NYSE: PAR CEO Savneet Singh Shares How He Great from $200m/yr to $400m/yr

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But this is a market cap late last night, $1.897 billion. What's crazy about this graph you look at is at a high back in 2021, but revenue has more than doubled since 2021. So why hasn't valuation also more than doubled? Please help me welcome to the stage Saad Neet Singh with Par Technologies.

Thanks for being here, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Third fastest growing, do you know who the two in one are?

I have no idea.

It's still impressive on this market to get this kind of, to get these kinds of deals done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's your take on why, why the market is not valuing your revenue growth? Is it just fed an interest?

Oh, I would, I would take the opposite. I think our stock's kicked ass. So, so if you look at, so we're about $2 billion market cap, but most of our life we've been around, you know, less than two, less than a billion for a lot of it. In that sort of sub $10 billion software, we're the best performer sans one company over the last one, three, five years. So it's a little bit size dependent, right? You've had the big stocks take away most of the gains that have kind of hit it. So the average, this is a crazy statistic, but the average, the median software company that's public is down 21% over the last six years, from 2018 to now. So you've actually had negative returns in software over time. So we feel great because we're up, you know, 5X or something since that time. And then on this chart particularly, you know, it was crazy. In 2021, our stock was trading at 30 times revenue.

We were public, so we were selling shares left and right by, by buying companies. So I think today we're actually undervalued and we look forward to, and I think that's why the stock's rebounding. But anyways. Long story short, we were overvalued and I think now we're growing into it. But you know, we get a lot of, because of the VC world, I think we kind of miss this. But software's actually been a really horrible category to invest in for the last five, six, seven years.

SAV's got a deep history investing in SaaS. He was running his own private equity shop before this, had his own debt shop before this. Just, I would say, one of the savviest business guys I've met. We're going to dive into his most recent earnings report. But I want to just very quickly, in about 60 seconds, I'm going to talk through the context really quick so we all have it. 39-year-old CEO, came in, recruited by the board. Actually, the board wanted you to run the recruitment process and then said, "Oh, actually, we just want to get you addicted and hooked in." He's now the CEO, comes in in 2019. You can see what he's done since then in terms of revenue growth. This is hard shit. This is really hard stuff, especially as a publicly traded company. This guy's taking bold bets. The company's more than doubled its revenue. And so we'll talk about operations, product, and M&A strategy over the next 20 minutes. We talked about public markets. This was old PAR before SAV.

Just so you put a visual to what the product is, it's the checkout system, right? It used to just be sort of a hardware. Now, we'll talk more about this. It's way more software now. He comes in in 2018 as CEO, and this is what their product mix looks like today. Why don't you talk maybe just for 30, 50 seconds on product?

Super simple. We sell software to restaurants. If you go into the average restaurant, you'll be shocked how many individual products run that restaurant. It's upwards of 20, 30, 40 sometimes. So we're the point-of-sale system, we're the loyalty software, the online ordering system in the back office. Not everybody buys all of our products. That's kind of the dream. But we're kind of the, think of us as a VPRP platform to run your restaurant.

Lots of room to expand ACV and Wallet with the product suite. You really doubled down on this at our last conference in Austin. You had just, you were fresh off two of these big deals. So these are two of the big deals you just did earlier this year. Paid 206 million for a company called Task, which is 40 million, top line 6 million EBITDA. About a 34x EBITDA multiple, 5x ARR multiple, which some people might say, "Oh my gosh, SAV got a great deal. This is incredible." We'll talk more about that in a second. Second big deal, you know, very close, paid another 170 million bucks for this business. 40 million top line, 14 million EBITDA. What's cool about this is you've now had time to sort of sync all these things together around this product map and vision. You're focused on ARR per share. Again, I'm going Just quickly now, we'll come back and dive deep. I want to get to this, though.

Yep.

Because when you look at the top line, something special happened. How do you go from burning a bunch to cash, you know, profiting?

