The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ketan Thakker, Chief Executive Officer at RDE, Inc. and Restaurant.com

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Ketan Thakker, Chief Executive Officer at RDE, Inc. and Restaurant.com Restaurant.com Show Notes About The Guest(s): Ketan Thakker is an accomplished executive with a track record of infusing innovation into established industries. He has a specialization in online marketplaces and has founded companies such as TripRental.com and served as CFO for Apartments.com. Currently, he is the CEO at RDE Incorporated and Restaurant.com. Summary: Ketan Thakker, CEO of Restaurant.com, joins Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss the company's mission and how it helps independent restaurants thrive. Restaurant.com is a digital tech and marketing company that focuses on independent specialty cuisines. They work with over 10,000 restaurants nationwide, offering marketing programs and incentives to drive customers to these establishments. Keaton also talks about the recent acquisition of CardCash.com, a secondary gift card market, and how it complements their existing business. Despite the challenges faced during the pandemic, Restaurant.com has managed to keep the lights on and is now thriving as people return to dining out. Key Takeaways: Restaurant.com focuses on independent restaurants, offering marketing programs and incentives to drive customers to these establishments. They have over 10,000 restaurants nationwide participating in their program, catering to a variety of cuisines. Restaurant.com also serves as an incentive company for businesses, allowing them to use gift cards to incentivize employees or customers. The recent acquisition of CardCash.com allows customers to buy and sell gift cards at a discount, providing additional savings opportunities. Despite the challenges faced during the pandemic, Restaurant.com has managed to keep the lights on and is now thriving as people return to dining out. Quotes: "We focus on the independent specialty cuisines that are one-offs, but they need distribution, visibility, and everything." - Ketan Thakker "We're a B2C consumer, and then we're an incentive company to the businesses as well." - Ketan Thakker "We're in the process of acquiring another company called CardCash.com, a secondary market for gift cards." - Ketan Thakker

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, folks. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. As always, we come to you once again.

Three to four episodes a day, a weekday, I should say, because we take weekends off. Help people. There's only so much time you can have with me. And 15 to 20 shows a day. For 15 years, we've been bringing you the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, governors, Congress members, U.S. ambassadors, astronauts, TV and print polls, surprise winners, journalists, all of the smartest minds in the world to give you this encapsulated podcast, this one little half an hour to hour where you can learn so much. And when you leave, you get what we call the Chris Foss Show glow.

You walk around and go, my God, you're so smart. And you must listen to the Chris Foss Show is. You walk around and go, my God, you're so smart. And you must listen to the Chris Voss Show is what they'll tell you. And thereby, we also always have the most smartest guests. Be sure to, as always, refer the show to your friends, families, relatives, dogs, cats, get everybody involved

in it. Go door knocking in your neighborhood and say, you know what you should do? You should subscribe to the Chris Voss Show podcast. Tell them to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrissvoss. On LinkedIn, subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter,

the 130,000 group over there. And on Facebook, chrissvossfacebook.com. We have an amazing gentleman on the show today. We're going to be featuring Keaton Thacker. Did I get that right that's correct there we go i want to make sure we did that we throw so much energy in the show the brain goes woohoo uh ketan is an accomplished executive with a track record of infusing innovation into established industries he has a specialization in online marketplaces

he founded triprental.com served as a cfo for apartments.com and then ceo at TripRental.com, served as a CFO for Apartments.com, and then CEO at YouBid.com. He is the CEO at RDE Incorporated and Restaurant.com. Now I'm hungry. Welcome to the show, sir. How are you? Good. How are you? Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. So we've got your dot-coms out of the way. Are there any other dot-coms you want people to look you up on the interwebs? Sure. Yeah.

Well, I bought a restaurant dot-com back in 2020 just before the pandemic hit and everything. And now we're in the process of acquiring another dot-com called CardCash.com. Oh, really? Based out of New Jersey. Yes. They are a secondary gift card market similar to StubHub where you can exchange your tickets and everything. But Cardcash is a secondary market for gift cards. So, for example, if you have Home Depot card and you don't want to use it, but you want to use Target or you want to use Starbucks. You can go there and exchange it.

Oh, wow. Yeah. It's a very big, it's a big market, right? Everybody receives gift card, but not everybody uses the one they get. You can re-gift that gift card. Exactly. And our business, even at restaurant.com, which is a gift card business in essence, that caters to the independent restaurants. So when we got introduced to this, it just made natural sense to come together.

There you go. I've got the website, Restaurant.com, a flavor at your fingertips. Give us an overview of how this works and what it's about. Absolutely. So Restaurant.com, it is described in multiple ways. We are a digital tech and a marketing company, and we cater to independent restaurants. We don't focus on the big chains or the fast food

because they're already a big corporation. They get a lot of support and everything. So we focus on the independent specialty cuisines that are one-offs but they need uh distribution visibility and everything that's what we focus on so we have two components of the business so we reach out to independent restaurants we work with them almost like a consultant where their pain points are and everything. And we'll sit down and we'll set up a marketing program for them. And our name, it's the most organic name you can get for our industry. Right.

You can't get any better than restaurant for restaurant. Who can forget that? Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So we work with these restaurants. We have today approximately about 10,000 restaurants on our program that

participate nationwide. So we work with them. We ask them what their pain points are. We set up the program. And then we have about 6.2 million consumers registered on our site who are always looking for restaurants, looking for deals, looking for, you know, what am I in mood for today, tomorrow? Am I going out to lunch? Am I going out to dinner? So they'll come to our site looking for restaurants across the country, wherever you are. And then they either they'll go on their own or we offer certain incentives to send consumers to the restaurant, which we do.

