Scaling Restaurant Operations: James Walker’s 30-Year Path to Digital Innovation

Anthony Codispoti : 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 Codispoti and today’s guest is James Walker, CEO and board member at Lunchbox. They are a restaurant technology company based out of New York that helps restaurants own their digital future. They offer a single platform for multi-channel ordering, B2B catering, and guest engagement, making it simpler for restaurant groups to connect with customers and boost online ordering. Under James’s leadership, Lunchbox secured a new funding round led by Shift4 and continues to receive praise for its innovative solutions. Before joining Lunchbox, James spent over 30 years in the hospitality industry holding senior roles with Subway, Nathan’s Famous, and Cinnabon. While serving as North American VP for Subway, he oversaw more than 28,000 locations, refining global strategies and improving guest experiences. He is known for scaling operations and driving digital transformation wherever he goes. We’re excited to learn how James blends vision with hands-on leadership to shape the future of restaurant tech. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad-Back 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. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications in a way that actually puts more money in your staff’s pockets and the company’s too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted net profits over $412,000 a year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. Alright, back to our guest today, the CEO of Lunchbox Tech, James Walker. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

James Walker : My pleasure and thanks. That was a voluminous introduction. I always think it’s interesting because I’ve worked in a lot of organizations and I think when I’m introduced, people tend to pick the companies they personally like the most. So, you know, they worked at Johnny Rockets because they’re a big hamburger or cheeseburger fan, for example.

Anthony Codispoti : But thank you. To be honest, we had to whittle down your intro because there’s so many notable stops along the way. There just wasn’t time. I was going to run out of breath.

James Walker : But all I’m hearing is that I’m your oldest guest so far. That’s all good.

Anthony Codispoti : Maybe the most with, maybe you have the most experiences along the way. The wisest and the most seasoned. Maybe we’ll go with that. There you go. Alright. Okay, so let’s talk about some of those senior leadership roles. You know, we mentioned Johnny Rockets.

Maybe, I don’t know if we mentioned Frisches, Subway, Nathan Famous. How did you first start this journey in the restaurant industry? How did you kind of first kick all this off?

James Walker : Yeah, so, it’s interesting to me and I think it still governs a lot of how I make decisions. I started on the culinary side. I was living on an island called Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. I was enjoying some time off between positions.

Really had never worked in hospitality and took a job managing a restaurant and really enjoyed the management side of the restaurant. And the number of levers you could pull for profitability. You could buy a blueberry muffin for $1 and sell it for $2, but you could make the blueberry muffin for $0.50 and sell it for $3.

And I remember, you know, like why would you ever buy a blueberry muffin ever again? And kind of went from that management role into the culinary side for a number of years. And that really drove a lot of my passion, I think, for quality service and people. It’s hard to be in a restaurant, running a restaurant and not care about your customers and not care about your fellow team members.

Or you certainly need to do both those things to be successful. And then, you know, ultimately made a decision that the better thing for my family was to go kind of that management route. And that kind of started the career trajectory that you covered so well.

Anthony Codispoti : So from a very early part of your career, your brain was kind of lighting up seeing these different profit levers that you could pull. Oh, make a blueberry for this much or, you know, we could buy it for this much. And why would you do one versus the other? Did you find yourself as you sort of made that decision to like, this is going to be your career, you’re going to, you know, go into restaurant management roles. Did you feel more drawn to sort of the financial aspects of the business or more of the people side like you were talking about just now?

James Walker : Yeah, so for me, they were always linked. It’s not an either or it has to be an and. So I would say, you know, there are some binary things. You know, I think it’s hard to say, listen, I’m very, very dedicated to driving top line, but I’m also looking at the pennies. You really do need to do both. But I think there’s a natural inclination that you enjoy one side of the business or the other. And I’ve also enjoyed kind of the go to market driving revenue, driving, you know, a creative profitability by finding ways to both drive the transaction level economics and size of check, but also bring in new customers.

And from that standpoint, yes, it’s about product, but it’s about people in place as well. So for me, the financials are the scorecard of everything else that you’re doing. So, you know, if you’re if you’re in charge of keeping score, that’s fantastic. I’d rather be the person really working with the team to drive the results that the scorekeeper is, is, you know, kind of taking note of.

Anthony Codispoti : Because if you take care of your employees, they’re going to take care of you and the customers, right?

James Walker : You know, it’s some of these things certainly were said a lot, you know, as I was a general manager, you know, back before Blackberries and iPhones and devices, you know, you kept three by five cards. And there was, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about things that we as restaurant managers or restaurant executives believed to be true.

And, you know, the saying was, you know, take care of your people and they’ll take care of your guests, or it’s hard to have great guest service with poor employee service. And I still think that those things are true. I think they were true back then. I think they’re true today. I think today, not everybody understands that technology is very, very important.

It is not a nice to have today. Technology, and for example, the organization that I’m lucky enough to be a team member of, Lunchbox, we provide technology services, but they are not to remove that, that experience of dining, of having a great time with your friends and family, or any of those things that make dining out so special. It’s to make them easier to make, remove friction in that process to allow the employees to have a better experience with their employer and be able to enjoy more time with the guests.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so that’s a great lead-in too. Let’s hear more about what Lunchbox does. I gave some of a high level there in the intro, because the nuts and bolts and, you know, hard examples of what it is that you can go into a restaurant and help them accomplish.

James Walker : Yeah, so our suite of services, and there’s nine, really nine today, more on the horizon. I think you’ll see where Lunchbox, if you were to ask individuals within the restaurant community, whether it’s restaurant operators or restaurant technology executives, kind of what is Lunchbox known for, we’re certainly the tent pole in catering. So catering is very important to restaurants today. It is still not at full capacity for many restaurant organizations. So it has the potential to grow profitability and revenue, and we’re really the tent pole in that movement. As I said, we have nine products today and more on the horizon. I think you’re going to continue to see us be a leading source of information around catering, but more and more trying to demystify artificial intelligence and machine learning. So those are buzzwords today. You know, there’s not going to be a restaurant, summit, or meeting, or gathering that you’re not talking about artificial intelligence, but I think many restaurant leaders are lost as to what those things mean, what they really could mean for their customer experience and their employee experience. So, you know, that didn’t directly answer your question. I would say Lunchbox provides solutions that drive revenue and profitability for restaurant organizations in their off-premises sales.

