which you mentioned earlier. Bank fees, often overlooked. Significant opportunity for most clients. Linens and laundry, specialty gas. Those are the big ones that we see and across those 20 to 34 percent savings is what we're averaging and on the high end the 34 percent 34 to 37 percent we typically see with bank fees and We could have a whole discussion just on that because the opportunity there is vast and like anything we don't change vendors this isn't about Going to a client and saying we'll find you a better deal switch vendors This is no operational disruption. This is keep the vendor you have, but make sure that you're getting the right deal and that they're billing you correctly. And in some cases, re-percure or kind of renegotiate what you have in accordance with what you need. 20 to 34 % savings between those core categories, we look at 90 % of supplier vendor spend, but those are the five that continue to jump out as huge opportunities for the restaurant space.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. Yeah, real quick, because you've mentioned it two or three times, define waste. What does waste exactly mean to those listeners that are out there? Because I think I understand it, but I'd love to make sure, because you brought it up two or three times, says waste is a big opportunity for everybody.

Eric Steele: Sure.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ⁓ I hear about it when I watched Robert Irvine or Gordon Ramsay coming in and start screaming at restaurant owners that are failing ⁓ as far their waste. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what that is before we dig into what looks like with your team.

Eric Steele: Yeah, I'm sorry. I should be clear with that. It is your waste hauler. So getting trash out of the restaurant, right? so, you know, whether it's waste management or Republic or, you know, there's a variety of vendors. This is looking at particularly if you have hundreds or thousands of locations. What is the mix of holler relationships? Do you have a national relationship with a big holler? Do you have regional hollers? we have really the best in class team that, know, going on 18 years, legacy business called that really was a boutique, just extraordinary waste negotiation that ⁓ SIV acquired a couple of years ago. true experts, true domain expertise. And ⁓ that team manages hundreds of thousands of ⁓ different invoices that are coming in, evaluating, looking at them, analyzing them. But ⁓ client to mind, I'll give you an example of this related to waste. Very big company, 3,000 plus locations. We looked at through SpinBrain, their national waste relationship. in eight days, detected anomalies in just one month of data and identified 1.4 million in errant spend. So that gives you a sense for the order of magnitude. ⁓ And one month.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: That's a huge needle mover, obviously. 43, that's huge.

Eric Steele: one spin category, just processing those invoices, detecting anomalies. in some cases, you know, it was what we call route price ⁓ anomalies you would have identical routes, ⁓ identical dumpsters, the ⁓ price almost ⁓ 2X, versus the other. And so of that was just, just errant Some of it was ⁓ an opportunity to and renegotiate that location. many other examples, ⁓ overage fees. As said earlier, 15,000 unique GL codes with some of these vendors, extremely complicated, but that's what we're able to knowledge graph. Using our expertise and the client's data, we build in that brain that can track all this.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah. So, so Eric, what does engagement look like? I guess, you know, I'm sitting on the other end of the phone. I own a franchise of one of these stores of 3000 stores and they're not already working with you guys. Or I'm an individual owner operator and I want to, I want these savings. I want this help. What does that look like? Cause I could see them being like, this is so overwhelming. I don't have all my invoices. I don't want the shame of not knowing where my contracts are. Cause I, I know I don't have that. I guess. walk our listeners through what does it look like to engage with you guys and how do you guys into this but not get them so overwhelmed that now they can't focus on running their business ⁓ they can still get the savings that you guys can help with.

Eric Steele: Yep, great question. So it all starts with a kickoff where we make it our first order of business to find the data. whether that's API-ing into ⁓ AP system or R365 Yardi or Kupa, whether it's if they have a shared folders or... Where is the data? Where are the contracts? Where are the invoices coming from? The invoices are typically really easy to track. Those tend to be automated in some form or fashion. And we can via read-only access or API ingest that. Contracts are a little bit trickier, but that's item number one. And we tell the clients, this is easy in the sense that once we have the data, we do the rest. The hard part initially for the client which can be a little painful, but it's a good pain because you do it once and then you don't have to deal with it again, right? It's just finding this data, right? One of the services we provide for clients who can't find contracts is we'll get a letter of authorization and we'll go on their behalf to the vendor, right?