So that's our B2C side of the business. And because we have a large number of restaurants on our program, businesses, small to large, use us as an incentive to incentivize their employees or get desired behavior from their customers. So, for example, in terms of businesses, I have a call center or I have a sales group. They reach their quota for the month. Here's a $50 restaurant.com card that they can use it to any of our participating restaurants or businesses that wants to get some desired behavior from their customers, they'll say sign up for auto pay or come test drive a car like a dealer and get a $50 restaurant card that they can use it to any of our restaurants that are participating.

So we're a B2C consumer, and then we're an incentive company to the businesses as well. There you go. So I'm on the site now. I can put in popular options of maybe the type of food I want to eat. I can filter different radiuses, my zip code, different cities. And then it looks like there's like coupon codes in each of these where I can get a discounted, uh,

like I can buy a $5 for two. I can buy a $5 certificate, uh, for say an existing example, $2. Um, you know, you can,

you can get some deals here, eh? Absolutely. So we have different denominations. We have $10, 15, 25, 50,

a hundred, and you don't have to use it all at once. For what? Yeah. So different restaurants, based on their average ticket, they will give you a certain incentive. So like a pizza chain or pizza restaurant, if their average ticket is like $50, they'll give you $10 off. Wow. If their average ticket is like $50, they'll give you $10 off. But if you go to a white tablecloth steakhouse, average ticket you're going to spend $200 or $300, they'll give you $50 or whatever they want to give you. So it varies by the restaurants, locations, and everything.

There you go. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Here's a place that if I spend $10, I can get a $25 gift certificate. If I spend $7, I can get $15. And if I spend $5 for a certificate, I can get a $10 certificate. So that works for me a great deal. You save some money there. Absolutely.

And who doesn't like, regardless of good economy, bad economy, who doesn't want to save some money, right? We're all consumers. If I can get some savings, 5%, 7%, 10%, 20%, I'll take it. Yeah, and these aren't big chain restaurants. In fact, I'm always looking for kind of the offbeat restaurants, the restaurants that are that great discovery. Maybe it's from someone who's an actual – California is big. You can meet people who are immigrants that have come from other countries,

and they cook an actual version of their food. It's not some sort of weird American bastardized version of, of, you know, uh, my, you know, whatever.

Um, you know, you actually get the real taste of, of the, of the country that folks came from. Uh, and so I'm just getting hungry looking, uh,

there's an ice cream here too. Um, but this is really great. They can just go on here they can uh check out all the stuff you've got different advertisements uh there i see something about a dining discount pass what does that how does that work so so we have a partnership with a another company so uh they give us all their that's where you get all the fast food uh uh programs if you want to.

So what that is, is it's a monthly sort of like a subscription and you can go to McDonald's, you can go to Subway, you can go to Mrs. Fields Cookies, whatever restaurants you want and they have that you can use deals over there as well too. There you go. And this works with an app so you can have an iphone app or android app uh that you can use to uh download to your phone and i guess the coupon codes go on there you can search while you're out mobile going hey where do i want to eat stuff and all that good stuff yep you can do it real time you know if i'm uh i'm in chicago i'm walking you

know i'm in 60173 zip code i I can just open the app, put in. I don't even have to put in the zip code. The app will, if your location of the map service is on, it will automatically find restaurants near you within whatever the distance, a few miles, and you can use that. Wow, man. Yeah. This is pretty cool.

And I get to save some money, too. That's kind of what I like. I like good stuff. So tell us a little bit about your hero's journey. How did you grow up? How did you get down this road in doing M&A and running companies? Absolutely. Well, I grew up in Chicago, did my undergrad, graduate in Wisconsin and Northwestern.

And then I'm a finance guy. I had a CPA, did my undergrad, graduate in Wisconsin and Northwestern. And then I'm a finance guy. I had a CPA, did my MBA. And so in the first 10 years, I worked for the big Fortune 500 companies, got some good finance foundation underneath my belt. And then when the whole dot-com took off in 1999, 2000, always entrepreneurial at heart. So I got a chance to join Ubit.com during the really heydays of the dot-com world. You know, so crazy times. I'm sure we all remember that. And I joined, I enjoyed it.

You know, the whole internet world was up and coming dynamic. So I learned quite a bit. I was there for six years and I got a chance to see quite a bit of just the public world, the finance world. And then in 2006, I left the company. Then I became a CFO for another.com,

which is the apartments.com world. And that company was owned by the five largest media companies. So that company was called Classified Ventures. So if you think about it, before the internet world came along, in the Sunday papers, you see those auto rental and real estate sections. Yeah. In the Sunday papers.

Remember those. Exactly. So the newspapers got together and said, hey, we need an online strategy for auto rental and real estate. So they created Apartments.com, Cars.com, and real estate. So I was overseeing the apartments, the rental category and the real estate category. So I did that for another seven years. We grew the company from $20 million to $150 million. Wow.

Yeah. And then as the print circulation was struggling, the owners wanted to sell the company and cash up, which they did. So between Cars.com, Apartments, and everything, both companies were sold in total for $2.5 billion. Wow. To two different entities. Yeah. So then I left and through acquaintance, I ended up coming back at UBID. And fast forward, I was running UBID, became CEO.

And then by then, UBID was a, as the name said, it was an auction engine. But auction was very niche market, right? And UBIT was a, as the name said, it was an auction engine. But auction was very niche market, right? Amazon won the big e-commerce war, you know, and they changed everything. So I said, let's move forward. Let's get into how we can consolidate and grow UBIT. So as I got to grow, going forward, I got a chance to to i wanted to grow the company through acquisition i'm getting into real finance world now so yeah so you can grow through new product or you can grow through acquisition so i had you bid first i bought another e-commerce company and then in

middle of 2019 i got a chance to buy restaurant.com. The previous owner wanted to retire. And I like to buy companies that has good technology, good consumers, good product, good name that I can add to my current consumers or current technology, right? That's accretive to everything I'm doing. So

it was a long shot and my good fortunes, my good looks, I don't know, the owner liked, and he sold the company to me. And here's the most interesting part. I signed the deal to buy restaurant.com March 1st of 2020. You know what happens 10 days later? Oh, my God. Wow.