Anthony Codispoti : Specifically in off-premises. So this is why you pulled up the catering example to start with. So take us through, like if you were trying to explain to, you know, a prospective customer, it’s like, okay, here’s what we’re going to come in, here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s what you’re likely to see on the back yet.

James Walker : Yeah, so I think let’s just stay with one product, and it’s probably our fastest growing product right now, because it’s the fastest part of the industry, our catering software. So, you know, one of the things when somebody will reach out to me, not necessarily as a CEO of Lunchbox, but just as somebody in the industry, and they’ll say, James, we really need to develop a catering program.

What advice do you have? And the first thing I said to him is, you need to understand that catering and a catering order philosophically, and from a nuts and bolts standpoint, is not just a large to go order. They are very, very different. They’re being placed by someone for other individuals. They may have different audiences, they have different needs. So having software that supports all of those things that you need operationally, the ability to have somebody place an order in advance, to have the restaurant notified at a certain period of time prior to that order, but then potentially reminded of that order to make it easy for the customer or the client to modify their order to get additional information to augment.

So it’s not going to be 30 people that I thought on Monday, by Tuesday morning, Friday’s order needs to be for 40 people. All of that needs to be seamless. And our technology allows it not only to be seamless from a client side or from a customer side, but also from an operation side. And that’s really what we do.

So we influence positively the revenue side, the profitability side, but what’s kind of near and dear to my heart with my background is we make it easier for the operator to execute that order in a way that provides the minimal amount of fatigue on their operations and their team members. Interesting.

Anthony Codispoti : So let me see if I can kind of wrap my head around this. So you made the point of saying that a catering order is a lot more than just a large to go order, right? There’s other sort of elements and factors at play, because maybe a large to go order, I don’t know, like 10, 12 people or something like that, but I’m placing it, you know, now and I want it an hour from now. Whereas a catering order, this is for an event, there’s some special thing going on on Monday, we thought it was 30 people by Wednesday.

Now it’s 45 people and I as the customer, want an easy way to be able to go in and update that. And now I know that I’ve got a vegetarian in the group. And so I need to make sure I’ve got a vegetarian option. And so I want to be able to do that without having to call and sit on hold or wait for somebody to call me back. I need a web interface to be able to affect all that. Is that that this is a big part of what you guys are doing? Absolutely.

James Walker : So I think you did a nice job at painting a picture of kind of the needs and the potential friction from a client side, also from a restaurant side, you know, as a restaurant general manager, which still, I think it’s really important that restaurant executives try to get in the mindset of looking through the optics of the general manager in a restaurant. So if I’m going to have a large order for Friday, let’s say it’s 10 people, if I’m having a, if I’m going to need to prepare meals for 10 people on Friday, I probably don’t care if you don’t tell me until Thursday. If it’s 100 people, I want to know immediately. I want to know on Monday.

Anthony Codispoti : You got a staff, you got to order your food items. Yeah.

James Walker : Do I have, you know, hopefully I’ve got enough of the paper products or the food supplies? So it’s, it’s everything you said from a, from a customer side standpoint, but also ensuring that we’re providing all of the information to allow the restaurant operator to be as successful as possible in fulfilling the needs of the customer themselves.

Anthony Codispoti : So on that sort of back of office side of things that the customer doesn’t see, but it’s important to the operator. How are you guys surfacing that information? Is there integrations with other payroll systems that are other software systems that they’re using? Or is it just sort of like emailing an alert to somebody? What’s that look like?

James Walker : So all of the above. So, so typically not payroll, but it could be with their POS system. By the way, it was hard for me not to say pause. So I’m sitting in England where POS is called pauses. So whether it’s their pause system or their POS system, yes, we typically have direct integration with most of the POS providers. But additionally, you mentioned email, it may be that, and I hear this fairly often where a restaurant operator will say, I get so much that comes to me through my POS system. In addition to that, can you send an email update to the general manager? So whether it’s, it’s direct integration, whether it’s integration through their POS system, whether it’s an email alert, it’s really catering to the restaurant operator in the way that they feel they need to be informed so they can be most prepared and most successful in executing that order.

Anthony Codispoti : Why aren’t the existing POS systems already incorporating these types of functions?

James Walker : Some of them do, but typically at a very rudimentary level. And what I would say is, in technology today, different organizations are focused on different things. So if you are a POS company, you’re focused on providing services that really provide the ability to record transactions, to take that transactional data, to feed that into, for example, the marketing team. So they’re analytics and insights that are driving profitability and sales and what have you. The specificity, the detail that’s needed for something like we’re talking about, and that’s why I like specifically talking about this catering product, requires a lot of nuance and focus that probably isn’t as important for a POS company who’s saying, listen, we may want to provide some rudimentary services so they’re there, but truly if you’re going to drive catering sales and catering profitability, you need software that is designed to get into the minute detail of those transactions. And it’s just, I don’t think it’s worthwhile for a lot of POS companies to provide that level of service. They do great work on many other things and many provide that lower level of support.

We provide really the nuanced information that drives profitability. Specifically for catering. Well, we’re talking about catering. We have other products that we do, and similarly, they are value added products that may take products that are on the market, that are available either from other technology providers or even our contemporaries or competitors, but takes them to another level.

Back to, we were talking about phrases in the industry, right? Take care of your people and they’ll take care of your guests. Listen, if you manage the pennies, the dollars will take care of itself. And I think our fleet of services are really designed to look for pennies and aggregate them into adding profitability for restaurant operators.

And today, this isn’t a nice to have. This may be the difference between a restaurant company being successful or not successful. I remember back a number of years ago when I launched delivery at Johnny Rockets, and we would see a 50% incremental gain. If the restaurant was doing $2 million, it might be pushing $2.9 or almost $3 million because of that incremental hit of delivery.

It was massive. That doesn’t happen today. And that’s because delivery is part and parcel to everyday consumer behavior. So because you can’t say, listen, my delivery business is completely accretive. Certainly some of it is.

