Get To Know: Up N' Go - Touradj Barman, CEO And Co-Founder (Ep 135)
In this episode, Jaime Oikle sits down with Touradj Barman, CEO and Co-Founder of Up N' Go, a game-changing contactless payment solution for restaurants. Discover how Up N' Go boosts efficiency, enhances customer experience, and increases table turnover—all while keeping both staff and guests safe. Touradj shares the story behind the creation of Up N' Go, their innovative approach to payment processing, and how they’re helping restaurants thrive in today’s fast-paced environment. From QR code technology to seamless POS integration, this conversation is packed with valuable insights for restaurant owners and operators.
Learn more about Up N' Go at upngo.com and check out more great tips at runningrestaurants.com
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Get To Know: Up N' Go - Touradj Barman, CEO And Co-Founder
I interviewed Touradj Barman, CEO and Cofounder of Up ‘n Go, which is a contactless payment company for restaurants that helps solve several key issues with customer payment and check out. We have an interesting topic. Check it out.
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Introduction To Up N' Go
We've got a great episode with you featuring Touradj Barman, Co-founder of Up ‘n Go. Let's start with a little bit about your company. Tell me what you folks are doing.
Thanks, Jaime. Our company provides contactless payments at restaurants. We've been around for a few years. We're the first company that I know of to integrate with point of sales systems and provide a QR code that didn't require an app. You can just scan, pull up your check, and pay.
It’s so funny that we talk about this and we're going to go to your website in a little bit. You simplified what you guys do right there. As it begins to the story, we'll figure out why it's so important that frustration towards the end of the check. Is that the derivation of the company? Where did it start? How do you guys get to where you are?
The number one problem I was trying to solve because I live in a metropolitan area in Downtown San Diego. I go out with friends all the time and I have for a long time, is splitting the check. That's where I fought, you go to a dinner or meal. Everything's fun and you're enjoying your friend’s company. The check comes and all the sudden, you have to start talking dollars with your friends.
Splitting the check shouldn't be uncomfortable! With Up N' Go, pick what you ordered, pay your share, and enjoy a seamless experience.
Sometimes, that gets uncomfortable. I thought, “There's got to be a better way.” My vision was that people could pick what they ordered and pay for their own thing. Naturally, that is fluent into that concept of paying the check. Anyway, there's a lot of technology in Up ‘n Go to help make splitting the check easy and fair.
Why is splitting the check with friends such an uncomfortable process? It's weird. Before, that's like, “You pay $20. No you pay $10. I got the thing but I didn't get the alcohol. Let's split it equally. You got the $20 thing. I got the $5 thing.” It can get awkward. Alright, derivation was splitting with the check. Simpleas scanning the QR code which now, for a little while, was confusing but everybody has a phone and has figured that piece of it out. How has the journey been? Is it much more simple than it was?
How Contactless Payments Benefit Restaurants
I had a three-year plan which was the 10, 100, and 1,000 plan which was to get into ten restaurants by the end of year one and 100 by end of year two and a thousand by end of year three. We pretty much tracked that which is pretty impressive. I'm very proud of our team and we continue to refine our product. I’m thinking about new and unique features we can add. We added 3D secure fraud protection, which I'm pretty sure we're the only service that lets you pay with your phone at a table that has 3D secure fraud protection. We're always looking to have the premium product and make sure we have technologies that are valuable to the restaurants and the guests.
Talk about a piece of the founding story or how you guys got started. One of the first implementations of how you learned and how to use a restaurant. You have a restaurant back on yourself.
By the way, I often forget about this myself but I was born because of a restaurant. My dad, back in the ‘70s, had a restaurant and my mom wandered in to get a job as a waitress and one thing led to another. In fact, when I was a kid, I used to wash dishes and do weird things like fry pickles on the grill. I still remember getting in trouble for clearing a plate and eating the leftovers of someone's fries. My mom told me that was not a good idea.
Anyway, when it comes to wanting to build this, I felt that you don't want to build something in a vacuum. You want to build something with a client in mind. I had recently met Matt through some local art activities. We're both artificianados associated with the local modern art museum. I approached Matt and I said, “I have this idea to create a new way to split the check and I want to build it in a real restaurant, to work for a restaurant. If it works in your restaurant, it's going to work in other restaurants.”