Exactly. Everything crashes for a restaurant. Exactly. But, you know, good leaders, that's when the good, true leaders are good business or anybody, whether it's business or sports or anything. That's when the good people or good characters or good leaders come out, right? So I managed through three years, kept the lights on, kept the employees on. And because of our business model, where the consumer side was completely dead because the dining rooms were closed. But because of our business side, B2B side, the businesses

continue to use our certificate to incentivize even down the road, business can use or consumers can use it. So they were using that incentive for their employees and for their customers. So we had the business, we lost some revenues, but we kept the lights on. There you go. Exactly. Fast forward, 2023, now we see as everything's open, now we're seeing the uptick on all the metric, people coming to the site, people going out. And as human beings, we're all we're social animals we knew we weren't going to be inside all the time right it drove us crazy we were we were like get us out of here exactly right exactly and at times in the delivery side of the business which was great during the pandemic but even then at some point i don't want to deliver i want to go sit at a restaurant

i want to eat i want to pay the bill wash my hands and be, I don't want to deliver. I want to go sit at a restaurant. I want to eat. I want to pay the bill, wash my hands, and be done. I don't want to bring it home. I don't want to clean. So when you think about it, I knew this is temporary. So we continued. Here we are, and we're thriving. And now I'm in the process of buying another company that's going to do great, which puts us on another growth, continued growth mode. There you go. You are the king of dot-coms. You were just hopping from one dot-com and making it work. You know, that must have been quite a thing to try and lead through.

You know, you make a purchase at restaurants.com. You hit the COVID. COVID, what sort of traits or leadership principles or skills did you tap into to try and keep everyone together during that time? Absolutely. As a leader, you have to be strong. We all have ups and downs. There's peaks and valleys in everything we do, right? You have to be strong. You have to continue to motivate your employees that this is temporary and continue to execute on it, no matter how small the issues are or the, you know, projects are. You just got to continue to execute.

And I believe I always like to use the baseball analogy. You got to keep hitting those singles and doubles. And once in a while you'll hit a home run, but you got to keep hitting those singles and doubles. And eventually you'll get where you need to be. You'll get those runs and you'll win. And that's what we kept on doing. Just execute on small things. We continue to, like we apply, you know, even though we're a.com, we're still in a restaurant industry. in the government after you know shutting down they launched a ppp program so i applied for that they had the eidl emergency disaster recovery loan i applied for this we got funds in the company to keep the lights on keep

the employees and we continue to develop our technology because you know eventually this wasn't this isn't permanent we knew yeah We knew that. So we took in. I also took advantage of pandemic helped me renegotiate all my supplier contracts and everything too. So you recognize those little things. And I said, hey, let's just, I redid everything. So the fruits of that labor is coming through now. There you go.

This is really cool because you had the vision and foresight to know that this, you know, hopefully wouldn't last forever. And it sounds like, you know, a lot of the resources you were doing for restaurants.com, you know, the biggest scary thing for small businesses, restaurants, server places, where they might go out of business. I mean, I remember a lot of them, they didn't even have an online presence, some of them, you know, some of the smaller places. And all of a sudden, it's like, you got to have an online presence so that people can look and order the food online.

And you got to have a delivery service lined up and everything else. And, you know, so sites like yours can help or probably helped companies survive. Exactly. And, you know, we have partnership with delivery companies and everything, but we're more in dining company. So what I mean by that is we, you know, with our program, our job is to put butts in the seat at restaurant.

And here's why we focus on the in dining, because when you do delivery, when you do takeout, it's a fixed amount the consumer is spending, right? I'm ordering two plates and that's all I'm going to get. When people are sitting at the restaurant, whether they're with family or friends or anything, because one, the average ticket usually goes up because you're sitting with people. I'm going to have this extra cocktail or I'm going to have this extra entree or I'm going to have this dessert. And especially when you have a deal or some type of incentive,

the average ticket goes up for the restaurant. That's why restaurants love working with us. And a lot of these restaurants have been with us for decades because the program works for them. That is awesome, Sos. I was just signing up here on the site with the app. I've got it downloaded to my phone.

All that good stuff looks like a conference. You can use it right on your phone there. Exactly. The other thing I want to add, going back to the acquisition strategy, I did in add, going back to the acquisition strategy, I did in 2019, what we did is we went on to a public market. We are a public company traded on OTC market, ticker symbol RSTN.

And so what I did is I did the merge with a public company and use stock as a currency to acquire more company. So, hence, that's why we're acquiring CardCatch, and we have other things in the pipeline as well, too. There you go. There you go. So, yeah, it looks like a really cool app. You can go in and do all the things.

You can work on your website or your computer if you want to, too. It's got some features on it. It shows me a map of the area, and I can see there's a local deal here that's want to too. It's got some features on it. It shows me a map of the area and I can see there's a local deal here that's close to me and all that good stuff. Yeah, pretty cool. You choose from

a deal, redeem credits. I can see my deals. I can have some cards, some active deals that I can know about and all that good stuff. Very cool. To all the listeners, also tell them, or I'd like to mention also, check out CardCash.com as well, too. CardCash.com.

