[00:00:00] Live from the Business Radio X studio inside Renasant Bank, the bank that specializes in understanding you. It’s time for North Fulton Business Radio.
[00:00:19] John Ray: And hello again, everyone. Welcome to another edition of North Fulton Business Radio. I’m John Ray, and we are broadcasting as usual from inside Renasant Bank in beautiful Alpharetta. And if you’re tired of the mega bank experience, Yes, the computer generated voice is you know what I’m talking about.
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[00:00:54] John Ray: That’s what I found myself. Here’s a way to try them out. Go to Renasantbank. com. Find one of their local offices near you and give them a call. See if a live person answers the phone. That’s a good way to test them out. And I happen to know they do answer the phone. Give them a try. I think you’ll be glad you did.
[00:01:11] John Ray: Renasant Bank, understanding you, member FDIC. And now I want to welcome Angela Caine. Angela is with WineView. Angela, welcome.
[00:01:23] Angela Caine: Thank you so much. Good to be here.
[00:01:24] John Ray: Yeah. Great to have you here. Wineview. Tell us a little bit about how you’re serving folks. It sounds like fun.
[00:01:30] Angela Caine: Yes. Wineview, and it’s spelled W I N E V I E W, and I have to say that because a lot of tech companies decide to name themselves by changing a letter here or there.
[00:01:42] Angela Caine: Yes. And so we decided against that strategy. We wanted people to know exactly what we did. It’s Wineview. W I N E. And view, V, I, E, W. So that makes a big difference to our company. But anyway, we are a software company a right now a B2B software company and we help restaurants increase their wine sales in two ways.
[00:02:03] Angela Caine: Number one, we train their servers on their particular wine list and menu and build confidence in their serving staff. And then we also provide an interactive guest experience. And I can talk a little bit more about those, but those are our two main. Functionalities. And we found that there’s a big need in the market because after the pandemic the servers in particular, workforce in particular had a huge problem finding servers who were experienced.
[00:02:27] Angela Caine: A lot of the veterans left the industry. And and also where we are on the coast is a lot of seasonal employees, a lot of college kids, a lot of non wine drinkers who are still acting as servers. And so we found that there was a kind of a gap there. On the guest experience side, we realize that sometimes, like for example, you go down to Destin and you’ve got a two hour wait for your table, what do you do in the meantime?
[00:02:48] Angela Caine: You can research that wine list. If you’re a wine drinker and there’s 200 bottles of wine on the list, how are you going to know 200 bottles of wine? Sure. In 10 minutes. You have an opportunity to interact with that wine list digitally.
[00:03:00] Angela Caine: Oh wow. I want to get We’ll get into that, of course, in depth, but let’s talk about you and your journey, though.
[00:03:08] Angela Caine: We all have one. We’ve all got one, but I’m asking the questions here now. We’re not going to talk about Bob, we’re going to talk about yours. No, uh, why wine view? This is not talk about your background, which I already know a little bit about because it does not necessarily lend itself to, you would think that a startup like this, right?
[00:03:32] Angela Caine: Absolutely.
[00:03:33] Angela Caine: And it was strange because I’m certainly the least tech person out there. I’ll just throw that out there at the beginning. Okay. I’m, I was an attorney for literally 30 years. And I decided, which, which allowed me to know a lot about wine. So you have to learn that in law school.
[00:03:48] Angela Caine: So I was working with another partner, my co founder at the time, and he had a digital company, which did websites, social media, digital strategy. And so I had a client at the end of my career, that was an entertainment client. He was on the, on American Idol. Very popular. He was the singing garbage man, for those of you Idol fans out there.
[00:04:07] Angela Caine: And he, he did very well, and so I needed a digital strategist, and I got Gary Campbell to help me put his digital strategy together, his social media, his website, all of that. And then when we went to the finale in Los Angeles, I said we’re all here in Los Angeles, we definitely need to go to a winery.
[00:04:25] Angela Caine: Cause Gary had never been to a winery and I said, we got to winery if you’re in, if you’re in California. So we did. And he started to realize just how difficult wine was for the consumer. And so I said yeah, wine’s great, but there’s millions and millions of bottles out there and it’s a lot of information and most people don’t know a lot of that information unless you go to school to become a sommelier.
