Transforming Restaurant Profitability: How Franklin Junction Maximizes Extra Kitchen Capacity

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspote and today’s guest is Rishi Nigam, CEO and co-founder of Franklin Junction. They are the world’s first and largest host kitchen marketplace, not to be confused with ghost kitchens.

They help restaurants earn extra revenue by using their spare kitchen capacity to prepare meals for delivery-only brands. Through this approach, they help businesses expand their reach, boost revenue, and bring more delicious meals to customers in new markets. Franklin Junction was also named one of the world’s most innovative companies by Fast Company in 2023, which reflects their leadership in the virtual dining space.

Rishi (00:36)
So.

Anthony Codispoti (00:53)
Before starting Franklin Junction, Rishi honed his hospitality and entrepreneurship skills across multiple ventures, including as director of operations at Aramark and vice president at NASCAR. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line.

Rishi (01:16)
Thank you.

Anthony Codispoti (01:21)
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All right, back to our guest today, CEO and co-founder of Franklin Junction, Rishi. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Rishi (01:56)
Thanks, Anthony. I’m excited to be on with you. Appreciate the opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti (02:00)
All right, so before Franklin Junction, which I’m really excited to talk about, you had a pretty impressive career in sports and entertainment, including a role as a VP at NASCAR. Can you tell us about the work that you did there and how the skills you learned would later become helpful in what you’re doing today?

Rishi (02:20)
Yeah, absolutely. I started working in sports venues when I was in college. I actually worked in restaurants on the college campus and then just found this great connection where I was studying business. I really enjoyed food service and I played competitive sports my whole life. And all of those things could come together in running the business of food service at sports venues. So it was a way for me to kind of continue that dream.

of somehow being connected to pro sports. I wasn’t obviously going to make it with my on-field talent. And so this is a way for me to explore a few different passions, but also use my business skills. And so I started working in minor league baseball venues, graduated to NBA, NFL, major league baseball venues with Aramark. And it was a great time. was early 2000s. At that time,

We were going from just basic hot dogs, burgers and nachos at sports venues to actually incorporating local restaurants, celebrity chefs, national chains. So there’s a lot of innovation going around with the experience that fans wanted inside a venue. And the food service was one of the key ways to lead that experience change. So after several years of doing that with NASCAR, I had an opportunity to go over to

Excuse me, with Aramark, I had an opportunity to go over to NASCAR. And at NASCAR, those services were owned in-house. So we did not outsource to an Aramark or another concessions company. We actually owned the food service, retail merchandise, and all of those experiences within our company. So that was a unique dynamic. There was the track ownership, which we owned the tracks.

Then we were selling the tickets, were doing the marketing and we’re running all of the services in-house. So rather than necessarily having a contractual relationship, we all functioned as one company, which I think allowed us to deliver ⁓ more of a unified ⁓ experience to fans. However, these NASCAR venues were stuck in the sixties basically. So ⁓ forget nachos and hot dogs and burgers, they barely had that. So in some of these concession stands, they were just selling cold sandwiches or just

beer, mean, there wasn’t even cooked food. So ⁓ the infrastructure was really lacking. The thought process, they had not had any management come in from those outside venues. So they didn’t realize what had been happening the last 50 years, let alone the last 20 years. so basically my mission was come in there and bring NASCAR venues to the 21st century.

And I’m very thankful that we were able to have the right resources to do that, to build a team that could deliver that, to have financial resources that would allow us to create those experiences. ⁓ And then most importantly, to have fans that were very engaged with what we were trying to do. And they were, you know, very easy adopters, of course, like they’re like, yeah, happy to not bring a cooler and buy food at the track if you sell me something good at a decent price. And so all of those things were great.

I got to learn a lot of different things there that you normally don’t get. mean, I was in my mid to late 20s when I went to NASCAR and got to take over that division, what it’s like to create and sell a vision, identifying who the stakeholders are, creating a strategy, leading collaboration with people who don’t necessarily want to collaborate. So how do you inspire them and get them on board? And then…

you know, creating ambassadorship with some of those people that do participate and enjoy that success of that. So it was really cool, man. I mean, there’s a lot of media out there from the things that we did during that time there. But I do think we fundamentally transformed some of these racetracks where, you know, they were places where the race almost took a backseat to the rest of the fan experience inside the venue. And I think, you know, our team, as well as a lot of other

Folks that we work with deserve credit for bringing the relevance of racetracks back to these communities.

Anthony Codispoti (06:35)
So that’s really interesting. Your time at Aramark, you were involved in elevating the food experience from nachos and hot dogs to something more upscale, local and, you know, celebrity chefs and whatnot, which had to have been a cool experience to be a part of. And then you’re sort of taking, I don’t know, in terms of progress, a giant step backwards to the NASCAR experience, which wasn’t even to nachos and hot dogs. Were you surprised at sort of the state of things? Because it’s not like

Rishi (06:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (07:04)
NASCAR is some little upstart. They’ve got some deep pockets. They’ve been around for a while.

Rishi (07:10)
Yeah, I don’t think so. I don’t think I was surprised because I’m from North Central Georgia. I think I know the core customer that NASCAR has. And I also know the logistics challenges of being able to develop to a venue of that size and a crowd that size. So when you go to a normal ⁓ local ballpark, a stadium or arena, they have dozens, if not hundreds of events every year.

It’s easier for them to spread out that investment over the course of a few years and get and see a return on it and serve their customers. It’s also a very consistent customer. But NASCAR, it’s more of a traveling road show, right? We’re going to these racetracks week to week and in a given racetrack, it may be only operational one or two weekends a year. And you’re basically building a little town to serve a few hundred thousand people. And then it’s over after one week. And so.

the same investment does not pencil out for them. And that customer is not looking for, let’s say you have season tickets to your local baseball team, you’re probably not going to eat funnel cakes and nachos every week. Most of the time, you’re probably just gonna eat a burger or a grilled chicken sandwich or something a little bit lighter. You might not even eat because it’s just somewhere that you go a few days a week every week for six months. But when you’re going to NASCAR, you wanna eat.

a lot of different things and experience things that you’re only gonna get once a year. It’s almost more like the state fair than it is like having season tickets to a normal event. ⁓ that’s also something different is like you have to understand what is that consumer’s needs. And again, like I said, we were in the hospitality business secondly, our primary business was actually logistics. It’s like, okay, we gotta build town. There’s no plumbing, there’s no sewage.

