Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Spencer.

Good afternoon. Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances. Today, we have a legend in this industry, Jeff Riley, CEO of Retail Management Hero, also known as RMH, and the incoming chairman of the RSPA, Retail Solutions Provider Association. Hi, Jeff. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate being asked.

It's great to have people of your mind in this industry. I mean, I always look forward to hearing your speeches, and I think it's an opportunity for people to learn so much based on your experience, and that's why you're here. Tell me a little bit about your journey in both instances of being CEO and incoming chairman.

OK, well, you know, I've been part of the retail and hospitality technology industry for 20 plus years, 22, 23 years. And I got involved when I was at Microsoft. I was at Microsoft for eight and a half years. The last couple of years there, I had the opportunity to head up Microsoft's RMS product, which is the retail management system. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed being a part of a technology offering that's geared intentionally to the small and medium business marketplace of retailers and restaurants. I've been associated with a couple of three different companies since then, including Microsoft, then Dinerware, which is a restaurant software developer that was acquired by Heartland in 2015. And Then I joined Retail Management Hero, where I've been CEO since May of 2018, about two or three years after the first version of RMH's products went to market. The journey has been a colorful one. I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot. I've partnered with literally hundreds of employees and external business partners to serve thousands of customers. And it's been a really rich journey. And I've grown and learned through that process through my affiliation with a solution providers association. Where I am incoming chair right now so I guess if you stick around long enough and you surround yourself with some of the right people. Great things happen over time with a little bit of commitment and diligence. I could tell stories until the cows come home. The reality of it, the lessons I've learned is that I still learn on a daily basis and that while technology changes, people don't really change a whole lot. That the technology is here to serve us as people and when we have that mindset, and that we're here as people delivering technology solutions to business owners who have mission critical needs for automation and efficiencies, that good things can come out of those partnerships.

Oh, fantastic. And I think the great thing that you touched on is that you're a thought leader. And I think that That in itself has, you know, bring some level of inspiration to the people around you. And I think with the RSPA and you being incoming chairman and just being that inspired really showed that This is something that everybody should be a part of. And I think that us as leaders about different regimes, it really puts a perspective of what we can learn from each other. And you don't really see that from most conferences you go to. And I think it's a great thing for you to be chairman of that cause, right?

Thanks, Kevin. I do. I think RSPA has a unique culture and as an organization that's been through a number of pivotal changes in its 75 year history, that still at the core of it, there is an assembly of independent minds, independent business owners, freelancers, professionals who take a lot of pride in the work they do as team players that are part of this community. If you go to an RSPA show and you go to a different type of a technology trade show or conference, you'll taste and feel that difference. It's very palpable in the interactions of the people that are at the event. And so I'm honored to be a part of RSPA and happy to be serving.

And tell us about, you know, I'd like to know how they both connect to each other, RMH and RSPA. Tell me how that connection has made you stronger as an organizer, stronger as a leader.

Well, I think first and foremost is that RMH is an independent software developer and as an independent company that doesn't have an unlimited war chest of resources, we're not publicly traded, that we're growing through the partnerships and the opportunities that we see in front of us. And we're really trying to build this business based upon customer success. When customers and partners tell us that the product works for them, that validates the direction we're going in. And I think that the RSPA has specialized, I mean, the RSPA's formation was basically an assembly of independent business people that had common interests that were oppressed by one of the large vendors in the industry. There was actually a lawsuit that was taken up against NCR a long, long time ago. They're a different company now, but This is where the RSPA came from in its early days as the SDA, the Assistant Dealers Association, which then later turned into the ICRDA, which then turned into RSPA. But that RSPA at its core from its very beginning stood up for the independent business owner. That recognizing that independent business owners that form together with common interests can create and achieve greater results than any one of them can on their own. And we see that happen day in and day out with RSPA events and with a community that's been established.

