The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Revolutionizing Restaurant Management with Daily Profit Insights with Geordy Murphy

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

Revolutionizing Restaurant Management with Daily Profit Insights with Geordy Murphy Fobesoft.com Cypresshospitalitygroup.com About the Guest(s): Geordy Murphy is a distinguished leader in the restaurant and hospitality industries. As the founder and president of FobeSoft and a partner at Cypress Hospitality Group, he boasts an impressive career spanning over three decades. His extensive experience includes concept development, executive leadership, and corporate chef roles, notably working with high-profile dining establishments like Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants and launching the renowned Plaza Club in Honolulu. Geordy Murphy is also the author of "Opening a Restaurant From Inception to Reception," providing expert insights into building successful restaurants. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss engages with Geordy Murphy, a seasoned restaurateur and leader in hospitality. The discussion delves into Geordy Murphy's entrepreneurial journey and the impactful solutions his ventures, FobeSoft and Cypress Hospitality Group, bring to the restaurant industry. With over 2200 episodes, The Chris Voss Show continues to be a repository of wisdom from leading visionaries and industry experts. Geordy Murphy shares his transformative journey from a young entrepreneur to a key player in the restaurant and hospitality sectors. His creation, FobeSoft, provides restaurateurs with cutting-edge tools for financial management, enhancing operational efficiency by delivering real-time P&L insights. Alongside, Cypress Hospitality Group aids in bridging the talent gap within the industry, offering headhunting solutions for culinary and managerial positions. The conversation unveils strategies for profitability, emphasizing the crucial importance of financial acumen in running a successful restaurant. Whether you're intrigued by the culinary arts, business strategies, or the art of hospitality management, this episode lays out essential insights that promise to elevate your understanding. Key Takeaways: Learn about Geordy Murphy's extensive career and impact on the restaurant industry. Discover how FobeSoft revolutionizes restaurant management with real-time financial analytics. Understand the significance of financial literacy in achieving restaurant profitability. Explore the operational challenges faced by restaurateurs and innovative solutions through Cypress Hospitality Group. Gain insights into improving operational efficiency and tactical decision-making in the hospitality scene. Notable Quotes: "Identify a problem and solve that problem, you have an opportunity." — Geordy Murphy "The most important thing that a restaurateur can do is learn the financials." — Geordy Murphy "Turn restaurant managers into operators." — Geordy Murphy "We teach people how to take small bites to get to the profitability that they want." — Geordy Murphy "It's no surprise that the restaurant world is run on QuickBooks." — Geordy Murphy

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chris fos won the tick tockety and chris fos facebook.com today with an amazing young man on the show we're going to be talking about his insights, his experience, and some of the things that drove him through life. Jordy Murphy is the founder and president of phobisoft.com. He's a recognized leader in the restaurant and hospitality industries. With over 30,000 years of experience, his career, boy, he really is young. His career spans concept development, executive leadership, and corporate chef roles, leaving a legacy in some of the nation's most celebrated dining establishments.

From launching the iconic Plaza Club in Honolulu to running operations for Wolfgang Puck's Postrio, he has a broad vision and profitability to high-profile restaurants. His own venture, Jordy's Restaurant, was recognized by Esquire as one of the 10 best new restaurants in America. He's also the author of Opening a Restaurant from Inception to Reception, offering a master class in building thriving restaurants. Welcome to the show. How are you, sir? I'm doing great, Chris. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? At phobisoft.com, F-O-B-E-S-O-F-T dot com. And it's G-E-O at phobisoft.com. And G-E-O at Cypress, C-Y-P-R-E-S-S, hospitalitygroup.com. And you put out your book in October 2015, opening a restaurant from inception to reception. Do we want to do any plugs for the book? Well, I mean, it's still out there. Mainly people that get it these days get it via tablet or something of that nature. It's not on audiobooks, but I'm thinking about redoing it,