I was just committed to wanting a good product. I always thought in the back of my mind, “Even though we had the 10, 100, and 1,000 plan, if this thing only works in Starlight. It's still a cool thing that works at Starlight.” I was just driven by that mission to make it a great way to pay. Turns out that Starlight used Aloha. That was fortuitous for us because it's very difficult to get into an Aloha partnership, but the folks at NCR shared our value with what we wanted to do.
They had previously and currently still have a product that's similar. We're both innovators in that area. Integrating with NCR and Aloha, that's a tall hill to climb and we were just up for the challenge. It goes back to that saying why did we go to the moon? We didn't go to the moon because it was easy. We went because it was hard. I was motivated by that challenge of getting something to work well with Aloha.
We'll talk about that for a second because a lot of restaurants will be interested in this or similar technologies. They'll think it's easy to integrate. You folks integrate with the Aloha. Is there other stuff you integrate with? Can you still use your stuff with some other alternatives? What are the options?
We also integrate with micros, so 3,700. We're introducing our symphony integration. One of the things that is special about Up ‘n Go is that we directly integrate with the POS. There's a very famous and very well-known successful company that does like middleware providers. They connect to something like 8 to 10 different points of sales systems, and they have an API. You can connect through them and connect to the POS.
A lot of at least my competitors look at that and they think, “We'll just be in a bunch of POS. Basically, quality was took presidents over the quantity. I wanted to have the very best and a great payment service for Aloha and the very best payment service for Microsoft. Yes, we have 2 instead of 10, but those are the best. If you're on Microsoft or Aloha, the very best you can have is Up ‘n Go.
Let me do this and we'll poke around your site a little bit. You can tell us a couple of things that are going on there. I started by having the basic how it works screen up and you've already talked about this. What else do they need to know?
What's going on is we integrate with the point of sales system. With your existing printers, they're going to print a QR code at the bottom. You don't have to change any hardware at all. You don't need any new hardware at all. We don't even install. There's no concept of Up ‘n Go being installed on your POS. We're literally using the built-in KPIs on those native platforms.
The check prints out. You drop it. At the table, get scans, and pulls up the check. We do another thing that's very unique which is that we can put the payment right into your POS. When it comes to submitting a payment to a point of sale system, you basically have two options. One option is you essentially send encrypted. We're a PCI level one certified service provider, so everything we do has security as a top priority. There's a mechanism where you can use the built-in credit card gateway of the POS and you could submit the card that way.
For the restaurant, it's so seamless. If they need to adjust a transaction or whatever, they can do everything for the POS. A lot of restaurants are moving away from this concept of having credit card numbers in their POS and using the gateway to the POS because they want to limit their PCI scope, especially when they move to EMV because these legacy POS that cannot process EMV locally. They all are the point-to-point encryption. They’re basically connecting to an above store payment gateway.
When they tell the POS a check is paid, they're creating what's called a tender. A tender is like an account, for example. You could say this check was paid with Up ‘n Go. That would be a tender. Instead of saying, “This check was paid with MasterCard 4444.” That's a real differentiator for Up ‘n Go. That's something that comes from the native one at a time integration with the POS.
Frankly, those aggregators don't even have access on Aloha. They don't have the authority from NCR to use the building gateway the way we do. We support both. Whether the restaurant wants the payment in their POS gateway directly or they want an above store gateway like let's say, Freedom Play, who's a new partner of ours or let's say a First Data gateway and even Braintree. We are plugged into many of them.
Stuff that gets tech heavy pretty quickly. You want to be done fast and quick question. It's probably going to be answered as we scan down. There’s a video stuff. Instead of asking a question and not that we look to do a sales pitch at all but these are some of the legit benefits with all of this stuff. Walk us through what you got.
By the way, the first thing that's not listed is health and safety and that's what led to a lot of our growth in 2020 as a response to COVID. Obviously, the fewer things people are touching the better but besides that, there's a lot of ways that Up ‘n Go is going to help your business. The first thing we see here is turning the tables. I encourage people when there's a check drop at their table at any restaurant, start a timer on your phone and see how long it is from when that check is dropped until you can leave.