Sorry. No, that's great. I mean, the thing about it is that You know, driving on that connection and how you explain it is really what inspires me and other business leaders who are in that group when we talk about RSPA, right? And that drive that RSPA has from your organization perspective is where your partners expect you to be the one that gets us where we need to go by introducing us to different business leaders, different vendors, bringing the whole experience of this retail and hospitality industry to a much more magnificent entity in itself because retail is so huge. Hospitality is so huge. Retail is the one that survived more or less in the pandemic. Hospitality took a hit. But, you know, this is such an amazing industry that we get to work in and we get to experience and that takes us beyond as we need to go further, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I think if you look at what's happening and what's happened in our industry, there's been a pattern of venture capital that's flown into our industry based on the opportunity, the sheer size of the economic opportunity of what restaurants represent in our gross domestic product and internationally in the economy as well. Although RSPA is more of a regional organization, it's not a global organization today. But I can get back to that if that's interesting, because they are growing regionally. Or retail, for that matter. The combination of retail and hospitality and grocery, the markets that these technologies serve, add up to greater than 20% of the world economic production value. And there's so many jobs, there's so many economic benefits associated with what technology can do for these industries, that that venture capital comes in and says, we want an opportunity to own a piece of the solution of that value. And, you know, there are just as many entrepreneurs and independent business people that see these opportunities that either have worked in a retail store or a restaurant when they were younger, that have learned technology and that have started a company out of their garage that say, hey, I'm excited about my knowledge about this industry, what I can bring to it, I'm going to develop software to support it. And that's why over the years, technology has always changed. But the reality is there have always been a lot of technology startups in these industries. There's also always been a lot of venture capital going into these industries. What has been more challenging about seeing the market develop is that when large companies with a lot of resources get involved, they have this belief or this thesis in this much money going in should equate to this much market opportunity. And we can put marketing dollars in to acquire customers. And we understand the math associated with the average cost of acquisition for a customer. We understand the life cycle that we can expect to hold these customer relationships for. And these business models evolve based upon all of the spreadsheets and the ideas of these venture capitalists. But the reality of the situation is it's a lot harder to win small businesses over and independent businesses over. The cost of acquisition is a misnomer in our industry. It's very hard to find an organization that understands their cost of customer acquisition. So the venture capitalists have had a harder time learning about how to be successful in growing their businesses than in a lot of cases, than the entrepreneurs who have started these businesses in their garage. And so you see a lot of still, there's a highly fragmented marketplace of technology vendors out there, ranging from enterprise players down to SMB and entrepreneurial startup players. And that's what makes it kind of rich is that there's if you go to one of these trade shows every year, you'll see 20 new vendors or 10 new vendors in the technology pavilion. Next year, they're not there or some percentage of them are not there. There's always some turnover with new technology and new ideas. Not every one of these ideas makes it just like any other business or industry. But it's a little bit more specific in our industry's case of what we see happening year in and year out. Certainly companies like Toast in the hospitality space have made a bigger dent, a bigger impact than a lot of the predecessors that have gotten a lot of venture capital. And that's a credit to them for understanding what it takes to be a good software product, to deliver on the promise of what they're promoting from a customer experience perspective, and then to refine that and get better and better at it over time. You haven't seen quite as much impact from a single player in the retail sector. partly because retail is a broader and more diverse audience than a lot of restaurants. In restaurants, you can categorize things in large groupings of different style of operators, from fast casual, to fast food, to fine dining, to sports bar. There's a few categories, whereas in retail, the categories are far more diverse and spread out, and the operational requirements of retailers vary quite differently in more ways than they do for restaurant operations. And so it's harder to consolidate the market. And so you have even greater fragmentation in some senses in the retail sector than you do in restaurants. But yeah, all of this is just observations from somebody who's been in the industry for 20 plus years that is just trying to find my way towards gathering more and more success with customers and partners.

No, it's important and it drives me to my next question. You talk about the relationship, the technology itself, but tell me how you as the software developer work with your partners and how that transcends into the end users of RMH.