And it’s much more scalable than four-wall business. You need to look at it through that same intense magnification looking for pennies that you do at your own four-wall business. We help with that.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you give us another example of how you’re helping to manage those pennies?

James Walker : I would say providing the ability for our team to focus on the shifting landscape between the POS providers and the delivery service providers. So you could be using whether it’s SkyTab or Toast. There are lots of great POS providers out there that provide great solutions. There are great delivery service providers like Uber Eats and DoorDash, but those organizations aren’t linked together. So Toast and SkyTab are looking at what they can do to make their product as robust as it possibly can be for their clients. And the delivery service providers are doing the same thing. But they aren’t necessarily talking together about what those changes are. In an organization like Lunchbox, we’re plugged into both of those sides of the transaction and ensuring that the restaurant doesn’t have to worry about the shifting technology landscape on either side of that transaction. We do that for them. So it allows them to be very efficient and focus on the customer, the customer experience, food quality, managing their costs in their restaurant versus worrying about, did my menu changes get pushed from my POS to the delivery service provider? Is there a mismatch in descriptions or pricing? We handle those types of things. So it allows the restaurant operator to focus on that all important customer experience.

Anthony Codispoti : So you guys, in that particular instance, you guys are kind of the bridge between a toast and an Uber Eats, making sure that the information, the data is communicated regularly back and forth between the two. Absolutely.

James Walker : That’s, you know, we’re, you know, one of the things I think if you look at my social media profiles, it says, you know, an advocate for restaurants and really, you know, one of the things I love about Lunchbox is while we provide technology services and support, we’re really restaurant tours. That’s what we’re passionate about. We’re passionate about restaurants.

We’re passionate about our customers. We close a deal with a customer like Mamon or Naya, Popup Bagels. And we’re so excited that, you know, Popup Bagels are off the hook, signed an agreement with us.

Nobody’s looking, well, what’s the size of that contract? We’re just like, we love Popup Bagels. What a great organization. What a great company. And, you know, we’re having an executive team meeting and all we’re talking about is their bagels and what’s their best smear. And if you tried their flavored butters, they’re so clever at how they do, you know, the marketing and the storytelling and how much we love it. And at some point, somebody said, oh, you know, it was a good deal for us too. We’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s, so I think that’s not even secondary or tertiary.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s like several tears down the list in terms of importance. Yeah.

James Walker : Yeah. I, but I think it kind of goes back to that. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your customers. And from our standpoint, if we love our clients and we do, and we’re super excited about them, we want them to be happy.

We want them to make more money. We run internal reports to make sure that our customers, every one of our customers or every one of the products they utilize that we offer them, they’re better off because of that service. And I think that same focus of take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your customers. If we love our clients and we’re super excited about doing business with them, because we love who they are, then the financials will make sense for us from an organizational standpoint as well.

Anthony Codispoti : So a lot of restaurants are really struggling to kind of own their digital presence and manage it effectively. I understood you guys offer some services in this area. From your perspective, what are maybe some of the biggest obstacles that are holding brands back? And can you kind of talk us through maybe a specific client example of how you were able to help them thrive where they couldn’t before?

James Walker : I wouldn’t necessarily want to get into the detail of individual clients. I would say there’s a number kind of back to the shifting landscape. Today, connectivity, the ability for one piece of technology to integrate, to link to other pieces of technology. So if you, for example, we provide web services and app services, and there’s a technological component where those apps need to integrate with the POS system, which needs to integrate with the DSP and maybe also a third party logistics company or delivery company, that’s a lot for a restaurant company to try to get not only an understanding of, but understanding that each of those pieces may be changing at any point in time. And you need to be up to date with any of those individual disparate players and how they come together to make sure that the technology is working. Meanwhile, that’s not even the piece that really matters to a brand. What matters to the brand is the ability to execute storytelling through that technology in a way that is aligned with the brand story that you would experience in the restaurant or in the bakery or in the coffee shop itself.

And what I find is that restaurants tend to be great at that in restaurant experience. They’ve done it for years. It’s probably, if they’ve got a founder, that’s what the founder was passionate about.

They were passionate about having the best cup of coffee and the most legitimate French pastry. And that’s what they execute all day, every day. We find a way to work with them to do that storytelling through technology, where they don’t have to worry about all of those technology components and disparate systems coming together to make sure it’s executed. We just work with them to have the storytelling come through the technology to the client in a virtual way, the same way it does in person in their individual restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops.

Anthony Codispoti : What does that look like from a practical standpoint? Are you using AI to kind of help them convert their story and then sort of broadcast to all the social channels that they’ve plugged in?

James Walker : Yes, we’re using AI more and more to be efficient at what we do. So I had a meeting where our Chief Product Office was talking about how much more efficient our engineers are.

The efficacy, one of my favorite words, I use it a lot, the efficacy of our engineers has really grown month on month over what’s called the past nine months because they’re using artificial intelligence to help drive the output of really their coding and the engineering work that they need to do. I think kind of back to what sets the lunchbox apart from some of our contemporaries in the technology industry is our founder, you know, started in the restaurant industry. Nabil was a marketer. You want to see him get excited about something. He gets excited about storytelling, about brands, about product. That’s what gets him really passionate myself, you know, as a restaurateur for longer than I care to admit going back to your soliloquy of an opening, you know, 30 years of focusing on these types of things.

I think what sets us apart is we understand one for one what type of storytelling needs to be executed. So some of these things that human touch still is important. So we’re going to use artificial intelligence to make ourselves more efficient, to make ourselves more efficacious. But I think our understanding and our love for our clients and their individual customers comes through in the ultimate product as well.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s talk about shift four. How did this come about? Who are they? What does this partnership mean to you?

James Walker : Yeah, so shift four is a number of things. Two of them I think are important for this conversation. They provide processing service, so credit card processing services, both in the United States as well as a number of international markets. They’re growing very, very quickly. They also are a POS provider. Their POS system is called SkyTab. So they’re a partner of ours. We work with them from a credit card processing standpoint in the US and we’re looking to expand beyond the borders of the US into certainly the UK and EU through that partnership. We do some cross-selling. So they have clients. We have clients that are looking for similar services on both sides of the fence. So we share information and resources together.