The fewer things people touch, the better. Up N' Go makes restaurant payments faster, safer, and contactless!
It's so much longer than you think. We did a case study at one of our restaurant sites. We looked at the people who paid with Up ‘n Go and the people who didn't pay with Up ‘n Go. The people who paid with Up ‘n Go had an average dwell time at a table of 41 minutes. The people who didn't pay with Up ‘n Go were 61 minutes. In fact, the Up ‘n Go people paid $40 on average instead of $38. Basically, if you compare 41 minutes to 61 minutes, that's saving about 33% of the time.
With Up N' Go, you can reduce table dwell time from 61 minutes to 41! More tables served, more revenue earned.
Where that number becomes interesting is if you think about what that does to your throughput. It doubled it. It's not a third. For example, take a two-hour period. If each party takes an hour, you can serve two parties in two hours at one table. If each party takes 40 minutes, then you can serve three parties in the same two hours. If you compare three parties to two parties, that's a 50% boost to your revenue. All of a sudden, if you use Up ‘n Go, basically the restaurant's getting 50% larger for a small monthly fee.
Before you even go further, I want to echo what you just talked about. We had a meal a few weeks ago at a restaurant. Outside dining after my daughter after a softball game, so it's already late. We probably sat down at 8:30-ish. Whatever. Anyway, we finished. She still has to go home, shower and all that stuff that you got to do when you're a student. They dropped the check and the same thing you echoed. You think it's going to be quick but that process can lag and lag.
We're newly attuned to this but my daughter can drive. We were like, “Shoot. Go ahead and leave.” Normally, she can't do that but we're like, “Go ahead and leave. You have your car. Head out.” In essence, we wasted twenty minutes waiting for that whole cycle to happen. The first thing she hit us with a QR code. I could have paid with a credit card and we could have walked out, which on a late night dinner, we were itching to go. When you have that itchy feeling as a customer, in the restaurant, you want to avoid your customer feeling itchy, especially with that last experience they feel. I'm probably echoing stuff you guys talk about all the time.
Improving The Guest Experience & Restaurant Operations
One thing that I love about these benefits is that they regard their experiences that are very universal. Everybody eats at restaurants. Everybody knows what a pain it is to wait for your check. Everybody can relate to this problem. It's a big problem to solve for a lot of people. In addition to helping the restaurant's business, it's improving the guest experience. People are going to walk away with a better feeling. The last thing you want is like a one-star Yelp review because someone waited half an hour to pay their check. This picks up and prevents those potholes if you will in your service from happening.
It's like, “Let me give you my money so I can leave.”
Unfortunately, I'm too honest but there are times where I’m like, “Let me just walk out of this place,” but I don't do that.
The sell more is interesting and you may find that it leads to even more tips. What do you find on that portion of it?
I have this whole philosophy when it comes to selling more. What is a server? A server, in my opinion, they should be two things one. One is a salesperson because they're selling. The other thing is a service provider. You need to ensure that people have a great experience but there's this job that every restaurant makes them play, which is cashier or accounts receivable person. I don't think a server's job should be to collect money.
Servers should focus on service, not collecting payments! Up N' Go allows them to do just that by automating the payment process.
Another way that I sometimes characterize Up ‘n Go is like having an invisible employee. You have this invisible employee that’s your cashier. It's going around and getting everyone's payments. If a server is not busy swiping five credit cards for its blood check. What could that server be doing instead? They could be selling drinks at one table. They can be making some people's experience better at another table. I think service should focus on service and selling. They shouldn't be an accountant basically.
That's interesting. I 100% agree there and you already echo this next one where people will negatively go on and leave a review. Imagine if they had a great experience but it took too long to pay. You don't want that to happen. You’ve had feedback where people like, “It's so easy. I want to go back to that place because they made my check out easy.” That's interesting.