[00:04:48] Angela Caine: Sure. So we got out there and we decided that’s where the company was born. And so I thought what is a lawyer who is not a tech person? And lawyers are notoriously bad tech people anyway. What is a lawyer doing running a tech company? So I thought, all right, I’m going to let Gary go out ahead.
[00:05:04] Angela Caine: And so he hired our first dev team. He put the product together and I stayed on the sidelines. I continue to practice law. I continue to do some other things, recruiting. I worked in international and I watched how things were going, right? And, but since I’ve been a lawyer for 30 years and I’ve represented a lot of small businesses, I knew a lot of the mistakes that they were going to make and that we could make.
[00:05:23] Angela Caine: And so that helped me really navigate the first two years of our business and lo and behold, we’re still standing after two years and we’re starting to grow. So
[00:05:32] John Ray: you can see the hairpin journey. Yeah, you could see the hairpin turns coming, right? Because
[00:05:37] Angela Caine: there are so many and you can hopefully predict the ones that aren’t coming that you don’t know exactly what they’re going to look like, they’re out there.
[00:05:43] John Ray: Yeah right. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And most, most startups don’t have this, right? They don’t have this.
[00:05:51] Angela Caine: And they have to hire it, and it’s very expensive to hire a professional service provider early in the process.
[00:05:57] Angela Caine: It really is, and lawyers are bad about helping small businesses survive, right? They start the clock running, and the costs go up, and even the accountants are guilty of that. It’s difficult, and so I think we had a huge advantage of my… 30 years of experience working with small businesses.
[00:06:16] Angela Caine: And and thankfully I didn’t have to handle any of the tech stuff.
[00:06:19] John Ray: One more thing about you personally, and then let’s talk about the company itself. You could have gotten involved with a lot of different. Startups, if you, if that’s what you wanted, but why Wineview versus anything else that’s come your way?
[00:06:32] John Ray: I guess I
[00:06:33] Angela Caine: I knew so I grew up half in Germany and half in the United States My mom’s German my dad’s from Alabama and they met when he was stationed over there in the classic story. Sure And so I grew up in two cultures and the European wine culture is so different than the American wine culture, alcohol culture.
[00:06:51] Angela Caine: And so I had a unique understanding of how it worked. And then I like to cook and I started getting more into wine as I liked. And I had worked as a server forever. That’s how I put myself through college and law school and made great money doing it. And so I felt like I had a unique set of skills and plus as a lawyer, you’re still a server at the end of the day, you’re a service provider.
[00:07:10] Angela Caine: So I’ve been in the service industry my whole life. And I thought that’s interesting. My skill set is. Fairly unique and I thought it would be a good compliment to Gary’s skill set and so I thought if we’re gonna do something You know, I like the space I felt like we’re really helping Restaurants understand how to get better at what they were trying to do which is sell more wine and educate their guests and their servers On how to sell more wine and drink more wine.
[00:07:33] Angela Caine: Yep. So I thought let’s you know, let’s do this Good thing is you don’t think too much don’t overthink it Yeah. When you start a tech company, do not overthink it or you probably will run.
[00:07:42] John Ray: So true. Angela Caine is with us folks. She is with wine view. You talk Angela about your service.
[00:07:51] John Ray: And it’s software as a service, is really what we’re talking about here. Yeah. How you’ve got basically two main objectives. One is to, and let’s talk about them one separately here. What you talked about the I guess the relative lack of wine education that most servers have. Today are many of them have today.
[00:08:10] John Ray: I don’t know if most is the right word, but many of them have today So how does how specifically does? Your service help bridge that education gap,
[00:08:22] Angela Caine: right, so so there’s a there’s a disconnect in the wine training in general, right? Because you can become a sommelier and just to become a level one is about a two year journey and it’s way overkill, right?