We gotta make sure we have sanitation in place for food service. So understanding what you can do is different than what you want to do.

Anthony Codispoti (09:07)
And so how did you sort of find that intersection of, we would love to be able to offer the celebrity chef like we did at Aramark, but here’s the actual infrastructure that we have to deal with. Was there still some kind of a significant investment in equipment that you could take from location to location that allowed you to do other things?

Rishi (09:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

for sure.

Yeah, just in my seven years, we had over a billion dollars in capital improvement projects. so that included, you know, infrastructure, whether it comes to our side of it, kitchens and and hospitality areas, but also goes into fan areas and restrooms and even simple things like electricity, Internet, plumbing, you know, just be, you know, to be able to create these areas. So lot of credit to the France family for continuously investing in their fans and their and their

and their racetracks to make sure that they are not just up to standards, but defining what the new standard is. So if they can do this for racetracks and for hospitality for events that are once or twice a year, it actually puts the pressure back on the stadiums that are operational every single week to push the envelope a little bit. So that was cool. mean, I think having resources was ⁓ a key reason for why I went to NASCAR. When I was looking at other opportunities, I’m like, you know,

There’s a lot of teams that I interviewed with, a lot of other venues, ⁓ opportunities, even things like the Olympics and stuff. it’s just like, they don’t all necessarily have the same resources that somebody like NASCAR does. And so I think ⁓ having resources to actually execute your vision is super important.

Anthony Codispoti (10:46)
I it. Okay, before we jump into where the idea to start Franklin Junction came about, maybe just a quick definition for people to clarify the difference between host kitchen, which is what you are versus ghost kitchen, which is something a lot of people heard of coming out of the pandemic.

Rishi (10:56)
Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the ghost kitchen idea is that there are ⁓ restaurant operators or brands that want to be in a new market, but they are willing to go operate that. So what a ghost kitchen does is create new infrastructure for operators and says, here’s a building we built, you know, 20 subdivided kitchens in there, and we’re going to go lease those out to people. So think of it like we work for restaurants and we know how well we work worked out. So.

So the idea that we had is that, well, infrastructure is not really the issue. ⁓ know, there’s not really that many operators necessarily looking for more spaces. What there are is a lot of kitchens that already have underutilized kitchen capacity. And so we created a model that we call host kitchen, H-O-S-T. in our model, you take existing ⁓ kitchens like restaurants, hotels, convenience stores, et cetera.

that are maybe not maximizing the use of the equipment and staff that they’ve already invested in, and they can use that to produce delivery orders for other brands. ⁓ So I would liken that to Airbnb. It’s maybe a little more complex than Airbnb because we’re in the food production business, but ⁓ there’s no new capital being deployed, no new capacity being created, you’re monetizing existing underutilized capacity.

Anthony Codispoti (12:27)
So where did the actual idea percolate from? As you’re describing it, it’s like, that makes a lot of sense. But how did you have the insight that there were a lot of these underutilized kitchens out there?

Rishi (12:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, so my co-founder is a guy named Aziz Hishim. Aziz had the original idea for this several years before COVID even. So we launched in 2020 during COVID, but several years before that, he had mentioned the idea to me. He’d already been thinking about it. Aziz is one of the, you know, at one point was one of the largest franchise operators in the country, heavily awarded by a lot of organizations, former chairman of the International Franchise Association.

So somebody that really understands a variety of brands and operations and has also invested tens of millions of his own dollars into building these restaurants all over the country. so Aziz had been dealing with this issue for decades and it’s something that was a persistent and pernicious issue as he said, across all of his brands where they had underutilized kitchen capacity. So he had already had the wheels spinning about, okay, I have X amount of these, you know,

these kitchens and I have this other brand that I could maybe leverage in this market. How do I make that happen? So he’d already been thinking about the idea. He had discussed it with me prior to, I think when COVID happened, we were already trying to take this idea to more of a beta state. I had just left another group I was ⁓ partnered up with on a separate business. And, you know, that’s when we kind of got together and said,

Is this the right time to build this host kitchen idea? And of course, COVID was the kick in the butt that we needed. It’s like, yeah, all these kitchens are about to shut down their dining rooms and rely strictly on delivery. So let’s get moving on this. so that was where we saw the big opportunity. The idea resonated with me when he first told me about it, because I think back to about 20, this is, can’t believe I’m saying this, almost 25 years ago when I was in college.

working at a pizza shop, we had three pizza ovens and every Monday morning we would throw away the leftover dough that didn’t sell over the weekend and shut down two of the three pizza ovens for midweek. And then the next weekend we would turn on all the ovens again and make a ton of pizzas for the weekend and then shut it down again. Our owners, as well as some of us that worked at the restaurant, worked on an idea where we would take this leftover dough and stretch it out into loaves of bread, basically.

and created a sandwich concept that would allow the ovens to be on, the dough not to get wasted, and something that would serve the students midweek when they didn’t necessarily want to eat pizza late night. So that became a sandwich concept, something lighter, something more in tune with lunch, ⁓ something even professors wanted. So it was something that allowed us to utilize our equipment and the ingredients that we already had and cut down on waste and improve profitability.

You’re gonna know this, some of our listeners may not know this, but there was no Uber or DoorDash 25 years ago. So we marketed that by getting a second phone line and flyering a bunch of cars and dorms and that’s how we told people. So if there’s a call online one, we knew it was for pizza. If there’s a call online two, it was for sandwiches. And we were able to launch a virtual concept that way. this is some.

Anthony Codispoti (15:49)
And how did it work?

Rishi (15:51)
It was great. was phenomenal. I mean, they’re still selling it 25 years later. I just checked the website the other day in preparation for this call. like, yeah, they’re still crushing it with the grinders. so, ⁓ you know, I thought that was pretty cool. you know, restaurant operators are very in tune with what’s going on with their business. They’re very creative. So, you know, when we discussed this idea with people that have never worked in restaurants or owned a restaurant,

It seems like a very foreign or super genius idea, but when we talk to restaurant operators, they’re like, yeah, man, I’ve been trying to figure this out for years. So they’ve already been thinking like that. This is just kind of a eureka, like, yes, what we need ⁓ is a partner who’s created some recipe for success to do this.