updating it a little bit. But, yeah, it's still out out there checklists to help you go through every step of the project and keep you tracked so give us a 30 000 overview of what you're working on today i believe it's phobisoft phobisoft yeah well just to give you some context here grew up in florida school in colorado ended up in san francisco or opened the plaza club in hulu hawaii ended up in San Francisco, opened the Plaza Club in Hollywood, Hawaii, ended up in San Francisco, where I owned and operated restaurants for about 18, 19 years. Worked for the Kimpton Group, where I did Colettos for them. Post-trio, three years with Wolfgang Park. Then I did Jordy's, like you mentioned, top 10 best new restaurants in the country by Esquire, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and all the publications. I started a group of Asian noodle restaurants with a partner.

We had six locations in San Francisco. And I needed a way to figure out how the restaurants were doing on a daily basis. Because I'd get up in the morning and it's like, where do I go? I've got six different locations throughout the Bay Area. So I came up with this plan to date myself a little bit. I would go around and I'd load a program on the computers of all the restaurants, the six of them. And at the end of the day, they would enter the sales, front of house, back of the house, labor, and whatever they spent that day. They would take that report and fax it to me. So when I got up in the morning, I knew what was happening in the restaurants and I'd visit the one that maybe had issues or what

happened. Fast forward, sold the long life back to our Taiwanese partners, moved back to Florida, where I grew up, to raise our kids. And I started a company called Cypress Hospitality Group, still in existence today. We're one of the premier headhunters for the hospitality industry. We place chefs, managers, all salary positions in the hospitality industry. So that's where, and I have a couple recruiters. One main recruiter, my partner, and she handles most of, you know, the work orders come in and she handles it. So it basically runs itself. And probably eight or nine years ago, I'm a cyclist. And I was riding my bike one morning, after numerous calls from friends in

the Bay Area, can you run some numbers for me? I'm going to open a restaurant. Would you do a projection for me? I don't know what my P&L. I got issues. Can you help me? So I had this idea. And I remember I was listening to Steve Jobs' book. And he made a comment that if you can identify a problem and solve that problem, you have an opportunity. So that day, I went into my office and I thought you know what I'm gonna find a program and so I just started I made

phone calls in a few weeks I found the right guy Raj he's my partner today let's hear from though and we have a development team in India but he's like the main and my other partner Matt Sloan, who's no sales. And what we did is we initially built it. And you had to still make all these entries. Well, now with development or whatever, what we do is Ubisoft gives restaurants. The restaurant business is a rearview mirror business. They operate for a month.

They turn around and look at a book for an accountant who hopefully knows what they're doing because a lot of them just use like book books and it's not set up correctly, and they make money last. Well, they're already two weeks into the following month, so if they have issues, those problems are being compounded. What Fobisoft does is it gives you a daily profit and loss statement from sales through rent that runs month to date, compares to a budget, and it's either red or green. So as you're going along with your budget and your profit and loss statement day by day by day as the month's building, if it turns it's like oh my gosh you know my my liquor cost is high or you know my china glass and silver is out of whack so it gives them an opportunity to fix these

issues before the month's over yeah image to the bottom line yeah because if you start because how you start bleeding out you know you don't want to catch something too late if you start you know doing what i call bleeding out something is you know not working right something is not you know you're bleeding like you said you you got your your liquor costs out of control or something like that and so it can it can really affect you and then by the time you catch it sometimes you know you can be quite a quite in a lost position if you're not on top of it yeah well that's the business though too because it's a business of pennies you know i saw two situations in the last probably three or four months there's a chef named evan funky

he's probably one of the hottest chefs in the country right now he owns a restaurant in los angeles called felix and then he has two or three other in the concepts called Mother Wolf. There's one, I think, in Vegas. There's one in Miami. His very first restaurant, they spent three and a half million dollars and went out of business. And the interview, this was on Netflix on chefs, master chefs or whatever. And the comment was, well, what happened? And he says, I had no idea

