Five Questions With: Rosie Atkins

Rosie Atkins is vice president of product for Upserve. / COURTESY UPSERVE
Rosie Atkins is vice president of product for Upserve. / COURTESY UPSERVE

Rosie Atkins, vice president of product for Upserve, recently answered questions posed by Providence Business News about the company’s recent acquisition of Breadcrumb and how that will affect the Providence-based company. Atkins previously held the same title for Breadcrumb.

PBN: Tell me how restaurants can benefit from Upserve’s acquisition of Breadcrumb.

ATKINS: With the acquisition of Breadcrumb, Upserve now offers the most complete suite of solutions purpose-built for restaurants, operating the industry’s largest cloud-based restaurant management platform. More than 6,000 restaurants in every U.S. state use Upserve to manage over 20 million meals per month.

Restaurants operate on thin margins, so our customers are always focused on profitability.

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By putting Breadcrumb’s cloud-based point-of-sale system and Upserve’s smart management assistant together, we’re able to deliver in-service intelligence to power great guest experiences in real time. We’re also able to deliver restaurant-specific insights that help owners and managers coach staff, optimize menu offerings, prepare for every shift and forecast things like food costs and scheduling. The result is higher productivity, measurable guest loyalty and a stronger bottom line.

PBN: Can you explain how Breadcrumb works?

ATKINS: Sure. The point-of-sale system is really the operational center of the restaurant during service. We do everything from capturing orders and special requests, manage tables, deliver guest notes, capture payments and even clock workers in and out. Because we’re a cloud-based system, the upfront costs are very low and the system is configurable in real time.

One of the things our customers really like is the sleek look of the iPad and the Breadcrumb software. Restaurants give a lot of thought to decor, so we have paid a lot of attention to designing our software and hardware to be discreet and attractive. Many of the legacy systems have huge, outdated monitors and big computer boxes that have to sit in otherwise sleek, modern dining rooms. They just don’t fit in.

As for what will change, we’re very focused on delivering the most reliable system in the market. Cloud-based software relies on the Internet and wireless networks and it’s our job to make sure that we’re bulletproof even in a restaurant loses connectivity. Beyond that, we’re working on delivering innovative payment options, kitchen display systems and improved reporting.

Another great change will be in our ability to deliver the best customer support to our customers. With Upserve, we’re 100 percent focused on helping restaurants run better and we need to be able to deliver service as well as the best restaurant. Toward that end, we’ve brought over our entire senior support team and account management team to join to join the great Upserve success team. We’re also working hard on getting a great “tier 1” support program in place.

PBN: When will the new San Francisco office open and how many will it employ?

ATKINS: Our San Francisco team is primarily focused on product and engineering, with a good number of customer success staff. The success team gives us a lot of customer intelligence so it’s great to have them sitting with us. We’re already at work and we expect to be in our new office in the coming weeks. Our senior Breadcrumb account team will remain in our Chicago office, and of course, the main operations – including a lot of great engineers and product people – is in Providence.

PBN: Which type of business has used Breadcrumb more – restaurants, bars or nightclubs?

ATKINS: A little more than half of our customers are fine dining establishments like Al Forno – they’ve been with us for more than two years, so we’re happy to have a home base in Providence. Breadcrumb is one of the only cloud-based POS systems that has the power to handle the complexity of service in this type of restaurant. The rest of our customers are a good mix of bars, cafes, quick-serve restaurants and nightclubs. Because the system is so customizable, just about any hospitality business can configure it to fit their operational needs.

PBN: How did the informal partnership begin? Was it a natural progression to unite the two companies, considering you were both serving the same industry?

ATKINS: We’ve admired what Angus and his team were building for quite a while. We completed a system integration and partnership in late 2015 and it instantly became our most popular and fastest-growing offering. More importantly, our customers immediately understood the value that their investment in Upserve was delivering to their bottom line. Within a month, about a quarter of our new customer growth was coming in as a result of the partnership. That’s a very powerful indicator that we had something special together. Because we’re both cloud-based and solely focused on the restaurant industry, we can deliver value for a relatively low upfront investment.

I grew up in a restaurant family on Nantucket, so I understand that if you’re asking a restaurant owner to spend money on anything, you better be delivering a strong return on investment.

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