You know, it's an iterative process, Kevin. We continue to learn on how to be more effective working with our partners every year. And I'm not ashamed to admit it because the reality is when you get to the next step of performance for your partners, the expectations change and you want to take the next step. So we want to get better and better at this over time. But one example is I think when we started RMH, specifically in our company's case, we had a very clear view as to what our opportunity was. And it had to do with replacing Microsoft RMS. And that was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because it made it really clear to our team what our goals would be, which is to create a product that basically met the feature capabilities of RMS in a way that was very continuous for our customers and our partners to move from one to the next. However, the curse associated with that was RMS was already a 20, 30 year old product, and we can't really copy it that closely because then we'll just be tying ourselves, painting ourselves into the corner of an older idea of what the product should be than what the market is telling us it should be today. So, you know, that started out on a theory of our product then should be multi-segment in retail. It shouldn't be specifically focusing on any one segment over others, but that we should recognize as an international product that we have different regional requirements for localization, compliance and all of the things that beget an international product with its currency and language capabilities. At the same time, that's a tall order, a multisign product that's international as a startup. So we knew we had to be careful about managing scope and getting to market quickly so that we could actually get the process started for revenue to start to flow so that we could iterate on the products. Starting with that point of view, saying we're a multi-segment product, we now have the opportunity to look at the grocery segment specifically, and we'll be doing this in the next few weeks with the NGA show coming up in Las Vegas, where we gather some of our top partners who focus on grocery, and we kind of have a powwow, we're calling it an executive summit, to make sure that our thinking and our understanding of what grocers need that's different from a a pet store or a liquor store or a hobby shop, that we really truly understand that. I don't know that it's our aspiration to be the point of sale provider, the technology provider to the top 10 grocers in the world in the next 10 or even 20 years. I don't know that that's where we're setting our sights. But what I can say is that When we have some validation that our partners have had some success with their grocery customers using our product, we want to now get closer to the customer and understand what the pain points were from a partner's point of view in bringing our MH in to support those customer requirements so that we can refine our product and make it even better at succeeding in that segment for our other partners.

And that's significant and epic that you are creating that forum because I think It's refreshing that somebody is willing to listen and take things constructive and push forward in where it's a combined thought process from end user to partner to software developer. You don't see that every day because sometimes the software developer thing, we do it this way because we want to do it this way. And they're not the ones that go into the store and talk to the business owner and you know, the challenges, the things that they want to get done, you know, what they need, you know, the people who listen to them. And I think that's refreshing from all ends of perspective, Jeff. And you talk about NGA. NGA is huge in terms of the independent grocers, and that's what it's for. It's for those guys who really are looking for that advice and that direction in terms of where they want to be successful and compete with the major guys, correct? Because they have to compete. They have to be able to survive the big guys. How do you see that from, not just from an RMAs perspective, but from you being incoming chairman of RSBA, how do you see that transcending and getting the word out to the people that you interact with?

Well, I think with any technology industry, there's this concept of competition where if you are afraid to share ideas and to listen to others with open ears about their ideas because you're fearful. that they're gonna take a secret from you and do something to hurt you or that you'll be able to take information one way without sharing anything in return. That's just old way of thinking. That's old school in technology and the largest tech companies that have been through these rivalries that are vicious. And I was a part of them when I was at Microsoft. That there was a maturity and a wisdom that started to penetrate the industry probably around the 90s, more so in the 2000s, where, you know, the government gets involved if you start to play too viciously and you aren't civil, if you aren't professional about your partnerships and how you conduct business, that we're really, that the efforts of, through collaboration, you don't have to share everything. There's certainly some secret sauce that does exist. But that by having the spirit of somebody who is sharing openly, and certain facets of what you can bring to the table, that begets good faith. And that good faith is returned. And that if you share that in that belief system, and you surround yourself with enough people who are like-minded, you'll be able to replicate the culture that RSPA has been able to develop through 75 years of doing this as an organization. So RSPA for me has been a place where as I became more of a seasoned veteran in our industry, rather than an up-and-comer or a newbie, that I can now portray and share my experience and leadership with others who haven't had the benefit of having a 22-year career in this industry. And I think that the cycle continues to renew itself. When I started in this industry and I went to my first RSPA shows, I was the young man in my career that was eager to learn more and eager to pick up all these ideas and eager to make a dent and an impact in our industry and the world in my small way. And now I find that it would be easy enough for me to rest on my laurels and just do my day job. But the reality is I'm called to serve. I'm called to give back and see what I can do to help support the next cast of generations that are coming in to our industry behind us.

Fantastic. What would you put on the wall as your greatest achievement or achievements as an individual, as a business businessman?

I think they still, I wouldn't yet put my RMH role into that because I think we're still trying to get our legs under us and climb this mountain that we see as an opportunity in front of us. But I think that, you know, I'd rather say that the things that I've done that have created some of the greatest contributions and that I feel proudest of, that I'm trying to leverage those and apply them to this new situation I'm in with this new team, this new community of partners. But, you know, I think that when you look at what we did with Dynaware in my last, my last go around is my last gig, so to speak, we went from, I think there were five or 600 customers using Dynaware, almost all of them in the Seattle area, because we sold our own product directly. And we built a channel of distribution up with value added resellers. And we created some private label distribution through a couple of big OEM partners. And we ended up with over 30,000 restaurants using that product in less than 10 years since I joined the company. And so I feel very proud of leading the team that enabled that to happen. I don't take credit for that growth 100%. Certainly my presence contributed to that. But I think that the growth story of Dinerware was an exciting one and one that I hang my hat on as something I can be proud of.