about the financials. I had, I, you know, I was a chef and I got in there and I didn't know what was going on. And the other situation was Jose Andres, who's one of the top chefs in the world. He's got 40 plus restaurants. He was on a podcast and they asked him, what's the most important thing that a person that's going to get in the restaurant business or a restaurateur can do? And he said, learn the financials. Before recipes, before setting it up, before doing all this stuff, if you don't know the financials, you're behind the eight ball. and what like we had a we had a we have a client that said not only did you make my restaurant more profitable you turned my manager into an operator and that's what we do that's what phobisoft does it opens their eyes to what's going on in the industry or they're in their in their four walls

basically and it works for just about any restaurant is that correct pretty yeah pretty much anything I mean if you're if you're a group of restaurants we have one version that we call the boss view so you can line four or five restaurants up all of one URL and as you look at it you can compare them across the board we've got some restaurants are doing ten twelve million dollars other ones are doing eight or nine hundred000. Because what we've done is we've broken it out into four different categories. And what we say is we take little bites.

So if you have your sales, and then you have your cost of goods, your labor, your controllables, and your non-controllables. So in your controllables category, a controllables so in your controllables category a lot of people that just use cookbooks by the way we push the cookbooks there but some people that use cookbooks will put all this information in from your controllables into one category called supplies we have a client two months ago and the supplies category last year had three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in the restaurant did one and a half million dollars two months ago and the supplies category last year had three hundred and sixty

thousand dollars in the restaurant did one and a half million dollars that's twenty percent and where do you know where that three hundred and sixty grand went at the end of the year it's in one category so we do in the controllables is we break it out into your china glass and silver your restaurant supplies kitchen supplies little in lawn and it's all it's all you know you have a budget for each category and if you look at it from the business standpoint say you have a restaurant that's making 10 profit and if we can find a point in your control in your in your in your cost of goods we can find a point in your labor we could find a point in your controllables and a point in your non-controllables we've added four points to the

10 profit now they're making 14 profit instead of the 10 profit that's a 40 increase which is huge can we do that every time not necessarily But we had a group of restaurants that were making 17-18% profit, and we got them to 21-22% profit. But it's paying attention to it, and it's running it like a business. So it helps you run it like a business, so restaurants can take and use this and utilize it

i know since this has increased your restaurant profit by 20 to 40 percent in just five minutes a day so well it used to it used to take a little bit more but now with technology we've got this to where there's basically three entry points we integrate with the point of sale system so we're bringing the food beer wine liquor merchandise sales in to the sales category we're bringing the front of house and back of the house labor in because we have the the salaries built into the back end we have your payroll taxes, your workman's comp, all that. So you're getting a true labor figure.

We have EDI connections with all the major broadliners, Cisco, U.S. Foods, Benny, Keith, all the big ones. So when the invoice hits the restaurant, the invoice hits Fobisoft. And we built a piece of AI that maps the invoice to the proper cell in Fobisoft. It's 97% accurate. Once we map it one time, it hits it every single time. And then if it's, say, your fish guy and he writes 10 pounds of ahi tuna, 12 bucks a pound

on a napkin, you can take a picture of that napkin with the app on the phone. It goes to the cloud and parses to the cell. So we're basically giving someone a full profit loss statement every single day. And they barely spend any time on it whatsoever because the information's coming through technology. And then what we do a couple times a month, if they're into it, we hook them up on our alert program. It was the seventh of the month, we shoot them a P&L compared to their budget. Here's where you are.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The 20th of the month, we shoot it to them again. Here's where you are. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So what we've done is we've given people in the restaurant business a roadmap to become more profitable. You know, one of the issues in the industry is you get in those four walls and you're working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. Sometimes you don't know where to turn. You don't have someone to ask the question to. You know, our support team is all ex-restaurant tours.