Anthony Codispoti (16:35)
interesting. See, I had assumed that going in and trying to have these conversations like, hey, would you make somebody else’s food is going to be just an uphill climb. But so many of these operators are like, no, we’ve had the same idea. Yes, please help us sign this up.

Rishi (16:44)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, I would say it’s a blend of both. mean, there’s 700,000 restaurants out there in America. So we hear all sorts of objections as well as support. So that’s a lot of what our job is, is just filtering that out and figuring out how this can be appealing to a majority of them.

Anthony Codispoti (17:06)
What’s the biggest objection that you run into and how do you speak to it?

Rishi (17:10)
Well, I think the main one that we get is rarely anything to do with us. It’s not like, I don’t want to create another brand or bring these items in. It’s usually other priorities that they have. There’s a lot of tectonic shifts going on in our industry around labor models, technology integrations. People are revamping their entire tech stacks the way they think about point of sale and restaurant service. ⁓

Etc. And then there’s also challenges with cost of goods. Food cost has increased at a faster rate in the last four years than it has in the previous 20 years. so there’s just a lot of other challenges. And what happens is that we are a quote good idea, but we get deprioritized with some of the other issues. And so I think that’s just it. It’s just finding a timing and it’s saying, when we have ⁓ a few months to spare, we’d love to integrate your concept into it. it’s.

I think rarely at this stage, five years into it, do we get objections about things that we could do better with our business model. It’s just figuring out the right time to slot in with them.

Anthony Codispoti (18:15)
And so when you have a conversation like that where they’re like, yeah, this is intriguing at not right now because of X, Y, Z, what’s sort of your business process to keep in touch with those folks, stay top of mind with them without sort of being annoying.

Rishi (18:30)
Yeah, well, we didn’t really have one other than me just checking in with people randomly or seeing them at conferences. A tremendous amount of our business still gets done at industry events, whether that’s conferences or roundtables, et cetera. So that’s still a big part of how we connect with customers in the restaurant industry. But last year, we hired a great ⁓ leadership person on the sales side and his name is David Goldstein. And David has…

been able to put a real CRM into place. It’s a software called Sunday. And we’ve put processes in place on how we do outreach, how we stay in touch with customers, how we onboard them, how we measure success with them, how we communicate with them. And that’s been huge. I we’ve gotten our onboarding times down from three months to three weeks. ⁓ Our close rates are much higher. Our top of funnel is a lot more productive. So a ton of credit to David.

and the rest of our team that’s onboarded the Sunday software and allowed us to have some more tools and processes in place for our GTM.

Anthony Codispoti (19:32)
Do you remember signing up the first customer? How did that go?

Rishi (19:35)
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Well,

to be fair, mean, were Aziz’s own restaurant, so they were Aziz’s restaurants. So I think it was pretty well received because he had management in place that already embraced agility and innovation. so that went pretty easy. But the first non-related customer we signed up, they were just, again, I don’t think…

Anthony Codispoti (19:40)
Okay.

Rishi (20:02)
I don’t think I’m at liberty to mention their name. They’re a public company, but I think they’re, you know, they were just interested in figuring out what to do with all these extra fryers they had purchased right before COVID. And they’re just like, bought a, you know, at that time, I know people weren’t ordering like French fries and chicken tenders or anything that was fried for delivery. Cause your delivery times are 45 minutes to an hour and it’s a horrible experience. And so a lot of brands didn’t even sell their fries for delivery back then just because they knew it was bad.

Fast forward to today, people are just buying French fries anyway. They’re like, I know they’re going to be cold and soggy. don’t care. want fries, you know? And so I think the expectations sadly were a little bit higher five years ago than they are now. So this company had just bought a bunch of fryers and, you know, to sell their chicken wings and fries and they were not able to. And, and, know, we just, come in there and we’re like, Hey, have you ever thought about using your fryer to make something else, you know, or another brand that you would be happy selling?

and they embraced it and it worked out pretty well.

Anthony Codispoti (21:02)
So as you give that specific example, it occurs to me that there has to be some kind of intersection of the Venn diagrams in terms of what that kitchen is set up to already produce and what, you know, sort of, what do you call the brand that comes in and uses their kitchens? What sort of cloud concepts? So the cloud concept, they have to be looking for that kind of a fryer for their food.

Rishi (21:22)
We call them cloud concepts. Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (21:31)
the host kitchen has to have that kind of fryer, right?

Rishi (21:35)
Yeah, I think most equipment is pretty universal in nature. If you went to, I’d say 50 % of restaurants across America, they’re gonna have very similar type of equipment, ovens, grills, ranges, fryers. And yes, there’s gonna be some different on specs and firepower and things like that, but all of those can be adjusted to make pretty much any food. And so it’s not that hardcore of a spec unless you have a very specific ingredient driven concept. For example, Chick-fil-A is gonna have a very specific fryer.

and you need to use that exact fryer spec, but does that mean that there’s no other fryer that can make fried chicken? No, that’s not the case. so I think ⁓ that is why we exist, is there is a lot of complexity in trying to sort through what that Venn diagram looks like. It’s something that hosts and brands are not going to be able to figure out on their own. ⁓ So where we sit here is evaluating

what are those common things that will allow a successful match? So with a host kitchen, it’s identifying location, supply chain, equipment, staff’s competencies, the demographics of a market, what suppliers they use, et cetera, to be able to figure out what is that capacity? What could you optimally make and where do you have room to make ⁓ more? And then vice versa, when we look at a cloud concept, it’s taking one of our brand partners and saying,

⁓ You know, where are you going to be most successful? What sort of equipment is required? What sort of supply chain is required? What sort of demographics are you you are you targeting? What’s your price point? And then figuring out what that matches. In the long run, we do have an algorithm for that. That is that that’s got a patent pending on it, but there’s going to be a tremendous amount of data through our existing matches and sales.

where people are gonna be able to log on to our website, fill out some information, and it’s automatically gonna create matches for them where they can sign up. In the short term, I think it still requires quite a bit of human intervention. There are, as I mentioned, 700,000 restaurants, but also tens of thousands of brands in America. So it still requires a bit of a human touch to figure out what’s gonna be the optimal match. But ⁓ yeah, it’s super exciting when you…

Look at the dozens of layers of data points that we have on both the host and concept side to figure out what creates an ideal match.