I would say kind of how it came together is I think there’s a fundamental sameness in kind of the management cultures. They are very serious at what they do, but they’re not enough tight groups. So I went to one of their investor events in Las Vegas before the organizations came together and before they made the investment in Lunchbox. And what I found was a lot of very passionate, very intelligent people. And they were wearing hoodies and blue jeans and tennis shoes for an investor date.

It wasn’t for a fact. How do we look like we’re technologists? Let’s go get a bunch of hoodies. Listen, they were casual guys. They were casual men and women, but they were intelligent. They were passionate. They were focused. They were into the details.

And they were very, very serious about driving shareholder value for their shareholders and investors. And to me, that’s also the culture at Lunchbox. You can be professional. You can be driven, but you can also be casual and playful and fun to be around. And I think the two cultures were very similar from that standpoint.

Anthony Codispoti : And so what is the level? Is it just like there’s an integration? Is there an investment? What’s the level of partnership that we’re talking about?

James Walker : So I would say a number of different. So from an integration standpoint, yes, we work with them as our one of our payment processors. We are working to integrate with their SkyTab POS system. So there is kind of that technology integration piece. There is a cross-selling piece where if we’re going to market with a new potential client and they’re looking for a new POS system or they’re looking for payment processing, this is one of the options that we’re able to put in front of them. We work with a number of different POS providers. So it doesn’t exclude our ability to work with, say, toast customers or par customers or what have you.

But if somebody is looking for those type of introductions, we have them with Shifor. So cross-selling integration and yes, they made an investment in early March in the organization. And I think the teams work very, very well together. So Shifor purchased Revell. We have a number of clients that use Revell, including Bricks Holdings, which is one of the clients that we’re super passionate about and we love our relationship with them. And they have a number of different brands and we have the ability, because of our relationship with Shifor, to ensure that they’re getting kind of that white glove high-level service from Revell through our relationship with Shifor to ensure that Bricks is as supported as they possibly can be. Not only by Lunchbox, which we control, we don’t have that control over Revell, but our relationship through Shifor allows them to get maybe greater resources than they would without that relationship.

Anthony Codispoti : Gotcha. Okay. That sounds pretty powerful, especially from a customer perspective and what they’re getting. So can you kind of paint a picture for us, for people who aren’t really familiar with Lunchbox? Like, what is your reach today? Do you feel like you’re pretty well penetrated into the US market? I know you mentioned you’re in London today, you’re excited about sort of the UK and EU expansion. Where are you today? Where are you going?

James Walker : Yeah. So, I mean, we’re across the United States. I would say we’re continuing to penetrate. So before I joined the day-to-day operations of the organization, the founder and the senior management team, I think made a really wise decision to really reposition efforts away from SMB towards enterprise. So we are winning enterprise day in and day out, and we’re seeing more and more enterprise restaurant companies within the United States move to Lunchbox.

And I think there’s a number of different reasons for that. One of them is we are, I think, more price and cost aware than some of our competitors. So something like integration, just the simple wiring, the plumbing, if you will, between the DSPs, the delivery service providers in the POS company, many of our competitors charge $40, $50, $60 a month per location. So if you think of an enterprise restaurant company, that’s thousands and thousands of dollars. We don’t charge for that.

If they use any of our other products, we don’t charge for integration. So we’re seeing a lot of enterprise restaurant companies say, listen, we agree. This is not something, this is our information.

We don’t want to pay for our data. So we’re happy to move to you. So we’re seeing that there is greater penetration available for us in the US, and much of that is underway. Now, having said that, we’ve got a partnership with Urban Piper. Urban Piper is a technology company that has right around 50,000 locations, Middle East, North Africa, EU, UK. So we partner with them from a go-to-market standpoint. So while we are continuing to win enterprise in the US, and I think we’ll continue to grab market share for the foreseeable future, you will see us win more agreements, more contracts, and more customers, not only for US-based restaurant companies that operate in these theaters, but for true international brands that may or may not have a US presence, but have international offices. And those markets, those theaters that you’ll see, continued growth for lunchbox. You mentioned certainly UK, EU, I would also say Middle East, North Africa, continued focus and winning of enterprise restaurant organizations within those theaters.

Anthony Codispoti : Is there less competition in some of those markets?

James Walker : I would say there’s always competition.

Anthony Codispoti : Maybe some of your contemporaries here in the States have not sort of made the push there yet.

James Walker : I think that’s true. There are local competition. I would say there is not direct competition that provides our, I would say, menu of services. So having meetings in Dubai, in Riyadh over the past couple of weeks, what I heard from enterprise restaurant companies is they said, James, we’ve looked at all your services. There are five products from Lunchbox we desperately need. And I said, you know, those educate me.

Why don’t you have them today? And they said, those five products are available in our market today, but it would be five contracts with five providers. And that’s just comprehensive.

That’s a big deal. Some of these organizations are new. They’re months. They may, when we say startup, I mean, they’re still in mom’s garage. And this is an organization that Nabil and the team put together a number of years ago.

I certainly don’t see us as a startup. Our technology is mature. Our team is mature.

Our strategies are mature. And our ability to go into a market like Dubai or Riyadh, with an understanding. I ran restaurant companies in all of those markets. We understand what it takes to compete in those markets. We understand what a restaurant tour needs. And we have technology that is, you know, it’s mature.

It’s verbose. It is going to provide that immediate value to them. And they can sign one agreement with us and get those five products instead of five agreements. And maybe some of those five agreements are with organizations that may not truly be ready for prime time.

Anthony Codispoti : And may not be around in a year or 18 months. And just the process of having to manage five different relationships in that case, something goes wrong. When they’re working with you, it’s, you know, it’s one call to an account rep and like, hey, I got a question. What do we do here? You know, if you’re working with five different suppliers, who are you going to call? Who’s part of the tech broke? You have five different payments to manage. It’s a big deal.

James Walker : It really is. So I think, you know, one of the things that we’ve been executing kind of around the world, certainly in the US, but internationally as well as we do these dinners, we do these roundtables, we bring industry people together just so we can understand. And does it help us from a go to market standpoint? It does because they’re telling us restaurant CEOs and executives are who we invite to these dinners.