[00:08:34] Angela Caine: If you’re a server in a traditional restaurant that has, let’s say 50 plus wines, you do not need to be a sommelier to sell wine. In fact, if you, if that’s all you have, you’re missing what we think is the biggest part of it, which is the pairing. So it’s not just the wine knowledge, it’s what wine goes with what food and what’s so interesting and what, and one of the reasons I love what we’re doing is, you have these chefs who are creating these tremendous menus and they are really creative people and they are putting these menus together and then you have these fabulous wines out there and nobody’s talking about how to put them together and more importantly, how do you do that?
[00:09:11] Angela Caine: quickly, right? Your staff is not gonna have the time or the maybe even the interest to learn at that level. And so what we’ve done with our software is allow them to learn what they need to know about that restaurant’s wine list and that restaurant’s menu. And so that’s really our secret sauce is that if you’re a restaurant owner and you’re like, I don’t want to sell more wine.
[00:09:32] Angela Caine: Here’s how we do that, right? We allow your servers to learn your wine list and your food pairings so that they can be experts on your restaurant. Now, whether they go somewhere else is irrelevant, but at the point of sale, when they come to you as a guest, instead of saying, Hey, what would you like to drink, they’re going to make recommendations.
[00:09:50] Angela Caine: So we’re actually changing the script of that first 60 seconds when you sit down at a restaurant.
[00:09:57] John Ray: Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense because you said it well, that, that. Here you have these executive chefs. A lot of times are the owners, right? That really care about what’s coming out of the kitchen.
[00:10:10] John Ray: They spent a lot of time on these creations, but they can’t be out in the dining room. Making sure the right wine gets paired, right? And that makes all the difference in the world sometimes. Absolutely. With your guest experience.
[00:10:24] Angela Caine: And your guests are becoming more discriminating when they go out there, with inflationary pricing, they want a better experience.
[00:10:30] Angela Caine: If I’m going to drop a bunch of money on a nice. dinner. I want that experience. I’m not going to, I don’t want to have the server go I’m new and I really don’t like wine. I really drink wine happens all the time. So how do you get that level experience that you want for your guest when you’re back?
[00:10:44] Angela Caine: Like you said, you’re back in the kitchen creating that menu item. And it’s funny because a lot of servers can rattle off ingredients in that dish. Yes. Elaborate. Oh, tonight’s special is and then they’ll go through this elaborate description and yet they forget the last piece, which is, and it would go very nicely or chef would recommend this wine to go with it.
[00:11:03] Angela Caine: No one ever does that, right? Because most guests would probably say yes, because they’re, you’re the expert on your restaurant, right? You’ve put your wine list together. You put your menu together. Why would you leave money on the table by not having the server or Be able to recommend to the guest
[00:11:20] John Ray: and that does mean money on the table.
[00:11:22] John Ray: So let’s talk about that. Let’s get to the bottom line. You’re right. So yeah, what does that mean? What’s the Delta?
[00:11:27] Angela Caine: Absolutely. Just, and we’re really not changing the process. We’re just tweaking the script, right? So typically, typical restaurant situation, you walk in, you sit down with your wife and they ask you.
[00:11:39] Angela Caine: What would you like to drink and they’ve given you what a minute and a half to look at them and you have no idea. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve ever been to this restaurant before, no idea. You’re looking at 200 wines on a wine list. And so if you’re a typical guy, you’re gonna be like, you know what?
[00:11:52] Angela Caine: I’m just gonna go with a bourbon or a beer. And then the wife is I like wine, but I have no idea. This is going to take forever for me to figure it out. So instead of doing that, what we’re trying to do is to let that server seat you, give you some water. And give you the time to relax into the experience and then come back and ask you not what you’re having to drink, but what are you having to eat?
[00:12:15] Angela Caine: For example, are you starting off with the crab claws, right? And then you say, yes, that’d be great. The chef recommends because of the way we prepare them, this great Sauvignon Blanc. Would you like to try a glass with the appetizer? Think about how different that would be. Cause first of all, you’ve been given time because a lot of times we train these servers to upsell and fast fast, and turn your tables.
[00:12:36] Angela Caine: And I was a server for 30 years and I can tell you it. It has not changed, it has not changed the same thing I did back, in the 80s is what’s happening today. So we’re going to change that and give you the time to enjoy this experience. And so one of the biggest things is that, that wine pairing.