Anthony Codispoti (24:02)
So can you paint a picture for us in ⁓ like who these cloud concepts are? they brands that just sort of exist in the cloud, like they don’t have any of their own physical locations, or are they brands that maybe they’ve got a strong presence in the Northeast, ⁓ but they want to test the waters in the Southeast and see if their concept is sort of appealing to people?

Rishi (24:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a combination of all of those. So we have over 40 brands on our platform. And of those brands, I would say about five of those probably only exist as cloud concepts. Or maybe they don’t have brick and mortar street side. They may also have non-traditional locations like college campuses, stadiums that we spoke about earlier and stuff.

They may exist in that sense, but they’re not gonna be a restaurant that you walk into off of Main Street. That’s, like I said, about five of them. The rest of them are established, well-known restaurant brands. You have a combination of global brands, like a Nathan’s Famous. You have regional brands, like a Romano’s Macaroni Grill or a Milk Bar. And then you also have national brands, like a California Pizza Kitchen. So these could be emerging brands or legacy brands, but…

They’re brands that at some point want an extension to their brick and mortar network and wanna enter new markets without necessarily having to build stores in those markets. And so they’ll come to us as basically a growth lever and say, how can you get me into this market? Can we tap into your host kitchen network and do it that way? And that’s what we enable them to do.

Anthony Codispoti (25:45)
And so on the host kitchen side, before they agree to something, are they wanting to see a certain level of penetration or sales in other markets? Cause obviously there’s some setup involved. They got to learn how to make this thing and you know, get the packaging right and all of that. So they’re not going to want to do it for, I mean, if I came to you with an idea and like, Hey, I want to create, you know, Anthony’s pizza brand, you’re probably going to say, Anthony, you don’t really know food. You don’t know what you’re doing. Like this isn’t for you, right?

Rishi (25:56)
Sure.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. The host kitchens themselves, again, we work with primarily with small to mid-size enterprise restaurants. So these are restaurants that have anywhere from 25 to 2000 plus locations. They have their own brands. They value other brands. And so they understand that somebody with brand equity out there that has a story, that has a vetted product, that has an established supply chain,

that has quality marketing collateral is going to have longer sustainable sales and also going to be something that they can respectfully take to their employees or their operators and say, we’re gonna produce this food. So producing a brand name pizza might be a more attractive proposition to them than making Anthony’s pizza. And so I know, and I bet your pizza is delicious by the way. mean, the name like cold as potty, how can it not be, know, so. ⁓

But yeah, I do think that they appreciate the fact that ⁓ creating off a little bit of complexity for serving a brand has its merits. so, and to your earlier point, there are definitely brands out there that reject that. And they’re like, look, I have a well-established casual dining brand. I’m not going to serve another brand out of my kitchen. And for that, we have these handful of brands that maybe only exist as

virtual or non-traditional brands and they don’t see that as much of a threat or a conflict of interest for themselves.

Anthony Codispoti (27:44)
Can you give any metrics that show sort of the success for the host kitchen themselves?

Rishi (27:50)
Sure. So our target average is about $2,000 a week in top line revenue for restaurants. And as I mentioned, we’re normally targeting restaurants that are doing under $2 million in top line revenue every year. I would say the average restaurant in America, just based off the statistics from National Restaurant Association, is still doing about a million dollars a year in top line sales. So when we bring them, know, yeah, I would say most restaurants, right? So that’s…

Anthony Codispoti (28:14)
So you’re targeting most restaurants. Okay.

Rishi (28:19)
that $100,000 a year in top line revenue that we bring them could be anywhere from five to 10 % incremental revenue. And because the overhead’s already been paid for by their main operation, this incremental revenue only has food costs attached to it. So whatever additional ingredients you need to buy to produce this cloud concept is your only incremental cost. The staff’s already there, the kitchen’s paid for, the utility bills are paid for, your rent’s not going up if you make…

an extra 10 orders a day. So that allows them to have a really high margin on this business. So if you don’t have Franklin Junction, your core business is doing about a five to 7 % profit margin. That’s the average in America for restaurants. If you add Franklin Junction, this incremental 10 % revenue actually has about a 27 to 30 % profit margin just on that. So it can materially improve your four wall profit.

just by adding ⁓ a couple of concepts that, you it’s maybe 10 orders a day. So operationally not a heavy lift, but the power of Rinker mentality really, really shows through when you look back on your results.

Anthony Codispoti (29:27)
And then how do those orders get delivered to the customer? it, you you’re using like a DoorDash or an Uber Eats?

Rishi (29:34)
Yeah, you got it. So the orders are generally originated on those marketplaces. So we will list the cloud concept on those marketplaces. The order is then given to the host kitchen. The host kitchen produces the order, and then they hand it back out to the driver from that marketplace to take to the end user.

Anthony Codispoti (29:52)
You’ve obviously worked with some pretty big restaurant chains and I’ll leave it up to you you want to mention any of the names. Curious if there’s anything in particular that’s surprised you about how they operate and how they sort of look at this incremental revenue.

Rishi (29:58)
Sure.

Yeah, I like, you know, using Denny’s as an example. They’re a very large company. They’ve been around a long time. It’s a brand that was very important to me to get on board for a couple of different reasons. One is I probably ate at Denny’s like three days a week in college. So it was and I don’t think I ate there since college. So, I mean, it was it was like very important to me in my younger years. And I’m like, why isn’t Denny’s relevant to me anymore? So I really wanted to help help them kind of be successful. One.

Two is they’re 24 hours and they have full service kitchens. I mean, you could literally make anything in a Denny’s kitchen and they’re located in 1600 locations across America and they’re 24 hours. I find a lot of great value and as somebody who’s spent a lot of their life, you know, working till three, four, 5 a.m., I love the value of a restaurant that’s just there for people to eat at. And so I really wanted them to continue to be successful.

in that 24 hour business model. And then lastly, in just like conversations with their leadership, I was really inspired by their ability to kind of think globally and act locally. And so, you know, they thought about the Denny’s brand and how it’s evolving, but at the same time, they were willing to partner with us to make their franchisees and operators successful at an individual store level by helping them gain profitability.

