If this week's Shoutout had you thinking about your people, good. Keep the thread, b/c the smart money is thinking about them too.
Here's the "deal," and it's an unusual one for this section: there isn't a single signed transaction to report. There's something more interesting. On July 30, our friends at Workstream are hosting its On The Clock Summit (OTC26) at The Starling in Atlanta, pulling operators, HR leaders and payroll chiefs into one room, with a stage that includes CKE's Joe Guith, a Papa John's franchisee, a Bojangles operator, and a lineup of QSR heavyweights.
On paper, it's a people-operations conference, but read the guest list through the lens of a banker, and you start to see something else. A room full of our industry's most important asset (our people), and the people who allocate capital against it.
Consider the category forming around that room. Workstream, which handles hiring, onboarding, scheduling, payroll and compliance for the hourly workforce, now counts 46 of the top 50 restaurant brands as customers (Taco Bell, Culver's, Arby's, Five Guys, Bojangles). It has raised north of $100M and was valued around $500mm in its last priced round. Now pair it with this week's Shoutout subject, DailyPay, and you can see the shape of a whole "people stack" getting built and funded. Hire them, onboard them, schedule them, pay them (early), keep them.
That's the pattern worth your attention. For a decade, restaurant-tech capital chased the guest: ordering, delivery, loyalty, the drive-thru. Respect.
The next wave is chasing the team. People operations has quietly become an investable category, b/c in an industry where turnover is the tax that never stops, whoever owns the hourly-workforce stack owns a line that hits every operator's P&L.
Which is why, heading into this event, I feel I’ve had more conversations about partnerships and deals around this one event than almost any he can remember. When the category's players and their would-be partners gather in one hotel to talk about the same problem, the math changes (and I’m not talking about 1 + 1 = something better than 2. I’m talking about 1 + 1 = 11).
So, here's my take, and I'll happily be graded on it later.
Put a bookmark on July 30. I don't think I’ll cover OTC26 as a conference recap. I think we look back on it in a few months as the place where a handful of partnerships and combinations got their first handshake. The Deal Room's job is to tell you where the puck is going. Right now, it's going to the people stack.
Bookmark it.
If you’ll be out at Workstream’s “On the Clock” and would like to connect, please click here or contact me directly.