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: was going to be one of my questions. One of the clients that was trying to negotiate with their credit card vendor said they needed a letter from a lawyer for every EIN that they needed the contracts for. And was like, really? And back to your shenanigans comment that you made earlier, I'm sure that's that's a delay tactic because they know that getting a lawyer to write a letter for every single EIN times 40 some of them, it's a lot of work and a lot of money and a lot of... time and energy. So now they just bought themselves 30 or 45 more days before they can actually get those contracts. So sorry, I'll let you keep going with what the process looks like.

Eric Steele: Exactly right. Yeah, no, you're that's a great example that I actually haven't heard that one before but that that's a perfect illustration of what clients are facing. So we will. Exactly.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, and then they just give up, quite frankly, unfortunately, without something like you guys. So the fact that this letter of authorization ends up allowing you guys to negotiate on their behalf.

Eric Steele: Yep, we get this letter of authorization. It gives us the ability to legally on their behalf as a steward of their business go and get those contracts and interact directly with the vendor. And it turns out that's enormously valuable for the client. That ends up being a target.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ⁓ yeah, because you just took so much of the work off of them.

Eric Steele: Exactly. Takes the work off of them. gives them kind of a relief of, wow, someone's going to go help us with this. So will do that. We'll ingest the data. In the absence of that data, we will go on behalf of the client to talk to the vendors to get the data. We then begin to build the brain. And so every client has what we call a microsite and ⁓ theirs. literally their brain. They name it. We begin ingesting the data into that site. That becomes their spin brain. We begin to process the invoices as they come in. We will do ⁓ what's called a golden question workshop where as we're building the ontology, we want to understand from the client, what are the ⁓ most questions that you want to ask of your spend? And for company, it's different. One of our clients really wanted to understand from purchasing of materials to a salesperson quoting a price to a proposal to a sold and invoiced deal, what were the anomalies through that chain of events? And so we built an ontology around that. For other clients, they want to just know, hey, within a 5 % margin of error across all of these vendors, we want to understand when prices change. or, know, maybe it's specific to a linens and laundry vendor where they want to know, they want to make sure there's anomalies when, for example, speaking of shenanigans, there are particular vendors that have, company policies where, when, ⁓ a delivers product to store, if they deliver additional product that wasn't purchased, that product nonetheless will be billed.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, it just shows up on the invoice whether they asked for it or not, or they're just walking through the back door and saying, hey, it looks like you guys are out of aspirin. They'll throw aspirin in the little deal and now it's a $50 bottle of aspirin where you could have gone down to CVS two doors down and it's, you know, eight bucks.

Eric Steele: Shut up, dude. Exactly right. And so an example of one of those golden questions could be, know, show me any time a product that was not on the original invoice is built. Right. And so we, we construct these golden questions and prioritize, you know, the vendors and the relationships we want to start with. Then we begin processing the invoices, anomalies are detected, and it's kind of a pane of glass where the client is on one side monitoring this and our experts are also on the other side monitoring. And we have a conversation, say, hey, we've noticed this vendor has erratly billed you two months in a row. Would you like us to go recover those funds? would you like us to recover those funds and negotiate and re-percure a better deal that is structured more in alignment with your business? So ⁓ a living ⁓ and there's a scoreboard and that scoreboard for us is savings. literally on the client site. They see how much money we are saving them every day, every week, every month, every quarter. That's our North Star. And right there. you know, from my experience, restaurant ownership and owners care about same store sales. They care about net operating income. They care about EBITDA. And they care about those things because when they can stick the landing on those numbers, it means they can invest in the guest experience. They can hire more people, they can build additional stores. So those things become, along with the savings, the North Star for our relationship and we track it maniacally.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: love that you guys have a customized deal. finished Will Goddard's book, Unreasonable Hospitality earlier this year. the fact that, ⁓ know, certain things you've got to measure down to the penny and then other things you want ⁓ spend extravagantly on. ⁓ to your point, ⁓ are going to be certain ⁓ that are like, know, again, ⁓ couple of years ago, read the book, you know, Horace Schultz about, ⁓ you know, the and kind of how they do things. And it's just, ⁓ hey, know what? They're okay to spend extravagantly on certain things, but on other things you want to make sure that you're really tight and so the fact that you guys customize that to match the brand doesn't paint everything with the same broad brush I guess.