Yeah, so we're, it's crazy. We're now making money, which is, which is crazy. But, you know, when we, the, the chart, kind of five or six slides ago of our revenue from 204,000, was kind of hiding something. When we took over the company, the revenues were about 170, 180, and they were $5 million of software revenue, 165 of hardware and services. Where today, we'll be, you know, whatever, 450 of revenue, but 250, 260 will be software. The software has sort of grown, you know, 40, 50x during that period of time. And part of that, though, was our core product, our point-of-sale product was broken. So you all work in software, but we were the, the first SaaS product in restaurants. But we were shipping product once a year.

Wow.

If you went to a Dairy Queen, there was a decent chance we would take down the store as opposed to actually processing your transaction. And so we had to put in tens of millions of dollars to stabilize and rebuild the product while growing. So we had to do an incredible amount of reinvestment. And now we're getting the benefit of, you know, we've been, you know, we're public, so we disclose this, but we haven't grown our operating expenses in almost two years. Yet, we've grown our revenue, you know, 25% a year over those periods of time, so way, well over doubled. And so, also, the SEC filings are kind of complicated, so we didn't actually lose this much money. You know, we sold a business, and so that's the 77 million there, so. But generally, you know, we've, we've kind of been able to, while we worked through this turnaround, we tried to burn, you know, 2 to 4 million a quarter while keeping the top line relatively high. And now it's obviously reflected nicely to profitability.

Talk about setting strategy and then divesting non-core assets. You sold, I think it was, your defense.

Yes.

What did that thing even do? How much revenue did it represent? Why'd you sell it?

So when you're public, you don't have necessarily the beauty of, when you're private, you can do whatever the hell you want. And so, you know, when we were, it's, I hate to take a lot of time, but Par was founded 50 or 60 years ago as a defense contracting company. In 1978, we invented the point-of-sale terminal, so the device you check out on. And then we went public in 82. And pretty much since that point, we sucked. We were, when, when we stepped in to run the company in 2018, the market cap of the company, which is the value of the company, was lower than when we went public in 1982. So for 40 years, we had no shareholder value creation. If you had just taken all the money at Par at the time of the IPO and invested in the S and P 500, you'd be worth $15 billion. And so, an incredible story of shareholder value destruction. And so, What we kind of realized was that we couldn't keep doing the same thing.

And so we had to do a crazy, dramatic shift. And so what I think we learned along the way was that, and I know this is not your question at all, but I think probably helpful for you all is that getting in software sounds like a better business model. But more often than not, it is not big enough to be a scalable public company or to be a venture-backed business. And when I took over the business, I wasn't sure if the product we had was like venture-backed or public. And so we had this government contracting business that was printing 10 million bucks a year. And so it kind of

On the top line or bottom?

On the bottom.

What was top on that?

The top was probably 70.

Okay, so what is that? That's like 40% of the total business.

It was huge, yeah. And for profits, it was all of our profits. We were losing money, right? So it was 200% of our profits. And so when we got there, everyone said, well, go sell the government business. Like, why are you, if you're trying to build a software company, why are you trying to hire a government business? I was like, we could do that. But then when I disclosed to market that the government business is printing 10 million bucks, they're going to see that our software business is on fire and that our customer NPS is negative 60. Our CSAT was negative 99. We didn't have one customer that was green on our CSM scores, right? And so it was in many ways to kind of give us time, candidly, two years to rebuild our products, so that we could then say, all right, now we don't need this government thing to keep us going. So that's why we kept it for a long time. We sold it and immediately deployed it back into this acquisition you showed.

And so our capital allocation philosophy has sort of been, we don't want to sit on your cash as a public company. We want to deploy it and we've got nowhere to put it, we'll give it back to you.

Yep. What did you sell the defense business for?

We sold it in two different, we broke it into two businesses, sold it like 102, 103 million.

Okay, so that came as cash back to your balance sheet?

That's right. And then we funded it right back. That's right, one of them.

One of them, one of them, okay. So walk us through, this is now sort of putting everything together, and it gives you a chance to talk about the different kinds of revenue you're doing today.

Yep.

Two acquisitions you're building in, hardware or software, walk us through this.

