Stealing Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Friends of Branded!

Happy Saturday and I hope you had a great week.

There's a scene near the end of the 1980 musical action comedy film, directed by John Landis, The Blues Brothers, I've always loved (that’s right Rat Pack, we’re pulling this week from a nearly 50 year old film).

Jake and Elwood and the band have just torn the roof off Bob's Country Bunker, that gloriously rough honky-tonk where the crowd's idea of range is "both kinds of music, country AND western." They play their hearts out from behind the chicken wire, win over a hostile room, and are preparing to exit the venue on a performer’s high.

Then the whole night falls apart at the very end, over the bill. There's a beer tab that more than swallows the band’s entire performance fee and the boys owe the Big Bob money for the night. An argument ensues over what was and wasn't on the house, and a triumphant evening curdles into a standoff. They earned the win. They lost it at checkout.

I’m moving on from the film reference (your welcome), but before I do, for anyone familiar with the movie, I’m certainly not endorsing skipping out on a tab (which of course is how the Blues Brothers handled theirs). The point is the truth that scene captures, one I watched play out in real life this week.

I was at a corporate dinner, and it was, by every measure, a wonderful night. The food was excellent. The service was warm and dialed in. The room had that rare, real energy where the conversation crackles and nobody's checking their phone (okay, not “nobody” of course, but let’s say far less often than any typical corporate dinner I’ve attended recently). Four tables of guests, genuinely happy, the kind of night a host dreams about when they book the room.

Then the check came, and our host's face fell.

Early in the evening, guests were graciously offered “still or sparkling?” It was a nice touch. What no one mentioned was that each small bottle cost $10. Across four tables over a long, lively dinner, that added up to roughly $600. Six hundred dollars for water. And there were still plenty of full bottles left on the tables. By the end of the meal, I wasn’t looking for a doggie bag, I wanted a small duffel bag to take home the leftover water.

Now, the amount isn't the point, and I want to be clear about that. The host could handle the number. What she couldn't shake was the feeling. A perfect night, and the taste left in her mouth wasn't the food, the amazing service or the laughter. It was the quiet sense of having been taken advantage of, right at the end, over something nobody had bothered to mention.

Here's why that stings so much more than the dollars justify, and there's real science to it (Dr. Hughes, get ready b/c I’m stepping into your lane here!).

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman gave us the "peak-end rule": we don't remember an experience as the average of its moments. We remember it by its peak and, crucially, by how it ended. The ending gets a wildly outsized vote in the memory. It's the part we carry out the door. It's the part we tell our friends about. Which means the last five minutes of a meal, the check, the goodbye, aren't an afterthought. They may be the most important five minutes of the entire night.

And this is exactly where so many otherwise-great operators quietly shoot themselves in the foot. We pour our souls into the food, the room, the service, the whole middle of the experience, and then we treat the check like a formality, or worse, like one last chance to squeeze. The unannounced $10 water. The "market price" that turns out to be triple. The surprise service charge in tiny print (and don’t get me started about the “Double G” and what happens when a guest figures out they’ve been Double-G’ed).

At a time when guests are already wary of junk fees and drip pricing, a surprise at the bottom of the bill does not feel like a line item. It feels like a breach of trust. You can spend an entire evening building goodwill and lose it with one unexplained charge.

The maddening part is how avoidable it is. The fix isn't to stop selling premium water, or to give the store away. The fix is one word: communicate. "Our still and sparkling are $10 a bottle, or we're happy to keep the tap coming all night, on us." That one sentence turns a landmine into a choice, and a choice into goodwill. The Blues Brothers got tangled up over what was and wasn't on the house, and the lesson cuts both ways: the ambiguity is the enemy. Tell people what things cost. And every so often, tell them this one's on you.

B/c let's do the math, and it isn't close. That $600 of water margin sits on one side of the ledger. On the other sits a corporate host who books dinners all year, who has ten peers she'll tell about tonight, and who just decided, in the final ninety seconds of an otherwise perfect evening, that she isn't coming back. The most expensive item on any menu is a surprise. Penny-wise, and pound-catastrophically-foolish.

So, here's the takeaway for those of us who build and back these rooms. The check is not the end of the meal. Think of it as the last course, and it should taste as good as the first. Be as intentional about the final five minutes as you are about the first five. Kill the surprises. And when in doubt, be the operator who sends a guest out the door feeling taken care of, not taken. That warmth is the cheapest, highest-returning marketing you will ever buy.

The venue this week did everything right. The food, the service, the joy in the room, all of it, a genuine victory. And then it let a $10 bottle of water snatch defeat from the jaws of it.

Do everything right, and then, most of all, win the ending.

It takes a village!

Making the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies is hard. Making it six years in a row is a different animal entirely. That's not a hot streak. That's a business the market keeps voting for, over and over.

So, a big Branded Shoutout to PourMyBev, which just earned its place on the 2026 Inc. 5000 for the sixth consecutive year. Full disclosure, and a proud one: PourMyBev is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly.

