Owning a restaurant can be a stressful endeavor that goes beyond how good the food tastes. Aside from employee and expense tracking, if equipment breaks in the middle of dinner service, it can be catastrophic for profits and reputation. Andy McKoski, formerly the owner of Tex-Mex chain Tin Lizzy’s Cantina, saw how equipment maintenance, while critical, often fell low in the daily operations priority list.
“For all of the effort that we spend as restaurateurs and as business owners on ambiance, training our people, and bringing really good food, a non-functioning bathroom carries as much weight as all the positives of all those other things,” says McKoski. “An undercooked burger carries as much weight as those other things. It completely ruins your branding experience.”
To alleviate these pain points, McKoski launched Humrun, an equipment repair and maintenance app that allows restaurants to better manage equipment, both on-demand and through scheduling. With no setup fees or heavy implementation prerequisites, a restaurant owner can jump on the app, get access to vetted service providers, order them on-demand if an emergency arises, and keep an accurate log of their restaurant’s equipment. If you don’t have an emergency, you can schedule one of the listed service providers for a time when you know service is due.
“It provides the restaurateur with the ability to identify a problem, track a problem, share the information with their team, and get back to focusing on customer experience training,” says McKoski. “It has a directory that directs them to the right professional, and an Uber-like component that allows them to hire a service professional on demand if their preferred technician is not available.
For service providers to be listed on the app, they must be preferred technicians at local restaurants already — that’s the first level of vetting. Once they are confirmed as a preferred service provider elsewhere, they are added to the on-demand portion of the app.
Humrun’s goal is to build an asset sharing marketplace to help restaurants get back on their feet faster.
“Restaurants can share their asset, which is the technician, with other restaurants. We know that they’re qualified, because if you’re working on one restaurant, you understand their equipment and their needs, so you should, in all likelihood, understand the needs of my restaurant,” says McKoski. “My HVAC guy, my plumber, my electrician, my handyman, my refrigeration and heating guys — all go in the database. Each restaurant will have a different subset of preferred vendors or contractors. That will then be shared with the other restaurants.”
Humrun’s revenue model is a hybrid — a SaaS subscription model as well as an on-demand fee. Through the subscription model, the restaurant will get access to job creation, communication tools, and a dashboard and directory feature. In the on-demand model, the restaurant doesn’t pay anything (they are already paying for the subscription) and the technician pays a flat transaction fee for getting the job.
Humrun’s other features can help restaurants automate preventative maintenance, which often falls through the cracks. You can integrate with accounting and payroll providers, schedule maintenance ahead of time, and soon, use a POS (Point of Sale) system.
The app has just launched after a beta run with positive feedback from the local restaurant community, according to McKoski.
“The most positive feedback that we’ve gotten is that the communication tools that are built into the application and the data tracking are key primary functions that they use even more so than on demand,” says McKoski. “Being able to communicate issues within a small user group, very similar to what Slack does with its communication tools, has been a key benefit.”