They’re telling us what we need to know to be more effective as a service provider for them. I had a dinner and I won’t tell you which one or who was there. But there was maybe a couple of people at the table who knew me and a couple who had just come to the dinner because maybe they like the restaurant. And the dinner started off with everybody talking about how amazingly successful Chili’s is right now. What are they doing?

How can we copy it? Look at their sales. And I had taken my two sons to Chili’s and I was showing photos and talking about the experience. We spent like an hour just talking about Chili’s. And then individually the restaurant CEOs, the residential restaurant CEOs started talking about their companies and what was working and what wasn’t.

And then the latter part of the meal, I’m trying not to just like pull out my business card. They started talking about how deceptive and confusing they thought restaurant technology companies were. That they felt that it was really hard to get a straight answer. And I think one of the things that the lunchbox really prides itself on is if we’ve got a restaurant CEO or a marketing individual and they say, listen, I just don’t know who to believe. We have individuals within our organization that are very passionate, the same way I’m passionate about finding the best cheeseburger in the world and the best pizza in the world.

We have people who are really passionate about all levels and all aspects of restaurant technology. I said, listen, these are not salespeople. I will put them anonymously on the phone with you. They won’t even know who you are. They have no way to sell to you.

By the way, they’re not a salesman. But if you want an hour where you can ask a whole bunch of questions about different technology providers and different services, and we’ve had a fair number of CEOs take us up on that. So kind of back to the culture of lunchbox that we were kind of talking about and us being very focused on being part of the industry and part of the solution and part of the help for restaurants. Sometimes that doesn’t benefit us. And not only is that not a bad thing, to me, that’s a great thing. That’s a great thing. If that CEO calls me back and says, so James, I’m still not buying anything from you, but you know what? You really helped me make several decisions.

Our team would be giving each other high fives that we helped in organization. And maybe at my age, I believe in karma a little bit. I do believe that those things ultimately will be good for myself and will be good for lunchboxes and enterprise. But we want to be part of the solution to restaurant profitability.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, I had one of your advisory board members on the show recently, Amy Hom from Barcelona Wine Bar. And they’ve got locations and I’m making this up. I don’t know, nine states, 12 states, multiple locations, each state. She actually did the interview from an airport coffee shop because it’s the only way she could squeeze it into her busy schedule. I’m like, Amy, why would you spend time to be on their advisory board when you’re so busy, you know, just trying to fulfill the requirements of your job? She’s like, I just really believe in what they’re doing. She’s like, I think they’re building the product the right way.

They’ve reached out to restaurant people from the very early stages to get feedback on what the product should be, how it should work, what the features should be. And she’s like, I just really believe in what they’re doing. And I want to be a part of that and help to steer and shape this product. And I thought, I mean, if you’re looking for a testimonial, like, you know, that’s a great one. A busy executive like that, carbon out time to be part of the sort of the bigger mission, what you guys are doing. I thought it was pretty powerful.

James Walker : I love that. You know, her organization, Barcelona Wine Bar, there’s one near where I live in Connecticut. We’ve loved it forever. And, you know, kind of this full circle, you know, I’ll text Amy and say, hey, you know, we’re going to my wife, Sarah and I are going to Barcelona tonight. You know, we’re super excited to go. But I think what she loves is I’m able to say, okay, so we know each other now, right? So yeah, there’s kind of that implied I’m going.

So she calls the general manager and she says, you know, look like the old guy that kind of looks like a beat up Charlie Sheen and his lovely young wife. We know, however she identifies me. And that’s great. But and she’ll say, how was it? I said, it’s great. But Amy, I’ve been going to that restaurant for five years and that restaurant’s been awesome for five years when they had no idea who I was or that I had a relationship with you. So, you know, I think I love her talking about us. And these are the stories we love to share. We love hearing how people feel about the culture of lunchbox, the support. I’ll get on the phone with the CEO of a restaurant company and like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, James, you’re the CEO, blah, blah, blah.

But let me tell you about, you know, Aubrey or Chi Yu or Tommy or Natalie or individuals on the lunchbox team and how great they are. And, you know, we had a problem and they fixed it in a second. And it could be about the technology or it just could be about something they’re doing because we love them as a customer. So I mentioned Mamon, which is one of our clients based in New York City. And our head of marketing and public relations said, you know, James, are you going to be back in the U.S. this weekend? And I said, yeah.

And she says, you know, Mamon’s got this. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be public enough. They’re doing an event and kind of a promotion with a fairly known food celebrity.

She’s like, you know, I know you want to be there. So I wanted to put it on your radar. It hasn’t, I’m not going to make a penny more. I’m going to drive to Mamon Sunday morning. I’m going to get my oat milk cappuccino. I’m going to get one of their amazing pastries. My wife is going to ask if we can buy 12 of their blue and white China coffee cups that she loves. We’re going to go there because we love the partnership with them and we love how they treat their clients.

So, you know, hearing this 360 from Amy and other CEOs, we love to provide the same feedback, you know, being able to go to the team at Mamon on Monday and say, love that promotion. It was super fun. By the way, you know, you guys, we loved the oat milk cappuccino. My wife loved the croissant. We had a great time.

Anthony Codispoti : I love that. Maybe in the same vein, setting aside the tech that you guys have developed and are continuing to work on, is there maybe another niche of tech within the restaurant space that you’re kind of excited to see evolve in the next year or two?

James Walker : Listen, I think anything that, we were talking a little bit before we started recording on, you know, I’m a lover of Apple and I wasn’t always, I have the same, I think I’ve got the same ring as Tim Cook because we both went to Duke through the same program. I had to be pulled by my wife, kicking and screaming away from my blackberry that, you know, probably had my fingerprints embedded in it.

It was so hard for me to give up. But the fact that I’m not particularly worried about who knows where I am or what I’m doing because I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t be doing and probably not doing anything that particularly interesting. I love that technology can help me in my day by providing true insights versus just, you know, hey James, do you want a sandwich? No, I don’t almost, I rarely want a sandwich. But you know what, if I’m in London and I love cheeseburgers and there happens to be, you know, the number three rated cheeseburger provider on belly, a half a kilometer from where I’m staying, I would love for my Apple Watch to say, hey, by the way, you normally eat at 6 p.m. An hour from now, you’re going to be near this restaurant.