[00:12:52] Angela Caine: It’s knowledge, it’s amazing when you pair the right wine with the right food. It’s magical, that is where the magic happens. That’s where we are trying to plug in. And I think a lot of restaurant owners will agree, but they feel like I believe they feel like they’re limited because of, the workforce is hard to find.
[00:13:09] Angela Caine: They’re very inexperienced and it takes time to train people and it takes time to motivate people, right? So that’s one of the ways we’re helping them out.
[00:13:16] John Ray: And the other thing too is The industry itself has trained diners, um, in a not so great direction, right? To go ahead and make that selection on what they’re going to have to drink before they order the food.
[00:13:31] John Ray: And so you’ve really got to, unlearn that tendency, right?
[00:13:37] Angela Caine: Correct. Go to Europe and you’ll unlearn it real fast because they don’t do that over there. They’re starting to because they feel like it works, but the European style is you’re seated for a minute. Before they come over and start asking you what you want to have.
[00:13:50] Angela Caine: And so that gives you the time to just settle in, this isn’t McDonald’s. You’re not there for fast in and out. This is an experience. If you’re dropping 200 bucks on a dinner, you want your money’s worth.
[00:14:00] John Ray: Yeah. And let’s get to that piece of it. So the guest experience.
[00:14:04] John Ray: I could see, of course we’re business here and I’m thinking about a business dinner, right? Where they don’t. Happened as much as they used to, right? And so therefore, when they happen, you want you that you want them to be first class and over the top and successful, right?
[00:14:23] John Ray: So that’s what we’re talking about. Here’s creating that. a great experience,
[00:14:27] Angela Caine: correct. And what I think that comes down to is how confident is your server on the menu, right? So you have to have confidence to be able to recommend a wine. It is not a cheap product. And if you were selling a glass, you have to upsell to a bottle.
[00:14:41] Angela Caine: And there’s, pro tips that we give on how to do that. But you have to go to that table with confidence. And that’s one of the things that, that most servers are not, they lack confidence in selling wine. They can sell a beer, they can sell a mixed drink because most people know those, most guests can order those themselves when it gets into wine, even the executives because this is a totally new wine list.
[00:15:02] Angela Caine: Maybe they’ve never seen these at Publix the wines on this list. So even then it’s, it comes down to the server being able to recommend. Wine to that table, and you can definitely get them to order wine because it makes the experience, the lunch or the dinner so much more fantastic,
[00:15:18] John Ray: right. And the server, I can see how the server is might be worried about running up against.
[00:15:24] John Ray: Someone who has some knowledge about wine, right? And they’ve got their own opinions. Absolutely. And so what you’re doing is giving them the knowledge and the confidence to be able to talk intelligently with that particular diner too.
[00:15:40] Angela Caine: Exactly. Because they’re not experts on wine.
[00:15:42] Angela Caine: They’re experts on their wine at their restaurant. That’s the big difference. And they’re pairing. That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly what we teach them and the training modules are fun So we actually modeled them on an app called Duolingo. Yes, which is a very fun I mean talk about something difficult learning a foreign language is really difficult Yes, and so we’ve said okay if they can do it and make it fun Then we can do it and make it fun.
[00:16:04] Angela Caine: And so the knowledge that we give there’s usually about eight to ten questions We do it like a wordle we do it maybe fill in the blank. There’s gonna pop in confusion Fetty, there’s lots of reinforcement because we want people to want to take, we want the servers to want to take the training and then really learn something along the way.
[00:16:21] Angela Caine: So we put it in kind of bite sized, unintended bite size morsels, and then we reinforce the training on that specific wine list and menu. So that’s, I think the big difference with our product.
[00:16:32] John Ray: So is this a product where the server learns this let’s say off the dining room floor and then brings that knowledge or they have a handheld or how does that work?
[00:16:44] Angela Caine: Yeah, so there’s a couple different ways that the restaurants can do it if they’re not tech adverse. So a lot of restaurants that are, they don’t want technology anywhere near the guest. I can understand that. And now with this newer generation, they recognize that maybe an iPad is a good way to.