Yep. It's a gift card exchange, or you can buy a gift card real time. If you're at Macy's or if you're at Target, whatever the retailers or restaurant chains you're at, you can buy the gift card at a discount. So even if you get 2%, 5%, 7% discount, why not? As the consumers we are and we spend money, whether it's, like I said, whether it's Target or Starbucks or Home Depot, you can save a few bucks. Why not? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, wow, this is great for, you know,

what's coming up with the holidays. You know, that's what a lot of people will do is give away. Now, when you buy or sell gift cards, I imagine the cards don't get sent to you in the mail. It's all like codes and stuff. Yes, we have both digital and physical. And both are platform, restaurant.com as well as CardCast. Typically, we stick nowadays with digital more than the physical because it's just everybody's got their iPhones

and everybody's got their Android or some device, right? So we want to make it easy for them we want to them to use it real time so we try to but there are those who wants physical and we'll give them physical card just love too there you go starbucks uh and is there an app for card cash.com yes there is absolutely cool so you just use the app you show them the code and all that good stuff. Jimmy John's up to 31% off. Starbucks up to 4.2% off. Dunkin' 4.1%. Subway 14.3%.

Domino's 15.8%. Olive Garden, don't go there. 7.4% off. No, I'm sure they're nice people. So it's very dynamic. It's, you look at, you know, it's technology. Here's Old Navy, 10% off, yeah. If you shop, and we all shop, regardless whether it's retailer or restaurant,

when you add up in a 12-month period, it does add up. It adds up, yeah, definitely, especially if you spend a lot, or you have a lot like I do. Here's the Cheesecake Factory, 7.4%. You can get stuff at Hotels.com. Here's an interesting thing. You can use that for travel. Yep.

Yeah. Dining and restaurant, I mean, dining and travel goes hand in hand. Oh, here's something for me, PetSmart. I'm always buying that dog food for the dogs and the dog treats. There's even one me, PetSmart. I'm always buying that dog food for the dogs and the dog treats. There's even one here for Uber as well. And there you go.

Yeah, pretty cool, man. All sorts of different things. NFL Shop, 24.5% off. There you go. It's gift card heaven up here. Yes. There's a lot of gift cards. Holy crap.

Exactly. And the gift card industry, you know, it's over $325 billion a year industry. Holy crap. Yeah. It's a huge industry. Similar to restaurants, right? When you're statistically speaking, there's over 1 point, probably about 1.1 million restaurants in this country alone. And about a third of them are fast food or they change.

Two-thirds of them are independent restaurants. And that's where we focus on. All right. You got me signed up over here now. So there's a 45-day guarantee on them. And there's over 520 brands found it said holy crap there's a lot of gift cards we're sizable company we do quite a bit there you go and you can buy a new gift card if you want or you can buy used gift cards uh you can uh i imagine you send the codes to people on

an email and they can use the app to utilize the code? Yep, exactly. You can sell your card on there too. There you go. You know, what I was saying earlier, you have a Home Depot, you don't want to use it, or you can't use it, you can sell it and then exchange it or buy another one for Starbucks. There you go.

Right? I can see here, yeah, one of the problems I always have is Grandma isn't quite there anymore. And she always gives me Victoria's secret gift cards. So I can see here that I can train him. Secret gift card for, uh, uh,

let's see, Texas roadhouse. There you go. So right. Or top golf. There's top golf on here. There's a lot of brands, whole eBay.

Wow. So this is extraordinary. And so what's your vision for the future? What you got, you want to build out? Do you want to keep looking at more mergers and acquisitions for core companies you're building out here? Yep.

That's correct. So we're in the process of finishing with card cash. We want to merge, you know, all our, right. So finishing with card cash, we want to merge all our – right? We do acquisitions because there's consumer or the customer efficiency, leveraging, cross-pollinating. And then there's always the operational efficiency that you want to leverage.

We're a dot-com, they're a dot-com. So there's marketing, technology, operation, efficiency that we want to leverage. So we're in the process of that. And then there's other ones similar in our space that we would love to, you know, if there's opportunity, we grow. Buy it and then grow. There you go. I need to make a gift card for the Chris Voss Show podcast. I don't know what we'd sell. People trade episodes.

Hey, I'll trade you episode 1527 for $14.95. I don't know. There you go. Well, so what sort of leadership principles do you use and market with, or who inspired you as a leader that you incorporate some of their work into how you do your leadership principles? There's no one or anyone. It just, I look at everybody, right. And you try to apply it to what I am doing. Right.

And I take a little bit from everywhere. There's no one place, right. Whether it's leadership skill, people skilled, and just really try to understand whether it's employees, customers, suppliers. It's, I do more listening than talking because I want to understand what their needs are more than anything, right?

Even the employees, even the suppliers, right? And then when you listen to them, then, and you figure out the working relationship with them. And also, of course,

I got my own interest here as well, too. It's not a charity or anything. So, yeah, I just try to really listen more than anything. To me, that's a big leadership skill. You got to listen more than talk. Well, you picked the right space because I'm back at restaurants eating all the time. I missed it so much. I missed being out.

I missed having lunch with people, sitting across from people face-to-face. I love eating out now. I kind of fallen away from it because I'm like, well, it's expensive and the food's pretty rich. I try to eat a little bit more healthy. But now, you know, it's like, fuck it. Let's go out and enjoy.

And there's so many great restaurants. And thank God, through the help of services like yours, they survived, you know, the horrible time that they went through with COVID. And now they come out the other side. So this is just awesome. Final thoughts and pitch out as we go out on the show. Everybody, just check out our website, both of them. Restaurant.com and CardCash.com. And we're also, as I

said, we're trading on public. Keep checking. We're adding new restaurants all the time. We're adding new retailers and everything on Card Cash. So it's a good chance you'll find something you're looking for. There you go. And if you have a favorite local restaurant, tell them to sign up. Sign up with the service so they can get some discounts on the side there.