You would love this cheeseburger. I love that technology has that information and is beginning to get to a level where it predicts for the consumer in a way that truly is meaningful for them. So I think, you know, Lunchbox, again, trying to provide solutions that drive profitability for restaurants. And the way we do that is through great consumer experiences, beginning to take artificial intelligence for things like menu suggestions, understanding purchasing behavior and patterns in a way that yes, drives profitability for restaurants, but does it by driving customer experience in a way that’s really tailored, personalized and meaningful for them. And I think you’re going to see certainly Lunchbox begin to execute against that in days, not weeks or months. Oh, wow.

Anthony Codispoti : What would this look like from a practical standpoint? Am I, I’m an iPhone user. And so I don’t know on the back end, you’ve got a client who’s this cheeseburger shop in London that signed up to use your services.

And so somehow maybe through Apple Maps, it’s like popping up the suggestion or is it a coming through like as an SMS or am I getting too far into the weeds and this is ready for public knowledge yet? All of the above.

James Walker : Okay. But nothing’s ever stopped me from getting ahead of the marketing or public relations team. What I would say is, you know, currently, our ability to influence customer experiences is within our realm of clients. So being able to provide information about a Maman event to somebody who might be in that area and as a Maman consumer, we do that today. You’re going to see us be able to do that more and more in insightful ways that drive profitability as well as customer experience for our clients. Now, I’m excited that Apple’s able to do that across as you said, Apple Maps.

So they can do it with anyone who uses Apple products and any restaurant that has public information out there. I think you’ll continue to see Lunchbox find ways to add value to our clients through information that we have that may be non-public, but also beginning to synthesize public information to the benefit of our clients. But to be clear, we’re currently focused on helping our clients and our partners and their customer bases. Gotcha. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s maybe take a little bit of a detour. If we’ve got time, we’ll kind of come back to the story because I think there’s more fun stuff to unpack here. But, you know, we’ve heard in the intro, we’ve heard, you know, just a little bit beyond that, some of the successes that you’ve had in your career. I’d be curious to hear about whether it’s professional or personal, a serious challenge that you’ve overcome. How you got through that and what you learned in the process.

James Walker : Yeah. I would say there’s challenges every day. I think for someone like myself who loves to work and is generally high energy and also believes in the importance and power of being present. So if I’m running restaurants, being in a restaurant, if I’m working with the technology company, being with the restaurant clients in their restaurants, experiencing the technology while watching a consumer utilize it, that puts me in a position where I’m away from home a lot. And, you know, I have a family that I love very dearly and a wife who has to put up with me being gone more than either one of us would like. So that presents a lot of challenges.

I would say things are better from a technology standpoint today. So when I started really traveling internationally, you know, I remember you had a teeny policy that said you could call home for 15 minutes a day because it was a long distance call from a hotel. And now, you know, my wife, I’m probably her first text every morning and we’re able to FaceTime and we’re able to interact. But it’s still just as I believe organizations need senior management to be present with their customers, with their customers, customers in their locations where the transactions are being made.

Families need that as well. So finding a way to reconcile that it’s probably easier today, but it’s never easy. So I don’t think we can ever say that that’s problem solved. I would say that we have found ways to mitigate some of the difficulties that that can can cause within a relationship.

Anthony Codispoti : So you mentioned a little bit about how the tech has changed radically, right? You know, long distance international phone call used to be very expensive. Now you can text, you can have a video call, no charge at all.

Obviously, that’s a big help. But aside from that, I don’t know. Do you have any advice for people who are maybe in similar situations where their work does require them to travel quite a bit and their, you know, their spouse is having to pick up more of the slack, you’re maybe missing out on some kids activities. Like, how do you sort of approach that tech aside?

James Walker : Yeah, I marry well, marry up. You know, listen, I’m very lucky that, you know, my wife reminds me if there’s things that I need to do that I need to reach out to my son that, you know, just check in and see how he’s doing. He got, you know, he got a good grade. He read a new book. You know, he made a new friend that I can reach out and kind of get in the middle of that conversation.

The other thing I would say is really trying, and some of this also depends on where you are in life, where you are financially, what you have the wherewithal to do. But if I’m home for three days, you know, I’m not out mowing the lawn and away from the family. I’m able to take, you know, my young son to breakfast and he likes that one-on-one time. I think trying to have, you know, the pomp and circumstance or the routines or different things that you do with individual family members that is very special to them and ensuring that those take a high priority in your life. So like I said, my young son, there’s a diner he likes to go to and, you know, we drive to the diner, we sit in the diner and eat and then we drive back and he never stops talking the entire time and, you know, it brings me up to speed on everything that’s going on in his life. So that’s really important that, you know, that’s not interrupted and, you know, I try to make it a phone face down period of time.

But I think it’s different for everyone, but, you know, what’s made it easier for me is a wife who is very understanding but also tees me up to be successful with the children and allows me to feel like I’m there and part of their lives even if I’m not there as much as I would like to be.

Anthony Codispoti : And the son that you just referenced that doesn’t stop talking the whole time, how old is he? He’s 15. Yeah. 15. Okay. So I’ve got two boys, 9 and 11, and selfishly I have to ask, what questions are you prompting him with to get him to talk so much? Because my kids, it’s like, pulling teeth.

James Walker : So I’m very lucky. And listen, I think there’s ages in different kids, right? You know, every four-year-old has plenty to say. And at some point in time, they probably have less to say to their parents.

Nick is still in that level. We saw, you know, I, we saw three children and those children are still at home. The youngest has not lost that desire to talk to his parents. The older, you’re saying my kids are broken.

No, I’m saying they probably matured early. But, you know, I think, you know, finding things that are important to them. I’m very lucky that my daughter, Madison, I have a similar outlook on life. We have a similar personality.

We get the same jokes. So, and I’m not an overly mature person for my age. So if she’s watching, you know, a, an animation or a comedy animation or something, and she’s like, oh, my dad would like this. I watch it. We discuss what have you. So I think young one has not outgrown his interest in talking to his parents. My daughter and I have a very similar personality where we’re able to connect, even if it’s not a lot, we’re able to connect very genuinely.