Eric Steele: Exactly right. It matters the kind of tomatoes ⁓ have in your store because I've heard Danny Meyer talk about this, his ⁓ tomatoes that she grew in the garden and that that was like where he began to really love food and that it brought people together. And he uses the tomatoes as almost an analogy for like working with a team and it matters. That matters. who your linens and laundry vendor is or your waste hauler may not matter as much. May not matter as much. Or your...

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: long as the service is good and it's performing the duties and it meets the spec you're in a good spot right?

Eric Steele: Right. Right. And I think we all agree that regardless of who that vendor is, we expect to be billed accurately. We would expect that the contract be honored. And even if it's our brother-in-law's hauler firm or a family connection with a linens and laundry vendor, we would all still expect that we are not leaving a tip and that we are just paying for what we originally bought.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, for sure.

Eric Steele: And that's where even just turning on SpinBrain is saving clients 3 % of anything that's loaded into it without us negotiating or touching anything just by detecting those errors.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: and making somebody aware so that they can go back and fix them. Well, I'd love one last piece before we jump into kind of what is it, you know, how do they get in touch, Eric? You mentioned earlier in our conversation the fact that you guys will also benchmark and I think that's really really powerful benchmarking against other brands Obviously and i'm i'm gonna pick a brand that's nationally recognized is gonna have more buying power than the brand that has four chicken restaurants that are selling fried chicken ⁓ their their deal So i'm you know, I can only assume chick-fil-a is gonna get better chicken pricing ⁓ their chicken purveyor than the guy that owns four stores and at the same time ⁓ linens maybe aren't the same. I guess I'd love to understand how do you guys manage that because like for like, know, KFC and Chick-fil-A, they don't want anybody to know what they're doing, but at the same time, they want to know that they're not getting screwed, you know, ⁓ pricing wise. And so I'd love to have you share a little bit about how you guys do the benchmarking across the different brands, regionally and nationally, I guess.

Eric Steele: Yeah. I first want to say, and this is almost a spiritual quest for the company. We, care about this deeply. We believe that for the past 30 years, big tech companies have learned from everyone's data and, and especially small midsize companies that are loading things into two different tools. They are, those tech companies are learning from, and in some cases just aping the data of that company. We do not allow, and all of our clients get a, when they become a spin brain contract, they see this, the first five pages articulate that ⁓ including us, can learn from their data. So that's core to what we're doing. No one can. The the it's not a public LLM. There's nothing that's shared. It is the client's brain. It's private We can't even learn from it. What we do learn from is on the vendor side The past 35 years that we've been able to negotiate and collect data in those vendor negotiations, we do know what prices look like for large franchise operators for ⁓ small regional ones. We know the nuances of geography. We know the nuances of, you know, mix of vendor. And so all aggregated and collected and has been for the past 35 years. But I did want to call out that it's, you know, it's not that we can pull up and say a Chick-fil-A would look like this. We actually wouldn't know, but we do know what those vendors might be charging a large, you know, 4,000 store footprint in these regions. And I think our clients appreciate that because it's, we talk a lot internally about this is the moment that companies should decide only they can learn from their data. And we really believe that. so the spin brain clients that are out there are learning a lot from their data and no one else can.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: make sense.

Eric Steele: and it's pretty cool to watch.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, I want I love that you guys have just layered on what you guys been doing for 35 years with teams of analysts and you still have them and you still have the people that are helping and you know, it's it's human aided technology that's that's doing this and so Eric I guess what can people expect like it, know, you talked about kind of what onboarding looks like You know you guys try and make it as low lift as possible I guess how do you guys make money? How do they engage with you guys to get started because it it almost seems like a no-brainer It's like why would you not? at least engage with your team to figure out how much money you can save and it will pay for itself. Whatever they're paying you, ⁓ going to make a small percentage of what you're saving that restaurant plan, I can guarantee it.

Eric Steele: Yeah, yeah, that's right. The question you asked, why would they not? It's one that we ask all the time. I like to think that not everyone knows about us yet and that that's... Yeah.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I had never heard, I mean, been in the restaurant space for 30 years and I've heard of the PEO, or not PEOs, but the people that are looking to, you that are doing group food buying and things like that, you know, but I've never heard of somebody that their entire job is to go look at everything that's going on until you guys came, you know, to be on the show. So I'm excited about it.