Yes, absolutely. There you go. The smaller restaurants i love i love finding a hole in the wall uh off beat you know stuff that you won't find anywhere else uh you know it's a it's usually you know a guy who knows how to cook really well really loves the work that he's doing uh makes great food maybe it's something from a country he's originated from or or he's really good at making the right burgers um and those are the small places i love i i i mean the big places are fine if you like to be changed but i like to find stuff that you know

i i go adventuring i try new places and it's fun right trying different things and everything and i always say to anybody and everybody, right? The word restaurant, one is understood by everybody in the world, right? No matter what language you speak. And what's the one thing you're going to find in every small town, Timbuktu in the world? You're going to go, what's the one thing you're going to find? You're going to find a restaurant, right? And we love going out to eat.

And we got to eat multiple times a day, not just once, right? So keep checking. We're always going to have new restaurants. We're adding new restaurants every day in all the locations, as much as we can find. There you go. Well, thank you very much. We certainly appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. We couldn't do it without you. As always, go to Goodreads.com for just Christmas. voss linkedin.com for chest chris voss youtube.com for chest chris voss chris voss one of the tickety-tockety and uh chris voss facebook.com thanks to my audience for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time you wanted the best you've got the best podcast.

The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your

brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com there you go folks welcome to the Show, my family and friends. As always, we come to you once again. Three to four episodes a day, a weekday I should say, because we take weekends off. Help people. There's only so much time you can have with me. And 15 to 20 shows a day. For 15 years we've been bringing you the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House, presidential advisors, governors, congress members, U.S. ambassadors, astronauts,

TV and print polls surprise winners journalists all of the smartest minds in the world to give you this encapsulated podcast of this one little uh half an hour to hour where you can learn so much and when you leave you get what we call the chris fosh show glow You walk around and go, my God, you're so smart. And you must listen to the Chris Voss Show is what they'll tell you. And thereby, we also always have the most smartest guests. Be sure to, as always, refer the show to your friends, families, relatives, dogs, cats, get everybody involved in it.

Go door knocking in your neighborhood and say, you know what you should do? You should subscribe to the Chris Voss Show podcast. Tell them to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrissvoss. On LinkedIn, subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 group over there. And on Facebook, chrissvossfacebook.com. We have an amazing gentleman on the show today. We're going to be featuring. Keaton Thacker.

Did I get that right? That's correct. There we go. I want to make sure we did that. We throw so much energy in the beginning of the show, the brain goes, woo-hoo. Keaton is an accomplished executive with a track record of infusing innovation into established industries. He has a specialization in online marketplaces. He founded TripRental.com, served as a CFO for Apartments.com,

and then CEO at YouBid.com. He is the CEO at RDE Incorporated and Restaurant.com. Now I'm hungry. Welcome to the show, sir. How are you? Good. How are you? Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. So we've got your dot-coms out of the way. Are there any other dot-coms you want people to look you up on the interwebs sure yeah uh well we bought i bought restaurant.com back in 2020 just before the uh pandemic hit and everything and now we're in the process of acquiring another dot com called carbcash.com. Oh, really? Yes. They are a secondary gift card market similar to StubHub where you can exchange your tickets and everything.

But CardCash is a secondary market for gift cards. So, for example, if you have Home Depot card and you don't want to use it, but you want to use Target or you want to use Starbucks, you can go there and exchange it. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's a very big market, right?

Everybody receives gift card, but not everybody uses the one they get. You can re-gift that gift card. Exactly. Exactly. And our business, even at restaurant.com, which is a gift card business in essence, that caters to the independent restaurants. So when we got introduced to this, it just made natural sense to come together. There you go. I've got the website, restaurant.com, a flavor at your fingertips.

Give us an overview of how this works and what it's about. Absolutely. So restaurant.com, a, it's described in multiple ways. We are a digital tech and a marketing company and we cater to independent restaurants. We don't focus on the big chains or the fast food because they're already a big corporation. They get a lot of support and everything. So we focus on the independent specialty cuisines that are one-offs, but they need distribution,

visibility, and everything. That's what we focus on. So we have two components of the business. So we reach out to independent restaurants. We work with them almost like a consultant, where their pain points are and everything. And we'll sit down and we'll set up a marketing program for them.

And our name, it's the most organic name you can get for our industry. Right. You can't get any better than restaurant for restaurant. Who can forget that? Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

That's a great name. Yeah. So we have, we work with these restaurants. We have today approximately about 10,000 restaurants on our program that participate nationwide. So we work with them. We ask them what their pain points are. We set up the program. And then we have about 6.2 million consumers registered on our site who are always looking for restaurants, looking for deals, looking for, you know, what am I in mood for today, tomorrow? Am I going out to lunch? Am I

going out to dinner? So they'll come to our site looking for restaurants across the country, wherever you are. And then they either they'll go on their own or we offer certain incentives to send consumers to the restaurant, which we do. So that's our B2C side of the business. And because we have a large number of restaurants on our program, businesses, small to large, use us as an incentive to incentivize their employees or get desired behavior from their customers. So, for example, in terms of businesses, I have a call center or I have a sales group.

They reach their quota for the month. Here's a $50 restaurant.com card that they can use it to any of our participating restaurants. Or businesses that want to get some desired behavior from their customers. They'll say sign up for auto pay or, you know, come test drive a car like a dealer and get a $50 restaurant that will come card that they can use it to any of our restaurants that are participating. So we're a B2C consumer, and then we're an incentive company to the businesses as well. There you go.