And then my older son, who’s 23, you know, is just he’s, I’m very lucky that he’s a really good person. And instead of, you know, he kind of being one of these children who, who you’re hoping will rattle off everything in their life, AJ, who I don’t call AJ, I call the hound. I’ve always called, I’ve called him the hound since he was born. So the hound, you know, dad, where have you been? How are you doing?

So, you know, maybe, maybe I’m the child in that relationship. So if I’m coming home, he’s like, where were you? How was it? Where did you go? You know, he, he’s trying to find out more about what I did. So the conversation’s happening, but he’s pulling things out of me instead of the other way around for him.

Anthony Codispoti : Fascinating. James, how would you characterize your superpower?

James Walker : You know, if there was a superpower, I have just a phenomenal amount of energy. I can sleep very little. I eat once a day. So, you know, I’m pretty situated physiologically to, you know, work in an organization that requires a lot of on time to take advantage of opportunities or to deal with problems. So from that standpoint, you know, I don’t work an eight hour day and I’m tired, I can work a 12 hour day and then go to dinner and still get up fairly early the next morning. And I’m very excited to kind of jump out of bed and start the day. So I think, you know, the ability to work a lot without becoming tired and being very passionate and excited about it is, if there was a superpower, that would be it.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s a big one. Have you always been this way? Something developed later in life? Did you start taking a supplement that helped with this?

James Walker : Yeah, I would think the only supplement I take is red wine and diet coke. So I don’t know, maybe there’s something in that combination. Maybe. No, so I would say, you know, in my probably mid 20s, driven by a desire to, you know, not only work as much as I could and make as much of a living as I could, but also wanting to, you know, spend time with my friends and do all those types of things. Sleep became less and less of a priority for me. I do have a very slow metabolism. So eating once every 24 hours is something I do. So I think it evolved probably in my late 20s and then, you know, in my early 40s kind of got in this rhythm where, you know, I don’t feel the need to eat constantly and, you know, I sleep very well. So something like, you know, how you only slept four hours, how, you know, how could that be? But I slept four hours almost exclusively in Ram or deep sleep and I’m totally rested and I feel great. Ready to go?

Yeah. And listen, I probably have a fairly strong constitution. I’ve never had COVID, even though I was in, you know, Brazil, Ukraine, Russia, India, all throughout kind of the height of COVID around people who had it or came down with it, you know, because I was in meetings with them and then the next week everybody got COVID, never came down with it. So I think generally just have probably, you

Anthony Codispoti : know, we need to get some blood samples, see what’s going on in your system and try to replicate it. It sounds like.

James Walker : Yeah, I guess I had to practice that Diet Coke and Red Wine.

Anthony Codispoti : What’s, you know, for those people who are listening, who are working their way up sort of the ladder within the restaurant industry and their sponges, they want to learn more, can you recommend any resources to them? Maybe it’s a book, maybe a podcast, a course, something that was maybe helpful for you or you’ve seen be helpful for others and kind of helping them advance their skillset in their career.

James Walker : Yeah, it’s hard. I don’t love to make a lot of suggestions in this area because I think it’s very personal for myself, anybody who goes into my LinkedIn profile, I have continued to seek out additional information and programs, you know, even after graduating Duke with my MBA, I’ve taken courses and programs at Harvard, at Yale, at MIT to further my education and my own knowledge. It didn’t help me get a better job. I didn’t make any more money, more often than not, I paid for them out of my pocket. But it made, it helped me in decision making and understanding how to be a better leader within the organizations that I was employed. What I would encourage individuals to do is find what works for them.

So, you know, if it’s podcasts, if it’s audio books, if it’s reading business books, if it’s taking, you know, some of the certificate programs that are very specialized and detailed, all of those are things that have worked for me, find what works for you. I think most people ask for advice and really don’t want it. The sooner you can get to a level where you listen to advice and maybe don’t take it at face value, but try to synthesize it into your decision making, the sooner you can do that, the better. One of the things that attracted me to Nebile, the founder of Lunchbox, is he seems for a young guy in his very early 30s, someone who really is looking for advice from individuals within the industry, within finance, and he finds a way to synthesize that, take the strongest points and make it part of his toolkit. And it’s great to see somebody at that age, because I don’t know that I took advice till I was, you know, 10 or 15 years, his senior.

Anthony Codispoti : So be open to the constructive feedback before you go asking for it, so that you’re in a receptive mode and ready to maybe act on some of that. Because it’s hard, right? It’s hard to sometimes take that, because it feels like criticism. It’s like, sometimes you go in, you made the point that, you know, some people ask for the advice and they’re not really ready for it, because it, I think what some folks are looking for is kind of a little pat on the back, like, oh, you’re doing everything great, like just affirmation. And that does feel good, but growth really happens when you’re heading into spaces that you haven’t been before and you’re uncomfortable and being open and receptive to that kind of constructive feedback that’s encouraging you to do things differently. I think that’s really important to that personal growth.

James Walker : Yeah, I think also just being introspective, understanding, you know, are you going to be open to feedback? And if you’re truly going to be open to feedback, are you going to be open to feedback that may not be, wow, every, you were just amazing.

And if you could just be more of yourself, that would be great for all of us. So that’s what you’re looking for. That’s probably going to hamper your career. And that’s okay. But, you know, understand that.

So I think the more, you know, if there was a piece of advice, I think individuals being true to themselves, understanding whether they are open or not open, and understanding what both of those things mean, I think is important. I love dining out, being in the restaurant industry. I spent a lot of time in restaurants. I’ve been in and around the restaurant industry for a while. So it’s not unusual for restaurant tours, restaurant owners, or chefs to ask my feedback. And I’m always thinking my mind, are they really looking for me just to tell them what I thought was great, or do they really want feedback? And, you know, I would say, from a distilled standpoint, it’s probably 50-50, half of the people just want, you know, please tell me what you liked, and let me move on. And the other half are like, listen, you may have a criticism, you may have some piece of advice. I don’t have to take that personally.

And I don’t even have to take it. I may disagree with it. You may say, listen, I thought the bacon should be a little crispier. But maybe there’s a reason that chef or that restaurant owner doesn’t want crispy bacon that I don’t understand.