[00:16:58] Angela Caine: Cause if you’re having that much knowledge that you have to impart in a very short amount of time, sometimes the guest wants to learn a little bit more about the wines that you have, right? Cause maybe the server slammed, maybe he just got sat with 10 tables. And so the guest might want to interact with the wine list.
[00:17:13] Angela Caine: And what’s cool about that is the chef or the beverage director can say, you know what? There’s the tasting notes on this wine are not very. Good. They’re not very informative. I’m going to change them and I’m going to say, I can make my own. I can customize the tasting notes so I can give the guests directly what I want them to know about this wine.
[00:17:30] Angela Caine: And that’s even better because, at the end of the day, the guest kind of likes the story. If you think about how many wines are out there, it’s the story that sells, where is this vineyard from? Why did they start this vineyard? What’s the, what are they passionate about with this wine making?
[00:17:43] Angela Caine: What is the vintage year and why was it important or why was it not good that year? Those kinds of things make things a lot more fun in the wine industry. And really the wine industry itself has done a poor job of kind of getting next generation wine drinkers interested. They’re still elitist to a certain extent.
[00:18:00] Angela Caine: It’s not very accessible to everyone. And so we’re trying to change that.
[00:18:05] John Ray: That’s an interesting dynamic. I hadn’t thought of. It’s just the demographics how those are changing and how that’s changing wine consumption. So is wine consumption overall on a downward trend right now? And you’ve got a lot of course, it seems like we have new wineries come out coming out all the time, right?
[00:18:24] John Ray: So is that the dynamic? That’s going on right now?
[00:18:27] Angela Caine: I think So if you compare the wine industry to like the craft beer industry, it’s getting crushed, right? The craft beer industry has done an amazing job of motivating the next generation wine drinkers and educating them and exciting the wine, the next generation of beer drinkers.
[00:18:42] Angela Caine: The wine industry has, I believe, lagged behind. Because I don’t think they thought they had to keep up, right? I think they thought they had their sales. They had their distributor channels. They had their loyal clientele. But as you, like my son’s 23 and he’s starting to learn how to cook. And he’s mom, I have no idea.
[00:18:59] Angela Caine: I want to make a lasagna or a chicken, chicken Alfredo or something. What do I do with it? So there is interest there, but especially men are very intimidated, with learning wine out in the open. We want to get. them more comfortable with it. And so that’s the idea is to I don’t want to say dumb it down, but make it more accessible to everybody.
[00:19:17] Angela Caine: Sure.
[00:19:18] John Ray: Maybe the way to say it is you break down the component parts of it all. Because it can be overwhelming, um, when it’s all put together. That’s right.
[00:19:27] Angela Caine: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a diff and like I said, when we saw Duolingo did a pretty good job with a very difficult topic.
[00:19:33] Angela Caine: Yeah. I thought, alright, if they can do it, we got this too.
[00:19:35] John Ray: . Yeah, for sure. For sure. and as, no, as as good and worthy as learning Spanish or Portuguese is learning about wine that way sounds even more fun. That’s right. Angela Caine is with us folks with Wine View is the name of her company.
[00:19:51] John Ray: What’s the overall difference that this makes for, uh, in terms of the the, the revenue to the restaurant itself. What, I know it’s different for each restaurant, but what does that look like overall?
[00:20:06] Angela Caine: So we guarantee a 20 percent minimum increase in about two months if you use our product correctly.
[00:20:12] Angela Caine: So we have a great onboarding process. We have a great CSM assigned to you to make sure that Understand the technology, we say it’s like a diet app, right? Yeah We all want to lose weight and then we download these apps and we actually never use them and then we’d understand why we haven’t Lost the pound, right?
[00:20:26] Angela Caine: So that’s what I realized from being a non tech person that we needed this really very robust onboarding process And so we figured that one out and our clients are very happy We walk them through the process. We get the servers on lined up for the training. And so what happens is you can increase wine sales because we’re not changing the actions that take place in the restaurant.