Eric Steele: Exactly. exactly. So I think honestly, a big part of it is awareness. I just think a lot of companies don't know that this exists and that there is a tool that they can use a weapon to fight back against the spend more world ⁓ that you can make reducing costs as easy as spending money that this exists. That's one. The second reason that I think maybe aren't doing it is, you know, Sometimes there can be the perception that, this is my job. If brought these guys in, isn't that ⁓ my ⁓ And it back to everything we were talking about earlier. It's impossible to do that job. Even with army of contract managers, how could you at

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah. Uh-huh.

Eric Steele: contract to invoice every time it's processed, map all of those GL codes, all the nuances, all the shenanigans, do it across every vendor relationship while having the expertise across all categories to know whether you've got the right deal and if not, how you can get a better deal. That's an impossible ask and.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. Yeah, unless you're completely vertically integrated, you have the entire supply chain yourself. That's the only way it's possible because you know, but even then, depending upon your incentive program, the people that are supplying your beef might raise your prices so that they can hit bonus this quarter and you might not even know it.

Eric Steele: Exactly right. And so we, we stand alongside our clients. We are their tool, their weapon, their consigniary. main job is to get them promoted, make them successful, save the company money, help them achieve that North Star so that they can invest in technology, hire more people, build new stores. And when we frame ⁓ relationship like that, I think we can really handle that objection. ⁓ but that tends to be it. And so I, you know, I think, you asked earlier about how, does this work? How, how do we get paid? ⁓ know, there, there's kind of three principle deal shapes with clients and we're flexible. We're, we're malleable in how we work with companies. Cause everyone's ⁓ a different level with different needs. many of our clients want us to just come in, build them a spend brain. And there's a fee associated with that. That fee is totally self-funded. based on the savings that it will achieve. typically within six months to less than a year. So there's that path. Other clients want us to build their spend brain and then get hands-on and actually negotiate and optimize like all of their contracts with vendors. In that case, there's that annual fee for spend brain and then a ⁓ saving share when we help renegotiate.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Absolutely.

Eric Steele: and optimize a contract and save the client millions of dollars. We take a small percentage of that as as an incentive for our deal teams to go and get a great deal. Then there's a third element, which is clients that want us to build their brain, re-procure and optimize contracts. And they want us to manage vendors and pay their bills. So turns out paying bills specifically to like utilities companies is something that nobody enjoys doing and is very difficult. And there's a myriad of ⁓ issues challenges associated with that. And so have many clients that say, hey, do ⁓ just this us. And we'll do that ⁓ oftentimes for a fee for the whole program. So different ways to work, all of it is self-funded based on the savings. In that regard, ⁓ we it as risk-free. We view it as totally performance-based and ⁓ to have clients that have been with us for ⁓ 20 plus years and a high ⁓ retention that ⁓ we our own baseline so we can't coast. So company that's been with us for 20 years, it means that we've saved them money every year, constantly. We're always.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, you have to just keep earning your keep every year, because if you don't, they'll up and leave. So Eric, how do they get in touch with you? How do they get in touch with the company? know, again, I'm sitting out here and I'm like, you know what? I need this in my life. I didn't even know this existed. How do I get more of this now? ⁓ Where do they connect with you? Where do they connect with the team?

Eric Steele: Right. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. You bet. We're at aboutSIB.com ⁓ ⁓ S-I-B like spendintelligencebrain.com. LinkedIn out there ⁓ on ⁓ ⁓ You'll be with a Meta ad after you've listened to this. You know, if our targeting works. We're at restaurant events. are hopefully ⁓ everywhere. you're in an In the couple months after this comes out, I hope that you'll see a spend brain ad in the airport and a banner. But I think you'll see more about us in 2026 as we start to really gain critical mass. We're surprised at the size of the companies coming to us. Couple Fortune 30, Fortune 20 clients that want us to build a spend brain for them. And we suspect more companies are going to be wanting to do something like this, kind of the ontology based. spend intelligence is going to be a critical step for CFOs, for heads of procurement, certainly for restaurant operators and franchise operators in 2026.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, I, now that I, you it's like anything else. Once you've seen it, now you can't unsee it. And now it's like, why do more people not have what Eric and the team are doing? So, well, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing kind of what you guys have been doing. I'm grateful to have you. To our listeners guys, like I said at the onset, I know you guys got lots of choices. So thanks for hanging out this week. If you haven't already done so, please go subscribe to the show and make it a great day.

Eric Steele: Okay.