I'll tell you my favorite stories from business school. I need to collect a marketing psychology class and they use this example of someone getting a colonoscopy. The two most painful parts of a colonoscopy or when you go in and when you go out. Not the middle. People are like people with this psychology. People tend to remember the beginning and the end of things. You have this fabulous meal. A great experience. If the end is bad, if it's hard to pay, that can just ruin everything. They're going to walk away and that's what they're going to remember. You don't want that if you're running a restaurant.
You talked about the split the check, text to check, and direct to check. What else do you have?
Innovative Payment Solutions: Text The Check
We have a lot of different benefits. We just put a few up on the site. Split the check is something that we excel at. We provide a few different ways to split the check. Whether it's picking your items, putting in a fraction or in a dollar amount and we keep track of all of that. One of the things we introduced which was a real big hit was text the check. After we released it, pretty much every one of our competitors followed suit but we were the first to market with that.
The idea was very simple. You get someone calling in an order. Rather than take their credit card number, you take their phone number. You put the phone number in the POS. Again, no third party hardware. We see that and we shoot out a text with a link to pay your check. It's the same payment experience as if you're in the restaurant. When you arrive, it's very clear that you've already paid. The receipts are printed out before you get there.
They can just hand over your order instead of you having to disrupt service. Most restaurants don't have a dedicated server standing around waiting for people to come and pay for their pickup orders. You're always waiting for someone to finish serving a table. It's never good. Paying in advance is awesome. The direct check shouldn't even be a feature but some of our competitors make you enter the check number which is ridiculous. That was just saying that when you scan a check on Up ‘n Go, it goes straight to the check.
I like the text idea as we all find ourselves ordering more often remotely. That pay process when you get to the location can be not fun. We’ll talk about these things and we'll jump back out.
Use cases. Up ‘n Go’s bread and butter is pay at the table. That's what we invented. When I was starting the company, I thought if you go to a quick service restaurant or fast food or fast casual pay at the counter. It's not a delay there. It's not so much of an issue. What I saw is the underserved area was paying at the table. That's our bread and butter. The next most popular use case is text the check which took off.
Before text to check and our first response to COVID, it wasn't even us. It was restaurants started doing it. It was curbside pickup. It basically saves one round trip for a server. If someone arrives to pick up their food. The server comes out with the check with the code on it and the guests can pay at the table showing their confirmation screen to the server and they can go in. With Up ‘n Go, they’re going back to the terminal then they're coming back out again. They're getting a signature and going back in again. They're going to have to write in the tip.
We've come out with some features for more counter service quick service. We have that ability where there's a QR code dedicated to, let's say, a terminal. You can walk up and scan that and pull up whatever check is on that terminal. Drive through the same thing. You can do some wine bust thing. People waste so much time just sitting in their car in a drive through. Why don't they give them the power to pay before they get to the window?
Lots of stuff. I'm going to jump out back to us and talk about it as we start to close. A lot of exciting stuff there. You folks sound like you're innovating all the time. What's coming next? Where are folks heading?
What’s Next For Up N' Go
We have a lot of different areas of expansion that we're looking at. As I said, we added 3D secure payment technology. We have orders at the table and online ordering both in beta. We have the ability where using your own phone, you can add to your order, start a new order and order online. These are running at a few restaurants so far. We're working on integrating more point of sales systems. I hope that will add one or maybe two more in 2024. We have some things I can't talk about that are some special things we're building out. By the end of 2024, we're going to have 1 or 2 features that surprise people.
You have to attack. You have to come up with a surprise. You got to keep you got to keep moving because it's not slowing down. As we officially get to the wrap-up stage, send them where you want, websites, social, or download stuff. What do you get?
Fortunately, there's no downloads but just go to UpNGo.com and learn about our company. There's a contact form. Reach out. If you want to get Up ‘n Go in your restaurant, we’ll get you up and going.
Simple as that. Perfect stuff. Good stuff to check out. I encourage folks to do it. I know it makes the experience a lot better. Folks, that was Touradj Barman of Up ‘n Go. You can find them on the web at UpNGo.com. For more great restaurant marketing, service, operations, and tech tips, stay tuned to us. We'll see you in the next episode. Thanks.
Thanks, Jaime.
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