Allowing us to use our model to drive those overnight sales which would help keep them open 24 hours and then bringing variety to these markets so people like me who have maybe you know graduated from ⁓ Eating late night at Denny’s could now still order Online variety of cuisine and it’s still made by my local Denny’s so so I’m still having that sort of ⁓ Contact so I really thought the whole story kind of came together with them and and they’re somebody who

you know, live and breed that culture of again, like thinking, thinking big, but acting tactically, tactically.

Anthony Codispoti (32:09)
So yeah, I was a college student once, ⁓ stayed up a little bit later than I do now. mean, outside of that market, is there much of a demand for sort of this late night kind of food?

Rishi (32:21)
Yeah, everywhere. mean, to be honest, it’s fastest growing day part that we’ve witnessed in the last six or seven quarters in a row now. So I think the enablement of ⁓ technology as a career choice for a lot more people, basically, when people say they work in AI or tech, I’m like, well, what’s that mean? Everything is AI or tech. And so people are working, ⁓ you know,

at their own hours, a lot of times their own location, work from home or these hybrid schedules have allowed people to have schedules that are a lot more flexible. I think you have a lot more individual contributors now because of that. ⁓ And so just, think seeing the overall trend of how people work and live has changed. And shockingly, most people are not built to wake up at 7 a.m. every day, commute for an hour to work, work nine to five, not see your kids, not take your pets for a walk and then come home.

buy groceries, make dinner, rinse and repeat. so I think this has allowed people to maybe live ⁓ what their best life is and what that means for a lot of people. Could be eating late night or midday, maybe having lunch at 3 p.m. or dinner at 9 p.m. or maybe dinner at 4 p.m. and then go to the gym and go to bed. And so I think just having that flexibility.

is probably going to make us all better and happier people in the long run. And so we do see a lot more people that prefer to work late night and they order at midnight 1, 2 a.m. and that might be their lunch break. So, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (33:53)
Interesting.

Rishi, as you think back to kind of where you guys were and how things operated when you first started versus where you are now, I’d be curious to hear about maybe one of the more significant changes that you made in that in-between time that has really helped in terms of overall customer experience, efficiency, or whatever it might be.

Rishi (34:16)
Sure. Well, I think we had a lot of aspirations from the get-go to be lean and be a technology-enabled company. And what I mean by that is our customers, restaurants, work on very lean margins. They don’t have the ability to pay high prices to cover large overheads for their tech partners. So if we’re going to come on board and offer them something, it has to be at a price point that makes sense for them, at a margin that makes sense for them.

And we have to make money doing it, otherwise we’re not gonna sustain. I don’t think we ever set out to build a model for venture capitalists and take a bunch of money and redistribute it to restaurants through cheaper free products. so we wanted to build a business that we thought would be lean and tech enabled that would allow us to offer those attractive price points and remain profitable. And I’d like to take credit for a lot of the things that we’re doing now, but.

It’s really more of just this global outpouring of growth around AI and technology that’s allowed us to fast forward a lot of the roadmap we had. So all the things that we see out here, this is not new. AI has been in development for decades, probably since, you know, I was in high school, people were already working on AI solutions and stuff like that. So it’s not new. think we had a lot of AI and tech in our roadmap, but the evolution of platforms and being able to use APIs to build, you know, bots and

⁓ use ⁓ AI in different ways to help some of the repeatable processes we have. A lot of the data analytics we have, those things have allowed us to fast forward some of our growth and also get to better unit economics for everybody, for ourselves, for our customers, et cetera. So I think ⁓ that’s something that I was probably not forecasting to happen so fast. I thought we would have to invest more money into building this stuff, but…

I’ve talked to founders recently where, I mean, they’re building 1 million ARR companies and they have like one or two employees, right? Like they’ve got like 25, 50, a hundred different bots working for them and they’re doing all this stuff. you know, we’re certainly not on that level yet. We believe ⁓ in the hospitality business, you kind of always need a little bit of that human element. And that includes a lot of the stuff that we do, but we’re certainly implementing.

the tremendous amount of technology resources that were unaffordable or unavailable four or five years ago. And that’s been really awesome to see.

Anthony Codispoti (36:42)
Can you give a specific example of the ways that you’re leveraging AI tech or the agents and the bots?

Rishi (36:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, when you think about what we really do, it’s marketing. So we’re putting a new brand in a new location, and then we’re going and acquiring customers for it. So the host kitchen side is the infrastructure solution is there, but the host kitchen is ultimately a fulfillment partner for Franklin Junction. We’ve signed them up to make orders on our behalf for this brand that we’ve distributed into a new market. But how we actually grow sales is that we’ll go put a cloud concept on these third party marketplaces. And then we understand

how to target that customer with pricing, with ads, with promos, how to communicate to that customer ⁓ on their experience and then better refine that so this brand continues to grow in that market. And so a lot of the data that we’ve collected around that sales transaction and that relationship with the customer, there’s a lot of unique ⁓ things we can build around that. We can build a lot of rules around

when to target which customers, what they like, how much should we spend on that? What are other competitors of a similar product doing in that market? So we kind of know the push and pull on the marketing budget. ⁓ What are customers enjoying or not enjoying? What’s seasonal? What’s not seasonal? That lets you get into dynamic menuing and maybe automated pricing adjustments. And so a lot of that marketing used to be done even when we started.

on a very manual level. So we had built a lot of machine learning into our BI tools. But at that time, we were still sitting there and running regressions and trying to figure this out ourselves and saying, okay, here’s how we performed last week, last month, last quarter, let’s refine this marketing strategy. And that marketing calendar would be three months, four months, five months, six months out. And I think inherently,

selling online, selling digitally only with these brands allows us to be very agile and adjust our strategies, not even week to week, but on the fly. Like during a shift, you can adjust what’s available on a menu, what’s not available. Prices can be adjusted day to day. And I think we can take advantage of that through a lot of the automations that we built. So taking all of these marketing functions that were at one point very reactive and required a lot more brain power from the human side,

have now become using our platform very automated. And basically, we set a bunch of rules and we set budgets and now the computer basically digests the data points and it goes and executes different campaigns and strategies to drive sales optimally.

Anthony Codispoti (39:25)
So that’s the part that’s surprising to me. guess I didn’t realize that I thought you guys were primarily sort of the matchmaking service here, but you’re also taking over the marketing of the cloud concept.