It doesn’t mean they have to listen and necessarily run with it, but being open to feedback and finding what you can take from it that makes you more successful, the sooner people are able to develop that, I think the better for their career. I like that a lot.

Anthony Codispoti : James, sometimes mistakes in the moment, what feels like a mistake in the moment, ends up becoming a really great teacher for us. Can you think of a moment in your career that seemed like a setback at the time, but actually propelled you forward?

James Walker : Yeah, it looks like all the way back from when I was cooking for a living, and I was a pastry chef early in my career. And I had a chocolate silk ganache pie that I was known for and had some success. And the owner accidentally ordered white chocolate instead of dark chocolate. And at that point in time, I hadn’t been to culinary school, so I didn’t understand the melt point or that those chocolates would behave differently. So it’s like chocolate to chocolate. And not only did I learn, hey, maybe you should find out some of this information instead of you just try to one for one replace it, but was very lucky and developed a white chocolate vanilla fray dough that became even more popular.

So my lack of knowledge in the tempering of chocolate led to success. I think from a business standpoint, one of the things I look back on, and this is going to be kind of opposite advice. While I didn’t have a lot of mentors early, I may always have been looking for a mentor. So if somebody had a bigger job, if someone had a bigger title, if someone had a bigger degree, if somebody was on a board of directors, I kind of assumed that they were smarter and more knowledgeable than I was. So even if I didn’t agree with what they were saying, I kind of said, listen, they know more.

And there was an example. I was running a fairly large Mexican restaurant company as the president. And the chairman, our signature product was a skirt steak, fresh, never frozen. It was a big part of the P mix. It was a big part of the profitability.

It was one of the things the restaurant chain was known for. And I wanted to lock in pricing for a year. And in order to lock in pricing and something that’s really going to be on kind of the commodity’s market, when you lock that price and you’re not locking in at the bottom, because whoever you’re buying it from has to mitigate their potential risk over that entire contract.

So you’re going to pay more on day one. My position was we didn’t have digital menu boards. It was hard to change pricing.

It was cumbersome and time consuming. I’d rather lock in pricing at a little bit higher, but know that I was not going to have price fluctuation in that all important ingredient for 12 months. And the board said, nope, we want to ride the market. And it didn’t seem to make sense to me, but I didn’t push back a lot.

I said, okay, well, you guys are smarter and that some of them had written books and had TV shows and were icons in the industry. So I’m like, well, I just learned better to ride the market. And then six weeks later, when immigration rated all of the meat plants and that product doubled in cost, I learned maybe it was okay for me to push back and maybe it was okay for me to challenge. And maybe it was okay for me to be a little suspect if I felt I had done my homework and maybe I was a little closer to the situation.

And that became a huge challenge within that organization for everything I mentioned. We didn’t have digital technology that allowed us to easily take price. This happened virtually overnight because it was a fresh product.

So the impact of those raids and what happened within those meat packing plants impacted us almost immediately and it was a signature product. So it became really, really difficult and a painful learning experience for me.

Anthony Codispoti : And the lesson is be a little more confident in your voice.

James Walker : I think that’s right. And I think it’s the other thing I learned is you don’t always have to fight on day one. When you have individuals and you’re dealing with a superior within the organization, somebody who’s a little higher on the food chain or has a higher box on an organ chart, you don’t necessarily have to wait until they’re almost done speaking to start disagreeing. You can say you listen, you ingest, you absorb, you go home, you complain to your wife, and she tells you what to say.

You come back that next day and say, listen, I heard everything you said and I really took it to heart and I went home and I thought about it. I want to give you my point of view. And what I have found is just that difference in 24 hours fighting their feedback or disagreeing with their feedback on day one, not only on day one, minute one, not even out of their mouth and you’re going to compete with it or you’re going to counter-dict it versus coming in the next day after you’ve truly thought about it, you’ve checked your numbers, you’ve checked your thinking, maybe you’ve checked with colleagues, maybe if you’re a director or you’re a vice president, you’ve gone and you’ve checked with the general managers and you’ve gotten really close to the business and come back and say, listen, I’ve had 24 hours to run this through. Could I take one more opportunity to tell you my point of view? And what I’ve found is my success rate in taking that 24 hours has allowed me to probably persuade individuals that were a little higher up or a lot higher up in the organization than I was.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s a real gold nugget there. I think a big part of why that probably works very well is when you provide that resistance immediately, like this guy didn’t hear me. This guy isn’t listening, he’s not even open to my idea. And so by waiting that time, if there is that time available and then coming back and sort of, you know, presenting it in the way that you did, hey, I thought about this, I hear your point, let me offer a different perspective here. You’re like, oh, this guy actually really thought about this. It’s been a whole day since we talked and okay, it’s just the whole conversation feels less defensive from both points of view. James, before I ask my last question, I want to give an opportunity for you to let the audience know either the best way to get in touch with you, to follow your story or that of Lunchbox. What would that be?

James Walker : Yeah, so Lunchbox is, we have an amazing head of marketing and communications who kind of drives not only the information pipeline that is Lunchbox, you know, you can join our mailing list, you can do that at Lunchbox.io, you can follow us on LinkedIn, and she’s really great at not overwhelming people with information but ensuring that they’re up to speed and up to date. Myself, it’s just jaywalkormobile.com, all of my links, all of my information is available there.

Anthony Codispoti : Terrific, and we’ll find those links and put them on the show notes for everybody. So last question for you, James. You and I reconnect a year from now and you’re really excited because you’re celebrating something big. What’s that one thing that you’re celebrating a year from now?

James Walker : I think, you know, Lunchbox is at a inflection point and, you know, I worked in private equity for years and it’s like beware of the hockey stick, right? We’re at this transformational inflection point where truly this organization could grow in a pyramidical fashion. It’s not going to be growing necessarily by, you know, double digits. You know, certainly there is the ability with our move to international with our focus of taking this product integration in the U.S. and not charging for it where our contemporaries charge a lot of dollars for it, where I believe there’s the opportunity for this organization to truly transform in size to a much larger organization in the time frame you mentioned.

Anthony Codispoti : Wow, that’d be fascinating and very interesting to follow up with you at that time and see where you guys are at. But James Walker from Lunchbox.io, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely my pleasure. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.