If you haven't seen their work, odds are you've poured a drink from it without realizing. PourMyBev is the global leader in self-pour technology, the tap walls, self-pour stations, and tap trailers that let guests pour their own beer, wine, and cocktails by the ounce, in everything from taprooms and hotels to stadiums, golf clubs, and universities.

Here's why it's more than a cool gadget, and why it's squarely a Branded kind of story. Self-pour is one of those rare moves that wins on every axis at once. It cuts labor (operators see roughly a 75% reduction), it kills the overpour and shrinkage that quietly bleed a bar, it lifts guest spend, and it frees your team from standing behind a tap so they can actually host. The receipts are real: PourMyBev has generated $329 million for operators across more than 400 million self-poured ounces. That's not a novelty. That's margin.

And the timing is the whole point. As CEO Josh Goodman put it: "Operators are fighting for every dollar right now, and self-pour is how the smart ones are winning. Six straight years on the Inc. 5000 tells me we are building something operators actually need. We added senior leaders and grew our teams this year because demand is not slowing down. It is accelerating."

That's the tell.

In a market where plenty of restaurant tech is quietly contracting, PourMyBev is hiring and growing, b/c it solves a problem operators feel on every single shift. Six years on the list isn't a trophy on the shelf. It's proof of demand that keeps compounding.

Congrats to Josh and the entire PourMyBev team. Here's to six, and to the next six.

Cheers.

If you would like to connect with Branded Hospitality to discuss opportunities with PourMyBev, please click here.

This week, our friends at inKind secured $414 million, anchored by Citi (alongside Cross River Bank and Liberty Mutual Investments), to fund independent restaurants without loans or equity. Big number, marquee backer, buzzy model. But here's what I think it actually is.

Strip away the fintech gloss and inKind is something wonderfully old: the house account, grown up and gone to Wall Street. Last week, up top, I wrote about the return of the house account, the regular who prepays and the trust in "settle up later." inKind is that exact instinct, industrialized. Diners pre-buy food-and-beverage credits, the restaurant gets cash today, and it repays not in dollars-plus-interest, but in future meals. It's right there in the name. Repaid in kind.

Here's why it's genuinely clever.

The whole thing runs on the gap between what a plate costs to make and what it sells for. inKind advances capital at roughly two-to-one, say $500,000 in cash for $1 million in future dining credits, which means a restaurant gets non-dilutive, non-debt money and "repays" with product that costs it a fraction of face value to serve. No bank, no board seat, no personal guarantee on the house. For an industry that traditional lenders have quietly redlined (first-year closure rates near 15%, operating costs up 36% since 2019), that isn't a gimmick. It's oxygen. And it's working at scale: more than $600 million deployed across 8,500-plus restaurants, five million diners on the app, and $60 million pushed out in July alone. When Citi anchors the check, the institutions are telling you they believe.

So far, so bullish. But the operator in me has to raise a hand, b/c I've written this line before and I meant it: leverage is like alcohol (it makes good times better, and bad times worse).

Selling tomorrow's revenue at a discount for cash today is still selling tomorrow's revenue. In moderation, to fund a build-out or bridge a slow season, it may be the smartest, cheapest capital in the business.

Over-issued, it becomes a mortgage on your own dining room. Every redeemed credit is a seat that pays your food cost instead of full freight, and if you've sold too much of your future, you can pack the house every single night and still come up short.

Let’s be crystal clear here, non-dilutive is not the same as free. The whole discipline is knowing how much of tomorrow to sell today.

Which is the real story here, and it's bigger than any one raise. A legitimate new asset class just earned institutional validation: a restaurant's own hospitality, its future covers and the healthy margin on a plate of food, packaged as capital. For once, money is being built for restaurants instead of jammed onto them from a template designed for software or real estate. That is a genuinely good thing, and it's overdue.

The best financing for a hospitality business, it turns out, might just be its own hospitality. Repaid in kind. Just don't drink the whole bottle.

If you're interested in exploring areas of collaboration with Branded's portfolio companies or our deal flow and opportunities to engage with our Branded Capital team, please click here or contact me directly.

I did something this week I never thought I’d do…I brought my kids to a conference. Eight podcasts, back-to-back meetings, a party, fireworks, late nights AND two kids in tow. Work/life integration at its finest! And shockingly, everything was going great…until it wasn’t.

One possible staph infection, a frantic search for a pediatric eye doctor and an unexpected conference exit later, I got a pretty powerful reminder of what all this “networking” we do is actually about.

Hospitality isn’t just about taking care of guests. It’s about taking care of PEOPLE. And sometimes the relationships we build between the meetings, podcasts, parties and cocktails show their true value when there’s absolutely no business involved.

So what happens when your work world and family world collide…and then your work world shows up for your family? This week’s POV is about conferences, community and why I’m officially giving up on the idea of work/life balance. Click here to dive into it!