Rishi (39:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, we actually own the license to the cloud concepts and we’re not sub-licensing that to the host kitchen. It’s still our license. So technically, let’s say we have 200 Nathan’s Famous out there. Those are Franklin Junction Nathan’s Famous locations ⁓ that exist. Those are under a… That’s a licensee, which is a similar concept, but maybe a little less restrictive.

Anthony Codispoti (39:52)
You’re sort of, are you like a franchisee in that respect or?

Rishi (40:01)
know, franchise rules have a lot of restrictions in place and they’re meant for brick and mortar or physical representations of a brand. License structures is what you use in more non-traditional settings like a sports venue, college campus, or in our setting, online marketplaces where you need a little more flexibility with the brand. So you’re not representing that you’re gonna be an exact one-to-one representation of that brand, but more that you are some sort of derivative business. So.

It’s certainly got the same requirements around certain things when it comes to recipes or production or execution of the food, but gives you a little more flexibility with menus, pricing and things like that, marketing for sure.

Anthony Codispoti (40:42)
And as you’re saying that I’m sort of like hitting myself like, duh, it makes a lot of sense because now your goals are really aligned, right? Like you guys want to help move as much product for both the host kitchen as well as the cloud concept as possible because then all three sort of partners in all of this win.

Rishi (40:49)
Yeah, 100%.

That’s right.

That’s right. That’s right. Grow the pie. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (41:01)
Yeah.

Fascinating. Have you had any of your cloud concepts sort of graduate into say, hey, we weren’t in Atlanta, Georgia before. We tested that market using Franklin Junction. It worked really well. Now we’re going to open up a physical location.

Rishi (41:19)
Yeah, we have seen that. We’ve seen even ⁓ brands enter from outside the country. You we’ve licensed Canadian brands, Japanese brands, European brands before and brought them over here. And they’ve used that as a test to see how it works in this market. It’s a zero cost way to penetrate a new country that otherwise might take many, many years and hundreds of thousands or millions in capital to do. And so I think we’ve been a platform for

not just within the states, but allowing for cross border penetration, which has been really, really cool. And then we’ve seen our host kitchens actually even have success with the brand and then go on to sign a franchise agreement for that brand and say, wow, this is doing so well on delivery through my kitchen. Why didn’t I just pop one open down the street? And that’s been a cool story too. So I definitely have seen kind of the network effects of being able to do that.

Anthony Codispoti (42:16)
⁓ Any plans for you to go and offer this to host kitchens ⁓ outside of the US?

Rishi (42:23)
I do think we’ll revisit that. in our early days, we definitely did that. We’ve done ⁓ England, ⁓ Europe. We’ve been in several countries in Europe, ⁓ Asia, Japan, Korea. We’ve tried a lot of other countries and we’ve done some exploratory work in Middle East and India and stuff. But, you know, we set our focus really on America coming out of COVID. We just saw that, you know, the growth was really great here.

The consumer purchasing power is great here. It’s our backyard. It’s everything we know really well. We have ⁓ deep contacts with supply chain partners, third-party marketplaces, and it’s a market that ultimately we understand through and through. So I definitely think that we will revisit international growth opportunities, but at the moment, we’re going to focus on the US and Canada and continue to see a lot of success there. And then once we feel like that, we have a significant ⁓

⁓ customer base here, then we may go back and revisit some other markets.

Anthony Codispoti (43:24)
As I think about ⁓ cloud concepts and host kitchens, you sort of need to have a balance there, but where is it that you are putting more of your energies to find more of?

Rishi (43:35)
Yeah, certainly host kitchens. think ultimately it’s more of a pull versus a push. So with the concepts, you’re kind of pushing and that’s the supply side of your ⁓ excuse me, the demand side of our equation. so unlimited number of brands ready to sign up with Franklin Junction and expand. mean, if I need a pizza concept, I think I can get 10 by the end of the day today. You know, they’d all be like, here’s my license. You know, here’s the ingredients. Knock yourself out.

and go get us live in these markets. The host side is more complicated because we go through a very heavy qualification process here. it’s not that there’s not just as many hosts that want to sign up and say, hey, I want to make more food. It’s that they’re making food on behalf of us and under technically our license of these brands. And so we want to make sure that they’re highly qualified when it comes to

production standards, sanitation and health standards, training standards, and that they’re really able to sustain and execute ⁓ operations to our standards. And as I mentioned earlier, I have a culinary background. Everybody at our company has spent anywhere from 10 to 30 plus years working in the industry. And we have people that have worked at places like Ritz-Carlton and stuff before. So there’s very high standards on our side on what we consider high quality execution.

And I think we’re a lot more measured on who’s gonna produce that food on our behalf. So ⁓ while there’s a big market out there, we believe that we need to be very judicious with who gets to produce that food on our behalf.

Anthony Codispoti (45:13)
So lot of energy being focused on scaling and activating those kitchens, the right kinds of host kitchens. I’m curious, Rishi, is there sort of like a bigger vision at play here? Like, do you see this model potentially transforming not just how restaurants operate, but how we think about food distribution and hospitality kind of in a bigger picture?

Rishi (45:20)
That’s right.

Yeah, my idea is to decouple this thought process that a restaurant is one unit. The restaurant’s actually composed of a few different modules. You have your dining room, which can be thematic and service-based. And then you have your kitchen, which is actually a production facility. It’s a factory to produce food. So the idea to transform the thinking that those two have to be tied together is something we want to get people away from.