So I'm on the site now. I can put in popular options of maybe the type of food I want to eat. I can filter different radiuses, my zip code, different cities. And then it looks like there's like coupon codes in each of these

where I can get a discounted, At different cities. And then it looks like there's like coupon codes in each of these. That's correct. Where I can get a discounted, like I can buy a $5 certificate for, say, in an existing example, $2. Sure. You can get some deals here, eh? Absolutely. So we have different denominations. We have $10, $15, $25, $50, $100, and you don't have to use it all at once. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So different restaurants, based on their average ticket, they will give you a certain incentive. So like a pizza chain or pizza restaurant, if their average ticket is like $50, they'll give you $10 off. Wow. If their average ticket is like $50, they'll give you $10 off. But if you go to a white tablecloth steakhouse, average ticket you're going to spend $200 or $300, they'll give you $50 or whatever they want to give you. So it varies by the restaurants, locations, and everything. Here's a place that if I spend $10, I can get a $25 gift certificate. If I spend $7, I can get $15. And if I spend $5 for a certificate, I can get a $10 certificate. So that works for me a great deal.

You save some money there. Absolutely. And who doesn't like, regardless of good economy, bad economy, who doesn't want to save some money? We're all consumers. If I can get some savings, 5%, 7%, 10%, 20%, I'll take it. Yeah, and these aren't big chain restaurants. In fact, I'm always looking for kind of the offbeat restaurants, the restaurants that are that great discovery. Maybe it's from someone who's an actual – California's big.

You can meet people who are immigrants that have come from other countries and they cook like an actual version of their food. It's not some sort of weird American bastardized version of, you know, my, you know, whatever. You know, you actually get the real taste of the country the folks came from. I'm just getting hungry looking. There's an ice cream here too. But this is really great. They can just go on here they can uh check out all the stuff you've got different advertisements uh there i see something

about a dining discount pass what does that how does that work so so we have a partnership with a another company so uh they give us all their that's where you get all the fast food programs if you want to use. So what that is, is it's a monthly sort of like a subscription. And you can go to McDonald's, you can go to Subway, you can go to Mrs. Fields Cookies, whatever restaurants you want and they have that you can use deals over there as well too. There you go. And this works with an app. So you can have an iPhone app or Android app that

you can use to download to your phone. And I guess the coupon codes go on there. You can search while you're out mobile going, hey, where do I want to eat and stuff and all that good stuff. Yep, you can do it real time. I'm in Chicago. I'm walking, you know, I'm in

60173 zip code. I can just open the app, put in, I know, I'm in 60173 zip code. I can just open the app, put in. I don't even have to put in the zip code. The app will, if your location of the map service is on, it will automatically find the restaurants near you within whatever the distance, a few miles, and you can use that. Wow, man. Yeah.

This is pretty cool. And I get to save some money, too. That's kind of what I like. I like good stuff. So tell us a little bit about your hero's journey. How did you grow up? How did you get down this road in doing M&A and running companies? Absolutely.

Well, I grew up in Chicago, did my undergrad, graduate in Wisconsin and Northwestern. And then I'm a finance guy. I had a CPA, did my undergrad, graduate in Wisconsin and Northwestern. And then I'm a finance guy. I had a CPA, did my MBA. And so in the first 10 years, I worked for the big Fortune 500 companies, got some good finance foundation underneath my belt. And then when the whole dot-com took off in 1999, 2000, always entrepreneurial at heart. So I got a chance to join Ubit.com during the really heydays of the dot-com world.

You know, so crazy times. I'm sure we all remember that. And I joined, I enjoyed it. You know, the whole internet world was up and coming, dynamic. So I learned quite a bit. I was there for six years and I got a chance to see quite a bit of you know just public world the finance world and then in 2006 I left the company then I became a CFO for another dot-com which

is the apartments comm world and that company was owned by the five largest media companies. So that company was called Classified Ventures. So if you think about it, before the internet world came along, in the Sunday papers, you see those auto rental and real estate sections. Yeah. In the Sunday papers. Remember those. Exactly.

So the newspapers got together and said, hey, we need an online strategy for auto rental and real estate. So they created Apartments.com, Cars.com, and real estate. So I was overseeing the rental category and the real estate category. So I did that for another seven years. We grew the company from $20 million to 150 million wow and then yeah and then you know as the print circulation was struggling the owners wanted to sell the company and cash up which they did so between uh cars.com and everything. Both companies were sold in total for $2.5 billion. Wow.

To two different entities. Yeah. So then I left and through acquaintance, I ended up coming back at UBID. And fast forward, I was running UBID, became CEO. And then by then, UBID was a, as the name says, it was an auction engine. But auction was very niche market, right? Amazon won the big e-commerce war, you know, and they changed everything. So I said, let's move forward.

Let's get into how we can consolidate and grow UBIT. So as I got to grow, going forward, I got a chance to, I wanted to grow the company through acquisition. I'm getting into real finance world now. So, yeah, so you can grow through new product or you can grow through acquisition. So I had UBIT first. I bought another e-commerce company. And then in middle of 2019, I got a chance to buy restaurant.com. The previous owner, you know The previous owner wanted to retire. And I like

to buy companies that has good technology, good consumers, good product, good name that I can add to my current consumers or current technology, right? That's accretive to everything I'm doing. So it was a long shot and my good fortunes, my good looks, I don't know. The owner liked me and he sold the company to me. And here's the most interesting part. I signed the deal to buy restaurant.com March 1st of 2020. You know what happens 10 days later? Oh, my God.

Wow. Exactly. Everything crashes for a restaurant. Exactly. But, you know, good leaders, that's when the good, true leaders are good business or anybody, whether it's business or sports or anything. That's when the good people or good characters or good leaders come out, right? So I managed through three years, kept the lights on, kept the employees on. And because of our business model, the consumer side was completely dead because the dining rooms were closed.

But because of our business side, the B2B side, the businesses continued to use our certificate to incentivize even down the road, business can use it or consumers can use it. So they were using that incentive for their employees and for their

customers. So we had the business go. We lost some revenues, but we kept the lights on. There you go. Fast forward three. Exactly. Fast forward 2023. Now we see as everything's open.