So now it's a lot simpler. So we have three lines of revenue, hardware. So when you go to a restaurant, that device, the cashier's pounding on, we still sell that. You know, we try to sell 80 to 100 million of that a year. That's got sort of 20% gross margins, 21, 23 in a good year. This is a shitty year for it, so, sorry. Bad year for this and so this will be a little lower. Subscription Services, that's our software line. So if you look, this is the quarter, so you know 45 million we did last quarter. You know, times it by four, you can get the run rate. Then we close an acquisition. So you know, now we're kind of run rating 240, 250. And then professional services, which is everything from install to repair warranty and other sort of services. The juice is all in the SaaS business, right? Subscription Services is our payments and our SaaS business. So that's where we get the multiple. That's where Walsworth gets excited about our story.

And that's where all the growth is. And so you can see in our public commentary, we literally spend 16 seconds on the rest of the business and everything is on our ARR and gross margins.

When you guys think about really quick, think about your current revenue or maybe last month's MRR multiplied by 12. And then what you spent on total paid, sales and marketing, salaries, commissions to sales reps, LinkedIn ads. What percent are you guys spending as a percent of your ARR on sales and marketing? Anyone off the top of your head? Is it like 5%, 25%? Do the math really quick. Ben, what do you, I mean, what do you see? You look at P and Ls all day long from SaaS companies. What are they spending? So founder-led sales, what he's saying is the founder is leading a lot of the sales. They can get away with spending maybe less than 10% of total revenue on sales and marketing. If it's not founder-led, then they have to go higher for that function. He's seen it get as high as 50%. I feel like you've got some arbitrage here because you got 9.8 million of total sales and marketing.

Yeah, so we're great. Yeah, we're getting there. So what's really cool about our model is the reason why the investors gave us such a break, right? We were losing money and growing and our stock kept going up. Is that the economic model, you can kind of see through it. So today at Par, we spend around 14% of our revenues on sales and marketing.

Which, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that feels like that's world-class.

That's world-class, yeah. So the average SaaS company is around 25%. This is public, I'm using public info. The average R and D spend is about 25%. We're like at 31%, so we're kind of within swing distance. And then G and A, which is your overhead cost, is sort of the rest of it. And you know, it's very much to me tied to your price point. So I think people get kind of, again, you and I talk a lot, SaaS is not SaaS. And so you know, our average customer is spending, you know, hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars with us. And so that is a suit carrying, you know, briefcase salesperson, not a download a free demo. And so in a, when you're selling to SMBs, when you're selling to individuals, your sales and marketing cost is just high because it's ground swell. It's deal by deal.

Versus enterprise deals, you know, we signed a deal in December of last year. That was a $230 million, 10 year deal, $23 million a year. That took one salesperson, right? That's the same sale, and so that's the same, you can think of the cacktail TV on it.

Is that your largest customer?

Yes, Burger King, it will be. You know, we just did a deal with a, you know, a big, another big chain, five millionaire, one salesperson. And so, you know, enterprise companies have the ability to be world-class on that sales and marketing side. The just, the real, where you see the real win in margins and, and you think your last guest was talking about multi-product or two-scope, is that can you sell multiple products from different buyer personas from the same bag? What that means is, is your first product selling to a CMO and your next product is going to sell to a CFO? And if you can do that from the same go-to-market organization, that's when you get some 15% sales marketing. That is really, really, really hard to do because inevitably your sales team's like, well, I'm the expert on CMOs and I know their budget and I know the CFO. And your product teams are like, well, we should have two product teams, one product. That's when businesses get really complicated. That's kind of why we've done really well, which we've been able to penetrate the same customers over and over again.

So just to make this land, because you're very inspirational, but you're at 400 million of revenue. To make it maybe actionable for a five or $10 million founder in the audience is the lesson, hey, if you guys have a sales team and you're trying to sell to a CMO, but also the CTO, try and figure out how to get the same sales reps selling to both. Don't resist the urge to split it.

Or if it doesn't work, immediately recognize that and figure out a super efficient way to do it. And, and so candidly for us, at Par, we went relatively decentralized. So our org designs are really much more like Amazon than they are a clean SaaS business because I believe in accountability. And so every product manager or GM has a P and L. It's really objective. It's an intense environment. But it's also a fun place to work because, you know, if I look at the average, this is, we don't hire based on age, but the average age of the GMs who run $100 million P and L's at our company is like 30. You know, we've got somebody that's 26 or 27, and we've got somebody that's like 35.