[00:20:46] Angela Caine: We’re just changing the conversations that take place in the restaurant. So you still have the server going up to the table and taking their order and you still have the guests looking at wine lists or menu items and trying to figure out what they want to eat or drink. But we are putting, We’re taking it up a notch, right?
[00:21:02] Angela Caine: So just by that changing that transaction, we can easily guarantee a 20 percent probably more, but our data is suggesting that, because you’ve servers are servers, you’re going to lose some and the downturns in the economy and people aren’t, that those factors, by and large, if you use our product as intended, you’re looking at a minimum of a 20 percent increase in about two months.
[00:21:22] John Ray: And that’s a 20 percent increase in wine sales. And and that’s a much higher margin. Component of the business than food, let’s say. So your gross margin is increased because of that. Increase in wine sales. ThAt’s music to a lot of restaurant owners ears, right?
[00:21:40] Angela Caine: And I know from being a server for all those years, margins in restaurants are tough and inflation is killing them right now.
[00:21:46] Angela Caine: High costs of energy is killing them right now. Workforce problems are killing them now. So technology I think is trying to get further and deeper into that industry to help restaurant owners. But, they’re limited on time. It’s not just the money. They don’t have time. And so we have to do both.
[00:22:00] Angela Caine: We have to save them time. We have to make them money. And I feel like we’ve done that.
[00:22:05] John Ray: You’ve got a collaboration with a company called Toast. Yes. Explain who Toast is and what the value of that collaboration is. Yes. So
[00:22:14] Angela Caine: Toast is an incredible, so Toast is a POS point of sale company and so we go to the National Restaurant Association convention every year in Chicago And we met them the first year.
[00:22:24] Angela Caine: I think they were the first year but when we were on the floor at the National Restaurant Association, there was probably 20 point of sale Systems out there and we’re in Atlanta. So NCR is a big one They have one called Aloha and then there’s micros and there’s all kinds of POS I had no idea there was 20 of them and probably more those were just the ones that we saw at the show But we started asking around and, just like every other industry, who’s the cool kids, right?
[00:22:47] Angela Caine: And Toast, definitely. They’re out of Boston and they have decided that they wanted to be the most innovative and they wanted to solve problems differently with technology than some of the existing who’ve been around forever. And so we hitched our kind of wagon to their train and they are growing like gangbusters and what’s nice because we’re integrated.
[00:23:06] Angela Caine: So we’re at what’s called a full integration partner. So right now if you’re a Toast customer, you can go on your point of sale and you can enable wine view, right? You don’t even have to talk to us at all. It’s right there on your point of sale system. And what that means is all of your menu items and all of your wines will migrate over to your system.
[00:23:23] Angela Caine: Through us. Okay. Then obviously you have to hire us to manage all that, but you can enable it right now. And some customers are already looking at, all right let’s, walk before we run, let’s see how this goes. And so being with Toast has given us a really good context because that’s, obviously they are a huge technological giant.
[00:23:42] Angela Caine: They’re, I went, just went to an event last night and they’re constantly putting new things out there. They’re trying to make it more. User friendly and we get the benefit of that, right? They’re a billion dollar company. We’re not. So we can, and they have lots of partners and the way they sell their partners is look, Toast cannot do everything.
[00:23:58] Angela Caine: So we bring in the software, like an app store, right? So you can a la carte, go through the app store on Toast and pick which ones that you need, maybe the accounting software, maybe an inventory software, maybe a menu software. And so we’re the only wine software in not only Toast, but any POS.
[00:24:14] Angela Caine: There’s no other wine software. where that’s integrated with the
[00:24:16] Angela Caine: POS.
[00:24:17] John Ray: Oh, wow. So that
[00:24:18] Angela Caine: we got real lucky./
[00:24:20] John Ray: And that, that’s certainly, I see why Toast would be interested in you then. Because you’re, that’s something that doesn’t exist unless you’re on the scene there for them. That’s right.
[00:24:30] Angela Caine: Our biggest competitor, if you ask around and they’re not even a competitor because they don’t do, it’s not apples to apples, but it’s a company called Vivino and they want to be the Amazon of wine. So they actually, you can buy from them and they can ship things to you and they teach you about wine and all that.