Now we're seeing the uptick on all the metric, people coming to the site, people going out. As human beings, we're social animals. We knew we weren't going to be inside all the time, people going out. As a human beings, we're social animals. We knew we weren't going to be inside all the time. It drove us crazy. We were like, get us out of here. Exactly. At times,

in the delivery side of the business, which was great during the pandemic, but even then, at some point, I don't want to deliver. I want to go sit at a restaurant. I want to eat. I want to pay the bill, wash my then, at some point, I don't want to deliver. I want to go sit at a restaurant. I want to eat. I want to pay the bill, wash my hands, and be done. I don't want to bring it home.

I don't want to clean. So when you think about it, I knew this is temporary. So we continued. Here we are, and we're thriving. And now I'm in the process of buying another company that's going to do great, which puts us on another growth, continued growth mode. There you go. You are the king of dot coms. You were just hopping from one dot com, making it work.

You know, that must have been quite a thing to try and lead through. You know, you make a purchase at restaurants.com. You hit the COVID. What sort of traits or leadership principles or skills did you tap into to try and, you know, keep everyone together during that time? ups and downs, there's peaks and valleys in everything we do, right? You have to be strong. You have to continue to motivate your employees that this is temporary and continue to execute on it, no matter how small the issues are or the, you know, projects are. You just got to continue to execute. And I believe, I always like to use the baseball analogy.

You got to keep hitting those singles and doubles. And once in a while, you'll hit a home run, but you got to keep hitting those singles and doubles. Once in a while, you'll hit a home run, but you've got to keep hitting those singles and doubles. Eventually, you'll get where you need to be. You'll get those runs and you'll win. That's what we kept on doing. Just execute on small things. Even though we're at.com, we're still in

the restaurant industry. In the government, after shutting down, they launched a PPP program. So I applied for that. They had the EIDL Emergency Disaster Recovery Loan. I applied for this. We got funds in the company to keep the lights on, keep the employees, and we continue to develop our technology. Because eventually this wasn't good.

This isn't permanent. We knew that. And I also took advantage of the pandemic helped me renegotiate all my supplier contracts and everything, too. So you recognize those little things. And I said, hey, let's just, I redid everything. So the fruits of that labor is coming through now. There you go hey this this is really cool because you had the vision and foresight to know that this you know hopefully

wouldn't last forever um and it sounds like you know a lot of the resources you were doing for restaurants.com you know the biggest scary thing for small businesses restaurants server places were um they might go out of business. I mean, I remember a lot of them, they didn't even have an online presence, some of them, you know, some of the smaller places. And all of a sudden, it's like, you've got to have an online presence so that people can look and order the food online, and you've got to have a delivery service lined up and everything else.

And, you know, so sites like yours can help or probably helped companies survive. Exactly. And, you know, we have partnership with delivery companies and everything, but we're more in dining company. So what I mean by that is we, you know, with our program, our job is to put butts in the seat at restaurant. And here's why we focus on the in-dining. Because when you do delivery, when you do takeout, it's a fixed amount the consumer is spending, right?

I'm ordering two plates, and that's all I'm going to get. When people are sitting at the restaurant, whether they're with family or friends or anything, because, one, the average ticket usually goes up because you're sitting with people. I'm going to have this extra cocktail or I'm going to have this extra entree or I'm going to have this dessert. And especially when you have a deal or some type of incentive, the average ticket goes up for the restaurant.

That's why restaurants love working with us. And a lot of these restaurants have been with us for decades because the program works for them. That is awesome, Sos. I was just signing up here on the site with the app. I've got it downloaded to my phone and all that good stuff. Looks like

I confirmed something. So yeah, you can use it right on your phone there. Exactly. And the other thing I want to add, you know, going back to the acquisition strategy, I did in 2019, what we did is we went on to a public market. We are a public company traded on OTC market, ticker symbol RSTN. And so what I did is I did the merge with a public company and use stock as a currency to acquire more company. So hence, that's why we're acquiring

CardCash and we have other things in the pipeline as well, too. There you go. There you go. So yeah, it looks like a really cool app. You can go in and do all the things. You can work on your website or your computer if you want to, too. It's got some features on it. It shows me

a map of the area and i can see there's a local deal here that's close to me uh and all that good stuff uh and uh yeah pretty cool you choose from a deal redeem credits i can see my deals i can have some cards some active deals that i can know about and uh all good stuff. Very cool. Yeah. To all the listeners, also tell them, or I'd like to mention also, check out CardCash.com as well too. CardCash.com. Yep.

It's on a gift card exchange, or you can buy a gift card real time. If you're at Macy's or if you're at Target, whatever the retailers or restaurant chains you're at Macy's or if you're at Target, whatever the retailers or restaurant chains you're at, you can buy the gift card at a discount. So even if you get 2%, 5%, 7% discount, why not?

As the consumers we are and we spend money, like I said, whether it's Target or Starbucks or Home Depot, you can save a few bucks. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. Wow, this is great for Starbucks or Home Depot, if you can save a few bucks, why not? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, wow, this is great for, you know, what's coming up with the holidays.

You know, that's what a lot of people will do is give away. Now, when you buy or sell gift cards, I imagine the cards don't get sent to you in the mail. It's all like codes and stuff. Yes. We have both digital and physical. And both are platform, restaurant.com as well as CardCast. Typically, we stick nowadays with digital more than the physical because it's just everybody's got their iPhones

and everybody's got their Android or some device, right? So we want to make it easy for them. We want them to use it real time. So we try to, but there are those who want physical, and we'll give them physical cards as well too. There you go. Starbucks, and is there an app for cardcash.com? Yes, there is.

Cool. Absolutely. Cool. So you can just use the app, you show them the code and all that good stuff. Jimmy John's up to 31% off. Starbucks up to 4.2% off. Dunkin' 4.1. Subway 14.3.