Wow.

And so it create, when you have a decentralized org chart, it gives you, it creates a lot more opportunity, right? Because you can be like, I'm the GM of a $5 million revenue line. You still feel like that's yours, that you're baby, own every single decision. And so the point I'm making is if you've got multi-product with multi-persona, figure out quickly if you can do it out of one bag or two. And if you do two, rebuild your design off that.

We've got about five more minutes left with Saab. And then when we have Nicholas on stage next with Shlee Piper, we'll talk more about how they've increased their ACV from 6K to 30K, which might be more actionable versus selling, which is incredible at $23 million. Was that per year customer burger?

Yeah.

This is wild. How many of those can you sell in a year? How many Burger Kings are there?

That's our biggest. We generally try to get a few of these sort of plus $5 million plus deals a year.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so is this still actively how you're thinking about product? Do we have any big M&A on the horizon?

We're taking a breather on M&A because we've... M&A has worked categorically well for us. You know, when we announced these deals, our stock was 39 bucks. Today it's 50 plus. But more importantly, when we look at M&A, we go in before we close a deal with a financial plan, an organizational design plan, like who reports to who, and a cultural plan, which is how are we going to integrate these cultures? And you know, the rigor I think we do upfront allows these deals to work. Because I would tell you, if you asked people at our leadership team, you know, did this company, Stu's, that we bought work? We'd be like, holy crap. Not only is the deal a home run, like it changed us for the better. And so we do a ton of work upfront. Now, the challenge is that it creates a lot of change inside, right? You've got a bigger product org, you've got a bigger sales org, you've got different people who now are like, hey, I've got a different opinion.

And so I think you need a little time to digest these deals and make them swim on the same song sheet. So literally yesterday, I just announced an updated set of values across our company that incorporates the two new companies we acquired. So they feel engendered as part of the company. But short answer is we are deeply focused on owning the enterprise restaurant. And so we don't want you to go to 50 vendors. We want you to go to five, and we want us to be 80% of that. And so we will continue to sort of look to build or buy. But today, it's built.

Yep. This acquisition you guys are seeing on the screen, many founders today doing 10, 20 million bucks of revenue would say, man, I'd love to get a 10x forward-looking ARR multiple or a 15x forward-looking ARR multiple. Or if you're raising around, you'd love to raise at a 20x ARR multiple. This guy got a deal done at a 14x EBITDA multiple. So ignore top line or bottom line. What would be the equivalent to ARR? Yeah, 4.5x ARR. I mean, are you a genius negotiator? How did you get this done? Tell us the dirt of how you got leverage on a company like this to sell to you for so cheaply.

Well, I would say this, the founder, after we got the deal done, didn't talk to me for 30 days because he was so pissed, but we're now really good buddies.

That's how you know you got a good deal.

So I'll turn that more to advice for the people in the room. If you're building your company to be sold, you should go in assuming that you're going to get the median multiple at best. You don't go in assuming you're at 10, or 20, or 30. And the reason why is, I come to this conference, and I'm part of the reason I love it is, I'll meet people and say, "Hey, I'm growing 100% a year, I'm worth 10x." And I'm like, "Well, it's your churn, what's your ACV?" And I'm like, "Nah, you're worth like 4." And the reason why, as an acquirer of software companies, those 10, 15x companies are incredibly rare now, and they should stay that way, because that's the way it's always been when that period of hype is gone. And so you should be building, assuming that the long-term SaaS index for literally 20 years, since SAP and Oracle started disclosing their recurring revenues, has always been around 5.5 to 6x XTM revenue.

That is the median of the public companies. And so if you're a $3 million revenue company, you're going to get a lower multiple. If you're a $20 million, you might get a higher multiple, because the size helps. But that's kind of what you should bank on. And if you're banking on the 10, or 20, or 30, you're really, you're getting crazy, because it can happen, but it's tough. And we, as a company, have spent 15x, but our stock was trading at 30x. And so, it's tough. But I would anchor yourself on the median and work backwards.