The kitchen, the dining room is designed to service the on-premises people. The kitchen’s job is to maximize production and that includes the dining room, but also includes your side door where you can service customers that may be dining off premises. ⁓ And so what that does for, know, from an altruistic point of view is that it restores the restaurants. ⁓

importance within a community. think the restaurants are always a gathering spot somewhere where people want to explore new ideas, new concepts and experience hospitality. And as customers kind of get away from on-premises dining and go more towards dining anywhere, home, work, the park, their car, anywhere but inside a restaurant, I think we want to restore that relevance to where restaurants don’t feel like they have to be so reactive to that but can

take part in promoting that and saying, look, we are still ⁓ that central piece of providing that experience to you and doing that. So I think that’s one thing. ⁓ And then the other part to me is just thinking a little more broadly about how many eating occasions we can serve ⁓ these customers. It goes beyond restaurants. We have tried and tested successfully with hotels.

convenience stores, grocery stores, family entertainment centers, soon college campuses. And so we’ve proven that any kitchen can be converted into this virtual food hall that can serve customers. So the idea is just to create a little more responsibility around the infrastructure that we built in this country where we don’t need to pop up more kitchens that are continuing to suck on energy and…

Not get a return. We have a tremendous over saturation right now Which is why you see some industry leading brands not comping positively year over year quarter over quarter You’re like how can brand XYZ not you know be making more money than last year. It’s because there’s too much saturation in the industry and we continue to see new concepts building new infrastructure and ultimately ⁓ We’ve you know, we’ve created this pathway where

you know, existing infrastructure can still provide more variety. So you’re still solving that need of distributing new brands ⁓ and getting customers new variety, but not going out and ⁓ irresponsibly building new infrastructure, which is I think is is a drain. And it’s an eyesore. mean, if you drive around anywhere from New York City to rural America, there’s closed restaurants everywhere. And it’s kind of disappointing. Yet you still see

news of chains opening, know, hundreds of locations every year and you’re like, what’s going on here? So we’re trying to get all of that right sized a little bit.

Anthony Codispoti (49:01)
Rishi, setting aside humility, what is your personal superpower?

Rishi (49:07)
I would say communication has been really key to my success. It just shocks me how many emails and phone calls go unanswered by people that I try to reach out to or I look at people’s inboxes and I’m like, how do you have like 75 emails or a thousand emails you haven’t either deleted or responded to? And I think a lot of my success has just been

getting back to people and being respectful of their time. 90 % of the time, it’s a waste of my time, but the 10 % of the time, it turns into something, a positive business opportunity, a positive conversation, everything. I think just basic etiquette and responsibility to people has been really beneficial to me. having strong communication skills, good manners, and just being…

Authentic to people like just very simple things that make you a good person for society have been really good for my business as well So I I don’t separate the two ⁓ I’ve you can tell by the industries I worked in and the work I did these are jobs that are not 40 hours a week I mean I live at my job They were hundred hour week type of jobs every office I had in the sports industry had a futon in an office. So there’s many many nights I’ve slept at work and so ⁓

I would venture to say a lot of people in the hospitality industry can’t draw a line between personal and professional. And so I never tried to, I just said, you know, who I am as a person should carry over to my work. And that’s helped me be, I think, really successful.

Anthony Codispoti (50:43)
Maybe let’s take a look at the other side of that coin, Rishi, and talk about a serious challenge that you’ve had to overcome in your life, whether it’s personal or professional. How did you get through it what did you learn?

Rishi (50:53)
Sure, well, I’ll share a bit of both. On the personal side, I had a back injury about 17 years ago and I never could figure out the root cause, whether it was caused by sports or a car accident I had previously or work, whatever it was. But nonetheless, I ended up with a herniated disc and I walked around like a hunchback for six months. I refused to take time off of work. It’s 2008, there’s a crisis going on.

Half my friends are unemployed and I’m like, well, I’m surely not taking time off of a good paying job. And I suffered with it. And basically, this is in, you know, I ended up eventually just caving in one day and calling up the doctor and being like, all right, I’m ready for surgery and doing that. now I, you know, basically every three to five years, I kind of get this flare up and I got to work it out through physical therapy or whatever. But I consider that a mistake in my life. Like I should have actually put health first.

and said, you know what, if I’m off work for a couple of months, I’ll scrape by. I’d done a good job saving money and stuff, but it really wasn’t about the money. It was just ⁓ this incorrect prioritization of my work over my health. ⁓ so I’ve been very, you know, ⁓ very keen to like just being in touch with everything, my physical, emotional health, and just making sure that that never gets deprioritized for anything again. And so

⁓ so yeah, I, you know, it’s not like I don’t go in waves of going on diets and then splurging. I mean, you know, it’s, fine. I do all of that, but, ⁓ I certainly try to be a little bit more careful with if something’s wrong, taking care of myself so I can then perform optimally at work or at home or whatever it may be. So that’s, that’s kind of the personal side. The professional side is, know, we started this company when this whole VC world was out of whack and it felt like all of our peers were building these.

crazy venture-backed companies and we’re like, how come we can’t get a fat $30 million check for doing nothing for creating a PowerPoint deck? And it didn’t make sense to us maybe because we weren’t young startup kids. We were people in the restaurant industry with decades of experience. We had identified a real problem, a real solution, and we knew how to build and execute it. So, you know, it…

there’s a little devil on our shoulder sitting there and being like, well, build a, know, just say what they want to hear and go get that big venture check. And then there’s an angel sitting here and saying, no, do it the right way and it’ll pay off. And ⁓ I think we took the road less traveled. We had a company that we easily could have made attractive for a venture scalable business, but we knew it would never survive ⁓ in our industry and specifically.

Anthony Codispoti (53:38)
This was a separate

business idea. ⁓

Rishi (53:39)
This is Franklin Junction. So specifically

for the problem that we’ve created here, we knew this is something that required infrastructure building and some solid systems and processes. And it took something that, you know, we had to create a vision and sell it over a period of time. We had to go execute it and then create ambassadorship. And we knew this is a 10, 20, 30 year transformation of the industry. So it’s not a get rich quick scheme. We did not see a lot of value in

basically building a business for investors. So we kind of stayed a lot more lean. We’ve gotten quarters where our team has sacrificed salaries just so we can extend our roadmap or invest in technology. And I’m very thankful for that. So when you see all the people at Franklin Junction that are working on this, they’re truly building something that they’re committed to, something they have a lot of conviction in.

something that ⁓ we see a lot of success with year over year. We see the growth happening. We see our restaurants doing well. And I think that gives us a ⁓ lot of energy and motivation to keep going. And so ⁓ we’re very close here to where we basically bootstrap this thing to profitability, never raise institutional capital. And it’s actually kind of rewarding. So it’s been a long five years. We know the next year or two are still gonna be.

⁓ critical for us, but we feel very excited about where we’re headed and the fact that we’ve done it kind of on our own accord. And meanwhile, we’ve seen a lot of our ⁓ peers that did kind of follow more of the money road, not make it as a company. And it’s kind of sad because you saw a lot of good solutions kind of go away with that. Good companies go away with that and a lot of money, just investor money get wasted. So.