[00:24:43] Angela Caine: It’s a great product, just not the same as ours. Yeah,
[00:24:46] John Ray: got it. So let’s talk about, whereas we come up on The end of our time, I’d love it if you could share maybe a success story or I know it’s early on, but sounds based on our conversation before the show, you’ve already got some.
[00:25:03] Angela Caine: We do. And, and I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, this industry is is no different than any other industry. So one of the biggest challenges they have is how do you train and motivate a young workforce that is always on their phone? The next generation, and I’m sure you’ve heard this after interviewing all the businesses that you’ve interviewed.
[00:25:20] Angela Caine: Oh, sure. How do you do that? These folks, they learn different. They respond different. They act different. And so if you’re, let’s say a baby boomer or a Gen X or a owner. And you’re, or beverage director, and you’re looking at this new generic, you’re pulling your hair out. You’re like, I can’t get them off their phones.
[00:25:39] Angela Caine: I don’t know if they’re paying attention. I don’t think they’re retaining anything. I don’t, they want everything too fat. How do they’re literally at the end of their rope. And they’re going, and I don’t have the time or expertise to deal with them. So what we’ve done, and we just signed a customer that’s got about 26 locations in multiple states.
[00:25:55] Angela Caine: And we handle all that for them, right? So we. Wrangle their servers and we can use messaging so we can directly message the servers and say, Hey, we’re out of the, 2018 Pinot Noir or whatever. And so there’s lots of ways that they can interact with their servers. We do all of the training.
[00:26:11] Angela Caine: We make sure that they’re doing the training because every week we can give a report to the restaurant and say, Hey, Susie’s looking really good. She’s crushing it. Billy, not so much. You may want to look at that or we can look at that for you. You decide how you want to handle it. So they were extremely happy that one of their biggest frustration points has turned into actually something quite positive because they’re seeing the wine sales go up as we are wrangling their staff and making sure that they know what they’re doing when it comes to selling wine and they’re loving it.
[00:26:40] Angela Caine: Because they literally had no other, they had no other option. They didn’t know what to do and they didn’t know we existed. And so when we were introduced to them by their distributor, they were like, yes. So yeah, so that’s one of our big ones and we ran it as a pilot and then we’re going to roll it out to all 26 locations.
[00:26:57] Angela Caine: That’s awesome. So I think it’s going to be, and it’s fun too, because the different locations now are competing against one another. So we told them like, like Framingham is doing pretty good, Meadowbrook or whatever is killing you guys. So you need to up your game so we can make them competitive and servers are very competitive people.
[00:27:12] Angela Caine: And so once you say, and there’s prizes and everything, they get bottles of wine, they get to actually try the food that they’re serving, which is rare in the industry. And so that’s like some fun, competitive advantage. But the biggest success story is that woman that we were meeting with initially, the beverage director is thank you.
[00:27:27] Angela Caine: I can now sleep at night. My hair is not as going as gray as it was. And and I’m not about to kill somebody. So I consider that a pretty big success
[00:27:36] Angela Caine: story.
[00:27:37] John Ray: That’s a great one. Let’s be clear as we wrap up here Angela on. The because restaurant industry is a big industry, lots of different players, lots of it’s changing and it’s changing.
[00:27:48] John Ray: So who are the best fits for your service?
[00:27:51] Angela Caine: Yeah, so really, we’ve narrowed it down to two types of restaurants. One is your sort of typical fine dining with servers with a big kind of a robust wine list, I would say at least 30 to 50 and above. And some have 600, these wine bars that have ridiculous amounts of wine.
[00:28:06] Angela Caine: So I would think that is definitely one of our biggest categories. But the other one is Just the opposite. Let’s say you go to a pizza and right around the holidays is really important. Let’s say you’re at Christmas shopping and your son or you’re with, they want, he wants a pizza and you’re like, I’m not feeling the pizza thing.