Can you talk to us more, as we wrap up here, a little bit more on why you choose to pull this specific graph out in your public calls?

Yeah, and I think for all of you to think about it this way, too, which is, ARR is not a tool for fundraising. ARR is a tool, because it's a future proxy of cash flow. The reason why ARR became a metric in software is that, in hypergrowth for software, investors back in the day didn't understand that when you signed a deal, that revenue was going to be there for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. And so they created this metric of ARR. But the reason why it's important is that investors will say, "Okay, under every dollar of ARR, there is 10 cents, 15 cents, 20 cents of future free cash flow." And that's actually what they're underwriting. They're not underwriting your revenue, they're underwriting your future free cash flow. And so, when we were a money losing company for a long time, I wanted a way to go to the market and say, "Well, how can I tell you, I know we're going to be crazy profitable, and I'm going to explain that to you, but are we more efficient or less efficient?" And so what we disclosed was, we said to our

For every share of Par you own, underneath that dollar, that one share that you own, is way more recurring revenue than when you had before, which means way more future free cash flow. And so as you guys grow your businesses over time, you should be thinking about if I've, you know, your number of shares on the bottom and your ARR on top. And that should be growing incredibly quickly. So not like 10%. That should be.

Just to be clear, because I know most, most private companies are like, okay, crap. I don't even know how many outstanding shares do I have? Like login to Carta, go look at your, go dig up that old Google Drive folder that you forgot what you named. It's gonna take you 30 minutes to search the right terms to look it up. But you have somewhere where you have an outstanding number of shares. Take that number, divide it into your ARR, and that's how you.

A way to think about it is if, let's just pretend you're growing 100% a year. And then you raise a growth round for $25 million. You sell a third of your company. Now your share count is a third bigger. But if your growth rate goes from 100 to 110%, you actually didn't create value. And so I oftentimes look at that when we're acquiring companies. Hey, did you actually need that money? Or was that money just like a press release? And so it's a really interesting way to kind of look back and say, hey, did like, did it make sense? Can you actually put that money to create more value?

So guys, I would say a genius deal maker. One of the youngest publicly traded SaaS CEOs back in 2018 at 39 years old has since more than doubled the business. Was it 34?

39 now, yeah.

Oh, my God. My God.

Making me old.

Now I feel like I haven't accomplished anything. All right, SaaS Open's growing. We're gonna have 20,000 people.

By the way, super shout out for Nathan. One of the biggest mistakes, if any of you've met me or if I've been in the room trying to buy your company or invest in your company, the single greatest mistake that founders make is TAM. They overestimate how big their opportunity is. And then they go raise super dilutive venture capital money. And so I am a wild champion of the services that his business offers because candidly, it sets the market in the way that it should be run. And so I'm a big fan.

Well, on the note of being open and transparent, I will tell you guys, part of us lending money is we have to put in our own capital. So I didn't want to give up control. I didn't want to give up equity. Are you, I haven't asked, are you comfortable sharing these numbers?

Yes.

So how much did you put in in the Series A? You don't remember, that's a good problem. If that means you're not thinking about it, it's wonderful. It was 8 million on a 90 pre, right? And that 8 million, we basically still all have in the bank because we have a team of 12 people doing, you know, north of 10 million, I was gonna say north of $10 million of revenue. But you allowed us to do that, we've stayed disciplined, we'll keep staying disciplined. We only care about AR per employee because we want to be here as a lender in 10 years, managing a billion, 20, 30 billion. So, thank you for that. But anyways, back to Saav. 34-year-old in 2018, third fastest-growing publicly traded company on a 100% basis, has transitioned the business from heavy hardware to heavy SaaS. Catch him in the hallway if you can. It's gonna be a fast-paced, fun conversation.

Also is deploying hundreds of millions in M&A, bringing it all together. And again, doing this in the very hard spotlight of being a publicly traded CEO. Please help me give it up for Saav Nitesh Singh. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, man. Appreciate you. [applause]