Domino's 15.8%. Olive Garden, don't go there. 7.4% off. No, I'm sure they're nice people. So, right? It's very dynamic. It's, we look at, you know, it's technology. Here's old Navy 10% off.

Yeah. If you shop and we all shop, regardless whether it's retailer or restaurant, when you add up in a 12 month period, it does add up. It adds up. Yeah, definitely. Especially if you spend a lot or you have a lot like I do. Here's the Cheesecake Factory, 7.4%. You can get stuff at Hotels.com. Here's an interesting thing.

You can use that for travel. Yep. Dining and travel goes hand in hand. Oh, here's something for me, PetSmart. I'm always buying that dog food for the dogs in the dog trees. There's even one here for Uber as well. And there you go. Yeah, pretty cool, man.

All sorts of different things. NFL Shop, 24.5% off. There you go. It's gift card heaven up here. Yes. There's a lot of gift cards. Holy crap. Exactly.

And the gift card industry, you know, it's over $325 billion a year industry. Holy crap. Yeah. It's a huge industry. Similar to restaurants, right? I mean, statistically speaking, there's over 1 point, probably about 1.1 million restaurants in this country alone. And about a third of them are fast food or they change. Two-thirds of them are independent restaurants.

And that's where we focus on. All right. You got me signed up over here now. So there's a 45-day guarantee on them. And there's over 520 brands found it said. Holy crap. That's a lot of gift cards. We're a sizable company.

We do quite a bit. There you go. And you can buy a new gift card if you want, or you can buy used gift cards. I imagine you send the codes to people on an email, and they can use the app to utilize the code. Yep, exactly. You can sell your card on there too. There you go. You know what I was saying earlier, you have a Home Depot, you don't want to use it or you can't use it.

You can sell it and then exchange it or buy another one for Starbucks. There you go. Right? I can see here, yeah, one of the problems i always have is uh grandma isn't quite there anymore and she always gives me victoria's secret gift cards so i i can see here that i can train in my victory secret gift card for uh uh let's see texas roadhouse there you go so right or top golf there's top golf on here like There's a lot of brands, whole eBay. Wow.

So this is extraordinary. And so what's your vision for the future? What you got, you want to build out? Do you want to keep looking at more mergers and acquisitions for core companies you're building out here? Yep. That's correct.

So we're in the process of finishing with card cash. We want to merge, you know, all our... We do acquisitions because there's consumer or the customer efficiency, leveraging, cross-pollinating, and then there's always the operational efficiency that you want to leverage. We're a dot-com, they're a dot-com. So there's

marketing, technology, operation, efficiency that we want to leverage. So we're in the process of that. And then there's other ones similar in our space that we would love to, if there's opportunity, we grow. Buy it and then grow. There you go. I need to make a gift card for the Chris Voss Show podcast. I don't know what we'd sell, but people trade trade episodes hey i'll trade the episode uh 1527 for 1495 there you go well so what sort of leadership principles do you use and mark with or who

inspired you as a leader that you incorporate some of their work into how you do your leadership principles? There's no one or anyone. It's just, I look at everybody, right? And you try to apply it to what I am doing, right? And I take a little bit from everywhere. There's no one place, right? Whether it's leadership skill, people skill, and just really try to understand whether it's employees, customers, suppliers.

I do more listening than talking because I want to understand what their needs are more than anything, right? Even the employees, even the suppliers, right? And then when you listen to them, then you figure out the working relationship with them. And also, of course, I got my own interest here as well, too. It's not a charity or anything. So, yeah, I just try to really listen more than anything. To me, that's a big leadership skill. You got to listen more than talk.

Well, you picked the right space because i'm back at restaurants eating all the time i i missed it so much i missed being out i missed being you know having lunch with people sitting across from people face to face um i i i love eating out now i kind of fallen away from it because i'm like well you know it's expensive and their food's pretty rich you know they're trying to eat a little I'm like, well, you know, it's expensive and their food's pretty rich, you know, or try and eat a little bit more healthy. But,

um, now, you know, it's like, ah, fuck it. Let's go out and enjoy. And,

uh, there's so many great restaurants and thank God through the help of services like yours, they survived, you know, the horrible time that they went through with COVID and, uh, and now that you come out the other side.

So this is just awesome. Any final thoughts and pitch out as we go out on the show? Everybody just check out our website, both of them, restaurant.com and cardcash.com. And we're also, as I said, we're trading on public. Keep up, you know, keep checking. We're adding new restaurants all the time. We're adding new retailers and everything on Card Cash.

So it's a good chance you'll find something you're looking for. There you go. And if you have a favorite local restaurant, tell them to sign up. Sign up with the service so they can get some discounts on the side there. Yes, absolutely. There you go. The more people, the the more i the smaller smaller restaurants i love i love finding a hole in the wall uh off beat you know stuff that you won't

find anywhere else uh you know it's a it's usually you know a guy who knows how to cook really well really loves the work that he's doing uh makes great food. Maybe it's something from a country he's originated from, or he's just really good at making the right burgers. And those are the small places I love. I mean, the big places are fine if you like the big chains, but I like to find stuff that, you know, I go adventuring. I try new places. And it's fun, right?

Trying different things and everything. And I always say to anybody and everybody, the word restaurant, one is understood by everybody in the world. No matter what language you speak. And what's the one thing you're going to find in every small town, Timbuktu in the world, you're going to go,

what's the one thing you're going to find? You're going to find a restaurant. And we love going out to eat. And we got to eat multiple times a day, not just once, right? So keep checking. We're always going to have new restaurants. We're adding new restaurants every day in all the locations, as much as we can find. There you go. Well, thank you very much. We certainly appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. We couldn't do it without you. As always, go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss,

YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1, the tickety-tockety, and Chris Voss Facebook.com. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.