Anthony Codispoti (55:17)
Hmm.

Rishi (55:26)
It was kind of sad, but it was very validating to us that we’re doing things the right way.

Anthony Codispoti (55:31)
You know, and tip of the hat to you, because that’s not easy to do when you see sort of folks around you going down this path. And in the moment, it feels and appears to be like the right path and it’s very successful and it’s very fruitful for them. But, you know, you guys had a different vision, 10, 20, 30 years. That doesn’t really align with institutional capital, right? They’re looking for a faster sort of turnover. And so, yeah, leaner years kind of leading up to now, maybe, you know, next year too.

Rishi (55:52)
That’s right.

Anthony Codispoti (56:01)
⁓ But then it sounds like you guys are really well positioned to kind of hit an inflection point. This is really going to take off and you’ve maintained that equity internal.

Rishi (56:11)
Yeah, well, we built something that is really powerful and I can’t do it myself. So all the credit goes to my fellow team here that has all thrown in, but also our contractors, our vendors. A lot of people have actually sacrificed their normal rates or even wrote off invoices because they believe in what we’re doing and they support us. And so we built this little ecosystem here that really supports what we’re doing. And it’s truly been

a gift to be able to work with all of these people that are all building what we are. And I could tell you there’s no shortage of testimonials out there that’ll tell you that this has helped a lot of restaurants from closing their doors. And that means keeping people employed, keeping brands alive in a market, putting a few extra bucks in employees’ pockets. I think all of those things make such a big difference. So it’s…

Anthony Codispoti (56:55)
Wow. Wow.

Rishi (57:09)
It’s very validating. mean, you can walk into one of our customers restaurants and they’re happy and they’re just like, man, we got an extra few hundred bucks this week thanks to this solution. And so it’s cool. I mean, I think ultimately that’s what we’re trying to prove is that there is a better way to run your restaurant.

Anthony Codispoti (57:31)
Rishi, has there been a particular ⁓ book or a podcast, a course, some kind of resource that’s been really helpful to you that you might recommend to our listeners?

Rishi (57:45)
Well, I am a voracious reader, although I’m pretty behind since I started building a company. It should probably be the other way. I should probably read more, but I’ve probably got about 45 books that I haven’t read yet. And I keep buying books. Like every week or two, there’ll be like an Amazon box. And my wife’s like, what are you doing? And I’m like, so I need like an extra bookcase for all the books I haven’t read yet. But I’m gonna get to them. I think one of the most meaningful ones, it’s not somebody who…

philosophically or politically I always agree with, but Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters are priceless. mean, like everybody in business should be reading those every year. I mean, it’s just somebody that is super intelligent, has made a lot of good decisions, but a lot of ⁓ questionable decisions, but somebody who’s not afraid to course correct and speaks in plain English. And you just don’t get people that are on that level that can bring themselves back down to earth.

and just talk to you like a normal person. And it’s somebody who feels like ⁓ they owe it to their shareholders to be very transparent in the way they manage the decisions they make and just reflecting back on both short-term and long-term effects of those decisions. so ⁓ I like to read those. I’ll reference back letters that were written before I was born. And every year I like to skim through or dive in sometimes on a topic that.

may be interesting to me and I actually pulled a quote out from one last year that I read. So I think this is a 2024 one if my file name is correct. in there, there’s a little blip where he talks about even on page one mistakes that they made at Berkshire. And so he mentions in here, I’m just gonna read this little passage. So he said, during the 2019 to 2023 period,

I have used the words mistake or error 16 times in my letters to you. Many other huge companies have never used either word over that span. Amazon, as I should acknowledge, made some brutally candid observations in its 2021 letter. Elsewhere, it has generally been happy talk and pictures. I’ve also been a director of large public companies at which mistake or wrong were forbidden words at board meetings or analyst calls. That taboo implying managerial perfection always made me nervous.

And so I just thought, know, again, this is a little blip out of what it’s a 15 page letter, but it’s so important for both your personal and professional development to read something like that. And from somebody who is so accomplished and of that status, it’s nice to see that humility and just kind of realign yourself with how you’re ⁓ running your life and your business. So that’s just one thing, but I guarantee you every letter you read will have.

five little nuggets like that. And ⁓ it’s just a constant source for me that I reflect back on.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:40)
Yeah, I really appreciate that honesty and transparency. ⁓ Rishi, I’ve just got one more question for you, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. First, I’m going to invite all of our listeners to go ahead and hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app. We’ve had a really great and interesting conversation here today with Rishi Nigam from Franklin Junction. And I want you to continue to get more great content like this. Rishi, I also want to let people know the best way to either get in touch with you or the brand. What would that be?

Rishi (1:01:09)
Sure, Well, the best way to follow news on Franklin Junction is to follow us on LinkedIn. And you can just follow our channel. You can connect with me directly, but we post updates on there every week. New cloud concept partners, new host kitchen partners, success stories, and just general knowledge about the food tech business and how restaurant e-commerce is evolving. So a lot of great stuff on there. And then…

If you want to reach out to us about our services, you can go to Franklinjunction.com and there’s a simple couple question form you can fill out there and we get back to you immediately.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:43)
Great. And last question for you today, Arushi, is you think about 12 months out into the future. We’ve had a nice conversation here today. You and I reconnected a year from now and you’re celebrating something. One thing. What is that thing that you’re super excited about?

Rishi (1:01:59)
That’s fantastic. I mean, I’d love to double the size of our employee base. I mean, I think that’s ⁓ metric for growth for us is that we have some internal metrics around revenue per full-time employee, customers per full-time employee. And so we have some pretty high bars there on how we can continue to be an efficient and productive, ⁓ but very tactical company. And so I’d love to have enough business where we can double the number of people that we have working here, but haven’t maintained or…

improved on those metrics and continue to be a very ⁓ robust solutions provider for our customers.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:34)
Well, that’s some pretty ⁓ aggressive growth that you’re looking forward to in the next 12 months. That’s awesome. Rishi Nigam from Franklin Junction. want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Rishi (1:02:38)
Yeah, yes.

Thank you, Anthony. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:50)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.