[00:28:20] Angela Caine: I want to get some pasta, right? Some nice pasta. And so you go to one of these kind of fast, casual restaurants that you still have to order and they still have alcohol. You’re not going to have a beer with like chicken Alfredo. You might have it with pizza, but you’re not going to have it with that. And if you’re a female, you really don’t want to have a beer with, with something like that.
[00:28:39] Angela Caine: So any place that has like pasta or fast casual that you would normally have a glass of wine with, those restaurants don’t even build a wine program very well. They have a couple of them. Like when you go in, they’ll say, would you like red or would you like white? That’s it. Yeah. , you don’t get anything else.
[00:28:54] Angela Caine: That’s proof. Yeah. So we can even help them build out a very basic wine selection and then we can help them. ’cause they don’t have servers, right? You’re ordering everything at the countertop. So we, there’s a big difference between one of our customer groups versus the other, but both of them benefit they just benefit from different parts of our product.
[00:29:11] John Ray: Yeah.
[00:29:12] John Ray: That makes a lot of sense. Wow. Angela, congratulations on your success so far. It’s, I’m delighted that we could have you here to celebrate that and to wish you well as you continue to grow. Yeah, congratulations on your work. But let’s get to the most important question for those that have heard something here that makes them want to be in touch.
[00:29:31] John Ray: Tell them how they can do that.
[00:29:32] Angela Caine: Absolutely.
[00:29:33] Angela Caine: So our website is as wineview. com and you can go there. It’s very, I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of explaining what we do. A lot of times you go to a tech website, you have no idea what they do. And then you actually have to talk to a person. If you go to our website, there’s a book, a demo button, and that’s the easy, what I tell people is it’s very difficult with tech to explain it. So it’s better just to see a demo. So if you’re a restaurant owner, you would go and then we could actually tell you how wine view would work in your restaurant. I feel like that’s the easy, I’m a visual person. Anyway, I feel like that’s the best, but yeah, but otherwise you can go to wineview.
[00:30:05] Angela Caine: com. You can find it on the app stores so you can download it directly off your apple app store or android and then you can check us out that way as well.
[00:30:13] John Ray: Terrific. AngelCainene from WineView. Angela, thanks again for coming in.
[00:30:18] Angela Caine: !Thank you so much. Pleasure being here.
[00:30:19] John Ray: Absolutely. Hey folks, just a quick reminder.
[00:30:22] John Ray: If you’re, um, if you’re not getting what you need out of your back office and you’re Just drinking too much wine. Worried about it. Maybe that’s the way to put it. You’ve got administrative tasks that are weighing you down. You’ve got your bookkeeping has the look of a Nike shoe box with receipts falling out.
[00:30:43] John Ray: If that’s your state of affairs you need to improve to bring the joy back to your business. And the folks that can help you do that are the folks at Office Angels. They have a whole team of angels who fly in, get that work done for you, and then they fly out and they do it on an ongoing.
[00:30:59] John Ray: Or as needed basis, I use their services myself for my business, and I couldn’t do it without them. Give them a call 0 5 0 0. Or if you’re shy, go to office angels dot U S and check them out there. But I suggest just giving them a call and let them know I sent you 6 And you’ll be glad you did. And as we record the show here in November, 2023 we’re a month away from my book coming out.
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[00:31:51] John Ray: If you want to know more, you can go to the generosity mindset. com and receive updates on the book. Or if you’re listening to this show in 2024, you can find out where to buy the book. But you can go to the generosity mindset. com. go To that website one way or the other.
[00:32:08] John Ray: And I want to thank you, our listeners. This is show, I think number seven. 16, I believe after seven and a half years, we’re still going and we’re still going because of you you continue to support us in numerous ways, including sharing social media posts. And one of the particular ways that I really appreciate is when you share the show with someone you think could benefit from knowing about the services or products of our guests.
[00:32:35] John Ray: Here’s a great example. If you know of a restaurant owner, you think could benefit from wine view services. Here’s a great one to share. Thank you for that because it helps our guests and that’s what we’re here to do. And it also helps us live into our mission to be the voice of business in the North Fulton region.
[00:32:54] John Ray: So for my guest, Angela Caine, I’m John Ray. Join us next time here on North Fulton business radio.