Fantastic. We want to share some of your hobbies so we know who's Jeff.

I live in the Cascade Mountains in central Washington, a little town called Leavenworth, Washington. So I love the outdoors. I love boating. I love hiking. I love snowshoeing in the wintertime. It's a four year town or four season a year town here. We've got rivers we float in in the summertime. And I love going on walks with my dogs year round. So, yeah, I love the outdoors. Nature calls to me.

Oh, fantastic. And I see you have... I'm also a drummer.

I play drums. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. We saw you beat the drums. I've played drums since I was a little boy. So those are those are two hobbies I'd share with you.

You have a band still?

I play in a couple of different bands here and there. I'm not committed to one. So I'm I'm a fill-in drummer. Which works for me. It's hard to it's hard to commit to one band.

It's hard to commit, right? Yeah. And I see behind you, you have that wall of your family. I can't stop looking at that green grass and people being happy in that picture.

Yeah. Well, I got the wrong. See, the mirror is the camera's backwards. That's my family. We've got six kids between the two of us. Oh, nice. They're all grown. The youngest is now 22.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's awesome. And I'm glad that, you know, you know, not much people showcase, you know, how important family is to keep you going. Right. And that's right. And I'm guessing that your family has been behind you as that rock in terms of your success. Correct.

They have. I've had a couple of kids work work as part of the company at different times of their um, college careers and, uh, none of them are working for us right now at the moment, but, uh, it's been fun to have them involved in the business and see what dad does for a living and, and be able to explain it to other people. I don't know that I could have done that very successfully with my, my dad's job, but, um, it is, it's fun. Family is amazing. And we have, uh, kids, um, literally, uh, all over the country and even internationally, my youngest is in Australia, but, uh, The rest of them, we only have one or two that are what I would consider local and the rest have gone to the East Coast or somewhere else.

Nice. Yeah. So just to wrap up, I mean, it's been great, but getting back to NGA, you're going to have your executive summit. You're going to be showcasing RMH as a great solution partner and users to experience what you have to offer. What are your expectations out of this show, this NGO?

It's funny because if you look at how I look at marketing, I don't really look at live events or trade shows or conferences as tremendously obvious ROIs from a marketing perspective. There is some element of faith that by going, you're going to pick up on either new connections or relationships, new ideas, exposure of your brands that have sort of softer benefits to the business that can then be parlayed into something else. So that the show itself is not an ends to a means to an end. but rather one of the many tools and steps along the way that you grow and learn. So that's one of the expectations. But with the NGA in particular, it's the first time we'll be going as RMH. It's really an exciting opportunity to start a new dialogue at a more intense and focused level with some of our top partners in grocery that can actually, quite frankly, educate us. We have a lot to learn. And it's one thing to approach a new segment that you haven't focused on, but you've incidentally had some success in by virtue of the fact that you have a product that does a lot of the things that that industry needs, but that if you tune into it and you double click on it, you zoom in, that you can really understand it at a deeper level to say, is this a path we want to invest in further? And if so, let's be really precise about how much insight we have to make the right decisions to have an informed strategy. And that just makes us all feel better, not just RMH, but our partners who are investing their time and energy exploring with us and sharing their ideas so that they know what to count on us in the future. Is RMH going to do this? Is this an investment they're going to make? How so? Where are they going to invest? Because we have a very open product, Partners can complement and fill in gaps for the product by bringing in other third party systems or solutions or developing their own on top of or around our existing platform. And so by sharing our roadmap and our vision, it telegraphs to our partners more effectively what investments in energy they should be making to supplement our strategy on their own.

Great, I mean this has been very inspiring and I think a man of your energy and being there in two weeks and experiencing what lies ahead, it's fundamentally exciting for anybody who is coming to that show to experience and I think We have the right guy, Jeff Riley, who has that experience, who has that vision to push it along. Thank you so much, Jeff. My pleasure, Kevin. Thank you. I know your social handles are out there in terms of LinkedIn and anywhere people can reach the social handles of RMH. Any other?

Thanks very much for having me. It's been a blast. Thank you. Great.

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