You can ask them a question about anything you know any item any cost any what have you you know and they have the knowledge to help solve any issues that are out there or at least have a plan that someone can go along the path to get to the result that they want and so how you guys have been doing this for how long now well i've had phobisoft for like eight or nine years but the reality the the real piece of it's about two and a half years old to where we've gotten it you know with the integrations etc to where it works the way that it does um so we've got hundreds of restaurants on it right now uh we've got a white label deal with Cisco Foods. Their version is called Proactive P and A and D L.

So we do a lot of business with some of their customers. Yeah, cruising along. Cruising along. And so tell us about how you grew up. What were some of your experiences? How did you get into being a restaurateur? What were some of your motivations there? Well, I mean, I needed a job to go out of high school or in high school before I went to college.

And I started working at a French restaurant here in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. I live in a place called Ponte Vedra Beach. beach and it was very cool because it was table side cooking french restaurants with i mean wines that you that today are just ridiculously expensive so i went to school came home to get my job i thought i could get the same job because we did very well there and the guy that i had worked for went to work for club corporations of america he, I went to see him downtown at the university club here. And he said, I can't give someone a summer job, but would you go to Hawaii and help these people open a restaurant? Well, growing up in North Florida, surfing, and having an opportunity to move to the North Shore for a couple years and surf the North Shore, it was like, sure, I can do that.

So I went to Honolulu, lived on the North Shore for two years, and opened the Plaza Club and figured out through Club Corp that you couldn't go any further with them without a college degree at the time. So I went back to school in Colorado. Happened to be the wintertime. Shocking. It's got to be fun. And I finished school, graduated college,

and then went to work for Club Corp in Dallas, Texas, where I ran a country club for them called Canyon Creek Country Club in Richardson, Texas. Oh, wow. And that's how I, you know, got back into it. What do you find is fulfilling about the work that you do and being in that field?

Well, I mean, it's the easy answer is that we're helping people, but we're opening the eyes of a lot of restaurateurs. It's no, Matthew, one of our partners partners makes us comment that it's no surprise that the restaurant world is run on QuickBooks. Well, you know, it kind of is. I mean, there's 800,000 restaurants in the country. Wow. And, you know, a lot of people, it's like,

I just need to find a bookkeeper. And then I've got QuickBooks. So they know what they're doing. And they're putting all their financial wherewithal into this person that they think is doing things correctly. And all this person does, they can be an accountant for, you know, a manufacturing company or a clothing store or whatever that has a bunch of accounts. And they set it up like they would a normal business. But in the restaurant business the main piece is your cost of goods and it's it's calculated differently than a manufacturing

business yeah your percentages of sales off that category of sales like your spend on food is divided by your sales on food your spend on liquor by your sales on liquor you know your cost of goods on wine beer etc is calculated by the sales on beer and wine etc so what we found numerous times is just the other day we had one with the guys like a lumber and a 31 food cost and i'm on the, and I was talking to him, and I texted him, and I said, well, that's off total sales. The reality is your food cost is 45%. And the guy about was like, oh, my God.

And then once we walked through it. It's like, wow. Yeah, exactly. It's helping people. It's opening their eyes. It's turning restaurant managers into operators. And it's fun. It keeps me in the industry industry but i don't have a set of keys as we like to say that's what we that's what we're doing it so let's talk about your other venture that you have the cypress

hospitality group what do you do over there and how do you do it the cypress were one of the premier headhunters in the country for the hospitality business. We find chefs, managers, we're headhunters for. We've been doing that for 22 years, and we're pretty good at it. Because everybody in the state, here again, they're all from the industry. You have to know that if Daniel Balloud needs an assistant manager, you're not sending him an assistant manager from Fridays. Well, I mean, there's so many people that have attacked the hospitality business to be a headhunter. They don't understand.

They just send paper. We interview the people. We send bios on the people. We head shots. If they're the chefs, we send pictures of their food You know like right now we're looking for a chef and a manager in South Florida We need some IAs and assistant managers in North Florida. I need a couple people in Alaska and these people in Northern, California

So yeah, yeah, so you guys know how do people do people sign up for that? Do you have to find them or can they apply? Yeah. Yeah. So you guys, now, how do people, do people sign up for that? Do you have to find them or can they apply? It looks like people, if they're looking for talent, they can go to your website and submit, you know, who they're looking for, I guess. Well, you know, it's just what we do is we have a conversation with them first to find out exactly what their needs are. And then we can, you know can prepare correctly and sell the opportunity the best. So it's just an email to me, geo at

cypresshospitalitygroup.com and then I have a conversation with them and they have a conversation with the headhunter and we go from there. We pretty much can take care of it in a week to two weeks. We fill most of the positions. 95% are filled within the first two to three weeks so because what happens now in the industry

people are pulled in so many directions it's like oh i'm going to put an ad on you know these different websites and they get inundated with resumes well they don't have the time to go through all the resumes because they're doing so many different things. Whereas this is what we, you know, the Cypress people do all day long. You know, we have people all over the place. So people can sign up there. They can find what they want. It says you have a 93% placement rate within the first week of receiving a work.

Exactly. If people are looking for work, can they contact you or is it just. Yes, they can send their resumes, but it depends on where... I mean, if I get a resume for someone, say in Chicago right now, I don't have any work orders in Chicago. But we put them in the database and they get phone calls. Casinos, restaurants... I live in Vegas, so imagine casinos are always looking for hospitality people and stuff like that. Casinos are a little different, though.

You know, I mean, the restaurants and the casinos are where we've done a ton of work. I've done work for Wolf out there. I've done work for Michael Mina for a bunch of different, you know, restaurant tours in Las Vegas. Casinos are a little different because of the security requirements and all that. We kind of they have their own way of doing things. Casinos are a little different because of the security requirements and all that. We kind of, they have their own way of doing things. Yeah. Yeah. So fun is fun. What haven't we talked about with the two companies you have that people should know about? I don't know. We've, you know, well, here's the thing.

We covered a lot. Yeah. I mean, we've, just to give you an indication on since i guess the last six or eight months we've processed a half a billion dollars worth of invoices to our to our microsoft azure and our the ai that we built and you know we teach people how to take small bites from infobisoft to get to the profitability that they want to that they want to be at and we do most of the work for like we set their budgets up we do all that with Cypress if you need help be it chefs to chef manager you know general manager we do that all day every day I mean we can

find those people pretty much anywhere. So we got it all in the can. Give people your final thoughts as we go out and tell people how they can onboard with you at both websites and find out more. Well, it's pretty simple. The email address is geo at phobisoft.com, F-O-B-E-S-O-F-T dot com. And at Cypress, it's G-E-O at Cypress, C-Y-P-R-E-S-S hospitalitygroup.com And both websites, it's phobisoft.com and cypresshospitalitygroup.com And then there's,

you know, of course, Facebook and et cetera. Phobisoft and Cypress Hospitality Group. Sounds good. Serve in the restaurant industry because we need more good restaurants in this world. We definitely do. We need more that operate and stay around, too. Yeah.

And probably, I mean, what's the employment condition like of restaurants right now? Is it people fighting over, you know, top employees? Yes, it's tough. You know, there's less people getting into it and still continuing more restaurants open. It's because all those young Gen Zers, they're into Instagram. Well, they'd rather be in the restaurant than work in the restaurant. Yeah, that's true. I would, but you don't want me cooking anything.

I'm not that great of a cook. But I often joke that I should go to chef school so that I can maybe meet the woman of my dreams, maybe. There you go. And never be a cordon bleu, cordon bleu chef. That or I just need to hang out outside the exit or something and pick up. Well, thank you very much, Ray, for being on the show. We really appreciate it. I appreciate it, too, Chris.

Thanks to our artists for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1 on the TikTok and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out. So Jordy, I didn't know.